Fire Hydrant of Freedom
Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Politics & Religion => Topic started by: Crafty Dog on July 20, 2004, 06:51:26 PM
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Woof All:
This thread is for matters of Homeland Security. As a starting point, I suggest reading:
http://dogbrothers.com/wrapper.php?file=savedbythemilitia.htm
Woof,
Crafty Dog
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Terror in the Skies, Again?
By Annie Jacobsen
A WWS Exclusive Article
Note from the Editors: You are about to read an account of what happened during a domestic flight that one of our writers, Annie Jacobsen, took from Detroit to Los Angeles. The WWS Editorial Team debated long and hard about how to handle this information and ultimately we decided it was something that should be shared. What does it have to do with finances? Nothing, and everything. Here is Annie's story.
On June 29, 2004, at 12:28 p.m., I flew on Northwest Airlines flight #327 from Detroit to Los Angeles with my husband and our young son. Also on our flight were 14 Middle Eastern men between the ages of approximately 20 and 50 years old. What I experienced during that flight has caused me to question whether the United States of America can realistically uphold the civil liberties of every individual, even non-citizens, and protect its citizens from terrorist threats.
On that Tuesday, our journey began uneventfully. Starting out that morning in Providence, Rhode Island, we went through security screening, flew to Detroit, and passed the time waiting for our connecting flight to Los Angeles by shopping at the airport stores and eating lunch at an airport diner. With no second security check required in Detroit we headed to our gate and waited for the pre-boarding announcement. Standing near us, also waiting to pre-board, was a group of six Middle Eastern men. They were carrying blue passports with Arabic writing. Two men wore tracksuits with Arabic writing across the back. Two carried musical instrument cases - thin, flat, 18 long. One wore a yellow T-shirt and held a McDonald's bag. And the sixth man had a bad leg -- he wore an orthopedic shoe and limped. When the pre-boarding announcement was made, we handed our tickets to the Northwest Airlines agent, and walked down the jetway with the group of men directly behind us.
My four-year-old son was determined to wheel his carry-on bag himself, so I turned to the men behind me and said, You go ahead, this could be awhile. No, you go ahead, one of the men replied. He smiled pleasantly and extended his arm for me to pass. He was young, maybe late 20's and had a goatee. I thanked him and we boarded the plan.
Once on the plane, we took our seats in coach (seats 17A, 17B and 17C). The man with the yellow shirt and the McDonald's bag sat across the aisle from us (in seat 17E). The pleasant man with the goatee sat a few rows back and across the aisle from us (in seat 21E). The rest of the men were seated throughout the plane, and several made their way to the back.
As we sat waiting for the plane to finish boarding, we noticed another large group of Middle Eastern men boarding. The first man wore a dark suit and sunglasses. He sat in first class in seat 1A, the seat second-closet to the cockpit door. The other seven men walked into the coach cabin. As aware Americans, my husband and I exchanged glances, and then continued to get comfortable. I noticed some of the other passengers paying attention to the situation as well. As boarding continued, we watched as, one by one, most of the Middle Eastern men made eye contact with each other. They continued to look at each other and nod, as if they were all in agreement about something. I could tell that my husband was beginning to feel anxious.
The take-off was uneventful. But once we were in the air and the seatbelt sign was turned off, the unusual activity began. The man in the yellow T-shirt got out of his seat and went to the lavatory at the front of coach -- taking his full McDonald's bag with him. When he came out of the lavatory he still had the McDonald's bag, but it was now almost empty. He walked down the aisle to the back of the plane, still holding the bag. When he passed two of the men sitting mid-cabin, he gave a thumbs-up sign. When he returned to his seat, he no longer had the McDonald's bag.
Then another man from the group stood up and took something from his carry-on in the overhead bin. It was about a foot long and was rolled in cloth. He headed toward the back of the cabin with the object. Five minutes later, several more of the Middle Eastern men began using the forward lavatory consecutively. In the back, several of the men stood up and used the back lavatory consecutively as well.
For the next hour, the men congregated in groups of two and three at the back of the plane for varying periods of time. Meanwhile, in the first class cabin, just a foot or so from the cockpit door, the man with the dark suit - still wearing sunglasses - was also standing. Not one of the flight crew members suggested that any of these men take their seats.
Watching all of this, my husband was now beyond anxious. I decided to try to reassure my husband (and maybe myself) by walking to the back bathroom. I knew the goateed-man I had exchanged friendly words with as we boarded the plane was seated only a few rows back, so I thought I would say hello to the man to get some reassurance that everything was fine. As I stood up and turned around, I glanced in his direction and we made eye contact. I threw out my friendliest remember-me-we-had-a-nice-exchange-just-a-short-time-ago smile. The man did not smile back. His face did not move. In fact, the cold, defiant look he gave me sent shivers down my spine.
When I returned to my seat I was unable to assure my husband that all was well. My husband immediately walked to the first class section to talk with the flight attendant. I might be overreacting, but I've been watching some really suspicious things... Before he could finish his statement, the flight attendant pulled him into the galley. In a quiet voice she explained that they were all concerned about what was going on. The captain was aware. The flight attendants were passing notes to each other. She said that there were people on board higher up than you and me watching the men. My husband returned to his seat and relayed this information to me. He was feeling slightly better. I was feeling much worse. We were now two hours into a four-in-a-half hour flight.
Approximately 10 minutes later, that same flight attendant came by with the drinks cart. She leaned over and quietly told my husband there were federal air marshals sitting all around us. She asked him not to tell anyone and explained that she could be in trouble for giving out that information. She then continued serving drinks.
About 20 minutes later the same flight attendant returned. Leaning over and whispering, she asked my husband to write a description of the yellow-shirted man sitting across from us. She explained it would look too suspicious if she wrote the information. She asked my husband to slip the note to her when he was done.
After seeing 14 Middle Eastern men board separately (six together, eight individually) and then act as a group, watching their unusual glances, observing their bizarre bathroom activities, watching them congregate in small groups, knowing that the flight attendants and the pilots were seriously concerned, and now knowing that federal air marshals were on board, I was officially terrified.. Before I'm labeled a racial profiler or -- worse yet -- a racist, let me add this. A month ago I traveled to India to research a magazine article I was writing. My husband and I flew on a jumbo jet carrying more than 300 Hindu and Muslim men and women on board. We traveled throughout the country and stayed in a Muslim village 10 miles outside Pakistan. I never once felt fearful. I never once felt unsafe. I never once had the feeling that anyone wanted to hurt me. This time was different.
Finally, the captain announced that the plane was cleared for landing. It had been four hours since we left Detroit. The fasten seat belt light came on and I could see downtown Los Angeles. The flight attendants made one final sweep of the cabin and strapped themselves in for landing. I began to relax. Home was in sight.
Suddenly, seven of the men stood up -- in unison -- and walked to the front and back lavatories. One by one, they went into the two lavatories, each spending about four minutes inside. Right in front of us, two men stood up against the emergency exit door, waiting for the lavatory to become available. The men spoke in Arabic among themselves and to the man in the yellow shirt sitting nearby. One of the men took his camera into the lavatory. Another took his cell phone. Again, no one approached the men. Not one of the flight attendants asked them to sit down. I watched as the man in the yellow shirt, still in his seat, reached inside his shirt and pulled out a small red book. He read a few pages, then put the book back inside his shirt. He pulled the book out again, read a page or two more, and put it back. He continued to do this several more times.
I looked around to see if any other passengers were watching. I immediately spotted a distraught couple seated two rows back. The woman was crying into the man's shoulder. He was holding her hand. I heard him say to her, You've got to calm down. Behind them sat the once pleasant-smiling, goatee-wearing man.
I grabbed my son, I held my husband's hand and, despite the fact that I am not a particularly religious person, I prayed. The last man came out of the bathroom, and as he passed the man in the yellow shirt he ran his forefinger across his neck and mouthed the word No.
The plane landed. My husband and I gathered our bags and quickly, very quickly, walked up the jetway. As we exited the jetway and entered the airport, we saw many, many men in dark suits. A few yards further out into the terminal, LAPD agents ran past us, heading for the gate. I have since learned that the representatives of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), the Federal Air Marshals (FAM), and the Transportation Security Association (TSA) met our plane as it landed. Several men -- who I presume were the federal air marshals on board -- hurried off the plane and directed the 14 men over to the side.
Knowing what we knew, and seeing what we'd seen, my husband and I decided to talk to the authorities. For several hours my husband and I were interrogated by the FBI. We gave sworn statement after sworn statement. We wrote down every detail of our account. The interrogators seemed especially interested in the McDonald's bag, so we repeated in detail what we knew about the McDonald's bag. A law enforcement official stood near us, holding 14 Syrian passports in his hand. We answered more questions. And finally we went home.
Home Sweet Home
The next day, I began searching online for news about the incident. There was nothing. I asked a friend who is a local news correspondent if there were any arrests at LAX that day. There weren't. I called Northwest Airlines' customer service. They said write a letter. I wrote a letter, then followed up with a call to their public relations department. They said they were aware of the situation (sorry that happened!) but legally they have 30 days to reply.
I shared my story with a few colleagues. One mentioned she'd been on a flight with a group of foreign men who were acting strangely -- they turned out to be diamond traders. Another had heard a story on National Public Radio (NPR) shortly after 9/11 about a group of Arab musicians who were having a hard time traveling on airplanes throughout the U.S. and couldn't get seats together. I took note of these two stories and continued my research. Here are excerpts from an article written by Jason Burke, Chief Reporter, and published in The Observer (a British newspaper based in London) on February 8, 2004:
Terrorist bid to build bombs in mid-flight: Intelligence reveals dry runs of new threat to blow up airliners
Islamic militants have conducted dry runs of a devastating new style of bombing on aircraft flying to Europe, intelligence sources believe.
The tactics, which aim to evade aviation security systems by placing only components of explosive devices on passenger jets, allowing militants to assemble them in the air, have been tried out on planes flying between the Middle East, North Africa and Western Europe, security sources say.
...The... Transportation Security Administration issued an urgent memo detailing new threats to aviation and warning that terrorists in teams of five might be planning suicide missions to hijack commercial airliners, possibly using common items...such as cameras, modified as weapons.
...Components of IEDs [improvised explosive devices]can be smuggled on to an aircraft, concealed in either clothing or personal carry-on items... and assembled on board. In many cases of suspicious passenger activity, incidents have taken place in the aircraft's forward lavatory.
So here's my question: Since the FBI issued a warning to the airline industry to be wary of groups of five men on a plane who might be trying to build bombs in the bathroom, shouldn't a group of 14 Middle Eastern men be screened before boarding a flight?
Apparently not. Due to our rules against discrimination, it can't be done. During the 9/11 hearings last April, 9/11 Commissioner John Lehman stated that ...it was the policy (before 9/11) and I believe remains the policy today to fine airlines if they have more than two young Arab males in secondary questioning because that's discriminatory.
So even if Northwest Airlines searched two of the men on board my Northwest flight, they couldn't search the other 12 because they would have already filled a government-imposed quota.
I continued my research by reading an article entitled Arab Hijackers Now Eligible For Pre-Boarding from Ann Coulter (www.anncoulter.com):
On September 21, as the remains of thousands of Americans lay smoldering at Ground Zero, [Secretary of Transportation Norman] Mineta fired off a letter to all U.S. airlines forbidding them from implementing the one security measure that could have prevented 9/11: subjecting Middle Eastern passengers to an added degree of pre-flight scrutiny. He sternly reminded the airlines that it was illegal to discriminate against passengers based on their race, color, national or ethnic origin or religion.
Coulter also writes that a few months later, at Mr. Mineta's behest, the Department of Transportation (DOT) filed complaints against United Airlines and American Airlines (who, combined, had lost 8 pilots, 25 flight attendants and 213 passengers on 9/11 - not counting the 19 Arab hijackers). In November 2003, United Airlines settled their case with the DOT for $1.5 million. In March 2004, American Airlines settled their case with the DOT for $1.5 million. The DOT also charged Continental Airlines with discriminating against passengers who appeared to be Arab, Middle Eastern or Muslim. Continental Airlines settled their complaint with the DOT in April of 2004 for $.5 million.
From what I witnessed, Northwest Airlines doesn't have to worry about Norman Mineta filing a complaint against them for discriminatory, secondary screening of Arab men. No one checked the passports of the Syrian men. No one inspected the contents of the two instrument cases or the McDonald's bag. And no one checked the limping man's orthopedic shoe. In fact, according to the TSA regulations, passengers wearing an orthopedic shoe won't be asked to take it off. As their site states, Advise the screener if you're wearing orthopedic shoes...screeners should not be asking you to remove your orthopedic shoes at any time during the screening process. (Click here to read the TSA website policy on orthopedic shoes and other medical devices.)
I placed a call to the TSA and talked to Joe Dove, a Customer Service Supervisor. I told him how we'd eaten with metal utensils moments in an airport diner before boarding the flight and how no one checked our luggage or the instrument cases being carried by the Middle Eastern men. Dove's response was, Restaurants in secured areas -- that's an ongoing problem. We get that complaint often. TSA gets that complaint all the time and they haven't worked that out with the FAA. They're aware of it. You've got a good question. There may not be a reasonable answer at this time, I'm not going to BS you.
At the Detroit airport no one checked our IDs. No one checked the folds in my newspaper or the contents of my son's backpack. No one asked us what we'd done during our layover, if we bought anything, or if anyone gave us anything while we were in the airport. We were asked all of these questions (and many others ) three weeks earlier when we'd traveled in Europe -- where passengers with airport layovers are rigorously questioned and screened before boarding any and every flight. In Detroit no one checked who we were or what we carried on board a 757 jet liner bound for American's largest metropolis.
Two days after my experience on Northwest Airlines flight #327 came this notice from SBS TV, The World News, July 1, 2004:
The U.S. Transportation and Security Administration has issued a new directive which demands pilots make a pre-flight announcement banning passengers from congregating in aisles and outside the plane's toilets. The directive also orders flight attendants to check the toilets every two hours for suspicious packages.
Through a series of events, The Washington Post heard about my story. I talked briefly about my experience with a representative from the newspaper. Within a few hours I received a call from Dave Adams, the Federal Air Marshal Services (FAM) Head of Public Affairs. Adams told me what he knew:
There were 14 Syrians on NWA flight #327. They were questioned at length by FAM, the FBI and the TSA upon landing in Los Angeles. The 14 Syrians had been hired as musicians to play at a casino in the desert. Adams said they were scrubbed. None had arrest records (in America, I presume), none showed up on the FBI's no fly list or the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists List. The men checked out and they were let go. According to Adams, the 14 men traveled on Northwest Airlines flight #327 using one-way tickets. Two days later they were scheduled to fly back on jetBlue from Long Beach, California to New York -- also using one-way tickets.
I asked Adams why, based on the FBI's credible information that terrorists may try to assemble bombs on planes, the air marshals or the flight attendants didn't do anything about the bizarre behavior and frequent trips to the lavatory. Our FAM agents have to have an event to arrest somebody. Our agents aren't going to deploy until there is an actual event, Adams explained. He said he could not speak for the policies of Northwest Airlines.
So the question is... Do I think these men were musicians? I'll let you decide. But I wonder, if 19 terrorists can learn to fly airplanes into buildings, couldn't 14 terrorists learn to play instruments?
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Interesting article, and I feel that I should make a couple of points.
1) Airport security in the US - Let's be perfectly honest here: IT'S A JOKE. I have been fortunate enough to travel extensively throughout the world, and nowhere else (with the exception of Fiji) is security as lax as it is in the U.S. Guess what? Taking my shoes off isn't going to stop a hijacking. Neither is staring intently at "Middle Eastern" men. Airports in Europe are often filled with many visibly armed men/women that are looking at YOU as a potential troublemaker regardless of skin color, clothing, instrument case.
I attribute our attitude and approach towards airport security to what I call "The American Comfort" factor. Americans like to live in comfort, not surrounded by the reminders that people like terrorists exist. Thus, no highly visible guards (unless in small quantities), no forcing people to stay in line for tickets and check in, basically no inconveniencing travellers/shoppers lest their experience be made uncomfortable and their travel dollars go elsewhere.
This has to change. If I am reminded that a stupid move on my part will be answered by 5-15 well-armed soldiers, police officers, or guards, I may think twice before acting. But being waved through security 'cause the slightly-above-minimum wage, kinda-sorta-trained, checkers are too busy watching the game is ridiculous.
2) Those crazy Middle Easterners -If you think that people willing to do whatever it takes to hijack a plane are going to act in an overtly suspicious way especially these days, you've got another thing coming.
The author writes, "For the next hour, the men congregated in groups of two and three at the back of the plane for varying periods of time." Gee, I've never seen this on a plane, especially near the bathroom. If a group of white men/white women on a plane had acted in the same manner (standing up, grouping by the bathrooms, pulling reading material in and out of their coats) would the author, or any of us acted differently?
People from the Middle East come in many different shades and a variety of looks. And since we are dealing with a "global threat" we should be thinking globally when it comes to spotting strange behaviour. Again, just 'cause you look different (and I hate to say this, but I mean since you don't look "white") doesn't mean you are gonna kick in the cockpit door.
I mean, do you truly believe that the only terrorists out there are men between the ages of 18-28 with olive colored skin and neatly trimmed beards? Remember the Moscow theater takeover 2 years ago? Of the 40 terrorists, 20 were women, and none of them were Middle Eastern.
The author also mentions throwing out her "...friendliest remember-me-we-had-a-nice-exchange-just-a-short-time-ago smile" Here's a crazy idea, how about walking up to the man and saying something...like "Hello, thanks for letting my kid on the plane first." Then if he decides to throw you one of those bone chilling glances he's either a) a real a-hole or b) a real a-hole. Since when does not smiling constitute a terrorist threat?
And, I'm happy to hear that she had a nice trip to India and went to Pakistan without feeling threatened. Had she considered that the other passengers on the plane might be thinking, "What the hell are those Americans doing on this flight? I hope they don't get us blown out of the sky!" Now who's perceptions are skewed?
3) Training lapses by the crew - One thing especially stood out and I find it more disurbing than the entire article:
"Approximately 10 minutes later, that same flight attendant came by with the drinks cart. She leaned over and quietly told my husband there were federal air marshals sitting all around us. She asked him not to tell anyone and explained that she could be in trouble for giving out that information."
Hmmm...let's try a little role playing. 12 of us are going to take over a plane. But, to be safe, we'll put 2 decoys on the plane to watch the other passengers. One of our decoys will mention to the flight attendant that they've noticed some suspicious behaviour among some of the passengers. I would have to put the stupidest flight attendant answer possible somewhere in the range of, say..."There are air marshalls all around you. Don't tell anyone or I'll get in trouble" Nice. Now I know that there are air marshalls on the plane and perhaps we'll pick another day for our hijinks.
A solid approach to combating terrorism is to change our approach and way of thinking about who terrorist are and what they will do to acheive their goal.
After all, an actual war on terror is physically impossible. The ancient Greek historian Xenophon wrote of the effectiveness of psychological warfare against enemy populations. Roman emperors such as Tiberius and Caligula used banishment, expropriation of property, and execution as means to discourage opposition to their rule.
The Spanish Inquisition used arbitrary arrest, torture, and execution to punish what it viewed as religious heresy. The use of terror was openly advocated by Robespierre as a means of encouraging revolutionary virtue during the French Revolution, leading to the period of his political dominance called the Reign of Terror.
So don't tell me we've suddenly come up with a formula to defeat terrorism worldwide.
We could develop an office of homeland security, hire thousands of people and spend alot of money on a color coded system of alarms. OR maybe we actually spend that money on hiring several thousand competent, well-trained individuals to work specifically on protecting places of travel, worship, and entertainment, as do many other countries around the world. Individuals who will search, question, and if necessary detain individuals who they are trained to look for based on behaviour, not look. What a novel idea!
Pardon the sarcasm, but my eyes are tired from constantly rolling at the inane perceptions of our public and their perceived "threats". The chance that any of us will be involved in a terrorist action at ANY point in our lives is probably less than that of being struck by lighting, so relax.
Miguel
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yep miguel, i agree.
your probably at much greater risk out there, especially in Detroit, than you are, ever, of getting messed up by some terrorist.
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Miguel,
We certainly could beef up security to the point where a terrorist attack would be virtually impossible, but it would impose unacceptable costs on almost every sector of the economy.
Sure Middle Easterners are not the only terrorists, but neither were the Japanese our only enemies during WW2. But anytime "the enemy" is easily identified visually, you're going to have whack-jobs who'll argue that we must have the right to legally discriminate against these people.
Rog
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Howdy:
"The author writes, "For the next hour, the men congregated in groups of two and three at the back of the plane for varying periods of time." Gee, I've never seen this on a plane, especially near the bathroom. If a group of white men/white women on a plane had acted in the same manner (standing up, grouping by the bathrooms, pulling reading material in and out of their coats) would the author, or any of us acted differently?"
C'mon--You ignore the writer's assertion that individuals who had boarded separately and were seated spread around the plane were signalling each other and meeting at the bathrooms. Most self-defense experts strongly suggest that people should listen to their intuition about danger. What would you have-- arrest, arraignment, voir dire, trial and verdict all while on the plane?
"But anytime "the enemy" is easily identified visually, you're going to have whack-jobs who'll argue that we must have the right to legally discriminate against these people."
Well, call me a whack-job then. It seems pretty stupid to me to not note that the overwhelming majority of those trying to kill us are Arab males between 20 and 50 and act accordingly.
Whack Job
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Whack Job...
First off, I am not ignoring the writer's assertion about the behaviour of the individuals in question.
I just wonder if the same attention would have been paid to a group of "non-ethnic" looking men/women. Having the pleasure of being ethnically profiled while surrounded by "non-ehtnic" types, I find it insulting that nowadays the automatic assumption is: Middle-Eastern looking, not acting "normal" = terrorist/troublemaker.
That is the very issue that I take with our "war on terror":
"...the overwhelming majority of those trying to kill us are Arab males between 20 and 50 and act accordingly"
First off, the "us" you speak of would be (and pardon the assumption on my part) Americans. If you are naive enough to believe that "the Ay-rabs" are out to get "us", I think you are losing the battle before it starts. Muslim extremists are out to get us and believe me, Muslims come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. That is why we have soldiers fighting the war in places like the Philippines, Indonesia, and parts of Africa.
Second, I am not advocating across the board budget changes to defend our home turf by placing a guard at each mall entrance. I am only suggesting that our perception of what a terrorist is needs to change, 'cause they sure as hell aren't going to keep sending people our way that "look" the part.
On this I believe we agree..."Most self-defense experts strongly suggest that people should listen to their intuition about danger." Absolutely. I just take issue with people narrowing their intuition to a field of vision that only includes "Arab males between 20 and 50". I would hope that people are educated in their vigilance, and not be UNABLE TO SEE THE WOODS FOR THE TREES.
Thoughts?
Miguel
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Whack Job,
The only reason Japanese-Americans (and not German- or Italian-Americans) were placed in prison camps during WW2 is because Japanese people have a distinct look. White people like Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski, and KKK members all qualify as terrorists, yet surely you would consider it absurd to allow such profiling of white people. As Miguel points out, profiling of Arabs would not be a bug-free solution even if we could do it. Plenty of Muslims as white as Geroge W. Bush are potential AQ recruits.
The fact is that a terrorist attack could happen anywhere, anytime, with no warning. This was just as true before 9/11 as it is now. We should take whatever reasonable security measures we can, but even turning the US into a virtual police state wouldn't make as any safer than we are now.
Rog
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All:
"First off, I am not ignoring the writer's assertion about the behaviour of the individuals in question."
Sorry if I missed where you paid attention to it , , ,
"I just wonder if the same attention would have been paid to a group of "non-ethnic" looking men/women. Having the pleasure of being ethnically profiled while surrounded by "non-ehtnic" types, I find it insulting that nowadays the automatic assumption is: Middle-Eastern looking, not acting "normal" = terrorist/troublemaker. "
Forgive me, but too bad so sad. It is an emminently reasonable thought to have. 15 of the 19 on 911 were Saudis.
That is the very issue that I take with our "war on terror":
"...the overwhelming majority of those trying to kill us are Arab males between 20 and 50 and act accordingly"
"First off, the "us" you speak of would be (and pardon the assumption on my part) Americans. If you are naive enough to believe that "the Ay-rabs" are out to get "us", I think you are losing the battle before it starts. Muslim extremists are out to get us and believe me, Muslims come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. That is why we have soldiers fighting the war in places like the Philippines, Indonesia, and parts of Africa."
Forgive me, but the naivete is yours. To be precise, it is not the 'Ayrab' who are out to get us, but the religious fascist killer nuts amongst them. As for those in the Philippines and Indonesia the same so-called discrimination you lament would apply to them as well.
Anyway, before moving on to another article I found on all this, because the tone behind typed words often miscommunicates I do want to take a moment to underline that all I say is in a spirit of respectful disagreement.
Now, here's this:
Whack Job
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More on airline security. Is there nothing that can be done that is not too intrusive for the public safety? When the next airline hijacking is completed, what do we do?
Scouting jetliners for new attacks
By Audrey Hudson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Flight crews and air marshals say Middle Eastern men are staking out airports, probing security measures and conducting test runs aboard airplanes for a terrorist attack.
At least two midflight incidents have involved numerous men of Middle Eastern descent behaving in what one pilot called "stereotypical" behavior of an organized attempt to attack a plane.
"No doubt these are dry runs for a terrorist attack," an air marshal said.
Pilots and air marshals who asked to remain anonymous told The Washington Times that surveillance by terrorists is rampant, using different probing methods.
"It's happening, and it's a sad state of affairs," a pilot said.
A June 29 incident aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 327 from Detroit to Los Angeles is similar to a Feb. 15 incident on American Airlines Flight 1732 from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to New York's John F. Kennedy Airport.
The Northwest flight involved 14 Syrian men and the American Airlines flight involved six men of Middle Eastern descent.
"I've never been in a situation where I have felt that afraid," said Annie Jacobsen, a business and finance feature writer for the online magazine Women's Wall Street who was aboard the Northwest flight.
The men were seated throughout the plane pretending to be strangers. Once airborne, they began congregating in groups of two or three, stood nearly the entire flight, and consecutively filed in and out of bathrooms at different intervals, raising concern among passengers and flight attendants, Mrs. Jacobsen said.
One man took a McDonald's bag into the bathroom, then passed it off to another passenger upon returning to his seat. When the pilot announced the plane was cleared for landing and to fasten seat belts, seven men jumped up in unison and went to different bathrooms.
Her account was confirmed by David Adams, spokesman for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS), who said officers were on board and checked the bathrooms several times during the flight, but nothing was found.
"The FAMS never broke their cover, but monitored" the activity, Mr. Adams said. "Given the facts, they had no legal basis to take an enforcement action. But there was enough of a suspicious nature for the FAMS, passengers and crew to take notice."
A January FBI memo says suicide terrorists are plotting to hijack trans-Atlantic planes by smuggling "ready-to-build" bomb kits past airport security, and later assembling the explosives in aircraft bathrooms.
On many overseas flights, airlines have issued rules prohibiting loitering near the lavatory.
"After seeing 14 Middle Eastern men board separately (six together and eight individually) and then act as a group, watching their unusual glances, observing their bizarre bathroom activities, watching them congregate in small groups, knowing that the flight attendants and the pilots were seriously concerned and now knowing that federal air marshals were on board, I was officially terrified," Mrs. Jacobsen said.
"One by one, they went into the two lavatories, each spending about four minutes inside. Right in front of us, two men stood up against the emergency exit door, waiting for the lavatory to become available. The men spoke in Arabic among themselves ... one of the men took his camera into the lavatory. Another took his cell phone. Again, no one approached the men. Not one of the flight attendants asked them to sit down."
In an interview yesterday with The Washington Times, Mrs. Jacobsen said she was surprised to learn afterward that flight attendants are not trained to handle terrorist attacks or the situation that happened on her flight.
"I absolutely empathize with the flight attendants. They are acting with no clear protocol," she said.
Other passengers were distraught and one woman was even crying as the events unfolded.
The plane was met by officials from the FBI, Los Angeles Police Department, Federal Air Marshal Service and Transportation Security Administration. The Syrians, who were traveling on one-way tickets, were taken into custody.
The men, who were not on terrorist watch lists, were released, although their information and fingerprints were added to a database. The group had been hired as musicians to play at a casino, and the booking, hotel accommodations and return flight to New York from Long Beach, Calif., also checked out, Mr. Adams said.
"We don't know if it was a dry run, that's why we are working together with intelligence and investigative agencies to help protect the homeland," he said.
Mrs. Jacobsen, however, is skeptical the 14 passengers were innocent musicians.
"If 19 terrorists can learn to fly airplanes into buildings, couldn't 14 terrorists learn to play instruments?" she asked in the article.
The pilot confirmed Mrs. Jacobsen's experience was "terribly alike" what flight attendants reported on the San Juan flight.
He said there is "widespread knowledge" among crew members these probes are taking place.
A Middle Eastern passenger attempted to videotape out the window as the plane taxied on takeoff and, when told by a flight attendant it was not permitted, "gave her a mean look and stopped taping," said a written report of the San Juan incident by a flight attendant.
The group of six men sat near one another, pretended to be strangers, but after careful observation from flight attendants, it was apparent "all six knew each other," the report said.
"They were very careful when we were in their area to seem separate and pretended to be sleeping, but when we were out of the twilight area, they were watching and communicating," the report said.
The men made several trips to the bathroom and congregated in that area, and were told at least twice by a flight attendant to return to their seats. The suspicious behavior was relayed to airline officials in midflight and additional background checks were conducted.
A second pilot said that, on one of his recent flights, an air marshal forced his way into the lavatory at the front of his plane after a man of Middle Eastern descent locked himself in for a long period.
The marshal found the mirror had been removed and the man was attempting to break through the wall. The cockpit was on the other side.
The second pilot said terrorists are "absolutely" testing security.
"There is a great degree of concern in the airline industry that not only are these dry runs for a terrorist attack, but that there is absolutely no defense capabilities on a vast majority of airlines," the second pilot said.
Dawn Deeks, spokeswoman for the Association of Flight Attendants, said there is no "central clearinghouse" for them to learn of suspicious incidents, and flight crews are not told how issues are resolved.
She said a flight attendant reported that a passenger was using a telephoto lens to take sequential photos of the cockpit door.
The passenger was stopped, and the incident, which happened two months ago, was reported to officials. But when the attendant checked back last week on the outcome, she was told her report had been lost.
Recent incidents at the Minneapolis-St. Paul international airport have also alarmed flight crews. Earlier this month, a passenger from Syria was taken into custody while carrying anti-American materials and a note suggesting he intended to commit a public suicide.
A third pilot reported watching a man of Middle Eastern descent at the same airport using binoculars to get airplane tail numbers and writing the numbers in a notebook to correspond with flight numbers.
"It's a probe. They are probing us," said a second air marshal, who confirmed that Middle Eastern men try to flush out marshals by rushing the cockpit and stopping suddenly.
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"First off, I am not ignoring the writer's assertion about the behaviour of the individuals in question."
Sorry if I missed where you paid attention to it , , ,
That would be Paragraph 2, of Section 2 in my response:
The author writes, "For the next hour, the men congregated in groups of two and three at the back of the plane for varying periods of time." Gee, I've never seen this on a plane, especially near the bathroom.
All I'm wondering is if this behaviour would have seemed suspect coming from anyone else (a group of nuns/football players/computer geeks/midgets) or if the current "Arabs bad, others good" thinking should automatically kick in.
As to your response:
Forgive me, but too bad so sad. It is an emminently reasonable thought to have. 15 of the 19 on 911 were Saudis.
Again, that is the main point of my writing: Tunnel vision in regards to the terrorist threat. Does it concern me that strange behaviour has been displayed by Arab men on planes? Definitely. The problem that I have is NOT "racial profiling" but our (notice the "our", not "your") collective inability to look at places besides the Middle East as training/breeding grounds for terroristic thought.
Forgive me, but the naivete is yours. To be precise, it is not the 'Ayrab' who are out to get us, but the religious fascist killer nuts amongst them.
I didn't say the Arabs are coming to get us. Those were your words. Unfortunately the sarcastic tone I applied in using the word "ay-rabs" doesn't quite translate on the page. And again, those religious fascist killer nuts come in all shapes and sizes.
I appreciate a vigorous discussion as much as the next person, I only wish that the written word worked better when I put it on the page. A shortcoming on my part, I am sure. :wink:
However, I will say that no one has responded to my notes on behaviour by both passengers and crew.
1) Shouldn't you be as concerned with the behaviour of a white male on a plane, mumbling to himself while stroking a Bible as you should a Middle Easterner doing the same while holding the Koran? Being vigilant means looking at everyone.
2) Shouldn't the crew not tip off passengers as to the presence of Air Marshalls? Again, I find that fact more disturbing than anything else.
3) Are we as a society so dumb as to believe that terrorists will act with stereotypical behaviour? Look, these people scouted, planned, trained, and pulled off one of the most audacious acts of terrorism that I can think of, right under our noses. Just as we have think tanks to find out their hows/wheres/whys, they have think tanks to figure out new unobstrusive ways of getting at the U.S. again. So let's broaden our field of view so that we are not caught with our pants down again.
4) When you are out and about, do you pay attention to the people around you? Having worked in various fields that require some type of crowd surveillance/control/security/organization, you often find that the person "least likely" to cause trouble if often the very one who does. I call it "the boy next door" syndrome. All I ask is that people get to know their neighbor, fellow passenger, co-worker even if with a few words of hello. You'd be surprised how far that will get you when it comes to noticing unusual behaviour.
Again, I solicit thoughts from the masses. And Whack Job, I honestly appreciate your thoughts on the matter. That is what ultimately puts us miles ahead of so many nations in the world: honest, open discourse.
Best,
Miguel
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SB:
"The author writes, "For the next hour, the men congregated in groups of two and three at the back of the plane for varying periods of time." Gee, I've never seen this on a plane, especially near the bathroom. "
My point is that this needs to be seen in conjunction with their boarding and sitting separately.
SB, I agree that sundry issues are raised by the article concerning improving security. I have no problem with the idea that not all terrorists are Arab muslims. I totally agree that environmental awareness and knowing one's neighbors, etc are good things. To the best of my ability I practice them. That said, one can overload and screening mechanisms to trim down the volume are rational.
Lets take a trip down memory lane with a quiz sent by an Israeli friend:
=============
Subject: Profiling in the U.S.
Take the short quiz, read, reflect and forward.
Please pause a moment, reflect back, and take the following Multiple
Choice test.... no need to keep score. The events are actual cuts from
past history. They actually happened!
Do you remember?
1. In 1972 at the Munich Olympics, athletes were kidnapped and massacred
by:
a. Olga Corbitt
b. Sitting Bull
c. Arnold Schwarzeneger
d. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
2. In 1979, the U.S. embassy in Iran was taken over by:
a. Lost Norwegians
b. Elvis
c. A tour bus full of 80-year-old women
d. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
3. During the 1980's a number of Americans were kidnapped in Lebanon by:
a. John Dillinger
b. The King of Sweden
c. The Boy Scouts
d. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
4. In 1983, the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut was blown up by:
a. A pizza delivery boy
b. Pee Wee Herman
c. Geraldo Rivera
d. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
5. In 1985 the cruise ship Achille Lauro was hijacked and a 70 year-old
American passenger was murdered and thrown overboard in his wheelchair
by:
a. The Smurfs
b. Davy Jones
c. The Little Mermaid
d. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
6. In 1985 TWA flight 847 was hijacked at Athens, and a U.S. Navy diver
trying to rescue passengers was murdered by:
a. Captain Kidd
b. Charles Lindberg
c. Mother Teresa
d. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
7. In 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 was bombed by:
a. Scooby Doo
b. The Tooth Fairy
c. Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid
d. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
8. In 1993 the World Trade Center was bombed the first time by:
a. Richard Simmons
b. Grandma Moses
c. Michael Jordan
d. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
9. In 1998, the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed
by:
a. Mr. Rogers
b. Hillary Clinton, to distract attention from Wild
Bill's women problems
c. The World Wrestling Federation
d. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
10. On 9/11/01, four airliners were hijacked; two were used as
missiles to take out the World Trade Centers and of the remaining two,
one crashed into the US Pentagon and the other was diverted and crashed
by the passengers. Thousands of people were killed by:
a. Bugs Bunny, Wiley E. Coyote, Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd
b. The Supreme Court of Florida
c. Mr. Bean
d. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
11. In 2002 the United States fought a war in Afghanistan
against:
a. Enron
b. The Lutheran Church
c. The NFL
d. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
12. In 2002 reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and murdered by:
a. Bonnie and Clyde
b. Captain Kangaroo
c. Billy Graham
d Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
Nope, I really don't see a pattern here to justify profiling, do you?
So, to ensure we Americans never offend anyone, particularly fanatics
intent on killing us, airport security screeners will no longer be allowed to profile certain people. They must conduct random searches of 80-year-old women, little kids, airline pilots with proper identification, Secret agents who are members of the President's security detail, 85-year old Congressmen with metal hips, and Medal of Honor winning former Governors, and leave Muslim Males between the ages 17 & 40 alone because of profiling.
Let's send this to as many people as we can so that the Gloria Aldreds
and other dunder-headed attorneys along with Federal Justices that want
to thwart common sense, feel doubly ashamed of themselves if they have
any such sense.
As the writer of the award winning story "Forrest Gump" so aptly put it,
"Stupid is as stupid does."
==============
You mentioned in a prior post being offended by profiling. My intent here is the opposite of offending--it is to persuade you (and those reading) that there is good reason for profiling. If you understand this, perhaps the sting you perceive will be removed.
Whack Job
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The fact that you write there is a good reason for profiling gives me chills for a bunch of different reasons.
That being said, it gives me slight solace to believe that you mean it only in cases of terrorist threat. Otherwise, I certainly wouldn't want to be driving through your neighborhood in my new car with 3-4 of my multi-ethnic friends lest we be marked as trouble makers.
"So, to ensure we Americans never offend anyone, particularly fanatics
intent on killing us, airport security screeners will no longer be allowed to profile certain people."
Here is the fundamental problem that I tried (apparently unsuccessfully) to address in my first notes. "The American Comfort" factor makes it uncomfortable for us to search whoever at an airport security checkpoint.
80-year-old women (perhaps that 80 year old had a son die in a US led strike in Afghanistan and has decided to get a little revenge, after all who is going to search a lil old lady?)
Little kids (golly no one has ever used them to hide weapons)
Airline pilots with proper identification (maybe if we placed security restrictions on them they wouldn't make it on the plane drunk)
Secret agents who are members of the President's security detail (Hmmmm, perhaps a little reminder since we are talking profiling: American Airlines passengers say an Arab-American Secret Service agent, who was kicked off a Christmas Day flight, was targeted because of his ethnicity, and that the agent behaved professionally through out the ordeal, never acting in an angry manner or becoming confrontational, news agencies reported)
85-year old Congressmen with metal hips ('cause being a Congressman automatically means that you are a swell guy and could never, ever be a troublemaker)
Medal of Honor winning former Governors (ditto)
Again, my issue is with the skewed, untrained approach to security and its often shoddy application. If you want to offend/detain/search do it across the board, 'cause believe me the bad guys are gonna figure out a fresh new way of gettin' the job done.
All I am saying is that anyone boarding my flight I regard with a modicum of suspicion whether drunk frat boy who will freak out and try to open a door midflight, or nicely dressed Muslim fellow who is reading from the Koran.
A justification for profiling? Go for it. Then watch your plane go down 'cause upstanding white businessman John Walker Lindh walked through security with 5 pounds of Semtex strapped to his body.
If terrorists don't take issue with killing whoever, whenever, why don't we take an interest in securing ourselves against whoever, whenever? No one seems to be up to that task for some reason. Maybe it's just easier to spot 'em if you look in specific places.
Oh those poor little old ladies and kids and Congressmen. Funny, in the days after 9/11 alot of people were perfectly comfortable giving up some freedoms in order to catch the bad guys. Now most of y'all can relax knowing that the bad guys is once again darkskinned and easy to spot. Give me a break. 17-40 year old Muslim/Arab males have done alot of bad stuff and we know that. But from the sound of it, you want to exclude everyone else from the screening process.
I'm out. My eyes are rolling again...
Miguel
-
Mig:
Sorry you're "out" on this, but that's up to you.
I too have "multi-ethnic" friends and have been on the receiving end of police stops more than once and yes it is a drag.
Yes there might be terrorists who are non-Muslim males 17-40, but the great majority of them are. If I understand you correctly we need to consider everyone as a possibility. Of course! But, but at the same time consider what a friend wrote me earlier today:
"As to the airlines, Mineta is a prime example of the problem. Because he was interred in WW2, he is too sensitive to racial profiling. Therefore only 2 people of Arab heritage can be searched per flight, otherwise airlines can be fined."
This strikes me as resoundingly stupid and accounts for some of my truculence on this issue.
My friend continues:
"The next time we lose an aircraft to terrorists....and it will happen....we will have to take a hard look at security. , , , A good start would be serious arming of pilots, not this BS program which makes it almost impossible for a pilot to get the training and permission to carry a weapon."
This matter of having more armed pilots strikes me as a good idea. Perhaps we can agree upon this?
What else can we agree upon?
Whack Job
-
"Again, my issue is with the skewed, untrained approach to security and its often shoddy application. If you want to offend/detain/search do it across the board, 'cause believe me the bad guys are gonna figure out a fresh new way of gettin' the job done."
One of the reasons that terrorism is such an attractive option for those with political agendas, but limited political capital, is that it works so well.
And one of the reasons that it works so well is that the terrorist is playing with very few restrictions. They can use targets of opportunity, instead of being limited to legitimate military targets. They can use means and methods that are off limits to legitimate governments. They don't have to play by any rule but one:
'Do whatever it takes to get your agenda on page one'
And they have an automatic win from the media attention given to their actions.
The more that the media lavishes attention on the terrorist's actions, the more reactionary and media influenced will be the reaction from politicians.
So professional risk management scientists (such as the ones who sent every member of Congress a report well before 9/11 noting that Middle Eastern extremists would likely attempt to fly aircraft into skyscrapers) are sidelined, and military types with impressive looking uniforms and medals, but who did NOT issue any such reports before 9/11 are put in charge of 'security'.
Automatic win for the terrorists.
So people will become invested in rumors and scare-mongering like the Annie Jacobsen article, and focus their attention away from everyday awareness to only looking at stereotypes.
Automatic win for the terrorists.
So people will fall for any 'magic wand' or 'band aid' solution that comes down the pike, be it 'explosives detecting' dowsing rods, or armed pilots, or changing the jackets of airport screeners from 'Argenbright Security' to 'Federal Marshal' while keeping the same employees and policies.
Automatic win for the terrorists.
And as these reactions settle in, people will do what people naturally do, which is to look for ways to minimize inconvenience to themselves from whatever measures are in place.
So 'important' people will get to bypass security checkpoints, back doors will be propped open so friends can stop by secured workplaces, suspicious activities will be overlooked through various rationalizations, budgets will be cut to fund more important boondoggles...
And another automatic win for the terrorists.
Paul
-
Any solutions Paul?
-
This coverage of the incident in question was posted today on National Review Online:
The Syrian Wayne Newton
The man inadvertently behind a scare in the skies.
By Clinton W. Taylor
Annie Jacobsen's recent piece for WomensWallStreet.Com made waves. Her account of flying with her family while 14 Middle Eastern passengers acted in a threatening and apparently coordinated manner makes for a terrifying read. Her article captures her sickening sense of both uncertainty and inevitability as what might possibly have been the next 9/11 unfolded around her.
Fortunately, nothing of the sort happened. On June 29, Northwest Airlines Flight 327 landed safely in Los Angeles and a phalanx of law enforcement greeted the suspicious passengers, whisking them away for some intense interviews. Jacobsen noted a pile of Syrian passports in the hand of a law-enforcement official.
But the men checked out, and Jacobsen was told that they were "hired as musicians to play at a casino in the desert." She was not told the name of the band, nor the name of the casino. And as her story made the rounds through the Internet and beyond (the Dallas Morning News printed a condensed version earlier this week), a note of skepticism about her story crept in. Had she imagined the whole thing? Or was the government covering up a "dry run" for another terrorist attack?
Columnist and blogger Michelle Malkin confirmed some of the details of Jacobsen's story with the Federal Air Marshal's service, but the identity of the band remained the subject of much speculation. For a while the blogosphere settled on a Syrian band called Kulna Sawa as a likely candidate, but the gents at Powerline received a note from that group's tour manager explaining the band was still in Syria when all this happened. Even the mainstream media began to notice the story: New York Times reporter Joe Sharkey confirmed some of the details of the story today but admitted he, too, was unable to identify the band.
Well, I am nominally the "news director" for Stanford University's student radio station, KZSU, and I figured I'd help the Times out. There aren't that many casinos in southern California, so I had my research assistant, Mr. Google, take a look at some. An hour later I was talking to the nice folks at Sycuan Casino & Resort, near San Diego. Unlike most casinos where it's all Elvis impersonators, Paul Anka, and Linda Ronstadt ? oh, wait, scratch that last one ? Sycuan books the occasional "ethnic music" show, too. In August, for example, they'll have a Vietnamese night.
"Oh, do you mean Arab music?" inquired Angie, who answered Sycuan's phone. Yes, they had had an Arab act perform on July 1, an artist named Nour Mehana. Terry, Angie's supervisor at Sycuan, confirmed that he was there and that there was probably a backup band brought in, since there's no house band at Sycuan. In fractions of a second, Mr. Google found a website for Sycuan's event promoters, Anthem Artists, whose archive confirms Nour Mehana performed at Sycuan on 7/01/04.
And then I noticed something that was truly terrifying, something linking Nour Mehana to a figure of such repulsive evil that I felt a rush of prickly fear not unlike Jacobsen's: Just one week later, the same company that arranged Mehana's performance, also booked Carrot Top!
I talked to James Cullen of Anthem Artists who confirms that Nour Mehana's large band did arrive on Northwest Flight 327. Some of them came in from Detroit, and some from Lebanon. Cullen says they never said anything about a disturbance on the flight to him, even though "I stayed in the same hotel, they were nice, they stayed right above me." He said that they were fine musicians, put on a great show, and he would work with them again in the future.
Cullen did receive a follow-up e-mail from the Department of Homeland Security, asking him to confirm that the band had played their gig at Sycuan. He had read Jacobsen's article and concluded that some "people are just paranoid." A pilot himself, Cullen insisted that the patterns Jacobsen perceived wouldn't occur to him. "We should take pride in our system. We've got to trust our system." (Cullen made it clear that he opposes "this crazy Bush Iraq war sh*t," but it is important to bear in mind that Cullen also admitted to booking Carrot Top.)
Nour Mehana (a.k.a. Noor Mehanna, or Nour Mhanna, plus various permutations of those spellings) is, in fact, Syrian. He performs both "new-agey" hits and old sentimental Middle Eastern classics in a style called Tarab. In this catchy ten-minute video of Mehana on stage, (scroll down; the name is rendered Noor Mhanan this time ) you can see he has a rather large backup band helping him out. (The resolution is low, but Jacobsen might recognize some of the band members Mehanna is interacting with.) Followers of news from Iraq may have heard about the U.S. tour of the "Iraqi Elvis." Well, Mehana comes across not as an angry jihadi, but rather more like the Syrian Wayne Newton.
Much more like Wayne Newton:
Anyway, this is good news. Nour Mehana's band might have acted like jerks on the plane, but it appears safe to say they were not casing Northwest Airlines for a suicidal assault, and we can quit worrying about this being a "dry run" or an aborted attack. And if Jacobsen was wondering why one man in a dark suit and sunglasses sat in first class while everyone else flew coach, well, it seems pretty clear that this was the Big Mehana himself.
Which is definitely not the same as saying Jacobsen was wrong to worry. The proven existence of this band confirms one of the last details of her story, and her story confirms some of our worst fears about airline security. The mindset of passengers, of the crew, and even of the law-enforcement personnel (Jacobsen said a flight attendant reassured her husband by pointing out that air marshals were on the flight), and decision makers higher up the ladder was reactive, not proactive.
Now, by that I certainly don't mean that the interceptors should have scrambled or the passengers should have started swinging Chardonnay bottles as soon as the oud player took too long in the john. But evidently no one even engaged these guys in a conversation, and no one, not the flight crew, and not the air marshals, challenged their egregious violations of protocols about congregating near restrooms or standing up in unison as the plane started its descent. Nothing was done to alleviate the terror Jacobsen, and probably a lot of the other passengers, felt.
Liberals will likely decry the suspicion and interrogation the musicians faced on Flight 327. And the principled Right will regret that that was necessary. If the band's English wasn't very good they might not have understood the instructions. But a polite word and some helpful gestures earlier on, rather than a guilty PC silence, might have saved them some embarrassment. In any case, the police-state parallels fade quickly: In a real police state, like, oh, Syria, you are not even allowed inside the country with an Israeli stamp in your passport.
June 29 was no ordinary day in the skies. That day, Department of Homeland Security officials issued an "unusually specific internal warning," urging customs officials to watch out for Pakistanis with physical signs of rough training in the al Qaeda training camps. The warning specifically mentioned Detroit and Los Angeles's LAX airports, the origin and terminus of NWA flight 327.
That means that our air-traffic system was expecting trouble. But rather than land the plane in Las Vegas or Omaha, it was allowed to continue on to Los Angeles without interruption, as if everything were hunky-dory on board. It certainly wasn't. If this had been the real thing, and the musicians had instead been terrorists, nothing was stopping them from taking control of the plane or assembling a bomb in the restroom. Given the information they were working with at the time, almost everyone should have reacted differently than they did.
Jacobsen's fear was quite natural under these circumstances, and she has done us a service by pointing out some egregious shortfalls in our airline security. Danke Schoen, Darling. Let's hope the right people are listening.
? Clinton W. Taylor is a lawyer and a Ph.D. student in political science at Stanford. He's also news co-director and an intermittent classic-country DJ for KZSU, Stanford.
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Any solutions Paul?
Any solutions for keeping politicians and the media from ruining the best laid plans?
Nope, not a one. But then again, that's why I'm not a political scientist...
8)
Are there better solutions to be had from pursuing risk management strategies?
Yes, in the less than perfect fashion that seperates real life from the ideal.
No one is going to make terrorists disappear, but they might make it worth their while to go after someone else.
And it is important to admit to such realities in examining security.
Medical science thought that they had eradicated diseases like TB and polio, and so forth decades ago. Medical science was wrong, because people screwed it up...now we have epidemics that are harder than ever to deal with...
That doesn't mean that medical science should never have addressed the problems. or criticised the old way of dealing with disease.
It just means that having a solution that works is no sort of guarantee
When I taught the only security/anti terrorism classes offered pre 9/11 at one of the top criminology departments in the US, I devoted an entire section to an examination of how *people* will screw up your best security plan, and how to anticipate media, politics, organizational behavior, and human nature when asked to come up with a solution for a security problem.
Very few of my students were ever happy with that section of the course.
They wanted a concrete answer, and wanted to assume that because they had the right answer from a security standpoint, that it would automatically be adopted, and that it would automatically work.
But we as a nation under recent terrorist attack, and reasonably anticipating others to come, can do significantly better than we are doing...the really tough question is how to get past the politicians and the media in order to address the terrorism issues directly and scientifically.
-
Things were getting hectic around the office and I let that translate to frustration in my writing.
A writer far better than I put it perfectly in that last article:
"The mindset of passengers, of the crew, and even of the law-enforcement personnel...was reactive, not proactive. "
and...
"...no one even engaged these guys in a conversation, and no one, not the flight crew, and not the air marshals, challenged their egregious violations of protocols about congregating near restrooms or standing up in unison as the plane started its descent. Nothing was done to alleviate the terror Jacobsen, and probably a lot of the other passengers, felt."
Upon relfection, this is the issue that I take not only with the incident mentioned, but with the war on terror as a whole. Obviously, our actions post 9/11 were reactive, as 90% of the world's would be. However, now that the commission's report has been released, we see a mind-boggling lack of proactivity prior to and post the events of that day.
All I ask is that we, as citizens of a country that will find itself under attack again, examine our behaviours in the face of often confusing/unexpected events. As martial artists/warriors/intelligent, free thinkers, I would hope that in the face of adversity we take the more rational approach instead of hopping on the alarmist band wagon.
Thanks again,
Miguel
-
Woof Whack Job,
Can you think of any scenarios where it would be appropriate to "profile" middle aged white guys?
-milt
-
"...no one even engaged these guys in a conversation, and no one, not the flight crew, and not the air marshals, challenged their egregious violations of protocols about congregating near restrooms or standing up in unison as the plane started its descent. Nothing was done to alleviate the terror Jacobsen, and probably a lot of the other passengers, felt."
And letting people like Jacobson direct air marshals to confront people acting in an 'obviously' suspicious manner is a real good way to get air marshals killed...they aren't security guards who are supposed to hassle minorities so the white lady can feel safe.
They have a tactical job to do, and public perceptions are never a good tactical mandate.
-
Milt:
Sure! If, for example you have a problem with middle-aged KKKers, cracker rednecks attacking black people.
Whack Job
-
http://www.anecdotage.com/index.php?aid=9689
-
...for vigilant actors like James Woods.
:lol:
-
In fairness, I post this piece-- but I submit that the question still remains about being proactive instead of reactive. At what point do we as passengers act? Do we wait for "probable cause"? What the hell is that? And what do we do if we do want to act?
=========
LAX flight terrorism fears discounted
SAFETY: Despite widespread interest and Internet reports on Syrian passengers, the FBI says there was no "national security threat."
By Ian Gregor, Daily Breeze
Media inquiries have poured into Los Angeles International Airport from as far away as Australia and England. The story has made the rounds on local radio talk shows and popped up in national publications. It has been poked and probed from every possible angle in Internet chat rooms.
There's only one glitch: The supposed dry run for a terror attack aboard a June 29 Detroit-to-LAX flight -- chronicled earlier this month in dramatic prose on a Web site called womenswallstreet.com -- never happened, federal officials say. The "terrorists" were, in fact, Syrian musicians who were simply flying to a gig at an Indian casino near San Diego, they say.
"The conclusion was there was no sort of terror threat, national security threat," said Cathy Viray, spokeswoman for the FBI's Los Angeles office. "To date this is absolutely our position."
An aviation security official who requested anonymity was more blunt in his assessment of the author, Annie Jacobsen of San Diego, who was aboard the Northwest Airlines flight.
"I just think it was an over-reactive passenger who saw things her own way," the official said. "It was immediately discredited."
The story of Flight 327 is one of increased anxiety in the post-9-11 era and, some observers charge, racial profiling of Middle Eastern men. It also shows how seriously authorities take concerns from flight crews as the government warns that terrorists remain interested in using commercial jets as instruments of attack. When it landed at Terminal 2, Flight 327 was met by a horde of FBI agents and officers from the LAX and Los Angeles police departments.
"We go to great pains to meet an aircraft at the gate when it's requested by flight attendants or pilots," said LAX Police Chief Bernard Wilson.
Jacobsen did not immediately return a phone message left with a clerk at womenswallstreet.com's Aliso Viejo offices. In a posting on the site, she said federal officials confirmed the facts in her story and she denied that she was guilty of racial profiling. She also said she had received supportive e-mails from flight attendants and pilots.
In her initial 3,300-word July 16 story, Jacobsen said she grew terrified when 14 Middle Eastern men, who knew each other but sat in separate groups, made repeated trips to the lavatories carrying bags and signaling each other as they came and went. As the plane was on its final approach to LAX, seven of the men stood up together and walked to the front and back lavatories, each spending about four minutes inside. Her husband and a nearby passenger shared her concerns, as did a flight attendant who intimated there were air marshals aboard watching the men, she wrote.
Intelligence officials believe terrorists are trying to find ways to assemble bombs aboard planes using innocuous materials, according to published reports.
"If 19 terrorists can learn to fly airplanes into buildings, couldn't 14 terrorists learn to play instruments?" Jacobsen wrote.
Some elements of Jacobsen's account were true, said Dave Adams, a spokesman for the Federal Air Marshals Service. The men did act strangely and air marshals checked the bathrooms after the men exited, he said. But marshals did not see a need to intervene.
"Obviously some of their actions were a little out of the ordinary but not to the extent that (air marshals) had to react other than to keep them under observation on the flight," Adams said.
Air marshals were not on Flight 327 because of any specific threat or concerns about the Syrian musicians, he said.
"There was no intelligence (about a threat) on that flight," Adams said. "There's no specific intelligence indicating terror groups are conducting test runs aboard any commercial airliners."
Nevertheless, the marshals and the flight crew decided that the men should be investigated, and requested that law enforcement officers meet the aircraft at its gate, Adams said.
"All complaints are taken seriously," the FBI's Viray said, adding that law enforcement agencies frequently are asked to meet planes at LAX.
Federal agents detained the men, interviewed them, ran their names through terrorist databases and, when they came up clean, let them go, Adams said. Agents later determined the men did perform on July 1 at the Sycuan Casino & Resort and monitored the concert, according to a report on radio station KFI (640 AM).
Publish Date:July 28, 2004
=======================
BTW, FWIW it was reported on 640AM radio in Los Angeles that the musicians were all later discovered to have expired visas
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Personal Journal
A New Approach
In Terror Readiness
Latest Efforts Address Specifics on How People
Can Respond to Attacks; Where to Find Shelter
By AMY DOCKSER MARCUS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
In the past three years, a lot of attention has focused on making sure hospitals, corporations and government offices are prepared for a terrorist attack. But a new push is under way to address the possibility that in the first hours after an attack, individuals may have to act on their own.
Much of the first round of preparedness advice focused on basics, such as disaster kits and supplies like duct tape and bottled water. But several groups are now attempting to offer concrete advice about how to respond to a detailed range of possible attacks, from conventional weapons to biological and chemical agents to "dirty bombs" laced with radiological materials. The Bush administration has warned about the possibility of an attack timed to disrupt the upcoming political conventions, though it hasn&t raised the official terrorist threat level.
Much of the recent effort has focused on unconventional weapons such as biological and chemical agents, because it is these sorts of attacks in particular that may require quick action on the part of individuals to minimize risk. The goal is to offer guidance on how people can act in the critical hours after an attack, while the government is preparing its response.
One problem is that many Americans don&t know the difference between types of unconventional weapons, nor the very different responses that would be called for in each circumstance. And despite government recommendations, today only a small proportion of households have even a rudimentary disaster-preparedness kit.
A public symposium being held today in Washington, sponsored by the American Red Cross and the Department of Homeland Security, among others, aims to explore why so many people are not prepared for the possibility of biological, chemical, nuclear or radiological attack, and what steps can be taken by individuals to help themselves survive.
Be Prepared
See how to prepare for and react to different kinds of terror attacks.
Rand Corp., a Santa Monica, Calif.-based think tank, has created a small reference card, designed to fit in a handbag or pocket, that summarizes a recent report it published on steps people can take in response to various types of terrorist attacks. The card is free and can be downloaded from the group&s Web site, www.rand.org. The Council for Excellence in Government, a Washington think tank, has issued its own report with advice for individuals.
Some groups have emphasized breaking a terror attack down into only few simple strategies to remember. In the event of a chemical attack, for example, Rand says the overarching goal is to find clean air very quickly: Take shelter in the closest building if the attack is outdoors; open windows if the attack is indoors. Remove clothing and shower once you are protected.
For radiological attack, people should avoid inhaling dust that could be radioactive. A dust mask or even a shirt can be helpful. In the case of nuclear attack, the main goal is to avoid radioactive fallout. Go as far underground as possible -- or high up in a multistory building -- until evacuation is possible.
One problem of course, is how to find out what type of attack is under way. For that, the Rand report suggests adding a battery-operated radio to any emergency-preparedness kit to monitor government announcements. The report, which costs $15, says a terrorism-preparedness kit doesn&t need to be elaborate and requires only a few items over and above the first-aid supplies and canned goods that might already be in someone&s emergency kit. In addition to the radio, the report suggests a dust mask with a N95-rated particulate filter that can be readily purchased to protect against radiological dust or fallout and biological agents, as well as duct tape and plastic sheeting to seal openings in a shelter.
The Duct Tape
Duct tape has been alternatively recommended and ridiculed as a protective measure. But while it can&t completely seal a home from contaminants, it can be helpful, the Rand report says. "What we found is that the most critical steps are simple to do and not hard to understand, but can make a tremendous difference," says Lynn Davis, senior political scientist at Rand Corp. and co-author of the organization&s report.
In general, preparedness experts aren&t counseling people to stock up on medications or gas masks, which have very limited value in an emergency. Cipro and other antibiotics, for instance, have a short shelf life, and indiscriminate or incorrect use of them could leave someone worse off. Gas masks need to be on at the time of an attack, or within a minute, and therefore are impractical since there is rarely sufficient warning of an attack.
Potassium iodide, which has a five-year shelf life, can be beneficial in protecting against the thyroid cancer that can result from a nuclear or radiological exposure. "But it has a very limited use" because it works only if certain types of radiation were used, says Christina Catlett, medical director of the Center for Emergency Preparedness at George Washington University Medical Center in Washington.
Some of the groups examining the issue of individual preparedness have studied the example of Israel, a country which has a long history of experience with terrorism and relies heavily on individuals to be vigilant against threats. Israelis are regularly reminded in public-service announcements to be on the lookout for suspicious objects or people. Most communities have citizen guards that take turns patrolling neighborhoods. Many schools have parent volunteers who help bolster security efforts. And nearly all homes have a designated "sealed room" with supplies and a phone jack where a family could retreat in an attack.
Convincing individuals to prepare for an attack hasn&t been easy. Last year, the Department of Homeland Security launched its Ready campaign, urging individuals to stockpile supplies such as water and canned goods and create a family emergency plan in the event of a terror attack. In a report to be presented at the Washington symposium today, the Red Cross found that only one in 10 people have made a disaster plan, prepared an emergency kit and received some kind of training in CPR or basic first aid.
The Council for Excellence in Government has sponsored town halls in seven cities, including St. Louis, Miami and Seattle, and this year published a "citizens& agenda" of actions individuals can take, such as lobbying for the creation of one telephone number, similar to 911, for citizens to report security threats and learn emergency information. The full report can be obtained at www.excelgov.org.
Preparing Hospitals
Meanwhile, amid concerns about an attack timed to the election, efforts to insure that there is an ample national supply of smallpox vaccinations and antibiotics continue. Last week, the Centers for Disease Control said it had shipped thousands of so-called "ChemPaks" to Boston and New York containing Cipro and other antibiotics, medical supplies and masks, and other supplies and medicines. For use by hospitals, the packs are meant to ensure that hospitals have supplies necessary to deal with biological, chemical or nuclear attacks.
Write to Amy Dockser Marcus at amy.marcus@wsj.com
Be Prepared . . .
Some steps you can take to prepare for a possible terror attack:
Take an emergency-preparedness course:
The American Red Cross and some hospitals and community groups offer emergency-preparedness courses. For a list of courses, contact: American Red Cross at www.redcross.org; George Washington University&s Response to Emergencies and Disaster Institute at www.readi.gwu.edu.
Prepare an emergency kit:
Checklists with helpful tips&such as don&t forget an extra set of prescription eyeglasses and medications&can be found at: Department of Homeland Security at www.ready.gov; America Prepared Campaign at www.americaprepared.org.
Learn in advance about potential chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offers fact-sheets with information about illnesses associated with unconventional terror attacks at www.bt.cdc.gov. The sheets include helpful information, such as the fact that anthrax isn&t contagious; that many effects of chemical agents such as sarin can be minimized by removing contaminated clothing and showering with soap and water; and how to recognize symptoms of various exposures.
Identify gaps in public preparedness and lobby for changes:
The Council for Excellence in Government published a report of suggestions of how emergency preparedness can be improved, such as creating one telephone number that people can call for information, available at www.excelgov.org. Trust for America&s Health published a report about gaps in public-health infrastructure in each state and plans to update it later this year, available at www.healthyamericans.org.
. . .How to Respond
If there is an attack, here are some simple steps individuals can take to improve the odds of survival.
TYPE OF ATTACK TIPS
Radiological
("dirty bomb") Avoid inhaling dust that could be radioactive by covering nose and mouth with any available cloth&even a shirt.
Nuclear Avoid radioactive fallout by evacuating the area quickly or seeking the best available shelter, either as far underground as possible or, if not available, in the upper floors of a multistory building.
Biological Go to a medical provider if symptomatic. Follow instructions from public-health officials on when and how to administer medications.
Chemical Find clean air quickly. In an indoor attack, open windows for fresh air or evacuate. In outdoor attack, find shelter&seal a room by closing windows and doors and shutting off air flow. Remove clothing and, if possible, shower.
Source: Rand Corp. A full copy of the report and recommendations are available at www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1731
Return to story
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I'm a member of a Community Emergency Response Team (CERT); a fair amount of our training involves homeland security issues. It's a volunteer program, and certainly cuts into MA training time, but in IMHO it's well worth the effort.
CERT isn't exclusively focused on homeland security; training a corps of people able to provide emergency services locally when first responders are overwhelmed is the basis of the program. A lot of the training involves natural disasters, light search and rescue, and so on.
Anyone seeking more info can find it at:
http://training.fema.gov/EMIWeb/CERT/index.asp
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Thanks for that Buzwardo.
Now, here's this from
http://www.stratfor.com/
Highly recommended
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Terrorist Tactics: The Art of Disguise
Jul 29, 2004 1550 GMT
Security sources in southern California have told Stratfor about incidents involving "vehicle-spoofing" -- or the use of falsely marked utility vehicles. The markings -- said to be fairly professionally done -- were identified by investigators looking into drug-smuggling cases.
That said, the potential for vehicle-spoofing and other types of disguises as terrorist tactics is a cause for concern.
The use of vehicles disguised as official or corporate cars, vans or trucks is an old tactic among criminals and militants that still bears review. It has cropped up everywhere -- from Iraq and Saudi Arabia to Maryland and San Diego -- and is even used by U.S. law enforcement agencies during surveillance operations. Such vehicles arouse little suspicion among the public -- and from a mental awareness standpoint, the mind has a tendency to discount the obvious, such as a delivery truck parked in a fire lane.
Stratfor has long argued that observance and vigilance among citizens are the best defenses against terrorism; the difficulty -- particularly during periods of heightened alert -- is knowing what to be on watch for.
Spoofed vehicles are only one example: Sources have told Stratfor that those identified in southern California were reasonable facsimiles of company vehicles -- utility trucks, delivery vehicles or even fleet sedans with corporate markings -- that would not attract notice from casual observers (emphasis on "casual"). In the past, militants also have used taxis as cover for surveillance; this has occurred in New York City and New Orleans, where investigators disrupted a Sikh militant assassination plot against Indian diplomats.
Other tactics include:
Official uniforms that are copied or stolen: This tactic has been used in terrorist attacks in the past, including the May assaults against Westerners at the Oasis housing compound in Khobar, Saudi Arabia. In the United States, theft of official uniforms -- such as those for police, firemen or security guards -- can be difficult to prevent; the most effective countermeasure usually is speedily reporting the theft to authorities.
Theft or copying of identification cards and badges: Requiring employees to display identification badges in order to enter the workplace is an effective security measure for many government agencies and companies, but it also renders the workplace vulnerable: Employees often wear their badges outside the building -- where they inadvertently could reveal important information or be lost or stolen. That said, employers can protect themselves through measures such as proxy card/badge readers, which allow specific numeric identifiers on lost or stolen cards to be deleted in real-time from computer memory banks, keeping any impostors from accessing the facility.
Stolen utility vehicles: These could be used in car- or truck-bombing plots, a tactic al Qaeda has discussed in the past. In 1993, militants in New York City considered using stolen delivery vans to gain access to target venues in several scenarios, such as blowing up the Waldorf-Astoria or U.N. Plaza Hotel. Countermeasures that can help to prevent against such attacks include the use of global positioning systems or similar technology that allows companies to trace lost or stolen vehicles quickly. GPS systems routinely are installed in commercial tractor-trailers, where federal officials say they have been extremely effective in preventing theft of cargo-loads traveling U.S. interstates.
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The Vulnerability of the Passenger Rail Systems
Jul 16, 2004 1141 GMT
By Fred Burton
The FBI has ratcheted up its counterterrorism intelligence collection efforts as the U.S. presidential elections draw nearer, and both the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security remain highly concerned that an attack could come at anytime.
Nevertheless, the United States still has many "soft targets" that are difficult or impossible to adequately protect against a militant strike -- and the nation's passenger rail system tops the list. In such an environment, a "Madrid-style" attack is entirely possible, whether involving improvised explosive devices hidden in a suitcase or satchel, a suicide bombing or even a biological/chemical attack using agents -- such as sarin gas or anthrax -- released inside a passenger rail car.
The security necessary to prevent such a strike would cause the passenger rail system to all but grind to a halt. Securing the rail lines is much more problematic than securing air travel because of the sheer volume of travelers and stops. The Sept. 11 hijackers exploited weaknesses within the nation's air-passenger screening system to carry out a well-orchestrated attack -- but nothing as elaborate as the Sept. 11 strikes is required for a highly effective, mass-casualty assault against the country's rail systems.
This threat is particularly relevant in the Washington-to-New York City corridor -- which counterterrorism officials refer to as "the X", or target zone. An attack within those cities proper could lead to massive casualties: On average, some 4.5 million passengers use New York City's trains and subways every weekday, as do 550,000 passengers in Washington.
Local officials are not completely blind to this threat, but they are not adequately equipped to defend against it either.
For example, the New York City Police Department -- which has a long history of fighting terrorism and has conducted more planning than any other major metropolitan police department for the possibility of another attack -- currently is on heightened terror alert. The NYPD is putting forth a visible show of manpower on the streets and fielding extra uniformed police around the exterior entrances to subways. Undercover officers also are deployed underground, as a further step to thwart attacks. However, inside New York's Penn Station rail hub, the police presence is smaller, in marked contrast to the show of force of force outside.
Though the NYPD has made a tactical decision about where to deploy its forces -- visibly and otherwise -- this likely does more to combat low-level street crime and provide psychological comfort to travelers and tourists than it would to deter an actual terrorist attack. All of al Qaeda's major attacks, including the African Embassy bombings, the attack against the USS Cole and bombing plots in New York City, have shown that the group factors visible police and security staff into their attack plans -- and into the overall casualty count of a strike. If militants opted for gunfire, a single officer with a pistol likely would be killed without gaining a chance to return fire. If bombs were to be placed on trains, the presence of police would be meaningless.
If an attack were to take place on a train or inside a terminal, likely scenarios include a "spray and pray" strike -- in which a suicide bomber sprays a crowd with gunfire before detonating his own explosives to maximize casualty counts -- placing improvised explosive devices on trains or releasing a deadly gas or chemical inside a passenger car. Any of these would be quite easy to carry out within the current security environment: Nearly three years after the Sept. 11 attacks, no passenger or baggage screening systems are in place at Penn Station, or in Union Station or the subways in Washington. This is a serious concern.
In fact, Stratfor sources within the U.S. counterterrorism community are puzzled why an attack against a passenger rail system has not already occurred, in light of these factors. An attack involving a crowded passenger train could kill scores of people and have economic effects that might rival those of the Sept. 11 strikes -- for example, leading to a rail system shutdown and keeping thousands or millions of commuters from their jobs. Moreover, any strike need not be highly sophisticated or carried out by a large group: A lone militant could carry out such a plan, as seen in a lone Islamist gunman?s attack against the El Al terminal at Los Angeles Airport in 2002 or the killings by Mir Aimal Kansi at the front gate of the CIA in 1993.
Stratfor believes that Washington remains firmly atop al Qaeda's target list. The capital city's Union Station and Metro subways are under heightened threat, but security there is less substantial than on the rail systems of New York City -- something that makes no sense from a threat assessment perspective. In New York, bomb dogs and SWAT teams with submachine guns are deployed at key locations, such as the World Trade Center site. Standoff weapons would allow officer to at least return adequate fire in the event of a commando-style attack, and possibly save lives. However, in Washington there are no visible bomb dogs or police officers with standoff shoulder weapons.
That said, there are a few concrete steps rail travelers can take for protection:
Buy a flashlight and smoke hood for the daily commute.
Be aware of your surroundings.
Remain mentally prepared for an attack and walk through escape plans in your mind.
At the government level, aggressive threat information collection efforts -- coupled with passenger and baggage screening efforts -- are vital to prevent an attack involving the passenger rail systems. Police and Emergency Medical System response plans also play an important role. However, the practical steps involved in screening millions of passengers daily -- in a timely manner -- is simply not doable. Thus, the nation's rail systems remain a serious vulnerability, and are likely to be the next militant target inside the United States.
================
The Vulnerability of the Passenger Rail Systems
Jul 16, 2004 1141 GMT
By Fred Burton
The FBI has ratcheted up its counterterrorism intelligence collection efforts as the U.S. presidential elections draw nearer, and both the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security remain highly concerned that an attack could come at anytime.
Nevertheless, the United States still has many "soft targets" that are difficult or impossible to adequately protect against a militant strike -- and the nation's passenger rail system tops the list. In such an environment, a "Madrid-style" attack is entirely possible, whether involving improvised explosive devices hidden in a suitcase or satchel, a suicide bombing or even a biological/chemical attack using agents -- such as sarin gas or anthrax -- released inside a passenger rail car.
The security necessary to prevent such a strike would cause the passenger rail system to all but grind to a halt. Securing the rail lines is much more problematic than securing air travel because of the sheer volume of travelers and stops. The Sept. 11 hijackers exploited weaknesses within the nation's air-passenger screening system to carry out a well-orchestrated attack -- but nothing as elaborate as the Sept. 11 strikes is required for a highly effective, mass-casualty assault against the country's rail systems.
This threat is particularly relevant in the Washington-to-New York City corridor -- which counterterrorism officials refer to as "the X", or target zone. An attack within those cities proper could lead to massive casualties: On average, some 4.5 million passengers use New York City's trains and subways every weekday, as do 550,000 passengers in Washington.
Local officials are not completely blind to this threat, but they are not adequately equipped to defend against it either.
For example, the New York City Police Department -- which has a long history of fighting terrorism and has conducted more planning than any other major metropolitan police department for the possibility of another attack -- currently is on heightened terror alert. The NYPD is putting forth a visible show of manpower on the streets and fielding extra uniformed police around the exterior entrances to subways. Undercover officers also are deployed underground, as a further step to thwart attacks. However, inside New York's Penn Station rail hub, the police presence is smaller, in marked contrast to the show of force of force outside.
Though the NYPD has made a tactical decision about where to deploy its forces -- visibly and otherwise -- this likely does more to combat low-level street crime and provide psychological comfort to travelers and tourists than it would to deter an actual terrorist attack. All of al Qaeda's major attacks, including the African Embassy bombings, the attack against the USS Cole and bombing plots in New York City, have shown that the group factors visible police and security staff into their attack plans -- and into the overall casualty count of a strike. If militants opted for gunfire, a single officer with a pistol likely would be killed without gaining a chance to return fire. If bombs were to be placed on trains, the presence of police would be meaningless.
If an attack were to take place on a train or inside a terminal, likely scenarios include a "spray and pray" strike -- in which a suicide bomber sprays a crowd with gunfire before detonating his own explosives to maximize casualty counts -- placing improvised explosive devices on trains or releasing a deadly gas or chemical inside a passenger car. Any of these would be quite easy to carry out within the current security environment: Nearly three years after the Sept. 11 attacks, no passenger or baggage screening systems are in place at Penn Station, or in Union Station or the subways in Washington. This is a serious concern.
In fact, Stratfor sources within the U.S. counterterrorism community are puzzled why an attack against a passenger rail system has not already occurred, in light of these factors. An attack involving a crowded passenger train could kill scores of people and have economic effects that might rival those of the Sept. 11 strikes -- for example, leading to a rail system shutdown and keeping thousands or millions of commuters from their jobs. Moreover, any strike need not be highly sophisticated or carried out by a large group: A lone militant could carry out such a plan, as seen in a lone Islamist gunman?s attack against the El Al terminal at Los Angeles Airport in 2002 or the killings by Mir Aimal Kansi at the front gate of the CIA in 1993.
Stratfor believes that Washington remains firmly atop al Qaeda's target list. The capital city's Union Station and Metro subways are under heightened threat, but security there is less substantial than on the rail systems of New York City -- something that makes no sense from a threat assessment perspective. In New York, bomb dogs and SWAT teams with submachine guns are deployed at key locations, such as the World Trade Center site. Standoff weapons would allow officer to at least return adequate fire in the event of a commando-style attack, and possibly save lives. However, in Washington there are no visible bomb dogs or police officers with standoff shoulder weapons.
That said, there are a few concrete steps rail travelers can take for protection:
Buy a flashlight and smoke hood for the daily commute.
Be aware of your surroundings.
Remain mentally prepared for an attack and walk through escape plans in your mind.
At the government level, aggressive threat information collection efforts -- coupled with passenger and baggage screening efforts -- are vital to prevent an attack involving the passenger rail systems. Police and Emergency Medical System response plans also play an important role. However, the practical steps involved in screening millions of passengers daily -- in a timely manner -- is simply not doable. Thus, the nation's rail systems remain a serious vulnerability, and are likely to be the next militant target inside the United States.
===============
The Sleeper Cell Threat: A Search in Unlikely Places
Jun 18, 2004 1706 GMT
Summary
An unfolding case against a man arrested in Tyler, Texas, points to potential threats posed by a combination of the United States' need for workers with specific qualifications, visa processes and the ability of sleeper cells to remain dormant -- and inconspicuous -- for years.
Analysis
A Pakistani man arrested in May in the small Texas town of Tyler has been accused of plotting to carry out terrorist attacks on the West Coast. FBI agents arrested Osama Haroon Satti after he bought a handgun and silencer from an undercover agent and asked where he would be able to acquire more. Satti allegedly has been linked to a group of men who were arrested in Virginia on suspicion of involvement with terrorist organizations.
There is little in Satti's background to mark him as an aspiring Islamist militant: He first entered the United States on a student visa in 1990, and worked in the computer industry before returning to Pakistan 11 years later. He holds an MBA from the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Satti -- like many other foreign workers in the United States -- has been caught up in the nation's counterterrorism dragnet, as federal officials seek out members of dormant sleeper cells. If the allegations against Satti and others are true, authorities could be rooting out militants from some seemingly unlikely places.
Higher Education
Two characteristics that appear repeatedly in the backgrounds of suspected militants arrested by U.S. authorities are high levels of education and an interest in technology. Though millions of foreign workers with similar backgrounds -- and absolutely no connections to terrorism -- have entered the country for years, it is noteworthy that militant organizations easily could infiltrate by exploiting the visa process.
In fact, at least two of the Sept. 11 hijackers -- Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, who entered the country on tourist visas -- were approved for M-1 student visas shortly before carrying out their attacks. Approval forms from the Immigration and Naturalization Service arrived at the al Qaeda members' Florida flight training school exactly six months after Atta and al-Shehhi died at the helms of the planes that plowed into the World Trade Center towers.
Consider also the following cases:
Maher "Mike" Mofeid Hawas: A naturalized U.S. citizen who worked as a lead engineer for Intel Corp. He was arrested in August 2003 after traveling to China and allegedly attempting to enter Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban. Hawas pleaded guilty in August 2003 to aiding terrorist organizations and was sentenced to seven years in prison.
Mohammed Atique: A Pakistani native who arrived in the United States in 1996 to study electrical engineering. Atique worked for a number of wireless communication companies before his arrest May 8, 2003. He is among the group of 11 men who have been dubbed the "Virginia Jihad," accused of colluding with militant organization Lashkar e Taiba (LeT). Atique was sentenced in December 2003 to more than 10 years in prison.
Khwaja Hassan: Another member of the "Virginia Jihad." Hassan is a naturalized U.S. citizen from Pakistan who holds a master's degree in business technology. He was arrested while working as a teacher in Saudi Arabia and extradited to the United States in July 2003 on suspicion of involvement with LeT. A federal court sentenced Hassan to more than 11 years in prison in November 2003.
These are only a few examples of men who have been accused of belonging to militant sleeper cells within the United States. Though the actual proof in many cases is open to question, the security threat posed by sleeper cells is not.
The case of the Virginia Jihad -- nine of whose 11 members ultimately were convicted -- is of interest, in part because it involves an eclectic assortment of suspects that includes native U.S. citizens, a Korean immigrant and a former U.S. Marine. These backgrounds, along with high education and stable employment histories, obviously would help sleeper cell members to blend into the populace while planning any attacks -- unlike those who are involved with document falsification or other crimes that can draw the attention of investigators. Sleeper cells might not be an exclusive club for foreign-born jihadists: Testimony during the trials of the Virginia Jihad suspects showed this group was not planted in the United States for militant purposes, but rather that its members were ideologically sympathetic to Islamist movements and were recruited into the LeT cause after living in the United States for years.
Given the level of sophistication that was evident in the Sept. 11 attacks -- and that likely is required to carry out further strikes within the United States -- it is logical to conclude that the leaders and members of militant sleeper cells are required to have a higher level of education than are the jihadist foot soldiers fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It also is conceivable that they maintain stable, legal employment with American companies.
Additionally, it is worth noting that, in light of the current focus on counterterrorism, sleeper cells and locally grown Islamist movements likely are operating with minimal guidance from al Qaeda, and are planning or carrying out operations on their own. This makes it all the more difficult to identify and disrupt the cells.
Focus on Background Checks
The May 1 attacks in Yanbu, Saudi Arabia, prompted many Western corporations to re-evaluate their own employees and security procedures. It is possible for dormant militants to remain in place for years before showing any signs of posing a threat: Some of the attackers in Yanbu were longtime employees of the targeted company, ABB Lummus -- they possessed access badges and enjoyed the confidence of their colleagues. Such a scenario is equally plausible within the United States, which places heightened emphasis on solid corporate security measures.
For privately held companies, conducting a thorough background check on workers can be extremely difficult. The required infrastructure in countries such as Pakistan and India, which contribute large numbers of workers to the United States, is practically non-existent -- heightening the potential for militants to exploit the L-1 visa process, which allows U.S.-based companies to import foreign workers with little diplomatic oversight.
Moreover, U.S. corporations do not have access to government-run counterterrorism databases -- making it difficult to know if an employee has been identified by federal officials as having links to militant groups.
Stratfor previously said Yanbu-style attacks -- or small-scale assaults involving well-trained, knowledgeable operatives -- would become more likely. Such attacks depend on militants having intimate knowledge of their target and the trust of coworkers and employers.
Though it is impossible to measure the number of people involved with sleeper cells in the United States or to give a definitive description of their backgrounds, a few facts are worth noting:
Because of a dearth of American workers with qualifications in math, science and engineering, large numbers of foreign workers have entered the United States to pursue careers in those fields -- frequently on student, or F-1/M-1, visas.
The high tech industry, which draws on workers with math, science and engineering degrees, offers an economic and social status that law enforcers tend to view as incompatible with public threats.
The number of visas awarded to foreign workers was reduced following the Sept. 11 attacks, after investigations showed that some of the hijackers entered the country legally with F-1/M-1 status. However, since the sleeper cell cycle is measured in years, it is entirely possible that militants who entered the country some time ago with student visas would only now be entering into an active attack phase.
Members of any new sleeper cells seeking to enter the United States likely would seek other forms of cover -- whether legal or illegal. The lack of a broad base of support for Islamist causes within the United States -- unlike in Europe, where there are large sympathetic populations with pre-existing communication channels and "safe houses" -- makes it less likely that cells would exist entirely of illegal immigrants and unemployed militants.
==========
The Militant Threat: Focus on Britain
Jul 27, 2004 1147 GMT
Elite British intelligence and counterterrorism teams reportedly have been deployed to northern England to investigate potential threats by Islamist militants there. Sources within the British intelligence community have told Stratfor that MI5 and law enforcement agencies have received specific information about groups that might be operating in northern cities such as Manchester, Newcastle, Leeds, Liverpool and Sheffield, as well as smaller cities such as York and Hull.
Operationally, these are logical areas for militants to be located. Most of the well-known radical and jihadist Islamist groups are centered around the London area: If there is a connection between these groups and real threats, it is in the interests of jihadists to maintain operational distance between their cheerleaders, who seek attention, and actual operatives, who do not.
British intelligence sources have told Stratfor they believe Islamist militant groups actively have been raising funds in northern England and perhaps even conducting limited training exercises in national park areas, such as the North York Moors, the Lake District and Yorkshire Dales. The Muslim population in northern English cities has been under observation for quite some time, following ethnic riots in Leeds in the summer of 2001.
Though it is not clear whether any groups that have fallen under the British intelligence eye have al Qaeda connections or are planning attacks, two things are clear: Islamist militants have yet to carry out an attack within the United Kingdom, and -- given al Qaeda's ideology, goals and recent statements -- the country likely ranks high on the list of potential targets.
According to our sources, the British intelligence community is particularly concerned about the possibility of attacks against industrial facilities near Manchester, port facilities in Liverpool and shipyards in Newcastle. Though the potential for such threats should not be discounted, Stratfor finds it far more likely that militants would attempt to mount a strike in London -- where the potential for economic and symbolic damage is far greater.
Recent threats issued by known jihadist groups -- such as the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades and the Islamic Monotheism Group -- have focused specifically on U.S. allies, and there is none more staunch than Britain. The United Kingdom has contributed more troops -- roughly 9,000 -- than any other U.S. partner in Iraq and long has been active in Afghanistan as well. Interestingly, mentions of Britain have been noticeably absent from recent threats against Europe, which tends to focus our attention there all the more.
It should be noted that Islamists view Britain as a longstanding nemesis -- responsible for the collapse of the Turkish caliphate in 1924 and a colonizer of vast tracts of the Muslim world.
Rife with tourist attractions and as the nation's financial epicenter, London is home to any number of sites that would make ideal targets for militants, ranging from Big Ben to Trafalgar Square to Parliament and Buckingham Palace. It also is crisscrossed by a massive public transportation center, more heavily used than even that in Madrid.
Not only do Stratfor sources within numerous international intelligence agencies believe London is overdue for a strike, but the nation's political posture heightens the threat to the city. There is speculation that Parliamentary elections could be called in less than a year; a finely timed terrorist attack -- such as that in Madrid -- could serve as an opportunity to unseat the Labor government, which has stirred domestic controversy over its support for Washington's Iraq policy.
That is not to say that strikes against smaller or "softer" targets elsewhere in the country should be ruled out.
For geographic reasons, the British Isles are more secure than countries within continental Europe -- but they are linked to the continent by ferry and shipping traffic that ingresses and egresses from more than 23 ports and, of course, the Chunnel rail system. Ferry and train passengers are subjected to customs inspections at both ends of their trips, but rail and port security measures are known for being less stringent than those at airports (in fact, that has served as a selling point for Chunnel rail tickets, which can be vastly more expensive than airline tickets).
In Britain, as elsewhere, the security scenario is less than airtight.
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Common-Sense Protection: From Tsunamis to Terrorism
Jul 26, 2004 1107 GMT
The British Home Office announced plans July 26 to distribute pamphlets outlining steps that citizens should take in the event of a terrorist attack. The 11-page, pocket-sized pamphlet will be mailed to every British household, and will be followed by a series of radio and television advertisements. Officials said the campaign is being launched as a general safety measure, rather than in response to any imminent or specific terrorist threats -- though the threat posture to the United Kingdom in general is high.
Interestingly, the International Association of the Red Cross said as recently as July 23 the United Kingdom is far more prepared in general than the United States to cope with a terrorist attack -- where other recent polls have shown that few Americans take warnings of an imminent threat seriously. Taking these events together, it is worthwhile to examine the U.S. and British counterterrorism preparation guidelines.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has published a document, comparable to the British pamphlet, titled "Are You Ready?" The document, which for the most part compromises longstanding guidelines issued by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), was revised in September 2002 to include guidance for civilian responses to a terrorist attack. The American Red Cross also has a publication containing advice and guidance on how to respond in the event of an attack. All of these publications are available for download on the respective agencies' Web sites.
All three documents are similar in that they emphasize common-sense approaches. Because terrorism is inherently unpredictable, government agencies can distribute few other kinds of broad guidelines to the general public.
Moreover, all three rehash advice that governments and non-governmental organizations have distributed for years about general steps to follow in the event of emergencies. For example, the DHS document lists threats ranging from volcanic explosions and tsunamis to cyber-attacks and the detonation of a radiological dispersion device.
In almost all cases, the guidelines are quite clear.
Know evacuation routes for whatever building you are in.
Prepare a household emergency kit that contains, among other items, a flashlight, radio and fresh water.
Learn and know how to use basic first aid techniques.
These examples are sound advice in all situations, but certainly are not ground-breaking -- which might be one reason the British Home Office pamphlet is coming nearly three years after the Sept. 11 attacks. The most useful guidance given -- and it is best put in the Home Office publication -- concerns simple steps the average person might take to assist in preventing a terrorist attack. (Similar information can be found in the DHS document, though it is found on page 83 of the 108-page publication.)
Here again, common sense prevails -- but that is particularly useful and specifically applicable to counterterrorism efforts, which rely on vigilance among the public, as well as from official agencies. These guidelines -- which include items such as reporting "suspicious" people, activities or retail purchases, or calling security to investigate unattended baggage -- likely are familiar to any government employee, but serve as useful reminders for average citizens who might feel powerless to act on the strength of exceedingly vague warnings from the government.
Because successful acts of terrorism are, by nature, unpredictable, government warnings will always be vague and almost always will carry an alarmist tone. Patterns of attack become apparent only after the fact -- leaving government agencies hamstrung in distributing anything but the most general advice to the public. Though common sense will never capture headlines, it remains perhaps the most useful and available weapon to citizens in any emergency -- whether tsunamis or terrorism.
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Suggestions of Complacency
Jul 23, 2004 1727 GMT
A Land Rover that police believe was rigged with an improvised explosive device exploded July 22 outside the largest hotel and convention center in Nashville, Tenn. Although officials say they have no reason to suspect terrorism, they are investigating the incident -- in which one person, the vehicle's owner, died -- further.
This explosion came only a few days after a New York City police officer was wounded when a backpack stuffed with fireworks exploded in a subway station -- another incident that triggered fears of terrorism. In this case, officials say the officer who was wounded actually was responsible for the blast: He was to leave the police force on July 20 -- the following day -- on a disability pension related to what officials say were "psychological problems."
Despite the motivational disconnects between these two incidents, it is interesting that both explosions occurred in locations that Stratfor has identified as ideal "soft targets." The vulnerability of passenger rail systems and hotels has been amply backlit by the March 11 bombings in Madrid and the August 2003 attack against a Marriot hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia. Within the United States, such targets remain quite open, despite ongoing warnings of potential terrorist threats.
It obviously is impossible for police and security guards to adequately guard all potential targets against attack. As a result, they rely to some degree on average citizens to act as their eyes and ears -- particularly in public venues such as hotels or subway stations.
However, at least two recent surveys suggest that the American public is less concerned about terrorist threats than is the government. A poll commissioned by the Council for Excellence in Government finds that only 34 percent of Americans believe another terrorist attack on U.S. soil is "very likely." Additionally, a survey conducted by the Red Cross found that only 42 percent of Americans have assembled home emergency kits and only 10 percent have taken the "three steps" outlined by the Red Cross -- creating emergency kits, laying family disaster plans and training in first aid techniques -- for responses to emergencies.
If anything, these surveys suggest that the psychological effects of the Sept. 11 strikes are fading within the domestic United States -- even amid the increasing government warnings, which lose impact with frequency and vague information -- and that many Americans do not incorporate the practical steps that can be taken to protect against another strike to their daily lives.
Coupled with details from the Nashville and New York incidents, it also appears that even those who are on watch may not always know exactly which indicators to look for.
For example, the Land Rover in Nashville exploded in a relatively isolated area of the hotel parking lot, near storage trailers -- an unusual place for a guest to leave his vehicle. Though the explosion likely could not have been prevented, such a detail -- particularly if the vehicle was left parked for any length of time -- might have excited suspicion.
In the New York subway incident, many factors could have provided cover to the policeman accused of planting the explosives -- the hustle and bustle of a busy transportation link; the tendency of passersby to mind their own business; the police uniform worn by the accused. However, none of these factors would make it impossible to suspect an attack if vigilance is applied: For instance, the bag was planted around 8 p.m., which is not exactly a peak rush-hour period. It also should be remembered that militants who carried out several recent attacks against Westerners in Saudi Arabia were wearing the uniforms of police or security guards -- reasonable facsimiles of which could be acquired within the United States also.
Nearly three years after the Sept. 11 attacks, it is logical to expect that Americans would be "returning to normal" and again gaining confidence in the security of their country. The recent polls seem to reflect that this is the case, and that the nation's overall mood is one of ambivalence toward the increasing threat warnings. Among the general public, vigilance does not run high.
And as we have noted on several occasions during the past three years, complacency is a would-be attacker's best friend.
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Seeking Cover: The Problem of Western Converts
Jul 22, 2004 1740 GMT
Sources within the European and U.S. intelligence communities have told Stratfor that their agencies are growing increasingly concerned about the potential for Western converts to Islam to be used in carrying out terrorist-style attacks. These concerns are coming to the fore amid heightened tensions over potential terrorist attacks in both regions and a strong counterterrorism focus on young, Middle Eastern males.
Al Qaeda has shown itself to be a dynamic, intelligence and adaptive organization. Using operatives who are Western in appearance would be one way of increasing its chances for pulling off a successful strike in the current high-alert environment. Nor would such a scenario be without precedent -- as the examples of men like Jose Padilla, John Walker Lindh, Richard Reid and Australia's Jack Roche, among others, show.
However, we view such a scenario as only a potential threat to be noted, rather than as an emerging trend.
The vast majority of Western converts to Islam, whether in the United States or Europe, receive the faith at the hands of ?mainstream? Muslims, rather than from radical Wahhabis. There are madrassahs and mosques in the West that teach more radical forms of Islam, and they do wield a degree of influence, partly because of the Saudi wealth that funds them. And it should be noted that radical Islamic literature is available in many Western prisons, where several would-be operatives from the West have spent time. That said, the majority of Muslim schools and mosques in Western countries are run by subscribers to mainstream, non-Wahhabi forms of the religion.
Moreover, al Qaeda has not shown a penchant for proselytizing. Rather than acting as missionaries -- which likely would lead to unwelcome exposure -- the network draws from the conversion work of other radical, but non-militant, Islamist and Wahhabi groups such as al Mujahiroun in Britain, the Islamic Assembly of North America (IANA) and Quran and Sunnah Society (QSS) in the United States.
Al Qaeda likely would not turn away a willing Western militant, but many factors serve to limit the potential pool. Though Islam teaches that there are no racial divisions among its children, Western converts do not embark upon their Muslim lives with a tabula rasa. Instead, they bring a history of cultural tenets and values that often cause other Muslims to question the quality of their faith. Moreover, radical jihadist groups such as al Qaeda reject any Muslims -- born or converted -- who do not subscribe to their own, much narrower, framework of ideology.
Though the vast majority of Western converts to Islam probably do not become radical Islamists, al Qaeda now is operating in an environment in which ethnic diversity would serve its aims. Correctly or otherwise, the ?profile? of a potential Islamist militant is that of a young, Middle Eastern man -- something that has prompted the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warn airport security workers to be on watch for all Pakistani men who recently traveled to that country.
In all likelihood, actual militants are now seeking new forms of cover -- for which there also are several historical precedents. For years, Palestinian militant groups have employed women -- and more recently children -- as suicide bombers when Israeli security forces began to intensify their searches of Palestinian men. Other groups, such as Sri Lanka's Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, also have histories of deploying female operatives -- in fact, one who officials say may have hidden explosives in her bra, killed herself and four police officers in Colombo on July 7. Reports also have circulated among the security and expatriate communities in Saudi Arabia that Saudi men are donning female garb as a disguise while conducting surveillance of potential targets. Most famously, Yasser Arafat dressed as a woman to escape capture by the Israelis while in Lebanon.
However, given al Qaeda prime's very conservative beliefs about women and the tactical complications of incorporating such a previously unused element into its plans, we view the possibility of female operatives being used in a major strike as extremely unlikely.
Al Qaeda, like any intelligent and successful organization, will do what works best. Within the current climate, it is certainly feasible that there could be a shift toward non-traditional operatives, such as Western converts. However, anxiety over this scenario easily could be overplayed: All factors still point to the emergence of Western Islamist militants as an exception, rather than a trend.
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NYPD Taking Initiative in Counterterrorism Fight
Jul 20, 2004 1711 GMT
The subway station at 43rd and 8th Streets in Manhattan was temporarily closed July 19 after a bag placed on the staircase exploded, burning a police officer. Officials have said the bag contained only fireworks, but that it was bundled to look like a bomb.
The blast drew a rapid response from the New York City Police Department -- and though the investigation is continuing, it is plausible that the faux bombing could have been planned as a non-lethal way of testing New York City's emergency response systems. Gauging responses and reaction times by the NYPD, emergency medical services and fire department could make it easier for terrorists to carry out a real operation in the future.
The July 19 incident put the NYPD -- already tense amid preparations for the Aug. 30 through Sept. 2 Republican National Convention -- further on edge. The department already is fielding 1,000 police officers on the streets daily as part of the war on terrorism -- something officials acknowledge is putting pressure on patrol strength and overtime costs, which this year are projected at a city-wide record of $345.9 million.
The threat environment -- with warnings of a possible al Qaeda attack in the domestic United States within the next few months -- has placed additional strains on many, if not most, U.S. law enforcement, intelligence and emergency agencies. The atmosphere has not been aided by their relations with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which -- with its communication process still evolving -- frequently is regarded as more of a hindrance than an ally in the war on terrorism.
In light of these circumstances, Stratfor has learned, many metropolitan police departments -- including those in New York and Los Angeles -- are taking the lead on counterterrorism efforts within their own cities and elsewhere.
Some of the methods employed by the NYPD of which Stratfor has learned include:
Since Sept. 11, NYPD has established close relationships with foreign law enforcement and security personnel. This move stems in part from threat information dissemination problems between federal agencies and their state and local counterparts: Because of security criteria, information cannot flow smoothly and freely from top to bottom.
The NYPD actively is reaching out to state and local police agencies throughout North America. These communication efforts are part of an overall attempt to generate good will and smooth cooperation at the local law enforcement level nationwide -- especially in high-threat cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Houston and Chicago, among others.
The department is taking part in a program to train service personnel in some important locations -- such as doormen, maintenance workers and delivery people -- to recognize threats and take appropriate action.
With better communication, the NYPD also has improved response and contingency planning involving other agencies, such as the New York/New Jersey Port Authority.
The NYPD and possibly other agencies are taking a proactive approach to terrorism. That is not to say that local law enforcement agencies have completely eschewed the aid of the federal government: New York City and Boston still will employ a number of DHS assets, including the Secret Service, during the upcoming Republican and Democratic National conventions.
However, the DHS -- still in the growth and definition process -- has not yet established itself as a reliable administrator. For local law enforcement agencies, necessity has become the mother of invention.
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The TSA's Airport Security Conundrum
Jul 09, 2004 1715 GMT
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) on July 7 launched a test of its registered traveler program in St. Paul, Minn. -- a program that allows frequent fliers to sidestep time-consuming security checks at airports by submitting biometric data and fingerprints and submitting to an extensive background check.
The previous day, however, the TSA had issued security guidance to all U.S. airports, calling for a system in which employees of airport vendors -- such as newsstands and restaurants -- must pass through security checkpoints when entering and leaving secure areas of terminals. Previously, such requirements were left to the discretion of individual airport authorities. A 30-day review period is under way before the guidance can be implemented.
On the surface, the two actions appear to contradict each other -- one apparently decreasing security, the other attempting to increase it. Taken together, however, these situations highlight the difficulties faced by the TSA and its parent organization, the Department of Homeland Security, in balancing post-9/11 security needs with practical measures and convenience for travelers.
The calls for security screening for airport vendor employees is not new: Both branches of Congress have pushed for the measures since the Sept. 11 attacks, but the TSA resisted, saying that background checks conducted by individual vendors were sufficient. The American Association of Airport Executives opposed the measures also. The rationale for the change, three years on, is not clear: TSA spokesman Mark Hatfield Jr. cited security reasons when he declined to explain to the Washington Post the motive or the specific language of the directive; he said only that it was issued as part of an ongoing TSA review of airport security.
In its own way, the TSA's registered traveler program is equally controversial: It has drawn fire from both the corporate security community and politicians, who say it is a loophole in airport security procedures or that it requires passengers to give up too much personal information to authorities.
Initially, the TSA is making the pilot program available only to travelers who fly more than once a week, though it later could be expanded to other applicants. Those who register their personal information will not go through mainstream security checks, but will be screened in a separate line. Secondary checks will not be conducted unless the TSA's Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System, or CAPPS, software raises a red flag -- typically if a traveler purchases a ticket with cash or pre-purchases a one-way ticket.
Though these measures likely will be welcomed by frequent fliers, when coupled with its July 7 directive, it is clear that the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security have a fight on their hands: They are attempting simultaneously to maintain their own relevance without crippling the airline industry with cumbersome security processes.
For the TSA, this need has been made all the more urgent by a congressional campaign to re-privatize airport security screeners and the loss of many security check personnel at smaller U.S. airports. And for the DHS, it comes in the wake of revelations about shortcomings in the air defense system: A congressional panel determined July 8 that the DHS was not in a position to interdict the plane of a former Kentucky governor that violated restricted air space while en route to the funeral of former President Ronald Reagan, had those aboard had hostile intent.
Tightening security processes within the airports themselves logically is one way to mitigate this weakness -- but in the face of the competing requirements faced by the agencies, success is not assured.
=================
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Alert Level Raised: Parsing the Threat
Aug 02, 2004 1404 GMT
Pakistani officials revealed Aug. 2 that attack plans targeting the United States had been discovered following the recent arrest of suspected al Qaeda militants, including Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani. The announcement comes a day after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) raised alert levels for the Washington, D.C., area from yellow (elevated) to orange (high) and issued specific warnings for financial targets in Washington, New York City (which already was on orange alert) and northern New Jersey.
According to U.S. government sources who have spoken with Stratfor, the threat information is based on "very reliable" intelligence, and law enforcement and intelligence agencies are taking a serious view of the threat.
Even prior to DHS Director Tom Ridge's early-afternoon weekend briefing on Aug. 1, U.S. intelligence agencies had been investigating reports of a sleeper cell in northern New Jersey and had received information that eventually was incorporated into the government warning. In fact, a July 14 New York Post article quoted intelligence agents, speaking on condition of anonymity, who warned of another attack against financial targets in New York City. The recent arrests of Ghailani and other militants -- one of whom has been identified as suspected al Qaeda communications officer Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan -- and the subsequent search and seizure of Ghailani's computer led Pakistani intelligence agents to the attack plans announced Aug. 2. Those details apparently were based on surveillance performed by al Qaeda prior to the Sept. 11 attacks, and likely represent 3-year-old plot scenarios.
The age of the plot scenarios, however, does nothing to diminish the significance of the DHS announcement. Surveillance can, and often does, begin years ahead of any planned attacks: for example, five years before the 1999 attacks against U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya. Even more to the point, Ridge called a hasty and poorly coordinated press conference -- on a Sunday -- to alert the public to the threat. It appears that the intelligence picture evolved late last week and was urgent enough that DHS officials felt the need to disseminate information to the public forthwith, allowing those in at-risk areas to decide before Monday morning whether they should report to work. Despite three years of intelligence-gathering and prisoner debriefs, this is unprecedented behavior on the part of DHS -- leading Stratfor to conclude that the agency undoubtedly has received some credible and sensitive intelligence, driving the urgency on this warning.
Police and security agencies in New York, northern New Jersey and Washington, D.C., are now on high alert: increased patrols are on the street, subway platforms are being monitored and some streets and bridges are closed to commercial traffic. Financial institutions in those areas have tightened security -- especially those mentioned specifically in the warning: Citigroup, Prudential, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the New York Stock Exchange.
Intelligence and law enforcement are taking the DHS warning very seriously: Although the specific targets named qualify as "soft" targets, which would yield fairly limited casualties, their status as well-known financial institutions does put them well within al Qaeda's standard targeting criteria. By simply making the threat information public, the U.S. government likely will have some impact on the security environment -- reducing the likelihood that al Qaeda itself would strike at the named targets, since the group seldom if ever strikes where expected. However, as al Qaeda is well aware, the United States and the American public cannot maintain extremely high levels of alert indefinitely.
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Second post of the day:
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Personal Journal
Preparing for the Terror Alert
Latest Warning Underscores
How Little Many Have Done;
The Case for Text Messaging
By ANDREA PETERSEN and JESSE DRUCKER
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Rod Thomas and his wife Giselle have been talking for nearly three years about what to do in the case of another terrorist attack. But the new alerts on Sunday prompted the 34-year-old financial adviser to finally cement those plans.
"It took me a long time to convince her to let me go to work today," said Mr. Thomas, whose office is barely a block from the New York Stock Exchange, a potential terrorist target cited in the alert. The couple, who both worked on high floors of the World Trade Center on the day of the Sept. 11 attacks, has now agreed to meet at their Staten Island home as soon as possible if there&s another attack. If either one is not there, they will head toward her mother&s house. "If anything happens I run straight home," he says.
Terror Alert
Terrorists Took Time to Get Data
On Alert, but Work as Usual
Bush Calls for Intelligence Chief
Wall Street Seems More Prepared if the Worst Hits
Many Americans have been preparing anew for terrorism during recent weeks, as fears have mounted of another attack pegged to the political conventions and the presidential election. Now, the weekend announcement from the Department of Homeland Security that terrorists may be planning attacks specifically in New York, New Jersey and Washington, D.C., has given those concerns more immediacy. Local governments have stepped up security efforts, such as barring commercial traffic on certain routes into Manhattan. And individuals who live and work in and around the named targets -- including the Citigroup building in New York and the World Bank building in Washington -- are growing overtly more cautious.
Business is up 20% to 30% at the Earthquake Supply Center in San Rafael, Calif., during the past couple of weeks, owner Michael Skyler says. People are snapping up 55-gallon water-storage drums and water-purification tablets. Some are buying potassium-iodide tablets that help protect the thyroid in the case of a nuclear attack. The alerts have "definitely raised consciousness across the board," he says.
Safety experts say the latest terror alerts targeting specific financial institutions highlight the need for people to not only have a safety plan for their home, but for their workplace as well. They are renewing calls for people to create disaster-preparedness strategies that encompass their work and commute. The focus on work might surprise people who have spent the past three years worried about creating safe rooms in their houses, but security experts say that in reality, you&re not likely to be at home in an emergency.
"You might be at work, your kids might be at soccer practice," says Lara Shane, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security. A number of studies show that even after numerous warnings, most Americans still haven&t created an evacuation plan or compiled a disaster kit. The government urges all families to have a communications plan that includes an out-of-state contact.
Home and Office Preparedness:
Safety experts advise people to have disaster preparedness plans and kits for both home and work. Here are some guidelines:
What you need at home:
FOOD AND WATER: Three gallons of water per person and a three-day supply of nonperishable food per person
FIRST-AID: Any needed prescription drugs, extra pair of glasses or contact lenses, aspirin, sunscreen, sterile bandages, soap
OTHER SUPPLIES: Battery-operated radio, flashlight, extra batteries change them every six months), cash, nonelectric can opener, plastic sheeting, one change of clothes per person
What you need at work:
FOOD AND WATER: One gallon of water, three meals of nonperishable food
FIRST-AID: Three-day supply of prescription medications, aspirin, sterile bandages, waterless hand sanitizer, extra pair of glasses/contacts
OTHER SUPPLIES: Flashlight with extra batteries, battery-powered radio, toothbrush, toothpaste, one complete change of clothing, comfortable shoes, emergency mylar "space" blanket
Source: American Red Cross
The American Red Cross recommends that individuals prepare a special disaster-supply kit for their workplace. The organization offers an exhaustive list of items that could make the average cubicle feel pretty crowded, including a flashlight, battery-powered radio, one gallon of water, food for one day, a change of clothing and shoes and a first-aid kit. (The full list is available at www.redcross.org. Under Disaster Services, click on "Be Prepared," then "Personal Workplace Disaster Supplies Kit.") Stocking up on medications like potassium iodide or the antibiotic Cipro isn&t recommended. Incorrect use of antibiotics could leave someone even more vulnerable to illness. And potassium iodide works only on certain types of radiation.
The Red Cross also sells a pared-down kit designed for one person, called a "Safety Tube." The tube can be attached to the underside of a desk (with Velcro) or fit in a briefcase, and includes a lightstick, a dust mask, a whistle and a water-filled pouch. The kit is available through local Red Cross chapters for around $5 and will be sold online at www.redcross.org beginning next month.
Aside from preparing a disaster kit, there&s the challenge of staying in touch with loved ones during an emergency. On the day of the Sept. 11 attacks, millions of people in New York and Washington, D.C., found that their cellphone calls wouldn&t go through. The networks& capacity was hurt by the destruction of lines leading into a Verizon Communications Inc. central office, which affected all carriers. Networks were also overloaded by all the extra telephoning.
Since then, carriers say they have added capacity. Recent agreements with law-enforcement agencies are designed to give priority on the wireless network to calls from police and other emergency personnel. In reality, however, even the extra capacity is unlikely to keep up with a dramatic spike in calling prompted by another attack.
There are a few tips for staying in touch in an emergency. For people on the street with only a cellphone, a text message could have a better chance of getting through than a regular call. If the network is overloaded, a phone call just gets dropped, but a text message essentially waits in a queue until there is room for it go through. It could be delayed for hours, but at least it&s more likely to get there.
If your cellphone provider is Nextel Communications Inc., that carrier&s walkie-talkie-like "push-to-talk" feature could be more likely to make it through, since it doesn&t rely on the public telephone network, and such calls take up less capacity. And the BlackBerry portable e-mail devices sold by most major cellular carriers can also potentially get a message through when the telephone network is clogged. BlackBerry users can also send messages even when the connection to their employer&s e-mail server is lost, by using a function that allows them to bypass the server altogether.
Some people have a simpler strategy to avoid problems: Stay home. The Republican convention in New York City that begins late this month has prompted James A. Pardo, a Manhattan attorney, to spend that week working from his house in Darien, Conn. -- where he has 60 gallons of emergency bottled water stored in his basement -- instead of traveling to his Midtown office. "If I can work from home, why do I want to be here?" he says.
For those who cannot stay home, there was little escaping the heightened concerns in New York and Washington yesterday. On the Washington Metro, special response teams armed with machine guns performed spot checks of the stations and trains, occasionally stopping rail service to check beneath the cars. More than 200,000 people rode the Metro yesterday morning, according to a spokesman, who said ridership was down slightly from the same day last week, but up from the same day a year ago.
The latest terrorism warnings say that plots could target the ventilation systems of businesses. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has been working with security managers in the private sector to encourage them to place physical barriers in front of entrances to ventilation and air-conditioning systems. But terrorism experts say that there is little that can be done if terrorists are successful in releasing a biological agent into a ventilation system. That is because it likely won&t be detected until people start becoming ill.
If there is news of a contagious agent -- such as smallpox or plague -- being released in a building, safety experts do say that those outside the immediate area can protect themselves from becoming infected by "sheltering in place." This means sealing windows and doors with plastic sheeting and -- yes -- duct tape. Avoiding hospitals and large groups of people will also help, as will wearing a protective mask. "If you don&t come into contact with those who have been exposed, you won&t get sick," says Greg Evans, director of the Institute for Biosecurity at St. Louis University.
-- Marlon A. Walker and Kara Scannell contributed to this article.
Write to Andrea Petersen at andrea.petersen@wsj.com and Jesse Drucker at jesse.drucker@wsj.com
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Woof All:
This aptly titled piece (after the famous Japanese movie about how three different players to one event each had a different version) follows up on the intriguing episode discussed earlier in this thread.
Crafty Dog
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Roshomon in the Skies: The Tangled Tale of Flight 327
by Clinton W. Taylor
Published 8/5/2004 12:09:20 AM
No one yet has the full story on the infamous June 29 Northwest Airlines Flight #327 from Detroit to Los Angeles, on which thirteen Syrian musicians acted so suspiciously that passenger and WomensWallStreet.com writer Annie Jacobsen feared she was about to be killed by terrorists. The identity of the band remained unknown for a while until I identified them as the backup band for Canaanite crooner Nour Mehana, whom I dubbed the "Syrian Wayne Newton."
Regardless of the behavior of Nour Mehana's band, Ms. Jacobsen's story has focused international attention on the very serious issue of terrorists sizing up our commercial aviation for another strike. She has been getting the full Paula Jones treatment for her trouble.
Critics gleefully hang Ms. Jacobsen's fear on a moral defect: a hidden and unacknowledged racism. She felt fear, you see, because deep down, she is really a bad person. And also because she is "bigoted and paranoid" (per Salon.com's Patrick Smith), and a "sniveling little twit" (from leanleft.com), and because girls tend to get hysterical and overreact. It's their hormones. It's why they can't be president.
I told my wife that, and she overreacted.
But it's not just the amateurs on left-wing blogs gunning for Ms. Jacobsen. Anonymous "federal officials and sources" told Los Angeles radio station KFI that "[t]he lady was overreacting," More recently she tangled with the Syrian ambassador to the United States, who repeatedly called her a "paranoid racist." It's always reassuring when officials of Syria's government and of our own sing from the same hymn book.
The opposite of paranoia is complacency -- in this case, a refusal to grapple with mounting evidence that hostile forces still stalk our skies. The Washington Post reported that air marshals had observed and filed reports on 192 instances of "potential terrorists" probing and testing aircraft between September 11, 2001 and January 2, 2003. Recent news, such as a Middle Eastern passenger removing a mirror from a plane's bathroom wall in order to break into the cockpit, and the capture of a suspected al Qaeda hotshot trying to fly to New York from Texas, suggests that our airliners and our resolve are still being tested.
For those who assume it's paranoid to suppose that a musical group might practice espionage, here's one better: How about an entire film crew? We know it can be done, because we've done it. During the Iranian hostage crisis, a CIA team infiltrated Iran disguised as a Canadian film company.
But don't take my word for it. You know who else thinks there's a terrorism risk posed by some Middle Eastern bands? Nour Mehana's tour manager. But more about him in a second.
LEFTISH PUNDITS ARE ALSO attacking the notion that political correctness had something to do with the way that Flight 327 unfolded. And it's true that "PC" can be a convenient scapegoat for outcomes conservatives dislike. But that's not the case here.
The funny thing about flight 327 is that something very much like it happened before. When it did, Northwest Airlines reacted very differently. Consider the case of Northwest Airlines Flight 979, traveling from Memphis to Las Vegas on Sept. 11, 2002. The behavior of three passengers on that flight was not that much more suspicious than that of the Swingin' Syrians on Flight 327.
Flight 979 had matching shaving kits; Flight 327 had a McDonald's bag. Flight 979 happened on the anniversary of 9/11; during Flight 327, DHS had issued an "unusually specific internal warning" that mentioned potential terrorist activity in both Detroit and LAX. But on Flight 979, the men were challenged by flight attendants. When they refused to obey, the plane landed in Little Rock and the men were arrested for "interfering with a flight crew in furtherance of their duty."
Had Nour Mehana's band been ordered to sit down but failed to comply, they might be spending the next 20 years serenading the fashion show in Leavenworth. But the confrontation and order never came, and the plane continued to its destination. Whatever you think of the decisions the two flight crews made, it seems clear that they were faced with two similar scenarios, but made very different choices. Why the change in policy? What intervened?
Lawsuits and pressure, especially from the ACLU, and fines from the Department of Transportation.
A few days after the September 11 attacks, Northwest expelled three Middle Eastern men from a flight in Salt Lake City. The Utah Attorney General's office publicly condemned the violation of civil rights and extracted an apology from Northwest, and one of the men sued the airline. On Christmas Day of 2001, Northwest ejected a Pakistani immigrant named Harris Khan from a boarded aircraft in Minneapolis. They had to apologize, pay a monetary settlement, and reeducate the pilot in civil-liberties sensitivity. Another "Flying while Arab" case involved Arshad Chowdury, who also sued Northwest Airlines for discrimination with the help of the ACLU.
Perhaps Northwest's culture has changed in response to these suits, although a former Northwest employee who worked in Customer Relations (and preferred to remain anonymous) also fingered Department of Transportation sanctions as another likely cause: "Northwest was gun-shy of being slapped with a bunch of fines by the DOT if we were too stern with customer complaints -- especially with militant minorities like Middle Eastern folks...So I felt that it was necessary to kowtow to customers of any stripe who would complain to the Dept. of Transportation so as to avoid fines. Once that kind of bad politics seeps into an organization or event, everyone feels that they are on notice to handle certain kinds of passengers with 'kid gloves.'"
Regardless of the merits of these suits and sanctions, it is difficult to imagine that they had no effect on Northwest's corporate culture over time. They were intended to punish and change the peremptory way Northwest dealt with minority passengers. But they may have pushed Northwest too far in the other direction, leaving the flight attendants scared even to enforce the rules and ask unruly Arabs to take a seat.
THANKS IN PART TO MS. JACOBSEN, there is now a reawakened concern over the potential for terrorism on commercial aircraft. The House Judiciary Committee has held emergency sessions to get to the bottom of the law enforcement response to the situation, and federal agencies seem to be actively running down the story of Flight 327.
James Cullen, who booked Nour Mehana's act at Sycuan Casino, declined further comment by e-mail: "Clinton I was asked by homeland sercurity [sic] not to talk to the press...we have to protect nour mehana from any negative stuff...Please do not divulge his number" And Elie Harfouche's former business partner has received three visits from two FBI agents at her home in Connecticut since the story broke.
Wait, who is Elie Harfouche?
Mr. Harfouche was the promoter for Nour Mehana's tour in America. He was on flight 327, and currently is in Lebanon but requested his former partner contact me on his behalf. (Blogger and professor of history H.D. Miller helped me verify some information about Elie Harfouche. Check out Miller's erudite and wide-ranging blog here.)
At his request, his former partner (who asked not to be identified) contacted me and provided the following list of the musicians who were traveling on Flight 327:
Minas Lablbjian
Ammer Sawas
Ziad Mlais
Nabil Anwar
Huuan El Waez
Saad Idlbi
Youssef Alajati
Mohamad Nahhas
Manaf Al Ibrahim
Edmond Derderian
Adbullah Hkwati
Tarek Alfaham
(My speculation in the NRO article that the passenger in seat 1A was Mr. Mehana was incorrect. The band was flying out to join Mehana in Los Angeles for the trip to Sycuan casino.)
Nour Mehana, she added, is a Middle Eastern superstar, equivalent in fame to Frank Sinatra.
"Or Wayne Newton?" I asked. Yes, or Wayne Newton.
I asked about the suspicious behavior of the band and the former partner acknowledged that it was quite likely they were being rowdy and disorderly. They were on tour 24-7, she said, with very little sleep and lots of drinking and partying. She did not think Ms. Jacobsen's account of their actions was at all implausible. She cited cultural differences language barriers as a likely source of the misunderstanding. "In the Middle East they're not disciplined to follow orders, and to stand in line...They're proud of who they are," she explained. "It's an Arab thing."
I asked columnist Michelle Malkin, who has covered this story from the beginning on her blog, to pass along a picture of Elie Harfouche along to Annie Jacobsen, without identifying who it was. I also sent along a ringer: a picture of Al-Jazeera journalist Elias Harfouche (no relation). This way the test was blinded so she couldn't know that one of them definitely was on the plane, and one of them wasn't.
And Ms. Jacobsen declined to comment.
MR. HARFOUCHE WAS ALARMED to learn he was being discussed as a potential terrorist. I telephoned him in Lebanon and he was adamant that he would contact his lawyer as soon as he returned to America, probably at the end of August.
Mr. Harfouche, a singer himself, came to America from Sweden in 1998. He is a dual citizen of Lebanon and Sweden and lives in New Jersey. In 2000 he opened an entertainment business has booked several Middle Eastern acts. Mr. Harfouche is a Maronite Catholic who attends Our Lady of Lebanon Church in Brooklyn.
In his version, not much happened on Flight 327. One of the band went back to the bathroom to discard a McDonald's bag, it was too small to fit in the garbage chute, so he gave it to a flight attendant to get rid of. He didn't remember Ms. Jacobsen from the flight -- in fact he couldn't recall her name -- but he was not aware of anyone being scared in the cabin. "She said we were doing strange stuff? That's bullsh*t. No, we're busy, we were tired and sleeping the whole way. That's it." Why, then, was Ms. Jacobsen so terrified? "Maybe she had something against Middle Eastern people."
I mentioned that some other people had written in to confirm her account, but he was quite firm that the band's demeanor on the flight was not that different from the other passengers'.
He did not remember the man in a suit and sunglasses whom Ms. Jacobsen saw in first class. No one in the band was in first class, he's certain, and they were all traveling comfortably in T-shirts and jeans and sandals, not suits. About the only point of agreement with Ms. Jacobsen's account of the flight was a confirmation of the man with the limp -- one singer is handicapped and wears some sort of brace on his foot.
What about everyone standing up at the end of the flight? According to Mr. Harfouche, it didn't happen. I took a multicultural tack with him and mentioned I'd read in the New York Times that the rules were different on Middle Eastern flights, and that perhaps some of these guys weren't used to our rules. "What? No. When the light is on and the plane lands, you sit in your seat. Everybody knows that."
When the FBI met them, he said, the agents were laughing and one of them admitted to him that "this was ridiculous" and that "one lady got scared." "I said, no, do your job. I'm happy when they do their job." Mr. Harfouche was surprised to hear the reports that he had been traveling on an expired visa. "We had extensions," he told me. "The proof was that the FBI looked at our visas and let us go."
Mr. Harfouche noted that these men had already been through a rigorous visa application process with the U.S. embassy in Syria. Each man was individually interviewed by several different agencies. He has never had an application refused, he says, and wants to keep it that way. So he pre-screens the musicians in-country before even starting the visa process.
Mr. Harfouche's story is so at odds with Ms. Jacobsen's that it will keep people guessing for quite a while, until perhaps more witnesses come forward. While I don't endorse all of the conclusions Ms. Jacobsen drew, or didn't quite draw, there are three witnesses -- her husband, who was writing things down in his journal, plus two anonymous passengers who have spoken up -- that corroborate her account of the events and, also, the mood of Flight 327.
The behavior of the flight attendants she describes indicates they also suspected something bad was up. And if the flight crew really thought the only problem on the flight was Ms. Jacobsen's hysteria, why would they summon the FBI, the TSA, Air Marshals service, and the LAPD to await them at their destination airport? Four agents, not four agencies, would have been sufficient to get her off the plane.
ANOTHER MEMBER OF THE Nour Mehana tour was Atef Kamel, an American citizen who works at the Nile Restaurant in North Bergen, New Jersey. He was born in Egypt and has been in America since 1987; he has worked with many Arabic stars such as Lebanese diva Feyrouz. The Nile confirmed he was recently on tour with Mr. Mehana. I spoke with Mr. Kamel and he confirmed that the band had played in various American cities: San Diego, Chicago, Anaheim, San Francisco, and Detroit, among others. Mr. Kamel was the manager for the tour and also worked as an emcee at the events. He traveled with this band on several occasions and met them at the gate in LAX. Like Mr. Harfouche, Mr. Kamel was insistent that all the trouble on Annie Jacobsen's flight arose from the McDonald's bag the drummer, Alfaham, carried back to the bathroom.
According to Mr. Kamel, the drummer told him the McDonald's bag contained "McDonald's." It was too big to fit in the bathroom trash can, so the drummer brought it back out. Someone noticed this, said Mr. Kamel, and the FBI was waiting for them as they came off the plane. They let them go on after an hour and a half -- "It was nothing." The whole band told the same story to Mr. Kamel as soon as the Feds released them.
It's not surprising the band didn't tell the trip manager anything more incriminating they might have done on the flight that might have alarmed the passengers and crew and had the FBI waiting to meet them. But since the band first arrived in Washington, D.C., on May 30, until the last concert at the Nile on July 4 (after which the band returned to Syria out of JFK), Mr. Kamel was with them constantly and never knew them to go to the bathroom together or "act weird."
Mr. Kamel had planned a month-long tour for Nour Mehana. But when the band arrived in the U.S. they were mistakenly issued visas for only a week, to Mr. Kamel's consternation. So they applied for and received extensions to their visas to finish out their trip. (Homeland Security now affirms that the band's paperwork was in order.)
I asked Mr. Kamel about the lyrics to a song called "Um al Shaheed" -- "Mother of a Martyr" -- that Mr. Mehana has recorded. It is not about suicide bombers, he insisted, but about soldiers who die in battle. Besides, if Mr. Mehana didn't do that old standard, "the people wouldn't like him." Mr. Kamel was raised Muslim but is now Catholic; he stated that suicide bombing bars you from heaven in both religions. "If you kill yourself, you're evil."
And on this subject Mr. Kamel said something I didn't expect him say: there are Middle Eastern bands out there with ties to terror groups. "I am a proud Arab American," he said. "But I don't deny there are some bad people" out there. He then named a couple of singers -- I will demur from repeating their names, but they appear to be quite prominent in Middle Eastern music -- whom he said had tried to enter the United States but were turned down because of alleged connections to [radical] Shi'a or to Hezbollah. One of them played at a party linked to Hezbollah. A rockin' affair that must have been.
Mr. Kamel has no problem with keeping terror-linked bands out of the United States. "That's how I like it!" he said. "Check them out and stop them over there -- if there's a problem, don't even let them in." He also welcomed surveillance of the bands while in the United States: "You have to have some people follow [the bands] around, so you don't leave people behind. You don't want to come over with 14 and leave with 12."
In case you missed that: A successful promoter with intimate knowledge of the Middle Eastern music scene admits that a few connections exist between Islamic terrorists and musicians, and that care is warranted in screening the musicians' visits to the United States. For those of you in the "mere paranoia" camp: Denial isn't just a nightclub in New Jersey.
When I told Mr. Kamel some of the details of Ms. Jacobsen's article, however, he was not impressed. "This reporter wants to make something from nothing," he said. "That's not nice. No, that's not nice." I mentioned to him that ABC's Good Morning America had contacted me to try to book Nour Mehana on their show, and he paused. "As the good guy, or the bad guy?"
He was not on the flight, but his account of the passengers on Flight 327 differs in some important respects from Ms. Jacobsen's and confirms Mr. Harfouche's. Mr. Kamel does not remember anyone in the band with a limp or an orthopedic shoe. And, like Elie Harfouche, he denies the man in the dark suit and sunglasses in seat 1-A was with the band. "No one flies first class except Nour Mehana," who wasn't on the plane.
Who was the dude in 1-A, then? Sharp dresser, stood in front of the cockpit door, fluently chatted up the Arab contingent on the plane...my next guess would be this was an Air Marshal. Or maybe he was just a fan.
IN HER FIRST ARTICLE, ANNIE Jacobsen asked why, if terrorists can learn to fly airplanes, they cannot also learn to play musical instruments. This new information doesn't answer that entirely fair question. In fact, given potential ties between certain musical groups and terrorist groups, it makes the question all the more critical.
All of which begs the question of why Nour Mehana's entourage wasn't simply dealt with, firmly but politely, by the flight crew. They were scared enough to call the FBI to meet the plane, but apparently they were not permitted to enforce federal regulations in flight. "I expect that no one came up and asked them to sit down, so how would they know they were creating a problem?" wondered the former business partner.
As New York Times business columnist Joe Sharkey noted, cultural differences are important to understanding this matter. I agree, and should I visit Syria, I would try to learn and accommodate that country's laws and customs as best I could, to avoid giving offense or alarm. Similarly, this country also has laws and customs that govern air travel and, under the real threat of terrorism, following these rules is more than just a matter of civility. It's deadly serious.
Mr. Harfouche's former partner may be right that the band's behavior was just "an Arab thing." But even the Islamic newswire Alt.muslim offers a "note to Arabs flying in groups in the US: don't play out your worst stereotypes."
It's still a free country. But the dry runs are real. And, there's a war on. Look, gentlemen, play your music, and enjoy your time in America. All we ask is that you don't act like terrorists. We don't tolerate that anymore.
It's an American thing.
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The DOT Has Never Had an Ethnic-Screening Policy
August 10, 2004; Page A11
In your July 23 editorial "The Pre-emption Commission" on the work of the 9/11 Commission, there is a reference to a screening quota allegedly established by the Department of Transportation limiting the number of Middle Eastern men that can be screened.
No policy ever existed, or exists today, that would limit the screening of passengers based on any criteria. The Department's general counsel, Jeff Rosen, and American Airlines' vice president of security, Peggy Sterling, went before the Senate on June 24 and testified that such a policy did not and does not exist. Said Mr. Rosen, the "department never had such a policy." Said Ms. Sterling, "We have not heard anything of this nature from the DOT or any other government agency. Our policies and procedures are not based on the proposition that there are any ethnically driven limits on how many passengers from a particular flight can be subjected to heightened security screening." Even the original broadcaster of this allegation, Michael Smerconish, admitted that "I don't know if there was ever a quota system for young Arab males." That is because there wasn't one . . . ever.
Finally, despite 9/11 Commission member John Lehman's initially having questioned whether there might have been such a quota policy, when the full Commission reached its conclusions no such policy was found to exist. Not a single word is dedicated to it in the much heralded 600-page Commission report. Not a single word.
Robert R. Johnson Jr.
Director of Public Affairs
U.S. Department of Transportation
Washington
========================
letter from the Department of Transportation takes issue with our editorial on the 9/11 Commission's report and explains the Department's post-9/11 policy on screening airline passengers. We'll let the letter speak for itself.
For the record, however, we'd also like to draw readers' attention to another Transportation Department missive. It is a consent order dated June 21 and signed by the Department's deputy general counsel. It asserts that Delta Air Lines discriminated against passengers undergoing its screening procedures and directs the carrier to spend $900,000 over the next two years to provide "civil rights training to its pilots, flight attendants, and passenger service agents."
Delta denies the charges that it violated federal law by removing from flights or denying boarding to "persons [who] were, or were perceived to be, of Arab, Middle Eastern or Southeast Asian descent and/or Muslim." The carrier says its actions were based solely on safety and security concerns. It agreed to the settlement to avoid litigation or fines.
Transportation notes that it has reached similar settlements with United, American and Continental -- all of which also speak for themselves, and don't make us feel safer.
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by Doug Casey
OSAMA?S NAVY SETS SAIL
(originally published on 4/26/04)
As if we didn?t have enough terrorism threats to worry about, it now appears al-Qaeda has a secret 15-ship ?navy? it acquired from a Greek supplier over a period of several years. US intelligence experts think one or more of the ships were used to transport the explosives used in the deadly bombings of two American embassies in Africa and in the terrible nightclub blast in Bali. Since al-Qaeda?s ships are ordinary merchant vessels registered under new names in different countries, they will be very difficult to identify and track.
Unfortunately, the biggest danger posed by an al-Qaeda ship is not its ability to transport explosives or terrorists. The ship itself can be used as a giant bomb to wipe out a US port. If the port has a large LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) storage facility or a gasoline refinery, the secondary explosion could destroy much of the adjacent city. (The devastating crash of fuel-laden trains in North Korea provides a tragic and relevant example of the danger.)
The cities vulnerable to an attack by al-Qaeda?s ships are not limited to our coasts. Due to our extensive network of navigable rivers, bin Laden could get a ship as far inland as Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, or even Kansas City. To make matters worse, even a small merchant vessel could carry enough shielding to prevent the detection of a stolen nuclear device or a radioactive dirty bomb.
In addition to having its own ships, it looks as if al-Qaeda plans to hijack a supertanker. Such a vessel would make an even bigger bomb than a freighter and create an environmental disaster.
According to London-based Aegis Defense Services, in March 2003 about ten Islamic pirates boarded the oil tanker Dewi Madrim off the coast of Sumatra. Instead of the usual routine of robbing the crew and either stealing the cargo or making off with portable items of value, in this instance the pirates disconnected the ship?s communication system, hooked up their own communications, and then spent over an hour learning how to steer the ship, run its engines, and use its electronic navigation equipment. When the pirates finally departed, they took the captain and his first officer with them. No ransom demands were received which indicates the pirates weren?t after money.
More recently, another group of ten armed pirates?probably from the Abu Sayyaf terrorist organization?boarded an ocean-going tugboat in the Sulu Sea south of the Philippines. This time they took the ship?s sophisticated navigation equipment in addition to its officers. Similar incidents are thought to have occurred throughout the region, but have been kept quiet by embarrassed ship owners and government officials. According to Singapore terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna, oil and chemical tankers have been the principal targets which suggests the hijackings were rehearsals for terrorist attacks.
Any modern merchant vessel used by terrorists will be extremely difficult to stop?even if it is detected and attacked a few miles from its destination. As we learned from the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989, large ships have such great momentum they can travel several miles even after their engines are stopped.
Considering what we now know about al-Qaeda?s threat to our port cities, our advice last month to spend next October in the countryside seems very timely. Particularly since National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice recently said that the government believes al-Qaeda is so pleased with the outcome of its Madrid bombing, it plans to use the tactic again in the US just before our presidential election.
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Just a couple of points on the story. It is not unusual to see a concentration of people of Middle Eastern ethnicity fly out of Detroit's
Metro Airport. There is a higher concentration of people of Middle Eastern ethnicity in the Detroit area than just about anywhere outside the Middle East. Do you not think federal law enforcement/intelligence isn't aware of that too?
I have travelled out of Detroit's Metro Airport many times and not once have I not had to produce identification to get past the checkpoint. The TSA people in Detroit appear a lot sharper than many other airports I've been through so I find that part difficult to believe.
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First off, apologies to Tiny for posting the following.
In light of our, uh, differing views on the event in question, I thought that it would be interesting to post an actual pilot's response to Anne Jacobsen's article (which, by the way, I have noticed has bought her plenty of airtime :shock: )
So, take a deep breath, keep an open mind, and read all four responses in "Ask the pilot"...
(if for some reason you can't get into Salon.com, you can click "free 1-day pass" and the rest is easy)
Main thread:
http://dir.salon.com/topics/ask_the_pilot/
Response 1:
http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2004/07/21/askthepilot95/index.html
Response 2:
http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2004/07/30/askthepilot96/index.html
Response 3:
http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2004/08/06/askthepilot97_doc/index.html
Response 4:
http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2004/08/13/askthepilot98/index.html
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Woof SB Mig:
It looks very interesting, but would you please post it here? I've found that signing up requires enabling cookies and tends to generate lots of spam. TIA
Crafty Dog
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Woof Guro Crafty,
I will attempt to post the responses as I pulled them off Salon.com
Be warned that the material amounts to around 14 pages of reading. I personally think that the last two responses are the best.
That being said:
RESPONSE #1
The hysterical skies
She survived a flight with 14 harmless Syrian musicians -- then spread 3,000 bigoted and paranoid words across the Internet. As a pilot and an American, I'm appalled.
By Patrick Smith
July 21, 2004
In this space was supposed to be installment No. 6 of my multiweek dissertation on airports and terminals. The topic is being usurped by one of those nagging, Web-borne issues of the moment, in this case a reactionary scare story making the cyber-rounds during the past week.
The piece in question, "Terror in the Skies, Again?" is the work of Annie Jacobsen, a writer for WomensWallStreet.com. Jacobsen shares the account of the emotional meltdown she and her fellow passengers experienced when, aboard a Northwest Airlines flight from Detroit to Los Angeles, a group of Middle Eastern passengers proceeded to act "suspiciously." I'll invite you to experience "Terror" yourself, but be warned it's quite long. It needs to be, I suppose, since ultimately it's a story about nothing, puffed and aggrandized to appear important.
The editors get the drama cooking with some foreboding music: "You are about to read an account of what happened," counsels a 70-word preamble. "The WWS Editorial Team debated long and hard about how to handle this information and ultimately we decided it was something that should be shared ... Here is Annie's story" [insert lower-octave piano chord here].
What follows are six pages of the worst grade-school prose, spring-loaded with mindless hysterics and bigoted provocation.
Fourteen dark-skinned men from Syria board Northwest's flight 327, seated in two separate groups. Some are carrying oddly shaped bags and wearing track suits with Arabic script across the back. During the flight the men socialize, gesture to one another, move about the cabin with pieces of their luggage, and, most ominous of all, repeatedly make trips to the bathroom. The author links the men's apparently irritable bladders to a report published in the Observer (U.K.) warning of terrorist plots to smuggle bomb components onto airplanes one piece at a time, to be secretly assembled in lavatories.
"What I experienced during that flight," breathes Jacobsen, "has caused me to question whether the United States of America can realistically uphold the civil liberties of every individual, even non-citizens, and protect its citizens from terrorist threats."
Intriguing, no? I, for one, fully admit that certain acts of airborne crime and treachery may indeed open the channels to a debate on civil liberties. Pray tell, what happened? Gunfight at 37,000 feet? Valiant passengers wrestle a grenade from a suicidal operative? Hero pilots beat back a cockpit takeover?
Well, no. As a matter of fact, nothing happened. Turns out the Syrians are part of a musical ensemble hired to play at a hotel. The men talk to one another. They glance around. They pee.
That's it?
That's it.
Now, in fairness to Jacobsen, I'll admit that in-flight jitters over the conspicuous presence of a group of young Arabs is neither unexpected nor, necessarily, irrational. She speaks of seven of the men standing in unison, a moment that, if unembellished, would have even the most culturally open-minded of us wide-eyed and grabbing our armrest. As everybody knows, it was not a gaggle of Canadian potato farmers who commandeered those jetliners on Sept. 11. See also the legacy of air crimes over the past several decades, from Pan Am 103 to the UTA bombing to the failed schemings of Ramzi Yousef, the culprits each time being young Arab males.
Air crews and passengers alike are thus prone to jumpiness should a certain template of race and behavior be filled. Jacobsen's folly is in not being able to step back from that jumpiness -- neither during the flight itself, at which point her worry and behavior are at least excusable, nor well after touching down safely. Speaking as a pilot, air travel columnist, and American, I find Jacobsen's 3,000-word ghost story of Arab boogeymen among the most overwrought and inflammatory tracts I've encountered in some time.
Most disturbing of all has been the pickup from Internet bloggers and news sources, including ABC, CNN, MSNBC and the New York Times. The writer hops a flight to California on which absolutely nothing of danger occurs, and the following are among the citations:
"Harrowing piece"
"The frightening true story"
"Disturbing account"
"Riveting article"
"An absolute must-read"
"Read all about the breaking Northwest airlines scare," advertises TheLosAngelesNews.com, suggesting perhaps a narrowly averted crash, a bomb defused during flight or a thwarted skyjacking. Click on over to hear instead about the toilet habits of a group of Syrian minstrels and one middle-aged woman's alarmist reaction to them. No matter; over the past week or so Jacobsen has found herself linked and excerpted in every last crevice of the Web. Those of you not convinced of just how paranoid and xenophobic Americans can be, look no further than the following online posts, which, along with thousands like them, have emerged in direct response to this story:
"You will never, ever, catch me on an airplane again!"
"My advice would be to de-plane as soon as I counted 14 Arabs as passengers. "
"Soon after 9/11 we were in a local McDonald's and a group of Middle Eastern men came in and got carry-out. They sat in their van for a while then headed North. I felt scared out of my wits. I wrote down a description of the vehicle and license, but never did anything with it. Guess next time I won't be so stupid."
Jacobsen spins her experience into a not-so-veiled call for racial profiling of airline passengers. Help me out with this one: If only those musicians had been interrogated prior to boarding, it would have been revealed they were, in fact ... musicians. (They had, of course, endured the same concourse X-ray and metal detector rigmarole as everyone else, and were in possession of valid passports and visas.)
My own feelings on passenger profiling are mixed, and I'm not as liberal on the issue as you might expect. However, I do think singling out a specific ethnicity for extra screening is less a racist idea than a wasteful and ineffective one. Does it not occur to people that Muslim radicals come in all complexions and from many nations -- from the heart of black Africa to the archipelagoes of Southeast Asia? (Many Syrians, no less, are fair-haired and light-skinned.) Does it not occur to people that terrorists are clever, resourceful and, in the end, bound to outwit such obvious snares? The notion that 14 saboteurs, replete with silk-screened track suits effectively advertising themselves as such, would obviously and boisterously proceed in and out of an airplane lavatory, taking turns to construct a bomb, is so over-the-top ludicrous it deserves its own comedy sketch. Indeed, Jacobsen is trying to portray a scene of angst and fear, but she inadvertently scripts out a parody. I half-expected her to tell me that one of the men wore a cardboard sign labeled "TERRORIST."
On Tuesday morning I appeared as a guest on a conservative, drive-time radio show in Philadelphia, and Jacobsen was the hot issue. The host, without much else to go on, proposed the Syrians had choreographed a "dry run" for a future attack. (At one point he referred to the involved carrier, Northwest Airlines, as "Northeastern.") When I dared express doubt, and noted that investigators from the Transportation Security Administration and the FBI had confirmed the men's identities and motives, I was mocked, ridiculed and eventually hung up on. The very suggestion that the men could have been innocent musicians seemed, in the eyes of the host and callers, preposterous. They had to be terrorists. Disagreeing got me called "a frickin' idiot," and a caller demanded to know which airline I worked for so he could be certain never to ride on a plane with a traitor like me at the controls.
Stop the presses: A sequel to "Terror in the Skies, Again?" has now been posted on WomensWallStreet.com, in which Jacobsen reinfects the conversation with a fresh dose of mongering. "And I now have another important question," she writes. "Is there a link between my experience ... and the arrest of Ali Mohamed Almosaleh by Customs agents at the Minneapolis Airport on July 7?" Almosaleh, a Syrian, was allegedly carrying a suicide note and "anti-American material."
Jacobsen's hint at conspiracy, however, is based exclusively on the coincidence that Almosaleh and the musicians happen to all be Syrian citizens. I see. That a supposition this groundless and stupid can make it into print and entice the likes of major news networks should outrage any clear-thinking American. How about we seek out all Syrians and put their names on airline blacklists?
Jacobsen's sequel is peppered with incendiary quotes from industry sources. Says an airline pilot: "The terrorists are probing us all the time." Another confides a maddeningly baseless belief that Jacobsen had been "likely on a dry run," while another states, "The incident you wrote about, and incidents like it, occur more than you like to think. It is a 'dirty little secret' that all of us, as crew members, have known about for quite some time."
Which dirty little secret, exactly, are we talking about? That foreigners ride on airplanes?
In a moment of truly ghastly philosophizing, Jacobsen includes a manipulative passage in which she is smitten with anguish as she recollects a photograph taken during the Sept. 11 attacks. She gives us this: "Political correctness has become a major road block for airline safety ... I think about the meaning of 'dry run.' And then I think about what it means to be politically correct. And I keep coming up blank."
So do I.
Aside from matters of politics and general opinion, is Jacobsen playing fast and loose with the facts? There appear to be embellishments in her original tale.
Aboard flight 327, as she, her husband and several passengers and crew are having their nervous breakdowns, comes this instance of B-movie tension: "[The flight attendant] leaned over and quietly told my husband there were federal air marshals sitting all around us. She asked him not to tell anyone and explained that she could be in trouble for giving out that information. She then continued serving drinks."
Are we to believe not only that an airline professional was unwise enough to reveal such a thing, but that a group of marshals -- not one, not two, but several -- having gotten word that a covey of Arabs were flying to LAX, were on hand to trail and observe them? That's some tight logistical planning. Are we following Middle Easterners through airports now? If so, how does that work at Kennedy International, I wonder, where foreign airliners carrying thousands of passengers arrive daily from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, the UAE and elsewhere? That's a lot of dry runs, and there's no love lost, after all, between Muslim radicals and the governments who own and operate these airlines -- Pakistan International, Saudi Arabian, EgyptAir, Royal Jordanian, etc. Such subtleties are lost on that segment of the public who'd prefer a more digestible cock-and-bull yarn from high above the American heartland. As for those wacky airlines from abroad, why not simply ban them from American airspace?
Clearly I'm in a fit of envy over Jacobsen's cheap grab at notoriety. I've got a book out and could use some publicity. Here, let me give it a try.
Late last summer I boarded a nonstop flight from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, to Newark, N.J. After taking my seat, I noticed that well over a hundred of my fellow passengers looked to be Muslims! Yes, that's the same faith adhered to by those dastardly perpetrators who knocked down our Trade Center and demolished part of the Pentagon. Not only that, but our aircraft, a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777, was registered and maintained by a company headquartered in a predominantly Muslim nation! What if the cargo holds had been stuffed full of anthrax or TNT by unscrupulous terrorists back in Kuala Lumpur!
Several passengers wore conservative Islamic dress -- men in white dishdashas; women concealed in full black burqa. Our plane contained a Muslim prayer enclave (for possible use by terrorists preparing for the throes of martydrom), and the seatback video displayed a graphic of the qibla, showing real-time distance and heading to Mecca. En route toward New York, dozens of Muslim passengers were seen socializing and using the lavatories, in some cases blatantly ignoring the illuminated seat-belt sign!
To my relief and utter astonishment, we landed safely (and on time).
Jacobsen simmers her own account in gratuitous detail and melodrama. It plays like a Hollywood disaster film -- the young child, the would-be villain who smiles innocently in a moment of spooky foreshadowing. We're waiting for the gunshots, the fireball from the lavatory, the marshals jumping up to yell, "Hit the floor!"
That her story concludes in such a painfully boring anticlimax ought to be the very point, and in the final few pages she still has time for a constructive moral, the clear lesson being not the potentials of global terror, but the dangers of our own preconceptions and imagination. Instead, she pulls a vile U-turn and chooses to bait us with racist innuendo and fearmongering. Nothing happened, but something might have happened, and so it serves us to remain frightened and draconian at all costs, furthering our nation's pathetic embrace of maximum paranoia.
Jacobsen's kicker: "So the question is ... Do I think these men were musicians? I'll let you decide. But I wonder, if 19 terrorists can learn to fly airplanes into buildings, couldn't 14 terrorists learn to play instruments?"
Excuse me? She concludes, as did the radio host Tuesday morning, by insinuating that the men were terrorists, despite every shred of evidence, not to mention common sense, arguing to the contrary. And with that her article, and her credibility with it, plummets from merely sensationalist to inexcusably offensive.
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RESPONSE #2
Ask the pilot
The hysterical skies, Part 2: In defiance of all obtainable facts, Annie Jacobsen continues to claim she was a witness to a terrorist "dry run."
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By Patrick Smith
July 30, 2004 | "Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror ..."
-- Franklin Roosevelt, 1933
The evening of my published rebuttal to Annie Jacobsen's scare story about sharing a Northwest Airlines flight to Los Angeles with a gang of hyperactive Syrian musicians, I attended an outdoor concert in Boston's South End. On stage was the Sharq Ensemble, an Arabic music sextet. As any connoisseur of fine irony will understand, I relished the fact that two of the band members (five Arabs and a Turk) were from Syria.
The show came to an end uneventfully, without a single casualty among the hundred or so concertgoers. Of course, there remains the distinct possibility that I witnessed a so-called "dry run." The musicians claimed to be professionals -- graduates of prestigious conservatories -- but I'm not so sure. They struck me as a menacing lot, glancing conspiratorially at one another while seeming to case the audience. Not once did I witness law enforcement personnel verifying visas, green cards, or notes of permission signed by the ambassador from Damascus. It appears you could pack quite a bit of Semtex into those odd Middle Eastern instruments. Will the next show conclude with the Qanun player blowing himself up on stage?
If you can't tell, my temptation to mock Jacobsen's account remains unabated. In retrospect I'll concede that my initial piece may have been a little more burlesque than it needed to be -- my cheap shot at Jacobsen's "grade school prose," for one, deserved the editorial shears -- but at the time I felt she deserved a good lampoon more than a serious dissection. Little has changed, and I stand by my general assertion that her narrative served no purpose other than to inflame and frighten.
If you think I'm recycling this issue for the sake of a few more laughs and lack of anything better to opine about, please know that Jacobsen continues to garner undeserved hype and coverage through major television, print and radio outlets.
On July 23 she appeared on a nationwide call-in show maestroed by conservative advocate Michael Smerconish. That's the same Smerconish on whose local Philadelphia show I appeared last week, and whose callers ridiculed me for refusing to swallow Jacobsen's reactionary bait. This time, he announced to millions of listeners that Annie Jacobsen was nothing less than "a victim of terrorism."
Smerconish, a lawyer by trade, has a book coming out: "Flying Blind -- How Political Correctness Continues to Compromise Airline Safety, Post-9/11." (Note the attractive cover and somewhat less than shy exploitation of the 9/11 reference, which appears in numerals four times the size of the accompanying wording.) The author appears eager to parlay Jacobsen's hissy fit into ammo for the conservative agenda. He links his Web site to both her original column at WomensWallStreet.com, and its even more treacly follow-up.
I'm unsure what saddens me more -- Jacobsen's rhetoric itself, or the manner in which commentators and pundits have spun the story into a partisan conflict of ideals: Those who find folly in draconian security measures and racial scapegoating are, to use one of my most loathed Bushisms, siding with the enemy.
A victim of terrorism? I asked Annie Jacobsen what she thought of such audacious speculation presented as fact. "Everybody is entitled to their own opinions," she answers. "Look, I'm a Democrat. I did not intend for this to be made a political issue, and I feel bad that it became one."
Odd for a Democrat to have referenced the national security expertise of Ann Coulter, but this, she daringly claims, was a decision borne of strict practicality and not ideology. "I barely knew who Ann Coulter was. And to be honest, I expected hardly anybody to read my piece to begin with."
Meanwhile, a Federal Air Marshals source confided to Los Angeles radio station KFI that Annie and her husband were as much of a spectacle aboard Flight 327 as the Syrians, something she vociferously denies. "Absolutely not," she says. "I hardly spoke to anybody during the flight, and I never got out of my seat other than to use the bathroom. Reports that my behavior was cause for alarm are simply not factual."
Agents say they verified the band members' identities at LAX, and all 14 were interrogated and cross-checked against terrorist watch lists. National Review, hardly a well of impartiality, cites James Cullen, a music promoter, confirming that the musicians arrived on Northwest Airlines Flight 327 not to spread mayhem throughout Southern California, but to play backup at the Sycuan Casino & Resort for Nour Mehana, a well-known Syrian-born singer. (Nour's disturbing likeness to Wayne Newton has not gone unnoticed, and brings up even more unsettling questions about who we let into this country. Is one Wayne Newton not enough?)
At this point, whether or not the Arabs on Flight 327 were hapless minstrels or scheming scoundrels is growing less important, even to those touting the supposition that the men were terrorists. Unable to fashion hard facts from conjecture, they present the story either as a lecture on the dangers of political correctness, or as otherwise groundless evidence that gangs of Muslims are running psy-ops surveillance for an eventual attack. Much the way our disastrous foray into Iraq is garbled by extraneous justifications, Jacobsen's ride to Los Angeles is co-opted into an excuse to discuss proverbial "greater issues."
Are there, somewhere in all of this, important discussions waiting to happen? Is it not true that airlines have been fined for selecting more than two passengers of the same ethnic extraction for preflight screening? Is it not unreasonable that our hypersensitivity to offending certain races or nationalities undermines air safety? Certainly so, but if Jacobsen wanted to advocate the need for profiling, she ought to have written a story in which profiling had a kernel of relevance, instead of one boiling over with histrionics and meaningless innuendo.
And she may have done her loudmouth proponents more of a disservice than she realizes. On June 29, the day of her infamous trip, the Department of Homeland Security issued an internal memo warning that a group of Pakistani men, alleged to be graduates of al-Qaida training camps, might be traveling through the U.S. The communiqu? specifically mentioned Detroit and Los Angeles, origin and terminus of Annie's flight. This could explain the presence of the onboard marshals. She lobbies for increased attention paid to Muslim passengers, and ironically it might be exactly that which managed to exonerate the Syrian musicians.
"But didn't you hear?" she says. "The Syrians were traveling on expired visas!" Why wasn't this discovered at LAX? Democrat Jacobsen follows up by e-mailing me an article from that stalwart of left-wing media, the Washington Times. Along with other, perhaps more objective, sources, the Times reports the men's P-3 artist visas turning into Homeland Security pumpkins on June 10, only 10 days after they arrived in the United States for a six-week concert tour.
But not so fast. While Jacobsen and others have seized on a visa's shelf life as reason enough to have to NORAD aiming its rockets toward Damascus, complicating matters is the fine print of the alien registration rules. The following is taken from a post on Michelle Malkin's blog site, which in the dearth of official statements has become a de-facto home page of the Jacobsen controversy.
"The period of an alien's authorized stay isn't governed by the visa. How long an alien can stay is governed by the date on his or her I-94. The I-94 is a form foreigners fill out on admission and approved by the immigration inspector. A musician on tour can apply for an extension of status. This extension allows the foreigner to remain in the U.S. longer, but has no effect on when the visa on which he or she came into the U.S. expires."
Queries to the public affairs office at the U.S. Department of State verify this. "The visa provides admission to the country and nothing more," a staff member explains. "The expiration of the visa itself is totally irrelevant." Not to the Washington Times it's not. Why muck up a good witch hunt with the petty specifics of law?
The bulk of evidence suggests the men were here in full legal compliance. "There was no legal basis for any manner of law enforcement," says David Adams, spokesperson of the Federal Air Marshals, a division of the Department of Homeland Security. "Everything was carefully checked out. Agents interrogated the men, attended their concert, and verified their stay at a local hotel." Adams tells me the men had played several gigs at numerous venues around the country.
Of course, you needn't be a convicted criminal or watch-listed radical operative to be a potential terrorist. With nothing else to go on, Jacobsen's allies keep coming around to the "dry run" theory. The trouble with this proposition is that it leaves open every Arab, and for that matter anybody who is conspicuously Near Eastern, Middle Eastern, Indian, or Central Asian, to a guilty-until-innocent presumption. The dry run idea provides a vague, but craftily indisputable fallback. Who can prove it wasn't a rehearsal?
"Annie Jacobsen is entitled to her own interpretations," says David Adams, lightly emphasizing that last word in a manner that suggests we read between the lines. "While the 19 original hijackers are known to have conducted test runs, there is no specific intelligence that terrorists are conducting test flights or surveillance activities on U.S. airliners. Period."
Baloney, claims Jacobsen, who at times seems eager to refute everything short of the earth revolving around the sun. "All I know is that I saw what I saw. Those men were up to something and I cannot believe otherwise."
Something nefarious, dastardly and deadly?
"I saw what I saw."
She states that the rambunctious behavior witnessed on Flight 327 has been confirmed by "numerous individuals" as telltale signals of a terrorist dress rehearsal. "You know," she says, "It turns out there was a second, eerily parallel incident." Once again she pulls out her Washington Times, which makes tauntingly vague note of "similar activity" on a flight last February between Puerto Rico and New York. "The six men involved worked for a cruise ship and were carrying musician's cases with instruments." No further explanation is given.
Jacobsen claims to be a fairly savvy flier, but anybody who has shared an airliner cabin with a group of any kind, be it a sports team, a band, or a bunch of ex-classmates heading for a college reunion, knows that such clusters tend to be boisterous and animated and move around a lot. What made this different, exactly? The ethnicity of the suspected perpetrators is my guess. Following the events of 2001, we are programmed to react fearfully when confronted by the combo of young Arab males and jet airplanes. That's understandable, and does not necessarily make us racists and bigots. But it does predispose us to act irrationally and, in some cases, shamefully. For the record, I do not consider Annie Jacobsen to be racist or prejudiced in any strict sense. However, I do feel she has fed, and continues to feed, many people's bigoted preconceptions.
"I don't care what country they were from," she answers. "Had the men on that plane been 14 Swedes, I'd have felt exactly the same way."
That's a noble and, dare I say it, politically correct bunch of hogwash, but I guess I give her credit her for trying.
I'd like to point out that several acts of airborne terror in American skies have come at the hands of non-Muslims and non-Arabs, from an insurance scam bombing of a 707 back in the 1960s, to suicide skyjackings over California in 1964 and 1987 (crews shot dead, planes crashed), to the attempted siege of a Federal Express DC-10 by a hammer- and spear-gun-toting off-duty pilot. Somewhere in there rests the Achilles heel of profiling -- a tantalizing idea, but one that wouldn't accomplish much other than knocking the system, at great cost and stress, into the next unwinnable phase of cat and mouse.
Be they Swedes or Syrians, it has long been my assertion -- in this column, in my book, and elsewhere -- that no sensible terrorists will be stupid enough to consider a copycat Sept. 11 attack. The 2001 modus operandi took advantage of a decades-old hijack protocol -- to land safely before procrastinating and, if need be, negotiating with the perpetrators. That protocol was terminated the moment American Airlines Flight 11 met its fate against the Trade Center's north tower.
Neither do I find it believable that a tag-team of 14 people would need be employed to assemble a bomb in an airplane lavatory -- another scenario thrown around by talk masters and pundits, borrowed from intelligence reports that operatives may try to smuggle aboard bombs one component at a time. Might they? Sure, but there are probably a hundred thousand other mechanisms of terror at any saboteur's disposal. Apoplexy over each and every one is the surest recipe for defeat. A frightened victim, in the grand scheme of terrorist philosophy, isn't a whole lot different from a dead one.
"Don't you find it disturbing," Annie Jacobsen asks me, "that a restaurant beyond the secure perimeter of an airport terminal is able to dispense forks!" Visas, hijackings, lavatory bombs, and now silverware? In her own style of martyrdom, Jacobsen sounds anxious to sling-shoot every last detail of Flight 327 onto every last surface to see what sticks.
Anathema as it might sound, I could not care less about forks. In the strange-bedfellows department, I have none other than Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., on my side regarding the complete futility of our zero-tolerance obsession with, as I like to call them, weapons of mass distraction. Mica is chairman of the House Subcommittee on Aviation, and has publicly voiced his belief that certain tools and implements -- heretofore dangerous in the eyes of zealous TSA screeners -- once again be allowed onboard airliners.
None of this maintains that America's sworn enemies will not heed their delusions of martyrdom and again strike. They probably will. My point is that our expectations of that violence will most almost surely prove off-mark, and meantime they drain our resources and waste our time. We continue to fuddle and obsess over corkscrews, butter knives and whether or not swarthy foreigners are eyeing the cockpit door.
Jacobsen is surprised that a pilot would feel this way. Aircrews, according to her testimonials, are in lockstep with the notions of skyjackings and dry runs. "Most every pilot I've spoken to," she says, "knows these things are going on." She claims to have heard "disturbing examples" from various crewmembers, but refuses to cite examples or speak on the record. "This is common knowledge," she says.
Is it? The e-mails below are edited for clarity and the exact identities of the writers withheld ...
"I appreciate your rebuttal to Annie Jacobsen. I am always surprised at how fellow flight attendants and passengers sometimes react to some of these situations. I see Arabs and Arab-Americans on flights frequently, alone and in groups. When you become suspicious of certain passengers on the basis of race, all of their normal behaviors become suspect."
-- Dale, flight attendant, major airline
"Do Arab males fly aboard our carriers? Have they always flown aboard our carriers? Could one or all of the men on Flight 327 have been terrorists? Could the white male in Row 15 also have been a terrorist? Was Timothy McVeigh a white male? Was John Walker Lindh a white male? Was Mrs. Jacobsen's article the most ridiculous, paranoia- stricken, overblown article ever written? Have we become a fear-frozen country? I recently had my car inspected by a Pakistani mechanic. Perhaps I should check the tailpipe for explosives."
-- Michael, Airbus A320 first officer, major airline
"I have been following Ms. Jacobsen's story since it first broke. She claims to have the backing of pilots; however, I speak for every pilot I know in saying that she has little or no support within the ranks. This was not an act of terrorism, but rather a serious exaggeration of something that happens almost daily on aircraft across the country and around the world. Although we must now exercise prudence, that prudence must be tempered by reason. I see no reason in Jacobsen's tirade."
-- David, 757 first officer, major airline
"I don't want that woman on my plane. We have enough problems with weather, air traffic control and the TSA -- all doing a very nice job of making us late!"
-- Michael, instructor pilot, Continental Express
"I was a friend and U.S. Navy squadron partner of Tom "Stout" McGuinness, the copilot on American Airlines Flight 11. After Sept. 11 I had a different reaction than many of my co-workers. I did not understand, for example, the urgency to hold Iraq accountable for terrorism when the original hijackers and their funding were Saudi Arabian. My take is that Annie Jacobsen's point of view is symptomatic of a greater societal dysfunction -- one shared with many airline pilots, being consumers of all things conservative -- which trots out the usual cast of bogeymen: welfare mothers, Muslims, and, especially, liberals."
-- Dan, Boeing 777 first officer, major airline
And so on.
Evidence and reason submit that Northwest Airlines Flight 327 was the scene of nothing more than gross misinterpretation. And although Annie Jacobsen was entitled to a measure of uncertainty while high above the Rockies en route to California, she has done all of us an embarrassing disservice by ignoring the facts and pandering to partisan noisemakers.
Mysteries remain. The precise status of the Syrians' travel documents, itineraries and current whereabouts is unknown. What were their names? Why have none come forward? Why was Mr. Cullen, the music promoter who verified the performance at the casino, reportedly asked by Homeland Security not to comment further to the media? They are legitimate, if not particularly foreboding, questions all. But government bureaus, historically uptight and perhaps less than eager to expose the politically sensitive realities of ostensibly "lenient" rules, aren't saying much. The result, as we see, is a hailstorm of rumor and rampant speculation.
With the simplest of clarifications from the proper spokespeople, Jacobsen would be off the air and her witch-hunting minions forced back into her xenophobic bunkers. Alas, say the cynics, there are those in power more than pleased with this arrangement, chortling along with the blowhards and conspiracy peddlers whose only duty is to stoke the coals of fear.
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RESPONSE #3
Ask the pilot
If Annie Jacobsen won't stop her fearmongering about terrorists, then I won't stop exposing the harm she's doing to us all, either.
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By Patrick Smith
Aug. 6, 2004 | "We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages -- they haven't ended yet."
-- Kurt Vonnegut, from "Deadeye Dick," 1982
If you're tired of hearing about Annie Jacobsen, so am I. Please don't take it out on me. A month ago we were in the midst of a multi-week conversation about airports and terminals. Annie came calling and now, like a bad case of jet lag, she won't go away. You can lay some of the blame on this very column if you want, for bothering to indulge the tenacious paranoia seeded by this story, but as a pilot and air travel columnist I feel uniquely qualified, perhaps obligated, to stick with it. The larger media has presented few, if any, rebuttals from those within the ranks of civil aviation.
Don't look now, but WomensWallStreet.com has just published Part 3 of "Terror in the Skies Again?" -- in which Jacobsen celebrates her incendiary non-story having made it to the ears of policymakers in Washington, D.C. That a Web site ostensibly devoted to the financial interests of American women has posted a hideously callow, three-part (thus far) sermon on what it pathetically characterizes as "national security" is shameless. That officials on Capitol Hill are now paying attention is somewhere between disheartening and irresponsible.
Part 3 of Jacobsen's reactionary triptych is shorter than the first two, but no less infuriating in its relentlessness and arrogant eschewal of the facts. Although it was widely reported that the Syrian musicians aboard flight 327 had not overstayed their I-94 limitations, once again we are baited with talk of those "expired visas." Elsewhere, in a reference to the musicians, the word "harmless" is enclosed in quotes -- yet another instance of the kind of sleazy conjecture that has been this story's only selling point from the beginning.
"It seems to me that the highest-ups don't like having to get information that involves national security from articles written by yours truly," Jacobsen explains. Probably not, and neither do the rest of us, particularly when that information is a bunch of alarmist balderdash.
"I've kept quiet about numerous matters that have surfaced over the past few weeks," she writes. "But there is something I must share because I find it so telling." Jacobsen has a way of ceremoniously preambling the most banal commentary. True to form she goes on to describe a suspiciously paraphrased tit-for-tat telephone conversation with an understandably insulted and annoyed Syrian ambassador, Dr. Imad Moustapha.
"I spoke at length with the United States House of Representatives Judiciary Committee," Jacobsen informs us. "It was an honor and a privilege, and I believe things are finally in the right hands." Let's hope those hands, manicured by your tax dollars, have the good sense enough to toss this matter where it belongs.
I was unable to procure a transcript of what Jacobsen had to say to this committee, which was attended by representatives from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and the Federal Air Marshals Association. But then, bound by the precepts of honesty and fact, there's only so much she could say:
"Dear Judiciary Committee Members:
"At the end of June, 2004, I flew to California in the company of a large group of Syrian musicians. During flight, the men acted much the way large groups of passengers act aboard flights the world over. They talked a lot, moved around a lot, ignored the seat belt sign, and made frequent trips to the toilet. With the images of September 11 still fresh in our minds, and because the men were Arabs, their behavior was unusually conspicuous and, on some level, cause for concern. We landed safely and it was later determined that the men were professional artists legally in this country. They had no records and were not on terrorist watch lists. Taking every precaution, government authorities followed the men, witnessed their concert performances, and checked out their hotels. They have since returned to Syria. I find this experience deeply troubling."
A full third of the WomansWallStreet.com home page is devoted to the "Terror in the Skies Again?" series, including a list of chronologically arranged links connecting readers to "follow-up information." While my own July 30 column is notably absent, included are click-overs to National Public Radio, the New York Times, and seven separate articles from the right-wing Washington Times, a paper that has, more than any other single source, propagated this affair through continuously vapid coverage.
The latest Washington Times piece borrows select details from Jacobsen's original account, repeating one of her most manipulative observations: "Upon returning to his seat, one man mouthed the word 'no' as he ran his finger across his throat."
Among the letters I've received over the past couple of weeks, several have taken me to task for not bothering with a point-by-point dissection of the musicians' in-flight conduct. Jacobsen presents a theater in which the men engaged in everything short of an onboard decapitation and a Frisbee game down the center aisle: They congregate and socialize; they bring cameras and cellphones into the lavatories; one removes a long skinny object, draped in cloth, from the overhead bin. What do these things mean?
Embedded in each tiny snapshot is a nugget of scary-sounding detail. But that's precisely the narrative's undoing; the entire thing is an out-of-context cheap shot of gratuitous detail. The men brought phones into the toilets? Who cares? Were the phones in their hands, or clipped to their belts? And if the former, what would the point be when all he'd have to do is slip the device into a pocket to conceal it? What of the item wrapped in cloth? An ivory-handled scimitar magically slipped past security? And so forth. It's ridiculous, especially when we accommodate even a small measure of embellishment.
Like any other pilot, and particularly one who answers questions from the general public, I've been privy to countless distorted chronicles from passengers about the last terrible flight they were on. Usually these stories have elaborate, totally implausible details such as the airplane banking upside down, pieces falling off, flight attendants screaming, ad nauseam. Is it not unreasonable that "Terror in the Skies Again?" includes similar fear-induced enhancements and exaggerations? The New York Times reported on Tuesday that, according to witnesses on the flight, and contrary to Jacobsen's statements, the musicians did not stand up after the seat belt light went on, but were already standing, and returned to their seats when asked to by flight attendants. When portions of Jacobsen's account are suspect, why trust the rest?
As for the regurgitation of the man mouthing "no," Jacobsen initially wrote that the men were speaking Arabic. Yet the Arabic word for "no" is "la." When I presented this to Jacobsen a week ago, she stammered and sputtered before contending the men had spoken both English and Arabic. It's also my understanding that the hand-across-the-throat gesture is a custom in parts of the world meaning full, complete or finished.
Virtually everything Jacobsen claims to have witnessed is patently and obviously explainable. That is, unless viewed obsessively through a prism of fear and politically motivated conjecture. To reiterate a point I made last time, Jacobsen's crime was not feeling anxious aboard flight 327. Her crime is trying to make the rest of us anxious more than a month afterward.
She and her partisan allies have succeeded in pushing this matter beyond the realm of air travel and onto the greater stages of politics and civil debate. It does not belong in any of these places, frankly, and thus I'm offended on two levels: first, as a pilot and air travel pasionado; secondly as an American.
As anybody familiar with my work as an aeroevangelist knows, commercial flight means more to me than any seat-of-the-pants thrill of airspeed and altitude. My infatuation with planes led directly to an infatuation with geography and travel. Studying the route maps of the airlines as a sixth-grader, I was inspired, as an adult, to visit places like Cambodia and Mali. In 2004, travelers can fly nonstop from New York City to China, Singapore, South Africa and the Middle East. Never before has air travel had the potential to so easily bridge cultures and open minds.
Whether they're intended to or not, stories like Annie Jacobsen's work to squander that potential, encouraging Americans to stay home, distrust their neighbors, and above all else be afraid -- afraid to fly and afraid of the world.
Heaven help us when terrorists strike again. By all indications we will find ourselves living in a fortress nation more resembling a Soviet-bloc police state than a liberal (with a small "l") democracy. The mail I've received of late certainly paints an ominous picture -- one of a nation in the paralytic throes of absurdity:
? A United Airlines 747 jettisons thousands of gallons of kerosene into the Pacific and swoops back to Sydney, Australia, for a precautionary landing because a discarded airsickness bag, with the letters "BOB" scrawled across it, is found discarded in a lavatory. The crew interprets the acronym to mean "bomb on board."
? A Canadian-Pakistani man is removed from a plane in Denver because a flight attendant reasoned he "looked like a wanted terrorist."
? Military fighter planes scramble to escort a jetliner into Kennedy airport after a group of Indian karaoke singers chat excitedly and point toward the Manhattan skyline.
? Buddhist monks visiting the Grand Canyon spark the alarm of tourists who worry they might be "terrorists."
? A Sikh university student is detained and interrogated for five hours by authorities in Boston for taking photographs of a campus chapel.
Excavated from the rubble of Sept. 11 could have been, and should have been, a crucial and instructive lesson beyond the expected hand-wringing over security and preparedness. Specifically, a call for American citizens to broaden their horizons and develop a smarter sense of the world's mechanisms and conflicts. Instead, we appear to be growing even more insular, myopic, and unimpressed with the fact that large numbers of people despise us for reasons a tad more complex than "they hate freedom." It's a path we follow at our own peril, and it is exactly opposite to what global tensions mandate. We can't tell the difference between an Indian, a Tibetan, and an Islamic radical. More to the point, we don't seem interested in learning what those differences are.
Annie Jacobsen represents the worst of America: pandering, irrational, dismissive of evidence. Assembling a scare story based entirely on raw speculation, she has nonetheless arranged herself a bunker impervious to full discredit. Her Syrian musicians will always be terrorists, no matter the facts and no matter anyone's official statement. And when the next batch of genuine terrorists strike, whether by airplane, truck bomb, submarine or on horseback, her lowest-common-denominator strategy retains just enough vaguely rendered credibility to shout out: "I told you so."
In the end, Jacobsen and I agree on one thing, even if we concur from opposite poles: As Americans it serves us to be vigilant, cynical and skeptical. Dangerous times indeed.
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RESPONSE #4
Ask the pilot
A bogus "federal air marshal" group joins Annie Jacobsen's crusade against Syrian musicians.
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By Patrick Smith
Aug. 13, 2004 | Feedback to my analysis of the Annie Jacobsen/flight 327 affair has been overwhelmingly positive. Of the hundreds of letters I've received, roughly 90 percent have been supportive. Here's hoping that testifies to the sensible thinking of Americans in general as much as it does to the eagerly analytical minds of Salon subscribers (read: elitist Democrats).
Dissent has arrived from two camps. A few of you who took me to task did so intelligently, patiently and respectfully. My gratitude to Tom Izzo, Ken Potter, Rebecca Matthews and several others (you know who you are), for your constructive and engaging critiques. Unfortunately, the bulk of the disagreement has come in the form of pugnacious little e-mail bombs -- rude, obscene, flippant letters that can't be bothered to address a specific point. These are easy to spot since their subject lines typically include some combination of the words "pussy," "loser," "idiot" or, most caustic of all, "liberal." Begins one letter: "You might be a pilot, but your [sic] also an idiot." Usually these notes are unsigned, and rarely longer than three or four lines. To a few -- call me crazy -- I took the effort of a pointed reply, but not once did the writer respond a second time or elaborate on his or her disappointment with my views.
"Dear Patty, I just read your article on Annie Jacobsen. I find it hard to believe you're a pilot given your cavalier attitude toward terrorism. Thanks, JH"
I'd hardly describe my take on terrorism to be "cavalier." To the contrary, I find the incendiary scare-mongering of Jacobsen, et al., to be reckless and destructive. I can't afford to be cavalier. The fallout of Sept. 11 cost me my job and effectively ruined a career I spent decades attempting to establish.
This how-can-you-be-a-pilot bit is something I keep running into. During my appearance with Michael Smerconish, the conservative talk-show host out of Philadelphia, he posed to his listeners: "Can you believe this guy? And he's a pilot! That is scary."
Pilots, in the opinions of those who transact in fear and hysterics, are consigned to play the part of red-meat nationalist -- eager to kick ass, take no prisoners, and hoist the Stars and Stripes over whatever inflammatory rhetoric happens to be cast about. Take a skeptical view, and you're a "pussy," if not a traitor. To those who insist on tying in ideology with FAA flight credentials, please extend the offer to thousands of other pilots, including those quoted in part 2 of my Jacobsen rebuttal, one of whom was a friend and U.S. Navy squadron mate of Tom McGuinness, the copilot of American Airlines flight 11. And consider this, from pilot Don Wright, retired from Pan Am and Delta:
"Last week my adult daughter announced she is terrified of flying. Reason: That idiotic piece about the Syrians. We've put the hysterics in charge. Last year the airlines killed exactly zero passengers while auto accidents did in about 40 thousand. I'm sure a number of those killed on highways would have been safely aboard airplanes if it weren't for people like Annie Jacobsen."
More than it hurts my feelings, the juvenile harshness I've encountered serves to underscore the strange way in which the story of flight 327 has been so acutely politicized.
As Annie and her story made the rounds of electronic and broadcast media, I started to feel as though I was typing into a void. At long last, other voices have begun scrutinizing the matter more carefully. Congratulations to Time magazine for featuring an exclusive interview with one of the federal air marshals aboard flight 327, who coolly and succinctly dismantled most of Jacobsen's histrionic fantasy. Then again, to quote one of my hometown's more popular drive-time radio blabbermouths, Time is "just another liberal rag."
Francis Volpe writes for the Sentinel, in Carlisle, Penn. Along with yours truly he was one of the few people to pen a less-than-gullible take on "Terror in the Skies Again?" Several days after his article ran, Volpe received an e-mail from something called the Federal Air Marshal Association (FAMA). Assuming it was a legitimate dispatch from a government agency, Volpe clicked open the letter. It read:
"You might want to read this about the 'innocent' 14 Syrian musicians and their leader, who were on NW Flight 327.
"Federal Air Marshal Association Media Relations Department"
The link carries you to the lyrics of "Mother of a Martyr," a song authored by Nour Mehana, the so-called Syrian Wayne Newton, who the flight 327 musicians were en route to play backup for. Several things here: For one, Nour Mehana was not on the airplane. Second, presenting song lyrics as circumstantial evidence of some vaguely defined wrongdoing opens quite the can of worms. (Never mind that "Mother of a Martyr" is about Palestinian suicide bombers in Israel and that the official Palestinian policy, what exists of it, does not actively target Americans.) We look forward to FAMA's advocating that rapper Ice-T be kept off airplanes because of his song "Cop Killer" and that Eric Clapton be grounded for "I Shot the Sheriff."
I found it discomforting that representatives of a law enforcement body, entrusted with the lives and security of all Americans, are going around sending snippy, unsigned e-mails to bolster a controversial cause, particularly when the Department of Homeland Security, under whose authority the federal air marshals safeguard our skies, openly disputes any speculation that terrorists were aboard flight 327.
Pay a visit to the FAMA Web site, however, and things drop into place. FAMA is not, in fact, a government-sanctioned entity. Rather, it's a spinoff composed of apparently disenchanted members of the official Federal Air Marshal Service, or FAMS. Air marshals with an agenda, you might say, operating as something between a labor union and a propaganda machine. Their choice of name and acronym lends itself nicely to quotes or sound bites. Indeed, several media accounts discussing Annie Jacobsen include statements from FAMA, ostensibly speaking on the government's behalf.
There's a creepy, artful convolution to the organization's press releases, which sound like a mix between Big Brother and Yogi Berra. "For immediate release," begins a dispatch. "[FAMA] announced today that additional evidence now exists confirming the possible existence of terrorist dry runs and probes on commercial passenger flights."
What is that evidence? How about "a man on a recent flight" and a pair of anonymous testimonials from flight 327 that presumably (we don't know because no details are given) buttress Annie Jacobsen's. These have "confirmed the original incident as a possible dry run or probe."
Oh.
One notably crude touch is the home page graphic of the KLM (Royal Dutch Airlines) DC-10. They've airbrushed out the tail design, but you can still see the carrier's logo on the engine cowls. Elsewhere we find images of a hooded marshal crouched behind an airplane seat, taking aim at, we figure, a terrorist strapped with dynamite, or possibly a Syrian oud player. A little too much swagger for comfort. Through its scratch and grain, the page looks, and I really hate to say this, like one of those al-Qaida recruitment videos we've seen on TV. Instead of bearded jihadis bayoneting effigies of George Bush, we see pictures of trigger-happy marshals antsy for the next takedown at 37,000 feet.
Doubtless somebody will rip the above from context and claim that I "compared federal air marshals to terrorists." And maybe I'll get a letter or two reminding me that I won't be saying these things "when one of our men is up there saving your pathetic liberal ass." I can't quote FAMA directly since none of my phone calls or e-mails were returned.
Air marshals could and should portray themselves in any number of ways: highly trained, competent, vigilant. Two things they should not be are politically partisan and confrontational. FAMA looks to be both, and the Department of Homeland Security should be alarmed and ashamed that some of its members have taken up like a renegade militia, purposely obfuscating the identity of a government office while openly contradicting its statements. I can think of nothing less professional. Who would you rather have aboard your plane, an unarmed Arab musician flying to a concert, or one of these reactionary zealots packing heat?
FAMA harps heavily on the dry-run theory despite contrary assertions from its bosses. "There is no specific intelligence that terrorists are conducting test flights or surveillance activities on U.S. airliners. Period." That's not from National Public Radio, the New York Times, or al-Jazeera. Those are the words of David Adams, spokesperson for the Federal Air Marshal Service in Washington, D.C.
Adams is concerned about FAMA's influence and media appearances, but won't tip his hand as to how or whether his bureau will address the matter. He says of FAMA's executive director, Bob Flamm, "He is not a federal air marshal. And, honestly, I don't know for sure who he is or what he represents. FAMA's assertions are not borne out by facts, and the group is not sanctioned by the office of the Federal Air Marshal Service or our workforce."
I wonder what FAMA thinks of the comments in Time magazine from the flight 327 air marshal. According to Adams, Annie Jacobsen disputes the officer's account and has reportedly called him a liar. But the more Annie Jacobsen discredits and rejects nearly everything set before her by the TSA, FBI, FAMS and DHS, the more we have to ask: Just what, exactly, do she and her allies want? Is that question even answerable? Here are the feelings of Stanley J. Alluisi, a professor from the Aviation Sciences Institute at Southeastern Oklahoma State University.
"One of my biggest problems with Ms. Jacobsen is her implicit and explicit insistence that 'something should have been done.' The 'so-called musicians' should have been arrested, deported, or possibly sent to Guant?namo Bay. For what? Being Syrian?"
"Her 'logic' that the Syrians were terrorists on a dry run is similar to the arguments put forward by those claiming psychic or magical powers. First, they demand that you prove their extraordinary claims are false, turning the evidentiary requirements on their head. And if you would just look closer and closer, you will eventually find the proof! The truth is out there."
"Jacobsen says, 'I saw what I saw' and 'Those men were up to something and I cannot believe otherwise.' Therefore, no amount of investigation will be sufficient if it does not dig deep enough to 'prove' the 14 Syrians were terrorists. Nothing short of their signed confessions, or their actually participating in a terror attack could satisfy her, since she 'cannot believe otherwise.' This is religion, not logic."
Conspiracy myths, if that's the appropriate term for all that has emerged from flight 327, come in all colors, sizes and political affiliations. I'm hoping at least a few of you remember my take on the Paul Wellstone crash a couple of years ago, when members of the fringe left were peddling grassy-knoll theories that Republican operatives had bombed Wellstone's twin-engine Beechcraft out of the sky. Now it's the other side's turn, and this time the stakes are much higher.
The right has spun the Annie Jacobsen psychodrama into a clash of ideologies. On one hand this is hardly surprising, yet at the same time I'm baffled -- and creeped out -- by the weight of people's investment in the idea of terrorists working among us. What does a group like FAMA stand to gain? Merely a justification for their existence and continued "business"? Or does a ceaseless pretext of us-vs.-them hostilities pander to baser instincts -- those that hunger for conflict and power?
It's a familiar story, whereby hard-line conservatives claim deed over all things virtuous, patriotic and strong, casting aside all who disagree as traitorous, co-conspiring liberals whose opinions ensure nothing short of rampant destruction and the collapse of society. This is not only distasteful but dangerously counterproductive. The security of the skies is being hijacked, if I may, by belligerent partisans who hold their own ideology above evidence, practicality and the common good. I have a problem with that, and you should too.
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Woof SBMig:
Thank you for that. Interesting read.
Crafty Dog
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Very interesting set of articles.
I'm wishing that the agencies set up in response to 9/11 had taken a different approach than they did, and the FAMA rhetoric is pretty unsettling.
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"I'm baffled -- and creeped out -- by the weight of people's investment in the idea of terrorists working among us."
Maybe this is because they are?
WJ
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Montreal man downed U.S. Plane, CSIS told
'Farouk the Tunisian' involved, al-Qaeda say, but officials insist crash was
accidental
Stewart Bell
National Post
Friday, August 27, 2004
A captured al-Qaeda operative has told Canadian intelligence investigators that a Montreal man who trained in Afghanistan alongside the 9/11 hijackers was responsible for the crash of an American Airlines flight in New York three years ago.
Canadian Security Intelligence Service agents were told during five days of interviews with the source that Abderraouf Jdey, a Canadian citizen also known as Farouk the Tunisian, had downed the plane with explosives on Nov. 12, 2001.
The source claimed Jdey had used his Canadian passport to board Flight 587 and "conducted a suicide mission" with a small bomb similar to the one used by convicted shoe bomber Richard Reid, a "Top Secret" Canadian government report says.
But officials said it was unlikely Jdey was actually involved in the crash,
which killed 265 people and is considered accidental. The fact that al-Qaeda attributed the crash to Jdey, however, suggests they were expecting him to attack a plane.
"We have seen no evidence of anything other than an accident here," said Ted Lopatkiewicz, spokesman for the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. "There has been no evidence found, from what I can tell -- at least that's been relayed to us -- that there was any criminality involved here. It appears, at least the evidence we have, is that a vertical fin came off, not that there was any kind of event in the cabin."
Jdey, 39, came to Canada from Tunisia in 1991 and became a citizen in 1995. Shortly after getting his Canadian passport, he left for Afghanistan and trained with some of the Sept. 11 hijackers, according to the 9/11
commission in the United States.
He recorded a "martyrdom" video, but was dropped from the 9/11 mission after returning to Canada in the summer of 2001. The planner of the World Trade Center attack, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, claims Jdey was recruited for a "second wave" of suicide attacks.
The FBI issued an alert seeking Jdey's whereabouts in 2002. John Ashcroft, the U.S. Attorney-General, told a news conference in May that Jdey was one of seven al-Qaeda associates "sought in connection with the possible terrorist threats in the United States."
The information on Jdey's alleged role in the plane crash is contained in a
memo on captured Canadian al-Qaeda operative Mohammed Mansour Jabarah. The Canadian government memo was written in May, 2002, and was based on information provided by a "source of unknown reliability."
Jabarah is a 22-year-old from St. Catharines who allegedly joined al-Qaeda and convinced Osama bin Laden to give him a terror assignment. He was tasked with overseeing a suicide-bombing operation in Southeast Asia, but was caught and has since pleaded guilty in the United States.
The report, which was sent to the Philippine National Police intelligence
directorate, recounts what Jabarah said he was told about the U.S. plane
crash by Abu Abdelrahman, a Saudi al-Qaeda member who was working for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
"In discussions, Abu Abdelrahman mentioned AL QAIDA was responsible for the assassination of Massoud, the Northern Alliance leader," the report says. "According to the source, Abu Abdelrahman added that the 12 November 2001 plane crash (btb American Airlines flight 587) in Queens, New York was not an accident as reported in the press but was actually an AL QAIDA operation.
"Abu Abdelrahman informed Jabarah that Farouk the Tunisian conducted a
suicide mission on the aeroplane using a shoe bomb of the type used by
Richard Reid .... 'Farouk the Tunisian' was identified from newspaper
photographs as being identical to Abderraouf Jdey, a Canadian citizen who had resided in Montreal."
Jabarah was initially suspect of the claim about Jdey, but he later believed
it after he saw the same information on a "mujahedin Web site," the report says.
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Thanks for the preface, Migs. ;)
It has also become apparent that, as mentioned by AskThePilot series author, Patrick Smith, Annie Jacobsen's behavior aboard the plane was far more disruptive than any of the other passengers. As always, sometimes unchecked paranoia and knee-jerk reactions are far more detrimental than the perceived threat. Aside from making American women look like paranoid, racist ninnies, Jacobsen's actions were upsetting other passengers. She has/had all the rationality that usually ignites mob mentality.
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Oh boy...
Report catalogues problems in air marshals service
Tue Aug 31, 6:12 AM ET
By Mimi Hall, USA TODAY
Federal air marshals have slept on the job, tested positive for alcohol or drugs while on duty, lost their weapons and falsified information, the Homeland Security Department's inspector general said Monday in a scathing report on the air marshals program.
The government logged 753 incidents of misconduct by air marshals during an eight-month period in 2002, according to the report. The report criticizes the undercover program as being too lenient on officers involved in misconduct. Most were placed on leave with pay after the incidents.
"In many cases, air marshals were placed on administrative leave for extended periods of time," the report said. "In similar cases, a screener (security checkpoint worker) would have been placed on leave without pay or dismissed."
The report also said 161 applicants to the air marshals program made it through a preliminary step in the hiring process despite problems that included accusations of domestic violence, drunken driving or sexual harassment. None of those applicants wound up being hired, however.
Homeland Security spokesman Brian Doyle said hiring guidelines for the program have since been changed. Even though the applicants were approved for consideration, Doyle said, all were eventually rejected because of concerns about their backgrounds.
Asa Hutchinson, chief of border and transportation security at the department, said new guidelines are also in place to make marshals more accountable.
Parts of the report were blacked out because many details about the air marshals service are classified for security reasons, including the precise number of marshals guarding commercial flights.
Before the Sept. 11 attacks, there were only a few dozen "sky marshals," and they flew mainly on foreign trips. After 9/11, several thousand new marshals were hired to also fly on domestic routes as one of many government efforts to protect against future acts of terrorism.
The armed marshals pose as regular passengers on flights. Their identities and routes are kept secret by the government.
Hutchinson disputed the report's finding that there were 753 disciplinary reports in 2002. He said that those reports were logged over a 22-month period, from 2002 to 2004, and that there were 717 cases.
Further, he wrote in a response to the report that most of the cases were "much less serious, but much more common allegations ... like rude behavior by a (federal air marshal) during the check-in process."
The inspector general's report also questioned why marshals had been given $6.5 million in cash travel advances when they are reimbursed every two weeks under a travel voucher system. The report recommended discontinuing travel advances; the department agreed with that recommendation.
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Ack. Don't mean to be a nuisance posting everywhere, but I thought everyone debating this thread would appreciate this:
http://www.manbottle.com/audio/Sinatra_-_Strangers_On_My_Flight.htm
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Woof All:
Tiny, no nuisance at all. We enjoy when people come to play.
Anyway, here's this.
Crafty
===========================
Quiet Investigation Centers on Al Qaeda Aide in New York
A Pakistani American raised in Queens is telling authorities about plotting with top network members, court documents show.
By Josh Meyer, Greg Krikorian and William C. Rempel, Times Staff Writers
NEW YORK ? As President Bush touted his record in the war on terror Thursday night at Madison Square Garden, another front in the terrorism fight was playing out nearby in the federal holding cell of a Pakistani American named Mohammed Junaid Babar.
Babar, who grew up in Queens, is a cooperating witness in an unfolding investigation of what authorities say may be a New York-based "sleeper cell" involved in Al Qaeda efforts to launch attacks in the U.S., perhaps as the Nov. 2 election approaches.
The investigation remains nearly invisible to the public, and federal authorities and defense lawyers have refused to discuss it.
But unsealed court documents show that Babar, 29, has admitted meeting with senior Al Qaeda members in remote South Waziristan in Pakistan this year as part of a scheme to smuggle money, night-vision goggles and other equipment to the terrorist network.
On June 3, he secretly pleaded guilty to charges of providing material support to a terrorist organization and agreed to cooperate in ongoing investigations.
"I understood that the money and supplies that I had given to Al Qaeda was supposed to be used in Afghanistan against U.S. or international forces," Babar told the court.
Authorities believe three of the men Babar met with were involved in plotting attacks in London and perhaps the United States, using surveillance gathered during visits to New York, New Jersey and Washington, D.C., in 2000 and 2001.
Babar's case is by no means isolated. Court documents and interviews show that U.S. authorities are conducting at least a dozen significant investigations throughout the nation into suspected support cells or operational cells of Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas and affiliate organizations.
These investigations ? and dozens of preliminary probes ? show the extent to which Al Qaeda maintains an active support network in the United States that is linked to its leaders on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, its global network of cells and potentially to ongoing plots here and overseas, according to senior U.S. counterterrorism officials.
During his acceptance speech Thursday night, President Bush said his administration's aggressive counterterrorism efforts had been successful in the three years since the Sept. 11 attacks.
Critics, however, say that at least some of the investigative activity unfairly targets innocent Muslims, and that all of the secret detentions, arrests and prosecutions have failed to uncover any proven terrorists in the United States.
Indeed, the Justice Department has had a mixed record in prosecuting alleged terrorism cell members in the United States; just this week, its first big terrorism conviction was thrown out of court by a federal judge in Detroit.
Such problems have raised questions about how successful the government has been in tracking terrorists, while skeptics ask if the terror threat is being hyped to bolster support for the Bush administration's hard-line approach.
Several U.S. counter-terrorism officials acknowledged that they had no hard evidence that Al Qaeda operatives were living in the U.S. and readying a terrorist attack. But the officials, who have tracked Al Qaeda in the United States and overseas, said they operated every day under the assumption that the terrorist network had not just sympathizers but one or more teams of attackers ready and waiting in the country.
One U.S. official, whose specialty is tracking Al Qaeda, said, "The difference between now and 9/11 is they are now in a rabbit hole. But are they still here? You bet."
Some of the investigations have been underway for months or even years. In others, the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and other agencies are pursuing recent leads generated through electronic intercepts and the capture and interrogation of suspected terrorists overseas and a review of their computers, cellphones and paper documents.
Several of the investigations involve alleged terrorism cells in New York and northern New Jersey, where suspected Al Qaeda operatives have been under intermittent surveillance since the early 1990s.
One focuses on local supporters of prominent Yemeni cleric Mohammed al Hasan al-Moayad and an aide, Mohammed Mohsen Yahya Zayed, who authorities contend have used a Brooklyn-based mosque, ice cream parlor and other businesses to funnel $20 million to Al Qaeda overseas, court documents show.
New York area authorities also continue to investigate whether local sympathizers helped another prominent cleric, Omar Abdel Rahman, the so-called blind sheik, communicate with leaders of an Egyptian-based terrorist organization while Abdel Rahman was imprisoned in Colorado. One U.S. postal employee is being prosecuted in that case.
Additional investigations in the New York region focus on other suspected Al Qaeda cells, as well as operatives believed to be providing clandestine support for alleged Al Qaeda affiliate groups such as Ansar al Islam and Egyptian Islamic Jihad as well as Hezbollah, a global terrorism network of its own, authorities said.
In Boston, authorities are investigating whether a Lebanese man who claims to have attended an Al Qaeda training camp is part of a larger sleeper cell in the region. Other probes focus on cities in Texas, Florida, Michigan and the Carolinas, authorities say.
And in California, authorities are pursuing leads that Al Qaeda is operating on both sides of the Mexican border, and that the group continues to be interested in launching attacks against high-profile targets in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
In some cases, authorities are closely monitoring suspects, often using secret wiretaps and search warrants obtained through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to determine whether they are raising money, recruiting operatives or providing logistical aid to terrorist groups, or even playing operational roles in plots against U.S. targets.
Authorities are also investigating several dozen other individuals and groups that have no visible connections to known terrorists, including two young men of Pakistani descent who were arrested last week on suspicion of plotting a "holy war" rampage in New York City. Authorities said those plans included blowing up subway stations, police precincts and bridges.
Babar's case appeared to be unique, authorities said, in that he had admitted having personal contact with several high-ranking Al Qaeda members and playing a role in a plot by the group to blow up pubs, restaurants and train stations in London. Babar has admitted providing the London group ammonium nitrate and other materials to make bombs.
British authorities thwarted that alleged effort in March, arresting eight suspects. Authorities also seized 1,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate, a key ingredient in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and the bombing of two Bali discos two years ago.
Soon after the arrests, British authorities told their U.S. counterparts that Babar appeared to be a co-conspirator. He had already been placed on an FBI terrorism watch list, after a Canadian television program broadcast footage of him from Pakistan making inflammatory remarks.
Babar said he was a Muslim first, an American second, and that he wanted to fight with the Taliban against U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
"I'm willing to kill Americans," he told the reporter on the program, even as he asserted that his mother had worked in one of the World Trade Center towers and barely escaped with her life on Sept. 11. He also said he would never return to New York.
But Babar did return to New York shortly after his meeting with Al Qaeda officials in Pakistan, and was put under surveillance. He was arrested April 10 by federal agents and local police as he drove to a taxi-driving class in Long Island City, Queens.
Babar began cooperating almost immediately, according to court records and interviews.
When visiting Pakistan, Babar said, he had brought cash, sleeping bags, waterproof socks and ponchos and other supplies for Al Qaeda operatives and their Taliban allies.
He also admitted participating in the London terrorism plots, and to personally setting up a "jihad training camp" in Pakistan and arranging lodging and transportation for recruits to attend.
Authorities say that while Babar was in Pakistan, he also met with key Al Qaeda operatives who conducted detailed surveillance of U.S. financial institutions for possible attack in 2000 and 2001.
Two of the operatives have since been arrested: suspected Al Qaeda communications specialist Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, in Pakistan, and a London-based operative who authorities said was sent by the network to the United States several years ago to facilitate terrorist attacks on U.S. soil.
A third attendee, authorities believe, was Adnan El Shukrijumah, a trained pilot, accomplished bomb-maker and former South Florida resident. Shukrijumah, who remains a fugitive, has been identified by the FBI as the apparent mastermind of an Al Qaeda plot to launch a mass-casualty attack in the United States.
Authorities continue to "work" Babar to determine the extent of his relationship with those men and other Al Qaeda leaders, and to determine who else may have helped him funnel money and supplies to Al Qaeda.
They are seeking information about whether an attack was in the works, according to a source close to the investigation.
That source and others familiar with the case also confirmed that authorities were scrutinizing New York-based members of Al Muhajiroun, a religious group with ties to Babar that had been linked to Islamic extremism in other parts of the world.
"He's a true believer," one source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said of Babar.
The source said no one knew why Babar, who attended St. John's University in New York for a year, was so eager to help Al Qaeda.
Babar, who was being held without bail, faces up to 70 years in prison. No sentencing date was set because of his agreement to cooperate.
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http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/news/editorial/9576050.htm
Opinion
Posted on Sun, Sep. 05, 2004
'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' is no strategy for homeland security
by TIM PAWLENTY (governor of Minnesota)
When Zacarias Moussaoui was in Minnesota allegedly preparing to take part in the biggest terrorist attack in American history, he would have liked the protections given to him by city ordinances in Minneapolis and St. Paul.
Minnesota's two largest cities prevent their police officers from inquiring about a person's immigration status. Police can't check to see if a visa is expired or if a person is in the United States illegally. Essentially, Minneapolis and St. Paul have taken a "don't ask, don't tell" approach that could impede our homeland security efforts.
Why would Minneapolis and St. Paul want to tie the hands of their police in protecting homeland security? With the threats that Sept. 11 made apparent to all Americans, why would city councils prevent their police officers from using all available legal means to protect their communities from terrorism? These are questions to which I'd like to hear some answers from the members of the Minneapolis and St. Paul city councils.
We are a country of immigrants, and immigration has contributed greatly to America's success. But immigration must be legal, reasonable and orderly. We cannot pretend there is no connection between illegal immigration and homeland security concerns.
Recently, in North Carolina, a police officer observed a man filming financial institutions and other nontourist structures. This was suspicious, but not necessarily illegal activity. The basis upon which the man could be detained and questioned was his immigration status, he was in the country illegally. His behavior and motives are now being reviewed for possible terrorism-related charges. In Minneapolis and St. Paul, city ordinance could have prevented that officer from taking action.
Minnesota has not been isolated from the war on terror. For a relatively small state in the middle of the country, we have had more than our fair share of terrorism-related arrests. Since 2001, five men from different countries ? all with connections to Minnesota ? were detained or arrested on suspicion of terrorism-related activities. This includes, for example, a Moroccan who lived in Minneapolis, who was indicted and later convicted of conspiring to provide material support or resources to terrorists, of fraud and of misusing documents.
The city councils argue that all residents should be able to seek the help of the police without fear their immigration status may become an issue. That concern, however, needs to be balanced against the need for increased vigilance to protect homeland security. That balancing can be accomplished without compromising public safety.
The ordinances in St. Paul and Minneapolis should be repealed. If the city councils are unwilling to take that action, they should at least be willing to grant police officers the option of questioning immigration status if there are concerns about homeland security.
The heart, soul and hope of America is reflected in the immigrants who come here to find a new life and new opportunity. Protecting our homeland does not oppress immigrants. It protects them ? and the freedom and opportunity for which they came. Our local law enforcement is the first line of defense in America's homeland security. Prohibiting them from using a critical public safety tool simply defies common sense.
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From a different forum, two well-regarded posters:
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There has been an Islamo-fascist 5th column in the US for over 10 years. Whom do people think carried out the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center?
The indictees and the convicted were Muslims living in New Jersey as well as Ramzi Yousef and his first lieutenant who fled to Iraq where he was given sanctuary by Saddam Hussein's government.
----------------------
<< There has been an Islamo-fascist 5th column in the US for over 10 years. >>
I agree Rick. I would say we have evidence of cells here in Tucson going back further, at least to 1990 and probably into the 80's according to this conviction: http://www.ago.state.co.us/PRESREL/presrl2001/prsrl31.stm
Cleric Rashad Khalifa was murdered at his Tucson Mosque on January 31, 1990. The way I see it, Islam is in the midst of a civil war between those who want to reform Islamic practice for modern life and those, often refered to as fundamentalists, who want the religion to adhere to medieval rules. Khalifa popularity in the Mulsim world was on the rise, even in the middle east, for his theory that the Quran is numerologically provably the word of god whereas the Sharia (sp?) and other medieval laws, supposedly based on the life of Mohammed, are provably not the word of god.
Although the document I linked above does not indicate the nationality of the convicted conspirator, I was told by a friend in Tucson who was an FBI agent at the time that before Khalifa's death, he said that he believed that two Saudi's were in Tucson to kill him. Ironically, the FBI then had a policy of keeping a low profile in cases such as this, with agents being reprimanded if their name should appear in the news. Thus, the FBI made no effort to investigate who killed Khalifa or why. The Tucson police never solved the case.
Mark
Ex-local man was 'assistant' to bin Laden
By David Wichner, Arizona Daily Star
A former Tucson resident sentenced to life in prison Oct. 18 in two U.S. embassy bombings was a "personal assistant" to Osama bin Laden (news - web sites), federal prosecutors say.
Wadih El-Hage, 41, who lived in Tucson in the 1980s, was sentenced in New York on federal charges that he helped plot the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Though El-Hage denied involvement in the bombings, which killed 12 Americans and more than 200 others, prosecutors at the sentencing said the evidence showed he was a "central facilitator" who acted as bin Laden?s assistant while leading the Kenyan cell of bin Laden's al-Qaida terror network.
El-Hage also has been linked to the 1993 purchase of a used jet aircraft in Tucson on behalf of bin Laden, as well as the 1990 murder of a Tucson Islamic leader. Together with evidence that Hani Hanjour, one of the Sept. 11 suicide hijackers, lived in Tucson, the links show how bin Laden's terror network touched Tucson and fuel suspicions that terrorists may still reside here. "They have, I think, blended in with the local people, based on the cases we know about," said Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, who revealed earlier this month that his department was looking for two Middle Eastern men who left evidence of possible terror links in their Catalina Foothills apartment.
A terrorism expert also said Tucson and Phoenix may have been considered prime locations for bin Laden?s terror group because of the large aviation industry and the presence of a significant population of Middle Eastern people.
"There is a lot of this going on out there, and a lot of them we find tied to the aviation industry," said Brent Smith, head of the Department of Criminology at the University of Alabama-Birmingham.
Tucson and Phoenix also may have been favored because they are home to significant populations of foreign students from the Middle East, allowing terrorists to blend in, said Smith, who tracks terrorist groups in cooperation with the FBI (news - web sites).
Imam Omar Shahin of the Islamic Center of Tucson said members of his community have cooperated with police and the FBI. But he said he had no information on the known terrorists and doubts any suspected terrorists were active in the local Muslim community. Shahin estimated that there are between 8,000 and 10,000 Muslims in the Tucson area, mostly foreign students. He estimated that there are about 45,000 Muslims in the Phoenix area.
According to Smith, members of bin Laden's al-Qaida group did not rely on local people for support, nor did they recruit in the United States.
"These people were recruited before they came to this country," he said, noting that many were veterans of the resistance to the occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union.
That description fits El-Hage, a Lebanese-born naturalized U.S. citizen who settled in Tucson in 1986 with his American wife.
El-Hage worked as a custodian for the city departments of Public Buildings and Parks and Recreation between 1987 and 1989, city officials have confirmed.
Investigators say El-Hage may have been involved in the January 1990 murder of Rashad Khalifa, the controversial founder and leader of the Masjid, or Mosque of Tucson, formerly at 739 E. Sixth St. El-Hage's name came up in the case in 1992, as Colorado state investigators probed a radical Islamic sect known as Jamaat ul-Fuqra, or simply Fuqra, with a history of targeting Hindus and Islamics deemed heretics.
In 1989, police searching a storage locker rented by the group in the Denver suburb of Englewood discovered explosives, weapons and documents indicating a planned attack on the Tucson mosque.
Seven members of the Fuqra group, mostly black American Muslims, were indicted in 1992 on conspiracy charges related to Khalifa's killing and the 1984 bombing of a Hare Krishna-owned hotel in Denver, along with fraud and theft charges.
Two Fuqra leaders were subsequently convicted of conspiracy charges, two were convicted of fraud charges and one pleaded guilty to theft.
The group's alleged leader, James D. Williams, jumped bail before sentencing in 1994 and wasn?t apprehended until early this year.
In March, Williams was sentenced to 69 years in prison on conspiracy charges, said Douglas Wamsley, a former assistant Colorado attorney general who worked on the case.
The Tucson Police Department file on the Khalifa case remains open. The case is still considered unsolved because no one was convicted of the actual murder, Tucson Police spokesman Sgt. Marco Barboa said. Wamsley, now a deputy district attorney in Golden, Colo., said Khalifa had angered many in the Islamic community by rejecting many Muslim traditions and predicting the end of the world based on a numerological analysis of the Quran, the holy book of Islam.
Wamsley said one Colorado Fuqra member, Edward Flinton, told investigators that he and Williams had visited Khalifa in Tucson. Federal prosecutors alleged in court that El-Hage had helped in surveillance of Khalifa before his slaying, but they did not provide details.
Wamsley said Khalifa was warned of a possible assassination plot by the Colorado sect, but he told investigators he did not know of the group. "Two weeks later, I'm afraid he heard of them in a big way", he said.
According to documents filed in the case, El-Hage moved with his family to Sudan around 1992. In 1993, El-Hage allegedly arranged the purchase of an aging twin-engine T-39 Sabreliner jet from a Tucson ?boneyard, or aircraft storage yard, according to testimony in the embassy bombing case. The plane was to be used to transport Stinger surface-to-air missiles to help Afghans fight the Soviets, the pilot, Essam Al-Ridi, testified.
Al-Ridi testified in February that he delivered the $210,000 plane to El-Hage at a Khartoum, Sudan, airport and later went to dinner with El-Hage and bin Laden.
Tucson's bustling aviation industry also provided a link to Hanjour, who moved to a rooming house on North Fourth Avenue near East Speedway in October 1991. Hanjour, who went by the last name ?Hanjoor? in Tucson, took an eight-week English course at the University of Arizona in 1991 and lived here at least a year before moving back to his Saudi Arabian homeland.
In 1996, Hanjour reportedly took several months of pilot training at a Scottsdale flight school and used a flight simulator in 1998 and as recently as June of this year.
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From the DRUDGE REPORT today:
FORMER HEAD OF CIA'S OSAMA BIN LADEN UNIT SAYS THE QAEDA LEADER HAS SECURED RELIGIOUS APPROVAL TO USE A NUCLEAR BOMB AGAINST AMERICANS
Fri Nov 12 2004 12:02:34 ET
Osama bin Laden now has religious approval to use a nuclear device against Americans, says the former head of the CIA unit charged with tracking down the Saudi terrorist. The former agent, Michael Scheuer, speaks to Steve Kroft in his first television interview without disguise to be broadcast on 60 MINUTES Sunday, Nov. 14 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.
Scheuer was until recently known as the "anonymous" author of two books critical of the West's response to bin Laden and al Qaeda, the most recent of which is titled Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror. No one in the West knows more about the Qaeda leader than Scheuer, who has tracked him since the mid-1980s. The CIA allowed him to write the books provided he remain anonymous, but now is allowing him to reveal himself for the first time on Sunday's broadcast; he formally leaves the Agency today (12).
Even if bin Laden had a nuclear weapon, he probably wouldn't have used it for a lack of proper religious authority - authority he has now. "[Bin Laden] secured from a Saudi sheik...a rather long treatise on the possibility of using nuclear weapons against the Americans," says Scheuer. "[The treatise] found that he was perfectly within his rights to use them. Muslims argue that the United States is responsible for millions of dead Muslims around the world, so reciprocity would mean you could kill millions of Americans," Scheuer tells Kroft.
Scheuer says bin Laden was criticized by some Muslims for the 9/11 attack because he killed so many people without enough warning and before offering to help convert them to Islam. But now bin Laden has addressed the American people and given fair warning. "They're intention is to end the war as soon as they can and to ratchet up the pain for the Americans until we get out of their region....If they acquire the weapon, they will use it, whether it's chemical, biological or some sort of nuclear weapon," says Scheuer.
As the head of the CIA unit charged with tracking bin Laden from 1996 to 1999, Scheuer says he never had enough people to do the job right. He blames former CIA Director George Tenet. "One of the questions that should have been asked of Mr. Tenet was why were there always enough people for the public relations office, for the academic outreach office, for the diversity and multi-cultural office? All those things are admirable and necessary but none of them are protecting the American people from a foreign threat," says Scheuer.
And the threat posed by bin Laden is also underestimated, says Scheuer. "I think our leaders over the last decade have done the American people a disservice...continuing to characterize Osama bin Laden as a thug, as a gangster," he says. "Until we respect him, sir, we are going to die in numbers that are probably unnecessary, yes. He's a very, very talented man and a very worthy opponent," he tells Kroft.
Until today (12), Scheuer was a senior official in the CIA's counter terrorism unit and a special advisor to the head of the agency's bin Laden unit.
Developing...
==================
Politics and Policy
Homeland Security's Counterweight
Inspector General Takes
Politically Risky Steps
In Serving as a Watchdog
By ROBERT BLOCK
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Throughout the 2004 presidential campaign, the harshest critic of the administration's homeland-security efforts wasn't John Kerry or the Democrats. It was one of President Bush's own -- Homeland Security Inspector General Clark Kent Ervin.
A Texas Republican and Houston native, Mr. Ervin is a longtime ally of the Bush family, having first worked for former President George H. W. Bush. He became Homeland Security's top cop for internal waste, fraud and abuse in a recess appointment nearly a year ago. The question now is whether he will be reappointed when the new Congress convenes in January.
During his tenure, Mr. Ervin has issued three reports critical of the department's sky-marshal and airport-screening programs and has lashed out at the department's "failure of leadership" in creating a single database of terrorist suspects. He attacked the Transportation Security Administration for throwing a $486,000 party, including outlays of $81,767 for award plaques, $1,500 for cheese buffets and $1,486 for balloons. He concluded that federal inspectors aren't up to the task of detecting weapons of mass destruction in shipping containers. And he has even gone so far as to describe the government's antiterrorism efforts on the whole as "ad hoc" and "uncoordinated."
Long for the Job?
Clark Kent Ervin is the outspoken Inspector General of the Homeland Security Department
Born: April 1, 1959
Raised: Houston
Education: B.A. in Government, Harvard College, 1980; Master&s, Oxford University, 1982; J.D., Harvard Law, 1985.
Family: Married to Carolyn Harris, a Democrat and consultant with the Heinz Center for Education and the Environment.
Public Service: 1989-91, White House Office of National Service; 1995-1999, Assistant Secretary of State of Texas; 2001-03, Inspector General, State Department.
Texas Ties: Went to the same Houston area secondary school as President Bush; won Republican primary but lost general election bid for Congress in 1991.
Source: WSJ research
"I stand by that," he says in a recent interview.
It is an extraordinary comment by an official in an administration not known to publicly air problems or disagreements. Mr. Ervin has turned heads in the media and on Capitol Hill with his candor and made enemies in the new department where he is criticized as uninformed about fighting terrorism. His detractors in DHS and on Capitol Hill also have complained that he talks too much to the media -- something Mr. Ervin admits to proudly, noting that the only thing he has to bring force to his reports is "the bright light of congressional attention and the press."
Like Superman, the alter ego of his namesake, Mr. Ervin seems impervious to the brickbats. "It's my job to call it as I see it and let the political chips fall where they may," says Mr. Ervin, a 45-year-old lawyer.
Where those chips are going to fall is unclear. By law Mr. Ervin's appointment expires at the end of this Congress. For him to continue in the job, the White House must reappoint him next year at the start of the 109th Congress. Neither the White House nor Senate leaders are saying whether Mr. Ervin will return to the post.
His first nomination to the job languished in the Senate for a year until Mr. Bush finally appointed him during the congressional recess in December 2003. According to Mr. Ervin and congressional staffers, the Senate didn't act on his nomination because of concern that he failed to investigate accusations of wrongdoing while he was inspector general at the State Department. He says that he did investigate the matter, but found that he had no jurisdiction. All sides refused to discuss any details.
Sen. Susan Collins (R., Maine), chairwoman of the Governmental Affairs Committee, said in a statement last week that if Mr. Ervin were nominated again, he would be considered carefully, "as the Governmental Affairs Committee considers every nomination."
About six weeks before the election, when Mr. Ervin issued perhaps his most scathing report, on the government's failure to forge a viable database of terrorist suspects, a White House spokeswomen said Mr. Bush had complete confidence in Mr. Ervin and was "grateful for his service." Since Mr. Bush's re-election, the White House has been more circumspect when discussing individuals on the president's team.
But Mr. Ervin is no stranger to fighting for survival. He was born a month premature, and his struggle to live touched his brother Art, 11 years old at the time and a huge Superman fan. When it became clear that the baby would be fine, Art begged his parents to name him after his hero. They agreed. "I love it," Mr. Ervin says. "It's I who insists on signing my name in full. Otherwise no-one would know what the "K" stands for."
Growing up the third son of a bricklayer in Houston's poor, black Third Ward, Mr. Ervin was pushed by two teachers to apply to the city's elite Kinkaid School, President Bush's alma mater. He was the first African-American boy to attend the school. He excelled at music, becoming an accomplished pianist, and was obsessed with politics, developing into one of the nation's top high-school debaters.
Mr. Ervin's friendship with George W. Bush started in 1988, when a mutual acquaintance recommended Mr. Ervin for a job in the first Bush administration. The younger Mr. Bush wrote a note recommending Mr. Ervin, who eventually landed work in George H.W. Bush's Office of National Service, which fostered volunteer projects. Later, when the younger Mr. Bush became Texas governor, Mr. Ervin joined his administration as an assistant secretary of state under Alberto Gonzales, who was named earlier this week to succeed John Ashcroft as Attorney General.
Mr. Ervin returned to Washington in 2001 as the State Department's inspector general after being personally recommended by Secretary of State Colin Powell. A year later, Mr. Powell suggested he take on the same role at the new Department of Homeland Security.
Despite his close ties to the Bush family, Mr. Ervin hasn't pulled his punches. His investigations have led to arrests of allegedly corrupt customs officials, embarrassed DHS Secretary Tom Ridge, and challenged the White House.
When President Bush created the Terrorist Threat Integration Center in May 2003, effectively duplicating Homeland Security's intelligence-analysis responsibilities, Mr. Ervin said the move risked undermining the department. At the time, Mr. Ridge insisted the move wasn't a threat to his department.
Asked about the conflicting views on PBS's "NewsHour," Mr. Ridge said the inspector general's conclusion suggested that Mr. Ervin was "not as aware as he should be" of the department's activities.
Mr. Ervin says he has only had positive feedback from the White House and Senate, and if the department is displeased with him, it is only natural. "Criticism, even though it's constructive, is not easy to take," he says.
Mr. Ervin says the department wants a break because it is new. "My response is that's precisely when we should be involved, before money is wasted, before a program is too far out of the block that it basically can't be corrected and you have to start all over. This mission is too important for it to fall victim to politics."
Asked if he thought there was a political risk in his attitude, he plays with his college ring from Harvard and shrugs. "Common sense would say there is. But on the other hand, I know the president well enough to know that he wants every person in his administration to do the right thing."
He adds: "My hope is that I get to stay. I want to stay. I think the record suggests that I should be able to stay."
Write to Robert Block at bobby.block@wsj.com
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FWIW:
================================
Bordering On Nukes?
New accounts from al-Qaeda to attack the U.S. with weapons of mass
destruction
By ADAM ZAGORIN
Sunday, Nov. 14, 2004
A key al-Qaeda operative seized in Pakistan recently offered an alarming
account of the group's potential plans to target the U.S. with weapons of
mass destruction, senior U.S. security officials tell TIME. Sharif al-Masri,
an Egyptian who was captured in late August near Pakistan's border with Iran and Afghanistan, has told his interrogators of "al-Qaeda's interest in
moving nuclear materials from Europe to either the U.S. or Mexico,"
according to a report circulating among U.S. government officials.
Masri also said al-Qaeda has considered plans to "smuggle nuclear materials to Mexico, then operatives would carry material into the U.S.," according to the report, parts of which were read to TIME. Masri says his family, seeking refuge from al-Qaeda hunters, is now in Iran.
Masri's account, though unproved, has added to already heightened U.S.
concerns about Mexico. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge met publicly with top Mexican officials last week to discuss border security and
smuggling rings that could be used to slip al-Qaeda terrorists into the
country. Weeks prior to Ridge's lightning visit, U.S. and Mexican
intelligence conferred about reports from several al-Qaeda detainees
indicating the potential use of Mexico as a staging area "to acquire
end-stage chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear material." U.S.
officials have begun to keep a closer eye on heavy-truck traffic across the
border. The Mexicans will also focus on flight schools and aviation
facilities on their side of the frontier.
And another episode has some senior U.S. officials worried: the theft of a crop-duster aircraft south of San Diego, apparently by three men from southern Mexico who assaulted a watchman and then flew off in a southerly direction. Though the theft's connection to terrorism remains unclear, a senior U.S. law-enforcement official notes that crop dusters can be used to disperse toxic substances. The plane, stolen at night two weeks ago, has not been recovered.
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From today's Left Angeles Times:
=========================
Ports Called 'Enormous Target'
About 12,000 containers arrive daily in L.A. On average, 43 of them are inspected by hand under the 'layered' system of Homeland Security.
By Greg Krikorian, Times Staff Writer
Two miles out from the nation's busiest seaport, Petty Officer 1st Class Tom Ryan gives the order to board a giant container ship bound for Los Angeles.
The Sealand Intrepid, Singapore-registered and longer than three football fields, is carrying a load of general cargo. But its last stop was Panama, a hot spot for stowaways.
One by one in choppy seas, Ryan's four-man Coast Guard crew climbs a 20-foot rope ladder and a 20-foot gangway to board the vessel. Wearing bulletproof vests and armed with 9-millimeter pistols, two sea marshals comb the ship and two head for the bridge to secure the vessel.
On average, this scene is repeated six times a day, seven days a week at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which handle 45% of the nation's container cargo. Sea marshals board container vessels, oil tankers, cruise ships, even commuter boats as part of a nationwide Coast Guard program launched after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
For all the concern about safety at the nation's airports, counterterrorism officials and other experts say the nation's ports may now present an even greater threat. Since Sept. 11, they have received far less security funding than airports, yet they continue to process far more cargo ? more than 9.5 million containers a year.
During this fall's presidential campaign, Democrat Sen. John F. Kerry repeatedly warned about the safety of the nation's ports, telling voters that only 5% of all incoming cargo was inspected.
Homeland Security officials denied Kerry's charge. They said they screen 100% of containers as part of a new "layered" system of defense that begins overseas, where foreign shippers must provide full cargo and crew manifests 24 hours before loading any ship bound for the U.S.
But after these manifests are examined, mountains of shipping intelligence are sifted and ships are tracked as they cross oceans, only about 6% of the containers arriving at U.S. ports are classified as high risk and examined using X-ray machines, officials said. Locally, about 6% of the containers scanned by X-ray are further inspected by hand.
With about 12,000 containers a day arriving at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, this means officials scan about 720 containers and inspect roughly 43 by hand daily.
"Even though there were manifests, some of us got the sense we really didn't know what was coming and going," said Dale Watson, former FBI head of counterterrorism and now an executive at Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. "It was a huge problem."
Randy Parsons, the FBI's chief counterterrorism official in Los Angeles and six surrounding counties, echoed Watson's concern. "If you look at where we are today, there has been notable improvement in terms of security at the ports," he said. "But it is just such an enormous target in terms of the volume of cargo and the numbers of employees and the crews and the ships moving in from foreign lands."
Another veteran counterterrorism agent who spoke on the condition of anonymity was blunter. "If I was Al Qaeda and I was looking for a hit, that is exactly where I would look," the agent said.
In a 2002 war game that involved top federal policymakers, Booz Allen presented the following scenario:
A huge shipping container passes through security at the Port of Los Angeles before it falls off a truck and inspectors discover a hidden radiological bomb.
Word quickly arrives that the Port of Savannah has arrested three men on an FBI watch list. One of the men, linked to Al Qaeda, tells authorities he is among several teams of terrorists targeting U.S. ports.
Quickly, authorities shut down all the nation's ports and border crossings. Then another dirty bomb is discovered, this one near Minneapolis.
Gas prices skyrocket because fuel ships cannot unload. The Dow drops 500 points. After 12 days, U.S. ports reopen, but the total cost to the U.S. economy is $58 billion.
It may sound alarmist. But at a hearing in Washington early this year, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) called America's ports "the soft underbelly of our nation's security." Her biggest concern? Terrorists attacking a port with a dirty bomb.
Complex Challenges
In his Terminal Island office, Coast Guard Capt. Peter V. Neffenger is staring at an aerial photo of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, gateway for nearly half of the containerized goods that enter the U.S.
He is the man ultimately responsible for safeguarding the world's third-busiest port complex and authorized, under federal law, to shut down the harbor, if needed, to protect it.
No port complex poses more challenges than this one. There are plenty of entry points. There is easy access to the port by sea and land. And its terminals are clustered together.
Alone, the Long Beach or Los Angeles ports would be the largest in the U.S. Together, they handle more than 1 million cruise passengers and $200 billion in trade annually, including half the petroleum products used in the Western U.S.
"It could make you go batty when you talk about security here," said Neffenger, who has a degree from the Naval War College in national security and strategic studies.
"It's not impossible. But it is daunting."
Before Sept. 11, fewer than 2% of the Coast's Guard vessels and crews were assigned to port security in the U.S. When crews boarded ships, it was almost always to inspect their seaworthiness, not for national security. Today, Neffenger said, there is no greater priority.
Long before ships are allowed to unload cargo, Neffenger's crews of sea marshals weigh such factors as a vessel's home port, cargo, last stop and crew to select which ships will be boarded for inspections.
The vast majority of incoming cargo is considered secure because huge corporations and international shippers have instituted their own safety checks and inspections.
The government estimates that about 40% of cargo heading for the U.S. is shipped by about 7,000 businesses worldwide that are cooperating with U.S. authorities to improve defenses against terrorists.
That leaves Homeland Security officials concentrating on the pieces of the supply chain that would be easiest for extremists to exploit.
Out at sea, Petty Officer 1st Class Ryan's crew boards ship after ship. "We don't have high-interest vessels come in every day, but we will board ships every day," said Ryan, 34.
A sturdy ex-Marine who served in Desert Storm, Ryan joined the Coast Guard seven years ago. After the Sept. 11 attacks, everything changed.
"On Sept. 10, we were running search and rescue missions," he said. "On Sept. 11, we started security patrols. It's amazing how fast everyone could change jobs and change directions."
High-Risk Cargo
On land, at just one terminal in the Port of Long Beach, 132 containers are lined up in rows like giant pieces of luggage, waiting to be scanned.
This is the high-risk cargo identified by officials from the Department of Homeland Security's Customs and Border Protection agency.
Their search begins 24 hours before any U.S.-bound ships are loaded in foreign ports, when Customs and Border Protection agents receive electronic copies of each ship's cargo manifest.
The information is sent to the department's National Targeting Center in northern Virginia, established after the Sept. 11 attacks. There, experts in customs, immigration and agriculture compare the manifests against terrorism intelligence, law enforcement files and data on commercial shipments to the U.S. during the last 20 years.
"The risk assessment begins with every container, the crew, the vessel, the carrier," said Vera Adams, port director for the Customs and Border Protection agency. "The myth is that there is greater value in [inspecting] greater numbers of containers. But why would we waste time and resources looking at things if we have determined they are low risk" for terrorism?
The information collected by the National Targeting Center is transmitted to Homeland Security officers so they can, if warranted, inspect the contents of containers bound for the U.S.
En route, authorities said, ships are monitored by Homeland Security so they can be intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard far from land, if anomalies have been detected in the crew, cargo or itinerary.
When ships arrive, the high-risk containers are sent for screening before they are allowed to leave the ports.
At the Long Beach terminal, inspectors move their truck, containing a giant X-ray machine, alongside each of the 132 containers and bombard it with gamma rays, looking for anything unusual. The dark image of a dense material like steel, for example, would raise concern if the container were supposed to be carrying carpets.
If agents cannot tell what exactly is inside a container, it is driven to a Homeland Security warehouse and opened.
"When in doubt, when we can't figure it out, we send it to the warehouse," Adams said.
At one warehouse in Carson, inspectors scour the contents of each container flagged during scanning. Using dogs that can detect explosives, drugs and other contraband, inspectors comb through vast scatterings of goods, some of which are taken in crates to another X-ray machine.
"The advantage we have here is time," said inspection supervisor Rolando Knight.
From Los Angeles to Washington, many analysts and officials view port security as a race against time. But leaders of the Department of Homeland Security say they are moving as fast as they can to protect the ports without bringing them to a standstill.
"People ask me, 'What keeps you up at night?' " Capt. Neffenger said. "Well, it isn't that something might happen here. After 23 years with the Coast Guard, I know you can't prevent everything. It's worrying that we didn't do enough to catch it. And that we weren't fully able to respond."
If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.
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NEW YORK: Passenger Arrested for Artfully Concealed
Prohibited Item. According to BTS reporting, on 30 November, at JFK
International Airport, TSA screeners detected a "Leatherman" tool
artfully concealed in a quart jar of hair gel in a passenger's
carry-on bag during x-ray screening. LEOs arrested the named U.S.
passenger on the state charge of criminal possession of a weapon in
the 4th degree. (BTS Daily Operations Report, 1 Dec 04; HSOC 4583-04)
===============
FWIW Stratfor.com on Ridge's resignation. FWIW I would be less kind.
===
Geopolitical Diary: Wednesday, Dec. 1, 2004
Tom Ridge resigned Tuesday as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. According to reports, Ridge had serious financial problems that he could not manage on a government salary, even a Cabinet-level salary. We tend to believe that reason. Ridge did not do either badly or well at homeland security. He presided over it, which is about all anyone could do with the hill of spare parts and broken pieces that were dragged together at the beginning of the war. It is not a Rube Goldberg machine, since that would imply that it works or at least that it does something. Some of the pieces that worked in the past continue to work. Some of the pieces that never worked very well still don't work. Beyond that, there is not much to say.
Homeland defense was a profoundly flawed concept in the context of al Qaeda from the beginning. The United States cannot be defended against a global, sparse network of trained covert operatives. It is a target-rich
environment -- meaning there are an awful lot of things that can be
attacked -- surrounded by borders so long and porous that they cannot be sealed. That is certainly the case if you intend to ship things in and out
of the country.
Homeland defense was designed to serve as an indication to a country in a state of panic after Sept. 11 that the government was doing something
tangible to protect the United States. That is not a trivial function. If we
remember back to Sept. 12, the country was suffering from shock and
paralysis. The dread was real and palpable. Calming the country was a
critical affair.
Consider airport security, a microcosm of homeland security in general.
Given the number of flights, airports and passengers, it is a physical
impossibility to secure all flights -- leaving aside other inherent
weaknesses of airport security. Airport security increases the chances of
being caught, but a capable and thoughtful covert operator can beat the
system. Except for shutting down the air traffic system -- eliminating the
threat by eliminating passengers -- the system can be penetrated. Anyone who asserts that it can't be penetrated is a liar, and anyone who demands an effective solution is a fool. It can't be done.
That is not to say that airport security is unimportant. It does provide a
degree of security, particularly against incompetent would-be terrorists, of whom there are more than a few. More important, it is a massive, visible effort and that very effort is comforting to those about to risk flying. We cannot afford to shut down civilian air traffic. We cannot afford to allow passengers to be gripped by terror. A modicum of security coupled with a psychological sense that a serious effort is being made has material impact in a war.
That was the primary use of homeland security. It provided a sense that
someone was trying to control the situation, even if we all understood the
fact that the situation could not be controlled that way. Sometimes the
efforts at reassurance became silly, as with the weird movement of the
warning colors -- in apparently random motion. The massive pile of agencies called the Department of Homeland Security might not have added up to much more than the constituent parts, but the very massiveness of the effort provided a degree of comfort.
In the end, however, homeland security is an illusion. Wars are not won
defensively, and certainly this war can't be won that way. What defense
there is consists of two parts. You can either negotiate a peace -- which
depends on finding someone to negotiate with and determining if you are
willing to pay the price. Or you can go out and attack and destroy the
enemy, assuming you can find him and defeat him.
Homeland security and Tom Ridge served a purpose. They were part of the process of calming down a country that was near hysteria after Sept. 11. The country was not being irrational. Anyone who wasn't frightened did not understand the situation. Nevertheless, fear does not win wars. Ridge helped calm things down. He did not do much, but what he did, he did pretty well.
Not a bad record on the whole.
Copyrights 2004 - Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.
http://www.stratfor.com
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Straighten Up and Fly Right
How long before Washington's political correcteness leads to new hijackings?
BY HEATHER MAC DONALD
Saturday, December 4, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST
One of the highest priorities for Homeland Security Secretary-designate Bernard Kerik should be to take political correctness and a fear of litigation out of national security decisions. From immigration enforcement to intelligence gathering, government officials continue to compromise safety in order to avoid accusations of "racial profiling"--and in order to avoid publicly acknowledging what the 9/11 Commission finally said: that the enemy is "Islamist terrorism." This blind antidiscrimination reflex is all the more worrying since radical Islam continues to seek adherents and plan attacks in the U.S.
The government antidiscrimination hammer has hit the airline industry most severely. Department of Transportation lawyers have extracted millions in settlements from four major carriers for alleged discrimination after 9/11, and they have undermined one of the most crucial elements of air safety: a pilot's responsibility for his flight. Since the charges against the airlines were specious but successful, every pilot must worry that his good-faith effort to protect his passengers will trigger federal retaliation.
Transportation's action against American Airlines was typical. In the last four months of 2001, American carried 23 million passengers and asked 10 of them not to board because they raised security concerns that could not be resolved in time for departure. For those 10 interventions (and an 11th in 2002), DOT declared American Airlines a civil-rights pariah, whose discriminatory conduct would "result in irreparable harm to the public" if not stopped.
On its face, the government's charge that American engaged in discriminatory conduct was absurd, given how few passenger removals occurred. But the racism allegation looks all the more unreasonable when put in the context of the government's own actions. Three times between 9/11 and the end of 2001, public officials warned of an imminent terror attack. Transportation officials urged the airlines to be especially vigilant. In such an environment, pilots would have been derelict not to resolve security questions in favor of caution.
Somehow, DOT lawyers failed to include in their complaint one further passenger whom American asked not to board in 2001. On Dec. 22, airline personnel in Paris kept Richard Reid off a flight to Miami. The next day, French authorities insisted that he be cleared to board. During the flight, Reid tried to set off a bomb in his shoe, but a stewardess and passengers foiled him. Had he been kept from flying on both days, he too might have ended up on the government's roster of discrimination victims.
Jehad Alshrafi is typical of those who were included in the suit against American. On Nov. 3, 2001, this Jordanian-American was scheduled to fly out of Boston's Logan Airport (from which two of the hijacked planes--including American Flight 11--departed on 9/11). A federal air marshal told the pilot that Alshrafi's name resembled one on a terror-watch list--and that he had been acting suspiciously, had created a disturbance at the gate, and posed unresolved security issues. The pilot denied him boarding. Alshrafi was later cleared and given first-class passage on another flight.
According to DOT, the only reason American initially denied Alshrafi passage was because of his "race, color, national origin, religion, sex or ancestry." Never mind that there were at least five other passengers of Arab descent on his original flight, none of whom had been given additional screening or kept from flying. In fact, on virtually every flight on which the government claims that American acted out of racial animus, other passengers of apparent Middle Eastern ancestry flew undisturbed.
If DOT believes that an air marshal's warnings about a passenger's name and suspicious behavior are insufficient grounds for keeping him off a flight, it is hard to imagine circumstances that would justify a security hold in the department's view--short of someone's declaring his intention to blow up a plane. Given the information presented to the pilot, the only conceivable reason to have allowed Alshrafi to board would have been fear of a lawsuit.
And litigation phobia is precisely the mindset that DOT is hoping to cultivate in flight personnel: 10 days after 9/11, the department started rolling out "guidance" documents on nondiscrimination. While heavy on platitudes about protecting civil rights, they are useless in advising airlines how to avoid the government's wrath. The closest the DOT gets to providing airlines a concrete rule for avoiding litigation is a "but-for" test: "Ask yourself," advise the guidelines, "But for this person's perceived race, ethnic heritage or religious orientation, would I have subjected this individual to additional safety or security scrutiny? If the answer is 'no,' then the action may violate civil rights laws."
But security decisions are never that clear. A safety officer will consider many factors in calculating someone's riskiness; any one of them could be pulled out as a "but-for" element. As American's record makes clear, it is almost never the case that someone gets additional screening based on his apparent ethnic heritage or national origin alone; behavior and no-fly-list matching are key in the assessment. (In fact, about half the complainants in the government's action were not even Middle Eastern. DOT simply assumes, without evidence, that American scrutinized the men because of the mistaken belief that they were Arabs.) A pilot trying to apply the "but-for" test to his own security judgment will inevitably reduce the test to an easier calculus: "Deny passage to someone who is or could claim to look Muslim only under the most extreme circumstances."
In application, the "but-for" test reduces to a "never-ever" rule: Ethnic heritage, religion, or national origin may play no role in evaluating risk. But when the threat at issue is Islamic terrorism, it is reckless to ask officials to disregard the sole ironclad prerequisite for being an Islamic terrorist: Muslim identity or its proxies--national origin or ethnic heritage. (Muslim identity should be at most only one factor in assessing someone's security risk.)
American contested DOT's action, but fighting the government civil-rights complex is futile. In February 2004, the airline, while denying guilt, settled the action for $1.5 million, to be spent on yet more "sensitivity training." American's pilots were outraged. "Pilots felt: 'How dare they second-guess our decision?' " says Denis Breslin, a pilots' union official.
Not satisfied with just one scalp, DOT lawyers brought identical suits against United, Delta and Continental. Those carriers also settled, pledging more millions for "sensitivity training"--money much better spent on security training than on indoctrinating pilots to distrust their own security judgments. And in the government's wake, the private civil-rights bar, led by the ACLU, has brought its own airline discrimination suits. An action against Northwest is seeking government terror-watch lists, Northwest's boarding procedures, and its cabin-training manual. If these materials got loose, they would be gold to terrorists trying to figure out airline-security procedures
The first George W. Bush administration tried mightily not to offend the antidiscrimination lobby. It's time to give up that game. From now on, common sense alone should determine security decisions, the only course which can protect all Americans, Muslims and non-Muslims, alike.
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This from today's WSJ is by a former Director of the CIA. It is both thoughtful and scary. It proposes solutions that could change the nature of the American government.
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Get Smart
By R. JAMES WOOLSEY
December 15, 2004; Page A20
Whatever the overall effects of the recent intelligence reorganization, the new director of national intelligence (DNI) should at least be able to bring about one important improvement -- coordinating foreign and domestic intelligence.
Such coordination was not really even being attempted before 9/11 because domestic intelligence, for all practical purposes, did not exist. The FBI was the only institution that had ever actually been in the business, e.g. with its very effective long-term penetration of the American Communist Party. But discredited in the mid-1970s by the revelation of excesses, including spying on Martin Luther King Jr., the Bureau had essentially been put out of the domestic intelligence business.
The Bureau's own decentralized character made it virtually impossible to collect domestic intelligence effectively. Decentralization prevented insightful agents in Phoenix and Minneapolis from communicating with one another before 9/11, although each had premonitions about what it meant that young Arab men were learning to fly commercial aircraft without learning to land them. Even if an office in the Bureau learned something useful about domestic terrorism, the Justice Department in the '90s had barred different parts of the Bureau from working together on such issues. and for good measure, Congress had gone the extra mile and barred the Bureau from giving most terrorist information that it obtained during its law enforcement work to the CIA -- or indeed to anyone but a prosecutor.
Since 9/11, the government has moved cautiously toward collecting domestic intelligence on the transnational terrorist threat; it chose to do so through the FBI instead of a new agency similar to Britain's MI-5, and to this end has shifted a number of FBI agents away from their law enforcement tasks of investigating individual past crimes.
But that new undertaking now needs to be fitted together with foreign intelligence collection. When terrorists are funded from the Middle East, plot in Kuala Lumpur, live in central Florida and Hamburg, train in Oklahoma and fly out of Logan Airport, any effort to stay ahead of them absolutely requires not only major efforts in both domestic and foreign intelligence but also the close coordination of the two. Congress rightly decided that it was better to create a new official to do this than to give the job to the director of Central Intelligence, since the latter heads the CIA. For sound civil liberties reasons the CIA should not be in the business of overseeing domestic intelligence.
Managing along this foreign-domestic fault line will be the principal, and hardest, job of the new DNI. The bureaucratic and policy clashes that will define the new director's effectiveness will not be those on which the press, the 9/11 Commission and the Congress have been focused for months -- rivalry with the Secretary of Defense. The defense secretary and the director of Central Intelligence have generally worked well together over the years and that will probably continue with the new DNI. Military management of some parts of the intelligence community and military use of intelligence will likely continue in its reasonably well-grooved and effective path. and that's fine. The Defense Department wasn't the pre-9/11 problem anyway.
But what if the new DNI says to the FBI: "We're in a war with radical Islamist fanatics and our foreign intelligence collection increasingly tells us that a number of individuals from the Saudi Wahhabi sect are a major threat here in the U.S. -- for example, Wahhabi clerics have penetrated our prisons as chaplains and recruited a number of potential terrorists. So why are you largely ignoring this sort of infiltration and focusing so much of your domestic counter-intelligence assets on Israel?" Will the FBI tell the DNI to get lost? Stay tuned.
Foreign intelligence collection -- especially human collection -- and intelligence analysis of course need to improve. The key here is not moving organizational boxes around, but getting the right policy decisions made and getting Congressional funding and support for them. This might or might not have happened under the old organization and might or might not under the new one. For instance, we currently rely heavily on intelligence collected by other countries and given to us in exchange for our providing either technical intelligence or some other benefit to them, i.e. from "liaison." CIA Director Porter Goss has rightly called for reducing reliance on such sources and running more of our own spies.
Too-heavy reliance on intelligence provided by liaison services can sap our will to challenge a foreign government that is trying to buy our quiescence with dollops of intelligence. There may be other explanations, but is this one of the reasons, for example, that we have been so tolerant for so long of the Syrians' support for terror and Syria's recent and blatant serving as a base for the Baathist insurgents in Iraq?
Reliance on liaison information can also introduce unhelpful bias into our foreign policy. Could the U.S. failure to train military units consisting of Shia and Kurds before the overthrow of Saddam have had anything to do with stern warnings against this from Iraq's Sunni Arab neighbors, from whom we were getting intelligence liaison information?
But even if the DNI becomes an engine for wise foreign intelligence reform (rather than, equally possible, a brake on it), there is a real risk that the extravagant claims made during the recent debate will convince people that the reorganization will be so effective that we will now be protected against attack.
This is dangerous nonsense. Small terrorist cells -- based on family, clan, and sect and communicating by courier -- are devilishly difficult to penetrate with spies or signal intercepts: much harder than the Soviets were. Those who opine that getting spies into al Qaeda should be easy since John Walker Lindh got in make the unsubstantiated assumption that foot soldiers such as Lindh are privy to closely held planning by the few guys in the cave. There is no reason to believe this. Most of the 9/11 terrorists, e.g., had no idea before boarding the flights that morning what Mohammed Atta's plans were, even in general.
So even if by some great good fortune both domestic and foreign intelligence, and their coordination, should be substantially improved by the new DNI, we are going to have to face a most unsettling proposition. Since the odds are strong that we will not have anything like the understanding of enemy capabilities and intentions that we had during the Cold War, we are going to have to turn immediately to making our society more resilient when the next attack comes. The electricity grid, industrial chemical distribution, food production and distribution, the Internet and much of the rest of our infrastructure all need urgent attention. We must integrate homeland security with military and other elements of the nation's security. In doing this we will have to do a much better job of managing risks and of assuring that our infrastructure is as protected as possible and that it can continue to function even if security fails.
If the new law engenders false confidence in what intelligence can provide, and this causes any delay in such improvements in resilience, intelligence reorganization will have done far more harm than good.
Mr. Woolsey, a former director of Central Intelligence, is a vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton.
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On January 25, the Domestic Events Net reported that (a flight to Florida) had an unruly passenger that had been detained by other passengers. The FBI met the flight upon arrival at West Palm Beach and arrested XX for interfering with a flight crew. The FBI interview revealed XX made reference to taking the plane down and took several steps toward the front of the aircraft before being subdued by other passengers.
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MIAMI, Florida (CNN) -- Passengers aboard a Southwest Airlines flight helped wrestle a fellow passenger to the floor Tuesday night after he tried to force his way into the cockpit, law enforcement officials said.
The incident happened aboard Flight 2161, which was traveling from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to West Palm Beach, Florida.
Christopher Egyed, 37, made "threatening comments about the government" and tried to make his way into the cockpit, Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office spokesman Paul Miller said.
"He had been acting in an obnoxious way throughout the flight," Miller said.
Egyed exchanged punches with a flight attendant before passengers joined the scuffle and subdued him, authorities said.
"They used duct tape to tie him up," FBI spokeswoman Judy Orijuela said.
Egyed was charged with interfering with a flight crew, she said. The pilot did not declare an emergency, and the plane landed without further incident at 9:45 p.m. ET in West Palm Beach. Egyed was taken into custody when the plane landed. Authorities said he is unemployed and lives in Philadelphia. Egyed was scheduled to appear Wednesday in federal court in Fort Pierce, officials said. If convicted, he could be sentenced to up to 20 years behind bars
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The updated list of US TSA permitted and prohibited items on US flights
may be found at:
http://www.tsa.gov/interweb/assetlibrary/Prohibited_English_4-1-2005_v2.pdf
Cattle prods and crowbars may not be carried onboard, and neither are martial arts or self-defense items permitted in carry-on luggage... including billy clubs, black jacks, brass knuckles, kubatons, night sticks, nunchakus or othermartial arts weatpons.
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Interesting interview from the NewsHour where problems with CIA tradecraft are examined.
MARGARET WARNER: In the early days of the Cold War, the CIA excelled at the cloak-and-dagger side of spycraft, human intelligence collection on the ground. It was the agency's strength, and the stuff of film legend.
ACTOR: My department authorized me to engage you to do some work for us.
ACTRESS: Why should I?
ACTOR: Patriotism.
MARGARET WARNER: But today it's clear that bad human collection was a major culprit in the two big recent U.S. intelligence disasters: 9/11 and Iraq's nonexistent weapons stockpiles. The commission investigating the Iraq WMD blunder was scathing.
JUDGE LAURENCE SILBERMAN: So the bottom line answer is, they had very little collection.
FORMER SEN. CHARLES ROBB: They clearly had an opportunity to do a good job with respect to tradecraft, and didn't
MARGARET WARNER: So fixing human spycraft is one of the toughest challenges facing John Negroponte, the new director of national intelligence.
JOHN NEGROPONTE: Our intelligence effort has to generate better results. That is my mandate, plain and simple.
MARGARET WARNER: But what exactly is the problem? Several former spies have shed their cloaks, though not their daggers, to address that in books about their CIA years. They describe an agency that simply hasn't adapted the art of human spying to today's world.
We met two of them in a Washington neighborhood whose parks were a favorite locale for Cold War espionage, to talk about what Negroponte faces. Lindsay Moran wrote "Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy" after just five years with the agency.
LINDSAY MORAN: The agency has relied on really dated methods of espionage and training for way too long.
MARGARET WARNER: Melissa Boyle Mahle, who penned "Denial and Deception" after a 14-year CIA career, reached much the same conclusion.
MELISSA BOYLE MAHLE: They do not want to a change to their methods. They don't want to change their power structure, because it's all very well-ingrained for the last 50 years.
MARGARET WARNER: Both women joined the CIA with impressive credentials and dreams of serving their country. Both endured the CIA's clandestine operative training camp in Virginia, known as "The Farm."
The Berkeley-educated, Arabic-speaking Mahle then went under diplomatic cover to the Middle East, ultimately rising to the rank of CIA chief in Jerusalem. She was forced out in 2002 over an unreported contact with a Palestinian militant.
The Harvard-educated Moran took her Serbo-Croatian language skills to the Balkans in the tense years after the Kosovo War. But after a brief stint back at Langley headquarters, she quit the agency in frustration in 2003.
MARGARET WARNER: What's wrong with spycraft at the agency, the human intelligence side?
MELISSA BOYLE MAHLE: The real problem is that the agency hasn't updated its methods since the end of the Cold War, and we're stuck doing things old-fashioned ways. And we're not thinking outside of a box and trying to say, you know, "We have a new target set; how are we going to go after it in a very aggressive way, in a different kind of way so they don't see us coming?"
MARGARET WARNER: Give me an example of doing something the old way, something from your own experience.
MELISSA BOYLE MAHLE: Sending our officers out to work the diplomatic circuit and to think that on this diplomatic circuit overseas we're going to meet terrorists, or we're going to meet narco-traffickers, or we're going to meet proliferators. We're just not going to find them there. We don't look like the right people. We're not speaking the right languages, and we're not going to really the ends of the earth where we need to be.
MARGARET WARNER: The failures begin, they said, with the recruiting process for clandestine officers.
LINDSAY MORAN: There was nobody in my training class who spoke any of the languages that the CIA needs to go after terrorist groups, such as Arabic, Pashtu or Urdu. Also, the agency has completely ignored a whole pool of potential employees of second-generation Americans who a lot of times are just as patriotic-- if not more so-- than people whose families came over on the "Mayflower."
And because there's this inherent distrust of foreigners within the agency, they're unwilling to hire these kinds of people, exactly the kinds of people that we need in order to gather effective intelligence in the Middle East.
MARGARET WARNER: Mahle spent a year recruiting other officers, and was appalled at how often the agency preferred hiring white Midwesterners who'd had no contacts with any foreigners ever.
MELISSA BOYLE MAHLE: I'd be very excited if I had people that I was going to be talking to that were native Arabic speakers, particularly native Arabic speakers, because we were looking for them, or Pashtu speakers, or even Chinese Americans or Korean Americans.
And, you know, I'd run them through all the loops, hoops, and test them to see if they could do the job, if they had, you know, the intuitive capabilities. And I would say, "Okay, this guy or this gal passes muster." And then you'd send them through security or psychological testing, and they would get washed out.
MARGARET WARNER: And why?
MELISSA BOYLE MAHLE: We were penetrated by a mole, and, therefore, we're so frightened of anybody that might have loyalties elsewhere, we overcompensate. And that's to the loss of the capabilities of the agency.
MARGARET WARNER: She was shocked when she attended the graduation of the first post-9/11 class of recruits.
MELISSA BOYLE MAHLE: It was a sea of white faces. And you know why? Because they were easily cleared. We wanted to have a big first class after 9/11 to make the point. And I think they made the wrong point.
MARGARET WARNER: Next came training, and a lot of it-- not just the paramilitary exercises, but the recruitment role playing-- seemed dated, too.
LINDSAY MORAN: Well, I think that all of us in my training class were rather unimpressed, because, as I said, we knew that terrorism was the primary threat. This notion that particularly young female case officers, that we would be able to target men in the Middle East and take them out to lunch or dinner, I think is realistic if you're going after one kind of target. But to really go after terrorist groups, I don't think that's a realistic way of infiltrating or even targeting a terrorist group.
MARGARET WARNER: Once overseas, their main job wasn't to spy themselves, but to recruit foreigners to betray secret information. Even after 9/11, Moran found there were red lines she couldn't cross.
LINDSAY MORAN: I started to target someone who, although he wasn't a terrorist himself, had ties to terrorist networks or Islamist extremist groups, and was writing back to headquarters asking for their approval to go ahead and develop this person and potentially recruit him as a foreign agent.
And I received a missive from headquarters saying, "We found out that this person has ties to terrorist groups. Cease and desist all contact with him." And I was astounded, and I think my boss in the field was equally as astounded, but we both felt sort of powerless to do anything about it.
Another problem that I saw there was a culture that I think rewards quantity over quality. For instance, we were all made to believe that our career progression depended solely on the number of recruitments that we could accrue.
MARGARET WARNER: No matter how good or bad the quality of his information is?
LINDSAY MORAN: Yes. I argued for the termination of a case that I was running in the Balkans, where this person was really peddling pretty useless information and receiving a very substantial salary from the CIA. And this was post-Sept. 11, so the information was particularly irrelevant.
And I kept arguing to terminate this case; that this person should not be on the CIA payroll and was told again and again by headquarters, "No, you should be keep running the case." And ultimately the reasoning that headquarters gave me, or that the management at headquarters gave me, was "This looks good for your career."
And that's when I felt just completely disillusioned with the agency. It occurred to me that most American taxpayers probably don't care what's good for my career progression. They want quality intelligence.
MARGARET WARNER: So she wasn't surprised when the WMD Commission found that the CIA had relied on bogus weapons information fed by dishonest Iraqi informants.
LINDSAY MORAN: I think the example of "curve ball," upon whom it seems we based our entire decision to go to war in this, ended up being a really unreliable source. That's a perfect example of how the quality of recruitments and the quality of information is not properly assessed.
MARGARET WARNER: Mahle had equally disheartening run-ins with Langley. She was sent to Qatar in 1995 to determine if al-Qaida figure Khalid Sheik Mohammad was, as reported, hiding there.
MELISSA BOYLE MAHLE: We didn't know very much about him, but we did know that he had been somehow involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and also in the Philippines airplane plot. Anyway, so I go out. I determined that, yes, indeed, this is the guy.
MARGARET WARNER: She urged Langley to snatch him rather than formally request extradition because she didn't trust the Qatari authorities. But Washington went the official extradition route, and, as she had predicted, Khalid Sheik Mohammad disappeared.
So how did you feel about that?
MELISSA BOYLE MAHLE: I was upset beyond, because I realized this guy was very dangerous, and I realized we had let a terrorist go free, and it didn't have to turn out that way. You've got to ask yourself, if he had been picked up in 1995, the guy who had the idea of hijacking lots of airplanes and the guy who had the idea of running, of blowing up tall towers in New York City, would 9/11 have happened?
MARGARET WARNER: So, Melissa, what is your analysis of what the problem is at headquarters?
MELISSA BOYLE MAHLE: We have managers whose job is to manage out risk. We have other managers whose job is to check to make sure those other managers have managed out risk. So by the time you, as a field operative, you set forward your great idea, you're going to have it rejected, because ultimately, from their perspective, there's going to be a flap.
MARGARET WARNER: One reviewer described you, Lindsay, as saying, "she expected to find James Bond, and she found James Bureaucrat."
LINDSAY MORAN: We used to joke in our training class that there was this policy at the agency called reverse Darwinism, whereby the most mediocre people would rise to the top; that it wasn't survival of the fittest; the best would end up leaving. And I found that to be true. From my training class, I think the best case officers and potential case officers left within the same span of time that I did, in five years.
MARGARET WARNER: That's why they don't believe adding more spies into the same old system-- by 50 percent as President Bush has ordered-- will solve the problem. What would be your piece of advice to John Negroponte about human intelligence?
LINDSAY MORAN: Well, I think that the agency could certainly start by developing a cadre of spies that is not under official cover. It's riskier, but a lot of people are drawn to this profession because they're drawn to risk.
MARGARET WARNER: Above all, they both endorsed the same bold recommendation: Set up a new elite unit within the existing CIA
LINDSAY MORAN: There's been, you know, a lot of talk: Don't throw the baby out with the bath water, in terms of the CIA; I tend to think that maybe you do have to start over and start a whole new clandestine service.
MELISSA BOYLE MAHLE: If you stand up to a new office or a new director within the CIA And you can say, "Okay, we're going to now do something completely different, and we're going to start small, but we know that it's the future, and you build that new incentive structure where you get rewarded for risk-taking, where you get rewarded for actually, really getting down deep into a society and learning how it works."
And then sooner or later everybody else in the agency is looking around and saying, "Hey, those are the people that are doing the best ops, those are the people that are getting promoted," and then they're going to say, "I want to be a part of that action." And that's how you're going to change the organization.
MARGARET WARNER: It's a tall order for the new DNI.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/fedagencies/jan-june05/spy_4-25.html
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TERRORISM BRIEF
The Successful Prosecution of a Far-Reaching U.S. Indictment
April 27, 2005 1747 GMT
A U.S. district court in Alexandria, Va., on April 26 convicted Islamist
ideologue Ali al-Timimi on 10 felony charges stemming from his efforts to
encourage others to bear arms against U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Al-Timimi, the primary lecturer at the Dar al-Arqam Islamic Center in Falls Church, Va., urged his followers in late 2001 to travel to Afghanistan and defend the Taliban regime against the impending U.S. invasion. His conviction on a September 2004 indictment has proven that inspiring others to take part in militant activities can be prosecuted successfully.
According to the indictment, al-Timimi urged at least four of the 11 members of the Virginia Jihad Network (VJN) to take up arms against the United States and its allies. In doing so, al-Timimi apparently arranged for some VJN members to travel to the Pakistani section of Kashmir to train with the militant Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) group. During their training, some of the men fired assault rifles -- hence the firearms charges. No VJN member actually fought anywhere, but the LeT has been connected to other Islamist militant groups, which would explain a charge against al-Timimi for attempting to contribute services to the Taliban.
Rather than organize militant activity, al-Timimi provided the intellectual
impetus to others to take action against U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The
conviction is an example of the post-Sept. 11 shift in the United States
toward more aggressive action against those who provide support of any kind to terrorist or militant organizations. In comparison, the United Kingdom still maintains a rather lax legal attitude toward those who support terrorist activities. London recently tightened some laws that deal with aiding terrorist groups, but a major law that would have broadened police powers to detain suspected terrorists was voted down in February.
Another example of the U.S. shift is the case involving Lynne F. Stewart,
the attorney for blind cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman who was convicted in February 2004 for her part in the 1993 World Trade Center attack. She faced five counts of providing material aid to terrorism for facilitating communication between the sheikh and his followers outside of prison and militants in Egypt.
Stewart allegedly used her privilege as Rahman's lawyer to bring one of his followers, Mohamed Yousry, along with her to meetings with the sheikh at his Minnesota prison. Rahman would pass instructions to his followers through Yousry and Ahmed Abdel Sattar. The two co-defendants in Stewart's trial also were convicted on various charges.
Al-Timimi was born and raised in the United States, as were a number of his followers. Among them were Randall Royer and Donald Surratt, who pleaded guilty along with others in March 2004 to terrorism-related charges for training at the LeT camp to fight U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Both were converts to Islam, and Surratt was a former U.S. Marine. In another case, U.S.-born Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, a 23-year-old from Falls Church, was arrested in Saudi Arabia and accused of being an al Qaeda member. He also was indicted in federal court for plotting to assassinate U.S. President George W. Bush. As U.S. citizens, they all were subject to anti-sedition and treason laws.
According to a 2004 survey conducted by the Institute of Social Policy and
Understanding, 8 percent of the 6 million to 7 million American Muslims
identify with any kind of Wahhabist causes. Of those who do, an even smaller minority support jihadist causes. Of course, as the Royer and Surratt cases have shown, an Islamic upbringing is not a prerequisite for supporting -- or taking part -- in jihadist causes.
Those two cases -- and especially the al-Timimi and Stewart cases -- have
shown however, that the U.S. legal system is now ready and willing to come down hard against those who never commit acts of aggression themselves, but whose speech or actions contribute to terrorism.
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TERRORISM BRIEF
European Islamist Extremism and the U.S. Security Threat
April 28, 2005 1720 GMT
The U.S. House of Representatives held a hearing April 27 to assess the rise of Islamist extremism in Europe. The hearing, sponsored jointly by the
Committee on International Relations and the Subcommittee on Europe and Emerging Threats, is indicative of mounting U.S. concern over the threat posed by Islamist extremists to Washington's allies in Europe -- and to the United States itself. As European countries continue to isolate their Muslim communities, Islamist extremism shows few signs of abating.
Norwegian televangelist Runar Sogaard reportedly sought police protection
after he enraged many Muslims in Sweden by calling the Islamic prophet
Mohammed a "confused pedophile" -- referring to the prophet's marriage to a 9-year-old girl -- in a March 20 sermon in Stockholm.
Following the sermon, a letter posted on a jihadist Web site and addressed
to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, implored al-Zarqawi to come to the defense of Muslims in Sweden. The letter was signed "The weakened Muslims in Sweden," implying the writer's belief that the country's 350,000 Muslims are being persecuted. The author also claimed that Sogaard would soon be killed, ". just like in Holland with the Dutchman ." The "Dutchman" is a direct reference to Theo van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker who was shot and stabbed Nov. 2, 2004, in Amsterdam, allegedly by an Islamist militant who reportedly was upset over a film van Gogh made that took a critical view of Islam.
The chairman of Sweden's council of imams, Hassan Moussa, issued a statement April 22 advising Swedish Muslims against taking the law into their own hands even though, he said, Sogaard's comments "injure millions of Muslims all over the world."
The atmosphere in Western Europe is conducive to the development of
extremist views in young Muslims for several reasons. First, lax immigration policies have allowed those with radical and isolationist tendencies to settle in European Muslim communities. Second, many Muslim communities find themselves isolated from the mainstream society in the European countries where they have taken root, which leaves them vulnerable to the introduction of extremist ideologies. Some Muslims who became radicalized in Europe have ended up committing acts against the United States. For example, Mohammed Atta, leader of the Sept. 11 hijackers, and Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center attack, both spent time in European universities, where, according to the 9/11 commission report, they came in contact with Islamist radicals.
Furthermore, Claude Moniquet, director of the European Strategic
Intelligence and Security Center, said during the joint committee hearing in Washington that some EU countries have been slow to reform the
asylum-seeking process and to coordinate among themselves to share
information about possible threats within their respective Muslim
communities.
These lapses can be exploited by Islamist radicals to gain footholds in the
EU countries' otherwise law-abiding Muslim communities. As long as these
conditions persist, Islamist extremism in Europe will continue to be a
security problem for the United States.
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United States: The Questionable Merits of the 'No-Fly' List
May 13, 2005 1653 GMT
The U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) diverted Air France
flight 332 to Bangor, Maine, on May 12 after authorities discovered that one of the 169 passengers onboard matched a name on the federal government's "no-fly" list. The passenger and two of his family members -- a woman and a young child -- were taken off the Airbus A-330 flight from Paris to Boston at the Bangor International Airport, and the flight continued on to Boston. TSA officials later determined the "person of interest" was not the one on the list and he and his companions were released.
Although the no-fly list is meant to enhance security of air travel, its
effectiveness as a true protective measure is questionable. The list,
enacted in response to the Sept. 11 attacks and maintained by the TSA,
includes names of people suspected of posing "a risk of air piracy or
terrorism or a threat to airline or passenger safety." Passenger manifests
of airline flights are checked against the list and, if matching names are
found, the TSA can order the flight diverted and the individual detained.
Although it initially denied the list's existence, the TSA acknowledged in
October 2002 that it was, indeed, keeping -- and constantly updating -- such a list. The U.S. government declines to say how many names are on the list, but the number reportedly is as high as 31,000.
In April 2004, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a nationwide
class-action lawsuit challenging the no-fly list on behalf of several
people. The suit is based on the argument that innocent travelers whose
names appear on the list are singled out as possible terrorists. According
to FBI documents obtained in 2004 by the American Civil Liberties Union,
more than 350 Americans had been delayed or denied boarding since the list's inception -- and apparently all were false alarms. Once added to the list, people usually are unable to find out why they were identified as a security risk and are unable to get their names removed.
Exacerbating the issue is the problem that the names on the list often are
transliterations into English of names in Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and other
Middle Eastern, South Asian and African languages. Considering that many
terrorists are militant Islamists, Arab/Muslim names -- in their phonetic
form -- appear frequently. Add to this the fact that many Arab/Muslim names are commonly used -- such as Mohammed, Ahmed and Ali -- and the system raises a red flag if it picks up even one part of the name: first, middle or last. Further complicating the system is the unusual number of birthdates on the first or last day of a given month, which stems from lack of accurate record keeping in some areas of the third world. A person may know the month in which he or she was born, but not the date. Clerks issuing identification cards, then, often assign the birthday as the first or last day of the month. It is no surprise, then, that birthdays often match.
TSA officials said the man detained on the Air France flight had a slightly
different spelling and the exact birthday of someone on the no-fly list.
Without elaborating, the TSA officials said the name in question belonged to a "serious bad actor" with connections to terrorism.
One of the most notable examples of the confusion over names occurred in 2004 when U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy was stopped and questioned at airports five times because the name T. Kennedy appeared on the no-fly list. The phonetically spelled name al Kannadi (The Canadian) apparently was the nom de guerre of an al Qaeda member on the list. It took the senator three weeks and a personal appeal to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge before his name was removed from the list. If a prominent U.S. senator experienced these difficulties, it stands to reason that an ordinary individual with no high-level connections would find it nearly impossible to fix the problem.
Terrorists rarely travel with their real passports and make a point of using
many different aliases. The no-fly list would be effective if terrorists
used passports borrowed from individuals already on the list, such as those identified as having traveled to training camps or other safe havens.
Because the existence of the no-fly list is well known, however, someone
contemplating a terrorist attack likely would create a totally clean
identity, which is not difficult to do. The perpetrator would then "test"
the new document by taking a flight to see if it passed the security check.
The Sept. 11 hijackers took similar reconnaissance flights to observe flight
routes, times and airport/airline security measures.
In the fight against international terrorism, constant vigilance is
necessary -- though repeated false alarms call into question the
effectiveness of the TSA's no-fly list
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The FBI Sting and Two New Militant Suspects May 31, 2005 1735 GMT
Following a two-year sting operation, the FBI has arrested two men it says
were conspiring to join al Qaeda and provide material support to the
jihadist network. Agents apprehended Tarik Ibn Osman Shah on May 27 inNew York City and Florida doctor Rafiq Sabir a day later near Boca Raton, Fla. Shah and Sabir "allegedly agreed to provide training in martial arts and hand-to-hand combat to al Qaeda members and associates, while Sabir allegedly agreed to provide medial assistance to wounded jihadists in Saudi Arabia," according to a joint statement issued May 29 by the FBI and federal prosecutors.
The FBI claims the men pledged allegiance to al Qaeda during a May 20
meeting in New York City with a person they believed was recruiting them
into al Qaeda, but who actually was an undercover FBI agent.
Information released about Shah allegedly reveals a connection to the
so-called Virginia Jihad Network, an informal network centered around Falls Church, Va., that has been the common denominator in many arrests related to conspiracy to commit or support terrorist acts. According to federal prosecutors, Shah had the names and phone numbers of individuals who had attended terrorist training camps in the Middle East and Afghanistan. Among these names was Seifullah Chapman, a member of the Virginia Jihad Network who was convicted in Virginia in March 2004 for providing material support to a Pakistan-based terrorist group.
Several people associated with the Virginia Jihad Network have been arrested on charges of conspiring to support terrorist groups, of participating in terrorist activities or of encouraging others to take part in militant activities against the United States. Among these are Masoud Khan, who was sentenced to life in prison in June 2004 under the Neutrality Act for conspiring to support terrorists; Ali al-Timimi, an Islamist ideologue convicted in April 2004 for urging his followers to travel to Afghanistan to resist the U.S.-led invasion; and Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, who was indicted in February for providing support to al Qaeda, including "material support and resources" in a plot to assassinate U.S. President George W. Bush. Like Shah and Sabir, all three are U.S. citizens who were living in the United States.
If the FBI case against Shah and Sabir is upheld in court, it could reveal
that the two lacked the operational skills required to successfully commit a
terrorist act on U.S. soil, but that they could have been useful to al Qaeda
in other ways -- such as providing valuable logistic and financial support
for the planning and staging phases of a terrorist attack. Furthermore, as
U.S. citizens already living in the country, they could have operated in the
open without attracting undue attention.
If the two are proven guilty, the case will demonstrate FBI improvements in surveillance and infiltration of jihadist cells in the United States -- and
the bureau's ability to gain intelligence from the arrests. Although the
meeting between the two and the undercover agent allegedly took place May 20, the men were not arrested until a full week later, after they had
returned to their homes. By apprehending the two at their homes, federal
agents gained access to potentially crucial evidence and intelligence, such
as address books and computer files. This could lead to further action
against alleged U.S.-based jihadists.
These arrests also demonstrate FBI interest in the Virginia Jihad Network.
FBI telephone taps or reviews of phone records allowed under the Foreign
Surveillance Intelligence Act likely tipped off agents as to Shah and
Sabir's alleged commitment to the jihadist cause -- and an undercover agent was assigned to perform the sting.
Another more disturbing revelation coming from Shah's arrest is a possible
connection between jihadists and Black Muslims in the United States. Shah is the son of "Lieutenant X," a former top aid of Malcolm X.
If Shah and Sabir are found guilty of conspiring to support al Qaeda, it
would prove there still are U.S. citizens in the United States who are
willing to support and participate in terrorist groups. In any case, more
arrests are likely to follow.
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................................................................
TERRORISM BRIEF
United States: The Jamaat al-Fuqra Threat
Jun 03, 2005 1738 GMT
Consider, if you will, a group whose members live "free from the decadence of a godless society" in guarded and insular communities in the rural United States. Additionally, consider that some members of this group have been convicted on a variety of weapons, fraud and terrorism charges. Those who assume we are once again addressing right-wing extremists such as the Aryan Nations would be wrong.
Although we do believe that right-wing extremists pose a threat to the
security of the United States, the group we describe does not give its
compounds names like Elohim City, the infamous compound of white
supremacists in Adair County, Okla. Instead they call them Islamburg (N.Y.), Ahmadabad (Va.) and Holy Islamville (S.C.).
The group is Jamaat al-Fuqra -- Arabic for "community of the impoverished" -- founded in the 1980s by Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani, a religious figure from Pakistan who incorporated the group as a tax-exempt organization under the name Muslims of the Americas. Its educational arm, the Quranic Open University, takes American Muslims to Pakistan for training, expecting them to return and instruct others.
Residents of Muslims of the Americas communities keep a low profile, display a benign image and most of all deny the existence of Jamaat al-Fuqra. They claim to be peaceful people who simply are attempting to escape the decadence of American society. Actions by some of the residents, however, belie that claim.
Many of the original al-Fuqra members were converts to Islam, and most were African Americans. However, one of its first members -- and its first
bombmaker -- was Stephen Paul Paster, who converted from Judaism to Islam. Paster was convicted for his role in the 1983 bombing of a Portland, Ore., hotel owned by the Hindu Bhagwan Rajneesh cult from India. He also was tried and acquitted on charges stemming from two other West Coast bombings. Upon his release from prison, Paster moved to Lahore, Pakistan, to join Gilani and other instructors at the Quranic Open University, where he allegedly helps to teach what Gilani calls "advanced training courses in Islamic Military Warfare."
The U.S. government claims that al-Fuqra members were involved in 13
bombings and arsons during the 1980s and 1990s and were responsible for at least 17 homicides. Many of these attacks targeted Indian groups such as the Hare Krishnas, or heterodox Muslim groups such as the Ahmadiyya sect. In 1991, five al-Fuqra members were arrested at a border crossing in Niagara Falls, N.Y., after authorities found their plans to attack an Indian cinema and a Hindu temple in Toronto, Canada. Three of the five later were convicted on charges stemming from the plot.
According to sources, many al-Fuqra members have fought in Afghanistan,
Kashmir, Lebanon, Bosnia and Chechnya. Several members also have been affiliated with the al-Kifah Refugee Center -- popularly known as the
Brooklyn Jihad Office. Group member Clement Hampton-el, for example,
provided weapons training to several people associated with the Brooklyn
Jihad Office. One of those men, El Sayyid Nosair later would use that
training to assassinate the Rabbi Meir Kahane in Manhattan. Hampton-el was convicted along with several other men, including Nosair's cousin, Ibrahim Elgabrowny and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, also known as The Blind Sheikh, in the 1993 New York Bomb Plot Case, and sentenced to serve 35 years.
More recently, police investigators working on the D.C. sniper case tied
convicted killer John Allen Muhammed to al-Fuqra. Rumors also surfaced that "Shoe Bomber" Richard Reid was connected to the group. Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, in fact, was investigating the Reid/al-Fuqra
connection and was in the process of attempting to interview Gilani when he was abducted and killed.
In addition to Hampton-el, several other members of al-Fuqra are in federal and state prisons on a variety of weapons charges and convictions stemming from worker's compensation, credit card, welfare and driver's license fraud. The group allegedly uses its imprisoned members to recruit other prisoners. Furthermore, it was revealed during Hampton-el's trial that one of the organization's tasks was to recruit American veterans to fight in Afghanistan.
Al-Fuqra members own several security companies, which provide a source of income and security for the group and its compounds, but also offer a plausible explanation for the presence of firing ranges on the properties -- a cover for the paramilitary training that allegedly is conducted at the compounds.
Perhaps most disconcerting is that al-Fuqra's cadre of battle tested
jihadist warriors -- men who refer to themselves as "Soldiers of Allah" and
"Mohammed's Commandos" -- are mostly Americans who legally can obtain U.S. passports and operate in the United States without raising suspicion.
As the United States advances its war on terrorism abroad and takes measures to tighten immigration procedures in order to protect U.S. citizens from foreign militants, it is important that authorities not overlook America's homegrown jihadists.
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My sentiments exactly. . . .
fighting words
Terminal Futility
Routine airport security won't thwart jihadists, but it does inconvenience and endanger the rest of us.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, June 6, 2005, at 1:02 PM PT
Is there anyone reading this column who would agree with Mark O. Hatfield Jr., spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration, that in the past year "the average peak wait time at [airport] checkpoints has dropped a minute ... to about 12 minutes"? This is what he was cited as having said, in a New York Times report of a confidential document from the Department of Homeland Security. The last time I was at Dulles Airport, the line for security began at the entrance to the terminal and wound itself in several rope-line convolutions, like a clogged intestine, for about 40 minutes. I had allowed the usual two hours and was checking no luggage, but this and other banana-republic conditions almost made me miss my plane. Nor was it a "peak time." In any case, a passenger cannot know what a "peak time" will be. Only the TSA knows how many people are booked on how many flights at a given hour and can make provision of enough machines and personnel. Or not, as the case may be.
So, Hatfield was telling me something that I didn't know. The rest of the report, however, contains things that everyone does know to be true. We learn that there is no real capacity to detect explosives, for example. And we learn that, "If, say, a handgun were discovered, the terrorist would have ample ability to retain control of it. TSA screeners are neither expecting to encounter a real weapon nor are they trained to gain control of it." Who hasn't worked that out?
I think I had also noticed that there are not enough plastic bins or tables to line them up on, and that "X-ray machines that examine carry-on baggage sit idle as much as 30 per cent of the time." The time elapsed between Sept. 11, 2001, and today's writing (1,364 days) is only slightly less than the time between Pearl Harbor and the unconditional surrender of Japan (1,365 days). And airport security is still a silly farce that subjects the law-abiding to collective punishment while presenting almost no deterrent to a determined suicide-killer.
There is one mercy at least: One no longer sees people smiling and saying, "Thank you" as their wheelchairs and their children are put through pointless inspections. But the new form of servile abjection?standing in sullen lines and just putting up with it?is hardly an improvement. One sometimes wants to ask, "What's my name?" or, "To what database is this connected" when someone has just asked for the third time for you to put down a bag and produce a driver's license. But I think the fear of making some inscrutable "no-fly" list may inhibit many people. There has never yet been a hijacker who boarded a plane without taking the trouble to purchase a ticket and carry an ID. Members of the last successful group were on a "watch list," for all the difference that made. The next successful group will not be on a watch list.
Flying from London to Washington the other day, I was told that I was no longer required to take my computer out of its case. Apparently, there are scanners that can see though soft cases as well as through the hardened lid of a laptop (and apparently the United States hasn't managed to invest in any of these scanners for its domestic airports). On the other hand, I was asked if I had packed my own bags and if they had been under my control at all times. This exceptionally stupid pair of questions?to which a terrorist would have to answer "yes" by definition?is now deemed too stupid for U.S. domestic purposes and stupid enough only for international travel. This makes as much sense as diverting a full plane that carries a notorious Islamist crooner, the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens, from one airport to another.
Routines and "zero tolerance" exercises will never thwart determined jihadists who are inventive and who are willing to sacrifice their lives. That requires inventiveness and initiative. But airport officials are not allowed to use their initiative. People who have had their names confused with wanted or suspect people, and who have spent hours proving that they are who they say they are, are nonetheless compelled to go through the whole process every time, often with officials who have seen them before and cleared them before, because the system that never seems to catch anyone can never seem to let go of anyone, either.
While people are treated as packages, we learn from the same New York Times account of the still-secret Homeland Security document that "air cargo on passenger planes is rarely physically inspected today." Imagine, if you will, the wolfish grin of an al-Qaida fan who reads that sentence. I sometimes don't want to mention all the other loopholes, in case it gives ideas to the wrong people, but just imagine for a second that we imposed our current airport rules on trains, or the subway, or the tunnels and bridges ?
What we are looking at, then, is a hugely costly and oppressive system that is designed to maintain the illusion of safety and the delusion that the state is protecting its citizens. The main beneficiaries seem to be the pilferers employed by this vast bureaucracy?we have had several recent reports about the steep increase in items stolen from luggage. And that is petty theft that takes place off-stage. What amazes me is the willingness of Americans to submit to confiscation at the point of search. Every day, people are relieved of private property in broad daylight, with the sole net result that they wouldn't have even a nail file with which to protect themselves if (or rather when) the next hijacking occurs.
Last month, cigarette lighters were added to the confiscation list. There's probably some half-baked "shoe-bomber" justification for this, but I hear that at Boise airport in Idaho there's now a lighter bin on the way out of the airport, like the penny tray in some shops, that allows you to pick one up. Give one; take one?it all helps to pass the time until the next disaster, which collective punishment of the law-abiding is doing nothing to prevent.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America.
Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2120330/
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AIRPORT SECURITY: NEW SCREENING SYSTEM
Airports, will be using a new machine for checking people boarding the
aircraft. Because of many complaints from Passengers that they are being
fondled. This NEW DEVICE WILL BE USED......This should start on/about
JULY 2005. Click on URL below and drag your mouse over picture to see an example of how the device functions.
http://home.chello.no/~siamak.javid/etc/NewAirportSecurity.swf
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Mexico Nabs 2 Iraqis Near U.S. Border
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
MEXICO CITY ? Mexican agents in Tecate captured two Iraqis who had hoped to sneak into U.S. territory without proper documents.
Federal authorities say Samir and Munir Yousif Shana (search) told investigators they were contacted by a person in their hometown of Baghdad, who said he could smuggle them into San Diego.
The two have relatives in San Diego.
Federal agents yesterday arrested the pair, along with two accused Mexican immigrant smugglers and a youngster, in the Paso de Aguila district of Tecate.
The Iraqis said they met the accused smugglers in Tijuana, then accompanied them by bus to Tecate. The group was walking toward the U.S. border when they were apprehended.
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Moving a post by Buzzwardo from another thread to here-- Crafty
====================================
Airline Security Changes Planned
Threats Reassessed To Ease Clearance
By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 13, 2005; Page A01
The new head of the Transportation Security Administration has called for a broad review of the nation's air security system to update the agency's approach to threats and reduce checkpoint hassles for passengers.
Edmund S. "Kip" Hawley, an assistant secretary of homeland security, directed his staff to propose changes in how the agency screens 2 million passengers a day. The staff's first set of recommendations, detailed in an Aug. 5 document, includes proposals to lift the ban on various carry-on items such as scissors, razor blades and knives less than five inches long. It also proposes that passengers no longer routinely be required to remove their shoes at security checkpoints.
After Sept. 11, 2001, many personal items were banned from flights. (By Shawn Baldwin -- Associated Press)
Agency officials plan to meet this month to consider the proposals, which would require Hawley's approval to go into effect.
Since his confirmation in June, Hawley has told his staff that he would reevaluate security measures put in place since the terrorist attacks in 2001 and ensure that they make sense, given today's threats. The TSA is struggling with new cuts in the screener workforce imposed by Congress while its new leaders hope to improve the agency's poor reputation among air travelers by introducing more customer-friendly measures. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff signaled the effort when he announced that the agency would eliminate a requirement that forced passengers to remain in their seats during the first and last 30 minutes of flights using Reagan National Airport.
"The process is designed to stimulate creative thinking and challenge conventional beliefs," said TSA spokesman Mark O. Hatfield Jr. "In the end, it will allow us to work smarter and better as we secure America's transportation system."
The TSA memo proposes to minimize the number of passengers who must be patted down at checkpoints. It also recommends that certain categories of passengers be exempt from airport security screening, such as members of Congress, airline pilots, Cabinet members, state governors, federal judges, high-ranking military officers and people with top-secret security clearances.
The proposal also would allow ice picks, throwing stars and bows and arrows on flights. Allowing those items was suggested after a risk evaluation was conducted about which items posed the most danger.
If approved, only passengers who set off walk-through metal detectors or are flagged by a computer screening system will have to remove their shoes at security checkpoints. The proposal also would give security screeners the discretion to ask certain passengers "presenting reasonably suspicious behavior or threat characteristics" to remove their shoes.
The proposal also would give screeners discretion in determining whether to pat down passengers. For example, screeners would not have to pat down "those persons whose outermost garments closely conform to the natural contour of the body."
The memo also calls for a new formula to replace the set of computer-screening rules that select passengers for more scrutiny. Currently, the system commonly flags passengers who book one-way tickets or modify travel plans at the last minute. The new TSA plan would give TSA managers assigned to each major airport the authority to de-select a passenger who has been picked out by a computer system.
Some security analysts praised the agency's proposal, saying that security screeners spend too much time trying to find nail scissors and not enough time focused on today's biggest threat: a suicide bomber boarding an airplane. The TSA has very limited capability to detect explosives under a person's clothing, for example, and is trying to roll out more high-tech machines that can protect against such threats.
K. Jack Riley, a homeland security expert at Rand Corp., said hardened cockpit doors, air marshals and stronger public vigilance will prevent another 9/11-style hijacking. "Frankly, the preeminent security challenge at this point is keeping explosives off the airplane," Riley said. The TSA's ideas, he said, "recognize the reality that we know that air transportation security has changed post-9/11. Most of these rules don't contribute to security."
Douglas R. Laird, former head of security for Northwest Airlines, said the proposal was a step backward. Laird said exempting certain categories of passengers from security screening would be dangerous because trusted groups have occasionally abused the privilege. "In an effort to be customer friendly, they're forgetting that their primary requirement is to keep airplanes safe," Laird said. "Either you screen everybody or why screen anybody?"
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PUBLISHED ON AUGUST 11, 2005:
Images From the Battleground
Ranchers 75 miles from Tucson say bad border policies have resulted in a daily invasion of drugs, death, pollution and violence
By LEO W. BANKS
Leo W. Banks
An illegal alien dump site two miles northeast of Lyle Robinson's ranch house.
Leo W. Banks
Border patrol checks on an overturned smuggling vehicle on Tres Bellotas Road, July 28, 2005.
Leo W. Banks
An Arizona Department of Transportation official checks an abandoned smuggler vehicle on Jarillas Ranch.
Leo W. Banks
Lyle Robinson points out smuggling trails on his property.
Lyle Robinson's Tres Bellotas Ranch sits in a cradle of hills right on the Mexican border. It's a pretty place. Sprawling Mulberry trees shade the brick house and oak trees--bellotas in Spanish--decorate the surrounding landscape. This time of year, during the monsoon season, the oaks drop acorns that cowboys and others working this land, 13 miles southwest of Arivaca, have prized as summer snacks for centuries.
It hardly seems possible that such a peaceful-looking spot could be the scene of anything momentous. But it is.
Everyone in America has a stake in what's happening on the Tres Bellotas. Everyone in America should know about the events that play out daily on this remote ground, and on neighboring ranches, because they explain our present and foretell our future.
This is a place where all the rhetoric from the president and his government about homeland security crumbles to pieces on the hot ground. The Tres Bellotas is a battleground in the relentless, ugly, nonstop invasion of drugs and illegals across our southern border.
It will happen again tonight. Robinson knows this, because two invaders showed themselves earlier on this beautiful July morning, shortly after breakfast. Walking openly, without fear of harassment, the two men walked from Mexican soil into the United States through the wide-open international border gate 200 yards below Robinson's home.
They were rolling a tire that needed air, and reaching the house, they asked one of Robinson's cowboys for permission to use the ranch compressor.
These men, coyotes making final preparations for a night smuggling run of either drugs or people, displayed no menace. They were polite. So was Robinson's cowboy. He said by all means, muchachos, fill your tire.
But it was a Vito Corleone kind of request, one the cowboy couldn't refuse.
Robinson's ranch has no phone, no electricity and is, in his own words, a no man's land, where surviving means doing what's necessary, including maintaining cordial relations with the bad guys.
If they want air for their tire, you give it to them. If they want water, you're better off handing it over, because if you say no, they may break a water line to get it. If they want you to open the gate across the dirt road that runs between your home and your horse corrals, you open it. Why fight it? If you refuse, they'll just cut the lock.
Six months ago, Robinson looked out his window and saw something incredible--a traffic jam on the Tres Bellotas, with 15 pickup trucks backed up at this second gate, 150 feet from his house. The pickups sagged under the weight of the illegals they carried, probably 20 in each, 300 in all.
When Robinson walked out, the coyote asked him to open the gate to let them pass. Robinson did so, and off the group went, driving north.
So this long convoy of invaders entered the United States by driving through two open gates, encountering no law enforcement to check papers. Or screen them for infectious diseases. Or punch in computer codes to learn if they were criminals. Or search for chemical or biological agents. Or search for suitcase nukes. Or check the names against terror-watch lists.
Or even wave howdy. In other words, they encountered fewer obstacles than commuters in American cities face driving home from work in rush-hour traffic.
But they don't just enter through the wide-open gate below Robinson's house. His land abuts Mexico for six miles, and the invaders routinely cut holes in the four-strand barbed-wire fence separating the two nations.
They break into the country so often along this stretch that Robinson can't keep up with the fence repairs, an ongoing nightmare in which he is far from alone. It happens at many spots along our southern border.
Tom and Dena Kay, Robinson's nearest neighbors on the U.S. side, have five miles of border with Mexico, and smugglers cut holes in their fence about every three days.
A drug smuggler on horseback, pulling a pack mule, can make such a hole in 10 seconds with a wire cutter, usually without dismounting. He leans over, snips the first three strands, then coaxes his horse over the bottom wire. He's in. If he's driving a truck, he can enter even faster than that, simply by ramming down the fence and barreling on through, which Tom Kay says happens just as often.
This goes on almost daily, 75 miles southwest of Tucson--invaders from countries around the world coming across this international boundary in a time of war, a time when nuts would like nothing better than to sneak into this country and murder Americans on a grand scale.
The Border Patrol doesn't release a by-nation breakdown of those it arrests, and the agency is particularly tight-lipped about arrests of special interest aliens, known as SIAs. These are individuals from the list of about 35 countries the U.S. considers terror threats. But the Weekly has obtained SIA arrest figures from a federal law enforcement source who asked to remain anonymous.
From 2000 through 2003, plus the first nine months of fiscal 2004, agents in the Tucson sector, and the Arizona office of the Yuma sector, arrested 132 SIAs. The numbers include 10 from Afghanistan, seven from Iran, 12 from Yemen, 11 from Pakistan and three from Iraq.
Using the common estimate that the Border Patrol only catches one out of every three who cross, or as some believe, one of every five, we can calculate that upward of 660 individuals from terror-threat nations have crossed into our country through Arizona.
Those SIA arrest figures, by the way, include six individuals from Saudi Arabia, the country that produced 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 maniacs.
Homeland security?
Along the border south of Arivaca, you'd best stand back when you utter those words, because the subject tends to make folks spitting mad. Even Robinson, a silver-haired, soft-spoken gentleman, gets a fire in his eyes when he talks about it.
"It's a joke," says the 67-year-old, semi-retired veterinarian. "Homeland security doesn't exist."
The contrabandistas have tainted life and corrupted hearts in Arivaca since before its founding as an American town in the 1870s. The trade is like a dirty fingerprint on the landscape, and a good bit of it runs along the Tres Bellotas Road, a dusty roller coaster that wends through canyons and rock washes from Arivaca down to the border.
It's rough country, all hills and horizon, and perfectly empty, unless you count soaring turkey buzzards, dust billows in your rearview, and the white-and-green Border Patrol trucks perched on intermittent hilltops.
Robinson and his wife, Mollie, knew the road running past their new home was a favorite of smugglers when they bought the place in 1969. But just in case they didn't, they received a dramatic reminder a few days after passing papers.
As they sat with the previous owner on the back porch, a proud young couple enjoying their first days on their new property, a station wagon roared up from Mexico. "Oh, there goes a marijuana load," said the previous owner in the most matter-of-fact voice possible.
Robinson admits to being a "little surprised" at the welcome, but not floored. The couple had seen the prevalence of drugs in their previous home, Gallup, N.M., and figured they couldn't escape it no matter where they went.
Even so, even sitting right on the border, they felt completely safe at the Tres Bellotas. "The first 30 years here, we had so few problems," says Mollie. "But the last six years, things have gotten really out of control with these illegals."
One day in 2003, Robinson and one of his cowboys rode their horses to a hilltop close to the house. To their shock, they saw an estimated 300 illegals congregated in the draw below. The riders watched as the mob divided into groups of 30 apiece, with one man, presumably a coyote, taking charge of each one as they prepared to walk north.
"I rode down and talked to them," says Robinson. "They weren't nervous or acting as if they were doing anything illegal at all. But seeing all those people on my land, and the way they acted, that's when I knew things had changed around here."
From then until now, the smugglers have all but taken charge, hijacking a way of life.
The hilly terrain offers abundant hiding places, says Border Patrol spokesman Gustavo Soto, and the Arivaca area's proximity to Altar and Sasabe, both right across the line in Mexico, make it a frequent crossing ground for drug and people smugglers. "The smugglers have built an infrastructure in those towns, which they use as staging areas to come across," says Soto. "They're trying to get to Highway 286 or I-19 up to Tucson, and the Arivaca road runs between those two highways."
On this hot summer day, as he rumbles across his land in a Jeep, Robinson talks about what it's like to live in the crosshairs of the invasion. The indignities include Mexican soldiers camping just south of the international gate below his house, a supposed show of force in the drug war. They come about every two months.
But these fellows make lousy neighbors. To kill time during the long days, they holler and fire off their weapons just for fun, filling the afternoon air with the rat-tat-tat of gunfire and scaring Robinson's horses.
Once-pristine canyons, narrow, shady oak and rock gorges, have become depressing dumping grounds for tons of feces, trash and personal items. "I don't really have anything against these illegals," says Robinson. "But it really gripes me how dirty they are, and they have no respect for private property."
The trash includes clothing--leather and denim jackets, Wrangler jeans and more--some of which is still usable after a good washing. Cowboys in the Arivaca area often add to their wardrobes by cruising these dump sites, and now, when Tres Bellotas cowboys go out riding, they joke, "See you later; we're going shopping."
In one of these dumps, Robinson found a hat with an Islamic crescent on it, and he rode up on a dead body, a young man, naked, a full water bottle right next to him. When dehydration sets in, people sometimes go mad and tear off their clothes before death. Two bodies have been found on his property this summer alone.
In his corral, Robinson has what he calls his "marijuana horse," an animal that smugglers turned loose. The pregnant mare has hideous open sores on her back from being forced to haul bails of marijuana without a saddle blanket. "There's not much I can do for her now," says Robinson. "Maybe her colt will be healthy."
It never ends.
One night two years ago, Lyle and Mollie were driving home on with a couple from Washington state in the car, the man a friend of Lyle's from his days at Colorado State University Veterinary School.
They encountered a high-speed chase on Black Mesa, 4 1/2 miles north of the ranch. A pickup filled with illegals was heading south, the Border Patrol in pursuit, when the smuggler suddenly wheeled off the Tres Bellotas Road into the desert. Robinson theorizes that coyotes about to be captured often become reckless, hoping to intentionally injure the illegals they're hauling, which they can then blame on the Border Patrol.
The smuggler truck sailed headlong through the darkness into a barbed wire fence. The top wire snapped up over the cab, then down, scalping a woman sitting in back. The wire literally removed her scalp from the middle of her forehead to halfway back on the top of her head. She was with her son, about 8 years old.
As Robinson tells this story, he's sitting at his kitchen table after a lunch of iced tea and enchiladas. Mollie is cleaning up at the sink. The sliding-glass door to the front porch is open, and an easy, warm wind blows in through the screen, bringing with it a faint whiff of the horse corrals and the chirping of birds.
It seems a scene of ultimate tranquility. But hanging over all of it is a sense of horror at what the invasion has brought to this land.
A visitor asks how his Washington guests reacted to stumbling upon the Wild West in modern-day Southern Arizona. "They'd never seen anything so exciting in their lives," Robinson says with a grim chuckle.
But it gets wilder still.
At 11:30 a.m. on April 22 this year, a Mexican helicopter landed in the Robinsons' backyard. Arivaca resident R.D. Ayers had driven to the ranch that morning to visit his injured dog, then under Dr. Robinson's care.
Ayers describes stepping outside the house to see what he describes as "a military Huey-type helicopter" circling, at the same time that a truck from the Tucson Fuel Co. was pulling into the yard. The Tres Bellotas gets its power from diesel generators, and that fuel has to be delivered.
As he approached the chopper, Ayers says six men in black, commando-type uniforms stepped out. Five had ski-type masks over their faces, and they wore body armor and carried automatic rifles. On their sleeves, Ayers saw the word, Mexico.
They stood in a defensive posture around a sixth man, their leader, who identified himself as a member of the Mexican police. He pointed aggressively to the fuel truck and asked what it was doing there. Ayers, in Spanish, told the man he was in the United States, not Mexico, and that he had no business in this country and needed to leave.
But the commander refused to listen and began walking toward the truck, at which point Ayers placed himself between the commander and the truck, again telling him to scram. After a few minutes, the tense confrontation ended when the commander ordered his troops into the chopper, and they split back across the border.
Ayers suspects that the Mexicans--one of Robinson's cowboys identified them as federales, Mexican federal police--were escorting a drug shipment to Tucson, and wanted to haul it in the fuel truck. Or they wanted to steal the fuel. The chopper had followed the truck much of the way down Tres Bellotas Road.
"Men with fully automatic weapons and masks don't just show up to say hello," says a still-outraged Ayers, owner of a backhoe company and a former EMT in Arivaca. He added that if he'd had his gun, he might've fired on the invaders. "I wasn't going to back down. This is my country."
These drug incursions occur with some regularity along the border. The Kays and Robinson say they're personally aware of three such incursions this summer alone, and it's worth noting that the men who recently shot two Border Patrol agents near Nogales also wore black, commando-type gear.
But this episode, like the others, has disappeared into the vapor of national security. Tucson Fuel refuses comment. The Border Patrol won't talk about it, saying its agents got to the Tres Bellotas too late to learn much of anything. The FBI in Tucson took a report the same day and forwarded it to Washington, but they're not talking, either.
As for Robinson, he was gone from the ranch that day, holding a veterinary clinic on the Tohono O'Odham Reservation--ironically enough, under a contract from the Department of Homeland Security. "I really don't know what happened," he says. "But I know my cowboys were so scared, they hid in the barn."
The driver of the fuel truck arrived at Tom and Dena Kay's ranch, eight miles north of the Robinson place, between noon and 1 p.m. that day.
"He was still shaken up, really wild-eyed," says Dena, who put in the first call to the Border Patrol. Ayers had tried to call, but when he got atop Black Mesa, the only place in the immediate area where cell phones work, the call wouldn't go through. He suspects that smugglers had jammed the signal.
At the moment, the Kays' Jarillas Ranch is a bustle of activity. Tom Kay, 63, is working the controls of a forklift with-on-the-ground help from his two cowboys, Roberto Triana and son, Peter. They're preparing a huge stack of railroad ties for eventual transportation to job sites around the 13,000-acre spread.
The solar-powered ranch house, located back from the clearing where Tom and his hands are working, sits on a rise above Tres Bellotas Road, shielded from its wildness by distance, some apple trees and a strong security gate.
After moving here in January 2003, the Kays spent six months re-doing everything about the house, except for two fireplaces that remain untouched. They sandblasted paint off the ceilings, installed a saguaro-rib ceiling in a hallway, and out front, beneath a tall pine tree, they built a rock wall around the manicured front lawn.
But the most telling touch is the sign hanging on the porch. Instead of the traditional Mi Casa Es Su Casa, so common on ranch-country homes, this message perfectly reflects the Kays' stance toward the illegals and smugglers who threaten their Eden. It reads, Mi Tierra Es Mi Tierra--my land is my land.
It's a manifesto, a hope and a bit of a prayer in a place where the invasion never stops, and its perpetrators receive, in the Kays' view, encouragement and welcome from water-in-the-desert "do-gooders."
On Arivaca Road on July 9, the Border Patrol busted two members of the self-described border-help group No More Deaths, alleging that they violated the law by transporting three illegals. Standing beneath the big pine tree outside her house, her bull mastiff, Ruby, bustling at her feet, Dena can't contain her delight that the Border Patrol has finally taken a stand against the group, which she says "entices people into our country to die."
"They put these crossers at the mercy of the coyotes, who rob and abandon all of them, and rape and abuse women," says Dena. "On the Fourth of July weekend, they found several bodies near here, and I hold these do-gooders morally responsible for every one of those deaths. They're so damn self-righteous, and they don't want to hear about all the damage the illegals are doing. They don't know how we're forced to live and don't want to find out.
"I invite all these so-called Samaritans to publish their home addresses so the illegals can go to their homes and defecate on their property and pound on their doors in the middle of the night and see how they like it."
Dena, 61, grew up at the Tucson's Tanque Verde Guest Ranch--when it was still a working ranch--taught English at Rincon High School and worked for 15 years as executive director of a domestic abuse advocacy center in Cortez, Colo.
In the latter job, she dealt with several women whose battering husbands, illegal aliens, had been deported to Mexico. Within a few months, they were back doing it again, and from that, she knew how easy it was to sneak back and forth across the line.
Beyond that, she and Tom had little first-hand knowledge of how overwhelming illegal immigration had become, and how dangerous. But an episode early in their time at the Jarillas Ranch initiated the Kays into the nightmare.
Dena was driving home along the Tres Bellotas when she turned a corner and ran smack-dab into 15 pickup trucks stuffed with about 25 illegals each. They were heading toward Arivaca and Interstate 19. When the lead truck saw Dena's vehicle, the driver jammed the brakes, then all the trucks began making U-turns on the narrow road, blocking her in.
"Here I am trying to get home at night, and there are hundreds of illegals and smugglers blocking my path," says Dena, who was unable to move for five minutes. "I didn't have my gun, and I'm thinking, 'Oops, I hope you guys don't want to steal my car.'"
The episode ended peacefully when the trucks got turned around and headed south.
On other occasions, the Kays have watched in astonishment as smuggler vehicles have rolled past in broad daylight, packed with human cargo. In one case, they saw a parade of pickup trucks with invaders sitting all around the edge of the rear bed, their arms locked so they wouldn't fall off. More stood in the bed, and they were packed in so tightly, it seemed impossible to breathe. Still more were packed into the double cabs like a fraternity stunt.
The site provided a stunning visual lesson in the economics of people smuggling. The Kays figure that each cab-and-a-half truck carried at least 50 people. According to Border Patrol estimates, each illegal pays $1,500 for transportation north. That's a grand total of $75,000 per truck. For, say, 15 trucks, that's a stunning $1.1 million.
"When I see those trucks, I think of slave ships passing in a harbor 300 years ago," says Tom.
The trucks sometimes roar down the rocky, gouged-out Tres Bellotas Road at night, with their lights off, at 50 mph. Dena says the nighttime racket can be especially loud during the Border Patrol's shift change, a time the coyotes know well. She has even seen mothers cradling babies, six months to two years old, at the roadside, after apprehension by the Border Patrol, and the babies are vomiting violently.
"I'm sure they have shaken-baby syndrome from driving this road at such high speeds," she says. "But as soon as they're released into Mexico, those mothers will be back with their babies to try again. They have no clue about the brain damage they've just caused their children."
Dena praises the Border Patrol's efforts to try to control illegal vehicle traffic on the road. "But they're overwhelmed," she says. "The illegals come at them from every direction."
The problems they cause are constant. The Kays have repeatedly had their outside water spigot left on, leaving no water for them to use their bathroom or shower. Neighboring ranchers have found stock tanks fouled by shampoo, soap and toothpaste deposited by invaders who use them as their personal bathroom sinks.
As Dena sits in her spacious living room, the summer light pouring in through the arched windows, she rattles off these episodes with some emotion, but not much. She's a thin woman with a gravelly voice and a fierce determination, a trait she acquired while running the women's center.
There, she testified against spousal abusers in court, in spite of their vows to come after her if she did. "I've had my life threatened a number of times," Dena says, shrugging. "I guess I got used to it. When you've been a victim's advocate, you learn not to give up."
She needs that kind of mettle living outside Arivaca, an unincorporated town of about 2,000 people.
On a Sunday night in early July, the Kays were alerted to something going on outside the house by the frantic barking of their four dogs. When Dena opened the door, she saw three illegals, in aggressive postures, one of them bare-chested. They asked for water. In Spanish, Dena responded, "You don't want water. Get the hell out of here. I'm calling la migra."
Like most ranchers, the Kays have given water to polite illegals in need. But these fellows were bad news. When they didn't respond to Dena's demand to hit the road, she told Tom, in a voice loud enough for the invaders to hear, to get her gun. Those words did the trick. "Unless they hear la pistola, they won't leave," Dena says.
Shortly afterward, to make sure they were gone, Tom went down to the gate and saw two trucks, presumably carrying the same men, coming down the road toward Arivaca, their lights off. As they passed, Tom aimed his flashlight into one of the cabs, and the men waved at him. Tom thinks those trucks might've carried drugs, but he didn't get a good enough look to be sure, and the Kays can only guess what those three men had planned while approaching their home.
Right now, Tom has just come into the living room, taking a break from working the railroad ties. A lifelong team roper in rodeo competitions, he spent 15 years running a sign company and athletic clubs in Tucson, his hometown, before spending most of the '80s and '90s in Colorado. He operated a small ranch there and ran a manufacturing company. But he's never had to run a business under the conditions he confronts every day on the border.
About a year ago, Tom was out riding when he witnessed a running gunfight in which automatic weapons-toting gangsters blasted away at each other on National Forest land on the U.S. side of the border, and the fight continued onto the Mexican side.
And in June this year, Roberto and Peter saw a second gunfight, also with automatic weapons. This one ended with two bodies being dumped into the bed of a pickup truck, which then fled into Mexico.
Surprisingly, Tom doesn't consider the violence of the drug smugglers his biggest problem. It's how ridiculously easy it is for them, and people smugglers--the two often work together, sometimes within the same gang--to invade American territory. They simply cut the fence, or run it down, and they're in.
But that also lets his cows out into Mexico, and that explains the railroad ties.
In two places, Tom is replacing cuts in his border fence with cattle guards--the ties will line the pits below the steel guardrails--hoping the smugglers will drive or walk across the guards, rather than cut his fence.
It's a desperate measure, giving bad guys ready access through America's back door. But Tom and Lyle Robinson, who also plans to install border cattle guards, say it's the only way they can maintain control over their livestock. At up to $1,000 a head, every animal that drifts into Mexico threatens their ability to stay in business.
"I talked to the Border Patrol and the Forest Service about the fence cuts, and they said there's nothing they can do," says Tom. "They said do what you have to do."
Border Patrol spokesman Soto says the agency is aware of the repeated fence cuts, and has no objections to ranchers installing cattle guards.
But if the agency knows about these constant border break-ins--a clear and present threat to national security and American sovereignty--why can't it be stopped? "We have a heavy presence in that area, but it's extremely difficult to control," says Soto. "In cases like this, we rely on ranchers to tell us the crossing patterns on their property. We don't have agents holding hands along the border. They're responding to other calls."
When his cattle do drift into Mexico, Tom sometimes contacts the Mexican brand inspector in Sasabe, Sonora, for help. But that's time-consuming, and Tom knows that if he sees fresh tracks and doesn't follow them right away, his animals might next appear on somebody's dinner plate in Sonora. To get them back, he saddles up and rides into Mexico with Roberto and Peter to find them.
In addition to being a national security nightmare, the fence cuts represent another fundamental outrage--the invaders are severely restricting how American citizens can use their property. Tom has two pastures abutting the border, Lyle Robinson three, and both say they can only use this land if they have cowboys available to ride the border fence at least once a day to keep the fence up.
The cost? Taking into account all the fences on his property, including the border fence, Tom spends at least one-third of his time looking for and fixing breaks.
"Two or three times a week, I have to send my cowboys to the border to make sure my fence is up, and it's an all-day job," he says. "All of this is expensive. If I make $40,000 a year running this ranch, every bit of that profit goes to repairing the damage these people do."
Why stay on land that American law enforcement can't or won't secure? After all, some around Arivaca already have left. In August 2001, Don Honnas and his wife, Carolyn, sold out after almost 41 years, in part due to illegals and drug smugglers.
As they reached their late 60s, the Honnases tired of sleeping with pistols under their pillows, suffering through 25 break-ins at ranch buildings, listening to their dogs bark all night and seeing two of their dogs poisoned. One of their biggest worries, remarkably, was the liability they might incur if one of their dogs bit an illegal, and the illegal sued.
"But the hardest part was when you call law enforcement, and they tell you they have nobody to send," says Honnas, now living in Sahuarita. "It was a difficult decision to get out, but we had to make a move."
For Tom Kay, running a ranch as big as the Jarillas has always been a lifelong dream, and he'll suffer through the dangers to keep it. "I'm very watchful and alert when I'm out working, but I'm not afraid," he says. "How could you be afraid and go to work every day? I'm not going to be afraid."
Whenever he rides his land, Tom carries a .44-caliber Magnum pistol on his saddle for self-defense, and for predatory lions. And when Dena goes for walks, she brings Ruby, the bull mastiff, and her pistol.
As far as she's concerned, the gun isn't optional. This is especially so in light of Border Patrol statistics showing that the common assumption about who is sneaking across the line and why--the harmless illegal only looking for work--has shifted significantly in recent years.
From Oct. 1, 2004, through July 24 of this year, Tucson sector agents arrested 375,000 illegals--37,000 a month. Of that 10-month arrest total, more than 28,324 had criminal records, 283 for sexually related crimes. Given this, and the effort it takes to reach their isolated house from the road, the Kays consider anyone who shows up at their door at night a threat. But they also know that should a confrontation go bad, American law enforcement will probably come after them.
"We've all been warned to not even show a gun to an illegal," she says. "A woman here did that a while ago, just showed it, didn't point it, and the FBI came to her house and warned her not to do it again, because it's a federal crime to threaten an illegal. But if I'm alone, what am I supposed to do? I can't scream, because no one will hear me."
Robinson is also sadly aware of whose side his own government is on when it comes to defending himself.
"Any rights we might have to protect our property or make an arrest have been taken from us," says Robinson, who usually doesn't carry a gun and doesn't particularly like them. "As far as I'm concerned, the smugglers can run anything they want through my ranch, and I'm not going to get up at night and look at them, and I'm sure not going to confront them. It's not my job. Besides, if I tried, and somebody got shot, I'd be the one to get arrested. The ACLU would probably take the case, and we'd lose our life savings."
It's early afternoon at the Tres Bellotas, and the sun is blazing over the desert. Out here, the intense summer heat keeps everyone's eyes focused on the sky for buzzards, because buzzards might mean a dead body, or body parts. Lions and coyotes sometimes descend on the corpses of illegals, leaving the death site a scatter of arms, legs or even a head.
Robinson has something he wants to show a visitor and pilots the Jeep up a steep hill less than a mile from his house.
The view from the peak would qualify for a postcard, if it weren't for the mass of litter and glass shards gleaming in the sunlight, and the smuggling trails that spider-web across the landscape. Some are so pounded down, they look like roads.
On this wind-swept peak, Mexican land visible across the pathetic little fence below, Robinson stands silently, examining what can only be described as a heartbreaking scene. He doesn't react to the debris and the environmental damage, at least openly.
But friends say the daily insults, the trampling of American law and sovereignty, the trashing of his property and especially the unwillingness of his own government to stop it, eats at his gut. Now, there's the latest chapter in the invasion--the helicopter landing. Robinson says he thinks about it often.
"I've never felt personally threatened living here until that Mexican helicopter landed," he says. "I know these Mexican drug people have access to helicopters, and if they get mad at me, what's to stop them from flying over the house and dropping a bomb and getting rid of me in seconds flat? Who'd care? The American government sure doesn't care. It makes me think how vulnerable I am."
As Dena Kay says, "There's nothing Lyle can do. If he fights back, the smugglers might burn his house, or he'll get up in the morning and find all his horses poisoned."
In addition to ratcheting up the stakes, the chopper incident did something else--it cut off Robinson's fuel supply. Tucson Fuel informed him that it would no longer deliver diesel to the ranch. Another company made one delivery and quit, citing the lousy condition of the road. The Border Patrol has helped by delivering fuel, and they've offered to provide an armed escort if Robinson can find a company willing to deliver. But Robinson hasn't decided what he'll do. He's thinking of buying a tanker to deliver his own fuel, and installing solar power. But that still won't give him phone service, except with his cell from atop Black Mesa, a 20-minute drive away.
Two years ago, he and Mollie got an expensive satellite phone and used it for several weeks, until all of their calls began mysteriously routing through a Mexican operator in Hermosillo. Even Verizon's technical people couldn't explain it.
Then a Border Patrol agent told the Robinsons what they already suspected: It's the smugglers again. They'd probably jammed the signals. The Kays say the same thing. At times of heavy night traffic on the Tres Bellotas, their cell phone--they have no land line--sometimes stops working for no apparent reason.
But Robinson doesn't spend a lot of time calling the Border Patrol. Even when he's certain a group is coming through --such as tonight's tire rollers--he usually won't call it in.
"If I were to call the Border Patrol, they'd say thank you and probably do nothing," says Robinson, adding that he'd have to drive up to Black Mesas several times a day to report suspicious sightings. "I'd be on the phone all the time and be frustrated all the time. I can't let it control me and affect my health. It'd ruin me."
And by the time the Border Patrol arrived, the threat would likely have passed. When Dena Kay called to report the helicopter incident, it took the Border Patrol four hours to get to the Tres Bellotas.
As Robinson sees it, the Border Patrol leaves his ranch largely undefended.
Even though the agency has had a horse patrol unit living at the ranch at times this summer, Robinson says that's unusual. More normally, agents come to the ranch in the morning looking for tracks, then either depart altogether or retreat to peaks miles back from the ranch to sit in their trucks and watch.
This allows the invaders unfettered access through Robinson's property, and it burns him up.
"Even though I'm only 200 yards from the border, my position is these illegals should never get here," says Robinson. "If you had real homeland security, they'd never be able to reach my ranch. But they're pouring across the line while the Border Patrol sits back on the hills, waiting to arrest them father back. I'm left here on my own, and it's like a taking of my property."
No phone, no fuel, and usually no Border Patrol. No man's land. So why stay?
It's the easiest question of all: It's home. The Robinsons raised their four children at the ranch. Most of their memories are on this land, and so are their hearts. They even have a ranch graveyard, the final resting place for several family members.
But Mollie admits it hasn't been easy, even from those first days in 1969. She had difficulty adjusting to the isolation, and took comfort in the biblical passage from Luke, in which Jesus said, "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God."
Mollie did that then, and she and Lyle are doing the same thing now, keeping their hands on the plow and asking God, through their prayers, to keep them safe. It's what they have instead of homeland security.
Everyone in America has a stake in those prayers being answered.
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Two articles in this post:
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Border Activist's Ranch Turned Over to Migrants; [HOME EDITION]
Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif.: Aug 20, 2005. pg. A.25
Full Text (466 words)
(Copyright (c) 2005 Los Angeles Times)
An Arizona ranch once owned by a member of an armed group accused by civil rights organizations of terrorizing illegal immigrants has been turned over to two of the very people the owner had tried keep out of the country.
The land transfer was done to satisfy a judgment against Casey Nethercott, a member of a self-styled border-watch group who is serving a five-year prison term for firearms possession.
Morris Dees Jr., chief trial counsel of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which represented the immigrants, said this week he hoped the ruling would be a cautionary tale to anyone considering hostile measures against border crossers.
"When we got into this case, ranchers all along the border were allowing these types to come on their property," Dees said. "Now, they're very leery of it, especially when they see someone losing their ranch because of it."
Nethercott was a member of the group Ranch Rescue, which works to protect private property along the southern U.S. border. He was accused of pistol-whipping Edwin Alfredo Mancia Gonzales, 26, in March 2003 at a Hebbronville, Texas, ranch near the Mexico border.
A jury deadlocked on the assault charge but convicted him of being a felon in possession of a firearm.
Mancia and another immigrant traveling with him from El Salvador, Fatima del Socorro Leiva Medina, filed a civil lawsuit last year saying they were harmed while being held by Ranch Rescue members.
Named in the suit were Nethercott; Jack Foote, the founder of Ranch Rescue; and the owners of the Hebbronville ranch, Joe and Betty Sutton. The Suttons settled for $100,000. Nethercott and Foote did not defend themselves, and a Texas judge issued default judgments in April of $850,000 against Nethercott and $500,000 against Foote.
Nethercott transferred ownership of his 70-acre Douglas ranch to his sister. But the sister gave up ownership to settle the judgment when challenged by the immigrants' lawyers.
The transfer of the ranch outraged border-watch groups.
"If the federal government was doing its job, ranchers would not be living in fear," said Chris Simcox, president of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, a group that watches for illegal immigrant crossings and reports them to the U.S. Border Patrol.
Simcox said his group had a policy against touching immigrants and used video to document its patrols.
Messages left for Nethercott's family and his attorney were not returned Friday.
Dees said his clients planned to eventually sell the property, which Nethercott bought for $120,000, but might allow humanitarian border groups offering aid to immigrants to use it for now.
Mancia and Leiva declined through Dees to speak to the media.
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Mara Salvatrucha Gangs and U.S. Security
In a sweep known as Operation Community Shield, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agencies have arrested and deported about 500 foreign gang members in recent months, most of the deportees allegedly affiliated with the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gangs. The operation is a response to a nationwide rise in incidents of organized, often brutal, MS-13 violence in U.S. cities from Boston to Los Angeles -- and concern that MS-13's growing smuggling network for guns, drugs and people could constitute a U.S. security threat. On a broader scale, authorities fear that MS-13 is spreading instability across Central America.
Though its members can be found across the United States -- the U.S. Justice Department estimates there are 8,000 to 10,000 MS-13 members in 31 states -- the gang itself is decentralized, with members of various MS-13 "cliques" operating regionally via fraternal and communal ties.
U.S. law enforcement is concerned, however, that MS-13's evolution from decentralized cliques to a more formal command-and-control structure could hasten the shift from its focus on marginally profitable small-scale crime -- such as neighborhood drug dealing and armed robbery -- to high-profit criminal enterprises such as overseeing major drug-smuggling or arms-trafficking networks. Shifts of this nature traditionally lead to a rise in high-profile violence such as assassinations, kidnappings and large-scale gang warfare as competing gangs battle for control of the businesses.
To date, law enforcement efforts to infiltrate the MS-13 organization have met with little success, mainly because MS-13 members are strongly tied through personal connections and shared experiences -- reflected in the complex, highly symbolic tattoos that cover members' bodies. As with other criminal organizations with a substantial immigrant composition, infiltrating the gangs requires successful operations abroad, a process that is always time-consuming and rarely completely effective. MS-13 prides itself on its particularly brutal punishments meted out to police informants.
The U.S. government, then, is relying on deportations to combat MS-13, because many suspected MS-13 members are in the United States illegally -- having taken advantage of the United States' porous southern border. Deportations, however, can be effective only when applied in conjunction with efforts to improve border security and increase coordination between U.S. and Central American security and intelligence services. Otherwise, nothing prevents the deportee from re-entering the United States. Furthermore, securing the border will not guarantee the decline of MS-13 in the United States because many MS-13 members are U.S.-born.
Although it is true that many of MS-13's current members are from abroad, to say that the problem was born in Central America is inaccurate. In fact, Mara Salvatrucha traces its roots to 1980s Los Angeles, and the gang-dominated Pico Union neighborhood. Hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans -- totaling one-fifth of El Salvador's population -- sought refuge in the United States during their country's civil war of the 1980s. Of the one million Salvadorans estimated to be living in the United States today, some 90 percent arrived after 1979. Those who settled in Los Angeles often found themselves hustled, extorted and abused by the city's myriad ethnic groups and their related gangs.
Some responded to this abuse by forming gangs of their own -- most notably MS-13 and the 18th Street gang (Calle 18). MS-13 then spread from the United States back to El Salvador -- and to other countries in Central America.
The U.S. deportations are damaging Central American stability -- as understaffed, under-funded and ultimately ineffective security and intelligence services attempt to battle the gangs. For example, simultaneous prison riots broke out across Guatemala on Aug. 15, pitting MS-13 members against their rival 18th Street gang. During the fighting, police lost control of several prisons as MS-13 members -- some of whom were armed with assault rifles and grenades -- attacked their 18th Street enemies. Security forces later regained control of the prison, but not until after 35 people had died. The level of coordination and the type of weapons used by the prisoners illustrate MS-13's disturbing capability in Central America. In El Salvador, meanwhile, the government has instituted la mano dura (the strong-hand) policy to deal with the gangs, but has been unable to render MS-13 inert.
Central American governments, facing the influx of deportees, have asked for U.S. support in creating a regional task force to counter the gangs' influence and ability to operate. Although the United States has been reluctant to heed the request, something along those lines will be needed if the United States is to effectively combat an increasingly centralized criminal network.
Combined with these problems are concerns that links could be forming between MS-13 and Islamist militants, particularly al Qaeda. Although these concerns have largely been raised by Central American leaders who need increased U.S. funding for security, a report surfaced in September 2004 that suspected al Qaeda member Adnan G. El Shukrijumah was spotted in Honduras meeting with MS-13 leaders.
In December 2004, alleged MS-13 member Frankie Sanchez-Solorzano was arrested along with Bangladeshi Fakhrul Islam and 11 other people after they were caught trying to enter the United States near Brownsville, Texas. Cases such as this increase calls for tighter border restrictions with Mexico, but provide little support for allegations that al Qaeda, as some have speculated, is attempting to infiltrate the United States using MS-13 smuggling networks. Although too many of these allegations are based on rumor and hearsay, the border merits close vigilance. Trafficking networks, like all black-market activities, are viciously capitalistic -- meaning anyone, al Qaeda member or otherwise, could make use of the service.
It remains to be seen whether U.S. law enforcement can bring MS-13 under control before the gangs become a national security concern. Should history repeat itself, and MS-13 go the way of criminal enterprises such as La Cosa Nostra, the Hell's Angels or the Colombian cartels, then Mara Salvatrucha will become a household name in the not-too-distant future.
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08/22/2005
Terrorists may pose as homeless for surveillance, government says
By MARK SHERMAN
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON- Asking for increased vigilance in the wake of the London
bombings, the government is warning that terrorists may pose as vagrants to
conduct surveillance of buildings and mass transit stations to plot future
attacks.
"In light of the recent bombings in London, it is crucial that police, fire
and emergency medical personnel take notice of their surroundings, and be
aware of 'vagrants' who seem out of place or unfamiliar," said the message,
distributed via e-mail to some federal employees in Washington by the U.S.
Attorney's office.
It is based on a State Department report that was issued last week. The
State Department had no immediate comment Monday.
The warning is similar to one issued by the FBI before July 4, 2004 that
said terrorists may attempt surveillance disguised as homeless people, shoe
shiners, street vendors or street sweepers.
The e-mail stresses that there is no threat of an attack and that it is
intended to be "informative, not alarming."
Homeless people easily blend into urban landscapes, the message said.
"This is particularly true of our mass transit systems, where homeless
people tend to loiter unnoticed," the e-mail said.
It referred to a recent incident in Somerville, Mass., in which a police
officer became suspicious about someone dressed as a street person. The
officer questioned the man, discovered he had a passport from a "country of
interest" _ typically a Middle Eastern or South Asian nation _ and a
checkbook with a questionable address, the e-mail said. The investigation is
continuing, it said.
Somerville police did not immediate provide comment.
Three British citizens were indicted in the United States earlier this year
on charges they conducted surveillance of the New York Stock Exchange and
other East Coast financial institutions in 2000 and 2001.
Discovery of the alleged terrorist plan last year prompted the Homeland
Security Department to raise the terror alert for the targeted buildings,
located in New York, Washington and Newark, N.J. Security in those cities
also was tightened.
Homeland Security also raised the terror alert for mass transit following
the July 7 bombings in London. The alert was lowered on Aug. 12.
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This piece claims plans might be in the works to allow government VIPs to avoid airport security. If this indeed comes to pass I'd say a lot of loud squawking is in order.
Taking an ice pick to airline security
Paul Jacob (archive)
August 28, 2005
Ready for your flight? Got your ticket? Your government-issued photo ID? An ice pick?
Truth is stranger than fiction. The 9/11 hijackers are believed to have used box cutters to take over the airplanes and commit their evil ? a tool, a weapon, which at that time was actually approved for carrying onto airplanes. Today, the Transportation Security Administration is looking at new rules that would again allow passengers to carry on similar items: ice picks, razor blades, martial arts throwing stars, bows and arrows, and knives under five inches long . . . which would appear to include box cutters.
The same Transportation Security Administration (TSA) that seems to delight in taking away our tiny nail clippers ? to save us from doom at 30,000 feet ? now suggests it might be A-OK to bring an ice pick on board.
Don't get me wrong. I'm glad to see the TSA relax some of its ridiculous rules. Folks may soon be able to keep their shoes on while going through security, and the days of harassing travelers for using one-way tickets may finally be over. No complaint there. In fact, I applaud the agency for any attempt, even a feeble one, to pay attention to flyers as people, as citizens, as customers.
But as David Marks writes at Blogcritics.org, "How is it 'customer-friendly' to allow scissors, razor blades, small knives, ice picks, throwing stars and bows and arrows on flights? Is there a great need to cut things, shave, pick ice, practice martial arts or target practice on a moving flight?"
Apparently, the TSA wants passengers to be better armed than pilots. The agency fought the proposal to permit pilots to carry firearms and then consistently dragged its feet in creating a system to evaluate, process and approve pilots. TSA even mandated that pilots go through an invasive psychological exam to carry a gun.
It never made much sense that a pilot already trusted with the lives of hundreds of people on the plane and thousands more on the ground should face such laborious additional scrutiny to carry a gun. Especially considering the gun was there only as a last-ditch defense against a maniacal mass murderer threatening to take over the plane.
Maybe government isn't really supposed to make sense.
It is also par for the course that the egalitarian TSA is proposing that certain big-shot passengers ? such as members of Congress, airline pilots, Cabinet members, state governors, federal judges, high-ranking military officers and people with top-secret security clearances ? not be screened at all. It might be worth considering if everyone on this list could be trusted, but just read the list again from the beginning.
"Either you screen everybody," responded Douglas Laird, former head of security for Northwest Airlines, "or why screen anybody?"
TSA's mission is to make certain that planes aren't hijacked, flown into buildings or blown out of the sky. And give it some credit; no planes have been hijacked or blown up since September 11, 2001.
But even the TSA ? in making the argument for relaxing the list of prohibited carry-on items ? tacitly admits that their screening at airports doesn't have much impact. TSA gives the credit for preventing hijackings and other attacks to new reinforced cockpit doors, increased use of air marshals and the fact that passengers will no longer sit idly by while being hijacked. The change in the expected behavior of passengers is the biggest factor, and may by itself be enough to thwart future hijackings.
On the other hand, many doubts remain about air marshals and TSA's passenger screening at airports. The former inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security reported in 2002 that air marshals were found sleeping on the job, tested positive for alcohol or drugs while on duty, and even lost their weapons. Surely this doesn't apply to most air marshals and doesn't mean they aren't a good idea ? just that they aren't foolproof. Pun intended.
And who hasn't suspected that the elaborate and expensive screening at airports is much more about show ? to impress Nervous Nellies into a false sense of security ? than about serious security work. Numerous official and unofficial tests of airport screeners have illuminated holes big enough to drive a truck-bomb through. Undercover government agents were able to sneak explosives and weapons past security screeners at 15 airports during one set of tests in 2003.
In fact, TSA officials now acknowledge they are more concerned about bombs being smuggled aboard airliners than about passengers using a Swiss army knife or an ice pick to hijack a jet. They argue that looking for and confiscating cigarette lighters and nail clippers only hinders the search for more serious weapons, such as bombs.
It's hard to argue with this logic, but an ice pick? Throwing stars? Arrows?
As those of us who fly a great deal know, the TSA is a political bureaucracy that will never function like a dynamic group of 007s. It can never ensure us total safety from terrorists. Even real 007s couldn't guarantee that.
We can have more protective, more common-sense policies. All it may take is for the TSA to regard my fellow passengers with a little more solidarity, as something more than cash cows (or any kind of cattle) and certainly a whole lot more than terrorist suspects. Treat us with a little more respect, and we might even be relied upon. For, in this whole mess, it's my fellow passengers I trust most.
Paul Jacob is Senior Fellow at Americans for Limited Government, a Townhall.com member group. His daily Common Sense commentary appears on the Web, and on radio stations across America
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Geopolitical Diary: Monday, Sept. 12, 2005
Al Qaeda released a new videotape on Sunday. It was the second time an American -- Adam Yahiye Gadahn -- appears to have served as a spokesman for the group. The critical message in his speech was: "Yesterday, London and Madrid; tomorrow, Los Angeles and Melbourne."
Also interesting was the fact that this tape was delivered to ABC News in Pakistan. Both of the tapes showing Gadahn were delivered by that route, while tapes featuring more senior al Qaeda officials are released via a Muslim media outlet, like Al Jazeera. There are two reasons for this, we would assume. First, Gadahn's value is that he is American and can speak directly and without translation in the United States; filtering his statements through Al Jazeera detracts from that. Second, al Qaeda must assume that an American broadcasting network operates under a security umbrella that is linked into the CIA and FBI. Even though they work through intermediaries, the trail can lead back to important individuals. When senior al Qaeda officials release statements, handing them to an Islamic outlet adds a layer of security; however, Gadahn's statements seem not to warrant that. We can assume from this that he is a link only back to the periphery of al Qaeda and is therefore less authoritative -- tracing his contacts wouldn't lead anyone back to the center.
Gadahn's statement also is interesting in that the new benchmarks being cited are Madrid and London, not the Sept. 11 attacks. For what little of value can be attributed to the statement, it seems to indicate that al Qaeda's ambitions no longer soar to the strategic attacks of Sept. 11, but that the group is satisfied with fairly pedestrian -- albeit murderous -- attacks via explosives aimed at public ground transportation.
The mention of Los Angeles is simply the mention of another American city. The mention of Melbourne is the mention of an Australian city. Al Qaeda certainly would like to hit a city in either country. Australia has been the major American ally in line behind Britain, and al Qaeda would want to punish it. Both major Australian cities have the usual transportation systems, and both have substantial Muslim populations.
Our view is that this communication has little importance in itself. The tape tells us nothing about what al Qaeda wants to do and far less about what it can do. Al Qaeda clearly has needed to attack the United States in the four years since Sept. 11 and has failed to do so. They also would need to attack Australia. We can assume that they will try to do both. We can make nothing out of this statement.
We are still back where we have been for months. From a political standpoint, al Qaeda needs to strike. From a capabilities standpoint, it does not seem to have the ability to mount sustained attacks, certainly not of the Sept. 11 variety. U.S. President George W. Bush, its nemesis, is clearly in trouble, with his positive ratings falling below 40 percent. From a political point of view, al Qaeda would very much like him to be repudiated in the United States. After Hurricane Katrina, a solid strike in the United States might convince people who favor the war in Iraq that Bush is incapable of devising a strategy to win it. So striking the United States makes more sense than striking Australia.
The problem al Qaeda seems to have is that it isn't capable of doing what it wants to do. In other words, whatever the problems in Iraq, the United States has crippled its operational capabilities. Instead of striking strategically, al Qaeda is settling for making fairly meaningless threats -- threats which at this point actually serve to reduce its credibility. If it could attack, it would. We are well past the point at which an attack is essential. Al Qaeda needs to do it and, from its point of view, it should be moving heaven and earth to do it. But it just can't seem to do it on any broad scale any longer.
Things can change, but at the moment, al Qaeda seems broken. Distinguish this from whether al Qaeda has sympathy and support in the Muslim world and hatred against the United States. Emotions do not, by themselves, create a global paramilitary organization. The emotions may be there, along with will. But the expertise seems to be missing.
www.stratfor.com
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Doctor: Officials gave hospital staffers mops as people died
Friday, September 16, 2005; Posted: 1:19 p.m. EDT (17:19 GMT)
A doctor reported that sick people languished in the New Orleans airport while he mopped floors.
Image:
(CNN) -- As violence, death and misery gripped New Orleans and the surrounding parishes in the days after Hurricane Katrina, a leadership vacuum, bureaucratic red tape and a defensive culture paralyzed volunteers' attempts to help.
Doctors eager to help sick and injured evacuees were handed mops by federal officials who expressed concern about legal liability. Even as violence and looting slowed rescues, police from other states were turned back while officials squabbled over who should take charge of restoring the peace.
Warehouses in New Orleans burned while firefighters were diverted to Atlanta for Federal Emergency Management Agency training sessions on community relations and sexual harassment. Water trucks languished for days at FEMA's staging area because the drivers lacked the proper paperwork.
Consider the stories of these frustrated volunteers:
Dr. Bong Mui and his staff, evacuated with 300 patients after three hellish days at Chalmette Medical Center, arrived at the New Orleans airport, and were amazed to see hundreds of sick people. They offered to help. But, the doctor told CNN, FEMA officials said they were worried about legal liability. "They told us that, you know, you could help us by mopping the floor." And so they mopped, while people died around them. "I started crying," he recalled. "We felt like we could help, and were not allowed to do anything." (Watch the video of hundreds languishing sick at the airport -- 4:16)
Steve Simpson, sheriff of Loudoun County, Virginia, sent 22 deputies equipped with food and water to last seven days. Their 14-car caravan, including four all-terrain vehicles, was on the road just three hours when they were told to turn back. The reason, Simpson told CNN: A Louisiana state police official told them not to come. " I said, "What if we just show up?' He says, 'You probably won't get in.' " Simpson said he later learned a dispute over whether state or federal authorities would command the law enforcement effort was being ironed out that night. But no one ever got back to him with the all-clear.
FEMA halted tractor trailers hauling water to a supply staging area in Alexandria, Louisiana, The New York Times quoted William Vines, former mayor of Fort Smith, Arkansas, as saying. "FEMA would not let the trucks unload," he told the newspaper. "The drivers were stuck for several days on the side of the road" because, he said, they did not have a "tasker number." He added, "What in the world is a tasker number? I have no idea. It's just paperwork and it's ridiculous."
Firefighters who answered a nationwide call for help were sent to Atlanta for FEMA training sessions on community relations and sexual harassment. "On the news every night you hear 'How come everybody forgot us?' " Pennsylvania firefighter Joseph Manning told The Dallas Morning News. "We didn't forget. We're stuck in Atlanta drinking beer."
The government's response to Hurricane Katrina has been sharply criticized. Elected officials -- chiefly President Bush, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin -- have acknowledged flaws in the response.
Some take responsibility
"To the extent that the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility," Bush said earlier this week. On Thursday, in a nationally televised address from New Orleans, he proposed a large aid package for the city and other areas that were hit hard by Hurricane Katrina. In the speech, he said the lessons from Katrina call for a new approach to responding to disasters. (Full story)
"There were failures at every level of government -- state, federal and local," Blanco told Louisiana legislators Wednesday evening in Baton Rouge. "At the state level, we must take a careful look at what went wrong and make sure it never happens again," she said. "The buck stops here, and as your governor, I take full responsibility."
Nagin, once angry and embattled, was also conciliatory.
"I think now we are out of nuclear crisis mode, it seems as though myself, the governor and president have done some retrospection as far as what we could have done better, and ultimately we're all accountable at the level of local state and federal government," he told CNN. "And that's what leadership is all about. We should take responsibility and we should try and do better."
While Blanco did not elaborate on her mistakes, Nagin said he mistakenly assumed that if New Orleans could hold out for a day or two, help would surely come.
"I am not going to plan in the future for the cavalry to come in three days," he told CNN. "I'm going to buy high water vehicles, helicopters, whatever I can do to make sure that I am in total control ... of the total evacuation process."
Vice Admiral Thad Allen, of the U.S. Coast Guard, is now heading the federal government's recovery effort. On Wednesday, he encouraged state and local officials to bring their issues to him.
"Whether you're a person or an agency, whatever you're doing, if you have concerns and they're not stated where somebody can act on them, that's just going to fester," he said. "And I, as the principal federal official in this response, am encouraging any leader that wants to talk to me about real or perceived problems of what's going on out there to do that."
Where was Chertoff?
But the men in charge of the federal Department of Homeland Security and FEMA in the critical days immediately after the hurricane haven't shared the blame.
Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security secretary, has offered no explanation as to why he waited three days after the National Hurricane Center predicted a catastrophic hurricane to declare Katrina an incident of "national significance."
In a memo written the day after Katrina made landfall, Chertoff said the Department of Homeland Security will be part of the task force and will assist the [Bush] administration. But the National Response Plan, designed to guide disaster recovery and relief, dictates that the Homeland Security secretary leads the federal response. ( Watch video on Chertoff's delays -- 3:09)
Chertoff appointed Michael Brown, then director of FEMA, as the federal official in charge in the Gulf states. Brown was relieved of his post late last week and resigned from FEMA Monday after taking the brunt of the criticism over the response.
Ex-FEMA boss blames governor
Speaking to The New York Times, his first public comments since he was relieved, Brown laid the blame on Blanco and Nagin. He told the newspaper he frantically called Chertoff and the White House in the hours after Katrina hit, telling them Blanco and her staff were disorganized and the situation was "out of control."
"I am having a horrible time," Brown said he told his superiors. "I can't get a unified command established."
Brown told the Times that he had such difficulty dealing with Blanco that he communicated with her husband instead.
"I truly believed the White House was not at fault here," he told the Times.
On August 30, the same day Chertoff wrote his memo, Brown said he asked the White House to take over the response from FEMA and state officials.
A Senate panel launched the first formal inquiry into the response on Wednesday. But the Senate's Republican majority defeated a bid by Democrats to establish an independent commission to investigate the disaster response.
Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, the panel's chairwoman, said the response to Katrina was plagued by confusion, communication failures and widespread lack of coordination despite the billions of dollars spent to improve disaster response since the terror attacks.
'Sluggish' response
"At this point, we would have expected a sharp, crisp response to this terrible tragedy," Collins said. "Instead, we witnessed what appeared to be a sluggish initial response."
One of the issues the committee will examine is whether FEMA should stay under the Department of Homeland Security instead of operating as a separate agency as it had in the past.
Sen. George Voinovich, a Republican from Ohio, said the committee would "get into the bowels" of Homeland Security as its members investigate how the federal government, specifically FEMA, planned for and responded to the disaster.
Members of the former 9/11 commission blasted Congress and the Bush administration for inaction on some of its recommendations. Had they been in place, lives could have been saved, they said.
"If Congress does not act, people will die. I cannot put it more simply than that," said former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, referring to what could happen in the next major disaster or terrorist attack.
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Student Arrested After Pilot Uniform Found
The Associated Press
Friday, September 16, 2005; 3:22 PM
MEMPHIS, Tenn. -- A university student from Egypt was ordered held without bond after prosecutors said they found a pilot's uniform, chart of Memphis International Airport and a DVD titled "How an Airline Captain Should Look and Act" in his apartment.
The FBI is investigating whether Mahmoud Maawad, 29, had any connection to terrorists. He is awaiting trial on charges of wire fraud and fraudulent use of a Social Security number.
Maawad, who is in the United States illegally, told the judge during a hearing Thursday that he is studying science and economics at the University of Memphis.
"My school is everything. I stay in this country for seven years; I stay for the school," he said.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Parker said Thursday that the airport-related items were found during a Sept. 9 search.
"The specific facts and circumstances are scary," Parker said.
U.S. Magistrate Judge S. Thomas Anderson ruled that Maawad be held without bond.
"It is hard for the court to understand why he has a large concentration of those (aviation) items, and nothing else to indicate Mr. Maawad plans to stay in the community," Anderson said.
Maawad had ordered $3,000 in aviation materials, including DVDs titled "Ups and Downs of Takeoffs and Landings," "Airplane Talk," "Mental Math for Pilots" and "Mastering GPS Flying," FBI agent Thad Gulczynski testified.
The company reported Maawad to authorities when he didn't pay for $2,500 of merchandise it had delivered, Gulczynski said.
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Pentagon Nixes 9/11 Hearing Testimony
Sep 21 9:00 AM US/Eastern
By KIMBERLY HEFLING
Associated Press Writer
The Department of Defense forbade a military intelligence officer to testify Wednesday about the work of a secret military unit that identified four 9/11 hijackers more than a year before the Sept. 11 terrorists attacks, according to the man's attorney.
In written testimony prepared for the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, attorney Mark Zaid, who represents Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, said the Pentagon also refused to permit testimony there by a defense contractor that he also represents.
The Judiciary Committee was scheduled to hear testimony about the work of a classified unit code named "Able Danger."
In his prepared remarks, Zaid was ready to say on behalf of Shaffer and contractor John Smith that Able Danger, using data mining techniques, identified four of the terrorists who struck on Sept. 11, 2001 _ including mastermind Mohamed Atta.
"At least one chart, and possibly more, featured a photograph of Mohamed Atta," Zaid said in his prepared remarks.
Maj. Paul Swiergosz, a Defense Department spokesman, said Wednesday that open testimony would not be appropriate.
"We have expressed our security concerns and believe it is simply not possible to discuss Able Danger in any great detail in any public forum," he said.
Swiergosz said no individuals were singled out not to testify.
"There's nothing more to say than that," Swiergosz said. "It's not possible to discuss the Able Danger program because there are security concerns."
On three occasions, Able Danger personnel attempted to provide the FBI with information, but Department of Defense attorneys stopped them because of legal concerns about military-run investigations on U.S. soil, Zaid said in his prepared remarks, encouraging the panel to locate a legal memorandum that he said Defense Department attorneys used to justify stopping the meetings.
Zaid also charged that records associated with the unit were destroyed during 2000 and March 2001, and copies were destroyed in spring 2004.
Rep. Curt Weldon. R-Pa., who was the first to come forward to assert that Able Danger had identified Atta and three others as being members of an al-Qaida cell, was also scheduled to testify.
If Weldon is correct, the intelligence would change the timeline for when government officials first became aware of Atta's links to the terrorist network al-Qaida.
Former members of the Sept. 11 commission have dismissed the "Able Danger" assertions.
Pentagon officials had acknowledged earlier this month that they had found three people who recall an intelligence chart identifying Atta as a terrorist prior to the Sept. 11 attacks.
In addition to Shaffer, another military officer, Navy Capt. Scott Phillpott, has come forward to support Weldon's claims. He was not on Wednesday's witness list.
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U.S. Terrorism Threats: Overconfidence in California?
Hamid Hayat, a California man who has been held on charges of lying to federal authorities about attending a terrorist training camp in Pakistan, was accused in federal court in Sacramento on Sept. 22 of providing material support to terrorists. The indictment alleges that Hayat "intended, upon receipt of orders from other individuals, to wage jihad (holy war) in the United States."
In June, federal authorities arrested Hayat, his father and three others from the same mosque in Lodi, Calif., near Sacramento -- later issuing deportation orders for the non-U.S. citizens among them. In announcing the latest Hayat indictment, U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott said authorities do not know what kind of plot was being hatched at the mosque, but that it had been stopped.
Scott's remarks could be premature.
Terrorist networks often are composed of multiple cells, one or more of them capable of operating independently and carrying out attacks after another has been broken up. For security reasons, terrorist cells often have no knowledge of the activities or status of one another. The December 2004 attack against the U.S. Consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, is a case in point. Saudi counterterrorism forces exposed one of the two cells the previous month, but the attack proceeded -- and five consulate employees died, none of them U.S. nationals. Four members of the Saudi military and three of the five attackers also died in the attack.
Attacks also have occurred after authorities believed they had thwarted the entire plot. In 1997, U.S. counterterrorism authorities suspected that an attack was being planned against the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. The investigation led to Wadih el Hage, who authorities say had been Osama bin Laden's close confidant and personal secretary. U.S. and Kenyan authorities searched el Hage's home but the suspect managed to flee Kenya in September 1997, leading U.S. officials to believe they had thwarted the attack. On Aug. 7, 1998, the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, were simultaneously attacked with massive truck bombs, killing more than 220 people.
The exposure of one cell or individual involved in a terrorist plot does not mean that other attacks are not being planned in the same area. In June 1993 -- four months after the World Trade Center bombing -- U.S. authorities raided a warehouse in Queens, N.Y., based on a tip from informants. The warehouse allegedly was being used by followers of blind Egyptian cleric Omar Abdel-Rahman to mix explosives to use in attacks against targets in New York, including the FBI building and U.N. headquarters. Abdel-Rahman, who was arrested in 1993 along with nine of his followers, was convicted in October 1995 of "seditious conspiracy." He is serving a life sentence.
Although the investigation into Hayat's activities resulted in multiple arrests and deportations, it is possible that only one part of a larger plot has been exposed. It also is possible that some other aspect of human or tactical intelligence has been overlooked, leaving other cells uninvestigated. After the Lodi arrests, any other cell in the area would have gone underground for a time to keep from being exposed. If that is the case, Scott could be overconfident.
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From another forum. Anyone have anything on this?
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Explosion Kills One at University of Oklahoma
Sunday, October 02, 2005
NORMAN, Okla. ? One person was killed in an explosion near a packed football stadium at the University of Oklahoma on Saturday night in what authorities said appeared to be a suicide.
The blast, in a traffic circle about 100 yards from Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, could be heard by some in the crowd of 84,000, but university President David Boren said no one inside the stadium was ever in danger.
"We are apparently dealing with an individual suicide, which is under full investigation," Boren said in a statement. There was no information about the person who was killed, and no reports of any other injuries.
A police bomb squad detonated explosives found at the site of the blast. The area near the stadium was searched by bomb-sniffing dogs.
Jaclyn Hull, an OU freshman who left the game shortly before the explosion, said she saw "a little bit of smoke, about as much as you would see coming up from a grill."
Officers cordoned off an area west of the stadium after the explosion and nobody was allowed out of the stadium for about a half-hour after the blast, which occurred shortly before 8 p.m., about halftime of the Sooners' game against Kansas State. The game continued.
WT Perspective: I'll bet we don't hear another word about this. We should, but we won't.
Admitting it was, if it was, would not be good for business or politics. I wonder. Was this a terrorist event gone wrong?
They say it was a suicide. I investigated many suicides in my time in service. I never saw on done with explosives.
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http://www.homelandsecurityus.com/
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INTELL PROVIDED BY MEMBERS
? Islamic Bomb-Making documents, Other Jihad Materials Reportedly Removed from Suspect's Park View Apartment
? Suspect's Apartment located Near the Islamic Society of Norman, OK
Law enforcement sources close to the Northeast Intelligence Network have confirmed that search and seizure warrants were served today upon the residence of the ?suicide bomber, 21-year-old Joel Henry Hinrichs III of Colorado Springs, CO, who was a resident of the Park View Apartments on campus.
Speaking strictly ?off the record,? the officials stated that they recovered ?a significant amount? of Islamic ?Jihad? type literature, some possibly written in Arabic, along with the suspect?s computer. Some of the documentation included material on how to construct bomb-making vests.
Further reports by the same officials indicated that the bomb was detonated prematurely when the suspect was either arming a bomb vest or backpack, which contained TATP, a homemade explosive.
TATP (triacetone triperoxide) is a very potent but relatively easily manufactured explosive compound that was used in the July London bombings. It is important to note that TATP has been cited in numerous Jihad bomb-making manuals.
The same officials, requiring anonymity as the investigation is ongoing, continued to confirm that ?other un-detonated explosive devices were found in the area cordoned off by police and federal officials.? Those devices WERE NOT DETONATED, but carefully confiscated for further forensic testing. Initially, information provided to the Northeast Intelligence Network suggested that that the so-called ?suicide-bomber? was attempting to attach bombs to the buses parked in the area when one of the bombs detonated prematurely. The investigation has expanded into the possibility that others might have been involved.
WT Editorial -
Suspicions confirmed? Lots of Jihadi connections in OK. Another post will contain more material. I will venture a theory. This American Hadji was going to go inside the stadium and blow himself up killing lots of americans. When they tried to evacuate, more deaths.
Now, the authorities can either say this was a terrorist event or that it was not. If they say it was not, everyone sheds a tear for the dead guy and discussions on how the sad tragedy of a suicide could have been averted. If they state it was a terror attack gone wrong, what would the reaction accross the country be???
I think we know WHY they are being quiet about this. The same thing happened with the Beltway Sniper case as well as with the Egyptian Shooter at LAX. If any WTers are privy to discussions held at the high levels of police admin it would be interesting to hear the logic behind their thinking.
===========
MANY PATHS SEEM TO INTERSECT IN NORMAN, OKLAHOMA
? In early July 2000, Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi visited the Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma.
? On or about 29 September, 2000, Zacharias MOUSSAOUI contacted Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma using an e-mail account he set up on September 6 with an internet service provider in Malaysia.
? On or about 26 February 2001, Zacharias MOUSSAOUI opened a bank account in Norman, Oklahoma where he deposited approximately $32,000 in cash.
? Between 26 February 2001 and 29 May 2001, MOUSSAOUI attended the Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma, ending his classes early.
? And more recently...26 September 2005: A University of Oklahoma student charged with bringing an explosive device to an airport pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge in federal court in Oklahoma City.
Charles Alfred Dreyling Jr. of Norman, Oklahoma faces up to a year in prison and a $100,000 fine at a future sentencing hearing. Dreyling, 24, was arrested in August at the Will Rogers World Airport after security personnel noticed a suspicious object in his carryon bag as he was leaving for a family vacation with his parents.
He later told FBI agents the device -- a modified carbon dioxide cartridge filled with gunpowder -- was "basically a pipe bomb," according to court papers that he had forgotten was in his bag. (Former Oklahoma City, OK Mayor Kirk Humphreys-- who was also DREYLING'S landlord-- spoke on behalf of DREYLING at his bail hearing).
? On a bus trip to the University of Oklahoma, Zacharias MOUSSAOUI was on the same bus as Nicholas BERG, the American man who was beheaded in Iraq in 2004 by Islamic terrorists. At some point on that trip, MOUSSAOUI asked BERG if he could use BERG'S laptop computer. Government sources said BERG gave the MOUSSAOUI his computer password...
? September 11 hijacker Ziad Jarrah?s ticket (United Airlines Flight 93) was purchased from a computer terminal at Oklahoma University.
? Norman, OK is also cited on a number of occasions in the best-selling book, the most comprehensive investigative work by Jayna Davis titled The Third Terrorist, about the truck bomb blast that killed 171 souls and destroyed the Murrah Federal Building on 19 April 1995
__________________
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Senate Will Probe Saudi Distribution Of Hate Materials
BY MEGHAN CLYNE - Staff Reporter of the Sun
October 5, 2005
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/20998
WASHINGTON - The American government is demanding that Saudi Arabia account for its distribution of hate material to American mosques, as the State Department pressed Saudi officials for answers last week and as the Senate later this month plans to investigate the propagation of radical Wahhabism on American shores.
The flurry of activity comes months after a report from the Center for Religious Freedom discovered that dozens of mosques in major cities across the country, including New York, Washington, and Los Angeles, were distributing documents, bearing the seal of the government of Saudi Arabia, that incite Muslims to acts of violence and promote hatred of Jews and Christians.
A Washington-based group that is part of the human rights organization Freedom House, the Center for Religious Freedom also found during its yearlong study that the Saudi-produced materials describe democracy and America as un-Islamic. They instruct recent Muslim immigrants to consider Americans as enemies and the materials urge new arrivals to use their time here as preparation for jihad. The documents also promote the version of Islam officially embraced by Saudi government and several of the September 11, 2001, hijackers, Wahhabism, as the only authentic Islam.
In response to the Freedom House report and as part of the Saudi Arabia Accountability Act of 2005 sponsored by Senator Specter, a Republican of Pennsylvania, the Judiciary Committee - of which Senator Specter is chairman - will be holding hearings into the hate materials on October 25, a spokesman for the senator, William Reynolds, said yesterday.
The Accountability Act, introduced in June, says its purpose is "to halt Saudi support for institutions that fund, train, incite, encourage, or in any other way aid and abet terrorism, and to secure fully Saudi cooperation in the investigation of terrorist incidents." The legislation is highly critical of the House of Saud for its support of terrorist activity and cites the January Freedom House report as evidence of the kingdom's complicity in the spread of radical Islamist ideology. As part of the
Accountability Act, Senator Specter has in the past held Judiciary Committee hearings into Saudi financing of terrorism and Saudi Arabia's role in injecting ideology into textbooks for Palestinian Arab schoolchildren.
Many of the details of the Judiciary Committee hearing later this month, Mr. Reynolds said, are still being arranged, including a final witness list. In the meantime, the committee expects testimony from the State Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Freedom House, and terrorism experts. The committee will press to determine whether the Saudi government has taken steps to stop the distribution of the materials, and will cull from witnesses recommendations to prevent their future dissemination, Mr. Reynolds said.
Also demanding answers about the hate materials is the State Department's undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, Karen Hughes. During a high-profile trip to the Middle East last week, Ms. Hughes said American representatives had addressed the propagation of Saudi hate material in America during private meetings with government officials.
In a State Department briefing held en route to Ankara, Turkey, from Saudi Arabia last Tuesday, Ms. Hughes was asked why she had raised the issue that day during a public meeting with Saudi journalists, becoming the first American official to do so publicly. "We had been raising the issue privately," Ms. Hughes said, "and as part of raising difficult issues that we need to discuss, I felt it was appropriate." The undersecretary did not elaborate on the results of the private meetings, but the degree to which Saudi Arabia is making efforts to stop the propaganda will be a subject of the Senate hearings, Mr. Reynolds said.
Requests for comment from the Embassy of Saudi Arabia yesterday were not returned.
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http://www.danielpipes.org/article/3005
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This is a follow up to an incident that drew several posts here. If you like the thought of various federal agencies with their collective heads shoved securely in the sand, then this piece will provide comfort.
October 26, 2005, 8:33 a.m.
Could It Happen Again?
Terrorists might not have given up on planes.
By Anne Morse
Journalist Annie Jacobsen gained a certain degree of fame last year as the woman who wrote about the strange and frightening behavior of a group of Syrian ?musicians? aboard a Northwest Airlines flight. She has now written a riveting book, Terror in the Skies: Why 9-11 Could Happen Again about what happened that day and in the months that followed. Jacobsen put her investigative skills to work, and discovered that the harrowing events that took place on her flight were far from an isolated occurrence. She ends her book with a warning: If our security system does not improve, another 9/11 is almost inevitable.
The events of Flight 327, on June 29, 2004, became notorious after Jacobsen described them on WomensWallStreet.com. Jacobsen, her husband, and their four-year-old son boarded Flight 327 in Detroit, the last leg of their flight home to Los Angeles after a family vacation in Connecticut. Settling into their seats, the Jacobsens noticed 14 Middle Eastern men board the plane. Shortly after takeoff, she writes, ?The unusual activity began.? One of the men got up and entered the restroom at the front of the coach section, taking with him a large McDonald?s bag. Leaving the restroom, he passed the bag to another man and gave him a thumbs-up sign. For the next hour, the men used the restroom consecutively. They congregated in groups at the rear of the plane. One of them stood in first class a foot from the cockpit door. Two were standing mid-cabin, and two more were standing in the galley, keeping an eye on the flight attendant. Others spent the flight patrolling the aisles, scrutinizing increasingly nervous passengers.
Unable to stand it any longer, Jacobsen?s husband got up and spoke with a flight attendant, who told him the captain was concerned about what was going on, and that there were people on board ?higher up than you and me watching? ? an apparent reference to federal air marshals. But it got worse: As the plane prepared to land, seven of the men suddenly stood up in unison and walked to the front and back lavatories of the coach-class cabin. One by one, they entered the lavatories, each spending about four minutes inside. Two men stood against the emergency-exit door; another stood blocking the aisle. At the back of the plane, two more men stood next to the bathroom, blocking the aisle. They ignored repeated orders from a flight attendant to sit down. ?The last man came out of the bathroom, and as he passed [one of the other Syrians] he ran his forefinger across his neck and mouthed the word ?No,?? Jacobsen writes.
As they deplaned, the Jacobsens saw two air marshals flash their badges and pull over several of the men. She later learned that representatives of the FBI, the LAPD, the Federal Air Marshals Service (FAMS) and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) met the plane. But, contrary to protocol, there was nobody from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the post-9/11 law-enforcement arm of what was once the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which oversees the air marshals. Nor was there anyone to take statements from passengers who?d witnessed the events. The Jacobsens told airport security what they had seen, and eventually told their story to a FAMS supervisor, who directed them to write down their statements and swear to their veracity. It quickly became clear that key elements of the story they (and a flight attendant) told ? particularly regarding what the men had done with the McDonald?s bag ? conflicted with accounts offered by the Syrians.
The next day Jacobsen was surprised to find no mention of the incident in the newspapers, or of any arrests at LAX. She began doing some online digging ? and what she found chilled her. Jason Burke, a correspondent for the London Observer, had written a story a few months earlier headlined ?Terrorist Bid to Build Bombs in Mid-Flight: Intelligence Reveals Dry Runs of New Threat to Blow Up Airlines.? Burke described ?dry runs? on European flights by terrorists attempting to carry components of explosive devices onto passenger jets hidden in everyday items like cameras and medicine bottles, and assemble them in mid-flight ? in restrooms. Burke noted that the United States was aware of these dry runs and that recent British Airways flights from London to Washington had been canceled over fears of such attacks. The French also knew of these attempts after discovering 100 grams of the explosive pentrite hidden in an armrest on a jet arriving in France from Morocco. (In August 2004, barely a month after the Jacobsens? flight, two civilian aircraft in Russia exploded, killing all 90 passengers and crew. The cause of the explosions? Bombs that had been placed in the planes? bathrooms by women with links to Chechen terrorists.)
When Jacobsen decided to write about her experience aboard Flight 327, she was contacted by Dave Adams, the head of public affairs at FAMS. Adams insisted that the Middle Eastern men on her flight were ?just musicians? from Syria. They?d been questioned by FAMS, the FBI, and the TSA. Their story checked out, Adams said, and none of their names appeared on the FBI?s ?no fly? list. Given the evidence that terrorists had been trying to assemble bombs in airliner restrooms, why, Jacobsen asked, had air marshals done nothing about the Syrians? bizarre behavior ? much of it involving restrooms? ?Our . . . agents have to have an event to arrest somebody,? Adams explained.
Jacobsen didn?t buy Adams?s ?they were just musicians? story, and her gripping account of what happened on Flight 327 ? ?Terror in the Skies, Again?? ? was posted on July 12, 2004, on WomensWallStreet. It exploded through the blogosphere, then the mainstream media, spawning intense debate. To some, Jacobsen was a courageous journalist exposing deadly flaws in America?s security system; to others, she was a racist, paranoid mommy with an overactive imagination. Jacobsen?s persistence in pursuing the story angered higher-ups in FAMS, and led to her testimony to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.
Astonishingly, Jacobsen writes, many of the federal agents who investigated the events of Flight 327 continued to insist that nothing unusual happened. In a sense, this was correct: These dry runs, or probes, apparently happen all the time. In the weeks after she posted her story, Jacobsen received more than 5,000 e-mails ? including 250 from commercial pilots, flight attendants, and other airport employees who are forbidden by their employers to talk to the press about similar ?incidents.? Gary Boettcher, president of the Coalition of Airline Pilots Associations, told Jacobsen that she?d likely witnessed a ?dry run,? and that he?d had many similar experiences himself: ?The terrorists are probing us all the time.? Mark Bogosian, an American Airlines pilot, said incidents like the one she described were a ?dirty little secret? that airline crew members had known about for some time. Air marshals sent e-mails congratulating Jacobsen for bringing to light ?something that had been going on since shortly after 9/11 and was being suppressed.? Many airline employees expressed outrage over security procedures that are lax, politically correct, and likely to lead to another 9/11.
RECKLESS ENDANGERMENT
Much blame for these procedures can be assigned to two entities: the Transportation Department and the ACLU. Incredibly, the Transportation Department forbids searches of more than two male Arabs per flight; to search more would be ?discriminatory.? This rule is strictly enforced by Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, who, just ten days after Arab hijackers used jets to murder 3,000 Americans, reminded all U.S. airlines that it was illegal to discriminate against passengers based on their race, color, national or ethnic origin, or religion. To make sure they got the message, Mineta subsequently directed his department to file discrimination complaints against Continental, United Airlines, and American Airlines. (United and American settled their cases for $1.5 million each; Continental, for $500,000.)
In June 2002, the ACLU got into the act, joining forces with the Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee to launch a number of lawsuits over cases of men being removed from jets. The ACLU has also filed a class-action lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, claming, among other things, that the ?no-fly list? violates passengers? right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. The airlines are now working hard to avoid discriminating against anyone else ? apparently by allowing unlimited numbers of Middle Eastern men carrying expired visas and mysterious packages to board jets and engage in conduct that terrifies the passengers and crew. ?The airlines? fear of being accused of racial profiling could very well lead us to stand around and wonder, ?How did we let 9/11 happen again??? Jacobsen writes.
As Jacobsen began appearing on television, FAMS kicked into high gear, repeatedly denying that anything untoward had occurred on Flight 327 and that it had no ?specific intelligence information? that terrorists were conducting dry runs, even as more and more journalists broke stories about them. FAMS spokesman Dave Adams insisted that all 14 of the Syrians had been thoroughly investigated and that they were in the U.S. legally. FAMS employees had followed the Syrians to the casino, he claimed, and then trailed them to their hotel.
The reality, as Jacobsen documents, was that only two of the men were briefly investigated, 13 were traveling on expired visas (the 14th was an American citizen), and nobody had any idea where the ?musicians? went after leaving the airport.
Much of the information FAMS gave out about Flight 327 was contradictory, and as Jacobsen continued to write and speak out, frustrated FAMS and FBI spokesmen tried to discredit her, painting the Princeton-educated journalist as a hysterical mother who had become upset at the sight of Middle Easterners on her plane. ?That the FBI and FAMS wanted the story to disappear was obvious. And I knew why,? Jacobsen writes. ?They made major errors in their handling of Flight 372. The more attention it received, the more would be revealed about how they had bungled the operation.?
Even as they attacked her veracity, seven other passengers from Flight 327 came forward to confirm Jacobsen?s account. One was so frightened by what she witnessed that she no longer travels by air. Others said they were convinced they were about to die. These passengers contacted Homeland Security, the FBI, and FAMS, telling stories similar to Jacobsen?s. Nevertheless, Dave Adams continued to insist that Jacobsen and her husband were the only passengers to complain.
?That so many passengers were terrified underscores how outrageous it was that the government had simply let the fourteen Syrians go based only on their claim that they were a traveling band of musicians with a gig to get to,? Jacobsen writes. (Months later, Jacobsen says, Adams admitted that he?d lied to her about the Syrians? being followed to the casino and to their hotel.)
Thanks to Jacobsen?s reporting ? she wrote 13 additional articles about Flight 327 ? the House Judiciary Committee opened an investigation into the matter, putting the actions of the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, and other federal agencies under congressional scrutiny. Even then, Jacobsen says, FAMS officials continued to lie about her, about what took place on Flight 327, and about how they?d dealt with the Syrians once the plane landed. They also refused to allow the Judiciary Committee to question the air marshals from Flight 327.
Jacobsen continues to receive e-mails from airline employees relating apparent terrorist probes: Middle Eastern men who arrive moments before boarding, without luggage, and pay cash for one-way flights on which they take photographs and pass objects to one another. She writes of the all but useless ?no fly? list that allows suspected terrorists to board while keeping babies and U.S. senators off; of law-enforcement officials not bothering to show up to interview badly behaving passengers despite requests from pilots to do so. In July 2004, a flight attendant e-mailed Jacobsen, telling her that a partially made bomb had been found in a flight-attendant jump seat on an Airbus 330S ? discovered because flight attendants heard ticking. And on April 8, 2005, Department of Homeland Security officials discovered that two passengers aboard KLM Flight 685, traveling from Amsterdam to Mexico City, were Saudis who had attended the same flight school as 9/11 hijacker Hani Hanjour. ?Will we ever know how often these incidents occur? Twice a year? Once a month? Every day?? Jacobsen asks.
More to the point: What can we do to stop them? What it will take, Jacobsen says, is a strong leader in the Department of Homeland Security ? one who will ruthlessly purge the agency of incompetence and out-of-date policies (such as continuing to train flight crews to cooperate with hijackers). The National Intelligence Reform Act, known as the Intel Bill, should also help: It created a new Cabinet-level position, the Director of National Intelligence ? someone who will oversee the 15 federal intelligence agencies and presumably teach them the need to share crucial information about terror suspects. Furthermore, the Intel Bill will make it more difficult for airlines ? ever mindful of those empty jets in the weeks after 9/11 ? to hide suspicious incidents from the public. They must now report them directly to the TSA Operations Center as they happen, preventing airlines from making information from these incidents disappear ? and pretending people like Annie Jacobsen are crazy.
Jacobsen also recommends that Americans take a leaf from the Israeli intelligence book: The Israelis have not lost a commercial plane to hijackers in 35 years because they engage, not in racial profiling, but in passenger profiling.
Terror in the Skies is based on Jacobsen?s 14 WomensWallStreet columns but also contains much new material mined from confidential government reports and correspondence and from interviews with dozens of pilots, flight attendants, air marshals, and FBI agents. It is a sobering and necessary book ? one that ought to be read by anyone planning to fly the increasingly unfriendly skies.
? Anne Morse is a senior writer at the the Wilberforce Forum, a division of the Prison Fellowship. Two of her relatives are still missing in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/morse200510260833.asp
-
This is a follow up to an incident that drew several posts here. If you like the thought of various federal agencies with their collective heads shoved securely in the sand, then this piece will provide comfort.
October 26, 2005, 8:33 a.m.
Could It Happen Again?
Terrorists might not have given up on planes.
By Anne Morse
Journalist Annie Jacobsen gained a certain degree of fame last year as the woman who wrote about the strange and frightening behavior of a group of Syrian ?musicians? aboard a Northwest Airlines flight. She has now written a riveting book, Terror in the Skies: Why 9-11 Could Happen Again about what happened that day and in the months that followed. Jacobsen put her investigative skills to work, and discovered that the harrowing events that took place on her flight were far from an isolated occurrence. She ends her book with a warning: If our security system does not improve, another 9/11 is almost inevitable.
The events of Flight 327, on June 29, 2004, became notorious after Jacobsen described them on WomensWallStreet.com. Jacobsen, her husband, and their four-year-old son boarded Flight 327 in Detroit, the last leg of their flight home to Los Angeles after a family vacation in Connecticut. Settling into their seats, the Jacobsens noticed 14 Middle Eastern men board the plane. Shortly after takeoff, she writes, ?The unusual activity began.? One of the men got up and entered the restroom at the front of the coach section, taking with him a large McDonald?s bag. Leaving the restroom, he passed the bag to another man and gave him a thumbs-up sign. For the next hour, the men used the restroom consecutively. They congregated in groups at the rear of the plane. One of them stood in first class a foot from the cockpit door. Two were standing mid-cabin, and two more were standing in the galley, keeping an eye on the flight attendant. Others spent the flight patrolling the aisles, scrutinizing increasingly nervous passengers.
Unable to stand it any longer, Jacobsen?s husband got up and spoke with a flight attendant, who told him the captain was concerned about what was going on, and that there were people on board ?higher up than you and me watching? ? an apparent reference to federal air marshals. But it got worse: As the plane prepared to land, seven of the men suddenly stood up in unison and walked to the front and back lavatories of the coach-class cabin. One by one, they entered the lavatories, each spending about four minutes inside. Two men stood against the emergency-exit door; another stood blocking the aisle. At the back of the plane, two more men stood next to the bathroom, blocking the aisle. They ignored repeated orders from a flight attendant to sit down. ?The last man came out of the bathroom, and as he passed [one of the other Syrians] he ran his forefinger across his neck and mouthed the word ?No,?? Jacobsen writes.
As they deplaned, the Jacobsens saw two air marshals flash their badges and pull over several of the men. She later learned that representatives of the FBI, the LAPD, the Federal Air Marshals Service (FAMS) and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) met the plane. But, contrary to protocol, there was nobody from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the post-9/11 law-enforcement arm of what was once the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which oversees the air marshals. Nor was there anyone to take statements from passengers who?d witnessed the events. The Jacobsens told airport security what they had seen, and eventually told their story to a FAMS supervisor, who directed them to write down their statements and swear to their veracity. It quickly became clear that key elements of the story they (and a flight attendant) told ? particularly regarding what the men had done with the McDonald?s bag ? conflicted with accounts offered by the Syrians.
The next day Jacobsen was surprised to find no mention of the incident in the newspapers, or of any arrests at LAX. She began doing some online digging ? and what she found chilled her. Jason Burke, a correspondent for the London Observer, had written a story a few months earlier headlined ?Terrorist Bid to Build Bombs in Mid-Flight: Intelligence Reveals Dry Runs of New Threat to Blow Up Airlines.? Burke described ?dry runs? on European flights by terrorists attempting to carry components of explosive devices onto passenger jets hidden in everyday items like cameras and medicine bottles, and assemble them in mid-flight ? in restrooms. Burke noted that the United States was aware of these dry runs and that recent British Airways flights from London to Washington had been canceled over fears of such attacks. The French also knew of these attempts after discovering 100 grams of the explosive pentrite hidden in an armrest on a jet arriving in France from Morocco. (In August 2004, barely a month after the Jacobsens? flight, two civilian aircraft in Russia exploded, killing all 90 passengers and crew. The cause of the explosions? Bombs that had been placed in the planes? bathrooms by women with links to Chechen terrorists.)
When Jacobsen decided to write about her experience aboard Flight 327, she was contacted by Dave Adams, the head of public affairs at FAMS. Adams insisted that the Middle Eastern men on her flight were ?just musicians? from Syria. They?d been questioned by FAMS, the FBI, and the TSA. Their story checked out, Adams said, and none of their names appeared on the FBI?s ?no fly? list. Given the evidence that terrorists had been trying to assemble bombs in airliner restrooms, why, Jacobsen asked, had air marshals done nothing about the Syrians? bizarre behavior ? much of it involving restrooms? ?Our . . . agents have to have an event to arrest somebody,? Adams explained.
Jacobsen didn?t buy Adams?s ?they were just musicians? story, and her gripping account of what happened on Flight 327 ? ?Terror in the Skies, Again?? ? was posted on July 12, 2004, on WomensWallStreet. It exploded through the blogosphere, then the mainstream media, spawning intense debate. To some, Jacobsen was a courageous journalist exposing deadly flaws in America?s security system; to others, she was a racist, paranoid mommy with an overactive imagination. Jacobsen?s persistence in pursuing the story angered higher-ups in FAMS, and led to her testimony to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.
Astonishingly, Jacobsen writes, many of the federal agents who investigated the events of Flight 327 continued to insist that nothing unusual happened. In a sense, this was correct: These dry runs, or probes, apparently happen all the time. In the weeks after she posted her story, Jacobsen received more than 5,000 e-mails ? including 250 from commercial pilots, flight attendants, and other airport employees who are forbidden by their employers to talk to the press about similar ?incidents.? Gary Boettcher, president of the Coalition of Airline Pilots Associations, told Jacobsen that she?d likely witnessed a ?dry run,? and that he?d had many similar experiences himself: ?The terrorists are probing us all the time.? Mark Bogosian, an American Airlines pilot, said incidents like the one she described were a ?dirty little secret? that airline crew members had known about for some time. Air marshals sent e-mails congratulating Jacobsen for bringing to light ?something that had been going on since shortly after 9/11 and was being suppressed.? Many airline employees expressed outrage over security procedures that are lax, politically correct, and likely to lead to another 9/11.
RECKLESS ENDANGERMENT
Much blame for these procedures can be assigned to two entities: the Transportation Department and the ACLU. Incredibly, the Transportation Department forbids searches of more than two male Arabs per flight; to search more would be ?discriminatory.? This rule is strictly enforced by Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, who, just ten days after Arab hijackers used jets to murder 3,000 Americans, reminded all U.S. airlines that it was illegal to discriminate against passengers based on their race, color, national or ethnic origin, or religion. To make sure they got the message, Mineta subsequently directed his department to file discrimination complaints against Continental, United Airlines, and American Airlines. (United and American settled their cases for $1.5 million each; Continental, for $500,000.)
In June 2002, the ACLU got into the act, joining forces with the Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee to launch a number of lawsuits over cases of men being removed from jets. The ACLU has also filed a class-action lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, claming, among other things, that the ?no-fly list? violates passengers? right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. The airlines are now working hard to avoid discriminating against anyone else ? apparently by allowing unlimited numbers of Middle Eastern men carrying expired visas and mysterious packages to board jets and engage in conduct that terrifies the passengers and crew. ?The airlines? fear of being accused of racial profiling could very well lead us to stand around and wonder, ?How did we let 9/11 happen again??? Jacobsen writes.
As Jacobsen began appearing on television, FAMS kicked into high gear, repeatedly denying that anything untoward had occurred on Flight 327 and that it had no ?specific intelligence information? that terrorists were conducting dry runs, even as more and more journalists broke stories about them. FAMS spokesman Dave Adams insisted that all 14 of the Syrians had been thoroughly investigated and that they were in the U.S. legally. FAMS employees had followed the Syrians to the casino, he claimed, and then trailed them to their hotel.
The reality, as Jacobsen documents, was that only two of the men were briefly investigated, 13 were traveling on expired visas (the 14th was an American citizen), and nobody had any idea where the ?musicians? went after leaving the airport.
Much of the information FAMS gave out about Flight 327 was contradictory, and as Jacobsen continued to write and speak out, frustrated FAMS and FBI spokesmen tried to discredit her, painting the Princeton-educated journalist as a hysterical mother who had become upset at the sight of Middle Easterners on her plane. ?That the FBI and FAMS wanted the story to disappear was obvious. And I knew why,? Jacobsen writes. ?They made major errors in their handling of Flight 372. The more attention it received, the more would be revealed about how they had bungled the operation.?
Even as they attacked her veracity, seven other passengers from Flight 327 came forward to confirm Jacobsen?s account. One was so frightened by what she witnessed that she no longer travels by air. Others said they were convinced they were about to die. These passengers contacted Homeland Security, the FBI, and FAMS, telling stories similar to Jacobsen?s. Nevertheless, Dave Adams continued to insist that Jacobsen and her husband were the only passengers to complain.
?That so many passengers were terrified underscores how outrageous it was that the government had simply let the fourteen Syrians go based only on their claim that they were a traveling band of musicians with a gig to get to,? Jacobsen writes. (Months later, Jacobsen says, Adams admitted that he?d lied to her about the Syrians? being followed to the casino and to their hotel.)
Thanks to Jacobsen?s reporting ? she wrote 13 additional articles about Flight 327 ? the House Judiciary Committee opened an investigation into the matter, putting the actions of the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, and other federal agencies under congressional scrutiny. Even then, Jacobsen says, FAMS officials continued to lie about her, about what took place on Flight 327, and about how they?d dealt with the Syrians once the plane landed. They also refused to allow the Judiciary Committee to question the air marshals from Flight 327.
Jacobsen continues to receive e-mails from airline employees relating apparent terrorist probes: Middle Eastern men who arrive moments before boarding, without luggage, and pay cash for one-way flights on which they take photographs and pass objects to one another. She writes of the all but useless ?no fly? list that allows suspected terrorists to board while keeping babies and U.S. senators off; of law-enforcement officials not bothering to show up to interview badly behaving passengers despite requests from pilots to do so. In July 2004, a flight attendant e-mailed Jacobsen, telling her that a partially made bomb had been found in a flight-attendant jump seat on an Airbus 330S ? discovered because flight attendants heard ticking. And on April 8, 2005, Department of Homeland Security officials discovered that two passengers aboard KLM Flight 685, traveling from Amsterdam to Mexico City, were Saudis who had attended the same flight school as 9/11 hijacker Hani Hanjour. ?Will we ever know how often these incidents occur? Twice a year? Once a month? Every day?? Jacobsen asks.
More to the point: What can we do to stop them? What it will take, Jacobsen says, is a strong leader in the Department of Homeland Security ? one who will ruthlessly purge the agency of incompetence and out-of-date policies (such as continuing to train flight crews to cooperate with hijackers). The National Intelligence Reform Act, known as the Intel Bill, should also help: It created a new Cabinet-level position, the Director of National Intelligence ? someone who will oversee the 15 federal intelligence agencies and presumably teach them the need to share crucial information about terror suspects. Furthermore, the Intel Bill will make it more difficult for airlines ? ever mindful of those empty jets in the weeks after 9/11 ? to hide suspicious incidents from the public. They must now report them directly to the TSA Operations Center as they happen, preventing airlines from making information from these incidents disappear ? and pretending people like Annie Jacobsen are crazy.
Jacobsen also recommends that Americans take a leaf from the Israeli intelligence book: The Israelis have not lost a commercial plane to hijackers in 35 years because they engage, not in racial profiling, but in passenger profiling.
Terror in the Skies is based on Jacobsen?s 14 WomensWallStreet columns but also contains much new material mined from confidential government reports and correspondence and from interviews with dozens of pilots, flight attendants, air marshals, and FBI agents. It is a sobering and necessary book ? one that ought to be read by anyone planning to fly the increasingly unfriendly skies.
? Anne Morse is a senior writer at the the Wilberforce Forum, a division of the Prison Fellowship. Two of her relatives are still missing in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/morse200510260833.asp
:shock: And people always wonder why I hate flying.
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The charts in this Stratfor piece probably will not print here, but worth the read anyway IMHO.
====================
U.S. Intelligence: Fixing the System, or Fighting It?
October 27, 2005 22 19 GMT
By Fred Burton
It has been nearly a year since we first noted the churn taking place within the CIA under then-new Director Porter Goss. In the life of any organization -- let alone a political one -- there is bound to be some shakeout within the ranks whenever there is a change of leadership, and doubly so when the outgoing leader has been in place as long as George Tenet was. But rather than reaching a crescendo early on and then dissipating, the turnover at Langley has intensified over the past year, and many of the departures have involved seasoned officials from the Directorate of Operations (DO).
Considering that the value of an intelligence officer is realized over the course of decades and entire careers, any churn in the secretive DO that is sufficiently high-level or widespread to attract the notice of mainstream news media is cause for concern. Neither intelligence agents nor senior managers -- such as deputy DO chief Robert Richer, who resigned in September -- are easily replaced; all require cultivation and heavy up-front investment.
The causes behind the problem are numerous, and most have been amply discussed in public venues: personality clashes with Goss or dissatisfaction over his management style; purges that were deemed necessary to induce a cultural shift following Tenet's business-oriented approach to intelligence collection and analysis; an overall intelligence community restructuring that created a new director of national intelligence (DNI) position, now held by John Negroponte. Though this last issue affects no one but Goss personally -- it shifts to the new DNI the daily responsibility for briefing the president -- it contributes to low morale at the Agency, where one of the perks for those who usually toil in anonymity has been the reflected glory of having your work reported directly each day to the president of the United States.
Add to that the castigation to which all of the nation's intelligence organizations were subjected -- though perhaps none so heavily as the CIA -- for the failures leading to Sept. 11 and unreliable intelligence about WMD in Iraq, and it is clear that there is a deep and systemic problem to be solved at Langley.
Goss is now fighting back, with at least some public attempts to restore the perceived glamour of intelligence work while driving toward a 50 percent increase in the size of the clandestine service and analyst staffs. One of the strategies he is pursuing is a campaign of unilateralism -- an attempt to wean the Agency from any dependencies on foreign intelligence services, rendering the CIA increasingly independent while also expanding and dispersing its agents' presence around the globe. "We are going to be in places people can't even imagine," he told employees in an all-hands meeting in late September.
The approach is intriguing on several levels. In terms of resolving Langley's immediate problems -- first, halting the churn -- it may indeed be just what is needed. Whether the intelligence such efforts produce, and the analysis thereof, ultimately helps mend the Agency's tattered image is a question for the longer term; success on both fronts is needed if Goss is to succeed in his mission.
That said, the intelligence world is riddled with interdependencies. National security, particularly on the counterterrorism front, requires a high level of coordination between the CIA (tasked with gathering human intelligence overseas), the FBI (tasked with gathering intelligence within the United States), and the State Department (which helps in protecting U.S. citizens and assets abroad, as well as with collecting intelligence), along with foreign intelligence services and liaisons and the National Security Administration. It is a complex system, unwieldy under the best of circumstances, and we would be hard-pressed to frame it as an ideal. Workable alternatives, however, are difficult to find.
In the post-Sept. 11 era, all of these systems (which have existed for decades) now come together under the aegis of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which -- on paper, anyway -- is designed to vet any information about potential terrorist threats and then disperse credible and timely intelligence to the appropriate state and local authorities and the public. Now, there are still many kinks in this system, four years after the Bush administration created the DHS, but this is how it is intended to work.
The problem with a campaign of unilateralism, by the CIA or any other intelligence organization, is that unless it scores a resounding success -- and quite rapidly at that (which is unlikely, given the nature of the work) -- it is more likely to add to national security problems than resolve them in the near term.
Fragmentation has been a feature of the U.S. intelligence system for some time, and for numerous reasons. For example, we noted intelligence from sources in February that John Negroponte -- then the U.S. ambassador to Iraq -- was setting up his own intelligence apparatus within Iraq because he reportedly did not view intelligence from the CIA as reliable. The Department of Defense and other branches of government likewise have established their own intelligence channels, which are not subject to congressional oversight -- and which also make holistic intelligence analysis difficult, if not impossible. This is not a new problem.
Where we are now seeing it play out -- often with incredible inconvenience for everyday Americans (and follow-on credibility problems for all the intelligence agencies involved) -- is in terrorism scares, such as the recent "threat" to Baltimore's Harbor Tunnel or to the New York subway system, that turn out to be based on bogus intel. The difficulty in these cases was not that someone uncovered rumors of a threat, or that those rumors were passed down the chain to local authorities who took action, or even that the daily commutes of thousands of people were interrupted, with resulting costs to the community -- all of these are preferable to failing to report a real threat that is ultimately carried out. Rather, the problem lies in the inability to supply timely and relevant intelligence all the way through the chain, consistently. There are simply too many potential points of failure.
The threat to the Harbor Tunnel is a perfect example of the system's increasing fragmentation, and bears close examination.
We have noted that it is the responsibility of the CIA to gather intelligence overseas, but the Agency is hardly alone in that endeavor. Either the FBI or the Department of State, through its embassies, might also be present in any given country, and quite often all three can be found together -- collecting and transmitting intelligence, jointly or independently, back to their home offices at Langley, Foggy Bottom or the Hoover Building in Washington.
This system appears to have been fully in play with the Harbor Tunnel scare, which originated with a foreign source who was questioned by Dutch intelligence, which then passed the information on to its U.S. counterparts. (This, by the way, is the sort of liaison dependency that Goss envisions weaning the CIA from.) The "in-country" teams would huddle and send the information back to headquarters in D.C., launching a flurry of back-and-forth communications: Do you think the source is credible? Can you get more information? What about specific targets? This part of the process is not necessarily always smooth, but it does work fairly well and is common sense.
The difficulties -- at least for homeland security purposes -- usually begin in Washington, where dozens of agencies by now have been made aware of the intelligence and are individually assessing what, if anything, to do with it. The State Department alone has a system that allows it to transmit intelligence to more than 50 government agencies simultaneously, so that all the pertinent officials are reading from the same page. In the Harbor Tunnel example, this might be a quite detailed report in some respects -- explaining how Dutch intelligence picked up the human source, who he is believed to be, what specifics he gave during interrogation, and so forth. This report might conclude with what is called a "tear line" -- literally, a point at which the page could be torn and a slip of paper with a homogenized message passed on by the DHS to state or local authorities and the general public. It would look something like this:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Begin Tear Line
On Nov. 1, 2005, a source of unknown reliability in a foreign country advised a foreign intelligence service that a terrorist attack will take place inside the United States before Thanksgiving.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
At that point, local officials would face the decision on whether or not to act in the face of what, for all they know, might be an imminent attack in their city. In the Harbor Tunnel case, roads in and out of Baltimore were shut down for about two hours before someone relayed the latest information, which had been known to intelligence agencies in the Netherlands for some time amid all the flurry: The human source was telling tales, and there was no threat to the tunnels.
There are several take-aways from this discussion. First, as we have just noted, tear-line information often is so watered down as to be nearly useless by local authorities. This is a complicated issue in itself. On the one hand, it is a symptom of all intelligence organizations' need and desire to protect their sources and methods and, at times, to compartmentalize sensitive information. On the other hand, it can be almost impossible to interpret and act upon such vagueness -- and all of this is assuming that the original source in Foreign Country A was providing bona fide threat information to begin with, which frequently is not the case. The entire system is rooted in the reliability of the sourcing -- a problem that Stratfor faces as well.
All of these practical difficulties have added to the cacophony of questions about the reliability of the U.S. intelligence system and fueled impulses by some agencies and local police departments to, like Goss, go it alone and collect their own intel. Increasingly, metropolitan police departments and other security agencies have taken to deploying their own agents abroad -- without the diplomatic cover afforded to official intelligence agents -- due to perceived need and distrust of the existing system.
We are not unsympathetic to the problem. It is human nature to prefer one's own sources to another agency's intelligence -- which is often second-hand by the time it is translated into English. Acting on information from their own human sources, the NYPD, State Department, FBI or other agencies are better able to judge its reliability: They would at least have an idea of the source's identity, something about his possible connections to terrorist groups, whether he was coerced during interrogation or developed a nervous tic when discussing the reported "threat." Everyone feels more comfortable assessing and acting on the intelligence when they've had a hand in collecting it.
But, ultimately, this "pile-on" effect stands only to increase the level of kludge in the existing intelligence system -- and it is questionable whether it actually serves the public, as opposed to the intelligence agencies. Because they bypass what ideally should be the firewall imposed by the DHS to shield the public from questionable intelligence, these outriders can lead to more, rather than fewer, needless panics if the local groups' threat information is not well-vetted or protected. And such scares, in turn, tend to reinforce questions and concerns about the reliability of the entire intelligence community -- not just the CIA -- in the minds of the public.
Identifying the problems in a system with so many moving parts is, while not easy, still much easier than proposing solutions -- and, as we noted above, finding viable alternatives to the existing system, imperfect though it may be, is challenging. The missing ingredient is trust, which is not endemic to the intelligence community. The task has now fallen to Goss to find ways of generating that trust in the still-tumultuous CIA, and to Negroponte -- who, we note, was only months ago contributing to the fragmentation in the system -- to streamline it instead.
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-
From Australia:
Airplane security and metal knives
By Bruce Schneier
Comment
November 30, 2005
Two weeks ago, Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone caused a stir by ridiculing airplane security in a public speech. She derided much of post-9/11 airline security, especially the use of plastic knives instead of metal ones, and said ?a lot of what we do is to make people feel better as opposed to actually achieve an outcome.?
As a foreigner, I know very little about Australian politics. I don't know anything about Senator Vanstone, her politics, her policies, or her party. I have no idea what she stands for. But as a security technologist, I agree 100% with her comments. Most airplane security is what I call ?security theater?: ineffective measures designed to make people feel better about flying.
I get irritated every time I get a plastic knife with my airplane meal. I know it doesn't make me any safer to get plastic. El Al, a company I know takes security seriously, serves in-flight meals with metal cutlery...even in economy class.
Senator Vanstone pointed to wine glasses and HB pencils as potential weapons. She could have gone further. Spend a few minutes on the problem, and you quickly realise that airplanes are awash in potential weapons: belts, dental floss, keys, neckties, hatpins, canes, or the bare hands of someone with the proper training. Snap the extension handle of a wheeled suitcase off in just the right way, and you've got a pretty effective spear. Garrotes can be made of fishing line or dental floss. Shatter a CD or DVD and you'll have a bunch of razor-sharp fragments. Break a bottle and you've got a nasty weapon. Even the most unimaginative terrorist could figure out how to smuggle an 8-inch resin combat knife onto a plane. In my book Beyond Fear, I even explained how to make a knife onboard with a tube of steel epoxy glue.
Maybe people who have watched McGuyver should never be allowed to fly.
The point is not that we can't make air travel safe; the point is that we're missing the point. Yes, the 9/11 terrorists used box cutters and small knives to hijack four airplanes, their attack wasn't about the weapons. The terrorists succeeded because they exploited a flaw in the US response policy. Prior to 9/11, standard procedure was to cooperate fully with the terrorists while the plane was in the air. The goal was to get the plane onto the ground, where you can more easily negotiate. That policy, of course, fails completely when faced with a suicide terrorists.
And more importantly, the attack was a one-time event. We haven't seen the end of airplane hijacking ? there was a conventional midair hijacking in Colombia in September ? but the aircraft-as-missile tactic required surprise to be successful
This is not to say that we should give up on airplane security, either. A single cursory screening is worth it, but more extensive screening rapidly reaches the point of diminishing returns. Most criminals are stupid, and are caught by a basic screening system. And just as important, the very act of screening is both a reminder and a deterrent. Terrorists can't guarantee that they will be able to slip a weapon through screening, so they probably won't try.
But screening will never be perfect. We can't keep weapons out of prisons, a much more restrictive and controlled environment. How can we have a hope of keeping them off airplanes? The way to prevent airplane terrorism is not to spend additional resources keeping objects that could fall into the wrong hands off airplanes. The way to improve airplane security is to spend those resources keeping the wrong hands from boarding airplanes in the first place, and to make those hands ineffective if they do.
Exactly two things have made airline travel safer since 9/11: reinforcing the cockpit door, and passengers who now know that they may have to fight back. Everything else ? all that extra screening, those massive passenger profiling systems ? is security theatre.
If, as Opposition leader Kim Beazley said, Senator Vanstone should be sacked for speaking the truth, then we're all much less secure. And if, as Federal Labor's homeland security spokesman Arch Bevis said, her comments made a mockery of the Howard government's credibility in the area of counter-terrorism, then maybe Howard's government doesn't have any credibility.
We would all be a lot safer if we took all the money we're spending on enhanced passenger screening and applied it to intelligence, investigation, and emergency response. This is how to keep the wrong hands off airplanes and, more importantly, how to make us secure regardless of what the terrorists are planning next ? even if it has nothing to do with airplanes.
Bruce Schneier is the CTO of Counterpane Internet Security, and the author of Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World. He can be reached at www.schneier.com. This article is reproduced with permission. Copyright rests with the author.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/soapbox/airplane-security-and-metal-knives/2005/11/30/1133026503111.html#
Best regards,
Argyll
-
New York Post
Air Security's Latest "F"
More than four years after 9/11 it's time to fix TSA, improve airport security
By Robert W. Poole, Jr.
The latest bin Laden tape was a grim reminder that terrorists are still probing for our weaknesses. So last month's 9/11 Commission report giving airline passenger-screening an "F" is a kick to the gut.
Why do our airports remain vulnerable? It's not lack of resources: The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) earned that "F" despite spending nearly its entire $5.5 billion budget last year on passenger and baggage screening.
Nor is screening the only problem area. Access to planes and the tarmac, either through the airport fence or by thousands of on-airport workers, remains a weak point. We still don't check most carry-on luggage for explosives. And the security measures we've added ? baggage-inspection machines, more checkpoints ? make for more crowds, a likely suicide-bombing target.
Reason Foundation's year-long assessment of airport security concluded that these holes, and others, are due to three fundamental problems with TSA.
First, TSA assumes all passengers are equally likely to be a threat. So all checked bags get the same costly screening; we all stand in the same endless lines, take off our shoes, etc.
Second, TSA is grossly over-centralized and unable to handle the wide diversity of circumstances at 450 different airports. Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.), the chairman of the House aviation subcommittee, calls it a "Soviet-style, command-and-control approach" that "has been unable to match the changing requirements."
Third, as both the provider of airport screening and its regulator, TSA has a built-in conflict of interest that allows it to grade and monitor its own performance. Here's the kind of thing that leads to: Shortly after it's creation, TSA paid a company to recruit new screeners; the taxpayers wound up spending $143,432 in recruitment costs for each screener ? each screener ? in the terrorism hotbed of Topeka, Kan. A bungling bureaucracy shouldn't police itself.
We can, and must, do better.
TSA should be reconceived as a rule-setter and enforcer, and get out of the business of providing security services. Individual airports (which already carry out other security functions, such as perimeter protection) should be given control of security, with strict TSA oversight and auditing. And our policies on airport security should become thoroughly risk-based, with more resources devoted to high-risk passengers and situations and less devoted to low-risk ones.
Israeli airports and 19 of the 20 busiest airports in Europe all use this risk-based airport-security model. Their governments don't provide screening services, but instead set and enforce strict standards that airports and their contractors must meet and adhere to ? with severe penalties for failures.
A risk-based system would focus more resources on potential terrorists ? where they should be focused. A computer program had flagged more than half the 9/11 terrorists as risks ? but they weren't then exposed to tough enough questioning or security.
We need to concentrate time and resources on the highest threats ? and toddlers and terrorists are not equal threats.
The forthcoming Registered Traveler program (scheduled for the summer), under which frequent flyers can opt to go through a background check and security clearance to gain access to fast-lane processing with a biometric I.D. card, is an important first step. This is one way to reduce the haystack, to better find the needles.
Sure, a terrorist could try to roll the dice and infiltrate the Registered Traveler system. But ask yourself this ? are terrorists more likely to volunteer themselves for in-depth background checks and fingerprinting to get a Registered Traveler card (where they'll still have to go through security at the airport) or simply take their chances in the regular lanes, knowing that most carry-on bags and passengers don't even get screened for explosives?
Our reaction to 9/11 created an air-security policy that doesn't examine relative risks, costs or benefits. And that system is failing miserably. It shouldn't take another attack to make us fix its fundamental flaws.
Robert Poole is director of transportation studies at Reason Foundation and author of the new study "Airport Security: Time for a New Model." He was a member of the Bush-Cheney transition team in 2000-01 and advised the White House Domestic Policy Council and several members of Congress on airport security following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
http://www.reason.org/commentaries/poole_20060131.shtml
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Framing the 'Sleeper Cell' Argument
April 11, 2006 23 00 GMT
By Fred Burton
Sleeper cell.
The very phrase conjures up an image of evil plotters burrowing deep into the fabric of a society, hiding under deep cover until they are called upon to strike at an unsuspecting host. Because it is a "sexy" phrase that arouses deep emotions and commands attention, it is frequently used in the public sphere. In fact, it has so much currency that Showtime even created a dramatic series called "Sleeper Cell" -- and you knew people would watch it on the strength of its name alone. Psychologically, it is the word "sleeper" that arouses the greatest angst in the post-9/11 context -- the world by now has grown familiar with the concept of "terrorist cell," and that phrase no longer carries the emotional impact that the word "sleeper" does.
As a result, the term not only is used frequently, but also often is used incorrectly -- not only by reporters and academics, but even at times by senior officials with agencies like the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, in testimony before the U.S. Congress and in other public statements. The issue is not one of mere semantics; the overuse of the phrase "sleeper cell" tends to blur important distinctions and contribute to general confusion about the nature of the jihadist threat the United States is fighting. Precise language is needed both for clear-eyed analysis and more effective defense and counterterrorism efforts.
Defining a 'Sleeper'
In simple terms, a sleeper is an operative that is infiltrated into the society, or even into the government, of a targeted country -- there to remain dormant ("sleep") until being activated, perhaps by a prearranged signal or a certain chain of events.
The concept of a sleeper operative dates back to the Cold War. In that context, a sleeper would be an officer working with a foreign intelligence service -- which would exercise maximum care in infiltrating him into the target country, to avoid detection by counterintelligence and security forces. The operative could be tasked with carrying out acts of sabotage if war should break out between the country that deployed him and the target country, but barring that, his job was to do nothing but blend into society, until the time came to act. A sleeper differs from what the Soviets (and now the Russians) would refer to as an "illegal", or what the CIA calls a "NOC" (an officer under "non-official cover"), in that a sleeper is not to take immediate operational activity, but rather must remain dormant until activated.
There are great dangers in submerging a sleeper operative for long periods in a target society, so intelligence agencies are very particular about what kinds of people are selected for such assignments. Such operatives must be mentally prepared for the stress they will endure in infiltrating the country, as well as capable of enduring the monotony of being in place for years without engaging in operational acts and without betraying their true identity or purpose. Only highly disciplined people qualify for such assignments.
Moreover, extensive training in operational tradecraft is needed; any contact between the operative and deploying government is extremely risky for the mission, so a highly sophisticated command-and-control system is needed for communication. This requirement would be multiplied in the case of a sleeper cell, given the need to avoid rousing suspicions or linking members of a cell together.
In short, an operation involving a sleeper must be -- by definition -- a long-term, strategic project that may take years or even decades to reach fruition. Great vision, sophisticated planning and deep reservoirs of patience are required of the government or group that prepares and deploys such agents, which are assets to be held in reserve until a time of great need.
In the Cold War context, sleeper operatives were a fallback or redundant intelligence network that could be activated in a crisis situation -- for example, if both the primary intelligence network (consisting of diplomats) and the secondary network (NOCs or illegal intelligence officers) were rolled up, leaving the deploying government blind. Sleeper officers would be the safety net to ensure that the sponsoring agency could still gather intelligence about what was happening in the targeted country.
Al Qaeda and Covert Operatives
Given this definition, we are not aware of any jihadist organization -- including al Qaeda -- that has ever created and run a true sleeper operation or cell. Perhaps the most significant reason for this is that an organization with limited resources would find it difficult to afford an operative who sits in place and does nothing.
As the 9/11 attacks and other operations have made clear, al Qaeda and other jihadist groups certainly have used clandestine operatives in the past. However, it is important to note that simply because an operative is hidden does not mean he is a sleeper.
Consider the 9/11 operatives as an example. The men were divided into two groups -- the pilots and those who might be termed the "muscle hijackers," who wielded box cutters while the al Qaeda pilots took control in the cockpit. Some in the media have equated the pilots with sleeper operatives because they began to arrive in the United States in early 2000, long before their planned attack, but this would be a misnomer. After arriving, these men quickly engaged in operational activities, such as attending English classes and enrolling in flight schools. The 9/11 pilots clearly were sent to the United States with a mission, which they began pursuing shortly after arriving. The same holds true for the muscle hijackers, who began arriving in the country by July 2001. Rather than trying to embed themselves in American society, they remained more or less aloof; they kept to themselves, lifted weights and waited for the green light from an operational commander -- in this case, Mohammed Atta -- to execute their mission.
One of the key aspects to consider in any discussion of al Qaeda -- and one that often is overlooked -- is that al Qaeda is a nonstate entity. That means not only that it is a network set up to carry out attacks, but also that it must sustain itself; it has nodes dedicated to fundraising, recruitment, and logistics and training activities. Examples of such nodes can be clearly seen in a historical review of al Qaeda's activities, and at times these can confuse the sleeper cell discourse.
In the mid-1990s, al Qaeda established a node in East Africa -- with headquarters in Nairobi -- that opened a charity called Help Africa People, as well as a gem-trading business, a fishing business and a branch of Osama bin Laden's Taba Investment Company. Alongside these non-terrorist activities, the Nairobi cell was busy with operational planning -- having surveilled the U.S. embassy in Nairobi as early as 1993. The group's planning activities (and its connection to al Qaeda) attracted so much attention that in August 1997, Kenyan and U.S. authorities visited the home of cell leader Wadih El-Hage, seized his computer and other evidence, and strongly suggested that he leave the country. Thus, even though the East Africa cell was present and active for several years before the 1998 attacks at the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, it could not correctly be categorized as a sleeper cell, given its open relationship with al Qaeda and recruiting and fundraising operations.
Grassroots Groups and Sleepers
Since 1979, thousands of Muslim men have fought jihad in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya and, most recently, Iraq. These men, along with others who have never been to jihad, have left their home countries or place of residence to attend training camps in places like Sudan, Pakistan and Afghanistan -- where they also were ideologically indoctrinated. During the jihad in Afghanistan and Bosnia, many of these men were recruited by Muslim "charities" associated with the Maktab al-Khidmat, or MAK -- known in English as the Afghan Services Bureau -- and many even had their travel expenses paid in whole or in part by these charities. These men eventually returned to their home countries but retained their paramilitary skills, their radical mindsets and their relationships with the men with whom they had fought and trained.
Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups have used such networks to their advantage. When Abdel Basit (perhaps more widely known as Ramzi Yousef) arrived in the United States in September 1992, he was able to use contacts at Brooklyn's Alkifah Refugee Center -- which was one of the U.S. branches of the MAK -- to quickly cobble together a team that helped him plan and execute the first World Trade Center bombing. In that case, Basit was not a sleeper because he came to the United States with a mission in mind and quickly got to work on it. Nor would the others arrested in connection with that case fit the definition of sleeper operatives; though they were living in the United States and were, to some degree, embedded in society, they were not deployed for that purpose by al Qaeda but rather came to the country of their own accord. Mahmoud Abouhalima, Mohammed Salameh and their colleagues were what might be termed "grassroots" operatives who were organized by an operational commander (Basit), who was dispatched to the United States from "the base" in Afghanistan.
The grassroots pattern has been used by al Qaeda far more often than the 9/11 model, in which all the operatives were sent into the United States from overseas.
As al Qaeda's evolution from an organization to a movement continues, the odds of another centrally planned, funded and executed attack like 9/11 will grow ever more remote. Instead, it is the combination of operational planners and grassroots cells that will continue to pose the most significant and most persistent threat. This is the model that was evident in the Madrid and London attacks. Grassroots cells lack the strategic reach and punch demonstrated by the 9/11 cell, but they will continue to pose a tactical threat in their areas of operation for the foreseeable future.
Again, it is critical to distinguish between grassroots militants or supporters of jihadist causes and sleeper operatives. If al Qaeda or any other transnational organization were to demonstrate the strategic reach and capabilities necessary for deploying true sleepers, there would be far-reaching implications for the war against terrorism -- ranging from U.S. counterintelligence policy all the way down to how immigration laws are written and enforced.
The Weight of the Evidence
Now, having said all of those things, it is quite interesting that Osama bin Laden, in the videotape issued in January 2006, implied that al Qaeda operatives are today present within the continental United States, and there have been media reports that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is in U.S. custody, discussed the existence of sleeper cells in the country. At the very least, it is logical to assume that the issue would have been near the top of the list of questions posed by interrogators during his debriefing.
Al Qaeda leaders of such high rank do command a certain amount of credibility, particularly when it comes to threatening and then carrying out specific attacks, and it would be foolish to dismiss their claims out of hand. But it also is important to note that they have strong incentives to spread disinformation, so as to confuse counterterrorism efforts in the United States and elsewhere. Moreover, it is difficult to know how al Qaeda itself defines concepts such as a "sleeper" -- and it is entirely possible that their definition differs from that used by state intelligence organizations.
Thus, while there is strong evidence that al Qaeda has contacts within the United States, the only answer to the question of whether it has sleeper agents in place is that we cannot know for sure. However, we tend to discount the possibility for several reasons.
For one thing, as previously discussed, the deployment of sleeper operatives is a strategic capability that takes a great deal of planning, coordination and training. And since 9/11, al Qaeda's strategic capabilities have been seriously degraded; the U.S.-led counteroffensive has denied the organization places to train, plan and operate, and has inflicted serious damage to its financial and communications networks. As a result, the operational tradecraft of al Qaeda field operatives has degraded to a level below that prior to the 9/11 attacks.
It follows, then, that even if al Qaeda possesses the strategic vision and patience necessary to embed sleeper operatives in the United States, the organization no longer would be capable of training the personnel or coordinating such an operation today. If there is a bona fide threat of al Qaeda sleepers in the United States, it would mean they were present in the country prior to 9/11.
Now, while the leadership of al Qaeda certainly has an attention span and takes a view of history longer than that of many Americans, there is evidence that it also has a relatively short planning cycle. History has shown that key planners and operatives frequently were engaged with more than one operation at a time. In other words, it is not sufficient to use successful al Qaeda attacks to extrapolate a planning cycle; this model does not take into account failed or foiled attempts, such as the shoe bomber plot and other planned spectaculars, that also were being implemented during the same time frame. When one also factors in the large number of senior al Qaeda planners who have been captured or killed since 9/11, it is clear that the organization is under enormous pressure.
The question, then, is this: How much longer could al Qaeda wait before activating any sleeper cells it might have? Logic would argue that any sleeper operatives still out in the cold either must be getting exceedingly nervous at this point or they do not exist. If they do exist, the ability to remain hidden so long after 9/11 implies that they possess a degree of professionalism on par with that of the KGB -- and far exceeding anything exhibited by al Qaeda operatives to date.
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Canada charges 17 in plot to blow up buildings
Authorities: Group had 3 tons of material used in ?95 Oklahoma City blast
J.P. Moczulski / Reuters
Police officers from the Ontario Provincial Police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police execute a search warrant at a private residence in Mississauga, a Toronto suburb, on Friday.
View related photos NBC VIDEO
? Canada suspects knew Ga. Tech student
June 3: The suspects charged in Canada had contact with a Georgia Tech student, who has since been arrested. NBC's Pete Williams reports.
MSNBC
NBC VIDEO
? Effects of ammonium nitrate
June 3: Col. Jack Jacobs explains how terrorists might use 3 tons of ammonium nitrate.
MSNBC
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Updated: 1 hour, 31 minutes ago
TORONTO - A group of Canadian residents arrested in coordinated raids across the Toronto area for ?terrorism-related offenses? had planned to blow up targets around southern Ontario, Canadian police said on Saturday.
Mike McDonnell, assistant commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, said the group had acquired three metric tons of ammonium nitrate ? or three times the amount used in the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City ? as they sought to ?create explosive devices.? Police said they had arrested 12 adults and five young people.
?This group posed a real and serious threat,? McDonnell said. ?It had the capacity and intent to carry out attacks. Our investigation and arrests prevented the assembly of any bombs and the attacks being carried out.?
Officials showed evidence of bomb making materials, a computer hard drive, camouflage uniforms and what appears to be a door with bullet holes in it at a news conference Saturday morning.
?This group took steps to acquire three tons of ammonium nitrate and other components necessary to create explosive devices,? McDonnell said.
The arrests were made Friday, with some 400 officers involved.
McDonnell said the suspects were either citizens or residents of Canada and had trained together.
?The men arrested yesterday are Canadian residents from a variety of backgrounds. For various reasons they appeared to have become adherents of a violent ideology inspired by al-Qaida,? said Luc Portelance, the assistant director of operations with CSIS ? Canada?s spy agency.
Heavily armed police officers ringed the Durham Regional Police Station in the city of Pickering, just east of Toronto, as the suspects were brought in late Friday night in unmarked cars which were drove into an underground garage.
The Toronto Star reported Saturday that Canadian youths in their teens and 20s, upset at the treatment of Muslims worldwide, were among those arrested.
The newspaper said they had trained at a camp north of Toronto and had plotted to attack CSIS?s downtown office near the CN Tower, among other targets.
Melisa Leclerc, a spokeswoman for the federal Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day, had no comment on the arrests. NBC VIDEO
? Canada arrests 17 on terror charges
June 3: Canadian authorities arrested 17 people on ?terrorism-related offenses.?
MSNBC
In March 2004, Ottawa software developer Mohammad Momin Khawaja became the first Canadian charged under the country?s Anti-Terrorism Act for alleged activities in Ottawa and London. Khawaja was also named, but not charged, in Britain for playing a role in a foiled bomb plot. He is being held in an Ottawa detention center, awaiting trial.
The Canadian anti-terrorism law was passed swiftly following the Sept. 11 assaults, particularly after Osama bin-Laden?s named Canada one of five so-called Christian nations that should be targeted for acts of terror. The others, reaffirmed in 2004 by his al-Qaida network, were the United States, Britain, Spain and Australian, all of which have been victims of terrorist attacks.
The anti-terrorism law permits the government to brand individuals and organizations as terrorists and gives police the power to make preventive arrests of people suspected of planning a terrorist attack.
Though many view Canada as an unassuming neutral nation that has skirted terrorist attacks, it has suffered its share of aggression, including the 1985 Air India bombing, in which 329 people were killed, most of them Canadian citizens.
Intelligence officials believe at least 50 terror groups now have some presence in the North American nation and have long complained that the country?s immigration laws and border security are too weak to weed out potential terrorists.
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Al Qaeda linked cleric, Hamas 'charity' fundraiser' to speak at Muslim Youth camp in Villanova PA
July 6, 2006
Al Qaeda linked Imam and suicide bomber supporter among speakers at upcoming youth camp in Villanova PA .
Residents protesting premises expansion cite security concerns at Foundation of Islamic Education Youth camp venue.
The Muslim Youth division of the Islamic Circle of North America and the Muslim American Society have announced their upcoming summercamp to be held at the Foundation for Islamic Education in Villanova, Pennslyvania on August 2nd to August 6th.
In 2001 the FIE was the location of Young Muslims Jihad Camp.
.The YM camps no longer go under that name, but several of the speakers who attended the Jihad Camp will be among those lecturing at the upcoming Muslim Youth camp at the FIE in Villanova.
According to the Philadephia Inquirer article linked to above the Foundation is "... a New York non profit religious group headed by a Saudi businessman agreed to to buy the campus of the Northeastern Christian Junior College , the former Morris Clothier estate, for 2.7 million.."
MIM has uncovered further information on the Saudi (Wahhabist) ties which go directly to the Saudi government:
The foundation's trustees are based in Saudi Arabia . The president of the board is Mahmoud Abdullah Taiba, a member of the Jajlis Ash Shura and former secretary of the the Energy and Electricity in Riyadh Saudi Arabia.
----------------------------------------------------
The speakers at the upcoming Muslim Youth camp (see original announcement below) have documented terrorism ties and reads like a Who's Who of radical Islamists.
The residents of Villanova have good reason to be concerned about security issues and should do everything possible to stop the planned expansion of the Foundation for Islamic Education.
More information can be found by doing a search for the speakers names on MIM - as well as the original Jihad camp registration form for the camp which took place at FIE in Villanova in 2001.
Speakers:
* Mazen Mokhtar a New Jersey Imam who is under investigation by the FBI for ties to Al Qaeda and bomb plotters in the UK. In 2004 the Washington Post reported on a previous Youth Camp appearance by Mokhtar :
This year's camp is to be held at Villanova Academy, an Islamic school in Pennsylvania, and its theme is "A Few Good Men/Lives of the Khulafa Rashideen (Pious Caliphs)."
Before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the group's summer gatherings were called "Jihad Camp." Advertised speakers in August 2001 included Imam Siraj Wahaj, identified by federal prosecutors in 1995 as a "possible unindicted co-conspirator" in the terrorism case against blind sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and Saffet Catovic, a Bosnian associated with the Benevolence International Foundation, a now-defunct Muslim charity accused by the U.S. government of financing terrorism.http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/239
*Jamal Badawi an Imam based in Canada who recently justified suicide bombings in an 7/29/06 forum on the Islam Online website with the theme Dying for Allah :"Martyrdom in Islam let's discuss it " Badawi was asked 'what is the difference between a martyr and a a sucide bomber?' and responded:
Not every martyr is a "suicide" bomber. As indicated earlier, a person who is killed in the battlefield is also a martyr; also a woman who dies in a difficult child birth is also a martyr (of a lower degree).
Not every "suicide" bomber is a martyr if that action violates any of the conditions detailed in the answers to the first question (Mr. Jacob). It should be made clear that defense against unprovoked aggression and resistance to reduce oppression are legitimate causes for combative jihad provided that all other conditions, qualifiers and ethics of war are strictly observed. It should also be noted that in all nations and according to the UN charter and international law, the Islamic causes are basically the same. Also, it should also be noted that all nations and peoples have lots of praises for those who not only put their lives on the line but also sacrifice their lives for what they consider as defense for their country or people.
It is known that people from various backgrounds sacrificed their lives in a way that many may classify as "suicidal operations" such as the Japanese pilots in the Second World War. http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/2074
* Siraj Wahaj an alleged unindicted co conspirator in the WTC 1993 bombings and Imam of Al Taqwa Mosque in New York who justified the cartoon riots at a demonstration saying that Muslims "Had to make sure that they (infidels) do not do this again."
Wahhaj likened the response to the rioting in American cities that followed the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. While King's death was not the cause of the riots, he said, it served as a catalyst because the loss was seen as a symbol of the deprivations suffered by African-Americans. Likewise, he said, the extreme Muslim reaction to the cartoons relates to the political and economic oppression of Muslims in parts of the world. http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/1662
* Faisal Hammoudeh : A leading Islamic Relief volunteer form Chicago: Last month the Gaza coordinator of Islamic Relief was arrested and deported from Israel for fundraising for Hamas:
MIM: The Young Muslims Summer Camp Announcement with speakers list to beheld at the Foundation for Islamic Education in VIllanova PA
YM Summercamp NE 2006
Deen and Dunya: Finding the Balance
Brothers only!
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CIA Reportedly Disbands Bin Laden Unit
Jul 4, 11:19 AM EDT
NEW YORK (AP) -- A CIA unit that had hunted for Osama bin Laden and his top deputies for a decade has been disbanded, according to a published report.
Citing unnamed intelligence officials, The New York Times reported Tuesday that the unit, known as "Alec Station," was shut down late last year. The decision to close the unit, which predated the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, was first reported Monday by National Public Radio.
The officials told the Times that the change reflects a view that al-Qaida's hierarchy has changed, and terrorist attacks inspired by the group are now being carried out independently of bin Laden and his second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
The CIA said hunting bin Laden remains a priority, but resources needed to be directed toward other people and groups likely to initiate new attacks.
"The efforts to find Osama bin Laden are as strong as ever," said CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise Dyck. "This is an agile agency, and the decision was made to ensure greater reach and focus."
A former CIA official who once led the unit, Michael Scheuer, told the Times that its shutdown was a mistake.
"This will clearly denigrate our operations against al-Qaida," he said. "These days at the agency, bin Laden and al-Qaida appear to be treated merely as first among equals."
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Back to Story - Help
Ahmadinejad warns of Islamic 'explosion' By ALI AKBAR DAREINI, Associated Press Writer
Fri Jul 7, 10:33 AM ET
Iran's hard-line president warned Friday that continued Israeli strikes against Palestinians could lead to an Islamic "explosion" targeting Israel and its Western supporters.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told thousands of demonstrators gathered in the capital, Tehran, to condemn the strikes in the Gaza Strip that Israel's supporters could be the target of revenge by Muslims.
"They should not let things reach a point where an explosion occurs in the Islamic world," he said. "If an explosion occurs, then it won't be limited to geographical boundaries. It will also burn all those who created (Israel) over the past 60 years," he said.
Ahmadinejad once again questioned Israel's right to exist.
"This is a fake regime ... it won't be able to survive. I think the only way (forward) is that those who created it (the West) take it away themselves," the president said.
Ahmadinejad, who last year called for Israel to be "wiped off the map," has repeatedly voiced fiery rhetoric against the Jewish state.
Iran supports ? and has varying degrees of influence on ? Islamic militant groups in the region including Hamas, Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
The Islamic republic also is locked in a standoff with Western nations, over its purportedly peaceful nuclear program, which the U.S. and its allies suspect is camouflage for developing an atomic bomb.
At least 24 Palestinians and one Israeli soldier have been killed in fighting since Israeli army moved into northern Gaza on Thursday.
The offensive is aimed at freeing a soldier captured by Palestinian militants on June 25, as well as destroying the increasingly powerful rockets that militants have been firing at Israel.
Hamas' representative in Iran, Abu Osamah Abdulmota, said Cpl. Gilad Shalit would only be set free in exchange for Palestinian prisoners.
"They (Israel) should know that Palestinian combatants won't release this Israeli prisoner ... (unless) Palestinian prisoners are freed from Zionist jails," he said in a pre-sermon speech before weekly Friday prayers in Tehran.
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XK: Those last two posts would have been better off in the WW3 thread.
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I found the following on another forum. The ideas expressed by the quoted blogger seem insightful to me.-- CD
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I've been subscribing to a blog called GLOBAL GUERRILLAS on my RSS feed for a few months now.
The author has some interesting ideas on what terrorist groups have evolved into and how they operate.
Here is his newsletter on the Bombay bombings.
There are some links in the document to other newsletters he has written explaining his terms.
? AN ATTACK ON IRAN = CATALYST OF CHAOS | Main
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
BOMBING SYSTEMS IN BOMBAY
Global guerrillas (claimed by: LeT: Lashkar-e-Taiba) set off seven bombs in quick intervals over a 20 minute period during rush hour on Mumbai's (a city of 16 million and India's commercial hub) commuter rail system. At least 163 people died and a thousand were wounded mostly in first class cabins, on a rail system used by 6.5 million people a day. Cascading systems effects included jammed phone systems and an indefinite suspension of all commuter train service (which will in turn cause jammed highways and reduced business activity).
The radical improvement in technique, targeting, and coordination demonstrated in Mumbai is yet another example of how the innovation generated by open-source warfare is now global. Hacks on warfare's source code generated in Madrid, London, and Thailand have now made their way to India.
As anticipated, this attack is also a sign that future attacks will increasingly target systems rather than low yield targets of symbolic terrorism. As methods of system disruption improve, attacks will be aimed at more precise systempunkts that underly modern economic activity, particularly in highly populated urban zones. One key vector of activity will be to use repetitive attacks to push urban centers to lower economic equilibria (see Urban Takedowns for more) -- it is potentially possible, once the data is developed, to calculate how many attacks are needed to achieve the seven percent "terrorism tax" that will accomplish this descent. Another vector will be aimed at improving the effectiveness of cross system cascades of failure to maximize total levels of disruption (these early demonstrations are fairly crude in this regard).
Posted by John Robb on Tuesday, July 11, 2006 at 06:26 PM | Permalink
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FBI Eyes Hizbollah In U.S. as Tensions with Iran Rise
By CAROLINE DREES, REUTERS, NEW YORK
The FBI is trying to ferret out possible Hizbollah agents in the United States amid concerns that rising U.S.-Iranian tensions could trigger attacks on American soil, FBI officials said.
Relations between Washington and Tehran, which soured after the 1979 Islamic revolution, have deteriorated further recently over Iran?s nuclear program and its support for Hizbollah, the militant Islamic group whose capture of two Israeli soldiers last week prompted Israel to launch retaliatory strikes in Lebanon.
American law enforcement officials are concerned the Lebanon-based Hizbollah, which has so far focused on fund-raising and other support activities inside the United States, could turn to violence in solidarity with Iran.
"If the situation escalates, will Hizbollah take the gloves off, so to speak, and attack here in the United States, which they?ve been reluctant to do until now?" said William Kowalski, Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the FBI in Detroit.
Detroit is home to one of the largest Muslim communities in the United States.
"Because of the heightened difficulties surrounding U.S.-Iranian relations, the FBI has increased its focus on Hizbollah," said FBI spokesman Paul Bresson in Washington.
"Those investigations relate particularly to the potential presence of Hizbollah members on U.S. soil."
There is no specific or credible intelligence pointing to an imminent U.S. attack by Hizbollah, which the United States considers a terrorist group, Bresson added.
But Iran?s Hizbollah -- which claims links to the Lebanese group -- said on July 18 it stood ready to attack U.S. and Israeli interests worldwide.
FBI Director Robert Mueller told reporters in Toronto that agents were keeping a close eye on Hizbollah, especially "when the international situation heats up."
AMERICAN MUSLIMS WORRY
Muslim American groups worry that fear of Hizbollah violence in the United States could again cast an unwelcome spotlight on their community, which has often felt a target of surveillance or discrimination since the Sept. 11 attacks.
Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington, said his advocacy group fielded almost daily complaints from Muslims who felt singled out or intimidated by government officials.
Muslim American groups say that while they support fighting against terrorism, they are concerned the focus is unfairly on them.
"There are individual concerns that the government does interviews with individuals, with kind of subtle threats that they could be arrested or deported if they don?t cooperate. That is really the concern for a lot of these groups right now," said Salam al-Marayati, head of the Los Angeles-based Muslim Public Affairs Council.
"That fact in itself will alienate, frustrate and perhaps even push these young people further to the margins, which creates a very problematic situation for all of us," he said. "In a way, this is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy."
Marayati, who consults regularly with government officials, said they were listening to his concerns, but should do more to show Americans that their Muslim compatriots are just as determined as they are to fight terrorism.
"Since the relationship is not publicized, people think we?re not contributing and Muslims continue to be seen as a problem in our society as opposed to part of the solution," he said.
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Seattle security raised after Jewish center shooting By Daisuke Wakabayashi
1 hour, 45 minutes ago
SEATTLE (Reuters) - Police stepped up security at Seattle synagogues and mosques on Saturday, a day after a Muslim man who said he was angry at Israel shot dead one woman and wounded five others at a Jewish center.
Naveed Afzal Haq, 31, burst into the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle on Friday afternoon. He surrendered without a struggle and police arrested him on charges of murder and five counts of attempted murder.
Amy Wasser-Simpson, the federation's vice president, told the Seattle Times that Haq got past security at the building and shouted, "I'm a Muslim American; I'm angry at Israel," before he began shooting.
Police officers circled Seattle's Seward Park area, the city's traditional Jewish neighborhood and home to three major synagogues. Uniformed guards stood outside the neighborhood's Bikur Cholim-Machzikay Hadath synagogue and the Sephardic Bikur Holim synagogue.
"There is high security," said Robin Boehler, chairwoman of the Jewish Federation. "This is the thing we dread the most happening."
She said three of the victims were not Jewish.
Authorities said they were "taking every precaution," searching for explosives and additional suspects, and were monitoring the city's synagogues and Jewish organizations.
Police said Haq is a U.S. citizen and that their initial conversation with him by phone while he was inside the building indicated that he was a Muslim. Police would not disclose the content of the conversation.
The Jewish federation, a group covering the Jewish community around the Puget Sound region, had organized a large rally last weekend to demonstrate support for Israel in its fight against Hizbollah in southern Lebanon.
"A CRIME OF HATE"
A silent march to protest Israeli actions in Gaza planned for Saturday morning in the Seattle suburb of Kirkland was canceled due to safety concerns, according to Arsalan Bukhari, president of the Seattle chapter of the Council of American-Islamic Relations.
There are no plans to scale back weekend schools or any other religious activities, he said.
"The events that are happening in the Middle East should not spill over into our city," said Bukhari.
In light of the fighting in the Middle East, Seattle police alerted its officers earlier this week to carefully monitoring synagogues, temples and mosques, but Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske said they had received no specific threats.
At a news conference on Friday, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels said, "This was a purposeful, hateful act as far as we know, by an individual acting alone. ... This is a crime of hate."
The FBI was working with local authorities on the case.
Local media reported Haq was on medication for a bipolar disorder and had a misdemeanor lewd conduct charge pending. He allegedly exposed himself at a shopping mall.
A hospital spokeswoman said three of the victims remain in critical condition. The surviving women range in age from 23 to 43, and one is pregnant. The dead woman's name has not been released.
Rob Jacobs, the executive director of the Anti-Defamation League of the Pacific Northwest, said acts of anti-Semitism are on the rise in region. Bias and discrimination complaints reported to the League in the Pacific Northwest quadrupled in the last three years.
"We see ourselves as very tolerant and accepting of all people, but the reality is that, on a day to day basis, we are sadly not too different from many other places," said Jacobs.
(Additional reporting by Elaine Porterfield)
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WSJ: Scholar Warns Iran's Ahmadinejad May Have 'Cataclysmic Events' In Mind For August 22
Tue Aug 08 2006 10:22:35 ET
In a WALL STREET JOURNAL op-ed Tuesday, Princeton's Bernard Lewis writes: "There is a radical difference between the Islamic Republic of Iran and other governments with nuclear weapons. This difference is expressed in what can only be described as the apocalyptic worldview of Iran's present rulers."
"In Islam as in Judaism and Christianity, there are certain beliefs concerning the cosmic struggle at the end of time -- Gog and Magog, anti-Christ, Armageddon, and for Shiite Muslims, the long awaited return of the Hidden Imam, ending in the final victory of the forces of good over evil, however these may be defined."
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "and his followers clearly believe that this time is now, and that the terminal struggle has already begun and is indeed well advanced. It may even have a date, indicated by several references by the Iranian president to giving his final answer to the US about nuclear development by Aug. 22," which this year corresponds "to the 27th day of the month of Rajab of the year 1427. This, by tradition, is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to 'the farthest mosque,' usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back (c.f., Koran XVII.1).
"This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world. It is far from certain that Mr. Ahmadinejad plans any such cataclysmic events precisely for Aug. 22. But it would be wise to bear the possibility in mind."
Developing...
Drudge Report
http://cbs4.com/topstories/topstorie...220000914.html
Quote:
FBI Searching For 11 Egyptian Students
(AP) WASHINGTON Eleven Egyptian students who arrived in the United States last month are being sought by authorities after failing to turn up for an exchange program at Montana State University.
The Egyptian men were among a group of 17 students who arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York from Cairo on July 29 with valid visas, according to U.S. authorities and university officials.
The other six have arrived at the Bozeman, Mont., campus for a monthlong program on English language instruction and U.S. history and culture, university spokeswoman Cathy Conover said.
When the 11 didn't turn up by the end of the last week, the FBI issued a lookout to state and local law enforcement, said FBI Special Agent Richard Kolko.
"At this point all they have done is not show up for a scheduled academic program," Kolko said. "There is no threat associated with these men."
They are between 18 and 22 years old, said a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the search for the men is continuing.
U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement declined to make their names public.
The government probably will seek to send the students home once they are located because they have violated the terms of their visas, the official said.
The government tightened the student visa process after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks when it learned that four of the hijackers entered the country on foreign student visas.
The school has tried repeatedly to contact the students, Conover said, including sending e-mails. When that failed, the school notified Homeland Security officials and registered the Egyptians as "no-shows" in the system developed after Sept. 11 to track foreign students, Conover said.
They were participating in an exchange program Montana State arranged with Mansoura University in Mansoura, Egypt.
"We hope this doesn't cast doubt on this program because we think it's important to have international students on our campus and in our community," Conover said.
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Target Britain: Wave of attacks planned, say investigators
Terrorists in UK still possess huge arsenal of bombs and weapons.
Country remains under 'very severe' threat, security sources warn
By Raymond Whitaker, Paul Lashmar, Sophie Goodchild and Severin Carrell
Published: 13 August 2006
Suspected terrorists were planning to unleash a wave of "apocalyptic" attacks on land and air, using an arsenal of bombs and weaponry, including firearms, investigators have discovered.
Police and intelligence sources have indicated that the alleged plot which was thwarted last week was targeted at the UK, as well as at airliners heading for the US, and could have caused devastating loss of life and destruction on the British mainland. One Whitehall source said "many dozens" of plots were under investigation, involving "hundreds" of suspects.
According to one report last night, al-Qa'ida's leader in Britain could have been held in the raids. But security sources estimate that as many as 1,200 people here are actively involved with terrorism, and that the country is still under "very severe" threat from other potential terrorist plots. This, they added, explained why there were no immediate plans to lower the current national threat assessment from "critical", its highest level.
Last night, 23 people were still being held under terror laws at Paddington Green police station, west London, and other police stations in what has been described as the biggest operation carried out by police to prevent a potential terror attack. Legal sources said that most would be detained for the full 28 days allowed under the terror laws, before being charged. Detectives were preparing for "a long haul", police sources said.
Sources have told The Independent on Sunday that intelligence officers are aware of several active "jihadi" cells around the country ­ including one in east London thought to be unconnected to the suspects arrested last week. Investigators said surveillance in progress since the July 2005 bombings in London had identified the locations of explosives and weapons in quantities sufficient to commit wide-scale atrocities.
The alleged plot uncovered last week was said to involve apparently innocuous home-made liquid explosives being carried on to aircraft, and then turned into bombs using electronic devices such as iPods or cameras. Last night it was reported that police had recovered scores of bottles containing peroxide, a chemical which can be used to make bombs, from a recycling bank in High Wycombe.
The IoS has also learnt that British security officers are to investigate the availability over the internet of so-called binary explosives that can be made easily from two harmless substances. Experts were alarmed to discover that a Canadian company is openly selling an explosive made simply by combining a liquid with a powder in a plastic bottle, and then attaching a detonator.
John Reid, the Home Secretary, told police chief constables yesterday that there was no room for "complacency or self-congratulation". He added: "As I have said all along, no one should be under any illusion that the threat ended with the recent arrests. It didn't."
* The Sunday Telegraph reported that it had uncovered a dossier of " extremist Islamic literature" at London Metropolitan University, one of whose students was arrested last week. Material included documents advocating jihad and a pamphlet on how to deal with approaches from the security services.
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/cri...cle1218895.ece
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My second post of the day:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/13/world/europe/13disrupt.html?th&emc=th
WASHINGTON, Aug. 12 ? The disclosure that British officials conducted months of surveillance before arresting 24 terrorism suspects this week highlighted what many terrorism specialists said was a central difference between American and British law enforcement agencies.
The British, they say, are more willing to wait and watch.
Although details of the British investigation remain secret, Bush administration officials say Britain?s domestic intelligence agency, MI5, was for at least several months aware of a plot to set off explosions on airliners flying to the United States from Britain, as well as the identity of the people who would carry it out.
British officials suggested that the arrests were held off to gather as much information as possible about the plot and the reach of the network behind it. Although it is not clear how close the plotters were to acting, or how capable they were of carrying out the attacks, intelligence and law enforcement officials have described the planning as well advanced.
The Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have suggested in the past that they would never allow a terrorist plot discovered here to advance to its final stages, for fear that it could not be stopped in time.
In June, the F.B.I. arrested seven people in Florida on charges of plotting attacks on American landmarks, including the Sears Tower in Chicago, with investigators openly acknowledging that the suspects, described as Al Qaeda sympathizers, had only the most preliminary discussions about an attack.
?Our philosophy is that we try to identify plots in the earliest stages possible because we don?t know what we don?t know about a terrorism plot,? Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said at the time. ?Once we have sufficient information to move forward with a prosecution, that?s what we do.?
The differences in counterterrorism strategy reflect an important distinction between the legal systems of the United States and Britain and their definitions of civil liberties, with MI5 and British police agencies given far greater authority in general than their American counterparts to conduct domestic surveillance and detain terrorism suspects.
Britain?s newly revised terrorism laws permit the detention of suspects for 28 days without charge. Prime Minister Tony Blair?s government had been pressing for 90 days, but Parliament blocked the proposal. In the United States, suspects must be brought before a judge as soon as possible, which courts have interpreted to mean within 48 hours. Law enforcement officials have detained some terrorism suspects designated material witnesses for far longer. (The United States has also taken into custody overseas several hundred people suspected of terrorist activity and detained them at Guant?namo Bay, Cuba, as enemy combatants.)
At the same time, Britain has far stricter contempt-of-court laws intended to prevent the prejudicing of trials. Anything that is said or reported about the suspects rounded up this week could, the police contend, prejudice their trial and prevent their prosecution.
Andrew C. McCarthy, a former terrorism prosecutor at the Justice Department, said he believed that British authorities were willing to allow terrorist plots to progress further because, if an attack appeared imminent, they could immediately round up the suspects, even without formal criminal charges.
?They have this fail-safe,? he said. ?They can arrest people without charging them with a crime, which would make a big difference in how long you?d be willing to let things run.? He said F.B.I. agents, who are required to bring criminal charges if they wanted to arrest a suspect, had a justifiable fear that they might be unable to short-circuit an attack at the last minute.
There is a difference, too, in how information is shared, with American law enforcement officials typically communicating much more fully with the news media and other agencies than their British counterparts do.
In one case in particular, last year after the London bombings when New York police officers traveled there to pitch in, the different working style created tension. British police and intelligence officials complained to the F.B.I., C.I.A. and State Department after the New York officers, used to speaking more openly, gave interviews to the press in London and sent information on to their headquarters in New York, where officials then held a news conference with some details about the investigation, according to one senior American official involved in the relationship with British agencies.
While American officials say they do not believe there were any serious compromises of the investigation, the British were extremely upset. ?They don?t want us to share so widely,? the senior American official said.
A senior federal law enforcement official said MI5 also had a distinct advantage over the F.B.I. in that it had a greater store of foreign-language speakers, giving British authorities greater ability to infiltrate conspiracy groups. The F.B.I. still has only a handful of Muslim agents and others who speak Arabic, Urdu or other languages common in the Islamic world.
Justice Department officials and others involved in developing American counterterrorism strategies, however, say it is wrong to suggest that the F.B.I. always moves hurriedly to arrest terrorism suspects, rather than conduct surveillance that may lead to evidence about other conspirators and plots.
On Saturday, as news reports surfaced describing significant disagreements between British and American officials over the the timing of the arrests in the bombing plot, Frances Fragos Townsend, the president?s homeland security adviser, said in a statement: ?There was unprecedented cooperation and coordination between the U.S., U.K. and Pakistan officials throughout the case and we worked together to protect our citizens from harm while ensuring that we gathered as much information as possible to bring the plotters to justice. There was no disagreement between U.S. and U.K. officials.?
John O. Brennan, a former official of the Central Intelligence Agency who set up the government?s National Counterterrorism Center two years ago, said in an interview that he had been involved in a number of recent cases ? most of them still classified ? in which the F.B.I. had placed suspected terrorists under surveillance rather than rounding them up.
He said the bureau?s willingness to wait reflected a new sophistication as supervisors adapted to the rhythm of terrorism investigations. ?Especially given the history of 9/11, of course the bureau wants to move quickly and make sure there is no risk of attack,? he said. ?But over the past two years, I think the bureau has become much more adept at allowing these operations to run and monitor them.?
But others are less certain that the bureau has overcome its traditional desire to make quick arrests.
Daniel Benjamin, a counterterrorism specialist in the National Security Council in the Clinton administration, said the apparent success of the British surveillance operation ? and the failure of the F.B.I. to identify and disrupt any similar terrorist cell in the United States since Sept. 11 ? argued for creation of an American counterpart to MI5. ?The F.B.I. has still not risen to the domestic intelligence task,? he said.
But MI5, others note, may have benefited from the longer experience of dealing with domestic terrorism in connection with the Irish Republican Army. And it has its own critics who question its strategy by noting that it had some of the suspects in last summer?s bombings in the London subway and on a bus under surveillance before the attacks.
British security officials have publicly acknowledged that two of the London bombers ? Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer ? had been observed in connection with a different terrorist plot that was subject to heavy surveillance. But when they dropped out of sight ? well before the London bombings ? intelligence agencies did not pursue them because the other conspiracy seemed a much greater priority.
John Timoney, the Miami police chief who also has run the Philadelphia Police Department and served in the No. 2 post in the New York Police Department, has worked extensively over the years in Britain on policing matters. He said comparing the two country?s approaches was difficult.
?First and foremost, the policing systems are completely different,? said Chief Timoney, noting that in Britain the Metropolitan Police is the dominant national law enforcement agency and is served by MI5.
In the United States, on the other hand, there is intense competition between various federal agencies and between some federal agencies and some state and local forces, he said.
But neither approach is guaranteed to succeed. In June, about 250 police officers stormed an East London row house looking for chemical weapons and arrested two brothers, Abul Koyair and Mohammed Abdul Kahar. Mr. Kahar was shot and wounded during the operation. But the two men were later released without charge after the authorities failed to find any evidence linking them to terrorist activities.
David N. Kelley, a former United States attorney in Manhattan who has overseen a range of international terrorism cases, including prosecuting the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, said, ?The real challenge in law enforcement when you have a plot like that is when do you pull the trigger.?
He also said that the longer investigators waited to take down a case, the risks that they might lose track of suspects increased, even if the plotters were under 24-hour surveillance.
?People think when you have someone under surveillance, it?s a fail-safe, but losing someone is a real fear in these things,? he said. ?It?s not like television. It?s a real juggling act. You?ve got to keep a lot of balls in the air and not let any of them drop.?
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2006/8/14 10:11:13
http://www.homelandsecurityus.com/site/modules/news/article.php?storyid=28
Liquid explosives carried in child's baby bottle
14 August 2006: According to authorities at Scotland Yard, Abdula Ahmed ALI, 25, and his 23-year-old wife Cossor ALI were arrested and are being questioned over suspicions that they were planning to use their baby's bottle to hide a liquid bomb. Cossor's grandfather, Nazir Ahmed, 84, admitted that Abdula ALI traveled to Pakistan about four weeks ago. That admission follows information from British Intelligence officials that many of the airline bomb plot suspects posed as relief workers to travel to al-Qaeda training camps in Pakistan. Police spent Sunday searching the suspect?s east London housing commission flat for evidence.
Police in the UK have recovered baby bottles containing peroxide, including some with false bottoms, from a recycling centre close to the homes of some of the arrested suspects.
In a separate but related case, a Muslim family of five- a husband, wife and 3 children, boarded American Airlines flight 109 at Britain?s Heathrow airport destined for Boston Logan airport on Sunday, 6 August 2006.
According to intelligence officials, the family checked in at the last minute, and as a result, only a superficial check of the children?s carry-on bags was conducted by airport security personnel.
Following the take off of the airliner, the check-in computer at the airport flashed a warning that a person under observation had boarded the flight. The airline staff informed immigration and security officials, and a background check found that the male adult member of the family was on a suspect list prepared by Scotland Yard subsequent to the 7/7 terror bombings in London. The pilot was ultimately alerted to the situation and after careful consideration, returned to Heathrow airport rather than continuing on to Boston.
Upon landing back at Heathrow, armed marshals boarded the aircraft and took the suspect and his family into custody. It was at that time a search of the children?s carry-on baggage revealed the deadly cargo.
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http://www.tsa.gov/travelers/airtravel/assistant/new-procedures.shtm
http://www.aa.com/apps/netSAAver/ViewPromotionsDetail.jhtml?fileName=system_flightInfo.xml&repositoryName=PromotionContentRepository&itemDescriptor=PromotionContent
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----- Original Message -----
From: <ajwhitehead@anti-cair-net.org>
Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2006 11:55 PM
Subject: CAIR: Cops Training Terrorists?
In Defense of the Constitution
>
News & Analysis
037/06 September 7, 2006
>
>
>
CAIR: Cops Training Terrorists?
>
>
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has a "Citizens Academy"
designed to introduce selected Americans to FBI operations and tactics:
>
http://www.fbi.gov/hq/ood/opca/outreach/academy.htm
>
This training program requires both a security clearance and a
recommendation to attend.
>
What is to stop suspected and known Islamic terrorist front groups from
requesting this training? How about groups like the Council on
American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which has had Islamic terrorists on
staff such as Ismail Royer and Bassem Khafagi:
>
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/1179
>
Considering that CAIR has, and does, provide "diversity" training to
various law enforcement agencies, what is to stop a CAIR official from
requesting FBI training? If the training is denied, what will be the
grounds? The FBI would be hard-pressed to deny access to the program to
CAIR officials, considering that the FBI uses CAIR for training.
Recently, police officials in Great Britain learned a hard lesson about
trusting so-called "moderate" Muslims. Sussex police officers were sent
to the Jameah Islameah School near Crowborough, East Sussex to learn about
the Muslim faith and receive "diversity training":
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=403650&in_page_id=1770
Not explained by the Sussex police was just why Sussex police officers are
so bigoted, xenophobic, and prejudiced that they need special training by
Muslims to learn about Islam. However, this seems to be a defect present
in every police force in the West, but noticeably absent in police forces
located in Islamic countries.
>
Now, the Jameah Islameah School is under investigation as having been used
as an Al Queda training camp. Yes, to the complete surprise of everyone
who doesn't have a clue about how radical Islam functions, the "school"
appears to have been a hot-bed of Islamic indoctrination where young
Muslims were groomed to become terrorists.
>
How about North American police forces? Would they be stupid enough to
engage the services of an Islamic hate group to provide "diversity"
training for clueless police officers?
>
We're not so sure that law enforcement officials on our side of the
Atlantic are any more street-smart than their cousins in Great Britain.
Consider:
>
On June 21, DHS officials gave members of CAIR (among others) a tour of
sensitive security areas at Chicago's O'Hare Airport. The group received
the whole dog-and-pony show, being treated to a tour of the
point-of-entry, customs stations, agricultural screening stations, and
interview rooms. Just the type of information members of an Islamic
terrorist-supporting hate group need, isn't it?
>
As if that wasn't enough, agents also explained how new systems recently
installed will work to identify suspect passengers.
>
Naturally, like good students, we're sure that CAIR took copious notes and
asked probing questions:
>
http://www.anti-cair-net.org/press_28_06
>
Witnessing the problems that European law enforcement is having with
so-called "moderate" Muslim groups, ACAIR can only hope that our own law
enforcement agencies are practicing due diligence when it comes to
partnering with Muslim groups with proven ties to Islamic terrorism such
as CAIR.
>
American law enforcement agencies would do well to remember that CAIR is
no friend; that CAIR has proven ties to Islamic terrorist groups; that
CAIR works with groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU),
to undermine every action taken by our great country to defend ourselves
from Islamist terror.
>
Is there any doubt that information provided to CAIR by law enforcement
would end up in the hands of our enemies?
>
Just how would the FBI explain this to the American people?
Let us hope that the FBI has the good sense to not do anything dangerous,
like inviting CAIR personnel to attend academy training.
Andrew Whitehead
Director
Anti-CAIR (ACAIR)
ajwhitehead@anti-cair-net.org
www.anti-cair-net.org
>
>
>
> ADVISORY:
> Subscribers are warned that the Council on American Islamic Relations
> (CAIR) may contact your employer if CAIR believes you are using a work
> address to receive any material that CAIR believes may be offensive. CAIR
> has been known to shame employers into firing employees CAIR finds
> disagreeable. For that reason, we strongly suggest that corporate e-mail
> users NOT use a corporate e-mail account/address when communicating with
> ACAIR or CAIR. We make every reasonable effort to protect our mailing
> list, but we cannot guarantee confidentiality. ACAIR does not share, loan,
> sell, rent or otherwise publicize our mailing list. We respect your
> privacy!
>
> TIPS:
> All persons are invited to submit tips and leads. ACAIR will acknowledge
> receipt of all tips/leads, but we will NOT acknowledge the source of ANY
> tip or lead in our Press Releases or on our web site. Exceptions are made
> for leading media personalities at the discretion of ACAIR and only on
> request of the person(s) submitting the tip or lead.
-
Freedom at War
Civil liberties in the age of terrorism.
by Peter Berkowitz
09/18/2006, Volume 012, Issue 01
Not a Suicide Pact
The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency
by Richard A. Posner
Oxford, 208 pp., $18.95
In late June, Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times breathlessly reported on the front page, above the fold and under a big headline, that in the just-announced case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court "shredded each of the administration's arguments." The decision--which held that, as organized, the military tribunals the Bush administration had created to try unlawful combatants seized on the battlefield in Afghan istan, were contrary to federal law and a provision of the Geneva Conventions--was, Greenhouse gushed, "a sweeping and categorical defeat for the Bush administration."
Indeed, she proclaimed, the decision was a "historic event, a definitional moment in the ever-shifting balance of power among the branches of government that ranked with the court's order to President Nixon in 1974 to turn over the Watergate tapes or with the court's rejection of President Harry S. Truman's seizing [in 1952] of the nation's steel mills."
Never mind that the Court had not questioned the government's right to detain Salim Ahmed Hamdan, allegedly Osama bin Laden's driver and bodyguard, without charge or trial, as an unlawful combatant, until such time as the conflict between the United States and al Qaeda comes to an end. Never mind that, in a paragraph-long concurring opinion, Justice Breyer emphasized that much, if not all, of the military tribunal procedures designed by the Bush administration would pass legal muster if explicitly authorized by Congress. Never mind that the Court's opinion commanded only a narrow five-justice majority. And never mind that Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito each authored powerful dissents that elaborated serious objections to which the majority's principal legal arguments are exposed. (Chief Justice Roberts did not participate in the case because, as judge on the D.C. Court of Appeals, he joined the opinion, which Hamdan reversed, upholding the administration's military tribunals.)
What was truly remarkable about Greenhouse's performance--her lengthy article was not an op-ed column or piece of "news analysis" but a news story of the sort customarily intended to provide a dispassionate and well-rounded account of the facts--was the omission of a single reference to the features of America's national security situation that motivated the Bush administration to turn to the use of military tribunals. In this failure to put national security considerations into the balance, let alone give them their due weight, Greenhouse and her editors at the Times typify the complacency and shortsightedness in thinking about constitutional rights and the war on terror that Judge Richard Posner's trenchant new book seeks to correct.
Rarely ceasing to amaze over the last three decades or so with the range of his intellectual interests and the acuteness of his analytical powers (and occasionally with the irreverence of his observations and unconventionality of his conclusions), Posner has, in the last several years, turned his attention to questions of national security. In 2004 he published Catastrophe, a book on the regulation of grave but remote risk: For example, what policy should government adopt if a physics experiment poses a truly extraordinary harm--say, the destruction of the planet--but the harm has an exceedingly remote likelihood, perhaps a one-in-fifty-million chance, of coming to pass? And in the last year, Posner published Preventing Surprise Attacks, and a sequel, Uncertain Shield, which explore the nature of intelligence-gathering and analysis, the strengths and weaknesses of our pre-9/11 intelligence system, and post-9/11 reform efforts. (Both volumes appear under the imprint of Hoover Studies, a series for which I serve as co-general editor.)
With his new book, Posner carries forward his analysis of national security questions into the sphere of constitutional law. True to the pragmatic approach to judging that he has long championed, Posner grounds his analysis of national security law and the Constitution in an appreciation of concrete circumstances. The danger posed by jihadist terror, according to Posner, is novel, grave, and growing. As he explains with characteristic vigor, this is partly because of the weapons increasingly at our enemies' disposal:
n the early years of the twenty-first century, the nation faces the intertwined menaces of global terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. A city can be destroyed by an atomic bomb the size of a melon, which if coated with lead would be undetectable. Large stretches of a city can be rendered uninhabitable, perhaps for decades, merely by the explosion of a conventional bomb that has been coated with radioactive material. Smallpox virus bioengineered to make it even more toxic and vaccines ineffectual, then aerosolized and sprayed in a major airport, might kill millions of people. Our terrorist enemies have the will to do such things and abundant opportunities, because our borders are porous both to enemies and to containers. They will soon have the means as well. The march of technology has increased the variety and lethality of weapons of mass destruction, especially the biological, and also and critically their accessibility. Aided by the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the acquisition of nuclear weapons by unstable nations (Pakistan and North Korea, soon to be joined, in all likelihood, by Iran), technological progress is making weapons of mass destruction ever more accessible both to terrorist groups (and even individuals) and to hostile nations that are not major powers. The problem of proliferation is more serious today than it was in what now seem the almost halcyon days of the Cold War; it will be even more serious tomorrow.
The danger is further defined by the jihadists' character, ideology, and tactics. We know that "they are numerous, fanatical, implacable, elusive, resourceful, resilient, utterly ruthless, seemingly fearless, apocalyptic in their aims, and eager to get their hands on weapons of mass destruction and use them against us." But because they do not represent a nation-state, and thus have neither territory nor population for which they are responsible, we do not know very much about "their current number, leaders, locations, resources, supporters, motivations, and plans; and in part because of our ignorance, we have no strategy for defeating them, only for fighting them."
The knowledge of concrete circumstances emphasized by pragmatists, Posner stresses, is critical when it comes to understanding the Constitution and the rights to which it gives rise. Constitutional rights, he argues, are not specified by the text of the Constitution, nor are they derivable from it by a single governing principle or a unique scientific or logical method. Rather, constitutional rights are created by justices interpreting the Constitution with a view to the moral and political consequences of their rulings.
Take the First Amendment. To be sure, it provides rights to freedom of speech, religion, press, and association. But it is the Supreme Court, over the centuries, that has determined the shape and scope of these rights, concluding, for example, that generally government may restrict speech on the basis of time, place, and manner, but not on the basis of content or viewpoint, and that the free exercise of religion is not wide enough to include prayer in school.
Posner's writings can give the disconcerting impression that sufficiently clever judges are free to reach whatever results they like. That is not his argument here. He recognizes that many legal controversies are resolved by straightforward application of the law. But in hard cases, where traditional legal materials--constitutional text, history, structure, and the holdings of previous cases--fail to yield a single lawful answer, justices ought to craft legal rules that serve the nation's moral and political requirements. Or rather, Posner believes that justices should do this more deliberately and forthrightly.
In reality, he argues, in the difficult and divisive constitutional cases, the very ones to which the public pays the most attention and which appear to have the largest political implications, justices reach their decision in much the same way that ordinary citizens make nonlegal decisions, "by balancing the anticipated consequences of alternative outcomes and picking the one that creates the greatest preponderance of good over bad effects."
Because the Supreme Court's legal conclusions about constitutional rights are, and ought to be, "heavily influenced by contemporary needs and conditions," they involve, in the final analysis, substantial policy judgments that result in the making of new law.
This may sound like an endorsement of judicial activism, but, according to Posner, it isn't. Indeed, he thinks that the pragmatic approach favors judicial restraint. Precisely because of the inevitably large pragmatic element in the adjudication of constitutional rights, justices should be restrained in invalidating the acts of the political branches. This is because Congress and the president are better equipped to weigh the actual or likely consequences of laws and policies, and they are better positioned to bring failed social and political experiments to an end.
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Much of Posner's writing about the practice of judging over the last decade has been calculated to rile moral philosophers who believe that reason itself can decide hard cases, and to provoke law professors who insist on the autonomy of legal reasoning. However, this time around, his exposition of the pragmatic dimension of judicial decision-making has an eminently practical purpose: to show the path that national security law should take in the war against Islamic extremism. The key is to appreciate that the Constitution itself requires courts to balance two competing interests or goods, individual liberty and public safety.
Drawing on central insights of the law and economics school, of which he is a founding father, and translating them into terms suitable for dealing with hard constitutional cases, Posner sets forth the appropriate balancing test:
Ideally, in the case of a right (for example, the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures) that could be asserted against government measures for protecting national security, one would like to locate the point at which a slight expansion in the scope of the right would subtract more from public safety than it would add to personal liberty and a slight contraction would subtract more from personal liberty than it would add to public safety. That is the point of balance, and determines the optimal scope of the right. The point shifts continuously as threats to liberty and safety wax and wane. At no time can the exact point be located. Yet to imagine it the object of our quest is useful in underscoring that the balance between liberty and safety must be struck at the margin. One is not to ask whether liberty is more or less important than safety. One is to ask whether a particular security measure harms liberty more or less than it promotes safety.
Of course, different justices will attach different weights to liberty and security, and come to different conclusions about the impact of specific measures on liberty and security. Posner does not deny or fear these difficulties. The purpose of his balancing test is not to eliminate but to refine the role of judgment in constitutional adjudication.
It follows that, at the margins, constitutional rights will and should vary with the threat that the nation faces. Posner recognizes that libertarians of both the left and right will decry this approach. They will prefer clear rules with very few exceptions--that, for instance, political speech can only be prohibited if it involves an incitement to crimes. They will also tend to discount the national security threat by treating terrorism as a species of crime. And they will warn darkly of the historical tendency of the government to chip away steadily at civil liberties in wartime in the name of dangers that eventually turn out to be farfetched.
To these libertarian objections, Posner replies that the rigidity of rules is disadvantageous when the constitutional terrain is as rocky and unfamiliar as it is in the case of jihadist terror. Further, he contends, unlike criminals but like traditional armies, Muslim extremists seek to cripple the state, and increasingly will have the means to do so, and thus pose a quantitatively and qualitatively different sort of threat than that for which the criminal law was designed.
Posner notes that what American history actually reveals is that, early on, when the enemy is poorly understood, government does truncate civil liberties--Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, FDR's internment of Japanese citizens, McCarthyite purges of suspected Communists--but that, as wars wear on, and well before they end, the government acquires an understanding of the adversary that allows it to continue to fight without further circumscribing civil liberties.
Posner admonishes those libertarians who would brook no trade-offs in civil liberties, in exchange for heightened security measures, for missing the larger picture. Nothing, he points out, is more sure to bring about a severe restriction of civil liberties in America than the backlash following the failure to prevent another 9/11, or worse.
Posner puts his balancing test to work on several of the novel and difficult legal issues raised by the war on terror, including questions concerning detention, interrogation, search and surveillance, speech, and privacy. Posner's reasoning, though debatable, is invariably illuminating, and overall demonstrates that the Constitution, pragmatically interpreted, is both sturdy and flexible, capable in the war we are now waging of protecting liberty and maintaining security.
Consider his treatment of the detention and interrogation of enemy combatants. To determine the minimum protections, under the Constitution, to which terrorists are entitled, it is necessary to classify terrorists correctly. Because they are making war on the United States by threatening the nation's political sovereignty and territorial integrity, they are not criminals, and therefore they are not entitled to the procedural protections that the Constitution provides those accused of criminal wrongdoing.
However, because they violate the laws of war by fighting without a regular command structure, without uniforms, without carrying their weapons openly, and by targeting civilians, terrorists are not entitled to the procedural protections that cover prisoners of war, or lawful enemy combatants, under international law. So what rights does the Constitution provide for unlawful enemy combatants?
It depends, argues Posner. If unlawful combatants are foreigners and are captured and detained abroad, the case is simple: They have no rights under the Constitution. If a U.S. citizen is detained on suspicion of being an unlawful combatant, then, as Hamdi v. Rumsfeld concluded, the Constitution protects his right to habeas corpus, which gives him the chance to challenge the grounds of his detention in front of an impartial decision-maker.
If the noncitizen, unlawful combatant is captured abroad, but transferred to U.S. territory, then (according to the Court's 1946 Yamashita decision) he, too, is entitled to the writ of habeas corpus. In 2004, the Supreme Court held in Rasul v. Bush that foreign persons detained as unlawful combatants at Guant?namo, which technically is not U.S. territory, also had the right to contest their detention.
Is this good constitutional law? For the most part, Posner thinks that protecting the right of habeas corpus for citizens held as unlawful combatants strikes the proper balance between security and liberty. He would extend that protection to foreigners captured and detained in the United States on suspicion of being terrorists. After all, he points out, there is a much greater risk of mistakenly ascribing to an individual membership in a terrorist organization than of mistakenly ascribing to him membership in a nation-state's armed forces. And giving detainees a limited opportunity to convince an impartial decision-maker that they have been wrongly detained poses only a small threat to national security. (Limits on this opportunity may include permitting the holding of a suspected terrorist for a reasonable period before any hearing and, at the hearings, placing a heavy burden of proof on the detainee.)
Once detained, what methods of interrogation does the Constitution permit the government to employ to elicit information from unlawful enemy combatants? Does the Constitution permit torture? Setting aside for the moment America's international law obligations under the Convention against Torture, Posner points out that the Constitution, which regulates the gathering of evidence, interrogations, trials, and punishments in criminal cases, has very little to say about the acquisition of information from terrorists for the purpose of preventing death and destruction.
The currently applicable constitutional rule is that methods of interrogation that "shock the conscience" are unlawful. But, as Posner points out, this test is sensitive to context: "What shocks the conscience depends on circumstances. In life-and-death circumstances the use of even highly coercive methods of interrogation is unlikely to shock the conscience of most people, even thoughtful and humane ones."
Yet not all highly coercive methods of interrogation rise to the level of torture, which, according to the Convention against Torture, is defined as the infliction of severe physical or mental suffering. Nevertheless, Posner is convinced that "torture is warranted to avert a greater evil." But warranted is not the same as constitutional or lawful.
Even though he believes that many consciences would not be shocked by the decision to shove knives under a person's fingernails to obtain knowledge about the location of a nuclear weapon set to explode in a few hours in Washington, Posner concludes that it would be unwise to hold that the Constitution permits torture. In cases of emergency, where torture is warranted but not constitutional, Posner the pragmatist prefers "to trust public officers to perceive and act on a moral duty that is higher than their legal duty." This approach regards torture as a form of morally and politically justified civil disobedience. In the event, it requires public officials to explain the necessity of their conduct in a court of law, and counts on judges to take account of the necessity under which public officials acted in ordering torture.
The alternative is codifying the circumstances in which torture is lawful. Posner believes that the costs of codification are too high. The costs include the constraint security officials will feel in confronting novel circumstances not dreamt of by the lawmakers, and the open invitation to lawmakers created by codification to constantly expand the boundaries of the legally permissible.
As with his analysis of detention and interrogation, Posner's explorations of surveillance, speech, privacy, and sundry other legal issues raised by the war on jihadist terror reflect the view that "law must adjust to necessity born of emergency." It is Posner's large achievement in this small book to show that this adjustment--difficult and contentious though it may be--is necessary, just, and constitutional.
Peter Berkowitz teaches at the George Mason University School of Law and is the Tad and Dianne Taube senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=12667&R=EDF2284B2
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El Shukrijumah and the 'Dirty Bomb' Threat
Certain bloggers are circulating rumors on the Internet that alleged al Qaeda militant Adnan El Shukrijumah has been sighted recently in Central America and Texas, saying this indicates al Qaeda is close to conducting a "dirty bomb" attack against the United States.
According to the rumors, El Shukrijumah is in possession of dirty bombs -- devices intended to disperse radiation -- and is waiting for a "go" signal or a taped statement from al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Still other rumors have circulated about an "American Hiroshima," or an al Qaeda nuclear attack against the United States. Although there is little chance that a dirty bomb attack is imminent, the U.S. government has good reason to believe that El Shukrijumah poses a significant threat.
Although the U.S. government says El Shukrijumah is a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in 1975 in Saudi Arabia, the Saudis say El Shukrijumah's father was an expatriate worker in Saudi Arabia and that neither the father nor the son was ever a Saudi citizen. The family also reportedly spent time in Guyana, where his father, Sheikh Gulshair El Shukrijumah, worked as a missionary for the Saudi government. In the early 1990s, the family moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., where the father took a job at the Al Farouq Mosque. Some members of the mosque were subsequently linked to the 1993 attack against the World Trade Center and a plot to bomb targets in New York, including the Holland Tunnel and U.N. Headquarters. In 1995, the El Shukrijumah family moved to Miramar, Fla., where Adnan studied computer science at Broward Community College.
By the late 1990s, perhaps inspired by the war between Bosnian Muslims and Serbs in the former Yugoslavia, El Shukrijumah began to favor more radical interpretations of Islam. In late 1999, according to the FBI, he began traveling to Pakistan and Afghanistan to attend al Qaeda training camps. By 2001, the FBI was investigating El Shukrijumah in connection with two alleged militant plots based out of south Florida.
In the months before 9/11, El Shukrijumah allegedly traveled extensively in the United States and Canada, possibly scoping out potential targets. He disappeared from south Florida shortly before 9/11, but is not believed to have been part of that plot. Based on an investigation into his activities, the FBI obtained an arrest warrant for El Shukrijumah in 2003, but by then he had dropped off the radar. The FBI believes El Shukrijumah could be anywhere, and the hunt for him has spanned into Trinidad, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Pakistan's Waziristan province.
According to the FBI, El Shukrijumah is especially dangerous because of his intelligence and because his appearance, which enables him to pass as a Latino or Indian, allows him to blend in with non-Muslims. Also, having spent a considerable amount of time in the United States, he speaks English well and is familiar with U.S. culture. The State Department, through its Rewards for Justice Program, is offering a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to El Shukrijumah's arrest. There also is speculation outside of the government that he is well-versed in nuclear technology and is an accomplished pilot, but these claims are not supported by the FBI's investigation. His technical background, however, suggests he would be able to construct a dirty bomb.
Operationally, an "American Hiroshima" plot would be difficult to successfully carry out. Although obtaining and employing weapons of mass destruction, including dirty bombs, have long been part of al Qaeda's strategic thinking, there has been no indication that the jihadist network has been able to make any significant progress toward that goal.
Rumors of imminent attacks with dirty bombs appear in cycles and are nothing new. If al Qaeda were in the operational phase of such a plot, it doubtfully would provide warnings or allow indicators of its plan to leak out. Speculation about an attack, however, does allow the jihadist network to spread fear, forces U.S. authorities to waste resources and perhaps even serves as cover for its real actions.
The rumors about dirty bomb plots and the whereabouts of the shadowy El Shukrijumah may be unfounded, but they do add to the mystery surrounding him. If he is in fact an al Qaeda operative, he is one of the group's more technically adept and sophisticated members, which makes him dangerous. El Shukrijumah, however, is more threatening as a capable organizer of a more conventional attack inside the United States.
Send questions or comments on
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Enemies Within
Bill Gertz on our grave intel gaps.
An NRO Q&A
Bill Gertz is long-time defense and national-security reporter for the Washington Times. Today he is out with a new book, Enemies: How America?s Foes Steal Our Vital Secrets?and How We Let It Happen, about which he took some questions from NRO editor Kathryn Lopez.
Kathryn Jean Lopez: Most of us think Jack Bauer nowadays when we think of counterintelligence. Is there anything real about him?
Bill Gertz: Counterintelligence is the function of identifying and stopping foreign spies and terrorists. The fictional character Jack Bauer in TV?s ?24? is a good example of the kind of counterterrorism specialist who often applies counterintelligence techniques to the problem of terrorism, something I advocate in Enemies, that needs to be done. Every terrorist attack is preceded by an intelligence operation and our counterterrorism agents need to get into that intelligence stream in order to stop the attacks before they take place.
Lopez: Briefly, who is Leandro Aragoncillo and why is he important?
Gertz: Leandro Aragoncillo was a spy for the Philippines who infiltrated the White House offices of Vice President Al Gore and Vice President Dick Cheney. He went on to get a job as an analyst at an FBI analytical unit in New Jersey and was caught by immigration agents after he tried to use his official status as an FBI employee to help one of his confederates in a spy ring that supplied U.S. secrets to Philippines opposition politicians.
The case showed that despite the extremely damaging spy case of FBI Agent Robert Hanssen, who spied for Russia, the FBI has not done enough to screen employees and limit their computer access to secrets.
Lopez: ?Today, nearly 140 nations and some 35 known and suspected terrorist groups target the United States through espionage, according to intelligence officials,? you write. Is that exceptionally high for the world?s superpower?
Gertz: We are the main target because enemies of the United States want to obtain our most important secrets, which range from our military?s unique warfighting techniques, to advanced weaponry, to our economic and high-technology secrets. They also seek to influence our government and force it to adopt policies that are contrary to U.S. national interests, such as the unprecedented Chinese-influence operations that have resulted in naive and counterproductive policies toward China that seek to portray a nuclear armed Communist dictatorship as a non-threatening power. Terrorists also have targeted our military and intelligence services, seeking to learn valuable information that could be used to conduct terrorist attacks against us.
Unfortunately, we know very little about these enemies? intelligence-gathering capabilities and unless we rapidly build-up our counterintelligence agencies, we are vulnerable to devastating losses.
Lopez: How significant a threat is China to our national security? Are we taking it seriously enough?
Gertz: China today represents the most serious long-term threat to our national security. Beijing is rapidly building up its military forces with one aim: To prepare to win a future military conflict against the United States. China?s intelligence services, both its Ministry of State Security (civilian) and Second Department of the People?s Liberation Army, known as 2 PLA, are the leading edge of a secret war by China against the United States. They are following the dictum of ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu, who said he acme of skill is defeating your enemy without firing a shot. Unfortunately, China, through intelligence operations and related influence operations have fooled major portions of the U.S. government, from the White House National Security Council to the higher levels of the military services into believing that China poses not threat to the United States.
The civilian part of the Pentagon alone among U.S. government agencies is taking the threat from China seriously and has begun quietly implementing a so-called ?hedge strategy? that involves a build up of military forces in the Pacific and Asia that will better position the United States to deal with a China that in the future drops the facade of friendliness and openly declares its hostility. Our intelligence and security agencies remain woefully unprepared to deal with China?s intelligence assault, as I reveal in Enemies in the case of Katrina Leung, China?s mole in the FBI in Los Angeles, and in the case of Tai and Chi Mak, two brothers who passed valuable defense technology that has helped China?s military.
The chapter on the spies who got away reveals that either gross negligence or a Chinese spy in the highest levels of government, or both, can explain why so many recent Chinese spy cases were mishandled.
Lopez: You say that the best way to deal with North Korea is counterintelligence. Does that mean we?re doomed?
Gertz: No. The current U.S. policy toward North Korea has been announced as ?diplomacy,? albeit a feckless effort to try and convince a radical Communist regime in Pyongyang to give up its nuclear-arms program. The diplomatic policy is doomed to failure but that does not mean that the only other option is to begin flying Tomahawks and dropping JDAMs on North Korea. The most effective middle ground between feckless diplomacy and heavy-handed military attacks is an effective, targeted program of regime change. The key to reaching this goal is to organize a major counterintelligence program that will target North Korean intelligence and government officials for recruitment. A targeted campaign would have the effect of creating opponents of the current regime within the power structure and to use those recruited agents to bring down the peaceful fall of the Pyongyang government and its replacement with a democratic regime. It will not be easy but it is the best option available.
Lopez: You have an entire chapter on Cuba ? can Cuba really be a big threat (to more than the Cuban people), all things considered?
Gertz: My chapter on Cuba?s mole in the Pentagon is a detailed look at the little-known spy case of Ana Montes, one of the most senior intelligence analysts in the U.S. government who provided vast amounts of classified information to Cuba, whose government in turn then sold or traded those secrets to Russia and China. Montes was an ideological spy for Cuba who worked within the Defense Intelligence Agency and ultimately became the most important U.S. intelligence analyst in the entire government. She spied at first to oppose U.S. policy that supported the anti-Communist contra rebels in Nicaragua because Montes supported the Communist Sandinistas. She later switched her allegiance to Cuba after the Sandinistas were ousted in elections.
Cuba remains a threat because it is spreading its anti-Americanism throughout the region and is now deeply involved in backing the leftist government of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, which could cause tremendous harm to U.S. national security by virtue of its oil exports to the United States. Chavez has invited Cuban intelligence and security police into the country in large numbers.
Lopez: How much of a problem for intelligence has media disclosures on that NSA surveillance program and other top-secret operations been?
Gertz: Electronic intelligence by its nature has a limited shelf life as targets are constantly identifying NSA electronic surveillance and shutting it down. It is a constant challenge for NSA to find new links for eavesdropping and certainly media disclosures have limited NSA?s ability to gather intelligence. That said, foreign governments and terrorists organizations know very well that all electronic signals they use to communicate are subject to monitoring so that it would be overstating the case to say we have been crippled by media disclosures. The problem for U.S. intelligence today is an over reliance on electronic eavesdropping and photographic intelligence, and a dramatic lack of human intelligence-gathering. As one intelligence official put it: ?The problem with the CIA can be summed up in two words: ?No spies.? Our intelligence agencies currently lack any inside sources in the places where we need them most: North Korea, China, Iran, Syria and other places. Thus the government has been forced to rely too much on its formidable electronic eavesdropping capabilities.
Lopez: What makes you so sure you have the full counterintelligence picture?
Gertz: I have interviewed scores of U.S. intelligence and counterintelligence officials and I have been writing and reporting on these issues for over 20 years. I feel very confident that the portrait I paint of a broken counterintelligence system is accurate and full. But the nature of intelligence is that it is secret and there is probably much more that we don?t know about. Just since the publication of Enemies I was able to learn about another spy for China inside the U.S. military who managed to get away without prosecution.
Lopez: What practical things can Congress do? Would they?
Gertz: Unfortunately, the problem of foreign spies and weaknesses in U.S. counterintelligence have been studied by numerous commissions, both administration and congressional, over the years, usually as a result of some of the recent extremely damaging spy cases. Nothing seems to change and bureaucrats in the intelligence community resist needed reforms.
The latest effort was the so-called WMD commission, which called for fixing the broken counterintelligence system.
I recommend creating new joint White House-Congressional panel that would focus exclusively on the counterintelligence failures of recent years and make practical recommendations for fixing the problems.
The problem has been that the CIA is averse to tough counterintelligence, viewing it as an impediment to their offensive spying efforts. The FBI continues to view counterintelligence from a law enforcement perspective, which means that instead of exploiting spy cases for counterintelligence operations against the enemies, they tend to first focus on ?putting the cuffs? on spies, when that should only be one option. The better course of action is to find the spies and then turn them to our strategic advantage.
Lopez: Your book is, ultimately, about how bad our intelligence is. Has it gotten any better in the wake of 9/11? What can be done?
Gertz: Enemies in some ways is a follow-up to my 2003 book Breakdown, on the intelligence failures related to the September 11 attacks, but with a special emphasis on counterintelligence, that is, the failures of counterintelligence agencies and the need to fix the problem so that we can defend our nation from spies, saboteurs and terrorists.
U.S. intelligence agencies remain mired in what I call crushing bureaucratization ? the loss of focus on national, strategic goals and the overemphasis on protecting bureaucratic turf, budgets and personnel. The problem is seriously undermining our national security.
The intelligence community is bloated, with too many agencies doing to many of the same things. Restructuring is needed to upgrade our intelligence services to the 21st Century. While some reform has been carried out, there is so much more that needs to be done. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, in my view, has become another layer of bureaucracy on the overly bureaucratic system. It turns out that what the intelligence community didn?t need was a czar who could make all well.
We need smaller agencies with better people and radically different operating methods and procedures.
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MzJlZWMyNWVmMWViMTFlZDgwMTZhZGE3N2E0YmMxNDQ=
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Study: U.S. Prisons Can't Combat Islamic Terror Recruiting
Updated: September 19th, 2006 12:14 PM EDT
http://www.officer.com/article/article.jsp?siteSection=8&id=32697
By LARA JAKES JORDAN
Associated Press Writer
Jailed Islamic extremists with violent interpretations of the Quran are taking advantage of scarce religious monitoring programs to breed terrorists in U.S. prisons, a study released Tuesday shows.
State and local prison officials struggle to track radicalized behavior by inmates or religious counselors, the joint study by George Washington University and the University of Virginia found.
Many prisons can't afford preventive programs; in California, for example, officials reported "that every investigation into radical groups in their prisons uncovers new leads, but they simply do not have enough investigators to follow every case of radicalization."
"Radicalized prisoners are a potential pool of recruits by terrorist groups," concluded the study, released at a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on "homegrown" terrorists. "The U.S., with its large prison population, is at risk of facing the sort of homegrown terrorism currently plaguing other countries."
An estimated 2 million people are imprisoned in the United States; 6 percent of them are Muslim, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a counterterrorism consultant, told senators that "chilling" interpretations of the Quran were given to prison inmates when he worked for the al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, an international charity that served as a major al-Qaida financier.
The readings urged Muslims "to wage war against non-Muslims who have not submitted to Islamic rule," Gartenstein-Ross said in prepared testimony to the Senate panel.
"I know of only a few instances in which prisons rejected the literature we attempted to distribute - and it was never because of the literature's radicalism," said Gartenstein-Ross, who has since left the charity and converted to Christianity.
Prisons have long been considered recruiting stations for gangs and, more recently, terrorists, but little has been done throughout government to combat them. The Senate hearing came as law enforcement and intelligence officials focus on finding out how and why extremist homegrown sympathizers cross a line to become operational terrorists.
The panel's chair, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, called the matter "an emerging threat to our national security." Added Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., "While homegrown Islamic terrorism might not be as much of a threat as in say, Europe or some other places, we ignore the threat that does exist at our peril."
The report cited several high-profile cases of terrorists who became radicalized while incarcerated, including British shoe bomber Richard Reid. It also noted what authorities call a foiled plot of a potential shooting rampage against California military facilities, synagogues and the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles by followers of Kevin James, who founded the radical group Jamiyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh, or JIS, as an inmate at California State Prison in Sacramento.
Researchers interviewed federal, state and local prison officials, religious counselors and counterterror authorities in four states - California, New York, South Carolina and Ohio - and the District of Columbia. They concluded that federal prison authorities have made significant strides in collecting and sharing information to help monitor whether inmates are becoming radicalized.
But state and local prison officials have largely relied on contractors and volunteers to lead Islamic services because of a lack of well-trained Muslim chaplains, the report found. In New York, that led to several cases of "imams espousing violent views," it said.
The report noted a 2004 study that found that about half of 193 prisons surveyed supervised religious services or monitored them with video or audio recorders. "In the absence of monitoring by authoritative Islamic chaplains, materials that advocate violence have infiltrated the prison system undetected," it found.
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http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/348
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We're Ignoring Simple Measures to Prevent Terrorist Infiltration of Borders & Prisons
By Michael Cutler
It seems that the only thing that is predictable where our nation's supposed "War on Terror" is concerned is that incompetence is the order of the day. A recent ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) press release dealt with a thwarted effort by a translator, who was employed as a contract translator at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, to secure an immigrant visa as the result of a fraudulent petition. I believe it is important to once again provide you with this press release because it meshes with the story in yesterday's "Washington Times" about a lack of translators who can read mail and other documents of detainees who are suspected of being involved in terrorism. According to the article, this lack of translators also prevents the Bureau of Prison, the agency in charge of these prisons, from monitoring verbal communications as well. This, in my opinion, creates two major critical issues that are not being addressed. First of all, it is important for officials in charge of a jail to be able to know what is going on to help prevent escapes and assaults on prison guards as well as other inmates. Second, this failure to read these letters and monitor phone conversations and other oral communication also impedes efforts to gain critical intelligence that might be culled from a review of all of these various potential sources of information.
We face a ludicrous paradox: While we agonize over how much pressure interrogators should bear against inmates who might possess intelligence that might be critical in preventing future terrorist attacks, our government is missing what might be critical information that would not even involve the interrogation of prisoners, only the ability to read and understand the languages in which they communicate, including Arabic.
Interestingly, I have recommended in testimony before Congress that it is essential to mandate that ICE enforcement personnel successfully complete a Spanish language training program, which was mandated when I attended Border Patrol Academy in 1972, as were all INS enforcement personnel. I further recommended that in addition to Spanish language training (a reasonable requirement since the great majority of illegal aliens are Spanish-speaking), that the ICE academy also provide other language training where strategic languages are concerned. Among those languages would be Arabic, Farsi and Urdu. Thus far, ICE special agents are still receiving absolutely no foreign language training! Apparently Bureau of Prison personnel are similarly hobbled by a lack of language training.
I hate to keep on saying the same things, but we need to remember that we are at war. Three thousand innocent victims of the attacks of September 11, 2001 provide mute testimony to that simple fact. Yet, the "Can-do" attitude that America demonstrated in prosecuting World War II is lacking today. While members of both houses jump up and down, usually only when a television camera is taping them, demanding that we do a better job of screening the containers arriving on vessels to search for Weapons of Mass Destruction, only a comparative few members of the House of Representatives and the United States Senate have been willing to tackle the issue of border security and the lack of integrity of the immigration system. Those who have consistently demanded such improvements are the true leaders of our nation, but they are waging an apparent uphill battle with their colleagues from both sides of the political aisle.
Clearly it is critical to provide language training to employees of BOP and ICE, as well as other agencies whose employees might be able to use foreign language ability to help prevent future terrorist attacks. This is not a new issue. After the attacks of September 11 much was made about the inability of the FBI to translate a mountain of intercepts and other material that might have helped them to prevent the attacks of 9/11. Yet, even this obvious strategy of providing appropriate foreign language is not being pursued. So while the debates about the use of torture to extract intelligence and information from detainees at Guantanamo has made the headlines, other non-controversial methods of securing intelligence have been ignored!
We the people have the absolute right to demand our government does a much better job of addressing these critical issues immediately! No less than the safety and survival of our nation and our citizens hang in the balance.
=======================================
"Supermax" mail unchecked
Most calls, letters by terrorist inmates in Florence aren't monitored, report says
By Mike Soraghan
Denver Post Staff Writer
DenverPost.com
Article Last Updated:10/05/2006 08:51:54 PM MDT
Washington - The federal government wants to do more wiretapping to catch terrorists, but according to a new Justice Department watchdog report, it's still not listening in on some of the terrorists it's already captured. Sometimes it doesn't even read their mail.
At "Supermax," the federal government's top-security prison in Florence, officials monitored less than half of the phone calls of prisoners on its "alert list," including those convicted of terrorism whose calls are supposed to be monitored "live."
The report by the Justice Department's inspector general warned that because of gaps like that, important information could be missed.
"The threat remains that terrorist and other high-risk inmates can use mail and verbal communications to conduct terrorist or criminal activities while incarcerated," said the report, issued this week.
Supermax - officially known as the Administrative Maximum United States Penitentiary, or USP Florence ADMAX - came under scrutiny in 2005 when NBC reported that three men convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing sent letters from the prison that were suspected of being used to recruit suicide bombers.
Since then, those prisoners have been locked up even tighter, and the prison has hired three Arabic translators with top-security clearances to monitor inmate letters and phone calls. But even then, prison officials didn't provide counterterrorism intelligence training to the translators in their first year on the job, the new report says.
The inspector general looked at 10 federal prisons including Supermax and found that the federal prison system does not read all the mail of its terrorist and other at-risk inmates; doesn't have enough good translators; doesn't do enough to flag the most dangerous international terrorists; and doesn't effectively monitor terrorists' phone calls and other conversations.
Federal prison officials said they've been trying to upgrade their monitoring of terrorists. But they told investigators they've been unable to do everything they want because they don't have enough money and the number of prisoners in their custody keeps going up.
The report recommended that:
Prisons should provide more foreign-language and counterterrorism intelligence training.
The federal Bureau of Prisons should improve its access to intelligence information.
Prisons should consider monitoring the cellblock conversations of all high-risk inmates.
Supermax, built to hold the nation's most dangerous criminals, houses more terrorists than any other federal prison.
Prison staffers told investigators they didn't feel as if they had the proper training to adequately analyze intelligence from terrorist inmates.
The report also says that investigative supervisors specially trained to monitor terrorists are often pulled for other duties because of staffing and funding shortages at the prison.
Supermax's two mailroom staffers randomly monitored less than 2 percent of the nearly 400 prisoners' mail, the report said.
Staff writer Mike Soraghan can be reached at 202-662-8730 or msoraghan@denverpost.com.
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Forwarding...
Instructor Call For Interest
POSITION SUMMARY
Homeland Security Corporation and PPCT Management Systems is currently
recruiting individuals interested in
instructing for the Department of State Antiterrorism Assistance
Program (ATAP). HSC/PPCT is seeking
successful and energetic trainers that will bring dynamics and
enthusiasm to the learning experience and who
have proven ability and expertise in the below listed fields. This is
an exciting opportunity for qualified
applicants to contribute to a successful and demanding organization
that embraces training as a valuable tool in
achieving our nation's security goals and objectives.
FIELDS OF INSTRUCTION
Hostage Negotiations - Lead Instructor and Instructor
Interdicting Terrorist Organizations - Policy -Lead Instructor, Staff
Instructor, Instructor "Cyber"
Interdicting Terrorist Activity - Basic - Lead Instructor and Instructor
Interdicting Terrorist Activity - Policy
Integrating Counter Terrorism Strategies at the National Level -
Implementation - Lead Instructor and Staff
Instructor
Integrating Counter Terrorism Strategies at the National Level - Policy
Emergency Medical Intervention for Mass Casualties - Lead Instructor
and Instructor
Hospital Based Management of Mass Casualty Incidents - Lead Instructor
and Instructor
Kidnap Incident Management - Lead Instructor and Instructor
Weapons of Mass Destruction - Awareness - Lead Instructor and Instructor
Weapons of Mass Destruction - Operations - Lead Instructor and Instructor
A Police Executive's Role in Countering Terrorism- Instructor
Anti-Terrorism Executive Forum- Expert moderator
REQUIREMENTS
. Must possess current certifications in the field of instruction from
state or federally recognized programs.
. Must have a minimum of five years of instructional experience.
. Must have well-developed interpersonal skills and excellent
leadership and motivational skills.
. Must possess confident public speaking, presentation, delivery, and
facilitation skills.
. Must be able to train one-on-one, in small groups, and in a
classroom setting while maintaining a mature,
composed, and professional approach within diverse student
environments and situations.
. Must be adaptable/flexible and work effectively under challenging
conditions.
. Selected applicants should have the flexibility to travel, as needed.
SALARY RANGE
The salary range for the contract is generally between $700-$800 per
day, based on position and experience.
FOR CONSIDERATION
Interested applicants are asked to submit a Resume' to Tom Jost via
email (tomjost@aol.com), or to call the
Belleville, IL. office of HSC/PPCT at 618-234-7728. Upon selection,
applicants will be asked to provide copies
of all applicable certifications and proof of 5 years instructional
experience as outlined on the resume'.
Deadline for resume' submittal is no later than October 19, 2006.
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Guro Crafty,
Is this position in Belleville, IL or will the position include traveling? I grew up in Belleville, IL and although I do not have the qulifications I may know of some people that do.
Thanks!
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Haven't a clue. :-D Why not ask them? :lol:
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Good point, I forward the info to several people as well. Thanks!
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Peter Huber, Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute for Policy Reasearch, speaking at the Gilder/Forbes Telecosm 2006 Conference earlier this month in Lake Tahoe (excerpt):
When a deliberate nuclear release occurs in the United States, as I think it inevitably will, we will almost certainly find that the material originated somewhere mundane?a hospital, a factory, an industrial setting. There is a whole lot of nuclear material out there all over the place. It has many useful applications. People who want it will find it.
The London subway bombers used Triaceatone Triperoxide (TATP). They brewed it in the bathtub using acetone, drain cleaner, and bleach. The Japanese subway attackers home-brewed their Sarin gas. The Oklahoma City bombers mixed liquid fertilizer and diesel fuel.
It is easy to forget about things like this if they haven?t happened in very recent memory. One would prefer to think that they?re not possible. But, the simple fact is?and people in the know really do know this?we still face today an absolutely horrifying disconnect between u-weapons (these very toxic materials) and our own ability to see them before they are released or detonated in a subway or a stadium.
Scientists can of course see anything in a lab. They can see a single atom of Cobalt-60 or a molecule of TATP or a strand of anthrax DNA. Just bring your sample to the right building and a well-trained technician will fire-up a room-sized or larger mainframe unit and in due course the instrument will tell you exactly what it is you brought in. It happens after every attack. They can always tell you what hit you, after you?ve been hit.
The challenge is to see these things before they detonate, before they?re dispersed, before they get into the air ducts, and to see them not roughly or approximately, but so precisely that you can see exactly what they are and react to them appropriately, in real time, in all of the places where they could inflict damage.
How do you even begin to do that?
Just across Manhattan on any given day are some 4 million letters, 3 million people, at least half a million motor vehicles, half a million parcels, any of which could be carrying a tiny amount of something that could cause enormous harm.
Some time ago, the officers who patrol the mall in Washington D.C. were given portable radiation detectors. They soon removed the batteries. The units registered so many false alarms, they were worse than useless.
Radiation is easy to detect. It?s easy to detect badly. You can?t evacuate Yankee Stadium twice during every game to respond to false alarms.
Again, inferior technologies are worse than useless. A significant fraction of money spent in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 on technology was wasted. Yet, with that said, there is absolutely no other alternative. You cannot fight unstable atomic nuclei or nerve agents or DNA with guns and guards and gates. Guns and guards and gates are too expensive and completely ineffectual. They can?t see the stuff and, if they can see it, they can?t intercept it. You need the accuracy of a lab in something the size of a pager. You need to push out the boundaries, so you can screen huge numbers of packages and containers and so on at points of origin overseas and screen again at ports of entry and at key switching points like mail centers and transportation transits points and buildings and hospitals, where the first responders are treated, and on and on and on.
What are the essential technologies that will make this possible? What are the core enablers?
I will not suggest that there is a short list, but one can begin to zero in on a few of them. That is certainly what I and some fellow investors started doing before 9-11 and have continued doing since?
Download the audio of Peter Huber?s complete Telecosm 2006 keynote address:
http://www.gildertech.com/public/Telecosm2006/Agenda.htm#Huber
(NOTE: This is a large 69MB MP3 file, which includes George Gilder?s opening Telecosm 2006 remarks. It may take a few minutes to download.)
========================
The Increased Vigilance of Radioactive Materials
Western security agencies made more than 300 seizures of material that could be used in radioactive "dirty bombs" between 2002 and 2005, according to a new report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The report goes on to say that annual seizures rose dramatically over the latter two years of the study. Although the rise appears significant, it likely represents the increase in efforts to confiscate radioactive material rather than an actual increase in trafficking.
A U.N. press release citing the report says the number of cases involving illicit smuggling of radioactive material occurred mostly in Europe, though it fails to specify the precise nature of the radioactive materials seized. Instead it breaks them down into broad categories such as "nuclear material" and "radioactive material."
Black market sales of military-grade radioactive materials spiked following the collapse of the Soviet Union as criminal elements descended on abandoned Russian nuclear and research facilities. The Russian government, in conjunction with various international agencies and the U.S. government, has since clamped down on the sale of Soviet-era radioactive materials. U.S. aid to Russia in the form of so-called nonproliferation assistance -- money paid to destroy or adequately secure such nuclear and radiological material -- increased from roughly $760 million a year before 9/11 to about $810 million in 2002 and $957 million in 2003.
What the IAEA's broad categories fail to show is the wide variety of materials that could be usable for dirty bombs. The term "radioactive material" used by the IAEA covers a broad spectrum of items ranging from spent plutonium and uranium used in nuclear reactors to items used for industrial purposes. Equipment used in the dental and medical professions for X-rays and certain cancer treatments contains a substantial amount of radioactive materials. Radioactive cobalt is used in the steelmaking process to further refine the quality of the metal. Even common household items such as smoke detectors and the mantles used in camping lanterns contain a certain amount of radioactive materials that could be harvested.
The wide-scale use radioactive materials in the commercial sector means that materials needed for a dirty bomb are everywhere. Militants who might seek to create such a device do not necessarily need to smuggle in radioactive waste in shipments when they can gradually and relatively safely gather significant quantities from products used commercially without major risk of detection from security organizations. On the other hand, the more often they smuggle materials, the more likely they are to get caught.
Since 2002, the number of agencies and personnel monitoring the smuggling of radioactive materials has increased. Therefore, a rise in the number of materials found does not necessarily mean an increase in the amount of materials being smuggled. Moreover, the threshold for what is considered an actual threat is lower now than it was before 9/11.
As a result, false threats can inadvertently materialize out of a monitoring agencies' zeal to find a legitimate threat. This was the case with the red mercury hoaxes of the late 1980s to mid-1990s, when intelligence agencies worldwide reported on a substance that supposedly could be used in the production of a nuclear device. Ultimately, most of the red mercury was discovered to be nothing more than harmless dyes and powders being promoted by criminals and scam artists as valuable nuclear material. The scares, however, did highlight the proclivity of monitoring agencies to overreact to nonexistent threats.
Though increased vigilance could lead to more false alarms, it also makes it harder for a person or group that is actually trying to make a dirty bomb to assemble the required materials.
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A Profiling In Courage
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 11/22/2006
Homeland Security: Kudos to US Airways. Risking fines and a boycott, it did the right thing this week by removing a group of Muslim men from a flight to protect its crew and passengers.
By most accounts, the six bearded men were behaving suspiciously at a time when airports were on high alert for sky terror during the holidays. "There were a number of things that gave the flight crew pause," an airline spokesman said. According to witnesses and police reports, the men:
? Made anti-American statements.
? Made a scene of praying and chanting "Allah."
? Asked for seat-belt extensions even though a flight attendant thought they didn't need them.
? Refused requests by the pilot to disembark for more screening.
Also, three of the men had only one-way tickets and no checked baggage.
Police had to forcibly remove the men from the flight, whereupon they were taken into custody. A search found no weapons or explosives, and they were released to continue on their journey.
Within hours, the men enlisted a Muslim-rights group to make a stink in the press, insisting they were merely imams returning home from an Islamic conference in Minneapolis. They say they were "harassed" because of their faith.
But were they victims or provocateurs?
All six claim to be Americans, so clearly they were aware of heightened security. Surely they knew that groups of Muslim men flying together while praying to Allah fit the modus operandi of the 9/11 hijackers and would make a pilot nervous. Throw in anti-U.S. remarks and odd demands about seat belts, and they might as well have yelled, "Bomb!"
Yet they chose to make a spectacle. Why? Turns out among those attending their conference was Rep.-elect Keith Ellison, D-Minn., who will be the first Muslim sworn into Congress (with his hand on the Quran). Two days earlier, Ellison, an African-American convert who wants to criminalize Muslim profiling, spoke at a fundraiser for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim-rights group that wasted no time condemning US Airways for "prejudice and ignorance."
CAIR wants congressional hearings to investigate other incidents of "flying while Muslim." Incoming Judiciary Chairman John Con-yers, D-Mich., has already drafted a resolution, borrowing from CAIR rhetoric, that gives Muslims special civil-rights protections.
While it's not immediately clear whether the incident was a stunt to help give the new Democratic majority cover to criminalize airport profiling, it wouldn't be the first time Muslim passengers have tried to prove "Islamophobia" ? or test nerves and security.
Two years ago a dozen Syrian men caused panic aboard a Northwest Airlines flight by passing bags to each other as they used the lavatory. As the plane prepared to land, they rushed to the back and front of the plane speaking in Arabic.
Then there's the case of Muhammed al-Qudhaieen and Hamdan al-Shalawi, two Arizona college students removed from an America West flight after twice trying to open the cockpit. The FBI suspected it was a dry run for the 9/11 hijackings, according to the 9/11 Commission Report. One of the students had traveled to Afghanistan. Another became a material witness in the 9/11 investigation.
Even so, the pair filed racial-profiling suits against America West, now part of US Airways. Defending them was none other than the leader of the six imams kicked off the US Airways flight this week.
Turns out the students attended the Tucson, Ariz., mosque of Sheikh Omar Shahin, a Jordan native. Shahin has been the protesters' public face, even returning to the US Airways ticket counter at the Minneapolis airport to scold agents before the cameras.
In an Arizona Republic interview after 9/11, he acknowledged once supporting Osama bin Laden through his mosque in Tucson. FBI investigators believe bin Laden set up a base in Tucson.
Hani Hanjour, who piloted the plane that hit the Pentagon, attended the Tucson mosque along with bin Laden's onetime personal secretary, according to the 9/11 Commission Report. Bin Laden's ex-logistics chief was president of the mosque before Shahin took over.
"These people don't continue to come back to Arizona because they like the sunshine or they like the state," said FBI agent Kenneth Williams. "Something was established there, and it's been there for a long time." And Shahin appears to be in the middle of it.
CAIR asserts the imams are peace-loving patriots. "It's inappropriate to treat religious leaders that way," a spokesman said.
Yeah, they all wear halos. Omar Abdul-Rahman, a blind sheikh, is serving a life term for plotting to blow up several New York landmarks. Imam Ali al-Timimi, a native Washingtonian, is also behind bars for soliciting local Muslims to kill fellow Americans. Imams in New York were recently busted for buying shoulder-fired missiles. Another in Lodi, Calif., planned an al-Qaida terror camp there.
We could go on and on. Imams or not, US Airways did right by its customers. Shahin is calling on Muslims to boycott the airline; that might actually work in its favor. US Airways has been flooded with calls from Americans saying it just became the safest airline.
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Read elsewhere:
"An aircraft mechanic e-mailed Laura Ingram and said the extenders can be used to buckle the belts across the aisle and create a barrier."
Fascinating , , ,
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Note that the "handcuffing" never happened!
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http://powerlineblog.com/archives/016084.php
The flying imams: What didn't happen
Audrey Hudson follows up her two Washington Times stories on the flying imams with an interview of ringleader Omar Shahin: "Imam disputes ties to Hamas." It's an oddly muted interview by contrast, for example, with this AP report. Shahin does not claim that the imams were mistreated by authorities. No handcuffs. No barking dogs. He speaks up for US Airways: "We love US Airways, and we want to fly with them," he said, which I'm sure is a great comfort to all involved.
Shahin disputes his knowledge that the KindHearts charity he supported was a Hamas front. Although KindHearts was established as a successor to the Global Relief Foundation shuttered by the feds after 9/11, his involvement was an innocent mistake.
Hudson apparently didn't ask Shahin about the seat belt extenders for which two or three of the imams asked. Shahin was reportedly one of the imams who asked for and received one, despite the fact he has no apparent need for it.
Hudson's article seems to me to save the best for last:
Mr. Shahin says that after they were questioned and released, US Airways declined to sell them another plane ticket, even after an FBI agent intervened at the imam's request. "I told him, 'Please sir, to call them.' And he did and talked for more than 20 minutes. He was trying to tell them we have no problem with the government and we can fly with anybody, but they still refused. He told me, 'I'm sorry I did my best.' I really appreciated it."
Paul McCabe, FBI spokesman in Minneapolis, says no such call took place on behalf of the men. "That never happened," Mr. McCabe said.
But where did all those reports imams in handcuffs come from? According to this AP report, they came from none other than Shahin himself:
"They took us off the plane, humiliated us in a very disrespectful way," said Omar Shahin, of Phoenix.
The six Muslim scholars were returning from a conference in Minneapolis of the North American Imams Federation, said Shahin, president of the group. Five of them were from the Phoenix-Tempe area, while one was from Bakersfield, Calif., he said.
Three of them stood and said their normal evening prayers together on the plane, as 1.7 billion Muslims around the world do every day, Shahin said. He attributed any concerns by passengers or crew to ignorance about Islam.
"I never felt bad in my life like that," he said. "I never. Six imams. Six leaders in this country. Six scholars in handcuffs. It's terrible."
It's terrible -- terrible he made up the stuff about the imams in handcuffs special for the first wave of publicity about the incident. Those imams in handcuffs -- I guess, to quote Paul McCabe, "that never happened" either.
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Also, here's this:
Marshals decry imams' charges
By Audrey Hudson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published November 29, 2006
Air marshals, pilots and security officials yesterday expressed concern that airline passengers and crews will be reluctant to report suspicious behavior aboard for fear of being called "racists," after several Muslim imams made that charge in a press conference Monday at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
Six imams, or Muslim holy men, accused a US Airways flight crew of inappropriately evicting them from a flight last week in Minneapolis after several passengers said the imams tried to intimidate them by loudly praying and moving around the airplane. The imams urged Congress to enact laws to prohibit ethnic and religious "profiling."
Federal air marshals and others yesterday urged passengers to remain vigilant to threats.
"The crew and passengers act as our additional eyes and ears on every flight," said a federal air marshal in Las Vegas, who asked that his name not be used. "If [crew and passengers] are afraid of reporting suspicious individuals out of fear of being labeled a racist or bigot, then terrorists will certainly use those fears to their advantage in future aviation attacks."
But Rabiah Ahmed, spokeswoman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said Muslims "have to walk around on eggshells in public just because we don't want to be misconstrued as suspicious. You have to strike a balance between legitimate fears which people may have, but not allow passengers to have so much discretion that they can trigger a process that would violate a traveler's basic civil rights."
"Because one person misunderstood the actions of other law-abiding citizens, they were able to trigger a very long and daunting process for other travelers that were pulled off the plane in handcuffs and detained for many hours before they were cleared."
The imams say they were removed from the Phoenix-bound flight because they were praying quietly in the concourse. They had been in Minnesota for a conference sponsored by the North American Imams Federation.
But other passengers told police and aviation security officials a different version of the incident. They said suspicious behavior of the imams led to their eviction from the flight. The imams, they said, tested the forbearance of the passengers and flight crew in what the air marshal called a "[political correctness] probe."
"The political correctness needs to be left at the boarding gate," the marshal said. "Instilling politically correct fears into the minds of airline passengers is nothing less than psychological terrorism."
The passengers and flight crew said the imams prayed loudly before boarding; switched seating assignments to a configuration used by terrorists in previous incidents; asked for seat-belt extensions, which could be used as weapons; and shouted hostile slogans about al Qaeda and the war in Iraq.
Flight attendants said three of the six men, who did not appear to be overweight, asked for the seat-belt extensions, which include heavy metal buckles, and then threw them to the floor under their seats.
Robert MacLean, a former federal air marshal, expressed the fear yesterday that the situation "will make crews and passengers in the future second-guess reporting these events, thus compromising the aircraft's security out of fear of being labeled a dogmatist or a bigot, or being sued."
Flight attendants said they were concerned that the way the imams took seats that were not assigned to them -- two seats in the front row of first class, exit seats in the middle of the plane and two seats in the rear -- resembled the pattern used by September 11 hijackers, giving them control of the exits.
A Minneapolis police officer and a federal air marshal who were called to the plane after the imams refused to leave the plane for questioning said "the seating configuration, the request for seat-belt extensions, the prior praying and utterances about Allah and the United States in the gate area ... was suspicious."
One pilot for a competing airline said the incident would have a chilling effect on the flight crews.
"The flight crew may be a little more gun-shy about approaching people, they may have a higher standard for the next few weeks for screening unusual behavior. I hope that's not the case, because I do think US Airways did the proper thing."
Andrea Rader, spokeswoman for US Airways, said its employees "are going to do what is appropriate" to ensure that airplanes are safe and will not be dissuaded by uproar over last week's incident.
"I don't think people will be less vigilant as a result of this, and I think that's appropriate. There is a balance, and I think we will continue to achieve that. Our crews and people on the airplanes are going to watch for behavior that raises concerns."
Many airports offer private rooms for prayer, but CAIR's Miss Ahmed said travelers required to arrive at airports two hours in advance to go through security inspections are too exhausted and must pray at the gate.
"It's convenient to check in then get to the gate and pray there," she said.
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Surprised this hasn't been posted:
DHS official admits taking bribes to fake documents
POSTED: 4:46 p.m. EST, December 1, 2006
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A federal immigration official pleaded guilty Thursday to receiving more than $600,000 in bribes for falsifying documents for illegal immigrants.
Robert Schofield, 57, could face 25 years in federal prison when he is sentenced in February.
He pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, to issuing fraudulent documents to at least 184 illegal immigrants who falsely received U.S. citizenship.
Schofield, a former supervisor for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, was arrested in June.
He had served as a supervisory district adjudications officer at the Washington district office of agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security.
According to court documents, Schofield illegally helped Asian immigrants obtain U.S. citizenship in return for payments of $30,000 or more.
Under terms of the plea agreement Schofield has agreed to surrender his home, his bank accounts and his government retirement account.
"The breadth and scope of Mr. Schofield's fraud and corruption are truly stunning," said U.S. Attorney Chuck Rosenberg.
"Those who compromise the integrity of our national immigration system betray the confidence of the American people, and their actions are shameful."
Prosecutors said Schofield employed a network of brokers to bring aliens to him who were willing to pay for the phony documents.
The government says it has identified a number of these brokers.
One of them, Qiming Ye of Washington, has already pleaded guilty and will be sentenced December 21.
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http://pajamasmedia.com/upload/2006/12/FlyingImamsPolice%20Report.pdf
The police report on the Six Imans taken off the plane. Note the original complaint was made by an Arab speaker who listened in on their conversation. Although the report does not say so (PC reasons? Security reasons?) given how few non-Arab Americans speak Arabic, the probability is that the complainant was Arab/Arab-American/Muslim?-- which given the concerns of many about where the loyalties of Arab Americans/Mulims lie, is worth noting.
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I can't go into any great detail, but I once was part of a case where an American of arab descent spotted something suspicious and reported in to LE. I performed the initial investigation while my supervisor relayed the info to alphabet soup types in the DC area. I know that the various federal agencies did follow-ups and I was out of the loop after that. IMHO, some bad guys got spotted and hopefully something was prevented.
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Posted December 02, 2006 06:43 AM Hide Post
http://pajamasmedia.com/2006/12/the_faking_imams_pajamas_media.php
THE FAKING IMAMS -- Pajamas Media Exclusive: Police Report, Passenger Reveals That Flying Imams Were Up to No Good
PJM in Seattle
December 1, 2006 5:58 PM
The Now Notorious Flying Imams Claim Their Only Crime Was “Flying While Muslim,” But Our Exclusive Reporting Reveals They Are Trying to Sweep Their Real Motives Under Their Prayer Rugs
Area Muslims pray near the ticketing area of the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, Friday, Dec. 1.
SEE ALSO: The first public publication of the official police report on the incident including handwritten statements from witnesses. Download file — PDF 3.8 Mgb
PLUS: The letter from US Airways passenger “Pauline” to U.S. Airways: Download file PDF 68K
[Bloggers are invited to examine these documents and provide theories for what happened. Please notify Pajamas Media. — Editors]
By Richard Miniter, PJM Washington Editor
The case of U.S. Airways flight 300 gets stranger by the minute. When six traveling Muslim clerics were asked to deplane last week, it looked like another civil rights controversy against post-9-11 airport security.
Now new information is emerging that suggests it was all a stunt designed to weaken security….
Yesterday I spoke with a passenger on that flight, who asked that she be only identified as “Pauline.” A copy of airport police report, which I also obtained, supports Pauline’s account - and includes shocking revelations of its own. In addition, U.S. Airways spokeswoman Andrea Rader also confirmed much of what Pauline revealed…..
The passenger, who asked that she only be identified as “Pauline,” said she is afraid to give her full name or hometown. She is spending the night at “another location” because she does not feel safe at home. She credits reports that one imam is apparently linked to Hamas. “It is scary because these men could be dangerous.”
Pauline said she never wanted media attention. She wrote an email to U.S. Airways and cc:ed her daughter, who unexpectedly emailed it to her friends. As the letter took on an internet life of its own, it made its way to the inbox of a retired CNN executive producer. Then, to her dismay, the feeding frenzy began.
Pauline revealed to the Pajamas Media that the six imams were doing things far more suspicious than praying - an Arabic-speaking passenger heard them repeatedly invoke “bin Laden,” and “terrorism,” a gate attendant told the captain that she did not want to fly with them, and that bomb-sniffing dogs were brought aboard. Other Muslim passengers were left undisturbed and later joined in a round of applause for the U.S. Airways crew. “It wasn’t that they were Muslim. It was all of the suspicious things they did,” Pauline said.
Here is her story, along with corroborating quotes from the U.S. Airways spokeswoman Andrea Rader and the official report, another Pajamas Media Exclusive.
Sitting in Minneapolis-St. Paul’s Airport Gate C9, she noticed one of the imams immediately. “He was pacing nervously, talking in Arabic,” she said.
She quickly noticed the others. “They didn’t look like holy men to me. They looked like guys heading out of town for a Vikings game.”
Pauline said she did not see or hear the imams pray at the gate (she was at dinner in a nearby airport eatery), but heard about the pre-flight prayers from other passengers hours later.
As the plane boarded, she said, no one refused to fly. The public prayers and Arabic phone call did not trigger any alarms - so much for the p.c. allegations that people were disturbed by Muslim prayers.
But a note from a passenger about suspicious movements of the imams got the crew’s attention. A copy of the passenger’s note appears in the police report.
To Pauline everything seemed normal. Then the captain - in classic laconic pilot-style - announced there had been a “mix up in our paperwork” and that the flight would be delayed.
In reality, the air crew was waiting for the FBI and local police to arrive.
Ninety minutes after the flight’s scheduled 5:15 p.m. departure, the captain announced yet another delay. Still, Pauline said, there was no sense of alarm.
Still, it seemed like just another annoying development, typical when flying the friendly skies.
The situation in cockpit was far more intense, according to a U.S. Airways spokeswoman and police reports.
Contrary to press accounts that a single note from a passenger triggered the imams’ removal, Captain John Howard Wood was weighing multiple factors - factors that have largely been ignored by the press.
Another passenger, not the note writer, was an Arabic speaker sitting near two of the imams in the plane’s tail. That passenger pulled a flight attendant aside, and in a whisper, translated what the men were saying. They were invoking “bin Laden” and condemning America for “killing Saddam,” according to police reports.
Meanwhile an imam seated in first class asked for a seat-belt extension, even though according to both an on-duty flight attendant and another deadheading flight attendant, he looked too thin to need one. Hours later, when the passengers were being evacuated, the seat-belt extension was found on the floor near the imam’s seat, police reports confirm. The U.S. Airways spokeswoman Andrea Rader said she did not dispute the report, but said the airline’s internal investigation cannot yet account for the seat-belt extension request or its subsequent use.
A seat-belt extension can easily be used as a weapon, by wrapping the open-end of the belt around your fist and swinging the heavy metal buckle.
Still, it seemed like just another annoying development, typical when flying the friendly skies. Days after the incident, the imam would claim that the steward helped him attach the device. Pauline said he is lying. Hours later, when the police was being evacuated, the steward asked Pauline to hand him the seat-belt extension, which the imam did not attach, but placed on the floor. “I know he is lying,” Pauline said, “I had it [seat belt extension] in my hand.”
A passenger in the third row of first class, Pauline said, told a member of the crew: “I don’t have a good feeling about this guy,” about the imam who wanted the seat-belt extension.
A married couple one row behind first-class, tried to strike up a conversation with the imam seated near them. He refused to talk or even look at the woman in the eye, according to Pauline. Instead, he stood up and moved to join the other imams in the back of the plane. Why would he leave the luxury end of the aircraft? Pauline wondered. The account of the married couple does not appear in the police report.
Finally, a gate attendant told the captain she thought the imams were acting suspiciously, according to police reports.
So the captain apparently made his decision to delay the flight based on many complaints, not one. And he consulted a federal air marshal, a U.S. Airways ground security coordinator and the airline’s security office in Phoenix. All thought the imams were acting suspiciously, Rader told me.
Other factors were also considered: All six imams had boarded together, with the first-class passengers - even though only one of them had a first-class ticket. Three had one-way tickets. Between the six men, only one had checked a bag.
And, Pauline said, they spread out just like the 9-11 hijackers. Two sat in first, two in the middle, and two back in the economy section. Pauline’s account is confirmed by the police report. The airline spokeswoman added that some seemed to be sitting in seats not assigned to them.
One thing that no one seemed to consider at the time, perhaps due to lack of familiarity with Islamic practice, is that the men prayed both at the gate and on the plane. Observant Muslims pray only once at sundown, not twice.
“It was almost as if they were intentionally trying to get kicked off the flight,” Pauline said.
A lone plain clothes FBI agent boarded the plane and briefly spoke to the imams. Later, uniformed police escorted them off.
Some press reports said the men were led off in handcuffs, which Pauline disputes. “I saw them. They were not handcuffed.”
Later, each imam was individually brought back on the aircraft to reclaim his belongings. They were still not handcuffed. They may have been handcuffed later.
At this point, the passengers became alarmed. “How do we know they got all their stuff off?” Pauline heard one man ask.
While the imams were soon released, Pauline is fuming: “We are the victims of these people. They need to be more sensitive to us. They were totally insensitive to us and then accused us of being insensitive to them. I mean, we were a lot more inconvenienced than them.”
The plane was delayed for some three and one-half hours.
Bomb-sniffing dogs were used to sweep the plane and every passenger was re-screened, the airline spokeswoman confirmed. Another detail omitted from press reports.
The reaction of the remaining passengers has also gone unreported. “We applauded and cheered for the crew,” she said.
“I think it was either a foiled attempt to take over the plane or it was a publicity stunt to accuse us of being insensitive,” Pauline said. “It had to be to intimidate U.S. Airways to ease up on security.”
So far, U.S. Airways refuses to be intimidated, even though the feds have launched an investigation. “We are absolutely backing this crew,” Rader said.
Tucked away in the police report is this little gem: one of the imams had complained to a passenger that some nations did not follow shariah law and his job in Bakersfield, Calif. was a cover for “representing Muslims here in the U.S.”
So what are the imams really up to? Something more than praying it seems.
===================================================
http://www.pipelinenews.org/index.cfm?page=imam12106%2Ehtm
By Beila Rabinowitz and William A. Mayer
December 1, 2006 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - The November 20 action by 6 Imams on a U.S. Airways flight was a pre-conceived exercise in cultural jihad.
The Muslim preachers had just returned from the North American Imam Federation conference and were merely putting into practice the media manipulation techniques which they had studied and discussed at the 2 day event.
It is no coincidence that the event took place in Minneapolis where Muslim voters had just elected Keith Ellison, a Wahhabist Muslim [who, incidentally is insisting on taking the oath of office by swearing on the Quran rather than the Bible].
The Minneapolis/St. Paul airport was also the site of a controversy that we reported on in September [Muslim Taxi Drivers At Minneapolis International Airport Subjecting Fares To Sharia] when Muslim taxi drivers, working with radical Islamist groups refused to transport passengers whom they believed to be carrying alcohol. A follow-up piece [Are Minneapolis Taxi Fares Going To Support Al-Qaeda?] explored the ties to terror that exist among the mostly Somali immigrant taxi drivers.
The imam's actions were the culminating event in a carefully executed plan that was preceded by a series of smaller incidents in which Muslims tested the tolerance level of the airlines and passengers by wearing T shirts to the airport reading "I am not a Terrorist." As part of this ramp-up in provocation, an Islamist activist goaded airport security personnel into preventing him from entering a plane because he was wearing a T shirt emblazoned with possibly threatening Arabic text.
Following this same template, the imams intentionally pushed all the right buttons to arouse the suspicions of airport security, Federal air marshals and passengers alike.
Specifically, some of the Imams had one way tickets and checked no baggage, they had prayed loudly and very publicly before entering the plane, shouting Allahu Akhbar ["God is great," an Arabic chant often used by terrorists as a war cry] they refused to take their assigned seats instead occupying seats strategically chosen to control all entrances and exits of the airliner. Passengers overheard them making anti-American remarks, statements strongly against the war in Iraq and mentions of al-Qaeda and bin-Laden. Two of the Imams demanded seat belt extenders [which could be used as weapons] when neither of them were overweight and thus realistically in need of making their seat belts longer. When confronted for their bizarre behavior and asked to voluntarily leave the plane for questioning, they refused and were then forcibly removed.
Their actions were thus consistent with either a terrorist probe - a dry run - or the real thing, the prelude to a hijacking attempt.
It is extremely troubling to consider the degree to which these supposedly holy men were familiar with the intricacies of the airline terror MO especially their request for heavy buckled seat belt extenders, which were placed on the floor alongside the imam's seats - supposedly ready for action - and their desire to be able to control entry and exit from the aircraft.
One explanation for the imam's apparent first hand knowledge of terrorist methodology might be due to the acumen of Omar Shahin who has a long history of involvement with terrorists and terror fundraising activities as Imam of the Islamic Center of Tucson which is linked to Hamas and al-Qaeda. The former director of Shahin's mosque, Wael Hamza Julaidan was the co-founder of al-Qaeda and current board member, Mir Ramatullah who also worked with Shahin sits on the ICT board today. Shahin has admitted that he supported bin-Laden "in the past." In addition, Hani Hanjour, the pilot of the airliner that was crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11 attended this same Tucson mosque.
Shahin's familiarity with incipient hijackers is personal; he defended two Muslim college students who had been removed from an America West flight for attempting to storm the cockpit in what the FBI believes was a dry run for 9/11. One of the students had trained in Afghanistan and the other was a material witness in the 9/11 investigations.
Shahin was also a representative for the Hamas terror financing faux charity "Kind Hearts" which was shut down after an investigation by the U.S. Treasury Department.
Given the above realities it's obvious that the imams designed this incident, set it in motion and then managed the public relations aspect of it intending to create a sense of anti-Muslim victimhood, with lawyer/spokesmen and press releases ready even before they had to be wrestled from the plane.
Doubtless this group was emboldened by the Ellison election which they view as an important step on the journey towards eventual Islamization of the United States.
The imams see this whole event as an experiment in how far they might be able to manipulate the media. Any criticism of their actions is framed as religious discrimination and bigotry so it's not surprising in the least that Ellison has injected [he was a speaker at the NAIF conference after all] himself into this controversy, demanding high level meetings with the Minneapolis airport managers as well as US Airways.
The goal of all of this is of course to batter the airlines and security into submission through fears of financial liability for "discrimination" against Muslims.
The six Imams operated straight out of the handbook prepared for the NAIF Imam conference which described how Imams should handle the media.
"Islam is now almost constantly on the news, and Imams must be capable of dealing effectively with the media. Good communication skills encompass being able to respond to media inquires , fielding questions from journalists, addressing information about Islam and the media, generating positive story ideals, and writing letters to the editor when necessary. Communication should not be limited to responding to misconceptions, but Imams should also take advantage of opportunities to highlight activities in local mosques and the contribution of Muslims to local communities."
In this same document NAIF counseled extremely aggressive and thoroughly coordinated media manipulation:
"In this regard NAIF intends to select a number of Imams to be in charge of this task of responding to the media. Each Imam will be responsible for one or more specific week(s) of the year. Given the unfortunate state of the world. it is likely that during each week there will be an opportunity to condemn extremism and violence. The Imam in charge of this week would write a short message, perhaps 50 to 100 to 200 or 300 words , responding to the specific event released in the news during their week. Then this message would be sent via e-mail to all the Imams on NAIF mailing list seeking their approval or disapproval of the event that occurred. Aftwards, an official statement representing NAIF's stance condemning violence and extremism could be issued.. NAIF would then phone the editorial page editor or the city page editor of the local newspaper or the local broadcast station to post Imam's official statements, NAIF would tell this editor that his newspaper or broadcasting statement will have sole and exclusive right (sic) to print or broadcast the message within the next 24 hours. Afterwards the message will be sent to the national media."
Access entire NAIF conference handbook, in .pdf file format here.
In our opinion, by their actions these imams were waging psychological terrorism - cultural jihad - on America and therefore this event has to be considered a political act designed to degrade airport security by linking reasonable precautions with anti-Muslim bigotry.
The question remains as to whether U.S. Airways will hold their ground and refuse to succumb to this radical Muslim pressure.
We suggest that the U.S. Airways and Minneapolis/St. Paul airport refuse to meet with the imam's representatives, including Congressman elect Keith Ellison who sees the potential in this created controversy as payback for his Muslim constituents and a first test of how he can use his newly acquired Congressional clout to promote the radical Islamist agenda.
We further suggest that the Department of Justice investigate this incident as a conspiracy intended to destroy reasonable and prudent airport security measures, thus enabling future airline based terrorist activities.
©1999-2006 Beila Rabinowitz, William A. Mayer/PipeLineNews.org
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http://www.investors.com/editorial/editorialcontent.asp?secid=1501&status=article&id=250126364574564&view=1&view=1
Tale Of Fibbing Imams
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 12/4/2006
Islam And Politics: As we first suspected, the six imams bounced from a US Airways flight misled the public about the incident and likely staged the whole thing as a scheme to weaken security.
Their actions undermine any good will and trust Muslim leaders have built since 9/11. And they call into question what we really know about these supposedly virtuous men we invite to the White House and other halls of power in gestures of tolerance.
Are they really moderate? Do they really mean it when they renounce terrorism? Do they really have America's best interests at heart?
The police report detailing the US Airways flap gives us serious pause. The imams acted more like provocateurs than victims. At the gate before boarding, they angrily cursed the U.S. Then they bowed to Mecca and prayed "very loud," chanting "Allah, Allah, Allah," according to the gate agent and another witness.
On the plane, they didn't take their assigned seats and instead fanned out to the front, middle and rear of the plane. One even "pretended to be blind" to gain access to another passenger's seat, according to a flight attendant.
Some ran back and forth speaking to each other in Arabic. Adding to suspicions, most of them asked for seat belt extensions even though they didn't need them — or even use them.
Yet the ringleader, Omar Shahin, claimed before the police report was released that they "did nothing" unusual. "It's obvious discrimination," he insisted.
When the story first broke, the imams denied they chanted "Allah." Yet, several witnesses in the police report say they did. The imams also claimed they were handcuffed and harassed by dogs. "Six imams. Six leaders in this country," Shahin complained. "Six scholars in handcuffs." But the police report puts the lie to both those claims, too.
Shahin also claimed that a local FBI agent pleaded with US Airways to sell the Saintly Six imams another plane ticket, telling airline reps that the government had "no problem" with the men. "Never happened," says an FBI spokesman in Minneapolis.
Shahin and his fellow imams, who were educated in Sudan and Saudi Arabia, says he and the imams are all moderates who love the U.S. and denounce terror. He doubts Muslims were responsible for 9/11.
"We have been asked by God and by the prophet Muhammad to respect all human life," he said. "The Quran is very clear, to save one life he saves all human life, and whoever kills one person he kills all humankind, and that is what Islam is all about."
But Shahin engages in more dissembling. He leaves out a key part of the verse (5:32) that condones killing those who murder fellow Muslims or spread "mischief in the land." Mischief is defined as "treason against Allah," and the very next verse calls for guilty infidels to be beheaded.
Shahin himself has ties to terrorism. He served (unknowingly, he now says) as an agent and fundraiser for a Hamas front. He ran a mosque in Tucson, Ariz., attended by several al-Qaida operatives including the hijacker who flew the plane into the Pentagon. And he now runs an imam federation that counts an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing among its trustees.
Shahin also teaches at an Islamic school fully accredited by an Egyptian university tied to the dangerous Muslim Brotherhood. The school's founder preaches sharia law. One of the imams kicked off the US Airways flight, an Egyptian native, praised sharia law, according to a passenger who sat next to him.
"He expressed views I consider to be extreme fundamentalist Muslim views," said the witness, a clergyman who has traveled to the Middle East. "He indicated that it was necessary to go to whatever measures necessary to obey all that's set out in the Quran."
But most disturbing, these imams aren't the fringe. Shahin's group, the North American Imams Federation, represents more than 150 mosque leaders across the country. It works in concert with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which wasted no time slamming US Airways for "stereotyping" Muslims and calling on Congress to pass legislation to outlaw passenger profiling.
Both CAIR and NAIF work closely with Rep.-elect Keith Ellison, D-Minn., the first Muslim member of Congress. Conveniently enough, he immediately stepped in on their behalf to pressure US Airways and the local airport to change security policies.
If it were an orchestrated stunt to create public sympathy and force airports to look the other way when groups of Muslim men fly, it's working. The Minneapolis airport plans to add a prayer room for Muslims, and Democrats plan to hold hearings on Muslim profiling. This could have a chilling effect on efforts to investigate terror suspects in the Muslim community.
Such hearings would only confer legitimacy on bogus complaints by Muslim leaders. We need to take a harder look at them, not airlines' security policies.
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http://public.cq.com/public/20061201_homeland.html
Fine Print in Defense Bill Opens Door to Martial Law
By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor
It’s amazing what you can find if you turn over a few rocks in the anti-terrorism legislation Congress approved during the election season.
Take, for example, the John W. Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2006, named for the longtime Armed Services Committee chairman from Virginia.
Signed by President Bush on Oct. 17, the law (PL 109-364) has a provocative provision called “Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies.”
The thrust of it seems to be about giving the federal government a far stronger hand in coordinating responses to Katrina-like disasters.
But on closer inspection, its language also alters the two-centuries-old Insurrection Act, which Congress passed in 1807 to limit the president’s power to deploy troops within the United States.
That law has long allowed the president to mobilize troops only “to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.”
But the amended law takes the cuffs off.
Specifically, the new language adds “natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident” to the list of conditions permitting the President to take over local authority — particularly “if domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the State or possession are incapable of maintaining public order.”
Since the administration broadened what constitutes “conspiracy” in its definition of enemy combatants — anyone who “has purposely and materially supported hostilities against the United States,” in the language of the Military Commissions Act (PL 109-366) — critics say it’s a formula for executive branch mischief.
Yet despite such a radical turn, the new law garnered little dissent, or even attention, on the Hill.
One of the few to complain, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., warned that the measure virtually invites the White House to declare federal martial law.
It “subverts solid, longstanding posse comitatus statutes that limit the military’s involvement in law enforcement, thereby making it easier for the President to declare martial law,” he said in remarks submitted to the Congressional Record on Sept. 29.
“The changes to the Insurrection Act will allow the President to use the military, including the National Guard, to carry out law enforcement activities without the consent of a governor,” he said.
Moreover, he said, it breaks a long, fundamental tradition of federal restraint.
“Using the military for law enforcement goes against one of the founding tenets of our democracy.”
And he criticized the way it was rammed through Congress.
It “was just slipped in the defense bill as a rider with little study,” he fumed. “Other congressional committees with jurisdiction over these matters had no chance to comment, let alone hold hearings on, these proposals.”
No matter: Safely tucked into the $526 billion defense bill, it easily crossed the goal line on the last day of September.
Silence
The language doesn’t just brush aside a liberal Democrat slated to take over the Judiciary Committee come January. It also runs over the backs of the governors, 22 of whom are Republicans.
The governors had waved red flags about the measure on Aug. 1, sending letters of protest from their Washington office to the Republican chairs and ranking Democrats on the House and Senate Armed Services committees.
No response. So they petitioned the party heads on the Hill — Sens. Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and Harry Reid, D-Nev., Speaker of the House J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and his Democratic opposite, Nancy Pelosi of California.
“This provision was drafted without consultation or input from governors,” said the Aug. 6 letter signed by every member of the National Governors Association, “and represents an unprecedented shift in authority from governors . . .to the federal government.”
“We urge you,” they said, “to drop provisions that would usurp governors’ authority over the National Guard during emergencies from the conference agreement on the National Defense Authorization Act.”
Again, no response from the leadership, said David Quam, the National Governors Association’s director of federal relations.
On Aug. 31, the governors sent another letter to the congressional party leaders, as well as to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who had met quietly with an NGA delegation back in February.
The bill “could encroach on our constitutional authority to protect the citizens of our states,” they protested, complaining again about how the provision had been dumped on a midnight express.
“Any issue that affects the mission of the Guard in the states must be addressed in consultation and coordination with governors,” they demanded.
“The role of the Guard in the states and to the nation as a whole is too important to have major policy decisions made without full debate and input from governors throughout the policy process.”
More silence.
“We did not know until the bill was printed where we stood,” Quam said.
That’s partly the governors’ own fault, said a Republican Senate aide.
“My understanding is that they sent form letters to offices,” she said. “If they really want a piece of legislation considered they should have called offices and pushed the matter. No office can handle the amount of form letters that come in each day.”
Quam disputed that.
“The letter was only the beginning of the conversation,” he said. “The NGA and the governors’ offices reached out across the Hill.”
Blogosphere
Looking back at the government’s chaotic response to Katrina, it’s not altogether surprising that the provision drew so little opposition in Congress and attention from the mainstream media.
And of course, it was wrapped in a monster defense bill related to the emergency in Iraq.
But the blogosphere, of course, was all over it.
A close analysis of the bill by Frank Morales, a 58-year-old Episcopal priest in New York who occasionally writes for left-wing publications, spurred a score of liberal and conservative libertarian Web sites to take a look at it.
But a search of The Washington Post and New York Times archives, using the terms “Insurrection Act,” “martial law” and “Congress,” came up empty.
That’s not to say the papers don’t care: There’s just too much going on in the global war on terror to keep up with, much less write about such a seemingly insignificant provision. The martial law section of the Defense Appropriation Act, for example, takes up just a few paragraphs in the 591-page document.
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When New Orleans and the state of Louisiana dropped the ball, the the federal gov't got the blame. Now the feds have the legal authority to act. Could it be abused? Sure, anything gov't have the power to do can be abused/misused.
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Probes dismiss imams' racism claim
By Audrey Hudson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 6, 2006
Three parallel investigations into the removal of six imams from a US Airways flight last month have so far concluded that the airline acted properly, that the imams' claims they were merely praying and their eviction was racially inspired are without foundation.
An internal investigation by the airline found that air and ground crews "acted correctly" when they requested that the Muslim men be removed from a Minneapolis-to-Phoenix flight on Nov. 20.
"We believe the ground crew and employees acted correctly and did what they are supposed to do," US Airways spokeswoman Andrea Rader said.
Omar Shahin -- one of the imams and the group's spokesman -- said the men did not behave out of the ordinary while on the plane, and that passengers overreacted because some of the imams conducted prayers in the concourse before boarding.
US Airways' investigation is "substantially complete" but Miss Rader said airline officials still want to meet with the imams to review the situation. "We're looking at it as a security issue and as a customer-service issue and where we might need to do outreach," she said.
Airline officials have had several discussions with Mr. Shahin, but a meeting scheduled for Monday with all six men was canceled at the imams' request.
"We talked with crew members and passengers and those on the ground. We've done what we typically do in a situation where there is a removal or some kind of customer service at issue," Miss Rader said. "We found out the facts are substantially the same, and the imams were detained because of the concerns crew members had based on the behavior they observed, and from reports by the customers."
The Minneapolis airport police department's report on the incident said the imams' behavior warranted their removal. The imams were not accused of breaking any laws.
The Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties is reviewing the actions of department members who were involved in the incident.
Secret Service agents questioned the imams, who are accused of making negative comments about President Bush and the Iraq war. Officials of the Transportation Security Administration were involved in screening the imams and their baggage.
"There is no indication there is any inappropriate activity, at least no indication at this time," DHS spokesman Russ Knocke said. "To my knowledge, we are only doing a review, and that is a fairly routine practice with incidents like this."
The Air Carrier Security Committee of the Air Line Pilots Association investigated the incident and said, "The crew's actions were strictly in compliance with procedures and demonstrated overall good judgment in the care and concern for their passengers, fellow crew members, and the company."
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WASHINGTON, Dec. 8 — Four years after the Coast Guard began an effort to replace nearly its entire fleet of ships, planes and helicopters, the modernization program heralded as a model of government innovation is foundering.
Failure to Navigate
First of two articles
Four years ago the Coast Guard launched what is now a 24-billion dollar program to replace or rebuild nearly its entire fleet of planes, helicopters and large ships. The start-up has been rocky.
PATROL BOATS Converted at a cost of $12 million each, these boats, which have been taken out of service, sustained hull breaches and shaft alignment problems that the Coast Guard tried to repair in Key West, Fla.
The initial venture — converting rusting 110-foot patrol boats, the workhorses of the Coast Guard, into more versatile 123-foot cutters — has been canceled after hull cracks and engine failures made the first eight boats unseaworthy.
Plans to build a new class of 147-foot ships with an innovative hull have been halted after the design was found to be flawed.
And the first completed new ship — a $564 million behemoth christened last month — has structural weaknesses that some Coast Guard engineers believe may threaten its safety and limit its life span, unless costly repairs are made.
The problems have helped swell the costs of the fleet-building program to a projected $24 billion, from $17 billion, and delayed the arrival of any new ships or aircraft.
That has compromised the Coast Guard’s ability to fulfill its mission, which greatly expanded after the 2001 attacks to include guarding the nation’s shores against terrorists. The service has been forced to cut back on patrols and, at times, ignore tips from other federal agencies about drug smugglers. The difficulties will only grow more acute in the next few years as old boats fail and replacements are not ready.
Adm. Thad W. Allen, who took over as Coast Guard commandant in May, acknowledged that the program had been troubled and said that he had begun to address the problems. “You will see changes shortly in the Coast Guard in our acquisition organization,” Admiral Allen said. “It will be significantly different than we have done in the past.”
The modernization effort was a bold experiment, called Deepwater, to build the equivalent of a modest navy — 91 new ships, 124 small boats, 195 new or rebuilt helicopters and planes and 49 unmanned aerial vehicles.
Instead of doing it piecemeal, the Coast Guard decided to package everything, in hopes that the fleet would be better integrated and its multibillion price would command attention from a Congress and White House traditionally more focused on other military branches. And instead of managing the project itself, the Coast Guard hired Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, two of the nation’s largest military contractors, to plan, supervise and deliver the new vessels and helicopters.
Many retired Coast Guard officials, former company executives and government auditors fault that privatization model, saying it allowed the contractors at times to put their interests ahead of the Guard’s.
“This is the fleecing of America,” said Anthony D’Armiento, a systems engineer who has worked for Northrop and the Coast Guard on the project. “It is the worst contract arrangement I’ve seen in all my 20 plus years in naval engineering.”
Insufficient oversight by the Coast Guard resulted in the service buying some equipment it did not want and ignoring repeated warnings from its own engineers that the boats and ships were poorly designed and perhaps unsafe, the agency acknowledged. The Deepwater program’s few Congressional skeptics were outmatched by lawmakers who became enthusiastic supporters, mobilized by an aggressive lobbying campaign financed by Lockheed and Northrop.
And the contractors failed to fulfill their obligation to make sure the government got the best price, frequently steering work to their subsidiaries or business partners instead of competitors, according to government auditors and people affiliated with the program.
Even some of the smaller Deepwater projects raise questions about management. The radios placed in small, open boats were not waterproof and immediately shorted out, for example. Electronics equipment costing millions of dollars is still being installed in the new cutter, even though it will be ripped out because the Coast Guard does not want it. An order of eight small, inflatable boats cost an extra half-million dollars because the purchase passed through four layers of contractors.
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For the Department of Homeland Security, which took over responsibility for the Coast Guard in 2003, Deepwater joins its already long list of troubled programs, including its airport checkpoint measures, its biodefense efforts and its widely condemned handling of the response to Hurricane Katrina.
Four years ago the Coast Guard launched what is now a 24-billion dollar program to replace or rebuild nearly its entire fleet of planes, helicopters and large ships. The start-up has been rocky.
The Homeland Security Department’s inspector general has warned that the department cannot repeat this experience as it begins a $7 billion plan to tighten the border. The department is taking a similar management approach with that plan, relying on the Boeing Corporation to develop, supervise and execute the strategy.
Spokesmen for Northrop and Lockheed, and the partnership they formed to run Deepwater, declined repeated requests for interviews, saying they would leave it to the Coast Guard to discuss the project. The companies also declined to respond to written questions.
Admiral Allen said the Coast Guard engineers and procurement staff team would now play a much larger role in overseeing the project in an effort to rein in its private sector partners, adding that the mistakes made were unacceptable.
“Our people are demoralized by it, they don’t deserve it, and it really impedes our ability to execute our mission,” he said.
Early Warnings
On a clear, calm morning in Key West, Fla., one day last month — perfect weather for running drugs and migrants — six of the eight converted Coast Guard patrol boats were broken down or out of service. Their crews had little to do but shine the ships’ already gleaming bells and clean its guns.
The Deepwater plan called for transforming the 110-foot boats into larger, more versatile cutters with rebuilt hulls, new communications and surveillance gear and a 13-foot extension to make room for a small boat launch ramp.
Even before the refurbishing began in 2003, though, Coast Guard engineers expressed doubts that the boats could bear the extra weight the changes would impose. “You could have buckling of the structure of the ship,” Chris Cleary, of the Engineering Logistics Center at the Coast Guard, said he recalls pointing out. But Bollinger Shipyards, a business partner of Northrop and Lockheed, insisted the conversion would succeed.
As the work got under way, the Coast Guard provided only limited oversight. It did not fill dozens of its seats on joint management teams set up for the project. And the Coast Guard assigned seven inspectors to monitor the work, compared with 20 on a similar-size job.
“In theory, we were going drive a 110-foot cutter up to the pier, drop it off and come back in 34 weeks to pick up a 123-foot cutter,” said Lt. Benjamin Fleming, the Coast Guard’s representative at the shipyard in Lockport, La. “We were putting a lot of trust and faith in our partners.”
Michael De Kort, a former Lockheed project manager, said the results quickly became apparent.
The VHF radio on the small launch would be exposed to the elements but was not waterproof, Mr. De Kort said. The classified communications equipment had not been properly shielded to protect messages from eavesdropping. Cameras intended to provide 360-degree surveillance had two large blind spots.
Mr. De Kort said he had repeatedly warned his Lockheed supervisors of the problems, but was rebuffed. “We have an approved design and we aren’t going to change it,” Mr. De Kort said he was told. He was later laid off from the company. Lockheed officials declined to comment.
In September 2004, more serious flaws in the boat conversion program became obvious after the first one, the Matagorda, was launched. As it traveled in relatively heavy seas from Key West to Miami, large cracks appeared in the hull and deck.
Giant steel straps that looked like Band-Aids were affixed to the side of the boats, and the vessels were barred from venturing out in rough water. But cracks and bulges continued to scar the Matagorda and other converted ships, followed by a series of mechanical problems.
Bollinger, it turned out, had overestimated how much stress the modified boats could handle, a miscalculation it cannot fully explain. “The computer broke for some reason,” said T. R. Hamlin, a senior Bollinger manager. “Whether it was a power surge or something, who knows?” The cursory oversight by the Coast Guard meant the mistake was not caught in time.
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After spending about $100 million on the first eight boats, the Coast Guard suspended the conversion plan. Last week, Admiral Allen ordered the boats taken out of service, citing concerns about crew safety.
Facing a shortage of patrol boats, the contractors and the Coast Guard decided to speed development of a larger ship, the Fast Response Cutter. The hull was to be built from glass-reinforced plastic, known as a composite, something never tried on a large American military ship.
While acknowledging that it might cost much more to build the 58 planned cutters with composite hulls instead of steel, Northrop and Lockheed claimed the boats would last longer and require less maintenance, saving money over the long run.
Coast Guard engineers again were doubtful that Northrop’s design would work, citing concerns about weight, hull shape and fuel consumption. The Coast Guard also found inconsistencies in the cost data Northrop used to justify the new hull.
One former Northrop executive said the company was pushing the plan not because it was in the best interest of the Coast Guard, but because Northrop had just spent $64 million to turn its shipyard in Gulfport, Miss., into the country’s first large-scale composite hull manufacturing plant for military ships.
“It was a pure business decision,” said the former executive, who disagreed with the plan and would speak only anonymously for fear of retribution. “And it was the wrong one.”
That became clear when a scale model of the Fast Response Cutter was placed in a tank of water — and flunked the test. After three years and $38 million, Northrop Grumman’s plan was suspended.
Financial Aid
The Coast Guard recognized from the start that it might need help financing a project as big as Deepwater, and that was part of the reason it turned to Lockheed and Northrop.
“They have armies of lobbyists, they can help get dollars to get the job done,” explained Jim McEntire, a retired captain who had served as a senior Coast Guard budget official. “The White House and Congress listen to big industrial concerns.”
That assistance would prove valuable. Just months after the contract was awarded in June 2002 through a competitive bidding process, the Coast Guard began to study whether the $17 billion Deepwater budget would be inadequate, given additional costs for antiterrorism equipment. In 2005, the service informed Congress that the program would cost $24 billion over 20 years and that the annual allocation would need to double, to $1 billion.
By then, though, the patrol boat conversion had been halted. Deepwater’s costs were ballooning, but the Coast Guard was having a hard time explaining exactly how it would spend more money. Government auditors were starting to churn out reports warning of serious management weaknesses.
That record disturbed some members of Congress. In May 2005, the House Appropriations Committee slashed the program’s annual budget request nearly in half to register its frustration.
At a hearing two months later, Representative Harold Rogers, a Kentucky Republican who oversees the Homeland Security budget, instructed the Coast Guard to fix its problems and restrain costs. “You simply took the most expensive, all-inclusive Cadillac Seville and we’re going to have to, with our limited funds, fit you into something a bit more appropriate,” Mr. Rogers said. “I hope it’s more than a Chevrolet.”
To fight back, the Coast Guard and contractors relied on Congressional allies, led by Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine, Representative Frank A. LoBiondo, Republican of New Jersey, and Representative Gene Taylor, Democrat of Mississippi. Mr. Taylor and Mr. LoBiondo had formed a group called the Congressional Coast Guard Caucus. It began in the late 1990s with 4 members and today has more than 75. The enthusiasm of the three leaders for the Deepwater project was not simply about meeting the Coast Guard’s needs. Maine is home to Bath Iron Works, a major ship builder that Ms. Snowe said might benefit from increased Deepwater spending. While that was a factor, she said it was not her primary motivation.
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Ms. Snowe and Mr. LoBiondo, the leaders of the Senate and House panels that oversee the Coast Guard, said they pushed for more spending only after the service’s leaders reassured them during hearings that they were addressing the program’s problems. They both also said they were convinced that the Coast Guard desperately needed Deepwater because its helicopter engines were routinely breaking down and the hulls of old ships were failing.
“We don’t want to waste money; we don’t want ineffective programs,” Ms. Snowe said in an interview. “At the same time, we can’t allow the Coast Guard to languish.”
Mr. Taylor’s district is home to Northrop Grumman’s shipyard in Pascagoula, Miss., which is building the Coast Guard’s largest ship, and Northrop and its employees are one of his biggest sources of campaign contributions. He worked along with two key Republicans in Mississippi — Senator Trent Lott, whose father was once a pipe fitter at the Pascagoula shipyard, and Senator Thad Cochran, the chairman of the Senate appropriations committee — to win more money.
Mr. LoBiondo’s district is home to the Coast Guard’s national training center, and Lockheed Martin built its Deepwater equipment testing center just outside his district. He is also one of the top Congressional recipients of Lockheed contributions.
The contractors ran advertisements aimed at lawmakers in Washington publications, delivering ominous messages about the need to stop terrorists before they reach American shores. The Navy League, a nonprofit group partly financed by Lockheed and Northrop, orchestrated telephone calls, letters and visits to lawmakers, reminding them that hundreds of contractors across the country were already working as suppliers on the project.
And the Coast Guard got an important boost when it was widely praised for its helicopter rescues after Hurricane Katrina.
The lobbying effort paid off. In September 2005, Congress agreed to increase the annual financing for Deepwater to nearly $1 billion.
Late Scramble
If there was a single ship that could prove to skeptics that the Coast Guard and its contractors could get the job done right, it would be the National Security Cutter, a ship unlike anything the Coast Guard had ever built. Bigger than any existing cutter, it was more like a warship, designed to patrol with Navy vessels.
It would carry sophisticated weapons systems, surveillance equipment, a helicopter and two unmanned aerial vehicles, all vital in its effort to intercept boats suspected of carrying terrorists, drug dealers or illegal immigrants. It was designed to monitor 56,000 square miles a day, an area four times as large as that covered by any other Coast Guard ship.
Because the ship was so expensive — each was expected to cost about $300 million — the Coast Guard decided to build only 8 to replace its fleet of 12 large cutters.
There was just one catch. Even before the cutter began taking form at the Pascagoula shipyard on the Gulf of Mexico, familiar problems cropped up.
The Coast Guard’s engineers believed the design proposed by Northrop and Lockheed had serious structural flaws that could result in the hull collapsing or premature cracking of the hull and deck, according to Mr. Cleary and his boss, Rubin Sheinberg, chief of the Coast Guard’s naval architecture branch.
When they alerted the contractors and Coast Guard officials, they were largely brushed off, the men said. In March 2004, their supervisor protested, saying the Coast Guard should delay construction.
“Significant problems persist with the structural design,” Rear Adm. Erroll M. Brown wrote to the Deepwater project director. “Several of these problems compromise the safety and the viability of the hull, possibly resulting in structural failure and unacceptable hull vibration.”
The Coast Guard decided to move ahead anyway, figuring it would be less disruptive to fix any problems later. As the shipbuilding progressed, other Coast Guard officials began to openly complain that some decisions by the contractors appeared to be motivated by a drive to increase profits, not to best serve the Coast Guard.
Lockheed, for example, ordered computerized consoles for the ship that it had developed for a Navy aircraft carrier. But they were too big for the cutter, said Jay A. Creech, a retired Coast Guard captain working as a contractor on Deepwater.
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A consultant hired by the Coast Guard to review Northrop and Lockheed’s purchasing decisions found that of $210 million worth of contracts awarded in 2004, just 30 percent involved a formal competitive process. Northrop in particular was faulted for failing to aggressively seek bids to ensure the best price.
Northrop and Lockheed “lack the independence needed to make objective decisions in the best interests of the Coast Guard,” an August 2006 report by the Homeland Security inspector general said.
Others say that giving the contractors so much authority was a mistake from the start. “A contractor with a profit motive is never a trusted agent,” said Joe Ryan, a Coast Guard consultant who has helped with the Deepwater project. “They are the vendor, and they are selling you something.”
Problems began to accumulate elsewhere. In Texas, a prototype of the unmanned aerial vehicle that was to be placed on the ship’s deck crashed this year. After the crash, the project, by Bell Helicopter, also faced a money crunch and was put on hold, pushing delivery back to at least 2013, six years after the first national security cutter is scheduled for active duty. Without the two aerial vehicles, the cutter’s surveillance range is reduced by more than half.
By the time the ship was christened last month, its price had grown to $564 million, nearly twice its original cost. (The average price for the eight ships is expected to be $431 million.) And by then, Coast Guard officials had conceded that the ship had structural flaws. Navy experts had evaluated the ship and confirmed many of the earlier warnings.
Admiral Allen said he had been given assurances that the ship was not at risk of a catastrophic hull failure and would not pose a safety threat to its crew. But the Coast Guard has decided to make structural modifications to the vessel and require design changes for the third cutter. Work is too far along to change course on the second cutter.
Four years into the Deepwater project, the Coast Guard, according to its original plan, was supposed to have 26 new or rebuilt ships, 12 new planes and 8 unmanned vehicles, but none are available. Now, officials are scrambling to find an off-the-shelf design for a new cutter and make modest repairs to keep their aging patrol boats operable.
“We don’t have the ships we need, and we don’t have a way to get them anytime soon,” said Representative David R. Obey, Democrat of Wisconsin, who will take over the House Appropriations Committee next month. “It’s inexcusable.”
The Coast Guard, which would not disclose the management fees it has paid Northrop and Lockheed, is renegotiating the contract to ensure that the companies honor a commitment to open the work to competition and deliver what they promise.
And Admiral Allen and other Coast Guard officials say the Coast Guard’s engineers are being given more power to supervise the work. Admiral Allen is also creating a division to oversee the procurement and maintenance of its ships and airplanes. “That is the main gap that needs to be closed,” he said.
The Deepwater experiment, one contracting expert said, underscores the need for the Coast Guard to be a smart buyer, even if it has hired high-priced advice.
“The government still needs to be in there so they know what decisions are being made and if the decisions are in their best interest,” said Michele Mackin, an assistant director at the Government Accountability Office. “It is still their money. And they are going to be flying the planes and running the ships.”
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http://michellemalkin.com/archives/006512.htm?print=1
Overstayed Muslim busted for seeking truck license but not wanting to learn to back up the truck. Also see
http://michellemalkin.com/archives/005971.htm for recent bust of 200 Somali and Bosnian Muslims for fraudulently obtaining hazmat truck licences
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Administration to Drop Effort to Track if Visitors Leave
By RACHEL L. SWARNS and ERIC LIPTON
Published: December 15, 2006
NY Times
WASHINGTON, Dec. 14 — In a major blow to the Bush administration’s efforts to secure borders, domestic security officials have for now given up on plans to develop a facial or fingerprint recognition system to determine whether a vast majority of foreign visitors leave the country, officials say.
Domestic security officials had described the system, known as U.S. Visit, as critical to security and important in efforts to curb illegal immigration. Similarly, one-third of the overall total of illegal immigrants are believed to have overstayed their visas, a Congressional report says.
Tracking visitors took on particular urgency after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when it became clear that some of the hijackers had remained in the country after their visas had expired.
But in recent days, officials at the Homeland Security Department have conceded that they lack the financing and technology to meet their deadline to have exit-monitoring systems at the 50 busiest land border crossings by next December. A vast majority of foreign visitors enter and exit by land from Mexico and Canada, and the policy shift means that officials will remain unable to track the departures.
A report released on Thursday by the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, restated those findings, reporting that the administration believes that it will take 5 to 10 years to develop technology that might allow for a cost-effective departure system.
Domestic security officials, who have allocated $1.7 billion since the 2003 fiscal year to track arrivals and departures, argue that creating the program with the existing technology would be prohibitively expensive.
They say it would require additional employees, new buildings and roads at border crossings, and would probably hamper the vital flow of commerce across those borders.
Congress ordered the creation of such a system in 1996.
In an interview last week, the assistant secretary for homeland security policy, Stewart A. Baker, estimated that an exit system at the land borders would cost “tens of billions of dollars” and said the department had concluded that such a program was not feasible, at least for the time being.
“It is a pretty daunting set of costs, both for the U.S. government and the economy,” Mr. Stewart said. “Congress has said, ‘We want you to do it.’ We are not going to ignore what Congress has said. But the costs here are daunting.
“There are a lot of good ideas and things that would make the country safer. But when you have to sit down and compare all the good ideas people have developed against each other, with a limited budget, you have to make choices that are much harder.”
The news sent alarms to Congress, where some Republicans and Democrats warned that suspending the monitoring plan would leave the United States vulnerable.
Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican who is a departing subcommittee chairman on the House International Relations Committee, said the administration could not say it was protecting domestic security without creating a viable exit monitoring system.
“There will not be border security in this country until we have a knowledge of both entry and exit,” Mr. Rohrabacher said. “We have to make a choice. Do we want to act and control our borders or do we want to have tens of millions of illegals continuing to pour into our country?”
Representative Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who is set to lead the Homeland Security Committee, also expressed concern.
“It is imperative that Congress work in partnership with the department to develop a comprehensive border security system that ensures we know who is entering and exiting this country and one that cannot be defeated by imposters, criminals and terrorists,” Mr. Thompson said in a statement Thursday.
In January 2004, domestic security officials began fingerprint scanning for arriving visitors. The program has screened more than 64 million travelers and prevented more than 1,300 criminals and immigration violators from entering, officials said.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and other officials often call the program a singular achievement in making the country safer. U.S. Visit fingerprints and photographs 2 percent of the people entering the country, because Americans and most Canadians and Mexicans are exempt.
Efforts to determine whether visitors actually leave have faltered. Departure monitoring would help officials hunt for foreigners who have not left, if necessary. Domestic security officials say, however, it would be too expensive to conduct fingerprint or facial recognition scans for land departures. Officials have experimented with less costly technologies, including a system that would monitor by radio data embedded in a travel form carried by foreigners as they depart by foot or in vehicles.
Tests of that technology, Radio Frequency Identification, found a high failure rate. At one border point, the system correctly identified 14 percent of the 166 vehicles carrying the embedded documents, the General Accountability Office reported.
The Congressional investigators noted the “numerous performance and reliability problems” with the technology and said it remained unclear how domestic security officials would be able to meet their legal obligation to create an exit program.
Some immigration analysts said stepping away from the program raised questions again about the commitment to enforce border security and immigration laws.
A senior policy analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies, Jessica Vaughn, said the government had long been too deferential to big businesses and travel groups that raised concerns that exit technology might disrupt travel and trade.
“I worry that the issue of cost is an excuse for not doing anything,” said Ms. Vaughn, whose group advocates curbing immigration. Domestic security officials said they still hoped to find a way to create an exit system at land borders. “We would to do more testing,” a spokesman for the department, Jarrod Agen, said. “We are evaluating the initial tests to determine how to move forward.”
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December 18, 2006
Former U.S. Detainee in Iraq Recalls Torment
By MICHAEL MOSS
One night in mid-April, the steel door clanked shut on detainee No. 200343 at Camp Cropper, the United States military’s maximum-security detention site in Baghdad.
American guards arrived at the man’s cell periodically over the next several days, shackled his hands and feet, blindfolded him and took him to a padded room for interrogation, the detainee said. After an hour or two, he was returned to his cell, fatigued but unable to sleep.
The fluorescent lights in his cell were never turned off, he said. At most hours, heavy metal or country music blared in the corridor. He said he was rousted at random times without explanation and made to stand in his cell. Even lying down, he said, he was kept from covering his face to block out the light, noise and cold. And when he was released after 97 days he was exhausted, depressed and scared.
Detainee 200343 was among thousands of people who have been held and released by the American military in Iraq, and his account of his ordeal has provided one of the few detailed views of the Pentagon’s detention operations since the abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib. Yet in many respects his case is unusual.
The detainee was Donald Vance, a 29-year-old Navy veteran from Chicago who went to Iraq as a security contractor. He wound up as a whistle-blower, passing information to the F.B.I. about suspicious activities at the Iraqi security firm where he worked, including what he said was possible illegal weapons trading.
But when American soldiers raided the company at his urging, Mr. Vance and another American who worked there were detained as suspects by the military, which was unaware that Mr. Vance was an informer, according to officials and military documents.
At Camp Cropper, he took notes on his imprisonment and smuggled them out in a Bible.
“Sick, very. Vomited,” he wrote July 3. The next day: “Told no more phone calls til leave.”
Nathan Ertel, the American held with Mr. Vance, brought away military records that shed further light on the detention camp and its secretive tribunals. Those records include a legal memorandum explicitly denying detainees the right to a lawyer at detention hearings to determine whether they should be released or held indefinitely, perhaps for prosecution.
The story told through those records and interviews illuminates the haphazard system of detention and prosecution that has evolved in Iraq, where detainees are often held for long periods without charges or legal representation, and where the authorities struggle to sort through the endless stream of detainees to identify those who pose real threats.
“Even Saddam Hussein had more legal counsel than I ever had,” said Mr. Vance, who said he planned to sue the former defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, on grounds that his constitutional rights had been violated. “While we were detained, we wrote a letter to the camp commandant stating that the same democratic ideals we are trying to instill in the fledgling democratic country of Iraq, from simple due process to the Magna Carta, we are absolutely, positively refusing to follow ourselves.”
A spokeswoman for the Pentagon’s detention operations in Iraq, First Lt. Lea Ann Fracasso, said in written answers to questions that the men had been “treated fair and humanely,” and that there was no record of either man complaining about their treatment.
Held as ‘a Threat’
She said officials did not reach Mr. Vance’s contact at the F.B.I. until he had been in custody for three weeks. Even so, she said, officials determined that he “posed a threat” and decided to continue holding him. He was released two months later, Lieutenant Fracasso said, based on a “subsequent re-examination of his case,” and his stated plans to leave Iraq.
Mr. Ertel, 30, a contract manager who knew Mr. Vance from an earlier job in Iraq, was released more quickly.
Mr. Vance went to Iraq in 2004, first to work for a Washington-based company. He later joined a small Baghdad-based security company where, he said, “things started looking weird to me.” He said that the company, which was protecting American reconstruction organizations, had hired guards from a sheik in Basra and that many of them turned out to be members of militias whom the clients did not want around.
Mr. Vance said the company had a growing cache of weapons it was selling to suspicious customers, including a steady flow of officials from the Iraqi Interior Ministry. The ministry had ties to violent militias and death squads. He said he had also witnessed another employee giving American soldiers liquor in exchange for bullets and weapon repairs.
On a visit to Chicago in October 2005, Mr. Vance met twice with an F.B.I. agent who set up a reporting system. Weekly, Mr. Vance phoned the agent from Iraq and sent him e-mail messages. “It was like, ‘Hey, I heard this and I saw this.’ I wanted to help,” Mr. Vance said. A government official familiar with the arrangement confirmed Mr. Vance’s account.
In April, Mr. Ertel and Mr. Vance said, they felt increasingly uncomfortable at the company. Mr. Ertel resigned and company officials seized the identification cards that both men needed to move around Iraq or leave the country.
On April 15, feeling threatened, Mr. Vance phoned the United States Embassy in Baghdad. A military rescue team rushed to the security company. Again, Mr. Vance described its operations, according to military records.
“Internee Vance indicated a large weapons cache was in the compound in the house next door,” Capt. Plymouth D. Nelson, a military detention official, wrote in a memorandum dated April 22, after the men were detained. “A search of the house and grounds revealed two large weapons caches.”
On the evening of April 15, they met with American officials at the embassy and stayed overnight. But just before dawn, they were awakened, handcuffed with zip ties and made to wear goggles with lenses covered by duct tape. Put into a Humvee, Mr. Vance said he asked for a vest and helmet, and was refused.
They were driven through dangerous Baghdad roads and eventually to Camp Cropper. They were placed in cells at Compound 5, the high-security unit where Saddam Hussein has been held.
Only days later did they receive an explanation: They had become suspects for having associated with the people Mr. Vance tried to expose.
“You have been detained for the following reasons: You work for a business entity that possessed one or more large weapons caches on its premises and may be involved in the possible distribution of these weapons to insurgent/terrorist groups,” Mr. Ertel’s detention notice said.
Mr. Vance said he began seeking help even before his cell door closed for the first time. “They took off my blindfold and earmuffs and told me to stand in a corner, where they cut off the zip ties, and told me to continue looking straight forward and as I’m doing this, I’m asking for an attorney,” he said. “ ‘I want an attorney now,’ I said, and they said, ‘Someone will be here to see you.’ ”
Instead, they were given six-digit ID numbers. The guards shortened Mr. Vance’s into something of a nickname: “343.” And the routine began.
Bread and powdered drink for breakfast and sometimes a piece of fruit. Rice and chicken for lunch and dinner. Their cells had no sinks. The showers were irregular. They got 60 minutes in the recreation yard at night, without other detainees.
Five times in the first week, guards shackled the prisoners’ hands and feet, covered their eyes, placed towels over their heads and put them in wheelchairs to be pushed to a room with a carpeted ceiling and walls. There they were questioned by an array of officials who, they said they were told, represented the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and the Defense Intelligence Agency.
“It’s like boom, boom, boom,” Mr. Ertel said. “They are drilling you. ‘We know you did this, you are part of this gun smuggling thing.’ And I’m saying you have it absolutely way off.”
The two men slept in their 9-by-9-foot cells on concrete slabs, with worn three-inch foam mats. With the fluorescent lights on and the temperature in the 50s, Mr. Vance said, “I paced myself to sleep, walking until I couldn’t anymore. I broke the straps on two pair of flip-flops.”
Asked about the lights, the detainee operations spokeswoman said that the camp’s policy was to turn off cell lights at night “to allow detainees to sleep.”
A Psychological Game
One day, Mr. Vance met with a camp psychologist. “He realized I was having difficulties,” Mr. Vance said. “He said to turn it into a game. He said: ‘I want you to pretend you are a soldier who has been kidnapped, and that you still have a duty to do. Memorize everything you can about everything that happens to you. Make it like you are a spy on the inside.’ I think he called it rational emotive behavioral therapy, and I started doing that.”
Camp Rule 31 barred detainees from writing on the white cell walls, which were bare except for a black crescent moon painted on one wall to indicate the direction of Mecca for prayers. But Mr. Vance began keeping track of the days by making hash marks on the wall, and he also began writing brief notes that he hid in the Bible given to him by guards.
“Turned in request for dentist + phone + embassy letter + request for clothes,” he wrote one day.
“Boards,” he wrote April 24, the day he and Mr. Ertel went before Camp Cropper’s Detainee Status Board.
Their legal rights, laid out in a letter from Lt. Col. Bradley J. Huestis of the Army, the president of the status board, allowed them to attend the hearing and testify. However, under Rule 3, the letter said, “You do not have the right to legal counsel, but you may have a personal representative assist you at the hearing if the personal representative is reasonably available.”
Mr. Vance and Mr. Ertel were permitted at their hearings only because they were Americans, Lieutenant Fracasso said. The cases of all other detainees are reviewed without the detainees present, she said. In both types of cases, defense lawyers are not allowed to attend because the hearings are not criminal proceedings, she said.
Lieutenant Fracasso said that currently there were three Americans in military custody in Iraq. The military does not identify detainees.
Mr. Vance and Mr. Ertel had separate hearings. They said their requests to be each other’s personal representative had been denied.
At the hearings, a woman and two men wearing Army uniforms but no name tags or rank designations sat a table with two stacks of documents. One was about an inch thick, and the men were allowed to see some papers from that stack. The other pile was much thicker, but they were told that this pile was evidence only the board could see.
The men pleaded with the board. “I’m telling them there has been a major mix-up,” Mr. Ertel said. “Please, I’m out of my mind. I haven’t slept. I’m not eating. I’m terrified.”
Mr. Vance said he implored the board to delve into his laptop computer and cellphone for his communications with the F.B.I. agent in Chicago.
Each of the hearings lasted about two hours, and the men said they never saw the board again.
“At the end, my first question was, ‘Does my family know I’m alive?’ and the lead man said, ‘I don’t know,’ ” Mr. Vance recounted. “And then I asked when will we have an answer, and they said on average it takes three to four weeks.”
Help From the Outside
About a week later, two weeks into his detention, Mr. Vance was allowed to make his first call, to Chicago. He called his fiancée, Diane Schwarz, who told him she had thought he might have died.
“It was very overwhelming,” Ms. Schwarz recalls of the 12-minute conversation. “He wasn’t quite sure what was going on, and was kind of turning to me for answers and I was turning to him for the same.”
She had already been calling members of Congress, alarmed by his disappearance. So was Mr. Ertel’s mother, and some officials began pressing for answers. “I would appreciate your looking into this matter,” Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois wrote to a State Department official in early May.
On May 7, the Camp Cropper detention board met again, without either man present, and determined that Mr. Ertel was “an innocent civilian,” according to the spokeswoman for detention operations. It took authorities 18 more days to release him.
Mr. Vance’s situation was more complicated. On June 17, Lt. Col. Keir-Kevin Curry, a spokesman for the American military’s detention unit, Task Force 134, wrote to tell Ms. Schwarz that Mr. Vance was still being held. “The detainee board reviewed his case and recommended he remain interned,” he wrote. “Multi-National Force-Iraq approved the board’s recommendation to continue internment. Therefore, Mr. Vance continues to be a security detainee. We are not processing him for release. His case remains under investigation and there is no set timetable for completion.” Over the following weeks, Mr. Vance said he made numerous written requests — for a lawyer, for blankets, for paper to write letters home. Mr. Vance said that he wrote 10 letters to Ms. Schwarz, but that only one made it to Chicago. Dated July 17, it was delivered late last month by the Red Cross.
“Diana, start talking, sending e-mail and letters and faxes to the alderman, mayor, governor, congressman, senators, Red Cross, Amnesty International, A.C.L.U., Vatican, and other Christian-based organizations. Everyone!” he wrote. “I am missing you so much, and am so depressed it’s a daily struggle here. My life is in your hands. Please don’t get discouraged. Don’t take ‘No’ for answers. Keep working. I have to tell myself these things every day, but I can’t do anything from a cell.”
The military has never explained why it continued to consider Mr. Vance a security threat, except to say that officials decided to release him after further review of his case.
“Treating an American citizen in this fashion would have been unimaginable before 9/11,” said Mike Kanovitz, a Chicago lawyer representing Mr. Vance.
On July 20, Mr. Vance wrote in his notes: “Told ‘Leaving Today.’ Took shower and shaved, saw doctor, got civ clothes back and passport.”
On his way out, Mr. Vance said: “They asked me if I was intending to write a book, would I talk to the press, would I be thinking of getting an attorney. I took it as, ‘Shut up, don’t talk about this place,’ and I kept saying, ‘No sir, I want to go home.’ ”
Mr. Ertel has returned to Baghdad, again working as a contracts manager. Mr. Vance is back in Chicago, still feeling the effects of having been a prisoner of the war in Iraq.
“It’s really hard,” he says. “I don’t really talk about this stuff with my family. I feel ashamed, depressed, still have nightmares, and I’d even say I suffer from some paranoia.”
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A very interesting piece, but it doesn't really belong in this "Homeland Security" thread. If you have a moment, please move it somewhere more suitable.
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December 18, 2006
Naked To Our Enemies
By Clarice Feldman
Much as been made of the demonstrated ignorance of Silvestre Reyes, the newly named chair of the House Intelligence Committee. But Reyes is far from alone in failing to have learned the most basic facts of the forces arrayed against us.
Reyes' position requires that he provide oversight of our intelligence operations, and those in charge of those operations have demonstrated they know little more than Reyes does:
At the end of a long interview, I asked Willie Hulon, chief of the [FBI's] new national security branch; whether he thought that it was important for a man in his position to know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. "Yes, sure, it's right to know the difference," he said. "It's important to know who your targets are."
That was a big advance over 2005. So next I asked him if he could tell me the difference. He was flummoxed. "The basic goes back to their beliefs and who they were following," he said. "And the conflicts between the Sunnis and the Shia and the difference between who they were following."
O.K., I asked, trying to help, what about today? Which one is Iran - Sunni or Shiite? He thought for a second. "Iran and Hezbollah," I prompted. "Which are they?"
He took a stab: "Sunni."
Wrong.
So it appears that neither the watchers (our counter intelligence officials) nor their watchers, the Congressmen selected to oversee them have a clue as to what they ought to know to do their work effectively.
One of the most disturbing books I can remember reading in a long time, is Bill Gertz' Enemies which reveals the failure of the U.S. Government in stopping the penetration of enemies and terrorists, stealing our secrets and using them against us. The numerous failures and the utter insufficiency of the few corrective steps taken are mind boggling. If Congressional oversight cannot accomplish what executive authority has not, we are in serious trouble. Management by committee having a poor track record, I am not comforted.
The most astonishing reports in the book are the incredible failures of David Szady who was appointed the FBI's senior counterintelligence official, despite consistent failures detailed throughout Enemies! Szady's blunders are so numerous and glaring that Gertz could have used them for a follow up book: What the Hell Do You Have to Do to Be Fired From the FBI?
What's less well known is that there has been little discernable change in our counter terrorism efforts. They still stink.
Gertz details the ghastly performance of our counter-intelligence forces. While he deals with several agencies, the most detailed deficiencies in the book involve the FBI, and I want to highlight two of its failures as he describes them., The focus is on the one man more responsible than anyone else for these failures: David Szady. He, and what came to be known as "the Posse", FBI officials Mike Rochford, Rudy Guerin, Jim Milburn and Bill Cleveland, have a lot of explaining to do.
The Hanssen Case
It was obvious there was a KGB mole operating in the US government. This person was likely to be in either the CIA or FBI. The agents in charge of the investigation, posse members Rochford, Guerin, and Milburn, were overseen by David Szady. All automatically assumed it could not be someone inside the Bureau. They focused instead on Brian Kelley of the CIA whom-in the absence of any credible evidence-they hounded and harassed (along with his family), ignoring a large body of very credible evidence that it was not he.
The mole, as we learned too late, was Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent whose own brother-in-law, another FBI agent, Mark Wauck, had over a decade earlier warned the FBI that Hanssen had suspicious amounts of cash on hand and was likely working for the Russians.
The supervisor to whom he conveyed this information, Jim Lyle, astonishingly never followed up on it. This alone is shocking enough.
Hanssen's betrayal was never uncovered by investigative effort. It was caught fortuitously because a tape recording and other evidence in the hands of a Soviet defector pointed the FBI to finally identify him as the mole.
Lyle, the FBI agent who failed to act on Wauk's suspicions, was promoted to head the Counterintelligence Center at the CIA.
The Department of Justice's Office of the Inspector General cited among other things:
(a) "long-standing systematic problems " in the FBI's CI program
(b) "ineffective oversight" of the Hanssen investigation
(c) "the absence of adequate security controls at the FBI"
(d) The Bureau's systematic failure to comply with Executive orders, Department regulations and sound intelligence-community procedures for internal security.
Gertz notes that while the FBI post-Hanssen did some things to improve security,
"Even today, the FBI's security problems are pervasive, from personnel security, to computer security, to document security, to security training and compliance." (Enemies, p. 125).
The damage did not end with Hanssen. Of Szady's numerous failures post-Hanssen, none is more documented or inexplicable than that involving the Chinese spy, Katrina Leung.
The Leung Case
The Inspector General's detailed report of his investigation into the matter is detailed here.
Here's the summary of that report:
As early as 1991 the FBI knew that Leung had privately confessed to spying for the Chinese and yet kept her working.
In part this may have been because two of the FBI's senior counterspies, J.J. Smith and Bill Cleveland, had been engaged in long-term sexual relationships with her and were thereby compromised. Smith had flat out lied to his supervisors when the evidence came to light in 1991, claiming falsely that Leung had passed a polygraph test.
She was the most highly paid of the US sources and the (dis)information she supplied was used by her supervisors to downgrade the credibility of other American intelligence sources on China which were sound.
The FBI engaged in a long cover up of this mole, who had so compromised our intelligence. Once Leung's perfidy could no longer be denied, Szady led the damage assessment team and allowed Leung's handler (Smith) off the hook, by early retirement. (Cleveland went on to Lawrence Livermore lab. When he did so, he failed to tell the security office about his affair with Leung, itself a serious breach which Szady excused, saying the violation should not be pursued.)
Not only was Szady's good friend, Cleveland, never prosecuted for his role in this, probably the most serious breach of intelligence in years, but Smith who was prosecuted did not cooperate as even the very weak plea deal he worked out required. Smith's inadequate cooperation allowed Leung to make a very generous plea agreement of the case against her as well.
As Gertz observes: "Szady himself was involved in the problems that plagued the Leung case." He looked the other way when preparing the damage assessment (particularly ignoring the fact that the disinformation she provided caused the agency to discount far more valuable contrary information, for example.) "His hands were in it from the beginning to the end," Gertz concludes. "And he never was held accountable for the obvious conflict of interest."
In an interview
for NRO, Gertz offered some suggestions to improve our intelligence operations:
"U.S. intelligence agencies remain mired in what I call crushing bureaucratization - the loss of focus on national, strategic goals and the overemphasis on protecting bureaucratic turf, budgets and personnel. The problem is seriously undermining our national security.
The intelligence community is bloated, with too many agencies doing too many of the same things. Restructuring is needed to upgrade our intelligence services to the 21st Century. While some reform has been carried out, there is so much more that needs to be done. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, in my view, has become another layer of bureaucracy on the overly bureaucratic system. It turns out that what the intelligence community didn't need was a czar who could make all well.
We need smaller agencies with better people and radically different operating methods and procedures."
I have some other ideas I do wish the Congressional intelligence committees would give serious attention.
a) Take domestic counter/intelligence (CI) out of the FBI's purview. Sooner or later it may have to be done. While that measure alone won't make any difference or improve anything, it could possibly prevent other reform measures from going astray due to the engrained organizational/cultural issues at the Bureau.
b) Consider a revision to our present-apparently rather toothless-espionage laws and set up a Court and a division of the Department of Justice specially designated to handle such cases. As we know from the performance of the FISA Court this is not a perfect solution. There is a tendency of such courts and divisions to expand and over zealously protect their own powers and cling to old procedures, rather than acting with good sense to meet new threats. Nevertheless, there is a great value to having judges with expertise in these matters and the kind of uniformity not possible when the cases are spread out over courts with such varying degrees of approach as, say, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and the Ninth Circuit.
c) Take all counter intelligence employees and officials out of the Civil Service system which makes it impossibly hard to remove poor performers. We pay with our lives and security if they do a bad job. It's not too much to hold them really accountable when they fail to do their jobs.
d) Professionalize CI; it is too important to neglect. If we choose to retain a CI office in the FBI, we must change the training of FBI CI agents and improve the resources available to them. Many FBI careerists have little interest in national security and no expertise in it. They are frequently anti-intellectual and distrustful of non-criminal experts. It's time a centralized pool of linguists (particularly Arabic, Chinese and Russian) and political experts was created to serve as a continuing resource to the FBI. People who know Sunni from Shia, can read and understand foreign communications and who can shed light on what otherwise is not obvious. Additionally, since so much of the spying involves the theft of military technology, a pool of technology experts which can regularly be tapped should be set up.
e) Laws should be enacted, barring military, Department of State and CIA and FBI officials from working for foreign governments, and operations funded by them, upon leaving government service. The number of such people already working for the Chinese and Saudi governments is a scandal, and the road to such employment posits a danger to honest analysis and actions in our national interest while still in government service.
Elections matter. The oversight functions of Congress are about to be shifted around. It isn't at all clear who will be even tasked with oversight of intelligence, a development creating yet more confusion and defusing accountability, making it even more likely that nothing much can be anticipated to change.
Nancy Pelosi has announced a brand new oversight of our intelligence operations is in the works:
Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi said Thursday that she will create a new congressional panel to examine the administration's intelligence budget and to make sure the money is being spent properly. [....]
The Select Intelligence Oversight Panel proposed by Pelosi would be made up by members of the Appropriations Committee and the Select Committee on Intelligence, and would work within the Appropriations Committee.
It would examine, through hearings, the president's intelligence budget, prepare the classified annex to the annual defense spending bill and conduct oversight of the use of appropriated funds by intelligence agencies
I'd be interested to watch how this proceeds.
Tom Maguire asks some sensible questions.
Will this new sub-committee have the budget authority to match oversight with money? How much power will it have relative to the Appropriations and Intel committees? And if it has real budget authority, shouldn't the chair of the House Intel Committee also chair this? Time will tell.
If Congressman Reyes, incoming chair of the House Intel Committee, is on this panel, is he up to the job? And who will staff it?
Will the sub-committee make the same mistake the 9/11 Commission did of relying so heavily on FBI and CIA employees seconded to it, people one can imagine were far more concerned about protecting the bureaucracies for which they work than an honest assessment of those agencies' failures?
I am growing increasingly concerned. How much longer can we count on dumb luck to protect us from our enemies?
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2006/12/naked_to_our_enemies.html at December 18, 2006 - 12:38:31 PM EST
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The Smoky Bomb Threat
By PETER D. ZIMMERMAN
Published: December 19, 2006
London
NY Times
THE exotic murder-by-polonium of the former K.G.B. spy Alexander Litvinenko has embroiled Russia, Britain and Germany in a diplomatic scuffle and a hunt for more traces of the lethal substance. But it also throws into question most of the previous analyses of “dirty bombs,” terrorist attacks using radioactive isotopes wrapped in explosives (or using other dispersion techniques) to spread radioactive material in crowded areas.
Essentially all analysts, myself included, played down the possibility of using alpha radiation — fast-moving helium nuclei ejected during the radioactive decay of certain isotopes, such as of polonium 210, the substance that killed Mr. Litvinenko — as a source of dirty bombs. We concentrated instead on isotopes that emit penetrating gamma rays, which are basically super-powered packets of light, hard to shield and effective at a yard or more.
The alpha radiation from polonium can be easily shielded — by a layer of aluminum foil, a sheet or two of paper, or the dead outer layer of skin. And so, the reasoning went, alpha radiation could not hurt you as long as the source stayed outside your body. Exactly. Mr. Litvinenko was apparently killed by polonium that he ate or drank or inhaled. That source was so physically small that it was hard to see, perhaps the size of a couple of grains of salt and weighing just a few millionths of a gram.
Dirty bombs based on gamma emitters, analysts have learned, can’t kill very many people. Mr. Litvinenko’s death tells us that “smoky bombs” based on alpha emitters very well could.
Polonium 210 is surprisingly common. It is used by industry in devices that eliminate static electricity, in low-powered brushes used to ionize the air next to photographic film so dust can be swept off easily, and in quite large machines placed end-to-end across a web of fabric moving over rollers in a textile mill. It is even used to control dust in clean rooms where computer chips and hard drives are made.
It may be difficult to get people to eat polonium; it isn’t hard to force them to breathe it. The problem for a radiological terrorist is to get his “hot” material inside people’s bodies where it will do the most harm. If the terrorist can solve that problem, then alpha radiation is the most devastating choice he can make. Precisely because alphas emit their nuclei so quickly, they deposit all of their energy in a relatively small number of cells, killing them or causing them to mutate, increasing the long-term risk of cancer.
The terrorist’s solution lies in getting very finely divided polonium into the air where people can breathe it. Without giving away any information damaging to national security, I see several fairly simple ways to accomplish this: burn the material, blow it up, dissolve it in a lot of water or pulverize it to a size so small that the particles can float in the air and lodge in the lungs.
It would be unwise for me to dwell on the details of just how one goes about getting a hot enough fire or breaking polonium into extremely fine “dust.” In the end, however, the radioactive material will appear like the dust from an explosion, or the smoke from a fire. My point is to demonstrate the urgent need for new thinking in the regulatory arena, not to give away important information.
Air containing such radioactive debris would appear smoky or dusty, and be dangerous to breathe. A few breaths might easily be enough to sicken a victim, and in some cases to kill. A smoky bomb exploded in a packed arena or on a crowded street could kill dozens or hundreds. It would set off a radiological emergency of a kind not seen before in the United States, and the number of people requiring life support or palliative care until death would overwhelm the number of beds now available for treating victims of radiation. First responders dashing unprotected into the cloud from a smoky bomb might be among the worst wounded. Fire and police departments around the country will need alpha radiation detectors, since the counters they carry now cannot see alphas.
Some of the steps involved with making a good smoky bomb from polonium would be dangerous for the terrorists involved, and might cost them their lives. That, unfortunately, no longer seems like a very high barrier.
What can we do to stop them? We must make it far less easy for them to acquiring polonium in deadly amounts. Polonium sources with about 10 percent of a lethal dose are readily available — even in a product sold on Amazon.com. Only modest restraints inhibit purchase of significantly larger amounts of polonium: as of next year, anyone purchasing more than 16 curies of polonium 210 — enough to make up 5,000 lethal doses — must register it with a tracking system run by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But this is vastly too high — almost no purchases on that scale are made by any industry.
The commission (and the International Atomic Energy Agency as well) is said to be considering tighter regulations to make a repeat of the Litvinenko affair less probable. There is talk that it might tighten the polonium reporting requirement by a factor of 10, to 1.6 curies. That’s better, but still not strict enough.
The biggest problem is that the regulatory commission’s regulations do not restrict the quantity of polonium used in industry. This may make it quite easy for terrorists to purchase large amounts of one of the earth’s deadliest substances. A near-term goal should to require specific licensing of any person or company seeking to purchase alpha sources stronger than one millicurie, about a third of a lethal dose. A longer-term goal ought to be eliminating nearly all use of polonium in industry through other technologies.
That is a technical challenge and would cost some money, but it would certainly be less expensive than coping with the devastation of a smoky bomb.
Peter D. Zimmerman, a nuclear physicist, is a professor of science and security in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. He was chief scientist of the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 2001 to 2003.
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http://www.homelandsecurityus.com/ulFuqrab.pdf
A group with a compound in upstate NY.
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From Stratfor:
TERRORISM BRIEF
United States: The Jamaat al-Fuqra Threat
Jun 03, 2005 1738 GMT
Consider, if you will, a group whose members live "free from the decadence
of a godless society" in guarded and insular communities in the rural United
States. Additionally, consider that some members of this group have been
convicted on a variety of weapons, fraud and terrorism charges. Those who
assume we are once again addressing right-wing extremists such as the Aryan
Nations would be wrong.
Although we do believe that right-wing extremists pose a threat to the
security of the United States, the group we describe does not give its
compounds names like Elohim City, the infamous compound of white
supremacists in Adair County, Okla. Instead they call them Islamburg (N.Y.),
Ahmadabad (Va.) and Holy Islamville (S.C.).
The group is Jamaat al-Fuqra -- Arabic for "community of the impoverished"
-- founded in the 1980s by Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani, a religious figure
from Pakistan who incorporated the group as a tax-exempt organization under
the name Muslims of the Americas. Its educational arm, the Quranic Open
University, takes American Muslims to Pakistan for training, expecting them
to return and instruct others.
Residents of Muslims of the Americas communities keep a low profile, display
a benign image and most of all deny the existence of Jamaat al-Fuqra. They
claim to be peaceful people who simply are attempting to escape the
decadence of American society. Actions by some of the residents, however,
belie that claim.
Many of the original al-Fuqra members were converts to Islam, and most were
African Americans. However, one of its first members -- and its first
bombmaker -- was Stephen Paul Paster, who converted from Judaism to Islam.
Paster was convicted for his role in the 1983 bombing of a Portland, Ore.,
hotel owned by the Hindu Bhagwan Rajneesh cult from India. He also was tried
and acquitted on charges stemming from two other West Coast bombings. Upon
his release from prison, Paster moved to Lahore, Pakistan, to join Gilani
and other instructors at the Quranic Open University, where he allegedly
helps to teach what Gilani calls "advanced training courses in Islamic
Military Warfare."
The U.S. government claims that al-Fuqra members were involved in 13
bombings and arsons during the 1980s and 1990s and were responsible for at
least 17 homicides. Many of these attacks targeted Indian groups such as the
Hare Krishnas, or heterodox Muslim groups such as the Ahmadiyya sect. In
1991, five al-Fuqra members were arrested at a border crossing in Niagara
Falls, N.Y., after authorities found their plans to attack an Indian cinema
and a Hindu temple in Toronto, Canada. Three of the five later were
convicted on charges stemming from the plot.
According to sources, many al-Fuqra members have fought in Afghanistan,
Kashmir, Lebanon, Bosnia and Chechnya. Several members also have been
affiliated with the al-Kifah Refugee Center -- popularly known as the
Brooklyn Jihad Office. Group member Clement Hampton-el, for example,
provided weapons training to several people associated with the Brooklyn
Jihad Office. One of those men, El Sayyid Nosair later would use that
training to assassinate the Rabbi Meir Kahane in Manhattan. Hampton-el was
convicted along with several other men, including Nosair's cousin, Ibrahim
Elgabrowny and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, also known as The Blind Sheikh, in
the 1993 New York Bomb Plot Case, and sentenced to serve 35 years.
More recently, police investigators working on the D.C. sniper case tied
convicted killer John Allen Muhammed to al-Fuqra. Rumors also surfaced that
"Shoe Bomber" Richard Reid was connected to the group. Wall Street Journal
reporter Daniel Pearl, in fact, was investigating the Reid/al-Fuqra
connection and was in the process of attempting to interview Gilani when he
was abducted and killed.
In addition to Hampton-el, several other members of al-Fuqra are in federal
and state prisons on a variety of weapons charges and convictions stemming
from worker's compensation, credit card, welfare and driver's license fraud.
The group allegedly uses its imprisoned members to recruit other prisoners.
Furthermore, it was revealed during Hampton-el's trial that one of the
organization's tasks was to recruit American veterans to fight in
Afghanistan.
Al-Fuqra members own several security companies, which provide a source of
income and security for the group and its compounds, but also offer a
plausible explanation for the presence of firing ranges on the properties --
a cover for the paramilitary training that allegedly is conducted at the
compounds.
Perhaps most disconcerting is that al-Fuqra's cadre of battle tested
jihadist warriors -- men who refer to themselves as "Soldiers of Allah" and
"Mohammed's Commandos" -- are mostly Americans who legally can obtain U.S.
passports and operate in the United States without raising suspicion.
As the United States advances its war on terrorism abroad and takes measures
to tighten immigration procedures in order to protect U.S. citizens from
foreign militants, it is important that authorities not overlook America's
homegrown jihadists.
=====================
Source unknown
Al-Fuqra
Holy Warriors of Terrorism
Introduction
For over ten years, a secretive Black Muslim sect in the United States and Canada has sought to carry out a self-declared policy of "jihad," or holy war, by taking violent action against its perceived enemies, generally other minorities or other Muslims with whom they disagree. The sect, known as Al-Fuqra, has been linked by law enforcement officials to terrorist violence in Colorado, Arizona, Pennsylvania, the Pacific-northwest and Canada.
Most recently, attention has been focused on the group in connection with a plot to bomb public sites in New York, including the United Nations, FBI offices at 26 Federal Plaza, and the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels. One of the fourteen men facing trial for this alleged conspiracy, which also included the World Trade Center bombing, is reportedly a member of Al-Fuqra, who is charged with training gang members and supplying them with weapons and explosives.
The bomb plot, described in a federal indictment as a plan "to levy a war of urban terrorism against the United States," also included the targeting of Jewish leaders and individuals.
Threats of terrorist violence by shadowy groups of fanatical religious extremists pose a serious challenge to public order and safety - as exemplified by the World Trade Center bombing which killed six people and injured hundreds more. This report is an effort to meet the need for increased public awareness about one such group in the hope that exposure can help prevent further violence of this nature.
Al-Fuqra
Al-Fuqra is the name of a violent Muslim extremist sect which has come under law enforcement scrutiny in the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. Headed by Sheikh Mubarak Ali Jilani Hashemi (also Hasmi) in Pakistan, the majority of its members are of African-American descent. The sect is an offshoot of orthodox African-American Muslims and has no connection to the Nation of Islam led by Louis Farrakhan.
The name of the organization is taken from the Arabic term "al- fuqara," meaning "the impoverished." The sect was formed in Brooklyn in 1980, after Sheikh Jilani visited the United States for the first time. During his stay, Jilani, who is known as a mystic and as a charismatic speaker, acquired followers by preaching at a local African-American mosque described as what was then the "most influential black American mosque" in the area. He has visited the United States several times since then. Adherents of Al- Fuqra have also been active in Canada.
Over the past thirteen years, followers of the sect have visited Pakistan to receive religious indoctrination from Sheikh Jilani. Additionally, Al-Fuqra members have sent funds to Jilani regularly at his base in Lahore, Pakistan. Press reports indicate that members of the sect in the United States number between 1,000 and 3,000.
The Two Faces of Al-Fuqra
Members of the Muslim community have described the Al-Fuqra sect as an organization which espouses the Islamic concept of self-help, undertaking civic works such as fighting drug dealers, cleaning and patrolling the streets and apartment project corridors and courtyards. Other adherents of the group who lived in a remote compound at Trout Creek Pass near Buena Vista, Colorado described themselves as shepherds fleeing the difficulties of urban life who owned guns in order to protect themselves from the evils of society.
Yet the contents of a Colorado Springs storage locker owned by members of the sect which was confiscated by police in 1989 revealed a hoard of explosives, military manuals, bomb-making instructions and detailed plans of the sect's intended targets. The materiel found at the site included 30 pounds of explosives, three large pipe bombs, and ten handguns and silencers. Among the explosives were three pipe bombs "fused and ready to blow," homecooked plastic explosives, and other bomb-making components, such as electric wiring, fuses, mercury switches and timing devices.
Also seized at the storage locker were target-practice silhouettes bearing such markings as "FBI Anti-Terrorist Team" and "Zionist Pig."
Documents discovered at the site indicated that sect members planned to murder a Muslim religious leader in Tucson, Arizona and were making efforts towards carrying out attacks on Colorado- based military installations and acts of sabotage on the Colorado state power, communications and air transportation infrastructures.
The plans of the group were painstakingly recorded by sect members in the documents found in Colorado Springs. According to a description of the records in the search warrant affidavit, members of the group are "specifically instructed, by means of a written doctrine, not to dispose of records, but to maintain - in a safe place - all documentation which could expose their true purpose and plans."
Husain Abdallah, described as one of the early organizers of Al- Fuqra in the U.S., responded to recent press reports concerning the violent nature of the sect by declaring, "We do not commit acts of terrorism in this country. just because other members of a faith commit crimes does not mean that we are criminals ... The government is trying to create a blueprint to destroy us, to pull another Waco and destroy us."
Terrorism Against Religious Targets
Al-Fuqra has focused on Hindu houses of worship and places of business for its acts of violence in North America. In Pakistan, Al- Fuqra has been charged with fomenting violence over the border in the Kashmir province of India by aiding Muslim separatists there. Over the same period of time, press reports indicate that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has linked members of the sect to sixteen criminal and terrorist activities in both the United States and Canada, including the firebombings of Hindu temples in Denver, Philadelphia and Seattle in 1984 and the murder of Muslim religious leaders in Canton, Michigan in 1983 and Tucson, Arizona in 1990. Also among the group's potential targets was the Jewish Community Center of Denver.
Al-Fuqra continues to be under investigation in Arizona for the 1990 murder of Imam Rashid Khalifa, the leader of a Tucson mosque. In Canada, the sect has been linked by investigators to the 1991 bombings of property owned by Hindus in Toronto.
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"Soldiers of Allah"
Reflecting the doctrines of the organization, members of Al-Fuqra cells refer to themselves as "Soldiers of Allah." In previous years they called themselves "Muhammad Commandos." The organization is structured into cells, each of which is assigned a geographic location in which to operate. Al-Fuqra is believed to have at least five cells, since the Colorado cell's members were allegedly designated as "Muhammad Commandos Sector 5."
In order to preserve the organization's overall structure, contact between members of a cell is never made directly. This ensures that members of the cell will not know the true identity or a physical description of another member. Cell members further obscure their identities by contacting other cell members via pay telephones at pre-determined times. The use of these methods has led law enforcement officials to describe Al-Fuqra as operating according to the principles of "classically structured terrorist cells."
Documents belonging to the sect in Colorado revealed that the organization was doing surveillance on even more ambitious possible targets, for the purpose of designing an attack to culminate in a major disaster. Among them were the route lines and control stations for the Colorado state petroleum, gas, electric and hydroelectric systems. In addition to this, a member of the group was requested to provide information on National Guard armories, U.S. military installations, police stations, communications control sites, and airports.
Centers of Al-Fuqra activity are spread across the United States. Certain criminal activities in Brooklyn (NY), Baltimore (MD), Philadelphia (PA), Tucson (AZ), Portland (OR) and Denver, Colorado Springs, and Buena Vista (CO) are being investigated for possible links to the sect by law enforcement authorities. Of particular interest are the Al-Fuqra compounds located in remote areas of the United States. In October of 1992 the Colorado State Police raided the 101-acre Al-Fuqra compound near Buena Vista and discovered a cache of weapons including Soviet manufactured AK-47 assault rifles, as well as American- made M-16 and M-14 rifles.
The headquarters of the organization is believed to be in Hancock, New York, along with what is regarded as the most important of the sect's compounds which is located near Deposit, New York in the Catskill Mountains. Two other compounds are located in South Carolina and the California desert. Press reports indicate that Sheikh Jilani took part in the purchase of Al-Fuqra's Colorado and New York compounds.
Turning Point: The Jihad Council for North America
The earliest attacks by members of Al-Fuqra have been traced to 1979; however, the group's well-orchestrated attacks on its perceived enemies commenced in 1983, the same year that the group initiated its Jihad [Holy War] Council for North America in Toronto. Al-Fuqra was estimated at that time to consist of three cells.
In contrast to the activities of other terrorist organizations, Al-Fuqra has never claimed responsibility for the acts of violence linked to its members. The existence of the group came to light in 1983, when police arrested Stephen Paster, an Al-Fuqra member who was later convicted for the bombing of a Portland, Oregon hotel owned by the Bagwan Shree Rajneesh, an Indian guru.
Materiel found at Paster's home included components for the construction of pipe bombs and what was described by investigators as an "urban warfare handbook." Paster subsequently jumped bail and was re-arrested on June 26, 1985. A search of his home at that time revealed a cache of several handguns, a semi-automatic pistol that looked like a submachine gun, written documents describing the construction of electronic bombing mechanisms, and a number of passports under a variety of aliases. Arms found in his car included a "zip gun" with a bore "large enough to hold a shotgun shell" together with a device for using it as part of a booby trap.
The growing sophistication of the methods and weapons used by Paster mirrors the development of Al-Fuqra from a loosely-knit organization whose adherents carried out bombing attacks on religious institutions to a North American network of organized cells whose members advanced to commit acts of fraud and target individuals for murder.
"Everyone Who Comes Must Be Eliminated. . ."
Evidence of the existence of a larger network of the organization only became apparent in 1989, after the Colorado Springs storage locker with its hoard of Al-Fuqra documents and weapons was discovered.
One of the documents found by the Colorado Springs police consisted of a detailed three-page plan to murder Sheikh Rashid Khalifa of the Islamic Center in Tucson, Arizona. Together with the plan were surveillance photographs of the mosque. On the assumption that there might be police patrols or other people at the mosque, the plan recommended that the "dispatching [of) the subject" should be done "in the quietest method possible: knife, garrotte . . . "
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The plan went on to anticipate that Sheikh Khalifa "may not be there" at the time that the Al-Fuqra members expected, and therefore recommended that "[a]s we wait, everyone who comes must be eliminated until he shows up." Khalifa was stabbed to death on January 31, 1990. As of yet, no arrests have been made, although two Al-Fuqra members in Colorado who were arrested on fraud charges are also suspected of having been a part of the plot to murder Khalifa.
Members of the sect allegedly funded their activities by illegally collecting and cashing 276 checks totalling $355,000 from a Colorado state insurance fund that paid workers' compensation claims. Dummy corporations with names such as "McClean Carpenters" and "Professional Security International" were used in order to receive the checks from the insurance fund, and the checks were sent to post office boxes.
Four members of the sect were arrested in Colorado and Pennsylvania on charges of racketeering and forgery in October of 1992. Edward Ivan McGhee, James L. Upshur, James D. Williams, all of Colorado, were arrested after law enforcement authorities raided their homes and the Al-Fuqra compound. Williams was separately charged with conspiracy to commit murder for his involvement in the 1984 bombing of a Hare Krishna temple in Denver and Imam Khalifa's murder in Arizona. Vicente Rafael Pierre was sentenced to four years of probation in July of 1993 for his part in defrauding the the Colorado workers' state compensation fund, and was permitted to return to his home in Pennsylvania. In reviewing Pierre's role as part of the sect, the sentencing judge described Pierre's role in defrauding the fund as minor, and further pointed out that Pierre had not taken part in the actual terrorist attacks.
Part of the funds collected by the sect were believed to have been used for the purchase of an isolated 101-acre farm compound near Buena Vista, Colorado where the sect members' families resided. To date, less than $20,000 of the stolen funds have been accounted for,which has led law enforcement authorities to believe that they may have been sent to Pakistan. Documents from the Colorado Springs storage locker that were discovered in 1989 indicate that this may well be the case, since members of the sect are described as being required to regularly donate a percentage of their income to Al-Fuqra's headquarters in Lahore, Pakistan. New documents discovered at the group's compound near Buena Vista, Colorado in October of 1992 formed the basis for the filing of new charges against Colorado Al-Fuqra members James Williams and Edward Flinton in February of 1993. The two men, who were previously charged with violations of organized crime laws were additionally charged with conspiracy to murder Imam Rashid Khalifa. The documents showed that Williams and Flinton had been involved in the planning of the murder, but those who actually carried it out have yet to be found.
Ties to the Afghani Mujahideen'
Throughout the last decade, Sheikh Jilani promoted the cause of the Afghani mujahideen' ('Those who fight the Jihad, or holy war) to American members of the Al-Fuqra sect. Corresponding to similar efforts throughout the Muslim world during the 1980's, some American members of the group travelled to the Sudan for military training in order to join the Afghanis in what was advanced as a "holy war" against the Soviets.
Most recently, Clement Rodney Hampton-El, an African-American allegedly connected to the averted attempt to bomb four major New York City locations, has been described as "having worked closely" with the Al-Fuqra sect. Hampton-El, who is also known as Abd al Rashid Abdallah, or "Dr. Rashid," is also alleged to have been a part of the World Trade Center bombing by assisting in the testing of explosives.
During the Afghan war, Hampton-El was recruited as a member of Gulbuddin Hikmatyar's Hizb al-Islami (also Hizb-I-Islami) - "Islamic Party" - to fight in Afghanistan. Hikmatyar is known as one of the most vehement opponents of secular regimes - including that of the United States - and it was his group which received the lion's share of aid from the United States via Pakistan in the 1980's. According to press accounts, the Afghan war's foreign volunteers kept to themselves by establishing camps separate from those of the Afghan troops. The volunteers acquired the reputation of being "zealous troops" who did not avoid "fierce combat," and were also known to have the policy of not taking any prisoners. Anthony Hyman, an expert on Afghanistan, described the mujahideen as having "gained the reputation as some of the most brutal fighters in the war, and they deserved it. They kept themselves apart from the Afghans and were disliked for it. They regarded themselves as superior."
After he was wounded as a combatant in the Afghan war in November of 1988, Hampton-El returned to the United States in order to recuperate. Robert Dannin, an anthropologist who visited him at Long Island College Hospital, described Hampton-El as having expressed the desire to go back to Afghanistan so that he could have "another chance at martyrdom and Paradise
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http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,242265,00.html
MIAMI — The Port of Miami on Sunday was in a heightened state of security after police discovered two men hiding in a cargo truck and a bomb squad was summoned to the scene, FOX News has learned.
The container truck was stopped near the cargo-area entrance to the port around 8 a.m. and the driver of the vehicle, who had valid port identification, was questioned by authorities.
"The driver of the 18-wheeler was apparently asked several questions — we're told routine questions — and at one point, he said he was alone," FOX News' Nancy Harmeyer said.
Police became suspicious and discovered two men hiding in the sleeper cab of the 18-wheeler. All three men are of Middle Eastern descent. The men were believed to be in the country legally.
"At this time we don't know why they were here, what they were planning to do, or quite honestly even if the driver knew that the two men were back there," Harmeyer said.
No searches of the truck had been conducted as of 1:30 p.m. EST, Harmeyer said, but two government vehicles with blacked-out windows were seen pulling up beside the vehicle and then driving away.
Two of the men reportedly are of Iraqi and Lebanese descent and authorities have a warrant out for one of the three, sources said.
The tractor-trailer has been cordoned off and investigators from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security were on the scene.
Weekends at the port are busy, with heavy cruise ship traffic; on Sunday, six cruise ships were at the port.
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WASHINGTON, Jan. 8 — House Democrats intend to fulfill a campaign promise this week by passing broad new antiterrorism legislation, but some Senate Democrats and the Bush administration object to security mandates in the plan, citing concerns about their cost and practicality.
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The House measure, the Sept. 11 Commission Bill, is intended to write into law recommendations by the group that investigated the 2001 terror attacks. They include initiatives intended to disrupt global black markets for nuclear weapons technology and to enhance cargo inspection.
“Today marks a giant leap forward toward a safer and more secure America,” said Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, the new chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, as he unveiled the bill Friday.
But the proposed legislation, which could come to a vote as early as Tuesday, goes beyond what the Sept. 11 commission recommended, taking up measures previously favored by Democratic lawmakers but opposed by the Department of Homeland Security.
The bill requires that within three years, all cargo on passenger jets be inspected for explosives, as checked baggage is now. The House bill also requires that within five years all ship cargo containers headed to the United States be scanned overseas for components of a nuclear bomb.
Homeland Security Department officials say there is no proven technology for such comprehensive cargo screening, at least at a reasonable cost or without causing worldwide bottlenecks in trade. The screening for air cargo is estimated to cost $3.6 billion over the next decade, and ship inspections could cost even more. “Inspecting every container could cause ports to literally shut down,” said Russ Knocke, a Homeland Security spokesman.
Many Republicans and some Senate Democratic committee chairmen said that the goal of 100 percent inspections was worthy, but that they were not convinced that mandates should be included in the bill.
“Airplane passengers must be assured that any cargo on a passenger jet will not pose a terrorist threat,” said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, who now leads the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. “But we must achieve these goals in an efficient manner to allow for the free flow of commerce without placing undue economic burdens on importers or bringing air traffic to a standstill.”
The Sept. 11 commission said in its 2004 report that any proposed new security measures must be carefully considered, weighing the cost and benefit of any one step, like inspecting cargo, against others that could be taken, like protecting planes against shoulder-fired missiles.
The commission recommended, for example, that passenger planes be equipped with hardened, bomb-resistant containers for some cargo, instead of moving immediately to inspect every cargo shipment.
Homeland Security Department officials said they were researching ways to inspect more air and sea cargo. The agency has tests planned this year at three ports in Pakistan, Honduras and England, where all ship containers headed for the United States will be checked for radioactive substances or dense objects that might be hiding a bomb.
Until then, the department intends to follow its existing security procedures, which include mandatory inspections of the small fraction of cargo containers deemed suspicious because of the sender, the destination or the contents, among other factors.
Currently, about 30 percent of air cargo on passenger planes is inspected by dogs or screening devices, while about 5 percent of all incoming ship containers are sent through a device like an X-ray machine.
Mr. Lieberman and Senator Daniel K. Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii, the new chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, want the security department to complete its tests on new technology before mandating inspection of all cargo.
But Mr. Thompson, the chief author of the House bill, and Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said the timetables were essential to push the department to move faster.
“We need firm deadlines to end the administration’s foot-dragging,” Mr. Schumer said Monday.
The push for 100 percent screening of all ship cargo containers first became a top priority for Democrats last year after the Bush administration proposed allowing a Dubai company to assume management of a half-dozen United States ship terminal operations. Democrats said then that they recognized the idea was compelling not only to increase security, but also as a political pitch as they tried to buttress their credentials as a party that takes domestic security seriously.
Part of the skepticism about the mandate for 100 percent screening is that even if the equipment is installed, it is not clear it would do much to prevent an attack, some security experts said.
The radiation detection equipment now in use, for example, probably would not pick up a crucial radioactive substance for a nuclear weapon if the material was shielded. And even if all cargo containers were checked, terrorists could find other ways to smuggle weapons into the United States, including on private boats or ships that carry cars, which would not be not covered by the inspection mandates.
“Tax dollars should not be spent on what makes for the best election-year bumper sticker, but on initiatives that offer the most security for the dollar spent,” said James Jay Carafano, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group in Washington, and a critic of the 100 percent inspection requirement.
Aside from the cargo inspection mandates, other security measures proposed by Democrats have a greater chance of becoming law.
The House bill calls for changes in the way some $2 billion a year in state and local domestic security grants are distributed, so that the money is more based on risk. A separate bill has been introduced in the Senate that would provide antiterrorism grants for Amtrak, freight railroads and other transit systems, a plan that previously passed the Senate but was opposed by House Republican leaders.
Mr. Thompson said that with the Democrats now in charge the party had a chance to push forward at least some of these measures, although he said he recognized compromise might be necessary before they were signed into law.
NY Times
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Publication:The New York Sun; Date:Jun 30, 2004; Section:Front page; Page:1
IRANIAN ENVOYS ARE CAUGHT CASING NEW YORK
TWO GUARDS AT U.N., SUSPECTED OF SPYING, RETURNED TO TEHRAN
By BENNY AVNI Special to the Sun
UNITED NATIONS — In the wake of growing rhetorical Iranian threats against America and recent disclosures of ties between Iran and Al Qaeda,Washington expelled two guards at the Iranian mission to the United Nations, it was disclosed yesterday.
The American U.N. envoy, Stuart Holliday, told reporters the Iranians were “asked to leave the country” after being caught casing New York sites. They left on Saturday.
The demand by Washington, the third such case involving suspicions against Iranians affiliated with the U.N. mission, came as tensions over Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program has led Tehran hard-liners to directly threaten the use of terrorism against America.
“We will map 29 sensitive sites in the United States, and give the information to all international terror organizations,” the head of an Iranian body known as Security Without Borders, Hassan Abassi, said two weeks ago.
Speaking in Tehran, he added, “We know where America’s Achilles’ heel is.”
Israel Radio’s Farsi service director, Menashe Amir, who closely monitors the Iranian press, told The New York Sun that Mr.Abassi is the top ideologue of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and is often being used as a mouthpiece for the hard-liners in Tehran. “The heads of the Revolutionary Guards have increased their anti-American rhetoric in the last few weeks,” he said.
Since the two spying suspects returned to Iran, Mr. Amir added, the Iranian press was divided among hardliners, who presented them as heroes, and the moderates, who criticized the circumstances that led to their return.
At the U.N.,Mr.Holliday said the two men, described as “security officials” but not identified by name, were seen “moving around New York City and essentially surveilling and taking photographs of a variety of New York landmarks and infrastructure and the rest. Obviously, this isn’t something that’s a part of protecting their mission here in New York.”
In a statement faxed to the Sun, a spokesman for Iran’s U.N. mission, Morteza Ramandi, said that the two security guards “curtailed their temporary assignments and left the United States,” stressing that they had done nothing wrong.
The men, who had no diplomatic immunity, left after Washington “invoked the shooting of a videotape and picture” in May, Mr. Ramandi said. He insisted they did not violate any law, and were merely taking pictures of “obvious popular tourist attractions in New York City.”
“We categorically deny that they ever took any photos of anything of security or sensitive nature,” he said.
American sources point to two previous incidents, in June 2002 and last November, when Iranians assigned to the U.N. mission were caught suspiciously photographing landmarks, infrastructure, and transportation sites and were asked to leave.
The latest one, involving videotaping by Iranians of a Woodside, Queens, subway station, was described by Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly in an interview with Fox News last December. “They were clearly focused on the train tracks for an inordinate period of time,” Mr. Kelly said. The pattern of Iranians, who temporarily come to New York on security assignments and then are either expelled or simply return to Iran and replaced by others, does not fit the normal flow of diplomatic activities, U.N. officials said.
“I understand that obviously the threshold is different for people that are assigned, in a sense, to activities here at the United Nations,” Mr. Holliday said. Countering Mr. Ramandi’s contention that the two were innocent tourists, he added,“We have great confidence in the ability of federal law enforcement to determine what actions and behavior is typical and what is atypical.”
In a little noticed detail of the interim staff report — of the congressional commission investigating the September 11 attacks, intelligence was cited, showing “far greater potential for collaboration between Hezbollah and Al Qaeda than many had previously thought.”
In particular, the report contended that Osama bin Laden played a role in the 1996 bombing of the Saudi Khobar Towers complex, which previously was thought to be solely conducted by Hezbollah, Iran’s terrorist proxy.
Tehran has long been suspected of using Hezbollah, particularly through its founder, Imad Moughniyeh, for overseas operations like the attacks on the Jewish Community Center and the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the mid-1990s.
Recently, as America increased its pressure for tougher action by the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency against Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program, the ayatollahs have flexed muscles, threatening to use known terrorist ties and perhaps physically preparing for such an eventuality as well, terrorism experts say.
Iran also toughened its public nuclear stance. Over the weekend, it announced it would resume building centrifuges for its nuclear program, pledging to temporarily not use the devices to enrich uranium.
It also said that in addition to its midrange Shihab 3 missiles, which can reach 750 miles, it would resume building the Shihab 4, with a range of 1,500 miles,and the Shihab 5,which can reach as far as 3,000 miles and threaten major European and American targets.
(Marc: Note that these ranges put Europe within the reach of Iranian nukes when they have them.)
“The Iranians are very thorough,” Israeli intelligence expert and journalist Yossi Melman told the Sun. “They are preparing themselves for the next battle with America.” One weapon in that battle, he added, might well be the collection of possible New York sites for a future “target bank.”
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Details Emerge About Possible Terror Threat
Suspects, Reportedly Tied to Al Qaeda in Iraq, Sought Student Visas
By PIERRE THOMAS
WASHINGTON, Jan. 22, 2007 — - Mimicking the hijackers who executed the Sept. 11 attacks, insurgents reportedly tied to al Qaeda in Iraq considered using student visas to slip terrorists into the United States to orchestrate a new attack on American soil.
Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, recently testified that documents captured by coalition forces during a raid of a safe house believed to house Iraqi members of al Qaeda six months ago "revealed [AQI] was planning terrorist operations in the U.S."
At the time, Maples offered little additional insight into the possible terror plot. ABC News, however, has learned new details of what remains a classified incident that has been dealt with at the highest levels of government.
Watch "World News with Charles Gibson."
Sources tell ABC News that the plot may have involved moving between 10 and 20 suspects believed to be affiliated with al Qaeda in Iraq into the United States with student visas -- the same method used by the 19 al Qaeda terrorists who struck American targets on Sept. 11.
U.S. officials now require universities to closely track foreign nationals who use student visas to study in the United States. University officials must report international students who fail to arrive on campus or miss class regularly.
In August, the FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement alerted intelligence agencies and state and local law enforcement about 11 Egyptian students who had failed to report to their classes at Montana State University. The students were ultimately apprehended.
Still, despite the heightened precautions, some security analysts fear that skilled terrorists -- handpicked because of their clean records and because they are carefully trained -- could still slip through an academic setting.
The plot was discovered six months ago, roughly the same time that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, was killed by coalition forces. Sources tell ABC News that the suspects involved in the effort to launch the U.S. attack were closely associated with Zarqawi.
The plan also came only months after Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda's No. 2, had requested that Zarqawi attempt an attack inside the United States.
"This appears to be the first hard evidence al Qaeda in Iraq was trying to attack us here at home," said ABC News consultant Richard Clarke, former chief counterterrorism adviser on the U.S. National Security Council.
The plan was uncovered in its early stages, and sources say there is no indication that the suspects made it into the United States. Officials also emphasize that there is no evidence of an imminent attack.
The hunt for suspects continues, however, and some fear that al Qaeda recruits in Iraq could be easily redirected.
"Anyone willing to go to Iraq to fight American troops is probably willing to try to come to the United States," Clarke said.
Copyright © 2007 ABC News Internet Ventures
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Second post of the day:
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New York Times
Filed at 10:29 p.m. ET
MONTERREY, Mexico (AP) -- Eleven Iraqis carrying false passports and heading to California were arrested at Monterrey's airport, immigration officials said Monday.
Nine men, a woman and a two-year-old girl traveled from Madrid, Spain, to Monterrey, where they were detained Saturday, an immigration official said on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to speak publicly about the arrests.
None of the Iraqi citizens appear on terrorist watch lists and they told authorities they were Chaldean Christians trying to get to California were they would request asylum, the official said.
They are being held at an immigration detention center in Mexico City pending charges for using false documents.
Chaldean Christians have a sizable community in southern California and frequently try to enter the United States through Mexico, saying they face persecution in Iraq.
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Tis a rare event when I post a NY Times editorial, but frankly I find its premise about Republican motivation here believable.
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Chemical Insecurity
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Published: January 23, 2007
The new Democratic leadership in Congress has a chance to finally do what the Republican Congress and the Bush administration failed to do after Sept. 11: to protect the nation’s chemical plants from an attack. Lawmakers should stop the Homeland Security Department from adopting new regulations that would block state and local governments from doing more to protect their residents and should finally pass a federal law with teeth.
An attack on a single plant could release deadly chemicals that could put hundreds of thousands of people at risk of death or serious injury. But since Sept. 11, the chemical industry — a major campaign contributor — has managed to ward off any significant new federal rules that might require it to spend money to increase security.
Now it is going a step further by trying to get the federal government to “pre-empt,” or invalidate, state and local efforts to impose safety standards. Supporters of pre-emption always claim that they just want a uniform standard. But in situations like this one — where the federal law is absurdly weak — it is obvious that the real agenda is to block serious safety measures at every level of government.
Congress wisely refused to include a pre-emption provision in legislation it adopted last year. Now, however, the Homeland Security Department has proposed regulations that would give itself the authority to pre-empt state and local laws. If the proposed regulations were adopted, they could wipe away the serious chemical plant security law that New Jersey has passed, and prevent other states and cities from requiring the chemical industry to do more to protect their residents.
It is up to Congress to act. It should block these deeply flawed regulations and move quickly to pass a comprehensive law that imposes tough requirements on chemical plants to harden their facilities.
Last year Congress passed a bad rider, backed by the industry, that gives the chemical industry far too much leeway to decide on its own how its plants are vulnerable and how to protect them. The new law should contain specific requirements for plant safety. It should also require companies to switch to safer chemicals when the cost is not prohibitive, a key safety measure that the industry has resisted. And it should clearly state that federal chemical-plant laws do not pre-empt state and local laws. Congress should finally put the public’s safety ahead of the chemical industry’s bottom line.
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NY Times
WASHINGTON, Feb. 8 — New York City is about to become a laboratory to test ways of strengthening the nation’s defenses against a terror attack by a nuclear device or a radioactive “dirty bomb.”
Starting this spring, the Bush administration will assess new detection machines at a Staten Island port terminal that are designed to screen cargo and automatically distinguish between naturally occurring radiation and critical bomb-building ingredients.
And later this year, the federal government plans to begin setting up an elaborate network of radiation alarms at some bridges, tunnels, roadways and waterways into New York, creating a 50-mile circle around the city.
The effort, which could be expanded to other cities if proven successful, is a major shift of focus for the Department of Homeland Security. As it finishes installing the first generation of radiation scanners at the nation’s ports and land border crossings, the department is trying to find ways to stop a plot that would use a weapon built within the United States.
“How do you create deterrence against terrorism?” said Vayl S. Oxford, director of the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, the Homeland Security agency coordinating the work. “You complicate the ability for the terrorist to do what they want.”
But even as the new campaign begins, some members of Congress and antiterrorism experts are raising concerns that the initiative, like previous Homeland Security programs, could prove extraordinarily costly and provide few security gains.
“This is just total baloney,” said Tara O’Toole, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Energy during the Clinton administration, where she oversaw nuclear weapons safety efforts. “They are forgetting that no matter what type of engineering solution they try in good faith to come up with, this is a thinking enemy and they will look for a way around it.”
While Homeland Security officials repeatedly declined to estimate the costs of a nationwide detection system, agency documents show they might spend more than a billion dollars on the cargo-screening equipment alone.
Local officials in New York are sparring with Homeland Security over a plan to immediately transfer to local and state authorities the burden of maintaining and operating the network of detection machines when it is completed within several years.
“We are concerned they will put money forward for a piece of hardware and then move to another project,” said Raymond W. Kelly, New York City’s police commissioner. He added that while the city supports the plan, he is not convinced that the proposed detection network makes sense. “Whether or not it works, whether or not it causes too many false alarms, which causes a whole other set of problems, all of these things are still to be determined,” he said.
Mr. Oxford said he is aware of the concerns about costs, which is still the subject of negotiations, and the performance of the new detection machines. But with a threat like a nuclear attack, the country cannot afford to wait until all the details are worked out, he said.
“Our philosophy is not to wait for perfection, because perfection never comes,” he said.
The Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, among the newest agencies at Homeland Security, was established in April 2005, in response to criticism that efforts to combat nuclear terrorism were too disorganized.
The office focuses on blocking two types of plots: a nuclear weapon or a dirty bomb. A nuclear attack by terrorists is considered unlikely, because of the difficulty of obtaining the required radioactive materials, such as highly enriched uranium.
The detonation of a dirty bomb is considered much more feasible. It only requires dynamite or another conventional explosive to detonate a widely available radioactive source — like the cesium or cobalt in certain medical devices. The blast might cause injuries or deaths, but the radioactive residue would cover a two- to three-block area and not pose an immediate health threat. Possible panic and economic disruption could be among the most serious consequences, experts say.
The Securing the Cities detection network, as the New York experiment is called, is intended to stop a nuclear or radiological threat as far away from a city as possible. “Detecting it in the core of Manhattan is too late,” Mr. Oxford said.
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The network would most likely include truck inspection stations along highways approaching New York, which would be equipped with radiation detection devices, agency budget documents say. Devices might also be installed at highway tollbooths and at spots where rail, boat and subway traffic could be monitored.
The detection equipment, some of which would be mobile, would be electronically connected and monitored so if a suspicious vehicle passed one spot without being stopped, it might be intercepted after passing another detector.
Some New York agencies already have a limited supply of radiation detection equipment, but the new system would be much more extensive and go much further outside the city.
Mr. Kelly said that the city would, at least initially, use any new detection equipment to screen vehicles heading into Lower Manhattan. The project would complement a city program to install cameras, license plate readers and devices that can block vehicle traffic, creating a “ring of steel” around the financial district.
The actual design of the Homeland Security system and the protocols for how responses to alarms will be handled, are still being negotiated by federal officials and authorities in New York City, New Jersey, Connecticut and New York state.
Benn H. Tannenbaum, a physicist and nuclear terrorism expert at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, said the system would never create anything close to an impenetrable barrier, particularly for a nuclear bomb, since the required ingredients have low levels of radioactivity and can easily be shielded. But the project still might be worthwhile, he said. “If nothing else, it makes the terrorist think twice before they do something like this,” he said.
Ms. O’Toole, the former Department of Energy official, pointed to Homeland Security’s BioWatch program, set up in about 30 cities in 2003 to monitor the air for a possible biological attack.
The equipment was installed quickly, but there was no detailed plan in place for how to respond to positive alarms, which meant three weeks of confusion among Houston authorities in October 2003, after tularemia, a naturally occurring pathogen, was discovered. “There is this disconnect between these grand schemes for technology and reality,” Ms. O’Toole said.
Laura S. H. Holgate, vice president at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Washington-based research group, said the government should put far more energy into a global effort to prevent nuclear materials from getting into the hands of terrorists.
The testing planned on Staten Island at the New York Container Terminal is intended to police concerns about false alarms.
Three sets of new types of detection machines have been installed there. For the first time, such machines sound an alarm when something radioactive passes through, and simultaneously identify the radioactive isotope. That allows officials to distinguish between innocuous items that can emit low levels of radiation, such as granite or kitty litter, and real threats.
Officials at the Government Accountability Office and some members of Congress are concerned that Homeland Security is moving too quickly to buy the new machines. Initial tests have shown them to be not much more effective than existing machines that are a fraction of the cost.
“We know this system is going to be expensive,” said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut and chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. “We need to be sure it will perform as promised.”
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Shooting in Utah
I have been trying to determine whether the shooter, Sulejmen Talovic, was a Muslim. My suspicious nature was aroused when the name of the shooter was not released in a quick manner, and then major media would not talk about it after release. He came from Bosnia, certainly a state with large numbers of Muslims, good and bad. The name Sulejmen is a very common Muslim name in Bosnia. The name honors Suleiman the Magnificent. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suleiman_the_Magnificent ) He had a backpack loaded with ammunition, a shotgun and a 38 pistol. Curiously, there are a large number of mosques within four miles of the Trolley Mall. (And the Trolley Mall has signs posted that guns are not allowed in the Mall, in a state where gun ownership and carrying of weapons is very common.)
WND reports hims as Muslim. Other blog sites are speculating the same.
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=54247
pat
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SB Mig: That post, while interesting, does not belong in this thread. Please put it in Military Science and then delete it here. If you can't delete it, then I will once you've posted it there. TIA-CD
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http://www.nbc5.com/news/11075310/detail.html?dl=headlineclick
Two Chicago-Area Men Arrested In Ohio Terrorism Case
POSTED: 4:14 pm CST February 21, 2007
UPDATED: 7:55 pm CST February 21, 2007
Two cousins were arrested Wednesday on federal charges of conspiring to wage holy war against Americans overseas, including U.S. military forces in Iraq.
Zubair A. Ahmed, 27, of suburban North Chicago, and Khaleel Ahmed, 26, of Chicago, were accused along with three other men who already had been under indictment on charges of plotting acts of terrorism against Americans overseas.
The fresh indictment returned by a grand jury in Cleveland added the two Chicago-area men to the roster of defendants and brought additional charges against the three other men.
The cousins, both American citizens, appeared briefly in Chicago before U.S. Magistrate Judge Geraldine Soat Brown, who ordered them sent to Ohio for arraignment. Prosecutors asked her to order them held in custody and sent to Ohio as federal prisoners. Defense attorneys asked for bond.
A hearing on whether to permit bond was set for 2:30 p.m. Monday.
Defense attorneys Gerald Collins and Brian Sieve said they had just met the two defendants, knew little about them and had no comment on the case.
The indictment claims that, between June 2004 and February 2006, the cousins and the other three men -- Mohammad Zaki Amawi, 27, and Marwan Othman El-Hindi, 42, both formerly of Toledo, and Wassim I. Mazloum, 22, formerly of Sylvania, Ohio -- conspired to "kill or maim persons in locations outside of the United States, to including U.S. armed forces personnel serving in Iraq."
The conspiracy allegedly included finding fresh recruits to commit terrorist acts and seeking out sites for training in firearms, hand-to-hand combat and the use of explosives. The men also allegedly agreed to raise funds for "jihad training" and download Internet information on improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
"They were perhaps not as intimately involved as the original three individuals from Toledo," said Bill Edwards of the U.S. Attorney's Office. "But, they did get involved, they knew one of the original individuals, Mr. El-Hindi."
A shadowy figure was described in the indictment only as the Trainer, a U.S. citizen with a military background. The indictment said the two cousins met with the trainer in July 2004 and discussed sniper tactics, counter-surveillance techniques and the use of heavy machine guns.
The three Ohio men, currently in federal custody, were charged in the original indictment with conspiring to provide material support to terrorists. Amawi was also charged with verbally threatening the president of the United States and unlawful distribution of a video concerning suicide bomber vests.
"They certainly knew exactly what was going on," Edwards said. "They talked to 'The Trainer' about being trained in 50-caliber machine guns. Mr. El-Hindi informed The Trainer that the two Ahmeds had attempted at one point to travel to Afghanistan or Iraq."
Wednesday's indictment charged Amawi with distributing information about explosive chemicals downloaded from the Internet and charged El-Hindi with distributing information about explosives and making false statements to officials.
The five men face a maximum penalty of life in prison if convicted of conspiring to kill Americans overseas, according to federal prosecutors.
Meanwhile, prosecutors in Cleveland said a separate indictment was returned charging Bilal Mazloum, 22, of Sylvania, Ohio, brother of Wassim I. Mazloum, with making a false statement to federal agents.
In addition, El-Hindi and Ashraf Zaim, 39, of Ottawa Hills, Ohio, are charged in a separate, seven-count indictment with conspiring to commit theft of public funds, making false statements and wire fraud in connection with a $40,000 federal grant they obtained to operate clinics for low-income taxpayers.
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Wired Iraqi man triggers scare at L.A. airport
Tue Mar 6, 2007 6:36 PM ET
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - An Iraqi national wearing wires and concealing a magnet inside his rectum triggered a security scare at Los Angeles International Airport on Tuesday but officials said he posed no apparent threat.
The man, identified by law enforcement officials as Fadhel al-Maliki, 35, set off an alarm during passenger screening at the airport early on Tuesday morning.
A police bomb squad was called to examine what was deemed a suspicious item found during a body cavity search of the man. Local media reports said a magnet was found in his rectum.
"He was secreting these items in a body cavity and that was a great concern because there were also some electric wires associated with that body cavity," Larry Fetters, security director for the Transportation Security Administration at the airport, told reporters.
Maliki, 35, who lives in Atlantic City, New Jersey, was preparing to board a US Airways flight from Los Angeles to Philadelphia.
The flight left without Maliki but with his luggage aboard. It made an unscheduled landing in Las Vegas, where the plane was thoroughly searched but nothing was found, officials said.
Passengers were not evacuated and no flights were disrupted by the incident at Terminal One at Los Angeles airport.
"There never was a threat," Fetter said.
He said police and the FBI were called in from "an abundance of caution" because Maliki was "so bizarre in his behavior."
Maliki, who had a U.S. green card, was being questioned by immigration officials about his immigration status.
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LAX passenger hides objects in his body; bomb squad called
By Andrew Blankstein
Los Angeles Times
Authorities called in the bomb squad early Tuesday and diverted a flight to Las Vegas after Los Angeles International Airport security screeners found hidden wires and other objects in a body cavity of a Philadelphia-bound passenger.
Fadhel Al-Maliki, a 35-year-old Iraqi national living in Atlantic City, N.J., had been flagged by security officials at LAX and was undergoing a secondary "selectee screening" when he set off a metal detector.
Al-Maliki, a former security guard, told screeners that he knew what had triggered the alarm and proceeded to remove items from his rectum, including a rock, chewing gum and thin wire filament.
Fetters, federal security director at LAX, said at news conference that Transportation Security Administration officers had become alarmed because Al-Maliki was acting strange but initially refused to identify the items he had hidden.
Concern that the objects might be components for an explosive device led airport authorities to call in the Los Angeles Police Department and FBI bomb technicians as well as a hazardous material team.
A preliminary investigation appeared to rule out a theory that Al-Maliki may have been looking for weaknesses in security or was rehearsing for a terrorist act, federal and local law enforcement authorities said.
During questioning, Al-Maliki said the objects in his rectum were used to alleviate stress, federal law enforcement sources said.
The rock, authorities said he told them, was from another planet.
As Al-Maliki was being detained, his two bags were loaded on to US Airways Flight 1422, which took off for Philadelphia with 143 passengers and six crew members on board, said Liz Landau, a spokeswoman for the airline.
Federal officials said the bags had been checked for explosives, chemicals and other hazardous materials using the most modern and extensive screening devices available. Even so, they diverted the aircraft to McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas "out of an abundance of caution."
There, passengers were taken off the plane, which was parked away from the terminal. Passengers had to leave their carry-on bags aboard, and the plane and their luggage were searched, Landau said.
Federal officials also said a search of Al-Maliki's luggage turned up nothing "hazardous or illegal." "Based on our investigation, there was no threat to Los Angeles International Airport or the airports in Las Vegas or Philadelphia," said Ethel McGuire, the FBI assistant special agent in charge of the Joint Terrorism Task Force.
Airport police briefly blocked access to roads leading to LAX and diverted vehicle traffic. But no other flights were disrupted at the airport, and Terminal 1, the building used by Southwest Airlines and US Airways, remained open.
After several hours of questioning, the FBI determined that Al-Maliki had not committed a crime, but he was turned over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
At Tuesday afternoon's news conference, authorities said that Al-Maliki had been in the United States legally since 1994 but that federal officials were reviewing his immigration status because he may have outdated information on his green card.
Law enforcement sources said Al-Maliki previously served time in jail for criminal trespassing in Atlantic City.
In addition, he was arrested on suspicion of possession of a destructive device, but the sources said charges were dropped; details of the incident were unavailable.
A law enforcement source close to the investigation said Al-Maliki spent only a day in Los Angeles, arriving Monday afternoon after taking a flight from Philadelphia.
Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times
All Rights Reserved
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Audit: FBI snooping did not follow rules
POSTED: 1:27 p.m. EST, March 9, 2007
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The FBI is guilty of "serious misuse" of the power to secretly obtain private information under the Patriot Act, a government audit said Friday.
The Justice Department's inspector general looked at the FBI's use of national security letters (NSLs), in which agents demand personal and business information about individuals -- such as financial, phone, and Internet records -- without court orders.
The audit found the letters were issued without proper authority, cited incorrect statutes or obtained information they weren't supposed to.
As many as 22 percent of national security letters were not recorded, the audit said.
"We concluded that many of the problems we identified constituted serious misuse of the FBI's national security letter authorities," Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said in the report.
The audit said there were no indications that the FBI's use of the letters "constituted criminal misconduct."
The FBI has made as many as 56,000 requests a year for information using the letters since the Patriot Act was passed in October, 2001, the audit found.
A single letter can contain multiple information requests, and multiple letters may target one individual.
The audit found that in 2004 and 2005, more than half of the targets of the national security letters were U.S. citizens.
Letter used to track phone calls, FBI says
FBI Director Robert Mueller said Friday that 90 percent of the letters are used to access phone records in helping to track U.S. contacts with suspected terrorists overseas.
Mueller took responsibility for the FBI's problems and said steps had been taken to eliminate them.
"I am to be held accountable," he said, for failing to provide the proper guidelines, training and tools for agents working with the national security letters.
The inspector general's review identified "26 possible intelligence violations" between 2003 and 2005, 19 of which the FBI reported to the president's Intelligence Oversight Board, the audit said.
Of the 26, "22 were the result of FBI errors, while four were caused by mistakes made by recipients of the NSLs," it said.
The audit also found problems with "exigent letters," which are supposed to be used only in emergencies when time may not permit the NSL procedure to be followed.
The audit found exigent letters were not used in emergencies and gave the agency access to telephone records it should not have had.
Mueller said Friday the FBI stopped using exigent letters in May 2006 after the practice was revealed. He said they were used to obtain information the FBI was entitled to but should have gained in other ways.
Use of letters grew after 9/11 attacks
Most of the 200-page report focuses on the national security letters, the use of which it says has undergone a "dramatic increase" since the Patriot Act was put into law after the September 11, 2001, attacks.
The letters existed before the attacks, but the Patriot Act allowed them to be used on a broader scale to seek more information.
The American Civil Liberties Union called on Congress to "act immediately to repeal these dangerous Patriot Act provisions."
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales wrote Fine, praising the report and saying he has asked the Justice Department's National Security Division and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Office to work with the FBI in making changes.
"They will report to me regularly on their progress," Gonzales said. "In addition, I ask that you report to me in four months on the implementation of your recommendations."
Mueller said the national security letters are indispensable in the the war on terror, saying that the recent arrest on espionage charges of a former U.S. Navy sailor in Arizona as one instance where they were needed.
The FBI director said no one has suffered harm from the errors made in use of the letters.
On Capitol Hill, the audit brought calls for better oversight and possibly changes in the law.
"There will be oversight hearings," said Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pennsylvania. He said the Patriot Act may have to be changed and power given the FBI curtailed because "they appear not to be able to know how to use it."
"You cannot have people act as free agents on something where they are going to be delving into your privacy," Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, said. "We all want to stop terrorists. We all want to stop criminals. But the FBI work for us, the American people, not the other way around."
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http://counterterrorismblog.org/2007/03/print/national_security_lettersan_im.php
Counterterrorism Blog
National Security Letters...An Important Investigative Tool for the FBI
By Dennis Lormel
Periodically, media stories appear articulating a sense of concern about the increased use of National Security Letters (NSLs) by the FBI since 9/11. Civil libertarians and critics of the FBI use these reports as a platform to voice apprehension about the perceived abuse of authority and infringement on personal rights and freedoms.
The Inspector General (IG), U.S. Department of Justice, has issued a report delineating audit findings identifying significant deficiencies in NSL recordkeeping and reporting processes. This determination is quite troubling and inexcusable. Disclosure of this report has obviously garnered considerable and deserved media scrutiny. However, before there is a rush to judgment and a race for juicy media sound bites about infringements of privacy and civil liberties and calls for eliminating or diminishing the program, the pertinent facts must be assessed and placed in proper context.
As mentioned above, the reported discrepancies are inexcusable and unacceptable. Immediate steps must be taken to correct all deficiencies. The FBI has issued statements acknowledging the accuracy and fairness of the IG report. More importantly, the FBI has indicated they have taken steps and will further take action necessary to rectify reporting deficiencies. In his response, FBI Director Robert Mueller stated “We strive to exercise our authorities consistent with privacy protections and civil liberties that we are sworn to uphold. Anything less will not be tolerated. This statement is the central point in this situation. Having been a former executive in the FBI dealing with financial records and terrorist financing issues, privacy rights and civil liberties were critically important to me. On numerous occasions, I heard Director Mueller reinforce the FBI’s responsibility to protect the civil liberties of our citizenry.
The problems identified by the IG are problems of process in terms of recordkeeping and reporting, which are administrative. The process in terms of operation and use of the information has not been problematic. The IG found no deliberate or intentional misuse of authority, meaning there were no infringements on privacy rights or civil liberties. Even though recordkeeping and reporting was inadequate, actual use of information was appropriate.
By way of background, an NSL is a letter requesting information from a third party. It is like a grand jury subpoena and is often used in counterintelligence and counterterrorism investigations. In the post 9/11 environment, NSLs have been an indispensable investigative tool. NSLs have contributed significantly to the FBI’s ability to carry out its national security responsibilities.
Before rushing to judgment and calling for the restriction or elimination of the NSL program, critics should remember that the problem is administrative, not operational. As such, civil liberties are not at risk. The only true risk is to national security if this issue escalates as a platform to diminish or eliminate an important investigative tool.
By Dennis Lormel on March 9, 2007 2:40 PM
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GM,
Thanks for that.
Before rushing to judgment and calling for the restriction or elimination of the NSL program, critics should remember that the problem is administrative, not operational.
A very important distinction which will hopefully not be overlooked. We can only hope that the bureaucracy can be streamlined...or is that oxymoronic?
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Well, as someone that has been working for governmental entities most all my adult life, I think it's unlikely. Kafka has nothing on what i've lived through. :roll:
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"the problem is administrative, not operational."
Would someone explain this distinciton to me please?
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Not being an FBI SA, I don't know the exact details, but the problem probably boiled down to the letters being obtained and used properly by the case agents in doing the investigation, but the documentation tracking the statistics for administrative reporting purposes isn't getting done in some cases.
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An eerie development in the imams case here in Minneapolis. The pretend terrorists trying to cripple airport security are suing the unidentified passengers for reporting the intentionally bizarre behavior. Even if a jury gets this right, and we don't know that they will, some poor travelors are going to spend a lifetime of income into legal defense costs.
Source: Katheryn Kersten Mpls Strib column - http://www.startribune.com/blogs/kersten/
Excerpts and analysis from Powerline (http://www.powerlineblog.com/):
March 15, 2007
Meet John Doe
Gary Cooper played John Doe in the Frank Capra's movie "Meet John Doe." It's a timely film about media manipulation driven by a sinister newspaper mogul with cynical political purposes. The media manipulation nevertheless takes on a life of its own in the flowering of the "John Doe Movement."
Many of us think that the case of the flyling imams begins with another case of media manipulation. In her Star Tribune column today, Katherine Kersten takes a look at the complaint they have filed against US Airways in Minnesota federal district court. Kathy discovers some John Doe defendants -- defendants whose identity plaintiffs do not know at present, but may later include in the lawsuit:
the most alarming aspect of the imams' suit is buried in paragraph 21 of their complaint. It describes "John Doe" defendants whose identity the imams' attorneys are still investigating. It reads: "Defendants 'John Does' were passengers ... who contacted U.S. Airways to report the alleged 'suspicious' behavior of Plaintiffs' performing their prayer at the airport terminal."
Paragraph 22 adds: "Plaintiffs will seek leave to amend this Complaint to allege true names, capacities, and circumstances supporting [these defendants'] liability ... at such time as Plaintiffs ascertain the same."
In plain English, the imams plan to sue the "John Does," too.
Who are these unnamed culprits? The complaint describes them as "an older couple who was sitting [near the imams] and purposely turn[ed] around to watch" as they prayed. "The gentleman ('John Doe') in the couple ... picked up his cellular phone and made a phone call while watching the Plaintiffs pray," then "moved to a corner" and "kept talking into his cellular phone."
In retribution for this action, the unnamed couple probably will be dragged into court soon and face the prospect of hiring a lawyer, enduring hostile questioning and paying huge legal bills. The same fate could await other as-yet-unnamed passengers on the US Airways flight who came forward as witnesses.
The imams' attempt to bully ordinary passengers marks an alarming new front in the war on airline security. Average folks, "John Does" like you and me, initially observed and reported the imams' suspicious behavior on Nov. 20. Such people are our "first responders" against terrorism. But the imams' suit may frighten such individuals into silence, as they seek to avoid the nightmare of being labeled bigots and named as defendants.
Unlike Frank Capra's John Doe, these John Does are the real deal. Like Capra's John Doe, however, they represent a genuine citizens' movement. If identified and added to the lawsuit, they may have a claim or two of their own to assert against the flying imams, or a movement to start.
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It's jihad by lawsuit. The global jihad is fought with many different weapons.
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An American Beslan?
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, March 20, 2007 4:20 PM PT
Homeland Security: As Democrats hold more silly hearings to embarrass Republicans, the FBI is warning local police to be alert for Muslim extremists hijacking school buses. Reality check, please.
We wonder if any of the grandstanding politicians on Capitol Hill are thinking in terms of one of these nuts driving a fertilizer-filled yellow bus up to a government building — or, easier yet, a school. Of course not. They're too busy swooning over Valerie Plame to even notice we're still under threat from the Islamic terrorists they say we shouldn't be spying on.
The FBI and Homeland Security Department last week sent out a bulletin to law enforcement across the country warning that Muslims with "ties to extremist groups" are signing up to be school bus drivers. They also noted "recent suspicious activity" by foreigners who drive school buses or are licensed to drive them.
Recent events come on top of several other school bus-related incidents involving Mideast men that raise suspicion of terror activity.
They include last year's surprise boarding of a school bus in Florida by two Saudi men dressed in trench coats. Authorities suspect they were making a dry run to see how easy it would be to hijack or blow up a school bus filled with American children.
Previously, an Arab man from Detroit was caught trying to obtain a job as a school bus driver in New York using fake Social Security documents.
Authorities fear the school massacre that took place in Beslan, Russia, in 2004 may be a dress rehearsal for what al-Qaida plans to do here. Chechen terrorists tied to al-Qaida seized a building in Beslan on the first day of school and slaughtered 338, including 172 kids.
Three years later, schools and local police in this country are still unprepared to deal with such an assault. Most don't have response plans for handling a single active shooter, let alone a cell of trained terrorists.
Yet terror cells secreted inside America may be planning to use buses as a Trojan horse to infiltrate school campuses and murder students and teachers. Floor plans for schools in Virginia, Texas and New Jersey have been recovered from terrorist hands in Iraq. Videotapes confiscated in Afghanistan show al-Qaida terrorists practicing the takeover of a school.
Simultaneous attacks on schools in multiple states would follow Osama bin Laden's goal of crippling the U.S. economy. If multiple schools were hit, parents would drop out of the work force en masse to protect their children.
A prolonged labor disruption would cost businesses billions of dollars in lost revenue.
It's a grim picture. But don't think for a moment that al-Qaida is above targeting school children. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said in his Gitmo confession that while he may not like killing kids, they're fair game in jihad. He claims U.S. forces bombed and killed the children of bin Laden's top deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, and arrested and "abused" his own children.
These people have nothing better to do than sit around and think of ways to kill us and our most precious resource, our children. They have many helpers placed inside U.S. cities who canvass targets and perform other logistics for such attacks. And these people will stop at nothing to pull them off. They're just waiting for the right time, when our guard is down.
Are we witnessing with Muslim men trying to obtain bus licenses what some alert (but ignored) agents witnessed before 9/11 when they noticed a number of Muslim men training to obtain pilot's licenses? Are schools and children the target of the next wave of terror attacks?
Parents should be outraged that Washington would continue to play politics with national security. Instead of using hearings to score partisan points, Congress would best serve constituents by using that power to investigate the terror threat to schools and how best to protect our children from attack.
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As some of you may know, the six imans who deliberately created an incident to get themselves thrown off a plane are now suing various people/institutions/compaines including the citizens who reported their strange behavior.
Little Green Footballs blog is reporting one US Muslim group with the integrity to stand by these citizens:
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Saturday, March 24, 2007
Legal Aid Offered to CAIR Targets
People from across the board are outraged at the Council on American Islamic Relations’ announced plan to file lawsuits against US Airways passengers who reported the six non-flying imams. Now the American Islamic Forum for Democracy has offered to pay for the legal defense of any “John Doe” passengers who end up being sued by CAIR.
A U.S. Islamic group is offering to pay to defend “John Does” being sued by six imams who were removed from a plane in Minneapolis for suspicious behavior.
The suit arose from an incident last November in which passengers and crew reported the men aboard a US Airways plane were disruptive, did not take assigned seats, loudly criticized the war in Iraq and shouted about al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden. They were removed from the flight, interrogated and later released.
They have since filed a lawsuit alleging discrimination by the airline, the airport authority and the “John Does” who reported them, The Washington Times reported Wednesday.
However, M. Zuhdi Jasser, director of American Islamic Forum for Democracy, told the Times his group will raise money for the unnamed peoples’ defense. He said anti-Muslim “backlash will be even greater when Americans see Islamists trying to punish innocent passengers reporting fears.”
Minnesota law firm Faegre & Benson LLP is also offering to represent the passengers for free, the report said.
The AIFD is an example of a legitimate (if unfortunately rather small) Muslim group that deserves the label “moderate.”
Here’s another Minneapolis attorney who’s offering to defend any passengers sued by CAIR: Attorney to defend passengers in Imam suit.
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http://michellemalkin.com/archives/007189.htm?print=1
Looks like Congress is acting to create legal immunity in such cases.
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http://michellemalkin.com/archives/007190.htm?print=1
Dear Muslim Terrorist Plotter/Planner/Funder/Enabler/Apologist,
You do not know me. But I am on the lookout for you. You are my enemy. And I am yours.
I am John Doe.
I am traveling on your plane. I am riding on your train. I am at your bus stop. I am on your street. I am in your subway car. I am on your lift.
I am your neighbor. I am your customer. I am your classmate. I am your boss.
I am John Doe.
I will never forget the example of the passengers of American Airlines Flight 93 who refused to sit back on 9/11 and let themselves be murdered in the name of Islam without a fight.
I will never forget the passengers and crew members who tackled al Qaeda shoe-bomber Richard Reid on American Airlines Flight 63 before he had a chance to blow up the plane over the Atlantic Ocean.
I will never forget the alertness of actor James Woods, who notified a stewardess that several Arab men sitting in his first-class cabin on an August 2001 flight were behaving strangely. The men turned out to be 9/11 hijackers on a test run.
I will act when homeland security officials ask me to “report suspicious activity.”
I will embrace my local police department’s admonition: “If you see something, say something.”
I am John Doe.
I will protest your Jew-hating, America-bashing “scholars.”
I will petition against your hate-mongering mosque leaders.
I will raise my voice against your subjugation of women and religious minorities.
I will challenge your attempts to indoctrinate my children in our schools.
I will combat your violent propaganda on the Internet.
I am John Doe.
I will support law enforcement initiatives to spy on your operatives, cut off your funding, and disrupt your murderous conspiracies.
I will oppose all attempts to undermine our borders and immigration laws.
I will resist the imposition of sharia principles and sharia law in my taxi cab, my restaurant, my community pool, the halls of Congress, our national monuments, the radio and television airwaves, and all public spaces.
I will not be censored in the name of tolerance.
I will not be cowed by your Beltway lobbying groups in moderate clothing. I will not cringe when you shriek about “profiling” or “Islamophobia.”
I will put my family’s safety above sensitivity. I will put my country above multiculturalism.
I will not submit to your will. I will not be intimidated.
I am John Doe.
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The Great Al-Qaeda "Patriot"
By Paul Sperry
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 9, 2007
A man identified as "Esam Omesh" spoke just before Cindy Sheehan at last month's antiwar rally that Sheehan headlined in Washington.
Following chants of "Impeach Bush!" from shivering protesters, Omesh took the podium and exhorted "brothers and sisters" to condemn Bush for the deaths of "more than 650,000 Iraqi lives." He demanded the White House "pull our troops out of Iraq now" and "end the war today."
The speaker counted himself among the "great American patriots" who braved the cold to march on Washington and protest the war that day.
While there may have been legitimate voices there, this speaker decidedly was not one of them. Not because he's Muslim, but because he's an Islamist tied to an al-Qaida fund raiser and the spiritual adviser to the 9/11 hijackers.
Turns out it his real name is Esam S. Omeish, and he runs a nonprofit group in Washington called the Muslim American Society, which the FBI believes is the U.S. branch of the dangerous Muslim Brotherhood, a worldwide jihadist movement that operates like the mafia. The secret Islamist society counts Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahri, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and blind sheik Omar Abdel Rahman among its members. Its motto: "The Quran is our constitution, the prophet is our guide; Death for the glory of Allah is our greatest ambition."
His office is right next door to the old office of one of Al-Qaida's top fund raisers in America, Abdurahman Alamoudi, before he was jailed a few years ago. And it's located in the same Alexandria, Va., business park as the former office of Osama bin Laden's nephew, before he hightailed it back to Saudi Arabia after 9/11.
"Omesh" is not the legal spelling of his name. He may spell it that way for the media, but that's not how it's listed in court documents I've examined. The correct spelling is Omeish with an "i." Perhaps he leaves it out to avoid links to his brother, Mohamed S. Omeish.
As I first reported in my book, "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington," Mohamed Omeish headed the U.S. branch of one of bin Laden's favorite Saudi charities, the International Islamic Relief Organization, which was raided after 9/11. Tax records I've obtained show Omeish shared an office with Alamoudi, the convicted al-Qaida-tied terrorist and godfather of the Muslim mafia in America. This is the same "moderate" Muslim leader who federal prosecutors caught on tape complaining bin Laden hadn't killed enough Americans.
It gets worse. Esam S. Omeish also sits on the board of the 9/11-tied mosque in Washington that helped the hijackers get licenses and housing, and whose imam prepared them for martyrdom operations in private closed-door sessions. Omeish personally hired the imam, Anwar Aulaqi, who fled the country on a Saudi jet about a year after 9/11 (the FBI now wants another crack at questioning him).
Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center, which tax records show has received large donations from the Islamic Relief Organization, is a Muslim Brotherhood bastion. Another former imam and current prayer leader, for example, is an admitted Brotherhood member from the Sudan. The mosque's deed was signed by an Alamoudi crony who has admitted participating in the Brotherhood's "Ikhwan" movement in America.
Dar al-Hijrah is a turnstile for terrorists and terror suspects. A prayer leader, Sheikh Mohammed al-Hanooti, was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the first World Trade Center bombing. Other dubious mosque members have included: Alamoudi, Abdullah bin Laden, Osama's nephew; Hamas leader and fugitive Mousa Abu Marzook and his partners Ismail Elbarasse and Abdelhaleem Ashqar, who was convicted of obstruction of justice in February; convicted Virginia Jihad Network leader Randall "Ismail" Royer, a former CAIR official; and Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, an al-Qaida operative recently convicted of plotting to assassinate President Bush.
Leaders of the mosque rallied around Ali, calling the trial a Zionist "witch hunt," even after it became obvious he was guilty.
What's more, the phone number to the mosque was found in the German apartment of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, roommate of 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta. Atta's deputy "emir" in the "raid" on America, Nawaf al-Hazmi, worshipped at Dar al-Hijrah, along with the pilot who crashed the plane into the Pentagon.
Back to mosque leader Esam Omeish, the "American patriot." Court records I've obtained show he put his home up for bond collateral in 2004 to help spring from jail a terrorist suspect who was caught allegedly casing the Chesapeake bridge for attack. His dubious pal Ismail Elbarasse is a founding member of Dar al-Hijrah.
Omeish's house is just down the road from the mosque in Falls Church, Va., and just a few blocks in the other direction from the Islamist business park in Alexandria. One of Omeish's neighbors on his cul-de-sac is the former bookkeeper for terror banker Soliman Biheiri. He started an Islamic investment bank that included Hamas leader Marzook and Abdullah bin Laden as major investors. Biheiri, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, was recently convicted of lying about his connections to Marzook in an investigation into his terrorist ties.
It's one big happy Islamist family in Omeish's neck of the woods.
This is who is rallying opposition to the war. Omeish may claim to be an "American patriot," but even Cindy Sheehan should know better. The people she's consorting with would not have shed a tear had her son been beheaded in Iraq.
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CAIR’s Grievance Theater, the Flying Imams and 9/11
By Patrick Poole
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 18, 2007
It’s a tale of two Novembers with the horror of September 11th sandwiched in between.
In November 2006, six imams on a US Airways Minneapolis to Phoenix flight begin engaging in bizarre behaviors eerily similar to those used by the 9/11 hijackers to takeover the planes used on that terrible day: shouting slogans in Arabic; leaving assigned seats to position themselves much like the 9/11 attackers; requesting seat belt extenders that they positioned on the floor, rather than used to secure themselves. Responding to the reasonable concerns of passengers and the flight crew, the imams were removed from the plane by authorities.
Seven years earlier in November 1999, two Saudi students on an America West flight from Phoenix to Columbus were detained after landing because they had made repeated attempts to enter the cockpit area of the plane during the flight.
In both cases, CAIR rose up to defend the offenders in question and engaged in their now standard grievance theater protest politics. In the most recent case, CAIR has tried to capitalize on the publicity surrounding the incident by backing the "Flying Imams" and supporting their lawsuit against the airlines and passengers for responding to their bizarre behavior. The lawsuit is being handled by a Muslim attorney associated with CAIR.
When it comes to the November 1999 incident, any mention of CAIR’s involvement or defense of the Saudi students has been scrubbed from the organization’s website. It’s no wonder, as the 9/11 Commission Report (page 521, footnote 60) explains that the FBI now considers the incident as a “dry run” for the 9/11 hijackings. And the two men involved? As the 9/11 Commission Report explains, Hamdan al-Shalawi was in Afghanistan in November 2000 training at an Al-Qaeda camp to launch “Khobar Tower”-type attacks against the US in Saudi Arabia, and Mohammad Al-Qadhaieen was arrested in June 2003 as a material witness in the 9/11 attacks. Both men were friends of Al-Qaeda recruiter, Zakaria Mustapha Soubra, who drove them to the airport that day in Qadhaieen’s car. Another friend of Shalawi is Ghassan al-Sharbi, another Al-Qaeda operative that would later be captured in Pakistan with high-level Al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida.
There is a connection between these two incidents, as the leader of the six “Flying Imams” this past November is none other than Omar Shahin, the former imam of the Islamic Center of Tucson, where the two Saudi students from the November 1999 incident attended. Counterterrorism expert Rita Katz told the Washington Post in September 2002 that the mosque served as “basically the first cell of Al-Qaeda in the United States; that is where it all started”. (Len Sherman’s Arizona Monthly November 2004 article, “Al Qaeda among Us”, provides greater detail about the connections between the Saudi pair involved in the November 1999 event and the Al-Qaeda cell that operated in Tucson and Phoenix.)
Their current silence and website purge notwithstanding, immediately after the November 1999 “dry run”, CAIR was not shy about publicly speaking on the incident. “It seems like they single out some individuals because of their name, the way they look or their national origin,” huffed current CAIR National Vice Chairman Ahmad Al-Akhras (who was then president of the CAIR Ohio chapter) in an interview with the Egyptian daily, Al-Ahram. That same article quoted Nihad Awad, Executive Director and Co-Founder of CAIR, who explained, “the hysteria around [the crash of] EgyptAir [Flight 990] has created a negative atmosphere that leads to such incidents.”
CAIR not only gave indirect support to the 9/11 “dry run” hijackers by launching an aggressive media defense and circulating their woeful tale of innocents victimized by the bigotry of non-Muslims, but as Katherine Kersten of the Minneapolis Star Tribune reminds us, in 2000 CAIR fronted a lawsuit for Shalawi and Qadhaieen against America West by hiring attorneys and calling for a boycott of the airline as a result of the incident. Again, two identical events eight years apart with CAIR playing the exact same role.
CAIR was unsuccessful in the lawsuit stemming from the November 1999 9/11 “dry run”, as the judge quickly dismissed the case, but they did succeed in creating an atmosphere of intimidation that was certainly aimed at stopping airline passengers from speaking up about suspicious behavior. Did CAIR’s campaign of intimidation silence any of the passengers aboard United Airlines Flight 175, American Airlines Flight 11, American Airlines Flight 77, or United Airlines Flight 93 who might have witnessed suspicious behavior of the 9/11 hijackers that day? Since all the passengers of those flights were silenced forever, we will never know.
But the horrific consequences of their previous defense of the 9/11 “dry run” has not prevented CAIR from using the exact same tactics and rhetoric in the current “Flying Imams” case. As Janet Levy recently explained in an article here at FrontPage (“The Minneapolis Six Sabotage Airline Security”), the CAIR-backed lawsuit by the six imams is being used as a propaganda device to advance CAIR’s legislative agenda for the passage of a bill through Congress that would prevent authorities from acting on suspicious behavior, much like what was seen in the November 1999 and November 2006 incidents, as well as 9/11.
As their current protest politics in the “Flying Imams” case demonstrates, CAIR shows no remorse for their complicity in providing cover for the 9/11 “dry run” operatives, though the purge of their website of any mention of their participation was clearly an attempt to try to wipe the public record clean of their involvement. But in light of their past actions and with their pursuit of the current lawsuit, it seems fair to ask: will thousands more Americans need to be murdered before CAIR brings the curtain down on their grievance theater road show? Tragically, we might have the opportunity to find out.
Patrick Poole is an author and public policy researcher. He also maintains a blog, "Existential Space," where he writes on a number of cultural, political and religious issues.
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Fifth Column Imam Flyers
By Joe Kaufman and Gary Gross
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 20, 2007
“f they don’t trust the security, this is their problem, not our problem.
- Omar Shahin, teleconference about imam lawsuit
On November 20, 2006, when six imams were removed from a plane headed for Phoenix, Arizona, little was known about them. All that could be determined was that they were Muslim and that they were acting in a way that was deemed suspicious – the two things at an airport that sound the loudest alarms in our post-9/11 world. Who they were and why they were in Minnesota were things yet to be determined. However, knowing what we know today, given the venue that they were coming from, given at least some of their extremist pasts, given whom they ally themselves with, and given the fiasco that took place at the airport and its carefully produced aftermath with a known terror front, it’s safe to say that it was probably a mistake to allow them to board the plane to begin with.
Omar Shahin and NAIF
The North American Imams Federation (NAIF) held its 2006 annual conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Attending the three-day event were one newly elected Congressman – Keith Ellison – and a surplus of Islamist radicals masquerading as holy men. They included Siraj Wahhaj, an individual whose name is found on the U.S. Attorney’s list of “unindicted co-conspirators” of the 1993 World Trade Center attack, and Mazen Mokhtar, an Al-Qaeda web designer that has used the internet to proclaim his support for Hamas and suicide bombings. In fact, all three of the aforementioned are pictured on the same page of the NAIF conference program, side-by-side one another.
The President of NAIF (and one of the removed imams) is Omar Shahin. Before NAIF’s founding in 2004, Shahin was the imam and President of the Islamic Center of Tucson (ICT), a mosque that represented one of Al-Qaeda’s main hubs in America, prior to the ‘93 attack. One of Shahin’s predecessors at the mosque was Wael Hamza Julaidan, a former colleague of Osama bin Laden and bin Laden’s mentor, Abdullah Azzam. Shahin, himself, has admitted to once supporting bin Laden.
Throughout his time with and after leaving ICT, Shahin was involved in terror financing organizations. He was the Arizona Coordinator for the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), a Hamas charity whose funds were frozen by the U.S. government soon after 9/11. Under his leadership, thousands of dollars were raised for HLF through ICT. As well, Shahin was a representative for KindHearts, another Hamas charity that was shut down by the U.S. (February 2006). In both cases, Shahin walked free.
As ICT’s imam, Shahin has used his pulpit to target Jews and Christians, even with death. During his October 4, 2002 sermon, he stated, “Allah almighty has described his servants with a precise description in order for us to follow in their footsteps. Allah Almighty started by saying ‘the slaves of (Allah) Most Gracious’ as an indication to their real loyalty… What an honor for any one to be called by Allah ‘the slaves of (Allah) Most Gracious.’ Allah has dignified those alone among all humanity. Because of them, Allah will also dignify the whole Islamic Nation. Prophet Mohammed peace be upon him said: ‘you will keep on fighting with the Jews until the fight reaches the east of Jordan river then the stones and trees will say: oh Muslim, oh (servant) slaves of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him…’”
During his December 20, 2002 sermon, he stated, “We should invite them [Christians] to investigate the religion of Islam especially nowadays we should give them the right information about Islam. And now let us open our hearts to what our great prophet said: Allah's Messenger (pbuh) said: You would tread the same path that was trodden by those before you span by span and cubit by cubit (inch by inch and step by step) so much so that if they had entered into the hole of the lizard, you would follow them in this also. We said: Allah's Messenger, do you mean the Jews and the Christians (by your words)? He said: Who else (than those two religious groups)?”
Another of the flying imams is Marwan Sadeddin, the Coordinator of the Imams Council of Arizona. Soon after the incident, Sadeddin discussed the matter of being ejected from the plane, on KFYI-Phoenix. When the host of the show confronted him about Omar Shahin’s involvement with Hamas-related charities, he responded by defending Hamas. He stated, “Hamas has nothing to do with [the] United States. Talk about Al-Qaeda only, because this is [sic] where they hit America. Hamas never said, ‘We are against America.’ They extend their hand many times to America, but America consider it – the foreign policy of America consider Hamas – as a terrorist. That’s their business.” Just as recently as December of 2006, Hamas has threatened attacks on the U.S.
NAIF has a Board of Trustees comprised of seven individuals, including Shahin. One of them is Siraj Wahhaj (mentioned earlier). Another is Mohamad Mwafak Algalaieni, the imam of the Grand Blanc Islamic Center, located in Grand Blanc, Michigan. In December of 2001, Algalaieni showed up in support of terror charity head Rabih Haddad, at Haddad’s INS hearing. Haddad was deported, after having been arrested for his leadership role in the Global Relief Foundation (GRF), an organization that was shut down by the U.S. government for raising millions of dollars for Al-Qaeda and Hamas.
A third trustee is Johari Abdul-Malik, the imam of Dar Al-Hijrah, located in Falls Church, Virginia. On his radio show, in September of 2004, discussing the impact of 9/11 on the Muslim community, Abdul-Malik took the opportunity to laud one of his congregants, Ismael Selim Elbarasse, who had just been arrested for videotaping structural parts of Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay Bridge. Elbarasse, who has been described as a “high-ranking Hamas operative,” held a joint bank account with Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook for the purpose of financing the terror group. Another congregant, Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, in March of 2006, was sentenced to 30 years in prison for providing material support to Al-Qaeda, whilst plotting to assassinate President Bush. About the charges against Abu Ali, Abdul-Malik stated, “Our whole community is under siege.”
In addition to a Board of Trustees, NAIF has an Executive Committee. One of the committeemen is Ashrafuzzaman Khan, the former Secretary General (President, Amir) of the Islamic Circle of North America (see below). Prior to coming to the States, Khan was located in Bangladesh – then Eastern Pakistan. To this day, he stands accused of being a death squad leader for Al-Badr, the Muslim Brotherhood of Pakistan’s (Jamaat-e-Islami’s) former paramilitary wing, during the 1971 massacre that led to Bangladesh’s independence, personally responsible for the murders of numerous individuals.
On the NAIF website, one finds many pictures from past events. Two of the pictures contain Ibrahim Dremali, the imam of the Islamic Center of Des Moines (Iowa). Shortly before 9/11, Dremali was the contact for a group that was telling its followers to provide material support to a website that was raising funds and recruiting fighters for the Taliban and Al-Qaeda related groups. At an October 2000 rally, amidst burning Israeli flags and shouts of “Zionist blood will wet the sand,” Dremali told a crowd “not to be sad for those who were martyred and to not be afraid to die for what they believe in.”
Three of the pictures contain Wagdy Ghoneim, who, in January of 1999, was denied entrance into Canada for being a member of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and who, in January of 2005, was deported from the United States. In a November 2006 essay, Ghoneim stated, “We must all equip ourselves, and be prepared for jihad at any moment… and to constantly renew the intention [for jihad]… We must all strive in praying that Allah - the Exalted and Majestic - have revenge on the damned Jews and to weaken them, them and their allies, helpers, and those who aid them…”
One more pic contains Zulfiqar Ali Shah, the Imam of the Islamic Center of Milwaukee. Prior to it being shut down, Shah was the South Asian Director of KindHearts. In June of 2001, he is quoted as saying, “If we are unable to stop the Jews now, their next stop is Yathrib (The Prophet's city of Medina), where the Jews used to live until their expulsion by Prophet Muhammad (SAW). That's the pinnacle of their motives.”
According to its website, “NAIF seeks establishing relationships with Islamic organizations (IOs) that are licensed to operate in North America.” The site states that this relationship is “collaborative, complementary, and cooperative.” These “partner organizations” include:
The Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), an umbrella organization for South Asian-oriented mosques and Islamic centers that was established, in 1971, to emulate the Muslim Brotherhood of Pakistan, Jamaat-e-Islami
The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), an umbrella organization for Arab-oriented mosques and Islamic centers that was co-founded, in 1981, by convicted Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) leader Sami Al-Arian
Life for Relief and Development (LIFE), a Michigan-based “charity” that was raided, in September of 2006, by federal agents from the Joint Terrorism Task Force and has been linked to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a defense mechanism for terrorists that was created, in June of 1994, by leaders of the now-defunct American propaganda wing of Hamas, the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP)
CAIR and the Choreography
The last organization mentioned, CAIR, and another group, the Muslim American Society (MAS), have played large roles in the saga of the six flying imams. MAS, which led a “pray-in” for the imams at Reagan Washington National Airport on November 27, was created as a Muslim Brotherhood activist organization in June of 1993.
According to an officer in the police report concerning the November 20 affair, both he and a U.S. Federal Air Marshal “agreed the seating configuration, the request for seatbelt extensions, the prior praying and utterances about Allah and the U.S. in the gate area and the seating configuration chosen among the traveling group was suspicious.” [A U.S. Airways official added that three of the six only had one-way tickets and no checked luggage.] The officer then states that an FBI Agent “requested we detain the six passengers until he could arrive and interview the six individuals on their suspicious behavior.” The report later goes on to say that the imams were escorted off the plane and detained for further investigation. The removal took place sometime after 5:30 p.m.
After the removal, the magnified role of CAIR took form. According to a spokesperson for the airport:
The imams contacted CAIR that evening.
The imams spent the night at a CAIR members’ home.
The next morning CAIR put out a press release.
Following the pr, CAIR accompanied the imams to the airport and appeared with them on camera.
In Shahin’s own words: “Since minute one of this incident, I then contacted Ibrahim Hooper and brother Nihad Awad, and we arranged everything…. [W]e already coordinate with them everything, and we update each other every once [in] a while, every two hours, three hours. And everything is being coordinated with CAIR and with MAS. Even today, I asked MAS-Arizona chapter, please, whatever you want to do, just let brother Nihad Awad and Ibrahim Hooper know about it before you [do]. That’s what we are doing, and we are going to do that in the future. Inshallah.”
In addition, within days, Congressman Keith Ellison asked for a meeting with executives from U.S. Airways and the Minneapolis/St. Paul Metropolitan Airports Commission (MAC), and Congressman John Conyers drafted a House resolution giving Muslims special civil-rights protections.
Now, the imams have filed a legal complaint against US Airways and MAC, and they are looking to sue individual passengers from the flight, those who alerted authorities, as well. The lawyer for the imams is Omar Mohammedi, the President of CAIR-New York, who is currently representing the Al-Qaeda-linked World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), in a 9/11 lawsuit for the murders of 3000 people, in which CAIR is also named a defendant.
While there is no mention of it in the NAIF program, CAIR is said to have participated at the NAIF conference. As well, pictures of CAIR’s National Executive Director, Nihad Awad, speaking at previous NAIF events are found on the NAIF website.
All of the above leads towards the question: Has all of this been pre-planned – some grand scheme to make those in society hesitant about reporting activity which they deem to be suspect in nature?
Considering the fact that all of those concerned, in some way, shape or form, have been involved in extremist pursuits, the answer may very well be yes. Of course, if that is the case, that makes those that spoke out and those that took action unwilling partners to an unsuspected crime. Regardless of the answer, though, the fact that these imams are radicals, in itself, suggests that they should not have been permitted on the plane and, instead, should have been placed on a “no-fly” list. It is measures, such as this, that need to be taken, in order to ensure that our nation is protected from those that wish to destroy us from within… and above.
Joe Kaufman is the chairman of Americans Against Hate and the founder of CAIR Watch. Gary Gross is the director of the Let Freedom Ring blog.
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Bomb Threats: Evacuations Not Always the Best Course of Action
The April 16 massacre at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., has generated a spate of bomb threats against schools and universities across the United States. In many cases, school authorities react to such threats by ordering the evacuation of students and faculty from buildings on campus. Evacuations, however, could expose students to a real danger lurking outside -- and should be used only as a last resort.
The University of Minnesota evacuated eight buildings on its Minneapolis campus April 18 after a student reported having found a typed bomb threat in a chemistry building's bathroom. All classes and meetings in those buildings were canceled and bomb-sniffing dogs were brought to search for explosives. A six-hour search of the campus, however, turned up nothing and the buildings were reopened the next day. Similar evacuations have taken place at numerous schools and universities in the four days since the Virginia shooting spree.
Ordering an evacuation tends to be the first response to any bomb threat, whether one occurs at schools and universities or public buildings and private businesses. The vast majority of these threats, however, turn out to be hoaxes, usually called in by pranksters or mentally disturbed individuals.
Although an evacuation can provide emotional reassurance that something is being done about the threat, it is not the best action to take when a nonspecific bomb threat is received. In cases in which the threat does not identify a specific classroom or building, sending people out into the open air can put them in more danger than keeping them in place. In a nonspecific threat, the bomb could be anywhere, including outside of buildings. Moreover, there is always the risk that a gunman called in the threat in order to shoot down a crowd of people gathered outside. In Jonesboro, Ark., in 1998, two students aged 13 and 11 set off the fire alarm at Westside Middle School and shot at people as they evacuated, killing four students and a teacher.
Of the bomb threats called into universities and high schools since the Virginia Tech massacre, none was connected to an actual bombing attempt. History has shown that people who intend to kill with explosives are unlikely to give any kind of warning. Furthermore, most cases of school violence involve guns rather than bombs. Although the two students who carried out the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., included pipe bombs in their arsenal, all of their victims were killed with guns.
The safest way to respond to a bomb threat against a campus or compound is to notify people over a public address system, providing only information that might assist in a search. Although the normal response would be to evacuate a classroom, dormitory or office that had been threatened, it is important to remember two things: Most bomb threats are hoaxes and the real danger might lie outside of the threatened area. Ideally, then, people in the threatened area should first search their immediate area, starting under tables and desks, then move to desktops and finally to shelves and cabinets. The people best suited to search for anything unusual in a room are those who use it daily and are familiar with potential hiding places -- and thus would be able to spot anything that was not there the day before.
Only if a suspicious object is found should an evacuation be ordered. Once such an order is given, students or workers should gather at a prearranged rally point or secondary location. There, a head count can be made and authorities notified of the status. Meanwhile, a cordon should be established around the affected building to keep people away from it.
Threats of bombing and other violence against schools and universities will likely continue as long as the Virginia Tech massacre remains fresh in the public consciousness -- and as long as schools provide students with time off every time one occurs. While evacuations can calm jittery nerves, they are not always the best course of action.
stratfor.com
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The NYTimes, which has betrayed America more than once in this war (e.g. revealing that we were tracking the enemy's financial transactions and more) is certainly of dubious credibility in all this, but a President who chose and stands by an Attorney General who doesn't belive that habeas corpus is a Constitutional right has credibility problems of his own too.
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Spying on Americans
Published: May 2, 2007
NYTimes
For more than five years, President Bush authorized government spying on phone calls and e-mail to and from the United States without warrants. He rejected offers from Congress to update the electronic eavesdropping law, and stonewalled every attempt to investigate his spying program.
Suddenly, Mr. Bush is in a hurry. He has submitted a bill that would enact enormous, and enormously dangerous, changes to the 1978 law on eavesdropping. It would undermine the fundamental constitutional principle — over which there can be no negotiation or compromise — that the government must seek an individual warrant before spying on an American or someone living here legally.
To heighten the false urgency, the Bush administration will present this issue, as it has before, as a choice between catching terrorists before they act or blinding the intelligence agencies. But the administration has never offered evidence that the 1978 law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, hampered intelligence gathering after the 9/11 attacks. Mr. Bush simply said the law did not apply to him.
The director of national intelligence, Michael McConnell, said yesterday that the evidence of what is wrong with FISA was too secret to share with all Americans. That’s an all-too-familiar dodge. Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who is familiar with the president’s spying program, has said that it could have been conducted legally. She even offered some sensible changes for FISA, but the administration and the Republican majority in the last Congress buried her bill.
Mr. Bush’s motivations for submitting this bill now seem obvious. The courts have rejected his claim that 9/11 gave him virtually unchecked powers, and he faces a Democratic majority in Congress that is willing to exercise its oversight responsibilities. That, presumably, is why his bill grants immunity to telecommunications companies that cooperated in five years of illegal eavesdropping. It also strips the power to hear claims against the spying program from all courts except the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which meets in secret.
According to the administration, the bill contains “long overdue” FISA modifications to account for changes in technology. The only example it offered was that an e-mail sent from one foreign country to another that happened to go through a computer in the United States might otherwise be missed. But Senator Feinstein had already included this fix in the bill Mr. Bush rejected.
Moreover, FISA has been updated dozens of times in the last 29 years. In 2000, Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, who ran the National Security Agency then, said it “does not require amendment to accommodate new communications technologies.” And since 9/11, FISA has had six major amendments.
The measure would not update FISA; it would gut it. It would allow the government to collect vast amounts of data at will from American citizens’ e-mail and phone calls. The Center for National Security Studies said it might even be read to permit video surveillance without a warrant.
This is a dishonest measure, dishonestly presented, and Congress should reject it. Before making any new laws, Congress has to get to the truth about Mr. Bush’s spying program. (When asked at a Senate hearing yesterday if Mr. Bush still claims to have the power to ignore FISA when he thinks it is necessary, Mr. McConnell refused to answer.)
With clear answers — rather than fearmongering and stonewalling — there can finally be a real debate about amending FISA. It’s not clear whether that can happen under this president. Mr. Bush long ago lost all credibility in the area where this law lies: at the fulcrum of the balance between national security and civil liberties.
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Six Arrested in Fort Dix Murder Plot
Tuesday , May 08, 2007
Six people were arrested on Monday night in connection with a plot to murder as many soldiers as possible at Fort Dix, WNBC.com reports.
The six ethnic Albanians attempted to purchase automatic weapons from an arms dealer working with the FBI and were arrested in New Jersey after officials learned of the plot, a law enforcement source said.
The undercover investigation followed the men, three of whom are brothers, from New Jersey to the Poconos, where they allegedly practiced firing automatic weapons.
Officials raided the homes of the men, described as Islamic radicals, and said there is video showing some of the planning.
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NEW YORK -- Six men from New Jersey have been arrested in an alleged terror plot against soldiers at Fort Dix, according investigators.
Investigators said the men planned to use automatic rifles to enter Fort Dix and kill as many soldiers as they could at the N.J. base. Fort Dix was just one of several military and security locations allegedly scouted by this group, authorities said.
Investigators told Newschannel 4's Jonathan Dienst that these arrests are the result of a tip to the FBI and use of an informant to track the suspects. Authorities were alerted in January 2006 after the terror suspects traveled to the Pocono’s for a training exercise where they practiced firing automatic weapons, investigators said.
Sources have told Newschannel 4's Brian Thompson that the suspects tried to have a their training video tape converted to DVD at a store in Cherry Hill, N.J., but the store owner alerted authorities.
Authorities then inserted a cooperating witness into the alleged terror cell to be a go between in their attempt to purchase M16 and AK-47 semi-automatic rifles. Arrests were made Monday night after the informant delivered dummy weapons paid for by the alleged terror cell suspects.
Investigators said the group discussed targeting numerous locations like Dover Air base, Fort Monmouth, a Coast Guard building in Philadelphia, and the Philadelphia Federal building before deciding on Fort Dix as their intended target. Fort Dix is run in part by the Army and is a reserve-training center, but active units take part in training, including some which focuses on counter-terrorism.
Sources tell Newschannel 4's Brian Thompson that the family of one of the suspects owns a pizzeria near Fort Dix and claimed to know the base "like the back of his hand." The same suspect told the alleged terror group it would be easy to penetrate to "get the most soldiers killed."
Investigators said the group of suspects have been discussing and planning for much of the last year. They allegedly pooled their savings to pay for the operation targeted at soldiers stationed here at home.
The six suspects arrested Monday night will face terror conspiracy charges. Three of the men are brothers, all believed to be Islamic radicals. Authorities have told Newschannel 4 that some of the men were born in Albania and the former Yugoslavia. Investigators said most of the suspects have spent several years here in the U.S.
Some of the group's alleged planning was caught on videotape, investigators said. On the videotape there is significant discussion of Martyrdom.
"Who is going to take care of my wife and kids," one suspect asks. Another responds, "Allah will take care of your wife and kids." The alleged terror cell is described by investigators as disciples of Osama Bin Laden. Among the evidence seized was the downloaded will and testament of two Sept. 11 hijackers.
Spokesmen for U.S. Attorney Chris Christie and the FBI in New Jersey and Philadelphia could not be reached for a comment.
The suspects will be arraigned this afternoon in front of a Federal Magistrate at 1 PM.
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The Terrorists Next Door?
Plot Suspects Lived Quietly in Suburb
By Anthony Faiola and Dale Russakoff
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, May 10, 2007; A01
CHERRY HILL, N.J., May 9 -- From the front porch of her two-story home on Mimosa Drive, Susan DeFrancesco looked out on the neighborhood she calls "a little United Nations." Pointing from one house to the next, she said: "They're Asian; that family's from Poland. They're from Canada. She's from India. "
Living among those varied families for the past seven years were the Dukas, a three-generational clan of ethnic Albanians. Their Muslim religious garb, repeated minor run-ins with the law, and a brood of up to 20 children, grandchildren and other relatives made them unusual, but hardly unwelcome.
"You don't want to single out a family because of where they're from or what they believe," DeFrancesco said.
On Tuesday morning, it suddenly looked different when three of the Duka brothers -- young, bearded men in their 20s who had spent most of their lives in New Jersey -- were among the six men indicted in an alleged terrorist plot to attack nearby Fort Dix with assault weapons.
For this bedroom community in the shadow of the Philadelphia skyline, they would become the accused jihadists next door -- their arrest immediately shattering assumptions both here and beyond about who Islamic militants are.
Experts have warned that the next big terrorist threat will come from homegrown extremists, unaffiliated with al Qaeda but harboring resentments fostered by materials easily available from the Internet. In fact, the few who have shown themselves thus far prove that there is no stereotype.
Most of the men arrested Tuesday were European rather than Middle Eastern. They hail from one of the most pro-American and secular parts of the Muslim world -- the ethnic Albanian regions of Macedonia, where gratitude for U.S. assistance in Kosovo during the 1990s still runs high.
They live in a garden-variety subdivision like those on the outskirts of cities from Washington, D.C., to Seattle -- once-homogeneous communities now quickly becoming ethnically and racially mixed. Their children play soccer and video games with the neighbors' kids; they hawked their roofing business at Friday prayers.
Had they not offered up an alleged jihadist video to be duplicated at a nearby Circuit City, they might never have been spotted.
That is precisely what has shaken this tree-lined suburb, where residents and leaders have prided themselves on tolerance and unity in the face of significant demographic shifts. Only last Sunday, leaders from the Islamic, Jewish and Roman Catholic faiths united with Mayor Bernie Platt on a empty patch of land in a moving groundbreaking ceremony for the community's first mosque.
Farhat Biviji, 54, a founding member of the soon-to-be-built Anjuman-I-Fakhri Mosque in Cherry Hill, said: "My heart sank when we heard of these horrible men who claimed to be Muslims. They are testing us all. Testing our ability to retain that tolerance. I pray that they have not damaged the goodwill of our community."
Perhaps they already have.
As a reporter approached the Duka house on Wednesday evening, two young mothers across the street yelled out, "Don't go over there and talk to them -- you don't know what they'll do."
Then Zurata Duka, the mother of the three arrested brothers, proclaimed their innocence, asking why neighbors now run from her.
"My sons got caught saying nothing -- there is no proof, no words from them in that affidavit, only the other three," she said. Wearing a headscarf and long robe, she threw her arms out, gesturing at her sons' pickup truck. "Look, it's their roofing truck. They're hard workers. If they were really terrorists, would they take that tape to Circuit City?"
A teenager who declined to give his name but said he was their younger brother declared: "I'm with my brothers 24-7. They never talked like terrorists."
In their daily lives, according to dozens of interviews with neighbors, authorities and acquaintances, the six arrested men largely blended into the cultural patchwork of southern New Jersey, a region emblematic of the changing face of suburban America.
In the Cherry Hill School District, children now speak 62 native languages, compared with 53 in 1998. White children made up 92 percent of the school district in 1980 -- compared with 76 percent today.
Within 10 miles of Cherry Hill, two mosques have sprung up over the past 15 years. One is the South Jersey Islamic Center in Palmyra, about 11 miles northwest of Cherry Hill, where the Duka brothers -- whose brother-in-law, Mohamad Ibrahim Shmewer, was also arrested Tuesday -- regularly worshiped on Friday evenings.
U.S. Attorney Christopher J. Christie said in an interview that it was inside the South Jersey Islamic Center that the Duka brothers met and recruited Serdar Tatar, 23, a Turkish-born legal U.S. resident raised in the south Jersey area.
Members of the mosque remember the Dukas differently. The eldest brother, Dritan, 28, was described as a friendly, outgoing man who would use the center to drum up customers for his roofing business, often telling jokes and heartily slapping backs. But as ethnic Albanians in a mosque dominated by Pakistani and Arabs, many of whom did not speak fluent English, conversations with the Dukas were often cursory.
"How are we supposed to know what they are thinking? The brothers came to the mosque for Friday prayers, but did not seem overly religious or interested in Muslim teachings," said a 41-year-old Tunisian butcher and regular worshiper at the mosque who requested anonymity.
"The oldest brother was a funny guy, a joker. But he was not North African or Pakistani, and the language barriers often force us to talk among our own ethnic groups. But they certainly did not seem like people who hated this country."
The Dukas were living in America illegally, having entered two decades ago on now-expired visas. In almost every way, they were products of typical U.S. suburban life. Shain, 26, and Eljvir, 24, attended Cherry Hill West High School and often played soccer in their front yard.
They were also no strangers to the police. Tatar and the Dukas were habitual offenders, stopped dozens of times a year for speeding, illegal passing and driving without a license. Dritan Duka pleaded guilty in 2000 to possession of drug paraphernalia and Shain Duka to possession of marijuana -- low-level charges that at the time did not trigger immigration background checks.
Only one brother had a driver's license, and only briefly. But they drove anyway and were ticketed regularly by Cherry Hill police -- including four citations in one five-week period for Dritan Duka. The three had their driving privileges suspended -- meaning they could not even apply for a license -- 54 times in less than a decade. William Kushina, a Cherry Hill Police Department spokesman, said the department could do nothing about serial unlicensed driving except continue to issue tickets and suspend privileges. "You can't physically restrain a person from driving," he said.
The six men are scheduled for a bail hearing on Friday. But for Cherry Hill, the question is whether the town will sustain the tolerance that is a hallmark of community pride.
Mike Levine, 38, who lives two doors from the Dukas, said they were good neighbors: They gave him vegetables from their garden and were unfailingly pleasant.
"They were your everyday Muslims," he said. "The kids would be out front playing soccer. They seemed hardworking. I would have believed they were aliens before I'd think they were terrorists."
"Now some people on the block are feeling guilty we didn't pick up on something," he continued. "I don't want to worry what the people next door are doing behind closed doors. I don't want to think like that, but maybe now I have to."
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http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/paul-williams051107.htm
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Radical Muslim paramilitary compound flourishes in upper New York state
By Paul L. Williams Ph.D., (author of THE DAY OF ISLAM)
With the able assistance of Douglas Hagmann, Bill Krayer and Michael Travis
Friday, May 11, 2007
Dr. Paul Williams at the entrance of Islamberg
Situated within a dense forest at the foothills of the Catskill Mountains on the outskirts of Hancock, New York, Islamberg is not an ideal place for a summer vacation unless, of course, you are an exponent of the Jihad or a fan of Osama bin Laden.
The 70 acre complex is surrounded with "No trespassing" signs; the rocky terrain is infested with rattlesnakes; and the woods are home to black bears, coyotes, wolves, and a few bobcats.
Muslim Lane
The entrance to the community is at the bottom of a very steep hill that is difficult to navigate even on a bright sunny day in May. The road, dubbed Muslim Lane, is unpaved and marred by deep crevices that have been created by torrential downpours. On a wintry day, few, save those with all terrain vehicles, could venture forth from the remote encampment.
A sentry post has been established at the base of the hill.
The sentry, at the time of this visit, is an African American dressed in Islamic garb - - a skull cap, a prayer shawl, and a loose fitting shalwat kameez. He instructs us to turn around and leave. "Our community is not open to visitors," he says.
Behind the sentry and across a small stream stand dozens of inhabitants of the compound - - the men wearing skull caps and loose fitting tunics, the women in full burqa. They appear ready to deal with any unauthorized intruders.
The hillside is blighted by rusty trailers that appear to be without power or running water and a number of outhouses. The scent of raw sewage is in the air.
The place is even off limits to the local undertaker who says that he has delivered bodies to the complex but has never been granted entrance. "They come and take the bodies from my hearse. They won't allow me to get past the sentry post. They say that they want to prepare the bodies for burial. But I never get the bodies back. I don't know what's going on there but I don't think it's legal."
On the other side of the hill where few dare to go is a tiny village replete with a make-shift learning center (dubbed the "International Quranic Open University"); a trailer converted into a Laundromat; a small, green community center; a small and rather squalid grocery store; a newly constructed majid; over forty clapboard homes; and scores of additional trailers.
It is home to hundreds - - all in Islamic attire, and all African-Americans. Most drive late model SUVs with license plates from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, South Carolina, and Tennessee. The locals say that some work as tollbooth operators for the New York State Thruway, while others are employed at a credit card processing center that maintains confidential financial records.
While buzzing with activity during the week, the place becomes a virtual hive on weekends. The guest includes arrivals from the inner cities of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania and, occasionally, white-robed dignitaries in Ray-Bans from the Middle East.
Venturing into the complex last summer, Douglas Hagmann, an intrepid investigator and director of the Northeast Intelligence Service, came upon a military training area at the eastern perimeter of the property. The area was equipped with ropes hanging from tall trees, wooden fences for scaling, a make-shift obstacle course, and a firing range. Hagmann said that the range appeared to have been in regular use.
Islamberg is not as benign as a Buddhist monastery or a Carmelite convent. Nearly every weekend, neighbors hear sounds of gunfire. Some, including a combat veteran of the Vietnam War, have heard the bang of small explosives. None of the neighbors wished to be identified for fear of "retaliation." "We don't even dare to slow down when we drive by," one resident said. "They own the mountain and they know it and there is nothing we can do about it but move, and we can't even do that. Who wants to buy a property near that?"
Islamberg's Grocery Store
Islamberg's Grocery Store
The complex serves to scare the bejeesus out of the local residents. "If you go there, you better wear body armor," a customer at the Circle E Diner in Hancock said. "They have armed guards and if they shoot you, nobody will find your body."
At Cousins, a watering hole in nearby Deposit, a barfly, who didn't wish to be identified, said: "The place is dangerous. You can hear gunfire up there. I can't understand why the FBI won't shut it down."
Islamberg is a branch of Muslims of the Americas Inc., a tax-exempt organization formed in 1980 by Pakistani cleric Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani, who refers to himself as "the sixth Sultan Ul Faqr," Gilani, has been directly linked by court documents to Jamaat ul-Fuqra or "community of the impoverished," an organization that seeks to "purify" Islam through violence.
Though primarily based in Lahore, Pakistan, Jamaat ul-Fuqra has operational headquarters in New York and openly recruits through various social service organizations in the U.S., including the prison system. Members live in hamaats or compounds, such as Islamberg, where they agree to abide by the laws of Jamaat ul-Fuqra, which are considered to be above local, state and federal authority. Additional hamaats have been established in Hyattsville, Maryland; Red House, Virginia; Falls Church, Virginia; Macon, Georgia; York, South Carolina; Dover, Tennessee; Buena Vista, Colorado; Talihina, Oklahoma; Tulane Country, California; Commerce, California; and Onalaska, Washington. Others are being built, including an expansive facility in Sherman, Pennsylvania.
Before becoming a citizen of Islamberg or any of the other Fuqra compounds, the recruits - - primarily inner city black men who became converts in prison - - are compelled to sign an oath that reads: "I shall always hear and obey, and whenever given the command, I shall readily fight for Allah's sake."
In the past, thousands of members of the U.S. branches of Jamaat ul-Fuqra traveled to Pakistan for paramilitary training, but encampments, such as Islamberg, are now capable of providing book-camp training so raw recruits are no longer required to travel abroad amidst the increased scrutiny of post 9/11.
Over the years, numerous members of Jamaat ul-Fuqra have been convicted in US courts of such crimes as conspiracy to commit murder, firebombing, gun smuggling, and workers' compensation fraud. Others remain leading suspects in criminal cases throughout the country, including ten unsolved assassinations and seventeen fire-bombings between 1979 and 1990.
The criminal charges against the group and the criminal convictions are not things of the past. In 2001, a resident of a California compound was charged with first-degree murder in the shooting of a sheriff's deputy; another was charged with gun-smuggling' and twenty-four members of the Red House community were convicted of firearms violations.
By 2004 federal investigators uncovered evidence that linked both the DC "sniper killer" John Allen Muhammed and "Shoe Bomber" Richard Reid to the group and reports surfaced that Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was captured and beheaded in the process of attempting to obtain an interview with Sheikh Gilani in Pakistan.
Even though Jamaat ul-Fuqra has been involved in terror attacks and sundry criminal activities, recruited thousands of members from federal and state penal systems, and appears to be operating paramilitary facilities for militant Muslims, it remains to be placed on the official US Terror Watch List. On the contrary, it continues to operate, flourish, and expand as a legitimate nonprofit, tax-deductible charity.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Williams is the author of THE AL QAEDA CONNECTION and forthcoming THE DAY OF ISLAM. Lee Boyland is the author of THE RINGS OF ALLAH). Dr. Williams can be reached at: letters@canadafreepress.com
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Mosques awarded Homeland Security grants
Posted: May 25, 2007 1:00 a.m. Eastern | © 2007 WorldNetDaily.com
While the European Union investigates mosques for ties to Islamic terrorism, the U.S. government is giving mosques security grants that are designed to protect churches, synagogues and other nonprofit groups from Islamic terror.
Most recently, the Islamic Society of Baltimore landed a $15,000 grant from the Department of Homeland Security to upgrade security at its Maryland mosque.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations since April has been urging leaders of mosques and Islamic schools across the nation to apply for the DHS grants, even though the agency's program was set up to help protect nonprofit facilities that are at high risk for attacks by Islamic terrorists.
CAIR encouraged its Muslim members to take advantage of $24 million in federal funds DHS has made available – specifically, DHS says, for nonprofit organizations "deemed high-risk for a potential international terrorist attack."
Organizations in 46 urban areas designated high risk for Islamic terror attack are eligible to participate in the new Nonprofit Security Grant Program.
The CAIR alert issued April 29 to Muslim members reads as follows: "ACTION REQUESTED: All eligible 501(c)(3) American mosques and other Islamic institutions are urged to begin the application process to receive training and to purchase equipment such as video cameras, alarm systems and other security enhancements."
Several Islamic institutions already have applied and are receiving government approval.
U.S. officials who spoke to WND on condition of anonymity expressed dismay that CAIR would drain limited federal funds away from higher risk targets for terrorism. They argue mosques are among the lowest risk for such attacks.
In fact, a number of mosques across the nation actually have promoted Islamic terrorism and have been tied to Islamic terrorists, including the large Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Washington, where some of the 9/11 hijackers received spiritual guidance, as well as help obtaining housing and IDs.
Terrorism experts note some 80 percent of U.S. mosques are funded and controlled through the Saudi Arabian government.
"Mosques have tended to serve as safe havens and meeting points for Islamic terrorist groups," said terror expert Steve Emerson. "Of course, we are not referring to all mosques, but there are at least 40 episodes of extremists and terrorists being connected to mosques in the past decade."
Meanwhile, European Union security officials earlier this month announced they will analyze member-state mosques, examining the training and funding sources of imams, in a project to be completed by fall.
Even in the wake of 9/11, remarkably, U.S. authorities have yet to conduct any similar sweeping investigation of the nation's 2,000 mosques. There also has been no nationwide effort to identify Muslim clerics who preach terrorism, even as an alarming number of imams have been caught up in separate terrorism investigations.
Law enforcement sources blame the hesitancy on political pressure applied by Washington-based CAIR, which sits on the FBI's community advisory board and routinely lodges complaints about case agents who question mosque leaders and followers. The bureau seldom makes a raid in the Muslim community without first contacting CAIR officials.
CAIR claims mosques have been victims of "terrorist" attacks since 9/11, which the group says triggered a backlash of "Islamophobic" vigilantism. When pressed, the group cites only scattered cases of vandalism, however, many of which the FBI has investigated and ruled out as "hate crimes."
No mosque in America has suffered a bombing attack, and there are no examples of international Muslim terrorists attacking mosques in America – the whole point of DHS' target-hardening grant program.
CAIR itself has had ties to terrorism. The nonprofit lobby group is a foreign-funded spin-off of a Hamas front group, and it has seen several of its executives convicted of terror-related crimes since 9/11.
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Group: Terrorism not focus of Homeland Security
POSTED: 7:39 p.m. EDT, May 27, 2007
From Scott Bronstein
CNN
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Claims of terrorism represented less than 0.01 percent of charges filed in recent years in immigration courts by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, according to a report issued Sunday by an independent research group.
This comes despite the fact the Bush administration has repeatedly asserted that fighting terrorism is the central mission of DHS.
The Transactional Records Action Clearinghouse said it analyzed millions of previously undisclosed records obtained from the immigration courts under the Freedom of Information Act.
Of the 814,073 people charged by DHS in immigration courts during the past three years, 12 faced charges of terrorism, TRAC said.
Those 12 cases represent 0.0015 percent of the total number of cases filed.
"The DHS claims it is focused on terrorism. Well that's just not true," said David Burnham, a TRAC spokesman. "Either there's no terrorism, or they're terrible at catching them. Either way it's bad for all of us."
The TRAC analysis also found that DHS filed a minuscule number of what are called "national security" charges against people in the immigration courts. The report stated that 114, or 0.014 percent of the total of roughly 800,000 individuals charged were charged with national security violations.
TRAC reported more than 85 percent of the charges involved more common immigration violations such as not having a valid immigrant visa, overstaying a student visa or entering the United States without an inspection.
According to the report by TRAC, which is affiliated with Syracuse University, the results show that there is an "apparent gap between DHS rhetoric about its role in fighting terrorism and what it actually has been doing."
DHS spokesman Russ Knocke called the TRAC report "ill-conceived" and said the group "lacked a grasp of the DHS mission."
Knocke said that, by clamping down on all forms of immigration, DHS has made it difficult for terrorists to come to the United States.
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I think defending our borders is of the utmost importance in maintaining a sovereign nation. After spending a week in AZ with the minuteman project, I realized that our immigration problem is not merely poor immigrants (mainly Mexican) looking to better their lives, but a highly organized human smuggling ring complete with forced labor, sex slavery, and drug smuggling. There are autrocities that the media does not report on. What stuck in my mind the most were the 'rape trees' where a woman is tied to a tree and gang raped and sometimes murdered afterwards. Frequently bodies of these women were found scattered in the area after being left in the desert. The Coyotes would leave trophies of panties and bras of their victims in the trees.
I cannot and will not take the official story of our 'war on terror' seriously as long as our southern border is wide open.
DHS spokesman Russ Knocke called the TRAC report "ill-conceived" and said the group "lacked a grasp of the DHS mission."
Knocke said that, by clamping down on all forms of immigration, DHS has made it difficult for terrorists to come to the United States.
Knocke, in my opinion is lying. Our executives have no intention of regulating our borders or letting our BP agents do their job without fear of legal retaliation.
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***There are autrocities that the media does not report on.***
Why not in your opinion?
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"The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media." ~ William Colby, Former Director, CIA
(Operation Mockingbird http://www.prisonplanet.com/analysis_louise_01_03_03_mockingbird.html)
Reguarding our borders, if the public was aware of the reality and dangers of our limited border security then it would raise awareness about the proposed North American Community http://www.cfr.org/publication/8102/ and the NAFTA Super Highway http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=51730.
In addition, drug running is a big business in which the CIA is interconnected. For just a few examples, we can examine Mena, Arkanasas. Up until recently, the CIA was caught running the biggest single shipment of cocaine in America. In addition it happened while Bush Sr. (former head of the CIA) was VP and Clinton was Govenor of Arkanasas. http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/dossier/id329/pg1/index.html
The mainstream media used to be the watchdog of our government, a fourth check and balance so to speak. Today, the media and government work hand in hand to further us toward a one world socialized government. Some would say that corporate/government interconnectedness is called fascism. The line between socialism and fascism is strangely difficult to distinguish in America. Maybe a democracy is in the middle of that right and left paradigm. Weren't we a Republic once before?
Go out and rent 'The Network' from 1977, it offers excellent insite into controlled media.
There are excellent documentaries online showing the government and pentagon involvment in the media including Hollywood movies. One is 'Enemy Image' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgWS7Ny_S9o (viewed in 9 parts)
and one of many videos on CIA and drugs is
Mike Ruppert - CIA drug running http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7009998324250484369
The movies I have seen on the border are not available online. 'Line in the Sand' and 'The Month of October' but there are others available for free I have not reviewed.
But the reasons are many as to why investigative jouralism is a dying phenomenon. I believe we the people are the ONLY check and balance in existance. And we the people must become experts ourselves on issues of importance today and no longer rely on anyone else to provide us with answers.
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A Back Door for Terrorists
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By RICHARD A. CLARKE
Published: June 1, 2007
AMID all of the xenophobia and nativism surrounding the immigration debate, there is a real security concern. In the language of the bureaucracy, the problem is referred to as the “O.T.M.’s,” or Other Than Mexicans.
Thousands of non-Mexicans are caught crossing the United States border every year. They cannot be sent back to Mexico, but must be deported to their home country. Until recently, most were given a deportation hearing date and then simply released. Not surprisingly, few showed up for their scheduled appearances. Beginning last year, however, most who are caught are put into detention. They are then put through a procedure called expedited removal, under which many are flown back home within a few weeks.
Many of these non-Mexicans come from Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, the Palestinian territories and other areas of concern to counterterrorism officials. What we don’t know is how many others are evading the Border Patrol every year and what happens to them when they leave the border area. It’s not too hard to imagine that these illegal immigrants, who have clearly spent a lot of money getting to Mexico and then into the United States, are able to buy themselves an identity and corroborating papers once in an American city.
Since 9/11, it has been far more difficult to get a visa to enter the United States if you are a citizen of a country considered a terrorism concern. But it is not difficult for a Pakistani, for example, to enter Mexico or another Central American country from which he can get to our border relatively easily, cross it and blend in.
The Real ID Act of 2005, which among other things established standards for state-issued driver’s licenses and non-driver’s identification cards, has now been put off until at least 2009. And many states are in open revolt against its tough requirements for issuing driver’s licenses.
The result is that potential terrorists here illegally can easily use phony licenses or, in many states, get real ones issued to them, along with credit cards and all of the other papers needed to blend into our society. (The only places in this country that seem to check the validity of drivers’ licenses are bars in college neighborhoods.) Indeed, those arrested for allegedly planning to attack Fort Dix in New Jersey included illegal immigrants who apparently had little difficulty getting along in this country.
In his commencement speech at the Coast Guard Academy last month, President Bush was right to express concern that Al Qaeda is trying to bring terrorists into the United States. He was wrong, however, to claim that fighting in Iraq somehow helps stop such attempts. In the absence of a secure border and verifiable biometric identification systems, preventing terrorists from getting in to this country and setting up sleeper cells here is almost impossible. Maybe we will get serious after the next attack.
Richard A. Clarke, the former head of counterterrorism at the National Security Council, is the author of “Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror.”
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Excellent idea Richard Clark....'Verifiable biometric identification systems.' HAH! Lets give government even more control over our lives! Lets put all of our personal, finacial, medical, and legal information into one database and then hand the government the keys. I'll feel REAL secure then.
And if you haven't read about the EEVS program.... http://www.newswithviews.com/Levant/nancy90.htm
If you ask someone what the most dishonest profession is, they usually say lawyers or politicians, yet we hand them control over our lives everyday trusting they will take care of us. Have Americans become so weak?
A new movie about our borders is coming out soon. www.bordermovie.com to watch the trailer.
If a group of 'vigilantes' like the Minutemen can plug up holes in our borders armed only with radios, flashlights, and binoculars, why can't our almighty DHS do the same? Because they don't want to secure our borders. They only want to increase the problems, so our government can offer us solutions which do nothing more than limit our individual soveriegnty.
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The JFK Airport Plot and the Caribbean Connection
U.S. and Guyanese authorities were still searching June 4 for a fourth suspect wanted in connection with an alleged plot to blow up jet fuel pipelines and storage tanks at New York's John F. Kennedy (JFK) International Airport. Although a serious flaw in the plot made the threat far smaller than the suspects apparently planned, the case does highlight the link between jihadism and the Caribbean islands -- and the effectiveness of jihadist propaganda.
Federal investigators charged four Muslims and arrested three -- two in New York and one in Trinidad and Tobago -- on June 2 in connection with the plot. One of the suspects in custody in New York, Guyana-born U.S. citizen Russell Defreitas, was employed at the airport until 1995 as a cargo handler, a position that would have allowed him to gain knowledge of the security and fuel-transfer systems. Another suspect arrested in New York, Kareem Ibrahim, is originally from Trinidad and Tobago, while a third suspect, Abdul Kadir, a former member of Guyana's parliament, is in custody in Trinidad and Tobago. The fourth alleged member of the cell, Abdel Nur, is believed to be at large in Guyana. The U.S. Justice Department described cell members as Islamists who, although they reached out to Jamaat al-Muslimeen (JAM), an Islamist group in Trinidad and Tobago, have no known ties to al Qaeda.
Although the arrests occurred after more than a year of surveillance, the plot reportedly was still early in the planning stage, and the cell still had not obtained explosives. Therefore, although the plotters were serious -- the plan apparently called for massive explosions at the airport -- they did not present an immediate threat. According to investigators, authorities acted against the cell because Kadir was about to leave for Iran, where keeping tabs on him would have been impossible.
The arrests, however, highlight the Caribbean islands' connections to jihadists. Some significant links between the region and jihadists already have been demonstrated, the most notable being Adnan El Shukrijumah, an alleged al Qaeda militant who was born in Saudi Arabia, lived in Guyana and has strong ties to Trinidad. Also, Germaine Lindsay, one of the suicide bombers involved in the July 2005 attack against London's mass transit system, was born in Jamaica. Authorities in Trinidad say Kadir and Nur are associated with JAM, which was involved in a 1990 coup attempt in that country that resulted in 24 deaths.
The Caribbean shares some similar characteristics with some other regions where jihadism has taken root, including much of the Middle East, Indonesia and East Africa. Although many Caribbean countries are wealthy (Trinidad and Tobago is a major oil producer), their often-corrupt governments siphon off much of the wealth and fail to provide adequate social services, leaving much of their populations poor and living in substandard conditions. Moreover, although the islands' Muslim populations are not large -- Trinidad and Tobago is about 6 percent Muslim, for example -- these communities are active.
Because it is a popular tourist destination, the Caribbean has well-developed transportation links to and from the United States. Someone making frequent trips to and from the resorts, therefore, would not arouse as much suspicion from intelligence and law enforcement agencies as, say, someone making frequent trips to Pakistan. This access, along with the Caribbean's confidential banking systems, allows for the easy transfer of funds, as well as for money laundering.
However, unlike places like Afghanistan, Sudan and Somalia, where militant groups have been able to operate freely in remote, sparsely populated areas, the Caribbean islands are small and populous. The almost small-town-like environment makes it difficult for large, complex militant organizations to operate undetected. Furthermore, most Caribbean governments are not hostile to Washington, which wields significant political and financial influence in the region. This influence, then, makes it easy for U.S. intelligence and law enforcement to operate on the islands.
The JFK plot does highlight the effectiveness of al Qaeda's propaganda, which is inspiring autonomous grassroots cells to act with little or no contact with anyone even close to the core of al Qaeda. Al Qaeda and other militant groups have posted a steady stream of videos and messages on the Internet calling for Muslims to act on their own against the West. This has been effective in inspiring impromptu militant cells in Europe and the United States, most recently involving Fort Dix, N.J..
Even if the alleged plotters had succeeded in carrying out the attack, though, it likely would not have been as destructive as they had hoped. In the United States, most turbine-powered civilian aircraft use a fuel called Jet A, which is harder to set ablaze in the open air than AvGas, which is commonly used in piston-powered general-aviation aircraft. Although Jet A was a poor choice for the plotters' purposes, their tactic was sound. Had they chosen a location where AvGas could be used to cause explosions, the potential destruction would have been greater. Experienced militants who had done better research and target selection would have known better than to target Jet A tanks and pipelines.
While the Caribbean is an unlikely place for militant training camps and bases, it can produce recruits and be a transit point for the global jihadist movement.
stratfor.com
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http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/...ive_suici.html
Exclusive: Suicide Bomb Teams Sent to U.S., Europe
June 18, 2007 4:45 PM
Brian Ross Reports:
Large teams of newly trained suicide bombers are being sent to the United States and Europe, according to evidence contained on a new videotape obtained by the Blotter on ABCNews.com.
Teams assigned to carry out attacks in the United States, Canada, Great Britain and Germany were introduced at an al Qaeda/Taliban training camp graduation ceremony held June 9.
A Pakistani journalist was invited to attend and take pictures as some 300 recruits, including boys as young as 12, were supposedly sent off on their suicide missions.
Photos: Inside an al Qaeda/Taliban 'Graduation'
The tape shows Taliban military commander Mansoor Dadullah, whose brother was killed by the U.S. last month, introducing and congratulating each team as they stood.
"These Americans, Canadians, British and Germans come here to Afghanistan from faraway places," Dadullah says on the tape. "Why shouldn't we go after them?"
The leader of the team assigned to attack Great Britain spoke in English.
"So let me say something about why we are going, along with my team, for a suicide attack in Britain," he said. "Whether my colleagues, companions and Muslim brothers die today or tonight, every drop of our blood will invigorate the Muslim (unintelligible)."
Video: Watch the Taliban's 'Graduation' Ceremony
U.S. intelligence officials described the event as another example of "an aggressive and sophisticated propaganda campaign."
Others take it very seriously.
"It doesn't take too many who are willing to actually do it and be able to slip through the net and get into the United States or England and cause a lot of damage," said ABC News consultant Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism official.
Watch Brian Ross' full report on "World News With Charles Gibson."
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In Defense of the Constitution
News & Analysis
014/07 June 27, 2007
CAIR & America's Political Class; Collusion or Confusion?
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) recently posted to its web site several articles trumpeting recent events and the list of distinguished attendees:
June 17, 2007: Ohio Governor Ted Strickland attended a CAIR event in Columbus honoring CAIR-Ohio's "work":
http://www.cair.com/default.asp?Page=articleView&id=2785&theType=NR
Governor Strickland addressed the same CAIR-Ohio that defended the "charity" organization KindHearts when it was closed down for investigation by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2006. According to tax filings, KindHearts did fundraising through the notorious Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP).
http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=28823
http://www.cleveland.com/terrorism/wide/index.ssf?/terrorism/wide/kindhearts.html
The IAP was found civilly liable for the terror-murder of an American citizen by Hamas. Hamas is yet another Islamist terrorist group that enjoys the support of CAIR. (Is it a coincidence that the Islamic Association for Palestine is also the parent organization of CAIR?)
How is it that a sitting governor of a state that forms part of a union currently fighting a war against Islamist terrorism can sit down with the very self-same group that supports America's enemies with impunity?
How many sons and daughters of Ohio have given their lives and limbs in the battle against Islamist terror?
Is Governor Strickland guilty of collusion or confusion?
June 16, 2007: CAIR Minnesota held an event attended by members of the FBI, ACLU, Rep. Keith Ellison, and president of the American Council of the Blind for Minnesota:
http://www.cair.com/default.asp?Page=articleView&id=2784&theType=NR
CAIR-MN Communications Director Valerie Shirley:
"We thank the Minnesota community for its tremendous support in our first months of operation and hope to work with people of all faiths on future initiatives of benefit to our state and nation"
While making deceptive commentary designed to portray CAIR as something it is not, let's not forget that this is same CAIR that defends the outrageous behaviour of the "Flying Imams":
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=27802
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewNation.asp?Page=/Nation/archive/200704/NAT20070417a.html
How many sons and daughters of Minnesota have given their lives and limbs in the battle against Islamist terror?
Is Representative Keith Ellison guilty of collusion or confusion?
June 16, 2007: CAIR New Jersey holds a meeting with "Security Officials" from the FBI, DHS, and State Police:
http://www.cair.com/default.asp?Page=articleView&id=2787&theType=NR
While many politically oriented law enforcement officials meet with CAIR in the spirit of "Muslim outreach", it should be noted that in the case of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), CAIR's constant promotion of a "relationship" with DHS is wearing thin:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070612/NATION/106120013&SearchID=7328524913433&template=nextpage
According to the article in the Washington Times:
"The department does not have a formalized relationship with that particular organization .
we do have formalized relations with other community groups with whom we do contracts for training and consultation on matters that are specific to a given community. It is not uncommon for that particular organization to issue a press release attempting to overstate their interaction with the department."
A check reveals that since 2000, CAIR has not been awarded a grant or government contract.
From an MSNBC article we learn:
"One senior law-enforcement official, who asked not to be identified talking about a sensitive matter, agrees that there is a "split in FBI culture" over the bureau's relationships with CAIR and says that some agents "hold their nose" when it comes to dealing with the group."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16384987/site/newsweek/page/3/
So much for the "special relationship"?
(Just who is CAIR trying to impress, their North American members or their Saudi leash olders?)
Is there a pattern here?
Given CAIR's proven connections to Islamist terrorism and Islamist terrorist groups, and CAIR's recent inclusion on a list of "prominent" U.S. Islamic groups as an "unindicted co-conspirator" in a plot to fund the notorious Islamist terrorist group Hamas; can North Americans be forgiven if they are asking themselves why our so-called "leaders" are pandering to CAIR?
http://www.anti-cair-net.org/press_007_07
http://www.nysun.com/article/55778
Why do many of our so-called "leaders" give a pass to CAIR?
Why is the mainstream press so reluctant to give CAIR the sort of investigative attention they give to Paris Hilton's underwear hue?
Why the disconnect between field agents of the FBI and the FBI's leadership?
Broken Moral Compass?
The simple fact is that many North Americans in leadership roles seem to have lost their sense of what is just; what is right. Many of our "leaders" have developed a moral compass that has swung so far askew that it can't point to the truth even when they want it to; their needle is clearly broken:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21528
Twenty years ago, would we have tolerated the presence of any invited members of law enforcement at KKK rallies or accepted a Representative of the People attending a rally for the NAZI party as an honored guest speaker?
Where is our sense of outrage?
Why are many of our political class willing to pander to CAIR? When not making mealy-mouthed statements calling for "understanding" and "tolerance", they are busy gadding about in search of approval from the very same groups that support the killing and maiming of America's brave warriors who are currently fighting - and dying - to defend our country from the very people they are telling us we must be "tolerant" of !
The time for "understanding" evil is long past.
The time for "tolerance" in the face of unrestrained Islamist terror is over.
The time for action is now. Calls for "tolerance" should be answered with a resounding "NO!" when it comes to radical Islam and those persons and groups, like CAIR, that clearly support an evil ideology.
There was a time in American communities when those who committed evil were shunned. People would not speak of them, or to them. In short, they were 'non-persons' as far as the civilized community was concerned. The person shunned usually had the good sense to move away.
We recommend CAIR make a move to Gaza. No doubt CAIR's leadership would be among their own and CAIR's constant carping about everything Islamic would fall on sympathetic ears.
By our silence to the activities of CAIR and other Islamist terrorist supporting groups, are we complicit in their activities? Do any of us share a little of the blame for CAIR's existence because we refuse to do anything about it? Do we enable CAIR and other Islamist groups when we continue to re-elect representatives who shake hands and break bread with America's enemies?
How many of our leaders have forgotten the precious legacy handed down by the founders?
How willingly they trade crass adulation for personal responsibility as they forget they represent America, not Hamas.
Where is America's champion... ?
Andrew Whitehead
Director
Anti-CAIR
ajwhitehead@anti-cair-net.org
www.anti-cair-net.org
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http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2007/07/al-qaeda-cell-i.html
Al Qaeda Cell in the U.S. Or On Its Way, According to New Intel
Share July 10, 2007 6:30 PM
Brian Ross Reports:
Senior U.S. intelligence officials tell ABC News new intelligence suggests
a small al Qaeda cell is on its way to the United States, or may already be
here.
The White House has convened an urgent multi-agency meeting for Thursday
afternoon to deal with the new threat.
THE BLOTTER RECOMMENDS
a.. Blotter Secret Document: U.S. Fears Terror 'Spectacular' Planned
b.. Blotter Al Qaeda No. 2 Makes More Threats Against the U.K.
c.. Click Here to Check Out Brian Ross Investigative Photos
Top intelligence and law enforcement officials have been told to assemble in
the Situation Room to report on:
--what steps can be taken to minimize or counter the threat,
--and what steps are being taken to harden security for government buildings
and personnel.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told the Chicago Tribune
editorial board on Tuesday he had "a gut feeling" that an attack was coming.
"We do worry about whether they are rebuilding their capabilities," Chertoff
said. "We strike at them; we degrade them; but they rebuild."
"It suggests they have information that the cell or cells coming this
direction want to attack a government facility," Brad Garrett, a former FBI
agent and ABC News consultant, said.
Law enforcement officials say the recent failed attacks in London have
provided important new clues about possible tactics.
Click Here for Full Blotter Coverage.
And officials say the London attackers' use of the Internet left important
clues that are being used to decode other e-mails that had initially been
deemed unimportant but are now taking on new significance.
A senior administration official said the level of concern of a new terror
attack is now higher than it has been in some time, and the meeting this
week in the situation room is one of a number that have been convened in
light of the new intelligence and what happened in London.
_______________________________________
"World News" closer between Charles Gibson and Brian Ross:
Charles Gibson: The obvious question, Brian, is how hard and how specific is
the intelligence?
Brian Ross: Not hard, but good. It's being taken very seriously, in
connection with increased chatter, e-mail traffic back and forth, the
attacks in London, and a general concern, as Secretary Chertoff said today,
that summer seems to be a time that al Qaeda likes to attack.
Charles Gibson: And there's been a bunch of tapes that have been coming from
al Qaeda lately.
Brian Ross: In fact, Zawahri put out his eighth tape today and says he had
easy access to the Internet, and he threatened new attacks against London.
Charles Gibson: Once was the day when this intelligence came in, they would
raise the level of concern going to a different color.
Brian Ross: The concern, now, by doing that and not telling Americans what
they can do, where the attack is coming, serves no useful purpose.
_______________________________________
White House response:
After the attempted terrorist attacks in the U.K., the U.S. government
convened meetings to discuss the situation -- that is what citizens should
expect. There is no credible evidence of an imminent threat, however, and
counter-terrorism officials regularly meet -- that is not unusual. We are
taking all threats seriously and working to ensure we can keep the
terrorists from striking at innocent people.
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FBI Patriot Act Abuse Documents: What Special Project Lives in FBI HQ Room 4944?
By Ryan Singel
In March, the Justice Department's Inspector General revealed that FBI agents had sent a flurry of fake emergency letters to phone companies, asking them to turn over phone records immediately by promising that the proper papers had been filed with U.S. attorneys, though in many cases this was a complete lie. More than 60 of these letters were made public today as part of a FBI document dump in response to a government sunshine lawsuit centered on the FBI's abuse of a key Patriot Act power.
The most striking thing about these expedited letters (made public via the Electronic Frontier Foundation) is that they all use the same pathetic, passive bureaucratese: "Due to exigent circumstances, it is requested that records for the attached list of telephone numbers be provided."
So far they seem to all be coming from the same office: the Communications Analysis Unit which looks to be located in Room 4944 in FBI Headquarters. The "exigent letters" also refer almost exclusively to a "Special Project" and the only name on any of the letters is Larry Mefford.
Mefford was no rookie FBI agent. Mefford was the Executive Assistant Director, in charge of the Counterterrorism/Counterintelligence Division. In English, that means he was in charge of preventing another terrorist attack domestically.
What does that mean? Well, Mefford's name is on documents that requested personal information on Americans. Some of those requests included information known to be false to the agents signing them. That's a federal crime, according to one former FBI agent.
What was this "Special Project" in the Communications Analysis Group? What exactly were they doing that would require "expedited" letters that sometimes requested more than 2 pages of phone numbers from phone companies? In the immortal words of the Butch Cassidy, who are those guys?
The documents also show that these "exigent letters" -- essentially end runs around the rules set up to keep the FBI from trampling on citizens rights -- weren't devised by some rogue Jack Bauer-style agent. The form letters originated from inside FBI Headquarters and in some cases, bear the name of a senior level FBI offiicial who should have been aware of the letters' legal grey status and possibility for abuse.
The FBI is fully aware of the power handed to it by Congress's passage of the Patriot Act. Indeed, as early as November 28, 2001, every field office was warned by the Office of the General Counsel that:
NSLs are powerful investigative tools in that they can compel the production of substantial amounts of relevant information. However, they must be used judiciously. [...] In deciding whether or not to re-authorize the broadened authority, Congress certainly will examine the manner in which the FBI exercised it. Executive Order 12333 and the FCIG require that the FBU accomplish its investigations through the "least intrusive " means. Supervisors should keep this in mind when deciding whether or not a particular use of NSL authority is appropriate. The greater availability of NSLs does not mean that they should be used in every case.
From the looks of the audits coming out, that seems to be one memo FBI agents dutifully ignored. And perhaps rightfully so, since Congress didn't bother to challenge Alberto Gonzales's knowingly false statements to Congress about the FBI's use of these powers before they made them permanent.
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Is it possible there is a pressing investigation that caused those letters to be produced? I'm guessing the Communications Analysis Group means datamining, which means hunting for terrorist cells.
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Report: Al Qaeda renewing efforts to sneak terror plotters into U.S.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Al Qaeda is stepping up its efforts to sneak terror operatives into the United States and has acquired most of the capabilities it needs to strike here, according to a new U.S. intelligence assessment, The Associated Press has learned.
The draft National Intelligence Estimate is expected to paint an increasingly worrisome portrait of al Qaeda's ability to use its base along the Pakistan-Afghan border to launch and inspire attacks, even as Bush administration officials say the U.S. is safer nearly six years into the war on terror.
Among the key findings of the classified estimate, which is still in draft form and must be approved by all 16 U.S. spy agencies:
* Al Qaeda is probably still pursuing chemical, biological or nuclear weapons and would use them if its operatives developed sufficient capability.
* The terror group has been able to restore three of the four key tools it would need to launch an attack on U.S. soil: a safe haven in Pakistan's tribal areas, operational lieutenants and senior leaders. It could not immediately be learned what the missing fourth element is.
* The group will bolster its efforts to position operatives inside U.S. borders. In public statements, U.S. officials have expressed concern about the ease with which people can enter the United States through Europe because of a program that allows most Europeans to enter without visas.
The document also discusses increasing concern about individuals already inside the United States who are adopting an extremist brand of Islam.
On a positive note, analysts concluded that increased international efforts over the past five years "have constrained the ability of al Qaeda to attack the U.S. homeland again and have led terrorist groups to perceive the homeland as a harder target to strike than on 9/11."
Those measures helped disrupt known plots against the United States, the analysts found.
National Intelligence Estimates are the most authoritative written judgments that reflect the consensus long-term thinking of senior intelligence analysts.
Government officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the report has not been finalized, described it as an expansive look at potential threats within the United States and said it required the cooperation of a number of national security agencies, including the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security Department and National Counterterrorism Center.
National security officials met at the White House on Thursday about the intelligence estimate and related counterterrorism issues. The tentative plan is to release a declassified version of the report and brief Congress on Tuesday, one government official said.
Ross Feinstein, spokesman for National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell, declined to discuss the document's specific contents. But he said it would be consistent with statements made by senior government officials at congressional hearings and elsewhere.
The estimate echoes the findings of another analysis prepared by the National Counterterrorism Center earlier this year and disclosed publicly on Wednesday. That report -- titled "Al Qaeda better positioned to strike the West" -- found the terrorist group is "considerably operationally stronger than a year ago" and has "regrouped to an extent not seen since 2001," a counterterrorism official familiar with the report's findings told The Associated Press.
On Thursday, news of the counterterrorism center's threat assessment renewed the political debate about the nature of the al Qaeda threat and whether U.S. actions -- in Iraq in particular -- have made the U.S. safer from terrorism.
At a news conference Thursday, President Bush acknowledged al Qaeda's continuing threat to the United States and used the new report as evidence his administration's policies are on the right course.
"The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq were the ones who attacked us in America on September 11," he said. "That's why what happens in Iraq matters to security here at home."
Yet Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-West Virginia, said Iraq has distracted the United States. He said the U.S. should have finished off al Qaeda in 2002 and 2003 along the Afghan-Pakistan border.
Instead, "President Bush chose to invade Iraq, thereby diverting our military and intelligence resources away from the real war on terrorism," Rockefeller said. "Threats to the United States homeland are not emanating from Iraq. They are coming from al Qaeda leadership."
Rockefeller, who voted in favor of toppling Saddam Hussein, called for the U.S. to end its involvement in what he called the Iraqi civil war.
In recent weeks, senior national security officials have been increasingly worried about an al Qaeda attack in the United States.
Appearing on a half-dozen morning TV shows Thursday, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff laid out a list of factors contributing to his "gut feeling" that the nation faces a higher risk of attack this summer: al Qaeda's increased freedom to train in South Asia, a flurry of public statements from the network's leadership, a history of summertime attacks, a broader range of attacks in North Africa and Europe, and homegrown terrorism increasing in Europe.
"Europe could become a platform for an attack against this country," Chertoff told CNN, although he and others continue to say they know of no specific, credible information pointing to an attack here.
National security officials are frustrated by an agreement last year between Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf and tribal leaders in western Pakistan, which gave tribes near the Afghan border greater autonomy and has led to increased al Qaeda activity in the region.
Nevertheless, Bush administration officials still view Musharraf as a partner.
Speaking to a congressional hearing, Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher said that Pakistan under Musharraf has captured more al Qaeda operatives than any other country and that several major Taliban leaders were captured or killed this year.
"There is a considerable al Qaeda presence at the border, but they are under pressure," Boucher told a House national security subcommittee.
Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tennessee, was skeptical, saying Osama bin Laden and other terrorist leaders apparently feel safe there. "Is this a Motel 6 for terrorists?" he asked.
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Thankfully it's all just a conspiracy by the illuminati/Bush administration. There aren' really terrorists out to kill us.... :-D
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http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/july2007/120707distinctchance.htm
Sheehan: Distinct Chance Of Staged Attack, Martial Law
Peace Mom warns of false flag terror as she prepares to take on sell-out Pelosi
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Cindy Sheehan, the famous Peace Mom who recently expressed her intention to run against Nancy Pelosi in San Francisco, says there's a "distinct possibility" that America will be hit with another staged terror attack that will allow Bush to enact the martial law provisions he recently signed into law.
Sheehan spoke to The Alex Jones Show as she prepares to embark on a two week trek towards Washington to confront Pelosi.
Asked what she thought of numerous recent comments on behalf of politicians, military analysts and GOP kingpins that the Bush administration needs more terror to save a doomed foreign policy, along with recent legislation that establishes the framework for martial law in the event of an emergency, Sheehan was open to the plausibility that another false flag attack could be visited upon the American people.
"I definitely think that is a distinct possibility, that there will be some kind of attack whether it's manufactured or real....I think it's really possible that these people will do that - why would he [Bush] put in that presidential directive if he didn't need to use it - I think it's really really frightening," Sheehan told The Alex Jones Show.
"Does anybody think that [Bush's] recent presidential decision directive wasn't for declaring martial law and suspending elections - that's why they have to be stopped," added Sheehan.
Recently liberated from the straightjacket of partisan control, Sheehan attacked the Democrats for failing to achieve what they were voted in to do last November.
"The culture of corruption doesn't stop at the Republican party and people need to realize that Democrats are not our saviors," said Sheehan.
"Over 600 soldiers have died since the Democrats took over power and many thousands of Iraqis, the blood is on their hands, they have the power to stop it and support our troops, support the people of Iraq, save America from more threats from the Bush administration and get them out of power," added the anti-war activist.
Sheehan told Pelosi that if she didn't have impeachment on the table by July that she would run against her in San Francisco and the Peace Mom has now taken that course of action.
"I will run against you and I will give you a run for your money," challenged Sheehan.
Sheehan slammed Pelosi as a warmongering elitist who lives in a mansion on a hill and is completely out of touch with her electorate, as well as a major supporter of AIPAC, a group which has expressed its explicit support for an attack on Iran.
"You can't have allegiance to two countries when you're a lawmaker in one of those countries," said Sheehan, adding that many politicians put America's best interests second behind Israel.
Asked why the candidacy of Ron Paul has become so popular, Sheehan commented "People are hungry for change, people are hungry for people to tell the truth, no matter what, people are hungry for those who act out of their integrity."
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Recently liberated from the straightjacket of partisan control
I think that pretty much sums it up.
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S B,
You dare question St. Cindy???? :wink:
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http://hotair.com/archives/2007/07/13/audio-us-in-great-danger-of-a-staged-terror-attack-or-new-gulf-of-tonkin-says-ron-paul/
Put Ron Paul down for a staged attack as well. I wish someone would run down the various terrorist attack globally since 1979 and tell me which were actual terrorist attacks and which were staged.
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Weak airport security
http://www.abc15.com/news/local/story.aspx?content_id=568d6b4d-67b7-4116-9098-4c35d8b5ce38#top
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http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,290658,00.html
TSA Warns Airport Security About Terror Dry Runs
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
AP
Aug. 100, 2006: A TSA officer carries a bin of confiscated items taken from travelers at a security checkpoint at Denver International Airport.
WASHINGTON ? Airport security officers around the nation have been alerted by federal officials to look out for terrorists practicing to carry explosive components onto aircraft, based on four curious seizures at airports since last September.
The unclassified alert was distributed on July 20 by the Transportation Security Administration to federal air marshals, its own transportation security officers and other law enforcement agencies.
The seizures at airports in San Diego, Milwaukee, Houston and Baltimore included "wires, switches, pipes or tubes, cell phone components and dense clay-like substances," including block cheese, the bulletin said. "The unusual nature and increase in number of these improvised items raise concern."
Security officers were urged to keep an eye out for "ordinary items that look like improvised explosive device components."
The 13-paragraph bulletin was posted on the Internet by NBC Nightly News, which first reported the story.
A federal official familiar with the document confirmed the authenticity of the NBC posting but declined to be identified by name because it has not been officially released.
"There is no credible, specific threat here," TSA spokeswoman Ellen Howe said Tuesday. "Don't panic. We do these things all the time."
Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke described the notice as the latest copy of a routine informational bulletin for TSA workers, airport employees and law enforcement officials.
A statement posted late Tuesday by the TSA on its Web site confirmed that "a routine TSA intelligence bulletin relating to suspicious incidents at U.S. airports" had leaked to news organizations. The statement added, "During the past six months TSA has produced more than 90 unclassified bulletins of this nature on a wide variety of security-related subjects."
The bulletin said the a joint FBI-Homeland Security Department assessment found that terrorists have conducted probes, dry runs and dress rehearsals in advance of previous attacks.
It cited various types of rehearsals conducted by terrorists before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon; the July 7, 2005, London subway bombings; the Aug. 2, 2006, London-based plot to blow up trans-Atlantic flights using liquid explosives and the 1994 Bojinka plot in the Philippines to blow up multiple airliners over the Pacific Ocean.
The bulletin said the passengers carrying the suspicious items seized since September included men and women and that initial investigation had not linked them with criminal or terrorist organizations. But it added that most of their explanations for carrying the items were suspicious and some were still under investigation.
The four seizures were described this way:
? San Diego, July 7. A U.S. person ? either a citizen or a foreigner legally here ? checked baggage containing two ice packs covered in duct tape. The ice packs had clay inside them rather than the normal blue gel.
? Milwaukee, June 4. A U.S. person's carryon baggage contained wire coil wrapped around a possible initiator, an electrical switch, batteries, three tubes and two blocks of cheese. The bulletin said block cheese has a consistency similar to some explosives.
? Houston, Nov. 8, 2006. A U.S. person's checked baggage contained a plastic bag with a 9-volt battery, wires, a block of brown clay-like minerals and pipes.
? Baltimore, Sept. 16, 2006. A couple's checked baggage contained a plastic bag with a block of processed cheese taped to another plastic bag holding a cellular phone charger.
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"This is as true in everyday life as it is in battle:
We are given one life, and the decision is ours whether
to wait for circumstances to make up our mind or whether
to act and, in acting, to live."
-- Omar Bradley, General
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On the Front Line in the War on Terrorism
Cops in New York and Los Angeles offer America two models for preventing another 9/11.
Judith Miller
Summer 2007
Three time zones, 3,000 miles, and a cultural galaxy apart, New York and Los Angeles face a common threat: along with Washington, D.C., they’re the chief American targets of Islamic terror. And both cities boast top cops, sometime rivals—the cities are fiercely competitive—who know that ensuring that a dog doesn’t bark will determine their legacies. After investing millions of dollars in homeland security, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly of New York and Chief William J. Bratton of L.A. can both claim counterterror successes. What can we learn from their approaches? And will they be able to continue preventing terrorist attacks in their cities?
On the face of it, the nation’s two biggest metropolitan forces seem to have adopted kindred counterterrorism strategies. Both have roving SWAT or “Emergency Service Unit” teams, equipped with gas masks and antidotes to chemical and biological agents. Both have set up “fusion” centers to screen threats and monitor secret intelligence and “open-source” information, including radical Internet sites, and both have started programs to identify and protect likely targets. Both have tried to integrate private security experts into their work. Both conduct surveillance that would have been legally questionable before September 11. Both have sought to enlist support from mainstream Muslims and have encouraged various private firms to report suspicious activity.
Yet despite such similarities, the terror-fighting approaches of New York and L.A., like the cities themselves, reflect very different traditions, styles, and, above all, resources. New York, which knows the price of failure and thus has a heightened “threat perception,” sets the gold standard for counterterrorism—and has the funding and manpower to do it. Kelly, 65, views his highest priority as ensuring that al-Qaida doesn’t hit the city again. “When your city has been attacked, the threat is always with you,” he tells me. Deploying its own informants, undercover terror-busters, and a small army of analysts, New York tries to locate and neutralize pockets of militancy even before potentially violent individuals can form radical cells—a “preventive” approach, as Kelly calls it, that is the most effective way that police departments, small or large, can help fight terror.
In L.A., a city that has never been attacked, terrorism is a less pressing concern than gang violence and other crime. Lacking the political incentive, and hence the resources, to wage his own war on terror, Bratton, 59, has instead pooled scarce funds, manpower, and information with federal and other agencies—an approach that federal officials hold up as a model for police departments that can’t afford New York’s investment.
Both cities can claim victories that underscore the central role that law enforcement can—and should—play in homeland security. Just this June, the NYPD and the FBI announced that they had foiled a new Islamic terror plot against New York, this time to blow up fuel-tank farms at John F. Kennedy International Airport. While the plot was extremely unlikely to succeed—law enforcement had penetrated it from the start—the arrests revealed that Trinidad and other Caribbean ports have become fertile ground for Islamic militancy. Since September 11, the NYPD has broken up at least seven terror plots. What the LAPD calls its “coming of age” terrorism case—as yet not widely reported—commenced with a concerned landlord’s call just days after September 11. It eventually led police investigators to a small group of Islamic militants who may have provided support for the 9/11 hijackers (see box).
Yet neither Kelly nor Bratton can rest on his laurels. Those playing defense must be constantly vigilant, while al-Qaida and like-minded militants need to be lucky only once.
Size matters. The NYPD has long been one of the world’s largest law enforcement agencies. On September 11, 2001, it was employing some 50,000 people—36,000 sworn officers and about 14,000 civilians—to protect more than 8 million people. The next five largest U.S. police departments combined don’t have as many employees, Bratton ruefully observes. His own adopted city of L.A.—he’s originally from Boston—has a civilian and sworn force of 12,800 covering a city of nearly 4 million. As the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), a Washington-based think tank, concludes in a new report, the NYPD has the resources “to do things that other departments cannot.”
Shortly after taking office under Mayor Michael Bloomberg in January 2002, Kelly began his second tour of duty as Gotham’s top cop by drawing on those considerable resources to revamp and expand the NYPD’s terror-fighting capabilities. He hired two key counterterrorism deputies from Washington, D.C.: David Cohen, a former deputy director of the CIA’s operations wing, to head the NYPD’s Intelligence Division; and Michael Sheehan, former State Department head of counterterrorism, to run the force’s new Counter Terrorism Bureau. Then he assigned more than 1,000 people to their units, the largest deployment of any American city to combat terrorism. With funds from the Police Foundation, a private group, he also sent liaison officers overseas to work alongside police departments in some of the cities most frequently targeted by terror, including Amman, London, and Singapore.
Each day, the Counter Terrorism Bureau’s 205 officers analyze worldwide threats to determine how many officers should deploy where; provide training for all members of the force; assess risks to targets; and develop plans for protecting key sites in and near the city. Much of the NYPD’s recent counterterrorism work has focused on the financial district in lower Manhattan, home to 75 of the city’s 367 most sensitive sites, information about which is kept in a giant red binder, the “Red Book.” Kelly is weighing a plan to erect a “ring of steel”—cameras, random screenings, and sophisticated sensors like those that London installed after its own subway and bus terror attacks in 2005—to help protect the 1.5-square-mile district and its 1 trillion daily financial transactions. The city is also spending $250 million to install cameras in its subway and transit system.
The cutting edge of the NYPD’s antiterrorism efforts, though, is David Cohen’s Intelligence Division. “We’re looking at ‘clusters,’ at how and where people get together, what they do and where they go, how they raise funds,” Kelly says during an interview at One Police Plaza. “This analytical work is not being done anywhere else in government. It’s all about prevention.”
Before September 11, the Intelligence Division mainly developed intelligence on narcotics and violent crimes, and sought to protect visiting dignitaries to the city—a glorified “escort service,” Kelly once scoffed. Now, its personnel devote 95 percent of their time to terrorism investigations, the PERF report concludes (and sources confirm). Kelly says that the division has 23 civilian intelligence analysts, with master’s degrees and higher from Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, and other universities; some have come from leading think tanks, even from the CIA—giving the force a capability, he says, “that exists no place else.” The division’s “field intelligence officers,” one assigned to each of the NYPD’s 76 precincts, keep tabs on people, crimes, and arrests that might have terrorism links. “Core Collection” officers develop confidential informants, who could give early warning about people being radicalized by militant associates or websites.
Cohen’s division also supervises undercover agents who infiltrate potentially violent groups. The identities of these covert warriors, and other details of the program, remain fiercely guarded secrets. But information occasionally turns up in federal prosecutions, such as the NYPD’s use of an undercover agent in helping to foil the June JFK airport conspiracy, and of both a Bangladeshi undercover officer and an Egyptian-born confidential informant in disrupting a 2004 plot by Islamic terrorists to bomb the Herald Square subway station. “I want at least 1,000 to 2,000 to die in one day,” one of the accused told the informant in the subway case, a stunned New York jury heard last year. Though the men had not acquired explosives, police arrested them shortly before the Republican national convention in August 2004, after nearly two years of surveillance. The key plotter, Shahawar Matin Siraj, a 22-year-old Pakistani, recently received a 30-year sentence. “This is the kind of homegrown, lone-wolf case that starts way below federal radar,” Cohen says. “But had these two guys acted on their intentions”—to “fuck this country very bad,” as Siraj threatened on tape—“a lot of New Yorkers would have died and been injured.”
Undercover work capitalizes on the NYPD’s 870-plus civilian and uniformed speakers of Albanian, Arabic, Bengali, Farsi, Pashto, Turkish, and Urdu—more linguists than the FBI’s New York field office employs. Of the 470 or so in uniform, more than 200 are “master linguists” in high-priority languages. The latest police academy class boasted graduates hailing from 65 countries, Cohen notes. Some will doubtless work for the division’s Cyber Intelligence Unit, a 25-person group situated in unmarked headquarters in a Chelsea industrial building; others may wind up in the Prison Intelligence program at Rikers Island, where they will work with officials from probations, the New York State Police, and other agencies to monitor the spread of militancy.
Richard Falkenrath, a counterterrorism expert who worked in the Bush White House and succeeded Deputy Commissioner Sheehan last year, says that New York’s intelligence efforts are “awe-inspiring,” beyond anything he’s seen at the local, state, and even federal levels. “New York is far more action-oriented than the feds,” he says, “partly because it’s a lot easier and faster to take action.” Even rivals like Bratton, who served as New York’s police commissioner in the mid-nineties before falling out with his boss, Rudy Giuliani, share the admiration. “The NYPD’s intelligence operation is widely regarded as the gold standard,” Bratton concluded in an article coauthored for the Manhattan Institute (City Journal’s publisher) last fall.
What Bratton criticizes—and he’s not alone—is the NYPD’s alleged refusal to give other law enforcement agencies access to the intelligence that it has so doggedly gathered. “New York has perfected an array of intelligence-gathering initiatives,” he observes. “My concern is that at the federal level, there are too few dots to connect, and in New York, what they collect is not being shared. As a result, law enforcement is not being formed by this information.”
Kelly dismisses this as “old criticism.” But neither he nor his deputies deny that for years after September 11, relations between the department and the FBI were rancorous. The NYPD blames the strain on FBI resentment of Kelly’s creation of what are basically a miniature FBI and CIA within the force. After Kelly tried unsuccessfully to take over the FBI-run Joint Terrorism Task Force—the nation’s first alliance between the bureau and local law enforcement, dating back to 1979—he stationed NYPD detectives overseas and authorized Cohen’s division to conduct its own surveillance and infiltration operations, despite FBI opposition. “For a long while,” Cohen says, “their attitude was: ‘If you’re not under our control, you’re out of control.’ ”
Kelly’s view that combating terrorism was “something we have to do ourselves” partly reflected the devastating effect of pre-9/11 intelligence failures on the law enforcement community. Not only did thousands of civilians die on 9/11; the city’s fire department lost 343 firefighters—the largest loss of life in one day in history for emergency responders; the Port Authority police suffered 37 deaths, the largest loss of life in one day in history for police; the NYPD itself lost 23 officers, the second-largest loss historically. “ ‘Trust us’ was no longer acceptable after 9/11,” observes Sheehan, who is writing a book on counterterrorism, Crush the Cell.
Tensions also grew between the FBI and Sheehan’s Counter Terrorism Bureau. In the summer of 2003, officials said, the FBI passed an unverified tip to the CTB that a “dirty bomb” might be on its way to New York. When Sheehan called a Friday afternoon meeting to discuss a possible deployment to the city of local, state, and federal investigators, emergency-response personnel, and nuclear-detection technology, the FBI began downplaying the threat. Furious, Kelly, Cohen, and Sheehan decided to use the tip to test the city’s emergency-response and intelligence teams in a massive drill. “What we learned from that episode was that when and if we needed federal assets, we were still on our own, even after 9/11,” a former senior city official complains.
Relations continued to deteriorate until the FBI replaced its senior leadership in New York in May 2005. Mark Mershon became the new head of the FBI’s 2,000-person New York field office (the bureau’s largest), and Joseph Demarest, Jr. took over its counterterrorism division. Both determined to repair what they saw as a crucial partnership. A turning point, both sides agree, came in November 2005, when FBI director Robert Mueller III visited the NYPD and had a private sit-down with Kelly. “The director was impressed by New York’s programs,” Demarest says. Mueller agreed with Kelly that New York was “big enough and enough of a target to warrant some independence,” an NYPD official recalled.
The FBI began seeing Cohen’s Intelligence Division not as a rival or nuisance but as an additional source of vital intelligence. Mueller also blessed Mershon’s desire to make the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force, with its 180 FBI and 125 police members, more inclusive. The senior-ranking NYPD official on the task force even became its “comanager.” “You get a real buy-in,” explains Demarest. “Important decisions are no longer made alone.” Cohen adds: “It’s hard to overstate how far we’ve come from the animosity of the early days.” He estimates that, though the FBI has the “first right of refusal” on tips and leads—35,000 have come in since the city set up its counter-terrorism hotline five years ago—the NYPD has pursued almost two-thirds of them.
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NYPD officials insist that the department doesn’t deserve its reputation for arrogance and that its counterterrorism programs have always required cooperation with private businesses and other law enforcement agencies. Since launching Operation Nexus in 2002, notes Cohen, the NYPD has visited more than 30,000 businesses in New York and beyond, encouraging them to report suspicious purchases or other potentially terrorism-related activity.
Another initiative, Operation Shield, helps area businesses assess, and revise, security. The program also shares unclassified intelligence and security tips with private security firms. “Shield is all about sharing with the private sector on a real-time basis,” Kelly says. “Two days after the bombings in Mumbai”—the devastating simultaneous bombings of seven trains in India last year that killed over 200 and wounded hundreds more—“our lieutenant did a teleconference from there with 100 Shield members in our pressroom, giving more specifics about the attack than anyone else had.” A recent session, with more than 500 in attendance, discussed the chlorine bombs that American forces have faced in Iraq.
New York’s “fusion center,” the nation’s first, now includes counterterrorism reps from approximately 40 local, state, and federal agencies. The NYPD coordinates, too, with the numerous agencies that operate the city’s massive public transportation system, with its 6.5 million daily riders. The NYPD protects that system mostly with its own funds, since the federal government has spent only $386 million nationally on transit security—far less than the $24 billion it has spent bolstering aviation security. In 2007, Falkenrath disclosed in March, there had already been 22 subway bomb threats and 31 intelligence leads on subway attack plots.
Despite these outreach efforts, state officials and leaders in other cities still occasionally grumble that the NYPD is reluctant to work with other police departments or, more often, that it neglects to inform them about its operations on their turf. Michael Sheehan, quoting his former colleague Cohen, responds: “There is no such thing as intelligence sharing; there is only intelligence trading.” Even small police forces can develop useful tips and leads with the proper skills and a little creativity, he points out; that’s why the NYPD has invested considerable resources to train and work with police from the tristate area. “But yes,” Sheehan acknowledges, “we prefer to work with people who are seriously in the game—those that run informants and collect real information, rather than just circulate watered-down, nonspecific threat information provided by the Department of Homeland Security.”
Getting more partners “in the game” is the goal of Operation Sentry, the NYPD’s discreet new effort to forge counterterrorism partnerships within a 200-mile radius of the city. Recognizing that the 9/11 attacks began not in New York but in Boston and Portland, Maine, Kelly invited law enforcement officials from counties and cities as far away as Baltimore to a three-day meeting late last year to discuss such issues as the radicalization of Muslim youth and what New York has learned about how to identify terrorism-related conduct.
Francisco Ortiz, New Haven’s police chief, calls Sentry “invaluable.” Through Sentry, he now gets updates on regional threats as they unfold, as well as invitations to bimonthly sessions in New York featuring the latest threat assessments and training courses on improving security at sensitive sites. “They’re helping us become a better listening post in Connecticut for New York,” he says. Ortiz now intends to use some of his own 400-officer force to start a version of New York’s Nexus program to sensitize local businesses to potential threats. New York police trainers have already visited New Haven to help.
Utica police chief C. Allen Pylman finds the Sentry sessions “eye-opening”—particularly one that focused on the “Toronto 18” plot, disrupted last year, to behead the Canadian prime minister, bomb high-profile targets, and conduct random shootings in shopping malls. “My city of 65,000 people is not likely to be a target of terrorism,” Pylman notes. “But are there people here who may be supporting radical causes? Yes, I think so.”
In many ways, Los Angeles and New York might as well be on different planets. Tim Connors, the director of the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Policing Terrorism, which has been advising the LAPD, argues that differences of geography, history, politics, and culture result in dramatically different attitudes toward, and resources for, fighting terrorism.
The sheer mass of sprawling territory that William Bratton’s 12,800-member force and other law enforcement agencies must cover is daunting. “What is New York at its widest—40 miles?” asks L.A. city councilman Jack Weiss, a champion of Bratton’s campaign for more funds and flexibility for the LAPD, especially its counter-terrorism efforts. “The city of Los Angeles alone is some 450 square miles. The county is 4,000 square miles, with 88 incorporated and unincorporated cities and the world’s seventh-largest economy. We have 45 separate police departments.” The FBI’s L.A. field office must protect 18 million residents in seven separate counties, says its head, J. Stephen Tidwell. “Ray Kelly has an army of 37,000. Well, nobody has an army here, so no one can do it by himself.”
“You’re talking about protecting a county that has multiple climates,” agrees John Sullivan, a lieutenant in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and an early champion of intelligence sharing and of redefining police as “first preventers” of terrorism. The county, he points out, contains 85 percent of California’s critical assets.
Civic culture and history also constrain Bratton’s terrorism-fighting capabilities. The LAPD’s notorious resort to illegal surveillance in the past led to extremely tight legal restrictions on whom it could monitor, and for what kinds of suspected offenses. Bratton is trying to loosen those restrictions, but Angelenos remain deeply suspicious of the police. Further, while most New Yorkers witnessed the 9/11 attacks, spent months breathing in air thick with ashes and the stench of scorched metal, lost friends and relatives, or knew people who knew victims, for Angelenos the day was “a disaster movie,” says Amy Zegart, a counterterrorism expert at UCLA. Terrorism—except in the L.A.-based TV show 24—is something that happens to others, not to them.
Another constriction is L.A.’s byzantine political system, dominated by competing fiefdoms and myriad jurisdictions with overlapping responsibilities. The California Highway Patrol, for example, polices the freeways that dissect Bratton’s territory. The Port of Los Angeles, through which some 45 percent of the nation’s cargo passes, has its own police force. So do the area’s airports. The biggest, best-funded local law enforcement office in the city isn’t even Bratton’s LAPD; it’s the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which has a sworn and civilian force of 16,216. And Sheriff Leroy Baca, a savvy elected politician, enjoys a $2.1 billion yearly budget—twice the LAPD’s. Of its $1.2 billion budget, the LAPD spends roughly $24 million on counter-terrorism; New York spends $204 million.
The Police Commission, a five-member panel appointed by the mayor, chooses Los Angeles’s chief cop and is likely to endorse Bratton for a second five-year term. But it’s the 15-member city council that approves Bratton’s budget and personnel levels. While Bratton could in theory shift officers from gang duty to counter-terrorism, Weiss tells me, it would be difficult without the council’s blessing. Nor can Bratton unilaterally create an LAPD career path in intelligence, as New York has done. Sacramento, seat of the state government, also wields far greater leverage over Los Angeles than Albany does over New York. “Everyone has a view on what we should and should not be doing,” Bratton says. “Even the L.A. Times seems to think it runs the police force.”
Such limitations make Bratton’s progress on counterterrorism since his appointment five years ago all the more remarkable. Working with Weiss and a handful of other supporters, he has added 75 officers permanently to the group of 33 who worked on terrorism before 9/11, and he has won the authority to hire or shift another 44 later. Still, the perpetual shortage of manpower and funds has made “sharing,” “jointness,” and “force multiplier” Bratton mantras. He has relentlessly sought to forge closer ties with other law enforcement and public-safety agencies in the region, particularly the FBI. “In this department, you need to justify exclusion,” Bratton says. The FBI’s Tidwell describes law enforcement cooperation in L.A. as “almost genetic,” a tradition, reinforced by Bratton and Baca, forged by decades of joint responses to earthquakes, fires, floods, and other natural disasters that plague the Southland. On the Joint Terrorism Task Force squads, to which Bratton has assigned some 15 officers, the FBI clearly leads. “And that doesn’t cause anyone any problems here,” Tidwell maintains. His office, too, has changed its own attitude toward sharing intelligence. “Our motto used to be ‘restrict and share what you must.’ It’s the opposite today.” Tensions between the LAPD and the Department of Homeland Security have also eased somewhat after DHS secretary Michael Chertoff met last year with the chiefs of the nation’s 15 largest police departments.
Homeland Security now has an official stationed full-time at L.A.’s crown jewel of “jointness”: the Joint Regional Intelligence Center, or “Jay-Rick,” which both Bratton and Chertoff hold up as a model for similar fusion centers soon to be operational in more than three dozen U.S. cities. Launched with a $4 million Homeland Security grant and opened last year in a concrete federal building in Norwalk, a 45-minute drive (without traffic) from downtown L.A., the center has 16 LAPD staffers and some 30 designees from other law enforcement and public-safety agencies. Inside, it resembles a modern-day newsroom: a vast open working space, shoulder-level partitions separating the analysts’ gray desks, computer screens everywhere, and wall-mounted television monitors showing various American and foreign-language news broadcasts.
The JRIC’s analysts don’t conduct investigations; instead, they vet tips and leads—nearly 25 new ones per week—to identify the 1 percent that prove serious. If someone threatens to spread anthrax in the city, for instance, the JRIC’s “threat squad” of some 20 analysts from federal and local agencies tries to figure out if the danger is real. Is the threat written or oral? From someone who seems scientifically knowledgeable? Have hospitals reported people with flu-like symptoms or who are having trouble breathing? Are adequate antibiotics on hand?
The JRIC’s heavy workload troubles Amy Zegart, among others. “The track-every-lead, confiscate-every-toenail-clipper approach may be a political winner, but it’s a counterterrorism loser,” she says. “Officials need to narrow the scope of inquiry to avoid more wild-goose chases rather than conduct them.” Experts also complain that it’s hard to tell who leads the JRIC. In theory, the LAPD, the sheriff’s office, and the FBI “comanage” the center. But what that might mean in an actual crisis is far from clear.
Moreover, the JRIC’s remote location makes it an unlikely assembly point in an emergency. John Miller, Bratton’s former deputy for counterterrorism and now an assistant FBI director in Washington, D.C., denies that the center’s location had anything to do with low rents, as some critics have charged. The choice of Norwalk, he says, ensured that the JRIC would be near, but not too near, logical targets in downtown and West L.A. Also, some officials say, since the FBI-led Joint Drug Intelligence Group already had an office in the building, it was relatively cheap and easy to link the bureau’s classified and unclassified computer lines to the fusion center’s. “The concept is right; the people are right; and they’ll grow into it,” Miller says.
However, staffing shortages prevent the center from operating “24/7,” as envisaged. Getting security clearances has also been a problem, according to Robert Fox, the LAPD lieutenant who comanages the center. “Clearances can take a year,” he says.
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Al-Qaida in Hollywood?
A source of both frustration and pride within the LAPD, the “Hollywood case”—details of which haven’t yet become public—shows how good police work can break up terrorist networks. But this tangled saga also highlights unanswered questions that continue to surround the 9/11 plot. Two senior detectives from the LAPD’s Anti-Terrorism Intelligence Section agreed to discuss the case, provided that they weren’t identified by name, since both remain active terrorism investigators.
The inquiry, they say, began three days after 9/11, when the manager of an apartment building in the heart of Hollywood called the police about a group of French-speaking North Africans who kept rotating into and out of one of his units. Immediately after 9/11, he told police, the men shaved their beards, changed out of traditional Islamic garb, and stopped praying openly and attending the King Fahd mosque, one of the area’s largest, in neighboring Culver City. The manager also claimed that he’d seen the renters remove a license plate from their car, which they pushed to a side street, off the busier boulevard where they usually parked it.
The police quietly sent an officer with a bomb-sniffing dog. The car was clean, but the police impounded it, anyway, for failing to display its plates. They became more suspicious after a series of visits to the apartment. Located in a slightly run-down four-story building in a soon-to-be-gentrified neighborhood, it had no furniture save bedrolls on the floor—“earmarks of a classic safe house,” one of the detectives points out. Posters of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, a known al-Qaida target, and New York’s glittering skyline adorned the walls. One officer spotted a pair of suitcases in the hallway: the luggage tags showed that they had been on a plane coming from Germany.
Learning that 9/11 bomber Mohammad Atta had belonged to a radical cell in Hamburg, “we knew enough to be worried,” a detective recalls. One of the North Africans, questioned by the police, claimed that the luggage belonged to his brother, who had recently arrived from Germany. But the police found no trace of the brother, either at the apartment or anywhere in L.A.
The North Africans told other inconsistent stories. Virtually all were jobless; several had registered to obtain pilot’s licenses or shown an interest in doing so. (The police later learned that enrolling in pilot’s school was a quick way of securing a student visa.) One was already a pilot. A police check of public records disclosed that he had claimed on an application to have attended a Florida flight school that, it later turned out, one of the 9/11 hijackers had also attended. Public records also showed that he had registered at an address in Arizona, not far from where a second hijacker had gone to flight school. “It wasn’t enough for the FBI at the start, but it was for us,” a detective notes.
The LAPD put the apartment and its residents—as well as their friends and associates, some 250 people in all—under surveillance. Eventually, it assigned more than 150 investigators and support employees to the case. Their focus eventually narrowed to a core of eight or ten suspects. “We knew we were dealing with a network of some kind,” a detective says. But investigators couldn’t prove that the group that they were watching was, as they suspected, an al-Qaida support cell in the heart of Hollywood.
When the police discovered that two of the men initially questioned were in the country illegally, they arrested them. One by one, others under surveillance were quietly arrested on various criminal charges—identity theft, illegal gun possession, and marriage and insurance fraud—none of which even mentioned terrorism. In some cases, immigration authorities deported the men on immigration charges. In other cases, suspects pleaded guilty and went to jail, or voluntarily left the country. One of the two men originally arrested on immigration charges bailed himself out of jail. The second secretly tried to obtain firearms in prison. Deported in 2002, both have now disappeared.
The investigation soon focused on a man who seemed to be at the cell’s hub—Qualid Benomrane, a North African taxi driver mentioned in a footnote of the 9/11 Commission Report. Arrested on immigration charges in early 2002, he told the police that prior to the attacks he had driven “two Saudis” around L.A. and to San Diego’s Sea World, after being introduced to them by Fahad al-Thumairy, a diplomat at the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles. Benomrane also told police that someone at the consulate had asked al-Thumairy to take care of the two men.
According to the 9/11 report, Benomrane, shown pictures of Khaled al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, two of the 9/11 hijackers, at first pulled their photos out of the group he was shown, but later claimed not to recognize them. The 9/11 commission investigators concluded that “the hypothesis that Benomrane’s ‘two Saudis’ were Hazmi and Midhar” couldn’t be substantiated.
But the LAPD detectives who investigated the case remain convinced that Benomrane and al-Thumairy were militants in the al-Qaida support network and that Benomrane’s passengers were, in fact, the two hijackers. “Our investigation found, for instance, that Benomrane had taken photos of the structural supports of the Golden Gate Bridge during a trip to northern California,” a detective says. The LAPD also discovered that Benomrane had taken his two Saudi passengers to a gas station where one of the two San Diego–based hijackers had worked before heading east to carry out his deadly mission. (The FBI, which participated in the investigation, declined comment since the inquiry was classified, but a commission investigator said that the bureau has no record of such a side trip.)
The LAPD investigators decided to question Benomrane in jail once more, but they never got the chance: he was deported on the eve of their visit to see him (a textbook example of one part of government’s not talking to another). Benomrane, too, has disappeared. But using standard policing tactics and procedures, the LAPD investigators broke up what they believe was a cell that supported al-Qaida’s 9/11 mission in ways still not fully understood. “We did all the right things without knowing it,” a detective notes, calling the case the LAPD’s “coming of age” in counterterrorism.
“Only the police are close enough to the ground to be able to go after terrorists like this by using standard criminal investigations,” argues Stephan C. Margolis, who now heads the LAPD’s Anti-Terrorism Intelligence Section. “The FBI has 12,000 agents for the entire country, only some of whom do counterterrorism. Local and state law enforcement includes some 800,000 people who know their territory. We are destined to be frontline soldiers in what could be a very long and complicated war.”
Operation Archangel, a second pillar of the LAPD’s counterterrorism effort (also financed by millions in Homeland Security funds), uses sophisticated computer software to identify, prioritize, and protect vulnerable targets—so far, 500 of them, ranging from Disneyland to nuclear plants, officials say. Archangel asks the owners and operators of these sites to provide the latest structural information—floor plans, air-conditioning and electrical-system locations, entrances and stairwells, and so on—which goes into a massive database; the software then assesses vulnerabilities and devises deterrence and prevention strategies, as well as emergency response plans. “We’re basically doing what we did before, but on steroids,” says Tom McDonald, the LAPD lieutenant who runs Archangel and sees it, as many federal officials do, as something that other cities can emulate.
If such a system sounds obvious, it isn’t, Miller points out. For instance, during the Columbine massacre, students had to help police sketch the school’s floor plan on top of a squad car with a marker. “Archangel is the kind of automated system you would need in an emergency,” Miller says.
But Archangel, located in the deliberately nondescript basement of an office building in West L.A., operates with just 15 people—one-third its projected staffing—and not around the clock. “We are hurt, not just in this program, by the fact that our city does not permit federal Homeland Security funds to pay for full-time city employees,” says Michael Downing, who spent time in London studying terrorism before taking command of the LAPD’s Counter-Terrorism and Criminal Intelligence Bureau this spring. “Resources are definitely a challenge.”
Another, adds McDonald, is the reluctance of some private businesses to associate openly with his program, fearing that being identified as targets will drive away business. Such concerns rule out L.A.’s adoption of the NYPD’s “in-your-face” exercises, like its random deployments of heavily armed police and vehicles to sites around the city. Bearing names like “Atlas” and “Hercules,” these displays of force, says Kelly, deter terrorists by showing them that New York is just too tough a target. “There’s less fear here than in New York, and less interest in generating fear,” says William McSweeney, chief of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department’s Office of Homeland Security.
The lack of public urgency means that Bratton must work doubly hard to get the counterterrorism manpower, money, and information that he needs. And that, in turn, has involved lots of travel, for which he has faced criticism. While Kelly is famously a homebody—he’s taken no vacation since starting in October 2002 and has made only five day trips from the city since then—Bratton was out of town more than a third of 2005, and nearly as often last year. Staunchly defended by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Bratton says that the LAPD and the city benefit from the information and cooperation that he gets from his travels. The explanation has satisfied most critics. Nor do Angelenos balk at their chief’s $300,000-plus salary, much heftier than Commissioner Kelly’s $189,700.
Continuing to promote “jointness,” Bratton is now trying to get several cities to pool resources to station detectives overseas, as New York has for several years; these liaison officers would share their reports among those who helped finance their posts. Supported by the Manhattan Institute and the Department of Homeland Security, he is also planning a national police academy in Los Angeles to train police from across the country in intelligence-led policing skills. “The nation’s 18,000 local police departments have been crying out for such advanced training and broader strategic guidance,” says Jerry Ratcliffe, who teaches at Temple University and attended the first planning meeting.
Despite their differences, both the NYPD and the LAPD agree that a key way to crush incipient terrorist cells and thwart terrorism is to use local laws and follow locally generated leads, which, after all, is what good police departments do best. Relying on this low-key approach, Downing says, the LAPD has arrested some 200 American citizens and foreigners with suspected ties to terrorist groups since September 11. At present, he adds, his division has 54 open intelligence cases, involving at least 250 “persons of interest.” One of the most celebrated examples of the strategy is the 2005 Torrance case, in which the arrest of two men for robbing a gas station in that city eventually unraveled a militant Islamic plot to attack U.S. military facilities, synagogues, and other places where Jews gather in Los Angeles County. But L.A., Downing admits, still lacks the resources to develop its own undercover agents and informants. “We do that with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force,” he says.
Because most American cities resemble L.A. more than they do New York, Bratton’s priority of pooling resources and information is likely to be a more attractive, if less ambitious, model than New York City’s approach, which includes running its own undercover counter-terrorism operations. But Washington has begun to acknowledge the virtue of New York’s argument that thwarting terrorism requires better local intelligence about what potentially dangerous groups and individuals are planning. Last year, the Department of Homeland Security’s “Urban Area Security Initiative” began to offer grants to help local police strengthen their ability to collect and analyze intelligence. Our cities, L.A. and New York included, will be safer for it.
Research for this article was supported by the Brunie Fund for New York Journalism.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_3_preventing_terrorism.html
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070809/NATION/108090085/1001
Californian seeks hearing on Islamic, Mexican ties
By Sara A. Carter
August 9, 2007
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A ranking House Republican yesterday demanded a hearing based on recent reports that Islamic terrorists embedded in the United States are teaming with Mexican drug cartels to fund terrorism networks overseas.
Rep. Ed Royce, ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs terrorism and nonproliferation subcommittee, said the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) document ? first reported yesterday by The Washington Times ? highlights how vulnerable the nation is when fighting the war on terrorism.
"I'll be asking the terrorism subcommittee to hold a hearing on the DEA report's disturbing findings," said Mr. Royce of California. "A flood of name changes from Arabic to Hispanic and the reported linking of drug cartels on the Texas border with Middle East terrorism needs to be thoroughly investigated."
Likewise, Rep. John Culberson, Texas Republican, said the DEA document revealed startling evidence that Islamic radicals are camouflaging themselves as Hispanics while conducting business with violent drug-trafficking organizations.
"I have been ringing the bell about this serious threat of Islamic individuals changing their surnames to Hispanic surnames for three to four years," Mr. Culberson said. "Unfortunately, Homeland Security's highest priority is to hide the truth from Congress and the public. I just hope we're not closing the barn door after terrorists have already made their way in."
Mr. Culberson, a member of the House Appropriations homeland security subcommittee, yesterday wrote a letter to the subcommittee's chairman, Rep. David E. Price, North Carolina Democrat, requesting a full investigation and hearing into the matter. A spokesman for Mr. Price said the committee is contacting the law-enforcement agencies and will work closely with Mr. Culberson's office on the matter.
"We certainly want to learn more about the matter from the agencies involved," said Paul Cox, press secretary to Mr. Price.
The 2005 DEA report outlines several incidents in which multiple Middle Eastern drug-trafficking and terrorist cells in the U.S. are funding terrorism networks overseas with the aid of Mexican cartels. These sleeper cells use established Mexican cartels with highly sophisticated trafficking routes to move narcotics ? and other contraband ? in and out of the United States, the report said.
These "persons of interest" speak Arabic, Spanish and Hebrew fluently, according to the document.
The report includes photographs of known Middle Easterners who "appear to be Hispanic; they are in fact, all Spanish-speaking Arabic drug traffickers supporting Middle East terrorism from their base of operations" in the southwestern United States, according to the DEA.
Michael Maxwell, a senior analyst with the House Appropriations homeland security subcommittee, said that the report is evidence that terrorism cells exist in the U.S. and are being aided by dangerous narco-trafficking cartels.
"While the procurement of fraudulent or multiple identities by terrorists to hide criminal activity is not new, the information suggests terrorist tradecraft is evolving and relationships now exist between Mexican and Middle Eastern individuals or groups, embedded here in the United States," he added.
The ties are as deep as family, according to the DEA report, which said that a Middle Eastern member of the Muslim Brotherhood, involved in narcotics sales and other crimes, married into a Mexican narcotics family.
"One of the targets of this investigation is an Arabic man," the document said.
A 2006 Department of Homeland Security intelligence report — also obtained by The Times — said that Al Qaeda has tried and is planning on using the Southwest border to enter the U.S.
Mark Juergensmeyer, director of the Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara and a terrorism specialist, said that links between terrorism and narcotics trafficking have been well-established in foreign nations, such as Afghanistan.
But Mr. Juergensmeyer said the DEA report linking terrorist organizations in the United States to Mexican drug cartels displays a new evolution in terrorist tactics and poses a serious concern in the area of security.
"In some ways, that's even more frightening to think that drug-trafficking organizations in Mexico may adopt some jihadist ideology," he said. "If it's an ideology being adopted by a drug culture then that makes this situation very dangerous."
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http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_3_urban_terrorism.html
The Coming Urban Terror
Systems disruption, networked gangs, and bioweapons
John Robb
Summer 2007
For the first time in history, announced researchers this May, a majority of the world’s population is living in urban environments. Cities—efficient hubs connecting international flows of people, energy, communications, and capital—are thriving in our global economy as never before. However, the same factors that make cities hubs of globalization also make them vulnerable to small-group terror and violence.
Over the last few years, small groups’ ability to conduct terrorism has shown radical improvements in productivity—their capacity to inflict economic, physical, and moral damage. These groups, motivated by everything from gang membership to religious extremism, have taken advantage of easy access to our global superinfrastructure, revenues from growing illicit commercial flows, and ubiquitously available new technologies to cross the threshold necessary to become terrible threats. September 11, 2001, marked their arrival at that threshold.
Unfortunately, the improvements in lethality that we have already seen are just the beginning. The arc of productivity growth that lets small groups terrorize at ever-higher levels of death and disruption stretches as far as the eye can see. Eventually, one man may even be able to wield the destructive power that only nation-states possess today. It is a perverse twist of history that this new threat arrives at the same moment that wars between states are receding into the past. Thanks to global interdependence, state-against-state warfare is far less likely than it used to be, and viable only against disconnected or powerless states. But the underlying processes of globalization have made us exceedingly vulnerable to nonstate enemies. The mechanisms of power and control that states once exerted will continue to weaken as global interconnectivity increases. Small groups of terrorists can already attack deep within any state, riding on the highways of interconnectivity, unconcerned about our porous borders and our nation-state militaries. These terrorists’ likeliest point of origin, and their likeliest destination, is the city.
Cities played a vital defensive role in the last major evolution of conventional state-versus-state warfare. Between the world wars, the refinement of technologies—particularly the combustion engine, when combined with armor—made it possible for armies to move at much higher speeds than in the past, so new methods of warfare emphasized armored motorized maneuver as a way to pierce the opposition’s solid defensive lines and range deep into soft, undefended rear areas. These incursions, the armored thrusts of blitzkrieg, turned an army’s size against itself: even the smallest armored vanguard could easily disrupt the supply of ammunition, fuel, and rations necessary to maintain the huge armies of the twentieth century in the field.
To defend against these thrusts, the theoretician J. F. C. Fuller wrote in the 1930s, cities could be used as anchor or pivot points to engage armored forces in attacks on static positions, bogging down the offensive. Tanks couldn’t move quickly through cities, and if they bypassed them and struck too deeply into enemy territory, their supply lines—in particular, of the gasoline they drank greedily—would become vulnerable. The city, Fuller anticipated, could serve as a vast fortress, requiring the fast new armor to revert to the ancient tactic of the siege. That’s exactly what happened in practice during World War II, when the defenses mounted in Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad played a major role in the Allied victory.
But in the current evolution of warfare, cities are no longer defensive anchors against armored thrusts ranging through the countryside. They have become the main targets of offensive action themselves. Just as the huge militaries of the early twentieth century were vulnerable to supply and communications disruption, cities are now so heavily dependent on a constant flow of services from various centralized systems that even the simplest attacks on those systems can cause massive disruption.
Most of the networks that we rely on for city life—communications, electricity, transportation, water—are overused, interdependent, and extremely complex. They developed organically as what scholars in the emerging field of network science call “scale-free networks,” which contain large hubs with a plethora of connections to smaller and more isolated local clusters. Such networks are economically efficient and resistant to random failure—but they are also extremely vulnerable to intentional disruptions, as Albert-Laszlo Barabasi shows in his important book Linked: The New Science of Networks. In practice, this means that a very small number of attacks on the critical hubs of a scale-free network can collapse the entire network. Such a collapse can occasionally happen by accident, when random failure hits a critical node; think of the huge Northeast blackout of 2003, which caused $6.4 billion in damage.
Further, the networks of our global superinfrastructure are tightly “coupled”—so tightly interconnected, that is, that any change in one has a nearly instantaneous effect on the others. Attacking one network is like knocking over the first domino in a series: it leads to cascades of failure through a variety of connected networks, faster than human managers can respond.
The ongoing attacks on the systems that support Baghdad’s 5 million people illustrate the vulnerability of modern networks. Over the last four years, guerrilla assaults on electrical systems have reduced Baghdad’s power to an average of four or five hours a day. And the insurgents have been busily finding new ways to cut power: no longer do they make simple attacks on single transmission towers. Instead, they destroy multiple towers in series and remove the copper wire for resale to fund the operation; they ambush repair crews in order to slow repairs radically; they attack the natural gas and water pipelines that feed the power plants. In September 2004, one attack on an oil pipeline that fed a power plant quickly led to a cascade of power failures that blacked out electricity throughout Iraq.
Lack of adequate power is a major reason why economic recovery has been nearly impossible in Iraq. No wonder that, in account after account, nearly the first criticism that any Iraqi citizen levels against the government is its inability to keep the lights on. Deprived of services, citizens are forced to turn to local groups—many of them at war with the government—for black-market alternatives. This money, in turn, fuels further violence, and the government loses legitimacy.
Insurgents have directed such disruptive attacks against nearly all the services necessary to get a city of 5 million through the day: water pipes, trucking, and distribution lines for gasoline and kerosene. And because of these networks’ complexity and interconnectivity, even small attacks, costing in the low thousands of dollars to carry out, can cause tens of millions and occasionally hundreds of millions of dollars in damage.
Iraq is a petri dish for modern conflict, the Spanish Civil War of our times. It’s the place where small groups are learning to fight modern militaries and modern societies and win. As a result, we can expect to see systems disruption used again and again in modern conflict—certainly against megacities in the developing world, and even against those in the developed West, as we have already seen in London, Madrid, and Moscow.
Another growing threat to our cities, commonest so far in the developing world, is gangs challenging government for control. For three sultry July days in 2006, a gang called PCC (Primeiro Comando da Capital, “First Command of the Capital”) held hostage the 20 million inhabitants of the greater São Paulo area through a campaign of violence. Gang members razed police stations, attacked banks, rioted in prisons, and torched dozens of buses, shutting down a transportation system serving 2.9 million people a day.
The previous May, a similar series of attacks had terrified the city. “The attackers moved on foot, and by car and motorbike,” wrote William Langewiesche in Vanity Fair. “They were not rioters, revolutionaries, or the graduates of terrorist camps. They were anonymous young men and women, dressed in ordinary clothes, unidentifiable in advance, and indistinguishable afterward. Wielding pistols, automatic rifles, and firebombs, they emerged from within the city, struck fast, and vanished on the spot. Their acts were criminal, but the attackers did not loot, rob, or steal. They burned buses, banks, and public buildings, and went hard after the forces of order—gunning down the police in their neighborhood posts, in their homes, and on the streets.”
The violence hasn’t been limited to São Paulo. In December 2006, a copycat campaign by an urban gang called the Comando Vermelho (“Red Command”) shut down Rio de Janeiro, too. In both cases, the gangs fomenting the violence didn’t list demands or send ultimatums to the government. Rather, they were flexing their muscles, testing their ability to challenge the government monopoly on violence.
Both gangs had steadily accumulated power for a decade, helped in part by globalization, which simplifies making connections to the multitrillion-dollar global black-market economy. With these new connections, the gangs’ profit horizon became limitless, fueling rapid expansion. New communications technology, particularly cell phones, played a part, too, making it possible for the gangs to thrive as loose associations, and allowing a geographical and organizational dispersion that rendered them nearly invulnerable to attack. The PCC has been particularly successful, growing from a small prison gang in the mid-nineties to a group that today controls nearly half of São Paulo’s slums and its millions of inhabitants. An escalating confrontation between these gangs and the city governments appears inevitable.
The gangs’ rapid rise into challengers to urban authorities is something that we will see again elsewhere. This dynamic is already at work in American cities in the rise of MS-13, a rapidly expanding transnational gang with a loose organizational structure, a propensity for violence, and access to millions in illicit gains. It already has an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 members, dispersed over 31 U.S. states and several Latin American countries, and its proliferation continues unabated, despite close attention from law enforcement. Like the PCC, MS-13 or a similar American gang may eventually find that it has sufficient power to hold a city hostage through disruption.
The final threat that small groups pose to cities is weapons of mass destruction. Though most of the worry over WMDs has focused on nuclear weapons, those aren’t the real long-term problem. Not only is the vast manufacturing capability of a nation-state required to produce the basic nuclear materials, but those materials are difficult to manipulate, transport, and turn into weapons. Nor is it easy to assemble a nuke from parts bought on the black market; if it were, nation-states like Iran, which have far more resources at their disposal than terrorist groups do, would be doing just that instead of resorting to internal production.
It’s also unlikely that a state would give terrorists a nuclear weapon. Sovereignty and national prestige are tightly connected to the production of nukes. Sharing them with terrorists would grant immense power to a group outside the state’s control—the equivalent of giving Osama bin Laden the keys to the presidential palace. If that isn’t deterrent enough, the likelihood of retaliation is, since states, unlike terrorist groups, have targets that can be destroyed. The result of a nuclear explosion in Moscow or New York would very probably be the annihilation of the country that manufactured the bomb, once its identity was determined—as it surely would be, since no plot of that size can remain secret for long.
Even in the very unlikely case that a nuclear weapon did end up in terrorist hands, it would be a single horrible incident, rather than an ongoing threat. The same is true of dirty bombs, which disperse radioactive material through conventional explosives. No, the real long-term danger from small groups is the use of biotechnology to build weapons of mass destruction. In contrast with nuclear technology, biotech’s knowledge and tools are already widely dispersed—and their power is increasing exponentially.
The biotech field is in the middle of a massive improvement in productivity through advances in computing power. In fact, the curves of improvement that we see in biotechnology mirror the rates of improvement in computing dictated by Moore’s Law—the observation, borne out by decades of experience, that the ratio of performance to price of computing power doubles every 24 months. This means that incredible power will soon be in the hands of individuals. University of Washington engineer Robert Carlson observes that if current trends in the rate of improvement in DNA sequencing continue, “within a decade a single person at the lab bench could sequence or synthesize all the DNA describing all the people on the planet many times over in an eight-hour day.” And with ever tinier, cheaper, and more widely available tools, a large and decentralized industrial base that is hiring lab techs at a double-digit growth rate, and the active transfer of knowledge via the Internet (the blueprints of the entire smallpox virus now circulate on the Web), biotech is too widely available for us to contain it.
In less than a decade, then, biotechnology will be ripe for the widespread development of weapons of mass destruction, and it fits the requirements of small-group warfare perfectly. It is small, inexpensive, and easy to manufacture in secret. Also, since dangerous biotechnology is based primarily on the manipulation of information, it will make rapid progress through the same kind of amateur tinkering that currently produces new computer viruses. Terrorists also have a growing advantage in delivering bioweapons. The increasing porousness of national borders, size of global megacities, and volume of air travel all mean that the delivery and percolation of bioweapons will be fast-moving and widespread—potentially on several continents at once.
It is almost certain that we will see repeated, perhaps incessant, attempts to deploy bioweapons with new strains of viruses or bacteria. Picture a Russian biohacker who, a decade from now, designs a new, deadly form of the common flu virus and sells it on the Internet, just as computer viruses and worms get sold today. The terrorist group that buys the design sends it to a recently hired lab tech in Pakistan, who performs the required modifications with widely available tools. The product then ships by mail to London, to the awaiting “suicide vectors”—men who infect themselves and then board airplanes headed to world destinations, infecting passengers on the planes and in crowded terminals. The infection spreads quickly, going global in days—long before anyone detects it.
It’s very possible that many cities will fall in the face of such deadly threats. Megacities in the developing world—which often, because of their rapid growth, widespread corruption, and illegitimate governance, aren’t able to provide security or basic services for their citizens—are particularly vulnerable. However, cities in the developed world that properly appreciate the threats arrayed against them may devise startlingly innovative solutions.
In almost all cases, cities can defend themselves from their new enemies through effective decentralization. To counter systems disruption, decentralized services—the capability of smaller areas within cities to provide backup services, at least on a temporary basis—could radically diminish the harmful consequences of disconnection from the larger global grid. In New York, this would mean storage or limited production capability of backup electricity, water, and fuel, with easy connections to the delivery grid—at the borough level or even smaller. These backups would then provide a means of restoring central services rapidly after a failure.
Similarly, cities may combat networked gangs by decentralizing their own security. Cities have long maintained centralized police forces, but gangs can often overwhelm them. Many governments are responding with militarized police: China is building a million-man paramilitary force, for example; and even in the United States, the use of SWAT teams has increased from 3,000 deployments a year in the 1980s to 50,000 a year in 2006. But militarized police may too easily become an army of occupation, and, if corrupt, as they are in Brazil, they may become enemies of the state along with the gangs.
A better solution involves local security forces, either locally recruited or bought on the marketplace (such as Blackwater), which can be powerful bulwarks against small-group terrorism. Such forces may become a vital component in our defense against bioterrorism, too, since they can enforce local containment—and since large centralized services, like the ones we have today, might actually accelerate the propagation of bioweapons. Still, if improperly established, local forces can also become rogue criminal entities, like the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia and the militias in Rio de Janeiro. Governments need to regulate them carefully.
In the future, we probably won’t know exactly how we will be attacked until it happens. In highly uncertain situations like this, centralized solutions that emphasize uniform responses will often collapse. Heterogeneous systems, by contrast, are unlikely to fail catastrophically. Moreover, local innovation—supplemented by a marketplace in goods and services that improve security, detection, monitoring, and so on—is likely to develop responses to threats quickly and effectively. Other localities will copy those responses that prove successful.
In June 2007, the FBI and local law enforcement halted a plot to blow up the John F. Kennedy International Airport’s fuel tanks and feeder pipelines. This was another great example of how police forces, if used correctly, can defuse threats before they become a menace [see “On the Front Line in the War on Terrorism”]. However, our current level of safety will not last. The selection of the target demonstrated clearly that future attackers will take advantage of our systems’ vulnerability to disruption, which will sharply increase the number of potential targets. It also showed that these threats can emerge spontaneously from small groups unconnected to al-Qaida. More and more attempts will come, with higher and higher rates of success. Our choice is simple: we can rely exclusively on our current security systems to stop the threats—and suffer the consequences when they don’t—or we can take measures to mitigate the impact of these threats by exerting local control over essential services.
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http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/018175.php
Tomorrow Bensman will be the keynote speaker presenting his findings at a conference of some 120 Assistant United States Attorneys whose jurisdiction covers the Texas/Mexico border. Bensman has kindly summarized his findings for us:
-- More than 5,700 illegal migrants from 43 Islamic countries, including State Sponsors of Terror, have been caught while traveling over the Canadian and Mexican borders along well-established underground smuggling routes since 9-11, a traffic that continues daily. People caught coming from these countries in the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa are labeled by our federal law enforcement agencies as "Special Interest Aliens."
-- I have estimated that between 20,000 and 60,000 have gotten through without getting caught since 9/11. Most are probably economic or politically persecuted migrants but all of those who evaded border patrol also did not undergo terror watch list screening and are walking around the country anonymous. This evasion constitutes the primary national security vulnerability of our unguarded borders.
-- These migrants, though relatively small in total numbers, are high risk because they hail from countries where American troops are actively battling Islamic insurgents such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and the Philippines. They come from nations where radical Islamic organizations have bombed U.S. interests or murdered
Americans, such as Kenya, Tanzania, and Lebanon. And they come from State Sponsors of Terrorism such as Syria, Iran and Sudan. And lastly, they come from Saudi Arabia.
-- Unguarded U.S. borders are most certainly in terrorist playbooks as a means of entering the country. Since the late 1990s, at least a dozen confirmed terrorists have sneaked over U.S. borders, including operatives from Hezbollah, Hamas, the Tamil Tigers and one Al Qaida terrorist once No. 27 on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorist list.
-- The general flow of routes across the world almost always head toward South America and Central America first because it puts them within easy striking distance of the Mexican border. Corrupt customs and government officials, as well as Arab settler populations in those countries help keep this this traffic moving northward, providing safe haven, jobs and smuggling connections.
-- Latin American consulates based in the Middle East are selling tourist visas outright for bribes or simply issuing them to local travelers in places like Damascus, Beirut and Amman Jordan without regard to U.S. security interests.
-- Large numbers eventually pass through Guatemala, which issues visas regularly from its foreign consulate offices in places like Jordan and Egypt, making illegal border crossings through Texas possible.
-- Since 9/11, Mexico has fielded a surprisingly robust effort to interdict Special Interest Migrants. Mexican intelligence officers interrogate and often deport special interest aliens in partnership with American FBI and CIA agents. Often, the Mexicans allow American agents inside their detention facilities. But severe shortages of manpower and interpreters result in the release of many onto the streets of Mexico -- without thorough threat assessements -- to continue on toward the U.S. border.
-- On the U.S. side of the border, the FBI is supposed to interrogate and conduct a threat assessment and interrogations on every captured special interest alien. But the process is severely flawed and open to error. Often, the FBI signs off on captured SIAs (allowing them access to the political asylum process) without conclusively knowing whether they are or are not terrorists.
-- Furthermore, border patrol agents are simply using a process called "expedited removal" to kick SIAs back into Mexico, where they will certainly try to cross again, with no investigation or FBI referral whatsoever.
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http://michellemalkin.com/2007/08/30/mystery-at-goose-creek-update-federal-grand-jury-investigates/
Speaking of SIAs....
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http://www.memri.org/bin/opener_latest.cgi?ID=SD170207
Special Dispatch Series - No. 1702
August 31, 2007 No.1702
On Islamist Websites: How to Join Al-Qaeda, Form a Jihad Cell, and Select a Western Target – '[Is] Assassinating the American Ambassador... Difficult For Someone Who Has Already Crushed America in His Home?'
On August 26, Islamist websites posted an item titled "How to Join Al-Qaeda." It is not clear when the item was written; it was produced by the website Al-Thabitoun 'Ala Al-'Ahd, which is affiliated with Al-Qaeda in Egypt and is currently inactive.
The item calls on every Muslim to regard jihad as a personal duty and to take initiative to establish a jihad cell without waiting for recognition from Al-Qaeda. It goes on to elaborate on how to form and run the cell, how to raise funds, and how to select a target, "for example, assassinating the American ambassador," which, it states, "takes no more than a gun and a bullet."
The following are excerpts from the item:
"You feel that you want to carry a weapon, fight, and kill the occupiers, and that it is our duty to call for jihad as much as to call for prayer... All that is required is a firm personal decision to fulfill this obligation, and participation in jihad and the resistance...
"Do you really have to meet Osama bin Laden in person in order to become a jihad fighter? Do you have to be recognized by Al-Qaeda as one of its members to become a jihad fighter? If Al-Qaeda commanders should be killed, would the jihad be eliminated? What would you do if Al-Qaeda did not exist today? How is Osama bin Laden different from you? - [yet] he managed to establish the world jihad organization. Who provided training to Osama bin Laden and Abdallah 'Azzam when they went to Afghanistan to become the first Arab jihad fighters?
"The answers to these questions are the following: I don't have to meet Osama bin Laden to become a jihad fighter. Moreover, there is no need to meet even one jihad fighter to become one. Neither do I need recognition from Al-Qaeda...
"As the first step, imagine that Al-Qaeda does not exist and that you are interested [in waging] jihad - what would you do in this case?... If you know any young people - whether one, two, or more - in your area, mosque, or university who are as dedicated and enthusiastic about jihad as you are, come to an understanding with them, and together form a cell whose objective is to help Islam and only Islam...
"At first, your cell should have no more than five members, all absolutely trustworthy... The cell must have a commander and a shura council... The commander must clearly realize that he is Osama bin Laden to the cell members...
"Each cell should have a source of funding... When you have several members, you will [surely] find the funds for your cell... Then you should buy weapons, make plans, brainstorm, plot your plans, monitor your enemy's important objectives, and study its moves. Set a goal; for example, assassinating the American ambassador - is it so difficult? Is it [indeed] difficult for someone who has already crushed America in her home?
"What is the difference between you and the hero of the New York attack, Muhammad Atta, who planned an action which even today shakes the world every time it is mentioned? Assassinating the ambassador takes no more than a gun and a bullet. One could disguise oneself as a peddler in order to tail [the target], which shouldn't cost a lot of money...
"The cells must maintain contact among themselves, but by no means in a direct or conventional way. The contact must be spiritual: What will unite you is the love of Islam and the motto "There is no God but Allah." Even if the contact between [your] cell and the rest is indirect, it will be close... You must meet once a month... You must not meet in the same place twice... Personal meetings with a small number of people [must take place] once a week...
"From the moment the cell is established, its members must be divided - into secret members, members who do not [act] openly and are not wanted by the authorities, and members who are wanted (who have been arrested in the past or on whom the intelligence apparatuses have a file)... The secret members must perform intelligence tasks, collect information, raise funds, recruit [new members], and assist in [actual operations]. Those who act in the open must perform the primary military operations, such as assassinations, firing at enemy facilities, etc.
"You must be aware that you have brothers everywhere, and that they are expecting the actions of you and your friends even if they don't know you in person or by name...
"Every jihad cell is a microcosm of the world jihad organization."
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http://wtop.com/?nid=251&sid=1235143#
TSA Worried About 'Things That Look Normal'
August 30, 2007 - 6:05am
J.J. Green, WTOP Radio
WASHINGTON -- The seventh floor of Transportation Security Administration headquarters is quiet when we walk in, but behind the calm, a storm is brewing.
It's a massive, ominous problem spanning 3.7 million square miles, 9,500 miles of coastline and 2,500 miles of land border with Canada --a government warning that a terror attack may be about to happen somewhere in the U.S. before summer's end.
This warning has put TSA Administrator Kip Hawley in a difficult position.
"Staying ahead of the threat and if you look at an environment where the threat picture says there are people interested in doing an attack, but you don't have the specifics on the who, what, where, when and how; what do you do about it?" Hawley says. "How do you put in places security measures that respond to threats that are out there, but you don't know exactly how it's going to come?"
For Hawley, this time period can't be business as usual. He says looking for things out of the ordinary isn't good enough.
"We have to pay attention to things that look normal --and that's the hard part."
As a result, TSA's Visible Intermodal Protection and Response teams - or VIPER - and Behavior Detection teams have been put on alert. They patrol Amtrak's Northeast Corridor, Los Angeles rail lines; ferries in Washington state; bus stations in Houston; and mass transit systems in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Washington and Baltimore and more.
The VIPER teams usually are made up of two air marshals, one TSA bomb-sniffing-canine team, one or two transportation security inspectors and a local law enforcement officer. It's one of the best tools Hawley's got to go looking for a needle in a haystack.
"TSA isn't reinventing the wheel. [The Department of Transportation] has been working transportation safety issues for a long time. Many of those measures form a very solid security foundation. Our job is to link with the safety activities and add value on top of that where there are particular security-specific needs," Hawley told the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. "Intelligence sharing, vulnerability analysis, technology sharing, and our VIPER teams are examples of that value-add."
Among the areas of most concern for the Homeland Security community are high density passenger transit systems in urban areas with underwater or underground tunnels; and highly toxic chemicals in rail cars that are standing unattended in high risk urban areas.
How serious is the threat?
U.S. intelligence officials believe a resurgent Al-Qaeda may have people in the U.S. engaged in an active plot to attack the U.S. The lack of precise tactical detail is perhaps the reason why Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said he had a "gut feeling" recently, but did not adjust the threat level. On top of that, one of the nation's top counter terrorism officials puts this all into context.
Ret. Vice Admiral John Scott Redd, the Head of the National Counter Terrorism Center, told Newsweek magazine, another attack on America is "inevitable".
"We have very strong indicators that al-Qaeda is planning to attack the West and is likely to [try to] attack, and we are pretty sure about that. We know some of the precursors ... they would like to come West, and they would like to come as far West as they can," he says.
It's not just his words that bring this home. The fact that he said anything at all is telling, because he's the E.F. Hutton of the intelligence community.
He never talks just to hear himself.
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http://counterterrorismblog.org/2007/09/print/the_tampa...ers_jihadists_or.php
Counterterrorism Blog
The Tampa Bombers: Jihadists or "Beach Boys?"
By Walid Phares
Six years after 9/11, the mainstream reading of the war on Terror still circles around the essence of the conflict. Two young men indicted for charges of possession of explosives aren't yet perceived as part of an Urban Jihadist campaign inside the United States, despite the fact that a number of cells and of individuals have been arrested over the past years, all linked to Jihadism. Ahmed Abdellatif Sherif Mohamed, 24 and Youssef Samir Megahed (in Egyptian accent it reads “Mujahid”) 21, are affiliated with South Florida University in Tampa. As one reviews all news reporting (until this day), no link was made yet to an ideology which is the master chain between the perpetrators and their action. The AP story begins with "two Egyptian students at the University of South Florida were indicted Friday on charges of carrying explosive materials across states lines and one was accused of teaching the other how to use them for violent reasons." The News Agency doesn't explain what these violent reasons are. Was it about drugs, social crisis, Palestine, Americans Politics, Egyptian politics, Abortion, or other matters? The mainstream media says "Terrorism," and so advances the Government, so far.
Ahmed Mohamed is an engineering graduate student and teaching assistant at the Tampa-based University. He and Megahed are facing "terrorism" charges for "teaching and demonstrating how to use the explosives." The question is: using them against whom, in which war, by whose instructions, under which doctrine? If none of this information is available how to define the terror factor beyond criminal charges?
According to AP, Mohamed was charged with "distributing information relating to explosives, destructive devices, and weapons of mass destruction, which is a terrorism-related statute, a Justice Department official said. The crime carries a maximum of 20 years in prison." Fine, but the American public needs to know more about the motives. The story doesn't begin with a Police unit stopping them on a highway and charging them of transporting explosives in interstate commerce without permits. This is not a criminal story happening on an ordinary day. The media reports said in South Carolina, where Mohamed and Megahed have been held in the Berkeley County jail, "U.S. Attorney Reginald I. Lloyd praised state and federal authorities for cooperating in the four-week investigation that initially did not look like a terrorism case." So what caused the mutation from crime to Terrorism? The AP writes that "since the Aug. 4 arrest, authorities sought to determine whether Mohamed and Megahed were fledgling terrorists or merely college students headed to the beach with devices made from fireworks they bought at Wal-Mart in their car, as they claimed. The local sheriff in South Carolina said the explosives were “other than fireworks.” A non expert reader would conclude that it is the “type” of explosives that made the case into Terrorism, not the actions, intentions and the combat doctrine of the perpetrators. Had the explosives been licensed, the two men would be free now. Had the material been large fireworks, they would have also been free. So, short of capturing them moving with illegal explosives, they wouldn't have been persons of interest. But is there any other way in our legal system to arrest Terrorists than catching them with explosives? Other than presenting an evidence that they “want” to cause harm, actually there isn't. That's why we weren't able to capture Mohammed Atta and Ziad Jarrah on 9/11 before they dive with the captured airliners. Mohammed and Ziad didn't have illegal explosives in their hands before they board, and not even after they boarded. Because they chose not to use explosives, and yet they were Jihadi Terrorists who have intended to massacre thousands of Americans. So, in fact, as I made the case several times to Government and NGO entities, including legislative committees, our legal system doesn't enable the Government to stop the Terrorists before they are caught armed or with sufficient evidence that they were about to detonate the material. The next question is: can we change the system? The answer is fast and natural: no we can't and we shouldn't on the essence. All persons are presumed innocents until proven guilty.
But what we can and should do is to learn from each case: If we are lucky enough to catch them before they act, at least we have to learn from the operation all what is needed to abort other potential ones. What we must know are the motives, the big picture and the positioning of the perpetrators in the larger war. Are they part of a cell and of a movement? What are their doctrinal beliefs, their ideology, their objectives, the literature and material that indoctrinated them and transformed them into Jihadi Terrorists? Short of this information, we wouldn't (the public, the Government and the experts) be able to assess the “Terror act” and place it in the widest context. If this action is the result of two persons who were planning on having fun blasting explosives, but didn't obtain a license is one thing, with no value related to the ongoing War on Terror; but if Mohamed and Megahed were part of a larger picture, even of a homegrown experiment, this would have tremendous consequences on Homeland Security. So which is the case?
According to the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) Mohamed had "rented a room in a house in Temple Terrace, a suburb of Tampa, which was used as the office for the World and Islam Studies Enterprise (WISE), a think-tank founded by former USF Professor Sami Al-Arian. In 2006, Al-Arian pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to make or receive contributions of funds, goods or services to or for the benefit of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). Evidence presented at his trial showed Al-Arian served on the PIJ governing board.” The next question then is: Are Mohamed and Megahed linked to the activities of Al Arian? Were the activities of the latter linked to them? Is there a wider activity linking both parties in the US? Mohamed and Megahed are Egyptians hence it is less likely that they would be part of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. But they can be Jihadist regardless of not being part of PIJ. So, if a link exists between these two parties, this could also mean that PIJ and the vast Jihadist movement operating in America are connected. We’re advancing these theories because the Salafi Jihadi movement is transnational and is operating against the US and other liberal democracies. These are the conclusions of many counter terrorism authorities such as the Task Force on Future Terrorism of the Department of Homeland Security, the New York Police Department, and recently too the US Air Force report on Terrorism. This and other arrests should be analyzed under the new parameters emerging from various centers in Government and across the specialized NGOs.
Another intriguing development was –according to the Investigative Project- that the Jury in Tampa heard from the representative of a local advocacy Islamist group: CAIR. The question is why would a particular American association testify in a Terrorism case? Logically it would be called upon if it has an expertise on Terrorism, if the two indicted persons were members of the organization, or if the latter was opposing the indictment on the basis of defending the ideology behind the act. In this case, what are the reasons invoked? CAIR isn’t a qualified counter Terrorism association, which leaves the two remaining arguments: membership or advocacy. Answers on both issues are warranted to solve the enigma. But the IPT report said “M. Ahmed Bedier, spokesman for the Tampa chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), testified under subpoena. Bedier has acted as a family spokesman for the Megahed family.” The next question is to know if M Bedier acted personally or as a representative of his organization. This fact is important as it would open another series of questions as to the relationship between “advocacy groups” and the Jihadist ideology. For the CAIR representative told the Tampa Tribune “that the men were being scrutinized due to their ethnicity.” But as far as it was reported they are Egyptian citizens who have been caught with illegal explosives. There are many Egyptian-Americans, Arab-Americans, and Middle Eastern Americans who are working within Law Enforcement. Actually, when documents are translated by Government in Terrorism cases, it is often that Arab-American translators are the ones tasked with the translation. So how then are the two Egyptians scrutinized “due” to their ethnicity while among those who are protecting the Homeland Security –and often on these cases- are people who belong to the same ethnicity: Law Enforcement, analysts, translators, etc?
"Obviously their heritage and background is playing a major role in blowing this out of proportion," Bedier said. "If these were some good old boys, I doubt this [story] would be played around the world." Actually, it is the other way around. While the Government is not –unfortunately- providing the public with the ideological material leading to the actions, the “advocacy groups” who sympathize with these Jihadists ideologies are attempting to transform any arrest into an “ethnic” case. For one would ask these “groups” why don’t they move with the same vigor if Copts, Sudanese, Assyrians, Kurds, Arab Christians, anti-Jihadist Muslims? If the Islamist advocacy groups are coming to the defense of individuals just for belonging to an ethnic group, the argument is flawed, as CAIR is not representative of an ethnic group, but of a (self described) ideological agenda. But on the other hand, if CAIR comes to the defense of the indicted persons because of their affiliation with a religious group, the argument needs to be made based on statements made by the two Egyptians. That is the link between their alleged religious beliefs and the fact that they had explosives: In fact there was none, for we haven’t read or heard from them or others that they were on a “religious mission.” Hence, CAIR must present another reason for their involvement, assuming that Mr Bedier acts on behalf of the organization in this case.
Which brings the analysis back to the initial question: Did Mohamed and Megahed act as Jihadists or not? US law doesn’t need such an answer. It has them under the charge of possession of explosives. But since CAIR and other advocacy groups are claiming that there something “else” involved, it should be beneficial to the American public –and certainly to the national security planners- to learn more about the ideological context of this case. For failing to address this dimension in the War on Terror would end up being compared with the following –virtual- dramatic interpretation: 1943: Two German young men born in Berlin were arrested in South Carolina for the possession of explosives and willing to use them against the US. While the two men were charged with this crime, regardless of WWII, an advocacy group accused the US Government of being “Germanophobe.” Better, among the Law enforcement that proceeded with the arrest were many German-Americans.
Dr Walid Phares is the Director of Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the author of The War of Ideas: Jihadism against Democracies.
By Walid Phares on September 1, 2007 11:18 PM
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Although this is about what happened in Germany, this thread seems to me the place for this post:
Stratfor.com
Germany: The Poorly Executed Militant Plot
German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schauble held an emergency meeting with state officials in Berlin on Sept. 7 to discuss anti-terrorism measures in the wake of the arrest of three men -- two German converts to Islam and a Turk -- in connection with an alleged plot to carry out militant attacks in the country. Although the militant fixation on soft targets in Europe is well-documented, this case demonstrates that jihadists' sloppy tradecraft can -- and does -- lead to their undoing. Moreover, the pressure that has been brought to bear on jihadists in places such as Afghanistan and Africa makes it much more difficult nowadays for them to get proper training.
The investigation began in late 2006 when a man was observed surveilling U.S. military installations around the town of Hanau in the southwestern state of Hessen. U.S. and German intelligence and law enforcement personnel began keeping tabs on the suspect, which led them to his accomplices. By March, Germany's federal criminal police, or Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), became convinced that a militant plot to attack U.S. facilities in Germany was being developed. In April, the U.S. Embassy in Berlin issued a Warden Message on a nonspecific security threat to U.S. diplomatic and military facilities in Germany. At the time, security officials leaked that they were concerned about "attacks by Iraqi Kurds and terrorists who have snuck into Germany from Iraq." In May, German authorities briefly detained two people on suspicion of surveilling Patch Barracks, a U.S. military facility just north of Stuttgart. Those suspects, who allegedly had ties to the Islamic Jihad Union, an al Qaeda-affiliated Uzbek group, are not the same ones arrested in this case.
The investigation culminated Sept. 5 in the small town of Oberschledorn when the GSG-9 counterterrorism unit and BKA officials raided a small cottage where the main suspects allegedly were preparing to move a large quantity of hydrogen peroxide to another location for the purposes of constructing improvised explosive devices. Approximately 30 other locations in Germany were raided at that time in connection with the investigation, though it is unclear whether more arrests were made or evidence seized.
The Germans had their suspects under investigation and surveillance for a long time, and yet the suspects never realized the authorities were onto them. German intelligence, which has a generally good reputation for its ability to conduct physical and technical surveillance, reportedly was even able to substitute a harmless chemical compound for the suspects' bombmaking material without their knowledge.
The sloppy tradecraft of the suspected jihadists, however, was directly responsible for the plot's failure. While surveilling potential targets and making their plans, the suspects failed to notice that they themselves were under surveillance. This enabled the BKA and other agencies to track their movements and follow leads to other parts of the plot -- as evidenced by the large number of raids conducted throughout Germany.
The suspects reportedly had not settled on a target set, although there were indications that they were considering Frankfurt International Airport and the U.S. air base at Ramstein. The U.S. facilities that allegedly were surveilled by the militants, Patch Barracks and Hanau, are relatively soft targets, as their security is not as tight as that at an air base or a tank park, for example. Indications that Patch Barracks was being surveilled, however, were particularly alarming, as it is home to the headquarters of the U.S. European Command and is an important communications node for the Defense Information Systems Agency in Europe.
Hanau in particular has a number of soft, isolated targets. Unlike most Army installations in the United States, it is made up of several small facilities, or kasernen, scattered around town. These facilities include Pioneer Kaserne, which has military police and transportation units; the New Argonner Kaserne, with a PX, military family housing, a dental clinic and a heath clinic; Underwood Kaserne, headquarters of the 5th Battalion, 7th Air Defense Artillery; Yorkhof Kaserne, headquarters of the U.S. Army's Hessen Garrison; and Grossauheim Kaserne, home to the 502nd Engineering Company, a bridging unit.
In this case, the militant plotters failed for months to notice that they were under surveillance. This failure allowed authorities to uncover the plot and to stage raids in 30 other places. Whether the three suspects in this case received any proper training is unclear, but it is clear that militants are being deprived of safe-havens and training in places such as Afghanistan and Africa. With this kind of pressure on them, jihadists cannot improve their skills or learn new ones -- which could mean their efforts will continue to be sloppy. This is good news for those who are attempting to stop them.
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http://counterterrorismblog.org/2007/09/print/obl_transcript.php
Counterterrorism Blog
SITE Institute: Transcript of Bin Laden Video
By Jeffrey Imm
The following is the transcript of the latest Osama Bin Laden Video as provided by the SITE Institute:
SITE Institute: Transcript of Osama Bin Laden video (PDF file 7 pages long)
SITE Institute: One minute video clip of new Osama Bin Laden video
"All praise is due to Allah, who built the heavens and earth in justice, and created man as a favor and grace from Him. And from His ways is that the days rotate between the people, and from His Law is retaliation in kind: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth and the killer is killed. And all praise is due to Allah, who awakened His slaves' desire for the Garden, and all of them will enter it except those who refuse. And whoever obeys Him alone in all of his affairs will enter the Garden, and whoever disobeys Him will have refused."
"As for what comes after: Peace be upon he who follows the Guidance. People of America: I shall be speaking to you on important topics which concern you, so lend me your ears. I begin by discussing the war which is between us and some of its repercussions for us and you."
"To preface, I say: despite America being the greatest economic power and possessing the most powerful and up-to-date military arsenal as well; and despite it spending on this war and is army more than the entire world spends on its armies; and despite it being the being the major state influencing the policies of the world, as if it has a monopoly on the unjust right of veto; despite all of this, 19 young men were able - by the grace of Allah, the Most High- to change the direction of its compass. And in fact, the subject of the Mujahideen has become an inseparable part of the speech of your leader, and the effects and signs of that are not hidden."
"Since the 11th, many of America's policies have come under the influence of the Mujahideen, and that is by the grace of Allah, the Most High. And as a result, the people discovered the truth about it, its reputation worsened, its prestige was broken globally and it was bled dry economically, even if our interests overlap with the interests of the major corporations and also with those of the neoconservatives, despite the differing intentions."
"And for your information media, during the first years of the war, lost its credibility and manifested itself as a tool of the colonialist empires, and its condition has often been worse than the condition of the media of the dictatorial regimes which march in the caravan of the single leader."
"Then Bush talks about his working with al-Maliki and his government to spread freedom in Iraq but he in fact is working with the leaders of one sect against another sect, in the belief that this will quickly decide the war in his favor."
"And thus, what is called the civil war came into being and matters worsened at his hands before getting out of his control and him becoming like the one who plows and sows the sea: he harvests nothing but failure."
"So these are some of the results of the freedom about whose spreading he is talking to you. And then the backtracking of Bush on his insistence on not giving the United Nations expanded jurisdiction in Iraq is an implicit admission of his loss and defeat there. "
"And among the most important items contained in Bush’s speeches since the events of the 11th is that the Americans have no option but to continue the war. This tone is in fact an echoing of the words of neoconservatives like Cheney, Rumsfeld and Richard Pearle, the latter having said previously that the Americans have no choice in front of them other than to continue the war or face a holocaust."
"I say, refuting this unjust statement, that the morality and culture of the holocaust is your culture, not our culture. In fact, burning living beings is forbidden in our religion, even if they be small like the ant, so what of man?! The holocaust of the Jews was carried out by your brethren in the middle of Europe, but had it been closer to our countries, most of the Jews would have been saved by taking refuge with us. And my proof for that is in what your brothers, the Spanish, did when they set up the horrible courts of the Inquisition to try Muslims and Jews, when the Jews only found safe shelter by taking refuge in our countries. And that is why the Jewish community in Morocco today is one of the largest communities in the world. They are alive with us and we have not incinerated them, but we are a people who don't sleep under oppression and reject humiliation and disgrace, and we take revenge on the people of tyranny and aggression, and the blood of the Muslims will not be spilled with impunity, and the morrow is nigh for he who awaits."
"Also, your Christian brothers have been living among us for 14 centuries: in Egypt alone, there are millions of Christians whom we have not incinerated and shall not incinerate. But the fact is, there is a continuing and biased campaign being waged against us for a long time now by your politicians and many of your writers by way of your media, especially Hollywood, for the purpose of misrepresenting Islam and its adherents to drive you away from the true religion. The genocide of peoples and their holocausts took place at your hands: only a few specimens of Red Indians were spared, and just a few days ago, the Japanese observed the 62nd anniversary of the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by your nuclear weapons."
"And among the things which catch the eye of the one who considers the repercussions of your unjust war against Iraq is the failure of your democratic system, despite it raising of the slogans of justice, liberty, equality and humanitarianism. It has not only failed to achieve these things, it has actually destroyed these and other concepts with its weapons - especially in Iraq and Afghanistan- in a brazen fashion, to replace them with fear, destruction, killing, hunger, illness, displacement and more than a million orphans in Baghdad alone, not to mention hundreds of thousands of widows. Americans statistics speak of the killing of more than 650,000 of the people of Iraq as a result of the war and its repercussions."
"People of America: the world is following your news in regards to your invasion of Iraq, for people have recently come to know that, after several years of the tragedies of this war, the vast majority of you want it stopped. Thus, you elected the Democratic Party for this purpose, but the Democrats haven't made a move worth mentioning. On the contrary, they continue to agree to the spending of tens of billions to continue the killing and war there, which has led to the vast majority of you being afflicted with disappointment."
"And here is the gist of the matter, so one should pause, think and reflect: why have the Democrats failed to stop this war, despite them being the majority?"
"I will come back to reply to this question after raising another question, which is:"
"Why are the leaders of the White House keen to start wars and wage them around the world, and make use of every possible opportunity through which they can reach this purpose, occasionally even creating justifications based on deception and blatant lies, as you saw Iraq?"
"In the Vietnam War, the leaders of the White House claimed at the time that it was a necessary and crucial war, and during it, Rumsfeld and his aides murdered two million villagers. And when Kennedy took over the presidency and deviated from the general line of policy drawn up for the White House and wanted to stop this unjust war, that angered the owners of the major corporations who were benefiting from its continuation."
"And so Kennedy was killed, and al-Qaida wasn’t present at that time, but rather, those corporations were the primary beneficiary from his killing. And the war continued after that for approximately one decade. But after it became clear to you that it was an unjust and unnecessary war, you made one of your greatest mistakes, in that you neither brought to account nor punished those who waged this war, not even the most violent of its murderers, Rumsfeld. And even more incredible than that is that Bush picked him as secretary of defense in his first term after picking Cheney as his vice president, Powell as secretary of state and Armitage as Powell's deputy, despite their horrific and blood history of murdering humans. So that was clear signal that his administration - the administration of the generals- didn't have as its main concern the serving of humanity, but rather, was interested in bringing about new massacres. Yet in spite of that, you permitted Bush to complete his first term, and stranger still, chose him for a second term, which gave him a clear mandate from you - with your full knowledge and consent- to continue to murder our people in Iraq and Afghanistan."
"Then you claim to be innocent! This innocence of yours is like my innocence of the blood of your sons on the 11th - were I to claim such a thing. But it is impossible for me to humor any of you in the arrogance and indifference you show for the lives of humans outside America, or for me to humor your leaders in their lying, as the entire world knows they have the lion's share of that. These morals aren't our morals. What I want to emphasize here is that not taking past war criminals to account led to them repeating that crime of killing humanity without right and waging this unjust war in Mesopotamia, and as a result, here are the oppressed ones today continuing to take their right from you."
"This war was entirely unnecessary, as testified to by your own reports. And among the most capable of those from your own side who speak to you on this topic and on the manufacturing of public opinion is Noam Chomsky, who spoke sober words of advice prior to the war, but the leader of Texas doesn't like those who give advice. The entire world came out in unprecedented demonstrations to warn against waging the war and describe its true nature in eloquent terms like "no to spilling red blood for black oil," yet he paid them no heed. It is time for humankind to know that talk of the rights of man and freedom are lies produced by the White House and its allies in Europe to deceive humans, take control of their destinies and subjugate them. "
"So in answer to the question about the causes of the Democrats' failure to stop the war, I say: they are the same reasons which led to the failure of former president Kennedy to stop the Vietnam war. Those with real power and influence are those with the most capital. And since the democratic system permits major corporations to back candidates, be they presidential or congressional, there shouldn't be any cause for astonishment - and there isn't any- in the Democrats' failure to stop the war. And you're the ones who have the saying which goes, "Money talks." And I tell you: after the failure of your representatives in the Democratic Party to implement your desire to stop the war, you can still carry anti-war placards and spread out in the streets of major cities, then go back to your homes, but that will be of no use and will lead to the prolonging of the war."
"However, there are two solutions for stopping it. The first is from our side, and it is to continue to escalate the killing and fighting against you. This is our duty, and our brothers are carrying it out, and I ask Allah to grant them resolve and victory. And the second solution is from your side. It has now become clear to you and the entire world the impotence of the democratic system and how it plays with the interests of the peoples and their blood by sacrificing soldiers and populations to achieve the interests of the major corporations."
"And with that, it has become clear to all that they are the real tyrannical terrorists. In fact, the life of all of mankind is in danger because of the global warming resulting to a large degree from the emissions of the factories of the major corporations, yet despite that, the representative of these corporations in the White House insists on not observing the Kyoto accord, with the knowledge that the statistic speaks of the death and displacement of the millions of human beings because of that, especially in Africa. This greatest of plagues and most dangerous of threats to the lives of humans is taking place in an accelerating fashion as the world is being dominated by the democratic system, which confirms its massive failure to protect humans and their interests from the greed and avarice of the major corporations and their representatives."
"And despite this brazen attack on the people, the leaders of the West - especially Bush, Blair, Sarkozy and Brown- still talk about freedom and human rights with a flagrant disregard for the intellects of human beings. So is there a form of terrorism stronger, clearer and more dangerous than this? This is why I tell you: as you liberated yourselves before from the slavery of monks, kings, and feudalism, you should liberate yourselves from the deception, shackles and attrition of the capitalist system."
"If you were to ponder it well, you would find that in the end, it is a system harsher and fiercer than your systems in the Middle Ages. The capitalist system seeks to turn the entire world into a fiefdom of the major corporations under the label of "globalization" in order to protect democracy."
"And Iraq and Afghanistan and their tragedies; and the reeling of many of you under the burden of interest-related debts, insane taxes and real estate mortgages; global warming and its woes; and the abject poverty and tragic hunger in Africa: all of this is but one side of the grim face of this global system."
"So it is imperative that you free yourselves from all of that and search for an alternative, upright methodology in which it is not the business of any class of humanity to lay down its own laws to its own advantage at the expense of the other classes as is the case with you, since the essence of man-made positive laws is that they serve the interests of those with the capital and thus make the rich richer and the poor poorer."
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"The infallible methodology is the methodology of Allah, the Most High, who created the heavens and earth and created the Creation and is the Most Kind and All-Informed and the Knower of the souls of His slaves and the methodology that best suits them."
"You believe with absolute certainty that you believe in Allah, and you are full of conviction of this belief, so much so that you have written this belief of yours on your dollar."
"But the truth is that you are mistake in this belief of yours. The impartial judge knows that belief in Allah requires straightness in the following of His methodology, and accordingly, total obedience must be to the orders and prohibitions of Allah Alone in all aspects of life."
"So how about you when you associate others with Him in your beliefs and separate state from religion, then claim that you are believers?!"
"What you have done is clear loss and manifest polytheism, And I will give you a parable of polytheism, as parables summarize and clarify speech."
"I tell you: its parable is the parable of a man who owns a shop and hires a worker and tells him, "Sell and give me the money," but he makes sales and give the money to someone other than the owner. So who of you would approve of that?"
"You believe that Allah is your Lord and your Creator and the Creator of this earth and that it is His property, then you work on His earth and property without His orders and without obeying Him, and you legislate in contradiction to His Law and methodology."
"This work of yours is the greatest form of polytheism and is rebellion against obedience to Allah with which the believer becomes an unbeliever, even if he obeys Allah in some of His other orders. Allah, the Most High, sent down His orders in His Sacred Books like the Torah and Evangel and sent with them the Messengers (Allah's prayers and peace be upon them) as bearers of good news to the people."
"And everyone who believes in them and complies with them is a believer from the people of the Garden. Then when the men of knowledge altered the words of Allah, the Most High, and sold them for a paltry price, as the rabbis did with the Torah and the monks with the Evangel, Allah sent down His final Book, the magnificent Quran, and safeguarded it from being added to or subtracted from by the hands of men, and in it is a complete methodology for the lives of all people."
"And our holding firm to this magnificent Book is the secret of our strength and winning of the war against you despite the fewness of our numbers and materiel. And if you would like to get to know some of the reasons for your losing of your war against us, then read the book of Michael Scheuer in this regard."
"Don't be turned away from Islam by the terrible situation of the Muslims today, for our rulers in general abandoned Islam many decades ago, but our forefathers were the leaders and pioneers of the world for many centuries, when they held firmly to Islam."
"And before concluding, I tell you: there has been an increase in the thinkers who study events and happenings, and on the basis of their study, they have declared the approach of the collapse of the American Empire."
"Among them is the European thinker who anticipated the fall of the Soviet Union, which indeed fell. And it would benefit you to read what he wrote about what comes after the empire in regard to the United States of America. I also want to bring your attention that among the greatest reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union was their being afflicted with their leader Brezhnev, who was overtaken by pride and arrogance and refused to look at the facts on the ground. From the first year of the Afghanistan invasion, reports indicated that the Russians were losing the war, but he refused to acknowledge this, lest it go down in his personal history as a defeat, even though refusal to acknowledge defeat not only doesn't do anything to change the facts for thinking people, but also exacerbates the problem and increases the losses. And how similar is your position today to their position approximately two decades ago. The mistakes of Brezhnev are being repeated by Bush, who - when asked about the date of his withdrawing of forces from Iraq - said in effect that the withdrawal will not be during his reign, but rather, during the reign of the one who succeeds him. And the significance of these words is not hidden."
"And here I say: it would benefit you to listen to the poignant messages of your soldiers in Iraq, who are paying - with their blood, nerves and scattered limbs - the price for these sorts of irresponsible statements. Among them is the eloquent message of Joshua which he sent by way of the media, in which he wipes the tears from his eyes and describes American politicians in harsh terms and invites them to join him there for a few days. Perhaps his message will find in you an attentive ear so you can rescue him and more than 150,000 of your sons there who are tasting the two bitterest things: "
"If they leave their barracks, the mines devour them, and if they refuse to leave, rulings are passed against them. Thus, the only options left in front of them are to commit suicide or cry, both of which are from the severest of afflictions. So is there anything more men can do after crying and killing themselves to make you respond to them? They are doing that out of the severity of the humiliation, fear and terror which they are suffering. It is severer than what the slaves used to suffer at your hands centuries ago, and it is as if some of them have gone from one slavery to another slavery more severe and harmful, even if it be in the fancy dress of the Defense Department's financial enticements."
"So do you feel the greatness of their sufferings?"
"To conclude, I invite you to embrace Islam, for the greatest mistake one can make in this world and one which is uncorrectable is to die while not surrendering to Allah, the Most High, in all aspects of one's life - ie., to die outside of Islam. And Islam means gain for you in this first life and the next, final life. The true religion is a mercy for people in their lives, filling their hearts with serenity and calm."
T"here is a message for you in the Mujahideen: the entire world is in pursuit of them, yet their hearts, by the grace of Allah, are satisfied and tranquil. The true religion also puts peoples' lives in order with its laws; protects their needs and interests; refines their morals; protects them from evils; and guarantees for them entrance into Paradise in the hereafter through their obedience to Allah and sincere worship of Him Alone."
"And it will also achieve your desire to stop the war as a consequence, because as soon as the warmongering owners of the major corporations realize that you have lost confidence in your democratic system and begun to search for an alternative, and that this alternative is Islam, they will run after you to please you and achieve what you want to steer you away from Islam. So your true compliance with Islam will deprive them of the opportunity to defraud the peoples and take their money under numerous pretexts, like arms deals and so on. "
"There are no taxes in Islam, but rather there is a limited Zakaat [alms] totaling only 2.5%. So beware of the deception of those with the capital. And with your earnest reading about Islam from its pristine sources, you will arrive at an important truth, which is that the religion of all of the Prophets (peace and blessings of Allah be upon them) is one, and that its essence is submission to the orders of Allah Alone in all aspects of life, even if their Shari'ahs [Laws] differ."
"And did you know that the name of the Prophet of Allah Jesus and his mother (peace and blessings of Allah be on them both) are mentioned in the Noble Quran dozens of times, and that in the Quran there is a chapter whose name is "Maryam," i.e. Mary, daughter of 'Imran and mother of Jesus (peace and blessings of Allah be upon them both)? It tells the story of her becoming pregnant with the Prophet of Allah Jesus (peace and blessings of Allah be upon them both), and in its confirmation of her chastity and purity, in contrast to the fabrications of the Jews against her. Whoever wishes to find that out for himself must listen to the verse of this magnificent chapter: one of the just kings of the Christians - the Negus - listened to some of its verses and his eyes welled up with tears and he said something which should be reflected on for a long time by those sincere in their search for the truth."
"He said, "verily, this and what Jesus brought come from one lantern": i.e., that the magnificent Quran and the Evangel are both from Allah, the Most High; and every just and intelligent one of you who reflects on the Quran will definitely arrive at this truth. It also must be noted that Allah has preserved the Quran from the alterations of men. And reading in order to become acquainted with Islam only requires a little effort, and those of you who are guided will profit greatly. And peace be upon he who follows the Guidance."
By Jeffrey Imm on September 7, 2007 6:30 PM
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http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/012737.php
September 8, 2007
Deadline For Terrorism: September 15th
The terrorists arrested in Germany had a deadline for their attack on Ramstein Air Base and the Frankfurt airport, given to them by their al-Qaeda masters: September 15th. Why that date, rather than the more obvious 9/11 anniversary? AQ has more current politics in mind:
Three suspected Islamist militants who were planning to attack U.S. installations in Germany had orders to act by Sept. 15 and knew police were hot on their trail before their arrest, a magazine said on Saturday.
The plan was foiled on Tuesday when police arrested two German converts to Islam and a Turk in the biggest German police operation in 30 years.
According to surveillance details published in Der Spiegel magazine, the men had been given a two-week deadline for their planned strikes in a late August call from northern Pakistan that was monitored by German police.
Congress set a deadline on September 15th as well -- the due date for a progress report on the Iraq War from President Bush. (Power Line incorrectly notes this as the date of General Petraeus' testimony, which will happen on the 11th.) AQ wanted to replicate the Tet offensive, only not in Iraq but in Europe. A devastating attack before Bush delivered his report would tend to discredit the forward strategy pursued by the administration since the 9/11 attacks.
Why attack Europe? Osama wants the US out of the Middle East, especially Iraq and Afghanistan. If he could convince the American critics of the administration that the forward strategy had failed, Osama thinks he could gain enough leverage over Bush to force a withdrawal of troops in Iraq, if not Afghanistan. He wants to hit behind our lines to push us into a retreat from the real fronts against AQ in Iraq and Afghanistan.
His video message was timed to deliver that purpose. His announcement would have immediately preceded the attacks in Germany and Denmark, emphasizing AQ's ability to strike anywhere in the world. And it probably would have had the effect Osama intended, had it worked; there is little doubt that war critics would have redoubled their effort to discredit the forward strategy and force Bush to pull out of Iraq.
Ask yourselves this: why does Osama want to push us out of the Middle East, especially Iraq and Afghanistan? It's not because we're losing in either theater. If we were losing, he'd be happy to beat American military forces for as long as we stuck around. He wants us out because he's losing -- and he tried to hit Germany and Denmark because he can't beat the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Or perhaps people think it's a coincidence that Osama finally reappeared after the surge pushed AQI all the way to the Syrian border?
Finally, let's just take a moment to acknowledge how this cell got discovered in the first place:
The arrests were the culmination of an investigation that began a year ago, when U.S. officials alerted German authorities to e-mails intercepted from Pakistan.
Chalk one up for the NSA. Nice work, folks.
Posted by Ed Morrissey on September 8, 2007 11:41 A
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http://michellemalkin.com/2007/09/09/if-we-cant-counter-tb-how-can-we-counter-terrorism/
TB, the dems and political correctness.
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Lessons in War
Reflections on 9/11, six years later.
By Victor Davis Hanson
On that day, we watched tape of the doomed in suits diving head first from the burning floors, hoping to splatter on roofs rather than crush and kill incoming firefighters — as some tragically did.
I remember reading about the last hours in the stairwell of the Cassandra FBI agent John O’Neill, who chose to go back into the inferno. His year-long, near solitary race to save us against the evil of the al Qaeda planners Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh came to an end that day — and with it O’Neill himself.
And I remember reading the accounts of a smiling bin Laden, fresh off from buying his fifth wife for $5,000 (a 15-year-old girl no less). At that very moment in Afghanistan, always the inveterate liar, he was haughty after his recent cowardly murder of the far better fighter Massoud.
That day bin Laden snickered to the radio reports of his 9/11 jihadists, now holding up a finger for each plane’s impending crash to his adoring acolytes in Afghanistan — and soon to be alternately denying culpability in his fear, then boasting of it in his hubris.
Then there were the incomprehensible statements of our own that followed — of Michael Moore, the later darling at the Democratic Convention, claiming that a Democratic city’s blue-state, anti-Bush voters ipso facto should have won an exemption from the killers’ target list.
We heard too from the now apparently warped novelist Norman Mailer, at last relieved that his aesthetic skyline was cleared of the bothersome looming towers (“two huge buck teeth”) — and with them, for Ward Churchill at least, the ashes of the “Little Eichmanns,” of his “technocrats of empire.”
We remember the firemen and police who went up into the towers even as they came down. And always there were the nightlong, lit-up scenes of the construction and rescue workers who brought a majestic dignity to the macabre task of sifting for hundreds in the detritus of lower New York.
We keep thinking as well that if there had not been a Todd Beamer and a few kindred brave souls on United Flight 93, there would have been no more Capitol at all, its century-old dome instead reduced to smithereens like that of the golden mosque of Samara. It perhaps would now still be sitting there, six years later, a quarter rebuilt amid scaffolds, its restoration unfinished as it was during the Civil War — and its smoldering skeleton plastered on every poster in Gaza, in DVDs sold in all the bazaars of Pakistan.
September 11 was not the first and won’t be the last terrorist assault on our citizens and culture. And the subsequent factionalism and left/right bickering over the proper course to defeat the jihadists — whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, the courts, at the Hague, or the United Nations — did not originate solely after 9/11.
But the day reminded us that for a near-quarter century prior, only luck and the impotence — not the intent — of radical Muslims had prevented the murder of Americans on such a horrific scale. It re-taught to us, as would surely a second or third such attack, that in war there aren’t really good choices. Instead, once the fighting breaks out, only the bad choices either of incurring casualties and expense to prevent greater such losses to our civilization in the future, or (far worse) of inaction in hopes of searching for reason or decency where they are not to be found, remain.
Bin Laden’s killers tore off a great scab on September 11; at once they exposed to billions the evil of radical Islam and with it the Western world’s shock, fright, and difficulty in confronting it and defeating it. That uncertainty ultimately does not arise from our enemies, but from within ourselves — this strange disease of thinking we fight back too much when we often do too little.
It was the particularly evil genius of bin Laden to see not that we are militarily weak as he alleged — indeed the United States is more powerful than ever — but that we are apologetic over the source of our bounty and the reasons for our success, to the point of a collective stasis.
The more we push for democratic change abroad, the more the democracy-hating terrorists slander us that we do not. The more we accommodate the religion and culture of detainees, the more the beheaders and bombers cry to the world that we are savage while musing among themselves that we are weak. The more that we tolerate the great asymmetry of reciprocity between Islam and the West; the more we are supposed to apologize for just that tolerance and liberality. The more we pay for outrageously priced oil, the more we are to concede that we are stealing it.
Our shock, and again their insight, is not that they level such absurd charges, but that they do so in such utter confidence that they will find a receptive audience in the West, an audience that has the desire and ability to curtail the American response.
We laugh that on this sixth anniversary a clownish Bin Laden, in dyed chin-whiskers no less, urges us from a cave in Waziristan to read more Chomsky and Scheuer. We laugh that radical Islam hates us for global warming, corporate profits, and high-priced mortgages. We laugh that its jihadists, as a result of these American “sins,” were forced to kill us for the Neocons, and Richard Perle, and Hiroshima, and the 19th-century Indian wars, and all the other American crimes that Hollywood and the universities have globally peddled into a lucrative industry. But the laugh is not that fascists would so clumsily crib our Left to justify their killing, but that they are convinced that they could do so in such amateurish fashion to such great effect.
So is the joke on them or on us?
Bin Laden and his evil Rasputin Dr. Zawahiri were confident on September 11 that such guilt and self-loathing in our hearts could be seasoned, and that it could then be harvested through their own arts of revisionism, victimization, and lies. And consequently within a brief six years of his murdering, our own voices — indeed the very elites of the West — in the luxury of calm before the next attack, are often emboldened to proclaim that the government of America, not the terrorists abroad, is the real danger.
The great lesson of September 11 was not that the jihadists ever believed that they could kill us all. Rather, they trusted that enough of the West and indeed enough of us here in America, might at the end of the day declare that we had it coming.
In this long war, that belief was — and is — far deadlier even than an unhinged murderer at the controls of an airliner.
—Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson fellow in military history and classics at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. This September he is teaching at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan as the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History.
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZWRiMjI3YTY3ZDA4ZjEwMGM0YzQwNGJmNWZiMGNhMWM=
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The War on Terror: The German Front
By Stephen Brown
FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, September 13, 2007
Although praise for the United States occurs very seldom in anti-American Western Europe, it was different in Germany last week. Unreported by most media outlets, the largest potential terrorist attack on German soil since the Second World War that saw three men arrested, two of them German converts to Islam, was thwarted with considerable American help.
As it turns out, according to a report in the German magazine, Der Spiegel, CIA officials had been working in close co-operation with German intelligence on this case for months, right up until the arrest of three suspects last week in an inconspicuous village in the state of North Rhineland-Westphalia. A joint team of American and German investigators had already been working in Berlin for some time on “Operation Alberich”, the name of a king in German mythology given to the project. US Secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, told Der Spiegel that the cooperation between the two countries’ intelligence services was never closer than during this investigation.
The terrorist cell broken up last week apparently appeared on German intelligence agencies’ radar screens for the first time last fall after a warning from their US counterparts. American authorities alerted the Germans that the Islamic Jihad Union, an extremist, Uzbekistani outfit with ties to al Qaeda and to which these particular terrorists belonged, was setting up a network in their country. It is known that the IJU’s German members arrested last week had trained at terrorist camps in Pakistan in 2006 where they most likely came to the attention of the American security officials stationed there.
In Afghanistan and Pakistan, America maintains a large, clandestine intelligence-gathering effort that has already resulted in several significant victories, as already reported in FPM (http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=2E7A4B89-D83F-4B1C-BA51-78E72EFD3AB6). FBI teams in Pakistan have built up a network of informers, including members of Pakistan’s military and intelligence services, which pass on information for money and, according to one Pakistani writer, even for trips to the United States.
This same writer states that this German cell had probably trained in the camp of al Qaeda commander Abu Hanifah, who trains Turks, Bosnians and Kurds in the lovely Islamist art of blowing up their fellow human beings. Another commander trains Chinese Muslim terrorists and Pakistanis, while still another looks after the homicidal needs of Uzbeks and Tajiks. One of the three suspects arrested last week is a German-Turk, while other Turks are being sought in this case.
It is also now known the cell returned to Germany with a “clear assignment.” Its German leader was even in contact with someone in Pakistan at the end of August who urged the carrying out of his murderous mission within the next fourteen days. And probably due to al-Qaeda’s apparent involvement, Americans were the plot’s main targets and not Germans. Besides American military installations and the Frankfurt airport, the terrorists, in their mindless hatred, were considering attacking discotheques, schools (think of Beslan), bars, or anywhere their sick minds considered there would be American citizens.
According to the Spiegel report, the tracking of the terrorists became an important theme in German-American relations over the past months, most likely because of this Islamist targeting of Americans and their desire to “kill as many people as possible” with bombs a hundred times more powerful than the backpack explosives used in the 2005 London transit bombings. Operation Alberich was considered so important that it was one of the topics of conversation between President George Bush and German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany, last June. President Bush was also immediately informed of last week’s terrorist arrests.
The only unfortunate part of the whole affair is that only three of the 49 Islamists that German Federal Intelligence Service chief Jorg Ziercke believes are involved in the plot are in custody where they are remaining silent. The German newspaper, Die Welt, reported Ziercke’s statement regarding the plot’s size as well as the fact that the cell consisted of a solid core of ten terrorists, of whom two are still in Germany but cannot yet be arrested due to a lack of evidence.
But perhaps just as alarming as this large number of potential mass murderers still on the loose and dedicated to killing Americans is the fact that seven persons from German Islamist circles have been arrested in Pakistan over the past months and an additional six are known to be currently in that country. And if such is truly the case, then one can probably expect a lot more friendly words to come America’s way from Western Europe yet.
Stephen Brown is a columnist for Frontpagemag.com. Email him at alsolzh@hotmail.com
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The Trans-Atlantic Militant Connection
Authorities on both sides of the Atlantic arrested a total of four people Sept. 12 in connection with a plot to stage jihadist attacks against Austria and Germany. Earlier in the month, Danish authorities arrested eight people on suspicion of plotting attacks in Denmark, and a day later German authorities arrested three people on suspicion of plotting to attack U.S. and Uzbek targets in Germany. Counterterrorism officials in Europe and the United States believe the plots in Germany and Denmark are related.
This latest wave of arrests demonstrates the interconnection between militant cells in Europe and North America -- and serves as a warning on the increasing militant activity on European soil.
On Sept. 12, two men and a woman were arrested in Vienna, Austria, for allegedly posting a video on an Islamist Web site threatening attacks against Germany and Austria because of those countries' support for the NATO mission in Afghanistan. The three allegedly are associated with the Global Islamic Media Front, a media outlet known for spreading al Qaeda messages on the Internet. The outlet also reportedly has links to the Army of Islam, the militant group linked to the kidnapping of British reporter Alan Johnston in Gaza in March.
Working with Austrian authorities, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrested Said Namouh, a Moroccan, in connection with the alleged plot and charged him with conspiring to detonate an explosive device. Canadian authorities said the plot was not directed at targets inside Canada, but that it was linked to the Austrian plot. The Global Islamic Media Front reportedly has other members in Canada, indicating that more arrests could follow after Canadian and Austrian investigators examine evidence found at Namouh's apartment. Namouh, who was taken into custody near Montreal, allegedly had communicated with the suspected militants in Austria over the Internet.
On Sept. 4, Danish counterterrorism forces in Copenhagen arrested eight people -- six Danish citizens and two foreigners with Danish residence permits -- on suspicion of plotting militant attacks against targets in Denmark. Less than a day later, German authorities raided several locations in Germany and arrested three people, including two Germans who had converted to Islam, on suspicion of plotting to attack U.S. and Uzbek military, civilian and diplomatic targets in Germany.
This spike in activity -- three cells arrested within 10 days -- highlights Europe's increasingly precarious security situation. Every year since 2004 there has been a major attack, failed attack or thwarted plot targeting a European city. Countries such as Spain, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom have had frequent incidents of militant activity, but other countries are feeling the heat as well. Although there have been militant elements present in Germany, Denmark and Austria, overall they had not been actively engaged in plotting serious attacks.
Germany, in particular, has seen an increase in the danger, beginning in summer 2006 when an attack targeting passenger trains failed in western Germany due to poorly constructed bombs. Although the plot that was thwarted Sept. 7 probably would have failed anyway, it was much larger in scope than past attempts, indicating that Germany's local cells are getting more ambitious.
The jihadists despise Europe as much as, if not more than, they do the United States, and they have made it clear that they intend to stage an attack on European soil. In addition to the threat from the Muslim immigrant community, the German example demonstrates the ongoing threat from within -- in the form of disassociated Europeans or longtime residents who convert to Islam and end up in one of these cells. The jihadists' poor tradecraft could be Europe's saving grace at the moment, as this failing appears to be one of the major reasons Europe has not experienced a major attack since the London bombings of 2005.
The arrest in Canada is another example of how grassroots jihadist cells in Europe can be linked to cells across the Atlantic. In June 2006, U.S., British and Canadian authorities uncovered a plot to attack targets in the United States and Canada. In addition to a European link, both the Canadian and U.S. cells had links to militant communities in South Asia.
By taking advantage of the well-developed communication links across the Atlantic, the relative ease of travel between Europe and North America, and contacts between immigrant communities on both continents as well as in the Middle East and South Asia, Europe's jihadist problem could easily become North America's problem, too.
Contact Us
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http://michellemalkin.com/2007/09/14/all-about-houssein-zorkot-hezbollah-fan-boy/
Med school jihadi.
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http://michellemalkin.com/2007/09/14/breakingmystery-at-goose-creek-update-making-bombs-to-save-a-martyr/
Fireworks!
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Going to be interesting to see how that plays out!
Here's this:
Security chief says terrorists have been arrested on border
By Jeff Carlton / Associated Press
Article Launched: 09/12/2007 07:09:01 PM MDT
DALLAS -- Texas' top homeland security official said today that terrorists with ties to Hezbollah, Hamas and al-Qaida have been arrested crossing the Texas border with Mexico in recent years.
"Has there ever been anyone linked to terrorism arrested?" Texas Homeland Security Director Steve McCraw said in a speech to the North Texas Crime Commission. "Yes, there was."
His remarks appear to be among the most specific on the topic of terrorism arrests along the Texas-Mexico border. Local and elected officials have alluded to this happening but have been short on details.
Leticia Zamarripa, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in El Paso, said Wednesday she was unaware of any border arrests of people with terrorist ties. An ICE spokeswoman in San Antonio did not return phone messages left by The Associated Press. U.S. Border Patrol spokesman Lloyd M. Easterling was unable to comment.
However, McCraw's remarks are similar to those made recently by National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell, who last month told the El Paso Times that a small number of people with known links to terrorist organizations have been caught crossing the border.
McCraw identified the most notable figure captured as Farida Goolam Mahomed Ahmed, who was arrested in July 2004 at the McAllen airport. She carried $7,300 in various currencies and a South African passport with pages missing. Federal officials later learned she waded across the Rio Grande.
After her arrest, U.S.
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Customs and Border Protection issued a release saying she was wanted for questioning about the bombing of a U.S. Consulate office, jibing with similar statements from a U.S. congressman.
But the department quickly retracted the terrorism connection, calling it "inaccurate on several levels." Michael Shelby, then the U.S. attorney in Houston, said in January 2005 that any suggestion Ahmed was involved in terrorism "is in error."
According to federal court records, Ahmed pleaded guilty to improper entry by an alien, making a false statement and false use of a passport. She was sentenced to time served and deported to South Africa. Other details of the case were sealed.
But on Wednesday, McCraw described Ahmed as having ties to an insurgent group in Pakistan and whose specialty was smuggling Afghanis and other foreign nationals across the border.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Michael Friel could not confirm details about Ahmed on Wednesday.
McCraw also said that since March 2006, 347 people from what he called "terrorism-related countries" have been arrested crossing the border in Texas. The number of Iraqis captured at the border has tripled since last year, he said.
"A porous border without question is a national security threat," he said.
Terrorism isn't the only concern for homeland security officials in Texas, McCraw said. The state's size, population and geography make it susceptible to all sorts of disasters, both natural and man-made. Emergency responders must also be prepared for natural disasters such as hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and wildfires, he said.
The state has made significant strides in emergency planning since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and Hurricane Rita, McCraw said. Plans include cooperating with large private companies, including grocery stores, Wal-Mart and the oil industry, to help the state respond during disasters.
"This is not a shot at FEMA, but we can't depend on FEMA to protect Texas," McCraw said. "The governor's mandate has made it clear: If those buses don't come, we better have our own buses. If that food doesn't come,we better have our own food. If that water doesn't come, we better have our own water to take care of Texas."
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I'm thinking the next big attack CONUS will be after the 2008 elections but before the next president is sworn in. It wouldn't surprise me if the deliberately leave a trail for investigators from over the border just so it'll be part of Bush's legacy
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Why do you think it will be after the election, instead of before?
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Unlike the Spanish population, the American public would react to the "Next 9/11" by electing a President willing to fight, which of course wouldn't be a democrat these days. It's in Al Qaeda's best interest to get a dem in office who'll attempt to appease them, withdraw from Iraq and allow them the opportunity to recover from the current offensive against them.
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Michigan Man Remains in Custody After Entering Park With AK-47
Friday , September 14, 2007
A 26-year-old man accused of carrying an assault rifle in a Michigan park remained in custody Friday on a $1 million cash bond.
Houssein Zorkot, of Dearborn, Mich., was arrested on Sept. 8 after witnesses called police to complain about a man with an AK-47, dark clothes and blackened face walking around a park.
"We don't know exactly what his intent was or what he was intending on doing," Dearborn Police Chief Michael Celeski told FOXNews.com.
Police responded to the scene and approached the vehicle Zorkot was driving. Zorkot attempted to flee and was not cooperative with police, Celeski said.
"At one point, he was reaching to a lower area of the vehicle and the other officer at the scene was able to determine there was a weapon on the floorboard," Celeski said.
Officers then took Zorkot into custody and charged him with one count of carrying a dangerous weapon with unlawful intent, one count of possession of a loaded firearm in a motor vehicle and one count of felony firearm. If convicted on all three counts, Zorkot faces 9 years in jail.
Zorkot was arraigned on Tuesday. A preliminary examination is scheduled for Sept. 21.
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Good to see alert citizens doing their part. In that vein, here's this:
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070915/COMMENTARY/109150001/1008
John Doe in post-9/11 era
Michelle Malkin
September 15, 2007
"If only." Those are the verbal crutches America must discard in a post-September 11, 2001, world.
If only the State Department hadn't been so sloppy in issuing visas to the September 11 hijackers. If only police and state troopers had been able to check the immigration status of the hijackers who were pulled over for speeding before the attacks. If only universities had been more diligent in monitoring the hijackers' whereabouts. If only the feds had listened to alert agents' recommendations to profile young Arab students in our flight schools. If only someone, anyone, had said something when they saw the suspicious behavior of the jihadists on dry runs.
We have borne the bloody costs of coulda-woulda-shoulda. Nearly 3,000 dead. The World Trade Center in ruins. The Pentagon on fire. The fields at Shanksville, Pa., scarred. Six years later, we can no longer afford hindsight heavy breathing. Memory must guide action. And action must be taken without apology.
Zogby released a poll for the sixth anniversary of the September 11 attacks showing that "77 percent of those living in the East and 46 percent of those living in the West — 61 percent overall — said they think about the attacks at least weekly. Eighty-one percent — 90 percent in the East and 75 percent in the West — said the attacks were the most significant historical events of their lives."
That's good news. But remembrance without resistance to jihad and its enablers is a recipe for another September 11. Not every American wears a military uniform. Every American, however, has a role to play in protecting our homeland — not just from Muslim terrorists, but from their financiers, their public relations machine, their Shariah-pimping activists, the antiwar goons, the civil liberties absolutists and the academic apologists for our enemies.
Earlier this year, jihadist enablers attempted to intimidate citizen whistleblowers who said something about the suspicious behavior of six imams on a US Airways flight in Minneapolis-St. Paul. The legal battle to protect ordinary Americans from such lawsuits gave rise to the John Doe movement. Pro bono lawyers and Republican members of Congress stepped up to provide protection. And Americans across the country expressed solidarity with the airline passengers targeted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations and its ilk.
The Left greeted the John Doe movement with mockery and derision, preferring instead to suck its collective thumb, wield the grievance card and play the blame game. But it's the John Does of the country, not the race-hustling litigators and speech-stiflers, who will help prevent the next terrorist attack. They are John Does like Brian Morgenstern, the young Circuit City employee who contacted authorities after viewing a jihadist training video by the Fort Dix Six Plotters.
"It was a difficult decision at first," Mr. Morgenstern told Fox News. "I went home, and I talked with my family about it. And we all came to the general conclusion that it was the right thing to do." No regrets. No apologies. And no "if onlys."
Not everyone is willing to do the right thing. When the FBI recently asked for the public's help in identifying two men acting suspiciously on Pacific Northwest ferries, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper refused to run the photos — and instead held a reader haiku contest mocking the terrorism concerns. When two young Muslim men were arrested and indicted on weapons and terrorism charges after being stopped near a naval base in Goose Creek, S.C., Muslim civil rights groups immediately cried racism and suggested law enforcement officials were bigoted and paranoid.
There are September 10 people and there are September 12 people. The September 10 people live in a world of make-believe, where sensitivity trumps security and second-guessing is their only acceptable homeland security policy. September 12 people are the John Does in your neighborhood, on your plane, train or bus, moving ahead with their lives but always on alert.
We live in post-September 11 reality where "Never forget" is not just a once-a-year slogan. It's a 24/7 frame of mind.
Michelle Malkin is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of "Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild."
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http://www.newschannel5.tv/2007/9/14/979646/-Homeland-S...n-Had-Terrorist-Ties
Homeland Security: Woman Had Terrorist Ties
Friday , September 14, 2007 Posted: 06:45 PM
Ahmed Latest at 6
Ahmed caught in McAllen airport in 2004
MCALLEN - For the first time, Homeland Security openly admitted a Pakistani woman captured in McAllen has terrorist ties.
Farida Ahmed was caught at the McAllen-Miller International Airport in 2004. She was on her way to New York with $7,000 in cash and a South African passport.
We learned she had swum across the river into the U.S.
At the time, NEWSCHANNEL 5 uncovered Ahmed was on a terror watch list. The information confirmed off the record through our sources.
Just this week, Texas Homeland Security Director Steve McCraw admitted publicly that Ahmed did have terrorist ties to an insurgent group in Pakistan. The group reportedly smuggles Afghanis and other foreign nationals.
Fred Burton is a counterterrorism expert recently appointed to the Texas Border Security Council.
He says, "You had an individual that had associations with an international terrorist organization all probability that would have been a jihadist group."
Burton recalls the Ahmed case. He tells us there are ongoing investigations right now.
"These individuals are going to take the path of least resistance. And I'm sad to say that that path is the border," says Burton.
NEWSCHANNEL 5 tried to get a phone interview with the Texas Director of Homeland Security in Austin.
A spokesperson in the Governor's Office told us he wasn't available for an interview. But they stand by the information he released.
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http://www2.tbo.com/content/2007/sep/15/na-jihadi-image...onator-video-found1/
'Jihadi' Images, Detonator Video Found
By ELAINE SILVESTRINI, The Tampa Tribune
Published: September 15, 2007
TAMPA - A laptop computer deputies found when they pulled over two University of South Florida students in South Carolina contained a video made by one of the men showing how to use a toy to detonate a bomb remotely, a federal prosecutor said Friday.
On that video, the student, Ahmed Mohamed, said the detonator could 'save one who wants to be a martyr for another day, another battle,' Assistant U.S. Attorney Jay Hoffer said.
The prosecutor said that video was posted by Mohamed on YouTube, a popular Web site.
Also on the laptop were 'jihadi' images and footage of rockets used by Hamas, Hoffer said.
Although a judge granted bail for the other student, Youssef Megahed, prosecutors immediately appealed, delaying his release until at least next week. Mohamed waived his right to a bail hearing.
Hoffer disclosed the computer evidence Friday as he laid out the prosecution's case that Megahed should be denied bail because he is a danger to the community and a flight risk.
U.S. Magistrate Elizabeth Jenkins ruled Megahed could be released on $200,000 bail if he meets a number of strict conditions, including what amounts to house arrest. 'I do agree he poses a danger, no question about that, based on what was found in the car,' Jenkins said. She also said the government failed to demonstrate a specific danger to the community, as required by law.
Hoffer acknowledged under questioning from the judge that he had no specific evidence of Megahed's intentions. Hoffer said that under the current charge, Megahed likely faces less than three years in prison if convicted.
A defense attorney maintained his client was not dangerous and that he has strong ties to the community and no record of violence. The federal courtroom was packed with Megahed's family members and friends, and Jenkins said she had received numerous letters in Megahed's support.
Neither the defense nor the prosecution presented sworn testimony during the hearing.
Megahed's public defender, Adam Allen, said there was no evidence his client made or saw the video that prosecutors said Mohamed made.
Both defendants are Egyptian citizens. Megahed is a legal, permanent resident of the Unites States, and Mohamed is here on a student visa.
Hoffer said that when deputies in South Carolina pulled the pair over for speeding on Aug. 4, they saw Megahed, who was the passenger, trying to put away the laptop computer that belonged to Mohamed. When investigators analyzed the computer, they found that the last-viewed images showed Qassam rockets, which are used by Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Also on the computer were videos of discussions of martyrdom and videos showing the firing of M-16 rifles, Hoffer said.
'Explosive Mixture'
In the trunk, deputies found four small sections of PVC pipe, at least three of which were stuffed with a 'potassium nitrate explosive mixture' of potassium nitrate, Karo syrup and kitty litter, Hoffer said. He said the kitty litter served as a binder to keep the substance from coming out of the pipes, which were not capped.
Investigators also found a container of gasoline, 20 feet of safety fuse and an electric drill, which Hoffer said could be used to drill holes in the pipe so fuses could be attached.
'Obviously, that raised the hackles of law enforcement in South Carolina,' Hoffer said. 'That's why we're here.'
Both men are charged with transporting explosives without a permit, relating to the stuffed PVC pipes deputies have described as pipe bombs. Hoffer conceded in court, however, that the devices, while explosive, were not pipe bombs and were not 'destructive devices' under the law.
Allen maintained that the filled PVC pipes couldn't do much damage because there were no caps and no metallic material that could serve as shrapnel.
Mohamed also is charged with demonstrating how to make explosives with the intent of helping terrorists. That charge evidently refers to the video, which Hoffer said Mohamed admitted making in his home in July using a camcorder. Hoffer said Mohamed posted the video on YouTube under another name. It shows Mohamed from the chest down standing in front of a tabletop and taking apart a radio-controlled toy car and pulling a wire from the remote control.
Speaking later from Cairo, Mohamed's father, Abdel Latif Sherif, said his son is being framed.
'This was created and put on his computer to blame him,' Sherif said. 'I can take a computer and put anything on it. They are making this up to make him look bad.'
Hoffer said that in the video, Mohamed makes a statement about the toy car being similar to a boat. The federal prosecutor noted that when investigators searched the Megahed home with the family's permission, they found a remote-controlled boat.
Megahed's South Carolina attorney has said the boat was a 'therapeutic device' for to the defendant's 10-year-old brother, who has Down syndrome.
Allen argued that the judge could set conditions to ensure Megahed would not flee the district if released on bail. For example, the entire Megahed family agreed to surrender their passports and allow investigators to search their home at any time.
The judge also ordered that Megahed be outfitted with the most secure Global Positioning System monitoring device available to probation officials and that Megahed be permitted to leave his parents' house only to see his attorney or attend religious services.
After Jenkins ruled, prosecutors immediately filed an appeal, meaning Megahed may not be released until U.S. District Judge Steven D. Merryday decides the issue. That can't happen until at least sometime next week.
Ammunition, No Firearms
Under the passenger seat of the car in South Carolina, deputies found ammunition, said Hoffer, but no firearms.
Hoffer said investigators also searched a commercial storage facility. Inside they found a .22-caliber rifle that Megahed had purchased lawfully. Hoffer said Megahed recently tried to purchase a handgun.
Also in the storage facility were welding supplies and scuba diving equipment. Hoffer said Megahed has skill as a welder, so there could be a legitimate reason for those items.
The prosecutor said that when deputies questioned Megahed, he initially denied knowing about 'these rockets or fireworks in the trunk.' But when both defendants were put in the back seat of a patrol vehicle, their conversation in Arabic secretly was recorded, Hoffer said.
A translation summary of the recording shows Megahed asking about what happened to the explosives, Hoffer said, which the prosecutor said shows Megahed was aware of what was in the trunk. The car, Hoffer said, was registered to Megahed's brother.
During the hearing, Allen said the Megahed family was prepared to post $50,000 cash to secure the defendant's release. Hoffer, however, said the government had information that the family has extensive assets and that $50,000 would not be nearly enough to ensure that Megahed would not flee.
Allen said his client is three credits away from earning a bachelor's degree in engineering. Among the glowing letters submitted to the court on Megahed's behalf was one from a university professor, Allen said. Landlords described the Megaheds as an 'on-time, responsible, polite, law-abiding family.'
He said it wouldn't make sense for the defendant to flee the jurisdiction over a charge for which he faces, at most, 33 months in prison.
Hoffer argued that if Megahed flees to Egypt, it will be 'very difficult, if not impossible' for the United States to have him extradited.
Hoffer said Megahed applied to become a citizen last year but was turned down by immigration officials because he had been out of the country for more than 1,600 days during a five-year period that ended in 2003. During that time, he made numerous trips to Egypt, many lasting more than six months, Hoffer said.
Hoffer said Megahed also traveled to Canada, Saudia Arabia and Nigeria, 'which is also of interest to the United States.'
But the judge seemed unimpressed with Megahed's travel, noting it took place when the defendant was 11 to 16 years old.
After the hearing, Megahed family members wouldn't discuss what was said, other than to say they were happy with Jenkins' ruling.
Smiling, his brother, Yahia, said, 'It confirmed our feeling of the justice system.'
Reporter Thomas W. Krause and Editor Howard Altman contributed to this report. Reporter Elaine Silvestrini can be reached at (813) 259-7839 or esilvestrini@tampatrib.com.
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Prosecutors: USF students had explosive materials, instructions. Case against pair shown
Prosecutors: USF students had explosive materials, instructions.
By ABBIE VANSICKLE, Times Staff Writer
Published September 15, 2007
The U.S. Attorney's Office opened up about what was found in the car of two USF students: pipes stuffed with fertilizer, Karo syrup, kitty litter, bullets and fuses, a laptop with Internet searches about martyrdom, Hamas and Qassam rockets and video instructions for turning a child's toy into a detonator.
Ahmed Abda Sherf Mohamed waived his right to a bail hearing. His attorney said he didn't think bond would be granted to him.
The judge ordered Yousef Samir Megahed, 21, to post $200,000 bail, to remain at his family's home, and to leave only for religious services and to meet with his attorneys.
TAMPA - Pipes stuffed with fertilizer, Karo syrup and kitty litter. Bullets and fuses. A laptop with Internet searches about martyrdom, Hamas and Qassam rockets. Video instructions for turning a child's toy into a detonator.
After weeks of silence, the U.S. Attorney's Office opened up about its case against two University of South Florida engineering students facing explosives charges, implying that Youssef Megahed and Ahmed Mohamed had something sinister in mind when they left Tampa in early August and headed north.
Despite the grim implications of what the government presented, prosecutors said they had no "hard, specific evidence" of a motive or answers for a judge's questions about what the men intended to do with the items, prompting U.S. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Jenkins to set bail for one of the men, although he remains in custody pending appeal.
The question of intent has been the biggest puzzle since Aug. 4, when Megahed, 21, and Mohamed, 26, were pulled over for speeding in Goose Creek, S.C., and arrested after a deputy became suspicious and searched the pair's car.
From the start, Megahed's family has said the young man went on a harmless road trip, the whims of college students on summer vacation. The family and supporters filled Courtroom 14B on Friday afternoon, and Megahed's siblings were beaming after the judge's ruling.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jay Hoffer laid out the government's case, saying they view the men as dangerous and at risk of fleeing to their home country of Egypt, a place that doesn't always return fugitives to the United States.
Here's what Hoffer said:
When federal agents searched the men's car, a Toyota Camry registered to Megahed's brother, Yahia Megahed, they found the stuffed pipes wrapped in plastic bags in the trunk alongside a 5-gallon container of gasoline.
Explosives experts categorized the items in the trunk as incomplete pipe bombs, each large enough to blow out windows in a room but not strong enough to destroy a house. Potassium nitrate is a low-grade explosive otherwise used as fertilizer. Kitty litter bound the ingredients while syrup could add fuel.
"I think you can safely say it's a bomb," said Edward Dreizin, a New Jersey Institute of Technology chemical engineering professor.
Agents also found a box of bullets underneath the front passenger seat, where Megahed sat. On a laptop hastily unplugged, agents discovered sites that concerned them, including searches of Qassam rockets, weapons developed by the Palestinian militant group Hamas, often made with steel pipe, liquid sugar and potassium nitrate.
The men were taken into custody and separately questioned. Megahed said he knew nothing about the materials in the trunk, Hoffer said. But when both men were put in the back of a squad car, they spoke to each other in Arabic. In that conversation, which was secretly recorded, Megahed asked Mohamed what happened to the pipes, if they exploded.
As agents dug deeper into the men's background, they found troubling information, Hoffer said.
In July, Mohamed posted a video on YouTube that explained how to transform a toy remote controlled car into a detonator, Hoffer said. The 12-minute video is narrated by a man speaking Arabic with an Egyptian accent. It shows no face, only hands.
"Mohamed admitted he made and uploaded it," Hoffer said.
The video's narrator says it's meant "to save one who wants to be a martyr for another day in battle," Hoffer said. The narrator also mentions a previous example that used a remote controlled toy boat. Federal agents searched the New Tampa home of Megahed's family and found a remote controlled toy boat, Hoffer said.
The judge asked if there was a definite link between the two, and Hoffer said no.
The evidence against Mohamed wasn't the focus, though, because he waived his right to a bail hearing. His attorney, Lionel Lofton, was in Tampa on Friday, but said he didn't think a hearing would have been useful at this time.
"I did not feel he would be granted a bond," he said.
Prosecutors also questioned Megahed's interest in weapons. He recently purchased a .22-caliber rifle and had inquired about a Berreta handgun, Hoffer said. Agents found the rifle inside a storage shed, along with welding and scuba diving equipment.
Megahed had joined a shooting range.
"It certainly raised interesting questions when he's training ... he buys a firearm with a scope," Hoffer said.
Prosecutors said Megahed also had "multiple Egyptian passports" and went to Sears in late July to get more passport-sized photos. There were two passports for Megahed with two different names, Hoffer said.
But Assistant U.S. Public Defender Adam Allen said one of the passports had expired, and that Megahed had used another version of his family's name on the document.
Agents did not seize the passports when they searched the Megahed home, Hoffer said, and they feared, if released, Megahed could flee to Egypt, which does not always extradite fugitives back to the United States. Megahed's extensive travel, both to Egypt and to other countries, including Canada, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, also concerned prosecutors.
When Megahed was arrested, he carried only a California-issued identification card and a photocopy of an immigration green card, Hoffer said.
Allen asked the judge to consider that Megahed had no criminal record and could be closely watched by his family.
"I don't think the government's evidence against my client is overwhelming," he said. He called the evidence against Mohamed "pretty damning."
The judge found the evidence to be "strong" but not "overwhelming" enough to prove Megahed was a dangerous flight risk that must be jailed until trial. "I do agree that he poses danger," she said.
She ordered him to post $200,000 bail, to remain at his family's home, and to leave only for religious services and to meet with his attorneys. His family also was required to consent to a search at any time.
After the hearing, prosecutors immediately filed an appeal, which will likely be addressed next week, Allen said.
As they filed from the courtroom, Megahed's family smiled.
"I'm happy, I'm really happy," said his sister, Mariam Megahed, 18. She said prosecutors couldn't back up much of what they suggested, and the judge knew it.
"Maybe they don't have any evidence because she kept asking questions, questions and more questions," she said.
Ahmed Bedier, director of the Central Florida office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, was quick to distinguish between Megahed and Mohamed.
"It's obvious there are two separate individuals with different charges and different allegations," he said. "I wouldn't be surprised if the two individuals end up having separate cases altogether."
He defended Megahed, saying it appeared he "just happened to be in the car." But he had harsher words for Mohamed.
If he could talk to Mohamed, Bedier said, "I'd say, 'Wake up!' "
He added, "Muslims don't get a second chance when they dabble with things like this. Not only will this have consequences on him, but it will have consequences on most of the Muslims in this country."
Found in the car
When a routine traffic stop led police to search a car driven by Youssef Megahed, here's what was found:
- Three pieces of PVC pipe cut into various sizes, 1 foot or less, filled with potassium nitrate (used in fertilizer) and Karo syrup. Cat litter was used to bind those ingredients.
- Safety fuse, 20 feet.
- Electric drill
- Bullets
- Gasoline, 5 gallon canister
- Laptop computer reflecting visits to the following Web sites: a video file that shows Qassam rockets firing, Hamas information, a discussion of martyrdom, M-16 rifle photos
Source: U.S. Attorney's Office
How much power?
Explosive experts interviewed by the Times say the loaded PVC tubes sound like incomplete pipe bombs, lacking only detonators. Each one, while not powerful enough to blow up a house, could blow out the windows in a room. However, without a detonator, the devices would simply have burned slowly. The chemical combination would not produce what people would typically think of as fireworks.
Sources: Edward Dreizin, New Jersey Institute of Technology chemical engineering professor; Vilem Petr, Colorado School of Mines explosive engineering professor; Van Romero, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology vice president for research
[Last modified September 14, 2007, 23:56:02]
http://www.wnd.com/redir/r.asp?http..._pair_sho.shtml
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http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/1318360/1352120
Germany warns of terror nuclear attack
Sep 16, 2007 3:08 PM
The risk of a terrorist attack in Germany, possibly even a nuclear strike, is high despite last week's arrest of suspected Islamist militants, Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told a newspaper.
"The terrorist threat has not diminished," Schaeuble told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, according to extracts published in advance.
"I am no less worried since the arrests. We know more precisely that we are in the crosshairs of Islamist terrorism...the terrorists want to carry out more attacks," he said.
Schaeuble even warned of the danger of a nuclear attack, although it was not clear if he was referring to Germany specifically.
"Many experts are convinced this kind of attack is a question of when, not if," he told the paper.
Last week, Germany said its security forces had foiled a plan by Islamist militants to carry out massive bomb attacks.
Police arrested three men suspected of belonging to an Islamist terrorist group and who, officials said, were planning strikes on Frankfurt international airport and a major US military base.
Schaeuble wants to introduce new measures to combat the threat from international terrorism, but opposition is high in Germany where curtailing civil liberties is very sensitive more than 60 years after the fall of Nazism.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20...007091402265_pf.html
Converts To Islam Move Up In Cells
Arrests in Europe Illuminate Shift
By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, September 15, 2007; A10
BERLIN -- Religious converts are playing an increasingly influential role in Islamic militant networks, having transformed themselves in recent years from curiosities to key players in terrorist cells in Europe, according to counterterrorism officials and analysts.
The arrests this month of two German converts to Islam -- Fritz Gelowicz and Daniel Schneider -- on suspicions that they were plotting to bomb American targets are just one example of terrorism cases in Europe in which converts to Islam have figured prominently.
In Copenhagen, a convert is among four defendants who went on trial this month for plotting to blow up political targets. In Sweden, a webmaster who changed his name from Ralf Wadman to Abu Usama el-Swede was arrested last year on suspicion of recruiting fighters on the Internet. In Britain, three converts -- including the son of a British politician -- are awaiting trial on charges of participating in last year's transatlantic airline plot.
"The number of converts, it seems, is definitely on the rise," said Michael Taarnby, a terrorism researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies. "We've reached a point where I think al-Qaeda and other groups recognize the value of converts, not just from an operational viewpoint but from a cultural one as well."
Religious converts are sometimes more prone to radicalization because of their zeal to prove their newfound faith, analysts said. They are also less likely to attract police scrutiny in Europe, where investigators often rely on outdated demographic profiles in terrorism cases.
Converts are a tiny subset of the Muslim population in Europe, but their numbers are growing in some countries. In Germany, government officials estimated that 4,000 people converted to Islam last year, compared with an annual average of 300 in the late 1990s. Less than 1 percent of Germany's 3.3 million Muslims are converts.
While religious leaders emphasize that most converts are law-abiding citizens who often promote interfaith understanding, the recent arrests in Germany prompted some lawmakers to suggest that police should keep converts under surveillance.
"Of course not all converts are problematic, but some are particularly dangerous because they want to demonstrate through extreme fanaticism that they are particularly good Muslims," Guenther Beckstein, interior minister for the state of Bavaria, said last week.
The trend is not limited to Europe. In Florida, U.S. citizen and convert Jose Padilla was convicted last month on conspiracy charges for participating in an al-Qaeda support cell. In March, David M. Hicks, an Australian convert, became the first prisoner at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to be convicted on terrorism charges.
Converts have joined militant groups, including al-Qaeda, for years. Wadih el-Hage, a Lebanese Christian who converted to Islam and became a U.S. citizen, served as an aide to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in the 1990s and was convicted for his role in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa.
But counterterrorist analysts and officials said they have become much more common and are now playing leadership roles. They said there is also evidence that militant groups, which used to eye converts suspiciously as potential infiltrators, are now encouraging them to join.
In May, al-Qaeda deputy chief Ayman al-Zawahiri released a videotape in which he repeatedly praised Muslim leader Malcolm X and urged African American soldiers to stop fighting in Iraq and embrace Islam.
"I am hurt when I find a black American fighting the Muslims under the American flag," Zawahiri said, according to a translation of the speech by the SITE Institute, a terrorism research group. "Why is he fighting us when the racist Crusader regime in America is persecuting him like it persecutes us?"
This month, bin Laden released a rare videotape in which he called upon all Americans to convert to Islam. Analysts said bin Laden's remarks, though theological in nature, were probably not intended as a direct recruiting pitch for al-Qaeda. But they said his speech likely was influenced by Adam Gadahn, a U.S. citizen from California who converted to Islam as a teenager and is a media adviser for al-Qaeda. He was indicted in the United States on treason charges last year.
"This has the language and hallmarks of Adam Gadahn and is very reminiscent of his own messages in terms of style and content," said M.J. Gohel, chief executive of the Asia-Pacific Foundation, a London-based security studies organization. "Gadahn, whenever he has appeared in an al-Qaeda video, has always used the opportunity to encourage others to convert to Islam."
Analysts said European converts sometimes are drawn to mosques or organizations at home that have a radical bent but profess nonviolence. After spending time in those circles, however, some seek to deepen their involvement by attending religious schools, or madrassas, in Islamic countries such as Pakistan, Egypt or Saudi Arabia.
Once there, it is easy for spotters from al-Qaeda and other militant groups to recruit potential followers, said Ashraf Ali, a researcher at the University of Peshawar in Pakistan. "That's the point where these new converts fall in the hands of jihadi organizations and they go for military training," he said.
One fundamentalist network that has attracted hundreds of converts in Europe is Tablighi Jamaat, a missionary sect based in Pakistan that characterizes itself as peaceful but is criticized by some authorities as a training ground for extremists. Another is al-Muhajiroun, a movement founded by a radical cleric in London that officially disbanded in 2004 but reorganized into an assortment of splinter groups.
Maulana Muhammad Qasim, a member of the Pakistani National Assembly from the Mardan district who is active in Tablighi Jamaat, said the organization has no links to terrorism or politics.
"It is not the policy of the Tablighi Jamaat to send people for military training or jihad," he said. "But if someone starts off with us and ends up as a militant, that's an individual's decision and has nothing to do with the manifesto of the group."
In Germany, investigators are still trying to determine how the three men arrested Sept. 4 became radicalized and how they came into contact with the Islamic Jihad Union, a South Asian network that has asserted responsibility for the plot to attack American targets in Germany.
Gelowicz, whom investigators have identified as the ringleader of the cell, struggled academically in high school and converted to Islam when he was 18. He was active in radical circles in the southern city of Ulm, home to an Islamic cultural center and other institutions that have long been under police surveillance.
In an interview with the German magazine Stern in July, two months before his arrest, Gelowicz described his introduction to Islam. "I had a good friend who was a Muslim," he said. "At some point, you start to ask questions like, 'Why do you fast?' 'Why don't you eat pork?' You keep asking. At some point you realize that God sent a prophet to fulfill all revelations."
Many Germans have been stunned by news of the alleged plot, and religious leaders said they were trying to counter what they described as a public backlash and heightened suspicion about converts.
Gerhard Isa Moldenhauer, a board member at the Central Institute of the Islam Archive, the oldest Muslim organization in Germany, blamed panicky lawmakers for stirring up distrust.
"The German politicians tell us almost daily that all converts are terrorists," said Moldenhauer, 58, himself a convert. "It is truly sad when politicians have no trust in their citizens."
Special correspondents Imtiaz Ali in Peshawar, Pakistan, and Shannon Smiley in Berlin contributed to this report.
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With the shadings for which the NY Slimes is known, here is this on the Homeland dangers faced by Denmark:
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This article was reported by Nicholas Kulish, Souad Mekhennet and Eric Schmitt, and written by Mr. Kulish.
Muslims see hypocrisy in Denmark’s talk of human rights and its actions in places like Afghanistan, said Imran Shah, 31.
COPENHAGEN, Sept. 16 — After three terrorism cases in less than two years, including an alleged bombing plot broken up this month, intelligence officials say tiny Denmark is on the front line in the battle against Islamic terrorism in Europe.
“Even though we’ve prevented one terrorist attack, we know that there are still people in Denmark and abroad that have the capacity, the will and the ability to carry out terrorist attacks in Denmark,” Jakob Scharf, the head of Danish intelligence, said in an interview in his office here.
He was referring to predawn raids on Sept. 4 that resulted in the arrests of eight suspects, two of whom are still in custody on terrorism charges and are accused of planning a bombing attack.
American authorities helped Danish security officials locate the suspects through electronic intercepts from Pakistan, just as they did in arrests the same day in a bombing plot in southern Germany, intelligence officials in Washington said. They said one of the men in the Danish case received instruction within the past 12 months in explosives, surveillance and other techniques at a terrorist training camp in Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan.
With Europe again focused on the threat posed by terrorist plots, Denmark illustrates the powerful interplay between foreign agitation and domestic discontent. The country became a target of foreign Islamist terrorist groups two years ago after a conservative newspaper here published controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, drawing worldwide attention. At home, the children of Muslim immigrants complain of job discrimination and integration problems, feeding the disenchantment of the small but growing Muslim population.
“In the schools, Danish teachers are always talking about democracy and human rights, but now they see what Denmark is doing in Afghanistan and what they did here with the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad,” said Imran Shah, 31, who leads a youth group at a local mosque. “They ask themselves, is this a democracy or are they talking about double standards?”
While much of the world’s attention was focused on the arrests that took place that same day in Germany, but were announced one day later, intelligence officials here and in Washington said at least one suspect in the Danish group had direct ties to leading figures in Al Qaeda, which has regrouped in northwestern Pakistan.
“What’s coming from this is that they are now able to give military and terrorist training and able to plan and steer specific operations in Europe,” Mr. Scharf, the Danish intelligence chief, said. “Al Qaeda is back.”
Mr. Scharf drew a clear distinction between independent or loosely affiliated groups drawing inspiration from Al Qaeda’s ideology and specific control of plans for attack, saying the Danish bomb plot was clearly the latter. “I’m not indicating a direct phone line to Osama bin Laden,” he said, but leading members are able to “direct operations outside of Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
This case was the first time officials here have linked an operation in Denmark to the group that masterminded the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
While Mr. Scharf underscored the threat posed by Islamic terrorism, he also differentiated between the religion of Islam and those who commit violence in its name, an important distinction in a country where debates over the role of Islam in a traditionally Christian society have often been contentious and the lines sometimes blurred.
The case in Denmark also highlights the uneasy coexistence of intelligence and prosecution. Danish authorities gave no indication of the quantity of explosive material found in Copenhagen this month, but they said suspects had begun mixing precursor chemicals for bombs. Of the eight men arrested, the authorities quickly released six of them, fueling skepticism about the strength of the case and the government’s ability to turn arrests into convictions.
In the first of the recent terrorism cases, stemming from arrests in October 2005, three of the four defendants found guilty by jurors had their verdicts overruled by a three-judge review panel. The fourth was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison on terrorism charges, and prosecutors say they will retry another. In the second case, nine suspects were initially arrested, of whom four are on trial. The court proceedings are under way in Copenhagen.
“They are manipulating the press and the public by giving the impression that they have a very serious case,” said Bjoern Elmquist, a lawyer for defendants in two of the cases, including this one. “They are scaring people.”
With a population of 5.5 million, Denmark is smaller than New York City by several million people, but it is a disproportionately large target on jihadist Web sites. Not only did Denmark achieve infamy across the Muslim world for the publication of the Muhammad cartoons, which incited violent and even deadly protests in other countries, it also has troops both in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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There are no official statistics, but researchers estimate that there are roughly 210,000 Muslims in Denmark. It is not a homogeneous group but is split among Turks, Iraqis, Bosnians and others. That jihadist Web sites have been translated into Danish for such a small and disparate group demonstrates the interest and effort they are putting into the country.
The Heimdalsgade mosque which, according to a Danish newspaper, was attended by suspects in all three of the alleged plots.
Mr. Scharf said the profile of Muslim men pulled into extremism was young, “normally in the age from 16 to 25.” The young men are courted by mentors whose job is to identify those predisposed to a jihadi mind-set, radicalize them and put them in touch with others who could help them plan violent acts.
“This is not taking place when the imam is preaching in the mosque,” Mr. Scharf said. “I think that these imams play a very important role in preventing the radicalization” of young Muslims.
Mohammed el-Banna, an imam from the famous family of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, said, “They like heroes, and heroes, from their point of view, are not those who talk but those who fight.” He preaches at a mosque in Heimdalsgade that Politiken, a leading newspaper here, reported had been attended by suspects in all three of the alleged plots. “We cannot check the ID cards of people who attend the prayers,” he said.
Mr. Banna, 49, moved to Denmark from Egypt in 1985. He is a Danish citizen and has four children, the eldest of whom is studying computer science at a university in Denmark. Saying he was speaking for himself and not the mosque, Mr. Banna said that before the cartoon controversy, Denmark enjoyed a very good reputation in the Muslim world, as a nation that did business in the Middle East rather than fighting or keeping colonies there.
For second-generation Muslims coming of age after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the American-led invasion of Iraq, it is a different story. Mr. Banna said young men had come to him looking for religious justification to go and fight in Iraq. “When I told them that there is no justification, they would look for someone else to get the justification,” he said.
The generational gap is a concern not only for security officials, but for Muslim parents grappling with the anger of their children.
“Young people have a problem of identity,” said Bilal Assaad the spokesman for the Community of Islam Mosque in Copenhagen, which led the protests here against the Muhammad cartoons. “They were born in Denmark but they don’t feel Danish. They don’t have good possibilities to get jobs because their name is Muhammad. My son tells me, ‘Yes I can see that I’m Muslim, but I can’t see that I’m Danish.’ ”
Mr. Shah, the youth group leader, said, “When I’m going on a train with my backpack, people start to look at me in a different way.” He said that he appreciated the irony of the fact that, while under suspicion on his commute, he was on the way to his job as a security guard at the airport.
Of the 11 locations searched by Danish authorities in the recent raids, it was an apartment on Glasvej Street in a mixed neighborhood of Muslim immigrants and ethnic Danes where investigators say the bomb-making materials were found. The front door is cracked where it was broken open by a police battering ram.
The apartment was occupied by two brothers of Pakistani descent. Both were arrested in the raids. The older of the two, who is 24, was released after less than a day. “They came at 2 o’clock,” he said. “They broke open the door. They broke everything. They came as animals.”
He added that he had not seen his brother since going to sleep the night before their arrest. Under Danish law, the authorities do not release the names of suspects, and he asked not to have his name used. The authorities say he remains under investigation.
“I work all day,” he said in a soft voice. “I don’t know what my brother and his friends do.”
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Ah yes, the endless muslim victimhood..... :roll:
If Denmark is so bad, pack up and move someplace where muslims rule the land, like France.
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http://www.nationalterroralert.com/updates/2007/09/17/school-terror-threat-jihad-boom-postcards-with-threatening-cartoon-sent-to-nine-schools/
This is a "ping", IMHO.
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070917/pl_afp/usattacksqaeda_070917103758&printer=1;_ylt=AqNgcBhifs_.o3qDT8SA1gmtOrgF
Qaeda urges Islamic terror in West in third 9/11 video
Mon Sep 17, 8:29 AM ET
Al-Qaeda called on Islamists to sow terror in the West to create a climate of fear, in a third video marking the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States which was posted on the Internet on Monday.
Called "reasons and motives for the attacks on New York and Washington," the video features a montage of images of the burning World Trade Centre towers and scenes from Islamist training camps.
"We must take Islamist terrorism to Western countries so that it becomes a normal part of life like natural disasters," a voiceover says.
"In that way, we will have acts of mass extermination in which people will feel that their affluence also brings death... and we will have created a balance of deterrence between us and them," the unidentified voice adds.
The new video also includes clips from old voice recordings of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his Egyptian deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, as well as a short video clip of Mustafa Abu Al-Yazid, also known as Sheikh Said, the group's commander in Afghanistan.
Al-Qaeda already released a videotape and an audiotape featuring bin Laden earlier this month to mark the the sixth anniversary of the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in the United States.
A third release had been trailed by Al-Qaeda's media arm, As-Sahab. In the event the new video was issued in the name of Al-Tanzem, prompting suggestions the network has launched a new media arm.
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http://counterterrorismblog.org/2007/09/print/third_911_video.php
Counterterrorism Blog
Third 9/11 Jihadist Video Calls For Attacks on West
By Jeffrey Imm
Media reports state that a third 9/11 Jihadist video, reportedly by Al Qaeda, has been released via Islamist web sites today, calling for Jihadist terror acts on the West to be a daily occurrence and calling for "acts of mass extermination".
AKI and AFP have thus far provided the primary reporting on this new Al Qaeda video.
AKI reports that the new 26 minute video is entitled "The attacks in New York and Washington - reasons and motives".
AFP reports that the video "features a montage of images of the burning World Trade Center towers and scenes from Islamist training camps."
AFP reports that a voiceover on the video states:
"We must take Islamist terrorism to Western countries so that it becomes a normal part of life like natural disasters" and "n that way, we will have acts of mass extermination in which people will feel that their affluence also brings death... and we will have created a balance of deterrence between us and them".
AKI reports that the new video begins with a message from Abu Yahya al-Libi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. On the new video, Al-Libi is reported to praise the role of Al Qaeda in defending the principles of Islam
AKI reports that the new video includes a montage of audio and video footage of previous messages Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri on the rationale behind the 9/11 attacks. AFP reports that the video also includes a clip by Mustafa Abu Al-Yazid, also known as Sheikh Said, the group's commander in Afghanistan.
AKI reports that:
"[a] voice on the video also gives an account of the war in Chechnya, blames the West for having committed a mass extermination and calls for revenge for this action. Also included is footage of interviews carried out by the Arab satellite TV network, Al Jazeera, with university professors, Arab commentators and editor of the London-based al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper. The entire video describes various events that occured before the 9/11 attacks, in particular the conflict in Chechnya, and tries to explain the reasons behind the terror attacks."
AKI reports that the video ends with a speech by Abdullah Azzam. Abdullah Azzam, who died in 1989, was an inspiration to Osama Bin Laden and countless other Jihadists.
AKI reports that the new video does not the logo of al-Sahab, Al Qaeda's communications arm, but carries the new logo of "al-Tanzim". AFP reports: "A third release had been trailed by Al-Qaeda's media arm, As-Sahab. In the event the new video was issued in the name of Al-Tanzem, prompting suggestions the network has launched a new media arm."
This posting will be updated as new information is released.
Sources:
September 17, 2007 -- AKI: Terrorism: Al-Qaeda releases third 9/11 video
September 17, 2007 -- AFP: Qaeda urges Islamic terror in West in third 9/11 video
September 17, 2007 -- Agenzia Giornalistica Italia -- Terror: Third Al Qaeda's video, attacks must be normal
April 16, 2002 - Slate: Abdullah Azzam - The godfather of jihad
By Jeffrey Imm on September 17, 2007 1:00 PM
****I really don't like the potential subtext here, as I see it as a potential call for "Beslan" attacks CONUS.****
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Gents,
My sources indicate that at least 20 school buses have been stolen in the past few months from various locations in Texas and Pennsylvania. We've been discussing this a bit and what the motive for this could be. In 15 years in law enforcement I never heard of anything like this.
Your take??
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Like many stolen vehicles, they could be across the border now serving Mexican schoolchildren. I would prefer that scenario.
The much worse scenario involves child hostages in VBIEDs being detonated on live global television.
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http://michellemalkin.com/2007/09/17/dearbornistan-government-at-work-covering-up-for-the-ak-47-jihadi-suspect/
Submission.
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Muslim Brotherhood's papers detail plan to seize U.S.
Group's takeover plot emerges in Holy Land case
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcont...d.35ce2b6.html
07:37 AM CDT on Monday, September 17, 2007
By JASON TRAHAN / The Dallas Morning News
jtrahan@dallasnews.com
Amid the mountain of evidence released in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial, the most provocative has turned out to be a handful of previously classified evidence detailing Islamist extremists' ambitious plans for a U.S. takeover. A knot of terrorism researchers say the memos and audiotapes, many translated from Arabic and containing detailed strategies by the international Islamist group the Muslim Brotherhood, are proof that extremists have long sought to replace the Constitution with Shariah, or Islamic law.
But some academics and Muslim leaders say that the ideals contained in the documents were written by disgruntled foreign dissidents representing a tiny radical fringe. The documents also pre-date the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and the 80-year-old Muslim Brotherhood is now either inactive or largely underground in America.
Hardly.
The documents – introduced in recent weeks as part of the prosecution's case in the trial of the now defunct Holy Land Foundation and five of its organizers – lay out the Brotherhood's plans in chillingly stark terms. A 1991 strategy paper for the Brotherhood, often referred to as the Ikhwan in Arabic, found in the Virginia home of an unindicted co-conspirator in the case, describes the group's U.S. goals, referred to as a "civilization-jihadist process."
"The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions," it states. This process requires a "mastery of the art of 'coalitions,' the art of 'absorption' and the principles of 'cooperation.' "
Success in the U.S. "in establishing an observant Islamic base with power and effectiveness will be the best support and aid to the global movement," it states.
A transcript of a Brotherhood orientation meeting recorded in the early 1980s includes discussions of the need for "securing the group" from infiltration by "Zionism, Masonry ... the CIA, FBI, etc. so that we find out if they are monitoring us" and "how can we get rid of them." Discussions later turn to "weapons training at the Ikhwan's camps" in Oklahoma and Missouri.
[...]
Esam Omeish, president of the Virginia-based Muslim American Society, or MAS, says the documents introduced in the Holy Land trial are full of "abhorrent statements and are in direct conflict of the very principles of our Islam."
"The Muslim community in America wishes to contribute positively to the continued success and greatness of our civilization," Dr. Omeish said. "The ethics of tolerance and inclusion are the very tenets that MAS was based on from its inception."
His group, formed in 1993, is thought by many to be the Brotherhood's current incarnation in the U.S., although he and other MAS leaders say their group formed as an alternative to radicalism.
"MAS is not the Muslim Brotherhood," Dr. Omeish said. The society "grew out of a history of Islamic activism in the U.S. when the Muslim Brotherhood once existed but has a different intellectual paradigm and outlook."
[...]
Mahdi Bray, director of the Washington, D.C.-based Muslim American Society's Freedom Foundation, which promotes Muslim civil rights, called the Holy Land documents "a throwback." He has attended portions of the Holy Land trial.
"If those documents talk about the establishing of Shariah law in America, I'm saying that's a lot of hype: wishful thinking from an immigrant perspective. ... It doesn't reflect genuine American perspective in terms of where we're heading," Mr. Bray said.
He said members of MAS decided in 1993, when the organization was founded, that they would pursue political and nonviolent tactics.
"I wouldn't be candid if I didn't say there weren't some old-timers who want to hold onto the old way, who say that this is the way the Ikhwan did it, this should be our model," he said. "We said 'So what? It doesn't work here.' We've been very adamant about that."
Mr. Bray, an Islamic convert, has been criticized by some as being an apologist for terrorists, particularly for his condemnation of Israel's 2004 missile strike in the Palestinian Gaza Strip that killed Hamas' spiritual founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
Mr. Bray says that although his politics are controversial, he's not anti-American.
"Those on the right and many of those who I would classify as Islamophobes, many of them have failed to realize that there is an authentic American Muslim organization here and movement in America that wants to integrate," he said. "We believe the ballot is an appropriate place to be."
He said that he "liked the Bill of Rights" and didn't want to see the Constitution replaced with Islamic law.
"There's a maturation that's taken place in the American Muslim community that's either not understood, or understood but viewed as a threat to other interest groups in this country."
[...]
There are those in the U.S. government who believe that the Brotherhood is the Bush administration's best chance for reaching out to moderate Islamists internationally.
The Brotherhood "works to dissuade the Muslims from violence, instead channeling them into politics and charitable activities," said Robert S. Leiken, director of the Immigration and National Security Program at The Nixon Center in a recent article in Foreign Affairs, a publication of the nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations.
While he has not studied the Holy Land documents, Dr. Leiken said that the U.S. discussion on Islamic thought tends to be polarized and that what passes for scholarship is often more selective than rigorous.
"The more you study it, the more distinctions and differences should emerge," he said. "And scholars should see these distinctions. In Europe, these things are understood better, but in the U.S., they often get brushed aside in the heat of the debate."
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/20/nyregion/20bomb.html?...jgWDT5ogkDOvdyWX9oqg
September 20, 2007
A Bomb Threat Closes Schools in Bergen County
By TINA KELLEY
Schools in at least a dozen districts in northern New Jersey will be closed today as a precaution after an anonymous bomb threat was received by the mayor of Emerson, in Bergen County, police officials said yesterday. The closings affect nearly 12,000 students.
A letter warned that five schools would be “blown out” at 11:30 a.m., school officials said. It mentioned Emerson’s three schools as well as two others in unidentified nearby towns.
According to a statement from the Emerson Police Department, the borough clerk’s office received the letter around 10:30 a.m. yesterday. The Emerson schools were immediately evacuated, and the Emerson police notified neighboring departments about the threat, the statement said.
The Bergen County police bomb squad searched every school building in Emerson, the statement said. No bombs were found.
School districts in Oradell, River Edge, Closter, Demarest, Haworth, Harrington Park, Northvale, Norwood and Old Tappan will be closed today. Two regional districts — Northern Valley, with schools in Demarest and Old Tappan, and River Dell, with schools in Oradell and River Edge — will also be closed. The schools, all in mostly affluent Bergen County, have a combined student population of about 11,700.
“My first reaction was shock, the concern for my two daughters, then anger,” Emerson’s mayor, Louis J. Lamatina, said yesterday in a telephone interview. “And it’s an anger that’s growing.”
Mr. Lamatina, a part-time mayor, usually collects his mail on Saturdays. But the clerk called him immediately after opening the letter, which had been written on a computer, he said.
“Could it be a prank from a child? From what I’ve heard, that’s obviously a credible theory,” he said, noting that the letter looked a bit patched together. It was postmarked in Teterboro, where the regional post office is located.
“These poor kids’ minds are forming, and they have to live with a threat like this,” he said. “Everything is plastered over the news in front of them, and the fact that someone wants to blow them up is just inhuman. If it’s a prank, there’s no potential justification or explanation of how someone could sink that low.”
He said the schools were evacuated so quickly that some teachers did not have time to grab their purses, which were locked inside.
In Oradell, schools were closed at the end of the day yesterday and will be closed today. All were being searched, the Oradell police said.
“Our department deemed it prudent to treat the threat as credible, to ensure the safety of the students and school personnel,” said Detective Sgt. Mike Oslacky of the Oradell police. Back-to-school nights at the middle and high school were also canceled.
The warning had ripple effects beyond the boundaries of Emerson, which has 7,300 residents and 1,200 students in its schools. In Glen Rock, about eight miles away, the schools will remain open, but, according to the district’s Web site, “All high school students will be required to remain inside the building for lunch, and no outside food deliveries will be allowed.”
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http://www.chicoer.com/portlet/article/html/fragments/p...d=6944877&siteId=135
Video, photos taken at fire stations spark concerns
By GREG WELTER - Staff Writer
Chico Enterprise-Record
Article Launched:
During the last week of July, fire officials in the Bay Area city of Campbell reported that two men had been seen videotaping routine activities at a fire station.
The men were reportedly in their 20s or early 30s, and one was using a sophisticated news media-style camera.
When firefighters attempted to talk with the men, they reportedly jumped into a waiting car and sped off.
The incident prompted the Sacramento Regional Terrorism Threat Assessment Center to send out a request for Northern California fire stations to watch for similar incidents, and report them immediately.
The day the request went out, Sept. 6, a second, similar incident was reported at a fire station in Yuba City.
According to officials, a fire captain encountered two men parked outside the city's main fire station. One of the men got out and allegedly began taking pictures of the fire station's administration building. When the captain approached the men, to tell them they were in a no-parking zone, the photographer jumped in the vehicle and the men left.
The man who took the photos was described as being between 30 and 40 years of age.
On Sept. 12, Fresno Fire Department officials spotted two men in a vehicle allegedly observing activities at a fire training center. When questioned, the driver reportedly said they were just checking things out, then left immediately.
Two days later, on Sept. 14, personnel from the Sacramento Metro Fire Department noticed two men taking photos of a fire station. A third man sat in the back of a car, and appeared to be drawing or taking notes.
When fire officials walked toward them, the two taking pictures jumped in the vehicle and sped away.
The men allegedly took pictures in front of the station, and in the rear. They ranged in age from late teens to about 60, officials recalled.
Tim Johnstone, a commander with the threat assessment center in Sacramento, said all of the incidents are being investigated, but there is no indication they might be related.
"We aren't considering this a specific threat at this time; we're just asking our public safety partners to be on the watch for suspicious activity," he said.
He said the threat assessment center was formed to act as a collection point for homeland security intelligence, and disseminate it appropriately.
Jay Alan, deputy director of communication for the Governor's Office of Homeland Security, said Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is concerned about security agencies sharing information, and has made it a top priority.
Local officials said no suspicious incidents involving videotaping or photos have been reported at fire stations.
Fire department personnel are being asked to take note of vehicle descriptions, descriptions of suspicious subjects, and complete license plate numbers. Citizens who witness suspicious activity, near fire stations or elsewhere, should do the same, and report it to their local law enforcement agency.
Citizens should not attempt to contact suspicious individuals.
Staff writer Greg Welter can be reached at 896-7768 or gwelter@chicoer.com.
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http://www.douglasfarah.com/article/249/the-sudden-rush...a-communications.com
Sep 20, 10:26
The Sudden Rush of Al Qaeda Communications
Perhaps one of the most successful achievements of the old guard al Qaeda, besides staying alive, is the vast expansion of its propaganda outreach arm.
Not only are the videos and tapes coming fast and furious, but in multiple languages aiming at a wide variety of audiences.
This indicates a level of sophistication and and stability that is both deeply alarming and indicative of how secure the group feels. The videos, with different scenes, subtitles, translations and rapid turnaround time (indicated by the references to recent events) shows that the old guard al Qaeda is dedicating significant resources to the propaganda/outreach wing and has a desire to retain a place of preeminence within the jihadi world.
It is interesting that both Bin Laden and Zawahiri have become ubiquitous after years of long silences. This indicates to me that not only do they have the wherewithal to run the operation, but that they feel it is imperative to get their message out repeatedly.
For non-state groups, cut off from the normal media channels, such outreach is vitally important to survival. I draw an imperfect parallel to the success of Radio Venceremos, run by the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) in the Salvadoran civil war in the 1980s.
The radio broadcast daily, and often with live combat reports as the fighting was happening. The constant voice of rebels was not just an irritant to the government, but a source of ideological sustenance to the cadres scattered around the country, as well as a vital recruitment tool.
Despite the dedication of significant resources and intelligence assets to getting rid of the radio, the U.S.-backed military could never take it down. It remained a thorn in the side of the Salvadoran army for 12 years, and a vital part of the FMLN’s ability to survive.
Al Qaeda does not broadcast daily, but the production unit has demonstrated a recent ability to greatly increase its operational tempo. This shows that they are likely in a stable location, with good equipment and not on the run or under significant pressure.
Why the sudden surge in communications with the network? That, to me, is the most important question. The content is important and should be analyzed, especially the call to war against Musharraf in Pakistan and the call to retake Spain for Islam. But much of the statements are simply restatements of old positions and rhetoric.
Perhaps, as the “Base” takes on a life of its own, the old leadership sees a need to reassert its relevancy. Or perhaps the old guard no longer holds a great deal of appeal to the young men wanting to fight the “hot” wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and are drawn to different jihadi organizations, rather than the old men living in caves or apartments.
Or perhaps the productions are largely intended as morale boosters for the cadre in the absence of significant successful attacks in the United States and Europe.
What does seem clear to me is that this propaganda machine, run at some risk and expense, is vitally important to the leadership. It is also vital for those in a virtual world, looking for some point of connection, to have access to this material, as well as being useful to those seeking to recruit.
I am not sure what it means, but it is another sign of how much work there is to do in shutting down the message as well as the messenger.
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S.C. mom scoops al-Qaida with its videos
By SAGAR MEGHANI, Associated Press Writer
16 minutes ago
Once her son is off to school, Laura Mansfield settles in at her dining room table with her laptop and begins trolling Arabic-language message boards and chat rooms popular with jihadists.
Fluent in Arabic, the self-employed terror analyst often hacks into the sites, translates the material, puts it together and sends her analysis via a subscription service to intelligence agencies, law enforcement and academics.
Occasionally she comes across a gem, such as when she found a recent Osama bin Laden video — before al-Qaida had announced it.
"I realized, oh my gosh, I'm sitting here, I'm a fat 50-year-old mom and I've managed to scoop al-Qaida," said Mansfield, who uses that name as a pseudonym because she receives death threats.
She sometimes spends 100 hours a week online, and she often finds items after word has begun spreading on the Arabic forums of an imminent release.
"It's really important to understand what the jihadists think and how they're planning on doing things," she said. "They're very vocal. They tell us what they're going to do and then they go out and do it."
Mansfield tips off her intelligence sources when she does find something new, part of an informal working relationship with the government.
"When I send them something, it's welcome," she said. "They thank me."
There have been times when an impending video release has kept her from a planned shopping trip with her daughter.
"It gets really challenging when you're trying to do that and cook spaghetti at the same time," she said.
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http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=27156_Update-_Terrorist_Threat_at_Raleigh-Durham_Airport_(FBI-_Misperceived)&only
:| This is where we stand, 6 years after 9/11.
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From www.danielpipes.org | Original article available at: www.danielpipes.org/article/431
Terror & Denial [by Hadayat at LAX]
by Daniel Pipes
New York Post
July 9, 2002
On the 4th of July, an Egyptian immigrant to the United States who believes in wild conspiracy theories about Jews, is known for his great "hate for Israel," and has possible ties to al Qaeda, armed himself to the teeth and assaulted the Israeli airline counter at Los Angeles International Airport, killing two.
It is obvious why Hesham Mohamed Ali Hadayet targeted Jews in a highly visible place on so prominent a date: to engage in terrorism against Israel.
But one important institution - the U.S. government - claims not to know Hadayet's goals. An FBI spokesman has said that "there's nothing to indicate terrorism." Another FBI official said of Hadayet: "It appears he went there with the intention of killing people. Why he did that we are still trying to determine." Possible causes named include a work dispute and a hate crime.
Sure, law enforcement should not jump to conclusions, but this head-in-the-clouds approach is ridiculous. It also fits a well-established pattern. Consider three cases of terrorism in the New York City area:
Rashid Baz, a Lebanese cab driver with a known hatred for all things Israeli and Jewish, armed himself to the teeth in March 1994 and drove around the city looking for a Jewish target. He found his victims - a van full of Hassidic boys - on the Brooklyn Bridge and fired a hail of bullets against them, killing one boy.
And how did the FBI classify this crime? As "road rage." Only because the murdered boy's mother relentlessly fought this false description did the bureau finally in 2000 re-classify the murder as "the crimes of a terrorist."
Ali Hasan Abu Kamal, a Palestinian gunman hailing from militant Islamic circles in Florida, took a gun to the top of the Empire State building in February 1997 and shot seven people there, killing one.
His suicide note accused the United States of using Israel as its "instrument" against the Palestinians, but city officials ignored this evidence and instead dismissed Abu Kamal as either "one deranged individual working on his own" (Police Commissioner Howard Safir) or a "man who had many, many enemies in his mind" (Mayor Rudolph Giuliani).
Gamil al-Batouti, an EgyptAir copilot, yelled "I put my faith in God's hands" as he crashed a plane leaving Kennedy airport in October 1999, killing 217. Under Egyptian pressure, the National Transportation Safety Board report shied away from once mentioning Batouti's possible terrorist motives.
And despite all the "world-has-changed" rhetoric following the horrors of last September, Western officialdom continues to pretend terrorism away.
Damir Igric, a Croat immigrant from the former Yugoslavia, used a boxcutter to slash the neck of a Greyhound bus driver in Tennessee last October, causing the bus to roll over, killing six passengers and himself. Although this bus-hijacking scenario echoed similar attacks by Palestinians on Israeli buses, the FBI immediately classified it "an isolated incident" and not an act of terrorism. The media attributed the violence to post-traumatic stress syndrome.
Hassan Jandoubi, an Islamist with possible connections to al Qaeda, had started working at the AZF fertilizer factory in suburban Toulouse, France, just days before a massive explosion took place there last Sept. 21. This, the worst catastrophe ever in a French chemical plant, killed Jandoubi and 29 others, injured 2,000, destroyed 600 dwellings, and damaged 10,000 buildings.
The autopsy revealed that Jandoubi was wearing two pairs of trousers and four pairs of underpants, which the coroner compared to what is worn by "Islamic militants going into battle or on suicide missions." Also, the chemical plant was processing ammonium nitrate, a stable chemical that requires a substantial infusion of energy to explode.
Ignoring these signs, the French authorities declared there was "no shred of evidence" of the explosion being a terrorist act and ruled it an accident. They even prosecuted two publications merely for calling Jandoubi a "radical Islamist," making them pay tens of thousands of dollars in fines to Jandoubi's heirs, a mosque and a Muslim organization for their "defamation" of Jandoubi.
Work dispute, hate crime, road rage, derangement, post-traumatic stress, industrial accident ... these expressions of denial obstruct effective counterterrorism. The time has come for governments to catch up with the rest of us and call terrorism by its rightful name.
_________
April 12, 2003 update: Good news: the FBI did "catch up with the rest of us" and did call terrorism by its rightful name. It took over nine months after the murders but it finally did:
July 4 Shooting at LAX Ruled Terrorism
By Paul Chavez
Los Angeles (AP) - An Egyptian immigrant who opened fire inside Los Angeles International Airport committed an act of terrorism, but he did it alone and was not tied to any terrorist organizations, federal officials have determined.
Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, 41, killed two people at the ticket counter of El Al, Israel's national airline, and wounded several others in the July Fourth attack before he was fatally shot by an airline security guard.
The Department of Justice had withheld characterizing the shooting while federal agents launched a worldwide probe. They determined it was terrorism related to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, said Matthew McLaughlin, an FBI spokesman in Los Angeles.
"The investigation developed information that he openly supported the killings of civilians in order to advance the Palestinian cause," McLaughlin said.
The FBI findings, made several months ago, were recently approved by the Justice Department. McLaughlin said Friday that his office was told not to issue a news release but was given permission to confirm the finding if asked.
The investigation found that Hadayet had become increasingly militant in recent years. Just weeks before the shooting, he bought the weapons used in the attack, closed his bank accounts and sent his family overseas. At the time, Hadayet, who lived in Irvine, was $10,000 in debt, and his limousine businesses was struggling, authorities said.
Mar. 14, 2006 update: I today found a name for Hadayet's rampage - Sudden Jihad Syndrome. See the explanation at "Sudden Jihad Syndrome (in North Carolina)."
_________
From www.danielpipes.org | Original article available at: www.danielpipes.org/article/431
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One on One with Steven Emerson: 'Jihad is jihad'
Ruthie Blum , THE JERUSALEM POST Sep. 20, 2007
Investigative Project on Terrorism executive director Steven Emerson claims that radical Islam is alive and well in America - thanks to the tacit cooperation of government agencies which embrace the very groups they should be investigating.
Steven Emerson's delicate delivery belies the pungency - and punch - of his words. Whether this is the result of having heard it all and said it all in every possible forum is not clear. In fact, delving beneath the surface of radical Islamic activity, only to discover additional layers with each dig, could just as easily have the opposite effect on one's demeanor. Particularly when the information being uncovered is pooh-poohed in some fashion. Or when its disseminator is dismissed as alarmist at best, and anti-Muslim at worst.
But Emerson - an investigative journalist turned NGO director - doesn't appear to be perturbed on a personal level. It's the public response to what he claims is a pernicious network of terrorist cells within the United States, fronted as humanitarian organizations, that gets to him.
"The US government, the media and the intelligentsia are witting and unwitting enablers of radical Islam," says Emerson, a best-selling author, whose books include American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us (2002) and Jihad Incorporated: A Guide to Militant Islam in the US (2006), and creator of the prize-winning documentary film Jihad in America (1994).
Here earlier this month to speak at the seventh annual conference of the International Institute for Counterterrorism (ICT) in Herzliya, Emerson, who founded and heads the Washington DC-based Investigative Project on Terrorism, gave The Jerusalem Post an overview of the situation he believes will only really be solved when Islam undergoes a genuine reformation.
In an hour-long interview at the David Intercontinental Hotel in Tel Aviv on the eve of the conference, Emerson, 50, punctuated this sentiment by pointing to the Dolphinarium across the street - the site of the 2001 suicide bombing that left 21 people dead and more than 100 wounded.
"What we're looking at," he says, poker-face intact, "is the marker of where 'lesser jihad' was carried out against young Israelis at a discotheque."
What is the purpose of conferences on counterterrorism? Do they have any effect?
Conferences are ubiquitous - mainly good for networking and making contacts. In the intelligence community, the best way of developing information and getting new ideas is to meet people who do different things in the same area. And conferences also bring in revenue for the organizers.
What about meeting people with different views on terrorism and how to combat it? These conferences, both in Israel and abroad, seem to have such a wide range of ideological slants as to render them useless.
Oh yes. Take the Aspen Institute's annual terrorism symposia, for instance. There participants believe that Prozac and therapy should be dispensed to terrorists. It's so "Kumbaya" that one would gag if forced to attend. It all comes down to the Harvard University view of terrorism, according to which terrorists carry out aggression because they are "humiliated." It's the pseudo-psycho view that offers justification for the committing of violent acts, and ends up blaming the victim rather than the terrorist. This is ridiculous, of course. I feel humiliated when I get a ticket; but that doesn't mean I get to shoot a cop. The whole field became a gravy train in Washington for many people after 9/11, thanks to the hundreds of millions of dollars dispensed by the US government to think tanks and academic centers.
These centers are overwhelmingly anti-American and anti-Israeli, and thus full of pro-Islamist ideologues or just plain charlatans. My organization does not take a dime of government money, so we are free to call the shots as we see them.
How do you see General Wesley Clark, the keynote speaker at the ICT conference this year, for example?
Clark is not someone for whom I have much respect, since he's been championing the notion that we should be talking to Iran and Syria, effectively rewarding them for their terrorist activities. He has also spoken about being nicer to terrorists. In fact, in 2004, when he was running for president, he sent a tape of an address to a radical Muslim convention, greeting participants as though they were members of the Rotary Club. Now, this was a combined group of the Muslim American Society and the Islamic Circle of North America, both of which have long been affiliated with radical Islamic groups, and whose previous conventions have been full of invectives for the US and Israel, replete with calls for jihad. Had Clark cared to do any due diligence, he would have discovered the extremist ideologies of these groups. But either he didn't bother to investigate, or he simply bought into the propaganda that these two groups were "moderate."
Even after I pointed out these groups' ulterior radical agenda in a debate I had with him on cable television about the appropriateness of his speaking before them, he continued to perpetrate the charade that all he was doing was engaging in "outreach" to innocent Muslim groups.
The new book and documentary film I'm working on - The Grand Deception - is about how the US government, the media and the intelligentsia are witting and unwitting enablers of radical Islam, by accepting front groups for the Muslim Brotherhood or for Hamas as credible and legitimate. This is particularly egregious at the highest levels of the government - such as the State Department, Department of Homeland Security, Justice Department and the FBI - who meet and greet groups they should be investigating, not embracing. This sends a terrible signal to genuine Muslim moderates and the Muslim rank-and-file, reinforcing their sense that it is the radical groups who are respected by the government.
There is a criminal trial presently under way in Texas of a suspected Hamas charity. The revelations that have emerged in the trial - probably the most striking findings since those that came out in the 1949 Alger Hiss trials - are that the Muslim Brotherhood had secretly set up shop in the US under the cover of "charitable" organizations, with the specific purpose of waging jihad from within and subverting the United States until it became a Muslim country. Yet, neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post published these findings.
This sounds reminiscent of the Cold War era, with witting and unwitting "fellow travelers" in the West furthering the communist agenda.
Then, too, there was a refusal to recognize that there were communists and communist fronts in the US, put up by the Soviets. This is the same type of structure, but much more extensive and less likely to fall down on its own.
Why is it less likely to "fall down on its own?"
Because it's ideologically and religiously based.
Communism was ideologically based, and for some it was even a kind of religion.
Yes, but it ultimately fell down because of its internal economic contradictions. Radical Islamic ideology transcends economics. That's why Hamas beat the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank-Gaza elections, and why Fatah got its ass kicked in the war in Gaza. Because, whereas the PA doesn't stand for anything other than corruption, Hamas adheres to a genuine ideology of destroying the West and the Jews. It's not going to be swayed by having villas on the sea.
You're saying that money is not its driving force, yet much of your research involves following the money trail. Isn't it relevant, then?
Money is relevant, but dollar-for-dollar, Islamist terrorist attacks are cheaper than any other type of terrorism.
Why?
Because it's not done for profit. Take the 9/11 attacks. At a cost of $500,000, they caused $500 billion worth of damage. That's a great rate of return. Even though the US Treasury has done a good job of seizing terrorist assets, al-Qaida is on the resurgence, and Saudi Arabia, despite the ritual slap on the wrist, continues to pump tens of millions a year into radical Islamic groups.
Speaking of which, how could those attacks have taken everybody by surprise?
There are several reasons, other than the obvious failure on the part of intelligence and law-enforcement services to connect the dots. The perpetrators of the attacks were regular visitors of known mosques; they were well taken care of; they were given logistical support, such as drivers' licenses. The FBI leadership's self-serving explanation was that these guys were working alone and therefore couldn't have been stopped. That's bullshit, and FBI agents have admitted to me that it is. The dirty secret of 9/11 is that there was logistical support from members of the Muslim community in the United States.
What could possibly be the motive of the FBI to ignore subversive activity in the first place, and fail to investigate it afterward?
I want to make a distinction between the FBI field agents and FBI headquarters. The headquarters are where the "suits" hang out, away from reality on the one hand, and subject to political winds on the other. The field agents, in contrast, know exactly what they're dealing with. But they are given instructions to go and "make nice" with the Muslim community in their districts.
Well, it's proper for the FBI to have good community relations with all ethnic groups. But the question is: Whom are you going to anoint as the representative of a given group, in this case the Muslim community? The FBI has allowed itself to be manipulated into anointing the Muslim Brotherhood as representatives of the Muslim community.
Why is the FBI not reaching out to the moderates?
The sad reality is that the vast majority of institutional organizations in the hierarchical Muslim spectrum represent the Muslim Brotherhood, the Wahhabis or the Salafists. It's a microcosm of the Muslim world. And we deceive ourselves into believing that the American Muslim community is somehow insulated from the "paranoia propaganda" that exists in the Muslim world as a whole - that which claims the Christians and the Jews are out to subjugate Islam.
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Where does this alleged self-deception come from?
To a certain extent, it comes from naivete. It reflects our own belief system. If we don't lie, we don't expect others to lie. If we don't hide behind a religion, we don't expect others to do so. Radical Muslims have no compunction about hiding behind the banner of Islam, while crying racism any time they're criticized and conflating criticism of their groups with criticism of their religion. Politicians run for cover at that point. And the media goes along with it.
Jews are accused of crying anti-Semitism whenever Israel is criticized. Why is this any different?
While perhaps the use of the term anti-Semitism is sometimes excessive, at least there's a heterogeneity of opinions within the Jewish world and Israel. Such heterogeneity does not exist within the Muslim world. You either support Hamas or you're considered a heretic. Nobody is allowed to dispute the views of the Muslim Brotherhood. Jihad, then, becomes obligatory for everybody. As for the distinctions between anti-Semitism and "Islamophobia," there are several: According to the Justice Department's annual bias reports, there are at least 10 times more hate crimes committed against Jews than against Muslims. But the news coverage reflects the opposite percentage.
Secondly, Muslim groups in the West routinely fabricate or exaggerate "hate crimes" against Muslims; they even categorize the arrests of Islamic terrorists as hate crimes. Finally, the entire concept of "Islamophobia" was invented by radical Islamic groups in Britain in the 1990s as a means of discrediting legitimate fears of radical Islam.
If, as you claim, the vast majority of institutional Muslim organizations represent the radicals, is there such a thing today as "moderate Islam"?
There is a moderate Muslim tradition that exists. You can see it in the actions and behavior of some Muslim leaders in the US - like Sheikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani and Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser - religious Muslims who have rejected terrorism and extremism. There are also secular Muslims - such as intellectual Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is one of the bravest women I have ever met. But since she's rejected Islam entirely, she has no religious standing.
And, as courageous as the above figures are, they don't have the following that CAIR [the Council on American Islamic Relations] does, because Saudi Arabia's not supporting them financially. There exists no Saudi "Peace Now" movement to back them. There's virtually nobody in the established Islamic hierarchy that will support any Muslim who denounces holy war. Of course, there are the ersatz moderates who assert that jihad does not mean holy war - that it only means striving. These are the propagandists who whitewash Islamic extremism.
Do all these Muslim leaders really support jihad, or are they afraid to come out against it for fear they will be targeted for assassination by radicals?
So far, there is no reformation going on within the Islamic world. The imams who espouse jihad and the killing of Jews and Christians are sincere in their belief. A relative handful of individual Muslim intellectuals and leaders have spoken out, but they have not garnered a major following. It's a fact of life that those willing to stick their necks out of the foxhole risk getting shot at.
You make a distinction between the "suits" in the FBI and organized Muslim institutions and the rank-and-file in the field. Extending that analogy to the American people as a whole, would you say that The New York Times and The Washington Post are perhaps not representative of the majority?
I definitely think the analogy can be extended, and that the American public gets it: They understand there is a problem with radical Islam.
The elite newspapers, with the exception of The Wall Street Journal, systematically censor the news in order to downplay the threat, or at worst, literally distort the facts to falsely portray radical Islamic groups in the United States as victims, which is exactly in line with the victimology propagated by these groups. If misreporting were a crime, a lot of reporters would be in jail.
How do you answer your many critics who accuse you of being paranoid and a conspiracy theorist?
That I wish my conjectures had not come true. In 1994, when I did the film Jihad in America, I was accused of being alarmist and histrionic. Yet, every Islamic radical in that film was subsequently indicted, convicted or deported. And if you look at a map of cells or groups operating in the US over the last 15 years, you will see that virtually every radical Islamic group has had a presence in the US, in more than 100 cities. I deal with information - hard, cold facts based on documents, recordings or impeccable law-enforcement sources. The reality I predicted in 1994 came to fruition in 2001. Had I investigated an easier group, let's say the Ku Klux Klan, I can assure you I would have been lauded all around, with no charges of being a conspiracy theorist. Its just that the KKK does not have a powerful PR machine with sympathetic members of the press.
In spite of all that, and in spite of the 9/11 attacks, why does one get the sense that people in the West are not as shaken by the phenomenon as they should be?
Because people only believe there's a threat when there's violence. If a group is only spreading its word, or only transferring money to suicide bombers in Israel, it isn't perceived as a threat.
Still, 9/11 did arouse awareness that terrorism is present. The point I have been stressing is that terrorism is the ultimate culmination of political Islam - political Islam being the indoctrination that Islam will reign supreme, and that Shari'a will be the law of the land.
How do you rate Israel's response to terrorism?
Israel responds in the same way most Westerners respond. If there's blood in the streets, they respond. If there's not, they don't. That's why Yasser Arafat was touted as a "man of peace," when all he was was a terrorist thug. His legacy will be the introduction of the greatest amount of arms and explosives into the most concentrated territory in the world on both sides of Israel's border. So now Israel has three Lebanons. This is not only Arafat's legacy, but that of the Israeli politicians and of former US president Bill Clinton, who brought them together, and whose advisers for seven long years deliberately averted themselves to the consistent and massive violations of the Oslo Accords by Arafat and his henchmen.
What about incumbent President George W. Bush - whose own legacy will include backing Israel's disengagement from the Gaza Strip, Egypt's control of the Philadelphi corridor and PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's being supported as a moderate?
Indeed, Abbas is not capable of doing anything - not even tying his own shoelaces - let alone controlling any security force or representing anybody other than himself and his family. It's a charade that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is propping up. That Bush has bought into the malarkey is partly a function of Israeli leaders' blinding him to the cold reality.
Why would he allow himself to be blinded?
He was getting hit over the head by the press and politicians who kept saying that he wasn't "engaged" - a euphemism for putting pressure on Israel, propounded by the likes of [former US ambassador to Israel and current Brookings Institute fellow] Martin Indyk and [former Mideast envoy and current director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy] Dennis Ross. This euphemism has resurfaced as a result of Bush's being besieged on Iraq. Needing a foreign policy victory that Rice said she could deliver, Bush went along with it. And he basically lost control of his agencies.
I can't claim to know what goes on in his head, but I believe he truly knows some of these [Islamic] groups are bad. Still, he does contradictory things. For example, a couple of months ago, he spoke at the Islamic Center of Washington and announced that he was appointing an American representative to the Organization of the Islamic Conference - a group that has supported suicide bombings. Bush referred to them as moderates. He also spoke at a mosque that is funded by the Saudis and which has distributed virulently anti-Semitic and anti-Christian literature. All of this was orchestrated by State Department Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Karen Hughes.
Has Bush, perhaps, relinquished his earlier convictions - those that dominated his speeches in the immediate aftermath of 9/11?
He goes back and forth, one minute denouncing "Islamofascism," another saying that peaceful jihad has been hijacked by the those who "pervert" Islam. What crockery! Jihad is jihad.
Yet a distinction has been made between holy war and spiritual jihad - between the "lesser" jihad and the large.
What we're looking at right here [he points to the Dolphinarium below, the site of the June 1, 2001 suicide bombing that left 21 dead and more than 100 wounded] is the marker of where the "lesser jihad" was carried out against young Israelis at a discotheque. Though it's true that moderate Muslims may interpret jihad as a spiritual struggle, radical Islamic clerics who aren't trying to "spin" the West say openly that jihad means only one thing: fighting for the sake of imposing Islam. And it's both obscene and corrupt that certain media outlets talk about it as though it were no more than quitting smoking or cleaning up the environment. The 3,000 killed on 9/11, and the 1,500 Israelis killed during the second intifada, died because the perpetrators were carrying out jihad.
Where does Iran come into all of this, and how do you explain the Bush administration's talk of negotiating with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?
Iran plays a vicious role in world affairs, though it is not the spiritual center of jihad; that still resides in Saudi Arabia. Nevertheless, certain terrorist groups, like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, could not exist without the training and funding they receive from Iran. The reason the US suddenly decided to invite Iran to negotiate was repeated pressure from the anti-Israel types - i.e. the Council on Foreign Relations, so-called Middle East "analysts" and the media - who kept saying that no harm can come of talking to the Iranians. Well, harm does come from talking. You wouldn't have sat down in 1933 with the Nazis. Yet that's exactly what's being done today. Iran is being given legitimacy by coming to the table. Which is exactly what Iran wants - not to reciprocate the gesture by any agreement on its part to lower the temperature, but to use the talks as a cover for continuing to carry out covert activities against the West.
What has to happen for the temperature to be lowered?
An Islamic reformation, and that's not in the cards in the short term. Absent that, a resolve to confront the sources of terrorism without wavering.
A reformation from within?
That's right. And it will be plenty bloody. Unfortunately, however, before that happens, Muslim nations like Iran will acquire weapons of mass destruction. They will acquire nuclear bombs, and when Ahmadinejad says Israel should be wiped off the face of the Earth, he really means it. And if he had the weapons to carry that out, he'd use them.
Where US policy vis a vis Iran and radical Islamic terrorism is concerned, will it make any difference whether a Democrat or a Republican wins the next presidential election?
It might make a difference. In the debates so far, several of the Democratic candidates have been taking the military option off the table, whereas few Republicans have. For some Democrats, even openly acknowledging the term "radical Islam" is hard to stomach. This makes Osama bin Laden's recent statements [on the tape he released on the sixth anniversary of 9/11] particularly telling. He actually recommended that Americans read books by [left-wing author] Noam Chomsky, who cites examples of American imperialism, and [former CIA analyst] Michael Scheuer, who says that the US does not understand the Muslim predicament. Scheuer's reaction to this endorsement was pride, rather than shame. Of course, Scheuer's answer to bin Laden is for the US to drop support for Israel, which he contends will appease bin Laden and result in his backing off attacks on the US. Neville Chamberlain practiced this thinking a bit earlier - and everyone knows the tragic results.
That Scheuer was allowed to stay at the CIA while propagating this nonsense tells us a lot about why the US totally misread bin Laden.
The ultimate question is whether any president has the guts to do what is necessary. And what is necessary is military action to take out the Iranian nuclear facilities. This doesn't mean the massive carpet bombing of urban centers. It means the pinpointing and elimination of underground facilities, with the purpose of retarding the nuclear program. It's an issue of buying time. But then, Israel's whole existence has been one of buying time.
How did you get into the business of exposing jihadist activities?
I was an investigative journalist. After producing Jihad in America in 1994, I thought maybe I'd do another film on a different topic. But I'd collected so much material on radical Islamic groups - material nobody else had - that I kept getting contacted for information from certain members of the media and law-enforcement agencies. It was clearly a vacuum that needed to be filled. So I established the Investigative Project on Terrorism to carry out in-depth investigation of these groups, and go into areas that the FBI wouldn't be allowed to, either because of freedom-of-speech restrictions or because of political correctness. In any case, the FBI's mission is not to serve as a truth-detector. Its mission is to prevent or solve crime. So, if a mosque or other Islamic organization lies about its aims, it's not up to the FBI to correct that impression among the American public. That's the work of the media or an NGO. And mine is probably the only non-profit organization - funded only by American contributions, taking no money from the US government - that's taken on the radical Islamic states.
Is it true that you consider your life to be in danger, and that as a result you are always looking over your shoulder?
No. Well, the office has a false cover. And I had to move out of my co-op 12 years ago, because my address had been publicly identified. Let's just say that I know there's a lot of radical Islamic animosity toward me. Even in transcripts that were recently declassified by the Justice Department, Hamas claimed that I was behind all of the bad press it got in the 1990s. I wish I had been responsible, but I wasn't. Still, the impression that I had been could mobilize somebody to do something bad. So I do take precautions. Whenever I speak somewhere that is made public beforehand, I have to have some type of security. I don't let it affect my behavior in general, though. Nor do I have a bodyguard. Having one would be more cumbersome - and conspicuous - than not having one.
Have you received concrete threats?
In the past I have. But I don't take the threats I receive via voice- or e-mail seriously. Someone who's really interested in doing something harmful isn't going to telegraph it. I am determined not to let the Islamists carry out their campaigns of intimidation against me or anyone else.
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In Defense of the Constitution
News & Analysis
016/07 September 24, 2007
CAIR Calls for Profiling of Muslims in the United States.
On September 20, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Washington DC based Islamic terrorism supporting group, issued a press release titled "CAIR Welcomes TSA Policy Change on Islamic Scarf".
http://www.cair.com/ArticleDetails.aspx?ArticleID=23180&&name=n&&currPage=1&&Active=1
From the article:
"Following discussions with community leaders of several faiths, including a representative of CAIR's Dallas-Fort Worth chapter, TSA officials have accepted a proposed modification to the August 4 policy. According to the updated policy, Muslim women who wear a head cover that is attached to the contour of the head, with no space between the scarf and the head, should not be subjected to a secondary screening. That style of cover is worn by the majority of Muslim women who wear scarves."
In a radical departure from past positions, CAIR is now calling on government agents to profile Muslims.in order to provide them special rights denied to non-Muslims.
Additionally, CAIR has signaled its Islamist terrorist masters that Muslim women are now America's newest privileged protected class and that they are now the perfect venue to smuggle unauthorized items aboard American airliners.
What could be the possible results of this latest appeasement of radical Islam?
Consider:
- A piece of sharpened carbon fiber, form-fitted to the head and covered with a scarf.
- A plastic letter-opener secreted in the folds.
- Any number of items, such as malleable plastic explosives, that could be formed to the contours of the head.
Let's not forget that there was time when the idea that an airliner could be taken over with a box cutter was laughable.
After 9-11, is anyone laughing?
Leaving aside the obvious security implications of this new policy, what about the rights of other travelers?
For instance:
- How will Mennonites, Jews, and other faiths that wear head-coverings react to the idea that they are to be subjected to searches that Muslims are excused from?
- The first amendment to the Constitution demands that all faiths be treated equally under the law; how does this square with government employees giving preferential treatment to Muslims?
- How will the airport inspectors determine someone is a Muslim? (Will they ask? Will Muslim travelers be provided a Muslim-only ID card? Will there be Muslim-only lines at the airport? We already have Muslim-only foot baths at some airports, is it really a stretch to call for Muslim-only lines?) Will they...dare we say it.."profile" Muslims?
http://wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=57784
The bottom line: CAIR is approving of the TSA PROFILING Muslim women!
How much more appeasement are we going to stand for before we realize that radical Islam is not only making us second-class citizens in our own country, but that we are tripping all over ourselves to help them do it?
CAIR and their terrorist masters must certainly see this turn of events as nothing more than another example of Americans surrendering to the fist of radical Islam.
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From today's Indy Star:
Inactive explosives found at airport
By Meagan Ingerson
meagan.ingerson@indystar.com
September 26, 2007
A suspicious item found in a security checkpoint at Indianapolis International Airport this morning caused a concourse of the airport to be closed for about an hour, delaying several flights, according to a report from the Indianapolis Airport Police.
An unidentified passenger reported the suspicious package, which appeared to be an improvised explosive device, after finding the item in a stack of gray plastic trays used to send personal belongings through the X-ray machine, the report stated.
Police shut down the checkpoint and adjoining concourse D from 5:10 to 6:20 a.m. A perimeter was set up and a bomb squad from the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department rendered the device safe.
The suspected bomb appears to be a simulated explosive device, the report stated. The device included a battery, wires, a switch, and a plastic bag containing a modeling-clay-like substance labeled as a semtex imitation. Semtex is a plastic explosive often used in terrorist attacks.
According to the report, a second plastic bag also contained a fake explosive consisting of a small amount of a liquid labeled helix and a powder-filled tube. The bag was marked with a label from manufacturer S.E.T.D. Law Enforcement Training Center in Stamford, N.Y., the report stated.
Police called the manufacturer and were told that the company did manufacture the simulated helix but did not make the semtex imitation.
The origin of the simulated device is unknown. The incident is still under investigation by airport police.
Several East Coast-bound flights for United and U.S. Airways were delayed as a result of the closure, airport spokeswoman Susan Sullivan said. No flights were cancelled.
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While opposing the Israeli invasion of Lebanon last year is within the range of reasonable points of view (for the record, as recorded elsewhere on this forum I supported the invasion as being forced by the attacks on Israel), the comment about Jihad here in America is not. Another moderate Muslim turns out not to be as billed.
Kaine Appointee Advocates 'the Jihad Way'
September 27, 2007 - 2:58pm
Editor's Note: This story contains video from YouTube. Please click on the link in the story or in the left-hand column to watch.
By BOB LEWIS
Associated Press Writer
RICHMOND, Va. - A member of the state's Commission of Immigration resigned Thursday, a few hours after Gov. Timothy M. Kaine was told about online videos showing the appointee condemning Israel and advocating "the jihad way."
Kaine learned of the videos from a caller to his live monthly radio program and accepted the resignation of Dr. Esam S. Omeish about three hours later.
"Dr. Omeish is a respected physician and community leader, yet I have been made aware of certain statements he has made which concern me," Kaine said in a press statement announcing the resignation.
Kaine said Omeish resigned because he did not want the controversy to distract from the work of the 20-member commission appointed to study the effects of immigration and federal immigration policies on Virginia.
Omeish, the president of the Muslim American Society, is shown in a video on YouTube denouncing the invasion of Lebanon during that time by the "Israeli war machine" during an Aug. 12, 2006, rally in Washington.
Omeish, chief of the division of general surgery at INOVA Alexandria Hospital, also accused Israel of genocide and massacres against Palestinians and said the "Israeli agenda" controls Congress.
In a separate, undated video made, Omeish tells a crowd of Washington-area Muslims, "...you have learned the way, that you have known that the jihad way is the way to liberate your land."
That video was credited to Investigative Project, a Washington-based organization that investigates radical Islamic organizations.
Omeish did not immediately respond to a request for comment. (Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
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Goose Creek Terror Trial - Egypt to Hire Lawyer for Accused USF Student
TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — Egypt's government is paying for the legal representation of a college student who authorities say was found with pipe bombs near a Navy base, an attorney said Wednesday.
Attorney John Fitzgibbons told a judge he was in talks with the Egyptian embassy in Washington and likely will be hired to represent suspended University of South Florida student Ahmed Abdellatif Sherif Mohamed.
Ahmed el-Qawassni, an official in Egypt's foreign ministry, said the government is closely monitoring the case and confirmed that an attorney is being hired for Mohamed, who was born in Kuwait to Egyptian parents.
"We are responsible for the sons of Egypt abroad with no exception," el-Qawassni said.
Mohamed, 24, and another USF student, Youssef Samir Megahed, 21, are charged with carrying explosive materials across state lines.
Link:http://www.christianaction.org/
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Summer 2007: The Attack that Never Occurred
By Fred Burton and Scott Stewart
The summer of 2007 was marked by threats and warnings of an imminent terrorist attack against the United States. In addition to the well-publicized warnings from Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and a National Intelligence Estimate that al Qaeda was gaining strength, a former Israeli counterterrorism official warned that al Qaeda was planning a simultaneous attack against five to seven American cities. Another warning of an impending dirty bomb attack prompted the New York Police Department to set up vehicle checkpoints near the financial district in Lower Manhattan. In addition to these public warnings, U.S. government counterterrorism sources also told us privately that they were seriously concerned about the possibility of an attack.
All these warnings were followed by the Sept. 7 release of a video message from Osama bin Laden, who had not been seen on video since October 2004 or heard on audio tape since July 2006. Some were convinced that his reappearance -- and his veiled threat -- was the sign of a looming attack against the United States, or perhaps a signal for an attack to commence.
In spite of all these warnings and bin Laden's reappearance -- not the mention the relative ease with which an attack can be conducted -- no attack occurred this summer. Although our assessment is that the al Qaeda core has been damaged to the point that it no longer poses a strategic threat to the U.S. homeland, tactical attacks against soft targets remain simple to conduct and certainly are within the reach of jihadist operatives -- regardless of whether they are linked to the al Qaeda core.
We believe there are several reasons no attack occurred this summer -- or since 9/11 for that matter.
No Conscious Decision
Before we discuss these factors, we must note that the lack of an attack against the U.S. homeland since 9/11 has not been the result of a calculated decision by bin Laden and the core al Qaeda leadership. Far too many plots have been disrupted for that to be the case. Many of those foiled and failed attacks, such as the 2006 foiled plot to destroy airliners flying from London to the United States, the Library Tower Plot, Richard Reid's failed attempt to take down American Airlines flight 63 in December 2001 and Jose Padilla's activities -- bear connection to the core al Qaeda leadership.
So, if the core al Qaeda has desired, and even attempted, to strike the United States, why has it failed? Perhaps the greatest single factor is attitude -- among law enforcement and intelligence agencies, the public at large, the Muslim community and even the jihadists themselves.
Law Enforcement and Intelligence
Prior to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the FBI denied the existence of an international terrorism threat to the U.S. homeland, a stance reflected in the bureau's "Terrorism in the United States" publications in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Even after the radical Zionist Rabbi Meir Kahane was killed by a jihadist with connections to the Brooklyn Jihad Office and "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdul-Rahman, the FBI and Department of Justice denied the act was terrorism and left the investigation and the prosecution of the gunman, ElSayyid Nosair, to New York police and the Manhattan District Attorney's Office. (Though they were greatly aided on the federal level by the Diplomatic Security Service, which ran investigative leads for them in Egypt and elsewhere.)
It was only after Nosair's associates detonated a large truck bomb in the parking garage of the World Trade Center in 1993 that the existence of a threat to the United States was recognized. Yet, even after that bombing and the disruption of other plots -- the July 1997 plot to bomb the New York subway system and the December 1999 Millennium Bomb Plot -- the apathy toward counterterrorism programs remained. This was most evident in the low levels of funding and manpower devoted to counterterrorism programs prior to 9/11. As noted in the 9/11 Commission Report, counterterrorism programs simply were not a priority.
Even the April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing made no real difference. Some changes were made, such as physical security enhancements at federal buildings, but they were merely window dressing. The real problems, underlying structural problems in the U.S. government's counterterrorism efforts -- resources, priorities and intelligence-sharing -- were not addressed in a meaningful way.
Prior to 9/11, experts (including the two of us) lecturing to law enforcement and intelligence groups about the al Qaeda/transnational terrorist threat to the United States were met with indifference. Of course, following 9/11 some of those same groups paid careful attention to what the experts had to say. Transnational terrorism had become real to them. The 9/11 attacks sparked a sea change in attitudes within law enforcement and intelligence circles. Counterterrorism -- aggressively collecting intelligence pertaining to terrorism and pursuing terrorist leads -- is now a priority.
Citizen Awareness
Before the 1993 World Trade Center bombing the American public also was largely unconcerned about international terrorism. Even after that bombing, the public remained largely apathetic about the terrorist threat to the U.S. homeland. This was partly the result of the media's coverage of the 1993 bombing, which seemed to focus on the hapless, bumbling Mohamed Salameh and not the cunning and dangerous Abdel Basit (who is more widely known by his alias, Ramzi Yousef). Furthermore, the follow-on plot to that attack, the 1993 New York bomb plot -- for which Abdul-Rahman and some of his followers were accused of planning strikes against the Lincoln Tunnel and other New York City landmarks -- was thwarted. This led many to believe that the government had a handle on terrorism and that the United States was protected from such attacks. The second plot was thwarted before it could be executed, and most Americans never saw the gigantic crater (nearly 100 feet across) that the February 1993 truck bomb created through several floors of Building One's reinforced concrete parking garage. Instead, they saw only a bit of smoke billowing from the damaged building. The 1993 cases lacked the stunning visual displays of the 9/11 attacks.
The events of 9/11 also created a 180-degree change in how people think about terrorism and how they perceive and respond to suspicious activity. "If you see something, say something" has become a popular mantra, especially in New York and other large cities. Part of this stems from the changed attitudes of law enforcement officials, who not only have issued appeals in the press but also have made community outreach visits to nearly every flight school, truck driving school, chemical supply company, fertilizer dealer and storage rental company in the United States. Through media reports of terrorist plots and attacks, the public also has become much more aware of the precursor chemicals for improvised explosive mixtures and applies far more scrutiny to anyone attempting to procure them in bulk.
U.S. citizens also are far more aware of the importance of preoperational surveillance and -- fair or not -- it is now very difficult for a person wearing traditional Muslim dress to take a photograph of anything without being reported to the authorities by a concerned citizen.
This change in attitude is particularly significant in the Muslim community itself. Contrary to the hopes of bin Laden -- and the fears of the U.S. government -- the theology of jihadism has not taken root in the United States. Certainly there are individuals who have come to embrace this ideology, as the arrests of some grassroots activists demonstrate, but such people are very much the exception. In spite of some problems, the law enforcement community has forged some strong links to the Muslim community, and in several cases Muslims have even reported potential jihadists to law enforcement.
Even in places where jihadism has more successfully infiltrated the Muslim community, such as Europe, North Africa and Saudi Arabia, the jihadists still consider it preferable to wage the "real" jihad against "crusader troops" in places such as Iraq, rather than to attack soft civilian targets in the West or elsewhere. As unpopular as it is to say, in many ways Iraq has served as a sort of jihadist magnet, drawing young men from around the world to "martyr" themselves. Pragmatically, every young jihadist who travels from Europe or the Middle East to die in Baghdad or Ar Ramadi is one less who could attack Boston, London, Brussels or Rome.
Attitude is Everything
In late 1992 and early 1993, amateur planning was all that was required to conduct a successful terrorist attack on U.S. soil. In addition to the almost comical mistakes made by Salameh, serious gaffes also were made by Ahmed Ajaj and Basit as they prepared for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. However, because of the prevailing apathetic attitude among law enforcement officials and the public in general, those mistakes were not fatal to the operation.
Given the changes in attitude since 9/11, however, no operation conducted as poorly as the 1993 bombing would succeed today. Before the bombing, the FBI investigated the cell that carried it out, made the determination that the men were harmless fanatics and closed the investigation. That would not happen today, as even slightly goofy, wannabe terrorists such as the Miami Seven are vigorously investigated and prosecuted when possible.
When Ajaj and Basit flew into JFK Airport in September 1992, authorities pretty much ignored the fact that Ajaj was found transporting a large quantity of jihadist material, including bombmaking manuals and videos. Instead, he was sentenced to six months in jail for committing passport fraud -- a mere slap on the wrist -- and was then to be deported. Had authorities taken the time to carefully review the materials in Ajaj's briefcase, they would have found two boarding passes and two passports with exit stamps from Pakistan. Because of that oversight, no one noticed that Ajaj was traveling with a companion. Even when his co-conspirators called Ajaj in jail seeking his help in formulating their improvised explosive mixtures and recovering the bombmaking manuals, the calls were not traced. It was not until after the bombing that Ajaj's involvement was discovered, and he was convicted and sentenced.
These kinds of oversights would not occur now. Furthermore, the attitude of the public today makes it far more difficult for a conspirator like Niday Ayyad to order chemicals used to construct a bomb, or for the conspirators to receive and store such chemicals in a rented storage space without being reported to the authorities.
Another change in attitude has been on the legal front. Prior to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, there were no "terrorism" statutes concerning the use of weapons of mass destruction or acts of terrorism transcending national borders. Instead, prosecutors in terrorism cases struggled to apply existing laws. The defendants in the 1993 New York bomb plot case were not charged with conspiring to build bombs or commit acts of international terrorism. Rather, they were convicted on "seditious conspiracy" charges. Similarly, Salameh was convicted of violating the Special Agricultural Worker program and with damaging U.S. Secret Service cars stored in the basement of the World Trade Center building.
The U.S. security environment has indeed improved dramatically since 1993, largely as a result of the sweeping changes in attitude, though also to some extent due to the magnet effect of the war in Iraq. Success can engender complacency, however, and the lack of attacks could allow attitudes -- and thus counterterrorism resources -- to swing back toward the other end of the spectrum.
stratfor
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Second post of the day
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FRESH JERSEY
Mike Kelly's journal about events and people in the Garden State.
Visit the blog
One of Cruise's deputies was even more specific.
"There are people in your county who are affiliated with known al-Qaida members overseas," said Jack Jupin, the FBI agent who heads the counterterror squad for Bergen County.
Cruise, who supervised FBI investigations of terrorist bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa and the USS Cole before taking over the Newark task force, cautioned that his agents have no information about an imminent attack here. But he said several al-Qaida sympathizers would try if given the chance.
"There are many people who are like-minded who want to commit acts of terrorism and have just not taken that extra step," said Cruise, who keeps a "wanted" poster of Bin Laden on his office wall.
Sometimes, he said, counterterror agents "disrupt" these North Jersey residents with al-Qaida ties.
Cruise declined to describe any case in detail. But in general, such disruption methods ranged from outright deportations to quiet visits by FBI agents in which suspected terrorists are told their activities are being monitored.
"There are many disruptions that occur that the public does not know about," Cruise said.
Taliban aren't here
For the past six years, FBI officials have routinely declined to discuss counterterror measures in northern New Jersey. But last week, the FBI granted The Record limited access to the offices of its Joint Terrorism Task Force, in a gleaming glass building in Newark overlooking the Passaic River.
This unusual glimpse into the inner workings of North Jersey's primary counterterrorism force revealed the following:
Task force investigators have discovered that every major terrorist group in the world, including Hamas and Hezbollah, has at least one North Jersey contact. The lone exception is Afghanistan's ultra-fundamentalist sect, the Taliban.
The task force is currently conducting more than 400 counterterror investigations. These range from probes into Bin Laden's network to neo-Nazis to environmental terrorists.
Each month, a task force "response" squad receives as many as a dozen new tips about possible nuclear, biological or chemical terrorism in New Jersey. These range from citizen concerns about a mysterious powder to the report that three ships were sailing to New Jersey with radiological material on board. Squad members were even dispatched to Emerson last month after school administrators received a threat to blow up schools.
Undercover agents attend all professional football games at Giants Stadium. Agents also plan to monitor the upcoming Breeders' Cup at Monmouth Park Racetrack.
Task force agents routinely travel overseas. One is currently in Iraq; another is in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, helping to question suspected al-Qaida captives at the U.S. naval base there. Newark-based agents also played a role in the investigation of the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and provided information to assist the interrogation of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed.
Task force agents say they are united by one common fear -- that they may overlook information that could stop a potential terrorist attack. Indeed, almost every office seems to contain some reminder of the 9/11 attacks.
'Daily reminder'
In weighing his own fear of an attack, Cruise noted that northern New Jersey has a wide range of tempting and vulnerable targets, from tunnels and bridges to sports venues, shopping malls and chemical plants.
"My greatest fear in New Jersey is that somebody or some group will slip through our grasp," he said.
Scott Nawrocki, the FBI agent who directs the task force's special response squad, keeps a photograph of the World Trade Center on the wall by his desk. On the opposite wall is a poster with a mushroom cloud from a nuclear bomb. "The first things I see are a daily reminder of why I'm here," Nawrocki said.
But he added that it's dangerous for his counterterror agents to fall into the trap of assuming that future terrorists will try to duplicate the 9/11 attacks.
"We use our imagination when we conduct assessments," Nawrocki said.
William Sweeney Jr., whose squad monitors potential terrorists in Hudson County, said some tips for local investigations can originate in the unlikeliest places.
In one case, Sweeney described how U.S. soldiers confiscated a laptop computer when they captured a suspected al-Qaida operative in Iraq. When the laptop's files were examined, investigators discovered several New Jersey phone numbers.
"Why was a person in New Jersey in the address book of a bad guy picked up in Iraq?" Sweeney asked. "We have to check it out."
He declined to describe the result. But the process, described by Sweeney, is not uncommon for the task force.
As a result, task force agents are in daily contact with officials at the CIA and other American intelligence agencies who monitor phone and Internet traffic from North Jersey to known operatives for al-Qaida and other terrorist groups.
"I talk to them 10 times a day," Jupin said of the CIA.
Listening in
Cruise holds several top-secret intelligence briefings each week with fellow agents as well as police from such small towns as Old Tappan and Ho-Ho-Kus.
Amid the wash of tips and ongoing cases, though, Cruise said the task force has to make difficult calculations -- especially when monitoring phone or Internet contacts.
"If it's somebody who is simply communicating with somebody who is known to be an al-Qaida operative, that in itself is not illegal," Cruise said. "It's what they intend to do."
To better understand some of his enemies, Cruise even listens to Arabic language CDs during his commute. But he tries to keep himself and his agents from becoming too confident.
"We have better security measures in place and we have better intelligence," he said. "But we are still vulnerable."
E-mail: kellym@northjersey.com
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I'm putting this piece here because I'm guessing the American homeland will be this man's target:
Geopolitical Diary: The Re-emergence of a Terrorism Artist
The United States dished out another round of sanctions against Iran on Thursday, making good on threats to single out the country's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist entity and targeting three of Iran's largest banks. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is neck-deep in separate security negotiations with both Washington and Tehran, bluntly accused the United States of worsening the situation by "running around like a madman with a razor blade."
As we have discussed extensively in recent days, the Iranians have a lot to ponder as they decide their next steps in dealing with the United States over Iraq. It does not appear that Tehran has yet made a decision on whether to move toward serious talks with Washington or hold out for a U.S. withdrawal with the Russians watching its back, but the stress is definitely taking its toll on the regime. Washington has picked up on this friction, and there are indications that it soon will extend a fresh offer of talks -- a negotiations carrot to complement the sanctions stick.
It was against this backdrop that we received a bit of intelligence on Thursday that made us bolt upright. Reports indicate that Imad Fayez Mugniyah has been training Shiite militants from Arab Persian Gulf states -- specifically, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain -- in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley for use in retaliatory attacks if the United States strikes Iran.
It has been some time since Mugniyah has popped up on the radar, so it is certainly worth revisiting what the man is capable of -- and, more important, how he fits into the contemporary geopolitical context.
Mugniyah's job title ranges from chief Hezbollah intelligence officer to head of special operations, but it does not matter what his business card says -- this guy is important. Simple improvised explosive devices and assassinations are not Mugniyah's game; he specializes in working behind the scenes in an egoless manner to plan the attacks that really hurt. Unlike Osama bin Laden, he ignores the limelight, and he eschews the day-to-day operations in much the same way Abu Musab al-Zarqawi did. Mugniyah is patient, good at understanding cultures and obsessed with security. His 30-year career has put him on a number of most-wanted lists, and his close association with Iranian intelligence is as cordial as it is impossible to track (except in retrospect).
While Mugniyah has a number of successful attacks under his belt, the most effective by far was the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut. In a day, Mugniyah achieved what 20 years of terrorist attacks could not: convincing the United States not only that the Middle East is dangerous but also that even a superpower can bleed badly enough that an ignoble retreat is the only policy option.
This singular attack unnerved Washington, causing it to end direct military involvement in Lebanon and ingraining a "cut-and-run" mentality in the White House. And this was under President Ronald Reagan, who is not exactly known for being gentle. The United States quickly developed a reputation for abandoning operations at (or even before) the first sign of casualties (e.g., Somalia, the Iranian hostage rescue and the first Gulf War), or limiting operations to those in which the chances of casualties are nil (e.g., Grenada, Panama, Haiti, the Libya bombing and the Kosovo air war). This risk-averse attitude persisted until al Qaeda's 9/11 attack.
Mugniyah is not simply a terrorist or a terrorist trainer; he treats terrorism almost as an art form, searching for a soft spot in a country's physical, cultural and emotional defenses. This makes him absolutely critical to Iranian military strategy.
Iran has to take U.S. threats of military action seriously, but it also has to do everything it can to make U.S. military planners seriously consider what would happen the day after Washington launched an attack. With Mugniyah back in the game, Iran appears to be hard at work creating that nightmare scenario.
stratfor
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Imad Mugniyah is one of the most dangerous terrorists on the planet. I'm sure it's shocking news to you all that during the Clinton administration, we had a chance to capture/kill him but didn't.
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I wish Stratfor had fleshed out his career more. I remember it to be all they say it is, but frankly I forget the details :oops: Anyway, I live in a major target area of America. Time to continue tightening up my game. With this news, "Escape from LA" scenarios just became a tad more likely.
PS: I hold the health-care-fascist-pardon-selling-etc Clintons in low regard, but in fairness one must note that the President's father created much of our problems today by snatching stalemate from the jaws of victory in 1991.
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http://www.theaviationnation.com/200...d-with-mirror/
(U//FOUO) Suspicious Activity Onboard Flight to Milwaukee
(U//FOUO) On 24 October 2007, crewmembers aboard a Reagan-Washington National to Milwaukee General Mitchell International Airport flight reported to a Federal Flight Deck Officer (FFDO) flying in non-mission status that they noticed suspicious behavior by four passengers.
One of the subjects entered and exited the rear aircraft lavatory three times and failed to comply with crewmembers' verbal instructions. The FFDO seated himself near this subject to observe his behavior. Shortly afterward, two more of the subjects moved into the aisles and entered both lavatories. After one of the subjects vacated the rear left lavatory, the FFDO searched it, noting that the mirror above the sink was not properly latched.
He exited the lavatory and a fourth subject was waiting second in line with a passenger in front of him. The FFDO offered the fourth subject access to the right lavatory, but the subject declined, claiming the right lavatory was dirty.The FFDO noted the right lavatory was clean, and the subject reluctantly entered the right lavatory and remained there for an extended period of time. (TSA/SD-10-3849-07)
(U//FOUO) TSA Office of Intelligence Comment: Although there is no information that the aircraft was being specifically targeted for a future terrorist attack, the actions of the four passengers are highly suspicious. FFDO confirmation of possible tampering of the lavatory mirror in one of the lavatories could be indicative of an attempt to locate concealment areas for smuggling criminal contraband or terrorist materials. In this case, it appears the left lavatory was the sole area of interest for the passengers. One subject's excuse that the right lavatory was dirty when it was confirmed to be clean shows the four passengers had a specific, operational objective. Although unconfirmed at this time, this incident has many of the elements of pre-operational terrorist planning.
Source: TSA Suspicious Incidents Report #177
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The LA Times reaches Orwellian levels of PC cowardice by refusing to identify the religion/ideology of the guilty here:
Try to Find "Islam" or "Muslim" in this Article on Terror Guilty Pleas
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Plot posed a real, immediate threat, experts say
The case illustrates how quickly authorities must be prepared to move once they learn of terrorists' plans.
By Greg Krikorian, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
December 15, 2007
It was not the most spectacular domestic terrorism plot since the Sept. 11 attacks, and certainly not the best-known.
But no other case posed such a real and immediate threat as the audacious scheme to attack more than a dozen military centers, synagogues and other sites in Southern California, experts said Thursday.
"If you look at the roster of defendants in terrorism cases, it often seems like a casting call. They all have aspirations, but most lack real talent and helpful connections," said Brian Levin, an attorney and director of Cal State San Bernardino's Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism.
"But here you actually had a case where defendants had a radicalized ideology, a list of targets and they had already gone from planning to operations," Levin said. "This was beyond merely a threat. In this instance, they were operational."
The guilty pleas announced Friday in what is known as the JIS case represented an important win for the Justice Department, after a string of high-profile courtroom defeats in terrorism-related prosecutions. Just Thursday, a jury in Miami acquitted one man charged with plotting to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago and deadlocked on charges against his six alleged accomplices.
The courtroom ending mirrored a mistrial declared earlier this year in a Dallas prosecution against five Islamic men accused in the largest terrorism-financing case brought by the U.S. government.
"The bottom line is that when you look at a lot of these prosecutions, many people are accused of lying to investigators or [other crimes] rather than terrorist acts or threats to national security," Levin said. "And that is why you have seen a bit of prosecutorial fatigue set in with the public. . . . There is a lot of talk about what could have happened in a case" rather than evidence of a pressing threat.
By contrast, the JIS plot was within 60 days of launching, according to sources close to the investigation.
The case illustrated how quickly authorities must be prepared to move in the event of an actual terrorist threat, they said. In a matter of weeks, the FBI, Los Angeles and Torrance police departments and two dozen other agencies conducted 19 searches, seized two dozen computer hard drives and examined about 53,000 documents, all without the normal luxury of moving at their own pace with undercover informants, surveillance and wiretaps.
The plotters "were flying dangerously below the radar," said the FBI's John Miller, who was the LAPD's counter-terrorism head at the time the case broke. He added that the defendants had robbed gas stations for the money to buy rifles, had picked their targets and had set a date.
"The clock was ticking. All they needed to do was to start killing," he said.
The prison-hatched scheme raised another fear in U.S. counter-terrorism circles, particularly within California, which has the nation's largest inmate population: Were there other members of the conspiracy, spawned in cellblocks and prison libraries, preparing to carry on the plan?
"We were confident that we could make a case against the people we had in custody," said Randy Parsons, the retired former head of counter-terrorism for the FBI in Los Angeles. "Our greatest concern was: Did we miss somebody? Is there somebody who has been released from prison or radicalized on the street that we might have missed who might be about to go operational?"
More than 350 federal agents, state investigators and local police worked five weeks, around the clock, to determine if others had escaped their dragnet. In the end, they did not find additional accomplices, but their investigation led to new intelligence coordination between prison officials and outside law enforcement.
For all its urgency, however, the case never drew the attention of lesser threats. One reason was that news of the JIS investigation trickled out over the course of weeks.
In addition, the federal indictment of the four defendants, though announced by top Justice Department officials in Los Angeles and Washington, was unsealed as the nation's attention was riveted on Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans.
Too, the men charged with terrorism did not fit the stereotype of the foreign-born menace that had been drilled into the American psyche after Sept. 11.
For professor Levin, that may be the long-term lesson of the case.
"I think this case shows you cannot racially or religiously profile an ideology. It is fanaticism, not faith, that drives this extremism," Levin said. "And disenfranchised people will craft their hatred into an ideology of their choice. That is why religious converts are so good for this radicalization . . . because those who have been raised in a faith know better."
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la...la-home-center
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0640 GMT -- SINGAPORE, UNITED STATES -- Under the new Secure Freight Initiative signed by Singaporean and U.S. officials, cargo leaving Singapore for the United States will be scanned for nuclear and radiological materials, the U.S. Embassy and Singapore's Ministry of Transport said in a joint statement Dec. 17, Channel News Asia reported. The scans will be conducted during a six-month trial of the new system. Singapore is one of seven global ports participating in the trial, the report said.
stratfor.com
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The Unilateral Disarmament Democrats: Putting Trial Lawyers Ahead of Your Family's Safety
by Newt Gingrich
It's hard to think of an action that has put as many lives at risk as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D.-Calif.) declaration of unilateral disarmament in the War on Terror last week.
By refusing to renew our ability to monitor terrorist communications overseas, Speaker Pelosi has put Americans at risk. She has blinded our counterterrorism capability and shut down America's most sophisticated defenses against the irreconcilable wing of Islam. As of midnight last Saturday, the law governing America's defense is totally inadequate to stop terrorists.
Why? Because the Democratic left believes lining the pockets of trial lawyers is more important than stopping terrorists.
Suing Telecom Companies for Helping Keep America Safe
At issue is the extension of the Protect America Act that was passed last August to allow U.S. intelligence agencies to monitor foreigner-to-foreigner communications without a warrant. Congress has known for six months that this ability under the Protect America Act was set to expire on Sunday. So last week, by an overwhelmingly bipartisan majority, the Senate passed legislation to prevent the authority from lapsing.
But the House Democratic leadership, led by Speaker Pelosi, refused to let the House vote on the bill. This led to a House GOP walk out led by Minority Leader John Boehner (Ohio), who said, "We will not stand idly by and watch the floor of the United States House of Representatives be abused for pure, political grandstanding at the expense of our national security."
Why? Not because the bill lacked bipartisan support, but because it lacked trial lawyer support. The Senate-passed bill contains a provision granting immunity from lawsuits to telecommunications companies that have been cooperating with the government in the War on Terror.
Instead of putting her fellow Democrats in a position where they have to make a public vote in favor of trial lawyers over the safety of Americans, Speaker Pelosi opted to leave Washington for vacation.
'The President Just Wants to Protect American Telephone Companies'
As Robert Novak reported Monday, the trial lawyers -- the Democrats' most important source of political contributions -- have filed dozens of lawsuits seeking millions of dollars against phone companies for helping keep us safe by responding to the request of intelligence agencies to provide critical information about suspected terrorist communications without a warrant.
The continued cooperation of the telecom companies in monitoring terrorist communications is crucial to America's defense, which is why the Senate bill contained the immunity provision.
The simple fact is that if a company cooperates with the United States government in tracking down terrorists, it should receive our thanks and gratitude, not a lawsuit.
But some Democrats evidently don't agree. Note that House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel (Ill.) chose to attack the bill and the President's support for it by siding with the trial lawyers: "This is not about protecting Americans. The President just wants to protect American telephone companies."
The House's Unilateral Disarmament Contrasts Sharply With the Senate's Leadership
Speaker Pelosi's and the House Democratic leadership's unilateral disarmament contrasts sharply with the Senate Democrats who joined in the bipartisan 68-vote majority to strengthen America's defenses against terrorism.
The Senate bill was a compromise between Senate Democrats and the White House. As former Justice Official Andy McCarthy put it: "Democrats surely did not want to give President Bush this legislative victory, and President Bush certainly did not want to cave on these issues. But both sides compromised precisely because they understood that failing to do so, failing to preserve current surveillance authority, would endanger the United States."
Senate Democrats such as Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (W.Va.), Claire McCaskill (Mo.) and Jim Webb (Va.) deserve thanks for putting the safety of America ahead of their partisan political interests.
The Law Was Never Meant to Protect Foreign Terrorists
So what is the state of our national defenses as I write this today?
The Protect America Act amended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that was passed in 1978 to protect people inside the United States from being monitored by U.S. intelligence without a warrant proving they were agents of a foreign government.
This point is crucial: FISA was never meant to apply to foreigners outside the United States communicating with other foreigners outside the United States.
For 30 years, this was the understanding of the law. But a court case last year said that foreigner-to-foreigner overseas communications now have FISA protections -- that is, they require a warrant before they can be monitored -- because technology has changed and these non-U.S. communications now technically may pass through U.S. channels in the global telecommunications network.
The result is that for U.S. intelligence to monitor suspected terrorist communications between a Pakistani and an Afghani, they have to go through the time-consuming, bureaucratic procedure of having the attorney general and others approve lengthy affidavits proving that the targets are agents of a foreign power.
As of Midnight Saturday, American Lives Are at Risk
So as of midnight last Saturday, if U.S. intelligence discovers a new terrorist threat, it must spend valuable time preparing bureaucratic documents and seeking approval of busy officials before their communications can be monitored. By the time they've jumped through the bureaucratic hoops forced on them by House Democrats, it may be too late.
What's more, American telecommunications companies are less inclined to cooperate with intelligence officials because they lack protection from lawsuits under the law.
In short, Americans are at greater risk today than we were four days ago.
But Don't Take My Word for It -- Listen to the Intelligence Professionals
But don't just take my word for it. Here's what Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell -- an intelligence professional who served under President Clinton as well as President Bush -- told "Fox News Sunday":
"Our situation now, when the terrorist threat is increasing because they've achieved -- al Qaeda's achieved de facto safe haven in the border area of Pakistan and Afghanistan -- the threat is going up.
"And therefore, we do not have the agility and the speed that we had before to be able to move and try to capture their communications to thwart their planning.
"...[Our country is in] increased danger, and it will increase more and more as time goes on. And the key is the -- if you think about the private sector global communications, many people think the government operates that.
"Ninety-eight percent of it is owned and operated by the private sector. We cannot do this mission without help and support from the private sector. And the private sector, although willingly helped us in the past, are now saying, 'You can't protect me. Why should I help you?'"
Obama and Clinton Were AWOL on Protecting Americans
The potential threat to our safety is so great that the situation calls for leaders of all political parties to come together to call for Congress to act -- without delay -- to restore these crucial authorities to U.S. intelligence.
Senators and presidential contenders Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama missed the vote that passed the Senate to extend the Protect America Act. But they now have an obligation to keep America safe by joining President Bush in calling for the House return to Washington and pass the Senate bill.
No presidential primary, no 12-day vacation, is more important than the safety and security of our country.
Our leaders and would-be leaders must act.
The United States Congress by its inaction has created a gap in our national defense. A gap we can now only hope will not be filled by our enemies. Congress has the solemn responsibility not to put politics over American security. The President should implore Congress, as a national security priority, to return to Washington and pass the Protect America Act to give our intelligence agencies the tools they need to defeat our enemies.
Your friend,
Newt Gingrich
P.S. -- The FISA issue in the Congress is another stark reminder of the need to move beyond red-versus-blue partisan bickering.
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Wrong Call on Telecoms
By Frank J. Gaffney Jr.
The Washington Times | Wednesday, February 20, 2008
We interrupt this congressional recess to bring you an announcement: While the House of Representatives is vacationing this week, terrorists are probably communicating about plots to kill Americans without fear that their plans will be intercepted by U.S. intelligence.
If one or more of those mortal plots are, as a result, succeed, we won"t need an independent commission to assign blame. The buck will stop squarely at the desk of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who refused to allow a vote on permanent renewal of the Protect America Act (PAA).
That legislation provides, in effect, authority for the commander in chief to monitor our adversaries" battlefield communications — something successive presidents have routinely done since the Founding of the republic. Unfortunately, in the current, ongoing War for the Free World, the battlefield is global and the enemy"s signals are conveyed by a bewildering array of media not anticipated back in 1978 when Congress first imposed significant, but relatively modest restrictions on how and when American signals intercepts could take place.
To be clear, I believe such authority is inherent in the president"s powers under our Constitution. Unfortunately, a federal court found otherwise last year. This led first to a mad scramble to enact the Protect America Act in Fall 2007 and then, as that temporary, six-month legislation was ready to expire last weekend, to a continuing test of wills between the Democratic House leadership and President Bush. Incredibly, the House left town without scheduling a vote to reenact the PAA on a permanent basis.
Prominent among the stated justifications for this dereliction of duty by the House of Representatives is that the Senate version of the PAA re-enactment — passed recently with broad bipartisan support — included a provision anathema to the lower chamber"s Democratic leadership: It offered immunity from litigation for private telecommunications companies whose help in collecting signals intelligence was indispensable in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks.
Sadly, this dereliction is not an isolated incident. In 2007, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) — an organization identified by the Justice Department as a Muslim Brotherhood front organization and an un-indicted co-conspirator in a terrorism financing case — threatened to sue several individuals identified to date only as "John Does." These Americans responded, as did the telecoms, to a request for help by their government. They reported worrisome and provocative behavior on the part of a group of "Flying Imams" prior to a flight from Minneapolis to Arizona in 2006.
Congress and the public reacted vociferously when word got out concerning CAIR"s threats to those who fulfilled the oft-stated request by law-enforcement agencies across America to the effect that, "If you see something, say something." Within days, it became clear that substantial majorities in both the House and Senate favored relief for the John Does.
Then as now, though, Nancy Pelosi and other, like-minded House leaders used their positions to try to prevent enactment of the needed legislation. In the case of the John Does, however, the outcry to protect the country and those who heed official appeals for help toward that end became simply irresistible. At the instigation Republican Reps. Peter King of New York and Pete Hoekstra of Michigan and Sens. Joe Lieberman, Connecticut Independent Democrat, and Jon Kyl, Arizona Republican, the obstructionists were forced to allow a vote that overwhelmingly repudiated the naysayers.
Mrs. Pelosi has evidently learned nothing in the intervening months about either the national security implications or the politics of obstructionism in the service of trial lawyers and at the expense of the common defense. All other things being equal, it seems likely she will be rolled again when Congress reconvenes in another week.
After all, as the director of national intelligence, Vice Adm. Mike McConnell, observed on the "Fox Sunday Morning" program last weekend: "We cannot do this mission without help and support from the private sector. ... f you think about the private sector global communications, many people think the government operates that. Ninety-eight percent of it is owned and operated by the private sector." Therefore, cooperation of the telecoms with U.S. intelligence is not simply nice to have; it is essential.
The problem is that, even if Mrs. Pelosi is forced to relent relatively soon, our intelligence agencies" "situational awareness" of terrorist activities may suffer lasting harm. As Andrew McCarthy, one of the prosecutors in the trials regarding the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, put it in a recent blog posting at National Review Online:
"Every day we don't fix this problem, the problem — the investigative leads you don't get, the connections you don't make, the things you don't learn but which you should know — metastasizes. Intelligence is dynamic: You can't stop collecting for a day, a week, a month or more and then figure you are picking up right where you left off. What you have lost tends to stay lost."
America can ill afford in time of war for the House Speaker to play games with legislation designed to ensure that patriots — be they individual John Does, telecommunications companies or other corporations — are not penalized for doing their civic duty. We can only pray that, by the time she gets around to doing hers, our enemies have not advanced undetected the plots that will put still more of us at risk.
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is the founder, president, and CEO of The Center for Security Policy. During the Reagan administration, Gaffney was the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control Policy, and a Professional Staff Member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by Senator John Tower (R-Texas). He is a columnist for The Washington Times, Jewish World Review, and Townhall.com and has also contributed to The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New Republic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Los Angeles Times, and Newsday.
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Congress recessed without renewing authority for eavesdropping because Democrats bowed to trial lawyers' demands not to grant retroactive immunity from lawsuits for phone companies that helped U.S. intelligence agencies. It shows greater Democratic reliance on contributions from trial lawyers than their vulnerability on the national security issue.
Robert Novak
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By Fred Burton and Scott Stewart
As Stratfor has observed for some years now, the global response to the 9/11 attacks has resulted in the transformation of the jihadist threat. Whereas six and a half years ago, the threat came from “al Qaeda the organization,” today it emanates from “al Qaeda the movement.” In other words, jihadism has devolved into a broader global phenomenon loosely guided by the original al Qaeda core group’s theology and operational philosophy. We refer to the people involved in the widespread movement as grassroots operatives.
In analyzing this metamorphosis over the years, we have noted the strengths of the grassroots jihadist movement, such as the fact that this model, by its very nature, is difficult for intelligence and law enforcement agencies to quantify and combat. We also have said it has a broader operational and geographic reach than the core al Qaeda group, and we have discussed its weaknesses; mainly that this larger group of dispersed actors lacks the operational depth and expertise of the core group. This means the grassroots movement poses a wider, though less severe, threat — one that, to borrow an expression, is a mile wide and an inch deep. In the big picture, the movement does not pose the imminent strategic threat that the core al Qaeda group once did.
It is important to recognize that this metamorphosis has changed the operational profile of the actors plotting terrorist attacks. This change, in turn, has altered the way operatives are most likely to be encountered and identified by law enforcement and intelligence officials. As grassroots operatives become more important to the jihadist movement, local police departments will become an even more critical force in the effort to keep the United States safe from attacks. In short, local police serve as a critical line of defense against grassroots jihadists.
Grassroots Operatives
The operatives involved in the 9/11 attacks attended al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, received thousands of dollars from the group via wire transfers and were in regular contact with al Qaeda operational managers. Grassroots operatives have a different operational profile. While some grassroots operatives — such as Mohammed Siddique Khan, the ringleader of the July 7, 2005, London bombings — have had some degree of contact with the al Qaeda organization, others have had no discernable contact with the group. This lack of contact makes it difficult for law enforcement and intelligence officials to identify grassroots operatives because efforts to identify these militants have been designed to focus on such things as personal contact, travel, financial links and operational communication.
U.S. security agencies have made great efforts since 9/11 to recruit human intelligence sources within communities that are likely to harbor militants. Such sources are invaluable, but they can only report on what they observe within their limited areas of operation. It is simply impossible to recruit enough sources to cover every potential jihadist operative within a given city or even within a given neighborhood or large mosque. Human intelligence sources are scarce and valuable, and they must be used wisely and efficiently. Intelligence pertaining to militant activity and planned terrorist attacks is only obtained if a source has had an opportunity to develop a relationship of trust with the people involved in planning the attack. Such information is closely guarded, and, in most cases, a source must have an intimate relationship with the target to gain access to it. Such relationships take a large investment of a source’s time and efforts because they are not established quickly and cannot be established with too many individuals at any one time. This means that the people charged with recruiting and running human intelligence sources generally point them toward known or suspected militants — people who have been identified as having connections with known militant actors or groups. They cannot waste their limited resources on fishing expeditions.
Moreover, in places such as London, Houston and New York, there are so many individuals with some sort of link to Hezbollah, Hamas, al Qaeda or another militant group that it is almost impossible to sort through them all. There is precious little intelligence or surveillance capacity left to focus on finding unknown individuals. The problem is that these unknown individuals many times are the ones involved in grassroots militant plots. For example, Khan came to the attention of British authorities during the course of an investigation that did not directly involve him. After briefly checking him out, however, authorities determined that he did not pose enough of a threat to warrant diverting resources from more pressing cases. Although that assessment proved to be wrong, it is not hard to understand how and why the British authorities reached their conclusion, given the circumstances confronting them at the time.
The strength of U.S. intelligence has long been its signals intelligence capability. The vast array of American terrestrial, airborne and space-based signals intelligence platforms can collect an unimaginable amount of data from a wide variety of sources. The utility of signals intelligence is limited, however; it does not work well when suspects practice careful operational security. In the case of grassroots operatives, escaping scrutiny can be as simple as not using certain buzzwords in their communications or not communicating with known members of militant groups.
In the end, most counterterrorism intelligence efforts have been designed to identify and track people with links to known militant groups, and in that regard, they are fairly effective. However, they are largely ineffective in identifying grassroots militants. This is understandable, given that operatives connected to groups such as Hezbollah have access to much better training and far greater resources than their grassroots counterparts. In general, militants linked to organizations pose a more severe threat than do most grassroots militants, and thus federal agencies focus much of their effort on countering the larger threat.
That said, grassroots groups can and do kill people. Although they tend to focus on softer targets than operatives connected to larger groups, some grassroots attacks have been quite successful. The London bombings, for example, killed 52 people and injured hundreds.
Grassroots Defenders
As we have said, grassroots militants pose a threat that is unlikely to be picked up by federal authorities unless the militants self-identify or make glaring operational security blunders. All things considered, however, most operational security blunders are far more likely to be picked up by an alert local cop than by an FBI agent. The primary reason for this is statistics. There are fewer than 13,000 FBI agents in the entire United States, and less than a quarter of them are dedicated to counterterrorism investigations. By comparison, the New York City Police Department alone has nearly 38,000 officers, including a counterterrorism division consisting of some 1,200 officers and analysts. Moreover, there are some 800,000 local and state police in other jurisdictions across the country. Granted, most of these cops are not dedicated to counterterrorism investigations, though a larger percentage of them are in a good position to encounter grassroots jihadists who make operational security errors or are in the process of committing crimes in advance of an attack, such as document fraud, illegally obtaining weapons and illegal fundraising activities.
Many terrorist plots have been thwarted and dangerous criminals captured by alert officers doing their jobs. Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, for example, was not captured by some terrorism taskforce or elite FBI team; McVeigh was arrested shortly after the bombing by an Oklahoma state trooper who noticed McVeigh was driving his vehicle on Interstate 35 without a license plate. A large federal taskforce unsuccessfully hunted Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph for more than five years, but Rudolph ultimately was arrested by a rookie cop in Murphy, N.C., who found him dumpster diving for food behind a grocery store. Yu Kikumura, the Japanese Red Army’s master bombmaker, was arrested on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1988 by an alert New Jersey state trooper. Additionally, Hezbollah’s multimillion-dollar cigarette smuggling network was uncovered when a sharp North Carolina sheriff’s deputy found the group’s activities suspicious and tipped off the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, thus launching the large “Operation Smokescreen” investigation.
Local traffic cops also have identified several potential grassroots jihadists. In August 2007, two Middle Eastern men stopped by a sheriff’s deputy for speeding near Goose Creek, S.C., were charged with possession of a destructive device. The deputy reported that the men’s behavior and their Florida license plates led him to believe they were involved in drug smuggling. A search of the car, however, turned up bombmaking materials rather than dope. Likewise, a traffic stop by a police officer in Alexandria, Va., in September 2001 led to an investigation that uncovered the Virginia Jihad Network. In that case, network member Randall Royer was found to have an AK-47-type rifle with 219 rounds of ammunition in the trunk of his car. However, at least one notorious militant was able to slip through a crack in the system. At the time of the 9/11 attacks, there was an outstanding bench warrant for the operation’s leader, Mohamed Atta, for failure to appear in court after driving without a license.
In July 2005, police in Torrance, Calif., thwarted a grassroots plot that came to light during an investigation of a string of armed robberies. After arresting one suspect, Levar Haney Washington, police searching his apartment uncovered material indicating that Washington was part of a militant jihadist group that was planning to attack a number of targets, including the El Al Israel Airlines ticket counter at Los Angeles International Airport; synagogues in the Westside area of Los Angeles; California National Guard armories in western Los Angeles, Manhattan Beach and Torrance; and U.S. Army recruiting centers in Long Beach, Torrance and Harbor City.
Cases such as this highlight the fact that grassroots operatives are more likely to indulge in petty crimes such as credit card theft, cargo theft or armed robbery than they are to have telephone conversations with Osama bin Laden. When these operatives do commit such crimes, local cops — rather than the National Security Agency, FBI or CIA — have the first interaction with them. In fact, because of the lack of federal interaction, any records checks run on these individuals through the FBI or CIA most likely would turn up negative. Indeed, even Atta had no CIA 201 file until after Sept. 11, 2001. Therefore, it is important for local cops to trust their instincts and hunches, even if a suspect has no record.
Also, since jihadism is a radical Islamist concept, when we discuss fighting grassroots jihadists, we are talking about militant Islamists, including converts to Islam. With that in mind, there are certain crimes that, when perpetrated by Muslims, warrant thorough investigation. Most observant Muslims are excellent law-abiding citizens. However, it should be a red flag to law enforcement when an otherwise-observant Muslim is found engaging in document fraud or financial frauds such as bank fraud, credit card fraud, interstate transportation of stolen property, fencing stolen property, cigarette smuggling, selling pirated goods (such as software or designer handbags) or even dope smuggling. These crimes are especially significant if the perpetrator has made millions of dollars and yet still lives modestly, raising questions about where the proceeds from such crimes have gone. Obviously, not every Muslim who commits such crimes is a terrorist, but these crimes are an indication that further investigation is required. Of course, this follow-on investigation could prove difficult — getting leads run in Pakistan or Lebanon can be tough — but it can be successful if the officer has determination and the proper mindset. An officer with such a mindset will look at such crimes and consider whether they could have been perpetrated for some purpose beyond self-enrichment — such as terrorism.
Like in the cases of Operation Smokescreen and the Virginia Jihad Network, the instincts and observations of an experienced street cop can launch an investigation with far-reaching implications. This fact makes local cops a critical line of defense against grassroots operatives.
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Beijing’s Obvious Hand at the U.S. Olympic Torch Run
April 16, 2008
Related Links
2008 Olympics: Beijing’s Hopes and Hurdles
China: Protests and Beijing’s Olympic Conundrum
The Olympic Torch in San Francisco
By Rodger Baker
The April 9 Olympic torch relay in San Francisco opened a window into the organizational capabilities of the Chinese government and its intelligence collection apparatus inside the United States. From the coordinating efforts of the city’s Chinese Consulate, down through local Chinese business and social organizations, and on to the pro-China supporters who photographed the event, the operation showed an efficiency and organizational capability not seen among the anti-China demonstrators. The run also revealed a high level of sophistication, planning and control in the pro-China camp.
A Day of Confusion
The torch relay in San Francisco proved a mixed bag of anti-China and pro-China demonstrators, as well as spectators simply hoping for a glimpse of the symbol of the Olympic Games. Pro-Tibet and other demonstrators altered their tactics in San Francisco following clashes surrounding the torch run in London and Paris — where pictures of a protester with a Tibet flag trying to snatch the torch from a handicapped torchbearer left the protesters looking worse than China. As a result, the demonstrators in San Francisco planned to impede the progress of the relay rather than attempt to extinguish the torch or interfere with the actual torchbearers. The massive gathering at the beginning of the torch route, and the blocking of a bus carrying Chinese security officials and items related to the torch run, triggered the organizers of the relay to change the route completely. In part, then, the protesters interrupted the relay effectively, though not in the manner they had hoped.
The on-the-fly changes in the torch relay route, which left many spectators waiting down near the piers when the torch was running along the hills several blocks away, allowed the relay to progress relatively smoothly, interrupted only a few times by protesters attempting to block the route or by a few demonstrators bearing little sign of affiliation with the Tibetan or Darfur causes who threw water balloons at the torch. The heavy police and Diplomatic Security Service presence around the torch runners largely kept demonstrators on the sidewalks, while the moving roadblocks and the unclear torch route left demonstrators unsure of where they could amass to intercept it. The security organizers, then, were relatively successful in their efforts to allow all planned participants to carry the torch with minimal interference.
In the end, neither protesters nor security “won” the day. Amid the confusion, however, the groups that showed a very strong sense of organization and planning were the pro-China demonstrators. Their coordination demonstrated the ability of the Chinese government, via its local consulate and its association with overseas Chinese organizations, to rally and coordinate large-scale activities inside the United States — and to use these activities for intelligence collection.
Pro-China Preparation
By 8 a.m. April 9, the pro-China demonstrators were taking up positions along the planned torch relay route, pulling in groups carrying Chinese, U.S. and Olympic flags, and equipped with cases of food and water. However, these were not spontaneous gatherings of overseas Chinese supporting the motherland, as Beijing media have portrayed them. Rather, there was a coordinated effort between local Chinese business and social associations and the consulate to attract, equip, deploy and coordinate the large pro-China turnout. This is in contrast to the Free Tibet, Save Darfur and other anti-China protesters — who often seemed disorganized.
By some estimates, as many as 50 busloads of Chinese from other parts of California were brought to San Francisco. Many of them paid (by some accounts $300 each) to come out for the day in support of Beijing. They were placed in groups along the anticipated torch relay route and given Chinese and Olympic flags, as well as American flags (the latter a tactical move to show they were not anti-U.S., but rather pro-China — a distinction made all the more apparent by the fact that most anti-China protesters did not carry U.S. flags, and some also were critical of the U.S. government).
In addition to those bused in from out of town, many of the local Chinese business and social organizations were involved in fielding groups of pro-China supporters, and these were similarly equipped. Most groups also were supplied with cases of water and food — something not seen among the anti-China demonstrators, who appeared more a gathering of individuals than prearranged groups. One local Chinese organizer was overheard saying they had spent some $30,000 on food and water for the day of the torch run — perhaps not a large amount overall, but a clear investment to ensure that there was group cohesion among the pro-China demonstrators.
In addition to many older overseas Chinese posted along the route, there also were numerous Chinese of college age, many representing several overseas and mainland Chinese student associations. Some carried a large flag representing China’s Tsinghua University, which produces many top Chinese officials, and among the others were local chapters of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association. During the run, some of these students challenged the American Free Tibet or Saver Darfur protesters to discussion, asking, for example, whether they had been to Tibet or diverting accusations of Chinese military support to Sudan with counteraccusations of U.S. military activity in Iraq and Afghanistan. In general, the Chinese side kept the confrontations rather civil, seeming to have been well prepared to respond (suggesting they had been provided with materials on how to respond in advance). On numerous occasions, however, the anti-China demonstrators in these one-to-one confrontations would resort to their own chanted slogans or just shout that the Chinese were liars.
The organization of the pro-China contingent was further demonstrated by its self-policing efforts. While the anti-China demonstrators ignored the barriers along the route and moved into the streets, far fewer pro-China demonstrators did so. When one did cross, the pro-China group would shout at them to return behind the barriers and “follow the rules.” There was clearly a concerted effort to make the Chinese demonstrators appear as the more controlled, more peaceful and less confrontational participants — part of a broader PR strategy.When confronted by a large group of pro-Tibet demonstrators, for example, the Chinese often simply ignored the repeated cries of “China lies, people die” and instead broke into song, effectively ending the exchange.
Instigation and Intelligence Collection
There was at least one exception to the restraint shown by the pro-China demonstrators, however, suggesting they were not entirely the innocuous gathering they sought to portray. On numerous occasions, individuals or small groups carrying cameras would seek to incite the anti-China demonstrators to acts of confrontation or violence, frequently by parading through the middle of a group of Free Tibet or Save Darfur demonstrators with a large Chinese flag, walking back and forth through the group. In some cases, small scuffles broke out — and pictures were snapped — though the anti-China demonstrators soon deployed individuals to try to keep the two opposing sides separated. The same day, Chinese media ran photos of pro-Tibet demonstrators shoving pro-China demonstrators, “proving” their point that the Tibet supporters are violent.
It was no accident that the photographs appeared so quickly in the Chinese media. In addition to the demonstrators, numerous individuals were sent out with cameras. Although cameras are expected at such an event, many of the photographers were collecting images either for Chinese propaganda purposes or to identify anti-China demonstrators in order to identify pinpoint “troublemakers” who might be planning to attend the Olympics in Beijing. With their pictures on file, Chinese authorities can then either deny their visas or monitor them more closely when they arrive in China.
In addition, Beijing has been trying to locate the organizers of anti-China protests and demonstrations overseas, ones who may be planning action in China, in order to infiltrate their groups and gather intelligence on their planned activities. This is not new for Beijing — as the Chinese Embassy official who defected in Australia a few years ago demonstrated by revealing the details of Chinese infiltration of and spying on Falun Gong supporters in Australia. Beijing also has been seeking out U.S. and other foreign academics for their insights on potential demonstrations in Beijing, hoping to get information about individuals and tactical details of plans in order to pre-empt or at least effectively counter them.
In addition to the intelligence collection efforts and the careful organization and coordination of the pro-China demonstrators in San Francisco, electronic countermeasures also were used to disrupt the communications and activities of the anti-China demonstrators. In some cases, the cell phones of the anti-China organizers were spammed with prank calls and text messages in order to limit their effectiveness as a coordinating tool — particularly as the torch changed routes. There also were unconfirmed cases of limited cell-phone jamming, likely using the short-range cell-phone jammers that were popular a few years ago. These created intermittent and isolated interference with cell-phone reception, further deteriorating the communications and coordination ability of the anti-China demonstrators.
Beyond San Francisco
Furthermore, China did not limit its activities to San Francisco. It also organized a smaller response to the Dalai Lama’s visit to Seattle, Wash., a few days later. Chinese Consul General in San Francisco Gao Zhansheng sent a letter to University of Washington (UW) President Mark Emmert urging him and other UW officials to refrain from meeting with the Dalai Lama or from giving him a platform for political or “separatist” activities. Additionally, the Chinese Students and Scholars Association sent an open letter to the UW leadership and met briefly with Emmert and Provost Ed Taylor, asking them to limit the Dalai Lama’s opportunity to use his visit for political reasons. Several hundred pro-China students also staged a demonstration outside the Dalai Lama’s speaking venue in Seattle on April 14, using the Internet to coordinate banners, chants and actions.
Throughout the United States there have been reports of other group actions by Chinese students and activists, from Internet-based activity promoting boycotts of French goods following the Paris torch relay to a push to “correct” foreign media coverage of the Tibet riots and the Tibet issue overall. But there also have been more aggressive instances. For example, at least one Chinese student at Duke University received threats after attending a pro-Tibet rally, while others have had their personal information, including their phone numbers and Chinese identification cards, posted on the Internet bulletin board hosted by the university’s Chinese Student and Scholar Association (the association denied responsibility, saying those postings were the actions of individuals). The students’ concern, however, is that the information will get back to Chinese authorities and thus undermine their future prospects in China or even lead to further harassment of themselves or their families.
China has had a long reach into the Chinese community in the United States for quite some time, and frequently uses this community for espionage, both within the community itself and against American companies, the military and the technology and political spheres. Also, Chinese consulates in the United States have helped facilitate pro-China gatherings in the past. However, while it already was known that China was anxious to restore its image after the Tibet unrest and the trouble with the torch run in London and Paris, the effort and coordination Beijing exhibited in San Francisco, through the consulate and local Chinese business and social organizations, was rather impressive.
There are no estimates of the number of pro- and anti-China demonstrators at the San Francisco event, though the former easily totaled several thousand. Additionally, the actions of the pro-China camp, along with the supporters’ placement along the anticipated route, demonstrated a much more centralized and coordinated organization than the anti-China groups — and revealed the depth to which the Chinese government can organize and deploy its overseas population, even in the United States.
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As I understand it, the PRC's biggest recruiting tool is playing on ethnic pride/loyalty in the Chinese communities.
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Chinese-Americans play an important role in high tech and we have seen some cases wherein the Feds have accused some of them of espionage. I know you follow these issues-- can you comment on this?
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If anything, the Chinese Ministry of State Security (China's version of the KGB) is more interested in economic espionage than getting political-military secrets, although that line is increasingly blurred, as technical knowledge IS political-military-economic strength in the 21st century.
As I understand it, the approach made both on Chinese nationals and Americans and Canadians of Chinese ancestry in high tech fields is to play on the ethnic loyalty and the Chinese Mainland's poverty to get small bits of sensitive information without formally recruiting their assets, unlike how the KGB recruited agents during the cold war.
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(Published in The Asian Pacific Post August 8, 2003
3,500 Chinese spy companies identified in Canada and U.S.
By Asian Pacific News Service
The man looks and acts like any other Korean corner store owner - a hardworking newcomer to Canada.
You cannot tell by his simple appearance that he owns the building the store is in and that he has just bought a million dollar mansion in the posh Beaconsville area of Montreal.
You also cannot tell that he is one of North Korea's foremost spies in Eastern Canada who actually owns a large computer business in Mapo, South Korea, that employs hundreds of people.
In the highrise glass towers of Vancouver - Tricell (Canada) Inc. and Top Glory Enterprises Ltd., both incorporated in the late '80s work for the Communist government of China.
Among their jobs was to help facilitate the covert entry of secret police into Vancouver by hoodwinking the Canadian government. The agents were hunting for high profile fugitive businessman, Lai Changxing, who himself was recruited by the Chinese military to spy on Taiwan.
The visitor visas from the bogus business delegation was endorsed by Chinas Ministry of Trade and Economic Co-operation (MOFTEC) - one of the most powerful ministries in the Chinese government, responsible for such vital areas as negotiating China's entry into the World Trade Organization.
From the windows of both these firms, which constantly invite "Chinese business delegations" to Canada, company officials can see the arrival and departure of ships belonging to the maritime behemoth - COSCO.
The shipping line is intimately linked to the China International Trust and Investment Corp., a key fundraiser for the Chinese government and a technology-acquiring source for Chinas military.
Its vessels have been caught carrying thousands of weapons into California and Chinese missile-technology and biological-warfare components into North Korea, Pakistan, Iraq and Iran, according to U.S. intelligence reports.
Insisting there is no evidence to show COSCO is involved in any illegal activity - the Vancouver Port Authority has a "gateway to North America" deal with the shipping giant.
When Canada's Nortel Telecommunications based in Brampton, Ontario wanted to do business in China, they hired Katrina Leung's company - Merry Glory Ltd.
Little did they know that 49-year-old corporate matchmaker would be in the limelight several years later accused of having have slept her way into the good graces of two FBI agents while stealing secrets for the Chinese government.
Leung, who was paid $1. 2 million in 1995 and 1996 for negotiating the Nortel-China deal, has strong connections to Canada's Chinese business associations.
Around the same time, the modern day Matahari was greasing the way for Nortel, the Canadian spy agency - CSIS - was conducting an investigation in the offices of Ontario Hydro regarding the theft of information in the nuclear technology field by "an individual of Chinese origin".
According to a secret intelligence report obtained by The Asian Pacific Post, the individual sent unauthorized faxes, some containing hours worth of data, to a telephone number in the offices of the State Science and Technology Commission of China.
The report said that there were two other cases where Canadian companies have alleged that their employees had been selling industrial secrets to China.
Like other ambitious young men who based their businesses in Hong Kong, James Ting was a citizen of the world, an entrepreneur who constructed a universe of interrelated companies and finances from Toronto to Tokyo to New York.
Ting was a darling of the Chinese-Canadian trade lobby. Even the Prime Minister's Office website lists Ting's Semi-Tech, once ranked as the nations 10th largest employer, as a member of Team Canada's business deals with China.
On the flip side, spy watchers were warning Ottawa without much success, that Ting was China's frontman to acquire high and medium technology and engage in economic and industrial espionage.
Among the companies Semi-Tech showed as part of its organization were several Chinese state-owned companies, related to military and intelligence activities obviously using what seemed to be a Canadian consumer based company as cover.
Two months ago, after avoiding a global manhunt while hiding in China, Ting surrendered to Hong Kong authorities where he is accused of serious financial crimes.
The mega-dealmaker, who stripped down companies in the west and to take their technology back to the east, left a trail of nearly $2 billion in debts and thousands without jobs.
The cases listed are but a small illustration of what the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said this week was the greatest espionage threat to North America in the next 10 years to 15 years.
FBI Director Robert Mueller told the United States Congress that China has more than 3,000 "front" companies in America whose real purpose is to direct espionage efforts. Some of the thousands of Chinese visitors, students and business people who go to the United States each year also have a government intelligence task to perform, authorities say.
"Left unchecked, such a situation could greatly undermine U.S. national security and U.S. military and economic advantage," Mueller told Congress.
"They figured out that what they want is throughout the United States, not just embassies, not just consulates," David Szady, FBI assistant director for counterintelligence, said in a published interview. "Its a major effort."
To meet this challenge, the FBI has transferred 167 agents into counterintelligence and set up an anti-espionage operation for the first time in all 56 field offices. Each is putting together a comprehensive survey of the potential espionage targets in their domain to give the FBI its first broad national picture.
Preventive efforts include FBI meetings with corporate executives, university officials and others to gauge vulnerabilities. It also means undercover work at conferences that draw foreign scientists and development of intelligence "assets" who describe for an FBI agent what the foreign government wants.
The FBI has made fighting espionage the No. 2 priority behind stopping terrorism, with the same philosophy of tracking and stopping spies rather than waiting to prosecute them.
Training has been strengthened, the career track resurrected and a cadre of intelligence analysts is being built.
In Canada, intelligence reports indicate the number of Chinese front companies to be between 300 and 500.
But unlike the Americans, China experts say the political climate in Ottawa is not conducive to cracking down on this significant threat.
"Virtually all the recent prime ministers and Paul Martin who is likely to be the next have strong connections to China on the personal, business and political fronts," said an intelligence analyst specialising in East Asian affairs.
"They find it difficult to understand this threat some just deny it," he said.
For former Canadian foreign service officer Brian McAdam, this week's FBI warning reads like a passage out of a report he worked on for the Canadian spy agency.
McAdam worked on "Project Sidewinder" which was conducted by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and aided by the RCMP between 1994 and 1996.
The conclusions were never publicly released, until leaked to the media amidst allegations that "political influence nixed the project."
That study mirrors this week's FBI assertions that China posed the most significant threat to Canada.
Sidewinder, analysts state, did not present theories but indicators of a multifaceted threat to national security. The report was generally ignored by the politicians. It was ahead of its time.
Among those whose connections were investigated were Macao casino king Stanley Ho, who has extensive interests in Canada, and Li Ka-shing, one of the world's wealthiest men, known in Vancouver for his purchase of the Expo lands and companies linked to tycoons like Robert Kuok, Cheng Yu Tung and Henry Fok.
Sidewinder among other things said many of the companies identified by the analysts have contributed "several tens of thousands of dollars to the two traditional political parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives."
A major financial and brokerage house gave the Liberal party C$20,432.94 in 1994, a large petroleum company owned by a Beijing-friendly tycoon gave more than C$100,000 to the same two parties and political donations were also made by a triad-run Chinese film studio.
At the time of the study, analysts said at least 200 Canadian companies are under the direct or indirect control of China.
The central point of the Chinese strategy is first to buy a Canadian company to obtain a "local identity".
Then, using this acquisition, the Chinese-Canadian company invests heavily under the Canadian banner.
But control lies in Hong Kong or Beijing and the financial benefits or fruits of research, often paid for by Ottawa or the provinces, are likely to make their way to Asia.
One China-controlled multinational with assets of more than US$23 billion, had spent more than $500 million buying companies in the forest sector in B.C., petrochemical firms in Alberta and real estate in central Canada.
It said that Triad or Chinese mafia members are behind an international seafood processing company that has offices in Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal and Mississauga. The company is believed to be a front for importing heroin. In addition, company managers have maintained regular contacts with Chinese army officials and paid for visits of Chinese delegations.
Sidewinder warned that the Chinese government was taking advantage of growing business ties between China and Canada to provide cover for intelligence services.
One example cited said a company owned by a Chinese-Canadian national sponsored what was ostensibly a Chinese business delegation to Canada. In reality, the delegation was comprised of Ministry of State Security officials travelling to Canada to conduct an intelligence operation.
Another similar delegation comprised officers from a sensitive sector of the People's Liberation Army, who were attempting to make arrangements to purchase secure communications technology for military purposes.
The Canadian spy agency which was at loggerheads with the RCMP over certain characterizations in the report said the Sidewinder study done by McAdam and others was revised and certain documents destroyed because they were based on unprovable conspiracy theories.
The spy agency later issued a watered-down version of the Sidewinder study to a select government group.
The Security Intelligence Review Committee, the civilian watchdog of Canada's spy agency, has once again been asked to review the handling of Sidewinder by CSIS.
"What is critical here is to compare the FBI study with Sidewinder. What is being released to Congress is what we warned the Canadian government about in the mid-nineties," McAdam told The Asian Pacific Post.
"The stuff about influence in universities, etc., was in Sidewinder... They did not want to listen to us then... maybe they will listen now."
Meanwhile, a report out of Ottawa this week said that Prime Minister Jean Chretien is planning a trip to China as part of an international farewell tour.
"Taxpayers are footing the bill on a trip that is going to do Canadians very little good. Do you think there's one beef farmer in Canada, whether it's Ontario or Western Canada that wants him to go to China - unless he's trying to sell them beef. Why can't he go sit down with the leader in Japan? That is the most important issue right now," said Canadian Alliance House leader John Reynolds, referring to the ongoing crisis caused by the mad-cow disease.
Reynolds said if Chretien wants to wrap up his time in office conducting an international farewell tour to "say goodbye to his friends," thats fine, but he should ask Paul Martin, his anticipated successor, to fill in for him while he is away.
Chretien is to attend the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation meeting in Bangkok Oct. 17-21 as well as the annual Commonwealth meeting in Nigeria in December.
But sources say he is seriously considering tacking on a trip to China and another one to India after his APEC meeting in Thailand.
The prime minister's office said Chretien may go to Shanghai at the recent request of the Chinese president to attend the opening of two Candu reactors.
The reactors, which employ 450 Canadians, were sold to China by Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd after Ottawa changed legislation to provide Beijing with over $1.9 billion in loans.
The office also confirmed that Chretien is also considering an invitation to meet with the Canada-China Business Council (CCBC) in Beijing.
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By Drew Griffin and Kathleen Johnston
CNN Special Investigations Unit
SAN DIEGO, California (CNN) -- Their mission is to protect airline passengers from acts of terror on U.S. flights. But in a special investigation, former and current air marshals told CNN that the number of marshals assigned to police flights is so low that the federal agency overseeing them has drastically lowered its firearms and psychological testing standards just so it can qualify new hires.
More than a dozen current and former marshals said that so many federal air marshals have resigned and are not being replaced, airport screeners are being employed to fill the dwindling ranks.
But the TSA says that's not true and that the rate of those leaving has remained at 6.5 percent a year since 2001.
A former federal air marshal and weapons trainer who left the agency in 2006 after four years of service said the situation was so bad that managers at his office fudged the numbers by assigning marshals to short, no-risk flights.
The former marshal said that was done to make it appear that the percentage of manned flights was higher than it really was.
"I think it's a national disgrace,'' said the former marshal, who asked not to be identified because he still works in law enforcement.
The Federal Air Marshal Service was greatly expanded in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, when flights to "high-risk cities" such as New York were given special air marshal manpower priority.
Assignments are "intelligence-driven" and "risk-based," the Federal Air Marshal Service said in an e-mail. But many of the marshals interviewed said it had little to do with intelligence or risk and was more about a numbers game.
"We were questioning how these flights could be intelligence-driven when we were flying from San Diego to Phoenix on another leg to Las Vegas back to Phoenix back to San Diego," the former marshal said. "It's not a threat flying on Southwest Airlines to Las Vegas."
Faced with fewer qualified applicants, current air marshals said that recruiting standards have been lowered. Air marshals still patrolling flights also said the loss of so many experienced agents has led the TSA to hire airport screeners as air marshals.
Agency spokesman Greg Alter said in an e-mail that only "a very small number of air marshals started their careers as Transportation Security Officers [airport screeners]."
Alter added that all "candidates receive the best training available and enter the workforce with the skill and expertise needed to protect the traveling public."
In July 2006, the Federal Air Marshal Service sent out a memo saying that new hires would no longer face mandatory psychological testing, unless the recruit admits that he or she has been treated for a mental condition.
TSA said it revised but did not "degrade" the psychological testing of applicants using the application and interaction with others in the service to determine mental competency.
On firearms training, a former weapons instructor with air marshals said that when recruits could not pass the tough federal tactical pistol course, known as the TPC, it was replaced with a less rigorous shooting test the potential recruits could pass.
"The TPC went away very quickly because they couldn't get enough people through it to pass," the former air marshal trainer said. "So they dropped the tactical pistol course and went to the practical pistol course, which is a standard federal law enforcement course. It's not nearly as quick or as dynamic as TPC."
But the TSA disputes the claim, saying it altered the weapons training six years ago because marshals needed more of a police-type training program rather than military-style weapons instruction.
The TSA said in an e-mail that "the course of fire and minimum qualification score air marshal candidates must acquire is the same today as it has been for over six years."
To replace departing air marshals, the TSA hired internally, including some administrative staff who had no college, law enforcement or military backgrounds, one current marshal said.
"To me, it's more of an embarrassment to be a member of that agency that would allow that particular individual in the training program," one marshal said. "I wouldn't want them on my flight. ... I don't want them as my partner."
The revelations come in the wake of a CNN investigation, in which air marshals and pilots said that only about 1 percent of the nation's 28,000 daily domestic flights were protected by onboard, armed federal marshals.
The Federal Air Marshal Service disputes that figure.
CNN's report about the declining number of marshals on planes also got the attention of Congress.
In a congressional hearing this week, the head of the Transportation Security Administration, Kip Hawley, told members of Congress that what CNN heard from the air marshals is wrong.
"I have to just correct on the factual basis on the CNN report about air marshals covering 1 percent. That number is absolutely wrong by an order of magnitude, and it was a guess by the folks there, and I just have to say that number is completely false."
Hawley would not say what percentage of flights has air marshals. That's a national security secret.
The service hides behind national security to keep the public from knowing how thin coverage really is, air marshals said.
The Federal Air Marshal Service continues to refuse CNN's request for an interview.
This month, Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, who serves on the Homeland Security Committee, began holding closed-door meetings with the air marshal's service to determine whether congressional oversight committees are getting the truth.
"We will keep working and continuing to make sure that the airlines are served with the appropriate law enforcement that ensures the safety of the traveling public. We, too, are not interested in having funny numbers," Jackson Lee said.
Jackson Lee said that the committee has not finished its work and that she is convinced American air travel is safe for passengers. "It is important to restate and to re-emphasize: This is not an open opportunity for those who would attempt to do Americans harm. We are light years from where we were in 2000. We have trained personnel. They're being utilized, and we feel that we are steps ahead of where we were, but we want to get better. And that's what we intend to do."
After seeing CNN's initial report, Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts sent a letter to Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff asking for clarity on the number of air marshals protecting domestic flights and sought a response by April 11.
The senator is still waiting, Kerry's staff said.
Todd Schwarzschild also contributed to this report.
Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/04/16/griffin.marshal.training/index.html
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Italian’s Detention Illustrates Dangers Foreign Visitors Face
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: May 14, 2008
He was a carefree Italian with a recent law degree from a Roman university. She was “a totally Virginia girl,” as she puts it, raised across the road from George Washington’s home. Their romance, sparked by a 2006 meeting in a supermarket in Rome, soon brought the Italian, Domenico Salerno, on frequent visits to Alexandria, Va., where he was welcomed like a favorite son by the parents and neighbors of his girlfriend, Caitlin Cooper.
But on April 29, when Mr. Salerno, 35, presented his passport at Washington Dulles International Airport, a Customs and Border Protection agent refused to let him into the United States. And after hours of questioning, agents would not let him travel back to Rome, either; over his protests in fractured English, he said, they insisted that he had expressed a fear of returning to Italy and had asked for asylum.
Ms. Cooper, 23, who had promised to show her boyfriend another side of her country on this visit — meaning Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon — eventually learned that he had been sent in shackles to a rural Virginia jail. And there he remained for more than 10 days, locked up without charges or legal recourse while Ms. Cooper, her parents and their well-connected neighbors tried everything to get him out.
Mr. Salerno’s case may be extreme, but it underscores the real but little-known dangers that many travelers from Europe and other first-world nations face when they arrive in the United States — problems that can startle Americans as much as their foreign visitors.
“We have a lot of government people here and lobbyists and lawyers and very educated, very savvy Washingtonians,” said Jim Cooper, Ms. Cooper’s father, a businessman, describing the reaction in his neighborhood, the Wessynton subdivision of Alexandria. “They were pretty shocked that the government could do this sort of thing, because it doesn’t happen that often, except to people you never hear about, like Haitians and Guatemalans.”
Each year, thousands of would-be visitors from 27 so-called visa waiver countries are turned away when they present their passports, said Angelica De Cima, a spokeswoman for Customs and Border Protection, who said she could not discuss any individual case. In the last seven months, 3,300 people have been rejected and more than 8 million admitted, she said.
Though citizens of those nations do not need visas to enter the United States for as long as 90 days, their admission is up to the discretion of border agents. There are more than 60 grounds for finding someone inadmissible, including a hunch that the person plans to work or immigrate, or evidence of an overstay, however brief, on an earlier visit.
While those turned away are generally sent home on the next flight, “there are occasional circumstances which require further detention to review their cases,” Ms. De Cima said. And because such “arriving aliens” are not considered to be in the United States at all, even if they are in custody, they have none of the legal rights that even illegal immigrants can claim.
Government officials have acknowledged that intensified security since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has sometimes led to the heavy-handed treatment of foreigners caught in a bureaucratic tangle or paperwork errors. But despite encouraging officers to resolve such cases quickly, excesses continue to come to light.
One recent case involved an Icelandic woman who was refused entry at Kennedy Airport because, a dozen years earlier, she had overstayed her visa by three weeks. The woman, Erla Osk Arnardottir Lillendahl, was deported Dec. 10 after what she described as 24 hours of interrogation and humiliating treatment — locked in a cell and barred from making phone calls. The Department of Homeland Security later issued a letter of regret.
In questioning Mr. Salerno, customs agents seemed to suspect that he intended to work here. Ms. Cooper, a copy editor for an educational publication, said she was in the airport lobby when an agent called to ask about Mr. Salerno’s income and why he visited so often.
The youngest son of a prosperous contractor in Calabria, Mr. Salerno helps out in his brother’s law firm in Rome and is able to visit the United States several times a year. Neighbors said he joined volunteers in refurbishing the Wessynton recreation center in 2006, then became one of its summer attractions, kicking a soccer ball with the kids and playing tennis with the adults.
“He just is a very open, fun and helpful guy,” said Christopher M. Porter, a resident of Wessynton.
Ms. Cooper said that at the airport, when she begged to know what was happening to Mr. Salerno, an agent told her, “You know, he should try spending a little more time in his own country.”
Another agent eventually told her to go home because Mr. Salerno was being detained as an asylum-seeker.
“The border patrol officer said to my face that Domenico said he would be killed if he went back to Italy,” she recalled, voicing incredulity that, in his halting English, he could express such a thought. “Also, who on earth would ever seek asylum from Italy?”
Twelve hours later, when Mr. Salerno was granted a five-minute phone call, he called Ms. Cooper and denied saying anything of the kind. Instead, he said, the asylum story seemed to be retaliation for his insisting on speaking to his embassy.
After being turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he was taken to the Pamunkey Regional Jail in Hanover, Va., where he ended up in a barracks with 75 other men, including asylum-seekers who told him they had been waiting a year.
Ten days after he landed in Washington, Mr. Salerno was still incarcerated, despite efforts by Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia, and two former immigration prosecutors hired by the Coopers.
“He’s just really scared,” Ms. Cooper said in an interview last Thursday. “He asked me if Virginia has the death penalty.”
Luis Paoli, a lawyer hired by the Coopers, said there was no limit on detention while waiting for an asylum interview. But even after officials agreed the asylum issue had been a mistake, Mr. Salerno was not released.
“Now an innocent European, who has never broken any laws, committed any crimes, or overstayed his visa, is being held in a county jail,” Ms. Cooper wrote in an e-mail message to The New York Times last Wednesday, prompting a reporter’s inquiries.
Less than 24 hours later, immigration officials intervened and arranged to deliver Mr. Salerno to Dulles, where last Friday he flew to Rome. Ms. Cooper, who said she was now considering moving to Italy, was by his side.
Mr. Salerno was still shaken. “In America,” he said, “there are so many good people and beautiful people that don’t deserve to be showing these terrible things to the world.”
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The Brits are our very good friends, so I include this here:
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Afghan plane hijacker is now working as a cleaner at Heathrow
By DANIEL BATES
One of the nine Afghans who won the right to live in Britain after hijacking a plane is now working at Heathrow airport as a cleaner, it emerged last night.
Nazamuddin Mohammidy was one of a group who took over an internal Afghan flight in 2000 and landed it in the UK, where they threatened to kill those on board unless they were granted asylum. Now it has emerged Mohammidy, 34, was recently arrested while driving a car around the new Terminal 5 at Heathrow airport. Police suspected he was an unlicensed cab driver but were stunned when checks revealed he was one of the hijackers. He even had a British Airways pass on him. Mohammidy was among the gang, who claimed they were fleeing the Taliban, which took over an Ariana Airlines jet on an internal flight in Afghanistan in February 2000 armed with firearms and hand grenades.
The Boeing 727, with 160 passengers on board, was diverted to Stansted Airport in Essex. There, the hijackers kept police and SAS marksmen at bay for four days before giving themselves up. All were jailed, but later had their convictions quashed by the Court of Appeal. They have since been living in West London rent-free and on state benefits at an annual cost of £150,000 to the taxpayer.
Mohammidy has been living in Hounslow, Middx, with his family and has spent months employed by a firm that has a contract to clean a BA training centre at Heathrow. Sources last night insisted the BA pass didn't give him airside access, but did allow him into secure areas.
When police pulled him in Mohammidy, wasn't arrested for terror offences but for breaching his bail conditions over an assault charge. He is accused of beating up his former landlord. Yesterday Mohammidy appeared in court over the bail breach, but magistrates in Uxbridge bailed him again - meaning he is back on the streets. A Scotland Yard spokesman last night confirmed that Mohammidy had appeared in court over the bail breach, which took place in December. He will reappear before magistrates in Ealing on May 19.
The spokesman added: "In December 2007 Officers stopped and searched a man under section 44 of the Terrorism Act at Terminal 5. Inquiries revealed he was in breach of bail."
Mohammidy, and brothers Ali and Mohammed Safi, were jailed along with Abdul Shohab, Taimur Shah, Abdul Ghayur, Mohammed Kazin, Mohammed Showaib and Reshad Ahmadi in 2001 over the hijack.
But in 2003 the Court of Appeal ruled their convictions for hijacking, false imprisonment and possessing guns and explosives were unsafe.
The men were released and settled in private properties in Hounslow, where they, their wives and children enjoyed a standard of living far removed from the life they left behind in Afghanistan.
Their houses had large gardens, computers, video recorders and hi-fi systems. The Afghans were also been given lessons in English and computer skills at a nearby college.
In 2006 Mr Justice Sullivan caused widespread outrage after ordering the Home Office to grant the gang 'discretionary leave' to remain in Britain as Afghanistan was 'unsafe' to return to.
The judge also ruled there had been an 'abuse of power' at the highest level in the handling of the case and singled out former Home Secretary David Blunkett and his successor Charles Clarke for acting 'unlawfully.'
A BA spokesman said last night: "We have been helping police with their inquiries into a man who is employed by a cleaning contractor."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/liv...n_page_id=1770
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IMHO, the next major terror attack CONUS will be, at least in part from jihadis holding US/UK/EU passports.
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This clip certainly does not inspire confidence:
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=61c_1210804020&c=1#comments
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Scannning the recent posts this caught my eye.......
IMHO, the next major terror attack CONUS will be, at least in part from jihadis holding US/UK/EU passports.
9/11 may have been plannned in some afghan cave some where.....It was actually hatched out and done pretty much from within the U.S. pretty much American made(except the players) ..........So I'am pretty much in agreement.
My question is How is it then prevented?
TG
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Woof Tom:
A number of the entries in the "Legal Issues presented , , ," thread address the legal aspect of answering this question.
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Woof, Ok.....I was just wondering if these would be fake passports........Or why we would issue passports to terrorists........
TG
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Counterfeit passports are an issue, though what i'm talking about is citizens of the west waging jihad against their own nations. The 7/7 London bombers, or Rodney Hampton-el, a US born and raised black muslim that was part of the original NYC/NJ al qaeda cell that first bombed the WTC as examples.
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Woof GM, I agree with you on this and find this really hard to prevent.
I personally would like to see more reasources being spent at home than abroad....but anyway....
Would you include Timothy Mcvie(sp) the Oklahoma city fed bldg. bomber in this group of possible terrorists?
TG
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Tom,
A huge amount of resources is being spent here, but the biggest factor in AQ not being able to top 9/11 in the last 7 years has been our offensives against AQ's global infastructure. Taking out training camps, interdicting their flow of money and killing their members does a lot to impair their ability to wage an offensive.
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Woof GM, I agree with you on this and find this really hard to prevent.
I personally would like to see more reasources being spent at home than abroad....but anyway....
Would you include Timothy Mcvie(sp) the Oklahoma city fed bldg. bomber in this group of possible terrorists?
TG
Terrorists motivated by left/right radicalism are threats, though not at the same level as the global jihad, which presents a long term existential threat to the US/Western world. Regarding McVeigh, there are those that claim a McVeigh-al-qaeda link. There is a historical alliance between the nazis and jihadis that still thrives today.
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Here are two top notch books on the topic of homeland security:
http://www.amazon.com/Terrorist-Watch-Inside-Desperate-Attack/dp/0307382133
http://www.amazon.com/Crush-Cell-Terrorism-Terrorizing-Ourselves/dp/0307382176/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211056343&sr=1-1
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There is a historical alliance between the nazis and jihadis that still thrives today.
Now thats a match I do not understand..... One being Racist and one being religous........
I will admit one thing.......things have been quite....Lets hope they stay that way.
Though my understanding of terrorism is that terrorism uses time to its advantage and the willingness to wait for the opertune moment, is a attribute to terrorism.
Take Bin Laden for example, he is showing a tremendous amount of restraint and not trying to force anything......He makes very little noise these days.
Yet we all know hes there......
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Both are militaristic totalitarians with a deep seated hatred of jews and freedom.
Patience is an asset the jihadis have that we don't, however AQ has been needing a followup to 9/11 for years now to prove their relevance. We've rolled up every big plot and forced them to cower in Pakistan's caves, however the Shia side of the global jihad is surging forward with little to stop them at this time.
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That is an intresting relation between Nazi's and Jihadis....Seems to make sense...not sure they could live well together....but anyway, it is understood.
Is the hatred for America related to our freedom or our alliance with Israel...or both?
however the Shia side of the global jihad is surging forward with little to stop them at this time.
Expound please? I'am thinking Sadr and Iran/Iraq....but see little threat to the U.S. with the exception of our being on their playing field in Iraq.......which was not their playing field until we made it that way.
Are they intrested in Terrorism on a global scale?
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That is an intresting relation between Nazi's and Jihadis....Seems to make sense...not sure they could live well together....but anyway, it is understood.
Is the hatred for America related to our freedom or our alliance with Israel...or both?
**Both. Just as Israel is a target for the jihadis because they exist on what was muslim conquered land, the jihadis speak the same way about Spain eventually being returned to "Dar al-islam" from "Dar al-harb" as part of the return of the Caliphate that will eventually span the world.**
however the Shia side of the global jihad is surging forward with little to stop them at this time.
Expound please? I'am thinking Sadr and Iran/Iraq....but see little threat to the U.S. with the exception of our being on their playing field in Iraq.......which was not their playing field until we made it that way.
**Iran is on the verge of becoming a nuclear power, if not already one and has been waging a war against us since 1979. Until 9/11, hezbollah (A wholly owned subsidiary of Iran's Revolutionary Guard) had killed more Americans than any other group. Hezbollah has demonstrated a global reach. This capacity, with nukes really does threaten the future of the United States.**
Are they intrested in Terrorism on a global scale?
**Yes. They have been ever since the Iranian revolution. Only Israel has really stepped up and bled them. Sadly, despite all the losses they've inflicted on us, we've never held them accountable. Our weakness emboldens them.**
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http://www.city-journal.org/printable.php?id=2574
Steven Malanga
Illegal in More Ways than One
Identity theft in America goes hand and hand with illegal immigration.
Spring 2008
As everyone knows, America is experiencing an epidemic of identity theft. In the last five years alone, complaints to the Federal Trade Commission from U.S. residents who have had their identity stolen have skyrocketed 60 percent, to 258,427 in 2007—one-third of all consumer fraud complaints that the commission receives. What’s less well understood, however, is how illegal immigration is helping to fuel this rash of crime. Seeking access to jobs, credit, and driver’s licenses, many undocumented aliens are using the personal data of real Americans on forged documents. The immigrants’ identity theft has become so pervasive that the need to combat it is “a disturbing front in the war against illegal immigration,” according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The FTC’s latest statistics help show why. The top five states in terms of reported identity theft in 2007 all have large immigrant populations—the border states of Arizona, California, and Texas, as well as Florida and Nevada. People who pilfer legitimate identities in these states are much more likely than in other parts of the country to use them to gain employment unlawfully—the most common reason that illegal aliens steal personal information. In Arizona, for instance, 36 percent of all identity theft is for employment purposes, compared with only 5 percent in Maine, a state with far fewer illegal aliens. “To many law enforcement leaders in Arizona, this suggests that Arizona’s identity-theft epidemic is directly linked to the problem of illegal immigration,” says a recent report by Identity Theft 911, an Arizona company that helps businesses and individuals protect themselves.
Government investigations have only begun to uncover the extent of the crime wave. When ICE agents raided six Swift meat-processing plants in December 2006, they found widespread evidence of fraud involving the use of real people’s identities; the feds eventually charged 148 illegal aliens in the case with crimes related to identity theft. In the first year and a half after Arizona created a special unit to deal with identity theft, investigators said that they were able to purchase more than 1,000 phony documents that made use of real people’s identities. A so-called three-pack—a Social Security card, a driver’s license, and a permanent-resident card—costs on average just $160 in the state.
Government statistics probably grossly underestimate the size of the problem. Many local police departments don’t track identity theft accurately, and the FTC only reports complaints that it receives. By combining data on complaints with FTC consumer surveys—which show that far more people have had their identity stolen than report it—Identity Theft 911 estimates that in Arizona alone, some 1.57 million people, or a quarter of the state’s population, have been victims over the last six years. About one-fifth are children—whose Social Security numbers are especially valuable targets, since the kids usually aren’t employed, making discovery of the fraud less likely. “We just don’t know how they’re getting all this information on minors,” says Maryann McKessy, bureau chief for fraud and identity-theft enforcement in the Maricopa County attorney general’s office.
One disturbing theory: health-care employees with access to children’s files are working for organized gangs that trade in illegal documents and are willing to pay richly for the data. “We have a major problem with workers in medical offices stealing patients’ identities, selling them and making a direct profit,” Sergeant James Bracke of the Phoenix Police Department told authors of the Arizona report. The gangs can afford these bribes because identity theft has become such a big business. In Phoenix, “coyotes,” the smugglers who lead illegal immigrants over our borders, have created a network of phony-document producers and safe houses where undocumented workers can wait until they get their fraudulent papers.
Americans who have their identity stolen by these gangs are in for major headaches. Among the complaints filed with the FTC is that of a Texas man arrested for a crime committed by an illegal alien who had filched his identity. In another case, highlighted by Nevada senator John Ensign in last year’s immigration-reform debate in Congress, the Internal Revenue Service hit a woman with a $1 million back-tax bill, even though she was a stay-at-home mom. An investigation later found that 218 illegal aliens were using her Social Security number. A Los Angeles police detective—who, ironically, worked in the department’s fraud bureau—was unable to buy a home because of bills piled up by an illegal immigrant who stole his Social Security number to gain employment at a processing plant. Then the IRS served the cop with a bill for $40,000 in back taxes; when he protested, the agency threatened to send his case to collection. Other legal residents have had their unemployment claims or workers’ compensation cases rejected after government records showed that someone with their Social Security number was working.
Despite all this, efforts to crack down on identity theft have proved controversial. Ensign offered an amendment to last year’s immigration-reform bill that would have barred illegals from Social Security benefits if they obtained work using stolen identities, but the amendment went down to defeat after critics complained that it was unfair to refuse benefit payments to those who had contributed to the Social Security system, even if they did so under a false identity. Ultimately, the immigration bill itself was defeated, in part because of controversy over its provisions to offer amnesty to illegal aliens, including those who might have stolen identities.
Frustrated by what some see as a tepid federal response, local officials in the hardest-hit areas have stepped up antitheft efforts. In Arizona, a new law makes it a felony to use the identity of another person to obtain a job. Local law enforcement agencies, like the Maricopa County attorney general’s office and the Phoenix Police Department, have expanded their fraud units. Even private businesses have gotten into the fight. Last year, the Arizona offices of A. G. Edwards, the national brokerage firm, held “community shred-a-thons” to give people a chance to destroy outdated financial records and other documents that might provide information to identity-theft gangs.
But many local law enforcement agencies still don’t treat the theft as a serious crime. Until they do, Americans who have had their identity stolen will pay the price in time, stress, and expensive legal bills.
Steven Malanga is senior editor of City Journal and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He is the author of The New New Left, a collection of his City Journal essays.
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I find myself wondering what the ethnicity of these two men is? Curious that they may have sought to use the same ingredient in an attempted Islamo Fascist attack in the UK , , ,
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May 21, 2008
Swedish Police Hold Two Men Over Nuclear Scare
By REUTERS
Filed at 11:42 a.m. ET
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Swedish police detained two men on suspicion of planning to sabotage a nuclear power station on Wednesday after one of them was discovered entering it with small amounts of a highly explosive material.
"Two men who were taken in for questioning this morning have now been detained on suspicion of preparing for sabotage," said Kalmar County Police spokesman Sven-Erik Karlsson.
Police were alerted shortly before 8 a.m. by the Oskarshamn nuclear power plant on the southeast coast of Sweden. Initially, police only said they were interrogating one man.
"They told us a welder who was going to perform a job there had been stopped in a random security check. He had been carrying small amounts of the highly explosive material TATP," Karlsson said.
TATP, or triacetone triperoxide, is extremely unstable, especially when subjected to heat, friction and shock.
The compound can be prepared in a home laboratory from easily available household chemicals. It has been used by suicide bombers in Israel and by Richard Reid, the thwarted British "shoebomber" who attempted to blow up a transatlantic airliner in 2001.
Police did not initially treat the men as criminal suspects.
"They were only being questioned in order to gather information," Karlsson said.
He said both were contract workers and one of them was previously known to police. He had no other details other than the years in which they were born, 1955 and 1962.
SUSPECT BAG
Police sealed off a 300-meter (330-yard) area around the substance and called in explosives technicians from Malmo, the nearest large city.
Oskarshamn, jointly owned by Germany's E.ON and Finland's Fortum, said in a statement on its Web site that it believed the reactor's safety was never threatened.
An E.ON spokesman said the material had been found on or inside the first man's bag. "What has happened is that a guy, a contractor, this morning came to the security check with a bag on which, or in which, there were traces of explosives," E.ON spokesman Johan Aspegren said.
An official at the plant said the men had been at one of the plant's three reactors, which had been shut for maintenance.
Professor Hans Michels, an explosives expert at Imperial College London, said TATP was mainly used as an initiator or "trigger explosive" to detonate a larger main charge.
He said four men who tried unsuccessfully to set off bombs on London transport in July 2005 had used detonators with 5-10 grams (0.18 to 0.35 oz) of TATP but failed to ignite the main charge of their devices.
Michels said TATP could also be used as a main charge, in which case he estimated that more than 100 grams (3.5 oz) of it would be needed to blow a hole in a heavy structure with an inch
or more of high-quality steel.
"Normal explosive experts shun (TATP) because it's very unstable, it's dangerous and it's not very pure. It tends to decompose," Michels said.
An experienced British investigator, who asked not to be named, said it was possible for small traces of household products such as hair bleach to trigger positive readings when picked up by explosive-screening devices. Hair bleach commonly contains hydrogen peroxide, an ingredient in TATP.
Oskarshamn is one of three nuclear plants in Sweden that meet half the country's power needs. Sweden's nuclear industry has been hit by a series of mishaps in recent years, prompting the United Nations nuclear watchdog to call for safety measures.
The Swedish nuclear regulator said there has never been an incident involving sabotage of a Swedish nuclear plant, although last year a bomb threat was received at one facility and turned out to be false.
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world...=1&oref=slogin
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http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/30072_CAIR_Sabotaging_Anti-Terror_Training_in_Seattle
CAIR Sabotaging Anti-Terror Training in Seattle
Sat, May 24, 2008 at 9:53:52 am PST
In Seattle, the Hamas-linked Council on American Islamic Relations is doing what it always does—sabotaging efforts to educate law enforcers about Islamic terrorism: Does course on Islam give law enforcers wrong idea?
And again, the Seattle Times quotes representatives of CAIR without a single word about their ties to terrorist groups or their status as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation Hamas funding trial.
Some local Muslim community members are upset about a training course for local law enforcement, saying it could promote stereotypes and ethnic and religious profiling.
The program, called “The Threat of Islamic Jihadists to the World” and conducted by a Miami-based company, began Thursday and continues today at the Port of Seattle. It is billed as providing insight into the formative phases of Islam, the religion’s different branches, radical Islam and how to respond to terrorist acts.
But Arsalan Bukhari, president of the Washington state chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said the program appears to be linking an entire religion to terrorism.
“Most police officers don’t have a basic grounding in Islam, so before you teach them about Islam, how can you teach them about radical Islam?” he asked. “It just makes you nervous because when a law-enforcement person pulls someone over, when they see a Muslim person or someone who appears Muslim to them — all this information they just learned kicks in.”
Bukhari believes the need for police training on issues of profiling and bias was highlighted by an incident last summer in which the FBI launched an international search for two men who took photos below deck on a Washington state ferry. The FBI announced earlier this month that the men were tourists, not terrorists. Bukhari said law-enforcement agencies need to learn about Islam, but not just in the context of terrorism.
But Solomon Bradman, CEO of Security Solutions International, which is conducting the program, said, “I can’t take the responsibility of my course linking their religion to terrorism. I think their religion got linked to terrorism a long time ago.”
And the police chief of the Port of Seattle is embracing the terror-linked Saudi-funded front group.
Port Police Chief Colleen Wilson met with local CAIR representatives and offered to have them come in to do additional training. Bukhari said CAIR intends to do so.
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080525/FOREIGN/541243918/1001&template=printart
Article published May 25, 2008
U.S. terror attack seen apt to follow '08 vote
May 25, 2008
By Rowan Scarborough - When the next president takes office in January, he or she will likely receive an intelligence brief warning that Islamic terrorists will attempt to exploit the transition in power by planning an attack on America, intelligence experts say.
After all, that is what happened to Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush at a time when their national security teams and their counterterrorism plans were in flux.
Islamic terrorists bombed the World Trade Center in February 1993, in Mr. Clinton's second month as president. Al Qaeda's Sept. 11 attacks came in the Bush presidency's first year. The strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon happened as the White House national security director was formulating a comprehensive plan for combating Osama bin Laden's terror network, which had declared war on the United States.
The pattern is clear to some national security experts. Terrorists pay particular attention to a government in transition as the most opportune window to launch an attack.
"If I were asked by the newly elected president, I would strongly encourage him to be extremely vigilant during the transition period and within the first six months of his administration against an attack by al Qaeda on American interests at home or abroad," said Bart Bechtel, a retired CIA operations officer and assistant chief academic officer at Henley-Putnam University.
Mr. Bechtel said he thinks al Qaeda operatives will debate a future course based on who is elected.
Both Sens. Hillary Clinton and John McCain serve on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain, a former Navy fighter pilot, have had extensive exposure to military security issues.
Both have attacked first-term Sen. Barack Obama's ability to handle national security.
Mr. McCain, Arizona Republican, has focused on Mr. Obama's stated willingness to meet with any world leader, including Iran's, without preconditions. Mrs. Clinton, New York Democrat, ran TV ads implying Mr. Obama is not qualified to manage an international crisis.
"I could see al Qaeda waiting to determine who was going to be the president and depending on which it is, taking an initial measure," Mr. Bechtel said. "For instance, Obama may be viewed as someone who will accomplish what al Qaeda would like him to do, which is get out of the Middle East, and give him an opportunity to move in that direction. Failing that, they may decide to test him with a substantial attack on America or some American interest and see how he reacts."
A U.S. intelligence official declined to comment on how the next president will be briefed.
Mr. Obama, Illinois Democrat, has vowed to remove all combat troops from Iraq within 16 months. He regularly has referred to the war against terror as centered in Afghanistan, while the Bush administration takes a broader view and sees Iraq as an opportunity to inflict a battlefield loss on al Qaeda. The White House has trumpeted the fact that the county has suffered no homeland terror strikes since Sept. 11, 2001.
Retired Gen. Merrill McPeak, a former Air Force chief of staff and an Obama campaign co-chairman, told The Washington Times that Mr. Obama's rivals are underestimating his ability to meet a challenge. Gen. McPeak likened him to Abraham Lincoln.
"I think people are only now beginning to realize that Barack is not your run-of-the-mill, ordinary Illinois politician," he said. "He's more like another Illinois politician who everybody underestimated."
Gen. McPeak added, "I feel bad about giving Barack advice because every time I do, I know that he's thought about it already. So I would draw him aside and say, 'The minute you're inaugurated, you will be tested.' He'll say, 'Oh, you mean like Kennedy was with the Bay of Pigs?' He'll show me some way that he's thought about that some time ago. The guy is absolutely scary smart. The real mistake al Qaeda can make is the one everybody else makes of underestimating the man."
Mr. Bechtel said bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders are likely weighing their next step right now.
"They are in a wait-and-see situation right now," he said. "They run the risk, if they attack before the election, of really influencing the way the election goes, to their detriment. If there's an attack, I really believe McCain is going to run away with the election, and I don't think they want that. I think they really would like Obama as their first choice and Clinton as their second."
Kenneth Katzman, a terrorism specialist at the Congressional Research Service, said "Al Qaeda has a pattern of testing new American leaders."
"Even now, al Qaeda is probably trying to plan something for after the U.S. inauguration," he said. "I think to a certain extent, al Qaeda tested President Clinton's administration several times. The response was ineffective. I think al Qaeda concluded it could attempt something as ambitious as 9/11, but concluded the time was better after a new president, who would not have time to review his strategy on al Qaeda. The time settled on was the summer or early fall, after a new president was inaugurated. They chose September because they wanted all the officials to be back at their desks from summer vacations."
A Congressional Research Service report last month noted that January will mark the first change in administrations since the 2001 al Qaeda attacks.
"Whether an incident of national security significance occurs just before or soon after the presidential transition, the actions or inactions of the outgoing administration may have a long-lasting effect on the new president's ability to effectively safeguard U.S. interests and may affect the legacy of the outgoing president," the report states.
The report urges the Bush administration to deliver extensive threat briefings to the president-elect's national security team.
Congress foresaw such a need when it wrote the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. The law allows for presidential candidates to obtain pre-election security clearances for its chosen transition officials so they can immediately be briefed on security threats by the outgoing administration.
On al Qaeda's ability to attack America again, Mr. Bechtel said, "I think they are still somewhat fractured. If you want to look at it as a piece of window glass, it's broken, but there are lots of sharp pieces out there. I think within the tribal areas of Pakistan, they feel pretty darn comfortable."
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/14/AR2008061402032_pf.html
Smugglers Had Design For Advanced Warhead
By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 15, 2008; A01
An international smuggling ring that sold bomb-related parts to Libya, Iran and North Korea also managed to acquire blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon, according to a draft report by a former top U.N. arms inspector that suggests the plans could have been shared secretly with any number of countries or rogue groups.
The drawings, discovered in 2006 on computers owned by Swiss businessmen, included essential details for building a compact nuclear device that could be fitted on a type of ballistic missile used by Iran and more than a dozen developing countries, the report states.
The computer contents -- among more than 1,000 gigabytes of data seized -- were recently destroyed by Swiss authorities under the supervision of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, which is investigating the now-defunct smuggling ring previously led by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.
But U.N. officials cannot rule out the possibility that the blueprints were shared with others before their discovery, said the report's author, David Albright, a prominent nuclear weapons expert who spent four years researching the smuggling network.
"These advanced nuclear weapons designs may have long ago been sold off to some of the most treacherous regimes in the world," Albright wrote in a draft report about the blueprint's discovery. A copy of the report, expected to be published later this week, was provided to The Washington Post.
The A.Q. Khan smuggling ring was previously known to have provided Libya with design information for a nuclear bomb. But the blueprints found in 2006 are far more troubling, Albright said in his report. While Libya was given plans for an older and relatively unsophisticated weapon that was bulky and difficult to deliver, the newly discovered blueprints offered instructions for building a compact device, the report said. The lethality of such a bomb would be little enhanced, but its smaller size might allow for delivery by ballistic missile.
"To many of these countries, it's all about size and weight," Albright said in an interview. "They need to be able to fit the device on the missiles they have."
The Swiss government acknowledged this month that it destroyed nuclear-related documents, including weapons-design details, under the direction of the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency to keep them from falling into terrorists' hands. However, it has not been previously reported that the documents included hundreds of pages of specifications for a second, more advanced nuclear bomb.
"These would have been ideal for two of Khan's other major customers, Iran and North Korea," wrote Albright, now president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security. "They both faced struggles in building a nuclear warhead small enough to fit atop their ballistic missiles, and these designs were for a warhead that would fit."
It is unknown whether the designs were delivered to either country, or to anyone else, Albright said.
The Pakistani government did not rebut the findings in the report but said it had cooperated extensively with U.N. investigators. "The government of Pakistan has adequately investigated allegations of nuclear proliferation by A.Q. Khan and shared the information with IAEA," Nadeem Kiani, a spokesman for the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, said yesterday. "It considers the A.Q. Khan affair to be over."
A CIA official, informed of the essential details of Albright's report, said the agency would not comment because of the extreme diplomatic and security sensitivities of the matter. In his 2007 memoir, former CIA director George Tenet acknowledged the agency's extensive involvement in tracking the Khan network over more than a decade.
Albright, a former IAEA inspector in Iraq, has published detailed analyses of the nuclear programs of numerous states, including Iran and North Korea. His institute was the first to publicly identify the location of an alleged Syrian nuclear reactor that was destroyed by Israeli warplanes last September.
A design for a compact, missile-ready nuclear weapon could help an aspiring nuclear power overcome a major technical hurdle and vastly increase its options for delivery of a nuclear explosive. Such a design could theoretically help North Korea -- which detonated a nuclear device in a 2006 test -- to couple a nuclear warhead with its Nodong missile, which has a proven range of 1,300 kilometers (about 800 miles).
Iran also possesses medium-range ballistic missiles and is believed by U.S. government officials to be seeking the capability to build nuclear weapons in the future, although an assessment late last year by U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Iran had discontinued its nuclear weapons program in 2003. Weapons experts have long puzzled over whether Tehran might have previously acquired a weapons design from the Khan network, which sold the Iranian government numerous other nuclear-related items, including designs for uranium-enrichment equipment.
The computers that contained the drawings were owned by three members of the Tinner family -- brothers Marco and Urs and their father, Friedrich -- all Swiss businessmen who have been identified by U.S. and IAEA officials as key participants in Khan's nuclear black market. The smuggling ring operated from the mid-1980s until 2003, when it was exposed after a years-long probe by the U.S. and British intelligence agencies.
Khan, who apologized for his role in the smuggling network in a 2004 speech broadcast in Pakistan, was officially pardoned by President Pervez Musharraf without being formally charged with crimes. The Tinner brothers are in Swiss prisons awaiting trial on charges related to their alleged involvement in the network. They and their father are the focus of an ongoing probe by Swiss authorities, who discovered the blueprints while exploring the heavily encrypted contents of the Tinners' computers, the report said. Several published reports have asserted that Urs Tinner became an informant for U.S. intelligence before the breakup of the smuggling ring, but that has not been officially confirmed.
Switzerland shared the finding with the IAEA as well as the United States, which asked for copies of the blueprints, the report states. The IAEA has acknowledged that it oversaw the destruction of nuclear-design material by Swiss authorities in November 2007. However, IAEA officials would neither confirm nor deny the existence of a second weapons design or comment on Albright's report.
Albright, citing information provided by IAEA investigators, said the designs were similar to that of a nuclear device built by Pakistan. He contends in the report that IAEA officials confronted Pakistan's government shortly after the discovery, adding that the private reaction of government officials was astonishment. The Pakistanis "were genuinely shocked; Khan may have transferred his own country's most secret and dangerous information to foreign smugglers so that they could sell it for a profit," Albright said, relating a description of the encounter given to him by IAEA officials.
Pakistan has previously denied that Khan stole the country's weapons plans. Musharraf has not allowed IAEA experts to interview Khan, an engineer who is regarded as a national hero for his role in establishing Pakistan's nuclear weapons program. Khan, in interviews last month with The Post and several other publications, asserted that the allegations of nuclear smuggling were false.
Albright said it remains critical that investigators press Khan and others for details about how the blueprints were obtained and who might have them. Because the plans were stored electronically, they may have been copied many times, he said.
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http://www.lasvegasnow.com/global/story.asp?s=8516184&ClientType=Printable
People Sick from Suspicious Package At Las Vegas Casino
Updated: June 18, 2008 12:16 AM
Several people are being treated after a suspicious package made them sick. It happened at Red Rock Hotel and Casino in northwest Las Vegas.
Metro Police officials say just after 7 p.m., casino security found a pillowcase in the garage. They said an unusually order was coming from the pillowcase, so they took it into the security office. Once it was inside, about five employees started feeling sick. Their symptoms included sweating and headaches.
Metro officials say they don't believe the illness is life threatening so everyone will be treated on the scene. Officials from the Clark County Fire Department and Metro officials have gone into the garage and are investigating.
"We have a team going inside to determine what's in that package at this time," said Metro Officer Jose Montoya.
Metro officials say the casino is operating as normally, but they will be taking a look at surveillance video to determine who left that package. No one is allowed in the garage to get their cars until officials can determine what's in that pillowcase.
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A couple point on the above story:
1. Vegas is a "top tier" target for jihad terrorism, domestic terror and all sorts of weird stuff that seems to drift into the city. Casino security should be much better trained than this.
2. If you see something, immediately say something to 911. Strange items emitting odors, possible WMD or IEDs, get lots of distance between you and it and report it. Do not touch, tamper or certainly don't take it from an outdoor location to a enclosed, populated one.
3. Cameras are important investigative tools, right Crafty? :wink:
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http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=5213783
Intelligence Officials: Dozens of Europeans Have Trained in Terror Camps in Pakistan
Officials Fear This May be the Beginnings of a New Breed of al-Qaeda-Affiliated Terrorism
By PIERRE THOMAS and JACK DATE
June 20, 2008—
Dozens of white Europeans have trained in terrorist camps in Pakistan's tribal regions in recent months, U.S. intelligence sources tell ABC News, in what officials fear may be the beginnings of a new breed of al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorism.
Government officials suspect the terrorists, recruited in Europe, have been dispatched to plan attacks against Europe and possibly the United States. The alleged terrorists hail from Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Romania and Estonia, sources said.
There is growing evidence that some European recruits may have already gone operational. Two of the suspects arrested in a September 2007 plot to kill American soldiers in Germany were native Germans, and U.S. officials say they are investigating whether they were trained in Pakistan.
An April 2008 report from Europol also noted that an increasing number of European nationals attended training in Pakistan "and were later involved in, or suspected of, terrorist offences in the EU."
Intelligence officials say the remote tribal areas along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan have in the last several years become a haven for terrorist recruiting and training. Hundreds of radicals from across the region have flocked to al-Qaeda training camps in the area.
In interviews with ABC News and in a series of little-noticed public statements and reports, intelligence officials have said they believe al-Qaeda has successfully completed a major goal: recruiting and training Western would-be terrorists.
"Al-Qa'ida is improving the last key aspect of its ability to attack the U.S.: the identification, training and positioning of operatives for an attack in the Homeland," according to a February Threat Assessment report from the Director of National Intelligence.
"[W]e have seen an influx of new Western recruits into the tribal area since mid-2006," the report said.
Those Western recruits are thought to be more difficult to detect and able to easily enter Europe and the U.S. and blend in with Western culture.
"They're recruiting operatives from Europe. Why? If you're from Europe, it doesn't require a visa to fly to the United States," Mike McConnell, the director of National Intelligence, said in a speech in March.
"So if you can get a disgruntled person in Europe to come to Pakistan to be trained in how to buy something commercially -- hydrogen peroxide -- [and] use it in a particular way, you could have mass casualties in the United States greater than 9/11," he said.
CIA Director Michael Hayden, in a speech in April, said the recruits "wouldn't cause you any concern or draw your attention if they were in the passport line at Dulles with you. I mean, they look Western and they fit in. So that's one, the continued intent to attack, training to attack, using Western operatives."
Despite these public warnings, members of Congress, including Republicans, say they are frustrated that the Bush administration and Pakistan have not done more to shut down the camps.
"The result that we have today is not acceptable," said Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich. "You can't have those camps in place in Pakistan."
Intelligence officials tell ABC News that the administration is trying to target key al-Qaeda leaders in the tribal regions with Predator airplane attacks and recently killed one leader who helped coordinate European operatives.
The U.S. has also urged the Pakistani government to be aggressive in pursuing terrorist leaders in the tribal areas, these sources said.
The Pakistani government has said it is committed to stopping militants in the area.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/19/AR2008061902627.html?hpid=moreheadlines
Inside TSOC.
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GM:
I always worry that the content of URLs disappear some day if someone would like to go back and check it out. Would you mind posting the entire piece, and simply have the URL as a citiation?
TIA,
Marc
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The Flight Watchmen
Nearly seven years after 9/11, Americans may feel like safe is normal again. But, to the counterterrorism experts who scour the nation's airspace, safety is hard-earned every minute of every day
By Laura Blumenfeld
Sunday, June 22, 2008; W10
0645 Hours: Peanut Butter and jelly, or ham and cheese?
Chan Browne is standing in his girlfriend's kitchen, making a sandwich for his girlfriend's daughter's lunch. He wants to get it right. Strawberry jelly, not grape, creamy peanut butter, not crunchy, spread thin, not thick, on wheat bread, not Italian, cut in rectangles, not triangles. The crusts are trimmed.
It is dark out still, but Chan's girlfriend, Kathy, has left for work. Chan, a thickly built federal air marshal from Alabama, an expert marksman wearing flip-flops and jeans, picks up a pen: Jamie, Have a good day. Do well in school and mind your manners. Mom and Chan. He folds the note and closes the 7-year-old's Hannah Montana lunchbox. He hopes it's good enough. He hopes he's good enough. He opens the lunchbox and adds Oreos.
For Chan, it has been nine months of second-guessing, of tucking in his shirt, of checking his tie, nine months of dating Kathy White. He has dated pretty women before. In high school he went out with the entire cheerleading team, one set of pom-poms at a time. But his enchantment with Kathy is unlike anything he's known, more exciting than her spark-red hair, more soothing than her Irish cream skin. When she walks into the room, his palms sweat.
Chan first saw Kathy three years ago at work, rushing past him in the hall. At the Freedom Center, a counterterrorism compound in Northern Virginia where Chan is an assistant special agent in charge, the employees always seem to rush. They hurry from the Huddle Room to the Emergency Conference Room, to the coffee refill room, to the Pentagon rubble memorial of 9/11 at the entrance, to the signs on the double door -- "Restricted Area," "Authorized Personnel Only" -- leading to the Watch Floor.
It is here that the officers stand watch round-the-clock with one assignment: Stop another 9/11.
From the time Kathy blurred past Chan until their first drink, two years had gone by. "It was boy sees girl. Boy wants to ask girl out. Boy's too nervous and doesn't," Chan recalls. He felt thrown by her, tumbling back to adolescence. Once, he wandered back to her office, pretending to look for a file. He had planned to ask for a date. When she looked up at him, though, with those clear, blue-sky eyes, he froze. "I almost felt like writing her a note: 'I like you. Do you like me? If so, check yes.' " But Chan is 44 now, achy-kneed, balding and divorced, his days and nights punctuated by the vibrations of a BlackBerry issued by the Department of Homeland Security.
Standing in Kathy's kitchen at dawn in Charles Town, W.Va., glancing at his BlackBerry on the counter, enveloped by the aroma of Jamie's toasting cinnamon Pop-Tart, he thinks about how much harder it is to fall in love a second time.
"You've got all the knowledge of your past failures," he says. You're always on alert. When the first time ends in disaster, the second time you have to do everything right.
Chan's BlackBerry begins to dance, vibrating across the counter. Something is wrong.
0650 Hours: Improper Selectee Screening at Chippewa (CIU)
On a runway at Chippewa County International Airport in northern Michigan, on Mesaba Airlines Flight 3042 to Detroit, a man is sitting in seat 4C, waiting for takeoff. He shouldn't have been allowed on the plane.
The man is a selectee, a person flagged by the government as one who might pose "a direct threat to U.S. civil aviation," according to Greg Alter, a DHS spokesman. The selectee's boarding pass had been printed with a special mark. At the checkpoint, a guard was supposed to divert the man for additional screening. The guard missed the mark.
For Chan and the others who work the Watch Floor, the passenger at Chippewa in 4C triggers the first adrenaline uptick of the day. Chan is at home, about to wake Jamie, who is snuggled upstairs with her yellow blanky. Chan's shift doesn't begin until 2 p.m., but he is tracking alerts and incidents on his BlackBerry because in a few hours they will be his.
Every security breach across eight modes of transportation collects and dumps on the Watch Floor. The unmarked building, originally called the Transportation Security Operations Center, opened in August 2003. It responds to threats to mass transit, bridges, railways, vehicles and roads, pipelines, postal and cargo shipping, maritime matters and ports, and, above all, aviation. One minute, a report comes in about a mysterious truck abandoned on railroad tracks in Delaware. The next, a note is discovered on a ferry in North Carolina: There are bombs on this boat. Do not run. Only a warning. The next, a 78-year-old Egyptian woman in a wheelchair is trying to board a plane from Nashville to JFK with $9,800 in cash and eight boxes of razor blades in her bra.
"You treat every incident, like --" says Chan's boss, Kent Jefferies, bracketing his eyes as if his hands were blinders on a horse, "-- is this the next 9/11? No? Good. Move on."
One lesson of al-Qaeda's simultaneous strikes in 2001 is the importance of communication. Though run by DHS, the Watch Floor houses representatives from the Department of Defense, Department of Transportation, Secret Service, Capitol Police, FBI and FAA. Data from more than 450 federalized airports and 19,000 general aviation airfields feed into the Watch Floor. Analysts try to connect seemingly unrelated -- and unusual -- events as they unfold across the country, to spot trends, to stop an emerging attack. In the fall of 2005, for example, over the course of two weeks, passengers on three different flights stood up in the aisles and fainted. Was it a probe? Were terrorists testing emergency preparedness on airplanes, or were the serial faintings a coincidence?
"You always hope it's going on somewhere, that the military is talking to the FAA, is talking to law enforcement, is talking to the airlines," says Alter. "You hope somehow, some way, those folks are talking, in case something goes bad."
If things do go bad, or at least seem to, men in Air Force uniforms take action. "We're scrambling now!" an officer said on a recent afternoon, running across the Watch Floor. Scrambling fighter jets. The classified radar had picked up an unidentified Cessna in restricted airspace over Washington. As Fox News reported the evacuation of the North Lawn at the White House and broadcast a live shot of people spilling out of the Capitol, a pair of F-16s roared toward the errant Cessna
"We are not sentries. It's more activist than that," says Kip Hawley, administrator of DHS's Transportation Security Administration, which manages the center. "Our job is not to sit and watch, but to stand and fight."
Over his 13 months in the job, Chan has developed a sense about the threats, when they're routine blunders or world-class crazies, and when they might be real. At Chippewa, a flight attendant escorted the selectee out of seat 4C, for additional screening. The guard who missed the special selectee mark spent the rest of his shift in remedial training. TSA at Chippewa reported: "There was no media attention." And on this quiet Tuesday, Chan isn't alarmed. Not yet, anyway. His biggest concern at 8:30 a.m., is getting Kathy's daughter to the bus on time.
"How's your day going to go?" he asks Jamie as they hurry along.
Chan is never sure. Kathy, a former travel agent who now makes reservations for air marshals, is the optimist. Chan has "a doomsday outlook," he says. "There's an underlying, unknown anxiety and stress in those of us who deal with terrorist threats. We know we're getting farther away from 9/11 and closer and closer to the next attack. It's only a matter of time." When Chan sends Kathy's
7-year-old girl out into the world, he worries.
At the bus stop, Jamie is the last kid in line. She steps up, and right before she disappears through the bus door, she always turns around. Chan looks at her: the sandy hair he has brushed and smoothed back with Jamie's favorite lime green headband, the freckles across her nose, the blue eyes. Chan waves. He calls it "that last reassurance wave."
He gives it to her every day.
0847 Hours: Passenger Arrested After Firearm Detected During Checkpoint Screening at Memphis (MEM)
Ready. Set. Jet. That is ExpressJet Airline's motto. Not for one passenger, though, on this sunny Memphis morning. The man tries to board Flight 2704 to Houston Intercontinental carrying a .32-caliber Kel Tec pistol loaded with seven rounds -- one chambered. He says that he "forgot the firearm was in his bag."
Every day, on average, American airport screeners find two guns.
As the Memphis police descend on the passenger with the pistol, Chan is changing into sweatpants in Kathy's bedroom. "Normal business," Chan thinks, clicking the "FIREARM DETECTED (MEM)" message on his BlackBerry. He laces up his sneakers and goes out for a run before his eight-hour shift, "to bleed-off the pent-up anxiety and work frustration." He jogs up and down the hills of Charles Town, searching the sky for the cottony contrail ribbons that unspool from aircraft. As much as aviation bedevils him, Chan loves airplanes.
He was born in a two-room hospital in Alabama, to a petite saleswoman and to a farmer he never met, and never could conjure beyond "a shadow on a tractor." Chan's stepfather, a 6-foot-3 slab of man, helped raise him, urging Chan to follow his example and excel at football. Chan drank a gallon of milk a day; he prayed each night he'd wake up six inches taller. But the slight, blond boy with light moss eyes never cleared 5-8.
That left airplanes. "It was another way to keep the bond with my stepfather," Chan recalls.
Chan's stepfather would park for hours near the end of the runway at the local airfield. "It always bewildered me, that these heavy airplanes can stay airborne," Chan says. "It's an amazing puzzle." Chan sat on the hood of their 1968 yellow Dodge Coronet, eating bags of roasted peanuts, as his stepfather pointed out the jets and the propellers.
"You'd feel the roar in your whole body," Chan recalls. "It wasn't frightening. It was comforting." Sometimes it rained. But Chan felt happy as he imagined the planes navigating the same wet winds that nipped his chin and fingers. He felt, he says, "connected. I thought: 'I belong in that. I'm connected to that. I belong in that airplane.' "
Chan became an Air Force air traffic controller. At age 19, his commander nominated him for the Air Force Academy preparatory school, a step toward his dream of pilot training. But Chan had met a woman in the Air Force. The academy accepted only prospective cadets who were single. Forced to choose, he pursued married life instead of his wings. In 1984, as a controller, he was honored by the Air Force Association as one of 12 Outstanding Airmen of the year, for his "superior leadership, job performance, community involvement and personal achievements." Up in the control tower, where Chan rose to supervisor, he felt "wonderment that you could talk to the planes, having that connectivity through the radio." He enrolled in the FAA's air traffic academy and was assigned to Forth Worth.
Then his marriage of 10 years began to fail. So did his performance in the control tower.
The personal turmoil distracted him. "I couldn't memorize the airspace and what altitude restrictions apply," Chan recalls. Soon he found himself divorced and out of a job.
Chan shambled back, defeated, humiliated, to Alabama where he worked for the state police. It took 9/11, eight years later, to bring him back to the skies. He applied for a job as a federal air marshal. Flying under cover, he told fellow travelers he was in "mortuary affairs"; they looked at him and believed it.
Last year, Chan was promoted to a supervisory position on the Watch Floor. Every day, when he crosses the lobby at work, a twisted steel girder salvaged from the 72nd floor of the World Trade Center's North Tower reminds him of the cost of another failure.
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On this Tuesday morning, Chan finishes his run around the neighborhood, his shirt soaked, his breath short, his calves burning, his thoughts scrolling over incidents from the day before: a suspicious golf bag at the Savannah airport causes delays; a box cutter is found in Phoenix on a Southwest jet, wedged between seats 2F and 2E ... As stressful as being an air traffic controller had been, this job is more so.
Chan stops at Kathy's front door and looks up at the sky. At any given moment, 6,000 planes are soaring overhead, crisscrossing America. As a boy, even one -- airborne -- seemed like a miracle. As a man in midlife, Chan wrestles with the dread of even one going down.
"This is like a second life for me. I get a chance to make redemption for the mistakes I made," he says. "I get a do-over, so I can tell Kathy's daughter I did it right."
1125 Hours: Suspicious Selectees on Flight to Las Vegas (LAS)
... 1133 Hours: Disruptive Passenger on Flight Arrested at Philadelphia (PHL)
... 1204 Hours: Firearm Detected During Checkpoint Screening at Birmingham (BHM)
... 1225 Hours: Passenger Arrested After Behavior Detection Officer Referral at Minneapolis (MSP)
Chan takes a quick shower -- "I don't have any hair to wash" -- while his BlackBerry vibrates on Kathy's television stand.
In Northern Virginia, meanwhile, at the Freedom Center, Chan's boss, Kent Jefferies, rises from his desk.
"Excuse me, Kent," Bruce Brown says, poking his head through the door. "Anomalous radar target coming up the Potomac."
Bruce is the division chief for the National Capital Region Coordination Center, which monitors the airspace over Washington. The NCRCC staff, including a liaison to the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) wearing an Air Force flight suit, occupies a pod on the Watch Floor. The men stare at radar feeds on three giant screens from the FAA, DOD and DHS. They scrutinize the green, glowing rings for incursions into the forbidden circle. Every month, there are 20 to 30.
Kent considers Bruce's report. A pair of Customs and Border Protection Black Hawk helicopters swept the area; the pilots found nothing. Still, supervisors at the White House are raising their vigilance to "condition yellow."
"Sometimes computers do weird things," Kent says, spinning the wedding ring on his finger, as his thoughts go round.
"Do we want to put out a page?" Bruce asks. A notification page alerts TSA officials.
"No. You could start a war 'cause you're reading it on your BlackBerry and get only half of it -- 'radar anomaly,' " Kent says. "A lot of times, it's a flock of birds."
Kent is the iceman of the Watch Floor. As the special agent in charge, his blood pumps slower, and chillier, than the shift workers he oversees. "The folks on watch are on and off. I am never off, so I have a higher threshold," Kent says, confident. "I'm supposed to be that person, a step back from the action."
Stepped back, and yet Kent is always there. At home on a recent Saturday, he was on an emergency conference call for so many hours that he switched to speakerphone and painted his teenage daughter's bedroom. When the phone rang on Christmas Eve, he recalls with a laugh, "my wife said, 'If you answer that, I'll divorce you.' " He answered.
Kent is a former Secret Service agent who drove Amy Carter to school, jogged with George H.W. Bush ("That man was as cool as a cucumber; he could shower and stop sweating and be dressed in five minutes. He always beat us."), and trailed Ronald Reagan horseback riding ("In Santa Barbara, he wanted male company. He said, 'Nancy's talking to Patti, and I can't get a word in edgewise.' "). At 52, Kent looks like a paunchier version, with reading glasses, of one of his Secret Service nicknames: Ken Doll.
"I've been 'doing' bad guys for 34 years," says Kent, who can still drive -- hands free -- with his left knee, though he is no longer limber enough to make turns. When his daughter calls him at work, he answers, "Hi, I'm saving the world!" On this Tuesday morning, Kent strides tall, tight and precise out of his office, toward the Watch Floor.
"Bad guys want to launch multiple attacks," Kent says, while walking. "I'm looking for a second or third incident, to tie it together, to link things." Kent looks up at a huge electronic map of the United States. "What are we tracking Delta 39 for?"
Three white flight lines cut across the map. One blip marked "AF2," is Air Force Two, the vice president's aircraft. Another digital white line indicates the path of "suspicious selectees," members of a swim team flying to Las Vegas. The airplane in question is "DL39."
Has the pilot "gone Nordo," short for no radio contact? A common occurrence, and yet each time -- keeping in mind 9/11 -- the watchmen rip though a checklist: Cockpit secure? VIPs on board? Air marshals? Hazardous cargo? Size and weight of the plane? Screening anomalies at airport of origin?
"Delta 39 --" says the command duty officer. "Drunk passenger, making passes at flight attendants."
"Oh, geez," Kent says, noting the flight path over the Atlantic. "From England?"
"Hamburg, Germany."
The bawdy traveler, in Watch Floor parlance, is a "disruptive passenger." On this day, another disruptive passenger, a man with leg cramps in an aisle seat flying to Philadelphia, threatens the crew. An all-time favorite disruption: a young woman on her way to a party in Fort Lauderdale who burst out of the lavatory naked and ran down the aisle.
"You always think the disruptive passenger is a diversion, 'cause you don't know how many bad guys he's traveling with," says Paul Ross, a former USAirways pilot, who works on the Watch Floor. The man flying to Tucson who refuses to lower the volume on his laptop? He is possibly, in the eyes of the watchmen, a mass-murdering terrorist.
Passengers creating diversions to hijack an airplane is one scenario that Chan plays out in his head as he gets ready for work. Chan likes to test himself, a mental exercise he calls "the pregame warmup."
"We cannot be wrong. We have to be right," is Chan's grave cheer.
At Kathy's house, Chan towels off and walks into her closet where for five months now, he has been keeping his things, and where he hopes, against the odds, they are here to stay. Chan hadn't dated for 14 years. And Kathy has, as she puts it, "trust issues ... a hard exterior" from a marriage to a high school sweetheart, by whom she felt betrayed.
Along came Chan, who ran out of gas on their first date, who wore a visor and burned his scalp on their second date, who tried to propose at a recent dinner at Olives in Washington but got so nervous that he dropped his keys, his fork, his water glass and his money clip, sending him crawling and groping under another table.
"You're a mess," Kathy had said.
"All along, I'm thinking, 'I'm going to mess this up,' " Chan recalls. "This is my second chance. Actually, my only chance, at love."
In Kathy's closet, Chan passes her clothes on the way to his. They comfort him. Kathy's gray business suits, her tennis dress, the rust-orange blouse she wears with his favorite brown slacks. He buries his face in her blouse and inhales. He smells coconut lotion, and Kathy.
Chan knots his tie, gets into his car. Hypothetical threats unfold in his mind as he drives. He checks his BlackBerry: A firearm is confiscated in Birmingham; a suspicious man with no travel documents in Minneapolis says he is "hanging around the airport ... wanted to leave the country, but was unable to decide where." A background check reveals that the man is wanted for assault in Chicago.
We cannot be wrong. We have to be right.
Scenarios, real and imagined, diverge, veer off and circle back to the same shaky place:
What would I do in a crisis?
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1425 Hours: Suspicious Passenger at Charlotte (CLT)
... 1442 Hours: Passenger Arrested After Travel Document Checker Referral at Miami (MIA)
At the Freedom Center, Chan rolls past a guard, the concrete abutments and a black metal fence, trimmed with three rows of barbed wire. Inside, he buzzes himself beyond the "SECRET" sign. Kathy works in another room, but Chan isn't thinking about love just now. His eyes tighten. The Watch Floor hums, windowless and dim, high-ceilinged and air-conditioned in a haze of radiant heat. Along one wall, digital clocks glow red, ticking in 10 time zones.
Kent's deputy, Andrew Hosey, sums up the day: "Vanilla."
Chan knocks wood.
The law enforcement databases keep logging off, idle. The air smells of microwaved popcorn. Kent teases Chan's partner, command duty officer Chuck Phucas, who is scanning CNN.com: "Hey, Chuck, what's the matter, nothing going on?"
"Nothing," says Chuck, a retired Marine. Chuck has 26 guns in his basement, forearms as thick as thighs and a 105-pound Rottweiler he loves because "I don't want a rug rat that's good for 30 yards, if you kick 'em right." Every night, as Chuck leaves work, he calls his wife because "who knows who's watching the building?" They have a code word, "in case there's trouble. If I use 'cupcake,' she calls the police."
Chuck had served as a master sergeant in counterintelligence. "We're still fighting the same fight," says Chuck, who is about to turn 50. "We stand in the breach." No one will hurt Americans, "not on my watch, not while I'm standing here."
Chuck is sitting in a polo shirt in front of seven phones with speed-dial buttons to every commercial airline, the White House Situation Room, the Coast Guard Operations Center and the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon.
Chan settles in beside Chuck at the head of the pod. Chan runs the research and law enforcement side. Chuck receives incoming reports and speaks for the Watch Floor on the Domestic Events Network, an interagency, perpetual conference call with the FAA.
It is quiet. "Too quiet," says their boss, Kent, hovering behind them.
Then, a call comes in from USAirways, area code 704. A passenger on Flight 1736, Charlotte to Indianapolis, said he saw a weapon on another passenger.
"I checked him," says Mike Jimenez, hurrying over to Chan with a notepad. Mike, an investigator with the fastest fingers on the Watch Floor, says he often has two minutes -- no more -- to determine if a person is an immediate threat. "He's on a watch list for terrorists. Short, 55, 170 pounds, possibly Muslim."
The profile fits a potential threat, except for one thing. The man on the watch list, Mike says, is, "the man who said he saw the weapon."
Chan stands up. Chuck does, too.
"What kind of weapon?" Kent says. "Hand grenade? Knife? Gun?"
"The butt of a gun," says Chuck, who is getting details from a watch officer. "In a passenger's pocket."
The air traffic controllers had released the plane for takeoff. "They let the bird go," says Chuck. He tells an officer: "Put it up on the tracking board."
USAirways 1736 blips white across the computerized U.S. map. A systems search reveals that the pilot is armed. Ground agents in Charlotte had screened the two passengers, but, even so, Chan's officer calls the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force to meet the plane at the gate when it lands in Indianapolis. Mike, Chan's investigator, gulps water from a Deer Park gallon bottle, as he scours government, law enforcement and commercial databases for clues.
Then, a call comes in from a TSA official, area code 305. "A man ran away at a checkpoint," Chuck says, relaying the notes from the officer who took the call.
"Where?" says Kent.
"Miami."
"Probably an illegal immigrant," says Kent.
"He bolted."
"That doesn't excite me," says Kent. "We've had people bolt away cause they can't take their $40 lip gloss. My daughter said, 'Dad can't you do anything about the lip-gloss rule?' "
"He was tackled by law enforcement," says Chuck.
"Oh, they tackled him?" Kent grimaces and smiles. "That's hard on the knees."
"He was Lebanese."
"What?" says Kent.
"Lebanese! Lebanese!" Chuck cracks his knuckles.
"How do you know?" Kent says, stepping back. A recent intelligence brief had highlighted the Lebanese group Hezbollah, noting: "Tactics include hijacking commercial aircraft and in-transit ambushes."
In Miami, the Lebanese man had presented a fake U.S. passport with a Hispanic name. The guard was suspicious and referred him to secondary screening. When the secondary screener reached for the man's bag, the suspect snatched his passport and ran.
"Create a file, mark it 'hot,' " Chuck says.
"We have two things now," Kent says, ever cool: a passenger in Charlotte who says he sees a gun; a passenger in Miami who flees. Are they related?
"Start a white board," says Chuck.
An officer named Lee starts typing, black letters crawling across a large white screen at the front of the room: "MIAMI SUSPICIOUS LEBANESE PASSENGER, CHECKPOINT/SECONDARY SCREENING. HE DISAPPEARED --"
"Hey, Lee!" Chuck barks. "He didn't 'disappear.' They tackled him! He left behind a bag."
As partners, Chuck and Chan know each other's tension ticks. Chuck gets loud; Chan gets quiet. Chuck slashes the air with his powerful arms, pointing. Chan paces like he's "on a dog run."
The two men are starting to slash and pace.
Chan's investigator, Mike, pulls up a picture of the 42-year-old suspect online, along with his real passport from Lebanon. He discovers in a commercial database that the suspect had bought his American Airlines ticket as well as tickets for two other men. Like him, the two men were flying from Miami to Los Angeles that afternoon, though, notably, on a different airplane.
Chan's agent pulls up a diagram of the Miami airport. Something about the police chase bothers Chan. The Lebanese man had fled the terminal, dashed outside. As the Miami-Dade County Police approached him, the man jumped from a second-story parking ramp. He hit the pavement and shattered his arm. Yet even with a broken limb, the suspect continued to struggle.
"Why jump?" Chan wonders. "Why so extreme?" He'd seen a lot before, but "we never have people running away." Abandon a bag? Leap off a ramp?
Chan says to an agent, "Send out an alert notification page."
The agent begins to type: MIA suspicious male pax ran from ckpt . . .
The text message blasts out to all American airports, federal air marshals, TSA employees and federal security directors, in case -- though very unlikely -- something similar is happening, somewhere.
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1510 Hours : Passenger Arrested After Behavior Detection Officer Referral at Los Angeles (LAX)
"The exact situation just happened in L.A.," says Andrew, Kent's deputy, pulling Kent aside. "A passenger took off."
Fifteen minutes had passed since the Lebanese man in Miami had fled. Now, a man in Los Angeles had been referred to secondary screening for suspicious behavior. The man dropped his bag on the X-ray conveyor belt and ran.
The tiniest of frown lines pinches Kent's brow. "Was he Lebanese?
"Jeanne Meserve is going to go live on CNN about it."
"Was he Lebanese?" Kent's frown line deepens.
On the white board at the front of the room, the incident unscrolls: LOS ANGELES LAX SUSPICIOUS PASSENGER IN TERMINAL 1 CHECKPOINT . . .
"Was he Lebanese or not?" Kent asks.
"I don't know," says Andrew. "See if he has grape leaves."
Chan orders another blast notification page, this time about L.A. In his mind, he is "bleeding between Code Orange and Red." Security directors from Newark, Connecticut and airports across the East Coast bombard the Freedom Center with questions. At La Guardia Airport in New York City, TSA employee Robert DeFrancesco, fires off an e-mail:
What about Miami, is there a connection???????
Kent, whose motto is "connect the dots," contemplates this: "Major airports on either coast, large aircraft like 9/11. Is it a probe, or is this an actual attack?"
"Get back on the phone with L.A.," Chuck orders the officer who took the L.A. report. Chuck's tremendous hands are flying. He stuffs them into his pockets so he doesn't accidentally whack someone. "Don't let them off the phone till I say so. Tell L.A. we want to compare facts: If he's a hundred-year-old Chinaman or a 12-year-old Mexican, we can take a step back."
Chan's investigator, Mike, clatters away at nine systems on five screens, racing to link the men in Miami and L.A.: Warrants? Border crossings? Did they share a PO box? Rent an apartment together? Mike's face turns warm. Then it gets hot. The Miami man has a fake California driver's license. Mike presses his cold Deer Park bottle to his burning cheek and forehead.
Kent's supervisor, Don Zimmerman, is called, who in turn -- "a few hairs up on the back of my neck" -- calls his supervisor at TSA headquarters in Arlington. Deputy administrator Gale Rossides looks at her caller ID: "URGENT-DonZ."
She steps out of a meeting.
"We have a situation here," Don tells her. "Actually, it's two situations."
On the Watch Floor, the usual murmur is gone. Chan has stopped pacing; he has to take a breath. With "two, simultaneous, 9/11-like activities" going on, he needs a few seconds to focus. "Don't overreact. Don't underreact," Chan tells himself. He doesn't want his agents to see him scared.
But when Chan looks up at the electronic U.S. map, at the Charlotte-to-Indianapolis flight pulsing across state lines, he thinks that armed terrorists might be on board, that the checkpoint running might be a diversion, that the terrorists have companions on other flights, and that any minute the entire map could light up with tiny, white planes.
It's like that dream Chan sometimes has: "I've been at work. It's faded and foggy. It's like you're a cop and in a foot chase. You never catch the guy. You're making all the right calls. Despite all your efforts, it's the realization that something bad is going to happen. And it drops off, like you're falling off the bed."
As Chan stands on the Watch Floor, he feels that same sinking in his stomach. The words flash through his mind, "Here we go again." The terrorist attack he expected. Then another flash: his past shortcomings and failures.
But seared in deep, beneath those fears, behind his own history, burn the faces of the 19 hijackers. He can see them, their eyes, their gaze, mental sketches of the men of 9/11: "three rows of five, and one row of four people. The steadfast, committed-to-their-mission look. Stoic, deliberate and tuned into their job."
Chan has seen that look before, that look of dedication -- in American police officers in uniform. And in him.
If there is going to be another strike, a second chance, "I hope it's me that gets to deal with it."
Chan takes a breath and tells one of his agents, Denny Spencer, in a calm, authoritative voice: "Alert all federal marshals transiting Miami and L.A."
Chan's next step would be to broadcast an emergency message to all air marshals in the United States and overseas; Chuck would dial into DOD's classified red-switch network to contact the U.S. Northern Command (Northcom) and NORAD.
"I'm on it," says Denny, catching the unwavering look in Chan's eyes. He flashes Chan a thumbs up.
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1516 Hours: Secure ID Violation at Dallas-Forth Worth (DFW)
. . . 1556 Hours: Explosive Detection Alarms at Los Angeles (LAX)
. . . 1653 Hours: Suspicious Individual at Newark (EWR)
. . . 1727 Hours: Suspicious Checked Baggage at John Wayne (SNA)
. . . 1924 Hours: Disruptive Passenger Atlanta (ATL)
. . . 2115 Hours: Passenger Arrested at Las Vegas (LAS)
"The guy in L.A. is a doper!" a voice calls from the Watch Floor.
"Where?" Chan says, turning to Denny. "Who are you talking to?"
"Los Angeles. The guy was nervous about flying, so he smoked pot," says Denny. "No apparent nexus to terrorism."
"Stand down!" Chan tells his officers.
The L.A. passenger was a 21-year-old African American. He had been smoking marijuana. It evidently made him paranoid.
Chan orders a text page: CLOSE OUT LAX; suspicious male pax arrested on charges of Public Intoxication and Fleeing a Checkpoint.
Chan takes another deep breath. So do his agents. The events in Miami and Los Angeles are not related.
As the afternoon dims into evening, Chan eats soup from a vending machine at his desk and calls Kathy at home. "We thought we had something today," he tells her. "How's Jamie?"
Chan's shift winds down with minor incidents in Dallas, Los Angeles, Newark, Santa Ana, Atlanta and Las Vegas. Earlier incidents close out. The Charlotte-Indianapolis passenger was not on a terrorist watch list after all. There had been an error in spelling his common Muslim name. He did, however, appear on a visitors list for a radical prisoner.
It took hours to resolve the case of the Lebanese man in Miami, who had leapt from the parking ramp and broken his arm. "That guy made me almost mess my pants today," Chuck says. "I'd throw him off the parking ramp myself."
Law enforcement officials pulled the Lebanese man's two companions off their flight and found 10 credit cards and three cashier's checks totaling more than $1 million. The carry-on bag the Lebanese man had abandoned contained cocaine.
He told police he fled because he was "having a bad day, and was nervous that he would miss his flight."
2336 Hours: Suspicious Individual in Custody at Santa Clara County (RHV)
Chan is listening to jazz instrumentals as he drives home in the dark. After eight hours of monitoring terrorism traffic, he doesn't want to hear any words. He reviews his day: "Did I call the right people? Get the right agents involved?"
It is 10:40 p.m. Up in the woods on Bull Run Mountain, in a small house on a gravel road, Chan's floor partner, Chuck, is already asleep, wearing his Marine medallion. Chuck will be on the Watch Floor again by sunrise. Before sinking into his dreams, Chuck cuddled with his Rottweiler and his wife, who share a king-size bed.
"Good night, Mom," Chuck said, to his wife.
"Good night, baby," Chuck said to the dog, who sleeps between them. Chuck pampers his pet even more since she's been diagnosed with lymphoma.
In the basement, hang Chuck's Marine uniforms: the dress blues, the green service alphas, the camouflage utilities. The closet is left open. Chuck tells people that being a Watch Floor command duty officer is like being a Marine, "same fight, different uniform." He tells himself, or tries to, that the work is satisfying: "Isn't that sad to say, at 50 you're washed up? Fortunately, we find a place we feel useful."
But then at night, when the truth seeps like vapors under his door, Chuck dreams that there's a national emergency. The Marines call him back into active duty, into real combat. He has the dream once a week; he's sorry to wake up.
"What's the dream?" Chuck says later. "That somebody needs you." Then Chuck stops talking, because he starts to cry. When he cries, sometimes, the Rottweiler licks his tears.
At 11 p.m., Chan's boss, Kent, is still awake, taking calls from the Watch Floor. Sitting in his family room, in his easy chair, feet up, all he wants to do is watch "Dancing With the Stars" and crash. But Kent answers the phone again and again, summoning his brisk, work voice: "Jefferies." It might be a call about the pilot who accidentally fired off a round in the cockpit. Or the three men on USAirways, kicking one another over a seat assignment. Or maybe it's the passenger who strapped a baby alligator to his leg and was caught when the screener saw his pants wiggle. (Kent: "It begs the question, which way was the alligator's head facing?")
Kent's response to the watchmen is always cool, but more than anyone, he absorbs the Floor's considerable heat. "Everyone wants to be the big boss, but it's not so great," Kent says. "Back in the day, I used to run with the president. I used to do a lot of things. I used to make fun of people like me." Now Kent has no time to exercise. Every quarter, he takes a government physical and a doctor checks his blood pressure, "to make sure I'm not going to croak."
During a break in the calls, Kent goes to bed. His dental night guard, he notices, is worn out. Since he's come to TSA, he has started clenching his jaws. He sometimes pulls back his lips, and examines the flat, black crack where his upper and lower bite meet. The iceman's teeth are ground even.
At 11:20 p.m., Chan drives up to Kathy's house. Inside, he checks on Jamie, who is sleeping on her back, holding her raggedy yellow blanky to her cheek.
"She has no idea," Chan thinks, looking at the little girl, "how drastic the world is." He closes Jamie's door carefully, trying not to disturb her.
When Chan opens Kathy's bedroom door, he is happy to see that she isn't asleep. Her red hair is spread out on her pillowcase. Her eyes are half-closed. She is wearing his aunt's antique diamond engagement ring.
"Are you serious?" Kathy had said last week, when Chan finally found the courage to propose.
Kathy had married young, been hurt hard and, after that, closed up. But an elderly man at the Freedom Center told her, "You deserve to have a nice guy to treat you right." After years of watching Chan bumble past, it occurred to her -- maybe the nice guy was Chan.
Now they would be married: Chan Browne and Kathy White. "We'll change our name to Tan," she joked.
"There actually is love," Chan said to her. "I'd stopped looking."
"I'd stopped looking," Kathy replied.
At 11:30 p.m., Chan lies down next to Kathy. He kisses her. He looks at her. He looks back at his day -- "Did I do everything right?" -- one last time. Then he falls asleep, at peace. Five minutes later, the BlackBerry on his bedside table vibrates.
A Secret Service agent in Santa Clara reports: A man in custody for theft and check fraud with possible "mental disabilities" said that in 2005, he took a flight from San Francisco to Dulles. He had planned to hijack the plane, and crash it into the White House.
Laura Blumenfeld is a Magazine staff writer. She can be reached at blumenfeldl@washpost.com.
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U.S. conviction upheld in FBI sting of NY Muslims
Wed Jul 2, 2008 3:45pm EDT
By Christine Kearney
NEW YORK (Reuters) - An Iraqi Kurdish imam and a Bangladeshi-American pizzeria owner on Wednesday lost an appeal of their convictions for plotting to kill a Pakistani diplomat in what turned out to be an FBI sting operation.
The U.S Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the convictions of Yassin Aref, 37, and Mohammed Hossain, 53, who were sentenced last year to 15 years each in prison for their roles in a fake plot to attack the Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations in New York with a missile.
Both appealed their convictions of money-laundering and conspiring to provide material support to the Pakistan-based Islamic militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed, which is considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. government.
The federal appeals court rejected all the defense's arguments, including that the men did not know missiles were involved.
"The evidence sufficed for a jury to conclude that Aref intended to aid in preparing a missile attack on American soil," the ruling said, concluding the same for Hossain.
During the 2006 trial, the two were found to have laundered $50,000 from an FBI informant who said he worked for the militant group.
Aref, who came to the United States as a refugee, was the imam of an Albany mosque when he was arrested in August 2004. Hossain is a naturalized U.S. citizen.
In a separate ruling, the appeals court dismissed arguments from defense lawyers and the New York Civil Liberties Union that the lower court had improperly denied it access to classified information and sealed court papers and orders.
The NYCLU's request for the wiretapping evidence followed a New York Times report citing the case as an example of the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance program.
During the trial, Aref alleged Muslims were unfairly branded as terrorists in the United States. Defense lawyers argued the men were victims of post-September 11 racial profiling.
http://www.reuters.com/article/domes...39355420080702
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07/03/2008
FBI may begin racial profiling to fight terror
Related article: Ariz. cops ask suspects about immigration status
By Lara Jakes
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Justice Department is considering letting the FBI investigate Americans without any evidence of wrongdoing, relying instead on a terrorist profile that could single out Muslims, Arabs or other racial and ethnic groups.
Law-enforcement officials say the proposed policy would help them do exactly what Congress demanded after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: root out terrorists before they strike.
Although President Bush has disavowed targeting suspects based on their race or ethnicity, the new rules would allow the FBI to consider those factors among a number of traits that could trigger a national-security investigation.
Currently, FBI agents need specific reasons, like evidence or allegations that a law probably has been violated, to investigate U.S. citizens and legal residents. The new policy, officials said, would let agents open preliminary investigations after mining public records and intelligence to build a profile of traits that were deemed suspicious.
Among the factors that could make someone subject of an investigation is travel to regions of the world known for terrorist activity, access to weapons or military training, along with the person's race or ethnicity.
More than a half-dozen senior FBI, Justice Department and other U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the new policy agreed to discuss it only on condition of anonymity, either because they were not allowed to speak publicly or because the change is not yet final.
The change, which is expected later this summer, is part of an update of Justice Department policies known as the attorney general guidelines. They are being overhauled amid the FBI's transition from a traditional crime-fighting agency to one whose top mission is to protect America from terrorist attacks.
"We don't know what we don't know. And the object is to cut down on that," said one FBI official, who defended the plans.
Another official, while also defending the proposed guidelines, raised concerns about criticism during the presidential-election year over what he called "the P word": profiling.
Critics say the presumption of innocence is lost in the proposal. The FBI will be allowed to begin investigations simply "by assuming that everyone's a suspect, and then you weed out the innocent," said Caroline Fredrickson of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Attorney General Michael Mukasey acknowledged the overhaul was under way in early June, saying the guidelines sought to ensure that regulations for FBI terror investigations don't conflict with ones governing criminal inquiries. He would not give any details.
"It's necessary to put in place regulations that will allow the FBI to transform itself ... into an intelligence-gathering organization in addition to just a crime-solving organization," Mukasey told reporters.
The changes would allow FBI agents to ask open-ended questions about activities of Muslim- or Arab-Americans, or investigate them if their jobs and backgrounds matched trends that analysts deemed suspect.
FBI agents would not be allowed to eavesdrop on phone calls or dig deeply into personal data, such as the content of phone or e-mail records or bank statements, until a full investigation was opened.
The guidelines focus on the FBI's domestic operations and run about 40 pages long, several officials said.
One senior Justice Department official said agents have been allowed since 2003 to build "threat assessments" of Americans based on public records and information from informants. Assessments could be used to open a preliminary investigation, the official said.
However, another official said the authorities are limited, tightly monitored by FBI headquarters in Washington and, overall, confused about how or when assessments can be used.
Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the guidelines governing when to open a national-security investigation are part of a "harmonizing" process that will not give the FBI any more authority than it already has. He declined to comment further, but he would not deny the changes as they were described by others familiar with the guidelines.
"Any review and change to the guidelines will reflect our traditional concerns for civil liberties and First Amendment liberties," Roehrkasse said.
Although the guidelines do not require congressional approval, House members recently sought to limit such profiling by rejecting an $11 million request for the FBI's security-assessment center. Lawmakers wrote that it was unclear how the FBI could compile suspect profiles "in such a way as to avoid needless intrusions into the privacy of innocent citizens" and without wasting time and money chasing down false leads.
The denial of funding could limit the FBI's use of profiles, or "predictive models and patterns of behavior" as the government prefers to describe the data-mining results, but would not change the guidelines authorizing them. The guidelines would remain until a new attorney general changed them.
Courts across the country have overturned criminal convictions when defendants showed they were targeted based on race. Racial profiling generally is considered a civil-rights violation, and former Attorney General John Ashcroft condemned it in March 2001 as an "unconstitutional deprivation of equal protection under our Constitution."
President Bush also has condemned racial profiling as "wrong in America" and, in a December 2001 interview, had harsh words for an airline that refused to let an Arab-American Secret Service agent board a commercial flight.
Copyright 2007 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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**I guess NYC's "If you see something, say something" ads have paid off.**
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2008/07/04/2008-07-04_van_left_on_brooklyn_street_packed_with_-2.html?print=1&page=all
Van left on Brooklyn street packed with hazardous material tied to blast suspect
BY SCOTT SHIFREL AND JONATHAN LEMIRE
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
Saturday, July 5th 2008, 12:03 AM
A van loaded with gasoline cans, wires and switches that prompted police to swarm a desolate Brooklyn street may belong to a suspect already in federal custody for alleged bomb-making, law enforcement sources said Friday.
The red Ford with mismatched license plates in Sunset Park contained explosives nearly identical to those previously used by Yung (Mark) Tang, who once tried to blow up a renter during a landlord-tenant dispute, sources said.
Investigators crawled over the van at 37th St. and Second Ave. Friday and discovered several 5-gallon containers and 12-ounce water bottles filled with a clear liquid that smelled like gasoline, according to a police source.
The jugs were connected with wires but no obvious detonator could be found, the source said.
"The bomb squad believes they seem similar, and it was found within a few blocks of [Tang's] house," a source said.
Investigators believe that the van had been parked at 53rd St. and Second Ave. for more than a month, and its dangerous cargo was discovered only after a car thief broke into the vehicle Thursday afternoon.
When the thief realized what was inside, he ditched it on a quiet stretch of 37th St. and called the police.
"He thought it might have been terrorism on the day before the Fourth of July, so he called the cops," said an NYPD source, adding it was unlikely the man would be charged in the van break-in.
Although the vehicle was found near where Tang, 38, had lived with his estranged wife, he has been held since May at a federal detention facility in Rhode Island after being caught with explosives in a vehicle while traveling from New York to Massachusetts.
Investigators think he may have been planning to threaten his wife with explosives.
He also faces 50 years for attempted murder, arson and other charges in state court in Brooklyn related to a 2002 bomb attack on a tenant.
The NYPD did not officially identify a suspect Friday, and Tang's lawyer denied his client was connected to the van.
"It may make for a very interesting news story," said George Farkas, "but as far as I know this has nothing to do with my client."
sshifrel@nydailynews.com
With Kamelia Angelova
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July 16, 2008
By Fred Burton and Scott Stewart
At the stroke of midnight July 8, the Denver Water Board closed the road over Dillon Dam in Summit County, Colorado, citing security concerns. The board’s decision, which was implemented without advance notice to local governments and citizens, has not been well-received. It has sparked protests by enraged residents and has even prompted officials from Summit County, three affected towns nearby and the local fire and rescue department to file suit in state district court in a bid to force Denver Water to reopen the road.
The road is one of only a few traversing Summit County, so residents are understandably upset at the inconvenience caused by the closure. Local fire and rescue departments also say closing the road negatively affects emergency response times. This not the first time the road has been closed, however. The road was shut down for a week in January after a report of suspicious activity in the area — activity investigated by authorities and found to be nothing more than two men from Denver filming a music video. The Water Board has spent several million dollars to improve security for the mile-long dam road, and in May it even hired a private security company to conduct 24-hour armed patrols of the dam.
Denver Water has said the decision to close the road was not made in response to a specific threat, and we tend to believe this. With the heat they’ve received over the issue, they surely would have cited evidence of a specific threat to assuage public anger if there had been such information.
But the ruckus raised over the closure of the Dillon Dam road provides a prime opportunity to re-examine the ability of jihadist militants to operate inside the United States, and to look at the types of targets militants might be most likely to select for an attack.
Assessing the Militant Threat
To assess a threat against a potential target like the Dillon Dam, several important tactical realities must be considered. The first is that as long as the ideology of jihadism exists and at least some jihadist militants embrace the philosophy of attacking the “far enemy” — aka the United States — there will be some threat of attacks against targets on U.S. soil. Indeed, there has not been a time since 1990 when some group of jihadists somewhere was not plotting such an attack.
A second tactical reality is that the U.S. government and the American people simply cannot protect every potential target. There are simply far too many of them. While insights gained from al Qaeda’s targeting criteria can help authorities protect select high-value targets, there are just too many potential targets to protect them all. The federal government might instruct state and local authorities to protect every dam, bridge, power plant and mass-transit system in their respective jurisdictions, but the reality on the ground is that there are not nearly enough resources to protect all of these, much less to protect the far more plentiful array of potential soft targets.
Another tactical reality is that simple attacks against soft targets are very easy to conduct and very difficult to detect in advance and thwart. As an attack plan becomes larger and more complex, however, it requires more individuals, more materials and more infrastructure. This means that the bigger the attack plan is, the more difficult it is to conduct and the greater the chances it will be discovered and thwarted.
That said, just because attacks are possible — and indeed likely — and because there are a large number of vulnerable targets does not mean that all the vulnerable targets will be attacked. The capabilities and targeting criteria of militants also must be considered.
Capability
Let’s begin with the capability question first. When considering the capability of militants to strike in the United States, one must recognize that with regard to militant jihadists there are generally three different levels of actors to consider. First, there is the core al Qaeda organization; this is the small vanguard of jihadists led by Osama bin Laden attempting to lead a global rising of the Muslim masses. Second, there are al Qaeda’s regional franchises (such as al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb), which are local or regional jihadist groups that have aligned themselves with al Qaeda, hoping to capitalize on the group’s popular brand name. And third, there are the local, self-motivated grassroots jihadists who think globally and act locally.
All three of these actors have different target selection criteria and different levels of capability. There is currently no al Qaeda franchise in the United States or even in the Western Hemisphere. This means that the main threat of an attack against a target in the United States will come from either the core al Qaeda group, a grassroots organization or a combination of the two, so we will focus our attention on those two actors.
Grassroots actors lack sophisticated terrorist tradecraft in crucial areas like preoperational planning and bomb making. Recent cases such as the July 7, 2005, attacks in London, the failed July 21, 2005, attacks in London, and the June 2007 attacks in London and Glasgow demonstrate the limited abilities of grassroots militants. They can sometimes kill people, but they do not have the ability to conduct large, strategic strikes.
Because of this, grassroots militants will often attempt to reach out for assistance if they desire to undertake a major attack. This is exactly what we saw in the early 1990s in New York. Grassroots operatives there were able to pull off a simple attack like the assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane, but they needed assistance for their bigger, more complex plans. In the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the local cell received assistance in the form of Abdel Basit (aka Ramzi Yousef), who helped them organize, plan their attack and construct a large truck-borne explosive device. In the second 1993 case, the local cell turned to an FBI informant for bomb-making expertise and were apprehended before they could strike.
The 2006 plot to bomb a series of airliners in the United Kingdom was likewise a case where a local grassroots cell received assistance from an al Qaeda operational commander but was thwarted before it could carry out its attack — mainly due to the complexity of the plan and the number of people involved.
Thus, without assistance the odds of a successful attack by a grassroots group against a target like a dam are low. Perhaps the greatest threat posed by a grassroots group is that one of its operatives could gain employment as an engineer at a dam — therefore gaining the opportunity to sabotage the equipment controlling the dam from the inside and turning the dam into a weapon against itself. This is similar to the threat posed by insiders at chemical plants. There have also been concerns previously that a savvy cyber-jihadist could assume control of the dam’s equipment via gaps in the information security of the entity running the dam.
As for the al Qaeda core, while the group may theoretically have personnel with the expertise to undertake such an attack, they have been extremely limited in their operational ability since the U.S. response to 9/11. We came under widespread criticism last July when we wrote that the al Qaeda core was a spent force that did not pose a strategic threat to the U.S. homeland, but our assessment holds one year on. Indeed, the vast majority of attacks attributed to the al Qaeda brand name since September 2001 have been conducted by regional franchises like Jemaah Islamiyah, al Qaeda in Iraq or al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, not core al Qaeda. In our assessment, the al Qaeda core might have some ability to attack, but it no longer has the ability to conduct a devastating strategic attack such as 9/11.
The Dam as a Target
It is possible to destroy a dam. Indeed, the British Royal Air Force destroyed German dams during World War II, and aircraft from the United States and its U.N. allies destroyed a North Korean hydroelectric dam during the Korean War. In general, however, dams are very large structures designed and built to withstand powerful forces such as floods and earthquakes. Because of this, it would be very difficult to destroy one with an improvised explosive device, unless the attacker could strike at a strategic location that would cause a leak in the structure (as the British did in their attacks on German dams) or at a location that would allow the water to overtop the dam and erode it — in either case, using the power of the water behind the dam to cause the structure to fail catastrophically.
Even with massive resources, however, it is not easy to destroy a large dam made of earth and rock. For proof, one need only to look at the massive efforts of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in China to unblock the Qingjiang River after it was dammed up by debris following the powerful May 12 earthquake. The PLA has used heavy machinery and massive amounts of explosives in their efforts. One July 2 blast on the Shibangou section of the river reportedly involved 6 tons of strategically placed explosives alone. It is very unlikely that militants would have the ability to carefully place that quantity of explosives on a dam in the United States without being detected.
Obtaining explosives in Western countries is also becoming more difficult in the post-9/11 era. Even the 2006 airliner plot involved small amounts of improvised explosives rather than an attack with a huge device, and the 9/11 attacks involved no explosives at all. The grassroots militants involved in the London and Glasgow attacks in the summer of 2007 also had problems obtaining explosives, and they instead chose to try using improvised (and ill-designed) fuel-air explosive devices in those incidents.
If a militant group planned properly and somehow amassed a sufficient quantity of explosives, it would be possible for it to destroy a dam. But that does not mean a group like al Qaeda would target a dam. Even if the group had the ability to conduct such an attack, it probably would choose to use such a large quantity of explosives to attack a far more symbolic target than a dam in rural Colorado.
While al Qaeda’s Taliban cousins have conducted several unsuccessful attacks against dams in southern Afghanistan, the situation on the ground in Afghanistan is far different than that in the United States. The Taliban in Afghanistan are a large, well-supplied insurgent force that regularly strikes at infrastructure such as roads, bridges and even schools.
Conversely, there is no large jihadist element in the United States. There are only scattered grassroots operatives and perhaps a few transnational al Qaeda-types available to conduct attacks. To our mind, that means that these operatives will want to maximize their efforts and undertake the most meaningful and symbolic attacks possible. Rather than choosing targets based on military utility (like the Taliban in Afghanistan), al Qaeda generally chooses targets in the United States for their potential symbolic value so as to elicit the greatest political or psychological impact, which they then hope will translate into economic impact.
This is not intended as an insult to the people of Colorado, but the Dillon Dam simply does not strike us as the kind of target that will carry the type of symbolic or economic impact al Qaeda would seek in an U.S. attack. Symbolic targets need to be readily recognizable not only by the people who live close to them, but also by people looking at a photo in a Pakistani newspaper. The World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol, the United Nations, or even the Library Tower in Los Angeles, the Sears Tower in Chicago, the strip in Las Vegas or the Space Needle in Seattle are highly symbolic targets that would meet these requirements. The Dillon Dam does not. In fact, we are Americans and had not even heard of this specific dam until the reports of the controversy over the road closure emerged.
Does this mean that jihadists will never strike in Denver? Not at all. Lone wolf or grassroots operatives could very well strike there. As seen in past cases in New Jersey, Florida and California, such people normally seek to strike in familiar territory close to where they live, and there might well be jihadists residing in Denver. But again, such a strike by grassroots operatives or lone wolves would likely be a smaller attack aimed at a soft target. We remain skeptical of the idea of al Qaeda dispatching a team from their headquarters in Pakistan to travel to the United States to destroy the Dillon Dam. The Democratic National Convention in Denver, maybe — but not the Dillon Dam.
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http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5i3uIGU_Clf36waqYlsaWDls9HP2gD91VURDO0
Chertoff: European terrorists trying to enter US
By EILEEN SULLIVAN – 13 hours ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — European terrorists are trying to enter the United States with European Union passports, and there is no guarantee officials will catch them every time, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Thursday.
Chertoff's comments on Capitol Hill comes as the country is entering a potentially vulnerable period with the presidential nominating conventions coming up next month; the presidential election in November; and the transition to a new administration in January — all of which may be attractive targets for terrorists.
In his last scheduled appearance before the House Homeland Security Committee, Chertoff said that the more time and space al-Qaida and its allies have to recruit, train, experiment and plan, the more problems the U.S. and Europe will face down the road.
"The terrorists are deliberately focusing on people who have legitimate Western European passports, who don't appear to have records as terrorists," Chertoff told lawmakers. "I have a good degree of confidence we can catch people coming in. But I have to tell you ... there's no guarantee. And they are working very hard to slip by us."
Chertoff and other intelligence officials have delivered similar warnings before, and he offered no new information about specific threats or an imminent attack.
Chertoff reiterated his concern that terrorists could sneak radiological material into the country on small boats or private aircraft. This material could be used to create an explosive device known as a "dirty bomb."
The Homeland Security Department has a strategy to protect against this small boat vulnerability and is testing radiation detection equipment in Seattle and San Diego ports.
Chertoff said that getting out a regulation to prescreen and enhance security of general aviation aircraft coming to the U.S. from overseas is one of his top priorities.
He also said he expects to approve new radiation detection technology this fall.
Responding to a question from Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, Chertoff dismissed any rumor that he is on a list of potential running mates for Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. Chertoff quipped that the only list he has for next year is a list of vacations.
Chertoff's term as the country's second Homeland Security Secretary ends when a new administration takes over the White House in January.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/07/21/video-mother-weeps-over-family-murdered-by-illegal-alien-gang-member/
Border security IS homeland security.
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Report warns vehicles could be stuffed with explosives for suicide attacks
Publishing Date: 22.07.08 11:08
By Gordon Thomas
LONDON -- Members of Britain's MI5 intelligence service have warned the nation's cash-strapped National Health Services that dozens of ambulances -- along with old police cars and fire engines -- are being snapped up by al-Qaida operatives in the United Kingdom to mount suicide bomb attacks.
So serious is the problem that counter-terrorism officials at the Home Office have written to eBay, the Internet auctioneer, asking them to stop selling emergency service vehicles, equipment and uniforms. But eBay has insisted it can only halt the sales if a new law is passed by Parliament. That could take many months. The use of ambulances is of particular concern to Britain's anti-terror chiefs. They say the tactic has already been used in Iraq with devastating effects.
A report by Lord Carlisle -- the government terrorist czar who last month warned about the possibility of private planes being used for an attack on London -- has been issued to all of Britain's 48 police forces warning of the danger of selling off emergency service vehicles. Lord Carlisle, who works closely with the Terrorism Analysis Centre in London set up since the 9/11 attacks, said ambulances were the ideal weapon of choice for terrorists.
"It is almost rare that police will stop such vehicles on suspicious grounds. An ambulance rigged with high explosives could drive into any ultra-sensitive target like a nuclear power station or even Whitehall," said a senior MI5 source.
The Association of Chief Police Officers has warned that the risk could be "highly significant" if the law is not tightened. Every year dozens of police cars, ambulances and even fire engines are sold on eBay for as little as $3,000. Many are still in working order. Those that need repair can be fixed to pass as genuine emergency service vehicles.
"An ambulance could carry half a ton of explosives. A rigged police car could carry half that amount. So could a fire engine," states the MI5 report.
MI5 counter-terrorism officers say such attacks have been successfully carried out in Iraq and Israel. The report reveals that an al-Qaida attack in Baghdad last February involved a stolen ambulance driven by a suicide bomber into an Iraqi police station.
The report states: "Terrorists have been using ambulances to transport bombs in Israel since at least 2002. The Israelis have told us that Hamas are using ambulances to ferry men and rocket launchers around Gaza."
A national security committee has been set up in London with MI5 and police chiefs drawing up plans to deal with the threat. Chairman of the committee, Steve Watts, said: "There is a need of urgent legislation becoming available to the police which adequately addresses the threat of pseudo-emergency service vehicles being used by terrorists."
Lord Carlisle has suggested all service vehicles to be sold must be clearly decommissioned so they cannot be used to imitate emergency services. Manufacturers of all such vehicles are being asked to urgently inspect vehicles taken out of service to see how this can be done.
Gordon Thomas is the author of a new edition of Gideon’s Spies: The Inside Story of Israel’s Legendary Secret Service The Mossad, by JR Books of London and available on Amazon Books.
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http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=5420514
U.S. Headed for 'Heightened Alert' Stage
Exclusive: Major Events on the Horizon Prompt a Surge in Anti-Terror Efforts
By PIERRE THOMAS
July 28, 2008—
Government officials have been quietly stepping up counterterror efforts out of a growing concern that al Qaeda or similar organizations might try to capitalize on the spate of extremely high-profile events in the coming months, sources tell ABC News.
Security experts point to next month's Olympics as evidence that high-profile events attract threats of terrorism, like the one issued this past weekend by a Chinese Muslim minority group that warned of its intent to attack the Games.
Anti-terror officials in the U.S. cite this summer and fall's lineup of two major political parties' conventions, November's general election and months of transition into a new presidential administration as cause for heightened awareness and action.
This is what the Department of Homeland Security is quietly declaring a Period of Heightened Alert, or POHA, a time frame when terrorists may have more incentive to attack.
According to drafts of government memos described to ABC News, the period would run roughly from this August through July 2009.
During this time, homeland security analysts will be asked to redouble efforts to study terrorism leads. And a number of agencies will be asked to review emergency response plans to a variety of attacks, from improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to biological weapons.
Officials also are being asked to make sure they are prepared for all contingencies during the transition from the Bush administration to that of the next president.
In a recent interview, FBI director Robert Mueller told ABC News of his concerns for homeland security.
"When you have a series of events like this which are very public, where you have a number of people that are congregated together, we take additional precautions," he said.
"That means identifying, focusing on the intelligence that's available and scrutinizing it to pieces and running it to ground, to putting in place the precautions to assure the particular events go according to plan and free from terrorist attacks," he said.
At the moment, the nation's public threat level will remain at yellow, or "elevated," but not orange, or "high."
The reasons: There are no specifics indicating an attack on the U.S. is imminent, and U.S. officials do not want to be accused of trying to inject themselves into the presidential campaign.
"That's a balancing act," said Jerry Hauer, former Homeland Security official and ABC News consultant. "They really have to focus on these events and this critical time we're going through as a nation, but they have to be very careful about the public message to not make it look political or like they're fearmongering."
Government officials point to the Sept. 11 attacks, which happened just nine months into a new administration, and the Madrid train bombings, which were carried out just three days before Spain's 2004 general election.
They say history suggests a need to take potential threats seriously -- especially in the very near future.
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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-siddiqui5-2008aug05,0,4629105.story
Accused Al Qaeda sleeper agent in custody
HO/AFP/Getty Images
Composite image provided by the FBI on May 26, 2004 shows Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani woman who studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.).
Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani mother of three who studied at MIT, is said to have moved in the terrorist group's inner circles. She faces charges of firing at U.S. personnel in Afghanistan.
By Josh Meyer, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
August 5, 2008
WASHINGTON -- One of the more elusive and mysterious figures linked to Al Qaeda -- a Pakistani mother of three who studied biology at MIT and who authorities say spent years in the United States as a sleeper agent -- was flown to New York on Monday night to face charges of attempting to kill U.S. military and FBI personnel in Afghanistan.
The Justice Department, FBI and U.S. military in Afghanistan said that Aafia Siddiqui, 36, was arrested in Ghazni province three weeks ago. She is accused of firing an automatic rifle at FBI agents and soldiers and is scheduled to appear before a federal judge in Manhattan today.
FOR THE RECORD: An earlier version of a caption with a photo accompanying this article misidentified Siddiqui's sister, Dr. Fozia, as Siddiqui.
Authorities believe Siddiqui used the technical skills she acquired at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to do what virtually no other woman has accomplished -- work her way into the clubby inner circles of Al Qaeda's command and control operation, including its chemical and biological weapons program.
But questions swirled around her Monday evening, including whether she has been in Pakistani custody for at least part of the last five years and whether there is hard evidence that she was a trained, committed and hardened Al Qaeda operative, as former Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft and other U.S. officials have contended.
"This doesn't pass the sniff test," Elaine W. Sharp, a Massachusetts defense lawyer representing Siddiqui, said of the circumstances surrounding her client's arrest. She said her client was not an Al Qaeda terrorist, but an innocent woman who had been held at Bagram air base in Afghanistan or elsewhere for the last several years and tortured by some combination of U.S., Pakistani and Afghan officials.
Sharp said that Siddiqui had obtained an undergraduate biology degree from MIT and a doctorate in behavioral neuroscience from Brandeis University, both near Boston, and that she had lived a quiet life in the Boston area, and in Houston before that, before returning to her native Pakistan in late 2002.
One senior U.S. federal law enforcement official refused to comment on the case, except to say that Siddiqui was an extremely significant catch and that authorities had pledged not to discuss any details of the operation because of its sensitivity and relationship to ongoing counter-terrorism operations.
"We can't say anything about this one," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. He confirmed that the woman in custody was the one near the top of the FBI’s Most Wanted List of fugitive terrorism suspects wanted for questioning.
For years, the FBI and the CIA have been desperately trying to find Siddiqui, who they say spent several years in Boston as a "fixer" for admitted Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, providing haven and logistical support for terrorist operatives that he sent to the United States to launch attacks.
Siddiqui also bought diamonds in Liberia as part of Al Qaeda financing efforts and married Mohammed's nephew, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, according to several U.S. counter-terrorism officials and government documents.
One former CIA weapons of mass destruction analyst who tracked Siddiqui said that she became extremely frustrated years ago, however, when she was told by senior Al Qaeda leaders to help their cause by getting pregnant.
"They told her that the best thing she could do for Al Qaeda was to start popping out little jihadists," said the former CIA officer, who left the agency in 2006. "She was furious; she knows more about this stuff than pretty much anyone in the organization."
Siddiqui never gave up her desire to launch attacks against the United States and its allies, according to FBI and Justice Department records made public Monday night.
According to court papers, Afghan national police officers in Ghazni province, south of Kabul, the capital, observed Siddiqui acting suspiciously near the provincial governor's compound July 17.
When they searched her handbag, they found documents relating to explosives, chemical weapons and weapons involving biological materials and radiological agents, along with descriptions of landmarks in New York City and elsewhere in the United States, and liquid and gel substances sealed in bottles and jars.
The next day, according to the court papers, she was being questioned by two FBI agents, an Army captain and an Army warrant officer, along with their interpreters.
A spokeswoman for U.S. forces at Bagram air base, Lt. Col. Rumi Nielson-Green, said Siddiqui, who was being interrogated at an Afghan police station, grabbed a gun that a U.S. military officer had laid down while speaking to Afghan police. He did not realize Siddiqui was in the room at the time, unsecured, because she was hidden behind a curtain.
"She seized a weapon and began to shoot," Nielson-Green said. "Our officer returned fire. She was shot in the stomach, but continued to struggle."
She was subsequently hospitalized at Bagram and "was not in the detention facility at any time," Nielson-Green said. Siddiqui was flown to the United States after being found well enough to travel, the spokeswoman said.
Siddiqui is charged in a criminal complaint filed in the Southern District of New York with one count of attempting to kill United States officers and employees and one count of assaulting U.S. officers and employees. If convicted, she faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison on each charge.
Michael J. Garcia, the U.S. attorney in New York, praised the investigative work and said the investigation was continuing.
In the past Siddiqui's lawyer, some human rights advocates and Siddiqui's family members have said she disappeared with her three children in March 2003 while visiting her parents' home in Karachi -- around the same time the FBI said it wanted to question her. Mohammed was arrested just before that in Pakistan.
In 2006, Amnesty International listed Siddiqui as one of many "disappeared" suspects in the U.S.-led war on terrorism. Of allegations that Siddiqui had been detained at Bagram after her disappearance in Pakistan, Nielson-Green said: "That's absolute nonsense."
Pakistani government spokesmen declined to comment on the case early today.
Sharp said that the U.S. government's accusations were untrue, that Siddiqui's three children have never surfaced and that her family believes that public pressure from Amnesty and other organizations prompted authorities to concoct her suspicious behavior and arrest so they could hide the fact that she has been in custody all this time.
"We thought she was dead until her brother in Houston got a visit from the FBI the other day and said she is alive," Sharp said.
josh.meyer@latimes.com
Times staff writer Laura King in Kabul contributed to this report.
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http://cbs4denver.com/local/burnsley.hotel.death.2.793573.html
Aug 12, 2008 5:02 pm US/Mountain
Man Dead, Large Amount Of Possible Cyanide Found
Reporting
Rick Sallinger
DENVER (CBS4) ― It has the makings of international intrigue. Less than two weeks before the Democratic National Convention a man has been found dead in a Denver hotel room with a container of what authorities initially suspect to be the deadly poison cyanide.
Adding to the intrigue is that the dead man, Saleman Abdirahman Dirie, 29, appears to be from outside the U.S. No passport was found on Dirie, who is believed to have entered the country from Canada.
A large container of a white powdery substance was found in the man's room on the fourth floor of The Burnsley hotel at 10th and Grant.
Tests are now being done by the Denver Police Crime Lab to determine exactly what the substance is. The tests could take days.
It's believed Dirie died from something other than the substance that was in the container.
Denver police are leading the investigation of the man's death. The FBI and other governmental agencies, including the Joint Terrorism Task Force, are assisting in the probe. Hazardous materials assistance has included the Colorado State Patrol and the Colorado National Guard.
"Our Joint Terrorism Task Force is involved in this simply because the victim here is from another country and it just kind of makes sense that our terrorism guys would take a look a look at this," FBI Special Agent in Charge James Davis said.
Davis told CBS 4 that nothing so far has been found to link the case to terrorism or the coming convention.
Authorities said The Burnsley hotel is safe and is open for business.
Cyanide can be made from plants in very small amounts. It can be a gas, liquid or powder. It prevents the body from using oxygen and therefore is more harmful to the heart and brain than other organs.
"It was used in concentration camps in World War II and by Saddam Hussein against the Kurds in the 1990s," CBD4 Medical Editor Dr. Dave Hnida said. "And put it in a little capsule, it is in fact used as a suicide pill just like you see in the movies."
Officials said cyanide can be used as a terrorist weapon if it is dumped in water put in food, sprayed as a gas, or many other methods.
The investigation is continuing.
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http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=5567066
Alleged Mata Hari of Al Qaeda Could Provide 'Treasure Trove' of Intelligence
Aafia Siddique Had a List of Targets in New York & Chem-Bio Weapons Information in her Possession
By RICHARD ESPOSITO and BRIAN ROSS
August 12, 2008—
When she was arrested in Afghanistan last month, Aafia Siddique allegedly had in her possession maps of New York, a list of potential targets that included the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, the subway system and the animal disease center on Plum Island, detailed chemical, biological and radiological weapon information that has been seen only in a handful of terrorist cases, as well as a thumb drive packed with emails, ABC News has learned.
That haul of information has led multiple government sources to describe Siddique, a 36 year-old MIT graduate, as a potential "treasure trove" of information on terrorist supporters, sympathizers or 'sleepers' in the United States and overseas.
"She is the most significant capture in five years," said former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who said she lives up to her reputation as an alleged terrorist 'Mata Hari.'
And there is an eagerness to see what, if anything, she can add to the thin trickle of fresh information on the activities of terrorists and terrorist supporters in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as what if any risk she might pose to national security.
Only a "handful" of captured alleged Al Qaeda associates have had the kind of detailed information on weapons of mass destruction that Siddique, who attended MIT as an undergraduate and earned her PhD in neuroscience at Brandeis, had in her handbag, multiple current and former US intelligence and law enforcement officials told ABC News.
"She is a very dangerous person, no doubt about it," said a senior US counter terrorism official.
"This is a major haul, a major capture for the FBI," said Kiriakou. "To find someone who has such rich information, computer hard drives, e-mails, that is really a major capture."
US authorities are analyzing Siddique's saliva, hair, and fingernail scrapings to determine, if possible, what evidence they can find of any exposure to chemical, biological or radiological materials with potential use in weapons of mass destruction, sources said.
"Her education troubled us. We know that she's extremely bright. She's radicalized. We knew that she had been planning, or at least involved in the planning, of a wide variety of different operations, whether they involved weapons of mass destruction or research into chemical or biological weapons, whether it was a possible attempt on the life of the President," said Kiriakou. "We knew that she was involved with a great deal and we had to bring her into custody."
When nabbed by a team of Afghanistan National Police officers on July 17th, she also had in her possession a one gigabyte digital media storage device - a thumb drive - whose contents included a large trail of emails that authorities are now poring over, sources said. Those e-mails, a source involved in the investigation said, are between "what she described as 'units' and what we would call 'cells'."
In her papers she had maps and information concerning potential targets in New York City that sources say included the subway, Times Square and the Statute of Liberty, ABC News has learned. She also carried excerpts from "The Anarchist's Arsenal" and "documents detailing United States military assets", according to the federal complaint against her filed July 31st in Manhattan.
ABC News sources said that she also had information indicating the possibility of "an attack" on Plum Island Disease Center, a secure US government facility off the tip of Long Island, New York where research into foot and mouth disease, swine fever and other animal pathogens is conducted by the Department of Agriculture and security is provided by the Department of Homeland Security.
"We're proud of our role as America's first line of defense against foreign animal diseases," the facility's website notes. "We're equally proud of our safety record. Not once in our nearly 50 years of operation has an animal pathogen escaped from the island."
The remote possibility of smuggling a pathogen off isolated Plum Island was the subject of the bestseller Plum Island by Nelson DeMille.
But a terrorist attack on the isolated island would not spread disease, according to homeland security officials familiar with the research activities there.
Interest in Siddique is in itself not new. On May 26th, 2004 she became the first woman wanted by the federal government in connection with Al Qaeda when then Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller asked the public's help in finding her and six men suspected of links to Al Qaeda.
At that same time they warned, in advance of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, that Al Qaeda was preparing to "hit the United States hard" that summer.
By then Siddique had been linked to an "ill conceived" and perhaps amateurish plot to "kill all living US presidents", according to sources from three federal agencies. And she had already vanished from public view for about 16 months.
She has also been twice married; once to a nephew of 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed.
Her name reportedly rolled from KSM's lips when he was captured and interrogated by US intelligence officers. She has also been linked to Adnan El Shukrijumah, a pilot and suspected al Qaeda member also on the Ashcroft-Mueller list.
Shukrijumah, Ashcroft noted, had once lived in Florida, had left the United States and had later attempted to re-enter the country using a variety of passports.
"We know that he has been involved in terrorist planning with senior al Qaeda leaders overseas and has scouted sites across America that might be vulnerable to terrorist attack," Ashcroft added.
By the time of Siddique's capture last month, she had become something of a cause celebre among some human rights activists who believe she was "disappeared" five years ago by the Pakistani government, perhaps at the request of the United States.
At a federal court hearing in Manhattan on Monday, the number of supporters who showed up required the US Marshals to move the Magistrate's Court proceeding to a larger courtroom and also open an overflow courtroom where spectators could listen to and watch the proceedings on closed circuit TV.
They saw Siddique slumped over in a wheelchair, the result of having been shot twice with a nine millimeter side arm after she allegedly grabbed a US Army Warrant Officer's M-4 Carbine and opened fire as a team of FBI agents, US Army officers including the Warrant Officer and a Captain, and interpreters prepared to interrogate her on July 18th, the day following her arrest, according the federal complaint.
"The Warrant Officer saw and heard Siddique fire at least two shots as Interpreter 1 tried to wrestle the gun from her. No one was hit. The Warrant Officer heard Siddique exclaim 'Allah Akbar!' Another interpreter (Interpreter 2) heard Siddique yell in English 'Get the f--- out of here,' as she fired the rifle," the complaint stated.
"Her medical condition is that, she was shot in the abdomen. There are stitches that run from the breast plate area down to the belly button area...layers and layers of tissue have been sewn, sutured. We have heard reports that she has lost a kidney; we don't know if those are accurate but we are concerned about that. There has been intestinal damage, part of the intestines, we understand, have been removed," according to Elaine Whitman Sharpe, one of a team of three attorneys present for Siddique.
Pakistani officials present at the hearing said they had "no information" on the allegations that Siddique had been secretly held prisoner and "no information" to offer on the allegations that their government may have assisted in that capture.
Her friends and family say the young woman, a mother of three, is innocent and being persecuted by the US.
There is some dissent in the intelligence community on Siddique's potential value and some have characterized her as mentally unbalanced and operationally insignificant.
But in an intelligence and law enforcement community that has exhausted the useful information from high value prisoners it has had in custody for as long as six years and has watched the stream of new intelligence go from a torrent to a trickle, she is seen by many as having at least the potential of holding valuable current intelligence about members and associates of Al Qaeda both overseas and in the United States.
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http://counterterrorismblog.org/2008/08/federal_complaint_and_other_do.php
Federal Complaint and Other Documents on Aafia Siddiqui, Alleged Al Qaeda "Fixer"
By Andrew Cochran
Aafia Siddiqui, long sought for alleged ties to Al Qaeda, appears in federal court today in New York City. Siddiqui was arrested on July 17 by the Afghanistan National Police and was carrying documents describing the creation of explosives, descriptions of landmarks in the United States, and substances that were sealed in bottles and glass jars." While she was in custody, she seized a rifle and fired twice at U.S. military personnel who were preparing to question her. A federal agent returned fire, and she was wounded while shouting in English that she wanted to kill Americans. Siddiqui is charged with one count of attempting to kill United States officers and employees and one count of assaulting United States officers and employees. The NEFA Foundation has posted the complaint, the DOJ press release about the complaint, and other documents referring to her.
Siddiqui has been on the Ten Most Wanted list of the Boston office of the FBI for years for her alleged role as a terrorist facilitator. In 2004, the Attorney General and FBI Director identified her as one of seven people wanted for questioning about suspected ties to Al Qaeda. She is alleged to have assisted Majid Khan and Ammar al-Baluchi, two alleged top Al Qaeda lieutenants now imprisoned at Gitmo, in their activities in the U.S. She is also alleged to have been among among the "intended beneficiaries" of the misuse of funds by Care International, the Boston-based Muslim charity whose leaders were convicted on several charges (later partially dismissed by a federal judge). Siddiqui is also implicated in Al Qaeda's interest in the west African diamond trade and traveled to Liberia in 2001. See this post by Douglas Farah in August 2005, quoting Mike Shanlin, the former CIA station chief for Liberia. "'They (al Qaeda operatives) were there during the period in question,' referring to the period of 1998-2001. 'And clearly they were involved in some sort of a diamond business. That's a fact.'"
Siddiqui's capture is an important break for U.S. counter-terrorism efforts and could lead to significant information about the Al Qaeda leadership structure worldwide.
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http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1205309,00.html
Exclusive Book Excerpt: How an Al-Qaeda Cell Planned a Poison-Gas Attack on the N.Y. Subway
Saturday, Jun. 17, 2006
Target of Terror: Passengers wait for their train on a New York City subway platform last week
DAVID BURNETT/CONTACT FOR TIME
Al-Qaeda terrorists came within 45 days of attacking the New York subway system with a lethal gas similar to that used in Nazi death camps. They were stopped not by any intelligence breakthrough, but by an order from Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman Zawahiri. And the U.S. learned of the plot from a CIA mole inside al-Qaeda. These are some of the more startling revelations by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind, whose new book The One Percent Doctrine is excerpted in the forthcoming issue of TIME. It will appear on Time.com early Sunday morning.
U.S. intelligence got its first inkling of the plot from the contents of a laptop computer belonging to a Bahraini jihadist captured in Saudi Arabia early in 2003. It contained plans for a gas-dispersal system dubbed "the mubtakkar" (Arabic for inventive). Fearing that al-Qaeda's engineers had achieved the holy grail of terror R&D — a device to effectively distribute hydrogen-cyanide gas, which is deadly when inhaled — the CIA immediately set about building a prototype based on the captured design, which comprised two separate chambers for sodium cyanide and a stable source of hydrogen, such as hydrochloric acid. A seal between the two could be broken by a remote trigger, producing the gas for dispersal. The prototype confirmed their worst fears: "In the world of terrorist weaponry," writes Suskind, "this was the equivalent of splitting the atom. Obtain a few widely available chemicals, and you could construct it with a trip to Home Depot — and then kill everyone in the store."
The device was shown to President Bush and Vice President Cheney the following morning, prompting the President to order that alerts be sent through all levels of the U.S. government. Easily constructed and concealed, the device ensured that mass casualties would be inevitable if it could be triggered in any enclosed public space.
Having discovered the device, exposing the plot in which it might be used became a matter of extreme urgency. Although the Saudis were cooperating more than ever before in efforts to track down al-Qaeda operatives in the kingdom, the interrogations of suspects connected with the Bahraini on whose computer the Mubtakkar was discovered were going nowhere. The U.S. would have to look elsewhere.
Conventional wisdom has long held that the U.S. has no human intelligence assets inside al-Qaeda. "That is not true," writes Suskind. Over the previous six months, U.S. agents had been receiving accurate tips from a man the writer identifies simply as "Ali," a management-level al-Qaeda operative who believed his leaders had erred in attacking the U.S. directly. "The group was now dispersed," writes Suskind. "A few of its leaders and many foot soldiers were captured or dead. As with any organization, time passed and second-guessing began."
And when asked about the mubtakkar and the names of the men arrested in Saudi Arabia, Ali was aware of the plot. He identified the key man as bin Laden's top operative on the Arabian Peninsula, Yusuf al Ayeri, a.k.a. "Swift Sword," who had been released days earlier by Saudi authorities, unaware that al-Ayeri was bin Laden's point man in the kingdom.
Ali revealed that Ayeri had visited Ayman Zawahiri in January 2003, to inform him of a plot to attack the New York City subway system using cyanide gas. Several mubtakkars were to be placed in subway cars and other strategic locations. This was not simply a proposal; the plot was well under way. In fact, zero hour was only 45 days away. But then, for reasons still debated by U.S. intelligence officials, Zawahiri called off the attack. "Ali did not know the precise explanation why. He just knew that Zawahiri had called them off."
The news left administration officials gathered in the White House with more questions than answers. Why was Ali cooperating? Why had Zawahiri called off the strike? Were the operatives who were planning to carry out the attack still in New York? "The CIA analysts attempted answers. Many of the questions were simply unanswerable."
One man who could answer them was al-Ayeri — but he was killed in a gun battle between Saudi security forces and al-Qaeda militants who had launched a mini-insurrection to coincide with the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Suskind quotes a CIA operative as questioning whether it was an accident that the Saudis had killed the kingpin who could expose a cell planning a chemical weapons attack inside the U.S. "The Saudis just shrugged," the source tells Suskind. "They said their people got a little overzealous."
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Predator Drone On L.I. Sparks Terror Investigation
Investigators said the drone was being designed to carry 600 pounds of explosives
POSTED: 1:36 pm EDT August 22, 2008
UPDATED: 2:16 pm EDT August 22, 2008
NEW YORK -- By Jonathan Dienst
A predator drone being built by an engineer on Long Island sparked a large counter-terrorism investigation across the New York area, officials tell WNBC.com. Police said they had stumbled upon overnight testing of the drone at a little-used airstrip in Calverton, Long Island.
Images: Drone
The investigation began in February of last year, when investigators first learned testing of the drone was underway. Officials said the drone was being designed to carry more than 600 pounds of explosives.
"It could be in the air for 8-10 hours and there's potential harm if it is carrying a large amount of toxic material," NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly said in explaining why his department's counterterrorism officials were concerned.
Police surveillance video obtained by News 4 New York shows a white van rolling onto the tarmac, a small group of men jumping out and ground testing the unmanned flight vehicle.
Kelly said the engineer building the drone never reported his work to any agency including the Federal Aviation Administration or local authorities. Investigators said concern increased for a time when they learned the man behind the project was an Egyptian national who had entered the U.S. on a Sudanese passport.
"It was such a bizarre set of circumstances," said New York State Homeland Security Director Michael Balboni. "Of course we watched it as closely as we did anything that was on our radar screen."
NYPD officials worked with Suffolk County police and the FBI to determine there were no ties to terror. Under questioning, the engineer said he was an inventor hoping to sell this drone model to the U.S. military. NYPD Lieutenant William McGroarty said during the investigation they had other questions.
"What if this individual could not sell to the military?” McGroarty asked. “Would he then turn and sell it to the highest bidder?"
The military uses unmanned aircraft in Iraq and Afghanistan. But security officials worry about terrorists acquiring them. Earlier this year, Homeland Security officials issued a general bulletin warning they could be used "as an improvised explosive device.”
In this case, police said there is no evidence any laws were broken as the drone was tested on the ground. Officials said if it had gone into the air without prior FAA approval, it could have been considered a crime.
While there are no terror links, police said their investigation continues. The engineer, who News 4 New York will not name because he was not charged, did not respond to numerous requests for comment. His drone project has now been taken over by a Maryland-based company that has registered with the FAA, officials said. One investigator said the engineer, at best, had showed poor judgment in trying to do the project in a manner that raised so many alarms.
After repeated requests for information about this investigation, law enforcement agencies agreed to talk about the case to highlight the city's "Operation Century." This NYPD program enables city and suburban police to better share threat information. Officials said the drone investigation is one recent example of how Suffolk County police officials quickly engaged the NYPD's counter-terrorism division to help investigate the report of a predator drone sighting.
"Regional cooperation is the order of the day. Law enforcement gets it and is communicating more than ever before," Kelly said.
http://www.wnbc.com/news/17266645/detail.html
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Movie review: "Traitor"
The smartest, and best researched movie on the global jihad ever made. In addition, Don Cheadle may now be my favorite actor. He does an outstanding job as the deep cover protagonist caught in the shadow world of terrorism and intelligence and all the moral grey areas he attempts to navigate as a moral man in a dark and deadly war. Best movie I've seen in a long time.
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Shoot first and ask questions later.
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Spies Warn That Al Qaeda Aims for October Surprise
Intercepted Messages Asking Local Cells To Be Prepared for Imminent Instructions
By ELI LAKE, Staff Reporter of the Sun | September 22, 2008
http://www.nysun.com/foreign/spies-warn-that-al-qaeda-aims-for-october-surprise/86326/
WASHINGTON — In the aftermath of two major terrorist attacks on Western targets, America's counterterrorism community is warning that Al Qaeda may launch more overseas operations to influence the presidential elections in November.
Call it Osama bin Laden's "October surprise." In late August, during the weekend between the Democratic and Republican conventions, America's military and intelligence agencies intercepted a series of messages from Al Qaeda's leadership to intermediate members of the organization asking local cells to be prepared for imminent instructions.
An official familiar with the new intelligence said the message was picked up in multiple settings, from couriers to encrypted electronic communications to other means. "These are generic orders," the source said — a distinction from the more specific intelligence about the location, time, and method of an attack. "It was, 'Be on notice. We may call upon you soon.' It was sent out on many channels."
Also, Yemen's national English-language newspaper is reporting that a spokesman for Yemen's Islamic Jihad, the Qaeda affiliate that claimed credit for last week's American embassy bombing in Sa'naa, is now publicly threatening to attack foreigners and high government officials if American and British diplomats do not leave the country.
Mr. bin Laden has sought to influence democratic elections in the past. On March 11, 2004, Al Qaeda carried out a series of bombings on Madrid commuter trains. Three days later, the opposition and anti-Iraq war Socialist Workers Party was voted into power.
In the week before the 2004 American presidential election, Mr. bin Laden recorded a video message to the American people promising repercussions if President Bush were re-elected. In later messages, Al Qaeda's leader claimed credit for helping elect Mr. Bush in 2004. Last year in Pakistan, Qaeda assassins claimed the life of Benazir Bhutto, a former prime minister who returned to her native country in a bid for re-election.
"There is an expectation that Al Qaeda will try to influence the November elections by attempting attacks globally," a former Bush and Clinton White House counterterrorism official, Roger Cressey, said yesterday.
Mr. Cressey said Al Qaeda lacks the capability to pull off an attack in the continental United States, however. "It would likely be a higher Al Qaeda tempo of attacks against U.S. and allied targets abroad," he said.
At a talk at the Washington Institute for Near East Affairs on August 12, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats said he expected to see more threat reporting on Al Qaeda as America approaches the November elections.
The terrorist attack on the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad on Saturday was a particular blow to the allied effort against Al Qaeda. The hotel's lobby in recent years served as a meeting place for the CIA and Pakistanis who would not risk being seen at the American Embassy. The bombing, which targeted one of the most heavily fortified locations in Pakistan's capital, will likely claim close to 100 lives after the dead are pulled from the rubble.
President Zardari, who had just given his first major address as Pakistan's head of state, on fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda, was the target of Saturday's attack, the vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, said.
"He was expected to attend the iftar dinner at the Marriott," Mr. Gartenstein-Ross said "Think of the symbolic value if they were able to kill Zardari after his first address as president of Pakistan in a speech announcing his fight against the terrorists. The symbolic effect of the attack on the same day would be devastating."
An adviser to Senator McCain and a former director of central intelligence under President Clinton, James Woolsey, said Al Qaeda has a "history of doing three things at least related to elections. One is to attack before elections, such as in 2004 in Spain, and of course the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. They also have a history of attacks when new leaders take over, like Gordon Brown in Britain and the new leader in Pakistan, with the attack over the weekend. Also Al Qaeda sends messages to populations in elections. You really don't know which one of these they are going to implement."
Earlier this summer, another McCain campaign official mused in an interview that an attack could benefit his candidate in the polls. But whether that statement is true is unclear: At the Republican National Convention this month, Mr. McCain praised the president's counterterrorism policies for preventing an attack in America since September 11, 2001. The Bush administration has deliberately refrained from pointing to this success in light of the many plots that the president has said have been aborted on American soil since September 11.
The deputy communications director for the McCain campaign, Michael Goldfarb, said: "There is no doubt that Al Qaeda is still dangerous and still desires to strike at America and our allies. But Americans will not be intimidated and their votes will not be swayed by terror."
A spokeswoman for the Obama campaign, Wendy Morigi, said, "Last week's attacks demonstrate the grave and urgent threat that Al Qaeda and its affiliates pose to the United States and the security of all nations. As Senator Obama has said for some time, we must refocus our efforts on defeating Al Qaeda around the world."
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In video, Al Qaeda vows more U.S. attacks
Story Highlights
In video, adviser to Taliban leader says Osama bin Laden is alive and well
Speaker in video posted on al Jazeera says "major, large-scale attacks" to come
Video is meant to mark the seventh anniversary of the September 11 attacks
(CNN) -- In a video marking the seventh anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, al Qaeda's top leader in Afghanistan vows more "large-scale" attacks against the United States and its allies.
In another segment, the personal adviser to Taliban leader Mullah Omar says al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is alive and well. Al Qaeda leaders featured on the video promise more violence against their enemies.
"We inform the forces of the Cross and their apostate agents that the Mujahedeen's policy in the coming stage, God permitting, is going to be more major, large-scale attacks like the Kandahar prison operation, the Nuristan raid, the Sarobi ambush and Khost airport operation in which approximately 50 Americans and 100 apostates were killed and four helicopters were hit and destroyed," Mustafa Abu al-Yazid says.
CNN could not independently verify the authenticity of the video posted on jihadi Web sites, purportedly by al Qaeda's video production arm, As Sahab.
The well-being of bin Laden, and the possibility of his demise, are frequently in question. But in the video, Mullah Mohammed Hassan Rahmani, adviser to Mullah Omar, says, "Sheikh Osama is healthy and well, and we ask God to protect him, and we pray to God to preserve him and foil the attempts if the enemies of the Nation to reach him."
Mullah Omar has been on the U.S. military's most-wanted list since a U.S.-led coalition ousted the Taliban rulers from Afghanistan in 2001.
Also on the video is a reading from the will of Saeed al Ghamdi, one of the 19 hijackers involved in the September 11 suicide missions in New York and Washington. He was believed to have been aboard United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in rural Pennsylvania. Officials said his passport was recovered from the crash site.
The documentary-style video is nearly 1½ hours long. Among the other speakers are Abu Ayyub al-Masri, also known as Hamza al-Muhajjer, the head of al Qaeda in Iraq; and Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's second-in-command.
Video excerpts were first released by the Arab news network al-Jazeera on September 8. Availability of the entire video was delayed by technical problems, according to terrorism analyst and CNN contributor Laura Mansfield
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2 Terrorism Suspects Arrested on KLM Flight
By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, September 26, 2008; 6:10 AM
BERLIN, Sept. 26 -- Two Somali-born men who had left notes saying they were willing to sacrifice themselves for "jihad" were pulled off a flight at the Cologne airport this morning, moments before it was scheduled to depart for Amsterdam, German authorities said.
The pair had been under surveillance for months, the German newspaper Bild reported, citing unnamed police officials. Police officials said they moved to arrest the men after searching their apartments and finding notes suggesting that they intended to take part in a terrorist attack.
Authorities identified the men as a 23-year-old Somali national and a 24-year-old German citizen born in Mogadishu. Officials did not immediately release their names or give other details of where they had been living prior to their arrests.
"They are under suspicion of intending to participate in the jihad and in possible attacks," Frank Scheulen, a spokesman for police in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, told German television. "Farewell letters were written."
Police said they boarded KLM Flight 1804 at 06:55 am local time, 10 minutes before it was scheduled to depart for Amsterdam. A KLM spokesman said all passengers were removed from the plane until police could locate luggage belonging to the suspects. The flight was allowed to depart after an 80-minute delay, airport officials said.
German counterterrorism officials have warned of a heightened risk of terrorism in the country, citing threats by Islamist groups over the presence of German troops in Afghanistan. On Thursday, the federal prosecutor's office issued a public alert seeking information on the whereabouts of two terrorist suspects believed to have returned to Germany after attending militant training camps in Pakistan. The two suspects, Eric Breininger, 21, and Houssain al Malla, 23, are suspected of involvement with a group called the Islamic Jihad Union that was accused of planning attacks against U.S. targets in Germany a year ago.
German federal police officials said, however, that they did not believe the suspects named in the alert were connected with the men arrested at the Cologne airport on Friday.
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:x :x :x :x :x :x :x :x :x :x
Airport security in America is a sham—“security theater” designed to make travelers feel better and catch stupid terrorists. Smart ones can get through security with fake boarding passes and all manner of prohibited items—as our correspondent did with ease.
by Jeffrey Goldberg
The Things He Carried
If I were a terrorist, and I’m not, but if I were a terrorist—a frosty, tough-like-Chuck-Norris terrorist, say a C-title jihadist with Hezbollah or, more likely, a donkey-work operative with the Judean People’s Front—I would not do what I did in the bathroom of the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport, which was to place myself in front of a sink in open view of the male American flying public and ostentatiously rip up a sheaf of counterfeit boarding passes that had been created for me by a frenetic and acerbic security expert named Bruce Schneier. He had made these boarding passes in his sophisticated underground forgery works, which consists of a Sony Vaio laptop and an HP LaserJet printer, in order to prove that the Transportation Security Administration, which is meant to protect American aviation from al-Qaeda, represents an egregious waste of tax dollars, dollars that could otherwise be used to catch terrorists before they arrive at the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport, by which time it is, generally speaking, too late.
I could have ripped up these counterfeit boarding passes in the privacy of a toilet stall, but I chose not to, partly because this was the renowned Senator Larry Craig Memorial Wide-Stance Bathroom, and since the commencement of the Global War on Terror this particular bathroom has been patrolled by security officials trying to protect it from gay sex, and partly because I wanted to see whether my fellow passengers would report me to the TSA for acting suspiciously in a public bathroom. No one did, thus thwarting, yet again, my plans to get arrested, or at least be the recipient of a thorough sweating by the FBI, for dubious behavior in a large American airport. Suspicious that the measures put in place after the attacks of September 11 to prevent further such attacks are almost entirely for show—security theater is the term of art—I have for some time now been testing, in modest ways, their effectiveness. Because the TSA’s security regimen seems to be mainly thing-based—most of its 44,500 airport officers are assigned to truffle through carry-on bags for things like guns, bombs, three-ounce tubes of anthrax, Crest toothpaste, nail clippers, Snapple, and so on—I focused my efforts on bringing bad things through security in many different airports, primarily my home airport, Washington’s Reagan National, the one situated approximately 17 feet from the Pentagon, but also in Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Chicago, and at the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport (which is where I came closest to arousing at least a modest level of suspicion, receiving a symbolic pat-down—all frisks that avoid the sensitive regions are by definition symbolic—and one question about the presence of a Leatherman Multi-Tool in my pocket; said Leatherman was confiscated and is now, I hope, living with the loving family of a TSA employee). And because I have a fair amount of experience reporting on terrorists, and because terrorist groups produce large quantities of branded knickknacks, I’ve amassed an inspiring collection of al-Qaeda T-shirts, Islamic Jihad flags, Hezbollah videotapes, and inflatable Yasir Arafat dolls (really). All these things I’ve carried with me through airports across the country. I’ve also carried, at various times: pocketknives, matches from hotels in Beirut and Peshawar, dust masks, lengths of rope, cigarette lighters, nail clippers, eight-ounce tubes of toothpaste (in my front pocket), bottles of Fiji Water (which is foreign), and, of course, box cutters. I was selected for secondary screening four times—out of dozens of passages through security checkpoints—during this extended experiment. At one screening, I was relieved of a pair of nail clippers; during another, a can of shaving cream.
During one secondary inspection, at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, I was wearing under my shirt a spectacular, only-in-America device called a “Beerbelly,” a neoprene sling that holds a polyurethane bladder and drinking tube. The Beerbelly, designed originally to sneak alcohol—up to 80 ounces—into football games, can quite obviously be used to sneak up to 80 ounces of liquid through airport security. (The company that manufactures the Beerbelly also makes something called a “Winerack,” a bra that holds up to 25 ounces of booze and is recommended, according to the company’s Web site, for PTA meetings.) My Beerbelly, which fit comfortably over my beer belly, contained two cans’ worth of Bud Light at the time of the inspection. It went undetected. The eight-ounce bottle of water in my carry-on bag, however, was seized by the federal government.
On another occasion, at LaGuardia, in New York, the transportation-security officer in charge of my secondary screening emptied my carry-on bag of nearly everything it contained, including a yellow, three-foot-by-four-foot Hezbollah flag, purchased at a Hezbollah gift shop in south Lebanon. The flag features, as its charming main image, an upraised fist clutching an AK-47 automatic rifle. Atop the rifle is a line of Arabic writing that reads Then surely the party of God are they who will be triumphant. The officer took the flag and spread it out on the inspection table. She finished her inspection, gave me back my flag, and told me I could go. I said, “That’s a Hezbollah flag.” She said, “Uh-huh.” Not “Uh-huh, I’ve been trained to recognize the symbols of anti-American terror groups, but after careful inspection of your physical person, your behavior, and your last name, I’ve come to the conclusion that you are not a Bekaa Valley–trained threat to the United States commercial aviation system,” but “Uh-huh, I’m going on break, why are you talking to me?”
In Minneapolis, I littered my carry-on with many of my prohibited items, and also an Osama bin Laden, Hero of Islam T-shirt, which often gets a rise out of people who see it. This day, however, would feature a different sort of experiment, designed to prove not only that the TSA often cannot find anything on you or in your carry-on, but that it has no actual idea who you are, despite the government’s effort to build a comprehensive “no-fly” list. A no-fly list would be a good idea if it worked; Bruce Schneier’s homemade boarding passes were about to prove that it doesn’t. Schneier is the TSA’s most relentless, and effective, critic; the TSA director, Kip Hawley, told me he respects Schneier’s opinions, though Schneier quite clearly makes his life miserable.
“The whole system is designed to catch stupid terrorists,” Schneier told me. A smart terrorist, he says, won’t try to bring a knife aboard a plane, as I had been doing; he’ll make his own, in the airplane bathroom. Schneier told me the recipe: “Get some steel epoxy glue at a hardware store. It comes in two tubes, one with steel dust and then a hardener. You make the mold by folding a piece of cardboard in two, and then you mix the two tubes together. You can use a metal spoon for the handle. It hardens in 15 minutes.”
As we stood at an airport Starbucks, Schneier spread before me a batch of fabricated boarding passes for Northwest Airlines flight 1714, scheduled to depart at 2:20 p.m. and arrive at Reagan National at 5:47 p.m. He had taken the liberty of upgrading us to first class, and had even granted me “Platinum/Elite Plus” status, which was gracious of him. This status would allow us to skip the ranks of hoi-polloi flyers and join the expedited line, which is my preference, because those knotty, teeming security lines are the most dangerous places in airports: terrorists could paralyze U.S. aviation merely by detonating a bomb at any security checkpoint, all of which are, of course, entirely unsecured. (I once asked Michael Chertoff, the secretary of Homeland Security, about this. “We actually ultimately do have a vision of trying to move the security checkpoint away from the gate, deeper into the airport itself, but there’s always going to be some place that people congregate. So if you’re asking me, is there any way to protect against a person taking a bomb into a crowded location and blowing it up, the answer is no.”)
Schneier and I walked to the security checkpoint. “Counterterrorism in the airport is a show designed to make people feel better,” he said. “Only two things have made flying safer: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.” This assumes, of course, that al-Qaeda will target airplanes for hijacking, or target aviation at all. “We defend against what the terrorists did last week,” Schneier said. He believes that the country would be just as safe as it is today if airport security were rolled back to pre-9/11 levels. “Spend the rest of your money on intelligence, investigations, and emergency response.”
Schneier and I joined the line with our ersatz boarding passes. “Technically we could get arrested for this,” he said, but we judged the risk to be acceptable. We handed our boarding passes and IDs to the security officer, who inspected our driver’s licenses through a loupe, one of those magnifying-glass devices jewelers use for minute examinations of fine detail. This was the moment of maximum peril, not because the boarding passes were flawed, but because the TSA now trains its officers in the science of behavior detection. The SPOT program—“Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques”—was based in part on the work of a psychologist who believes that involuntary facial-muscle movements, including the most fleeting “micro-expressions,” can betray lying or criminality. The training program for behavior-detection officers is one week long. Our facial muscles did not cooperate with the SPOT program, apparently, because the officer chicken-scratched onto our boarding passes what might have been his signature, or the number 4, or the letter y. We took our shoes off and placed our laptops in bins. Schneier took from his bag a 12-ounce container labeled “saline solution.”
“It’s allowed,” he said. Medical supplies, such as saline solution for contact-lens cleaning, don’t fall under the TSA’s three-ounce rule.
“What’s allowed?” I asked. “Saline solution, or bottles labeled saline solution?”
“Bottles labeled saline solution. They won’t check what’s in it, trust me.”
They did not check. As we gathered our belongings, Schneier held up the bottle and said to the nearest security officer, “This is okay, right?” “Yep,” the officer said. “Just have to put it in the tray.”
“Maybe if you lit it on fire, he’d pay attention,” I said, risking arrest for making a joke at airport security. (Later, Schneier would carry two bottles labeled saline solution—24 ounces in total—through security. An officer asked him why he needed two bottles. “Two eyes,” he said. He was allowed to keep the bottles.)
We were in the clear. But what did we prove?
“We proved that the ID triangle is hopeless,” Schneier said.
The ID triangle: before a passenger boards a commercial flight, he interacts with his airline or the government three times—when he purchases his ticket; when he passes through airport security; and finally at the gate, when he presents his boarding pass to an airline agent. It is at the first point of contact, when the ticket is purchased, that a passenger’s name is checked against the government’s no-fly list. It is not checked again, and for this reason, Schneier argued, the process is merely another form of security theater.
“The goal is to make sure that this ID triangle represents one person,” he explained. “Here’s how you get around it. Let’s assume you’re a terrorist and you believe your name is on the watch list.” It’s easy for a terrorist to check whether the government has cottoned on to his existence, Schneier said; he simply has to submit his name online to the new, privately run CLEAR program, which is meant to fast-pass approved travelers through security. If the terrorist is rejected, then he knows he’s on the watch list.
To slip through the only check against the no-fly list, the terrorist uses a stolen credit card to buy a ticket under a fake name. “Then you print a fake boarding pass with your real name on it and go to the airport. You give your real ID, and the fake boarding pass with your real name on it, to security. They’re checking the documents against each other. They’re not checking your name against the no-fly list—that was done on the airline’s computers. Once you’re through security, you rip up the fake boarding pass, and use the real boarding pass that has the name from the stolen credit card. Then you board the plane, because they’re not checking your name against your ID at boarding.”
What if you don’t know how to steal a credit card?
“Then you’re a stupid terrorist and the government will catch you,” he said.
What if you don’t know how to download a PDF of an actual boarding pass and alter it on a home computer?
“Then you’re a stupid terrorist and the government will catch you.”
I couldn’t believe that what Schneier was saying was true—in the national debate over the no-fly list, it is seldom, if ever, mentioned that the no-fly list doesn’t work. “It’s true,” he said. “The gap blows the whole system out of the water.”
This called for a visit to TSA headquarters. The headquarters is located in Pentagon City, just outside Washington. Kip Hawley, the man who runs the agency, is a bluff, amiable fellow who is capable of making a TSA joke. “Do you want three ounces of water?” he asked me.
I raised the subject of the ID triangle, hoping to get a cogent explanation. This is what Hawley said: “The TDC”—that’s “ticket document checker”—“will make a notation on your ticket and that’s something that will follow you all the way through” to the gate.
“But all they do is write a little squiggly mark on the boarding pass,” I said.
“You think you might be able to forge that?” he asked me.
“My handwriting is terrible, but don’t you think someone can forge it?” I asked.
“Well, uh, maybe. Maybe not,” he said.
Aha! I thought. He’s hiding something from me.
“Are you telling me that I don’t know about something that’s going on?” I asked.
“We’re well aware of the scenario you describe. Bruce has been talking about it for two years,” he said, referring to Schneier’s efforts to publicize the gaps in the ID triangle.
“Isn’t it a basic flaw, that you’re checking the no-fly list at the point of purchase, not at the airport?”
He leaned back in his chair.
“What do you do about vulnerabilities?” he asked, rhetorically. “All the time you hear reports and people saying, ‘There’s a vulnerability.’ Well, duh. There are vulnerabilities everywhere, in everything. The question is not ‘Is there a vulnerability?’ It’s ‘What are you doing about it?’”
Well, what are you doing about it?
“There are vulnerabilities where you have limited ways to address it directly. So you have to put other layers around it, other things that will catch them when that vulnerability is breached. This is a universal problem. Somebody will identify a very small thing and drill down and say, ‘I found a vulnerability.’”
In other words, the TSA has no immediate plans to check passengers against the no-fly list at the moment before they board their flight. (Hawley said that boarding passes will eventually be encrypted so the TSA can follow their progress from printer to gate.) Nor does it plan to screen airport employees when they show up for work each day. Pilots—or people dressed as pilots—are screened, as the public knows, but that’s because they enter the airport through the front door. The employees who drive fuel trucks, and make french fries at McDonald’s, and clean airplane bathrooms (to the extent that they’re cleaned anymore) do not pass through magnetometers when they enter the airport, and their possessions are not searched. To me this always seemed to be, well, another “vulnerability.”
“Do you know what you have on the inside of an airport?” Hawley asked me. “You have all the military traveling, you have guns, chemicals, jet fuel. So the idea that we would spend a whole lot of resources putting a perimeter around that, running every worker, 50,000 people, every day, through security—why in the heck would you do that? Because all they have to do is walk through clean and then have someone throw something over a fence.”
I asked about the depth of background screening for airport employees. He said, noncommittally, “It goes reasonably deep.”
So there are, in other words, two classes of people in airports: those whose shoes are inspected for explosives, and those whose aren’t. How, I asked, do you explain that to the public in a way that makes sense?
“Social networks,” he answered. “It’s a very tuned-in workforce. You’re never alone when you’re on or around a plane. ‘What is that guy spending all that time in the cockpit for?’ All airport employees know what normal is.” Hawley did say that TSA employees conduct random ID checks and magnetometer screenings, but he did not say how frequently.
I suppose I’ve seen too many movies, but, really? Social networks? Behavior detection? The TSA budget is almost $7 billion. That money would be better spent on the penetration of al-Qaeda social networks.
As I stood in the bathroom, ripping up boarding passes, waiting for the social network of male bathroom users to report my suspicious behavior, I decided to make myself as nervous as possible. I would try to pass through security with no ID, a fake boarding pass, and an Osama bin Laden T-shirt under my coat. I splashed water on my face to mimic sweat, put on a coat (it was a summer day), hid my driver’s license, and approached security with a bogus boarding pass that Schneier had made for me. I told the document checker at security that I had lost my identification but was hoping I would still be able to make my flight. He said I’d have to speak to a supervisor. The supervisor arrived; he looked smart, unfortunately. I was starting to get genuinely nervous, which I hoped would generate incriminating micro-expressions. “I can’t find my driver’s license,” I said. I showed him my fake boarding pass. “I need to get to Washington quickly,” I added. He asked me if I had any other identification. I showed him a credit card with my name on it, a library card, and a health-insurance card. “Nothing else?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“You should really travel with a second picture ID, you know.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“All right, you can go,” he said, pointing me to the X-ray line. “But let this be a lesson for you.”
The URL for this page is http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200811/airport-security
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**Hope will be what passes for Homeland Security.**
http://hotair.com/archives/2008/11/10/the-return-of-the-wall/
The return of The Wall?
posted at 9:45 am on November 10, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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The New York Times’ Eric Lichtblau takes a look at a potential Attorney General nominee in the nascent Barack Obama administration — and it’s a familiar face. Jamie S. Gorelick may be on Obama’s short list for AG, but she has been a familiar face during the Bush administration, too. Gorelick served under Janet Reno during the Clinton administration and played a critical role in blinding counterterrorism efforts prior to 9/11:
Would bring to the job: A wide-ranging Washington résumé that spans corporate, legal and national security affairs. Ms. Gorelick (pronounced Guh-REH-lick) was the No. 2 official at the Justice Department in the Clinton administration, from 1994 to 1997, and if chosen would be the second woman to be named attorney general, following her former boss, Janet Reno. Ms. Gorelick would also bring corporate experience to an Obama administration at a time of financial crisis.
Is linked to Mr. Obama by: Deep contacts in Democratic circles and a background in civil rights. But Ms. Gorelick backed Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primaries and contributed early on to her campaign, which could work against her as a contender. She contributed $10,000 to Mr. Obama’s presidential political action committee in August, after his nomination was all but assured.
Gorelick would bring corporate experience to an Obama administration — in the same way Rahm Emanuel did. Gorelick was vice chairman at Fannie Mae in the years when the GSE fraudulently reported its income. She got a Friends of Angelo sweetheart mortgage for almost a million dollars in 2003, and is currently under investigation by the department she would run if nominated for AG.
But even without that taint of corruption, Gorelick would signal a return to incompetence and infighting. Gorelick played a major role in keeping counterterrorist and law-enforcement agents from sharing information and “connecting the dots” before 9/11. In a series of judgments at the DoD and at Justice during her tenure in the Clinton administration, Gorelick hamstrung our efforts to find and disarm terrorist infiltrators by discouraging any cooperation between intelligence and enforcement efforts by making “the wall” much more significant than Congress ever intended.
Gorelick wound up serving as a panelist on the 9/11 Commission, but she should have been served a subpoena instead. Two memos from Clinton-appointed US Attorney Mary Jo White made this point crystal clear, as did an explanation from someone involved for years in the counterterrorist effort. Gorelick imposed an unrealistic standard on intelligence gathering that led directly to the 9/11 attacks. As AG, she would have even more power to reimpose those same limitations, and leave us just as blind as we were before those attacks.
Obama ran on “hope and change”, but if Gorelick is what he had in mind, then he sold the US a bill of goods. It would make the second former GSE board member nominated to a high position in his administration, one who already has connections to Countrywide’s corruption and a federal probe into her actions. Gorelick also has failed in developing policies and strategies to keep the nation secure. She would be a disaster as AG, and if she really is on the short list, it shows how clueless Barack Obama is about the threats to this nation.
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Yeah, I remember Gorelick :-P
Forgive my senior moment, but please refresh my memory as to what the GSE is , , ,
If things go right, most of the names in the following piece should go to source information:
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D.C. Watson: Jihadists In America: Their “Inner Struggle” Goes On
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/023450.php#more
D.C. Watson updates his "Misunderstanders of Islam" list:
While the professional protesters masquerading as moderate Islamic lobby groups continue to cry out in anguish as a result of the rabid, (and invented) “Islamophobia” epidemic they claim is sweeping across America and most other Western nations, more misunderstanders of their peaceful and tolerant faith continue to make their way onto this running, yet incomplete slate of Muslims in the United States who have conspired to, or managed to carry out, their “jihad,” and have either been arrested, convicted, are on the run, or are deceased.
It would benefit this nation if American politicians and the American mainstream press considered the well-being of the American people who elect them to office, and who read, watch, and listen to their media product, instead of giving credibility to bullies who have taken over America’s Islamic community and appointed themselves its leaders, and who have made it a common practice to condemn not those who want to see the United States destroyed, but instead to condemn Americans who step up to the plate and confront Islamic jihadists and their supporters.
Thus far, in this arena, politicians and news sources have been a disgrace. The American public deserves better, much better.
It would also benefit this nation if the press and politicians obtained the perspective of Muslims living in the United States who are not associated with organizations such as the Council on American Islamic Relations, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, or the Islamic Society of North America.
And now, those who “struggle”:
Abdel Azim El Siddig: Financing Islamic terrorism (Missouri).
Abdelhaleem Ashqar: Criminal contempt and obstruction of justice for refusing to testify in 2003 before a grand jury investigating the Palestinian militant movement Hamas. Telephone records presented in the case records showed that Ashqar was in contact with Hamas leaders.
Abdikarim Warsame: Weapons and explosives charges. (Missouri)
Abdul Hakim Murad: Conspiring and attempting to bomb 12 airliners.
Abdul Rauf Noormohamed: Providing false terrorism tips to federal agents.
Abdurahman Alamoudi: Financing Islamic terrorism.
Adam Gadahn, convert to Islam: Treason.
Adham Hassoun: Conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim people in a foreign country.
Adnan el-Shukrijumah: Wanted in connection with possible threats against the United States.
Agron Abdullahu: Conspiring to provide weapons to illegal immigrants.
Ahmad Abdelmomen: Aggravated assault, for beating his younger sister, breaking her back, and leaving her wheelchair bound because he was upset about her relationship with a non-Muslim boy. Their parents did not immediately call for medical assistance, believing that the beating was justified. (Michigan)
Ahmad Mustafa: Aiding Islamic terrorists (Missouri).
Ahmad Saad Nasim: Filing a false 'anti-Muslim' hate crime (Arizona).
Ahmed Abdel Sattar: Assisting an Islamic militant imprisoned in the United States with communicating with his followers in Egypt (New York).
Ahmed Barodi: Smuggling bogus passports into Saudi Arabia for the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood.
Ahmed Ibrahim Bilal: Pleaded guilty to conspiracy to aid the Taliban and to federal weapons charges. (Oregon)
Ahmed Mohamed: Teaching and demonstrating the making and use of an expolsive and destructive device, illegal transporting of explosive materials. (South Carolina)
Ahmed Omar Abu Ali: Terror-related charges, plotting to kill a U.S. President (Virginia).
Ahmed Ressam: Plotting to bomb the Los Angeles Airport on the eve of the new millennium.
Ali Abu Kamal: Shooting seven people on the Empire State Building's observation deck, killing one because he wanted to "punish America for supporting Israel."
Ali al-Timimi: Recruiting Islamic terrorists.
Ali Asad Chandia: Providing material support to terrorists or conspiring to do so.
Ali bin Mussalim: Investing funds for Osama bin Laden and Al Qaida.
Ali Hussein Darwiche: Involvement in a cigarette-smuggling ring that sent profits to Hezbollah. (North Carolina)
Ali Khalid Steitiye: Weapons and fraud charges. (Oregon)
Ali Mohamed Bagegni: Financing Islamic terrorism (Missouri).
Ali Warrayat: Aggravated assault and arson. Warrayat, a Muslim and former student at Arizona State, with a Qur'an and a Palestinian flag in his trunk, rammed his car through the doors of an Arizona Home Depot store, drove through the store to the section that stocks the flammable liquids, and sets it ablaze. Why? He was unhappy with his raise. Also noted in police statements was that Warrayat had referred to his religion on several occasions, and that a Qur'an was hanging from the rearview mirror inside his vehicle.
Amir Abdelgani: Seditious conspiracy, bombing conspiracy and attempted bombing.
Amjad Abunar: Arson, reporting a false 'anti-Muslim' hate crime (Texas).
Ayoub Hisham Ahmed: RICO conspiracy (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) in a case involving funneling money obtained through bank fraud to Palestinian territories. (Missouri)
Bassam Hisham Ahmed: RICO conspiracy (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) in a case involving funneling money obtained through bank fraud to Palestinian territories. (Missouri)
Bassem Khafagi: Visa and Bank fraud. Khafagi was a founding member and president of the Islamic Assembly of North America (IANA), an organization under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice for terrorism-related activities. He was also a community relations director for CAIR.
Basel Saleh Salem Kassem: Charged with making a threat on a public conveyance, screaming that he had a bomb in his bag after getting into an argument with someone on an Amtrak train (Virginia).
Basman Elashi: Conspiracy, money laundering and dealing in property of a terrorist (Texas).
Bayan Elashi: Conspiracy, money laundering and dealing in property of a terrorist (Texas).
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Chawki Hammoud: Involvement in a cigarette-smuggling ring that sent profits to Hezbollah. (North Carolina)
Christopher Paul, aka Abdul Malek, or Abdul Malik: Providing material support to terrorists, conspiracy to provide support to terrorists, conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction. (Ohio)
Clement Hampton-El: Seditious conspiracy, bombing conspiracy and attempted bombing (New York).
Dawud Salahuddin, convert to Islam: Murder of a critic of Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, saying the killing was "an act of war and a religious duty." Fled to Iran after the murder he committed (Bethesda, Maryland).
Derrick Shareef, aka Talib Abu Salam Ibn Shareef: Attempting to damage or destroy a building by fire or explosion, attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction against persons or property in the U.S.
Donald T. Surratt, convert to Islam: Conspiracy, terror support.
Dritan Duka: Conspiring to kill uniformed military personnel.
Earnest James Ujaama: Pleaded guilty of conspiring to supply goods and services to the Taliban.
Ehsanul Sadequee: Conspiring to provide and providing material support to terrorists. (Georgia)
Elbaneh Jaber: Pleaded guilty to charges of providing material support to al Qaeda. (New York)
El-Sayyid Nosair: Seditious conspiracy, murder in aid of racketeering, attempted murder in aid of racketeering, attempted murder of a postal police officer, use of a firearm in the commission of a murder.
Eljvir Duka: Conspiring to kill uniformed military personnel.
Emadeddin Z. Muntasser: Conspiracy to defraud the United States, tax violations, and making false statements by lying to the government to win tax-exempt status for Care International, an Islamic charity, and then using the nonprofit to distribute publications promoting jihad, and to support Muslim militants overseas. (Boston, Mass.)
Eman Zaeri: Threatening to blow up a local bus with a grenade in Las Vegas.
Fadil Abdelghani: Seditious conspiracy, bombing conspiracy, attempted
bombing. (New York).
Fadl Mohammad Maatouk: Conspiring to provide support to a terrorist organization. (Florida)
Faisal Al-Salmi: Lying to the FBI when he denied knowing 9/11 hijacker, murderer Hani Hanjour, who flew American Airlines flight 77 into the Pentagon. (Faisal Al-Salmi and Hani Hanjour were registered at the same time to use a flight simulator at a Phoenix flight school.)
Fares Khallafalla: Seditious conspiracy, bombing conspiracy and attempted bombing. (New York).
Imam Fawaz Damra: Obtaining U.S. citizenship by providing false information, concealing his ties to designated Islamic terror organizations (Ohio).
Fawzi Assi: Attempting to provide support to a terrorist organization.
Faysal Galab: Contributing "funds, goods and services to and for the benefit of Osama bin Laden and al Qaida.
Ghandi Hisham Ahmed: RICO conspiracy (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) in a case involving funneling money obtained through bank fraud to Palestinian territories. (Missouri)
Ghassan Elashi: Conspiracy, money laundering and dealing in property of a terrorist (Texas).
Gregory Vernon Patterson, convert to Islam: Plotting terrorist attacks against synagogues, the Israeli Consulate and military facilities in Los Angeles.
Habis Abdullah Al-Saoub: Seditious conspiracy, supplying goods to the Taliban. (Deceased).
Haider Mohammed: While in a bar in Palm Springs, began to yell that he was going to “kill all Jews."
Hamid Hayat: Providing material support to terrorists, lying to the FBI.
Hammad Abdur-Raheem: Providing material support to a known terrorist organization.
Hammad Riaz Samana: Plotting terrorist attacks against synagogues, the Israeli Consulate and military facilities in Los Angeles.
Hasan Akbar: Murder of fellow U.S. soldiers.
Hassan Abujihaad, fka Paul R. Hall, former U.S. Sailor: Supporting terrorism with intent to kill U.S. citizens, transmitting classified information to unauthorized people.
Hassan Moussa Makki: Pleaded guilty to racketeering charges and providing material support to Hezbollah. (North Carolina, Michigan)
Hazim Elashi: Conspiracy, money laundering and dealing in property of a terrorist. (Texas).
Hesham Mohamed Hadayet: With a .45 caliber firearm, went on a shooting spree at the Los Angeles International Airport while standing in line at the ticket counter of Israel's El Al Airlines, killing two people, including a 20-year-old unarmed woman. He also wounded four others, shooting an unarmed 61-year-old woman, pistol whipping an unarmed man, and stabbing a security guard with a six inch long knife he was also carrying. Side note: The wife of the murderer blamed the United States and its "hate for Islam" for the attack, saying that her spouse was a "victim of injustice."
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Hesham Mohamed Hadayet: With a .45 caliber firearm, went on a shooting spree at the Los Angeles International Airport while standing in line at the ticket counter of Israel's El Al Airlines, killing two people, including a 20-year-old unarmed woman. He also wounded four others, shooting an unarmed 61-year-old woman, pistol whipping an unarmed man, and stabbing a security guard with a six inch long knife he was also carrying. Side note: The wife of the murderer blamed the United States and its "hate for Islam" for the attack, saying that her spouse was a "victim of injustice."
target="_blank">Hussein Ali Nure: Weapons and explosives charges. (Missouri)
Ibrahim Abu Mezer: Plotting to bomb New York subways.
Ibrahim Ahmed, Nashville, TN cab driver: Assault and attempted homicide, when after an argument with two non-Muslim passengers over religion, he attempted to run them over as they walked away from the taxi. He succeeded in critically injuring one.
Ibraham Ahmed al-Hamdi: "Virginia Jihad Network", weapons and explosives violations, carrying a rocket-propelled grenade in furtherance of a conspiracy to undertake a military operation against India. (Virginia).
Ibrahim A. Elgabrowny: Seditious conspiracy; assault of a Federal agent and city police detective. (New York).
Ihsan Elashyi: Illegal sales of computer equipment to known Islamic terror sponsoring states (Texas).
Ismail Yassin Mohamed while driving a stolen black Chevy Cavalier, he began intentionally ramming a blue and white taxi cab for several blocks until the cab crashed. The passenger inside the cab was critically injured. Mohamed then took off in the Cavalier and crashed it into a business. He then got out of the car and stole a school van. The driver of the van managed to get an 8-year-old boy out of the vehicle before Mohamed drove off with it. Mohamed crashed the van into another group of cars. Authorities said Mohamed was trying steal another car when witnesses pinned him down and waited for police. When asked why he did this, Mohamed replied..."Allah made me do it." Police ruled out road rage as a motive (Minneapolis).
Iyman Faris: Providing material support and resources to al Qaida (Virginia).
Imam Jamil Al-Amin: Murder, felony murder, aggravated assault on a police officer, obstructing a law enforcement officer, impersonating an officer, and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.
Jeffrey Leon Battle: Pleaded guilty to conspiracy to levy war against the United States. (Oregon)
John Muhammad, sniper: Murdering Americans by sniper fire.
John Walker Lindh, convert to Islam: Providing support to the Taliban.
Jose Padilla/aka Abdullah al-Muhajir: Terrorism conspiracy.
Kevin James, convert to Islam: Plotting terrorist attacks against synagogues, the Israeli Consulate and military facilities in Los Angeles.
Karim Moussaoui: Possession or receiving of a firearm by a person admitted to the United States under a non-immigrant visa.
Kifah Jayoussi: Conspiring to provide material support and resources for terrorism and conspiracy to kill, kidnap, maim or injure people or damage property in a foreign country.
Lafi Khalil: Plotting to bomb New York subways.
Levar Haney Washington, convert to Islam: Plotting terrorist attacks against synagogues, the Israeli Consulate and military facilities in Los Angeles.
target="_blank">Maher Hawash: Conspiracy to supply services to the Taliban.
target="_blank">Mahmet M. Kadayifci: First and second-degree charges of falsely reporting an incident, and using a laptop to place the three bomb threats.
Mahmoud Kourani: Supporting the Islamic terror organization, Hezbollah, through fund-raising.
Mahmud Faruq Brent: Conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization.
Mandhai Jokhan: Attempting to blow up nuclear power plants in Florida.
Masoud Ahmad Kahn: Conspiracy to levy war against the United States, providing support to the Taliban.
Mazhar Tabesh: Arson, reporting a false 'anti-Muslim' hate crime (Utah).
Michael Julius Ford, convert to Islam: Opened fire at a warehouse in Denver, Colorado, killing one and injuring four others because he was "teased for being a Muslim and couldn't take it anymore."
Mir Aimal Kasi: Murdering two CIA agents, and wounding three others with an assault rifle near CIA headquarters. (Virginia)
Mirza Akram: Arson, reporting a false 'anti-Muslim' hate crime (Washington state).
Mohamad Atef Darwiche: Involvement in a cigarette-smuggling ring that sent profits to Hezbollah. (North Carolina)
target="_blank">Mohamad Fouad Abdallah: Sending anti-Semitic e-mails threatening rape and death to conservative TV commentator and blogger Debbie Schlussel. (Michigan)
Mohamad Ibrahim Shnewer: Conspiring to kill uniformed military personnel.
target="_blank">Mohamed Judeh: Weapons and explosives charges. (Missouri)
Mohamed Shorbagi: Pleaded guilty in federal court to providing material support to Hamas with donations through the Holy Land Foundation. (Georgia)
Mohammed Ali Alayed: After experiencing a religious awakening, he murdered his Jewish friend by slashing his throat.
Mohammed Al Hassan al-Moayad: Attempting to fund terrorist organizations (New York).
Mohammed Badwan: RICO conspiracy (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) in a case involving funneling money obtained through bank fraud to Palestinian territories. (Missouri)
Mohammed Hammoud: Providing material support for Hezbollah (North Carolina).
Mohammed Junair Babar: Pleaded guilty to five counts of conspiring to provide material support to Al Qaeda. (New York)
Mohammed Khalil Ghali: Conspiracy to commit offenses against the U.S.
Mohammed Mohsen Yahya Zayed: Conspiring to provide material support to the al-Qaeda and Hamas terrorist groups.
Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar: Nine counts of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to cause bodily injury after plowing a sport utility vehicle into a crowd of pedestrians, saying he wanted to "spread the will of Allah" (North Carolina).
Mohammed Saleh: Seditious conspiracy, bombing conspiracy and attempted bombing. (New York).
Mohammed Yousry: Providing material aid to terrorism and conspiring to deceive the government.
Mousa Abuelawi: Weapons and explosives charges. (Missouri)
Mubarak Hamed: Financing Islamic terrorism (Missouri).
Muhamed Mubayyid: Making false statements to the FBI, conspiracy to defraud the United States, tax violations, and making false statements by lying to the government to win tax-exempt status for Care International, an Islamic charity, and then using the nonprofit to distribute publications promoting jihad, and to support Muslim militants overseas. (Boston, Mass.)
Muhammed Aatique: Commencing a military expedition against a friendly nation, and using and discharging a firearm in relation to a crime of violence.
Muhammad Ibrahim Bilal: Conspiring to help al Qaeda and the Taliban. (Oregon)
target="_blank">Muhammad Salah: Obstruction of justice for lying under oath on a written questionnaire involving the shooting death in Israel of an American teenager, David Boim, who was killed by Hamas in 1996 while standing at a bus stop.
Mukhtar al-Bakri: Providing material support to al Qaeda.
Muthanna Al-Hanooti: Conspiracy to act as an unregistered agent of a foreign country, illegally purchasing Iraqi oil and lying to authorities after arranging a visit to Baghdad by three Democratic U.S. congressmen financed by Saddam Hussein's intelligence agency in the run-up to the Iraq war.
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GSE= Government Sponsored Enterprise
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http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2008/11/16/20081116scrutiny1116.html
Ariz. Muslim leaders face increased FBI scrutiny
Monitoring grew after charity probe, 2 incidents
by Sean Holstege and Dennis Wagner - Nov. 16, 2008 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic
The FBI has sharpened its scrutiny of some Phoenix-area Muslim leaders because of their links to two controversial incidents and a federal probe into the financing of terrorist groups.
No Arizonan has been accused of supporting terrorist groups or actions. However, a Mesa man was charged with lying to the FBI during the financing investigation.
The events that triggered the stepped-up scrutiny were the federal probe into a Muslim charity accused of funneling money to the Palestinian group Hamas; a target-shooting episode in Phoenix this year involving a large group of Muslim men and boys firing hundreds of rounds from AK-47s and other guns; and the high-profile removal in 2006 of six Arizona-bound imams from a jetliner after passengers and crew complained of their behavior.
Although some Islamic leaders say they understand the scrutiny, they also view it as another sign that innocent Muslims unjustly fall under suspicion because of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
"Whoever did Sept. 11, go after them and see who they are. I'm not going to pay for them. I'm not going to be guilty," said Marwan Sadeddin, one of the Valley imams who sued US Airways after being removed from a jetliner in Minneapolis. Like the others, he was questioned by FBI agents after the incident, in addition to being questioned about the arrested Mesa man.
The FBI is monitoring the family and community ties among Valley residents involved in the jetliner, shooting and charity probes, said John Lewis, who runs the FBI's Arizona office.
"All of these things come on our scope," said Lewis, the agency's former head of counterterrorism operations.
The FBI routinely watches communities and groups that show patterns of radicalism seen in terrorism cases in the U.S. and Europe; those include radical Islamic theology, anti-Western political rhetoric and fundraising tied to terrorist groups.
Lewis declined to discuss any details of the agency's monitoring activities.
The only Arizonan arrested by the FBI is Akram Musa Abdallah of Mesa. He was indicted by a grand jury in August on one count of lying to FBI agents. The government contended in court documents that Abdallah falsely told agents he had not raised money in the 1990s for the Holy Land Foundation, a Muslim charity that President Bush shut down in 2001.
Five founders of the Texas-based charity are on trial in Dallas on charges of steering $12 million to Hamas after the U.S. declared it a terrorist group.
M. Zuhdi Jasser, a Phoenix physician and Muslim who founded an organization to counter radical Islamic teachings, said Abdallah's arrest, the target-shooting episode and what he says are the imams' extreme views bear vigilance.
"You can't help wonder where this is going," he added.
Target shooting
Shortly before noon on a sunny Sunday in March, two Toyota SUVs rolled to a stop along a dirt road in north Phoenix.
About 20 young Muslim males climbed out, armed with assault rifles, a shotgun, a sniper rifle and handguns. The location near Happy Valley Road and 51st Avenue is a desert recreation site for off-road motorists, hikers and bikers, dozens of whom were enjoying the spring-like weather.
For more than an hour, the shooters blasted away at a granite rock and empty cans in front of a hill.
Officials estimate the fusillade totaled 500 to 1,000 rounds. Some shooters left before police arrived and detained 10 adults and five boys, including an 11-year-old.
The young men and boys told officers the weapons belonged to their parents. They said they were not aware it was illegal to use firearms in the residential area.
Six were arrested and charged with felony weapons violations in Maricopa County Superior Court. Among them were the 20- and 21-year-old sons of two imams at Phoenix-area mosques, as well as the 20-year-old son of Abdallah.
Phoenix police then notified the Arizona Counter Terrorism Center, a clearinghouse for intelligence, and the case was referred to the FBI, Lewis confirmed. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was called to trace the guns, its Arizona chief said.
Soliman Saadeldin, brother of one of the imams on the jetliner and a board member at the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix, was not surprised by the reaction.
"Twenty Muslims? Of course the FBI, the CIA and the White House would be worried," Saadeldin said.
Valley Islamic leaders were furious at the youngsters, he added, knowing how the incident might be perceived.
"I'm one of those who got mad at them. (But) they went over there just to have fun shooting. ... It's showing off more than anything else," Saadeldin said.
He described the target shooting as merely bad judgment by a group of young guys out for a good time.
The Abdallah case
The FBI's scrutiny of Abdallah came to light in January 2007, when agents raided his Mesa house and loaded what a neighbor said was two vans full of evidence.
Court records show that Abdallah, a 54-year-old Palestinian, denied during interrogation that he had been a fundraiser for the Holy Land Foundation during the 1990s, when the Islamic charity could still legally receive donations.
At the time of the raid, federal investigators were pursuing a criminal case against the foundation based on allegations that it had channeled money to Palestinian terrorists. The organization had been banned after the 9/11 attacks.
The Abdallah case points to the FBI's continued interest in Arizonans who have raised money for any charity suspected of supporting militant groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah.
For many years, several mosques in Phoenix and Tucson legally raised money for the Holy Land Foundation, which was the largest Muslim charity in the United States.
Islamic civil-rights groups argue that Muslim Americans donated to the charities to support hospitals and orphanages in the West Bank and Gaza. Although Hamas and Hezbollah have organized attacks against Israeli civilians, their humanitarian missions are central to Palestinians' fight for survival, civil-rights groups say.
The federal government charged the foundation's leaders with raising $12 million for Hamas. The first trial in Dallas ended in October 2007 with a deadlocked jury, a stunning setback for the government's biggest-ever terrorism financing case. A new trial has gone to the jury.
Abdallah is not a witness or defendant in that case. But as the FBI looked into Holy Land Foundation contributions, he was indicted in August on one count of lying about the fundraising to federal agents. An FBI tactical squad swarmed into a northwest Phoenix cafe to arrest him. Abdallah pleaded not guilty and was released without bail. No trial date has been set.
Abdallah, a naturalized citizen who arrived in the country in the late 1970s, did not return calls.
His 20-year-old son, Saiaf, is one of the half-dozen suspects facing felony charges from the target shooting. The younger Abdallah declined to comment except to say, "In the past five to six years, Muslims have been falsely accused of many things."
Controversial imams
The saga of the six traveling imams touched off a national controversy and attracted federal scrutiny. Much of the focus has been on the group's spokesman, Omar Shahin.
Shahin, who lives in Phoenix and presides over the North American Imams Foundation, led the Arizona delegation of six imams to its conference in Minneapolis in 2006. After boarding the return flight to Phoenix, passengers and crew reported that the men chanted loudly to Allah and spoke angrily about President Bush and America's war in Iraq.
All six imams were handcuffed and later interrogated, then released with no charges. US Airways banned the men from future flights.
Shahin led a news conference to condemn prejudice against Muslims. The imams later sued the airline, airport police and an FBI agent, claiming they had been degraded and humiliated unlawfully. US Airways officials have said they acted appropriately. The lawsuit is ongoing.
Shahin's involvement was one factor that drew the FBI's attention to the case and intensified its interest in Muslims' activities in Arizona.
A strident scholar of Islamic law and prolific charity fundraiser, the 47-year-old Shahin had been under the FBI's microscope before but has never been accused of wrongdoing.
In the late 1980s, Shahin served as imam at the Islamic Center of Tucson, where he headed a Muslim youth group. The mosque was a hub for adherents to the radical Wahhabi school of Islam, some of whom later became important aides to Osama bin Laden in the al-Qaida terrorist group.
Weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Shahin, a Jordanian-born naturalized citizen, said he did not believe Muslims were responsible for destroying the World Trade Center and questioned the accuracy of the FBI's list of hijackers.
While in Tucson, Shahin raised money for the Holy Land Foundation before the group was outlawed. He also was a fundraiser for the Illinois-based KindHearts Foundation, which the government shut down last year for alleged support of Hamas.
According to tax records, Shahin was a paid employee of a third charity, the Michigan-based Life and Relief Development Inc. In September 2006, FBI counter-terrorism agents seized $134,000 in cash from the home of the charity's founder as part of a fraud case related to the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal. The charity remains open.
Shahin has served as a Muslim community liaison with the FBI and the Phoenix police. A book released by Shahin last year advocated that Muslims living in Western society follow a strict version of conservative Sharia law.
"A Muslim must try his best to abide by the rulings of Sharia whenever possible as much as he can. He should not allow himself to be liable to those western laws that contradict the clear-cut Islamic rulings," Shahin wrote.
Throughout the book, Shahin quotes an extremist Islamic scholar who studied under the man widely credited with inspiring al-Qaida. The scholar was a speaker at Holy Land Foundation events, prosecutors in the Dallas case said in court this year. They showed jurors photos of the man with Hamas and Hezbollah leaders and in videos preaching to kill Jews.
Shahin declined to comment in detail on his writings, the jetliner incident or the fundraising case. He is the father of one of the young men arrested in the Phoenix target shooting, Oday Shahin, 20. Another imam stopped in Minneapolis, Mahmoud Sulaiman, 51, a Syrian native, also has a son who was at the scene of the target shooting but was not arrested, a Phoenix police report stated.
Shahin and his son share other connections with people involved in events that drew the FBI's interest. Omar and Oday Shahin work with a third imam from the plane, Didmar Faja, a 28-year-old Albanian, at a conservative Islamic school in south Phoenix. Saiaf Abdallah, son of Akram Abdallah, accused of lying to the FBI, also works there, and his mother is a board member.
Shahin declined to comment except to say that his son's target-shooting arrest is "no big deal" and to caution against drawing unfair conclusions. "All I want to say is there is no connection between these things."
Civil libertarians, Muslim advocates and Valley imams all point out that even extreme political views don't equate to potential violence.
Marwan Sadeddin said the nation is teeming with Americans who hate President Bush's policies. So why can't he despise U.S. support for Israel, condemn terrorism and love America at the same time?
"The foreign policy is wrong," Sadeddin said. "That's my personal opinion. That doesn't mean I'm going to try to change it by force. I'm using my constitutional right to think the way I like."
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***The U.S. military expects to have 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by 2011 trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe, according to Pentagon officials***
If Bush was doing this the left would be going nuts.
"or other domestic catastrophe" like?
cynical: maybe this is in recognition that we will weaken our abilities overseas so that terrorism is more likely to come here now that BO is weak.
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Please read the entire article before pointing the finger at the incoming administration:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/30/AR2008113002217_pf.html
The long-planned shift in the Defense Department's role in homeland security was recently backed with funding and troop commitments after years of prodding by Congress and outside experts, defense analysts said.
But the Bush administration and some in Congress have pushed for a heightened homeland military role since the middle of this decade, saying the greatest domestic threat is terrorists exploiting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction
In late 2007, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England signed a directive approving more than $556 million over five years to set up the three response teams, known as CBRNE Consequence Management Response Forces.
What will happen to Posse Comitatus?
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Haven't read the article but what Mig says here resonates with my sense of this issue.
I would add a point that is very important to me: As I remember this issue, the Dems often posture militantly on this subject but quite often it is advocated from a "Flee the world and hide and home" emotional center.
Regardless, the facts are the facts-- this IS something for which we need to dial up.
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Speak of the devil , , ,
Panel warns biological attack likely by 2013
By PAMELA HESS, Associated Press Writer Pamela Hess, Associated Press Writer 31 mins ago
WASHINGTON – The United States can expect a terrorist attack using nuclear or more likely biological weapons before 2013, reports a bipartisan commission in a study being briefed Tuesday to Vice President-elect Joe Biden. It suggests the Obama administration bolster efforts to counter and prepare for germ warfare by terrorists.
"Our margin of safety is shrinking, not growing," states the report, obtained by The Associated Press. It is scheduled to be publicly released Wednesday.
The commission is also encouraging the new White House to appoint one official on the National Security Council to exclusively coordinate U.S. intelligence and foreign policy on combating the spread of nuclear and biological weapons.
The report of the Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism, led by former Sens. Bob Graham of Florida and Jim Talent of Missouri, acknowledges that terrorist groups still lack the needed scientific and technical ability to make weapons out of pathogens or nuclear bombs. But it warns that gap can be easily overcome, if terrorists find scientists willing to share or sell their know-how.
"The United States should be less concerned that terrorists will become biologists and far more concerned that biologists will become terrorists," the report states.
The commission believes biological weapons are more likely to be obtained and used before nuclear or radioactive weapons because nuclear facilities are more carefully guarded. Civilian laboratories with potentially dangerous pathogens abound, however, and could easily be compromised.
"The biological threat is greater than the nuclear; the acquisition of deadly pathogens, and their weaponization and dissemination in aerosol form, would entail fewer technical hurdles than the theft or production of weapons-grade uranium or plutonium and its assembly into an improvised nuclear device," states the report.
It notes that the U.S. government's counterproliferation activities have been geared toward preventing nuclear terrorism. The commission recommends the prevention of biological terrorism be made a higher priority.
Study chairman Graham said anthrax remains the most likely biological weapon. However, he told the AP that contagious diseases — like the flu strain that killed 40 million at the beginning of the 20th century — are looming threats. That virus has been recreated in scientific labs, and there remains no inoculation to protect against it if is stolen and released.
Graham said the threat of a terrorist attack using nuclear or biological weapons is growing "not because we have not done positive things but because adversaries are moving at an even faster pace to increase their access" to those materials.
He noted last week's rampage by a small group of gunmen in Mumbai.
"If those people had had access to a biological or nuclear weapon they would have multiplied by orders of magnitude the deaths they could have inflicted," he said.
Al-Qaida remains the only terrorist group judged to be actively intent on conducting a nuclear attack against the United States, the report notes. It is not yet capable of building such a weapon and has yet to obtain one. But that could change if a nuclear weapons engineer or scientist were recruited to al-Qaida's cause, the report warns.
The report says the potential nexus of terrorism, nuclear and biological weapons is especially acute in Pakistan.
"Were one to map terrorism and weapons of mass destruction today, all roads would intersect in Pakistan," the report states.
In fact, commission members were forced to cancel their trip to Pakistan this fall. The Islamabad Marriott Hotel that commission members were to stay in was blown up by terrorist bombs just hours before they were to check in.
"We think time is not our ally. The (United States) needs to move with a sense of urgency," Graham said.
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Stratfor.com
From the New York Landmarks Plot to the Mumbai Attack
December 3, 2008
By Fred Burton and Ben West
On the surface, last week’s attack on Mumbai was remarkable for its execution and apparently unconventional tactics. But when compared to a plot uncovered 15 years ago that targeted prominent hotels in Manhattan, it becomes apparent that the Mumbai attack was not so original after all.
The 1993 New York Landmarks Plot
In July 1993, U.S. counterterrorism agents arrested eight individuals later convicted of plotting an elaborate, multistage attack on key sites in Manhattan. The militants, who were linked to Osama bin Laden’s then-relatively new group, al Qaeda, planned to storm the island armed with automatic rifles, grenades and improvised explosive devices (IEDs). In multiple raids on key targets combined with diversionary attacks, they aimed to kill as many people as possible.
The planned attack, which came to be known as the “Landmarks” plot, called for several tactical teams to raid sites such as the Waldorf-Astoria, St. Regis and U.N. Plaza hotels, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, and a midtown Manhattan waterfront heliport servicing business executives and VIPs traveling from lower Manhattan to various New York-area airports. The militants carried out extensive surveillance both inside and outside the target hotels using human probes, hand-drawn maps and video surveillance. Detailed notes were taken on the layout and design of the buildings, with stairwells, ballrooms, security cameras and personnel all reconnoitered.
The attackers intended to infiltrate the hotels and disguise themselves as kitchen employees. On the day of the attack, one attack team planned to use stolen delivery vans to get close to the hotels, at which point heavily armed, small-cell commando teams would deploy from the rear of the van. Stationary operatives would use hand grenades to create diversions while attack teams would rake hotel guests with automatic weapons. The attackers planned to carry gas masks and use tear gas in hotel ballrooms to gain an advantage over any security they might come up against. They planned to attack at night, when the level of protection would be lower.
The targeted hotels host some of the most prestigious guests in Manhattan. These could have included diplomats like the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, who traditionally keeps an apartment in the Waldorf-Astoria, or even the U.S. secretary of state, who is known to stay at the Waldorf during U.N. sessions. They also host various business leaders. If successful, the attackers doubtless would have killed many high-profile individuals key to New York’s stature as a center for financial and diplomatic dealings.
Meanwhile, the plots to detonate explosives in the Lincoln and Holland tunnels would have blocked critical transportation infrastructure, sowing chaos in the city as key escape routes were closed off. And VIPs seeking to escape the city via the midtown heliport would have been thwarted by the attack planned for that location. In fact, the heliport attack was planned to be carried out using watercraft, which also could have been used to target transport ferries, further disrupting transportation in and out of Manhattan. The New York City Police Department could plausibly even have quarantined Manhattan to prevent the attackers from fleeing the city.
With the city shut down and gunmen running amok, the financial center of the United States would have been thrown into chaos and confusion until the attackers were detained or killed. The attacks thus would have undermined the security and effectiveness of New York as a center for financial and diplomatic dealings.
At the time, U.S. counterterrorism officials deemed that the attack would have had a 90 percent success rate. Disaster, then, was averted when federal agents captured the plotters planning the Landmarks attack thanks to an informant who had infiltrated the group. Along with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing just four months earlier, which killed six people but was intended to bring down both towers, the United States dodged a major bullet that could have been devastating to New York.
The Nov. 26 Mumbai Attack
A little more than fifteen years later, the Nov. 26 attacks in Mumbai closely followed the script of the New York plot. Militants armed with AK-47s, grenades and military-grade explosives carried out a very logistically sophisticated and coordinated attack on the financial capital of India.
(click to view map)
Clearly, the Mumbai attack involved extensive preoperational surveillance. Attackers had maps of the targeted hotels, and according to the Indian Marine Commandos who raided the Taj Mahal hotel, the militants moved around as if they knew the hotel’s layout by heart. Advance members of the attack teams had already taken up positions in the hotels, stockpiling firearms, ammunition, grenades and food that were quickly accessed and used to maintain the attackers’ positions in the hotels. One of the attackers reportedly also had taken a job as an intern chef in the Taj Mahal hotel kitchen, so his movements raised less suspicion and he had a detailed knowledge of the entry points and corridors. For such attacks, preparedness is key, and escaping alive is a long shot. The attackers therefore must have been highly motivated and willing to die — a rare combination that requires immense amounts of training and ideological zeal.
At least two teams entered the city by watercraft, breaking up into smaller groups as they made their way to the Taj Mahal hotel, Oberoi-Trident hotel complex and Nariman (also known as Chabad) House, a Jewish center in the same area of Mumbai. These tactical teams dispersed across the city, attacking prominent sites where foreign VIPs were sure to be present. They infiltrated the hotels through back entrances and kitchens, thus enhancing the element of surprise as they opened fire on guests in the dining areas and atriums of the hotels.
Beyond killing people and holding hostages in Mumbai’s most prestigious hotels, other attack teams assaulted additional strategic sites in Mumbai, creating a sense of chaos and confusion over the whole city. Mumbai’s main train station, Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, as well as Cama Hospital, offices of The Times of India newspaper, restaurants, a theater, and bars frequented by foreigners also were attacked. The attackers’ excellent coordination — the multiple attacks took place nearly simultaneously — thus ensured maximum confusion and chaos, frustrating police responses. This could explain in part why operations like those at Nariman House and the hotels lasted for more than 48 hours.
Similarities between New York and Mumbai
The similarities between the Landmarks plot and the Nov. 26 Mumbai attack are quite obvious. In symbolic terms, as the Mumbai attack unfolded, many onlookers said that an attack on Mumbai is to India what an attack on New York is to Americans. In more concrete terms, the targets, methods, weapons and geography involved were similar (if not identical), and the unconventional style of the attacks points to a common author.
U.S. counterterrorism forces in 1995 detained Landmarks plot mastermind Ramzi Yousef, who remains in U.S. federal prison. But his ideas obviously did not stay behind bars. This illustrates how a plan’s initial failure does not mean the threat has been eliminated. Indeed, Stratfor observed in 2005 that the 1993 Landmarks plot (among others) should not be discounted, as al Qaeda or other terrorist groups are known to return to past targets and plot scenarios.
The similarities between the Landmarks plot and the Mumbai attack exist at several levels.
The first relates to the target set. Both New York and Mumbai are the respective financial centers of their countries and home to their nations’ major stock exchanges. In both cities, the planners had picked out high-profile soft targets — sites that have less security personnel and countermeasures than, say, a military installation or key government building. Softer security means gaining access to strategic assets and people is easier. Stratfor has long stressed the importance of maintaining vigilance at soft targets like hote ls that cater to international guests, as these are likely targets for militant Islamists. Both plans also involved infiltrating hotel staff and booking rooms in the hotels to gain inside information and store supplies.
The second similarity involves how both plans included peripheral targets to cause confusion and chaos and thus create a diversion from the main targets. In Mumbai, transportation infrastructure like the city’s main railway station was attacked, and militants detonated explosive devices in taxis and next to gasoline pumps. Meanwhile, roving gunmen attacked other sites around the city. In a country where coordination among first responders is already weak, the way the attackers fanned out across the city caused massive chaos and distracted security forces from the main prize: the hotels. Attacking Cama Hospital also sowed chaos, as the injured from one scene of attack became the targets of another while being rescued.
A third similarity exists in the geography of the two cities. In both plots, the use of watercraft is a distinctive tactical similarity. Watercraft gave militants access at unconventional locations where security would be more lax. Both Mumbai (a peninsula) and Manhattan (an island) offer plenty of points where militants can mount assaults from watercraft. Such an attack would not have worked in New Delhi or Bangalore; these are landlocked cities where militants would have had to enter by road, a route much more likely to encounter police patrols. Being centers of trade and surrounded by water, both Mumbai and New York have high levels of maritime traffic. This means infiltrating the area from the water would raise minimal suspicions, especially if the craft were registered locally (as was the case in the Mumbai attack). Such out-of-the box tactics take advantage of security services, which often tend to focus on established threats.
A fourth similarity lies in transportation. In addition to using watercraft, both plots involved the use of deceptive vehicles to maneuver around the city undetected. The Landmark plotters used taxis to conduct surveillance and planned on using a delivery van to approach the hotels. In Mumbai, the attackers planted bombs in taxis, and at least one group of militants hijacked a police van and used it to carry out attacks across the city. Using familiar vehicles like taxis, delivery vans or police vans to carry out surveillance or attacks reduces suspicion and increases the element of surprise, allowing militants to stay under cover until the moment of attack.
An Off-the-Shelf Plan
As indicated, the striking similarities between the Landmarks plot and the Mumbai attack suggest that Ramzi Yousef and other early al Qaeda operatives who helped prepare the Landmarks plot in New York authored the Mumbai plan. Considering that the militants launched their original attack from Karachi, Pakistan, and the previous involvement of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency — which has connections with al Qaeda leaders in western Pakistan — it is very likely that al Qaeda in Pakistan at least provided the blueprints for this attack. On-the-ground operations like training, surveillance and the actual attack appear to have been carried out by the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba in connection with Indian Islamist groups.
Here we see more evidence of the existence of an ideological or strategic battle space that exists in the radical Islamist world, which has been greatly influenced by al Qaeda. Like a contingency plan that might sit on the shelf for years or decades before it is useful, terrorist plots (especially good ones) can have a long shelf life and be applied in various scenarios. In fact, plans that sit on the shelf longer might actually be more effective as security officials focus their attention on evolving threats and forget old ones.
Just because a plot has been disrupted, the threat has not been eliminated. Once terrorists happen upon a successful model, they are likely to follow that model. This can be seen in al Qaeda’s return to the World Trade Center in 2001, eight years after the initial truck bomb attacks in 1993. It can also be seen in the fact that Mumbai has been the target of multiple attacks and threats, including train bombings in 2006 that killed approximately 200 people. Though the tactics might have differed, the target set remained the same. Various parts of the attack cycle can change, but rarely does an attack occur that is completely novel.
Ultimately, the biggest difference between the Landmarks plot and the Mumbai attack is that the Mumbai attack succeeded. The failure of the Landmarks plot probably provided key lessons to the planners of the Mumbai attack, who were able to carry out the stages of the attack without detection and with the full element of surprise. Gauging by the success of the Mumbai incident, we can expect similar strategies and tactics in future attacks.
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No idea yet about this website's reliability:
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Recruitment from...Canada for Islamic terror training continues
Young Muslim men are being recruited from mosques and Islamic Centers in the U.S., Canada for terrorist training. They are beginning to return, some in plastic bags.
By Douglas J. Hagmann, Director
5 December 2008 The Northeast Intelligence Network confirmed Thursday that there is a nationwide investigation being conducted by the FBI of young men from Somalia being trained as suicide bombers and “low-tech attackers” for use inside the U.S. The investigation began last summer when authorities noticed a trend of Somali immigrants “disappearing” from the Minneapolis, Minnesota area. According to initial reports, about four dozen men ranging between the ages of 17 and 35 have “gone missing” within the last several months in the Minneapolis area alone. One federal law enforcement official, speaking on the strict condition of anonymity to the Northeast Intelligence Network, confirmed that this trend is neither exclusive to Minneapolis nor Somalia immigrants, but it was first noticed there. The investigation was further punctuated by the death of suicide bomber and Minnesota resident Shirwa AHMED. AHMED, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was one of five Muslim terrorists who killed 29 people in northern Somalia on October 29.
AHMED, pictured at left, was buried this week in Burnsville, a suburban community south of the Minneapolis- St. Paul area. AHMED’s remains were transported back to the U.S. with the help of the FBI after DNA tests established his identity. According to news reports, the FBI is investigating the “disappearance” of young men from Somalia by “ reaching out to the Somali-American community” in search of additional information. The FBI admits that they are looking into the disappearance of 20-40 young Somalia men from Minnesota, but unofficial reports by a federal source close to the Northeast Intelligence Network places that number much higher.
“There is active recruitment from mosques, Islamic centers and over the Internet calling young men from the U.S. and Canada to ‘train for Jihad as their religious duty,’” stated this official. The plan is to have these young men trained in the handling of weapons and explosives, and sending them back to the U.S. and Canada to engage in low-tech attacks against “soft targets,” such as malls, shopping centers, and other crowded locations.
The Northeast Intelligence Network has been warning readers about homicide bombers coming to the U.S. and Canada for years, with expedited recruitment within the past 36 months. We are now beginning to see the evolution of this recruitment and training as it manifests into results, such as the recent terrorist attack in Mumbai. It will not be long before we see it in North America.
http://3w.homelandsecurityus.com/20081205b
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In a closely related vein, here's this from the local FOX station:
http://www.myfoxtwincities.com/myfox/MyFox/pages/sidebar_video.jsp?contentId=8029360&version=1&locale=EN-US
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December 09, 2008, 4:30 p.m.
Why Does KSM Want to be Executed?
Who Cares?
By Andrew C. McCarthy
We don’t understand our enemies any better than we did when they first strode out on that great American stage, the federal courtroom, 15 years ago.
That is the upshot of Monday’s latest episode in Mohammed’s March to Martyrdom, a dreadful show that should close in Cuba before ever making it to the Great White Way. Five top al-Qaeda terrorists told a military judge at Guantanamo Bay that they want to skip their commission trial, admit — no, brag about — their guilt, and proceed straight to execution and its promised eternity of Boogie Nights.
Mohammed, of course, is none other than KSM, the black artist formerly known as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. That was before he orchestrated the 9/11 atrocities, vaulting into that small circle of celebrity where the initials are all you need to know. Infamy is the achievement of a lifetime for this Baluchi marauder turned courtroom diva. It’s what he has always craved: to be known . . . and feared.
In the mid-Nineties, he was just an up-and-comer: anteing up a paltry $660 for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, then co-designing the off-off-Broadway run of Bojinka: an ambitious 1994 production designed to slaughter hundreds of Americans by exploding their cross-Pacific flights in midair — a production that collapsed when a preview detonation failed to bring down the plane, though it did manage to kill a Japanese tourist.
KSM was green with envy when those pilots became star turns for other terrorists: his mad-scientist nephew, Ramzi Yousef, and Omar Abdel Rahman, the capo di tutti jihadi known in America’s living rooms as “the Blind Sheikh.”
Back in those days, KSM couldn’t get himself arrested. Or at least the FBI couldn’t get him arrested. That was thanks to Qatar, another of our ambivalent Arab “allies” in the war on terror. The emirate is an authoritarian sharia-state and jihadist financial hub — though you may know it better as the home of al-Jezeera, the Muslim world’s virulently anti-American media giant to which KSM once served as al-Qaeda’s official liaison.
A U.S.-educated engineer, KSM had a government job in Qatar’s ministry of electricity and water when he was tipped off in 1996 that the Americans were closing in. In the nick of time, he fled to Afghanistan. That’s where Osama bin Laden, having recently worn out his welcome in Sudan, was just setting up shop.
The rest, as they say, is history. Years later, while confirming his status as an enemy combatant, KSM recounted how he’d become al-Qaeda’s “military operational commander” for all foreign operations, running the 9/11 attacks “from A to Z.”
And that was just the warm-up. Mohammed took charge of the cell that managed production of biological weapons and radiological “dirty bombs.” He planned an unconsummated “second-wave” of suicide-hijacking attacks on the Israeli city of Elat, iconic sites in Great Britain, and the U.S. — where the Empire State Building and other skyscrapers in Chicago, San Francisco and the state of Washington were targeted. KSM directed the bombing of a hotel frequented by Israelis in Mombassa, Kenya — and, for good measure, shot a surface-to-air missile near Mombassa’s airport, barely missing a departing El-Al flight. He plotted bomb strikes against America’s domestic financial centers; American naval ships and oil tankers in Singapore and the Straits of Hormuz and Gibraltar; and American embassies in Japan, Australia, and Indonesia. The list (which you can find at pages 17-18 of the combatant hearing transcript, here) goes on and on.
KSM is going to be put to death. He knows it and we know it. The same is true of his four underlings. The question is not if but when.
These legal proceedings, then, are simply theater. For the Left, that means projecting shopworn themes under the guise of thoughtfully pondering the purpose of the jihadists’ procedural maneuvering. Is KSM scheming to challenge our new president’s redoubling of Islamic outreach? Is he daring Obama to kick off the promised era of good feeling by executing Muslims, even as the new administration backpedals from campaign commitments to shut down Gitmo and withdraw from Iraq forthwith? Or is he, as the ACLU speculated for the New York Times, trying to draw attention to the asserted folly of abandoning the 1990’s model of civilian terrorist trials in favor of “a failed commission process”?
Yes, it’s the silly season.
What we don’t yet seem to grasp, even after all that’s gone on these last two decades, is that our politics and our law are of interest only to us. They matter nothing to jihadists. It’s a fatuous exercise in self-absorption to suppose otherwise — and a foolish one since it demonstrates for all to see that we still don’t get it. The delusion that we can change our enemies by changing ourselves is what makes the useful idiots useful.
KSM doesn’t see Bush or Obama. He sees an American president. He sees a symbol — the embodiment of a people and culture that are his mortal enemy. Back in 1994, when the Bojinka escapade was flushed out in the Philippines, investigators found that the jihadists were also planning an assassination of President Clinton. Thirteen years later, KSM explained to a military judge that he had mapped out “the assassination of several former American presidents, including President Carter.”
Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, cowboy or solon — these distinctions matter to us. KSM couldn’t care less.
In 1999, as was the fashion throughout the Nineties, we gave the embassy bombers due process’s version of The Full Monty: a civilian trial in the Big Apple, with multiple taxpayer-funded attorneys and investigators at their beck and call. We thought we were teaching the enemy and the world about America’s high regard for them and for the rule of law.
The Islamic world was unimpressed — much of it mocking the proceedings as a show trial. As for al-Qaeda, it did what al-Qaeda does: it studied our solicitous procedures with an eye toward the usual barbarity. Mamdouh Salim, a KSM confederate in al-Qaeda’s top echelon, determined that the constitutional rights to counsel and to prepare a defense provided a splendid opportunity to kidnap one’s American lawyers and use them as human shields in an attempted jail-break. Salim was stopped, but not before nearly killing the prison guard he stabbed in the eye while making his move.
For radical Islam, it’s not about us; it’s about them. KSM isn’t about us. He’s about KSM. There is no system we can devise, nothing we can do or not do, no one we can elect or anoint, that will alter how we are perceived by the millions who share the jihadist worldview, if not jihadist methods.
So why are KSM and his four fellow detainees trying to end-run their trial and rush to martyrdom? I daresay the answer should be, “Who cares?”
Live jihadists attain a lofty status in our custody, their notoriety enhancing their ability to inspire more terror. The Blind Sheikh issued the fatwa for 9/11 from his American jail cell; Sayyid Nosair, the murderer of JDL-founder Meir Kahane, exhorted the 1993 World Trade Center bombers from Attica prison; those bombers, in turn, egged on Spanish terrorists by sending messages through the penitentiary mail system. KSM and his associates will be no different. If they are ready to die, we ought to accommodate them — for once, our interests are in sync.
If I thought it was worth wasting much attention on his latest ploy, I’d point out that since being captured in 2003, KSM has been what he hates maybe even more than he hates Americans: irrelevant. Now that he finally has his soapbox, he also has his reputation to consider. Since 9/11, he’s best known for breaking under interrogation and thus helping the United States thwart more mayhem than he managed to pull off.
What he wants now is to go out in a blaze of bravado. A full-blown trial — whether military or civilian — might not be the best way to do that. It would broadcast his failures as much as his triumphs. As the outcome is not in doubt, he’d just as soon focus on a heroic, defiant, martyr’s death, with as much spotlight as possible.
We should take his guilty plea, then move swiftly to the capital phase and the inevitable death sentence. That is our law. But once that’s done, KSM ought to be consigned back to obscurity, at least for a while. He’s in a rush, but we don’t need to be. At a time of our choosing, when it will get minimum coverage, KSM and his confederates should be executed without fanfare. A curt announcement should be made, informing the public that the deed has been done.
Most of the world would yawn. That would be justice.
— National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy chairs FDD’s Center for Law & Counterterrorism and is the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books 2008).
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=M2M2YjliZWM4NGRmMTQ3MDY1YjM1ZTU0ZGMxMjNmNDc=
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122895354114996367.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
DECEMBER 11, 2008
Officials Worry Attacks in Mumbai Could Spur Copycats in the West
By SIOBHAN GORMAN and SUSAN SCHMIDT
WASHINGTON -- The Mumbai attacks have prompted some Western officials to step up vigilance against the type of low-tech assault the 10 gunmen mounted last month.
Since the attacks in Mumbai, al Qaeda Web sites and chatrooms have lit up with aspiring militants urging more such attacks, according to the Washington-based SITE Intelligence Group. One message cheered "the heroes" of the attack for making "the enemies suffer," including the U.S., the U.K. and Israel.
Historically, the group accused in the attack, Lashkar-e-Taiba, has focused on furthering Pakistan's claims to the Kashmir region, disputed with India. Although its messages have a strong anti-American component, U.S. officials have seen the group as a lesser counterterrorism priority.
But current and former intelligence officials say they are worried the Mumbai attacks may reflect a broadening of Lashkar's interests, and that would-be jihadis may copy the approach of the Mumbai attackers, who carried out their assault on foot using little more than machine guns, explosives and cellphones. Al Qaeda's resurgent base in Pakistan also provides opportunities for collaboration with groups such as Lashkar, officials said.
David Cohen, the head of intelligence for the New York Police Department and a former senior Central Intelligence Agency official, said what used to be merely propaganda against the U.S. and Israel has now been "operationalized" by the Mumbai attacks. "It puts us on notice in a much more clear and direct way," he added.
The NYPD has dispatched three officers to Mumbai to better understand the attacks because of concerns about copycats.
"It's a very clear indication that we have the potential to be victimized by a group motivated by religious ideology that doesn't use something sophisticated," said John Cohen, a senior official in the Bush administration's office for sharing information among intelligence agencies.
Pockets of Lashkar supporters sympathetic to the group's flavor of conservative Islam can be found around the U.S., current and former U.S. officials say.
Lashkar operates with an English-speaking public face, said Evan Kohlmann, a terrorism specialist. A camp-and-classroom structure brings people together from all over the world, and when graduates remain connected in a potent alumni network.
The most recent case alleging American involvement with Lashkar is that of two Americans in Atlanta. The men, who are awaiting trial, said in communications obtained by law enforcement that they sought to work under Lashkar because it was easier to "climb the ladder" to another terrorist group, said Mr. Kohlmann, who has reviewed the communications while assisting law enforcement on the case. Lawyers for the two men said they weren't involved with Lashkar.
Write to Siobhan Gorman at siobhan.gorman@wsj.com and Susan Schmidt at susan.schmidt@wsj.com
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FWIW:
By PETER BERGEN
Published: December 13, 2008
Washington
A FEW days before the presidential election, the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, told a group of intelligence officials that the new administration could well be tested by a terrorist attack on the homeland in its first year in office. “The World Trade Center was attacked in the first year of President Clinton, and the second attack was in the first year of President Bush,” he said.
President-elect Barack Obama made a similar observation when he told “60 Minutes” that it was important to get a national security team in place “because transition periods are potentially times of vulnerability to a terrorist attack.” During the campaign, Joe Biden warned that “it will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy.”
Should we be worried? In fact, the probability of a Qaeda attack on the United States is vanishingly small, for the same reasons that for the past seven years the terrorist group has not been able to carry out one.
President Bush and his supporters have often ascribed the absence of a Qaeda attack on the United States to the Iraq war, which supposedly acted as “flypaper” for jihadist terrorists, so instead of fighting them in Boston, America has fought them in Baghdad. Other commentators have said that Al Qaeda is simply biding its time to equal or top 9/11.
The real reasons are more prosaic. First, the American Muslim community has rejected the Qaeda ideological virus. American Muslims have instead overwhelmingly signed up for the American Dream, enjoying higher incomes and educational levels than the average.
Second, though it is hard to prove negatives, there appear to be no Qaeda sleeper cells in the United States. If they do exist, they are so asleep they are comatose. True, in 2003, the F.B.I. arrested Iyman Faris, an Ohio trucker who met with Qaeda leaders in Pakistan after 9/11 and then had a plot to demolish the Brooklyn Bridge with a pair of blowtorches, a deed akin to trying to blow up the Statue of Liberty with a firecracker. But he is an exceptional case. Two years after his arrest, a leaked F.B.I. report concluded, “To date, we have not identified any true ‘sleeper’ agents in the U.S.”
Third, when jihadist terrorists have attacked the United States, they have arrived from outside the country, something that is much harder to do now. The 19 hijackers of 9/11 all came from elsewhere. Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 Trade Center bombing, flew to New York from Pakistan. Today’s no-fly list and other protective measures make entering the country much more difficult.
Fourth, the Bush administration has made Americans safer with measures like the establishment of the National Counterterrorism Center, where officials from different branches of government share information and act on terrorist threats. As a result of such measures, scores of terrorism cases have been aggressively investigated in the United States. But despite the billions of dollars invested in all these efforts and the thousands of men and women who get up every day to hunt for terrorists, the resulting cases have almost never involved concrete terrorist plots or acts.
Of the so-called terrorism cases since 9/11, many have revolved around charges of “material support” for a terrorist group, a vague concept that can encompass almost any dealings with organizations that have at one point engaged in terrorism. And in the cases where a terrorist plot has been alleged, the plans have been more aspirational than realistic.
If Al Qaeda can’t get people into the country, doesn’t have sleeper cells here and is unable to garner support from the American Muslim community, then how does it pull off an attack in the United States? While a small-bore attack may be organized by a Qaeda wannabe at some point, a catastrophic mass-casualty assault anything along the lines of 9/11 is no longer plausible.
This is not to say Al Qaeda is no longer a threat to our interests. It has of course regenerated itself on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan since 9/11, and as the 2005 attacks on the London subways and the foiled 2006 plot to bring down airliners leaving Heathrow Airport showed, it remains a grave danger to Britain.
In addition, Al Qaeda’s inability to attack the American homeland for the foreseeable future does not then mean that it can’t kill large numbers of American living overseas. If the 2006 “planes plot” had succeeded, British prosecutors say, as many as 1,500 passengers would have died, many of them Americans.
The incoming Obama administration has much to deal with, between managing two wars and the implosion of the financial system and car industry. But the likelihood of a terrorist attack on the United States in its early stages by Al Qaeda is close to zero.
Peter Bergen is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of “The Osama bin Laden I Know.”
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Bergen is wrong. We have dodged a bullet multiple times since 9/11 and AQ really wants to make a hit early on in the empty suit's administration.
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5 Men Found Guilty of Plotting to Kill Fort Dix Soldiers
Monday , December 22, 2008
CAMDEN, N.J. —
Five Muslim immigrants accused of scheming to massacre U.S. soldiers at Fort Dix were convicted of conspiracy Monday in a case that tested the FBI's post-Sept. 11 strategy of infiltrating and breaking up terrorist plots in their earliest stages.
The men could get life in prison when they are sentenced in April.
The five, who lived in and around Philadelphia for years, were found guilty of conspiring to kill U.S. military personnel. But they were acquitted of attempted murder after prosecutors acknowledged the men were probably months away from an attack and did not necessarily have a specific plan. Four defendants were also convicted of weapons charges.
The federal jury deliberated for 38 hours over six days.
The government said after the arrests in 2007 that case underscored the dangers of terrorist plots hatched on U.S. soil. Although investigators said the conspirators were inspired by Osama bin Laden, they were not accused of any ties to foreign terror groups.
Defense lawyers argued that the alleged plot was all talk — that the men weren't seriously planning anything and that they were manipulated and goaded by two paid FBI informants.
Faten Shnewer, the mother of defendant Mohamad Shnewer, said the informants should be the ones in jail. "Not my son and his friends. It's not right, it's not justice," she said after the verdict. The government "sent somebody to push him to say something; that's it."
Convicted were: Shnewer, a Jordanian-born cab driver; Turkish-born convenience store clerk Serdar Tatar; and brothers Dritan, Eljvir and Shain Duka, ethnic Albanians from the former Yugoslavia, who had a roofing business. A sixth man arrested and charged only with gun offenses pleaded guilty earlier.
The government said the men were targeting New Jersey's Fort Dix for an attack but had also conducted surveillance at Fort Monmouth, Dover Air Force Base in Delaware and other military installations, and had talked about assaulting some of those spots. The jury did not have to find that the men had any specific target in mind to convict them.
"These criminals had the capacity and had done preparations to do serious and grievous harm to members of our military," Ralph Marra, the acting U.S. attorney for New Jersey, said after the verdict.
But some Muslim leaders in New Jersey disputed that.
"I don't think they actually mean to do anything," said Mohamed Younes, president of the American Muslim Union. "I think they were acting stupid, like they thought the whole thing was a joke."
Jim Sues, executive director of the New Jersey chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said: "Many people in the Muslim community will see this as a case of entrapment. From what I saw, there was a significant role played by the government informant."
The yearlong investigation began after a clerk at a Circuit City store told police that some customers had asked him to transfer onto DVD some video footage of them firing assault weapons and screaming about jihad.
The FBI asked two informants — both foreign-born men who entered the U.S. illegally and had criminal records — to befriend the suspects. Both informants were paid and were offered help obtaining legal resident status.
During the eight-week trial, the government relied heavily on information gathered by the informants, who secretly recorded hundreds of conversations.
Prosecutors said the men bought several assault rifles supplied by the FBI and that they trekked to Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains to practice their shooting. The government also presented dozens of jihadist speeches and videos that the men supposedly used as inspiration.
According to prosecutors, the group chose Fort Dix because one of the defendants was familiar with it. His father's pizza shop delivered to the New Jersey base, which is 25 miles from Philadelphia and used primarily to train reservists for duty in Iraq.
The group's objective was to kill "as many American soldiers as possible," prosecutors said.
But the men's lawyers attacked the credibility of the informants and accused them of instigating the plot.
After the verdict, Schnewer's attorney, Rocco Cipparone, said there would not have been a conspiracy without the involvement of the informants. "I believe they shaped the evidence," he said.
Prosecutor William Fitzpatrick defended the government's handling of the case, telling the jury: "The FBI investigates crime on the front end. They don't want to have to do it on the back end."
Members of the jury would not speak to reporters after the verdict.
The government said after the men's arrest that an attack was imminent, though prosecutors backed off that assertion at the trial.
The government has had a mixed record on terrorism prosecutions since Sept. 11. It won guilty pleas from Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui; Richard Reid, who tried to blow up a trans-Atlantic jetliner with a shoe bomb; and the Lackawanna Six, a terrorist cell outside Buffalo, N.Y. And it convicted Jose Padilla of plotting terrorist attacks.
But a case against four men in Michigan fell apart after a federal prosecutor was accused of withholding evidence. And a case in Miami against seven men accused of plotting to blow up Chicago's Sears Tower has produced one acquittal and two mistrials.
http://www.foxnews.com/printer_frien...470900,00.html
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http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/89690a7e-d36d-11dd-989e-000077b07658.html
New threats to online security
By Richard Waters in San Francisco
Published: December 26 2008 17:20 | Last updated: December 26 2008 17:20
Internet security has deteriorated markedly this year as a new generation of invasive computer attacks, often masterminded by criminal gangs, has reached a heightened level of sophistication, according to the latest studies of online threats.
“It’s getting worse year after year,” warned Pat Peterson, chief security researcher at Cisco Systems, who blamed the deterioration on the fact that computer “hacking” is quickly turning into big business. “Capitalism is working against us,” he said.
EDITOR’S CHOICE
Tech blog - Dec-26
Lex: Spam, spam, spam - Dec-26
Personal view online: the security debate - Oct-07
“It’s a step back after things had gotten better,” added John Pescatore, a security analyst at Gartner.
In particular, computer security experts warn that so-called botnets, or networks of “slave” PCs whose owners do not know their machines have been infected, have become both more prevalent and sophisticated.
By planting a piece of software on an unguarded PC, criminals are able to assemble large networks of machines to carry out tasks for them, such as launching attacks on other internet users.
PCs that are part of botnets, some of which span 1m or more machines, have become harder to identify and root out in recent months as the rogue software has burrowed deeper into the machines, said Paul Wood, a senior analyst at MessageLabs.
Botnets have also become more dangerous as their controllers have learnt how to repurpose the slave networks to carry out different tasks, Mr Peterson said. One network that was originally used to steal users’ passwords and send out spam was given an overhaul this year so that it could attack legitimate websites, according to Cisco.
A second big new threat that has become notable this year has been the commandeering of legitimate websites and e-mail accounts to spread malicious software. Rogue software is used to scrutinise public websites and “inject” code into those that are found vulnerable, so that later visitors to the sites can be infected.
The setback for internet security follows several years in which the biggest online threats were successfully held at bay or, in some cases, pushed back. The use of the internet to exploit vulnerabilities in millions of PCs first emerged as a significant threat in 2001, after an outbreak of fast-spreading computer viruses and worms.
Those threats were largely thwarted after a concerted effort by Microsoft and other software makers to plug flaws in their code, and after anti-virus software became more widely used. A subsequent wave of spyware that emerged in the middle of this decade was also pushed back.
However, the prospect of making large amounts of money by stealing sensitive information from millions of users, such as their passwords or financial data, has led to a new and more insidious outbreak of mass internet attacks.
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The Department of Homeland Security in Action
04 January 2009
http://www.michaelyon-online.com/
A Thai friend with whom I have traveled in Europe and Asia took time off from her job to meet me in Florida over the holidays. This was a good time for me, as it was between reporting stints in the war. My friend, Aew, had volunteered to work with me in Afghanistan or Iraq, but I declined because many people around me get shot or blown up. So we were looking forward to spending some vacation time together. She comes from a good family; and one that is wealthier than most American families. She didn’t come here for a job. Well-educated, she has a master's degree and works as a bank officer in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Aew was excited about the prospect of visiting America for the first time, though she had traveled to many other countries and had the passport stamps to prove it. She had no problem getting a U.S. visa, and she was paying her own way to fly.
Problems began when she entered the airport in Bangkok. Aew had a one-way ticket to America, because we would travel back in the direction of the war before she would go home, but we did not know our exact itinerary, so she hadn't bought a round-trip ticket back to Thailand. Before boarding the flight from Thailand to America, Northwest Airlines required Aew to buy a return ticket for 53,905 Thai bhat, or about $1,200 for a return ticket, else they would not let her board the flight. Aew paid by her credit card and pushed on. Understandably, it raises suspicions when a foreign national doesn't have a round-trip ticket in an age of massive illegal immigration -- even if that person is an educated professional with a home and career, and even though Aew has a ten-year visa to the United States. Nevertheless, Aew paid approximately $1,200 for the return ticket, and so now had a return ticket.
That is how it began. She boarded the jet, eventually landed in Japan and then Minneapolis, before the final leg to Orlando. While thousands of people have canceled trips to Orlando due to the failing economy, Aew was coming with cash to spend in Florida. We would go to Disney, Kennedy Space Center and many other places; she'd be seeing the sights while I was meeting with military and other people in preparation for my upcoming return to Afghanistan for the long year ahead.
I first met Aew in Indonesia during a break from the Iraq war. I had gone to visit the site of the murder of my friend Beata Pawlak, who, along with about two hundred other people, was killed in a terrorist attack on the island of Bali.
After meeting in Indonesia, Aew and I stayed in touch. We traveled at different times to Singapore, Great Britain, Thailand and Nepal. Yet when Aew landed in Minneapolis, she was hustled away by an immigration officer. After approximately 24 hours of exhausting travel, Aew was detained for about 90 minutes without cause, and as a result, she missed her connecting flight to Orlando. She was brought into a small room where she saw a camera peering down. The officer conducting the shakedown wore a name tag: "Knapp." Five times she had traveled to China with zero problems, but Knapp grilled Aew with a long series of questions, rifling through her wallet, handling her credit cards and reading them carefully, questioning her piece by piece. Her passport, thick with extra pages, showed stamps from countries around the world. It contained the valid U.S. visa, and stamps and visas from countries she had traveled to, such as Great Britain, Japan, China, Nepal, Singapore, Indonesia, Myanmar, South Korea, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Brunei, New Zealand and Cambodia. She had traveled to some of these countries on multiple occasions, always paying her own way. She never had problems. Not even in China. We had toured Parliament together in London, on a private expedition led by Member of Parliament Adam Holloway. Aew was very interested to see the Royal Family, and was beside herself when I met Lady Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, who at that time read this website. The British, including military officers, had treated her very well and she left with positive memories of Great Britian.
But that was Great Britain. The American shakedown was just starting. Her sister, Puk, was sending me SMS messages from Thailand, worried that Aew seemed to have disappeared. I had bought Puk's daughters, North and Nurse, who are 8 and 9, a "talking globe" so they could track the travels of their Aunt Aew. The last time I saw North and Nurse, we had taken them to the Chiang Mai zoo, and also to an elephant camp where the elephants paint. Puk's husband, Bey, is a high-ranking Thai police officer who, as part of his duties, helps organize security for the Thai Royal Family.
While the U.S. Immigration officer named Knapp rifled through all her belongings, Aew sat quietly. She was afraid of this man, who eventually pushed a keyboard to Aew and coerced her into giving up the password to her e-mail address. Officer Knapp read through Aew's e-mails that were addressed to me, and mine to her. Aew would tell me later that she sat quietly, but “Inside I was crying.” She had been so excited to finally visit America. America, the only country ever to coerce her at the border. This is against everything I know about winning and losing the subtle wars. This is against everything I love about the United States. We are not supposed to behave like this. Aew would tell me later that she thought she would be arrested if she did not give the password.
The Government of the United States was reading the private e-mails of a U.S. citizen (me). The Department of “Homeland Security” was at work, intimidating visitors with legitimate visas. They had at least 24 hours to check her out before she landed in the United States. What kind of security is this? The Department of Homeland Security was at this moment more like the Department of Intimidation.
Officer Knapp called my phone as I was driving to the Orlando airport. I was going to be there two hours early to make sure I would be on time, so that she had a warm welcome to my country. But instead, Knapp was busy detaining Aew in Minneapolis and was on my cell phone asking all types of personal questions that he had no business asking. Sensing that Aew was in trouble, I answered his questions. Mr. Knapp was a rude smart aleck. The call is likely recorded and that recording would bear out my claims. This officer of the United States government, a grown man, had coerced personal information from a Thai woman who weighs 90 pounds. I asked Aew later why she gave him the e-mail password, and she answered simply, "I was afraid," and “I thought I would be arrested.”
What could I say to alleviate any of this? Could I say, "This is the U.S., nothing to be afraid of."? The world already sees us as senseless bullies. Aew might have been detained indefinitely; even I was concerned that the Department of Homeland Security might detain Aew for no reason. Essentially, she had no rights. They had already coerced her e-mail password out of her head through intimidation.
This does not make me feel safe: Our Homeland Security was focusing on a 40-year-old Thai bank officer while there are real bad guys out there. Thailand and the United States have had good relations for 175 years, and Thailand is one of the few countries in the world that is proud to say they are friends of the United States. There are no threats to Americans from Thai people -- who, among other relevant things, are mostly not Muslims. The King of Thailand was born in Massachusetts and graduated from Harvard. I have never seen the King with a gun; only a camera. His 2009 New Year’s speech was also a call for peace. The King and his family helped bring widespread education to Thailand, which created a special problem. Today there are large numbers of highly educated, successful women looking for highly educated men. I remember General (ret.) McCaffrey, our former drug Czar, telling me a couple of years ago that the King of Thailand was incredibly important in wiping out opium poppies in Thailand. The King of Thailand is highly respected by the government of the United States. He is a very good man.
During World War II, when the Japanese encouraged the Thai people to fight us, the Thai government actually declared war on the United States and Great Britain. But the Thai Ambassador in Washington refused to deliver the declaration of war. The upshot was that the United States refused to declare war on Thailand, and the Thai people formed a resistance against the Japanese.
Thai people refused to fight Americans. Instead, they attacked the Japanese. Has our government had problems recently with 90-pound, 40-year-old Thai women? Do they blow things up? Aew doesn’t even know how to light a match. She doesn’t smoke or drink, and is more upright than your average southern Baptist. She can’t even curse and gets upset if she hears me say a bad word about someone. “Michael!” she says, “Don’t say that!”
When I discovered that she had missed her flight, after about 24 hours of travel thus far, I called immigration at Minneapolis and asked to speak with Officer Knapp. Knapp got on the phone, but this time it was me questioning him. Knapp told me it was legal to read e-mails. I asked for his first name, but he was afraid to give his first name, which was rather strange for someone working within the confines of an airport where everyone has been searched for weapons. Where I work, in a war zone, soldiers give their first and last names and face Taliban and al Qaeda heads up, man to man. I write about al Qaeda, Taliban and other terrorist groups who kill thousands of people. My name is Michael Yon. My first name is Michael. Mr. Knapp hides behind a badge bullying a woman whose only activities are Yoga, reading, travel, and telling me what is healthy and unhealthy to eat. Knapp is a face of Homeland Security. How many other officers at Homeland Security bully 90-pound women, but are afraid to give their own names?
Knowing that Homeland Security officers are creating animosity and anxiety at our borders does not make me feel safer. How many truly bad guys slip by while U.S. officers stand in small rooms and pick on little women?
I have just returned from Afghanistan and Iraq on a trip with U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and I can assure you that we can do better. We do not have to violate human rights and insult our closest allies to maintain our security.
Meanwhile, Aew had missed two flights; standby seats were full on the second flight, and I was considering flying from Florida to Minneapolis to get her myself. I did not want Aew to have to sleep in the airport overnight.
I had intended to show Aew a bit of my country. But it's taking a little while for her to get over her discomfort at being in America. She was treated better in China. So was I.
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Great article. Unfortunately, the treatment that Ms. Aew received is far from rare. Even more unfortunate that the behavior is condoned by many under the guise of protecting our populace. And let's not fool ourselves and say that this is an isolated case. Had this woman not known a respected journalist the story would never have come to light.
We've backed ourselves into a nice little Catch-22 haven't we? You can't catch the bad guys by treating everyone equally, but you can't treat everyone equally and expect to catch bad guys.
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**Anyone here able to tell a Thai that's Buddhist from a Thai that's Muslim?**
http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/023328.php
November 2, 2008
Thailand: jihadists eliminate last Buddhist family from village
A 72 year old mother and her 39 year old daughter. The mother was shot in the head and killed. The father was slain a year ago. Now no more Buddhists (i.e., "pagans," "mushrikin") in Narathiwat.
"Last Buddhist family in Narathiwat village attacked," from the Nation, November 2:
Narathiwat - The last Buddhist family in a village of this southern border province was attacked by Muslim insurgents Sunday, killing the mother and severely injuring the daughter.
The attack against the family in Moo 7 village of Tambon Laloh of Ruesoh district happened at 1:20 pm.
Police said the mother Ladda Sutthani, 72, owner of a clothes shop, was fatally shot and her daughter, Darunee Duangkaew, 39, was severely injured and sent to the provincial hospital.
Ladda, who was shot at her head and neck, died before she was sent to the hospital.
Police said the two were sitting inside the shop with two other relatives and the insurgents arrived on two motorcycles. They initially pretended to buy clothes but opened fire at the mother and daughter while the two relatives managed to flee.
The shop was attacked with a bomb two years ago, injuring Ladda. Darunee's husband was killed about a year ago.
Ladda and Darunee's family is the last Buddhist family in the village.
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http://www.9-11commission.gov/staff_statements/911_TerrTrav_Monograph.pdf
Well worth reading, if you want to get an idea of the challenges we face.
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http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/pacificnw/2001/1125/cover.html
WRITTEN BY PAULA BOCK
PHOTOGRAPHED BY BENJAMIN BENSCHNEIDER
In quiet Port Angeles, local folks tackle a terrorist - and nothing has been quite the same since
EVER SINCE terrorist Ahmed Ressam drove off the ferry from Victoria, B.C., with 135 pounds of bomb ingredients hidden in his trunk, the folks at U.S. Customs — who caught and chased him on foot through the streets of Port Angeles — have wondered many things.
Was the Los Angeles airport really his only target?
What would've happened if they hadn't caught him?
Most of all, why did he pick Port Angeles? Does that mean (and this gives them the creeps) that he scoped them out before that drizzly night?
Let's say he did. Ressam would have spied an international border crossing that looks, frankly, homemade. Most of the operation takes place outdoors under an awning balanced on creosote pilings, a structure more casually built than your average picnic shelter.
Instead of sitting in booths, the inspectors stand in the salty air next to tables slapped together from scrap lumber, painted gray. To make a phone call or check the computer, they head for a trailer furnished with 1940s office chairs, masonite clipboards, a combo-dial safe and a brass-handled filing cabinet left over from the "Casablanca" era. There are no surveillance cameras. Sparrows and seagulls flit in the rafters. One of the inspectors, since retired, fed the birds on the sly even though they tended to spatter her spit-and-polish colleagues. Despite this ever-present danger, most of the customs officials smile a lot.
Inspector Diana Dean appears to be smiling even when she isn't because her warm brown eyes turn up at the corners, like a Kewpie doll's, and she often winks at the ferry passengers when they show their Murchie's Tea and ask for directions to Highway 101.
Inspectors wonder whether terrorist Ahmed Ressam scoped out Port Angeles before he boarded the Coho ferry in Victoria, B.C., and attempted to bring nearly 135 pounds of bomb ingredients into America through their tiny port. When they discovered the load, he fled on foot and they chased him up the street at left, tackling him a few blocks later.
Headed to Crescent Lake? She directs them west, past an abandoned shack improbably labeled, CURRENCY EXCHANGE. Seattle? Dean points east in the direction of Omelet King and Dairy Queen.
She waves. "You're good to go!"
Friendly border, no barbed wire. It'd be understandable if an international terrorist mistook this port for easy entry.
Wrong.
ALONG WITH her disarming smile, Diana Dean carries a Glock.
All that day — the day before Ressam, before everything — she'd been out on the firing range with her colleagues, practicing in the rain. Target shooting. Take downs. Handcuffings. Fun when you're in your 20s or 30s, Dean says, but she's well beyond that, and by late afternoon, she was eager to finish, tend to the evening ferry and go home to a hot shower.
What to make for dinner? That was the only thing on her mind. Something quick. Baked potatoes. Hamburger. One of Dean's three grown daughters is vegetarian. Whether to accommodate her that night. Typical Tuesday. December 14th, 1999.
At first, customs inspectors thought the load was dope, but field tests were negative. Then they remembered the black boxes, unscrewed the lids and found these timers rigged from Casio watches.
The Millennium was just around the corner, hardly a blip on Dean's radar screen, security or otherwise. Christmas came first. At home, the tree was already up. Downtown, shopkeepers had decorated the streets with little white lights. It wasn't cold enough to frost the breath, but damp.
At 5:30, the ferry from Victoria docked with only 20 vehicles aboard. Dean checked cars in Lane 2, the center lane, while Inspectors Mark Johnson, Mike Chapman, Steve Campbell and Dan Clem worked the other lanes and foot passengers.
"When I'm working a car, I'm always glancing at the next one behind," Dean says. "If it looks like grandma and grandpa from Sequim, it probably is. You're going to ask different questions depending on whether they have U.S. or Canadian plates. You eyeball that person and see if what they look like matches with who they say they are."
Instead of a spare tire, the wheel well of Ressam's rental car held 10 bags of urea fertilizer, two olive jars with an amber liquid similar to nitroglycerin, pill bottles filled with highly volatile military-grade explosives and four timers. Ressam brought some of the chemicals from a jihad training camp in Afghanistan, assembled the bomb in a Vancouver motel and said he planned to detonate it at the Los Angeles International Airport.
All the other passengers were "regular, normal people," Dean recalls. Ressam's rental car is the only one she remembers. Did he pick her line, she wonders now, "maybe, because I'm a woman?"
It was the last vehicle off the boat, a dark green Chrysler 300M with B.C. plates, a luxury sedan usually favored by the older set. The driver was small and wore long sideburns and a too-big camelhair coat. He looked to be in his early 30s. He rolled down the window.
"Where are you going?" Dean asked him.
"Sattal," he said. Nervous, she thought. Out-of-the-ordinary nervous.
"Why are you going to Seattle?"
"Bisit," he said. Fidgeting.
"Where do you live?"
"Montreal." Oh. French-Canadian. That explains the accent. But not his jumpiness.
"Who are you going to see in Seattle?"
"No, hotel." Why such a roundabout route from Montreal, on two ferries, to visit a hotel in Seattle? Doesn't make sense, Dean thought. The man became more agitated, began rummaging in the console.
"The minute the hands disappear," Dean says, "you get nervous."
Secondary inspection. She gave him a customs declaration to get his hands busy and asked for his driver's license. It identified him as Benni Noris of Montreal.
Not quite. Though he later claimed "I am a not a citizen of anywhere," Ahmed Ressam is Algerian, born there in 1967. He worked a while in his father's coffee shop before moving to France under a false name, then to Montreal, where he lived on welfare and petty thievery and joined a terrorist cell. In 1998, he learned to rig bombs, conduct urban warfare and do surveillance at a jihad training camp in Afghanistan. In 1999, he returned to Vancouver, B.C., with the key chemicals for making the bomb for Los Angeles and spent several days putting it together with accomplice Abdelmajid Dahoumane in Room 118 of the 2400 Inn. The men kept the window open despite the wet, rainy weather, housekeeping staff testified, and left an acid burn on a table and corroded plumbing.
Ressam then drove to Victoria, where he called ahead to reserve a room at the Best Western hotel near Seattle Center, jotting the number on a notepad from the Empress Hotel. The slip of paper was found in his car along with a Los Angeles map — airports circled — but it would take months for the rest to unfold.
Dean watched the jittery man. Turn off the car, pop open the trunk and step out, she ordered. He didn't comply. By that time, the other inspectors had processed their passengers and were waiting for her to finish. Johnson had served a brief stint in Montreal, so Dean asked him to talk to the French Canadian.
Johnson didn't speak French, but knew Spanish from years working the southern border. "Habla Español?"
"Parlez-vous Français?" the man replied. He handed over his Costco card as identification.
"So you like to shop in bulk?" Johnson joked. "Y'know the 120-roll pack of toilet paper?" He was trying to crack the mask, test whether the guy was feigning no-speak-English. The guy gave him a withering look but wouldn't respond. He was acting "hinky," Johnson says, suspicious.
Johnson escorted him, by the arm, to a gray table to search the pockets of his trench coat. A few steps away, inspectors Clem and Chapman removed a suitcase from the trunk and unscrewed the covering over the spare tire. Clem called out. They'd found something.
Johnson gripped Ressam by both shoulders and walked him to the trunk. They peered inside.
In Johnson's hands, Ressam shuddered.
To check the computer, make phone calls or process papers for truckers, Dean and other inspectors head for this vintage trailer at the Black Ball ferry terminal. The hand-hewn tables and lack of surveillance cameras lend the international border station a homey feel, which perhaps lulled Ressam into thinking it'd be an easy crossing.
"I CAN'T TELL YOU I've led a very exciting life," Diana Dean says. "Absolutely not one thing extraordinary. Nothing. Totally boring."
When pressed, Dean talks about her animals. She has two llamas, a Dalmatian, another dog, a tiny freshwater puffer fish, two cats, five unnamed chickens, a yellow-naped chartreuse Amazon parrot and two African leopard tortoises, Lily and Luke, whose parents were recently featured in Reptile Magazine. That's the closest Dean admits to fame.
Dean has loved animals since she was a girl growing up in Seattle. Her mom, a Seattle schoolteacher, let her keep baby raccoons, rabbits, cats, dogs, hamsters, even a snake or two. Her father was killed in the Battle of the Bulge shortly before she was born, so she spent a lot of time with her grandparents on their North Dakota farm.
She dreamed of being a veterinarian or marrying a farmer. Instead, she wed a city boy, Tony, whom she'd met at Roosevelt High. He became a sky marshal and then worked in customs. She took courses at Everett and Spokane community colleges, worked as a payroll manager in Seattle, moved to Hawaii when Tony was transferred, then applied to be an inspector herself.
Dean loved the job, especially the airport buzzing with people. She glommed onto inspectors she admired to learn what they looked for and how they asked questions. Over the years, she made several big busts along with run-of-the-mill seizures, even after transferring to Port Angeles, a much quieter port. Dean's boss says she has a "sixth sense," but Dean attributes it to experience and training.
"Being an inspector," she says, "you see the same types day in and day out. I can almost tell who they are, where they're going, and practically what they do for a living. And if they seem a little off, I pull them over for a second look-see."
The day after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Port Director Jerry Slaminski framed this newspaper photo of Osama bin Laden and placed it across from his desk to remind himself that "the Bible says you should pray for your enemies." So far, that's been too hard. Instead, the port director prays bin Laden will be captured, tried and brought to justice. He hopes to someday scrawl DECEASED or CAPTURED or DEATH ROW across bin Laden's photo.
That's all she was doing the night of Dec. 14, 1999, when Ressam came through. "Who would have dreamed it? Never in a trillion years," she says. "You have your life pretty much planned out, and something will happen to change it. You go with what life hands you, I guess I don't know."
Since snagging Ressam, Dean and her colleagues have been honored by the director of U.S. Customs and awarded medals by the U.S. Treasury secretary. They've testified at trials in Los Angeles and New York and in front of Congress in Washington, D.C. A self-described "homebody," Dean had never visited any of these places before. "I'd never heard of Algeria or Afghanistan," she says. "That's not true, but it is. Before, you didn't think of things that go on in other parts of the world."
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Now she does. She's watched documentaries about Ressam's homeland. She's gone on the Internet with her daughter to read about women in Afghanistan under the Taliban. What if a woman's husband is killed, she wonders. How would she make a living, take care of her children?
"Unimaginable," Dean says. "Chaotic. That's the only word. Certainly not like it is here. It's not even like New York, for crying out loud!"
In Port Angeles, daily life goes on. "I get up every morning, get my kids to school, come home, make dinner, shop at Safeway. This being Port Angeles, that's one of the highlights." But somehow, especially since Sept. 11, it's not the same.
"You think about these things in the weirdest places," she says. The other night in the Safeway, by the meat counter, something washed over Dean. "You look around and people are shopping in their own little world," she says. "I can't believe everyone isn't down on their knees because we have so much, and so many people don't. We complain about the stupidest thing in this country. Go figure."
The meat counter in the Port Angeles Safeway is 52 steps long. It ends where a Hostess Twinkie display intersects with the pet-food aisle. Pet Food stretches the entire length of the store and includes treats such as Purina Bacon Beggin' Strips, $3.49 for six ounces.
To Diana Dean, this used to be normal.
Now it's not.
Slaminski oversees four full-time and eight part-time customs inspectors at a border crossing so quiet they usually seize only one or two marijuana joints every other month. The poster of the inspectors who caught Ressam is autographed, with thanks, from Ray Kelly, then head of U.S. Customs, who credits them with saving countless lives.
DEEP INSIDE Ressam's trunk, the wheel well was loaded. Ten green plastic garbage bags filled with white crystals, two olive jars of amber liquid, black boxes, two pill bottles.
Drugs, Johnson thought, flashing back to the southern border. Maybe meth. Not powdery like cocaine, coarser, somewhere between sugar and rock salt.
Johnson patted Ressam down for weapons, felt a hard bulge in his right pocket. Suddenly, Ressam slipped out of his trench coat and ran. "Instead of running after him," Johnson recalls, "I'm like: Hey! Hey! You can't do that!
"If anything be known, I'm the guy who let Ressam go."
Not for long. He and Chapman took off on foot. Dean and Inspector Steve Campbell jumped in their family vans. "Watch the trunk!" Dean called to her husband, who was waiting for a ride home because his car had broken down.
It was dark. Ressam led by half a block. Which way? Campbell yelled to an old man on the corner. The guy pointed with his cane: That-a-way!
At the trial, the prosecution used an aerial map of downtown Port Angeles to trace the four-block chase. Ressam ran up Laurel, past the banks and flower planters toward First Street's twinkling holiday lights. Chapman followed. Johnson cut through a parking lot by a mural of the ferry Kalakala. At the corner of First Street, Ressam bumped into a guy, kept running and dove under a pickup truck parked in front of the shoe store.
Chapman finally caught up and squatted on the curb, gun drawn: Stop! Police! Customs!
Ressam crawled out, glanced at Chapman, turned his back and ran into the traffic. He rebounded off a moving car and tried to duck into the Kalakala parking lot, but found himself facing Johnson. It'd been all uphill. Everyone was panting, but the race plodded on, past the movie theater and the furniture store and Dynasty Chinese restaurant.
"It was kinda weird because it was like a slow-motion chase," recalls a local shopowner, who watched it. "They were going around in circles. He (Ressam) kept looking back. He looked bored, really, so we just thought he's just some shoplifter. The last thing in the world you'd think was it was a terrorist."
Traffic was confused. At the intersection of First and Lincoln, Ressam grabbed the door handle of a blue Olds stopped at the light. The manager of Safeway video rentals was at the wheel. She hadn't locked her car door, of course, this being Port Angeles. She wondered whether to run the red light. Go! her husband said. She floored it.
Ressam spun, off balance. Chapman tackled him. Johnson pounced, 240 pounds kneeling on Ressam's shoulders, and slapped on Smith & Wesson cuffs.
For more than a year, Inspector Mark Johnson hid his medal in his locker because he felt ashamed of his snappish behavior in the days following Ressam's arrest. But on Sept. 11, after a hard workout to vent anger, Johnson went to change his clothes, saw the medal and felt proud.
AFTER THE awards ceremony in Washington, D.C., Johnson hung his medal in the back of his locker and never wanted to look at it again. He was ashamed how he'd snapped at people in the days following Ressam's capture. He'd stayed awake nearly 72 hours babysitting the explosive cache, and when he finally went home, he thought he saw a man dressed in black crawling toward the house. "I recognized I was going nuts," the inspector said. He took time off to sleep and work out.
Also, like the other inspectors, Johnson didn't feel deserving of special merit. It had taken several years to find his calling as a customs inspector after graduating from Fife High School and Western Washington University and working various construction and warehouse jobs.
His first year as a customs inspector along the southern border near Tijuana, other inspectors zeroed in on dope all the time, but he couldn't find a thing. "The southern border was like getting slapped with a wet towel," he says, until "I learned to read the thing and hone it down to an edge." In 1996, Johnson was awarded a belt buckle for making the most seizures in San Ysidro and Tecate ports. He'd push the traffic, moving a line quickly to weed out civilian chaff and suck in smugglers. Long hours, tough conditions, hard work. The other inspectors on the southern border, he says, deserve medals, too.
USA v. Ressam (CR99-666c) was held in Los Angeles in a stylish new courthouse, part Perry Mason, part Restoration Hardware. Johnson was nervous while testifying, but that didn't keep him from trying to connect with the slight man in the brown sweater.
The prosecution: "Now during this field-testing process, did you test the contents of the pill bottles?"
Johnson: "I did not."
Q: "What, if anything, did you do with the pill bottles?"
A: "I just looked at them and shook them around."
Q: "Did you know the pill bottles contained a high explosive?"
A: "I know that now."
A Tylenol bottle contained a powerful military-grade explosive, cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine, or RDX. Another small bottle held hexamethylentriperoxodiamin, or HMTD, an unstable explosive so dangerous it's not manufactured commercially. Two tall olive jars were filled with 50 ounces of ethylene glycol dinitrate, or EGDN, a chemical cousin to nitroglycerin. Used in dynamite, EGDN is sensitive to shock, heat and friction. Screwing the jar lids could have been enough to set it off. The garbage bags contained 118 pounds of urea fertilizer and 14 pounds of sulfate powder. Mixed with other chemicals, it's a bomb. When the FBI detonated five pounds of the mixture under a big old sedan, the explosion left only shards of car carcass and drifting ash.
Q: "What, if anything, did you do with the Safeway olive-jar containers that had the brown liquid?"
A: "I tipped them upside-down for the viscosity of it."
Q: "Did you know at the time it contained the equivalent of nitroglycerin? Do you know if you dropped the bottle what would have happened?"
A: "I know."
At that, Johnson made eye contact with Ressam, who returned his gaze and then looked down. Did he feel remorse? Johnson couldn't tell. "My Christian belief says everyone can be redeemed."
Every night before bed, Johnson and his three boys pray for Mommy and baby sister; for Manolin and Yurebe, boys they sponsor in the Dominican Republic; for neighbors; for help in saying no to sin and yes to God. They also pray Ressam will repent and become a Christian, "not in the sappy sense," Johnson says, "but in recognition of 'Hey, I'm a sinner.' " He adds, "Even though I'm praying for the guy, I want to get in that cell and throttle him."
On Sept. 11, Johnson worked out his sadness and anger by running the ramps behind the Federal Building. Changing clothes at his locker, Johnson spied his medal, still dangling from its blue ribbon. He thought about what could have been, and for the first time, he felt proud.
"Yeah," he said. "That's OK."
HANDCUFFED, RESSAM lay on cold pavement while traffic detoured around him. His left cheekbone was scraped; he curled his legs like a dead spider, not resisting, but not cooperating. "So I applied pain compliance to his wrist," Johnson said, "and that's when he decided he was going to walk back." A patrol car arrived to drive them the last few blocks.
In the trailer, the inspectors pulled out field kits to test the white granules in the garbage bags. They still thought it was dope, but all the drug tests were negative. Then, they remembered the four black boxes in the trunk and unscrewed one of the lids. A Casio watch face stared back, laced to a circuit board with red wires.
Calls had gone out. Layers of law enforcement arrived and swarmed around the little ferry terminal. In the backseat of the patrol car, still handcuffed, Ressam kept peeking over the edge of the window, then ducking down as officials poked at the bomb materials in his trunk. Dean wondered if he'd been badly hurt in the scuffle. Should they call medics? They loosened his handcuffs.
At the trial, Ressam's defense attorney cross-examined Inspector Chapman: "You didn't run up to the people at the trunk of the car and say, 'Get away from the trunk of the car. There is something wrong here because this guy is diving down on the seat?' "
A: "No. I'm not trained in testing for either narcotics or any other material. We had individuals that are trained, and I was relying upon their field of expertise."
Johnson cut through this parking lot, in front of the Kalakala ferry mural, when running after Ressam, in the dark, through downtown Port Angeles. Every night, Johnson prays with his sons that Ressam will feel remorse. Ressam is in a federal detention center in SeaTac awaiting final sentencing.
Everyone cringes when they look back. That night, they'd stored the heat- and shock-sensitive EGDN in the warm basement of the Federal Building, a classic brick and stone edifice heated by steam radiators. Johnson recalls the olive jars knocking against each other as he walked them downstairs. Three days later, an ATF agent drove 900 miles on I-5 with the chemicals before learning how volatile they were. This summer, when testifying against co-conspirator Mokhtar Haouari, Ressam said he was too scared to drive with the chemicals in his car; he'd planned to take Amtrak to Los Angeles instead.
"We didn't realize the magnitude of it that night," Dean says. What started as an ordinary drizzly day had turned into a nervous ferry passenger, then a suspicious car, then a bomb plot, then a Montreal terrorist cell, then a jihad training camp in Afghanistan linked to Osama bin Laden.
Customs inspectors are not experts in such matters. They are good at reading eyes.
"You know how you look in somebody's eyes and there's light? He looked at me and his eyes were dead," Dean says of Ressam. "It was just a chilling chilling chilling feeling. It was like looking at a person who was not there. There was no spark, no life, no soul. His eyes were just flat."
PORT ANGELES Port Director Jerry Slaminski is a beefy man with a moustache who resembles Captain Kangaroo's bigger, less jolly, younger brother.
One wall of his office serves as a glory board. In framed montages, beaming inspectors show off sacks of confiscated marijuana and bricks of cocaine.
The Ressam capture is in the center and features snapshots of the terrorist taken that night in the trailer. He stands next to a fire extinguisher and K9 recruiting poster, pockets turned inside out, undershirt peeking from his gray sweater. There's slight stubble on his hollow cheeks and he's set his face in an expressionless mask. Maybe if he were smiling you could imagine the guy, in an alternate universe, laughing with friends at a soccer match or café. Maybe not.
Next to the glory board, there's a framed photo of President George W. Bush. It's on top of a VCR on which Slaminski shows documentaries to teach his staff about other cultures. Slaminski, who's traveled extensively around the world and was a sky marshal in the Middle East, has a daughter who married a Muslim and moved there. When he imagines Ressam's roots in Algeria, he says:
"What would your identity be, as a man, if you had no job, people are getting killed and you're not sure who's right, the government is corrupt, the rich are getting richer and the poor people are taken advantage of and you'll never amount to anything, anyway, you're never going to get out of the hole, or have a family, or job. They're probably looking for a cause. Trying to find some purpose in life."
Across the room, under a navigational chart of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, is another framed photo: Osama bin Laden. He sits cross-legged in a flowing white garment and camouflage jacket. Slaminski sinks into his chair, dark uniform belted and decorated with badges. The leader of the Armed Islamic Group and the head of Port Angeles Customs stare at each other.
Slaminski put bin Laden's picture up on Sept. 12, "thinking I was going to pray for him, but I haven't," he says, tapping a pen on his desk. "I pray that he's going to get caught. I think that would be even better than seeing him killed. Yeah, brought back here in handcuffs and put in a courtroom. It reminds me to pray that justice is done. Also to pray for the people in New York.
"It's intense. Every time I look at it, you feel like you're at war and this is my Public Enemy No. 1, and you don't want to grow lethargic until we control this situation. Maybe someday I can write DECEASED or CAPTURED or DEATH ROW on that picture with this black pen.
"The Bible says pray for your enemies. I find it hard. I want to pray that his soul will be saved, but I can't." The port director pauses, swallows. "Excuse me," he says. His ample jaw trembles. He takes a deep breath. "God's grace is bigger than my grace. To be honest, I believe God allowed that man to be caught as a warning to the U.S. that we were a target and they were trying to penetrate our borders and do damage. Whether it was taken seriously or not, you be the judge."
It is an odd feeling to be on a misty peninsula, in a government office, listening to the director of a tiny port talk about God, jihad and Algerian grandmothers wailing in olive groves. But these are strange times.
"You think of a small town like this as a quiet haven of peace where you can escape this kind of thing," Slaminski says. "There's no place in the world to run from this anymore. No country's too small, no city's too small."
Every month in Port Angeles, customs inspectors seize Cuban cigars and a few bottles of Tylenol with codeine. Every other month, they confiscate a joint or two. Once a year, they'll uncover a notable load, like last year's 120 pounds of marijuana in a motorhome. Mostly, the port deals with the surplus of bountiful nations: tourists and commercial truckers.
The tidy office is stocked with rubber stamps, staplers, a fax machine, Scotch tape, manila folders, pencil jars, paperclips, envelopes. The implements of civil society. Office supplies never looked so vulnerable.
In three weeks, it will be two years since Ressam took the ferry to Port Angeles.
Every day, 249,000 people cross the northern border between Canada and the United States. In December, more than 5 million passengers typically travel through the Los Angeles International Airport. In the Federal Detention Center in SeaTac, Ahmed Ressam is cooperating with the FBI in hopes of getting less than 130 years at his Feb. 14 sentencing. In Afghanistan, the United States is dropping 7½-ton bombs as big as Volkswagen Beetles. Osama bin Laden remains at large.
On the Port Angeles waterfront, wind whips the flags. Every evening, when the ferry docks, Diana Dean smooths on an extra layer of Chapstick and goes out to meet the boat. She winks and waves at everyone, almost.
Paula Bock is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff writer. Benjamin Benschneider is a magazine staff photographer.
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Possible Hijacker Stopped At OIA
An alleged "20th hijacker" was turned away a month before the Sept. 11 attacks.
By Tamara Lytle | Washington Bureau Chief
January 20, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Orlando Sentinel. All rights reserved.
WASHINGTON -- Just one month before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a potential "20th hijacker" may have been prevented from entering the country by an alert border agent at Orlando International Airport, federal investigators said Monday.
Sometime in August 2001, a man known only by his last name -- al-Qahtani -- arrived at the airport on the same day that lead hijacker Mohamed Atta was known to have been there and to have used a payphone.
But al-Qahtani was turned away after questioning by border agent Jose Melendez-Perez, who is currently an inspector with the Customs and Border Protection arm of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Melendez-Perez is scheduled to testify about the "incident in Florida" at a Monday hearing of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, better known as the 9-11 Commission, according to a witness list.
Al Felzenberg, the commission's spokesman, would not confirm details of the incident but said Melendez-Perez's quick thinking may have helped prevent the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks from being even more devastating. It's long been suspected that a so-called "20th hijacker" was supposed to have been part of the terrorist team that was overwhelmed by passengers aboard United Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania.
It has been speculated that that flight may have been aimed at the U.S. Capitol or the White House, and the fact that the terrorist team was one man short may have given passengers an edge.
"He helped make it a lot less of a tragedy than it might have been," said Felzenberg. "There were many people who worked for the government who helped enhance security, and he's one of them."
Authorities had earlier speculated that Zacarias Moussaoui was meant to be the 20th hijacker but have since backed off. The Morocco-born al-Qaeda operative is awaiting trial in Virginia on terrorism and conspiracy charges.
At least one other of the Flight 93 hijackers -- Saeed Alghamdi -- is known to have entered the country through Orlando on June 27, 2001, according to previous FBI testimony. A total of four hijackers entered through Orlando en route to joining terrorist cells in South Florida, the FBI has said.
A congressional source said the would-be hijacker al-Qahtani was later picked up in Afghanistan as a combatant and is now being questioned at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay.
The Orlando incident was first reported in the edition of Newsweek that went on sale Monday. That story reported that Melendez-Perez, a 58-year-old Vietnam veteran, turned al-Qahtani away and put him on a flight out of the country after "his story fell apart" about being in Orlando to meet a friend.
The 9-11 panel has also discovered that Atta made a call on a payphone from the airport to a country in the Middle East the same day. Newsweek reported that a surveillance camera captured Atta placing the call.
But commission officials would neither confirm nor deny those details Monday night.
"We're aware of the story, and we're not in a position to comment on it," said Philip D. Zelikow, executive director of the panel. "The commission will be preparing a detailed statement on this topic and much broader issues."
Melendez-Perez already has spoken with the staff at the commission, which is run by former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean and former Rep. Lee Hamilton. Monday he will testify as part of a hearing on border and aviation security. "We think what he has to say will be extremely important to our investigation," Felzenberg said.
The commission has done 800 interviews and held six public hearings so far. It is scheduled to report to Congress and the president May 27. Recently, some commissioners had said they needed more time. But congressional leaders responded vociferously that they want the report finished on time.
A congressional joint inquiry, led by Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., and Rep. Porter Goss, R-Sanibel, finished its work last year investigating the intelligence failures that led up to the Sept. 11 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people when terrorists hijacked planes and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The Kean commission has a much broader mandate than the congressional inquiry. It will look at aviation security, Congress' role, border security, terrorist financing, the intelligence community and other factors. The commission will begin hearing from Cabinet members from both the Clinton and Bush administrations this spring.
Unlike the congressional inquiry, the 9-11 panel will have access to classified White House documents
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Just Doing My Job, OIA Inspector Says
Jose Melendez-Perez said he can't say more yet on a man stopped in 2001 who was a possible hijacker.
By Pamela J. Johnson and Tim Barker | Sentinel Staff Writers
Copyright © 2004, Orlando Sentinel
January 21, 2004
It is a decision Jose Melendez-Perez had made countless times before. Only this time, it may have prevented United Airlines Flight 93 from striking the U.S. Capitol or the White House.
About a month before Sept. 11, 2001, the federal border-patrol inspector at Orlando International Airport denied a man entry. However, this man -- identified only as al-Qahtani -- may have been the "20th hijacker," some officials said.
"I've been doing this every day for years, and only God knows how many people I've turned away," Melendez-Perez said Tuesday night while waxing his black Nissan Maxima at his home in an east Orange County gated community. "I usually never hear anything about it."
Just how important this catch was is debated among security experts, especially because 19 other hijackers made it into the country. It is suspected that the man whom Melendez-Perez blocked was supposed to be part of the terrorist team that was overwhelmed by passengers aboard the United flight, which crashed in Pennsylvania.
"It's like saying we did a great job at Pearl Harbor by shooting down 29 Japanese airplanes," said Michael Boyd, an aviation consultant with the Colorado-based Boyd Group.
Still, experts say it demonstrates the importance of the customs operations in protecting the nation.
The most obvious role of customs is found at U.S. airports, where inspectors quiz international travelers.
"You're looking at their reactions," said Douglas Laird of Laird & Associates, a Nevada-based aviation-security consulting company. "Are they sweating? Are they averting their gaze?"
But the agency's role has morphed considerably since the 2001 attacks.
In early 2003, customs was moved under the umbrella of the new Department of Homeland Security. The agency was split, with its criminal investigators moved into a new federal agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The remainder of the old customs agency became U.S. Customs & Border Protection, which got a boost to its anti-terrorist toolbox earlier this month with the debut of the U.S. Visitor and Immigration Status Indicator Technology program. The system uses photos and fingerprints to track the comings and goings of visitors from countries where visas are required.
These changes illustrate a shift in the agency's responsibilities, with more emphasis placed on searching for potential terrorists, rather than just keeping out illegal immigrants, said Charles Slepian, aviation-security expert with the Foreseeable Risk Analysis Center.
Melendez-Perez, a native of Puerto Rico, said he could not provide details about the Orlando airport incident until he testifies Monday during a hearing of the National Commission of Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.
"My wife doesn't even know anything about it," he said.
Earlier, authorities had suspected that Zacarias Moussaoui was meant to be the 20th hijacker but now say it might have been this new suspect.
To Melendez-Perez, his own story is mundane.
"It's my job," he said. "It's what I get paid to do."
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9-11 Panel Lauds OIA Agent
Hijackers' leader should not have slipped by, inspector says
By Tamara Lytle | Washington Bureau Chief
January 27, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Orlando Sentinel. All Rights Reserved.
In Washington. (PHOTO: DENNIS COOK/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS)
FROM THE TESTIMONY
"The bottom line is, he gave me the chills," Jose Melendez-Perez said.
"It is entirely plausible to suggest your actions in doing your job efficiently and competently may well have contributed to saving the Capitol or the White House and all the people who were in those buildings, those monuments to democracy," Sept. 11 commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste said.
WASHINGTON -- An Orlando border agent hailed for blocking a suspected terrorist from entering the country told a federal commission Monday that the ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks never should have slipped past border agents.
Jose Melendez-Perez said there were enough red flags about Mohamed Atta -- including the wrong visa, his age and his impeccable clothing -- that an alert border agent should have refused Atta's entry.
"I would have recommended refusal," Melendez-Perez told the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States in the first of two days of hearings on security breakdowns that may have contributed to the attacks.
Three of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers told obvious lies on their visa applications, the commission's staff said Monday, and as many as eight may have entered the United States with doctored passports.
While Monday's hearing focused largely on forged documents, lapses in security and other problems, Melendez-Perez was hailed for the gut instinct that led him to deny entry to a Saudi national who arrived at Orlando International Airport a little more than a month before the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 in New York, Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon.
"When the subject looked at me, I felt a bone-chilling cold effect," Melendez-Perez testified Monday. "The bottom line is, he gave me the chills."
Federal authorities now think the man Melendez-Perez turned away -- Mohamed al-Qahtani -- may have been the missing 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 attacks.
The border agent's decision may have left the terrorists shorthanded on one of the four airliners hijacked that day, allowing passengers to fight back and crash the jet thought to have been targeted at Washington into a rural Pennsylvania field.
"It is entirely plausible to suggest your actions in doing your job efficiently and competently may well have contributed to saving the Capitol or the White House and all the people who were in those buildings, those monuments to democracy," commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste told Melendez-Perez during Monday's hearing. "For that, we all owe you a debt of gratitude."
With that, the Hart Senate hearing room broke into uncharacteristic applause as Melendez-Perez, a 58-year-old native of Puerto Rico, sat alone in a crisp gray suit at a long table, facing the cameras and the commission and the sudden attention for his part in fighting terrorism before it was a national commitment.
The commission also heard about a series of government failures in issuing visas, not sharing intelligence and allowing hijackers into the country with doctored passports and other improper documentation. The commission staff pointedly disputed CIA and FBI claims that most of the hijackers couldn't have been stopped because they entered the country legally.
As a counterpoint to all those failures, Melendez-Perez was invited to tell his story -- one of an inspector who risked wrath in a system that was deferential to Saudi visitors.
"I was just doing my job," Melendez-Perez repeated like a mantra Monday.
Instinct -- honed by military training and 11 years of border work -- is what led Melendez-Perez to deny entry to al-Qahtani on Aug. 4, 2001, the agent told the bipartisan federal panel, better known as the Sept. 11 Commission.
Al-Qahtani was sent to Melendez-Perez's secondary inspection station at OIA because he claimed not to speak English and hadn't properly filled out his paperwork.
Melendez-Perez sat with him in a back room, an Arabic translator on the speaker phone between them.
Al-Qahtani, who had arrived from Dubai, had no return ticket or credit cards and just $2,800 in cash for a six-day "vacation." That's not enough money to buy a ticket back to Dubai after six days of hotel expenses, Melendez-Perez figured.
The Saudi man said a friend was waiting for him in the airport, then changed his story to say no one was there after the border agent pressed him for a name. Investigators now know that Atta, who died in the Sept. 11 attacks, was in the Orlando airport calling another plotter when al-Qahtani didn't appear.
As Melendez-Perez found more holes in al-Qahtani's story, he drew on experience from 26 years in the Army, including a stint training recruiters in interview techniques. Al-Qahtani was aggressively arrogant -- even pointing a finger in the border agent's face -- but that didn't intimidate him.
Melendez-Perez, who had been an Army first sergeant, looked at al-Qahtani's neatly trimmed mustache, perfect grooming and confident bearing, surmising the man had military training. When al-Qahtani claimed he didn't know where he was going after the U.S. trip, the thought "hit man" flashed through the inspector's mind.
The evasiveness and shaky story weren't firm grounds for barring the Saudi from the country. But when al-Qahtani refused to answer questions under oath, that was a different story.
Melendez-Perez got permission from his supervisor's boss, and soon he was marching al-Qahtani over to the next flight to Dubai via London. As the Saudi who claimed not to speak English got on the plane, he looked back at Melendez-Perez and said something in English to the effect of "I'll be back."
Instead of coming back, al-Qahtani was later captured in Afghanistan and now is being held as an enemy combatant at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, according to congressional sources.
Members of the Sept. 11 Commission did not ask Melendez-Perez about the four hijackers who are known to have entered the country through OIA before joining terror cells in Florida.
Melendez-Perez, meanwhile, keeps checking visitors and immigrants in Orlando, although his border agency is now part of the Department of Homeland Security. The father of four and grandfather of six has not received any special award for his prescient judgment.
And no one from the FBI ever asked him for information, although he called his office Sept. 11 as soon as he heard of the attacks, reminding them of his run-in with the Saudi. Melendez-Perez also turned away another Saudi national that August, according to Ben-Veniste, although that person has no proven terrorist ties.
Kristin Breitweiser, whose husband died at the World Trade Center, said Monday that she wished the commission put front-line people who hadn't done their jobs on the spot instead of just featuring Melendez-Perez. "I applaud the man, but really I'd like to have the other however-many thousand people who dropped the ball," she said.
But commissioners and their staff were at times pointed in their criticism of the State Department officials who processed visas, the Immigration and Naturalization Service that watched the borders and the intelligence agencies that didn't share information with one another.
Commissioner John Lehman, a former Navy secretary, told Mary Ryan, the former assistant secretary of state for consular affairs, that her staff should have given closer scrutiny to people applying for visas in Saudi Arabia because of the well-known presence of Islamic fundamentalists there.
"Everybody we talked to said 'Saudi Arabia is our friend. We don't look for terrorists there,' " Lehman said. "Hello, did anyone read the newspapers?"
Ryan said Saudi Arabia was considered an ally and that the State Department did not have intelligence information to help it know who to keep out of the country by denying visas.
Jim Leusner of the Sentinel staff contributed to this report.
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Mr. Yon mentioned how China was "nicer". China doesn't need to worry so much at it's border crossings, as it has a massive internal surveillance infrastructure. We, on the other hand have very little. Once someone makes it into the US, it's quite easy to disappear and live "off the grid".
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By Fred Burton and Scott Stewart
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Militant Attacks In Mumbai and Their Consequences
On Jan. 8, the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs heard testimony from a number of experts about the lessons learned from the Nov. 26 Mumbai attack. According to Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), the Mumbai attack deserves attention because it raises important questions about the plans of U.S. authorities to prevent, prepare for and respond to similar attacks directed against targets in the United States.
As we’ve previously pointed out, the tactics employed in the Mumbai attack were not new or remarkable, although the attackers did incorporate some tactical innovations due to their use of modern technology. As shown by a long string of historic terror attacks, armed assaults can be quite effective. There are a number of factors, however, that would reduce the effectiveness of a similar attack inside the United States or many Western European countries.
Armed Assaults
Armed assaults employing small arms and grenades have long been a staple of modern terrorism. Such assaults have been employed in many famous terrorist attacks conducted by a wide array of actors, such as the Black September operation against the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics; the December 1975 seizure of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries headquarters in Vienna, Austria, led by Carlos the Jackal; the December 1985 simultaneous attacks against the airports in Rome and Vienna by the Abu Nidal Organization; and even the December 2001 attack against the Indian Parliament building in New Delhi led by Kashmiri militants.
In a particularly brutal armed assault, a large group of Chechen militants stormed a school in Beslan, North Ossetia in September 2004, taking more than 1,000 hostages and booby-trapping the school with scores of anti-personnel mines and improvised explosive devices. The attack, standoff and eventual storming of the school by Russian authorities after a three-day siege resulted in the deaths of more than 320 people, half of them children.
In some instances — such as the December 1996 seizure of the Japanese ambassador’s residence in Lima, Peru, by the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement — the objective of the armed assault was to take and intentionally hold hostages for a long period of time. In other instances, such as the May 1972 assault on Lod Airport by members of the Japanese Red Army, the armed assault was a suicide attack designed simply to kill as many victims as possible before the assailants themselves were killed or incapacitated. Even though Mumbai became a protracted operation, its planning and execution indicate it was intended as the second sort of attack — the attackers were ordered to inflict maximum damage and to not be taken alive.
When viewed as a part of this historic trend, perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of the Mumbai attacks was the assailants’ use of modern technology to assist them with planning the attack and with their command, control and communications during the execution of their operation. Technology not only assisted the Mumbai attackers in conducting their preoperational surveillance, it also enabled them to use satellite imagery of Mumbai and GPS receivers to reach their assigned landing spots by water and move to their assigned attack sites. (Mumbai was not the first instance of militants using boats to reach their targets; several Palestinian groups have used boats in attacks against Israeli coastal towns, while other groups — such as the Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka — have long used watercraft to transport teams for armed assault missions.)
Modern technology also allowed the tactical commanders and even individual team members to use satellite and cell phones to place calls to their strategic commanders in Pakistan, as demonstrated by some of the chilling audio captured by the Indian government. In transcripts of some of the conversations released by the Indian government, an unidentified commander reportedly exhorted the exhausted militants at the Nariman House to continue fighting. In another conversation, an off-site commander allegedly ordered the militants holed up in the Oberoi Hotel to kill their non-Muslim captives. From the transcripts, it is also apparent that the commanders were watching news coverage of the siege and then passing information to the attackers on the ground.
In the past, when a facility was seized, police tactics often called for the power and phone lines to be cut off to limit attackers’ ability to communicate with the outside world. Such measures have proven ineffective in the era of cell phones and portable satellite communications.
Mitigating Armed Assaults
Stratfor has long held that the United States and Europe are vulnerable to armed attacks against soft targets. In an open society, it is impossible to protect everything. Moreover, conducting attacks against soft targets such as hotels or malls can be done with ease, and can prove quite effective at creating carnage.
In fact, as we’ve previously pointed out, Cho Seung Hui killed more people with handguns in his attack at Virginia Tech than Jemaah Islamiyah was able to kill in Jakarta, Indonesia, in the August 2003 bombing of the Marriott Hotel and the September 2004 bombing of the Australian Embassy combined. Clearly, armed assaults pose a threat.
That said, while militants can use this same modus operandi and technology to attack targets in the United States or Europe, several factors would help mitigate the impact of such armed assaults.
First, reviewing the long history of armed assaults in modern terrorism shows that the tactic has forced many countries to develop specialized and highly trained forces to combat it. For example, it was the failed rescue attempt of the Israeli athletes in Munich that motivated the German government to create the elite Grenzschutzgruppe 9 (GSG 9), which would become one of the best counterterrorism forces in the world. The activities of the Provisional Irish Republican Army likewise helped shape the British Special Air Service into its role as an elite counterterrorism force.
While some developing countries, such as Singapore, have managed to develop highly trained and extremely competent counterterrorism units and effectively use such units, India is not one of them. In spite of the long history of terrorist activity directed against India, Indian security and counterterrorism assets are simply too poorly funded and organized to comprehensively address the militant threats the country faces. Even the elite National Security Guards (NSG), also known as the Black Cats, provided a sluggish response to the Mumbai attack.
When we view the entire spectrum of counterterrorism capabilities, however, the greatest gap in capability between Indian and European or Indian and American forces is not the gap between elite counterterrorism forces, but the gap at the individual street cop level. This is significant because street cops are a critical line of defense against terrorists. The importance of street cops pertains not only to preventing attacks by collecting critical intelligence, noticing surveillance or other preoperational planning activity and questioning or arresting suspects, it also applies to the tactical response to armed attackers.
Among the most troubling aspects of the Mumbai attack were accounts by journalists of Indian police shooting at the attackers and missing them. Some journalists have said this failure can be explained by the fact that many Indian police officers are armed with antiquated revolvers and Lee-Enfield rifles. But the Lee-Enfield is an accurate and reliable battle rifle that shoots a powerful cartridge, the .303 British. Like the .30-06 Springfield and the .308 Winchester, the .303 British is a man stopper and is deadly out to long ranges. The kinetic energy produced by such cartridges will penetrate body armor up to the heavy Type III level, and the amount of kinetic energy they impart will often even cause considerable shock trauma damage to people wearing heavy body armor.
The .303 British is a formidable round that has killed a lot of people and big game over the past century. Afghan sharpshooters used the Lee-Enfield with great success against the Soviets, and Taliban are still using it against coalition forces in Afghanistan. There is also nothing wrong with a .38 revolver in capable hands. The problem, then, lies in the hands — more specifically, in the training — of the officers so armed. If a police officer does not have the marksmanship to kill (or even hit) a suspect at 20 or 30 meters with aimed fire from a battle rifle, there is little chance he can control the automatic fire from an assault rifle or submachine gun effectively. In the end, the attackers outclassed the Indian police with their marksmanship far more than they outclassed them with their armaments.
By and large, U.S. and European police officers are better-trained marksmen than their Indian counterparts. U.S. and European officers also must regularly go to the shooting range for marksmanship requalification to maintain those skills. This means that in a Mumbai-type scenario in the United States or Europe, the gunmen would not have been allowed the freedom of movement they were in Mumbai, where they were able to walk past police officers firing at them without being hit.
The overall tactical ability of the average street cop is important. While most large police departments in the United States have very skilled tactical units, such as the New York Police Department’s Emergency Services Unit, these units may take time to respond to an incident in progress. In the case of a Mumbai-style attack, where there are multiple teams with multiple attackers operating in different areas of the city, such units might not be able to tackle multiple sites simultaneously. This means that like in Mumbai, street cops probably not only will have the first contact with the attackers, but also might be called on to be the primary force to stop them.
In the United States, local police would be aided during such a confrontation by the widespread adoption of “active shooter” training programs. Following a series of attacks including the highly publicized 1999 Columbine school shooting, it became apparent that the standard police tactic of surrounding an attacker and waiting for the SWAT team to go in and engage the shooter was not effective when the attacker was actively shooting people. As police officers waited outside for backup, additional victims were being killed. To remedy this, many police departments have instituted active shooter programs.
While the details of active shooter tactical programs may vary somewhat from department to department, the main idea behind them is that the active shooter must be engaged and neutralized as quickly as possible, not allowed to continue on a killing spree unopposed. Depending on the location and situation, this engagement sometimes is accomplished by a single officer or pair of officers with shoulder weapons. Other times, it is accomplished by a group of four or more officers trained to quickly organize and rapidly react as a team to locations where the assailant is firing.
Active shooter programs have proven effective in limiting the damage done by shooters in several cases, including the March 2005 shooting at a high school in Red Lake, Minn. Today, many police departments not only have a policy of confronting active shooters, they also have provided their officers with training courses teaching them how to do so effectively. Such training could make a world of difference in a Mumbai-type attack, where there may not be sufficient time or resources for a specialized tactical team to respond.
In the United States, armed off-duty cops and civilians also can make a difference in armed attacks. In February 2007, for example, a heavily armed gunman who had killed five victims in the Trolley Square Mall in Salt Lake City was confronted by an off-duty police officer, who cornered the shooter and kept him pinned down until other officers could arrive and kill the shooter. This off-duty officer’s actions plainly saved many lives that evening.
One other factor where European and American law enforcement officers have an edge over their Indian counterparts is in command, control and communications. Certainly, an armed assault is very chaotic no matter where it happens, but law enforcement agencies in the United States have a lot of experience in dealing with communications during complex situations. One such example is the February 1997 shootout in North Hollywood, where two heavily armed suspects wearing body armor engaged officers from the Los Angeles Police Department in a lengthy shootout. Following that incident, in which the responding officers’ handguns and shotguns proved incapable of penetrating the suspects’ heavy body armor, many police departments began to arm at least some of their units with AR-15s and other high-powered rifles. Ironically, the LAPD officers almost certainly would have welcomed a couple of old battle rifles like the Lee-Enfield in the gunfight that day.
Hindsight is another huge advantage European and American law enforcement officers now enjoy. Police and security agencies commonly examine serious terrorist attacks for tactical details that can then be used to plan and conduct training exercises designed to counteract the tactics employed. As evidenced by the Jan. 8 testimony of NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Mumbai has gotten the attention of police agencies around the world. The NYPD and others already are studying ways to rapidly deny attackers the communications ability they enjoyed in Mumbai during future attacks. The preoperational surveillance conducted by the Mumbai attackers is also being closely scrutinized to assist in countersurveillance operations elsewhere.
A seen by the Fort Dix plot and actual armed attacks against targets, such as the July 2002 assault on the El Al ticket counter at Los Angeles International Airport and the July 2006 attack against the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, the threat of armed terrorist assaults against soft targets in the United States is quite real. However, the U.S. law enforcement environment is quite different from that in India — and that difference will help mitigate the effects of a Mumbai-like attack.
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jan/19/al-qaeda-bungles-arms-experiment/print/
Monday, January 19, 2009
Al Qaeda bungles arms experiment
Eli Lake
An al Qaeda affiliate in Algeria closed a base earlier this month after an experiment with unconventional weapons went awry, a senior U.S. intelligence official said Monday.
The official, who spoke on the condition he not be named because of the sensitive nature of the issue, said he could not confirm press reports that the accident killed at least 40 al Qaeda operatives, but he said the mishap led the militant group to shut down a base in the mountains of Tizi Ouzou province in eastern Algeria.
He said authorities in the first week of January intercepted an urgent communication between the leadership of al Qaeda in the Land of the Maghreb (AQIM) and al Qaeda's leadership in the tribal region of Pakistan on the border with Afghanistan. The communication suggested that an area sealed to prevent leakage of a biological or chemical substance had been breached, according to the official.
"We don't know if this is biological or chemical," the official said.
The story was first reported by the British tabloid the Sun, which said the al Qaeda operatives died after being infected with a strain of bubonic plague, the disease that killed a third of Europe's population in the 14th century. But the intelligence official dismissed that claim.
AQIM, according to U.S. intelligence estimates, maintains about a dozen bases in Algeria, where the group has waged a terrorist campaign against government forces and civilians. In 2006, the group claimed responsibility for an attack on foreign contractors. In 2007, the group said it bombed U.N. headquarters in Algiers, an attack that killed 41 people.
Al Qaeda is believed by U.S. and Western experts to have been pursuing biological weapons since at least the late 1990s. A 2005 report on unconventional weapons drafted by a commission led by former Sen. Charles Robb, Virginia Democrat, and federal appeals court Judge Laurence Silberman concluded that al Qaeda's biological weapons program "was extensive, well organized and operated two years before the Sept. 11" terror attacks in the U.S.
Another report from the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation, released in December, warned that "terrorists are more likely to be able to obtain and use a biological weapon than a nuclear weapon."
British authorities in January 2003 arrested seven men they accused of producing a poison from castor beans known as ricin. British officials said one of the suspects had visited an al Qaeda training camp. In the investigation into the case, British authorities found an undated al Qaeda manual on assassinations with a recipe for making the poison.
The late leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab Zarqawi, was suspected of developing ricin in northern Iraq. Then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell referred to the poison in his presentation to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003 that sought to lay the groundwork for the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Roger Cressey, a former senior counterterrorism official at the National Security Council under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, told The Washington Times that al Qaeda has had an interest in acquiring a poisons capability since the late 1990s.
"This is something that al Qaeda still aspires to do, and the infrastructure to develop it does not have to be that sophisticated," he said.
Mr. Cressey added that he also is concerned about al Qaeda in the Land of the Maghreb, which refers to the North African countries of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.
"Al Qaeda in the Maghreb is probably the most operationally capable affiliate in the organization right now," he said.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/algeria/4294664/Al-Qaeda-cell-killed-by-Black-Death-was-developing-biological-weapons.html
Al-Qaeda cell killed by Black Death 'was developing biological weapons'
An al-Qaeda cell killed by the Black Death may have been developing biological weapons when it was infected, it has been reported.
Last Updated: 6:10PM GMT 20 Jan 2009
The group of 40 terrorists were reported to have been killed by the plague at a training camp in Algeria earlier this month.
It was initially believed that they could have caught the disease through fleas on rats attracted by poor living conditions in their forest hideout.
But there are now claims the cell was developing the disease as a weapon to use against western cities.
Experts said that the group was developing chemical and biological weapons.
Dr Igor Khrupinov, a biological weapons expert at Georgia University, told The Sun: "Al-Qaeda is known to experiment with biological weapons. And this group has direct communication with other cells around the world.
"Contagious diseases, like ebola and anthrax, occur in northern Africa. It makes sense that people are trying to use them against Western governments."
Dr Khrupinov, who was once a weapons adviser to the Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, added: "Instead of using bombs, people with infectious diseases could be walking through cities."
It was reported last year that up to 100 potential terrorists had attempted to become postgraduate students in Britain in an attempt to use laboratories.
Ian Kearns, from the Institute for Public Policy Research, told the newspaper: "The biological weapons threat is not going away. We're not ready for it."
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U.N. exec picked for No. 2 at Homeland Security
Posted 2h 41m ago | Comments 9 | Recommend E-mail | Save | Print |
WASHINGTON (AP) — A top United Nations official who once served on the White House National Security Council has been picked for deputy secretary of the Homeland Security Department, a move that would place two women at the top of the department for the first time.
President Barack Obama's nomination of Jane Holl Lute, a retired Army major who worked on the NSC under President Bill Clinton, was announced Friday by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.
Three secretaries and five deputy secretaries — all men — have served at the agency since it launched in 2003.
At the U.N., Lute coordinates peace efforts among countries in conflict.
"Jane's experience leading large operations with broad and challenging missions lends itself to the undertaking we have before us at Homeland Security," Napolitano said in a statement.
In addition to her NSC work, Lute has served as vice president and chief operating officer of the United Nations Foundation. She served in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm. Lute is married to Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, Obama's deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan.
At Homeland Security, the deputy secretary's role has traditionally been that of a chief operating officer who oversees the day-to-day management of the 200,000-person department.
Homeland Security expert James Carafano thinks Lute is an odd pick. "She doesn't have the right skill set," said Carafano, a fellow with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. "And she knows nothing about the issues."
Carafano said the Homeland Security deputy secretary needs to be someone who knows how to manage massive bureaucracies like the department. "She's going to have a really incredibly steep learning curve," he said.
The department includes divisions that protect the country's borders, develop new radiation detection equipment, study and test infectious diseases, enforce immigration and maritime laws. Homeland Security also is responsible for protecting the president and other dignitaries, coordinating disaster response, keeping terrorists off airplanes and other transportation, and monitoring and preventing cyber-intrusions.
Napolitano also announced her chiefs of staff Friday — both of whom worked for her when she was governor of Arizona: Noah Kroloff, chief of staff for policy, and Jan Lesher, chief of staff for operations.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2009-01-23-homeland-security_N.htm
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The empty suit is busy surrendering to al qaeda, so why not put political hacks in place in the CIA and DHS? What could possibly go wrong?
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090125/ap_on_re_us/mystery_terrorist/print;_ylt=Aqam7ISLSp4n4wroVv2b2d9H2ocA
AP IMPACT: Freedom looms for terrorist
By ADAM GOLDMAN and RANDY HERSCHAFT, Associated Press Writers Sat Jan 24, 11:48 pm ET
NEW YORK – In 1973, a young terrorist named Khalid Duhham Al-Jawary entered the United States and quickly began plotting an audacious attack in New York City.
He built three powerful bombs — bombs powerful enough to kill, maim and destroy — and put them in rental cars scattered around town, near Israeli targets.
The plot failed. The explosive devices did not detonate, and Al-Jawary fled the country, escaping prosecution for nearly two decades — until he was convicted of terrorism charges in Brooklyn and sentenced to 30 years in federal penitentiary.
But his time is up.
In less than a month, the 63-year-old Al-Jawary is expected to be released. He will likely be deported; where to is anybody's guess. The shadowy figure had so many aliases it's almost impossible to know which country is his true homeland.
Al-Jawary has never admitted his dark past or offered up tidbits in exchange for his release. Much of Al-Jawary's life remains a mystery — even to the dogged FBI case agent who tracked him down.
But an Associated Press investigation — based on recently declassified documents, extensive court records, CIA investigative notes and interviews with former intelligence officials — reveals publicly for the first time Al-Jawary's deep involvement in terrorism beyond the plot that led to his conviction.
Government documents link Al-Jawary to Black September's murderous letter-bombing campaign targeting world leaders in the 1970s and a botched terrorist attack in 1979. Former intelligence officials suspect he had a role in the bombing of a TWA flight in 1974 that killed 88 people.
"He's a very dangerous man," said Mike Finnegan, the former FBI counterterrorism agent who captured Al-Jawary. "A very bad guy."
The events linked to Al-Jawary happened long ago, when the conflagration in the Middle East spread around the world; he is being released into another century, one in which the scale of terrorism has grown exponentially, even bringing down two of New York's skyscrapers.
Al-Jawary has long insisted that he was framed and that the government has the wrong guy. Al-Jawary declined an interview through prison officials and has since failed to answer letters mailed to him in the last year and a half, but his former lawyer, Ron Kuby, insists he "wasn't a threat in 1991 and he's not a threat now."
Federal prosecutors didn't see it that way. They point to his trip to the United States in the 1970s as proof.
A slender, nattily dressed man with a thin mustache, Al-Jawary walked into the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in November 1972 and applied for a visa using a phony Iraqi passport. He answered some routine questions, had his picture taken and was granted a visa.
On Jan. 12, 1973, Al-Jawary flew to Boston via Montreal and then to New York City.
Five days later, after the bureau's office in Tel Aviv received a tip in connection to another investigation, agents tried to locate a man who later turned out to be Al-Jawary.
They found him in New York City and conducted a perfunctory interview. Where do you live? Baghdad. Why did you come here? Flight training at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey.
The agent asked if Al-Jawary was affiliated with any political groups. He said he was "nonpolitical."
The agent asked how long he was staying. Al-Jawary said he planned to return to the Middle East after his training ended in about a month and get a job as a commercial pilot, according to FBI documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
Al-Jawary befriended a woman named Carol and her young son Todd. Carol and Al-Jawary grew close, with Al-Jawary taking her son on trips to Manhattan. Unbeknownst to the woman, the boy was a decoy. Al-Jawary had no interest in a relationship with her or Todd. He was scouting targets for a terrorist attack, and the presence of the boy would help him avoid suspicion.
He picked two Israeli banks on Fifth Avenue and the El-Al cargo terminal at Kennedy Airport.
Possibly working with two or more people, Al-Jawary rented three cars and assembled three bombs comprised of large containers filled with gasoline, propane tanks, plastic explosives, blasting caps and batteries, according to FBI and federal court records. The propane tanks were particularly diabolical, adding shrapnel to the blast.
Two of the bombs used alarm clocks, but a third employed a sophisticated electronic-timing device commonly referred to as an "e-cell," said Terence G. McTigue, who worked on the New York Police Department's bomb squad. It was twice as powerful as the other two bombs.
On March 4, Al-Jawary — and possibly others — readied the cars in anticipation of Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir's visit to the city.
Each car contained a Hebrew language newspaper with propaganda from Black September — the terrorist organization that carried out the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics just months earlier — tucked inside.
But the bombs failed to explode. It is not clear why. They were discovered after the two cars on Fifth Avenue were towed, and the FBI learned about the third car at JFK and notified police.
McTigue disarmed the e-cell bomb at JFK and found the components for the fourth one in the car. It was cutting edge, the work of a professional.
"It was a sea change because it was the first time we encountered an electronic timer rather than a simple alarm clock or mechanical timer," recalled McTigue, who would be badly injured in 1976 when he tried to dismantle a bomb left by a Croatian terrorist.
McTigue also recognized something else as he examined the car bomb: a plastic explosive called Semtex from Czechoslovakia. It had been used in scores of letter bombs sent around the world the previous year, targeting Jews and Israelis and even U.S. Secretary of State William Rogers. One had killed an agricultural counselor at the Israeli embassy in London and another mangled the hands of a 26-year-old postal worker in the Bronx.
McTigue knew those letter bombs. He had handled them. The letters had pressure-release firing devices and were the work of Black September, Palestinian guerrillas believed by intelligence officials to be controlled by Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat.
Rogers called the attempted New York City attack a "disturbing development" in a confidential memo to President Richard Nixon — it was, he said, the first time Black September had "mounted an operation on American soil."
As it turns out, Al-Jawary's car bombs and the letter explosives contained similarities that made authorities suspect they were linked.
"The explosive material found in the rental cars was imported and found to be identical to that used in the recent worldwide letter bomb campaign," according to declassified State Department documents obtained from the U.S. National Archives in College Park, Md.
The FBI began a large investigation, "one of the most intensive in the history of the FBI," called "Tribomb," deploying 300 agents and interviewing hundreds of people.
The FBI lifted 60 fingerprints; they all matched Al-Jawary's. They uncovered a fake Jordanian passport behind an air conditioning duct and bomb materials from a room Al-Jawary had rented at a hotel near JFK. Agents recovered a copy of a Jordanian driver's license he had used to rent the cars.
Agents quickly realized that Al-Jawary was involved in the attempted attack and issued an arrest warrant. But he had already slipped out of the country.
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The FBI focused on Lebanon because Al-Jawary had gotten his visa there. But Lebanon was the Wild West of the Middle East at that time, a safe haven where Arab and PLO terrorists circulated without fear of arrest. If he was there, Al-Jawary was out of reach.
Al-Jawary brazenly sent postcards to Carol from Paris, Rome, Beirut.
Years passed. The FBI gave up the hunt.
But their elusive quarry resurfaced in 1979, not long after Israel assassinated a top Black September terrorist. Border police stopped Al-Jawary's car as he and another man tried to cross into Germany from Austria, according to federal court documents.
In the trunk of the car, police found 88 pounds of high explosives, electronic timing-delay devices and detonators hidden in a suitcase. They also unearthed cash and nine passports inside a portable radio that could be used to monitor transmissions from ships, airplanes or the police.
Al-Jawary was traveling under the alias "Yousif Salim Sejaan" and refused to talk. He was carrying a French passport indicating he was born in Lebanon, and riding with a man who was a PLO officer.
German authorities soon learned why Al-Jawary was in the country. They had nabbed a total of 11 Palestinians and 40 pounds of explosives around the time of Al-Jawary's arrest. Two of the men admitted they were going to bomb targets in Germany — most likely, Jewish and Israeli ones.
All the explosives seized from Al-Jawary and the other men bore the same wrapping from a pastry shop in Beirut which served as a front for Fatah, the military arm of the PLO. Al-Jawary's fingerprints were on the wrapping.
Still, Germany released Al-Jawary long before the FBI knew that he had been taken into custody.
And he disappeared once again.
But those e-cell bombs did not. A group known as the 15 May Organization — named for the date that Israel was founded — began carrying out terror attacks from Lebanon, Tunis and Baghdad in the 1980s. Suitcase bombs made with e-cells were the 15 May trademark. Its leader was a skilled bomb-maker named Husayn al-Umari, commonly referred to as Abu Ibrahim. Ibrahim had an education in chemical and electrical engineering and a proclivity for targeting airliners. He also received KGB training.
In one high-profile attack in 1982, an explosion rocked a Pan Am jet flying to Honolulu from Tokyo, killing a 16-year-old Japanese boy and injuring several others.
Denny Kline was an explosives guru for the FBI and worked the 15 May cases. He also transported Al-Jawary's 1973 e-cell bomb to FBI headquarters in Washington.
As Kline recollects, the bombs were compared. Yes, both Al-Jawary and Ibrahim had used e-cells, but that was the only common denominator. This similarity didn't mean the bombs were built by the same person, Kline said.
The FBI's bomb expert worked closely with the CIA and never received any evidence or information to suggest that Al-Jawary was involved with 15 May.
But other investigators have since learned of the e-cell connection and believe it's a powerful one, because they were such sophisticated devices and so few people knew how to operate and create them.
"That's a big commonality especially since I don't know of anyone else using the e-cells in the bomb," said Billie Vincent, the former FAA security chief from 1982 to 1986 who studied the Ibrahim devices.
CIA investigative notes obtained by the AP, based on human intelligence and communication intercepts, indicate that Al-Jawary's nom de guerre was Abu Walid al-Iraqi. The notes link Al-Jawary to a man named Abdullah Labib, aka Col. Hawari, who took his orders from Arafat. The notes say that Al-Jawary also worked as a document forger for the PLO and Hawari.
Hawari, a senior Fatah security official and Arafat confidant, "inherited" elements of Black September, according to the CIA notes. Declassified State Department and CIA documents say Hawari took over 15 May in the mid-1980s while Ibrahim continued to supply his expertise.
According to declassified CIA records, Hawari orchestrated the 1986 attack on a TWA flight from Rome to Athens that killed four Americans, including an infant, after they were sucked out of the plane. The explosives used in the attack were linked to Ibrahim.
Hawari reportedly died in a car crash in 1991. Ibrahim, who was charged in the 1982 Pan Am attack, remains at large, possibly hiding out in Iraq.
Besides the use of e-cells, Al-Jawary had another link to 15 May. Ibrahim was suspected of being Black September's bomb maker, Kline and other former intelligence officials said.
Al-Jawary acted on behalf of Black September in 1973 when he rigged the car bombs in New York, federal prosecutors asserted in court documents.
FBI agent Mike Finnegan didn't know any of this when he arrived at work one day in 1988 to find the entire case file — many volumes and thousands of pages — sitting on his desk with a note that said: "Find Him" — find Al-Jawary.
Finnegan thought to himself: "I am screwed."
It took Finnegan a year to review the entire file. He followed every lead and re-interviewed witnesses. Nothing. He asked the CIA for help. Nothing.
Finnegan also looked at other terrorism cases involving bombs. There was one in particular that drew his attention: TWA Flight 841 crashed Sept. 8, 1974, in the Ionian Sea near Greece after an explosive device detonated.
Seventy-nine passengers and nine crew members were killed. Among them were 17 Americans on the flight that originated in Tel Aviv and was headed ultimately for John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.
Thirteen days earlier, the same flight had landed in Rome. When a ramp agent opened the rear cargo compartment, smoke was found coming from a suitcase.
The fire was extinguished. Italian authorities wrongly determined it had started accidentally when batteries inside a tape recorder caused lighter fluid to ignite. One of the flight's passengers — Jose Maria Aveneda Garcia — stepped forward and identified the bag, according to recently declassified FBI files.
Garcia, who was probably using a fake Chilean passport, wasn't detained. Garcia's address in Rome was bogus.
The suitcase and contents were sent to an FBI laboratory in the U.S., which concluded it was a bomb.
The FBI tried to find Garcia. They never located him. The National Transportation Safety Board said the suitcase was "an attempt at the same form of sabotage" that downed the flight over the Ionian Sea.
Neither attack was ever solved. The suitcase was later destroyed.
Finnegan thought Al-Jawary had been behind the suitcase bomb. It employed an e-cell, according to the FBI. At that time, he was told, the use of an e-cell was a bomb signature.
"It had a very distinct timing device," said Finnegan, who retired in 2004. "It was almost like a foregone conclusion. This was my guy. I desperately wanted to resurrect that case."
James R. Lyons, a retired FBI agent who worked many big cases such as the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, said the use of e-cells in 1973 and 1974 would have been considered the signature of a bomb-maker, making Al-Jawary a prime suspect.
"Absolutely," said Lyons, who was also an FBI bomb technician. "I'd be going after the same guy. No doubt about it."
Another top FBI explosives expert, Dave Williams, said: "Look back in the '70s and '80s and there weren't too many bomb builders out there. So it was very likely that some of these bomb builders got their instructions from the same person or persons. If I were investigating it back then, I would have come to the conclusion that he was an integral part of that conspiracy."
But it wasn't Finnegan's call to pursue the 1974 attack. Street agents don't make those decisions. He had to focus on the New York investigation.
Finnegan had "computer-aged" pictures of Al-Jawary — ones from Al-Jawary's visits to the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1971 and 1972. He also had one from a Jordanian driver's license that had been obtained from the investigation.
He now had a good idea what Al-Jawary looked like as a 45-year-old man, and he passed the photos along to foreign intelligence agencies.
In the fall of 1990, Finnegan learned Al-Jawary was residing on Cyprus — a center of terrorism — as the PLO's "cultural attache" under the name of Khaled Mohammed El-Jassem.
Finnegan finally had Al-Jawary in his sights, but then he was gone: In December, Al-Jawary escaped to Iraq, after he figured out the FBI was on to him. Finnegan was furious.
Then, some luck. In January 1991, Al-Jawary left Iraq to attend a funeral in Tunis for his good friend, Saleh Khalef, the leader of Black September and Arafat deputy known as Abu Iyad who had been gunned down by a rival Palestinian group.
But Al-Jawary's travel plans were derailed. He tried to go to Cyprus first but was denied entry. He was put on a plane to Athens. Again, denied entry. He flew to Italy.
Finnegan alerted the Italians that Al-Jawary was on his way. As he passed through Rome, Italian authorities detained him for using a fake Jordanian passport.
But the Italians were reluctant to give him to the FBI, said Robert Blitzer, who served in the FBI's International Terrorism Operations Section from 1986 to 1995.
"They didn't want to release him," Blitzer said. "They were afraid to release him."
After many months of diplomatic wrangling, Finnegan and Bassem Youssef, an Arabic-speaking FBI agent, flew to Rome on a military transport plane to take Al-Jawary back to the U.S.
Under intense security that included the closing of the Rome airport and its air space, Al-Jawary arrived on a helicopter gunship. He had iron plates protecting the front and back of his torso. He was wearing a Kevlar hood.
Inside the plane, Finnegan took off Al-Jawary's hood. Finnegan introduced himself to a bewildered Al-Jawary: "I am Mike Finnegan, New York office FBI."
Youssef began speaking to Al-Jawary in Arabic. Startled, Al-Jawary responded briefly, allowing Youssef enough time to detect a Palestinian dialect along with a Libyan one.
But Al-Jawary quickly switched back to English and began yelling, believing Youssef was an Israeli agent.
"I am not going to talk to you," an animated Al-Jawary told Youssef. "I am not talking to the Mossad."
Convinced, finally, that he was in the custody of the FBI, Al-Jawary collapsed in a chair, relieved. He allowed Finnegan to question him.
Youssef listened.
"The guy was definitely lying about a lot of things," Youssef said. "He did not want to telegraph anything about the truth."
Al-Jawary told Finnegan he wasn't in New York when the bombs were planted. The FBI had the wrong guy. The Mossad had framed him. He's not from Mosul, Iraq. He's not an Iraqi national as the American government asserted.
He's Khaled Mohammed El-Jassem, father of five and devoted husband. He's a victim of Israeli aggression and bombs, which killed his brother and an infant son.
In time, he would say that he was born in Palestine in 1947 but was forced to flee from his home after Israel was established in 1948 and war erupted with its Arab neighbors.
Al-Jawary claims in court filings that he grew up in refugee camps in Jordan. When he was 18, in 1965, he joined Arafat's PLO.
While mired in poverty, a resourceful Al-Jawary managed to earn a bachelor's degree in Palestinian history in Deraa, Jordan, in 1972. Later, he says, he was arrested in Damascus, Syria, from September 1972 to July 1973 — the period of the New York bombing attempts — for publishing an anti-Syrian letter in a local newspaper.
After graduation, Al-Jawary claims he taught history and Arabic in Jordan and married a woman named Rima Omar in 1975.
In 1977 the family moved to Beirut, where Al-Jawary claims he worked as a teacher. Five years later, Al-Jawary left Lebanon, choosing to start a new life in Nicosia, Cyprus, where he operated a legitimate business importing electronic equipment from Japan and exporting it to various Middle Eastern countries.
The store folded in a couple of years, according to his version. At some point, he became the PLO's cultural attache.
A Brooklyn jury didn't buy any of this. It took about three hours for the jury to convict Al-Jawary in 1993 — just days after the first attack on the World Trade Center — based on evidence that included his fingerprints on one of the bombs.
Judge Jack B. Weinstein sentenced Al-Jawary to 30 years in prison on April 16, 1993. Weinstein later rejected his pleas for mercy in a written opinion issued after the trial, saying the bombs would have "killed and maimed hundreds, caused large fires and terrorized thousands of people."
Al-Jawary, the judge wrote, was a serious threat.
"It is highly likely that were this defendant released he would continue his dangerous terrorist activities," the judge said.
Since his conviction, many top Palestinian officials have written to the judge on Al-Jawary's behalf, seeking his release. There's even a death certificate in court files along with witnesses claiming Al-Jawary was killed by Israeli shelling in 1988.
None of it was convincing. Al-Jawary's appeals foundered.
But those countless hours behind bars are almost over. Freedom looms for this gaunt and graying terrorist who has spent about a quarter of his life in maximum-security prisons. He was transferred recently to a federal detention center in Manhattan.
Al-Jawary is scheduled to be released Feb. 19 after completing only about half his term, including time served prior to his sentencing and credit for good behavior, according to the federal Bureau of Prisons.
Once he's released, Al-Jawary will be handed over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and held until his deportation.
It remains unclear where he'll go, largely because Al-Jawary's true identity remains in question — even to this day.
Those who helped put Al-Jawary behind bars believe he'll pick up where he left off.
"What is he going to do when he gets out?" McTigue said. "He'll be deported and received as a hero and go right back into his terrorist activities. He's had years to think about nothing else but causing havoc and destruction."
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The AP National Investigative Team can be reached at investigate (at) ap.org
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090129/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/i...bGsDaG9tZWxhbmRzZWNy
Homeland secretary wants criminal aliens out of US
By EILEEN SULLIVAN, Associated Press Writer
1 hr 12 mins ago
WASHINGTON – If you're a criminal and you're not entitled to be in the United States, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano wants you out of the country. Napolitano wants what she calls "criminal aliens" off American streets. She is looking at existing immigration enforcement programs to see if taxpayers are getting the most bang for their buck.
"That sounds very simple, but it's historically not been done," Napolitano said, speaking to reporters and senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials Thursday.
About 113,000 criminals who were in the U.S. illegally were deported last year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement said. The agency estimates there are now as many as 450,000 criminals in federal, state and local detention centers who are in the country illegally.
Napolitano said she wants to improve data-sharing among local, state and federal facilities. So far, there are jails in 26 counties across the country with computer systems that can talk instantly with immigration systems.
The goal, Napolitano said, is for federal immigration officials to know whether an inmate is in the country illegally immediately after he is processed into a detention facility. After the criminal serves his or her sentence, immigration officials can be ready to deport that person right away.
ICE spokesman Richard Rocha said the agency plans to expand this connectivity to all state and local detention centers over the next four years.
Napolitano, whose job includes overseeing immigration laws, says she also will go after criminal fugitives who are in the country illegally.
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:? That sounds good.....where is the catch? I will belive it when I see it, and I hope they do it. :?
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http://www.metimes.com/International/2009/01/27/al-qaida_and_the_plague/9143/
Al-Qaida and the Plague
OLIVIER GUITTA
Published: January 27, 2009
TOUGH CONDITIONS -- Undated photo released by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb on the Internet showing training and work of al-Qaida groups in Algeria. (Balkis Press photo via Newscom)
In the middle of the massive coverage of U.S. President Barack Obama's inauguration, a rather troublesome news story emerged. Unfortunately, it failed to get the coverage it deserves. If confirmed, it deserves the full attention of the Obama administration: the story has to do with bio-terrorism.
The story began with a Jan. 6 report in the Algerian newspaper Echorouk that a number of terrorists had died of the plague in one of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) training camps in Tizi Ouzou. Another Algerian newspaper En-Nahar, affirmed that 50 terrorists have been diagnosed with the plague, 40 of whom have already died.
Now some analysts dismissed outright this story saying it was totally fallacious. But a few observations at this point give credibility to this story, even though one cannot be sure of the provenance of the plague. Consider the following:
1. Algerian authorities have been totally silent. Reliable sources usually willing to share information declined to comment on this report. As can be expected, Algerians authorities were not too pleased that the story was confirmed by American sources. Indeed the Washington Times confirmed through a senior U.S. intelligence official that an incident had taken place at an AQIM training camp that had to be shut down as a result.
2. Coincidence or not: 60 terrorists from AQIM from Tizi Ouzou (the same region where the incident allegedly occurred) decided to surrender to the authorities. It is very rare that such a large number of AQIM operatives defect at the same time. That could mean that they possibly got really scared by what had taken place in the training camp and did not want to get involved in biological weapon experimentation that could likely result in their deaths.
3. Over a year ago, Pakistani terrorists came to train in AQIM training camps and may have one way or another contributed to the production of that biological agent. Interestingly, the Washington Times mentions an intercepted communication between AQIM leaders and AQ Central in Pakistan relating the mishap.
4. Al-Qaida operatives in Europe had tried to develop biological weapons in the recent past. In France, Menad Benchelalli, a terrorist specialized in poisons had produced small amounts of ricin and Botulinum toxin that he intended to release in France. He was arrested in 2002.?Then in 2003, British authorities arrested seven individuals accused of also producing ricin.
5. AQIM was "hired" by AQ central mostly because of their extensive network in Europe that could allow them to strike Europe at some point. AQIM's leadership has been under intense pressure to attack European targets in order to maintain its credibility. In fact, by not using a "conventional" weapon, AQIM would prove its value to AQ Central. If the group was indeed developing a biological weapon, it was surely destined for delivery in Europe, and most likely in France.
Interestingly, AQIM did not wait long to refute this story. On Jan. 21, in a communiqué the group accused "some hypocrites who quoted their masters at the Algerian intelligence agency" of being behind this false story. The group also noted that this story was planted to dry up the well of new AQIM recruits. If indeed that is the case, it might be a very smart strategy that maybe should be copied.
Another explanation for the alleged deaths of the AQIM operatives is very bad hygienic situation in the camps. Indeed, several former AQIM terrorists told the Algerian En-Nahar newspaper that living conditions are horrendous and that numerous deaths resulted from poor hygiene. They add that the AQIM emirs (chiefs) quarantine the sick right away, because the disease propagates itself very quickly.
Whatever the explanation, it seems that there have been unexplained deaths among AQIM operatives. At this point, the developments of this story and its possible implications need to be closely monitored. Indeed a nightmarish scenario could unfold if one of the infected individuals boarded a flight to Paris, London or New York. This person could become de-facto the means of "delivering" the weapon.?
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Olivier Guitta is an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and a foreign affairs and counterterrorism consultant. You can read his latest work at www.thecroissant.com/about.html
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CIA warns Barack Obama that British terrorists are the biggest threat to the US
Barack Obama has been warned by the CIA that British Islamist extremists are the greatest threat to US homeland security.
By Tim Shipman in Washington
Last Updated: 9:08PM GMT 07 Feb 2009
The CIA has told President Barack Obama that British terrorists are the biggest threat to the US
American spy chiefs have told the President that the CIA has launched a vast spying operation in the UK to prevent a repeat of the 9/11 attacks being launched from Britain.
They believe that a British-born Pakistani extremist entering the US under the visa waiver programme is the most likely source of another terrorist spectacular on American soil.
Intelligence briefings for Mr Obama have detailed a dramatic escalation in American espionage in Britain, where the CIA has recruited record numbers of informants in the Pakistani community to monitor the 2,000 terrorist suspects identified by MI5, the British security service.
A British intelligence source revealed that a staggering four out of 10 CIA operations designed to thwart direct attacks on the US are now conducted against targets in Britain.
And a former CIA officer who has advised Mr Obama told The Sunday Telegraph that the CIA has stepped up its efforts in the last month after the Mumbai massacre laid bare the threat from Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant group behind the attacks, which has an extensive web of supporters in the UK.
The CIA has already spent 18 months developing a network of agents in Britain to combat al-Qaeda, unprecedented in size within the borders of such a close ally, according to intelligence sources in both London and Washington.
Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer who has advised Mr Obama, told The Sunday Telegraph: "The British Pakistani community is recognised as probably al-Qaeda's best mechanism for launching an attack against North America.
"The American security establishment believes that danger continues and there's very intimate cooperation between our security services to monitor that." Mr Riedel, who served three presidents as a Middle East expert on the White House National Security Council, added: "President Obama's national security team are well aware that this is a serious threat."
The British official said: "The Americans run their own assets in the Pakistani community; they get their own intelligence.
There's close cooperation with MI5 but they don't tell us the names of all their sources.
"Around 40 per cent of CIA activity on homeland threats is now in the UK. This is quite unprecedented."
Explaining the increase in CIA activity over the past month, Mr Riedel added: "In the aftermath of the Mumbai attack the US and the UK intelligence services now have to regard Lashkar-e-Taiba as just as serious a threat to both of our countries as al-Qaeda. They have a much more extensive base among Pakistani Diaspora communities in the UK than al–Qaeda."
Information gleaned by CIA spies in Britain has already helped thwart several terrorist attacks in the UK and was instrumental in locating Rashid Rauf, a British-born al-Qaeda operative implicated in a plot to explode airliners over the Atlantic, who was tracked down and killed in a US missile strike in November.
But some US intelligence officers are irritated that valuable manpower and resources have been diverted to the UK. One former intelligence officer who does contract work for the CIA dismissed Britain as a "swamp" of jihadis.
Jonathan Evans, the director general of MI5, admitted in January that the Security Service alone does not have the resources to maintain surveillance on all its targets. "We don't have anything approaching comprehensive coverage," he said.
The dramatic escalation in CIA activity in the UK followed the exposure in August 2006 of Operation Overt, the alleged airline bomb plot.
The British intelligence official revealed that CIA chiefs sent more resources to the UK because they were not prepared to see American citizens die as a result of MI5's inability to keep tabs on all suspects, even though the Security Service successfully uncovered the plot.
MI5 manpower will have doubled to 4,100 by 2011 but many in the US intelligence community do not think that is enough.
For their part, some British officials are queasy that information obtained by the CIA from British Pakistanis was used to help target Mr Rauf, a British citizen, whom they would have preferred to capture and bring to trial.
Sensitivities over the intelligence arrangement formed a key part of briefings given to Mr Obama, since they are central to what is often called "the most special part of the special relationship" and could complicate his dealings with Gordon Brown.
Tensions in transatlantic intelligence relations which were laid bare last week during the High Court battle over Binyam Mohamed, the British resident held in Guanatanamo Bay.
British judges wanted to publish details of the torture administered to Mr Mohamed, an Ethiopian national, in US custody. But key paragraphs were blacked out after American officials threatened it could damage intelligence sharing between the two countries.
Intelligence experts said that a trusting intelligence relationship, in which one country does not publish intelligence data obtained by the other, is vital to both countries' national security.
Patrick Mercer, chairman of the House of Commons counter-terrorism sub-committee, said: "The special relationship is a huge benefit to us. It clearly works to our advantage and helps keep the people of the UK and the US safe.
"There is no doubt that a great deal of valuable intelligence vital to British national security is procured by American agents from British sources."
Mr Riedel added: "The partnership between the two intelligence communities is dynamic; it is one of great intimacy. We overuse the term special relationship, but this is an extraordinarily special relationship.
"Since September 11 the philosophy on both sides has been to err on the side of telling each other more rather than less. It is in everyone's interests that that continues."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...to-the-US.html
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Second post of the morning:
=========
Presidential Documents
Federal Register
/ Vol. 74, No. 22 /Wednesday, February 4, 2009 / Presidential Documents 6115
Presidential Determination No. 2009–15 of January 27, 2009
Unexpected Urgent Refugee and Migration Needs Related To Gaza
Memorandum for the Secretary of State
By the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the
United States, including section 2(c)(1) of the Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1962 (the ‘‘Act’’), as amended (22 U.S.C. 2601), I hereby determine, pursuant to section 2(c)(1) of the Act, that it is important to the national interest to furnish assistance under the Act in an amount not to exceed $20.3 million from the United States Emergency Refugee and Migration Assistance Fund for the purpose of meeting unexpected and urgent refugee and migration needs, including by contributions to international, governmental, and nongovernmental organizations and payment of administrative expenses of Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration of the Department of State, related to humanitarian needs of Palestinian refugees and conflict victims in Gaza. You are authorized and directed to publish this memorandum in the
Federal Register.
THE WHITE HOUSE,
Washington, January 27, 2009
[FR Doc. E9–2488
Filed 2–3–09; 8:45 am]
Billing code 4710–10–P
VerDate
http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2009/pdf/E9-2488.pdf
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20.3 million dollar stimulus for HAMAS.
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http://counterterrorismblog.org/2009/02/print/will_nsc_reorg_deal_realistica.php
Counterterrorism Blog
Will NSC Reorg Deal Realistically With Terrorist Threats?
By Michael Cutler
I am certain that I am not the only person who wished that our world was not plagued by the threat of terrorism. I am also not alone in my wish that our nation's economy and the economy of many other countries have been shaken to the core or that international criminals and terrorists are on the move around the globe, plying their trades wherever they can, seeking weaknesses and exploiting those weaknesses. The problem is that those critically important challenges confront our nation and most other nations on the face of this planet. Therefore it is imperative that our nation's leaders put political differences aside and stop pandering to the various special interest groups and business interests and make our nation's security the unequivocal number one priority!
This news article was forwarded to me by one of the many folks I have been in touch with ever since I decided to attempt to provide my insights concerning immigration in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. It appeared in a British-based newspaper, the Telegraph, and addresses two of the many areas of concern I have been hammering away at; the Visa Waiver Program and the lack of resources devoted to enforcing the immigration laws from within the interior of the United States.
This second article appeared in yesterday's edition of the Washington Post and was entitled, "Obama's NSC Will Get New Power." If the whole point is to seek out and then devise strategies to protect our nation, then our nation's leaders must incorporate the issues of border security and the enforcement and administration of the immigration laws into their national security strategies.
Let's start out considering the Visa Waiver Program that the Bush administration, in its final weeks, expanded from 27 participating countries to 34 countries. The travel and hospitality interests hired Tom Ridge, the first Secretary of Homeland Security to be their "talking head" to hawk their program called, "Discover America." As I have pointed out on many occasions, Mr. Ridge and his deep-pocketed friends in the travel and hospitality industries appear to have forgotten that al-Qaeda and other terrorist and criminal organizations have already discovered America! Remember that citizens of Great Britain are eligible to seek to enter the United States without first applying for a visa.
Here is a review of the benefits to be gained by requiring visas of all foreign visitors seeking to enter the United States:
1. The visas requirement subjects aliens who seek to enter the United States to tighter scrutiny including those alien airline passengers on airliners that are destined to the United States. Richard Reid, the so-called "Shoe Bomber" was able to board an airliner destined to the United States, although he had no intentions of entering the United States. His apparent goal was to blow up the airliner and its many passengers somewhere over the depths of the Atlantic Ocean by detonating explosives he had concealed in his shoes. Because he is a subject of Great Britain, a country that participates in the Visa Waiver Program, Reid did not need to obtain a visa before he boarded that airliner.
2. The CBP inspectors are supposed to make a decision in one minute or less as to the admissibility of an alien seeking to enter the United States. The visa requirement helps them to do a more effective job. Their's is a tough job I can certainly attest to, I began my career at the former INS as an immigration inspector at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and worked there for 4 years before I became a special agent.
3. The application for a nonimmigrant visa contains roughly 40 questions that could provide invaluable information to law enforcement officials should that alien become the target of a criminal or terrorist investigation. The information could provide intelligence as well as investigative leads
4. If an alien applicant lies on the application for a visa that lie is called "visa fraud." The maximum penalty for visa fraud starts out at 10 years in jail for those who commit this crime simply in order to come to the United States, ostensibly to seek unlawful employment or other such purpose. The penalty increases to 15 years in jail for those aliens who obtain a visa to commit a felony. For aliens who engage in visa fraud to traffic in narcotics or commit another narcotics-related crime, the maximum jail sentence that can be imposes rises to 20 years. Finally, when an alien can be proven to have engaged in visa fraud in furtherance of terrorism, the maximum penalty climbs to 25 years in prison. It is important to note that while it may be difficult to prove that an individual is a terrorist, it is usually relatively simple to prove that an alien has committed visa fraud.
5. The charge of visa fraud can also be extremely helpful to law enforcement authorities who want to take a bad guy off the street without tipping their hand to the other members of a criminal conspiracy or terrorism conspiracy that the individual arrested was being arrested for his involvement in terrorism or a criminal organization.
6. Even when an application for a visa is denied, the application can be maintained to track those who attempt to secure a visa for the United States.
These benefits do not apply when aliens are admitted under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program.
On May 11, 2006 I was called to testify before a Congressional hearing conducted by the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the Committee on International Relations of the House of Representatives on the topic, "VISA OVERSTAYS: CAN WE BAR THE TERRORIST DOOR?"
As you read about the resources being poured into the development of informants in Great Britain within the Pakistani community I want you to consider another issue of extreme importance. The cultivation of informants is, arguably, one of the most important endeavors of intelligence services and law enforcement agencies. It is certainly extremely important to make use of sophisticated surveillance techniques to keep track of potential terrorists and their plots to attack our nation and our allies, but it is important to understand that the use of informants, especially in conjunction with those high-tech surveillance methods is vital for the successes upon which the security of our nation and the lives of our citizens depend.
It is not enough to know the name, for example, of a bad guy who may be involved in a terrorist or criminal plot, it is absolutely vital to be able to put a face with the name. That is where informants often come in to play.
Additionally, terrorists and criminals are not stupid. They know that if phones may be tapped or electronic communications may be intercepted, that they may have to resort to low-tech tactics such as using rented mail drops or courier services to communicate. Again, informants who can infiltrate an organization or a community, may well make the difference between a bunch of terrorists being caught before they have the opportunity to strike, or a devastating attack that kills many people.
As a former INS special agent, I was intimately involved in "flipping" or cultivating informants. As you may know, I spent nearly one half of my career working with other law enforcement agencies on investigations involving narcotics trafficking. I also worked with fellow law enforcement officers of the FBI and other agencies in several investigations involving terror suspects. One of my primary areas of responsibility was to use the statutory authority I had as an INS agent to help to recruit informants. The INS statutes provide large sticks and juicy carrots when you are dealing with aliens who are involved in criminal activities in the United States.
The challenge our country faces is that while much has been made about the security of our nation's borders, a critical issue, to be sure, almost no attention has been paid to the enforcement of the immigration laws from within the interior of the United States.
Most people seem to think that the interior enforcement of the immigration laws begin and end with the investigation of unscrupulous employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens. Certainly this is an important area of concern, but there are precious few resources allocated to going after aliens who commit immigration fraud in order to secure lawful status in the United States, including obtaining United States citizenship by committing fraud on their applications.
To make the importance of this aspect of immigration law enforcement simple to understand, you must think of fraud as a lie placed on an application by an alien or a person who files an application for that alien to provide him (her) with a benefit that would not be possible if the truth was known.
Informants constitute a vital tool to combat immigration fraud, narcotics trafficking, terrorism and all sorts of other violations of law. In order to help to make this effort as effective as possible, given the high-stakes nature of these efforts, especially when you consider the potential for devastating terrorist attacks, our nation needs to have many more special agents at ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) who can enforce the immigration laws and, in the process, develop informants to act as the "eyes and ears" of our law enforcement and intelligence officers.
On May 18,2004, Representative Sheila Jackson Lee who, at that time, was the ranking member of the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims, requested that I testify at a hearing that was convened to explore the topic: "PUSHING THE BORDER OUT ON ALIEN SMUGGLING: NEW TOOLS AND INTELLIGENCE INITIATIVES"
All too many of our nation's leaders are, at the least, naive in considering the role that immigration can and must play to address these critically important national security threats that confront our nation, each and every day.
Several days ago, former Vice President Dick Cheney assailed the current administration and went on about the threat that terrorism poses. Meanwhile, the administration in which he was the number two man, ignored the threat posed by our utter lack of security on our borders. A responsible homeowner would lock his doors and windows, especially if he was concerned about burglars breaking in. The Bush administration did not only failed to lock the back door, but essentially took that door off of its hinges!
The previous administration created the DHS (Department of Homeland Security) that merged Customs and Immigration and then split the former INS into three separate and distinct agencies: CBP (Customs and Border Protection), ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services). This unwieldy arrangement, in my judgement, hobbled efforts to effectively enforce the immigration laws. This is why I came to refer to the DHS as being the Department of Homeland Surrender!
The process by which visa applications are processed obviously need to be understood from a national security perspective. Immigration law enforcement needs to also be conducted with an understanding that not only must our borders be secured against the entry of illegal aliens, among whom may well be criminals and terrorists, but that the entire immigration bureaucracy must be mindful of the potential for so-called "sleeper agents" seeking to enter our country and acquire lawful resident status and even United States citizenship that can then enable spies and terrorists to get sensitive jobs in industry and within the government, itself, to spy on our nation and gain access to critical infrastructure.
What also needs to be considered is that critical infrastructure can include many industries that have the potential to harm or kill large numbers of our citizens.
Food processing plants can be as significant, for example, as power generating plants. Schools, hotels, malls and hospitals are as important as national landmarks.
In our interconnected society, their are many pressure points that need to be protected. The presence of perhaps as 20 million illegal aliens whose identities, backgrounds, affiliations and intentions are unknown and unknowable represents a huge threat to our safety and the survival of our nation.
Any massive amnesty program will only make matters worse because any such program has the real potential of providing criminals and terrorists with official immigration status even though their true names are unknown.
During the campaign, President Obama promised us, "Change we can believe in."
I would love to see an end to the Visa Waiver Program. I would love to see the President, for once and for all, make it clear that illegal aliens will not be rewarded with lawful status after they violated our nation's laws and our nation's borders.
Let us remember that each and every year, the United States furnishes more aliens with lawful immigrant (resident alien) status than do all of the other countries of the world combined (more than one million)!
Remember, the difference between and immigrant and an illegal alien is comparable to the difference between a houseguest and a burglar.
By Michael Cutler on February 9, 2009 1:22 PM
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http://www.bangornews.com/detail/99263.html
Report: 'Dirty bomb' parts found in slain man's home
Agency says radioactive materials recovered in home of man allegedly slain by his wife
BDN FILE PHOTO
Maine State Police Detective Bryant Jacques (left) takes empty boxes into the Cummings home on Dec. 10, 2008, during the investigation into the killing of James Cummings the day before.
BANGOR DAILY NEWS PHOTO BY KEVIN BENNETT
This photo (above) taken Tuesday shows the home at 346 High St. in Belfast where 29-year-old homicide victim James Cummings reportedly had bomb-making materials in the basement. Buy Photo
By Walter Griffin
BDN Staff
BELFAST, Maine — James G. Cummings, who police say was shot to death by his wife two months ago, allegedly had a cache of radioactive materials in his home suitable for building a “dirty bomb.”
According to an FBI field intelligence report from the Washington Regional Threat and Analysis Center posted online by WikiLeaks, an organization that posts leaked documents, an investigation into the case revealed that radioactive materials were removed from Cummings’ home after his shooting death on Dec. 9.
The report posted on the WikiLeaks Web site states that “On 9 December 2008, radiological dispersal device components and literature, and radioactive materials, were discovered at the Maine residence of an identified deceased [person] James Cummings.”
The section referring to Cummings can be read here.
It says that four 1-gallon containers of 35 percent hydrogen peroxide, uranium, thorium, lithium metal, thermite, aluminum powder, beryllium, boron, black iron oxide and magnesium ribbon were found in the home.
Also found was literature on how to build “dirty bombs” and information about cesium-137, strontium-90 and cobalt-60, radioactive materials. The FBI report also stated there was evidence linking James Cummings to white supremacist groups. This would seem to confirm observations by local tradesmen who worked at the Cummings home that he was an ardent admirer of Adolf Hitler and had a collection of Nazi memorabilia around the house, including a prominently displayed flag with swastika. Cummings claimed to have pieces of Hitler’s personal silverware and place settings, painter Mike Robbins said a few days after the shooting.
An application for membership in the National Socialist Movement filled out by Cummings also was found in the residence, according to the report. Cummings’ wife, Amber B. Cummings, 31, told investigators that her husband spoke of “dirty bombs,” according to the report, and mixed chemicals in her kitchen sink. She allegedly told police that Cummings subjected her to years of mental, physical and sexual abuse. She also said that Cummings was “very upset” when Barack Obama was elected president.
A “dirty bomb” is a type of “radiological dispersal device” that combines a conventional explosive such as dynamite with radioactive material, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Web site. “Most RDDs would not release enough radiation to kill people or cause severe illness,” the NRC says, adding that “a dirty bomb is in no way similar to a nuclear weapon” because its effects occur in a very limited area compared to a nuclear explosion.
The report noted that “uranium, thorium, cesium-137, stontium-90 and cobalt-60 are radioactive isotopes and 35 percent hydrogen peroxide is a necessary precursor for the manufacture of peroxide-based explosives. Lithium metal, thermite and aluminum are materials used to sensitize and amplify the effects of explosives.”
The report stated that the uranium component was bought online from a U.S. company that was identified in the investigation, but not in the report.
John Donnelley, an agent at the FBI’s Boston office, declined Tuesday to comment on the report. Donnelley said some FBI reports are provided to law enforcement agencies and sometimes get released to media outlets.
“I wouldn’t be prepared to speak on that,” Donnelley said. “I have no comment.”
The Washington Regional Threat and Analysis Center is an intelligence gathering office affiliated with Washington, D.C., law enforcement. Telephone and e-mail messages left with the center Tuesday were not returned.
State police have identified Amber Cummings as the person who shot James Cummings. The couple’s 9-year-old daughter was present the morning of the shooting in what police have described as a domestic violence homicide.
Amber Cummings, who is staying in the Belfast area, has not been charged in the case, although the Waldo County grand jury currently meeting in Belfast could take up the matter during its session this week. While state police have acknowledged that the 29-year-old Cummings was killed by a gunshot, the results of the autopsy have been impounded, as have the search warrants executed at Cummings’ High Street home following the shooting. Authorities spent days searching the home, according to neighbors.
Lt. Gary Wright, who heads up the Maine State Police Criminal Investigation Division team working the case, declined to comment on any aspects of the case when contacted Tuesday.
“We’re not going to comment on anything,” Wright said Tuesday evening. “It’s an open homicide investigation and we’re not going to comment. That’s our standard policy.”
Stephen McCausland, spokesman for the Maine Department of Public Safety, also had no comment on the report. “This is an active, open homicide investigation,” he said Tuesday evening, “and as a result, it’s inappropriate to get into confirming or denying aspects of that.”
Maine Deputy Attorney General William Stokes also declined to comment on the report Tuesday.
David Farmer, spokesman for Gov. John Baldacci, said Tuesday that it was inappropriate for the governor to comment on an open investigation. When asked about the copy of the field report sent to him by the Bangor Daily News, he said, “At this point, I have been unable to confirm the authenticity of the documents you sent to us.”
A spokesman for U.S. Sen. Susan Collins’ staff said there was no one able to comment on the report Tuesday night.
Telephone messages left with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security were not returned Tuesday evening. Robbins, who worked on the house for a month last summer, described Cummings as an angry person who was verbally abusive to his wife. He said Cummings apparently was independently wealthy and did not work. Robbins said Cummings talked incessantly about his love of guns and his fascination for Hitler. He said Cummings repeatedly berated his wife about home-schooling their daughter. He said Cummings had a controlling personality and wanted to know his wife and child’s every move.
Cummings grew up in California and lived in Texas before moving to Maine in August 2007. Although Robbins said Cummings told him he made his money in Texas real estate, it appears that the actual source of his wealth was a trust fund established by his father, a prominent landowner in the Northern California city of Fort Bragg. An Internet search of the James B. Cummings Trust indicated that it has an annual income of $10 million.
The FBI field intelligence report was apparently first reported on by unattributable.com, an online magazine which covers and blogs on current events.
BDN writer Dawn Gagnon in Bangor contributed to this report.
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Whoa! :-o
and here's this:
FBI may shift counterterror agents to anti-fraud
By DEVLIN BARRETT
The Associated Press
Wednesday, February 11, 2009; 6:05 PM
WASHINGTON -- With thousands of fraud investigations under way, the FBI is considering shifting agents away from counterterrorism work to help sort through the wreckage of the financial meltdown.
FBI Deputy Director John Pistole told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that the bureau may reassign some of the positions that were reallocated to anti-terrorism work after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Such a move would be a further sign of the government breaking with the Bush administration's priorities, which pledged to assign every available resource to averting another terrorist attack. Pistole told Congress his investigators have 530 active corporate fraud investigations, and 38 of them involve some of the biggest names in corporate finance _ cases directly related to the current crisis.
In addition, FBI investigators are tackling an even bigger mountain of mortgage fraud cases in which hundreds of millions of dollars may have been swindled from the system, he told lawmakers. The FBI now has more than 1,800 open mortgage fraud investigations, more than double the number of such cases just two years ago. There are so many mortgage fraud cases to investigate, he said, that the bureau is not focusing on individual purchasers, but industry professionals generating fraud schemes that could total as much as hundreds of millions of dollars.
"It is a matter of lawyers, brokers or real estate professionals that are systematically trying to defraud the system," Pistole said.
Agents have even seen some instances of organized crime getting involved in mortgage fraud, he said.
Also appearing before the committee was Neil Barofsky, the watchdog of the government's $700 billion Wall Street rescue package passed last year.
Senate Democrats are urging more spending to expand the ranks of the FBI's financial fraud investigators. After the 2001 terror attacks, about 2,000 FBI agents were moved to counterterrorism work, and Pistole said they are considering moving some of them back to beef up anti-fraud efforts.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., urged the FBI and the Justice Department to put people who have committed mortgage fraud behind bars.
"Most people are honest," Leahy said. "The ones who are not honest in this field are creating economic havoc and I want to make sure that we're able to go after them. I want to see people prosecuted.... Frankly, I want to see them go to jail".
Barofsky, who was appointed the inspector general of the ongoing financial bailout plan, suggested the best way to clean up mortgage fraud is to pursue licensed professionals in the industry, and make examples of them.
"They have the most to lose, they're the most likely to flip, and they make the best examples," said Barofsky, a former federal prosecutor in New York.
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GM's post moved to here:
**Ah, thank god the dems are in control again. Nothing to worry about.**
How Chinagate Led to 9/11
By Jean Pearce
FrontPageMagazine.com | Tuesday, May 25, 2004
As the 9/11 Commission tries to uncover what kept intelligence agencies from preventing September 11, it has overlooked two vital factors: Jamie Gorelick and Bill Clinton. Gorelick, who has browbeaten the current administration, helped erect the walls between the FBI, CIA and local investigators that made 9/11 inevitable. However, she was merely expanding the policy Bill Clinton established with Presidential Decision Directive 24. What has been underreported is why the policy came about: to thwart investigations into the Chinese funding of Clinton’s re-election campaign, and the favors he bestowed on them in return.
In April, CNSNews.com staff writer Scott Wheeler reported that a senior U.S. government official and three other sources claimed that the 1995 memo written by Jamie Gorelick, who served as the Clinton Justice Department’s deputy attorney general from 1994 to 1997, created "a roadblock" to the investigation of illegal Chinese donations to the Democratic National Committee. But the picture is much bigger than that. The Gorelick memo, which blocked intelligence agents from sharing information that could have halted the September 11 hijacking plot, was only the mortar in a much larger maze of bureaucratic walls whose creation Gorelick personally oversaw.
It’s a story the 9/11 Commission may not want to hear, and one that Gorelick – now incredibly a member of that commission – has so far refused to tell. But it is perhaps the most crucial one to understanding the intentional breakdown of intelligence that led to the September 11 disaster.
Nearly from the moment Gorelick took office in the Clinton Justice Department, she began acting as the point woman for a large-scale bureaucratic reorganization of intelligence agencies that ultimately placed the gathering of intelligence, and decisions about what – if anything – would be done with it under near-direct control of the White House. In the process, more than a dozen CIA and FBI investigations underway at the time got caught beneath the heel of the presidential boot, investigations that would ultimately reveal massive Chinese espionage as millions in illegal Chinese donations filled Democratic Party campaign coffers.
When Gorelick took office in 1994, the CIA was reeling from the news that a Russian spy had been found in CIA ranks, and Congress was hungry for a quick fix. A month after Gorelick was sworn in, Bill Clinton issued Presidential Decision Directive 24. PDD 24 put intelligence gathering under the direct control of the president’s National Security Council, and ultimately the White House, through a four-level, top-down chain of command set up to govern (that is, stifle) intelligence sharing and cooperation between intelligence agencies. From the moment the directive was implemented, intelligence sharing became a bureaucratic nightmare that required negotiating a befuddling bureaucracy that stopped directly at the President’s office.
First, the directive effectively neutered the CIA by creating a National Counterintelligence Center (NCI) to oversee the Agency. NCI was staffed by an FBI agent appointed by the Clinton administration. It also brought multiple international investigations underway at the time under direct administrative control. The job of the NCI was to “implement counterintelligence activities,” which meant that virtually everything the CIA did, from a foreign intelligence agent’s report to polygraph test results, now passed through the intelligence center that PDD 24 created.
NCI reported to an administration-appointed National Counterintelligence Operations Board (NCOB) charged with “discussing counterintelligence matters.” The NCOB in turn reported to a National Intelligence Policy Board, which coordinated activities between intelligence agencies attempting to work together. The policy board reported “directly” to the president through the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.
The result was a massive bureaucratic roadblock for the CIA – which at the time had a vast lead on the FBI in foreign intelligence – and for the FBI itself, which was also forced to report to the NCOB. This hampered cooperation between the two entities. All this occurred at a time when both agencies were working separate ends of investigations that would eventually implicate China in technology transfers and the Democratic Party in a Chinese campaign cash grab.
And the woman charged with selling this plan to Congress, convincing the media and ultimately implementing much of it? Jamie Gorelick.
Many in Congress, including some Democrats, found the changes PDD 24 put in place baffling: they seemed to do nothing to insulate the CIA from infiltration while devastating the agency’s ability to collect information. At the time, Democrat House Intelligence Chairman Dan Glickman referred to the plan as “regulatory gobbledygook." Others questioned how FBI control of CIA intelligence would foster greater communication between the lower levels of the CIA and FBI, now that all information would have to be run through a multi-tier bureaucratic maze that only went upward.
Despite their doubts, Gorelick helped the administration sell the plan on Capitol Hill. The Directive stood.
But that wasn’t good enough for the Clinton administration, which wanted control over every criminal and intelligence investigation, domestic and foreign, for reasons that would become apparent in a few years. For the first time in Justice Department history, a political appointee, Richard Scruggs – an old crony or Attorney General Janet Reno’s from Florida – was put in charge of the Office of Intelligence and Policy Review (OIPR). OIPR is the Justice Department agency in charge of requesting wiretap and surveillance authority for criminal and intelligence investigations on behalf of investigative agencies from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court. The court’s activities are kept secret from the public.
A year after PDD 24, with the new bureaucratic structure loaded with administration appointees, Gorelick drafted the 1995 memo Attorney General John Ashcroft mentioned while testifying before the 9/11 Commission. The Gorelick memo, and other supporting memos released in recent weeks, not only created walls within the intelligence agencies that prevented information sharing among their own agents, but effectively walled these agencies off from each other and from outside contact with the U.S. prosecutors instrumental in helping them gather the evidence needed to make the case for criminal charges.
The only place left to go with intelligence information – particularly for efforts to share intelligence information or obtain search warrants – was straight up Clinton and Gorelick’s multi-tiered chain of command. Instead, information lethal to the Democratic Party languished inside the Justice Department, trapped behind Gorelick’s walls.
The implications were enormous. In her letter of protest to Attorney General Reno over Gorelick’s memo, United States Attorney Mary Jo White spelled them out: “These instructions leave entirely to OIPR and the (Justice Department) Criminal Division when, if ever, to contact affected U.S. attorneys on investigations including terrorism and espionage,” White wrote. (Like OIPR, the Criminal Division is also part of the Justice Department.)
Without an enforcer, the walls Gorelick’s memo put in place might not have held. But Scruggs acted as that enforcer, and he excelled at it. Scruggs maintained Gorelick’s walls between the FBI and Justice's Criminal Division by threatening to automatically reject any FBI request for a wiretap or search warrant if the Bureau contacted the Justice Department's Criminal Division without permission. This deprived the FBI, and ultimately the CIA, of gathering advice and assistance from the Criminal Division that was critical in espionage and terrorist cases.
It is no coincidence that this occurred at the same time both the FBI and the CIA were churning up evidence damaging to the Democratic Party, its fundraisers, the Chinese and ultimately the Clinton administration itself. Between 1994 and the 1996 election, as Chinese dollars poured into Democratic coffers, Clinton struggled to reopen high-tech trade to China. Had agents confirmed Chinese theft of weapons technology or its transfer of weapons technology to nations like Pakistan, Iran and Syria, Clinton would have been forced by law and international treaty to react.
Gorelick’s appointment to the job at Justice in 1994 occurred during a period in which the FBI had begun to systematically investigate technology theft by foreign powers. For the first time, these investigations singled out the U.S. chemical, telecommunications, aircraft and aerospace industries for intelligence collection.
By the time Gorelick wrote the March 1995 memo that sealed off American intelligence agencies from each other and the outside world, all of the most critical Chinagate investigations by American intelligence agencies were already underway. Some of their findings were damning:
In an investigation originally instigated by the CIA, the FBI was beginning its search for the source of the leak of W-88 nuclear warhead technology to China among the more than 1,000 people who had access to the secrets. Despite Justice Department stonewalling and the Department’s refusal to seek wiretap authority in 1997, the investigation eventually led to Wen Ho Lee and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The FBI first collected extensive evidence in 1995 linking illegal Democratic Party donations to China, according to the Congressional Record. But Congress and the Director of the CIA didn’t find out about the Justice Department’s failure to act upon that evidence until 1997, safely after the 1996 election.
According to classified CIA documents leaked to the Washington Times, between 1994 and 1997, the CIA learned that China sold Iran missile technology, a nuclear fission reactor, advanced air-defense radar and chemical agents. The Chinese also provided 5,000 ring magnets to Pakistan, used in producing weapons-grade uranium. The Chinese also provided uranium fuel for India's reactors.
In many cases the CIA resorted to leaking classified information to the media, in an effort to bypass the administration’s blackout.
Gorelick knew these facts well. While Clinton may have refused to meet with top CIA officials, Gorelick didn’t. According to a 1996 report by the legal news service American Lawyer Media, Gorelick and then-Deputy Director of the CIA George Tenet met every other week to discuss intelligence and intelligence sharing.
But those in the Clinton administration weren’t the only ones to gain from the secrecy. In 1994, the McDonnell Douglas Corporation transferred military-use machine tools to the China National Aero-Technology Import and Export Corporation that ended up in the hands of the Chinese army. The sale occurred despite Defense Department objections. McDonnell Douglas was a client of the Miller Cassidy Larroca & Lewin, L.L.P. (now called Baker Botts), the Washington, D.C., law firm where Gorelick worked for 17 years and was a partner. Ray Larroca, another partner in the firm, represented McDonnell in the Justice Department’s investigation of the technology transfer.
In 1995, General Electric, a former client of Gorelick’s, also had much to lose if the damaging information the CIA and the FBI had reached Congress. At the time, GE was publicly lobbying for a lucrative permit to assist the Chinese in replacing coal-fired power stations with nuclear plants. A 1990 law required that the president certify to Congress that China was not aiding in nuclear proliferation before U.S. companies could execute the business agreement.
Moreover, in 1995, Michael Armstrong, then the CEO of Hughes Electronics – a division of General Electric and another client of Miller Cassidy Larroca & Lewin – was publicly lobbying Clinton to switch satellite export controls from the State Department to the Commerce Department. After the controls were lifted, Hughes and another company gave sensitive data to the Chinese, equipment a Pentagon study later concluded would allow China to develop intercontinental and submarine-launched ballistic missiles aimed at American targets. Miller Cassidy Larroca & Lewin partner Randall Turk represented Hughes in the Congressional, State Department, and Justice Department investigations that resulted.
The Cox Report, which detailed Chinese espionage for Congress during the period, revealed that FBI surveillance caught Chinese officials frantically trying to keep Democratic donor Johnny Chung from divulging any information that would be damaging to Hughes Electronics. Chung funneled $300,000 in illegal contributions from the Chinese military to the DNC between 1994 and 1996.
It was this web of investigations that led Gorelick and Bill Clinton to erect the wall between intelligence agencies that resulted in the toppling of the Twin Towers. The connections go on and on, but they all lead back to Gorelick, the one person who could best explain how the Clinton administration neutered the American intelligence agencies that could have stopped the September 11 plot. Yet another high crime will have been committed if the September 11 Commission doesn’t demand testimony from her.
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Speaking of agencies not speaking to each other, we have the INS (immigration enforcement) which I think has changed names and changed departments (are they still in business?) and we have the Census Bureau which periodically tracks every little private detail about every living person hidden anywhere in the country, for political purposes. One reason Judd Gregg stepped down from becoming Commerce Secretary was because the Glibness Group wants control of the Census moved from Commerce to the White House. The reason the WHite House wants greater control is to make a more aggressive count of the 'new people' in the country.
It ocurrs to me that while we are spending federal dollars and sending federal agents to comb all neighborhoods, finding out every private detail about their life for political purposes... maybe we could also use that opportunity to ask them for documentation for citizen or visitor status. Just a thought.
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Doug,
"The reason the WHite House wants greater control is to make a more aggressive count of the 'new people' in the country."
But why do they need to bring Census into the White House to accomplish this? After 200 years of census taking.
What are they really up to? Why would we trust them to not *manipulate* data for redistricting purposes and other political maneuvers?
If this was a Republican doing this the MSM would be all over this. I think Lou Dobbs has brought this up.
MSNBC is already congratulating BO for his achievement with the spending bill. But what is the great achievement when you have the same parties controlling both houses on your side? This is nothing like when Reagan came in and got opposing parties to agree.
While I don't think the Republicans just calling for tax cuts as the answer to everything a gigantic spending bill so huge and long that those voting on cannot even read it or know what is in it was not the answer I had in mind. The comparisons to Lincoln boggles the mind for anyone who knows anything about history. Yet probably most youngsters today know little if anything about Lincoln. But they all know about Phelps. I lamment. I will be doing that a lot for the next eight and probably 12 or 16 yearss.
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Not sure if there is a better place for this, but it's the first place I found that made sense. . . .
February 12, 2009 7:27 AM PST
Obama's BlackBerry brings personal safety risks
by Chris Soghoian
When the mainstream media first announced Barack Obama's "victory" in keeping his BlackBerry, the focus was on the security of the device, and keeping the U.S. president's e-mail communications private from spies and hackers.
The news coverage and analysis by armchair security experts thus far has failed to focus on the real threat: attacks against President Obama's location privacy, and the potential physical security risks that come with someone knowing the president's real-time physical location.
Serial numbers
Before we dive in, let's take a moment to note that each mobile phone has a unique serial number, known as an IMEI, or MEID. This unique number is transmitted in clear text, every time the phone communicates with a nearby cell tower. Thus, while the contents of a phone call or the data session (for e-mail) are usually encrypted, anyone with the right equipment can home in on a particular IMEI and identify the location of the source of that signal.
The most common device used to locate a phone by its IMEI is a "Triggerfish", a piece of equipment that is routinely used by law enforcement and intelligence agencies. This kind of device tricks nearby cell phones into transmitting their serial numbers and other information by impersonating a cell tower.
The devices, which are actually fairly low-tech, were used to hunt down famed hacker Kevin Mitnick back in the 1990s. Most interesting of all, according to Department of Justice documents, Triggerfish can be used to reveal a suspect's location "without the user knowing about it and without involving the cell phone provider."
The expensive brand-name Triggerfish devices, made by the Harris Corp., are sold only to government agencies. However, it is almost certain that foreign governments have similar technology. Furthermore, someone with a low budget could likely use the open-source GNU Radio platform, which can already decipher GSM signals, to roll their own phone sniffer.
Finding Obama
We know that the president has been given a White House-issued BlackBerry phone. As a result, Obama's smartphone is broadcasting its IMEI serial number for anyone with the right equipment to detect.
Of course, the president is never alone, and so it is likely that anyone sniffing the wireless spectrum near the president would pick up hundreds of different BlackBerrys in the area.
However, Obama's aides do have to go home at some point, whereas Obama sleeps at the White House. This means that over the course of several days or weeks, it should be possible for a patient adversary to determine which IMEI belongs to the president's phone, and which IMEIs are associated with the phones of aides, simply by following the president (at a distance) and monitoring the spectrum at all hours.
As staffers go home for the evening, and Secret Service agents rotate out of duty, an adversary can strike their IMEI numbers off of the list. Within days, that initial list of 100 BlackBerrys can be reduced down to a single IMEI identifying the president's phone
Were someone to learn the president's IMEI, they could use it to gain valuable (and dangerous) information. For example, by pointing an antenna at the White House, it'd be possible to instantly determine if the president was inside. With a sophisticated-enough antenna, it might even be possible to determine which vehicle the president is sitting in while traveling in a motorcade, or to determine if the Secret Service is driving an empty limousine along a high-profile route to draw attention, while the president travels to a venue in an unmarked vehicle. The digital trail left by the president's BlackBerry would soon announce his presence to those keeping an eye out for his IMEI.
I am sure that others could come up with even more nefarious uses for real-time access to the president's physical location. I will leave that task to the blogosphere.
Burners
The simple solution to this problem, of course, is for the President to regularly change his IMEI serial number by getting a new phone. However, this presents another problem: that of the odd man out.
Imagine that foreign spies point a directional antenna at the White House and are thus able to capture the IMEI numbers of Obama and his team, as they leave and return to the White House from various events.
If a new IMEI number were to suddenly appear, be used for one week, disappear, and then be replaced by a new IMEI, which was also used for a week, before also disappearing, it would soon be obvious that a single person was changing phones. This pattern would be even more obvious, if everyone else in the president's entourage kept using their own phone--and thus broadcast the same IMEI, week after week.
Simply put, the only way that President Obama can gain some level of anonymity with regard to his IMEI number is if everyone in his team also changes their IMEI numbers with the same regularity.
Fans of the HBO TV show The Wire (a group that includes Obama) will no doubt remember the use of cheap prepaid "burner" phones by the fictional drug dealers. In order to avoid being wiretapped by the police, the entire criminal gang would dispose of their phones at once and switch to brand-new devices.
Essentially, the White House needs to start using burners.
Cost-effective protection
It would be extremely expensive (and wasteful) for the president and his staff to get a new BlackBerry each week. Luckily, there are two options available to the White House tech staff that allow them to protect the president's location privacy in a cost-effective (and environmentally friendly) way:
First, the White House geek team can simply shuffle the BlackBerrys used by the President's staff. That is, take away everyone's phone, mix them up, restore the software to the factory default, then issue a "new" phone to each staffer.
Within minutes, the phones would synchronize with the White House e-mail servers, and thus the "new" devices would have instant access to the e-mails and information that had been on the previous device.
The inconvenience factor of such a solution could also be significantly reduced by having twice as many phones as employees--that way, staff would not have to go without their phone for more than a minute or two, as they were swapped each week.
As long as this shuffling of phones were done randomly, the IMEI numbers would be sufficiently anonymized. Sure, a potential attacker would know that the device belonged to a member of the White House staff, but they would not know whether if belonged to a lowly intern, the press secretary, or the president.
A slightly more laborious method would be to hack the software running on the BlackBerrys and flash the devices with a new serial number. While this is quite possibly a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (which prohibits most forms of phone hacking), it is unlikely that Research In Motion (which makes the BlackBerry) would sue the White House for engaging in such reverse engineering.
Of course, the downside of giving each phone a new serial number is that these phones would then need to be re-registered with the wireless communication company, which would otherwise refuse to provide the devices with service. However, this additional burden for the White House techies would yield significant security benefits, as each phone would be given a clean IMEI number not associated with the White House.
Insiders
In this article, I've focused solely on the scenario of a bad guy with an antenna. There is also the very real (and significant) risk of an insider working for the phone company.
Insiders are a notoriously difficult security problem to fix, something Obama has likely already learned, after his passport file was read by a contractor working for the State Department.
Even if every person working for the White House's telecommunications carrier were honest, it could also be possible to social-engineer the information out of a customer service representative (otherwise known as "pretexting").
Alternatively, an adversary could simply hack into the computer systems used by the phone company in order to get information on Obama's phone. Is was this latter approach that was followed by an unknown attacker who was able to spy on the phone calls of more than 100 Greek government officials during the 2004 Olympics.
Foreign trips
President Obama is likely to go on many foreign trips during his four (or more) years in office. In addition to burdening taxpayers with the obscene international roaming rates associated with his foreign BlackBerry usage, there are new and more serious security concerns to consider.
The federal government can most likely trust AT&T and the other wireless carriers. After all, they did join forces with the National Security Agency to spy on millions of American's phone calls without a warrant. The telecommunication companies in foreign countries are far less likely to be pro-United States, and in some cases, they are likely to be working closely with foreign intelligence agencies.
Thus, as long as President Obama keeps his BlackBerry turned on while he is in China, it is likely that the Chinese government will be closely monitoring his location, as reported by the president's phone to the Chinese government-owned phone company. The same sort of security issues will likely arise in many other countries.
Due to these security concerns, this blogger would be extremely surprised if the Secret Service permitted the President to use his BlackBerry when on foreign trips.
As you can see, the use of a BlackBerry by the president creates a number of very real security headaches that are no doubt keeping several people at the Secret Service awake at night. While the initial focus of the press was on the e-mail and smartphone technology in the president's phone, the real threats and risks are actually associated with more boring functions of the device.
Further reading: M. Jakobsson and S. Wetzel. "Security Weaknesses in Bluetooth" (PDF) describes some very similar location privacy attacks against mobile phones using Bluetooth-based sniffers.
Christopher Soghoian delves into the areas of security, privacy, technology policy and cyber-law. He is a student fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society , and is a PhD candidate at Indiana University's School of Informatics. His academic work and contact information can be found by visiting www.dubfire.net/chris/. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13739_3-10159055-46.html
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/opinion/15arquilla.html
Op-Ed Contributor
The Coming Swarm
By JOHN ARQUILLA
Published: February 14, 2009
Monterey, Calif.
WITH three Afghan government ministries in Kabul hit by simultaneous suicide attacks this week, by a total of just eight terrorists, it seems that a new “Mumbai model” of swarming, smaller-scale terrorist violence is emerging.
The basic concept is that hitting several targets at once, even with just a few fighters at each site, can cause fits for elite counterterrorist forces that are often manpower-heavy, far away and organized to deal with only one crisis at a time. This approach certainly worked in Mumbai, India, last November, where five two-man teams of Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives held the city hostage for two days, killing 179 people. The Indian security forces, many of which had to be flown in from New Delhi, simply had little ability to strike back at more than one site at a time.
While it’s true that the assaults in Kabul seem to be echoes of Mumbai, the fact is that Al Qaeda and its affiliates have been using these sorts of swarm tactics for several years. Jemaah Islamiyah — the group responsible for the Bali nightclub attack that killed 202 people in 2002 — mounted simultaneous attacks on 16 Christian churches in Indonesia on Christmas Eve in 2000, befuddling security forces.
Even 9/11 itself had swarm-like characteristics, as four small teams of Qaeda operatives simultaneously seized commercial aircraft and turned them into missiles, flummoxing all our defensive responses. In the years since, Al Qaeda has coordinated swarm attacks in Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Turkey, Yemen and elsewhere. And at the height of the insurgency in Iraq, terrorists repeatedly used swarms on targets as small as truck convoys and as large as whole cities.
This pattern suggests that Americans should brace for a coming swarm. Right now, most of our cities would be as hard-pressed as Mumbai was to deal with several simultaneous attacks. Our elite federal and military counterterrorist units would most likely find their responses slowed, to varying degrees, by distance and the need to clarify jurisdiction.
While the specifics of the federal counterterrorism strategy are classified, what is in the public record indicates that the plan contemplates having to deal with as many as three sites being simultaneously hit and using “overwhelming force” against the terrorists, which probably means mustering as many as 3,000 ground troops to the site. If that’s an accurate picture, it doesn’t bode well. We would most likely have far too few such elite units for dealing with a large number of small terrorist teams carrying out simultaneous attacks across a region or even a single city.
Nightmare possibilities include synchronized assaults on several shopping malls, high-rise office buildings or other places that have lots of people and relatively few exits. Another option would be to set loose half a dozen two-man sniper teams in some metropolitan area — you only have to recall the havoc caused by the Washington sniper in 2002 to imagine how huge a panic a slightly larger version of that form of terrorism would cause.
So how are swarms to be countered? The simplest way is to create many more units able to respond to simultaneous, small-scale attacks and spread them around the country. This means jettisoning the idea of overwhelming force in favor of small units that are not “elite” but rather “good enough” to tangle with terrorist teams. In dealing with swarms, economizing on force is essential.
We’ve actually had a good test case in Iraq over the past two years. Instead of responding to insurgent attacks by sending out large numbers of troops from distant operating bases, the military strategy is now based on hundreds of smaller outposts in which 40 or 50 American troops are permanently stationed and prepared to act swiftly against attackers. Indeed, their very presence in Iraqi communities is a big deterrent. It’s small surprise that overall violence across Iraq has dropped by about 80 percent in that period.
For the defense of American cities against terrorist swarms, the key would be to use local police officers as the first line of defense instead of relying on the military. The first step would be to create lots of small counterterrorism posts throughout urban areas instead of keeping police officers in large, centralized precinct houses. This is consistent with existing notions of community-based policing, and could even include an element of outreach to residents similar to that undertaken in the Sunni areas of Iraq — even if it were to mean taking the paradoxical turn of negotiating with gangs about security.
At the federal level, we should stop thinking in terms of moving thousands of troops across the country and instead distribute small response units far more widely. Cities, states and Washington should work out clear rules in advance for using military forces in a counterterrorist role, to avoid any bickering or delay during a crisis. Reserve and National Guard units should train and field many more units able to take on small teams of terrorist gunmen and bombers. Think of them as latter-day Minutemen.
Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Turkey and Yemen all responded to Qaeda attacks with similar “packetizing” initiatives involving the police and armed forces; and while that hasn’t eliminated swarm attacks, the terrorists have been far less effective and many lives have been saved.
As for Afghanistan, where the swarm has just arrived, there is still time to realize the merits of forming lots of small units and sprinkling them about in a countrywide network of outposts. As President Obama looks to send more troops to that war, let’s make sure the Pentagon does it the right way.
Yes, the swarm will be heading our way, too. We need to get smaller, closer and quicker. The sooner the better.
John Arquilla teaches in the special operations program at the Naval Postgraduate School and is the author of “Worst Enemy: The Reluctant Transformation of the American Military.”
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http://www.policeone.com/pc_print.asp?vid=1786847
02/16/2009
NYPD trains hard to not be “outgunned” by terrorists
By TOM HAYS
Associated Press Writer
Operators from the NYPD Emergency Services Unit move in a stack formation as they prepare to enter a building during training at the NYPD H.I.D.T.A., pronounced "highduh" (High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area) training site in Orchard Beach, Thursday, Feb. 12, 2009 in New York. The training was to simulate response in the event of a terrorist attack similar to those that occurred in Mumbai, India in December 2008. (AP Photo)
Related Article:
News Report: Is Mumbai a call to arms for police around the world?
Urban Shield 2008: Plan, prepare and train
NEW YORK — The team of police officers crisscrosses down a New York City block, bracing for a potential firefight with heavily armed suspects who have taken hostages inside a building.
"We know there are hostages in there," Lt. Kenneth Beatty warns while supervising the operation. "The number's unknown."
It's not real, but it's not a standard training session, either.
Local authorities believe New York City could be a potential target of militants trained and supplied as well as those who staged coordinated attacks in Mumbai last November, and New York Police Department leaders are determined not to be outgunned.
"Terrorists are thinking creatively about new tactics," Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said last week at a City Council public safety hearing. "So must we."
The largest U.S. police department launched a counterterrorism initiative this month to train a new team of officers with semiautomatic rifles loaded with armor-piercing bullets. The officers also are being trained in tactics for close quarters combat and rescuing hostages in hotels and other high-rise buildings.
After the three-day assault in Mumbai on luxury hotels, a Jewish center and other sites in November left 164 people dead, the NYPD dispatched investigators to India to see if there were any security lessons for New York. They were struck by how the 10 shooters calmly caused so much mayhem by relying on cell-phone communication and Chinese knockoff AK-47s. The local police and security officers, they said, were clearly overwhelmed.
"Their weapons were not sufficiently powerful and they were not trained for that type of conflict," Kelly said. "It took more than 12 hours for properly armed Indian commandos to arrive."
The NYPD's 400 Emergency Service Unit officers already can carry fully automatic Colt M4 rifles -- what the manufacturer bills as "the weapon of the 21st century soldier."
But post-Mumbai, the department decided to train about 130 reinforcements from its Organized Crime Control Bureau with Ruger Mini-14s in case a militant force even larger than the one that struck India's financial capital invaded here. Police academy recruits will get a tutorial on how to secure assault weapons recovered in combat situations or, in a pinch, how to shoot them.
The NYPD also has begun videotaping the interiors of large hotels so emergency service officers can learn their layouts and match wits with terrorists who, as in Mumbai, may have done surveillance. In addition, Kelly told the council that police want to explore ways to disrupt cell phone service "in a pinpointed way against terrorists who are using them."
The training session last week took place at the police department's firearms training facility on a desolate, wind-swept peninsula in the borough of the Bronx. The street the officers crisscrossed is the NYPD version of a movie studio back lot, with mock street signs, cinderblock storefronts, even a yellow cab and city bus. The guns can't fire. The hostages are played by other officers.
Instructors drilled officers on how to rescue hostages while giving each other cover. They warned that terrorists could try to blend in with victims. Any lapse in concentration could prove deadly.
"You guys have to communicate!" one instructor yelled as the officers secured a darkened stairwell as an escape route.
At a nearby firing range, another set of officers used their assault weapons to blast away at targets. They would shoot 600 rounds over two days to complete the training.
Some of the guns were purposely rigged to suddenly fire blanks _ a signal to the officers to practice dropping a jammed weapon and immediately draw their semiautomatic pistols and keep shooting. When the shooting stopped, the range was littered with shell casings and empty magazines.
The exercise was another sign of a new era in policing, said Assistant Chief George Anderson, commanding officer of the police academy.
"We've always been prepared to deal with criminals, not terrorists," Anderson said. "Now we have to go to the next level."
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ITOTA: Beslan and the cry of the bear cubs
Editor's Note: PoliceOne has partnered with the International Tactical Officers Training Association (ITOTA) to bring you feature articles from their outstanding quarterly publication. The following article first appeared in the pages of SWAT Digest magazine and is reprinted by permission of the publisher. Check back on (or around) the third Tuesday of every month for features and opinions presented in partnership with our friends at ITOTA in our ongoing effort to provide SWAT operators around the country with the best information available on issues important to SWAT operators.
By Greg Ferency, SWAT Digest
“He (God) kept the best… the most beautiful ones… the best children”
12 year old girl… Beslan hostage survivor
The Day of Knowledge is an important day in Russia. This is the first day of school and they take it much more seriously than their American counterparts. It is a day of celebration and festivities. The first day of school in Russia always is on September 1st and young Beslan students dressed in their best on that faithful morning. They came with gifts and flowers for the teachers. They also came with joy and excitement.
The city of Beslan (population 40,000) was celebrating the first day of school like the rest of Russia. Beslan School #1 had drawn approximately 3000 people due to the fact that it handled grades 1-11.
At Beslan School #1 a party of sorts was held outside the school. Teachers, students, parents and relatives met, hugged, sang and welcomed each other on school grounds. The students then lined up according to grade, a perfect formation and an advantage for those who were about to come. At approximately 9:20am, the rage of terror struck, approximately three dozen Chechen and Islamic extremists pulled up in two large trucks and jumped out. This was the catalyst for several others hidden among the crowd to jump into action. In total approximately forty nine heavily armed terrorists charged and took the lives of a massive amount of innocent people over a period of sixty two hours.
They executed a plan of action, which involved wrangling the adults and students into the school building. They fired their weapons in the air and on the ground in an effort to maximize panic and submission to their demands. It was incredibly effective. Speed was vital to them and they had planned and done their job well. At first some of the victims thought the original shots being fired was a military drill or police “chasing bandits”. One teenage student thought this exact scenario until she saw a “bearded man” yell at her… “Why are you standing here? You are all being taken hostage!” A police officer and security guard engaged the attackers with minimal effect. They didn’t have much of chance and were quickly cut down. However, it is just possible their actions allowed an amount of potential victims to get away. No matter how small or large that unknown number was it was significant.
What can now be considered hostages were herded into the school with threats of death to themselves and more importantly to their children. Families were split up in the chaos and many children were left on their own to deal with this frightening event. The hostages were effectively driven into, what could be loosely called by American standards, a gym in school. The siege had begun.
In a matter of minutes the terrorists had taken approximately 1,132 innocent souls. Almost immediately the citizens of Beslan gathered around the school forming a human fence around the hostages and terrorists. The hostage takers consisted of Chechen and Islamic extremists, this included two “Fiancés of Allah”. The “Fiancés of Allah” are women who are under the age of twenty-five and had a male member of their family killed in the Chechen War. The women strapped explosives to their bodies to be used as mobile human bombs.
The group eventually divided themselves in three command and control elements:
“Control group” – supervised and controlled the hostages.
“Security group” – protected the group from barricaded positions within the school. “Leader group” – gave orders and controlled limited negotiations.
After the hostages were forced into the gym mothers attempted to calm their children by telling them that they were in a movie, a military exercise or it was just “a game”. Even with the terrorists attempts to control everyone it was obviously chaotic inside the gym. The terrorists were constantly threatening the children that they would be shot if they continued crying. A forty six year old man who attempted to calm the other hostages down was executed in front of everyone in the gym. His body was then drug out of the gym leaving an ominous blood trail. This was an obvious submissive tactic to let the hostages know that they had no problem killing their prey.
The group then began wiring explosive devices amongst the hostages. The bombs were placed around and above the sitting hostages, including a basketball goal that would later play a catastrophic role in the events of this incident. Most of the bombs were primitive but deadly. They were embedded with nails and other objects to act as shrapnel to increase their effectiveness. The terrorists claimed to have wired one of the bombs to a foot controlled “dead mans switch”. It appeared in the form of a pedal. This was one of two dead man switches that they claimed to have and the foot pedal can be seen in video footage the terrorists sent out to the Russian authorities to let them know that it existed. A terrorist would keep his foot on the pedal. If he was shot or lifted his foot off the pedal for any reason the bomb(s) would detonate. Russian authorities now believe that the dead mans switch was a fake. But, whether it was or not was irrelevant to the hostages at the time. Hence, it was effective.
Early on the first day the hostages were told to give up their cell phones along with any cameras, including video cameras. They were told that if anyone hid a cell phone and were caught they and others around them would be shot. In the end a pile of these devices were on the floor. The terrorists found a video camera that a father had brought to video his child going to school. They used it for their own and videotaped the hostages along with themselves. The videotape was later found by a group of boys going through the carnage of the school after the event was over. The videotape can be seen in several documentaries about the Beslan event and can viewed on some video web sites. It offers some limited insight into conditions of the hostages on the first two days of the siege as well as the mindset of the terrorist holding them. In this video a bomb can be seen hung so low that anyone walking under it would have hit their head on it. It was obviously slung this way for maximum killing effect.
Fear and death were not over yet for day one of the siege. Up to sixteen men and boys were taken to the second floor (room 206) of the school and lined up against the wall of one of the classrooms. They were then executed outright. Their bodies were then tossed out a window onto the ground below. It is probable that the terrorists viewed these men as a possible threat and wanted to get rid of them quickly. These men were probably large in stature, appeared to be healthy and most likely posed a liability. It made no difference if the threat perception was real or not. Several other men were forced to assist them in the fortification of the school. They were forced to assist in barricading the windows and door from the outside. After their efforts were complete they were shot dead and left where they lay. This brutal group had something else in store for the young attractive female hostages. They were singled out and one by one taken to another room of the school where they were sexually assaulted over the entire course of this event. This included the barrels of assault weapons and other forbidding objects.
As day one progressed and the hostages suffering continued Russia began its response to the school. The 58th Infantry Division arrived at Beslan. This division is a standard military entity made up of mostly young conscripts. They were in no way prepared to handle this situation. What they found was a melee of armed angry civilians that had surrounded the school by the thousands. Many of the men were armed with their own weapons and were threatening to storm the school. The Russian authorities did not help matters any by announcing that there were only 354 hostages in the school. The crowd knew the number was much higher and this number incensed them, as well as the terrorists in the school when the number reached them. This down playing of the numbers did not help the authorities in any way. All it did was escalate suspicion of them by the Beslan civilians and caused the anger of the terrorists to pour over onto the hostages in the school.
Russia sent numerous other military and government Special Forces to Beslan. These groups are known as “Spetsnaz” units. The word Spetsnaz comes by combining the words “Special Purpose Forces”. Although several responded, the two primary units assigned to the school were Alpha and Vympel. These units responded from Chechnya and Moscow. Alpha can be best compared to America’s Delta Force or CAG, as they are now known. Vympel is Russia’s formal “terrorist type” unit. They conduct the missions that are very specialized and unpleasant. They are also trained to go behind enemy lines and cause havoc. Both are top notch units and trained well in what they do. Again, upon their arrival they found a scene that was chaotic at best… both behind the walls of the school and streets outside of it. During this time snipers began taking up positions around the school.
In regards to negotiations with the terrorists… they were limited at best. The terrorists had a bloody end planned for this incident and talking to them was not going to divert them.
Civilians continued to gather around the school. Over the course of the siege and up to its catastrophic end the civilians stayed at the school. Many refused food or to sleep in solidarity with the hostages inside the school. For logistical reasons this helps nothing and might be construed as a bad idea… no matter how noble. If an event like this ever occurs in the United States we can assume that the end will also be bloody to say the least. First responders, especially law enforcement, may very well be decimated with officers wounded and killed. Other first responder agencies will also be pulled to their furthest brink. The one element that has potential to remain strong is the community. People may need places to stay. Children victims may need blankets and someone to hold on to until the proper entity can assist them. Food may need distributed. In other words the community may be called in some low level, but important factor when the final bullet is fired. Hence, they will need to be strong, rested, fed and ready to assist if that is asked of them.
It is amazing how the civilians were able to intermingle with the security forces around the school. Males with rifles with some fueled with vodka continued to place themselves in positions to fire at the school. They exchanged verbal insults and gestures with the terrorists inside the school. The Russian authorities may have feared that if they attempted to disarm the civilians of their weapons they would be involved in a firefight with the very same people whose children were being held hostage inside the school.
As the morning of September 2nd came to Beslan little had changed for the hostages. Parents continued to try to comfort their children as well as keep the calm. Those with medical conditions started to feel the effects of the lack of their medication, food and water.
One politician was allowed inside the school for negotiations on the second day of the siege. He was Ruslan Aushev. Aushev was a former Russian general who later became the President of Ingushetia. Ingushetia lies between Chechnya and North Ossetia (where Beslan is located). Chechnya and Ingushetia are predominately Muslim while North Ossetia is mostly Christian. The Inguish, including Aushev, are very sympathetic to Chechnya and its bid for independence. A number of the terrorists that took over the school had Inguish origins.
Aushev was allowed inside the school. The video footage that the terrorists took with their new camera shows him attempting to get the terrorists to release some of the hostages. The school principal can also be seen pleading for the children. The terrorist to whom they were speaking with agrees to release some of the nursing babies. When they were released mothers were forced to make decisions no parent should never have to do. They were forced to leave with their babies but leave older children behind. As they left the school Aushev left with them carrying a baby that a mother gave up to stay behind with her older child. Aushev followed the released mothers out of the school with the child and he was never able to return to the school.
This was not a kind act by the terrorist. It was at best a standard stalling tactic. As in, “see we are releasing hostages”. Babies do not know terrorism or any other act of violence. They only know they are hot, hungry, thirsty and not having a good time. As we all know this usually translates into crying. These particular babies were driving the terrorists crazy. However, they probably knew enough to know that if they started executing babies outright this would be the one thing to cause a riot of sorts among the mothers inside. Hence, this was probably a strategic move on their part as much as anything else.
Interviews with the former hostages stated that many started losing hope of a peaceful resolution as day two went on. The terrorists also became more hostile and unpredictable towards them. Many of the hostages had gone without food or water since the siege began the day before. They started drinking their own urine and eating pedals off the flowers that they had brought for the teachers to celebrate the Day of Knowledge. Everything bad from day one transferred over to day two. Hostages continued to be sorted out for various forms of harassment and abuse. This continued as day two grew into day three of the siege of Beslan School #1.
The hostages continued to obviously deteriorate as the morning September 3rd arrived. Many hostages and civilians outside the school later reported that there was something in air on September 3rd. They knew something was going to happen on this day. Parents stated that the children inside the school no longer responded to the terrorists threats and the gunfire that usually followed. They were exhausted, dehydrated and numb to all stimuli around them. One mother even said that some of the mothers pondered doing something to spark an end to this horror. The mental stability of the hostages and even the terrorist (even they began arguing with each other) appeared be to breaking down.
At approx 1:05pm that something did happen. One of the bombs hanging from a basketball goal fell and detonated. It was followed by another explosion several seconds later. This set off a trigger of events that proved catastrophic for all. The explosions obviously killed many people immediately. They obviously injured many parents, teachers and children alike. Some survivors described a deafening silence and zero visibility from the debris of the explosions. As time progressed hostages began jumping out the gyms windows in an effort to make a dash for escape and life. The terrorist realized what was happening and started firing into the fleeing victims. One teenage female hostage stated that she was finally able to fall asleep. She was awakened by the explosions and was surrounded by “dead bodies”. She escaped out of a hole blown into the gym wall with a friend. Several minutes after the second explosion the roof of the gym caught fire and collapsed. This took even more innocent lives. One child survivor stated that he saw other children melting alive.
Confusion was apparent on both sides. The Russian military thought the terrorists set the bombs off on purpose. The terrorist thought the Russians had started their assault on the school. Just prior to the explosions going off the terrorists had agreed to allow the Russian authorities to remove the bodies of the men killed on day one of the attack and thrown out the window. As the men were doing this the explosions occurred. This may very well have seeded the terrorists belief that the assault was planned on the Russian side and the body removal was an attempt to place soldiers in a strategic position. These brave rescuers assigned to remove the bodies were fired upon… one was killed.
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Alpha and Vympel units waited for the “go” command to enter the school. The problem was that none of the “higher ups” could or would give the order. Finally the units began the entry after not being able to stand by any longer as their Russian children were being slaughtered. Patch made elements of both units began their rescue attempt. A large portion of Alpha was 18 miles to the south in the city of Vladikavkaz practicing a prepared assault on a school that was similar to Beslan School #1. Vympel would bear much of the brunt of the initial rescue attempt.
Obviously, the Spetsnaz units were placed in a position that forced them to engage. Some with in rescue teams used their own bodies as shields as they attempted to protect the fleeing hostages that were pouring out of the gym. The Alpha and Vympel teams made entry through windows and “mouse holes” they blew into the walls of the school with explosive breaches. One Vympel element attempted to enter the school through the main entrance, but it was heavily barricaded and wired with explosives. A tank round finally gave them a way inside.
The armed civilians also started firing their weapons at the school. Others surged forward toward the school with the Spetsnaz teams. Some helped hostages through the windows and rushed them to safety. Others can be seen in photos helping with fire hoses showering water into the gym. The civilians were playing a role in the incident from start to finish…. for good, bad or worse. At this point crowd control was literally non-existent.
Six year old Aida Sidokova was blown out the window of the gym after the initial bombs went off. There is a series a photos taken by a photographer that documents part of her story. The photographer was imbedded with a Russian sniper team positioned outside the school. The photos start off by showing Aida and another woman lying on the ground outside the gym in the courtyard. The woman and Aida then start to raise up. The woman flees the area. Aida, dressed in only her underwear with her skinny legs covered in blood, is then photographed climbing back into the gym through the same windows she was blown out of... her attempt to re-enter the gym was successful. The very last photo shows the roof collapsing and the gym engulfed in flames.
Many of the surviving hostages in the gym were forced into the kitchen and cafeteria area of the school. Once there they were forced to stand in front of the windows acting as human shields to protect the terrorists from incoming bullets. The terrorists told them to scream to the military (and in all probability civilians) to stop the assault on the school.
As Vympel and Alpha teams made their way into the school engaging their targets the hostages continued to stream out of the school. In the end it took ten hours for the Russians to retake the school with the last remaining terrorists were killed on the north side of the southern wing of the school. Alpha and Vympel blasted the barricaded hostiles with RPG and RPO’s, basically blowing that section of the school apart. Beslan School #1 was finally back in Russian control. Hostages continued to stream out of the school during all this in an attempt to escape the carnage. As you view and study the photos of the event several things become evident.
You will notice that most of the children are either naked or in their underwear. This was due to the fact that the gym acted as a greenhouse of sorts with the windows and all the people stuffed inside. The heat inside the gym became unbearable. You will also notice that most of the hostage make up were women and younger children. This may be due to the fact that many of the older, hence stronger / faster kids, were able to flee the school grounds when the assault was initiated. The younger children had no recourse other than to follow the terrorists directions. Note: the lower number of older students was also determined because the older students found such festivities “not cool,” as the event was designed for the younger children. There were also a fairly significant number of men to women hostage ratio. This may be due to the fact that fathers tend to avoid this type of activity and many may have been working at the local businesses and factories.
You will also notice that many of the victims (especially the children) were being carried by other civilians. This was due to them being injured, exhausted, malnourished / dehydrated and panicked. Despite their actions throughout the incident it could be safe to say that some of the civilian males saved the lives of hostages by assisting them to safety.
Make shift aid stations were set up in secure areas around the school. Most of the escaping hostages begged for water from their rescuers and first responders. The Russian authorities planned poorly for the medical treatment side and there were limited numbers of medical assets around the school. For some victims the “Golden Hour” was ticking away. Many of the victims wandered the aid areas looking for family members… children looking for parents… parents looking for children… brother looking for sister and so on. The anguish of Beslan was to continue as families received the news of dead loved ones… some of this came immediately as they identified bodies other news came later as DNA results became apparent in later months.
By 11:00pm the Russian military had taken the battered school back from the Chechens and their extremist allies. Imagine a ten-hour battle in and around an American school. The North Hollywood bank shootout in 1997 between two bank robbers and LAPD lasted less than an hour. And even though the North Hollywood bank actors were heavily body armored they were shooting from minimal use of cover and concealment with a vehicle being their only real option. Imagine dozens of motivated individuals with brick and mortar as cover.
Eleven Vympel and Alpha soldiers were killed re-taking the school. Other Spetsnaz units lost ten other brave men… another sixty-three were wounded. Compare these casualties to any American police department. Stories of heroism on the part of these Russian units should be acknowledged… this may be our American police officers if a similar event happens here. One of the individual incidents that I am aware of involved a Vympel officer grabbing a terrorist in the gym. The officer saw that the man was about to throw a grenade into a crowd of hostages who had survived the initial explosions. The officer tackled the terrorist and held him in a bear type hug until the grenade exploded and killed them both. Another Vympel officer was shot in the neck while trying to cover the fleeing hostages from sniper fire coming from the second floor of the school. He literally bled to death while never giving up or retreating from his position that was completely exposed in the school courtyard. These are just two brief examples and I bet there are hundreds of stories just like these. These acts not only included heroism (true heroism) on the part of the Spetsnaz units, but these are also stories of unbelievable brave acts on the parts of the teachers, parents and even the older students who sacrificed their lives to save others.
One of the Chechens made it out of the school. He was found hiding under a truck by the Russians. His name was Norpasha Kulayev and he was sentenced to “life” in prison in the summer of 2005.
During this 53 hour incident the most recent numbers I have seen are as follows:
1,132 hostages
334 dead
186 children dead
700+ wounded
Old Soviet habits die hard in the Russian military and political machine. Nobody would take charge of the school scene. Command and control was poor. Lower level officers and officials had no chain of command to turn to. Shooters for the Spetsnaz teams around the school couldn’t get anyone in a position of authority to give the order to move in on the school after the bombs went off. After waiting so long they decided to go in on their own.
Wounded children and adults were spread out all over southern and western Russia (including Moscow) for medical treatment. It took weeks, even months, for some families to find out that their relatives had survived. It should be noted that Moscow is 1000 miles from Beslan. One female survivor who was a teenager reported that it took her awhile to realize that she was now safe while in the hospital. In her mind she perceived the doctors and nurses as being terrorist who continued to want to harm her.
Entire generations were destroyed in the Beslan incident… especially younger generations where all the younger siblings were killed. Some children survived but one or both of their parents did not. Pictures were put up on the walls of Beslan streets of unclaimed child survivors.
During the Cold War America depended on the Russians / Soviets loving their children as much as we did. The heroism of the shooters who re-took the school compiled with the grief of the people of Beslan and Russia itself…. proved that they do. Russian citizens left bottles of water and other beverages at the school as a symbolic attempt to quench the thirst of the dead, dying and injured. They also left stuffed dolls and animals in acknowledgment of the child victims… the youngest of the dead being two years old. This continues to be what can now be considered a tradition at the cemetery where the dead are buried. Toys and drinks are left at the gravesites of the victims slaughtered at the school.
Victims of the siege reported that the hostage takers were injecting something into themselves during the incident. Heroin is a major drug in that area of the world. However, the descriptions of the terrorists behavior after the injections are much more consistent with some type of amphetamine based stimulant. The victims reported that they became much more hyper and aggressive and physical / sexual abuse increased towards the hostages after the drug ingestion. We should take note of this as what would be normally be conceived as a recreational drug is now being used as a strategic option against us. If this behavior is observed in future incidents we should not assume that we are dealing with drug addicted thugs… but a crack team of assailants who have an agenda and strategy already set in motion. The drugs are simply an effective part of the original plan.
Some have attempted to state that the Russian military units started the assault on September 3rd thus causing the bombs to detonate. This doesn’t make sense for several reasons. The main Spetsnaz units had only 133 operators around the school that were “on duty” at the time that bombs went off. Another 133 operators were “off duty” on a two minute stand-by. By American police standards this seems like a lot, but their planned assault called for at least twice that many to be at the school. In an exchange of E mails I learned of an important fact from the photographer embedded with a sniper team. He stated that he did not notice anything in Spetsnaz behavior to indicate a planned assault at the time the bombs went off in the school.
The Russians correctly estimated that there were around fifty terrorists in the school. They also knew that it would take 10 to 1 superiority ratio for each entrenched terrorist to be taken out… plus another 50% of ready reserve to back up the initial assault team. Obviously, if you do the math the numbers needed did not match what an experienced military, like the Russians had at Beslan, would need for a planned assault / rescue. Also, don’t forget that most of the primary unit (Alpha) assigned for this type of mission was miles away practicing for the planned assault if it came to that. There were other military units at Beslan with Alpha and Vympel. But they rarely train with or draw assets from them. Also, as we already discussed it actually took an extended period of time for the Vympel and the remaining Alpha troops to go into the school because the government officials balked at giving the order.
The Russians were caught flat-footed. They had no formal assault plan yet and after the bombs went off any type of plan that they might have been trying to formulate converted into “just save as many kids as you can”. .. period. The results are what we have in the history of what occurred at Beslan School #1.
It has been noted that the floorboards of the library had been torn up. Some have assessed that because of this weapons were hidden under the library floor months prior to assault in September. In all practicality a more obvious answer would be that the terrorists were looking for tunnels being dug underneath the school by Russian forces for a planned assault and entry point into the school. The Russians had done this at the Dubrovka Theatre (the play that was being put on was called Nord Ost, which this incident is commonly known as) play in October 2002. The terrorists at Beslan probably learned from this an were looking for the tunnels, which did not exist, at the school.
The only thing that has come out of the Beslan School siege is death, depression, despair and lessons. As police officers in the United States and around the world we were powerless to do anything for the victims while this incident was in motion. However, we can learn from the lessons that can be taken away from this tragedy. If we don’t we may suffer the consequences in a manner that is much more than anything we have dealt with in the past on our soil. These lessons were not free… they came with a price… the cry of the bear cubs… in September 2004.
Note: Aida Sidakova survived her ordeal at Beslan School #1. She was later asked why she climbed back into the gym. She stated she wanted to be with her mother who was still inside.
References and resources:
Terror at Beslan – John Giduck (www.terroratbeslan.com)
Children of Beslan – HBO documentary
Three Days in September – Showtime documentary
Greg Ferency of SWAT Digest can be reached at gregferency@swatdigest.com.
The ITOTA is an international association designed to offer quality professional training and information sharing. The ITOTA recognizes the need to expand and share tactical knowledge by focusing on the wealth of experience that exists in the global tactical community.
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http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?print=yes&id=30762
Terror Training Camps On American Soil
by Robert Spencer
Posted 02/19/2009 ET
“We are fighting to destroy the enemy. We are dealing with evil at its roots and its roots are America.”
So said the Pakistani Sheikh Muburak Gilani, leader of the jihad terrorist group Jamaat ul-Fuqra. And the way that he and his organization are “dealing with evil at its roots” is to set up jihad terror training camps all over the United States -- often under the noses of government and law enforcement officials who are either indifferent or too hamstrung by political correctness to do anything about it.
Sheikh Gilani is no shrinking violet, and Jamaat ul-Fuqra is a force to be reckoned with both in the United States and elsewhere. Journalist Daniel Pearl was on his way to interview Gilani when he was kidnapped and beheaded in 2002. The following year, a member of Jamaat ul-Fuqra, Iyman Faris, pled guilty to plotting to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. In 2005, the Department of Homeland Security included the group among “predicted possible sponsors of attacks” on American soil. And in 2006, the Department of Justice reported that Jamaat ul-Fuqra “has more than 35 suspected communes and more than 3,000 members spread across the United States, all in support of one goal: the purification of Islam through violence.” That means, of course, violence against unbelievers.
Yet despite the fact that Justice and the DHS are obviously aware of what is going on, Jamaat ul-Fuqra continues to operate, relatively unhindered, in the United States. A new documentary from the Christian Action Network, Homegrown Jihad: The Terrorist Camps Around the U.S., tells the whole shocking story. CAN spent two years visiting many of these Jamaat ul-Fuqra terror compounds, at great risk to network personnel. The documentary filmmakers dared to go inside these camps, cameras rolling, to ask compound leaders pointed questions about who they were and what they were doing.
The documentary reveals that these compounds are dedicated to the training of Muslims in terrorist activities. Most of these camps are tucked away in remote rural areas -- Hancock, N.y., Red House, Va. -- as far away from the watchful eye of law enforcement as possible. And what goes on in them is truly hair-raising: a training video that the network obtained shows American Muslims receiving training in how to fire AK-47 rifles and machine guns, and how to use rocket launchers, mortars, and explosives, as well as training in kidnapping, the murder of hostages, sabotage, and subversive operations.
Yet the State Department doesn’t include Jamaat ul-Fuqra on its Foreign Terrorist Organization Watch List. And so far the mainstream media’s reaction to the documentary has run from indifferent to hostile. CBS News ran a hit piece on the film last Wednesday, saying that “officials describe the film to CBS News as ‘sensationalistic’ and without any real foundation. According to one official, it is strictly designed to upset and inflame people and does not present a true picture of any so-called ‘homegrown Jihad’ danger. No current intelligence exists to suggest any threat connected with this group, which officials describe as ‘wannabes’ and not terrorists.”
No current intelligence? Someone should notify the Colorado Attorney General’s Office, which currently has posted on its website a page about Jamaat ul-Fuqra. “In addition to being suspected of committing numerous acts of domestic terrorism,” it says, “FUQRA members in the United States have been suspected of committing fraud against various governmental entitlement programs in an effort to financially support their activities.” And “FUQRA or its members have been investigated for alleged terrorist acts including murder and arson in New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, Toronto, Denver, Los Angeles and Tucson. UL FUQRA is suspected of more than thirteen firebombings and, at least, as many murders within the United States.”
The Homegrown Jihad documentary, which premiered last week in Washington, does a great service in shedding light on this group’s activities. We can only hope that American law enforcement officials wake up out of their politically correct fever dream in time to close these camps and end once and for all the possibility that these jihadists could mount an attack on American citizens.
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http://www.ago.state.co.us/pr/121001_link.cfm.html
INFORMATION REGARDING
COLORADO'S INVESTIGATION AND PROSECUTION OF
MEMBERS OF JAMAAT UL FUQRA
Beginning in the late 1980s, the Colorado Attorney General's Office successfully prosecuted members of a fundamentalist Sufi-militant Islamic sect known as "JAMAAT UL FUQRA". Five FUQRA members were ultimately prosecuted between 1993 and 1994.
"FUQRA" is an Arabic word, which translates most accurately as "the impoverished". The sect advocates the purification of the Islamic religion by means of force and violence. Sheikh Mubarik Ali Jilani Hasmi, who is known by many other aliases, and who also calls himself the sixth Sultan Ul Faqr, originated this group in Pakistan.
In addition to being suspected of committing numerous acts of domestic terrorism, FUQRA members in the United States have been suspected of committing fraud against various governmental entitlement programs in an effort to financially support their activities.
Colorado's investigation indicated that the United States FUQRA movement was composed of approximately 30 different 'Jamaats' or communities, somewhat mobile in nature. Most of these 'Jamaats' are believed to currently exist today, along with what investigators deemed to be several 'covert paramilitary training compounds' -- one of which had been located in a remote mountainous area near Buena Vista, Colorado prior to Colorado's prosecutions in the mid-1990s. The corresponding FUQRA 'Jamaat' to the Buena Vista compound was located in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Colorado's investigation of FUQRA was initiated in 1989 when Colorado Springs Police Department detectives, initially investigating a series of burglaries, were contacted by the owner of a storage locker site and were told about a locker of, what appeared to be, abandoned property.
In September 1989, detectives executed a search warrant of the storage locker upon suspicion of illegal explosives. The search of the locker disclosed numerous items believed to belong to the FUQRA sect then residing in that area. Several explosive components-- thirty to forty pounds of explosives, three large pipe bombs, a number of smaller improvised explosive devices, shape charges, ten handguns-- some with obliterated serial numbers-- silencers in various stages of manufacture, military training manuals, reloading equipment, bomb-making instructions, and numerous FUQRA-related publications were located in this storage area. Titles of some of the publications included "Guerilla Warfare", "Counter Guerilla Operations", "Understanding Amateur Radio", and "Fair Weather Flying," and "Basic Blueprint Reading and Sketching." Several silhouettes for firearms target practice were also discovered, including one with the words "FBI Anti-terrorist team" written on the target's torso bullseye.
Of great interest to law enforcement officials were documents concerning potential 'targets' for destruction and murder in the Los Angeles, Tucson, and Denver areas, including surveillance-type photographs, maps with hand-drawn overlays, notes, etc., concerning these targets. In addition, references to Buckley Air National Guard Base, Rocky Mountain Arsenal, the Air Force Academy, and electrical facilities in Colorado, and Warren Air Force Base, and two Wyoming National Guard armories in Wyoming were found. A somewhat detailed description of a firebombing attack on what is believed to have been the Hare Krishna Temple in Denver was also discovered. An attack, as described in these writings, did, in fact, take place in Denver in August 1984, causing an estimated $200,000 in damage. Investigation by Denver authorities at that time revealed that a Hare Krishna Temple in Philadelphia, where FUQRA activity also had been noted, was firebombed in a similar fashion.
Among the many documents found in the Colorado Springs' storage locker were numerous blank birth certificates; blank social security cards; several sets of Colorado drivers' licenses, each containing a picture of the same individual, but each with a different identity; and many underground press publications concerning the assembly of phony identification -- to be reproduced in a manner to "withstand even close government scrutiny".
Finally, the search disclosed a number of workers' compensation claims, which ultimately led to a full-scale fraud investigation being conducted by the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment in coordination with the Colorado Attorney General's Office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation Joint Terrorist Task Force.
This investigation revealed that Colorado Springs FUQRA members had defrauded the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment of approximately $350,000 dollars between September 1984 and January 1992. The mobility and multiple addresses and identities of the various FUQRA members posed a significant challenge to early detection and normal prevention of the fraud. As a result of the two-year investigation, five FUQRA members were indicted by the statewide grand jury in September 1992 on racketeering charges involving theft, mail fraud, and forgery. Six months after the indictments, further racketeering charges, including theft of rental property, conspiracy to commit murder and arson (the Denver Hare Krishna Temple), were also filed against the five individuals and a sixth person -- all FUQRA members. Some of the fraudulently obtained workers' compensation funds were traced directly to payments for a parcel of land near Buena Vista used by the group as a residence compound and training site.
One of the FUQRA defendants convicted is James D. Williams. After his conviction in 1993 for conspiracy to commit first degree murder, racketeering, and forgery, Williams fled and remained a fugitive until being apprehended in Virginia in August 2000. He was returned to Colorado and sentenced this past March to 69 years in prison. From at least the middle 1980's through 1990, Williams was a leader of a Colorado FUQRA.
The conviction for conspiracy to commit first degree murder referred to a comprehensive written plan for the murder of a Tucson, Arizona Muslim cleric, Rashad Khalifa. Khalifa was murdered in January 1990 in a manner that was remarkably similar to the written plan.
It is believed the activities of UL FUQRA across the nation continue. Just recently the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms (BATF) arrested one of the former Colorado defendants and FUQRA member, Vincente Rafael Pierre, in Virginia on alleged ammunition violations. In California, a FUQRA member was arrested on the suspected murder of a Fresno County Deputy Sheriff this last August. In addition, FUQRA operates something called the Quranic Open University in Los Angeles, which has received over $1.5 million dollars over the course of the last two years in charter school funding. This entity is also located in New York City and Philadelphia. There are believed to be active UL FUQRA training compounds still existing in New York, Michigan, South Carolina, California, and perhaps other states.
FUQRA or its members have been investigated for alleged terrorist acts including murder and arson in New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, Toronto, Denver, Los Angeles and Tucson. UL FUQRA is suspected of more than thirteen firebombings and, at least, as many murders within the United States
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http://formerspook.blogspot.com/
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Coming to America, Redux
Last month, during the transition between the Bush and Obama Administrations, there was a major homeland security "war game." For two-and-a half hours on a day in mid-January, senior federal officials reacted to a series of simulated, terrorist bombings across the country, responding to medical needs, managing the investigative process and ensuring that protective forces were deployed.
The exercise was unique for a couple of reasons. First, the Bush team allowed their Obama counterparts to "sit in" on the exercise and ask questions, giving them a foundation for their own drills and policies in the future. Secondly, the war game scenario was based on a familiar threat, one that remains at the forefront of homeland security concerns. According to Jake Tapper of ABC News (one of the few journalists to write about the event), the half-day exercise condensed two days of IED attacks, targeting economic and transportation centers across America.
Obviously, there's no potential shortage of threats for a homeland security exercise, from a nuclear blast in a U.S. city, to a sudden anthrax epidemic unleashed by terrorists. That's why the IED focus is particularly illustrative. Almost almost eight years of combat in Afghanistan--and nearly six years into the Iraq mission--security officials are acutely familiar with the threat from improvised explosive devices, and they remain concerned about similar attacks here in the homeland.
We're written about the IED threat in the past, most recently in 2007 after a "mass graduation" of Al Qaida suicide bombers at a training camp in Afghanistan. More than 300 terrorists participated in the ceremony, which was recorded by a Pakistani journalist. The tape included warnings in English that some of the bombers were destined for targets in the west.
Fortunately, those attacks failed to pan out. Many of the suicide bombers were probably diverted to Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, where they were killed by allied forces. Others were rolled up by domestic security operations between Pakistan's tribal regions and their intended targets.
But those measures aren't 100% effective. Sooner or later, a suicide bomber or IED cell will slip through and launch a bloody campaign on American soil. And, in many respects, the domestic end represents the weakest link in the security chain. Our nation is filled with thousands of potential targets, including shopping malls; "big box" retailers, transit stations, schools, community centers, hotels, churches, hospitals and other locations were Americans gather, work or shop in large numbers.
Protecting all of these facilities is virtually impossible. But it's more disconcerting that security many of these stores (and other public facilities) ranges from lax to virtually non-existent. Admittedly, members of the general populace aren't privy to all protection measures--nor should they be. But anyone familiar with basics of physical security can get a general grasp of the plan at their local mall, "box" retailer or other public place.
Many of these institutions have invested heavily in security cameras that cover the interior and exterior of the building. There's also (typically) a uniformed security staff and a few undercover store detectives as well. But these precautions are aimed more at shoplifting than the terrorist threat.
Clearly, no one expects the security staff of a store or public building to stop a terrorist attack by themselves. That's where local, state and even federal authorities come in. But getting them to respond quickly can be problematic; potential terror targets are sometimes located on the edge of town, or in high-traffic areas.
A determined psychopath or a team of terrorists can inflict a lot of damage before the local SWAT team arrives. That was painfully evident when a lone gunman, with a history of mental problems, opened fire in an Omaha mall two years ago. Police officers responded in less than 10 minutes but by that time, the gunman had killed eight people, including himself. A few months earlier, an 18-year-old man shot and killed five individuals at a Salt Lake City Mall. Only the quick actions an armed, off-duty police kept the carnage from being much worse.
According to a RAND Corporation study (released before the Omaha massacre), shopping malls and big box outlets could reduce their vulnerability to such attacks by implementing a series of security measures. The cost? Between $500,000 and $2 million per location.
That may seem like a relatively small price to pay, but no one's rushing to add new layers of security. The commercial real estate and retail sectors are hurting in the economic slowdown; mall owners and their tenants would balk at the cost of new security measures, which would further impact their bottom line.
But defeating domestic terror requires more than effective physical security at the site of a potential attack. It requires planning and coordination with local law enforcement, and periodic response drills. Unfortunately, such exercises occur infrequently; there's the matter of cost, and no one wants to really highlight the fact that a local store, mall, school or hospital could be a terror target.
And, as The Wall Street Journal observed in 2005, there's the matter of national priorities and leadership. During the first half of the decade, Israel suffered though the latest--and bloodiest-- Palestinian intifada; more than 1,000 civilians died at the hands of terrorists, mostly through suicide bombings.
When diplomatic overtures failed to produce any results, the Israeli government took more tangible steps. Palestinians suspected of supporting the terror campaign were locked up; the leaders of bomb cells were targeted for assassinations. Physical barriers between Israeli and Palestinian population centers made it much for difficult for terrorists to reach their targets.
Those measures reduced the number of bombings--and civilian casualties--by more than 90%. As you might expect, the Israel anti-terror campaign was widely criticized by law and human rights advocates. But the crack-down achieved its desired results.
Here in the U.S., we haven't faced the threat endured by Israelis. But suicide bombings are IED attacks in the homeland are not a matter of "if," but "when." It's no surprise that such threats formed the scenario for last month's homeland security drill. Experts believe that type is almost inevitable in the coming years.
At some point, the Obama Administration must tell the public how it will deal with such threats, and prevent them in the future. Hopefully, the Obama team will realize that the bomber threat requires more than a "law enforcement" response--before that first explosive device goes off.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/23/AR2009022301850.html?hpid=topnews
FBI Director Warns of Terror Attacks on U.S. Cities
By Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 23, 2009; 3:19 PM
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III today warned that extremists "with large agendas and little money can use rudimentary weapons" to sow terror, raising the specter that recent attacks in Mumbai that killed 170 people last year could embolden terrorists seeking to attack U.S. cities.
At a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, Mueller said that the bureau is expanding its focus beyond al-Qaeda and into splinter groups, radicals who try to enter the country through the visa waiver program and "home-grown terrorists."
"The universe of crime and terrorism stretches out infinitely before us, and we too are working to find what we believe to be out there but cannot always see," Mueller said.
One particular concern, the FBI director said, springs from the country's background as a "nation of immigrants." Federal officials worry about pockets of possible radicals among melting-pot communities in the United States such as Seattle, San Diego, Miami or New York.
A Joint Terrorism Task Force led by the FBI, for instance, continues to investigate a group in Minneapolis after one young man last fall flew to Somalia and became what authorities believe to be the first U.S. citizen to carry out a suicide bombing. As many as a half-dozen other youths from that community in Minnesota have vanished, alarming their parents and raising concerns among law enforcement officials that a dangerous recruiting network has operated under the radar.
"The prospect of young men, indoctrinated and radicalized in their own communities . . . is a perversion of the immigrant story," Mueller said.
For the first time, Mueller also disclosed details about FBI efforts to assist Indian authorities probing a November siege by conspirators with ties to a terrorist group in Pakistan. FBI Special Agent Steve Merrill, a legal attache posted to the bureau's office in New Delhi, had been preparing to play cricket for the American team competing at the Maharajah's annual tournament, the FBI director recalled.
Instead Merrill detoured to Mumbai, where he helped to rescue Americans trapped in the burning Taj Hotel and coordinated the arrival of the bureau's rapid deployment team.
Analysts and agents from the FBI ultimately conducted 60 interviews including one of the lone surviving attacker, Ajmal Amir Kasab. Forensics experts pulled fingerprints from improvised explosive devices and recovered data from damaged cellphones, once "literally wiring a smashed phone back together," Mueller said.
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With three Afghan government ministries in Kabul hit by simultaneous suicide attacks this week, by a total of just eight terrorists, it seems that a new “Mumbai model” of swarming, smaller-scale terrorist violence is emerging.
The basic concept is that hitting several targets at once, even with just a few fighters at each site, can cause fits for elite counterterrorist forces that are often manpower-heavy, far away and organized to deal with only one crisis at a time. This approach certainly worked in Mumbai, India, last November, where five two-man teams of Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives held the city hostage for two days, killing 179 people. The Indian security forces, many of which had to be flown in from New Delhi, simply had little ability to strike back at more than one site at a time.
While it’s true that the assaults in Kabul seem to be echoes of Mumbai, the fact is that Al Qaeda and its affiliates have been using these sorts of swarm tactics for several years. Jemaah Islamiyah — the group responsible for the Bali nightclub attack that killed 202 people in 2002 — mounted simultaneous attacks on 16 Christian churches in Indonesia on Christmas Eve in 2000, befuddling security forces.
Even 9/11 itself had swarm-like characteristics, as four small teams of Qaeda operatives simultaneously seized commercial aircraft and turned them into missiles, flummoxing all our defensive responses. In the years since, Al Qaeda has coordinated swarm attacks in Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Turkey, Yemen and elsewhere. And at the height of the insurgency in Iraq, terrorists repeatedly used swarms on targets as small as truck convoys and as large as whole cities.
This pattern suggests that Americans should brace for a coming swarm. Right now, most of our cities would be as hard-pressed as Mumbai was to deal with several simultaneous attacks. Our elite federal and military counterterrorist units would most likely find their responses slowed, to varying degrees, by distance and the need to clarify jurisdiction.
While the specifics of the federal counterterrorism strategy are classified, what is in the public record indicates that the plan contemplates having to deal with as many as three sites being simultaneously hit and using “overwhelming force” against the terrorists, which probably means mustering as many as 3,000 ground troops to the site. If that’s an accurate picture, it doesn’t bode well. We would most likely have far too few such elite units for dealing with a large number of small terrorist teams carrying out simultaneous attacks across a region or even a single city.
Nightmare possibilities include synchronized assaults on several shopping malls, high-rise office buildings or other places that have lots of people and relatively few exits. Another option would be to set loose half a dozen two-man sniper teams in some metropolitan area — you only have to recall the havoc caused by the Washington sniper in 2002 to imagine how huge a panic a slightly larger version of that form of terrorism would cause.
So how are swarms to be countered? The simplest way is to create many more units able to respond to simultaneous, small-scale attacks and spread them around the country. This means jettisoning the idea of overwhelming force in favor of small units that are not “elite” but rather “good enough” to tangle with terrorist teams. In dealing with swarms, economizing on force is essential.
We’ve actually had a good test case in Iraq over the past two years. Instead of responding to insurgent attacks by sending out large numbers of troops from distant operating bases, the military strategy is now based on hundreds of smaller outposts in which 40 or 50 American troops are permanently stationed and prepared to act swiftly against attackers. Indeed, their very presence in Iraqi communities is a big deterrent. It’s small surprise that overall violence across Iraq has dropped by about 80 percent in that period.
For the defense of American cities against terrorist swarms, the key would be to use local police officers as the first line of defense instead of relying on the military. The first step would be to create lots of small counterterrorism posts throughout urban areas instead of keeping police officers in large, centralized precinct houses. This is consistent with existing notions of community-based policing, and could even include an element of outreach to residents similar to that undertaken in the Sunni areas of Iraq — even if it were to mean taking the paradoxical turn of negotiating with gangs about security.
At the federal level, we should stop thinking in terms of moving thousands of troops across the country and instead distribute small response units far more widely. Cities, states and Washington should work out clear rules in advance for using military forces in a counterterrorist role, to avoid any bickering or delay during a crisis. Reserve and National Guard units should train and field many more units able to take on small teams of terrorist gunmen and bombers. Think of them as latter-day Minutemen.
Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Turkey and Yemen all responded to Qaeda attacks with similar “packetizing” initiatives involving the police and armed forces; and while that hasn’t eliminated swarm attacks, the terrorists have been far less effective and many lives have been saved.
As for Afghanistan, where the swarm has just arrived, there is still time to realize the merits of forming lots of small units and sprinkling them about in a countrywide network of outposts. As President Obama looks to send more troops to that war, let’s make sure the Pentagon does it the right way.
Yes, the swarm will be heading our way, too. We need to get smaller, closer and quicker. The sooner the better.
John Arquilla teaches in the special operations program at the Naval Postgraduate School and is the author of “Worst Enemy: The Reluctant Transformation of the American Military.”
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http://formerspook.blogspot.com/2009/02/who-do-you-believe.html
Monday, February 23, 2009
Who Do You Believe?
Way back when, the intelligence community operated under a simple rule. Disagreements over analysis were worked out in private and when the community spoke, it was with one voice.
Ah, for the good old days. Unfortunately, in today's "leak culture," analysts--and the agencies that employ them--are anxious to air their assessments, even if they highlight divisions within the community.
Consider yesterday's revelations from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. In the matter of a few hours, both organizations offered highly conflicting views on domestic terror threats. After reading their respective opinions on these matters, members of Congress (and the public) have every right to be confused.
The dust-up began when FBI Director Robert Mueller, speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, warned that terrorists "with large agendas and little money" can use rudimentary weapons to launch Mumbai-style attacks in the United States. As the Washington Post reports:
Mueller said that the bureau is expanding its focus beyond al-Qaeda and into splinter groups, radicals who try to enter the country through the visa waiver program and "home-grown terrorists."
"The universe of crime and terrorism stretches out infinitely before us, and we too are working to find what we believe to be out there but cannot always see," Mueller said.
One particular concern, the FBI director said, springs from the country's background as a "nation of immigrants." Federal officials worry about pockets of possible radicals among melting-pot communities in the United States such as Seattle, San Diego, Miami or New York.
A Joint Terrorism Task Force led by the FBI, for instance, continues to investigate a group in Minneapolis after one young man last fall flew to Somalia and became what authorities believe to be the first U.S. citizen to carry out a suicide bombing. As many as a half-dozen other youths from that community in Minnesota have vanished, alarming their parents and raising concerns among law enforcement officials that a dangerous recruiting network has operated under the radar.
But later in the day, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security downplayed the domestic terror threat:
"We are not immune to an attack from a home-grown terrorist, but the probabilities and sustainability of such an act are very low," said DHS spokesman Michael Keegan.
Keegan said the American immigrant story is one reason the United States is less vulnerable to home-grown terrorism than other countries.
"People come to the United States to be part of something special, to practice their beliefs without worries of persecutions based on their religious faith, political views or personal life styles," he said. "When you give citizens the opportunity to live in an environment that promotes personal growth and happiness, you're essentially promoting the wellness and safety of an entire nation rather than a community of homegrown terrorist cells."
Mr. Keegan will get brownie points for political correctness, but there is a certain fallacy in both his logic and his assumptions. True, the overwhelming majority of immigrants in this country are law-abiding and hard-working, but there are radicalized elements within that broad community, particularly among Muslims.
We assume that Keegan is familiar with the Fort Dix 6. That terror plot, aimed at killing soldiers at the New Jersey army post, involved recent emigres from various Islamic countries. And the Fort Dix conspiracy isn't the only foiled terror attack that originated among Muslim immigrants or their offspring.
So, does that automatically disqualify the comments of Mr. Keegan and the assessments of his department? Not necessarily. DHS has its own analytic resources, though they pale in comparison to those of the FBI. While that doesn't give the bureau a monopoly on the truth, the comments of the FBI Director should carry more weight than a p.r. flack from DHS.
Normally, we're not fans of Congressional hearings, but this public disagreement practically begs one. The chairman of the House and Senate intelligence committees should summon Mr. Mueller, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano and their top analysts for a closed door review of the intelligence.
Disagreements within the intelligence community are hardly new and they can actually prove beneficial, forcing agencies to develop a consensus on critical topics. But issuing such divergent opinions--only hours apart--does little to inspire confidence. On matters as important as domestic terror threat assessments, we need more convergence and less conflict.
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Obama funds $20M tax payer dollars to immigrate Hamas Refugees to the USA
This is the news that didn't make the headlines...
By executive order, President Barack Obama has ordered the expenditure of $20.3 million in migration assistance to the Palestinian refugees and conflict victims in Gaza. The "presidential determination" which allows hundreds of thousands of Palestinians with ties to Hamas to resettle in the United States was signed on January 27 and appeared in the Federal Register on February 4th.
Few on Capitol Hill took note that the order provides a free ticket replete with housing and food allowances to individuals who have displayed their overwhelming support of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) in the parliamentary election of January 2006.
Now we learn that he is allowing hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refuges to move to and live in the US at American taxpayer expense.
To verify for yourself: www.thefederalregister.com/d.p/2009-02-04-E9-2488
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He's giving the money to HAMAS (not officially, but that's where it will go) but there is nothing in the EO to allow the hajis to immigrate here. Not yet, anyway.
And Rachel is strangely silent about this....
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I will make a mental note about the reliability of that source, thank you for the catch.
Rachel has sidebarred me. She may be taking a break from things here. I am working on persuading her to change her mind.
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http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/03/03/eveningnews/main4841761.shtml
FBI Watching Somali Muslims In Minneapolis
CBS Evening News: 20 From Same Mosque Have Repatriated, One Became A Suicide Bomber; Mosque Officials Deny Radical Agenda
Comments 12
MINNEAPOLIS, March 3, 2009 | by Dean Reynolds
Breeding Terror In Minneapolis
U.S. officials have become concerned over some 20 U.S. citizens who have joined Somalia's Civil War. As Dean Reynolds reports, these Minneapolis residents could bring their skills stateside. | Share/Embed
(CBS) On election night last November, the outcome was wildly celebrated by Somalis living in Minneapolis, 70,000-strong, mostly refugees from their war-torn country. It is the largest Somali community in the United States, reports CBS News correspondent Dean Reynolds.
But the evening was noteworthy for something else, too. That night, the latest in a line of young Somalis who grew up here, departed unannounced for Somalia itself, joining a civil war in a country few had ever seen and causing concern in the United States.
Hussein Samatar's 17-year old nephew left without a word to his family.
"He was an A student," says Samatar. "He has everything to hope for to attend any Ivy League school that he wanted to. Why he would do it is a mystery to us."
Some 20 vanished last year - all American citizens - an exodus the FBI has noticed for a troubling reason.
"A man from Minneapolis became what we believe to be the first U.S. citizen to carry out a terrorist suicide bombing," said agency director Robert Mueller.
The October attack by 27-year-old Shirwa Ahmed killed 30 near Mogadishu, and there is alarm that the skills acquired abroad could be brought back to America.
"He could have done it here," says Omar Jamal, a Somali advocate in Minnesota. "We don't see anything that would have prevented him from doing this right here in the heart of Minneapolis."
This much seems clear:
"It appears that this individual was radicalized in his hometown in Minnesota," Mueller said.
The missing men all came from one local mosque, according to the FBI. But officials at the mosque deny that they play any role in turning young people into radicals, Reynolds reports.
This week they held an open house to answer critics and confront recent harassment.
"We absolutely deny that such things happen in this mosque," says Omar Hurre, executive director at the Abubakar Islamic Center.
But Somalis here are deeply troubled. Who is behind this exodus? Who is paying for it? And who may be the next to go?
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http://chronicle.com/news/article/6092/clinton-announces-million-dollar-scholarship-program-for-palestinian-students
March 9, 2009
Clinton Announces Million-Dollar Scholarship Program for Palestinian Students
Ramallah, West Bank — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has announced a new million-dollar scholarship program to help Palestinian students enroll at Palestinian and American universities.
Mrs. Clinton announced the Middle East Partnership Initiative during a visit to this Palestinian town last week. The four-year program will support about 10 scholarships each year for disadvantaged students to attend four-year courses at Palestinian universities. The program will also offer 25 “opportunity grants” to enable promising but disadvantaged young Palestinians to apply to American-accredited institutions in the United States or the Middle East, a State Department official told The Chronicle.
Once funds are approved by Congress, Mrs. Clinton hopes to begin the program in the 2010-11 academic year. The money is in addition to $900-million in aid to the Palestinian Authority announced by the secretary last week at the donors’ conference, in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt.
During her visit to an American-sponsored English-language teaching program in Ramallah, Mrs. Clinton said the opportunity grants would create “a larger pool of capable young men and women from places like the West Bank and Gaza” who can “compete along with students in other countries for the opportunity to further their academic training in America.” The secretary spoke on a youth program aired by Palestinian Authority TV.
Last year several Palestinian students from Gaza who were awarded Fulbright scholarships ran into difficulty entering Israel to complete the application process, and two of them were subsequently denied entry visas to the United States on security grounds.
Micaela Schweitzer-Bluhm, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem, said efforts were being made to enable Gazans to participate in American-sponsored projects despite the security challenges.
“We’ve had several dozen Gazans participate in our programs over the last few months, both educational and professional,” said Ms. Schweitzer-Bluhm.
“It is difficult,” she said. “It’s a challenge to bring Gazans to participate in these programs, but we go through great lengths to try and facilitate their participation, and we have advance coordination with the Israelis to get them the necessary permits.” —Matthew Kalman
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Well, she may not have bent over for Bill, but she'll have the US doing it for Hamas. :cry:
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For those who have not seen this yet
http://shock.military.com/Shock/videos.do?displayContent=185279#&ESRC=retirees.nl
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Moonies give me the willies so I hate quoting the Washington Times, but this is the only place I'm seeing this story. Combined with recent DoD directives to destroy military bullet casing rather than allow them to be sold and reloaded for the civilian market, I think we can see the shape BHO's anti-second amendment machinations will take.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
EDITORIAL: Guns on a plane
After the September 11 attacks, commercial airline pilots were allowed to carry guns if they completed a federal-safety program. No longer would unarmed pilots be defenseless as remorseless hijackers seized control of aircraft and rammed them into buildings.
Now President Obama is quietly ending the federal firearms program, risking public safety on airlines in the name of an anti-gun ideology.
The Obama administration this past week diverted some $2 million from the pilot training program to hire more supervisory staff, who will engage in field inspections of pilots.
This looks like completely unnecessary harassment of the pilots. The 12,000 Federal Flight Deck Officers, the pilots who have been approved to carry guns, are reported to have the best behavior of any federal law enforcement agency. There are no cases where any of them has improperly brandished or used a gun. There are just a few cases where officers have improperly used their IDs.
Fewer than one percent of the officers have any administrative actions brought against them and, we are told, virtually all of those cases “are trumped up.”
Take a case against one flight officer who had visited the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles within the last few weeks. While there, the pilot noticed that federal law enforcement officers can, with the approval of a superior, obtain a license plate that cannot be traced, a key safety feature for law enforcement personnel. So the pilot asked if, as a member of the federal program, he was eligible. The DMV staffer checked and said “no.” The next day administrative actions were brought against the pilot for “misrepresenting himself.” These are the kinds of cases that President Obama wants to investigate.
Since Mr. Obama's election, pilots have told us that the approval process for letting pilots carry guns on planes slowed significantly. Last week the problem went from bad to worse. Federal Flight Deck Officers - the pilots who have been approved to carry guns - indicate that the approval process has stalled out.
Pilots cannot openly speak about the changing policies for fear of retaliation from the Transportation Security Administration. Pilots who act in any way that causes a “loss of confidence” in the armed pilot program risk criminal prosecution as well as their removal from the program. Despite these threats, pilots in the Federal Flight Deck Officers program have raised real concerns in multiple interviews.
Arming pilots after Sept. 11 was nothing new. Until the early 1960s, American commercial passenger pilots on any flight carrying U.S. mail were required to carry handguns. Indeed, U.S. pilots were still allowed to carry guns until as recently as 1987. There are no records that any of these pilots (either military or commercial) ever causing any significant problems.
Screening of airplane passengers is hardly perfect. While armed marshals are helpful, the program covers less than 3 percent of the flights out of Washington D.C.'s three airports and even fewer across the country. Sky marshals are costly and quit more often than other law-enforcement officers.
Armed pilots are a cost-effective backup layer of security. Terrorists can only enter the cockpit through one narrow entrance, and armed pilots have some time to prepare themselves as hijackers penetrate the strengthened cockpit doors. With pilots, we have people who are willing to take on the burden of protecting the planes for free. About 70 percent of the pilots at major American carriers have military backgrounds.
Frankly, as a matter of pure politics, we cannot understand what the administration is thinking. Nearly 40 House Democrats are in districts were the NRA is more popular than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. We can't find any independent poll in which the public is demanding that pilots disarm. Why does this move make sense?
Only anti-gun extremists and terrorist recruits are worried about armed pilots. So why is the Obama administration catering to this tiny lobby at the expense of public safety?
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/mar/17/guns-on-a-plane-obama-secretly-ends-program-that-l/
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As Mark Levin would answer (I think). It isn't about polls. It is about ideology.
It is more about moving the USA (and hence the world) towards a more socialistic society.
It isn't about making/keeping America great it is about transforming us into a different country that fits BO's idealized concept of the world.
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Guantanamo Detainees May Be Released in U.S.
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By EVAN PEREZ
WASHINGTON -- Attorney General Eric Holder said some detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, may end up being released in the U.S. as the Obama administration works with foreign allies to resettle some of the prisoners.
Mr. Holder, in a briefing with reporters, said administration officials are still reviewing individual cases of the approximately 250 detainees to determine which will be put on trial and which may be released to comply with plans to close the detention facility by next year.
Six weeks into his tenure, Mr. Holder is still trying to assemble much of the Justice senior leadership, with several nominees awaiting Senate confirmation. He said he has reviewed the department's handling of white-collar criminal cases in response to the financial crisis and is considering ways to increase coordination on financial fraud among federal prosecutors and state officials. He said he is trying to increase the budget dedicated to white-collar crime, while maintaining funding for national security.
European justice ministers met with Mr. Holder earlier this week and pressed for details on how many Guantanamo prisoners the U.S. planned to release domestically, as part of any agreement for allies to accept detainees. Mr. Holder said U.S. officials would work to respond to the questions European officials have over U.S. Guantanamo plans.
For "people who can be released there are a variety of options that we have and among them is the possibility is that we would release them into this country," Mr. Holder said. "That process is ongoing and we've not made any determinations or made any requests of anybody at this point."
Among the detainees whose fate remains undetermined are 17 ethnic Uighurs, from the Central Asian region of China, who have been ordered released by a judge. The U.S. has refused to turn the men over to China, which considers them part of an separatist group.
Mr. Holder is planning to visit Mexico next month to meet with his counterparts and discuss efforts to fight the trafficking of guns from the U.S. into Mexico and the drug trade from Mexico into the U.S.
"The Mexican government has been courageous in the way it has confronted the problems that now challenge it," Mr. Holder said, noting the violence that has resulted from battles against the drug cartels in Mexico.
Source The Wall St. Journal
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/themes/organizations/hezbollah/
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v=Congressional Testimony
House Armed Services Committee
John Robb
April 2, 2009
Threats to US Security in the early 21st Century
I am here before the subcommittee today to provide testimony on 21st Century security threats. I hope this testimony is of value despite its brevity. My analytical method is to provide frameworks for decision makers to help them make sense of rapidly changing environments. These frameworks are intended to provoke high quality thinking -- agreement or disagreement with their specifics works equally well to achieve this.
The threat the US faces today is as dire as the darkest days of the Cold War. In fact, this threat may be even more dangerous because it is so insidious. The threat we face is a combination of global systemic threats (economic, financial, energy, etc.) that will damage us from above and the rapid emergence of violent non-state groups (a multitude of gangs, religious sects, tribes, clans etc.) that thrust at us from below.
Let’s begin with an acknowledgement that globalization has fundamentally changed the strategic security landscape. Most critically, it has enabled the emergence of a global super-network that is a tightly interconnected mixture of economic, financial and communication networks. The growth of this super-network has weakened nation-states across every measure of power, from control of its borders, finances, economy, media, etc. Worse, due to a combination of design decisions (hyper-efficiency, from just-in-time global supply chains to trillion dollar daily financial flows) and a complete lack of oversight during its growth phase, this super-network has now become a dynamically unstable system that is too large, fast, and complex for any nation-state or collection of nation-states to control.
This super-network has now entered a period of extreme turbulence due to several very
dangerous feedback loops. These feedback loops include:
• Extreme debt. The US economy is saddled with a level of debt unseen since the start of the 20th Century’s Great Depression. Total indebtedness -- the combination of consumer, corporate, GSE, financial, and government debt -- is now over 350% of GDP. That is $30 trillion in debt over traditionally sustainable levels of 150% of GDP (in contrast, in 1929, the debt level was 290% of GDP). Unfortunately, this excess debt must be eliminated
before we can return to economic growth. We are already seeing this as individual citizens and corporations cut back spending to repair dangerously damaged balance sheets.
• Excessive complexity. Due to relaxed oversight a vast unregulated financial system of extreme complexity, beyond the ability of anybody to understand, has emerged. This
“shadow banking system” is a collection of derivative financial products that are based
on unsupportable assumptions for what constitutes “normal behavior” (as in the use of
normal curves that don’t account for the occurrence of extreme movements in financial
markets over medium to long time horizons). Worse, this “shadow banking system” is
nearly an order of magnitude larger than the global economy upon which it was built.
The failure of AIG and the near miss financial meltdown last fall are examples of how
this system can catastrophically fail.
The likely outcome from this situation, barring a government sponsored unwinding of debt and
derivative financial products (this is not being done), is a deep and protracted global depression that financially and economically guts nation-states across the globe. What this means for US security includes:
• Widespread state failure. Weak nation-states will quickly fall victim to financial collapse and internal chaos. Developing nations, like China, that are both dependent on exports to the US and weakly legitimate -- China’s legitimacy rest solely on its ability to deliver economic growth -- may become very disorderly. It’s important to note that the real
threat from China is not as a peer competitor; it is that it may suffer a disorderly fragmentation.
• Rapid growth in the number of violent non-state groups. With the failure or
weakening of nation-states across the board and the lack of ideological alternatives,
people will shift their primary loyalties to any group that can provide them security and
the basics of survival. These groups will span the gamut of gangs, tribes, criminal
syndicates, militias, religious sects, etc. Many, if not most of these groups, will maintain
and expand the interests both vigorously and violently. The worst version of this trend
line would be the expansion of the criminal insurgency in Mexico into the US (through
expansion of the criminal ecosystem more than anything due to ethnic identity).
• Radical cuts in US defense spending. US budget deficits, already running in the
trillions of dollars, will continue as the US tax base shrinks and bailouts continue. The
rapid onset of severe budgetary restrictions will force a disorderly shrinkage in the DoD,
DHS, and intelligence agencies, and due to gross misallocation of funding, severely
damage the ability of the US to respond to the rise in non-state threats.
The rapid growth in violent non-state groups is likely to become the most worrisome security
trend and it will likely define the vast majority of the conflicts we will face in the next twenty years. How these small groups organize, fight, coordinate, and ultimately defeat nation-states was the subject of my book, “Brave New War” (amazingly, it’s in its third printing, which is very unusual for a book on military theory). Here’s a quick summary of some of its findings.
The rampant growth in interconnectivity (from economics to travel to communications) and
torrential improvements in technology have already super-empowered small groups by radically
increasing their ability to conduct warfare. This will only increase over time. Due to the
combination of a doubling of computer power every two years (Moore’s Law and Carlson
curves) and the expansion of electronic networks from cell phones to the Internet (Metcalfe’s Law), small groups are getting more powerful by the day. This will lead to:
• Do-it-yourself weapons (DIY). Cheaper and more powerful technology makes it
possible to build more accurate, plentiful, and destructive weaponry. For example, DIY
rockets being used in Gaza against Israel can now benefit from commercially available
tools that include $150 rocket design software to a $25 autopilot system. We also saw
numerous examples of this at work in Iraq with IED design. Over the longer term, DIY
bioweapons will become commonplace as “labs on a chip” and the expertise that used to
take a room full of PhDs a week to build five years earlier is doable by a hastily trained
technician in a couple of minutes.
• Systems disruption. Societal reliance on vast networked infrastructures (from electricity to oil to communications) makes it possible for small disruptions to do outsized harm. Recent examples, like the disruption of a gas pipeline in Mexico that shut down 1,800 factories/companies for a week, show returns on investment of 100,000,000 percent
(calculated by the damage done divided by the cost of the attack). Systems disruption is
growing in usage due to the successful example seen in Iraq, where the country’s
economy was held in limbo due to shortages of electricity, fuel, and water. Al Qaeda’s
unsuccessful attack on Abqaiq (a central hub of the global oil system) and it successful
attack on the Golden Mosque (in Iraq) which set off the civil war in 2006 are other
examples of system disruption.
• Global criminal financing. Easy access to vast multi-trillion dollar global criminal supply chains (made possible by the emergence of a global super-network), that connect customers with illegal goods/services, have made it possible for small violent groups to become not only financial viable, but financially successful. For example, the Taliban now has access to a portion of billions in opium sales to expand their operations,
Mexico’s Narco-cartels and thousands of associated criminal subgroups are successfully
waging a war with the government to protect and extend a market worth tens of billions,
Nigeria’s gangs bunker billions in oil and fuel that in part funds disruption of oil
production in the country.
In addition to the above, small violent groups are now developing new methods of organizing
warfare. Rather than hierarchical and ideologically cohesive insurgencies (i.e. Communist
insurgencies), we now face insurgencies that are made up of many small groups (organized
around a plethora of motivations, as in many flavors of jihadi, nationalist, ideological, and criminal) that can loosely coordinate their activities. We saw this recently in Iraq and we are now facing this in Mexico and Pakistan. In this type of “open” insurgency, we see very rapid rates of innovation in both tactics and weapons (as in the rate of improvement we saw in Iraq with IEDs). Worse, since these groups are so small and can rapidly emerge, any success against one group means little to the larger insurgency.
Against this dark picture, a combination of assault by a global economic system running amok
and organic insurgency by superempowered small groups, there are few hard and fast
recommendations I can provide. It’s complex. However, it is clear:
• We will need to become more efficient. Force structure will shrink. Most of the major
weapons systems we currently maintain will become too expensive to maintain, particularly given their limited utility against the emerging threat. Current efforts from the F-22 and the Future Combat System appear to be particularly out of step with the evolving environment. Smaller and more efficient systems such as unmanned aerial vehicles and coordination systems built on open platforms (as in a Intranet) that allow organic growth in complexity make much more sense.
• We should focus on the local. In almost all of these future conflicts, our ability to
manage local conditions is paramount. Soldiers should be trained to operate in uncertain
environments (the work of Don Vandergriff is important here) so they can deal with local
chaos. Packages of technologies and methodologies should be developed to enable communities in distressed areas to become resilient – as in, they are able to produce the food, energy, defense, water, etc. they need to prosper without reference to a dysfunction regional or national situation. Finally, we need to get build systematic methods for managing large numbers of militias that are nominally allied with us (like Anbar Awakening, Pakistan’s Frontier Corps, etc.). Even a simple conversion of a commercial “customer relationship management” system would provide better institutional memory and oversight than we currently have.
• We need to get better at thinking about military theory. Military theory is rapidly
evolving due to globalization. It’s amazing to me that the structures and organizations
tasked with this role don’t provide this. We are likely in the same situation as we were
prior to WW2, where innovative thinking by JFC Fuller and Liddell Hart on armored
warfare didn’t find a home in allied militaries, but was read feverishly by innovators in
the German army like Guderian and Manstein. Unfortunately, in the current environment, most of the best thinking on military theory is now only tangentially associated with the DoD (worse, it’s done, as in my situation, on a part time basis).
Thank you for the opportunity to testify today. It was a wonderful opportunity. I hope this brief introduction will serve as the basis of valuable thinking on future US security needs.
#REMOVE#http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/files/congressional-testimony1.pdf#REMOVE#
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WASHINGTON -- Cyberspies have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system, according to current and former national-security officials.
The spies came from China, Russia and other countries, these officials said, and were believed to be on a mission to navigate the U.S. electrical system and its controls. The intruders haven't sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war.
"The Chinese have attempted to map our infrastructure, such as the electrical grid," said a senior intelligence official. "So have the Russians."
The espionage appeared pervasive across the U.S. and doesn't target a particular company or region, said a former Department of Homeland Security official. "There are intrusions, and they are growing," the former official said, referring to electrical systems. "There were a lot last year."
Question of the Day
Vote: How worried are you that a cyberattack could damage U.S. infrastructure?Very | Somewhat | Not at all worried
Join the discussion.More
Environment: Will a Smart Grid Repel Attacks?Many of the intrusions were detected not by the companies in charge of the infrastructure but by U.S. intelligence agencies, officials said. Intelligence officials worry about cyber attackers taking control of electrical facilities, a nuclear power plant or financial networks via the Internet.
Authorities investigating the intrusions have found software tools left behind that could be used to destroy infrastructure components, the senior intelligence official said. He added, "If we go to war with them, they will try to turn them on."
Officials said water, sewage and other infrastructure systems also were at risk.
"Over the past several years, we have seen cyberattacks against critical infrastructures abroad, and many of our own infrastructures are as vulnerable as their foreign counterparts," Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair recently told lawmakers. "A number of nations, including Russia and China, can disrupt elements of the U.S. information infrastructure."
Officials cautioned that the motivation of the cyberspies wasn't well understood, and they don't see an immediate danger. China, for example, has little incentive to disrupt the U.S. economy because it relies on American consumers and holds U.S. government debt.
But protecting the electrical grid and other infrastructure is a key part of the Obama administration's cybersecurity review, which is to be completed next week. Under the Bush administration, Congress approved $17 billion in secret funds to protect government networks, according to people familiar with the budget. The Obama administration is weighing whether to expand the program to address vulnerabilities in private computer networks, which would cost billions of dollars more. A senior Pentagon official said Tuesday the Pentagon has spent $100 million in the past six months repairing cyber damage.
U.S. Intelligence Detects Cyber Spies
1:54
WSJ's Intelligence Reporter Siobhan Gorman says that Intelligence officials have found cyber spies lurking in the U.S. electrical infrastructure.
Overseas examples show the potential havoc. In 2000, a disgruntled employee rigged a computerized control system at a water-treatment plant in Australia, releasing more than 200,000 gallons of sewage into parks, rivers and the grounds of a Hyatt hotel.
Last year, a senior Central Intelligence Agency official, Tom Donahue, told a meeting of utility company representatives in New Orleans that a cyberattack had taken out power equipment in multiple regions outside the U.S. The outage was followed with extortion demands, he said.
The U.S. electrical grid comprises three separate electric networks, covering the East, the West and Texas. Each includes many thousands of miles of transmission lines, power plants and substations. The flow of power is controlled by local utilities or regional transmission organizations. The growing reliance of utilities on Internet-based communication has increased the vulnerability of control systems to spies and hackers, according to government reports.
The sophistication of the U.S. intrusions -- which extend beyond electric to other key infrastructure systems -- suggests that China and Russia are mainly responsible, according to intelligence officials and cybersecurity specialists. While terrorist groups could develop the ability to penetrate U.S. infrastructure, they don't appear to have yet mounted attacks, these officials say.
It is nearly impossible to know whether or not an attack is government-sponsored because of the difficulty in tracking true identities in cyberspace. U.S. officials said investigators have followed electronic trails of stolen data to China and Russia.
Russian and Chinese officials have denied any wrongdoing. "These are pure speculations," said Yevgeniy Khorishko, a spokesman at the Russian Embassy. "Russia has nothing to do with the cyberattacks on the U.S. infrastructure, or on any infrastructure in any other country in the world."
A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, Wang Baodong, said the Chinese government "resolutely oppose any crime, including hacking, that destroys the Internet or computer network" and has laws barring the practice. China was ready to cooperate with other countries to counter such attacks, he said, and added that "some people overseas with Cold War mentality are indulged in fabricating the sheer lies of the so-called cyberspies in China."
Utilities are reluctant to speak about the dangers. "Much of what we've done, we can't talk about," said Ray Dotter, a spokesman at PJM Interconnection LLC, which coordinates the movement of wholesale electricity in 13 states and the District of Columbia. He said the organization has beefed up its security, in conformance with federal standards.
In January 2008, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved new protection measures that required improvements in the security of computer servers and better plans for handling attacks.
Last week, Senate Democrats introduced a proposal that would require all critical infrastructure companies to meet new cybersecurity standards and grant the president emergency powers over control of the grid systems and other infrastructure.
Specialists at the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, a nonprofit research institute, said attack programs search for openings in a network, much as a thief tests locks on doors. Once inside, these programs and their human controllers can acquire the same access and powers as a systems administrator.
NERC Letter
The North American Electric Reliability Corporation on Tuesday warned its members that not all of them appear to be adhering to cybersecuirty requirements. Read the letter.
The White House review of cybersecurity programs is studying ways to shield the electrical grid from such attacks, said James Lewis, who directed a study for the Center for Strategic and International Studies and has met with White House reviewers.
The reliability of the grid is ultimately the responsibility of the North American Electric Reliability Corp., an independent standards-setting organization overseen by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
The NERC set standards last year requiring companies to designate "critical cyber assets." Companies, for example, must check the backgrounds of employees and install firewalls to separate administrative networks from those that control electricity flow. The group will begin auditing compliance in July.
—Rebecca Smith contributed to this article.
Write to Siobhan Gorman at siobhan.gorman@wsj.com
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4 Arrested in New York Terror Plot
By Sewell Chan
Updated, 11:34 p.m. | Federal authorities arrested four men on Wednesday night on charges of plotting to bomb a synagogue in the Riverdale section of the Bronx and to use antiaircraft missiles to shoot down military planes at a military base in Newburgh, N.Y., 60 miles north of New York City.
The charges, which include conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction in the United States and conspiracy to acquire and use anti-aircraft missiles, represent some of the most significant allegations of domestic terrorism in some time. They come months into a new presidential administration, and as President Obama grapples with the question of how to handle detainees at the Guantánamo naval base in Cuba.
The four defendants — whom federal authorities identified as James Cromitie, David Williams, Onta Williams and Laguerre Payen, all of Newburgh, in Orange County — are expected to appear in Federal District Court in White Plains, in Westchester County, on Thursday morning.
Though Mr. Cromitie, who is described as the lead defendant, is said to have told an F.B.I. informer that he had ties with Jaish-e-Muhammad, a jihadist group based in Pakistan, none of the defendants actually obtained weapons of mass destruction, according to the authorities. The men were, however, given an antiaircraft missile system that was incapable of being fired, as well as homemade bombs containing inert plastic explosives, as part of the undercover investigation, the authorities said.
Documents
• Text: Criminal Complaint (pdf)
• Text: U.S. Attorney’s Office Press Release (pdf)
According to the criminal complaint, Mr. Cromitie met the informer last June, and told the informer that his parents had lived in Afghanistan and that he was upset about the deaths of Muslims at the hands of United States military forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Mr. Cromitie expressed interest in returning to Afghanistan and said that if he were to die a martyr he would go to paradise, according to the complaint, which states that Mr. Cromitie threatened to do “something to America.”
In July, according to the complaint, Mr. Cromitie and the informer discussed Jaish-e-Muhammad, and Mr. Cromitie claimed to be involved with the militant organization.
Starting in October, the informer began meeting Mr. Cromitie in a house in Newburgh that the F.B.I. had equipped with concealed video and audio equipment, the according to the complaint. In several meetings at that house, Mr. Cromitie and the other defendants discussed their desire to attack a synagogue in Riverdale — a heavily Jewish neighborhood in the northwestern Bronx — and to shoot down military aircraft at the Air National Guard Base in Newburgh.
Mr. Cromitie “asked the informant to supply surface-to-air guided missiles and explosives for the planned operations,” and the informer told Mr. Cromitie that he could provide him with C-4 plastic explosives, the complaint states.
Starting in April 2009, the complaint says, the four men selected the synagogue they intended to target — the Riverdale Jewish Center, at 3700 Independence Avenue — and conducted surveillance, including photographs, of military planes at the base.
Late that month, Mr. Cromitie and David Williams bought a 9-millimeter semi-automatic pistol to use in the planned attack, and then traveled to “a location from which they could shoot at the military planes using surface-to-air guided missiles,” the authorities said.
In early May, Mr. Cromitie, David Williams and Mr. Payen drove with the informer toward Stamford, Conn., to obtain what the three men were told would be a surface-to-air guided missile system and three improvised explosive devices containing C-4 plastic explosive material.
The informer gave the men “a Stinger surface-to-air guided missile provided by the F.B.I. that was not
capable of being fired,” as well as three improvised explosive devices, each containing more than 30 pounds of inert C-4 plastic explosives, telling the men that he had obtained them from Jaish-e-Muhammad, the authorities said.
The three men took the weapon materials back to Newburgh, and two days later, joined by Onta Williams, they met to inspect the materials and “further discuss the logistics of the operation,” the authorities said.
Lev L. Dassin, the acting United States attorney in Manhattan, said in a statement on Wednesday night that “the defendants wanted to engage in terrorist attacks.”
He added: “They selected targets and sought the weapons necessary to carry out their plans. Fortunately, the defendants sought the assistance of a witness cooperating with the government. While the weapons provided to the defendants by the cooperating witness were fake, the defendants thought they were absolutely real.”
Political leaders responded to the news of the arrests with statements expressing relief.
“While the bombs these terrorists attempted to plant tonight were – unbeknownst to them – fake, this latest attempt to attack our freedoms shows that the homeland security threats against New York City are sadly all too real and underscores why we must remain vigilant in our efforts to prevent terrorism,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said in a statement.
Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said in a statement: “If there can be any good news from this terror scare it’s that this group was relatively unsophisticated, infiltrated early, and not connected to another terrorist group.”
Mr. Schumer added that he had spoken with the New York office of the F.B.I. and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, and said: “They have told me they have been monitoring this group for some time and that they did not have any connection to other terrorists.”
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Full Text of Cheney’s Anti-Obama Speech
May 21, 2009 at 10:45 am (politics)
Tags: attack, cheney, obama
Thank you all very much, and Arthur, thank you for that introduction. It’s good to be back at AEI, where we have many friends. Lynne is one of your longtime scholars, and I’m looking forward to spending more time here myself as a returning trustee. What happened was, they were looking for a new member of the board of trustees, and they asked me to head up the search committee.
I first came to AEI after serving at the Pentagon, and departed only after a very interesting job offer came along. I had no expectation of returning to public life, but my career worked out a little differently. Those eight years as vice president were quite a journey, and during a time of big events and great decisions, I don’t think I missed much.
Being the first vice president who had also served as secretary of defense, naturally my duties tended toward national security. I focused on those challenges day to day, mostly free from the usual political distractions. I had the advantage of being a vice president content with the responsibilities I had, and going about my work with no higher ambition. Today, I’m an even freer man. Your kind invitation brings me here as a private citizen – a career in politics behind me, no elections to win or lose, and no favor to seek.
The responsibilities we carried belong to others now. And though I’m not here to speak for George W. Bush, I am certain that no one wishes the current administration more success in defending the country than we do. We understand the complexities of national security decisions. We understand the pressures that confront a president and his advisers. Above all, we know what is at stake. And though administrations and policies have changed, the stakes for America have not changed.
Right now there is considerable debate in this city about the measures our administration took to defend the American people. Today I want to set forth the strategic thinking behind our policies. I do so as one who was there every day of the Bush Administration -who supported the policies when they were made, and without hesitation would do so again in the same circumstances.
When President Obama makes wise decisions, as I believe he has done in some respects on Afghanistan, and in reversing his plan to release incendiary photos, he deserves our support. And when he faults or mischaracterizes the national security decisions we made in the Bush years, he deserves an answer. The point is not to look backward. Now and for years to come, a lot rides on our President’s understanding of the security policies that preceded him. And whatever choices he makes concerning the defense of this country, those choices should not be based on slogans and campaign rhetoric, but on a truthful telling of history.
Our administration always faced its share of criticism, and from some quarters it was always intense. That was especially so in the later years of our term, when the dangers were as serious as ever, but the sense of general alarm after September 11th, 2001 was a fading memory. Part of our responsibility, as we saw it, was not to forget the terrible harm that had been done to America … and not to let 9/11 become the prelude to something much bigger and far worse.
That attack itself was, of course, the most devastating strike in a series of terrorist plots carried out against Americans at home and abroad. In 1993, terrorists bombed the World Trade Center, hoping to bring down the towers with a blast from below. The attacks continued in 1995, with the bombing of U.S. facilities in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; the killing of servicemen at Khobar Towers in 1996; the attack on our embassies in East Africa in 1998; the murder of American sailors on the USS Cole in 2000; and then the hijackings of 9/11, and all the grief and loss we suffered on that day.
Nine-eleven caused everyone to take a serious second look at threats that had been gathering for a while, and enemies whose plans were getting bolder and more sophisticated. Throughout the 90s, America had responded to these attacks, if at all, on an ad hoc basis. The first attack on the World Trade Center was treated as a law enforcement problem, with everything handled after the fact – crime scene, arrests, indictments, convictions, prison sentences, case closed.
That’s how it seemed from a law enforcement perspective, at least – but for the terrorists the case was not closed. For them, it was another offensive strike in their ongoing war against the United States. And it turned their minds to even harder strikes with higher casualties. Nine-eleven made necessary a shift of policy, aimed at a clear strategic threat – what the Congress called “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” From that moment forward, instead of merely preparing to round up the suspects and count up the victims after the next attack, we were determined to prevent attacks in the first place.
We could count on almost universal support back then, because everyone understood the environment we were in. We’d just been hit by a foreign enemy – leaving 3,000 Americans dead, more than we lost at Pearl Harbor. In Manhattan, we were staring at 16 acres of ashes. The Pentagon took a direct hit, and the Capitol or the White House were spared only by the Americans on Flight 93, who died bravely and defiantly.
Everyone expected a follow-on attack, and our job was to stop it. We didn’t know what was coming next, but everything we did know in that autumn of 2001 looked bad. This was the world in which al-Qaeda was seeking nuclear technology, and A. Q. Khan was selling nuclear technology on the black market. We had the anthrax attack from an unknown source. We had the training camps of Afghanistan, and dictators like Saddam Hussein with known ties to Mideast terrorists.
These are just a few of the problems we had on our hands. And foremost on our minds was the prospect of the very worst coming to pass – a 9/11 with nuclear weapons.
For me, one of the defining experiences was the morning of 9/11 itself. As you might recall, I was in my office in that first hour, when radar caught sight of an airliner heading toward the White House at 500 miles an hour. That was Flight 77, the one that ended up hitting the Pentagon. With the plane still inbound, Secret Service agents came into my office and said we had to leave, now. A few moments later I found myself in a fortified White House command post somewhere down below.
There in the bunker came the reports and images that so many Americans remember from that day – word of the crash in Pennsylvania, the final phone calls from hijacked planes, the final horror for those who jumped to their death to escape burning alive. In the years since, I’ve heard occasional speculation that I’m a different man after 9/11. I wouldn’t say that. But I’ll freely admit that watching a coordinated, devastating attack on our country from an underground bunker at the White House can affect how you view your responsibilities.
To make certain our nation country never again faced such a day of horror, we developed a comprehensive strategy, beginning with far greater homeland security to make the United States a harder target. But since wars cannot be won on the defensive, we moved decisively against the terrorists in their hideouts and sanctuaries, and committed to using every asset to take down their networks. We decided, as well, to confront the regimes that sponsored terrorists, and to go after those who provide sanctuary, funding, and weapons to enemies of the United States. We turned special attention to regimes that had the capacity to build weapons of mass destruction, and might transfer such weapons to terrorists.
We did all of these things, and with bipartisan support put all these policies in place. It has resulted in serious blows against enemy operations … the take-down of the A.Q. Khan network … and the dismantling of Libya’s nuclear program. It’s required the commitment of many thousands of troops in two theaters of war, with high points and some low points in both Iraq and Afghanistan – and at every turn, the people of our military carried the heaviest burden. Well over seven years into the effort, one thing we know is that the enemy has spent most of this time on the defensive – and every attempt to strike inside the United States has failed.
So we’re left to draw one of two conclusions – and here is the great dividing line in our current debate over national security. You can look at the facts and conclude that the comprehensive strategy has worked, and therefore needs to be continued as vigilantly as ever. Or you can look at the same set of facts and conclude that 9/11 was a one-off event – coordinated, devastating, but also unique and not sufficient to justify a sustained wartime effort. Whichever conclusion you arrive at, it will shape your entire view of the last seven years, and of the policies necessary to protect America for years to come.
The key to any strategy is accurate intelligence, and skilled professionals to get that information in time to use it. In seeking to guard this nation against the threat of catastrophic violence, our Administration gave intelligence officers the tools and lawful authority they needed to gain vital information. We didn’t invent that authority. It is drawn from Article Two of the Constitution. And it was given specificity by the Congress after 9/11, in a Joint Resolution authorizing “all necessary and appropriate force” to protect the American people.
Our government prevented attacks and saved lives through the Terrorist Surveillance Program, which let us intercept calls and track contacts between al-Qaeda operatives and persons inside the United States. The program was top secret, and for good reason, until the editors of the New York Times got it and put it on the front page. After 9/11, the Times had spent months publishing the pictures and the stories of everyone killed by al-Qaeda on 9/11. Now here was that same newspaper publishing secrets in a way that could only help al-Qaeda. It impressed the Pulitzer committee, but it damn sure didn’t serve the interests of our country, or the safety of our people.
In the years after 9/11, our government also understood that the safety of the country required collecting information known only to the worst of the terrorists. And in a few cases, that information could be gained only through tough interrogations.
In top secret meetings about enhanced interrogations, I made my own beliefs clear. I was and remain a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation program. The interrogations were used on hardened terrorists after other efforts failed. They were legal, essential, justified, successful, and the right thing to do. The intelligence officers who questioned the terrorists can be proud of their work and proud of the results, because they prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people.
Our successors in office have their own views on all of these matters.
By presidential decision, last month we saw the selective release of documents relating to enhanced interrogations. This is held up as a bold exercise in open government, honoring the public’s right to know. We’re informed, as well, that there was much agonizing over this decision.
Yet somehow, when the soul-searching was done and the veil was lifted on the policies of the Bush administration, the public was given less than half the truth. The released memos were carefully redacted to leave out references to what our government learned through the methods in question. Other memos, laying out specific terrorist plots that were averted, apparently were not even considered for release. For reasons the administration has yet to explain, they believe the public has a right to know the method of the questions, but not the content of the answers.
Over on the left wing of the president’s party, there appears to be little curiosity in finding out what was learned from the terrorists. The kind of answers they’re after would be heard before a so-called “Truth Commission.” Some are even demanding that those who recommended and approved the interrogations be prosecuted, in effect treating political disagreements as a punishable offense, and political opponents as criminals. It’s hard to imagine a worse precedent, filled with more possibilities for trouble and abuse, than to have an incoming administration criminalize the policy decisions of its predecessors.
Apart from doing a serious injustice to intelligence operators and lawyers who deserve far better for their devoted service, the danger here is a loss of focus on national security, and what it requires. I would advise the administration to think very carefully about the course ahead. All the zeal that has been directed at interrogations is utterly misplaced. And staying on that path will only lead our government further away from its duty to protect the American people.
One person who by all accounts objected to the release of the interrogation memos was the Director of Central Intelligence, Leon Panetta. He was joined in that view by at least four of his predecessors. I assume they felt this way because they understand the importance of protecting intelligence sources, methods, and personnel. But now that this once top-secret information is out for all to see – including the enemy – let me draw your attention to some points that are routinely overlooked.
It is a fact that only detainees of the highest intelligence value were ever subjected to enhanced interrogation. You’ve heard endlessly about waterboarding. It happened to three terrorists. One of them was Khalid Sheikh Muhammed – the mastermind of 9/11, who has also boasted about beheading Daniel Pearl.
We had a lot of blind spots after the attacks on our country. We didn’t know about al-Qaeda’s plans, but Khalid Sheikh Muhammed and a few others did know. And with many thousands of innocent lives potentially in the balance, we didn’t think it made sense to let the terrorists answer questions in their own good time, if they answered them at all.
Maybe you’ve heard that when we captured KSM, he said he would talk as soon as he got to New York City and saw his lawyer. But like many critics of interrogations, he clearly misunderstood the business at hand. American personnel were not there to commence an elaborate legal proceeding, but to extract information from him before al-Qaeda could strike again and kill more of our people.
In public discussion of these matters, there has been a strange and sometimes willful attempt to conflate what happened at Abu Ghraib prison with the top secret program of enhanced interrogations. At Abu Ghraib, a few sadistic prison guards abused inmates in violation of American law, military regulations, and simple decency. For the harm they did, to Iraqi prisoners and to America’s cause, they deserved and received Army justice. And it takes a deeply unfair cast of mind to equate the disgraces of Abu Ghraib with the lawful, skillful, and entirely honorable work of CIA personnel trained to deal with a few malevolent men.
Even before the interrogation program began, and throughout its operation, it was closely reviewed to ensure that every method used was in full compliance with the Constitution, statutes, and treaty obligations. On numerous occasions, leading members of Congress, including the current speaker of the House, were briefed on the program and on the methods.
Yet for all these exacting efforts to do a hard and necessary job and to do it right, we hear from some quarters nothing but feigned outrage based on a false narrative. In my long experience in Washington, few matters have inspired so much contrived indignation and phony moralizing as the interrogation methods applied to a few captured terrorists.
I might add that people who consistently distort the truth in this way are in no position to lecture anyone about “values.” Intelligence officers of the United States were not trying to rough up some terrorists simply to avenge the dead of 9/11. We know the difference in this country between justice and vengeance. Intelligence officers were not trying to get terrorists to confess to past killings; they were trying to prevent future killings. From the beginning of the program, there was only one focused and all-important purpose. We sought, and we in fact obtained, specific information on terrorist plans.
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Those are the basic facts on enhanced interrogations. And to call this a program of torture is to libel the dedicated professionals who have saved American lives, and to cast terrorists and murderers as innocent victims. What’s more, to completely rule out enhanced interrogation methods in the future is unwise in the extreme. It is recklessness cloaked in righteousness, and would make the American people less safe.
The administration seems to pride itself on searching for some kind of middle ground in policies addressing terrorism. They may take comfort in hearing disagreement from opposite ends of the spectrum. If liberals are unhappy about some decisions, and conservatives are unhappy about other decisions, then it may seem to them that the President is on the path of sensible compromise. But in the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground, and half-measures keep you half exposed. You cannot keep just some nuclear-armed terrorists out of the United States, you must keep every nuclear-armed terrorist out of the United States. Triangulation is a political strategy, not a national security strategy. When just a single clue that goes unlearned … one lead that goes unpursued … can bring on catastrophe – it’s no time for splitting differences. There is never a good time to compromise when the lives and safety of the American people are in the balance.
Behind the overwrought reaction to enhanced interrogations is a broader misconception about the threats that still face our country. You can sense the problem in the emergence of euphemisms that strive to put an imaginary distance between the American people and the terrorist enemy. Apparently using the term “war” where terrorists are concerned is starting to feel a bit dated. So henceforth we’re advised by the administration to think of the fight against terrorists as, quote, “Overseas contingency operations.” In the event of another terrorist attack on America, the Homeland Security Department assures us it will be ready for this, quote, “man-made disaster” – never mind that the whole Department was created for the purpose of protecting Americans from terrorist attack.
And when you hear that there are no more, quote, “enemy combatants,” as there were back in the days of that scary war on terror, at first that sounds like progress. The only problem is that the phrase is gone, but the same assortment of killers and would-be mass murderers are still there. And finding some less judgmental or more pleasant-sounding name for terrorists doesn’t change what they are – or what they would do if we let them loose.
On his second day in office, President Obama announced that he was closing the detention facility at Guantanamo. This step came with little deliberation and no plan. Now the President says some of these terrorists should be brought to American soil for trial in our court system. Others, he says, will be shipped to third countries. But so far, the United States has had little luck getting other countries to take hardened terrorists. So what happens then? Attorney General Holder and others have admitted that the United States will be compelled to accept a number of the terrorists here, in the homeland, and it has even been suggested US taxpayer dollars will be used to support them. On this one, I find myself in complete agreement with many in the President’s own party. Unsure how to explain to their constituents why terrorists might soon be relocating into their states, these Democrats chose instead to strip funding for such a move out of the most recent war supplemental.
The administration has found that it’s easy to receive applause in Europe for closing Guantanamo. But it’s tricky to come up with an alternative that will serve the interests of justice and America’s national security. Keep in mind that these are hardened terrorists picked up overseas since 9/11. The ones that were considered low-risk were released a long time ago. And among these, we learned yesterday, many were treated too leniently, because 1 in 7 cut a straight path back to their prior line of work and have conducted murderous attacks in the Middle East. I think the President will find, upon reflection, that to bring the worst of the worst terrorists inside the United States would be cause for great danger and regret in the years to come.
In the category of euphemism, the prizewinning entry would be a recent editorial in a familiar newspaper that referred to terrorists we’ve captured as, quote, “abducted.” Here we have ruthless enemies of this country, stopped in their tracks by brave operatives in the service of America, and a major editorial page makes them sound like they were kidnap victims, picked up at random on their way to the movies.
It’s one thing to adopt the euphemisms that suggest we’re no longer engaged in a war. These are just words, and in the end it’s the policies that matter most. You don’t want to call them enemy combatants? Fine. Call them what you want – just don’t bring them into the United States. Tired of calling it a war? Use any term you prefer. Just remember it is a serious step to begin unraveling some of the very policies that have kept our people safe since 9/11.
Another term out there that slipped into the discussion is the notion that American interrogation practices were a “recruitment tool” for the enemy. On this theory, by the tough questioning of killers, we have supposedly fallen short of our own values. This recruitment-tool theory has become something of a mantra lately, including from the President himself. And after a familiar fashion, it excuses the violent and blames America for the evil that others do. It’s another version of that same old refrain from the Left, “We brought it on ourselves.”
It is much closer to the truth that terrorists hate this country precisely because of the values we profess and seek to live by, not by some alleged failure to do so. Nor are terrorists or those who see them as victims exactly the best judges of America’s moral standards, one way or the other.
Critics of our policies are given to lecturing on the theme of being consistent with American values. But no moral value held dear by the American people obliges public servants ever to sacrifice innocent lives to spare a captured terrorist from unpleasant things. And when an entire population is targeted by a terror network, nothing is more consistent with American values than to stop them.
As a practical matter, too, terrorists may lack much, but they have never lacked for grievances against the United States. Our belief in freedom of speech and religion … our belief in equal rights for women … our support for Israel … our cultural and political influence in the world – these are the true sources of resentment, all mixed in with the lies and conspiracy theories of the radical clerics. These recruitment tools were in vigorous use throughout the 1990s, and they were sufficient to motivate the 19 recruits who boarded those planes on September 11th, 2001.
The United States of America was a good country before 9/11, just as we are today. List all the things that make us a force for good in the world – for liberty, for human rights, for the rational, peaceful resolution of differences – and what you end up with is a list of the reasons why the terrorists hate America. If fine speech-making, appeals to reason, or pleas for compassion had the power to move them, the terrorists would long ago have abandoned the field. And when they see the American government caught up in arguments about interrogations, or whether foreign terrorists have constitutional rights, they don’t stand back in awe of our legal system and wonder whether they had misjudged us all along. Instead the terrorists see just what they were hoping for – our unity gone, our resolve shaken, our leaders distracted. In short, they see weakness and opportunity.
What is equally certain is this: The broad-based strategy set in motion by President Bush obviously had nothing to do with causing the events of 9/11. But the serious way we dealt with terrorists from then on, and all the intelligence we gathered in that time, had everything to do with preventing another 9/11 on our watch. The enhanced interrogations of high-value detainees and the terrorist surveillance program have without question made our country safer. Every senior official who has been briefed on these classified matters knows of specific attacks that were in the planning stages and were stopped by the programs we put in place.
This might explain why President Obama has reserved unto himself the right to order the use of enhanced interrogation should he deem it appropriate. What value remains to that authority is debatable, given that the enemy now knows exactly what interrogation methods to train against, and which ones not to worry about. Yet having reserved for himself the authority to order enhanced interrogation after an emergency, you would think that President Obama would be less disdainful of what his predecessor authorized after 9/11. It’s almost gone unnoticed that the president has retained the power to order the same methods in the same circumstances. When they talk about interrogations, he and his administration speak as if they have resolved some great moral dilemma in how to extract critical information from terrorists. Instead they have put the decision off, while assigning a presumption of moral superiority to any decision they make in the future.
Releasing the interrogation memos was flatly contrary to the national security interest of the United States. The harm done only begins with top secret information now in the hands of the terrorists, who have just received a lengthy insert for their training manual. Across the world, governments that have helped us capture terrorists will fear that sensitive joint operations will be compromised. And at the CIA, operatives are left to wonder if they can depend on the White House or Congress to back them up when the going gets tough. Why should any agency employee take on a difficult assignment when, even though they act lawfully and in good faith, years down the road the press and Congress will treat everything they do with suspicion, outright hostility, and second-guessing? Some members of Congress are notorious for demanding they be briefed into the most sensitive intelligence programs. They support them in private, and then head for the hills at the first sign of controversy.
As far as the interrogations are concerned, all that remains an official secret is the information we gained as a result. Some of his defenders say the unseen memos are inconclusive, which only raises the question why they won’t let the American people decide that for themselves. I saw that information as vice president, and I reviewed some of it again at the National Archives last month. I’ve formally asked that it be declassified so the American people can see the intelligence we obtained, the things we learned, and the consequences for national security. And as you may have heard, last week that request was formally rejected. It’s worth recalling that ultimate power of declassification belongs to the President himself. President Obama has used his declassification power to reveal what happened in the interrogation of terrorists. Now let him use that same power to show Americans what did not happen, thanks to the good work of our intelligence officials.
I believe this information will confirm the value of interrogations – and I am not alone. President Obama’s own Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Blair, has put it this way: “High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al-Qaeda organization that was attacking this country.” End quote. Admiral Blair put that conclusion in writing, only to see it mysteriously deleted in a later version released by the administration – the missing 26 words that tell an inconvenient truth. But they couldn’t change the words of George Tenet, the CIA Director under Presidents Clinton and Bush, who bluntly said: “I know that this program has saved lives. I know we’ve disrupted plots. I know this program alone is worth more than the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency put together have been able to tell us.” End of quote.
If Americans do get the chance to learn what our country was spared, it’ll do more than clarify the urgency and the rightness of enhanced interrogations in the years after 9/11. It may help us to stay focused on dangers that have not gone away. Instead of idly debating which political opponents to prosecute and punish, our attention will return to where it belongs – on the continuing threat of terrorist violence, and on stopping the men who are planning it.
For all the partisan anger that still lingers, our administration will stand up well in history – not despite our actions after 9/11, but because of them. And when I think about all that was to come during our administration and afterward – the recriminations, the second-guessing, the charges of “hubris” – my mind always goes back to that moment.
To put things in perspective, suppose that on the evening of 9/11, President Bush and I had promised that for as long as we held office – which was to be another 2,689 days – there would never be another terrorist attack inside this country. Talk about hubris – it would have seemed a rash and irresponsible thing to say. People would have doubted that we even understood the enormity of what had just happened. Everyone had a very bad feeling about all of this, and felt certain that the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and Shanksville were only the beginning of the violence.
Of course, we made no such promise. Instead, we promised an all-out effort to protect this country. We said we would marshal all elements of our nation’s power to fight this war and to win it. We said we would never forget what had happened on 9/11, even if the day came when many others did forget. We spoke of a war that would “include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success.” We followed through on all of this, and we stayed true to our word.
To the very end of our administration, we kept al-Qaeda terrorists busy with other problems. We focused on getting their secrets, instead of sharing ours with them. And on our watch, they never hit this country again. After the most lethal and devastating terrorist attack ever, seven and a half years without a repeat is not a record to be rebuked and scorned, much less criminalized. It is a record to be continued until the danger has passed.
Along the way there were some hard calls. No decision of national security was ever made lightly, and certainly never made in haste. As in all warfare, there have been costs – none higher than the sacrifices of those killed and wounded in our country’s service. And even the most decisive victories can never take away the sorrow of losing so many of our own – all those innocent victims of 9/11, and the heroic souls who died trying to save them.
For all that we’ve lost in this conflict, the United States has never lost its moral bearings. And when the moral reckoning turns to the men known as high-value terrorists, I can assure you they were neither innocent nor victims. As for those who asked them questions and got answers: they did the right thing, they made our country safer, and a lot of Americans are alive today because of them.
Like so many others who serve America, they are not the kind to insist on a thank-you. But I will always be grateful to each one of them, and proud to have served with them for a time in the same cause. They, and so many others, have given honorable service to our country through all the difficulties and all the dangers. I will always admire them and wish them well. And I am confident that this nation will never take their work, their dedication, or their achievements, for granted.
Thank you very much.
http://stephencrose.wordpress.com/2009/05/21/full-text-of-cheneys-anti-obama-speech/
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Homegrown Islamic Jihad in the Bronx: Now We Are All Israelis
Posted By Phyllis Chesler On May 21, 2009 @ 11:06 am In Uncategorized | 108 Comments
Riverdale, in the Bronx, is a gloriously leafy, hilly, and peaceful suburb. I have visited its extraordinary gardens and gracious homes which overlook the Hudson river. More often, I’ve visited a close friend and her family who live there. I have studied, dined, and prayed with them. I have attended lectures at Riverdale synagogues. Riverdale is as close to me, both personally, psychologically, and geographically, as was the World Trade Center.
In response to a gruesome series of Islamic-Palestinian synagogue bombings in Europe, police officers guarded Europe’s synagogues and Jewish Centers. Now, synagogues all over New York City, tend to have barricades or some kind of police presence outside. We are now all Israelis: Not just the Jews, but the world’s civilians.
And thus, four African-American converts to Islam, all of whom converted to Islam in prison, have been arrested by the FBI just as they attempted to bomb two Riverdale synagogues, (the Riverdale Jewish Center and the Riverdale Temple), in the Bronx and a New York National Guard air base in Newburgh, New York where they lived and attended a mosque.
Why do I begin by clearly stating the race and religion of the terrorists? Because the liberal mainstream media refuses to do so, or buries such facts on its back pages. For example, see the New York Times coverage [1] HERE. What starts as a bland, front page story continues on page 33 where, laughably, the Times writes “some of the men were of Arabic descent, and one is of Haitian descent.” Only the New York Post [2] HERE mentions these important facts up front and clearly. (And, by the way: One of the arrested men is quoted as saying that his parents once lived in Afghanistan; if this is true, let’s note that Afghanistan is not an Arab country. It is totally unclear whether his parents are Afghans or not).
A friend has just told me that NPR’s coverage earlier today of this attempted terrorist bombing failed to mention that the perpetrators are African-Americans or Muslims. I am sure that in a matter of days, perhaps hours, these men will have civil rights and left-oriented lawyers prepared to argue that the FBI “played” them, enticed them, preyed on their…jihadic bitterness.
No, I am not in favor of “profiling,” i.e. discriminating against or persecuting people because of their skin-color or religious beliefs. However, what is one to do when these facts are crucial to the matter at hand?
According to my esteemed colleague, [3] Frank Gaffney, the Saudis have been funding Wahabi-style political-religious conversions among marginalized men in prison in the West for a long time. The Islamic Society of North America has allegedly placed many imams and mullahs in the American prison system where they prey mainly upon men of color, (they are over-represented in the American prison system), whose lives have already been shattered by poverty, racism, drugs, mental illness, gang life, and a long history of criminality. (And, as a reader, David Thomson, has just pointed out, their lives have also been “severely harmed by widespread illegitimacy, vile rap music that denigrates women and traditional values, feelings of victimization, self-pity, and the politically correct nonsense that asserts that all their problems are the result of white imperialism.”)
Islam may be presented to these inmates as a religion of many colors, as especially friendly to men of African descent. Jihad may also be presented as a way to overcome “oppression.”
Islam is probably not presented as an imperialist, colonialist force or as a religion whose leaders practice genocidal jihad, slavery, and both gender and religious apartheid; whose leaders were instrumentally involved in the African slave trade to America; and who, today, keep slaves, and persecute black Africans in Darfur. A formal, radical doctrine which preaches hatred of “white racist America,” the very country that has jailed them, might be balm to their shamed spirits. Perhaps jailed men of color are also attracted by the possibility of polygamy, or by female co-religionists who are, voila!, subservient to men on American soil.
Perhaps James Cromitie, David Williams, Onta Williams, and Laguerre Payen, (the Bronx Four), were inspired by the late, great Malcolm X, a.k.a. Malik Shabazz, a criminal turned Muslim leader—who was, arguably, assassinated by The Nation of Islam who found his preaching ultimately too…peaceful, too color-blind, too charismatic.
Or, perhaps these latest homegrown terrorist-wannabees were inspired by the ability of the Nation of Islam, (which emerged in 1930 America), to offer African-American prisoners protection and an identity in jail, and more than that: to help them remain sober, and to give dignity, meaning, and purpose to their lives. To the extent to which this “hate Whitey, hate the Jews” version of political Islam could and still does, indeed, uplift and console the spirits of the disenfranchised…..we are all in grave trouble.
Perhaps men also convert simply because they want to receive the perks that Muslims receive in prison: a better quality halal food, incense, prayer rugs.
But really, why am I not surprised by this latest thwarted terrorist attack in the Bronx? Jihad went global a long time ago. The Bronx synagogue car bomb and military airplane explosion scenario immediately reminds us of other, exploding, Muslim-detonated car and truck bombs outside American embassies and Marine Barracks in Africa and the Middle East; and exploding Muslim human as well as car bombs which blow up civilians, (most are Muslim civilians), in Israel, Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
If we did not and now cannot stop it “over there,” it is only a matter of minutes before we inherit it “over here.” True, some say that if we bury our heads in the sand and build a high, isolationist wall, that the troubles abroad need not affect us in America, that we have endangered ourselves precisely by invading Afghanistan and Iraq and by supporting Israel.
Obviously, I disagree. But I do not know how America and Israel can effecitvely win a non-traditional Islamic, jihadic war which uses Muslim civilians, including children as hostages and as human bombs–and which has the support of the world’s media.
The Bronx Four should immediately remind us of some other examples that are closer to home and which we continue to forget at our peril.
For example, in 2005, in Los Angeles, another group of African-American prison converts to Islam planned to blow up American military facilities, Israeli facilities, and synagogues. The group’s leader was Kevin Lamar James; his most ardent follower was Levar Haney Washington who, once released from Folsom State Prison, recruited other potential terrorists to the cause. According to Frank Gaffney,
“Despite all the warnings, (about Saudi Wahabi infiltration of America’s prisons), the alleged New Folsom State plot was not foiled by intensive surveillance of prison incitement and recruitment by Wahhabi clerics – let alone by keeping such Islamofascists out of the U.S. penal system. Rather, according to the Associated Press, it came on 5 July when Levar Washington, a convicted thief and street gang member, was arrested after his release from the New Folsom Prison, along with an accomplice suspected of perpetrating a string of gas station robberies.”
America at the Crossroads aired a film about this: “[4] Homegrown: Islam in Prison,” which explores Washington’s troubled background and conversion to Islam. The film asks, (but does not answer), important questions such as:
Can prison officials restrict an “inmate’s access to religious teachings and services without violating the inmate’s Constitutional right to freedom of religion? Do the allegations in this (terrorist) case outweigh the many instances of positive Islamic conversion in prison? And should prison reform — so long neglected at all levels of government — become integral to overall U.S. national security policy?”
These are questions that cry out for answers and for action. According to Gaffney, writing in August of 2005, (four years ago!):
“The cumulative effects of Islamist recruitment in the U.S. penal system are as stunning as they are ominous. Currently, there are said to be roughly 350,000 inmates in federal, state and local prisons who identify themselves as Muslims. Some 30,000-40,000 more are being added to that population each year. Official estimates suggest that roughly 80% of prisoners who “find faith” while in prison convert to Islam and that the percentage of the prison population that is “Muslim” today is somewhere between 15-20%. In fact, prison conversion alone is a major contributor to the rapid growth of Islam in the United States. “
I wonder what those estimates are today? According the the website of the [5] Federal Bureau of Prisons, these statistics seem to come out every five years. Thus, there are no more current national estimates. A [6] New York City estimate tells us that the majority of inmates at Rykers Island, the largest jail complex in the county, are Muslim.
There are other, perhaps forgotten examples of homegrown and foreign-born Muslims and/or prison converts to Islam who have attempted acts of terrorism in America. Jose Padilla, a.k.a. Abdullah al Muhajir, also converted to Islam in prison and, in 2002 was arrested for attempting to explode a “dirty bomb” and for wanting to join the forces of jihad in Afghanistan.
Onta Williams of the Bronx Four is quoted as saying: “They (the United States military) are killing Muslim brothers and sisters in Muslim countries, so if we kill them here (in the United States) with IEDs (improved explosive devices) and Stingers, it is equal.” James Cromitie, a.k.a. Abdul Rahman, stated that he was part of a Pakistani-based terror group and wanted to kill Jews and Americans. According to the [2] New York Post, “Cromitie pointed to people walking on the street in the vicinity of a Jewish community center and said that if he had a gun, he would shoot each one in the head.”
It is crucial that we see the larger patterns and even more crucial that we act: To stop Saudi Wahabi funding of Islamic conversions in America, beginning recruitment in our prison system. But we must also reform our prison system, including a reform of our drug laws, so that we jail fewer inmates and do not provide such a fertile breeding ground for anti-American and anti-Jewish Islamic terrorism.
Article printed from Chesler Chronicles: http://pajamasmedia.com/phyllischesler
URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/phyllischesler/2009/05/21/homegrown-islamic-jihad-in-the-bronx-now-we-are-all-israelis/
URLs in this post:
[1] HERE: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/22/nyregion/22terror.html?hp
[2] HERE: http://www.nypost.com/seven/05212009/news/regionalnews/chilling_terror_plot_thwarted_170280.htm
[3] Frank Gaffney: http://www.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=7541
[4] Homegrown: Islam in Prison: http://www.pbs.org/weta/crossroads/about/show_homegrown.html
[5] Federal Bureau of Prisons: http://www.bop.gov/
[6] New York City estimate : http://www.religionlink.com/tip_031009b.php
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This piece could be filed in more that one place, and contains a pretty scary message.
Wishful Thinking and Indecisive Wars
Ralph Peters
The most troubling aspect of international security for the United States is not the killing power of our immediate enemies, which remains modest in historical terms, but our increasingly effete view of warfare. The greatest advantage our opponents enjoy is an uncompromising strength of will, their readiness to “pay any price and bear any burden” to hurt and humble us. As our enemies’ view of what is permissible in war expands apocalyptically, our self-limiting definitions of allowable targets and acceptable casualties—hostile, civilian and our own—continue to narrow fatefully. Our enemies cannot defeat us in direct confrontations, but we appear determined to defeat ourselves.
Much has been made over the past two decades of the emergence of “asymmetric warfare,” in which the ill-equipped confront the superbly armed by changing the rules of the battlefield. Yet, such irregular warfare is not new—it is warfare’s oldest form, the stone against the bronze-tipped spear—and the crucial asymmetry does not lie in weaponry, but in moral courage. While our most resolute current enemies—Islamist extremists—may violate our conceptions of morality and ethics, they also are willing to sacrifice more, suffer more and kill more (even among their own kind) than we are. We become mired in the details of minor missteps, while fanatical holy warriors consecrate their lives to their ultimate vision. They live their cause, but we do not live ours. We have forgotten what warfare means and what it takes to win.
There are multiple reasons for this American amnesia about the cost of victory. First, we, the people, have lived in unprecedented safety for so long (despite the now-faded shock of September 11, 2001) that we simply do not feel endangered; rather, we sense that what nastiness there may be in the world will always occur elsewhere and need not disturb our lifestyles. We like the frisson of feeling a little guilt, but resent all calls to action that require sacrifice.
Second, collective memory has effectively erased the European-sponsored horrors of the last century; yesteryear’s “unthinkable” events have become, well, unthinkable. As someone born only seven years after the ovens of Auschwitz stopped smoking, I am stunned by the common notion, which prevails despite ample evidence to the contrary, that such horrors are impossible today.
Third, ending the draft resulted in a superb military, but an unknowing, detached population. The higher you go in our social caste system, the less grasp you find of the military’s complexity and the greater the expectation that, when employed, our armed forces should be able to fix things promptly and politely.
Fourth, an unholy alliance between the defense industry and academic theorists seduced decisionmakers with a false-messiah catechism of bloodless war. In pursuit of billions in profits, defense contractors made promises impossible to fulfill, while think tank scholars sought acclaim by designing warfare models that excited political leaders anxious to get off cheaply, but which left out factors such as the enemy, human psychology, and 5,000 years of precedents.
Fifth, we have become largely a white-collar, suburban society in which a child’s bloody nose is no longer a routine part of growing up, but grounds for a lawsuit; the privileged among us have lost the sense of grit in daily life. We grow up believing that safety from harm is a right that others are bound to respect as we do. Our rising generation of political leaders assumes that, if anyone wishes to do us harm, it must be the result of a misunderstanding that can be resolved by that lethal narcotic of the chattering classes, dialogue.
Last, but not least, history is no longer taught as a serious subject in America’s schools. As a result, politicians lack perspective; journalists lack meaningful touchstones; and the average person’s sense of warfare has been redefined by media entertainments in which misery, if introduced, is brief.
By 1965, we had already forgotten what it took to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, and the degeneration of our historical sense has continued to accelerate since then. More Americans died in one afternoon at Cold Harbor during our Civil War than died in six years in Iraq. Three times as many American troops fell during the morning of June 6, 1944, as have been lost in combat in over seven years in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, prize-hunting reporters insist that our losses in Iraq have been catastrophic, while those in Afghanistan are unreasonably high.
We have cheapened the idea of war. We have had wars on poverty, wars on drugs, wars on crime, economic warfare, ratings wars, campaign war chests, bride wars, and price wars in the retail sector. The problem, of course, is that none of these “wars” has anything to do with warfare as soldiers know it. Careless of language and anxious to dramatize our lives and careers, we have elevated policy initiatives, commercial spats and social rivalries to the level of humanity’s most complex, decisive and vital endeavor.
One of the many disheartening results of our willful ignorance has been well-intentioned, inane claims to the effect that “war doesn’t change anything” and that “war isn’t the answer,” that we all need to “give peace a chance.” Who among us would not love to live in such a splendid world? Unfortunately, the world in which we do live remains one in which war is the primary means of resolving humanity’s grandest disagreements, as well as supplying the answer to plenty of questions. As for giving peace a chance, the sentiment is nice, but it does not work when your self-appointed enemy wants to kill you. Gandhi’s campaign of non-violence (often quite violent in its reality) only worked because his opponent was willing to play along. Gandhi would not have survived very long in Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s (or today’s) China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Effective non-violence is contractual. Where the contract does not exist, Gandhi dies.
Furthermore, our expectations of war’s results have become absurd. Even the best wars do not yield perfect aftermaths. World War II changed the planet for the better, yet left the eastern half of Europe under Stalin’s yoke and opened the door for the Maoist takeover in China. Should we then declare it a failure and not worth fighting? Our Civil War preserved the Union and abolished slavery—worthy results, surely. Still, it took over a century for equality of opportunity for minorities to gain a firm footing. Should Lincoln have let the Confederacy go with slavery untouched, rather than choosing to fight? Expecting Iraq, Afghanistan or the conflict of tomorrow to end quickly, cleanly and neatly belongs to the realm of childhood fantasy, not human reality. Even the most successful war yields imperfect results. An insistence on prompt, ideal outcomes as the measure of victory guarantees the perception of defeat.
Consider the current bemoaning of a perceived “lack of progress” and “setbacks” in Afghanistan. A largely pre-medieval, ferociously xenophobic country that never enjoyed good government or a central power able to control all of its territory had become the hostage of a monstrous regime and a haven for terrorists. Today, Afghanistan has an elected government, feeble though it may be; for the first time in the region’s history, some of the local people welcome, and most tolerate, the presence of foreign troops; women are no longer stoned to death in sports stadiums for the edification of the masses; and the most inventive terrorists of our time have been driven into remote compounds and caves. We agonize (at least in the media) over the persistence of the Taliban, unwilling to recognize that the Taliban or a similar organization will always find a constituency in remote tribal valleys and among fanatics. If we set ourselves the goal of wiping out the Taliban, we will fail. Given a realistic mission of thrusting the Islamists to the extreme margins of society over decades, however, we can effect meaningful change (much as the Ku Klux Klan, whose following once numbered in the millions across our nation, has been reduced to a tiny club of grumps). Even now, we have already won in terms of the crucial question: Is Afghanistan a better place today for most Afghans, for the world and for us than it was on September 10, 2001? Why must we talk ourselves into defeat?
We have the power to win any war. Victory remains possible in every conflict we face today or that looms on the horizon. But, for now, we are unwilling to accept that war not only is, but must be, hell. Sadly, our enemies do not share our scruples.
The present foe
The willful ignorance within the American intelligentsia and in Washington, D.C., does not stop with the mechanics and costs of warfare, but extends to a denial of the essential qualities of our most-determined enemies. While narco-guerrillas, tribal rebels or pirates may vex us, Islamist terrorists are opponents of a far more frightening quality. These fanatics do not yet pose an existential threat to the United States, but we must recognize the profound difference between secular groups fighting for power or wealth and men whose galvanizing dream is to destroy the West. When forced to assess the latter, we take the easy way out and focus on their current capabilities, although the key to understanding them is to study their ultimate goals—no matter how absurd and unrealistic their ambitions may seem to us.
The problem is religion. Our Islamist enemies are inspired by it, while we are terrified even to talk about it. We are in the unique position of denying that our enemies know what they themselves are up to. They insist, publicly, that their goal is our destruction (or, in their mildest moods, our conversion) in their god’s name. We contort ourselves to insist that their religious rhetoric is all a sham, that they are merely cynics exploiting the superstitions of the masses. Setting aside the point that a devout believer can behave cynically in his mundane actions, our phony, one-dimensional analysis of al-Qaeda and its ilk has precious little to do with the nature of our enemies—which we are desperate to deny—and everything to do with us.
We have so oversold ourselves on the notion of respect for all religions (except, of course, Christianity and Judaism) that we insist that faith cannot be a cause of atrocious violence. The notion of killing to please a deity and further his perceived agenda is so unpleasant to us that we simply pretend it away. U.S. intelligence agencies and government departments go to absurd lengths, even in classified analyses, to avoid such basic terms as “Islamist terrorist.” Well, if your enemy is a terrorist and he professes to be an Islamist, it may be wise to take him at his word.
A paralyzing problem “inside the Beltway” is that our ruling class has been educated out of religious fervor. Even officials and bureaucrats who attend a church or synagogue each week no longer comprehend the life-shaking power of revelation, the transformative ecstasy of glimpsing the divine, or the exonerating communalism of living faith. Emotional displays of belief make the functional agnostic or social atheist nervous; he or she reacts with elitist disdain. Thus we insist, for our own comfort, that our enemies do not really mean what they profess, that they are as devoid of a transcendental sense of the universe as we are.
History parades no end of killers-for-god in front of us. The procession has lasted at least five thousand years. At various times, each major faith—especially our inherently violent monotheist faiths—has engaged in religious warfare and religious terrorism. When a struggling faith finds itself under the assault of a more powerful foreign belief system, it fights: Jews against Romans, Christians against Muslims, Muslims against Christians and Jews. When faiths feel threatened, externally or internally, they fight as long as they retain critical mass. Today the Judeo-Christian/post-belief world occupies the dominant strategic position, as it has, increasingly, for the last five centuries, its rise coinciding with Islam’s long descent into cultural darkness and civilizational impotence. Behind all its entertaining bravado, Islam is fighting for its life, for validation.
Islam, in other words, is on the ropes, despite no end of nonsense heralding “Eurabia” or other Muslim demographic conquests. If demography were all there was to it, China and India long since would have divided the world between them. Islam today is composed of over a billion essentially powerless human beings, many of them humiliated and furiously jealous. So Islam fights and will fight, within its meager-but-pesky capabilities. Operationally, it matters little that the failures of the Middle Eastern Islamic world are self-wrought, the disastrous results of the deterioration of a once-triumphant faith into a web of static cultures obsessed with behavior at the expense of achievement. The core world of Islam, stretching from Casablanca to the Hindu Kush, is not competitive in a single significant sphere of human endeavor (not even terrorism since, at present, we are terrorizing the terrorists). We are confronted with a historical anomaly, the public collapse of a once-great, still-proud civilization that, in the age of super-computers, cannot build a reliable automobile: enormous wealth has been squandered; human capital goes wasted; economies are dysfunctional; and the quality of life is barbaric. Those who once cowered at Islam’s greatness now rule the world. The roughly one-fifth of humanity that makes up the Muslim world lacks a single world-class university of its own. The resultant rage is immeasurable; jealousy may be the greatest unacknowledged strategic factor in the world today.
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Embattled cultures dependably experience religious revivals: What does not work in this life will work in the next. All the deity in question asks is submission, sacrifice—and action to validate faith. Unlike the terrorists of yesteryear, who sought to change the world and hoped to live to see it changed, today’s terrorists focus on god’s kingdom and regard death as a promotion. We struggle to explain suicide bombers in sociological terms, deciding that they are malleable and unhappy young people, psychologically vulnerable. But plenty of individuals in our own society are malleable, unhappy and unstable. Where are the Western atheist suicide bombers?
To make enduring progress against Islamist terrorists, we must begin by accepting that the terrorists are Islamists. And the use of the term “Islamist,” rather than “Islamic,” is vital—not for reasons of political correctness, but because it connotes a severe deviation from what remains, for now, mainstream Islam. We face enemies who celebrate death and who revel in bloodshed. Islamist terrorists have a closer kinship with the blood cults of the pre-Islamic Middle East—or even with the Aztecs—than they do with the ghazis who exploded out of the Arabian desert, ablaze with a new faith. At a time when we should be asking painful questions about why the belief persists that gods want human blood, we insist on downplaying religion’s power and insisting that our new enemies are much the same as the old ones. It is as if we sought to analyze Hitler’s Germany without mentioning Nazis.
We will not even accept that the struggle between Islam and the West never ceased. Even after Islam’s superpower status collapsed, the European imperial era was bloodied by countless Muslim insurrections, and even the Cold War was punctuated with Islamist revivals and calls for jihad. The difference down the centuries was that, until recently, the West understood that this was a survival struggle and did what had to be done (the myth that insurgents of any kind usually win has no historical basis). Unfortunately for our delicate sensibilities, the age-old lesson of religion-fueled rebellions is that they must be put down with unsparing bloodshed—the fanatic’s god is not interested in compromise solutions. The leading rebels or terrorists must be killed. We, on the contrary, want to make them our friends.
The paradox is that our humane approach to warfare results in unnecessary bloodshed. Had we been ruthless in the use of our overwhelming power in the early days of conflict in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the ultimate human toll—on all sides—would have been far lower. In warfare of every kind, there is an immutable law: If you are unwilling to pay the butcher’s bill up front, you will pay it with compound interest in the end. Iraq was not hard; we made it so. Likewise, had we not tried to do Afghanistan on the cheap, Osama bin Laden would be dead and al-Qaeda even weaker than it is today.
When the United States is forced to go to war—or decides to go to war—it must intend to win. That means that rather than setting civilian apparatchiks to calculate minimum force levels, we need to bring every possible resource to bear from the outset—an approach that saves blood and treasure in the long run. And we must stop obsessing about our minor sins. Warfare will never be clean, soldiers will always make mistakes, and rounds will always go astray, despite our conscientious safeguards and best intentions. Instead of agonizing over a fatal mistake made by a young Marine at a roadblock, we must return to the fundamental recognition that the greatest “war crime” the United States can commit is to lose.
Other threats, new dimensions
Within the defense community, another danger looms: the risk of preparing to re-fight the last war, or, in other words, assuming that our present struggles are the prototypes of our future ones. As someone who spent much of the 1990s arguing that the U.S. armed forces needed to prepare for irregular warfare and urban combat, I now find myself required to remind my former peers in the military that we must remain reasonably prepared for traditional threats from states.
Yet another counter-historical assumption is that states have matured beyond fighting wars with each other, that everyone would have too much to lose, that the inter-connected nature of trade makes full-scale conventional wars impossible. That is precisely the view that educated Europeans held in the first decade of the twentieth century. Even the youngish Winston Churchill, a veteran of multiple colonial conflicts, believed that general war between civilized states had become unthinkable. It had not.
Bearing in mind that, while neither party desires war, we could find ourselves tumbling, à la 1914, into a conflict with China, we need to remember that the apparent threat of the moment is not necessarily the deadly menace of tomorrow. It may not be China that challenges us, after all, but the unexpected rise of a dormant power. The precedent is there: in 1929, Germany had a playground military limited to 100,000 men. Ten years later, a re-armed Germany had embarked on the most destructive campaign of aggression in history, its killing power and savagery exceeding that of the Mongols. Without militarizing our economy (or indulging our unscrupulous defense industry), we must carry out rational modernization efforts within our conventional forces—even as we march through a series of special-operations-intensive fights for which there is no end in sight. We do not need to bankrupt ourselves to do so, but must accept an era of hard choices, asking ourselves not which weapons we would like to have, but which are truly necessary.
Still, even should we make perfect acquisition decisions (an unlikely prospect, given the power of lobbyists and public relations firms serving the defense industry), that would not guarantee us victory or even a solid initial performance in a future conventional war. As with the struggle to drive terrorists into remote corners, we are limited less by our military capabilities than by our determination to pretend that war can be made innocently.
Whether faced with conventional or unconventional threats, the same deadly impulse is at work in our government and among the think tank astrologers who serve as its courtiers: An insistence on constantly narrowing the parameters of what is permissible in warfare. We are attempting to impose ever sterner restrictions on the conduct of war even as our enemies, immediate and potential, are exploring every possible means of expanding their conduct of conflicts into new realms of total war.
What is stunning about the United States is the fragility of our system. To strategically immobilize our military, you have only to successfully attack one link in the chain, our satellites. Our homeland’s complex infrastructure offers ever-increasing opportunities for disruption to enemies well aware that they cannot defeat our military head-on, but who hope to wage total war asymmetrically, leapfrogging over our ships and armored divisions to make daily life so miserable for Americans that we would quit the fight. No matter that even the gravest attacks upon our homeland might, instead, re-arouse the killer spirit among Americans—our enemies view the home front as our weak flank.
From what we know of emerging Chinese and Russian warfighting doctrine, both from their writings and their actions against third parties, their concept of the future battlefield is all-inclusive, even as we, for our part, long to isolate combatants in a post-modern version of a medieval joust. As just a few minor examples, consider Russia’s and China’s use of cyber-attacks to punish and even paralyze other states. We are afraid to post dummy websites for information-warfare purposes, since we have talked ourselves into warfare-by-lawyers. Meanwhile, the Chinese routinely seek to infiltrate or attack Pentagon computer networks, while Russia paralyzed Estonia through a massive cyber-blitzkrieg just a couple of years ago. Our potential enemies believe that anything that might lead to victory is permissible. We are afraid that we might get sued.
Yet, even the Chinese and Russians do not have an apocalyptic vision of warfare. They want to survive and they would be willing to let us survive, if only on their terms. But religion-driven terrorists care not for this world and its glories. If the right Islamist terrorists acquired a usable nuclear weapon, they would not hesitate to employ it (the most bewildering security analysts are those who minimize the danger should Iran acquire nuclear weapons). The most impassioned extremists among our enemies not only have no qualms about the mass extermination of unbelievers, but would be delighted to offer their god rivers of the blood of less-devout Muslims. Our fiercest enemies are in love with death.
For our part, we truly think that our enemies are kidding, that we can negotiate with them, after all, if only we could figure out which toys they really want. They pray to their god for help in cutting our throats, and we want to chat.
The killers without guns
While the essence of warfare never changes—it will always be about killing the enemy until he acquiesces in our desires or is exterminated—its topical manifestations evolve and its dimensions expand. Today, the United States and its allies will never face a lone enemy on the battlefield. There will always be a hostile third party in the fight, but one which we not only refrain from attacking but are hesitant to annoy: the media.
While this brief essay cannot undertake to analyze the psychological dysfunctions that lead many among the most privileged Westerners to attack their own civilization and those who defend it, we can acknowledge the overwhelming evidence that, to most media practitioners, our troops are always guilty (even if proven innocent), while our barbaric enemies are innocent (even if proven guilty). The phenomenon of Western and world journalists championing the “rights” and causes of blood-drenched butchers who, given the opportunity, would torture and slaughter them, disproves the notion—were any additional proof required—that human beings are rational creatures. Indeed, the passionate belief of so much of the intelligentsia that our civilization is evil and only the savage is noble looks rather like an anemic version of the self-delusions of the terrorists themselves. And, of course, there is a penalty for the intellectual’s dismissal of religion: humans need to believe in something greater than themselves, even if they have a degree from Harvard. Rejecting the god of their fathers, the neo-pagans who dominate the media serve as lackeys at the terrorists’ bloody altar.
Of course, the media have shaped the outcome of conflicts for centuries, from the European wars of religion through Vietnam. More recently, though, the media have determined the outcomes of conflicts. While journalists and editors ultimately failed to defeat the U.S. government in Iraq, video cameras and biased reporting guaranteed that Hezbollah would survive the 2006 war with Israel and, as of this writing, they appear to have saved Hamas from destruction in Gaza.
Pretending to be impartial, the self-segregating personalities drawn to media careers overwhelmingly take a side, and that side is rarely ours. Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media. Perceiving themselves as superior beings, journalists have positioned themselves as protected-species combatants. But freedom of the press stops when its abuse kills our soldiers and strengthens our enemies. Such a view arouses disdain today, but a media establishment that has forgotten any sense of sober patriotism may find that it has become tomorrow’s conventional wisdom.
The point of all this is simple: Win. In warfare, nothing else matters. If you cannot win clean, win dirty. But win. Our victories are ultimately in humanity’s interests, while our failures nourish monsters.
In closing, we must dispose of one last mantra that has been too broadly and uncritically accepted: the nonsense that, if we win by fighting as fiercely as our enemies, we will “become just like them.” To convince Imperial Japan of its defeat, we not only had to fire-bomb Japanese cities, but drop two atomic bombs. Did we then become like the Japanese of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere? Did we subsequently invade other lands with the goal of permanent conquest, enslaving their populations? Did our destruction of German cities—also necessary for victory—turn us into Nazis? Of course, you can find a few campus leftists who think so, but they have yet to reveal the location of our death camps.
We may wish reality to be otherwise, but we must deal with it as we find it. And the reality of warfare is that it is the organized endeavor at which human beings excel. Only our ability to develop and maintain cities approaches warfare in its complexity. There is simply nothing that human collectives do better (or with more enthusiasm) than fight each other. Whether we seek explanations for human bloodlust in Darwin, in our religious texts (do start with the Book of Joshua), or among the sociologists who have done irreparable damage to the poor, we finally must accept empirical reality: at least a small minority of humanity longs to harm others. The violent, like the poor, will always be with us, and we must be willing to kill those who would kill others. At present, the American view of warfare has degenerated from science to a superstition in which we try to propitiate the gods with chants and dances. We need to regain a sense of the world’s reality.
Of all the enemies we face today and may face tomorrow, the most dangerous is our own wishful thinking.
Ralph Peters is a retired U.S. Army officer, a strategist, an author, a journalist who has reported from various war zones, and a lifelong traveler. He is the author of 24 books, including Looking for Trouble: Adventures in a Broken World and the forthcoming The War after Armageddon, a novel set in the Levant after the nuclear destruction of Israel.
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June 3, 2009
By Scott Stewart and Fred Burton
At approximately 10:30 a.m. on June 1, as two young U.S. soldiers stood in front of the Army Navy Career Center in west Little Rock, Ark., a black pickup pulled in front of the office and the driver opened fire on the two, killing one and critically wounding the other.
Eyewitnesses to the shooting immediately reported it to police, and authorities quickly located and arrested the suspect as he fled the scene. According to police, the suspect told the arresting officers that he had a bomb in his vehicle, but after an inspection by the police bomb squad, the only weapons police recovered from the vehicle were an SKS rifle and two pistols.
At a press conference, Little Rock Police Chief Stuart Thomas identified the suspect as Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, a 21-year-old African-American man who had changed his name from Carlos Leon Bledsoe after converting to Islam. In Arabic, the word mujahid is the singular form of mujahideen, and it literally means one who engages in jihad. Although Mujahid is not an uncommon Muslim name, it is quite telling that a convert to Islam would choose such a name — one who engages in jihad — to define his new identity. Muhammad was originally from Memphis, Tenn., but according to news reports was living and working in Little Rock.
Chief Thomas said Muhammad admitted to the shootings and told police that he specifically targeted soldiers. During an interrogation with a Little Rock homicide detective, Muhammad reportedly said that he was angry at the U.S. Army because of their attacks against Muslims overseas, that he opened fire intending to kill the two soldiers and that he would have killed more if they had been in the parking lot. These statements are likely what Chief Thomas was referring to when he noted in his press conference that Muhammad appears to have had political and religious motives for the attack and that it was conducted in response to U.S. military operations.
Chief Thomas also stated that the initial police investigation has determined that Muhammad acted alone and was not part of a wider conspiracy, but given that the shooting was an act of domestic terrorism directed against U.S military personnel, a thorough investigation has been launched by the FBI to ensure that Muhammad was not part of a larger group planning other attacks.
ABC News has reported that Muhammad had traveled to Yemen after his conversion, though the date of that travel and its duration were not provided in those reports. ABC also reported that while in Yemen, Muhammad was apparently arrested for carrying a fraudulent Somali passport and that upon his return from Yemen, the FBI opened a preliminary investigation targeting him.
The fact that the FBI was investigating Muhammad but was unable to stop this attack illustrates the difficulties that lone wolf militants present to law enforcement and security personnel, and also highlights some of the vulnerabilities associated with using law enforcement as the primary counterterrorism tool.
Challenges of the Lone Wolf
STRATFOR has long discussed the threat posed by lone wolf militants and the unique challenges they pose to law enforcement and security personnel. Of course, the primary challenge is that, by definition, lone wolves are solitary actors and it can be very difficult to determine their intentions before they act because they do not work with others. When militants are operating in a cell consisting of more than one person, there is a larger chance that one of them will get cold feet and reveal the plot to authorities, that law enforcement and intelligence personnel will intercept a communication between conspirators, or that law enforcement authorities will be able to introduce an informant into the group, as was the case in the recently foiled plot to bomb two Jewish targets in the Bronx and shoot down a military aircraft at a Newburgh, N.Y., Air National Guard base.
Obviously, lone wolves do not need to communicate with others or include them in the planning or execution of their plots. This ability to fly solo and under the radar of law enforcement has meant that some lone wolf militants such as Joseph Paul Franklin, Theodore Kaczynski and Eric Rudolph were able to operate for years before being identified and captured.
Lone wolves also pose problems because they can come from a variety of backgrounds with a wide range of motivations. While some lone wolves are politically motivated, others are religiously motivated and some are mentally unstable. Even among the religiously motivated there is variety. In addition to Muslim lone wolves like Muhammad, Mir Amal Kansi, Hesham Mohamed Hadayet and John Allen Muhammad, we have also seen anti-Semitic/Christian-identity adherents like Buford Furrow and Eric Rudolph, radical Roman Catholics like James Kopp and radical Protestants like Paul Hill. Indeed, the day before the Little Rock attack, Scott Roeder, an anti-abortion lone wolf gunman, killed prominent abortion doctor George Tiller in Wichita, Kan.
In addition to the wide spectrum of ideologies and motivations among lone wolves, there is also the issue of geographic dispersal. As we’ve seen from the lone wolf cases listed above, they have occurred in many different locations and are not just confined to attacks in Manhattan or Washington, D.C. They can occur anywhere.
Moreover, it is extremely difficult to differentiate between those extremists who intend to commit attacks from those who simply preach hate or hold radical beliefs (things that are not in themselves illegal due to First Amendment protections in the United States). Therefore, to single out likely lone wolves before they strike, authorities must spend a great deal of time and resources looking at individuals who might be moving from radical beliefs to radical actions. With such a large universe of potential suspects, this is like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.
Limitations on Both Sides
Due to the challenges lone wolf militants present, the concept of leaderless resistance has been publicly and widely embraced in both the domestic terrorism and jihadist realms. However, despite this advocacy and the ease with which terrorist attacks can be conducted against soft targets, surprisingly few terrorist attacks have been perpetrated by lone wolf operatives. In fact, historically, we have seen more mentally disturbed lone gunmen than politically motivated lone wolf terrorists. A main reason for this is that it can be somewhat difficult to translate theory into action, and as STRATFOR has frequently noted, there is often a disconnect between intent and capability.
Because of the difficulty in obtaining the skills required to conduct a terrorist attack, many lone wolves do not totally operate in a vacuum, and many of them (like Muhammad) will usually come to somebody’s attention before they conduct an attack. Many times this occurs as they seek the skills or materials required to conduct a terrorist attack, which Muhammad appears to have been doing in Yemen.
However, in this case, it is important to remember that even though Muhammad had been brought to the FBI’s attention (probably through information obtained from the Yemeni authorities by the CIA in Yemen), he was only one of the thousands of such people the FBI opens a preliminary inquiry on each year. A preliminary inquiry is the basic level of investigation the FBI conducts, and it is usually opened for a limited period of time (though it can be extended with a supervisor’s approval). Unless the agents assigned to the inquiry turn up sufficient indication that a law has been violated, the inquiry will be closed.
If the inquiry indicates that there is the likelihood that a U.S. law has been violated, the FBI will open a full-field investigation into the matter. This will allow the bureau to exert significantly more investigative effort on the case and devote more investigative resources toward solving it. Out of the many preliminary inquiries opened on suspected militants, the FBI opens full-field investigations only on a handful of them. So, if the information reported by ABC News is correct, the FBI was not conducting surveillance on Muhammad because to do so it would have had to have opened a full-field investigation.
Of course, now that Muhammad has attacked, it is easy to say that the FBI should have paid more attention to him. Prior to an attack, however, intelligence is seldom, if ever, so black and white. Sorting out the individuals who intend to conduct attacks from the larger universe of people who hold radical thoughts and beliefs and assigning law enforcement and intelligence resources to monitor the activities of the really dangerous people has long been one of the very difficult tasks faced by counterterrorism authorities.
This difficulty is magnified when the FBI is looking at a lone wolf target because there is no organization, chain of command or specific communications channel on which to focus intelligence resources and gather information. Lacking information that would have tied Muhammad to other militant individuals or cells, or that would have indicated he was inclined to commit a crime, the FBI had little basis for opening a full-field investigation into his activities. These limitations, and the FBI’s notorious bureaucracy (as seen in its investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui and the 9/11 hijackers), are the longstanding shortfalls of the law-enforcement element of counterterrorism policy (the other elements are diplomacy, financial sanctions, intelligence and military).
However, politics have proved obstructive to all facets of counterterrorism policy. And politics may have been at play in the Muhammad case as well as in other cases involving Black Muslim converts. Several weeks ago, STRATFOR heard from sources that the FBI and other law enforcement organizations had been ordered to “back off” of counterterrorism investigations into the activities of Black Muslim converts. At this point, it is unclear to us if that guidance was given by the White House or the Department of Justice, or if it was promulgated by the agencies themselves, anticipating the wishes of President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder.
As STRATFOR has previously noted, the FBI has a culture that is very conservative and risk-averse. Many FBI supervisors are reluctant to authorize investigations that they believe may have negative blow-back on their career advancement. In light of this institutional culture, and the order to be careful in investigations relating to Black Muslim converts, it would not be at all surprising to us if a supervisor refused to authorize a full-field investigation of Muhammad that would have included surveillance of his activities. Though in practical terms, even if a full-field investigation had been authorized, due to the caution being exercised in cases related to Black Muslim converts, the case would most likely have been micromanaged to the point of inaction by the special agent in charge of the office involved or by FBI headquarters.
Even though lone wolves operate alone, they are still constrained by the terrorist attack cycle, and because they are working alone, they have to conduct each step of the cycle by themselves. This means that they are vulnerable to detection at several different junctures as they plan their attacks, the most critical of which is the surveillance stage of the operation. Muhammad did not just select that recruiting center at random and attack on the spot. He had cased it prior to the attack just as he had been taught in the militant training camps he attended in Yemen. Law enforcement officials have reported that Muhammad may also have researched potential government and Jewish targets in Little Rock, Philadelphia, Atlanta, New York, Louisville and Memphis.
Had the FBI opened a full-field investigation on Muhammad, and had it conducted surveillance on him, it would have been able to watch him participate in preoperational activities such as conducting surveillance of potential targets and obtaining weapons.
There is certainly going to be an internal inquiry at the FBI and Department of Justice — and perhaps even in Congress — to determine where the points of failure were in this case. We will be watching with interest to see what really transpired. The details will be extremely interesting, especially coming at a time when the Obama administration appears to be following the Clinton-era policy of stressing the primacy of the FBI and the law enforcement aspect of counterterrorism policy at the expense of intelligence and other elements.
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The Practical Implications of the WHTI
May 28, 2009
By Scott Stewart and Fred Burton
External Link
Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative Web site
(STRATFOR is not responsible for the content of other Web sites.)
On June 1, 2009, the land and sea portion of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI) will go into effect. The WHTI is a program launched as a result of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 and intended to standardize the documents required to enter the United States. The stated goal of WHTI is to facilitate entry for U.S. citizens and legitimate foreign visitors while reducing the possibility of people entering the country using fraudulent documents.
Prior to the WHTI, American travelers to Mexico, Canada and several countries in the Caribbean needed only a driver’s license and birth certificate to re-enter the United States, while American travelers to other regions of the world required U.S. passports to return. This meant that immigration officials had to examine driver’s licenses and birth certificates from every state, and since the driver’s licenses and birth certificates of all the states change over time, there were literally hundreds of different types of documents that could be used by travelers at points of entry. In practical terms, this meant there was no way immigration officers could be familiar with the security features of each identification document, thereby making it easier for foreigners to use counterfeit or fraudulently altered documents to enter the country by claiming to be returning U.S. citizens.
The air portion of the WHTI went into effect in January 2007 and required that all international air travelers use passports to enter the United States. However, the land and sea implementation of WHTI will be a little different from the air portion. In addition to passports, travelers can also use U.S. passport cards (a driver’s license-sized identification document), an enhanced driver’s license (which are currently being issued by Michigan, New York, Vermont and Washington) or “special trusted” traveler identification cards such as Nexus and Sentri to enter the country by land or sea.
The WHTI will greatly simplify the number of travel documents that immigration officials have to scrutinize. It will also mean that the documents needed to enter the United States will be far harder to counterfeit, alter or obtain by fraud than the documents previously required for entry. This will make it more difficult for criminals, illegal aliens and militants to enter the United States, but it will by no means make it impossible.
An Evolutionary Process
Identity document fraud has existed for as long as identity documents have. Like much sophisticated crime, document fraud has been an evolutionary process. Advancements in document security have been followed by advancements in fraud techniques, which in turn have forced governments to continue to advance their security efforts. In recent years, the advent of color copiers, powerful desktop computers with sophisticated graphics programs and laser printers has propelled this document-fraud arms race into overdrive.
In addition to sophisticated physical security features such as ultraviolet markings and holograms, perhaps the most significant security features of newer identification documents such as passports and visas are that they are machine-readable and linked to a database that can be cross-checked when the document is swiped through a reader at a point of entry. Since 2007, U.S. passports have also incorporated small contactless integrated circuits embedded in the back cover to securely store the information contained on the passport’s photo page. These added security measures have limited the utility of completely counterfeit U.S. passports, which (for the most part) cannot be used to pass through a point of entry equipped with a reader connected to the central database. Such documents are used mostly for traveling abroad rather than for entering the United States.
Likewise, advancements in security features have also made it far more difficult to alter genuine documents by doing things like changing the photo affixed to it (referred to as a photo substitution or “photo sub”). Certainly, there are some very high-end document forgers who can still accomplish this — such as those employed by intelligence agencies — but such operations are very difficult and the documents produced are very expensive.
One of the benefits of the WHTI is that it will now force those wishing to obtain genuine documents by fraud to travel to a higher level — it has, in effect, upped the ante. As STRATFOR has long noted, driver’s licenses pose serious national security vulnerability. Driver’s licenses are, in fact, the closet thing to a U.S. national identity card. However, driver’s licenses are issued by each state, and the process of getting one differs greatly from state to state. Criminals clearly have figured out how to work the system to get fraudulent driver’s licenses. Some states make it easier to get licenses than others and people looking for fraudulent identification flock to those states. Within the states, there are also some department of motor vehicles (DMV) offices — and specific workers — known to be more lenient, and those seeking fraudulent licenses will intentionally visit those offices. In addition to corrupt DMV employees and states that issue driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, an illegal industry has arisen devoted entirely to producing counterfeit identification documents, compounding the problem.
Birth certificates are also relatively easy to obtain illegally. The relative ease of fraudulently obtaining birth certificates as well as driver’s licenses is seen in federal document-fraud cases (both documents are required to apply for a U.S. passport). In a large majority of the passport-fraud cases worked by Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) special agents, the suspects have successfully obtained fraudulent driver’s licenses and birth certificates, which are submitted in support of a passport application. It is not uncommon for DSS special agents to arrest suspects who possess multiple driver’s licenses in different identities from the same state or even from different states. Such documents could have been used to travel across the U.S. border via land prior to the implementation of the WHTI.
Countermoves
For those able to afford the fees of high-end alien smugglers, who can charge up to $30,000 for a package of identification documents that contains a genuine U.S. passport with genuine supporting documents (birth certificate, social security card and driver’s license), or $10,000 to $15,000 for a genuine U.S. visa (tied to a database, the newer machine-readable visas are very difficult to counterfeit), the WHTI will not make much difference. These high-end document vendors obtain legitimate identification documents by paying corrupt officials who have been carefully cultivated.
That said, the WHTI should succeed in causing the vast majority of criminal aliens, illegal economic immigrants and even militants — people who have not traditionally patronized high-end document vendors — to change the way they enter the United States. Of course, perhaps the simplest way is to take the low road. That is, get to Canada or Mexico and then simply sneak across the border as an undocumented alien — something that hundreds of thousands of people do every year. Once inside the country, such aliens can link up with lower-level document vendors to obtain the driver’s licenses, social security cards and other identity documents they need in order to live, work and travel around the country.
But there are other ways that the WHTI measures can be circumvented. For example, the crush of passport applications the WHTI is now causing will create a distinct vulnerability in the short term. Although the U.S. Department of State has hired a large number of new examiners to process the flood of passport applications it is receiving (and also a number of new DSS special agents to investigate fraud cases), the system is currently overwhelmed by the volume of passport applications.
Historically, passport examiners have had their performance evaluations based on the number of passport applications they process rather than on the number of fraudulent applications they catch (which has long been a source of friction between the DSS and the Bureau of Consular Affairs). This emphasis on numerical quotas has been documented in U.S. Government Accountability Office reports that have noted that the quotas essentially force examiners to take shortcuts in their fraud-detection efforts. As a result, many genuine passports have been issued to people who did not have a legitimate right to them. The current overwhelming flood of passport applications as a result of WHTI, when combined with a batch of new examiners who are rated on numerical quotas, will further enhance this vulnerability. Unless a passport application has an obvious fraud indicator, it will likely slip through the cracks and a fraudulent applicant will receive a genuine U.S. passport.
Stolen passports are another area to consider. In addition to being photo-subbed, which has become more difficult, stolen passports can also be used as travel documents by people who resemble the owner of the document. All the holograms, microprinting and other security features that have been placed on the laminates of passport photo pages tend to make it difficult to clearly see the photo of the passport holder. Also, people change over time, so a person who was issued a passport eight years ago can look substantially different from their passport photo today. The passport process and the laminate can also make it especially difficult to see the facial features of dark-skinned people. This means it is not at all uncommon for a person to be able to impersonate someone and use his or her passport without altering it. This problem persists, even with digital photos being included with the information embedded electronically in the memory chips of newer electronic passports.
Because of these possibilities, stolen passports are worth a tidy sum on the black market. Indeed, shortly after U.S. passports with green covers were issued, they were found to be extremely easy to photo-sub and were soon fetching $7,000 apiece on the black market in places like Jamaica and Haiti. In fact, criminal gangs quickly began offering tourists cash or drugs in exchange for the documents, and the criminal gangs would then turn around and sell them for a profit to document vendors. The problem of U.S. citizens selling their passports also persists today.
On the flip side, many Americans are unaware of the monetary value of their passport — which is several times the $100 they paid to have it issued. They do not realize that when they carry their passport it is like toting around a wad of $100 bills. Tour guides who collect the passports of all the people in their tour group and then keep them in a bag or backpack can end up carrying around tens of thousands of dollars in identification documents — which would make a really nice haul for a petty criminal in the Third World.
But U.S. passports are not the only ones at risk of being stolen. The changes in travel documents required to enter the United States will also place a premium on passports from countries that are included in the U.S. “visa waiver” program — that is, those countries whose citizens can travel to and remain in the United States for up to 90 days without a visa. There are currently 35 countries in the visa waiver program, including EU member states, Australia, Japan and a few others. The risk of theft is especially acute for those countries on the visa waiver list that issue passports that are easier to photo-sub than a U.S. passport. In some visa waiver countries, it is also cheaper and easier to obtain a genuine passport from a corrupt government official than it is in the United States.
While there are efforts currently under way to create an international database to rapidly share data about lost and stolen blank and issued passports, there is generally a time lag before lost and stolen foreign passports are entered into U.S. lookout systems. This lag provides ample time for someone to enter the United States on a photo-subbed passport, and it is not clear if retroactive searches are made once the United States is notified of a stolen passport in order to determine if that passport was used to enter the United States during the lag period. Of course, once a person is inside the United States, it is fairly easy to obtain identification documents in another identity and simply disappear.
There have also been cases of jihadist groups using the passports of militants from visa waiver countries who have died in order to move other operatives into the United States. On Sept. 1, 1992, Ahmed Ajaj and Abdul Basit (also known as Ramzi Yousef) arrived at New York’s Kennedy Airport. The two men had boarded a flight in Karachi, Pakistan, using photo-subbed passports that had been acquired from deceased jihadists. Ajaj used a Swedish passport in the name Khurram Khan and Basit used a British passport in the name Mohamed Azan.
Ultimately, the WHTI will help close some significant loopholes — especially regarding the use of fraud-prone driver’s licenses and birth certificates for international travel — but the program will not end all document fraud. Document vendors will continue to shift and adjust their efforts to adapt to the WHTI and exploit other vulnerabilities in the system.
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**When I look at the missing Air France flight, I'm reminded of the incidents below.**
Counterterrorism Blog
London: The Latest in a String of Al Qaeda Plots Against Airlines
By Zachary Abuza
The London plot is simply the latest in a concerted effort to target airliners, something that Al Qaeda and its affiliates know would have a crippling global impact. In statement by Osama bin Laden issued in early October 2002, he warned: “We will target the nodes of your economy.” The global aviation industry is clearly front and center in Al Qaeda’s targeting.
• In 1994-1995 Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed plotted to down 11-12 US jetliners over the Pacific in what is now known as the Bojinka Plot. Although a test run worked when a bomb aboard a jetliner detonated forcing the pilot to make an emergency landing in Okinawa, the plot went awry when Ramzi Yousef and an accomplice Hakim Murad set the nitro-glycerine on fire.
• In 2001, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed began planning a second phase of 9/11 that would target the West Coast of the United States with Jetliners from Asia. This plot was put on hold by the Al Qaeda leadership.
• 22 December 2001 Richard Reid’s plot to blow up a jetliner with a shoe bomb – a mixture of high explosives and TATP, failed.
• On 27 November 2003, English authorities recovered a similar shoe bomb from Sajid Badat, a co-conspirator of Richard Reid.
• In 2004, Philippine Police raided an Abu Sayyaf safehouse in Manila where they found a number of small bombs comprised of C4 melted down with I think kerosene and injected into toothpaste tubes and shampoo bottles. Philippine intelligence officials believed these bombs were intended for use on airplanes.
• In September 2004, US officials intercepted another shoe bomb at California postal facility, sent from Southeast Asia.
By Zachary Abuza on August 10, 2006 10:36 PM
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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/11/world/europe/11manila.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print
August 11, 2006
MANILA PLOTTERS
Echoes of Early Design to Use Chemicals to Blow Up Airliners
By RAYMOND BONNER and BENJAMIN WEISER
JAKARTA, Indonesia, Aug. 10 — The plot to blow up several airliners over the Atlantic, uncovered by British authorities, bears a striking, if not eerie, resemblance to a plot hatched 12 years ago to simultaneously blow up a dozen airliners over the Pacific.
That scheme was developed in Manila by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was starting his climb to become a top lieutenant to Osama bin Laden, and Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who was a mastermind of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Philippine investigators came to believe that the Manila operation was financed by Mr. bin Laden.
Mr. Mohammed code-named the operation Bojinka, which was widely reported to have been adopted from Serbo-Croatian, meaning big bang. But Mr. Mohammed has told his C.I.A. interrogators that it was just a “nonsense word” he adopted after hearing it when he was fighting in Afghanistan during the war against the Soviet Union, according to “The 9/11 Commission Report.” Mr. Mohammed was seized in Pakistan in 2003, and is now being held by the C.I.A. at an undisclosed location.
The Bojinka plot in 1995 was anything but nonsense. At an apartment in Manila, Mr. Yousef began mixing chemicals, which he planned to put into containers that would be carried on board airliners, much like the plotters in Britain are alleged to have been planning.
In those days, it would have been relatively easy to get liquid explosives past a checkpoint. Mr. Mohammed and Mr. Yousef, according to the 9/11 Commission, studied airline schedules and planned to sneak the liquid on a dozen planes headed to Seoul, South Korea, and Hong Kong and then on to the United States. The idea was that the bombs, complete with timing devices, would be left on the airliners, but that the plotters would disembark at a stop before detonating the devices.
To rehearse the operations, a practice bomb was detonated in a Manila theater late in 1994. Another bomb was concealed aboard Philippine Airlines Flight 434 from Manila to Tokyo 10 days later. The bomb exploded on the way to Tokyo, killing a passenger, but the pilot managed to land the damaged 747. American prosecutors later concluded that Mr. Yousef had taken a liquid explosive onto the plane before disembarking.
The plot, however, was foiled in early 1995 when a fire broke out in the apartment where some of the conspirators were working. Among the things found when the police investigated was Mr. Yousef’s laptop, with a file named “Bojinka.” They also found dolls with clothes containing nitrocellulose, according to the 9/11 Commission.
“When the police hit the place, they were weeks away from starting,” said Michael J. Garcia, a prosecutor in the 1996 Bojinka trial and now the United States attorney in Manhattan. “In Ramzi’s laptop there were very detailed plans,” he said, including equipment, airports, flight numbers and the timer settings.
Mr. Yousef was captured in Pakistan, turned over to the United States, convicted in New York and sentenced to life without parole.
According to investigators, Mr. Yousef’s specialty was making bombs from innocuous-looking objects that could be smuggled through airport security — a digital wristwatch modified to serve as a timer, or a plastic bottle for contact lens solution filled with liquid components for nitroglycerine.
When questioned after his arrest, Mr. Yousef refused to explain precisely how he had planned to carry out the bombings, according to testimony at his trial for the Bojinka plot.
Brian G. Parr, a Secret Service agent, testified at the trial that under questioning Mr. Yousef made clear that other terrorists were aware of the explosive technique, and he did not want to compromise their ability to carry out similar acts.
“He said that he didn’t want us to have knowledge of the techniques that they were going to use,” Mr. Parr testified, “because it may help us prevent other people from using those techniques.”
And Mr. Yousef, in his statement to Mr. Parr, made clear that he had carefully analyzed how to carry explosives through airline security.
For example, when questioned about one chemical mixture that could be used in explosives, Mr. Yousef said he would not have used it because it could have “been easily detected by airport security screening,” Mr. Parr testified.
Mr. Parr said that Mr. Yousef “specifically said that he would have used a different type of device that even the most sophisticated bomb-screening machines would not have been able to detect.”
Mary Jo White, the former United States attorney whose office successfully investigated and prosecuted Mr. Yousef in the Bojinka plot, recalled: “It was frightening. There were people wandering the globe able to do this. And that was 10 years ago.”
Mr. Mohammed has told his interrogators that after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which involved explosives loaded onto a truck that failed to bring down the building, he “needed to graduate to a more novel form of attack,” as the 9/11 report puts it. That led to Bojinka, and the first thoughts about using planes to bomb the World Trade Center.
Raymond Bonner reported from Jakarta, Indonesia, for this article, and Benjamin Weiser from New York. William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting from New York.
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http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/a...etary-dhs.html
OBAMA APPOINTMENT: Arif Alikhan, Asst Secretary DHS
Arif Alikhan, currently deputy mayor for the city of Los Angeles, was appointed as assistant secretary for the Office of Policy Development at the Department of Homeland Security.
Muslim Democrats welcome Alikhan’s appointment
At a banquet/fundraiser for the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California last weekend, the first speaker was Arif Alikhan (Deputy Mayor of Los Angeles - in charge of public safety for the city). He bid farewell, as he is going to take a post as Assistant Secretary at the Department of Homeland Security. Arif Alikhan is a devout Sunni and the son of Pakistani immigrants (here).
....speakers included Arif Ali Khan, the former Deputy Mayor of Los Angeles. He bid the attendees farewell as he prepared to leave the Los Angeles area for Washington, D. C. There he will serve as Assistant Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Professor Agha Saeed of the American Muslim Task Force (AMT) spoke of the aftermath of 9/11 and the struggle of the Muslim Community against the pervasive atmosphere of Islamophobia and hatred. It was a struggle against the tide - a very strong tide - to prevent Muslims in America from being marginalized and silenced.
Professor Saeed ....issued five demands from Muslims to the Department of Justice. These demands included a cessation to the infiltration by spies of mosques and an end to the introduction of agents provocateur. In addition there was to be a cessation of attempts to undermine Muslim groups such as the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR).
This is where Alikhan spoke? He was comfortable with this terror talk?
Why Alikhan? DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano noted Alikhan’s “broad and impressive array of experience in national security, emergency preparedness and counterterrorism.” I am not sure what she is talking about (neither is she, I am sure.)
Arif Alikhan was appointed Deputy Mayor of LA - picked from relative obscurity.
He began his career seven years ago, when he took a job with the Department of Justice hunting down computer hackers, crooks who were selling merchandise on Ebay at rock-bottom prices. In his former position as an assistant US attorney, Alikhan consistently did his work accurately and silently, never producing any headlines. But then he suddenly became one of the most important men in Los Angeles, America's second-largest city after New York.
He took the position of Deputy Mayor in November 2006. The year that the Congress went Democrat and history and America took a disastrous turn. How does an obscure bureaucrat a and devout Muslim come to the position of Deputy Mayor of Los Angeles - in charge of public safety for the city? And now Assistant Secretary to DHS?
Un-indicted co-conspirator CAIR was thrilled at the appointment:
CAIR-LA Congratulates Calif. Muslim Appointed to DHS Post , Arif Alikhan will serve as Assistant Secretary for Policy Development
(LOS ANGELES, CA., 5/6/09) - The Greater Los Angeles Area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-LA) today congratulated Arif Alikhan on his recent appointment as Assistant Secretary for Policy Development in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
"Congratulations to Mr. Ali Khan on this well-deserved appointment," said CAIR-LA Executive Director Hussam Ayloush. "Mr. Alikhan's new position reflects his and the community's dedication to helping preserve the security of our country. The American Muslim community can be proud of him."
In the past few weeks, American Muslim leaders have been urging the Obama administration to be inclusive and to reflect the diversity of our nation as he selects the most qualified public servants to fill important positions.
Back in 2007, Alikhan was instrumental in removing the Muslim terror tracking plan in LA.
The controversial Muslim 'Mapping' Plan of the Los Angeles Police Department is now "dead on arrival" according to Chief William Bratton.
"It is over and not just put on the side," said Chief Bratton in a meeting with the Muslim leadership of Southern California on Thursday, November 15th. The meeting was moderated by Deputy Mayor of Los Angeles, Arif Alikhan and attended by Deputy Chief Mike Downing.
Chief Bratton acknowledged the hurt and offense caused to Muslims and agreed to send a letter to the Muslim community announcing the official termination of the 'mapping' plan.
A major reason for the termination of the 'mapping' plan was the Muslim community's vociferous opposition and active civic engagement in making themselves heard beyond Los Angeles. Muslim organizations demonstrated a strong unity of purpose and message on the issue of 'mapping' that led to a position of strength for Muslims in the meeting. Those involved in the initial phases of this controversy were the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and Muslim Advocates.
Today, the people of Los Angeles spoke and the City of Los Angeles listened to the collective voice for justice and civil rights.
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second post
Obama Appoints Devout Muslim to Homeland Security Post
Our Islamic loving President Obama has appointed Arif Alikhan a devout Sunni Muslim to assistant secretary for the Office of Policy Department of Homeland Security. Mr. Alikhan was instrumental in taking down the LA Police Department's plan to monitor it's Muslim community.
Hat tip to Atlas Shrugs.
Arif Alikhan Moves from LA Mayor’s Office to DHS
By SUNITA SOHRABJI
Arif Alikhan, currently deputy mayor for the city of Los Angeles, was appointed Apr. 24 as assistant secretary for the Office of Policy Development at the Department of Homeland Security.
Alikhan’s appointment was announced alongside David Heyman’s nomination to the post of assistant secretary for policy at the department. DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano noted Heyman and Alikhan’s “broad and impressive array of experience in national security, emergency preparedness and counterterrorism.”
Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa also hailed Alikhan’s appointment at DHS. “Arif Alikhan has been instrumental in advancing my administration’s central priorities of preparing Los Angeles to respond to natural disasters and against the threat of terrorism, increasing public safety and putting 1,000 new LAPD officers on our streets,” said the mayor in a press statement.
In a telephone interview, Alikhan told India-West that he has no start date yet for his new role, as he is still looking for a home in Washington, D.C., and wrapping up at the L.A. mayor’s office. His appointment does not require Senate confirmation.
The Canadian-born Alikhan, who grew up in Southern California, said he spoke to Napolitano briefly before the appointment was made. “She said she was very happy I was coming on board,” said the 1993 Loyola law school graduate, adding that he was “very impressed” by Napolitano and her accomplishments.
First on the agenda at DHS will be learning the priorities of the department, said Alikhan, adding that he wanted the directives for his new post to come from within the administration.
Alikhan has served as L.A.’s deputy mayor of homeland security and public safety since November 2006. Of his tenure there, Alikhan said he was most proud of his gang reduction strategies, and working with the city’s fire department on issues of discrimination.
Alikhan also secured over $400 million in homeland security and public safety grants for the Los Angeles area, and helped to revamp the city’s emergency procedures. He served as a key aide to Villaraigosa during times of brush and wild fires, and during a Metrolink train crash last September, which killed more than 15 people.
Before joining Villaraigosa’s administration, Alikhan served for nine years as a senior official at the U.S. Department of Justice, where he oversaw a national computer hacking and intellectual property program. He also served as a key advisor on intellectual property and cybercrime at the U.S. Attorney’s office in both Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles.
In 2004, Alikhan received an award from the DOJ for “Superior Performance in a Management and Supervisory Role.” He has also received several awards from law enforcement agencies.
“We are very proud of Arif Alikhan for his appointment,” said Pankit Doshi, co-president of the South Asian Bar Association of Southern California. “His uncompromising dedication to the Los Angeles community is second to none. This honor is a testament to his abilities and dedication.” “Arif has been a very good friend to SABA-SC and a role model to South Asian American lawyers throughout the country,” echoed SABA-SC co-president Paul Saghera, noting that Alikhan is a current SABA-SC member and the 2007 recipient of the SABA-SC Foundation Trailblazer Award for his contributions to the South Asian legal community.
Alikhan began his legal career as a judicial law clerk to U.S. District Judge Ronald Lew in Los Angeles. He then joined the firm of Irell and Manella, where he handled civil and white-collar criminal defense cases. He graduated cum laude from the University of California, Irvine in 1990, with a degree in social ecology and an emphasis in criminal justice, criminology and legal studies.
Parents Mir Farooq and Rafat Alikhan, originally from Hyderabad, now live in Diamond Bar, Calif., while brother Zafar Alikhan, an urban planner, lives in Denver, Colorado.
http://islaminaction08.blogspot.com/...muslim-to.html
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http://www.examiner.com/x-2684-Law-Enforcement-Examiner~y2009m6d6-NYPD-Intelligence-issues-update-on-Jihad-at-army-recruiting-station
NYPD Intelligence issues update on Jihad at army recruiting station
June 6, 9:19 AM
A suspected "Jihadist" killed one US Army recruiter and wounded another during a morning attack in Little Rock, on Monday .
Private William Long, 23, was killed as he worked at a military recruitment center in Arkansas.
Long and another man, Private Quinton I. Ezeagwula, 18, were shot as they stood outside the Army-Navy recruitment center in Little Rock. Ezeagwula was wounded but survived the attack.
According to the New York City Police Department's Intelligence Division, the suspect, a black male, drove his SUV by the Army/Navy Recruitment Center located at the Ashley Area Square Shopping and opened fire on two recruiters standing outside of the military recruitment offices.
Emergency Medical Responders pronounced one of the recruiters DOA (dead on arrival), while the other recruiter was rushed to the hospital where he is in critical, but stable, condition.
Following the drive-by shooting, bloodshed and the subsequent pursuit, local police officers captured the suspect near the Interstate (I-30/I -630) highway interchange.
After taking the suspect into custody, police discovered a SKS rifle, a .22 caliber handgun, ammunition, and a "suspicious" package, according to the NYPD Intelligence Division's William O'Regan, a research specialist.
Police said that the suspect surrendered without incident and that he used language "indicating his association with "Jihad." He also indicated the possible existence of explosives.
The Little Rock police officers at the scene brought in their department's Hazmat/Bomb Squad, who retrieved the suspicious parcel for analysis.
Little Rock police reported there were no other suspects involved in the deadly attack.
According to NYPD Intelligence, military installations continue to be the target of anti-military groups and individuals. Recruiting stations, National Guard armories, and Reserve Centers have no armed guards which makes them vulnerable targets.
New York City military facilities have been targeted in the past — i.e. the March 6, 2008 bombing of the Times Square Recruiting Station.
Police identified the alleged attacker as Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, 23, an Islamic convert. He is being charged with first-degree murder as well as 15 counts of perpetrating terrorism.
Update by NYPD Intelligence Division/NYPD Shields
According to officials with the New York City Police Department, Abdulhakim Majahid Muhammad, a/k/a
Carl Leon Bledsoe, converted to Islam as a teenager.
Prior to the attack and homicide, the FBI had initiated an investigation of Muhammad following his return to the US from Yemen. According to the intelligence report -- based on the FBI report and a post-incident interview of Muhammad -- he was arrested in Yemen for carrying a false passport. Subsequently he studied "Jihad" with a Yemeni Islamic scholar.
Muhammad told interrogators that he attacked the recruiting station and Army recruiters because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
The search warrants issued for the young terrorist's apartment and SUV reportedly resulted in the following in addition to items already found in SUV:
-Molotov cocktails
-Homemade silencers
-Compact disks with Arabic writing
Muhammad allegedly conducted Google Map searches on Jewish institutions, a Baptist church, a child care facility, a U.S. post office, and military recruiting centers in the following areas:
-Atlanta, Georgia
-Little Rock, Arkansas
-Louisville, Kentucky
-New York, New York
-Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
-Memphis, Tennessee
The NYPD issued a list of previous plots and attacks:
-May 2009, 4 converts arrested in New York for targeting Bronx Synagogues and a military aircraft
-February 2009, convert arrested for killing Philadelphia police officer
-June 2008, converts sentenced for targeting military and Jewish facilities in California
-November 2007, convert pleads guilty to conspiracy to use WMD’s against Illinois shopping mall
-February 2007, convert convicted for role in “Virginia Jihad Network”
-August 2007 convert pleads guilty in New York to conspiracy to support terrorists
The NYPD Shields report stated that there exists a "troubling trend for US security and law enforcement officials."
The report also stated that terrorists -- foreign and domestic -- continue the targeting of high-value civilian and government targets, while military installations continue to be the target of anti-military groups and individuals
Recruiting stations, National Guard armories, and Reserve Centers have no armed guards which makes them vulnerable targets. New York City military and religious facilities have been targeted in the past—i.e. the March 6, 2008 bombing of the Times Square Recruiting Station
Additional Sources:
U.S. Army National Guard Anti-Terrorism/Force Protection Report,
“Update: Gunman Shoots Two at Arkansas Military Recruitment Center,”FBI and DHS Threat Alert and Advisory Message,"
National Association of Chiefs of Police Terrorism Committee
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Professor Saeed ....issued five demands from Muslims to the Department of Justice. These demands included a cessation to the infiltration by spies of mosques and an end to the introduction of agents provocateur. In addition there was to be a cessation of attempts to undermine Muslim groups such as the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR).
I find this deeply distrubing, even more distrubing though is that America gave into these demands. If this is not the right place please feel free to move it but its important that we take a closer look at CAIR and see the kind of evil people we are giving in to.
CAIR was started by Hamas members and is supported by terrorist supporting individuals, groups and countries. -
http://www.investigativeproject.org/513/hlfs-financial-support-of-cair-garners-new-scrutiny
CAIR has proven links to, and was founded by, Islamic Terrorists. CAIR actively supports terrorists and terrorist-supporting groups and nations.
http://counterterrorismblog.org/2007/08/cair_executive_director_placed.php
CAIR is an organization founded by Hamas supporters which seeks to overthrow Constitutional government in the United States and replace it with an Islamist theocracy using the American Constitution as protection. -
Let there be no doubt that the Council on American-Islamic Relations is a terrorist supporting front organization that is partially funded by terrorists, and that CAIR wishes nothing more than the implementation of Sharia Law in America.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=4734
*“I swear by Allah that war is deception,”...“We are fighting our enemy with a kind heart ... Deceive, camouflage, pretend that you’re leaving
while you’re walking that way. Deceive your enemy ...”
*"Politics Is A Completion Of War"
Omar Ahmad
(Click Photo)
Co-Founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations
President and CEO of Silicon Expert Technologies.
Former Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) Officer.
Omar Ahmad was captured on FBI surveillance tapes at Hamas meetings in the U.S.A. during 1993 explaining that the IAP could not, for political reasons, admit its support for Hamas, and then
discussing how the Hamas agenda could be cloaked and advanced. Omar Ahmad's airfare
and hotel bills for this meeting were paid for by the Holy Land Foundation
"Those who stay in America should be open to society without melting, keeping Mosques open so anyone can come and learn about Islam. If you choose to live here, you have a responsibility to deliver the message of Islam ... Islam isn't in America to be equal to
any other faiths, but to become dominant. The Koran, the Muslim book
of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the
only accepted religion on Earth."
"Fighting for freedom, fighting for Islam, that is not suicide," ...
"They kill themselves for Islam."
(Ahmad Praising Suicide Bombers)
"Registering an organization is easy. I can register 100 organizations
in 100 cities in one day ..."I mean, we don't really have available
people whom we could dedicate for the work we want to hide ..."
" Politics is a completion of War "
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nihad Awad
(Click Photo)
Co-Founder and CAIR Executive Director
Former Public Relations Director for the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP)
A Palestinian born in Jordan and now a U.S. citizen.
Identified participating at a 1993 Hamas meeting in the United States
"I am in support of the Hamas movement."
"We Should Not Blame The United States Alone For The 11 September 2001 Attacks"
"Our administration has the burden of proving otherwise.”
(Awad's response to muslim accusations that federal raids
were a War against Islam and Muslims)
"Address people according to their minds. When I speak with the American,
I speak with someone who doesn't know anything."
"If you love Israel, you're OK ... If that is the litmus test, no American Muslim
and no freedom-loving person is going to pass that test."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ibrahim Hooper
(Click Photo)
CAIR Spokesperson
Former Employee Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP)
"CAIR does not support these groups publicly."
(Hooper comments on CAIR's record of supporting Hamas,
Hezbullah and other official terrorist groups)
"I wouldn't want to create the impression that I wouldn't like the government of
the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future...But I'm not going to
do anything violent to promote that. I'm going to do it through education."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mousa Abu Marzook
Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) Founder
Parent organization of the Council on American-Islamic Relations
Officially Designated Terrorist and Fugitive from Justice.
(IAP was found Liable for aiding and abetting Hamas in the murder of a 17-year-old American)
"Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it,
just as it obliterated others before it" - Hamas Charter
Senior Hamas member Marzook conspired with Omar Ahmad, Nihad Awad, and others to establish what the United States government has termed “front organizations” to support and advance the interests of Hamas and radical Islam in the United States. IAP provided the
Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) with employees, funding, operational
expertise, and ideological guidance.
" ... probable cause exists that Abu Marzook knew of Hamas's plan to carry out violent, murderous attacks, that he selected the leadership and supplied the money to enable the attacks to take place, and that such attacks were, therefore, a foreseeable consequence
of the conspiracy." (Judge Kevin Duffy on Marzook)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ahmed Rehab
(Click Photo)
CAIR National
Strategic Communications Director
"CAIR is not a front for Hamas, Hezbollah, or any other foreign group,
nor has it ever been. CAIR is an independent American institution,
established by Americans ..."
"Nihad Awad and Omar Ahmad have never been members of
or associated with or tied to Hamas"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Corey Saylor
(Click Photo)
CAIR Director Of Government Affairs
"Some people try to hold us responsible for the actions of people that
are associated with our organization. That’s absolutely ludicrous …
you don’t hold all of Enron responsible for what Ken Lay did."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ahmed Bedier
(Click Photo)
(Former) CAIR-Florida Communications Director
"We are to the American Muslim community what the NAACP is to blacks
in America. If you attack us, you are attacking the Muslim community
and the religion of Islam in this country." (Mpls Star-Trib -10/24/06)
"Catholic priests pose more of a terrorism threat by having sex with young
altar boys than those who flew planes into the World Trade Center."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ahmad Al-Akhras
(Click photo)
CAIR Vice-Chairman\
"Americans in general might be more supportive of targeted attacks on civilians,
as part of the war on terror, than U.S. Muslims"
"What has happened in Somalia, for the majority of Somalis inside
and those who are abroad, is a positive change."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Randall "Ismail" Royer
(Click Photo)
CAIR-National Civil Rights Coordinator
& Communications Specialist
*CONVICTED*
Committed Terrorist Crimes while working for CAIR
Pled guilty to using and discharging a firearm during, and in relation to,
a crime of violence; and with carrying an explosive during commission
of a felony ... admitted helping four people gain entry to a terrorist
training camp in Pakistan operated by Lashkar-e-Taiba.
[United States Of America V. Randall Todd Royer (pdf)]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ghassan Elashi
(Click Photo)
Founder Of CAIR-Texas
Chairman of Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development
*CONVICTED*
Sentenced To 65 Years In Federal Prison
Committed Terrorist Crimes while working for CAIR
Tried on 21 counts of conspiracy, money laundering and dealing
in property of a terrorist. Found guilty on all 21 counts.
[United States of America V. HLF (pdf)]
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President Obama and CIA Director Leon Panetta have been at pains to say they don't want to punish intelligence officials and agents who had a role in "enhanced interrogation" after 9/11. But tell that to Philip Mudd, who withdrew his nomination late Friday to be the intelligence chief at the Homeland Security Department under pressure from Democrats in Congress.
Mr. Mudd is a well-regarded career intelligence officer who has worked in senior positions at the FBI and CIA, including deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Mr. Obama nominated him on May 4 amid fulsome praise from Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. But in a statement issued by the White House on the eve of a late spring weekend, Mr. Mudd said he was withdrawing so as not to become "a distraction to the president and his vital agenda."
The truth is that he risked being a distraction to Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democrats, who suddenly don't want to talk about what they knew about the interrogation techniques they once endorsed and long funded but now denounce. So Ms. Pelosi doesn't have to answer any questions about her changing claims about her CIA briefings, but a foot soldier like Mr. Mudd who did what his country asked him to do to keep the country safe is blackballed.
The White House said Mr. Obama accepted Mr. Mudd's withdrawal "with sadness and regret," but it's clear the President wasn't willing to fight for him. The message that will be heard loud and clear across the intelligence services is that you better not take any risks to keep America safe, because if you get into political trouble Mr. Obama will throw you over the side, albeit with "regret."
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http://counterterrorismblog.org/2009/06/print/hack-jet_losing_a_commercial_a.php
Counterterrorism Blog
Hack-Jet: Losing a commercial airliner in a networked world
By Roderick Jones
When there is a catastrophic loss of an aircraft in any circumstances, there are inevitably a host of questions raised about the safety and security of the aviation operation. The loss of Air France flight 447 off the coast of Brazil with little evidence upon which to work inevitably raises the level of speculation surrounding the fate of the flight. Large-scale incidents such as this create an enormous cloud of data, which has to be investigated in order to discover the pattern of events, which led to the loss (not helped when some of it may be two miles under the ocean surface). So far French authorities have been quick to rule out terrorism it has however, emerged that a bomb hoax against an Air France flight had been made the previous week flying a different route from Argentina. This currently does not seem to be linked and no terrorist group has claimed responsibility. Much of the speculation regarding the fate of the aircraft has focused on the effects of bad weather or a glitch in the fly-by-wire system that could have caused the plane to dive uncontrollably. There is however another theory, which while currently unlikely, if true would change the global aviation security situation overnight. A Hacked-Jet.
Given the plethora of software modern jets rely on it seems reasonable to assume that these systems could be compromised by code designed to trigger catastrophic systemic events within the aircraft's navigation or other critical electronic systems. Just as aircraft have a physical presence they increasingly have a virtual footprint and this changes their vulnerability. A systemic software corruption may account for the mysterious absence of a Mayday call - the communications system may have been offline. Designing airport and aviation security to keep lethal code off civilian aircraft would in the short-term, be beyond any government civil security regime. A malicious code attack of this kind against any civilian airliner would, therefore be catastrophic not only for the airline industry but also for the wider global economy until security caught up with this new threat. The technical ability to conduct an attack of this kind remains highly specialized (for now) but the knowledge to conduct attacks in this mold would be as deadly as WMD and easier to spread through our networked world. Electronic systems on aircraft are designed for safety not security, they therefore do not account for malicious internal actions.
While this may seem the stuff of fiction in January 2008 this broad topic was discussed due to the planned arrival of the Boeing 787, which is designed to be more 'wired' --offering greater passenger connectivity. Air Safety regulations have not been designed to accommodate the idea of an attack against on-board electronic systems and the FAA proposed special conditions , which were subsequently commented upon by the Air Line Pilots Association and Airbus. There is some interesting back and forth in the proposed special conditions, which are after all only to apply to the Boeing 787. In one section, Airbus rightly pointed out that making it a safety condition that the internal design of civilian aircraft should 'prevent all inadvertent or malicious changes to [the electronic system]' would be impossible during the life cycle of the aircraft because 'security threats evolve very rapidly'.
Boeing responded to these reports in an AP article stating that there were sufficient safeguards to shut out the Internet from internal aircraft systems a conclusion the FAA broadly agreed with - Wired Magazine covered much of the ground. During the press surrounding this the security writer Bruce Schneier commented that, "The odds of this being perfect are zero. It's possible Boeing can make their connection to the Internet secure. If they do, it will be the first time in the history of mankind anyone's done that." Of course securing the airborne aircraft isn't the only concern when maintenance and diagnostic systems constantly refresh while the aircraft is on the ground. Malicious action could infect any part of this process.
While a combination of factors probably led to the tragic loss of flight AF447 the current uncertainty serves to highlight a potential game-changing aviation security scenario that no airline or government is equipped to face.
Comments on Hack-Jet:
(Note - these are thoughts on the idea of using software hacks to down commercial airliners and are not specifically directed at events surrounding the loss of AF447).
If you would like to comment on Hack-Jet go to discussion blog linked here.
From the author of Daemon Daniel Suarez:
It would seem like the height of folly not to have physical overrides in place for the pilot -- although, I realize that modern aircraft (especially designs like the B-2 bomber) require so many minute flight surface corrections every second to stay aloft, that no human could manage it. Perhaps that's what's going on with upcoming models like the 787. And I don't know about the Airbus A330.
I did think it was highly suspicious that the plane seems to have been lost above St. Peter & Paul's Rocks. By the strangest of coincidences, I had been examining that rock closely in Google Earth a few weeks ago for a scene in the sequel (which was later cut). It's basically a few huge rocks with a series of antennas and a control hut -- with nothing around it for nearly 400 miles.
Assuming the theoretical attacker didn't make the exploit time-based or GPS-coordinate-based, they might want to issue a radio 'kill' command in a locale where there would be little opportunity to retrieve the black box (concealing all trace of the attack). I wonder: do the radios on an A330 have any software signal processing capability? As for the attackers: they wouldn't need to physically go to the rocks--just compromise the scientific station's network via email or other intrusion, etc. and issue the 'kill' command from a hacked communication system. If I were an investigator, I'd be physically securing and scouring everything that had radio capabilities on those rocks. And looking closely at any record of radio signals in the area (testing suspicious patterns against a virtual A330's operating system). Buffer overrun (causing the whole system to crash?). Injecting an invalid (negative) speed value? Who knows... Perhaps the NSA's big ear has a record of any radio traffic issued around that time.
The big concern, of course, is that this is a proof-of-concept attack -- thus, the reason for concealing all traces of the compromise.
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From John Robb - Global Guerrillas:
The really dangerous hacking, in most situations, is done by disgruntled/postal/financially motivated employees. With all glass cockpits, fly by wire, etc. (the Airbus is top of its class in this) it would be easy for anybody on the ground crew to crash it. No tricky mechanical sabotage.
External hacks? That is of course, trickier. One way would be to get into the diagnostic/mx computers the ground crew uses. Probably by adding a hack to a standard patch/update. Not sure if any of the updates to these computers are delivered "online."
Flight planning is likely the most "connected" system. Easier to access externally. Pilots get their plans for each flight and load them into the plane. If the route has them flying into the ground mid flight, it's possible they won't notice.
In flight hacks? Not sure that anything beyond outbound comms from the system is wireless. If so, that would be one method.
Another would be a multi-directional microwave/herf burst that fries controls. Might be possible, in a closed environment/fly by wire system to do this with relatively little power.
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There has been continuous discussion of the dangers involved with fly-by-wire systems in Peter Neumann's Risk Digest since the systems were introduced in the late 1980s. The latest posting on the subject is here.
Investigator: Computer likely caused Qantas plunge
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Links to Note
PodCast Analysis of flight AF447 error messages from Innovation Analysis Group [Analysis suggest all computer systems failed simultaneously]
Pilot Network online discussion
Aviation Safety Network
Photograph of Jet from spotter site
Twitter Feed for Flight AF447
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By Roderick Jones on June 9, 2009 3:34 PM
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GM:
I was intrigued enough by your previous post to share it with someone with a background in aviation far deeper than his humble reply here indicates. Here is what he said:
"Hack into an aircraft fly by wire system? Seems damn near impossible, and it would become immediately obvious to the computer system provoking an alarm and disabling of functions to maintain safety. It seems highly unlikely and very difficult for one to plant a software bomb and not have it detected. Even with my little airplane with FAA approved electronic flight controls, the self check routine takes two minutes after start up, and the number of errors the system can detect is in the hundreds.
Unlike our home computers running an operating system upon which are operated the various programs we use, control systems are their own operating systems constantly doing only the tasks they are assigned, continuously and without interruption. In that respect they are very stripped down. They also have many levels of internal checking, and if something wrong is detected, various levels of isolation and shutdown are automatically invoked.
My money is on an in flight break-up due to the strong turbulence and up and down drafts that were apparently present. The impact of turbulence may have been worsened if the pitot tube (velocity sensing instrument) problem that has been mentioned by Airbus was in play. It would make it more likely for the crew to fly at a higher than planned airspeed which worsens the impact of turbulence. These folks may have been recipients of some really bad weather luck. Occasionally, like rogue waves in the ocean, the atmosphere generates something truly ugly, of only for a moment.
Big thunderstorms break up big and little airplanes and have done for decades. The survival rate for a plane penetrating a big thunderstorm is better than 99%, but the chances of a bad outcome are still lousy compared to the risks we take elsewhere. Thunderstorms are to be avoided.
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What of a High Energy Radio Frequency burst directed to the "fly by wire" system?
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http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World-News/Terror-Names-Linked-To-Doomed-Flight-AF-447-Two-Passengers-Shared-Names-Of-Radical-Muslims/Article/200906215300405?lpos=World_News_Carousel_Region_0&lid=ARTICLE_15300405_Terror_Names_Linked_To_Doomed_Flight_AF_447%3A_Two_Passengers_Shared_Names_Of_Radical_Muslims
Terror Names Linked To Doomed Flight AF 447
3:58pm UK, Wednesday June 10, 2009
Peter Allen, in Paris
Two passengers with names linked to Islamic terrorism were on the Air France flight which crashed with the loss of 228 lives, it has emerged.
Debris from Air France flight AF 447 has been recovered from the Atlantic
French secret servicemen established the connection while working through the list of those who boarded the doomed Airbus in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on May 31.
Flight AF 447 crashed in the mid-Atlantic en route to Paris during a violent storm.
While it is certain there were computer malfunctions, terrorism has not been ruled out.
Soon after news of the fatal crash broke, agents working for the DGSE (Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure), the French equivalent of MI6, were dispatched to Brazil.
It was there that they established that two names on the passenger list are also on highly-classified documents listing the names of radical Muslims considered a threat to the French Republic.
A source working for the French security services told Paris weekly L'Express that the link was "highly significant".
Agents are now trying to establish dates of birth for the two dead passengers, and family connections.
There is a possibility the name similarities are simply a "macabre coincidence", the source added, but the revelation is still being "taken very seriously".
France has received numerous threats from Islamic terrorist groups in recent months, especially since French troops were sent to fight in Afghanistan.
Security chiefs have been particularly worried about airborne suicide attacks similar to the ones on the US on September 11, 2001.
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GM:
My informed friend responds to your question:
Marc
"What of a High Energy Radio Frequency burst directed to the "fly by wire" system?"
"Electrical and Avionics systems must all test a series of “HIRF” tests: High Intensity Radio Frequency. Components are put in a sealed room and blasted with a wide range of frequencies and the whole aircraft is subjected to a system test which I believe is conducted in an empty hangar with lots of antennas pumping electromagnetic energy around. And there are also lightning tests, direct hits to boxes, and direct hits to larger subassemblies including cable assemblies. At least that was the protocol years ago. I am sure it is more thorough now. It is one reason why these things cost so much."
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Ditto that. Had a friend designing electronics for the Aegis class destroyers. They had to "shake and bake" everything: mount it on a rack and then expose it to environmental extremes while hitting it with all sorts of odd RF. Though not as strict as military protocols, he tells me avionics deal with similar regimens.
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My brother who is trained in avionics used to tell me that if I thought my cell phone would interfere with the planes navigation and control systems I shouldn't be flying. Now I check email and download dbma forums to read on my handheld right up to the last minute.
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I thought airliners had replaced electrical wires with fiber optics that are far lighter, more secure and zero EMI - susceptibility to electrical interference. As I google the topic now I find that transition is not as far along as I thought: http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/17533/.
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June 15, 2009
Obama's 2010 Defense Budget: Top Five Worst Choices for National Security
by Jim Talent and Mackenzie Eaglen
WebMemo #2486
President Obama has submitted a defense budget request to Congress for fiscal year 2010 that, if implemented, will dramatically reshape America’s military.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates often says this budget shifts about 10 percent of funds to irregular warfare. That is a deceptive description: While the budget does shift funding, the far more important truth is that it cuts programs.
In the short term, the 2010 defense budget—if enacted—signals the beginning of yet another procurement holiday for the military. Over the longer term, the Obama budget blueprint actually cuts topline defense spending in real terms.
If Congress ultimately gives the Administration what it wants, America’s armed forces will lose capabilities that its leaders and citizens have come to take for granted. Those capabilities include, but are hardly limited to:
Strategic defense;
Control of the seas;
Air superiority;
Space control;
Counterterrorism;
Counterinsurgency;
Projecting power to distant regions; and
Information dominance throughout cyberspace.
And this decreased capability will happen in the absence of any careful reevaluation of America’s global mission. The Obama Administration, by its own admission, is recommending fundamental changes for the U.S. military without having conducted a strategic review of defense or foreign policy.
1. Scaling Back Missile Defense
President Obama’s 2010 defense budget proposes cutting $1.4 billion from the Missile Defense Agency’s budget. These cuts include scaling back the Airborne Laser boost-phase program, terminating the Multiple Kill Vehicle and Kinetic Energy Interceptor, canceling the expansion of ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California, and delaying funding for interceptor and radar sites in Poland and the Czech Republic.
It is one thing to carefully oversee the operational capability and technical feasibility of specific ballistic missile defense (BMD) programs; it is an entirely different endeavor to substantially cut the overall missile defense budget when the risk of a ballistic missile launch is palpably growing. North Korea is aggressively testing missiles and weapons, Iran is moving closer to acquiring nuclear capability, and insurgents and terrorists are fighting for control of Pakistan and its substantial nuclear arsenal. A multi-layered missile defense system is the only protection the world has against these growing threats.
The ideological opposition by many to missile defense dates back to the Cold War, when the left believed missile defense would destabilize America’s relationship with the Soviet Union. That position was at least understandable, albeit misguided. But the Cold War has been over for nearly 20 years, and missile defense today is a clear tool for peace. In fact, it may be the only stabilizing tool available to prevent a global nuclear arms race. As the ballistic missile programs of North Korea and Iran continue to mature, America must invest in a comprehensive, multi-layered missile defense system to stay ahead of the technology curve—instead of deemphasizing and restructuring the program for a more a constrained vision of what the future may hold.
2. Ending F-22 Production at 186 Fighters
Over a decade ago, the U.S. Air Force made a decision to build two complementary fifth-generation fighter aircraft to work together and harmonize one another’s capabilities. The F-22A Raptor, with its advanced super-cruise and thrust-vectoring technologies, would provide air dominance, while the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) would be optimized for ground attacks.
The F-35, a single-engine attack aircraft, was not designed to fulfill certain core missions of the more advanced F-22. Just like shoes need shoelaces, to be an effective conventional deterrent in a 21st-century environment—at least until approximately 2040—the Air Force must have the proper mix of both platforms. Senior Air Force leadership argued through numerous budget cycles over many years that a fleet of 381 F-22s is the minimum requirement for such a mix.
Air Force Chief of Staff General Norton Schwartz recently said that 243 F-22s would place the U.S. Air Force at moderate risk during future conflicts, while 183 F-22s would result in “moderate to high” risk. Despite the advice of Air Force leadership, however, Obama is prepared to end production of the F-22 at just 186 aircraft (which is only about 127 combat-ready planes as some fighters will be used for training and testing) while continuing with the planned build of 2,443 F-35s.
This reduced fleet size—in addition to ensuring that the service life of operational F-22s will expire much more quickly than was originally anticipated—is wholly insufficient to ensure that America’s Air Force can maintain an effective conventional deterrent force in the decades ahead. Indeed, the Chinese and Russians are continuing to acquire large numbers of new generation fighter aircraft. Without adequate numbers of F-22s, the U.S. will lose the ability to achieve air dominance in places like the Middle East and the straits of Taiwan. Considering the implications for the next three decades of American security, no less than a moderate-risk fleet of 243 F-22s should be acceptable to the U.S. Congress and the American public.
3. Ending C-17 Cargo Aircraft Production
Even though the C-17 was singled out by President Obama during his campaign as a priority for ensuring America can “preserve global reach in the air,” his Administration is now prepared to end production of this aircraft at 205 frames. The C-17, which can carry 169,000 pounds of equipment, including the Abrams tank and Apache helicopter, is also ideal for operating from austere airfields, including dirt runways.
Secretary Gates has repeatedly emphasized that he wants a force capable of fighting counterinsurgency operations. If that is indeed the case, then ending the C-17 line makes no sense. Given the danger of rockets, improvised explosive devices, and guerrilla attacks on truck convoys overseas, the C-17 has become the preferred means for moving men and materiel in theaters like Afghanistan.
Also, with Army and Marine endstrength still growing, there is little chance for a decline in operational tempo in the years ahead. Given the cost to restart the C-17 line after shutting it down (estimated at $5.7 billion), now is the wrong time to end the production of this core capability platform.
Yet even more disturbing is the repeated trend of the Administration making this sweeping recommendation to Congress in the absence of any analytical justification or security rationale.
4. Delaying Army Modernization
The Obama Administration wants to cancel the Army’s Future Combat Systems (FCS) program, despite the fact that it is the only program through which the Army was going to replace most of its tracked vehicles—many of which date back to the 1970s. Further, the label “future” is misleading, because the Army has already put technologies and capabilities from the program into the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.
This decision is also troubling because the Army must update its medium-weight forces now. As a result of the procurement holiday of the 1990s, the Army has essentially missed an entire generation of modernization. Over the past two decades, Army leaders phased out the Sheridan—the service’s only light tank capable of rapid deployment—and canceled its replacement, the Armored Gun System. Budget constraints halted research and development of other advanced armor vehicles, including the Future Scout and Cavalry System, the replacement for the Humvee and the Bradley. The consequences of the 1990s defense drawdown first became apparent in Kosovo when the Army struggled to deploy quickly from Germany and later when Turkey denied use of its territory for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Meanwhile, major combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are wearing down the Army’s fleet of heavy vehicles. The Army estimates that the operational tempo of Abrams and Bradleys in Iraq and Afghanistan has increased fivefold and sixfold, respectively. Coupled with harsh environmental conditions, each year of deployment equals about five years of normal wear and tear.
Canceling the FCS means that the Army will have no modern, medium-weight forces that are useful in a variety of conflicts ranging from peacekeeping and counterinsurgency operations to full-scale conventional combat. FCS is designed to give the Army a capability that it has today only in a high-demand interim replacement vehicle known as the Stryker. Delaying what has already been delayed for 20 years is a disservice to those in uniform.
5. Delaying the Navy’s CG(X) Cruiser Program
President Obama has proposed postponing the Navy’s next-generation cruiser, known as the CG(X), in order to revisit both the requirements and acquisition strategy. The CG(X) should be the Navy’s highest acquisition priority. China and Russia have acquired large numbers of carrier-killer and other missiles against which the U.S. Navy currently has no effective defense.
Delaying the procurement of CG(X) beyond the middle of the next decade will leave the fleet and U.S. forward bases unnecessarily vulnerable while compromising America’s conventional deterrence. Even with the service-life extensions for the Ticonderoga-class cruisers, the retirement age for the remaining 15 cruisers will fall between 2026 and 2034. With just 15 cruisers at sea in 2025 that were originally built in the 1980s, Navy leaders will be forced to operate under unacceptable risk levels.
Choosing not to build an advanced radar and instead improving the CG(X) radar system incrementally may offer the best course for Navy leadership to move ahead with the program now by reducing near-term technical risks associated with the program.
Defense Is Not a Zero Sum Game
The Obama Administration may be cutting defense because the President believes in negotiation and conciliation, and he may think that those tactics are inconsistent with military power. If so, he is making a strategic mistake that will eventually overwhelm his foreign policy.
The tools of diplomacy and soft power require an atmosphere of security within which they can operate—an environment only American strength can provide. If Members of Congress really want the President to succeed, they will step back, reexamine Vietnam-era assumptions about the American military, and ask themselves whether they really want American power to continue to decline. Walking softly in foreign policy is not a new idea nor a bad idea; however, it works only if you also carry a big stick.
The Honorable Jim Talent is Distinguished Fellow in Military Affairs at The Heritage Foundation and served as a U.S. Senator from 2002 to 2007. Mackenzie M. Eaglen is Senior Policy Analyst for National Security in the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies, a division of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies, at The Heritage Foundation.
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Border Incident Yesterday in Region V
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From One Of My Sources. IMHO, running away solves nothing
Subject: Border Incident Yesterday in Region V
All:
This is a short recap about the incident yesterday in Region V during which two of our employees (Mark F******* and Matt W******) along with a Pima County employee (Joe ********) came under gun fire from what appeared to be drug traffickers from south of the border.
About mid afternoon our people were on three quads in the Tumacacori Mountains doing recon for an access project with Pima County south of Bear Grass Tank about four miles due east of Arivaca Lake. In a small canyon area through which the road they were on traversed they came upon at close quarters and surprised a group of hispanic males (at least 4) dressed in camo who were in the immediate vicinity and probably using water jugs left by the “No More Deaths” organization (this organization has recently been successfully prosecuted for their water jug distribution activities under the littering laws on the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge; and now their activities have directly put our people at risk as well).
Upon the initial sighting of the first two camo clad persons who immediately fled a short distance up a hill from the area dropping down into the grass our people backed out of the immediate vicinity and regrouped. After a few minutes Mark F******* crept up to small rise about 30 yards from the road to look over the scene with his binoculars; he observed another 2 hispanic males also in camo in the area but over in a different direction from the first two. At that point Mark started back down to the quads and a shot was heard coming from the direction where the first two suspects had fled.
The bullet impacted the ground within ten feet or so behind Mark. At that point, with two of the quads with drivers and already pointed in the necessary exit direction, Mark ran and jumped on the back of the quad with Joe as the driver; Matt was on the other quad. Both quads with our three people quickly and immediately departed the area heading back to high ground closer to Arivaca to make contact with radio.
Once in contact with dispatch, we called in Border Patrol, Pima County SO and DPS Ranger to the area to join up with our people and take care of the situation. Within 30 to 45 minutes approximately 15 – 20 BP, 15 – 20 SO, and three helicopters were in the area to handle and investigate the situation. Subsequently, and unfortunately, the suspects were able to evade the search party, however SO as the lead for the investigation, did recover several fresh shot 9mm casings from the area where the initial shot likely came from, indicating that subsequent shots may have been fired at our people as they were getting out of the area. The third quad was recovered and had not been touched by the suspects.
I am glad to say that Mark, Matt and Joe made all of the right decisions and moves when things went bad, and most importantly, they ended the day safe and sound. We will study and learn from this matter with the objective of continuing to keep our people safe along the treacherous border area. Please distribute this information as you see fit so as to quell any misinformation, and should you have any questions please give me a call. Thank you.
Leonard L. Ordway
Region V Supervisor
Arizona Game and Fish Department
Region V Office
555 N. Greasewood Road
Tucson, AZ 85745
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By SIOBHAN GORMAN
WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration plans to kill a controversial Bush administration spy satellite program at the Department of Homeland Security, according to officials familiar with the decision.
The program came under fire from its inception two years ago. Democratic lawmakers said it would lead to domestic spying.
Police Chiefs' Letter to Napolitano The program would have provided federal, state and local officials with extensive access to spy-satellite imagery — but no eavesdropping capabilities— to assist with emergency response and other domestic-security needs, such as identifying where ports or border areas are vulnerable to terrorism.
It would have expanded an Interior Department satellite program, which will continue to be used to assist in natural disasters and for other limited security purposes such as photographing sporting events. The Wall Street Journal first revealed the plans to establish the program, known as the National Applications Office, in 2007.
"It's being shut down," said a homeland security official.
The Bush administration had taken preliminary steps to launch the office, such as acquiring office space and beginning to hire staff.
The plans to shutter the office signal Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano's decision to refocus the department's intelligence on ensuring that state and local officials get the threat information they need, the official said. She also wants to make the department the central point in the government for receiving and analyzing terrorism tips from around the country, the official added.
Lawmakers alerted Ms. Napolitano of their concerns about the program-that the program would violate the Fourth amendment right to be protected from unreasonable searches-before her confirmation hearing.
Once she assumed her post, Ms. Napolitano ordered a review of the program and concluded the program wasn't worth pursuing, the homeland official said. Department spokeswoman Amy Kudwa declined to speak about the results of the review but said they would be announced shortly.
The lawmakers were most concerned about plans to provide satellite imagery to state and local law enforcement, so department officials asked state and local officials how useful that information would be to them. The answer: not very useful.
"In our view, the NAO is not an issue of urgency," Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton, wrote to Ms. Napolitano on June 21.
Writing on behalf of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, Chief Bratton said that were the program to go forward, the police chiefs would be concerned about privacy protections and whether using military satellites for domestic purposes would violate the Posse Comitatus law, which bars the use of the military for law enforcement in the U.S.
Rep. Jane Harman (D., Calif.), who oversees the House Homeland Security subcommittee on intelligence, said she was alarmed when she recently saw that the Obama administration requested money for the program in a classified 2010 budget proposal. She introduced two bills that would terminate the program.
"It's a good decision," Ms. Harman said in an interview. "This will remove a distraction and let the intelligence function at [the department] truly serve the community that needs it, which is local law enforcement."
Supporters of the program lamented what they said was the loss of an important new terrorism-fighting tool for natural disasters and terrorist attacks, as well as border security.
"After numerous congressional briefings on the importance of the NAO and its solid legal footing, politics beat out good government," said Andrew Levy, who was deputy general counsel at the department in the Bush administration.
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The No-Rights List
Posted by David Rittgers
A media drumbeat is steadily building to keep those on the government’s terrorist watch list from buying firearms. A month ago, Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) introduced a bill to bar them from purchasing a gun even if they had no legally disqualifying criminal conviction. Now Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) has introduced his own legislation to achieve the same goal.
This is arbitrary government at its best. The “no-fly” list used to prevent suspected terrorists from boarding aircraft has tagged Nelson Mandela, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA), Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-CA), Rep. Don Young (R-AK), Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), a retired general, a Marine reservist returning from Iraq, the President of Bolivia and dead 9/11 hijackers, a former federal prosecutor, and over twenty men named John Thompson as threats to our national security. The list now contains over 1 million names. This prompted calls for probes into the watch list, and the ACLU filed suit to challenge the list.
The push to prevent firearms purchases by persons on this list is nothing new. Here is White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel saying in 2007 that, “if you’re on that no-fly list, your access to the right to bear arms is cancelled, because you’re not part of the American family; you don’t deserve that right. There is no right for you if you’re on that terrorist list.”
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJBZZKlvrP4&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ecato%2Dat%2Dliberty%2Eorg%2F2009%2F06%2F23%2Fthe%2Dno%2Drights%2Dlist%2F&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
If the government can take an enumerated liberty away from selected citizens by placing them on a “no-rights” list without due process, the rule of law is dead.
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/06/23/the-no-rights-list/
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Its the NYT, so caveat lector. That said, troubling questions are raised:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/27/us/27arizona.html?th&emc=th
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ARIVACA, Ariz. — “Somebody just came in and shot my daughter and my husband!” the woman shouted to the 911 dispatcher. “They’re coming back in! They’re coming back in!”
Arivaca finds itself a town both terrified and angered.
Multiple gunshots are then heard on a tape of the call.
The woman, Gina Gonzalez, survived the attack after arming herself with her husband’s handgun, but both he and their 10-year-old daughter died.
The killings, last month, have terrified this small town near the Mexican border, in part because the authorities have now tied them to what they describe as a rogue group engaged in citizen border patrols.
The three people arrested in the crime include the leader of Minutemen American Defense, a Washington State-based offshoot of the Minutemen movement, in which citizens roam the border looking for people crossing into the country illegally. Former members describe the group’s leader, Shawna Forde, 41, as having anti-immigrant sentiments that are extreme, at times frightening, even to people accustomed to hard-line views on border policing.
The authorities say that the three suspects were after money and drugs that they intended to use to finance vigilantism, and that members of the group may have been involved in at least one other home invasion, in California.
“There was an anticipation that there would be a considerable amount of cash at this location,” said Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, since, he said, Ms. Gonzalez’s husband, Raul J. Flores, had previously been involved in narcotics trafficking, an assertion the family denies.
A Pima County public defender representing Ms. Forde had no comment on the case. Nor did lawyers for the other suspects, Jason E. Bush, 34, and Albert R. Gaxiola, 42. All three remain in custody, charged with first-degree murder, assault and burglary.
Merrill Metzger, who worked for the group for six months just as it was getting started in 2007, said Ms. Forde had often traveled from Washington to Arizona with weapons. In March, while stopping over at his home in Redding, Calif., she presented a plan for the group to undertake, Mr. Metzger, her half-brother, said in a telephone interview.
“She was sitting here talking about how she was going to start an underground militia and rob drug dealers,” he said.
Mr. Metzger quit the group, alarmed, he said, by a number of things, including Ms. Forde’s demand for extreme loyalty, right down to the choice of cuisine.
“I had to take an oath, and part of the oath was that I couldn’t eat Mexican food,” he said. “That’s when red flags went up all over for me. That seemed like prejudice.”
Another former member, Chuck Stonex, a retired independent contractor, said Ms. Forde had talked about buying a ranch near Arivaca and building a compound. He said that in October, he took an excursion with her into the desert north of here, where, wearing camouflage and carrying handguns and rifles, they searched for illegal immigrants.
“It’s just like hunting,” Mr. Stonex said, describing the tracking skills the group used. “If you’re going out hunting deer, you want to scout around and get an idea what their pattern is, what trails they use.”
Mr. Stonex said he treated one of the suspects, Mr. Bush, for a flesh wound the day of the attack on Ms. Gonzalez’s family. Ms. Gonzalez had presumably shot Mr. Bush in warding off the attackers, but, Mr. Stonex said, the wound did not raise his suspicions, because, he said, Ms. Forde offered what seemed a plausible explanation: “They’d been jumped by border bandits.”
“They were very relaxed, having casual, normal chitchat,” he recalled.
Small numbers of Americans have always viewed border patrolling as a patriotic duty, but the most recent incarnation — the Minutemen movement, which takes its name from citizen militias formed during the Revolutionary War — gained steam in 2005, when hundreds of volunteers flocked to border locations.
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Their patrols initially drew praise from some political leaders, including Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, but also raised concerns that the activities were thin veils for racism and xenophobia. Over time, the movement has also suffered from infighting, with some groups, like Ms. Forde’s, advocating increasingly confrontational tactics while others have simply monitored the border and reported illegal crossings to the authorities.
Shawna Forde, 41, a suspect, in an undated photograph.
Gilbert Mungaray, 80, says he “can’t imagine why” his grandson and great-granddaughter were killed.
Since the killings here, members of some better-known groups involved with the movement have scrambled to disassociate themselves from Minutemen American Defense. Others had begun doing so well beforehand. The 750-member San Diego Minutemen, for instance, started warning people on its Web site in January to avoid Ms. Forde.
According to Ms. Gonzalez’s 911 call, the killers arrived shortly after midnight on May 30, dressed in uniforms resembling those of law enforcement personnel. They told the family that they were looking for a fugitive. Actually, the authorities say, the three suspects believed that Ms. Gonzalez’s husband, Mr. Flores, 29, was holding both drugs and money at their remote home.
Sheriff Dupnik has said there is ample drug activity between here and the border. The suggestion has angered the residents of Arivaca, a town of retirees, artists and working people about 50 miles south of Tucson. “This is a good town,” said Fern Loveall, 76. “It’s a good place to live, and it’s a good place to raise kids. What they’re saying about it isn’t true.”
Members of Mr. Flores’s family also denied that he had had any connection to the drug trade.
“He was a good guy,” said Gilbert Mungaray, his 80-year-old grandfather. “I know what happened, but I can’t imagine why.”
The family’s house was silent this week. An American flag hung on the porch, and three pink roses adorned the front door. Down a dirt road, at the local community center, a picture of Brisenia, the slain daughter of Mr. Flores and Ms. Gonzalez, had been placed in a frame with a small black ribbon affixed to it.
For the regulars at La Gitana Cantina, a friendly establishment with a mixed clientele of Anglos and Mexican-Americans, emotions have ranged from abject sorrow to rage.
“I’ve had people come into the bar and just put their heads in their hands, and all the sudden they’ve got tears pouring down their face,” said Karen Lippert, a bartender. She added that while Mr. Gaxiola was a local, the two other suspects were not.
“This is not us guys,” she said. “It’s the not the way us guys operate.”
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http://www.wtop.com/?nid=778&sid=1711695#
U.S. warns of multiple al-Qaida plots
July 7, 2009 - 7:15am
Intelligence suggests al Qaida operatives are planning to plant multiple explosive devices in several locations. (AP File Photo) J.J. Green, wtop.com
WASHINGTON - Last week, German authorities discovered that groups of terrorists may have been dispatched from training bases in Pakistan to launch crippling attacks.
In April, U.S. intelligence officials warned Germany about possible terror attacks. Since that time German security officials have reportedly been preparing for massive, multi-layered attacks for which al-Qaida has become known.
Shortly after the April warning, German Ambassador Klaus Scharioth said in an unrelated interview, "You will understand that I can't go into the details of the terrorist threat, but I can only tell you that we all know that we have to be vigilant and that we have to continue to work very hard on that, but I do not want to go into details."
Intelligence suggests al-Qaida operatives are planning to plant multiple explosive devices in several locations and detonate them either in a simultaneous or sequential fashion.
U.S. and German intelligence sources say that strategy is designed to emulate the ones employed Bali in 2002 and Madrid in 2004. The idea is to draw in first responders to the scene after the first explosion, and then the subsequent explosions are set off in the same location to inflict maximum casualties.
A U.S. intelligence source with knowledge about the situation says "it is a credible threat, which also includes Germans in North Africa."
They say as a minimum of 12 al-Qaida operatives who were trained in the tribal region of Pakistan have left the training camps and are headed back to their home countries. Spain, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy and Egypt are just some of those countries.
According to the source, the threat levels also were raised for many other Western European countries to include concerns for "Turkish Airlines flying passengers from Istanbul to the U.S., the UK and Israel."
The source says "passengers traveling out-bound from Istanbul to those locations on July Fourth were segregated, screened multiple times, including their bags and told there were concerns for Turkish Airlines flights to these locations."
Another source headed to Chicago from Istanbul said they were told that there was a specific threat against Turkish Airlines flights headed to those places.
In the U.S., Turkish Airlines flies to New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Charlotte, Tampa and Chicago.
U.S. Intelligence and German media sources indicate the warning came from the U.S. government, but the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) had arrived at the same conclusion after picking up chatter that al-Qaida is planning an attack during the run-up to the Bundestag election to try to force Germany to withdraw from Afghanistan.
Scharioth is well aware of why Germany is a target.
"We are the third biggest troop contributor in Afghanistan, and we are also the fourth biggest contributor of civilian efforts, training and reconstruction and also trying to help the country to redo the education system, give more girls a chance to get an education and all those things - that's one thing," Scharioth says.
The operatives are thought to be skilled in obtaining, assembling and the detonation of explosives that could damage large buildings, disable transit systems and create mass casualties.
This alleged plot is only a part of what concerns Scharioth. A number of rogue nations may be on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons and opening the door to al-Qaida to get ahold of them.
"We have to address the problem of nuclear proliferation because we would be very concerned, if say in 15-20 years, you have 20 nuclear weapon countries and of course the more nuclear weapon countries you have, the greater the risk and you also have to protect those nuclear weapons [so they don't fall into the wrong hands]," Scharioth says.
Scharioth says he's grateful that the U.S. and Germany are allies. He praises the cooperative effort given the alternative.
"We believe that the Cold War was dangerous enough. We were very close to a very, very bad situation and everybody who was bearing responsibility can tell you just how close we came," Scharioth says.
The German government is reportedly concerned enough about this new threat that it is contemplating changes to its emergency response measures
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http://www.fema.gov/media/fact_sheets/nle09.shtm
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National Level Exercise 2009 (NLE 09)
National Level Exercise 2009 (NLE 09) is scheduled for July 27 through July 31, 2009. NLE 09 will be the first major exercise conducted by the United States government that will focus exclusively on terrorism prevention and protection, as opposed to incident response and recovery.
NLE 09 is designated as a Tier I National Level Exercise. Tier I exercises (formerly known as the Top Officials exercise series or TOPOFF) are conducted annually in accordance with the National Exercise Program (NEP), which serves as the nation's overarching exercise program for planning, organizing, conducting and evaluating national level exercises. The NEP was established to provide the U.S. government, at all levels, exercise opportunities to prepare for catastrophic crises ranging from terrorism to natural disasters.
NLE 09 is a White House directed, Congressionally- mandated exercise that includes the participation of all appropriate federal department and agency senior officials, their deputies, staff and key operational elements. In addition, broad regional participation of state, tribal, local, and private sector is anticipated. This year the United States welcomes the participation of Australia, Canada, Mexico and the United Kingdom in NLE 09.
EXERCISE FOCUS
NLE 09 will focus on intelligence and information sharing among intelligence and law enforcement communities, and between international, federal, regional, state, tribal, local and private sector participants.
The NLE 09 scenario will begin in the aftermath of a notional terrorist event outside of the United States, and exercise play will center on preventing subsequent efforts by the terrorists to enter the United States and carry out additional attacks. This scenario enables participating senior officials to focus on issues related to preventing terrorist events domestically and protecting U.S. critical infrastructure.
NLE 09 will allow terrorism prevention efforts to proceed to a logical end (successful or not), with no requirement for response or recovery activities.
NLE 09 will be an operations-based exercise to include: activities taking place at command posts, emergency operation centers, intelligence centers and potential field locations to include federal headquarters facilities in the Washington D.C. area, and in federal, regional, state, tribal, local and private sector facilities in FEMA Region VI, which includes the states of Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas.
EXERCISE OBJECTIVES
Through a comprehensive evaluation process, the exercise will assess prevention and protection capabilities both nationally and regionally. Although NLE 09 is still in the planning stages, the exercise is currently designed to validate the following capabilities:
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Intelligence/Information Sharing and Dissemination
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Counter-Terrorism Investigation and Law Enforcement
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Air, Border and Maritime Security
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Critical Infrastructure Protection
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Public and Private Sector Alert/Notification and Security Advisories
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International Coordination
VALIDATING THE HOMELAND SECURITY SYSTEM
Exercises such as NLE 09 are an important component of national preparedness, helping to build an integrated federal, state, tribal, local and private sector capability to prevent terrorist attacks, and rapidly and effectively respond to, and recover from, any terrorist attack or major disaster that occurs.
The full-scale exercise offers agencies and jurisdictions a way to test their plans and skills in a real-time, realistic environment and to gain the in-depth knowledge that only experience can provide. Participants will exercise prevention and information sharing functions that are critical to preventing terrorist attacks. Lessons learned from the exercise will provide valuable insights to guide future planning for securing the nation against terrorist attacks, disasters, and other emergencies.
For more information about NLE 09, contact the FEMA News Desk: 202-646-4600.
FEMA leads and supports the nation in a risk-based, comprehensive emergency management system of preparedness, protection, response, recovery, and mitigation, to reduce the loss of life and property and protect the nation from all hazards including natural disasters, acts of terrorism and other man-made disasters.
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By SIOBHAN GORMAN
WASHINGTON -- Extensive secrecy limited the effectiveness of the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance program, according to an internal review of the program completed Friday.
The review, the first comprehensive independent look at an unprecedented program that roused extensive debate during the Bush administration, also questioned the legal basis for the original program and cast doubt on some of the administration's justifications.
For the first month of its existence in October 2001, the program was running without a Justice Department legal opinion. The first legal memo for the program wasn't drafted until the following month, the report found.
See the Report
Unclassified Report on the President's Surveillance Program, July 10 (pdf)The report by the inspectors general of five government bodies involved in the program also recommended that the current version of the program, which Congress authorized last year, "should be carefully monitored."
In recent months, lawmakers in both parties have raised alarms that the program was collecting far more domestic data than intended. The Obama administration says it has added safeguards.
The report, mandated last year by Congress, assesses what it calls the "President's Surveillance Program" and says that the government's domestic spy activities extended beyond the activities acknowledged publicly by the Bush administration.
The more limited program the Bush administration publicly acknowledged, known as the Terrorist Surveillance Program, monitored without a warrant communications between the U.S. and abroad when one of the people communicating was believed to be linked to al Qaeda. The report says President George W. Bush also authorized "other intelligence activities," which it says remain highly classified.
The Wall Street Journal reported last year that the NSA's domestic-surveillance activities were far broader than previously acknowledged, monitoring huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches, as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records.
Bush officials repeatedly described the warrantless-surveillance program as critical to U.S. national security. As recently as May, former Vice President Dick Cheney said that it "prevented attacks and saved lives." He made similar arguments when advocating internally for the program, saying that a failure to approve would risk "thousands" of lives, according to the report.
The report was more equivocal. There are several cases identified by intelligence officials and documentation where information from the program "may have contributed to a counterterrorism success," the report found.
CIA officials, for example, complained that much of the data from the program was "vague and out of context," so they turned to other information sources. Data from the program would have been better used if analysts understood its full capabilities, the report said. Some officers also said they lacked legal guidance for how they could use information from the program.
Most of the leads passed on to the Federal Bureau of Investigation didn't have any connection to terrorism. Still, many officials there said the "mere possibility" of the leads that could be useful made investigating them worthwhile. The report concluded that the program "generally played a limited role in the FBI's overall counterterrorism efforts."
Analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center said the program was a "useful tool" but it was "one tool in the toolbox."
Several agencies reported that while the program produced information "of value," they had difficulty defining its precise contribution because information from it was usually combined with many other sources.
Some lawmakers who received highly classified briefings about the program before it was publicly revealed were surprised by the report's findings. Rep. Jane Harman, who was the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee at the time, said that in briefings "this was described as an extremely secret, highly useful program with sound legal underpinnings." The report, she said, "blows through" that contention.
Former NSA Director Michael Hayden, who helped start the program, said in an interview Friday that he could "point to things being disrupted as a direct result of this program." But he added that as more intelligence programs produced terrorism tips, data from the NSA program was increasingly blended with information from other sources.
The NSA program established a system of "sensors" that served as a trip wire for potential al Qaeda activity. He said the system was useful, if only to confirm there may have been less of an al Qaeda presence in the country than was initially feared.
Mr. Hayden also noted that the inspector general report didn't find any evidence of wrongdoing by intelligence officers.
The report also chronicles the internal Bush administration battles over the legality of the program.
The Justice official who drafted the initial memos was Assistant Attorney General John Yoo. His factual discussion of the "other intelligence activities" was identified by his successors at Justice in late 2003 as "insufficient" and presented a "serious impediment" to the president's re-approval of the program. Mr. Yoo had concluded that the requirement for a warrant didn't apply to the whole surveillance program because of the president's constitutional wartime powers.
The report concluded that Mr. Yoo's role -- as the single Justice Department attorney developing legal opinions -- was "inappropriate."
The Justice Department lawyers who succeeded Mr. Yoo in late 2003 believed Mr. Yoo's assertion that wartime powers trumped surveillance laws ignored the provision of a key surveillance law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allowed for surveillance without a warrant for 15 days in an emergency.
In his 2005 book "War by Other Means," Mr. Yoo wrote about the NSA program, saying that the Clinton administration also concluded that the president could use his commander in chief powers to bypass that surveillance law under certain circumstances.
For months, Justice lawyers battled the White House over the legality of the program, which had to be re-approved by the president every 45 days. Mr. Bush signed off for the first time in March 2004 over the Justice Department's protest. The president later modified or discontinued certain "other intelligence activities" that Justice lawyers had protested.
Last year, Congress approved a new surveillance law that authorized an even broader set of "unprecedented collection activities" at NSA the report concluded.
Congress is required this year to reauthorize several key sections of the USA Patriot Act, which includes surveillance measures. American Civil Liberties Union legal counsel said Congress should use that legislation to narrow the scope of NSA's surveillance operations in light of the effectiveness issues the report raises.
In preparing the report, the inspectors general interviewed many of the senior administration officials involved with the program. However, former CIA Director George Tenet, Attorney General John Ashcroft, former counsel to the vice president David Addington, and Mr. Yoo were among those who refused to be interviewed.
The report was prepared by the inspectors general of the Defense and Justice departments, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Director of National Intelligence, and the NSA. The 38-page unclassified version was made public Friday, and a more extensive classified version, in the form of five separate agency reports and a 70-page summary remains under wraps.
NSA officials referred questions to the DNI office, which called the report "important and comprehensive." It said Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair is committed to seeing that all surveillance activities comply with U.S. law and the Constitution.
Write to Siobhan Gorman at siobhan.gorman@wsj.com
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Fixing Airport Security
It's been months since the Transportation Security Administration has
had a permanent director. If, during the job interview (no, I didn't get
one), President Obama asked me how I'd fix airport security in one
sentence, I would reply: "Get rid of the photo ID check, and return
passenger screening to pre-9/11 levels."
Okay, that's a joke. While showing ID, taking your shoes off and
throwing away your water bottles isn't making us much safer, I don't
expect the Obama administration to roll back those security measures
anytime soon. Airport security is more about CYA than anything else:
defending against what the terrorists did last time.
But the administration can't risk appearing as if it facilitated a
terrorist attack, no matter how remote the possibility, so those
annoyances are probably here to stay.
This would be my real answer: "Establish accountability and transparency
for airport screening." And if I had another sentence: "Airports are one
of the places where Americans, and visitors to America, are most likely
to interact with a law enforcement officer - and yet no one knows what
rights travelers have or how to exercise those rights."
Obama has repeatedly talked about increasing openness and transparency
in government, and it's time to bring transparency to the Transportation
Security Administration (TSA).
Let's start with the no-fly and watch lists. Right now, everything about
them is secret: You can't find out if you're on one, or who put you
there and why, and you can't clear your name if you're innocent. This
Kafkaesque scenario is so un-American it's embarrassing. Obama should
make the no-fly list subject to judicial review.
Then, move on to the checkpoints themselves. What are our rights? What
powers do the TSA officers have? If we're asked "friendly" questions by
behavioral detection officers, are we allowed not to answer? If we
object to the rough handling of ourselves or our belongings, can the TSA
official retaliate against us by putting us on a watch list? Obama
should make the rules clear and explicit, and allow people to bring
legal action against the TSA for violating those rules; otherwise,
airport checkpoints will remain a Constitution-free zone in our country.
Next, Obama should refuse to use unfunded mandates to sneak expensive
security measures past Congress. The Secure Flight program is the worst
offender. Airlines are being forced to spend billions of dollars
redesigning their reservations systems to accommodate the TSA's demands
to preapprove every passenger before he or she is allowed to board an
airplane. These costs are borne by us, in the form of higher ticket
prices, even though we never see them explicitly listed.
Maybe Secure Flight is a good use of our money; maybe it isn't. But
let's have debates like that in the open, as part of the budget process,
where it belongs.
And finally, Obama should mandate that airport security be solely about
terrorism, and not a general-purpose security checkpoint to catch
everyone from pot smokers to deadbeat dads.
The Constitution provides us, both Americans and visitors to America,
with strong protections against invasive police searches. Two exceptions
come into play at airport security checkpoints. The first is "implied
consent," which means that you cannot refuse to be searched; your
consent is implied when you purchased your ticket. And the second is
"plain view," which means that if the TSA officer happens to see
something unrelated to airport security while screening you, he is
allowed to act on that.
Both of these principles are well established and make sense, but it's
their combination that turns airport security checkpoints into
police-state-like checkpoints.
The TSA should limit its searches to bombs and weapons and leave general
policing to the police - where we know courts and the Constitution still
apply.
None of these changes will make airports any less safe, but they will go
a long way to de-ratcheting the culture of fear, restoring the
presumption of innocence and reassuring Americans, and the rest of the
world, that - as Obama said in his inauguration speech - "we reject as
false the choice between our safety and our ideals."
This essay originally appeared, without hyperlinks, in the New York
Daily News.
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2009/06/24/2009-06-24_clear_common_sense_for_takeoff_how_the_tsa_can_make_airport_security_work_for_pa.html
or http://tinyurl.com/kwa2pd
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/06/fixing_airport.html
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Schneier is to security what Obama is to economic or foreign policy. :roll:
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- Pajamas Media - http://pajamasmedia.com -
Foiling the Next 9/11 and Not Even Knowing It
Posted By Ryan Mauro On July 14, 2009 @ 12:00 am In . Column2 05, . Positioning, Crime, Homeland Security, US News | 91 Comments
The United States may have narrowly missed a repeat of the 9/11 attacks in June — and, apparently, even the FBI doesn’t realize it.
On June 4, a 24-year-old Muslim man named Raed Abdhul-Rahman Alsaif was [1] arrested for trying to bring a seven-inch knife on board a U.S. Airways flight at Tampa International Airport, destined for Phoenix. The blade was seen by a screener and Alsaif was caught before he could get onto the airliner. Of course, he says he is innocent, as some forgetful friend gave him the luggage bag and failed to mention that a knife was embedded inside the material, which the criminal complaint [2] states was “artfully” concealed in such a way as to allow for it to be retrieved once the flight took off.
Alsaif graduated from the Islamic Saudi Academy in Virginia in 2003. For those that don’t remember, this school has been embroiled in a little bit of controversy the past two years. In October 2007, the U.S. Commission on International Religion Freedom [3] requested that the State Department close the school, citing the use of textbooks filled with extremism. The commission again [4] reported on the school’s radical curriculum in June 2008. One graduate has been convicted of [5] working with al-Qaeda, while two former students were [6] kicked out of Israel upon landing due to clear signs they were planning suicide bombings.
Private investigator Bill Warner [7] notes that when Alsaif was booked and photographed by police in October on his second arrest on drug charges, he had a beard — a beard that was shaven off before he attempted to board the U.S. Airways flight. For those that think this is all attributable to coincidence, there’s another key element to consider.
On the same day, June 4, two other individuals, Roshid Milledge and Damien Young, were [8] arrested in Philadelphia after sneaking a handgun onto a flight. The airline? U.S. Airways. The destination? Phoenix. The departing time? About [9] 35 minutes from the flight Alsaif attempted to board, using the same airliner and with the same destination.
The FBI immediately cast doubt on questions that the two were part of a terrorist plot or even connected to Alsaif.
“This investigation represents an isolated incident, involving only these two individuals,” the FBI press release following their arrest [8] states.
I don’t know what’s more frightening: the fact that the FBI so readily dismissed the remarkably similar arrests as unconnected, or the fact that in the latter case, the handgun actually made it on board the aircraft and the suspects were only apprehended after another passenger reported them as engaging in suspicious behavior. The aircraft was then turned around and brought back to the gates.
Luckily, the FBI does appear to have common sense and the tone has changed. A spokesperson has [10] said, “We don’t know if there is a connection, but we are checking it out.”
However, the fact remains that the FBI prematurely dismissed a possible connection, reflecting a desire to immediately squash speculation about a wider plot. Either the FBI was aware of the similarities in the arrests and deliberately misled the public, or they failed to look into other data indicating a wider conspiracy before making a conclusion. Either way, it does not reflect well upon the FBI.
The hit-or-miss Israeli website Debkafile [11] reported on July 7 that U.S. and German intelligence believes that 15-20 al-Qaeda terrorists have been trained in Pakistan and Algeria and are now hiding in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Turkey, and Egypt. Their mission, according to the report, is to hijack and bomb Western airliners headed to Israel and the United States.
Are we really to believe these three events are unrelated — the arrest of Milledge and Young, the arrest of Alsaif, and the reported warning about attacks on airliners?
The good news is that a 9/11 plot may have been thwarted. The bad news is that the public and possibly the FBI are unaware that they even have had a success, failing to connect obvious dots. If the coincidences of these cases are not addressed and if they are attributed to chance, then we’ve truly fallen out of the post-9/11 mindset and only a disaster will wake us up.
Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com
URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/foiling-the-next-911-and-not-even-knowing-it/
URLs in this post:
[1] arrested: http://www2.tbo.com/content/2009/jun/16/man-charged-trying-bring-knife-plane-tia/
[2] states: http://www.investigativeproject.org/blog/2009/06/islamic-saudi-academy-grad-held-without-bail-after-
trying.html
[3] requested: http://www.uscirf.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=88
[4] reported: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/03/17/despite-revising-islamic-history-books-saudi-academy-face
s-criticism/
[5] working with al-Qaeda: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4461642.stm
[6] kicked out of Israel: http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/2002/03/27/2002-03-27_u_s__muslim_terror_bust__mar.html
[7] notes: http://pibillwarner.wordpress.com/2009/06/17/saudi-arabian-muslim-student-raed-al-saif-at-univ-of-ta
mpa-tries-to-get-on-plane-with-7-inch-butcher-knife-in-his-carry-on-bag-the-last-name-al-saif-is-lin
ked-to-al-qaeda/%20
[8] arrested: http://philadelphia.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel09/ph060409.htm
[9] 35 minutes: http://www.billwarnerpi.com/2009/06/were-two-us-airways-planes-going-to-be.html
[10] said: http://www2.tbo.com/content/2009/jun/19/fbi-investigates-attempts-smuggle-weapons-planes/
[11] reported: http://www.debka.com/headline.php?hid=6169
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Too bad they quote DEBKA, even as disparagingly as they do-- DEBKA IMHO is lunatic fringe.
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Yes, Debka is the Weekly World News of OSINT. (Batboy joins al qaeda!)
I almost didn't post the article because it was mentioned. Still, the important point of the article was that AQ and other have and will continue to target commercial aviation for mass casualty attacks.
This isn't "the last war", this is one of the major threats we face.
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SAN DIEGO — They move north in rickety fishing boats, often overloaded and barely seaworthy, slipping through the darkness and hidden from the watchful radar of American patrols.
Federal agents said a man spotted last month paddling a surfboard north from Mexico was found to be carrying almost 25 pounds of marijuana.
Along beaches north of here, the migrants from Mexico and beyond scramble ashore, in groups of a dozen or two, and dash past stunned beachgoers, sometimes even leaving behind their boats, known as pangas. Drug smugglers, too, take this sea route, including one last month found paddling a surfboard north with a duffel bag full of marijuana on it.
As the land border with Mexico tightens with new fencing and technology, the authorities are seeing a sharp spike in the number of people and drugs being moved into the United States by sea off the San Diego coast.
Law enforcement authorities in the United States said the shift demonstrated the resolve of smugglers to exploit the vastness of the sea, the difficulty in monitoring it, and the desperation of migrants willing to risk crossing it.
“It’s like spillover from a dam,” said Cmdr. Guy Pearce, who oversees the antismuggling effort for the Coast Guard in San Diego.
For generations, people have tried to swim, surf and ride boats, sometimes carrying contraband, into the United States from south of the border.
But Commander Pearce and other officials in the Department of Homeland Security say those sporadic efforts have accelerated to unprecedented levels recently — a doubling in the number of illegal immigrants — more than 300 in the last two years — caught on boats or beaches and a sevenfold increase in maritime drug seizures, principally several thousand pounds of marijuana.
The authorities have taken note that the increase coincides with the near completion of new, more fortified border fencing along a 14-mile stretch from the ocean inland.
New smuggling rings have also emerged, operating out of beach towns south of the border and islands off the Mexican coast, convincing migrants that the passage is safe and the ocean too wide open for maritime law enforcement to catch them.
A recent patrol with the Coast Guard showed they may have a point.
All night and into the morning, the Coast Guard cutter Petrel dashed across the seas looking for suspect boats. A tip that a suspect boat was due to pass miles off the coast around 1 a.m. sent the cutter, nearly all of its lights off to avoid detection, searching by the faint glow of a half moon. The boat was not found.
Later, just after 4 a.m., a radar sweep picked up two boats moving quickly south, prompting the crew to cut off the classical music wafting from overhead speakers on a bridge lighted only by navigation monitors.
As the roaring engines sent the cutter crashing over swells for more than 20 minutes after the boats were first noticed, the crew could see the boats speeding without their lights on.
A boarding team mobilized with body armor and rifles and raced in a small craft from the cutter to check out the boats. Just early-morning fishing, said the people on the boats, who insisted they did not realize their lights were off. With no evidence of contraband, they were let go.
But Chief Petty Officer Gary Auslam, in charge on this watch, had his doubts as he watched the boats quickly motor on. Gunrunners bringing weapons from the United States move swiftly.
“Boy, they got out of here pretty quick, didn’t they?” Chief Auslam said, gazing out the bridge.
It falls mainly to the Coast Guard and the Customs and Border Protection division of the Department of Homeland Security to patrol the seas with a mix of cutters, aircraft and a few small high-speed boats.
The authorities arrested 136 illegal immigrants sneaking in by sea in the fiscal year that ended Oct. 30, double the 66 marine arrests in 2007. Since October, more than 100 illegal immigrants have been arrested, bringing the marine arrests of illegal immigrants in the past couple of years to unprecedented levels, said Michael Carney, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in San Diego who oversees a task force on marine smuggling.
The seizure of drugs, principally marijuana, has similarly skyrocketed. In the fiscal year that ended in October, the authorities seized 6,300 pounds of marijuana in the coastal waters north of the border, a sevenfold increase from the 906 pounds confiscated in 2007. This fiscal year, 6,100 pounds have been found.
“This is somewhat of an alarming trend,” Mr. Carney said. “It has opened our eyes. There is still a lot we need to learn about how these organizations operate.”
The Department of Homeland Security is responding to this surge with orders for more boats and equipment.
Generally, the flow of migrants north has slowed as the economy here has withered and the United States has bolstered patrols and fencing. But people still make the journey and the desire for drugs keeps smugglers busy.
Victor Clark Alfaro, director of the Binational Center for Human Rights in Tijuana, Mexico, who has studied smuggling, said he doubted the fence was causing the spike. Instead, Mr. Clark Alfaro said, “a new generation” of smugglers have simply had success ferrying people over the seas and are encouraging migrants to go their way. The charge is more than $4,000, roughly double what a smuggling guide would charge to lead somebody over land, he said. Marijuana smugglers, likewise, have gotten wise to the sea route.
“It’s always,” Mr. Clark Alfaro said, “a fight between technology and the ingenuity of smugglers.”
Coast Guard officials said they knew of no boats that had sunk but they worry about that prospect. In March they seized a 25-foot boat with 22 people aboard.
The biggest adversary at times, though, is the darkness.
Petty Officer First Class Pablo Mendoza picked up night-vision binoculars and scanned the horizon. When it was suggested that the equipment might offer an advantage, Petty Officer Mendoza replied, “Yeah, the problem is they have these, too.”
Crew members said they did not believe the guard or Customs and Border Protection had enough fast boats to get to suspected smuggling boats in time, though the agencies, as well as the Navy and civilian law enforcement, are making an effort to coordinate their patrols.
In the end, said Petty Officer First Class Jason Tessier, another supervisor on the Petrel, “it is a matter of being in the right place at the right time.”
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FBI, DHS Warn Police on Homegrown Terrorists
Wednesday, July 29, 2009 7:24 AM
WASHINGTON -- Antiterrorism officials are increasingly concerned about American-bred extremists who travel abroad for terror training and then return home, sometimes quietly recruiting followers over the years.
Federal authorities have issued a bulletin to law enforcement agencies around the country on the heels of the arrest Monday in North Carolina of a man whose devotion to the cause of violent jihad allegedly began 20 years ago.
The internal bulletin - reviewed by The Associated Press - says the FBI and the Homeland Security Department are very worried about the danger posed by little-noticed Americans traveling abroad to learn terrorism techniques, then coming back to the United States, where they may be dormant for long periods of time while they look for followers to recruit for future attacks.
On Monday, the FBI arrested Daniel Patrick Boyd, 39, charging he was the ringleader of a group of aspiring international terrorists.
The charges "underscore our ongoing concerns about individuals returning to the United States after training or fighting on behalf of extremists overseas," said Justice Department spokesman Richard Kolko.
"As a general matter, such individuals may be in a unique position to solicit others in the U.S. to follow their example, given their combat experience, their network of overseas contacts and their credibility among young radicals seeking an authority figure," Kolko said.
Six other suspects - including Boyd's two sons - were also charged in what prosecutors say was a long-running conspiracy to train for violence and then fight overseas.
Boyd's wife, Sabrina, said in a statement Tuesday that the charges are unsubstantiated.
"We are an ordinary family," she said. "We are decent people who care about other human beings."
The internal terrorism bulletin says Boyd is part of what investigators believe is an unsettling trend of Americans attracted to terrorist groups.
Often, such individuals are what officials call "self-recruiting," using only an Internet connection to plug into a network of like-minded people who help point them toward militant groups.
Just a week ago, federal prosecutors revealed they had in custody an American, Bryant Neal Vinas, who was raised on Long Island, N.Y., converted to Islam and traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan to train alongside senior al-Qaida operatives.
And on Monday, a Virginia man was sentenced to life in prison for joining al-Qaida and plotting to assassinate then-President George W. Bush. Authorities say he joined al-Qaida while attending college in Saudi Arabia.
The police bulletin, issued the evening after Boyd's arrest in North Carolina, also cites a case of what authorities say were aspiring terrorists in Oregon. In that case, prosecutors won a conviction of a man for trying to set up a terror training camp in 1999 in Bly, Ore.
Boyd and the others arrested Monday are not charged with planning attacks in the United States. Prosecutors say the seven men repeatedly traveled overseas hoping to engage in violence, and trained in military tactics at a private property in North Carolina.
The Boyds lived at an unassuming lakeside home in a rural area south of Raleigh and had a family-operated drywall business.
In 1991, Boyd and his brother were convicted of bank robbery in Pakistan. They were also accused of carrying identification showing they belonged to the radical Afghan guerrilla group, Hezb-e-Islami, or Party of Islam. Each was sentenced to have a foot and a hand cut off for the robbery, but the decision was later overturned.
Their wives told The Associated Press in an interview at the time that the couples had U.S. roots but the United States was a country of "kafirs" - Arabic for heathens.
Sabrina Boyd said in her statement that her husband was in Afghanistan fighting against the Soviet Union "with the full backing of the United States government."
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http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/07/31/napolitano-brings-terror-security-discussion/
Napolitano Lets the Word 'Terror' Come Out of the Closet at Homeland Security
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who drew criticism for not mentioning the word "terror" during her first appearance before Congress in February, used the term or its variants 23 times during a 30-minute speech before the Council of Foreign Relations on Wednesday.
By Joshua Rhett Miller
FOXNews.com
Friday, July 31, 2009
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says the U.S. government has not done everything it can to educate and engage the public in preventing terrorism. (AP)
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who drew criticism for not mentioning the word "terror" during her first appearance before Congress in February, has reinserted the term into her lexicon.
The former Arizona governor used the term or its variants 23 times Wednesday during a 30-minute speech before the Council of Foreign Relations in New York.
When she testified before the House Homeland Security Committee in February, Napolitano became the first homeland security director not to mention the word "terror." Her predecessor, Michael Chertoff, mentioned terrorism seven times during his address in 2005. Tom Ridge, the agency's first secretary when the department was created in 2003, uttered the word 11 times, according to an Associated Press analysis.
But Napolitano noticeably avoided the term in February, referring to acts of terrorism as "man-caused disasters" instead.
She later admitted that it was part of a larger effort to change the tone in Washington. The Obama administration has also phased out the term "War on Terror," replacing it with the less sinister "overseas contingency operation."
The switch "speaks for itself," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters in March.
"It demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur," Napolitano told the German magazine Der Spiegel.
But now, terror is back. So, what's in a name?
Asked Friday what prompted her to start saying "terror" again, Napolitano told FOX News, "I'm not really into labels. What we're talking about is the fight against terrorism in all forms, whether it comes from abroad or indeed is homegrown and what Americans can do to combat it."
She said Americans are safer than they were prior to the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, but she stressed that more work remains to be done.
"The threat of terror is always with us, we can't hermetically seal off the United States," Napolitano said. "But there are things we can do individually, locally, federally and even with international partners to make us safer."
Individually, Napolitano said Americans can always be on the lookout for unusual occurrences, like "someone taking photographs of a piece of critical infrastructure" or an unattended package left on a platform, and to report them to authorities.
"Those are the kinds of very simple things that can be done," she said. "Now we're not asking people to spy on their neighbors or do any of that sort of thing. There's a balance to be struck, but it's a careful balance and it's one that in the end, I think will make us safer."
Napolitano acknowledged an "increased presence" of homegrown extremism and called for increased cooperation on local, state and federal levels to thwart any potential attacks.
Asked whether homegrown terror risks have become a bigger threat than those overseas, Napolitano demurred.
"I don't know that you can rank them one or two," she said. "Both exist; they both must be dealt with. They are both things that we are concerned about and they're both things that we want Americans to be prepared about."
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Stratfor.com
Paying Attention to the Grassroots
By Scott Stewart and Fred Burton | August 5, 2009
Seven men accused by U.S. authorities of belonging to a militant cell appeared in U.S. District Court in Raleigh, N.C., for a detention hearing Aug. 4. The hearing turned out to be very lengthy and had to be continued Aug. 5, when the judge ordered the men to remain in government custody until their trial. The seven men, along with an eighth who is not currently in U.S. custody, have been charged with, among other things, conspiring to provide material support to terrorists and conspiracy to murder, kidnap, maim and injure persons in a foreign country.
According to the grand jury indictment filed in the case, one defendant, Daniel Boyd (also known as “Saifullah,” Arabic for “the sword of Allah”), is a Muslim convert who was in Pakistan and Afghanistan from 1989 to 1991 attending militant training camps. The indictment also states that Boyd fought in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, though we must note that, because the Soviets completed their withdrawal from Afghanistan in February 1989, it is more likely that any combat Boyd saw in Afghanistan was probably against Soviet-backed Afghan forces during the civil war waged by Islamist militants against the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (a socialist state and Soviet ally) was overthrown by Islamist forces in 1992.
Islamist veterans of that war in Afghanistan are held in reverence by some in the Muslim community, tend to be afforded a romanticized mystique, and are considered to be victorious mujahideen, or “holy warriors,” who defeated the Soviets and their communist (and atheistic) Afghan allies. The grand jury indictment implies that Boyd used the prestige of his history in Pakistan and Afghanistan to influence and recruit others to participate in militant struggles abroad. It also charges that he helped train men inside the United States to fight in battles abroad and that he helped them attempt to travel to conflict zones for the purpose of engaging in militant activities such as guerrilla warfare and terrorist operations.
An examination of the indictment in the Boyd case reveals that the facts outlined by the government allow for a large number of parallels to be drawn between this case and other grassroots plots and attacks. The indictment also highlights a number of other trends that have been evident for some time now. We anticipate that future court proceedings in the Boyd case will produce even more interesting information, so STRATFOR will be following the case closely.
Homegrown Jihadists
As STRATFOR has noted for several years now, the threat from al Qaeda and its jihadist militant spawn has been changing, and in fact has devolved to pre-9/11 operational models. With al Qaeda’s structure under continual attack and no regional al Qaeda franchise groups in the Western Hemisphere, perhaps the most pressing jihadist threat to the U.S. homeland at present stems from grassroots jihadists. This trend has been borne out by the large number of plots and arrests over the past several years, including:
A June 2009 attack against a U.S. military recruiting office in Little Rock, Ark.
A May 2009 plot to bomb Jewish targets in the Bronx and shoot down a military aircraft at an Air National Guard base in Newburgh, N.Y.
The August 2007 arrests of two men found with an improvised explosive device in their car near Goose Creek, S.C.
A May 2007 plot to attack U.S. soldiers at Fort Dix, N.J.
A June 2006 plot to attack targets in the United States and Canada involving two men from Georgia.
A June 2006 plot to bomb the Sears Tower in Chicago involving seven men from Miami.
The July 2005 arrests in Torrance, Calif., of a group of men planning to attack a list of targets that included the El Al airline ticket counter at Los Angeles International Airport, synagogues, California National Guard armories, and U.S. Army recruiting stations.
And now the organization led by Daniel Boyd.
We are listing the Boyd group as a grassroots cell because it appears to have only dated or tangential connections to the larger jihadist movement, though members of the group appear to have attempted to initiate stronger contact with other jihadist players. According to the indictment in the Boyd case, Daniel Boyd, his two sons and two other associates were largely unsuccessful in their attempts to link up with militant groups in Gaza to fight against the Israelis. One of Boyd’s associates, Hysen Sherifi, appears to have had a little more success establishing contact with militant groups in Kosovo, and another associate, Jude Kenan Mohammad, attempted to travel to camps on the Pakistani-Afghan border. (Some reports indicate that Mohammad may have been arrested in Pakistan shortly after his arrival there in October 2008, although his current whereabouts are unknown.)
A Known Quantity
Information released during the Aug. 4 detention hearing indicated that Boyd also attended training camps in Connecticut in the 1980s — an indication, perhaps, that he was then connected to the al Qaeda-linked “Brooklyn Jihad Office” (formally known as the al-Kifah Refugee Center), which trained aspiring jihadists at shooting ranges in New York, Pennsylvania and Connecticut before sending them on to fight in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
According to some reports, Boyd and his brother Charles (also a Muslim convert) were arrested in Pakistan in 1991 and charged with bank robbery. The Boyd brothers were initially sentenced by a Pakistani court to have a hand and a foot amputated as punishment, but they were pardoned by a Pakistani court in October 1991 and deported. It is not clear whether the Boyds were guilty of the bank robbery, but interestingly, in a recording introduced during the detention hearing, Boyd could be heard saying that militant operations could be financed by robbing banks and armored cars, lending credence to the charge.
Due to Boyd’s activities in Afghanistan and Pakistan he was likely known to U.S. counterterrorism officials — there were many Americans who fought as jihadists in Afghanistan but very few were blond-haired, as Boyd is, and he would have garnered additional attention. The chance of his being on the U.S. government’s radar dramatically increased due to his alleged involvement in jihadist training inside the United States and his arrest in Pakistan. It is therefore not surprising to see that Boyd had been under heavy scrutiny, and evidence produced so far appears to indicate that not only was he under electronic surveillance but the FBI had also placed at least one confidential informant within his circle of confidants, or somehow recruited one of his associates to serve as an informant.
This government scrutiny of Boyd may also explain the problems he and his co-conspirators experienced when they tried to travel to Gaza to link up with militants there. The Americans likely tipped off the Israelis. This would also explain why Boyd was questioned by American authorities twice upon his return to the United States from Israel. Boyd has been charged in the indictment with two counts of making false statements to government agents during these interviews.
Parallels
In many ways, the activities of Boyd’s group closely mirror those of the group of jihadists in New York that would go on to assassinate Rabbi Meir Kahane in Manhattan in 1990, help bomb the World Trade Center in February 1993 and attempt to attack other New York landmarks in July 1993. The members of that New York organization were very involved with firearms training inside the United States and many of them traveled overseas to fight.
It was this overseas travel (and their association with Sheikh Omar Ali Ahmed Abdul-Rahman, also known as the “Blind Sheikh”) that allowed them to link up with the nascent al Qaeda network in Afghanistan. Bin Laden and company would later assign a pair of trained operational commanders and bombmakers from Afghanistan, Abdel Basit and Ahmed Ajaj, to travel to the United States to help the New York group conduct the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
One huge difference between the Boyd case and the 1993 New York cases is the legal environment. Prior to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, there were no “terrorism” statutes concerning the use of weapons of mass destruction or acts of terrorism transcending national borders. Instead, prosecutors in terrorism cases struggled to apply existing laws. The defendants in the 1993 New York landmarks bomb-plot case were not charged with conspiring to build bombs or commit acts of international terrorism. Rather, they were convicted on the charge of seditious conspiracy — a very old statute without a lot of case law and precedent — along with a hodgepodge of other charges. This made the case extremely challenging to prosecute.
Because of cases like the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the trial of the Blind Sheikh and his co-conspirators, that legal environment has changed dramatically. As highlighted in the Boyd case, today there are not only laws pertaining to terrorist attacks that have been completed, but prosecutors now can charge defendants with providing material support to terrorists (18 USC section 2339 A), or with conspiring to kill, kidnap, maim or injure persons outside the United States (18 USC section 956 [a]).
Following 9/11, the PATRIOT Act amended many statutes in order to ease the prosecution of terrorist crimes and stop them before people were harmed. For example, the definition of “material support” in the statute (18 USC section 2339 A) was changed to include providing “expert advice or assistance” and “monetary instruments.” Such charges are far easier to prove in court than seditious conspiracy.
Before these legal changes, agents and police officers assigned to the joint terrorism task forces investigating the cases and the assistant U.S. attorneys they coordinated with needed to have all the goods on a suspect before proceeding to act on a terrorism case. (It was, quite frankly, easier to prosecute a terrorist case after the attack had been conducted, and the authorities didn’t want to risk losing the case in court. This often meant letting the conspiracy fully develop and get very close to action before authorities stepped in and interdicted the attack — a risky endeavor.) The newer terrorism laws mean that prosecutors can be far more proactive than they could be in the early 1990s, and this has allowed them to focus on prevention rather than prosecution after the fact.
One other interesting parallel between the Boyd case and the 1993 cases is the ethnic mix of militants involved in the plot. In the World Trade Center bombing, Egyptian and Palestinian jihadists worked with Pakistanis. In the follow-on July 1993 landmarks plot, there were Egyptians, Sudanese, an African-American and a Puerto Rican militant involved. In the Boyd case, we have Boyd and his sons, all Caucasian Americans, along with men from Kosovo, and Jude Kenan Mohammad, who appears to have a Pakistani father and American mother. Ethnic mixing also seems to be in play in the recent plot disrupted in Australia, where Somali militants were reputed to be working with Lebanese militants.
Ethnic mixing is not uncommon among Muslim communities in Western countries, just as Westerners tend to congregate in places like China or Saudi Arabia. Such mixing in a militant cell, then, reflects the composition of the radical Muslim community, which is a small component drawn from the overall Muslim population.
What Ifs
Because investigators and prosecutors in the Boyd case had the luxury of pursuing the prevention strategy, Boyd’s cell did not have the opportunity to develop its conspiracy to a more mature form. This has caused some commentators to downplay the potential danger posed by the cell, pointing to its inability to link up with militant groups in Gaza and Pakistan.
However, it is important to remember that, although Boyd’s cell was seemingly unable to make contact with major jihadist groups, it seems to have tried. Had it succeeded in making contact with a major jihadist group — such as al Qaeda or one of its regional franchises — Boyd’s group, like the 1993 New York cell, could have played an important part in launching an attack on U.S. soil, something the jihadists have been unable to do since 9/11. Hopefully the lessons learned from the 1993 plotters (who were also under heavy scrutiny prior to the first World Trade Center bombing) would have helped prevent the group from conducting such an attack even with outside help.
Frustration over not being able to conduct militant operations abroad appears to be another parallel with the plot recently thwarted in Australia. The Somalis and Lebanese arrested there reportedly were originally plotting to commit violence abroad. After being repeatedly thwarted, they decided instead to conduct attacks inside Australia. In some of the evidence released in the Boyd case detention hearing, Boyd could be heard saying that he would consider attacks inside the United States if he could not conduct militant operations abroad.
It is important to remember that even without assistance from a professional militant organization, Boyd and his followers were more than capable of conducting small-scale attacks that could have killed many people. In addition to the training conducted with Boyd, other members of the cell had reportedly attended a private academy in Nevada where they allegedly received training in survival, assassination, and escape and evasion.
At the time of his arrest, Daniel Boyd was carrying an FN Five-Seven pistol and his son Dylan Boyd was armed with a 9 mm pistol. According to the indictment, Boyd had purchased a rather extensive arsenal of weapons — certainly enough for the group to have conducted an armed assault-style attack. An FBI agent testified during the detention hearing that agents seized more than 27,000 rounds of ammunition (some armor-piercing) from the Boyd residence while executing a search warrant.
As STRATFOR has noted repeatedly, even seemingly unsophisticated “Kramer jihadists” can occasionally get lucky. Aggressive counterterrorism efforts since 9/11 have helped reduce the odds of such a lucky strike, but as we move further from 9/11, complacency, budget constraints and other factors have begun to erode counterterrorism programs.
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Fugitive Still Licensed to Fly by the F.A.A. Sign in to Recommend
By MATTHEW L. WALD
Published: August 18, 2009
NY Times
WASHINGTON — The Federal Bureau of Investigation is offering a $50,000 reward for a Seattle man it says is a domestic terrorist. But that has not kept him from keeping his pilot’s license or from trying to sell his airplane online, apparently because the Transportation Security Administration has not compared the F.B.I.’s wanted list with the Federal Aviation Administration’s list of licensed pilots.
6 Considered Threats Kept Licenses for Aviation (June 26, 2009) The pilot, Joseph Mahmoud Dibee, 31, was indicted with 10 other people in January 2006, in Eugene, Ore., on charges that they committed arson, destroyed an electric tower and other acts of domestic terrorism. Credit for those acts and others were claimed by two groups, the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front.
The F.B.I. says Mr. Dibee may have fled to Syria.
According to F.A.A. records, Mr. Dibee still owns a single-engine airplane, a 1977 Grumman/American Cheetah. He is also trying to sell the plane on the Internet for $39,000.
The New York Times learned that Mr. Dibee still has his license and his plane from a database processing company, Safe Banking Systems, which in June released the names of six other people with F.A.A. licenses who had been charged or convicted of terrorism crimes or otherwise were considered a threat to national security.
After the names were released, the Transportation Security Administration suspended the six licenses and said it would take steps to weed out other pilots who posed security risks from among the nearly four million names in the F.A.A.’s public database.
Last week, the Democratic and Republican leaders of the Senate Commerce Committee and its aviation subcommittee sent a letter to the Transportation Security Administration and the F. A. A. asking whether the two agencies were reconsidering which lists to use to match against the list of pilots. The letter referred to “apparent weaknesses in the existing vetting system.”
The Transportation Security Administration did not provide details on whether it is doing anything different since the disclosure of the six cases.
Laura J. Brown, a spokeswoman for the F.A.A., which rescinds licenses when told to by the Transportation Security Administration, said her agency had, in fact, revoked “several” licenses since June, though she declined to say how many.
The Transportation Security Administration has been hampered in identifying some individuals because of variations in how their names were transliterated from Arabic. For example, the list that Safe Banking Services published in June included the man in prison for blowing up Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. The man, who at the time was a licensed aircraft dispatcher, was listed on his F.B.I. wanted poster as Abdel Basset Ali Al-Megrahi, but by the F.A.A. as Abdelbaset Ali Elmegrahi.
But Mr. Dibee was born in Seattle, and the F.B.I. poster and F.A.A. records spelled his name the same way and had the same birthday for him, Nov. 10, 1967.
With such a straightforward match, David M. Schiffer, president of Safe Banking Systems, said it was “highly unlikely” that, despite assurances in June, the Transportation Security Administration was matching the publicly available F.B.I. list with the publicly available F.A.A. list.
Through Ms. Brown, the F.A.A. spokeswoman, the Transportation Security Administration said it could not comment on specific cases because it might “jeopardize ongoing investigations and/or violate the privacy rights of the individual.” Ms. Brown did not elaborate.
The Transportation Security Administration said that while it did not routinely consult the F.B.I. wanted list, it used “a more robust list that incorporates the F.B.I. list, as well as many other lists.” The agency said that it “continuously assesses vetting performance and adjusts its vetting engines accordingly.”
Congress created the Transportation Security Administration, making it part of the Homeland Security Department and responsible for reviewing the list of people holding F.A.A. licenses, after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when the F.A.A. was stripped of most security responsibility.
The four senators who sent a letter to the Transportation Security Administration and the F.A.A. last Friday were John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia and chairman of the Commerce Committee; Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, the committee’s ranking Republican member; Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota and chairman of the aviation subcommittee; and Jim DeMint of South Carolina, the subcommittee’s ranking Republican member.
The letter said the two agencies had agreed to a 90-day plan to improve their performance.
According to officials familiar with current procedure, the F.A.A. checks daily for changes to the Transportation Security Administration’s No-Fly List and Selectee Flight List, and matches that against the list of licensed pilots; and once a week, the names of new student pilots are checked against those lists. But the quality of those lists is not clear.
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I wish I could say I was surprised to read this, but I'm not.
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Pasted from the 9/11 thread:
09/11/2009
Editor's Corner
with PoliceOne Senior Editor Doug Wyllie
American cops: Force multipliers in counterterrorism
Editor's Note: I don't typically write in "first person" on this Web site. This is, in fact, the first time I’ve ever done so. One of the great pleasures of my job is that I get to talk to heroes every day. From cadets to Chiefs of Police, from the rookies to the recently retired, I’ve had the privilege of speaking with hundreds of outstanding police officers. But I don’t often get to speak with one of our country’s heroes who has hunted (and bagged) international terrorists. Fred Burton has been there and done that, and a few weeks ago I had the opportunity to spend some time with him. What follows are a few of the highlights of that conversation. I will refer back to this interview at times in the future — my intent here is merely to relate some of the wisdom he shared with me during our talk, the sum of which is this: American cops are on front lines against potential terrorist attacks on our soil.
— Doug Wyllie, PoliceOne Senior Editor
Some PoliceOne Members already know a little bit about Fred Burton through his regular columns on current counterterrorism activities both here and abroad. For those of you who don’t know his work, a little bit of historical context will go a long way.
Fred Burton began his law enforcement career in a way many police officers can relate to — a young man with the desire to help people in his community became a cop in Montgomery County, Maryland, which borders our nation’s Capitol. In the first chapter of his book, GHOST: Confessions of a Counterterrorism Agent, he writes, “I was a Maryland cop. I protected my community. I loved law enforcement, but I wanted something more.”
He applied for federal service, and the Diplomatic Security Service of the U.S. Department of State offered him a job. Before he began training for the DSS in November 1985 — around the time terrorists hijacked the Achille Lauro cruise liner — he had never even heard of the organization. By the time he retired from DSS, Fred had helped create (and then lead) the agency’s Counterterrorism Division. “Very few people have ever heard of us,” Fred writes. “My training for that work was as a street cop back when terrorism was in its infancy.”
He orchestrated the arrest of Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He investigated cases including the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the killing of Rabbi Meir Kahane, al Qaeda’s New York City bombing plots before 9/11, and the Libyan-backed terrorist attacks against diplomats in Sanaa and Khartoum. He has served his country in ways that may remain secret forever.
Today, Fred Burton is widely considered to be one of the world’s foremost authorities on terrorists and terrorist organizations. As Vice President for Counterterrorism and Corporate Security at STRATFOR, a global private intelligence company, Fred Burton leads a team of experts (with input from human intelligence sources around the world) that analyzes and forecast the most significant events and trends related to terrorism and counterterrorism.
To this day, he carries with him at all times a list of about a dozen names — handwritten into a small journal — of known actors, unidentified suspects, rogue intelligence operatives, and terrorists’ aliases or code names. When a bad guy is caught or killed, the name is scratched off the list. The number of names varies, he says, “depending on the speed of justice in the world.”
The NYPD Beat Cop Concept
Most police officers have a pretty good handle on where the “high-value targets” are in their patrol area. Many even think beyond the typical list of power plants, transportation facilities, malls, hospitals, sports complexes, rail yards, radio towers, and public buildings. But it goes way beyond even that. Burton says that agencies and officers should be aware of where the offices are whose CEOs or managers are particularly high-profile, or unexpectedly low-profile. He says that targets could be among the most innocuous-looking structures and areas.
“It’s still surprising to me the kind of blank stares I get at times — officers may know that they patrol an area that has a nuclear reactor, or that there’s a large dam. But they may not know, for example, that large oil, chemical, or gas lines run through their areas or that your suspicious person call in the vicinity of a location may be connected to those kinds of places.”
Further, Burton advises that police officers get to know the locations of the synagogues in their area of responsibility, as well as the mosques. “Have you made any effort to reach out to the Imam of the mosque or the Rabbi of that synagogue and establish some dialogue? What I sense — what I know and I’m sure you know too — is that cops are responding to their radio calls and they don’t have a lot of opportunity to get out and just develop some very granular contacts in the community. But these could turn out to be valuable information conduits.”
If you have a good avenue of communication within your various communities, he explains, they’re more apt to bring more information to your attention. “Say, for example, if they have someone — whether it’s in the jihadi community or in the right-wing Jewish extremist community — that they want to talk to you about...” Burton offers, and then allows that sentence hang in the air, unanswered.
Individuals working day-to-day in ethnically-owned private small business — from the deli to the hot dog cart to the self-storage businesses — are always good conduits of information if you really know your area of responsibility. When he visits police agencies around the country, he asks for a show of hands among the gathered group: ‘who here knows those business owners, or even where the synagogues, Jewish day care centers, or mosques are located?’
“You’ll get a hit or miss response,” he laments. “In an audience of 100 you might get 25 hands. Whether folks don’t want to respond, or what, I don’t know. But I get a sense there’s still not a lot of understanding of your different communities... where you can play a significant role in the war on terror.”
Information about all of these types of people and places has meaning — specifically it can mean the difference between an attack that’s carried out and one that’s prevented.
It’s the old beat cop principle that New York City is so famous for — knowing everything that is happening on your beat. “You really do need informational resources in the community as well as good observation skills to know what changes are taking place.”
Who’s Watching the Watchers?
Most pre-operational surveillance — such as sitting on a park bench, taking a picture, or shooting scenic video — is innocent-looking in nature and generally does not break the law. The real problem with this isn’t the legality of the activity, it’s that in too many cases, virtually no one is taking note that it’s happening. Burton says that often, no one has the mindset to wonder, ‘Why is this person taking a picture of this building?’
Worse, omong those who do make the observation, few will take the time to write it up in an intelligence report and make sure that it gets to the local Joint Terrorism Task Force for further investigation. “There may be three or four of those things that happen across a region,” Burton says, “but no one would know to make an analysis because no one bothered to send the sighting up the line.”
According to Burton, there’s a prevailing expectation among too many cops that someone else is doing that, but in fact, nobody is. “I think street cops think, ‘Well, the FBI must be doing that.’ And that’s just not the case. You know, the FBI — especially today’s FBI — they have an operating manual that’s about the size of an old Bell telephone book. They’re under a lot of bureaucratic requirements and scrutiny as to when they can talk to people and when they can’t. It takes a lot of supervisory approvals and so forth. So, your average street cop or your average detective has much more probability of running into a real terrorist than your average federal agent does. They also have the ability to just do more intelligence collection through interfacing with their area of responsibility.”
Burton contends that the thwarting of a terrorist attack is more probable at the street level than at the federal level. “I spent a lot of time with these folks across the country and I talked to a lot of different people and do a lot of speaking engagements with counter-terrorism agents. Even in the post-9/11 environment with DHS and your joint terrorism task forces with intelligence division agents and detectives — everybody kind of senses that somebody else is doing this stuff. In reality, they’re not.”
Jails: The Jihadist Jack-in-the-Box
Where would a jihadist go to cultivate new recruits? Where would he find recent converts to Islam who could easily be radicalized? Where are there large numbers of young men who feel disenfranchised and prone to violence? You’ve probably already guessed the top two places (hint: they’re not colleges and mosques). Cartels and gangs on the streets, and their related populace who live behind bars.
“You have a couple of environments that are very conducive for the recruitment for jihadist criminal activity. Obviously, one is the prison systems — more at the local and state level than the federal system because the federal system usually has folks that are put away for a good number of years due to federal sentencing guidelines. So, in essence, at the local and state levels where you see more of the recruitment of gang members as well as you get the converts to Islam, you get the captive audience that has to join the group for self-preservation phenomena.”
Burton says that there are some outstanding programs underway in some state and local corrections agencies that are beginning to develop actionable intelligence on these prisoners to garner how they’re doing recruitment. Despite these excellent efforts, there remain some “huge intelligence gaps” due to the difficulty of getting that kind of data and making sense of it. But strides are being made by extending some of the intelligence gathering activities devoted toward drug cartels and their criminal cadre who occupy our prisons.
“The other phenomena — and we see it especially when it comes to the Border — is that relationship between your various cartels and your criminal enterprises, your street gangs. Whether it’s MS-13, Barrio Aztecas, or a lot of smaller ones, you know there has to be an interface between the cartels that are pushing the dope north and the flow of weapons, stolen vehicles, and cash going south. You have that hand and glove interface there.”
Case in Point: A Successful Model
At the center of the successful take-down of a grassroots jihadist cell in May are some of the very things Burton discussed with PoliceOne:
1. among these homegrown terrorists, only one was reared as a Muslim — the other three converted to Islam in prison
2. relatively ordinary local synagogues were among the terrorists’ intended targets (the other target was a U.S. military transport aircraft)
3. one well-placed informant in a mosque was the conduit of information to law enforcement
4. the would-be terrorists used cameras bought at Wal-Mart to photograph their targets, doing their pre-operational surveillance in the open
5. vigilant observation of the suspects — and information being quickly passed to federal agents — led to the successful prevention of an attack
Of course, we’re talking about the Newburgh plot. In STRATFOR’s excellent analysis of the failed plot, Burton and his team write that “with an informant in place, the task force in charge of tracking the Newburgh plotters most likely constructed an elaborate surveillance system that kept the four men under constant watch during the investigation and sting operation, using technical surveillance of their residences and potential targets.”
Having the ability to closely observe the group’s communications and movements, STRATFOR estimated, law enforcement officials were able to gain control over the group’s activities to such a degree that they felt confident in letting the plotters plant a 37-pound inert explosive device in the trunk of a car outside of Riverdale Temple and two similarly harmless bombs outside the Riverdale Jewish Center, a synagogue a few blocks away.
There’s one other element to the Newburgh plot that Burton discussed with PoliceOne, and it’s as esoteric as it is concrete. The suspects told their arresting officers that they “wanted to commit jihad” because they were “disturbed about what happened in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
Going Home... Eyeing the Horizon
Burton was recently invited to do a presentation on terrorism for his old PD, Montgomery County Police. “I guess it was about 250 police officers, and they had invited the U.S. Park Police and ICE and ATF... it was good going back and having an opportunity to talk to my old department.”
Among the things Burton said to the group is something he tries to talk about wherever he goes — that police officers are so focused on the day-to-day of patrol that they sometimes fail to recognize how the events which take place abroad can impact security here in the States.
“Whether that is a Mumbai attack or the current saber-rattling between Israel and Iran, they don’t put it in a domestic perspective. Meaning, ‘how does this international event resonate here? What are the possible ramifications to us here on my beat and in my city?’ I talk to a lot of police officers and what I see is that once you start talking about this issue, they clearly get it then and recognize that it’s important.”
Burton says that once the international trigger incident occurs, it is way too late to go back and start laying the foundations to those relationships and making those intelligence inroads. The “quiet times” on patrol are the best times for doing security surveys at those facilities, or establishing liaison with the owner of those properties. He asks, “Have you done a walk-through when you’ve got some down time to know these sites in case you’re called for an active shooter that takes place at this location?”
Just one example from which you can choose — among the topics he covers at STRATFOR — Burton points to the tensions between Iran and Israel right now. “Whether or not Israel is going to conduct a preemptive strike on Iran is a topic that we discuss here every day. That event, in the event that it occurs, will significantly resonate here in the United States. One: does your average police officer recognize that? And two: you’ll be in a much better position if you already know within your area of responsibility those Jewish-owned, multi-national Jewish schools, synagogues, as potential target sites and you’ve made an effort to establish contact with all of them. Because that brings you to the new phenomena of your lone-wolf jihadi and how in all probability — again, back to your street officer — your street officer is going to be the most probable interface between the victim and the perpetrator.”
Counterterrorism Force Multipliers
Burton states with conviction that police officers in the United States are at the front line of the preemption of a terrorist attack on our soil. He adds that strictly from a data-collection perspective — and all police officers are data-collectors — cops are “our best eyes and ears for detecting pre-operational surveillance by anybody. If you could marshal those assets nationally, from sea to shining sea, you could have a much better picture of events from a real-time surveillance perspective than we currently do.”
The good news, he says, is that America’s cops are a counterterrorism force multiplier, especially when you’re entering into times of heightened concern.
The bad news is chillingly simple: “Based on my investigations and the kind of work I’ve done in the past, once that suicide bomber starts rolling toward target they’re going to be about 95 to 97 percent successful in carrying out their mission and killing somebody.”
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A veteran of more than ten years in online and print journalism, Doug Wyllie was writing about digital music before Napster, streaming video before YouTube, and wireless technology since the original Palm Pilot debuted. As senior editor of PoliceOne, Doug is responsible for the editorial direction of the PoliceOne website. In addition to his editorial and managerial responsibilities, Doug writes on a broad range of topics and trends that affect the law enforcement community.
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http://michellemalkin.com/2009/09/11/special-report-how-obama-cronyism-threatens-rail-security/?print=1
Special report: How Obama cronyism threatens rail security
By Michelle Malkin • September 11, 2009 07:29 AM
How Obama cronyism threatens rail security
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2009
New Delhi. Mumbai. Chechnya. Madrid. London. The question isn’t whether America will suffer a jihadi attack on our passenger rail lines, but when. So, why has President Obama neutered the nation’s most highly-trained post-9/11 counterterrorism rail security team?
All signs point to business-as-usual cronyism and pandering to power-grabbing union bosses.
Amtrak’s Office of Security Strategy and Special Operations (OSSSO) grew out of a counterterrorism and intelligence unit developed by the Bush administration in the wake of global jihadi attacks on mass transit systems. The office was staffed with Special Forces veterans, law enforcement officers, railroad specialists, other military personnel, and experts who collectively possessed hundreds of years of experience fighting on the front lines against terrorism. Each member underwent at least 800 hours of rail security-related training, including advanced marksmanship, close quarters, and protective security exercises.
OSSSO’s mobile prevention teams acted as “force multipliers” working with local, state, and federal authorities across the country to detect, deter, and defend against criminal and terrorist attacks on mass transit. They conducted hundreds of show-of-force, uniformed, and rail marshal rides.
OSSSO also provided security services for President Bush, the Pope, the 2008 Democrat and Republican conventions, then-Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s campaign events, and then-Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden’s Amtrak whistle stop tours. The counterterrorism unit’s push to conduct random passenger and baggage screening earned predictable criticism from civil liberties absolutists, but also garnered bipartisan praise on Capitol Hill. Even Democrat Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas hailed the rail security team’s work last year:
“Let me congratulate them for being aware” of the threat to rail passengers, the chairman of a House Homeland Security subcommittee on transportation security, told USA Today in July 2008. “(But) this has to be the new standard for Amtrak.”
How will Congress react to the news that this high standard has been obliterated?
According to multiple government sources who declined to be identified for fear of retribution, OSSSO’s East Coast and West Coast teams have not worked in a counterterrorism capacity since the summer. Their long-arms were put under lock and key after the abrupt departures of Amtrak vice president for security strategy and special operations Bill Rooney and Amtrak Inspector General Fred Weiderhold.
Weiderhold played an instrumental role in creating OSSSO’s predecessor at Amtrak, the Counter-Terrorism Unit (CTU). He tapped Rooney to oversee the office. But Rooney was quietly given the “thank you for your service” heave-ho in May and Weiderhold was unexpectedly “retired” a few weeks later — just as the government-subsidized rail service faced mounting complaints about its meddling in financial audits and probes.
As I reported in June, Weiderhold had blown the whistle on intrusion of Amtrak’s Law Department into his financial audits and probes. A damning, 94-page report from an outside legal firm concluded that the “independence and effectiveness” of the Amtrak inspector general’s office were “being substantially impaired” by the Law Department – which happens to be headed by Eleanor Acheson, a close pal of Vice President Biden.
Biden, in turn, is tight with the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), the powerful union that represents the Amtrak Police Department. According to OSSSO sources, the APD brass have been aggrieved over the non-unionized counterterrorism unit’s existence from its inception. A West Coast OSSSO team member told me that union leaders blocked police credentialing efforts by his office for more than a year. An East Coast OSSSO team member told me that the FOP recently filed a grievance against one of its counterterrorism officers for assisting a train conductor who asked for help in ejecting a ticketless passenger.
Unlike the highly-specialized officers at OSSSO, APD officers possess minimal counterterrorism training. Past studies show alarmingly low pass rates among APD patrolmen who have attended undergone basic special operations classes, according to government sources. The Amtrak FOP continues to squabble over turf with the rival Teamsters Union; its leaders can’t even agree on minimal physical fitness standards for its members that have yet to be implemented. Nevertheless, OSSSO is now under the command and control of the APD — and federal stimulus funding specifically earmarked for the counterterrorism unit has now been absorbed by the police department.
Amtrak did not respond to my questions about OSSSO by my column deadline Thursday afternoon.
Al Qaeda operatives have repeatedly plotted to wreak havoc on our mass transit systems. And they will try, try again. American jihadi Bryant Neal Vinas recently gave the feds details about a plot blow up a Long Island Rail Road commuter train in New York’s Penn Station. As America marks the September 11 anniversary and the “Never forget” mantra echoes, an OSSSO team member told me: “There is no room for internal protectionism, vested interests of unions, or asset-manipulating bureaucracies where the safety of our national passenger railroad is concerned.”
Does anyone else in Washington agree?
***
The RAND Corporation conducted an internal review of the Amtrak Police Department’s deficiencies in counterterrorism training, and made the following observations:
Although APD officers receive police training, they do not receive special counterterrorism training either as part of their initial training or in training activities after they join the APD. The lack of counterterrorism training might explain why every APD officer interviewed indicated that he or she saw no fundamental difference between police and counter-terror work.
(By counterterrorism training, we refer to knowledge and skills to conduct counter-surveillance, special training to respond to chemical, biological, radiation, and nuclear threats and familiarization with attack methods that might involve the use of these types of weapons, profiling techniques to identify suspicious behaviors, knowledge about protocols for security information sharing, and awareness of how to work with Federal Government agencies and other entities involved in counterterrorism.)
…Moreover, there are no metrics in the Amtrak Security Threat Level Response Plan against which to monitor compliance or to gauge the effectiveness of prescribed countermeasures. There are no performance metrics for the divisional security coordinators program either. RAND’s review of Amtrak security documents and interview responses also did not find any explicit criteria guiding the selection of additional or alternative countermeasures or shifts in response levels within the system. It was, thus, not clear what would guide the Chief of Amtrak Police’s decisions on these matters. In this connection, it is also not clear how management would know with high confidence that the response posture chosen by APD translates into reduced vulnerability for Amtrak….
***
Major Observations
Recruitment and retention issues severely impede capacity building for security preparedness
Counter-terrorism training for APD officers is inadequate
Deployment options for APD officers are impaired by jurisdictional and work rules issues
Close corporate oversight of APD is lacking
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Queens terror raids part of FBI probe into Denver-based cell plotting attack on 9/11 scale
BY James Gordon Meek In Washington AND Rocco Parascandola AND Larry Mcshane In New York
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
Updated Tuesday, September 15th 2009, 12:47 PM
The massive FBI probe that triggered raids in Queens is focused on a Denver-based terror cell plotting another attack on the scale of 9/11, the Daily News learned Tuesday.
Hundreds of FBI agents are on the ground in Colorado, conducting round-the-clock surveillance on five suspects - including a man who recently visited Queens, sources told The News.
New York authorities searched three Flushing apartments and detained several men - later released - after getting a warrant to look for bomb-making components, explosive powders and fuses.
"The FBI is seriously spooked about these guys planning another 9/11," a former senior counterterrorism official told the News. "This is not some ... FBI informant-driven case. This is the real thing."
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly told reporters it's an ongoing investigation with plenty of "substance."
The 24-7 counterterror operation included Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants used to intercept calls and e-mails, as well as overseas-linked wiretaps to eavesdrop on Arabic and Pashto-speaking targets.
Sources said the investigation's targets are Afghans - an unusual development. Al Qaeda prefers Arabs and Pakistanis as there overseas operatives.
FBI officials are furious at Kelly over Monday's raids because the NYPD seemed intent on scaring off the cell - which is believed to be plotting a New York attack.
The FBI hoped to wait and determine what the Colorado cell was planning.
Two other sources confirmed the FBI-NYPD rift. An investigator involved in the case said Kelly prefers to "act too soon rather than act too late."
NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said it is "an utter fabrication that the FBI is furious with Kelly or that Kelly fought to shut down the action early."
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2009/09/15/2009-09-15_queens_terror_raids_part_of_fbi_probe_into_denverbased_cell_plotting_attack_on_9.html?print=1&page=all#ixzz0RChXmFKt
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http://hotair.com/archives/2009/09/15/report-nyc-terror-plot-wasis-on-scale-of-911/
Report: NYC terror plot was/is on scale of 9/11
posted at 7:05 pm on September 15, 2009 by Allahpundit
Not sure what that means — were the Madrid bombings, for instance, “on the scale of 9/11″? — but an awful lot of people in the know are scrambling. Combine this with that ominous Journal piece from last night and it sure sounds like someone’s worried about WMD, probably of the chemical variety given the FBI warnings to cops about foul odors and large window fans.
Hundreds of FBI agents are on the ground in Colorado, conducting round-the-clock surveillance on five suspects - including a man who recently visited Queens, sources told The News…
“The FBI is seriously spooked about these guys planning another 9/11,” a former senior counterterrorism official told the News. “This is not some … FBI informant-driven case. This is the real thing.”…
The 24-7 counterterror operation included Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants used to intercept calls and e-mails, as well as overseas-linked wiretaps to eavesdrop on Arabic and Pashto-speaking targets.
Sources said the investigation’s targets are Afghans - an unusual development. Al Qaeda prefers Arabs and Pakistanis as there [sic] overseas operatives.
The Post IDs the Colorado suspect as an Afghan known as “Najibullah” and claims that he trained with Al Qaeda. Could be that AQ wants to put an Afghan stamp on the next attack to frame it as some sort of reprisal for the U.S. occupation, but that’s just me guessing. As for how he got away, it seems we jumped too soon:
The FBI, meanwhile, is furious with the NYPD for bungled intelligence gathering that tipped off Najibullah that he was under surveillance, sources said.
Federal agents working with the Joint Terrorism Task Force asked their NYPD counterparts to discreetly gather intel on Najibullah.
Rather than slyly contact their list of sources and informants the NYPD canvassed the suspect’s old Flushing neighborhood and flashed around his picture.
Eventually the imam of the Masjid Hazrat Abu Bakr Islamic Center learned of the investigation and contacted the man’s family to let them know that he was subject of a law enforcement inquiry.
Great work, imam. You’re a true patriot. No arrests so far, no bomb materials recovered. Where do they go from here?
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/nyregion/16terror.html?_r=1&hp
Man in Queens Raids Denies Any Terrorist Link
KAREN ZRAICK and DAVID JOHNSTON
Published: September 15, 2009
A Colorado man whose visit to New York apparently set off government raids on several Queens apartments on Monday has denied having ties to al Qaeda or any other terrorist group.
Terrorism Task Force Raids Queens Apartments (September 15, 2009) “I have nothing to do with this,” said the man, Najibullah Zazi, 25, who was reached by telephone in Colorado on Monday and Tuesday. “This looks like it’s going toward me, which is more shocking every hour.”
Law enforcement authorities have not divulged the man’s identity, but they confirmed that he was suspected of having al Qaeda ties and was already under surveillance for that reason.
The man whom officials were watching left New York last weekend, according to officials who have knowledge of the raids but were not authorized to discuss them. No arrests were made and no explosives or weapons were found.
Representative Peter T. King of Long Island said agents of the city’s Joint Terrorism Task Force “acted very appropriately” in carrying out the raids.
“It was based on the totality of the evidence, and from what I understand of the evidence, it was important that they acted when they did,” Mr. King said. “I am positive they did the right thing.”
Federal authorities regarded the man to be a legitimate terrorist suspect who had become the focus of intense investigation and elaborate covert surveillance before his trip to New York, according to government officials briefed on the case.
The man’s arrival last Thursday appeared to be the event that prompted authorities to stop his car near the George Washington Bridge and then carry out the searches that began late Sunday night — based on federal search warrants drafted during a frantic weekend in which prosecutors in New York and Washington hastily assembled the necessary legal documents. Officials said they decided to disrupt any plot that might have been imminent, but the raid came before investigators understood the suspect’s intentions, according to several federal officials. Because there were no arrests, officials have been left to assert that they acted out of an abundance of caution.
But several said the raids were carried out well before investigators had a prosecutable case, and before they had figured out the nature of the plot, its intended target or its likely means of execution — if there was a plot at all.
Several federal officials said they were persuaded that the case was an important one and had been moving in a significant direction, but was prematurely brought to a close at the urging of police officials in New York.
Mr. Zazi said on Tuesday that he was contacting a lawyer, but he invited the F.B.I. to question him.
“I was hoping they’d come question me, give me a chance to question them, ask, ‘Why are you following me?’ ” said Mr. Zazi. “If they want to investigate, they can.”
He said he left Aurora, Colo., in a rented car and headed to New York to try to resolve an issue with a coffee cart that he said his family is licensed to operate in Lower Manhattan. A spokeswoman for the New York City health department could not confirm if the man or his father operated a mobile food cart.
Mr. Zazi said he was stopped at the George Washington Bridge by the authorities, who briefly detained him and searched his car. A city official confirmed that officers stopped a man at the bridge and searched his car, and that “everything was clean.” The official could not say what prompted the stop.
Mr. Zazi said he thought the police might be profiling him or suspected him because he has a beard and had rented the car. The next day, he said he thought his car had been stolen, but the police told him it had been towed. The following day, he said, he noticed he was being followed and called the police twice to complain.
Finally, he said, he cut short his stay in New York, deciding to fly back to Colorado on Saturday.
“It was too much for me,” Mr. Zazi said. “I said, ‘I can’t stay here, even for a minute.’ ”
A relative of Mr. Zazi’s who lives in Aurora, Colo., Abdul Jaji, said he has “never seen anything wrong” with Mr. Zazi, and that he works 16-hour days as an airport shuttle driver. He added that Mr. Zazi traveled last year to Peshawar, Pakistan, where his wife lives, and stayed there four months.
It was not known who ordered the searches, but it was evident that that decision worsened the sometimes-quarrelsome relations between the New York Police Department and the F.B.I.
Evidence uncovered as part of the investigation and raids prompted the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security to issue a bulletin to law enforcement agencies around the country, warning them to be vigilant about homemade explosives, officials said.
The bulletin said the two agencies had no specific information on the timing, location, or target of any planned attack. But it noted that chemicals used to form hydrogen-peroxide-based explosives can be found at places like hardware stores and pharmacies, and that recipes for such explosives are easily obtainable.
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said Tuesday that while “there was enough substance” in the intelligence gathered to result in search warrants for the raids, the city was not under an imminent threat.
At one raid site, a fifth-floor apartment on 41st Avenue, a tenant, Naiz Khan, spoke of Mr. Zazi, who stayed overnight there on Thursday. He said that he had barely spoken with Mr. Zazi on his recent visit but that they had been closer when they were students at Flushing High School. He said he was committed to helping the F.B.I.
“Anything they need, I will help them out,” Mr. Khan said on Tuesday, standing amid a messy jumble of belongings. “It’s my responsibility.”
Al Baker and William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting from New York and Dan Frosch from Aurora, Colo.
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http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2009/09/16/2009-09-16_fbi_unit_set_for_more_antiterror_raids_in_queens_sources_fears_of_madridstyle_su.html?print=1&page=all
FBI unit set for more anti-terror raids in Queens; Fears of Madrid-style subway bombings - sources
By James Gordon Meek In Washington and Rocco Parascandola, Alison Gendar and Larry Mcshane In New York
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
Updated Wednesday, September 16th 2009, 3:28 PM
Fearful of a Madrid-style subway train bombing, authorities are poised to make more raids to seize bomb-making materials at locations in Queens, sources said Wednesday.
The FBI's elite Hostage Rescue Team arrived in New York in anticipation of the offensive to thwart a Denver-based terror cell with ties to Al Qaeda, police sources told the Daily News.
Another source said an earlier raid uncovered nine backpacks and cell phones, raising memories of the March 2004 bombings in Madrid.
A series of terrorist bombs detonated aboard commuter trains killed 191 people. The source said authorities feared a potential attack on the city subway, with its 5.2 million daily riders.
FBI Director Robert Mueller, speaking at a Senate hearing Wednesday, said the plot posed "no imminent danger."
"New Yorkers are well benefited from the work of the NYPD and (Commissioner) Ray Kelly," said Mueller, offering no other details on the HRT deployment.
Najibullah Zazi, the Colorado man who triggered a rash of Queens raids Monday, was identified through e-mail, wire taps and a confidential informant as part of the plot, the source said.
Zazi, 25, told The News he had nothing to do with any terrorist activity.
"No. Of course, I'm not a terrorist," the 25-year-old Afghan national said Tuesday.
A source said Zazi, tipped while visiting Manhattan last weekend that he was under surveillance, fled back to suburban Denver.
Even as Zazi, of Aurora, Colo., professed his innocence, counterterrorism agents eyed him as part of the first suspected Al Qaeda cell they've uncovered in the U.S. since 9/11.
A bearded and barefoot Zazi, standing in the doorway of his apartment, said he's a hard-working airport shuttle driver who is married and lives with his elderly parents in the Denver suburb.
"I didn't know anything about who was following me," Zazi said of reports he is under surveillance by the FBI.
He confirmed driving to New York last week to visit friends, but denied involvement in any Al Qaeda bomb plot or terror cell.
Zazi was stopped at the George Washington Bridge on his way into the city, sources told The News. Authorities later seized his rental car from a Queens street, sources said.
In the car, sources said the feds found documents and papers about bomb-making and bombs. The massive federal response was "an indication of just how serious a threat they see this as," said Frances
Townsend, a former counterterrorism adviser to ex-President George W. Bush.
Zazi remained under constant surveillance Tuesday, the sources said.
Zazi said he and his newly hired lawyer plan to hold a press conference Wednesday.
FBI officials would not comment on The News' report that Zazi is indeed the target of their ongoing probe.
Scores of FBI agents inundated Denver Tuesday as they closed the noose on what sources say is a five-man cabal with ties to World Trade Center mastermind Osama Bin Laden's terrorist group.
One of the suspects, purportedly Zazi, recently had returned home from a trip abroad to Pakistan, where the U.S. believes a significant number of Al Qaeda's leaders live, sources said.
Multiple sources told The News the FBI believes it had uncovered an Al Qaeda cell for the first time since 9/11, prompting the unprecedented response.
"The FBI is seriously spooked about these guys," a former senior counterterrorism official told The News. "This is not some ... FBI informant-driven case. This is the real thing."
Zazi, seen last week praying and chatting with other worshipers at the Masjid Hazart Abubakr Islamic Center in Queens, was one of the quintet under intense scrutiny, sources said.
Known around the mosque as "Naji," he ran a coffee and doughnut cart in Manhattan before moving to Colorado earlier this year.
"I left New York because it's hard to live there; the rent is too expensive," said Zazi, who was born in eastern Afghanistan and moved here as a child.
His Queens home was in the same Flushing neighborhood where FBI agents swarmed into three apartments Monday, bashing down doors and carrying search warrants seeking bomb-making materials.
"I didn't know what he was up to," said mosque President Abdulrahman Jalili, 58, after he was contacted by the FBI about Zazi. "Islam is against terrorism. It is a religion of peace."
Red flags about an impending attack went up last week when Zazi visited with several people in a single day, combined with worrisome information collected from wiretaps, sources said.
The Queens apartment raids were triggered by the Denver investigation, Zazi's New York visit and the timing of the upcoming UN General Assembly.
New York authorities also detained several men - later released - in a hunt for bomb-making components, explosive powders and fuses.
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said unspecified material was seized from the apartments and shipped for analysis.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2009/09/16/nyc-terror-plot-fbi-fears-madrid-style-attack-on-subways-planning-more-raids/
NYC terror plot: FBI fears Madrid-style attack on subways, planning more raids
posted at 7:23 pm on September 16, 2009 by Allahpundit
I was thinking today that this story is an object lesson in how utterly useless the color-coded terror warning system is. Major plot, Al Qaeda cell, hundreds of FBI agents scrambling, no arrests made or bomb materials yet found, and more raids on the way. If this isn’t a code red, nothing is.
Note well: So convinced were the feds that these guys are dangerous that they had their hostage team in the city, ready for action in case the raids turned ugly.
The FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team arrived in New York in anticipation of the offensive to thwart a Denver-based terror cell with ties to Al Qaeda, police sources told the Daily News.
Another source said an earlier raid uncovered nine backpacks and cell phones, raising memories of the March 2004 bombings in Madrid…
Najibullah Zazi, the Colorado man who triggered a rash of Queens raids Monday, was identified through e-mail, wire taps and a confidential informant as part of the plot, the source said…
Zazi was stopped at the George Washington Bridge on his way into the city, sources told The News. Authorities later seized his rental car from a Queens street, sources said.
In the car, sources said the feds found documents and papers about bomb-making and bombs.
The Daily News claims the cell is comprised of five men but I don’t know how that squares with the detail about nine backpacks. In fact, if you believe ABC News, it was actually 14 backpacks that were found. Remember: It only took four to kill 52 people in the London bombings of 2005. Exit question: Do they really not have enough to arrest Zazi? E-mails and wiretaps and an informant and bomb-making instructions and a cross-country drive to NYC: Seems like there’s a conspiracy and an overt act in there somewhere. Maybe they let him go in hopes that he’ll do something stupid like contacting other members of the cell, against whom the evidence might momentarily be weak. If you want to see him wearing a sh*t-eating grin and denying everything, follow the ABC link and watch the embedded video.
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http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=8618732
Terror Suspect's Computer Said to Show Sports Stadiums, Fashion Sites
Officials Report Denver Man Sent Texts Suggesting Attack Coming; 'Wedding Cake' Is Ready
By RICHARD ESPOSITO, BRIAN ROSS and CLAYTON SANDELL
Sept. 19, 2009—
A computer belonging to alleged al Qaeda suspect Najibullah Zazi showed he had researched baseball and football stadiums and sites used in the recent Fashion Week event in New York City, law enforcement officials tell ABCNews.com.
Zazi, 24, had been scheduled to spend a fourth day today being questioned by the FBI but his lawyer, Arthur Folsom, canceled the session.
"He has taken the day to consult with his client," said Wendy Aiello, a spokeswoman for the lawyer.
Zazi is not in custody, she said.
While officials say they do not know the targets of the alleged plot, the contents of Zazi's computer are considered a valuable insight into what he might have been planning.
After first denying any ties to al Qaeda, Zazi has now admitted certain ties developed during trips to Pakistan, law enforcement officials told ABCNews.com.
The officials said text messages sent by Zazi suggest the plot was nearing the attack phase. One message said the "wedding cake is ready," which authorities say may have been code to indicate the attack was ready. Al Qaeda operatives have frequently used references to weddings to disguise planned terror attacks.
Zazi's lawyer, Arthur Folsom, said his client was cooperating fully with the FBI during his long interrogation sessions. Folsom told ABCNews.com "no deal has been offered," but authorities say Zazi is preparing a "proffer" of information he would be prepared to testify about as part of a plea negotiation.
Zazi's computer was copied, or "mirrored," by FBI agents last weekend without Zazi's knowledge. His lawyer said the agents probably made the copy after towing away Zazi's car on an purported parking violation. The computer was in the car, and Zazi told his lawyer he discovered it had been tampered with when he retrieved the car at a police lot.
Authorities who have been briefed on elements of the alleged plot said it was a "varsity level" plan similar in scope to the 2005 attacks on London's subways and busses.
A recipe for homemade explosives found on Zazi's computer would have produced a bomb of the same size and type used in London, authorities said.
The suicide bombers in London used backpacks and plastic containers to carry the explosive mixtures.
Raids in New York led to the discovery of 14 new backpacks.
FBI agents in New York, Denver and other U.S. locations are "working around the clock" on the investigation, according to Attorney General Eric Holder.
The New York Daily News reported Saturday that seven New York men with ties to Zazi had unsuccessfully attempted to rent a large rental truck on Sept. 10, the day before Zazi arrived from Denver.
This story has been updated with information from Najibullah Zazi's lawyer.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2009/09/21/fbi-active-terror-cell-aimed-at-real-deal-nyc-attack/
FBI: Active terror cell aimed at “real deal” NYC attack
posted at 1:36 pm on September 21, 2009 by Ed Morrissey
Two new reports from ABC and the Washington Post underscore the “real deal” nature of the al-Qaeda terror cell uncovered this month in a flurry of arrests and search warrants. Sources within the investigation now claim that Najibullah Zazi left his fingerprints all over evidence that points to a terrorist attack, which may account for his reported flirtation with a plea bargain. Others tell ABC that they haven’t yet identified all the plotters:
Investigators said they found notes describing how to make bombs in the handwriting of an airport shuttle driver arrested as part of a terrorism investigation, and they also discovered his fingerprints on materials — batteries and a scale — that could be used to make explosives.
The emerging details show that Najibullah Zazi, who has admitted receiving weapons training from al-Qaeda, played a direct role in an alleged terror plot, authorities said in court documents released Sunday. …
The FBI said it found images of nine pages of handwritten notes on a laptop containing formulas and instructions for making a bomb, detonators and a fuse.
Zazi told the FBI that he must h ave unintentionally downloaded the notes as part of a religious book he downloaded in August. Zazi said he “immediately deleted the religious book within days of downloading it after realizing that its contents discussed jihad.” However, an arrest affidavit says the handwriting on the notes appeared to be Zazi’s. The affidavit doesn’t mention that they were part of a book, but that they were e-mailed as an attachment between accounts believed owned by Zazi in December, including an account that originated in Pakistan.
“It appeared to be consistent with the handwriting as it appeared in the document,” an FBI agent wrote of comparisons of Zazi’s handwriting with the notes.
In addition, agents found Zazi’s fingerprints on a scale and double-A batteries seized during a raid at a home in the New York City borough of Queens on Sept. 14.
Zazi’s legal team denies that it discussed a plea bargain last week, but they may not have a lot of choice. If the FBI sources are correct about this evidence, it will be very difficult for Zazi to argue to a jury of New Yorkers that plans for bombs from his e-mail as well as equipment for making them just wound up with his fingerprints by mistake. Zazi isn’t OJ Simpson, and this won’t be a Los Angeles celebrity trial.
ABC offers this less optimistic update:
After overnight arrests this weekend in the alleged New York terror plot, FBI agents believe an active terror cell directed by al Qaeda was preparing an attack on New York City, and authorities say they have yet to identify everyone involved.
Officials say they do not have specifics on the potential targets of the alleged plot, and with so much still unknown, security in New York has been heightened.
A familiar face has joined the defense team for one of the arrested suspects:
Also arrested this weekend was Ahmed Afzali, who was apprehended in his Queens, NY home and charged with making false statements to federal agents. He is alleged to have falsely told authorities that he didn’t tell the Zazis he had been asked by officials about them.
Afzali’s attorney Ron Kuby told ABC News that his client, a respected imam at a Queens, NY mosque who had worked as a source for law enforcement in the past, was doing what authorities asked him to do.
“It was the government that went to him and said we need to know the whereabouts of Najibullah Zazi,” Kuby said. He said that Afzali then reached out to others to find Zazi, located and spoke to him, and then “duly reported this to the FBI.”
“Now the FBI claims he didn’t report everything, or he stated some details of the conversation wrong, so they arrest him,” Kuby said. ” So this is his reward for being a good member of the community.”
Kuby was a protege of William Kunstler, who made his reputation by defending radicals in the 1960s and 1970s. It doesn’t surprise me to see Kuby on the defense in this case. At the very least, the defendants will not be able to claim that they didn’t get adequate representation.
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http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=8642956
Officials Worry NY Terror Plot 'Still Alive' as Case Broadens
Surveillance Teams "Stretched Thin" with More Than 24 Possible Suspects
By RICHARD ESPOSITO and BRIAN ROSS
Sept. 22, 2009—
Law enforcement officials say the alleged terror plot against New York City may be "still alive" despite the arrest of its alleged ringleader, 24-year-old Najibullah Zazi of Denver, Colorado.
"I have never been so worried," said one senior law enforcement official with more than a dozen years of experience in counter-terrorism investigations.
CLICK HERE FOR COMPLETE COVERAGE OF THE NEW YORK TERROR PLOT AND OTHER TERRORISM STORIES.
In Washington, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin to law enforcement authorities urging vigilance at so-called "soft targets" including sports stadiums and luxury hotels.
ABCNews.com reported Monday that Zazi's computer contained information relating to New York area baseball and football stadiums and a video of Grand Central Terminal in New York.
Earlier, the FBI and Homeland Security had warned police about possible attacks on mass transit targets but said there was no evidence of any specific target or timing.
Law enforcement authorities tell ABCNews.com that more than 24 men in New York have been under watch at various times since Zazi's trip to the city on September 11.
One official said local and federal surveillance teams are "stretched thin" as authorities seek to track a group of young men allegedly recruited by Zazi following his return from an al Qaeda training camp in Pakistan in January.
Click here to watch Zazi denying al Qaeda ties to television cameras.
Officials said some of the initial subjects had "washed out" but that others had emerged as "possible players."
Click here to watch Zazi returning home after a day of questioning.
Officials told ABCNews.com that Zazi had organized three distinct teams of four men each and that the investigation had led to more than ten others.
"This investigation is going forward aggressively," New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said Tuesday. "We are doing everything we can to protect the city."
Authorities cautioned there is always the possibility of the case "fizzling out," but for a tenth consecutive day, agents were attempting to find a garage or storage shed where they believe Zazi and others may have stored chemicals and bomb components.
Zazi is the Alleged Ringleader
Since a series of raids in New York and Denver, authorities say Zazi's alleged role as organizer and recruiter has come into sharper focus.
Zazi, who had lived in New York since he and his family arrived from Afghanistan in 1999, traveled to Peshawar, Pakistan in Aug. 2008.
According to an FBI affidavit filed in connection with his arrest, Zazi spent four and half months in Pakistan and received weapons and explosives training at an al Qaeda camp located near Peshawar.
Authorities tell ABCNews.com that several other men from the U.S. traveled with Zazi to Pakistan.
Upon his return to the U.S. on Jan. 15, Zazi moved to Denver and went to work at an airport shuttle van service.
Law enforcement authorities say he has been under FBI surveillance since then and that he traveled to New York at least one time before his September trip.
Authorities believe the earlier trip or trips to New York were designed to organize others he allegedly recruited for his network.
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http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/092409dnmetbombarrest.1b177db8b.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idUSN2447383520090924
http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE58N6YT20090924
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Fears over 'internal' terror bomb
By Frank Gardner
BBC security correspondent
Security and intelligence experts are deeply worried by a new development in suicide bombing, the BBC has learned.
It has emerged that an al-Qaeda bomber who died last month while trying to blow up a Saudi prince in Jeddah had hidden the explosives inside his body.
Only the attacker died, but it is feared that the new development could be copied by others.
Experts say it could have implications for airport security, rendering traditional metal detectors "useless".
Last month's bombing left people wondering how one of the most wanted al-Qaeda operatives in Saudi Arabia could get so close to the prince in charge of counter-terrorism that he was able to blow himself up in the same room.
Western forensic investigators think they have the answer, and it is worrying them profoundly.
The explosives, they believe, were detonated by mobile phone.
Peter Neuman of Kings College London says the case will be studied intensively, and that there are "tremendous implications for airport security with the potential of making it even more complicated to get on to your plane".
"If it really is true that the metal detectors couldn't detect this person's hidden explosive device, that would mean that the metal detectors as they currently exist in airports are pretty much useless," he said.
The bomber was a Saudi al-Qaeda fugitive who said he wanted to give himself up to the prince in person.
The prince took him at his word and gave him safe passage to his palace.
But there, once he got next to his target, the bomb inside him was detonated.
Miraculously the prince survived with minor injuries, but footage emerging this week shows a sizeable crater in the concrete floor and the bomber's body blown in half.
It is believed the force of the blast went downwards which is why only the bomber died.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/8276016.stm
Published: 2009/09/26 01:23:46 GMT
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Abdullah Hassan Taleh al-Asiri has a big anus
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AQAP: Paradigm Shifts and Lessons Learned
September 2, 2009
Stratfor
By Scott Stewart
On the evening of Aug. 28, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the Saudi Deputy Interior Minister — and the man in charge of the kingdom’s counterterrorism efforts — was receiving members of the public in connection with the celebration of Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting. As part of the Ramadan celebration, it is customary for members of the Saudi royal family to hold public gatherings where citizens can seek to settle disputes or offer Ramadan greetings.
One of the highlights of the Friday gathering was supposed to be the prince’s meeting with Abdullah Hassan Taleh al-Asiri, a Saudi man who was a wanted militant from al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Al-Asiri had allegedly renounced terrorism and had requested to meet the prince in order to repent and then be accepted into the kingdom’s amnesty program. Such surrenders are not unprecedented — and they serve as great press events for the kingdom’s ideological battle against jihadists. Prince Mohammed, who is responsible for the Saudi rehabilitation program for militants, is a key figure in that ideological battle.
In February, a man who appeared with al-Asiri on Saudi Arabia’s list of most-wanted militants — former Guantanamo Bay inmate Mohammed al-Awfi — surrendered in Yemen and was transported to Saudi Arabia where he renounced terrorism and entered into the kingdom’s amnesty program. Al-Awfi, who had appeared in a January 2009 video issued by the newly created AQAP after the merger of the Saudi and Yemeni nodes of the global jihadist network, was a senior AQAP leader, and his renouncement was a major blow against AQAP.
But the al-Asiri case ended very differently from the al-Awfi case. Unlike al-Awfi, al-Asiri was not a genuine repentant — he was a human Trojan horse. After al-Asiri entered a small room to speak with Prince Mohammed, he activated a small improvised explosive device (IED) he had been carrying inside his anal cavity. The resulting explosion ripped al-Asiri to shreds but only lightly injured the shocked prince — the target of al-Asiri’s unsuccessful assassination attempt.
While the assassination proved unsuccessful, AQAP had been able to shift the operational paradigm in a manner that allowed them to achieve tactical surprise. The surprise was complete and the Saudis did not see the attack coming — the operation could have succeeded had it been better executed.
The kind of paradigm shift evident in this attack has far-reaching implications from a protective-intelligence standpoint, and security services will have to adapt in order to counter the new tactics employed. The attack also allows some important conclusions to be drawn about AQAP’s ability to operate inside Saudi Arabia.
Paradigm Shifts
Militants conducting terrorist attacks and the security services attempting to guard against such attacks have long engaged in a tactical game of cat and mouse. As militants adopt new tactics, security measures are then implemented to counter those tactics. The security changes then cause the militants to change in response and the cycle begins again. These changes can include using different weapons, employing weapons in a new way or changing the type of targets selected.
Sometimes, militants will implement a new tactic or series of tactics that is so revolutionary that it completely changes the framework of assumptions — or the paradigm — under which the security forces operate. Historically, al Qaeda and its jihadist progeny have proved to be very good at understanding the security paradigm and then developing tactics intended to exploit vulnerabilities in that paradigm in order to launch surprise attacks. For example:
•Prior to the 9/11 attacks, it was inconceivable that a large passenger aircraft would be used as a manually operated cruise missile. Hence, security screeners allowed box cutters to be carried onto aircraft, which were then used by the hijackers to take over the planes.
•The use of faux journalists to assassinate Ahmed Shah Masood with suicide IEDs hidden in their camera gear was also quite inventive.
•Had Richard Reid been able to light the fuse on his shoe bomb, we might still be wondering what happened to American Airlines Flight 63.
•The boat bomb employed against the USS Cole in October 2000 was another example of a paradigm shift that resulted in tactical surprise.
Once the element of tactical surprise is lost, however, the new tactics can be countered.
•When the crew and passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 learned what had happened to the other flights hijacked and flown to New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, they stormed the cockpit and stopped the hijackers from using their aircraft in an attack. Aircraft cockpit doors have also been hardened and other procedural measures have been put in place to make 9/11-style suicide hijackings harder to pull off.
•Following the Masood assassination, journalists have been given very close scrutiny before being allowed into the proximity of a VIP.
•The traveling public has felt the impact of the Reid shoe-bombing attempt by being forced to remove their shoes every time they pass through airport security. And the thwarted 2006 Heathrow plot has resulted in limits on the size of liquid containers travelers can take aboard aircraft.
•The U.S. Navy is now very careful to guard against small craft pulling up alongside its warships.
Let’s now take a look at the paradigm shift marked by the Prince Mohammed assassination attempt.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2009/09/27/video-the-implications-of-the-body-bomb/
Keep in mind that AQ will work to refine this.
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Counterterrorism Blog
Spread of Jihadi "operations" inside America: a quantitative warning
By Walid Phares
It is unprecedented in American counter terrorism annals: in one day the nation was dealing with three separate Jihadist plots to blow up civilian and other targets inside the Homeland. Although the cases were addressed at different time periods by the FBI and other agencies, nevertheless, the thickening web of Terror attempts breached the crossing line of US national security. This week, authorities revealed three conspiracies by American Jihadists: Michael C. Finton, (other name: Talib Islam) a 29-year-old man who wished to follow the steps of American-born Taliban John Walker Lindh, was arrested after trying to detonate what he thought was a bomb inside a van outside a federal courthouse in Springfield, Ill. Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, a 19-year old Jordanian national was arrested after placing what he believed was a bomb at a downtown Dallas skyscraper. But perhaps the most troubling case is of Afghan-born Najibullah Zazi who set up shop in suburban Denver, scouting the Web and visiting beauty supply stores in a hunt for chemicals needed to build bombs for Al Qaeda. Sources called the alleged plot one of the most significant terror threats to the U.S. since 9-11. Add to the list the North Carolina Jihad cell, led by Saifullah Boyd, which was planning on attacking civilian and military targets across the country.
The immediate question raised by an increasingly worried public is about the connection between all these terror cases: are they all connected? While law enforcement and certainly judicial authorities proceed in a bottom up reasoning, that is to build the case for a global connection between all what is happening with the help of legal evidence, analysts in the field of counter terrorism and conflict are already realizing the meaning of what is happening inside America.
The Zai case suspects
In my book Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies against America (2005-2006) I clearly projected that Jihadists, individuals and cells will be mushrooming and expanding inside the United States within few years from then and that they will precisely do what they are trying to do now. I have also projected how large they will become, with time. It was a simple deduction: if the Government doesn’t counter this ideological growth, Jihadists will keep coming. And in fact they kept coming, spreading crossing the barriers of ethnicities, races, nationalities and geographical frontiers. The Jihadists committed to harm the US, and based inside our borders, are now by the hundreds. When I suggested this fact on CNN in 2006, and reiterated it on Oprah’s show so that the public realizes what is to come, I raised a few eyes brows. Now unfortunately, we are meeting the cells of Jihadism in our cities and little towns, and sadly the expectation is that we will see more, and we may unfortunately not be able to stop them all from reaching their goals.
The North Carolina cell, the New York subway plot, the Dallas attempt, the Illinois case, added to the previous cases of the shooting of a soldier in Arkansas, the precedent New York cells, Georgia’s young Jihadists, all the way back to the infamous Virginia paintball network, if anything gives us the genome of what is morphing inside the country -- a vast body of dispersed cells with at least one binding force -- the Jihadi ideology. The question thus is to find out who is propagating the doctrines of Jihadism: who is funding it; who is protecting the indoctrination operation which leads naturally to the rise of homegrown or foreign linked, lone wolves or packs of Jihadists, Terrorists. That is the real question: where is the factory?
What should the US Government do? Well, it must first of all come to the front of the threat and lead the nation against it. This is not a matter of only local police or law enforcement efforts. President Obama and Congressional leaders from both parties must give this spreading plague a top priority: for if one of these groups is successful, our national economy will crumble again, or at least will be wounded even more severely, let alone the human consequences of terror. Americans are watching with great concerns, these terror plots being revealed. They expect their elected officials to address these fears before the worse happens.
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Dr Walid Phares is the author of The Confrontation: Winning the War against Future Jihad and the Director of the Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Dr Phares is an advisor to the US House Caucus on Counter Terrorism
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Talib Islam, aka Finton, planning in Illinois
Hussam Smadi operating in Dallas
Najibullah Zazi targeting New York
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Watch a short interview on Canada's CTV: "American and Canadian Jihadists are connected through ideology and more." http://watch.ctv.ca/news/latest/canadian-ties/#clip217436
Listen to a short radio interview on Washington Dateline http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/feeds.radioamerica.org/rd-bin/rdfeed.mp3?DWP&cast_id=13073
By Walid Phares on September 26, 2009 4:27 PM
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http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/09/28/eveningnews/main5347847.shtml
You think the TSA is invasive now....
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NATIONAL SECURITY
Warfront With Jihadistan: Terrorist Plots Foiled
An unsettling string of arrests for terrorist plots within the U.S. occurred last week. In Springfield, Illinois, Talib Islam was arrested for allegedly trying to detonate explosives in a van outside a federal courthouse; in North Carolina, Daniel Patrick Boyd and Hysen Sherifi were indicted for planning to attack the Quantico Marine Corps base; in Dallas, Hosam Maher Husein Smadi was arrested in an FBI sting when he parked an SUV packed with what he thought were explosives outside a Dallas skyscraper and attempted to detonate it; and finally, in New York City, an Afghan immigrant, Najibullah Zazi, was arrested for planning to attack commuter trains on the anniversary of 9/11. Allegedly, at least three of his accomplices are still at large. All these arrests occurred soon after government officials issued a flurry of terrorism warnings for popular, crowded areas such as sports complexes, hotels and mass transit systems.
As troubling as this string of terrorism arrests is, even more disturbing is the reaction of the Obama regime and their minions in the Leftmedia. The federal government tried to play down the arrests, alleging there was absolutely no connection between the varied plots. (We're not sure, but the suspects' names seem to imply some sort of connection, if we could just lay our finger on it...) The Leftmedia also downplayed the arrests, with some even speculating that in spite of this increased terrorist activity, al-Qa'ida-type terrorism is actually in decline. Strangely, no one in the press noted that these kinds of incidents are not supposed to occur in the Era of Hope and Change™.
A more rational analysis could easily conclude that the reason there was no known link between the plots is that these are acts of individual terrorist sleeper cells here in the U.S. It also would appear that the intelligence community knew something was up, which led to earlier warnings and allowed anti-terrorism officials to take action before any of the plots could be effectively executed. We hope (but aren't holding our breath) that Obama now sees how effective the anti-terrorist policies put into place by President George W. Bush really are. It's interesting that these arrests coincide with the administration's announcement last Friday that the January deadline for closing Guantanamo Bay might not be met.
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second post of the AM
Immigration Front: Border Patrol to Move Agents North
The U.S. Border Patrol, part of the Department of Homeland Security's Customs and Border Protection, is responsible for securing a total of 8,607 miles of border, including the U.S.-Mexico border, the U.S.-Canada border and some sectors of coastline. Each year, the Border Patrol sets a goal for "border miles under effective control (including certain coastal sectors)," defined as an area in which the Border Patrol detects an illegal border crosser and can be expected to succeed in apprehending that person.
In its May performance review, DHS said the Border Patrol's goal for fiscal 2009 was to have 815 of the 8,607 miles of border -- less than 10 percent -- under "effective control." The goal remains the same for fiscal 2010, meaning DHS does not plan to secure a single additional mile of border in the coming year. On Aug. 31, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report to Congress on the effectiveness of the Border Patrol. Its findings were not exactly encouraging.
For example, the Border Patrol established three performance measures to report the results of checkpoint operations, and while they provide some insight into checkpoint activity, they do not indicate if checkpoints are operating efficiently and effectively. Second, GAO found that a lack of management oversight and unclear checkpoint data-collection guidance resulted in the overstatement of checkpoint performance results in recent reports, as well as inconsistent data collection practices at checkpoints. Furthermore, individuals GAO contacted who live near checkpoints generally supported their operations but expressed concerns regarding property damage that occurs when illegal aliens and smugglers circumvent checkpoints to avoid apprehension.
Here's the kicker: The U.S.-Mexico border is 1,954 miles long, with only 697 miles under "effective control," but the Border Patrol plans to decrease the 17,399 Border Patrol agents on that border by 384 agents in Fiscal 2009. Some 414 will be added to the Canadian border for a total of 2,212. Maybe BO is concerned about the Canucks crossing the border for U.S. health care -- at least until ObamaCare ruins that option.
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http://www.jihadwatch.org/2009/10/dhs-slashes-funds-for-nyc-counterterror-funding.html
DHS slashes funds for NYC counterterror funding
After all, the war on terror is over, right? Najibullah Zazi? Pah! "Stunning: Despite Plot, NYC's Terror Funds Slashed," by Marcia Kramer for CBS, October 10 (thanks to Pamela):
NEW YORK (CBS) ― After facing one of the most serious terror threats since the 9-11 attacks, Department of Homeland Security officials are slashing a big chunk of anti-terror funding to New York City.
Local lawmakers say the cut could put American lives at risk.
Just weeks after Najibullah Zazi was nabbed in an al-Qaida terror plot to explode dirty bombs here, the feds have inexplicably slashed Big Apple terror funding designed to build a network of sensors to uncover nuclear or radioactive devices in a 50 miles radius of the city.
"To me this is beyond comprehension that less than a month after al-Qaida attempted an attack against New York City that you would have the Congress cutting the money that New York City needs to defend itself from a dirty bomb attack. It's absolutely mind-boggling," Rep. Peter King, R-Long Island, told CBS 2 HD on Thursday afternoon.
The city wanted $40 million to build the network at bridges, tunnels and other locations in the metropolitan area. Congress only earmarked $20 million for the program and then slipped NYC a doubly whammy -- the money is in a pot that other city's can apply for, so we may not even get the $20 million.
"This $20 million can be spread around like political pork the way other homeland security funds have been spread around the country," King said.
"This is a bad day for New York."...
And for all of us.
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Possible bombs discovered near Oklahoma City track
BY AARON CRESPO
Published: October 12, 2009
The Oklahoma City bomb squad Sunday night disposed of at least three possible bombs along railroad tracks at SE 34 Street and Shields Boulevard.
Authorities were at the scene from about 5 p.m. until after midnight. A resident said he saw a man speeding along the 200 block of SE 34 and throwing out several devices, police Lt. Jeff Cooper said.
The resident investigated and called police after finding what looked like bombs near the railroad tracks, Cooper said.
The bomb squad had neutralized three of the devices by 10:30 p.m.
"It’s kind of scary because you think something is happening right next door to your house,” said Raul Barrios, who lives on the street. "I’ve got my family and my kids and knowing that there might be an explosive here by my house, I mean it worries me a lot more.”
Also on the scene were representatives of the BNSF Railway, the FBI, the local cell of the Department of Justice’s Joint Terrorism Task Force and the Red Cross.
The incident delayed several trains en route through the area.
Four northbound trains, including the Amtrak Heartland Flyer, were stalled by the incident, said BNSF spokesman Joe Faust. Three more trains would be stalled by midnight, he added.
Officials said it would be at least 12:30 a.m. before the area was cleared.
Read more: http://newsok.com/possible-bombs-discovered-near-track/article/3408418#ixzz0TjmZkuFo
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U.S. Can’t Trace Foreign Visitors on Expired Visas
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr. and JULIA PRESTON
Published: October 11, 2009
DALLAS — Eight years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and despite repeated mandates from Congress, the United States still has no reliable system for verifying that foreign visitors have left the country.
Hosam Maher Husein Smadi entered the United States legally, but then overstayed his visa. In Italy, Tex., Mr. Smadi was able to work at a restaurant.
New concern was focused on that security loophole last week, when Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, a 19-year-old Jordanian who had overstayed his tourist visa, was accused in court of plotting to blow up a Dallas skyscraper.
Last year alone, 2.9 million foreign visitors on temporary visas like Mr. Smadi’s checked in to the country but never officially checked out, immigration officials said. While officials say they have no way to confirm it, they suspect that several hundred thousand of them overstayed their visas.
Over all, the officials said, about 40 percent of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States came on legal visas and overstayed.
Mr. Smadi’s case has brought renewed calls from both parties in Congress for Department of Homeland Security officials to complete a universal electronic exit monitoring system.
Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, the senior Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, said the Smadi case “points to a real need for an entry and exit system if we are serious about reducing illegal immigration.”
Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York and chairman of the Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on immigration, said he would try to steer money from the economic stimulus program to build an exit monitoring system.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, immigration authorities, with more than $1 billion from Congress, have greatly improved and expanded their systems to monitor foreigners when they arrive. But despite several Congressional authorizations, there are no biometric inspections or a systematic follow-up to confirm that foreign visitors have departed.
Homeland security officials caution that universal exit monitoring is a daunting and costly goal, mainly because of the nation’s long and busy land borders, with more than one million crossings every day. The wrong exit plan, they said, could clog trade, disrupt border cities and overwhelm immigration agencies with information they could not effectively use.
Since 2004, homeland security officials have put systems in place to check all foreigners as they arrive, whether by air, sea or land. Customs officers now take fingerprints and digital photographs of visitors from most countries, instantly comparing them against law enforcement watch list databases. (Canadians and Mexicans with special border-crossing cards are exempt from those checks.)
But homeland security officials said that a series of pilot programs since 2004 had failed to yield an exit monitoring system that would work for the whole nation. They have not yet found technology to support speedy exit inspections at land borders. And airlines balked at an effort last year by the Bush administration to make them responsible for taking fingerprints and photographs of departing foreigners.
The current system relies on departing foreigners to turn in a paper stub when they leave.
Last year, official figures show, 39 million foreign travelers were admitted on temporary visas like Mr. Smadi’s. Based on the paper stubs, homeland security officials said, they confirmed the departure of 92.5 percent of them. Most of the remaining visitors did depart, officials said, but failed to check out because they did not know how to do so. But more than 200,000 of them are believed to have overstayed intentionally.
Immigration authorities have put in place a separate system for keeping track of foreigners who, unlike Mr. Smadi, come on student visas. That system has proved effective at confirming that the students have stayed in school and do not overstay their visas, officials said.
Immigration analysts said that given the difficulties of enforcing the United States’ vast borders, it remains primarily up to law enforcement officials to thwart terrorism suspects who do not have records that would draw scrutiny before they enter the United States.
“You can’t ask the immigration system to do everything,” said Doris Meissner, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a research center in Washington, and a former commissioner of the immigration service. “This is an example of how changes in law enforcement priorities and techniques since Sept. 11 actually got to where they should be.”
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Mr. Smadi, like many tourists who overstay visas, was able to fade easily into society and encountered few barriers to starting a life here, according to court documents and people who know him. He enrolled in high school, obtained a California identification card, landed jobs in two states and rented a string of apartments and houses. He bought at least two used cars, and even procured a handgun and ammunition.
Mr. Smadi rented an apartment even though his visa expired.
Mr. Smadi’s arrest on Sept. 24 for the attempted bombing was not his first encounter with American law enforcement. Two weeks earlier, a sheriff’s deputy in Ellis County, Tex., pulled him over for a broken tail light just north of the town of Italy, then arrested him for driving without a license or insurance.
When the deputy checked his identity, Mr. Smadi’s name showed up on a watch list by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which was already investigating him. But the background check turned up no immigration record. The deputy called the F.B.I. and was told there was no outstanding arrest warrant for Mr. Smadi. So on the evening of Sept. 11, Mr. Smadi paid a $550 fine and walked out of the county jail.
“There was nothing to indicate to us that this person was currently in the States illegally,” said Chief Deputy Dennis Brearley.
Mr. Smadi had come to the United States from Jordan in early 2007 on a six-month tourist visa, immigration officials say.
For a few weeks he stayed in San Jose, Calif., with Hana Elrabodi, a retired Jordanian businessman who knew his family, according to Mr. Elrabodi’s wife, Temina. Though Mr. Smadi was not authorized to work, he found a job at a local restaurant. In late March, Mr. Smadi obtained a California identification card using Mr. Elrabodi’s address.
In October 2007, Mr. Smadi moved into an apartment in Santa Clara with his younger brother, Hussein Smadi, and another man he identified as his cousin, according to the manager of the apartment complex, Joe Redzovic. Mr. Smadi took another job, in a falafel restaurant, and in the winter he briefly enrolled in the Santa Clara High School.
After a fire gutted his Santa Clara apartment, Mr. Smadi moved to Dallas. Though his visa had expired by April 2008, he landed a job working behind the counter at Texas Best Smokehouse in Italy, Tex., about 45 miles from Dallas. He rented a bungalow nearby, using his California identification and passing a criminal background check, said his former landlord, David South.
Three months later, Mr. Smadi married one of his co-workers, Rosalinda Duron. They separated in the fall of 2008 after only three months, Ms. Duron said.
Investigators have found no evidence that Mr. Smadi, during his first year in the United States, openly espoused Islamic fundamentalism. Neither have they found any evidence that he received terrorist training abroad or came to the United States intending to commit a terrorist act, said Mark White, a spokesman for the F.B.I. in Dallas.
But by the spring of 2008, he caught the attention of the F.B.I. by posting incendiary remarks about wanting to kill Americans on Jihadist Web sites. Over the summer, he met with agents posing as members of Al Qaeda and planned to bomb the Fountain Place office building in downtown Dallas, according to an indictment unsealed on Thursday.
His arrest on terrorism charges came after he parked a truck that he had been told was carrying explosives in the building’s underground garage, according to court documents.
When the F.B.I. later searched his residence, they found a Beretta 9 millimeter pistol and a box of ammunition, along with his passport and the expired visa, the court documents show.
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Minneapolis Indictment Stokes Somali Concerns
by IPT News • Oct 15, 2009 at 10:23 am
http://www.investigativeproject.org/blog/2009/10/minneapolis-indictment-stokes-somali-concerns
The indictment of a fourth Minneapolis-area Somali man has the local community wondering whether the flow of Somalis returning to their homeland to fight with the terrorist al-Shabaab movement continues.
About a year ago, law enforcement officials began investigating the disappearance of about 20 young Somali men after one, Shirwa Ahmed became the first known American to carry out a suicide bombing attack. He allegedly drove a truck bomb into a government compound in Mogadishu. Two other men are believed to have been shot and killed in Somalia this past summer.
Since then, three men have pled guilty to charges they provided material support to al-Shabaab or lied about their involvement with the group.
On Tuesday, Abdow Abdow was charged with providing false statements to federal investigators after he was questioned about a road trip. Abdow was pulled over by a Nevada Highway Patrol trooper Oct. 6. He claimed to have only one passenger with him, when there really were four passengers. Two of the travelers are believed to have crossed into Mexico, where they may have boarded a flight to Mexico City. Their ultimate destination remains a mystery, but the community response points to common sense.
Minnesota Public Radio quoted Minneapolis attorney Stephen Smith saying "it's not unrealistic to at least wonder whether the individuals that were allegedly with Mr. Abdow intended to leave this country, ultimately with the intent of heading to Somalia."
While the federal investigation has been in the news for nearly a year, and several of the young men have been killed, community officials say Abdow's case raises disturbing questions whether the flow of young Somalis to the battle zone has stopped.
"The numbers now are probably much higher than 20. Definitely," Omar Jamal director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center, told the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
It's not clear whether Abdow will face additional charges. Najibullah Zazi, charged with plotting terrorist attacks in New York, originally was charged with providing false statements to law enforcement.
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Man On Terror Watchlist Stopped Then Let Go
Posted By Mike Levine On October 14, 2009 @ 11:39 PM
A Somali man on the U.S. government's terrorist watchlist was stopped last week by a police officer outside Las Vegas, but the officer had no legal authority to detain the man so he was sent on his way, multiple law enforcement sources told FOX News.
On Oct. 6, about 10 miles north of Las Vegas, a Nevada Highway Patrol officer pulled over a rental car that was speeding, according to court records and one of the sources. The gray Chevrolet was occupied by five men of Somali descent, including Cabdulaahi Faarax of Minneapolis and Abdow M. Abdow of Chanhassen, Minn., according to the court records and sources.
The five men offered conflicting accounts of their travel. All five told the officer they were on their way to San Diego to attend a friend’s wedding, but they “gave inconsistent explanations regarding where they were staying in San Diego, how the occupants knew one another, and who was getting married at the wedding in San Diego,” according to court documents.
When asked for their dates of birth, they all gave “January 1” as their birthday, but each offered a different year of birth. Faarax said he was born Jan. 1, 1977, making him 32 years old, one source said.
When the officer ran Faarax’s information through a law enforcement database, it came back as “a hit on the terrorist watchlist,” a law enforcement source said.
It’s unclear why Faarax’s name would be on the terrorist watchlist. But unless there’s a warrant for the person’s arrest or a “red notice” from the global police force Interpol, there is no reason or ability to detain someone on the list, sources said.
“There are people on the list that are just being monitored,” one law enforcement source said.
“If there’s not a crime being committed, there’s no reason to hold anybody,” another source said. “Once they’re on the list, it’s kind of just being supervised, like being on parole. You just interview them, and if they didn’t do anything wrong, you cut them loose.”
The officer who stopped the car last week would not have known what prompted Faarax’s name to be added to the terrorist watchlist, only that Faarax was on the list, one source said.
However, sources confirm that occupants of the car are related to the long-running FBI investigation of young men from the Minneapolis area and elsewhere who were recruited to train and possibly fight alongside an Al Qaeda-linked group in Somalia, known as al-Shabaab.
One source said Faarax had certain associations with al-Shabaab, but how deep those associations run is unclear.
For example, voicing support online for al-Shabaab, which was labeled a terrorist organization by the U.S. government last year, could warrant placement on the terrorist watchlist, one source said.
Training with al-Shabaab in Somalia could also warrant placement on the terrorist watchlist. None of the sources would say whether Faarax had trained with al-Shabaab or traveled to Somalia recently.
Still, the sources said, Faarax would have been detained last week by the Nevada Highway Patrol officer if Faarax had been deemed an “immediate threat.”
One law enforcement source called all of this “an unexpected twist” in the FBI's investigation.
An FBI spokesman in Minneapolis, E.K. Wilson, declined to comment for this article. Asked whether authorities know the current whereabouts of Faarax or any of the other passengers from the vehicle, aside from Abdow, Wilson said he couldn’t answer.
An FBI spokesman in Washington also declined to comment for this article.
However, two days after their vehicle was pulled over outside Las Vegas, two of the passengers appeared at the U.S.-Mexico border crossing in San Ysidro, Calif.
According to court documents, they had been dropped off by a taxicab, and they told a customs official at the border crossing “that they would be flying from Tijuana airport to Mexico City airport, and [they] displayed airline tickets to the Officer.”
In several cases over the past decade, Mexico has been a waypoint for travel between the United States and Somalia.
Meanwhile, the driver of the rented vehicle, 26-year-old Abdow M. Abdow, is the only one of the five Somali men to be facing charges so far.
He has been charged in a criminal complaint with lying to the FBI.
The officer who stopped Abdow’s vehicle found $4,000 in the car and eventually learned that Abdow’s wife had filed a missing persons report in Minneapolis. The officer contacted the FBI, which interviewed Abdow on Oct. 8.
After giving conflicting accounts about his travel a few days before, Abdow told the FBI agents interviewing him, “I am talking too much,” according to court documents.
Asked who paid for the rental car, he told the FBI he didn’t know, that he had done nothing wrong, and that “whatever those guys are into I’m not,” according to court documents.
FBI agents later determined Abdow rented the car from Avis Rental Car Company and paid for it with his own Visa debit card.
“He was obviously trying to protect somebody or some people,” one source said.
Abdow made his initial appearance in federal court on Tuesday. A judge in the case ruled that Abdow could be released to a halfway house under certain conditions.
A grand jury in Minneapolis is still investigating how the Somali men from Minnesota were recruited to fight in Somalia. Three men have already pleaded guilty to terror-related charges, including providing material support to terrorists.
The indictments said the men traveled to Somalia "so that they could fight jihad" there.
Somalia has had no stable government since 1991, when dictator Siad Barre was ousted from power. A newer secular government has had trouble keeping Muslim militants at bay, and in 2006 fighting with al-Shabaab intensified after Western-backed Ethiopian forces invaded Somalia. U.S. officials say if al-Shabaab prevails, Somalia could turn into a haven for Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.
In October 2008, 27-year-old college student Shirwa Ahmed of Minneapolis became "the first known American suicide bomber" when he blew himself up in Somalia, killing dozens, according to the FBI.
Since then at least four more men from Minneapolis have been killed in Somalia, according to their families.
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Article printed from Liveshots: http://liveshots.blogs.foxnews.com
URL to article: http://liveshots.blogs.foxnews.com/2009/10/14/man-on-terror-watchlist-stopped-then-let-go/
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Eh GM, the clusterfcuk continues , , ,
Here's this:
GOP Lawmakers Accuse CAIR of Planting Spies on Capitol Hill
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Quote:
GOP Lawmakers Accuse Muslim Advocacy Group CAIR of Planting Spies on Capitol Hill
Four congressmen are asking for an investigation into the Council on American Islamic Relations after discovering an internal memo noting the group's strategy.
FOXNews.com
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Four House Republicans on Wednesday accused the nation's largest Muslim advocacy group of trying to "infiltrate" Capitol Hill by placing interns in the offices of lawmakers who handle national security issues.
The four lawmakers, members of the anti-terror caucus, asked for an investigation into the Council on American Islamic Relations after discovering an internal memo noting the group's strategy. They also highlighted a new book by Paul Sperry titled "Muslim Mafia," scheduled for release on Thursday, which claims the group has been actively infiltrating Congress.
Reps. Sue Myrick of North Carolina, Trent Franks of Arizona, Paul Broun of Georgia and John Shadegg of Arizona asked the Internal Revenue Service to determine whether CAIR deserves its nonprofit status. They also are asking their colleagues to review a summary of findings that led the Justice Department to name CAIR as a co-conspirator in a terrorism case.
The internal memo, provided to FOXNews.com, stated that CAIR would "focus on influencing congressmen responsible for policy that directly impacts the American Muslim community."
The memo cited three House committees -- Homeland Security, Intelligence and the Judiciary -- as panels on which lawmakers preside over policy affecting American Muslims.
"We will develop national initiatives such as a lobby day and placing Muslim interns in Congressional offices," the memo read.
Earlier this year the FBI severed its once-close ties with CAIR as evidence mounted of the group's links to a support network for Hamas, which the U.S. has designated a terrorist organization.
"It's frightening to think that an organization with clear-cut ties to terrorism could have a hand in influencing policy -- especially national security policy -- within our government," Myrick said. "The investigations that we're asking for are simple, and I'm hopeful that they will bring to light any and all information regarding the goals of CAIR."
Franks called on CAIR to renounce its ties to terrorist groups and state publicly that it does not support Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood.
"I take the charges levied against CAIR and laid out in this book very seriously because they affect our national security," Franks said in a statement. "This Congress must be deliberate in taking a strong stance against those groups and organizations that align themselves with terrorists."
"We live in a post-9/11 world where the coincidence of nuclear proliferation and Islamic terrorism pose a very dangerous combination and real threat to America's national security," he said. "That is why it is critical, in light of the well supported documents and information, that the U.S. Congress take this issue seriously."
CAIR decried the call as a "racist" and "insidious" attack on Muslims and mocked the allegations.
"If it wasn't so insidious, it would be laughable," CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper told FOXNews.com. "What are their charges? CAIR seeks political participation of Muslims. I'm shocked."
Hooper said the evidence proves only that the group is trying, like every other minority group, to engage Muslims in the political process.
"Why is it evil when Muslims seek political participation?" he asked.
In the book "Muslim Mafia," a six-month sting appears to link CAIR to an organized crime network made up of more than 100 other Muslim front groups that make up the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood. The book claims the group is bent on destroying Western civilization.
Hooper said Sperry's efforts only proved the group's good intentions.
"The guy spied on us for months, stole documents -- and the most they came up with is CAIR seeks to work with policymakers on Capitol Hill?" Hooper said.
"I see it as a stamp of approval."
Quoted from http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009...-capitol-hill/
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We're lucky that a bonafide jihadist isn't running DHS with this administration.
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Occured 25 miles from my house. Still waiting for more details
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1774293770?bctid=44843384001 (http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1774293770?bctid=44843384001)
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ANALYSIS: The Alleged Zazi Plot to Strike New York Mass Transit
Why FBI, NYPD Moved Before the Investigation was Complete
By BRAD GARRETT
Oct. 9, 2009 —
Editor's note: Former FBI Agent Brad Garrett is an ABC News consultant and regular contributor to the Blotter.
At 8:30 any given weekday morning in New York City, an estimated five million people are riding the city's subway system. They are a prime and vulnerable target.
For the FBI and the New York police department, it is a nightmare scenario that agents and detectives have played out in their planning.
Terrorists bent on destruction could enter nine of the city's 425 subway stations wearing backpacks filled with homemade bombs and face little risk of detection.
As was made clear in court documents in the most recent alleged terror case, bombs can easily be constructed with over-the-counter products used to style hair or remove nail polish.
With enough followers, a terrorist mastermind has no need to limit the attack to just the subways.
The city's major international financial institutions present another inviting target for terrorists seeking a one-two punch. Ten rental trucks or even coffee carts - packed with easily purchased fertilizer, diesel fuel and cotton would create even more destruction and death.
My former law enforcement colleagues say this is the chilling scenario of what Najibullah Zazi and his associates might have done.
Unraveling Terror Plots
Precise details of Zazi's exact plans are not yet known because agents continue to investigate and probably de-classify information. But the use of homemade bombs in backpacks, and fertilizer and fuel-packed trucks has been a staple of al Qaeda-linked groups, as well as domestic terrorists in the U.S., for over a decade.
The July 2005 London subway attacks and the foiled 2006 plot to blow up commercial airplanes traveling from the U.K. to the U.S. involved the use of liquid peroxide-based bombs.
In 1995, fertilizer-based bombs were used by Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. The 2002 Bali nightclub bombing, the 2003 synagogue bombings in Istanbul and a 2007 planned bombing of shopping malls in London were all fertilizer-based bombs.
Unraveling such basic but destructive plots before they occur presents huge challenges. When arrests are made early in an investigation - which appears to be the situation in the Zazi case - evidence and suspects have a tendency to disappear.
In typical criminal investigations, law enforcement agents continue to investigate a crime as long as they possibly can to obtain evidence and to identify those involved.
I once investigated a man who had savagely killed three people in a highly-publicized robbery. In order to get close to this killer and build the evidence, I sent a police informant to talk to him. I was reasonably certain that, given the media attention the murders had received, the killer would not act again. Since I also had a court-authorized wiretap on his phone, I knew from his conversations that he was not planning any new murders. This gave me the luxury of time to develop the evidence about the murders by using the informant.
I fitted the informant with a transmitter and body recorder and instructed him to purchase drugs from the killer's cohort many times. I hoped to arrest the cohort and get him to testify later against the killer. In order to prove the murder case, I knew we needed more evidence for a judge and jury. If at any point during the investigation I thought the killer was going to harm the informant or anyone else, I would have arrested him immediately and taken my lumps in court for having brought a less-developed case. Fortunately, I was able to use the next six months to build an airtight case against the killer.
Concern for Public Safety
It seems reasonable to assume that the agents in the Zazi case acted out of concern for public safety, possibly because they had a foreign intelligence wiretap on Zazi's phone. If they had information that Zazi was going to harm citizens - whether from an informant or a wiretap - they had to make an immediate arrest.
Unlike my murder case, they may not have had the luxury of time to finish their investigation before they took Zazi into custody. If the evidence presented against Zazi in court turns out to be less strong than it might have been with the luxury of time, but the agents averted another 9/11 when they arrested him, any criticism of them at a later time will ring hollow indeed.
The law enforcement and the intelligence communities have been dramatically overhauled since 9/11. Whether these improvements resulted in uncovering Zazi's alleged terror plot is unknown. The 9/11 Commission report noted that the FBI had a limited ability to collect and analyze intelligence, and share evidence with intelligence gathering agencies. The FBI might have disrupted the 9/11 attacks had they connected the movements of Mohammed Atta and the other hijackers through intelligence sharing.
The FBI of today does collect and share intelligence. Perhaps the new FBI could have discovered that three of the four Hamburg, Germany cell members had arrived in the U.S. during the summer of 2000 and begun pilot training.
Apparently the Zazi plot was uncovered because of these improvements. If so, this will be a welcome change.
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6 imams removed from Phoenix-bound flight reach settlement
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http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/hourlyupdate/314003.php
6 imams removed from Phoenix-bound flight reach settlement
By Steve Karnowski
The Associated Press
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 10.20.2009
MINNEAPOLIS — Six imams who were removed from a US Airways flight in 2006 after passengers reported what they considered suspicious behavior have reached a tentative settlement of their discrimination lawsuit, one of their attorneys said Tuesday.
A one-page court form filed Tuesday said a settlement had been reached at a conference Monday in St. Paul with U.S. Magistrate Judge Arthur Boylan. The form said the conference lasted seven hours and 20 minutes, and that the terms of the settlement were confidential. It gave few other details.
“It is true,” attorney Omar Mohammedi told The Associated Press. “We’re still trying to finalize the details, but a settlement has been reached.”
Mohammedi declined to give the terms of the settlement, which he said will require approval from the federal judge handling the case, Ann Montgomery. He estimated that might take two weeks or so.
One of the imams, Marwan Sadeddin of Phoenix, said the settlement does not include an apology but he considers it an acknowledgment that a mistake was made. He said he couldn’t divulge the terms because both sides had agreed not to discuss them publicly.
“It’s fine for all parties. It’s been solved. ... There is no need for a trial,” Sadeddin said.
An attorney for US Airways Group Inc., Michael Lindberg, declined to comment.
Authorities in Minneapolis removed the imams from the Phoenix-bound flight in November 2006 while they were returning home from a conference of the North American Imams Federation clerics. Passengers had reported that the imams were saying their evening prayers in Arabic in the airport concourse before boarding the plane and that some of the men made critical comments about the Iraq war while aboard.
The imans were questioned for several hours before they were released. They ultimately returned home via another airline.
Another of the imams, Omar Shahin, who is head of the North American Imams Federation, said the settlement sends “a strong message to the community” that the country values justice.
“It’s a settlement that’s satisfactory for all of us,” Shahin said. Shahin is the former imam of the Islamic Center of Tucson. He was the imam of Tucson's largest mosque from 2000 to June 2003, when he left abruptly.
Their lawsuit named Tempe, Ariz.-based US Airways; the Metropolitan Airports Commission, which runs the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport and its police department; and the airport police officers and an FBI agent who were involved in the case.
Patrick Hogan, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Airports Commission, said he had no immediate information on the settlement.
A spokesman for US Airways did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment, nor did attorneys for the airports commission or the FBI agent named in the lawsuit.
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a poster on another forum writes:
Some background on Shahin.
He was the iman in Tucson, AZ from 2000-2003. The mosque ("Islamic Center") was the one attended by Hani Hanjour as he bummed around the US, taking flying lessons. That was in the late '90s, and no, Shahin wasn't there at the time. The board which selected him, however, was the same board that selected his predecessor.
Shahin's other activities include serving as director for the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. That fund was a front for Hamas, and had its funds frozen by the .gov shortly after 9/11. Shahin apparently didn't learn his lesson, since he morphed over into representing "Kind Hearts", another Hamas charity that was shut down. To the best of my knowledge, he was never charged in any of those schemes.
There's more....
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Yolo DA: Beating Victim Made Comments Supporting US Actions In Afghanistan
Anti-Taliban Remarks Cited In Attack
KCRA.com - POSTED: 7:15 pm PDT October 22, 2009
WOODLAND, Calif.
Four Northern California men were indicted this month on charges of beating up four people after one of the victims talked about supporting the United States and the military's role in ousting Afghanistan's Taliban government.
Mohammed Qumar Ashraf, 29, of Sacramento; Khialluddin Niazi, 69, of West Sacramento; Sarajuddin Niazi, 31, of Union City; and Zafaruddin Niazi, 27, of Los Gatos, face multiple counts, including attempted murder.
The four suspects were released on their own recognizance after Judge Arvid Johnson ordered them to surrender their passports, the district attorney's office said.
The men are accused of going to one victim's residence in March 2004, armed with baseball bats. They beat up four people, prosecutors said; three victims needed medical attention.
Arraignment is scheduled for Nov. 20.
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The four suspects were released on their own recognizance after Judge Arvid Johnson ordered them to surrender their passports, the district attorney's office said.
I am not surprised by the attack but by the response of our justice system!!! I know the sheriff and prosecuting attorney in my county and if anyone did that they would not be let out of jail like that!!!....White, Hispanic or any race, or creed! What is wrong in Woodland?
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Mass man accused of plot to kill U.S politicians
By DENISE LAVOIE, AP Legal Affairs Writer Denise Lavoie, Ap Legal Affairs Writer Wed Oct 21, 7:57 pm ET
BOSTON – A Massachusetts man and two friends tried and failed to get into terrorist training camps and then plotted to kill two prominent U.S. politicians and randomly shoot people at American shopping malls, authorities said Wednesday.
Tarek Mehanna, who recently taught at a Muslim school in Worcester, was arrested early Wednesday at his parents' suburban Boston home.
Mehanna was charged with conspiring with two other men — an American now in Syria and another man who is cooperating with authorities — to provide support to terrorists.
Ultimately, the trio never came close to pulling off an attack. Authorities say they never got the terrorist training they sought — that the men told friends they were turned down because of their nationality, ethnicity or inexperience, or that the people they'd hoped would get them into such camps were either in jail or on a religious pilgrimage.
The men abandoned the mall attack plans after their weapons contact said he could find only handguns, not automatic weapons.
The men used code words such as "peanut butter and jelly" for fighting in Somalia and "culinary school" for terrorist camps, and talked extensively of their desire to "die on the battlefield," according to court documents.
Mehanna, who has taught math and religion at Alhuda Academy, made a defiant court appearance hours after his arrest. He refused to stand to hear the charge against him and finally did — tossing his chair loudly to the floor — only after his father urged him to do so.
"This really, really is a show," his father, Ahmed Mehanna, said as his son was being led away in handcuffs. When asked if he believed the charges against his son, he said, "No, definitely not."
Prosecutors said Mehanna worked with two men from 2001 to May 2008 on the conspiracy that, over time, intended to "kill, kidnap, maim or injure" soldiers and two politicians who were members of the executive branch but are no longer in office. Authorities refused to identify the politicians and said they were never in danger.
Acting U.S. Attorney Michael Loucks said the men justified the planned attacks on malls because U.S. civilians pay taxes to support the U.S. government and because they are "nonbelievers," Loucks said. He refused to identify the targeted malls.
Mehanna — who received a doctorate in 2008 from the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy in Boston, where his father is a professor — allegedly conspired with Ahmad Abousamra, who authorities say is now in Syria.
Mehanna, 27, is being held without bail until his next court appearance on Oct. 30.
"I'm confident that the American people will put aside their fears and instead rely on the fairness guaranteed by our Constitution," said his attorney, J.W. Carney Jr. "Mr. Mehanna is entitled to that."
Rola Yaghmour, 20, of Shrewsbury and her family are friends with the Mehannas and she said she couldn't believe the new charges against Mehanna, calling him a "good man."
"He's not going to go crazy in a mall. There's no way he would do something like that," she said. "I read it and I was laughing, and I was like, 'They have to be kidding.' Because there's no way he would do something like that. It makes no sense. I was in shock. That's not like him at all nor his family, nothing of them at all."
Mehanna first was arrested in November and charged with lying to the FBI in December 2006 when asked the whereabouts of Daniel Maldonado, who is now serving a 10-year prison sentence for training with al-Qaida to overthrow the Somali government.
Authorities said Wednesday that Mehanna and his conspirators had contacted Maldonado about getting automatic weapons for their planned mall attacks, but he told them he could only get handguns.
Court documents filed by the government say that in 2002, Abousamra became frustrated after repeatedly being rejected to join terror groups in Pakistan — first Lashkar e Tayyiba, then the Taliban.
"Because Abousamra was an Arab (not Pakistani) the LeT camp would not accept him, and because of Abousamra's lack of experience, the Taliban camp would not accept him," Williams wrote in the affidavit.
Mehanna and Abousamra traveled to Yemen in 2004 in an attempt to join a terrorist training camp, according to court documents.
Mehanna allegedly told a friend, the third conspirator who is now cooperating with authorities, that their trip was a failure because they were unable to reach people affiliated with the camps.
Abousamra said he was rejected by a terror group when he sought training in Iraq because he was American, authorities said.
___ Associated Press writers Jay Lindsay, Bob Salsberg and Russell Contreras in Boston, Eric Tucker in Sudbury, Mass., and Devlin Barrett in Washington contributed to this report from Boston.
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Published: October 28, 2009
WASHINGTON — After a Somali-American teenager from Minneapolis committed a suicide bombing in Africa in October 2008, the Federal Bureau of Investigation began investigating whether a Somali Islamist group had recruited him on United States soil.
Instead of collecting information only on people about whom they had a tip or links to the teenager, agents fanned out to scrutinize Somali communities, including in Seattle and Columbus, Ohio. The operation unfolded as the Bush administration was relaxing some domestic intelligence-gathering rules.
The F.B.I.’s interpretation of those rules was recently made public when it released, in response to a Freedom of Information lawsuit, its “Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide.”; The disclosure of the manual has opened the widest window yet onto how agents have been given greater power in the post-Sept. 11 era.
In seeking the revised rules, the bureau said it needed greater flexibility to hunt for would-be terrorists inside the United States. But the manual’s details have alarmed privacy advocates.
One section lays out a low threshold to start investigating a person or group as a potential security threat. Another allows agents to use ethnicity or religion as a factor — as long as it is not the only one — when selecting subjects for scrutiny.
“It raises fundamental questions about whether a domestic intelligence agency can protect civil liberties if they feel they have a right to collect broad personal information about people they don’t even suspect of wrongdoing,” said Mike German, a former F.B.I. agent who now works for the American Civil Liberties Union.
But Valerie Caproni, the F.B.I.’s general counsel, said the bureau has adequate safeguards to protect civil liberties as it looks for people who could pose a threat.
“Those who say the F.B.I. should not collect information on a person or group unless there is a specific reason to suspect that the target is up to no good seriously miss the mark,” Ms. Caproni said. “The F.B.I. has been told that we need to determine who poses a threat to the national security — not simply to investigate persons who have come onto our radar screen.”
The manual authorizes agents to open an “assessment” to “proactively” seek information about whether people or organizations are involved in national security threats.
Agents may begin such assessments against a target without a particular factual justification. The basis for such an inquiry “cannot be arbitrary or groundless speculation,” the manual says, but the standard is “difficult to define.”
Assessments permit agents to use potentially intrusive techniques, like sending confidential informants to infiltrate organizations and following and photographing targets in public.
F.B.I. agents previously had similar powers when looking for potential criminal activity. But until the recent changes, greater justification was required to use the powers in national security investigations because they receive less judicial oversight.
If agents turn up something specific to suggest wrongdoing, they can begin a “preliminary” or “full” investigation and use additional techniques, like wiretapping. But even if agents find nothing, the personal information they collect during assessments can be retained in F.B.I. databases, the manual says.
When selecting targets, agents are permitted to consider political speech or religion as one criterion. The manual tells agents not to engage in racial profiling, but it authorizes them to take into account “specific and relevant ethnic behavior” and to “identify locations of concentrated ethnic communities.”
Farhana Khera, president of Muslim Advocates, said the F.B.I. was harassing Muslim-Americans by singling them out for scrutiny. Her group was among those that sued the bureau to release the manual.
“We have seen even in recent months the revelation of the F.B.I. going into mosques — not where they have a specific reason to believe there is criminal activity, but as ‘agent provocateurs’ who are trying to incite young individuals to join a purported terror plot,” Ms. Khera said. “We think the F.B.I. should be focused on following actual leads rather than putting entire communities under the microscope.”
Ms. Caproni, the F.B.I. lawyer, denied that the bureau engages in racial profiling. She cited the search for signs of the Somali group, Al Shabaab, linked to the Minneapolis teenager to illustrate why the manual allows agents to consider ethnicity when deciding where to look. In that case, the bureau worried that other such teenagers might return from Somalia to carry out domestic operations.
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Agents are trained to ignore ethnicity when looking for groups that have no ethnic tie, like environmental extremists, she said, but “if you are looking for Al Shabaab, you are looking for Somalis.”
Among the manual’s safeguards, agents must use the “least intrusive investigative method that effectively accomplishes the operational objective.” When infiltrating an organization, agents cannot sabotage its “legitimate social or political agenda,” nor lead it “into criminal activity that otherwise probably would not have occurred.”
Portions of the manual were redacted, including pages about “undisclosed participation” in an organization’s activities by agents or informants, “requesting information without revealing F.B.I. affiliation or the true purpose of a request,” and using “ethnic/racial demographics.”
The attorney general guidelines for F.B.I. operations date back to 1976, when a Congressional investigation by the so-called Church Committee uncovered decades of illegal domestic spying by the bureau on groups perceived to be subversive — including civil rights, women’s rights and antiwar groups — under the bureau’s longtime former director, J. Edgar Hoover, who died in 1972.
The Church Committee proposed that rules for the F.B.I.’s domestic security investigations be written into federal law. To forestall legislation, the attorney general in the Ford administration, Edward Levi, issued his own guidelines that established such limits internally.
Since then, administrations of both parties have repeatedly adjusted the guidelines.
In September 2008, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey signed the new F.B.I. guidelines that expanded changes begun under his predecessor, John Ashcroft, after the Sept. 11 attacks. The guidelines went into effect and the F.B.I. completed the manual putting them into place last December.
There are no signs that the current attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., plans to roll back the changes. A spokeswoman said Mr. Holder was monitoring them “to see how well they work” and would make refinements if necessary.
The F.B.I., however, is revising the manual. Ms. Caproni said she was taking part in weekly high-level meetings to evaluate suggestions from agents and expected about 20 changes.
Many proposals have been requests for greater flexibility. For example, some agents said requirements that they record in F.B.I. computers every assessment, no matter how minor, were too time consuming. But Ms. Caproni said the rule aided oversight and would not be changed.
She also said that the F.B.I. takes seriously its duty to protect freedom while preventing terrorist attacks. “I don’t like to think of us as a spy agency because that makes me really nervous,” she said. “We don’t want to live in an environment where people in the United States think the government is spying on them. That’s an oppressive environment to live in and we don’t want to live that way.”
What the public should understand, she continued, is that the F.B.I. is seeking to become a more intelligence-driven agency that can figure out how best to deploy its agents to get ahead of potential threats.
“And to do that,” she said, “you need information.”
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http://www.policeone.com/pc_print.asp?vid=1959980
10/29/2009
L.A. police patrols boosted at Jewish temples after attack
Editor's Note: Fred Burton, widely considered to be one of the world’s foremost authorities on terrorists and terrorist organizations began his law enforcement career as a cop in Montgomery County, Maryland. Now VP of counterterrorism for the private intelligence firm STRATFOR, Burton recently told PoliceOne that while most police officers know where the “high-value targets” are in their patrol area — the power plants, transportation facilities, malls, hospitals, sports complexes, rail yards, radio towers, and public buildings — they should also get to know the locations of the synagogues in their area of responsibility, as well as the mosques. This story, as well as the report from Detroit yesterday, nails home that point. Read the full conversation with Burton here.
Synagogue parishioners huddle at the scene in Los Angeles where a gunman shot and wounded two men in the parking garage of a North Hollywood synagogue early Thursday, Oct. 29, 2009. Jewish schools and temples were put on alert in case it was not a lone attack, authorites said. (AP Photo/Nick Ut)
LOS ANGELES — A gunman shot and wounded two men in the parking garage of a North Hollywood synagogue Thursday, frightening worshippers who heard gunshots and screams before the bleeding victims stumbled in during morning services.
Authorities initially put Jewish schools and temples on alert before saying the attack appeared to be isolated.
Police detained a 17-year-old high school student near the temple because he matched a "very loose" description of the attacker, who was described as a black man wearing a hoodie, Deputy Police Chief Michel Moore said. They later released the youth, saying while he was still a potential suspect, they didn't have enough evidence to hold him.
Two men, ages 38 and 53, were shot in the legs near the Adat Yeshurun Valley Sephardic Orthodox synagogue in the San Fernando Valley, Moore said. The men, both members of the synagogue, arrived in separate cars for the morning service shortly before 6:30 a.m. and were in a stairwell leading up to the synagogue sanctuary when the gunman shot them several times, police said.
The victims, who were hospitalized in good condition, told police the attacker did not speak, Moore said.
One worshipper, Yehuda Oz, said he and about 14 others were praying in the temple when they heard four gunshots and screams from the parking area. Two men stumbled into the temple, Oz said, and people rushed to stop their bleeding.
No one saw the attacker, he said.
"Maybe it was crazy person," Yehuda told the Los Angeles Times. "Maybe he was drugged up. Maybe it was a Jew. We don't know."
Even as investigators tried to find a motive, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and other officials moved to calm fears that the attack was part of any organized anti-Semitic violence.
"We certainly recognize the location and we're sensitive to that," Moore said. "But we do not know that this was a hate crime at all."
Police searched the area for several hours but found no one. An alert that sent extra police patrols to local Jewish schools and synagogues was called off.
Security camera footage from the synagogue shows the suspect but not the shooting, and the quality is too poor for investigators to identify the man, Cmdr. Jorge Villegas said.
The attack occurred 10 miles from a Jewish community center where white supremacist Buford Furrow wounded three children, a teenager and an adult, in 1999. Furrow later killed a Filipino letter carrier on another street, and is serving a life sentence without chance of parole.
The synagogue is in an area of long boulevards with commercial districts, tree-studded blocks of post-World War II stucco homes and apartment complexes on the north side of the Hollywood Hills. It has the second-largest concentration of Jews in the city, said Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish rights group with more than 400,000 members in the United States.
About 6,000 Jews live within walking distance of the synagogue, among many more thousands who live in the San Fernando Valley, Cooper said.
"Adat Yeshurun is a Sephardic synagogue, which means it would attract primarily Jews from Morocco, Yemen, Israelis, some Persians," Cooper said.
It would be easy to scope out synagogue members because they show up every morning at the same time, Cooper said. The synagogue is not on a busy thoroughfare, and Cooper said he believed the gunman may have gone out of his way to attack the men.
"It's a bit of an anomaly about what was that guy doing there, and if he targeted, why there?" Cooper said.
LAPD First Assistant Chief Jim McDonnell said investigators were trying to determine whether a similar suspect might have been involved in robberies or other crimes in the area.
Shayan Yaghoubi, 13, was walking with his mother to the synagogue's adjoining school but wasn't allowed to cross the police line.
"The cops told us we can't go," he said. "I feel very bad because this is my favorite school ... I have a lot of friends over there. I hope everyone is OK. There's never been a problem with fighting."
Michael Bloom, 30, an Orthodox organizer with Hatzolah, a Jewish volunteer medical response team, grew up in the diverse neighborhood. He said there had been instances of Jews being insulted as they walked to the synagogue on the Sabbath.
"This has been going on for years. Everything from "death to Israel" to "dirty Jew,'" he said. "There are gangs in the area. It's not the safest neighborhood."
But Sholomo Yaghobi, 18, said the neighborhood was "calm, relatively."
His brother attends the temple's school and was worried.
"I'm upset if something would have happened to my brother, who would answer to that?" he said.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/us/01terror.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print
November 1, 2009
Smaller-Scale Terrorism Plots Pose New and Worrisome Threats, Officials Say By DAVID JOHNSTON and ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON — After disrupting two recent terrorism plots, American intelligence officials are increasingly concerned that extremist groups in Pakistan linked to Al Qaeda are planning smaller operations in the United States that are harder to detect but more likely to succeed than the spectacular attacks they once emphasized, senior counterterrorism officials say.
The two cases — one involving two Chicago men accused this week of planning an attack on a Danish newspaper that published cartoons of the prophet Mohammad, the other a 24-year-old Denver shuttle bus driver indicted in a plot to use improvised explosives — are among the most serious in years, the officials said.
In both, the officials said, the main defendants are long-term residents of the United States with substantial community ties who traveled to Pakistan’s tribal areas, where they apparently trained with extremist groups affiliated with Al Qaeda. The officials, from American military, law enforcement and intelligence agencies, spoke on the condition that they not be identified because they were not authorized to discuss the cases.
According to F.B.I. documents, David Coleman Headley, 49, the principal defendant in the Chicago case, met with Ilyas Kashmiri, who is regarded by Western authorities as one of the most dangerous Islamic militants operating in Pakistan’s restive tribal areas. Mr. Kashmiri turned to terrorism after serving as a Pakistani special operations commando, and has drawn renewed focus from United States officials after surviving an American drone strike in September.
“He’s a consummate opportunist and a master strategist who has both intimate local knowledge and a vicious global agenda,” said Jarret Brachman, author of “Global Jihadism” and a consultant to the United States government about terrorism.
The authorities have been struck in the Denver and Chicago plots by the central roles played by men who seem to have been more security conscious and better organized and trained than many of those involved in terrorism cases brought since 2001, including a surge of arrests in recent weeks. A number of those arrested were young men inflamed with militant zeal but few skills to carry out an attack.
Some officials said that while the Chicago and Denver cases stood out from lower-level terrorism prosecutions in the United States, it was not new for would-be terrorists to travel to Pakistan and other training grounds and return home to engage in militant activity. They said the activities of Najibullah Zazi, the Denver man, closely resembled the methodology of the Madrid train bombings in 2004 and the London subway bombings in 2005.
A case last year suggests that young men from the United States are also finding their way to Pakistan to fight American forces. Bryant Neal Vinas, 26, grew up on Long Island and worked as a truck driver for the Long Island Rail Road before going to Pakistan. He made contact with a Qaeda group and took part in a rocket attack on an American base in Afghanistan before being captured in Pakistan and brought back to the United States in November 2008. Since then, Mr. Vinas has cooperated with the authorities, helping to identify other extremists who trained for operations in the West.
The model of young men who have lived for years in the United States before traveling overseas and connecting with militant Islamist groups is not confined to Pakistan.
In October 2008, for example, a Somali-American teenager from Minneapolis carried out a suicide bombing in northern Somalia. The teenager, Shirwa Ahmed, had come to the United States in the 1990s and became a citizen. In the months before the attack, he had traveled to the Horn of Africa and apparently joined up with Al Shabab, a militant Muslim group fighting the Ethiopians.
Government counterterrorism analysts said it was significant that the Chicago and Denver cases involved plots that seem less ambitious than the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks or suspected plots of the past, like those aimed at Los Angeles International Airport or the Sears Tower in Chicago.
Western intelligence officials believed that Al Qaeda’s leadership concentrated on spectacular, mass-casualty attacks to build its credibility in the Islamic world. American analysts said the difficulty of carrying out such grandiose plots offered a measure of protection to the United States.
J. Patrick Rowan, a former top lawyer in the Justice Department’s national security division, said the recent cases could mean shifting away from large-scale plots. “There has always been a view that Al Qaeda wants to duplicate or do something even more substantial than 9/11,” Mr. Rowan said.
“The hypothesis has been that they have focused their resources on carrying out a spectacular attack and decided not to pursue lesser plots,” he said. “These cases would seem to undercut that hypothesis and suggest they might be rethinking their strategy, which is obviously worrisome because smaller operations may be harder to detect and stop.”
One of the most important figures in this emerging trend is Mr. Kashmiri, the operational commander of Harakat-ul Jihad Islami, a Pakistani terrorist group affiliated with Al Qaeda, whom one American official described as a “nightmare guy” because he was “an operator who could make things happen.”
Mr. Kashmiri, 45, has a long history of waging guerrilla operations. As a Pakistani army trainer of Afghan mujahedeen, he lost an eye battling Russian forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Later, while working with Kashmiri militants attacking India, Pakistan’s archenemy, he earned wide renown in Pakistan after escaping from an Indian jail where he was imprisoned for two years.
But Mr. Kashmiri turned against the state after President Pervez Musharraf banned his group after the Sept. 11 attacks. He was arrested four years later in connection with an attempted assassination of Mr. Musharraf in December 2003, but released because of lack of evidence.
After the Pakistani government laid siege to Islamic militants in the Red Mosque in Islamabad in July 2007, Mr. Kashmiri moved his operations to North Waziristan and took up arms with Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban there. He is listed as the fourth-most-wanted man by the Pakistani Ministry of the Interior, according to Pakistani media reports.
American intelligence and counterterrorism officials say Mr. Kashmiri is among the most dangerous militant leaders in Pakistan today because of training skills, commando experience and strategic vision to carry out attacks against Western targets, like the Danish newspaper.
Mr. Brachman said that while militants like Mr. Kashmiri were not under Al Qaeda’s direct control, they were responding to the terrorist organization’s rallying cry to attack the West.
“For years now Al Qaeda has been calling their movement to arms — sowing seeds across the global movement,” Mr. Brachman said. “What is clear, however, is that the seeds are now starting to sprout.”
Charlie Savage and Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.
-
- FrontPage Magazine - http://frontpagemag.com -
Detroit Jihad – by Robert Spencer
Posted By Robert Spencer On October 30, 2009 @ 12:24 am In FrontPage | 43 Comments
Luqman Ameen Abdullah, the imam of Detroit’s Masjid Al-Haqq (Mosque of Truth), was killed Wednesday in a shootout with FBI agents. The agents were trying to arrest him on charges of conspiracy, receipt of stolen goods, firearms offenses and more. Agents also arrested eight mosque members; then Thursday, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police caught Abdullah’s son, Mujahid Carswell. Two other accused jihadists also fled, and have not yet been found.
According to the indictment, in his mosque in Detroit Luqman Abdullah was preaching “offensive jihad” and the establishment of a Sharia state in North America. This sovereign Isamic state would be ruled by Islamic law – and by the apparent godfather of Abdullah’s movement, Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin. Al-Amin is the former Black Panther and convert to Islam who gained fame under the name H. Rap Brown. Al-Amin is now serving a life sentence for murdering two police officers, while his disciples, like Luqman Abdullah, carry on the message he articulated so memorably in the 1960s: “If America don’t come around, we’re gonna burn it down.”
In the spirit of his mentor, Abdullah has told his flock: “America must fall.” He has encouraged the Muslims in his mosque to support Hizballah, the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. He exhorted them to bestir themselves to pious deeds: “We should be figuring out how to fight the Kuffar” – that is, unbelievers. “We got to take out the U.S. government. The U.S. government is nothing but Kuffars.” Among the unbelievers were FBI agents, about whom Abdullah declared: “Deal with them, deal with them the way, the way they supposed to be dealt with…. It’s not that complicated, man….If they are coming to get me I’ll just strap a bomb on and blow up everybody.” A law enforcement official wrote in an affidavit that “Abdullah and his followers have trained regularly in the use of firearms, and continue to train in martial arts and sword fighting” – in accord with Abdullah’s dictum that every Muslim believer should “have a weapon and should not be scared to use their weapon when needed.”
Abdullah found justification for all this in the Islamic holy book, the Qur’an, which he said “justified stealing, robbing and other illegal acts, as long as they profit Islam.”
One would think that Muslim spokesmen in America would be anxious to prove their moderate bona fides by repudiating Abdullah, praising the efforts of law enforcement officials, and announcing new measures to teach against the understanding of Islam that prevailed at the Masjid al-Haqq and to shore up the moderate Islam that politically correct orthodoxy insists prevails in all mosques in America in the first place. But no such luck. Instead, they praised Abdullah and excoriated law enforcement.
Dawud Walid of the Michigan branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) reinforced CAIR’s image as an unsavory group with numerous ties to terror – an image newly reinforced by numerous revelations in the explosive new book Muslim Mafia — as he tried to paint a very different picture of Abdullah: “I know him as a respected imam in the Muslim community.” He emphasized the Masjid al-Haqq’s charitable activities, perhaps forgetting that Nazi Germany (and Hamas, and Hizballah) ran social programs as well, and thus their existence is no indication that the one operating them is in every sense benign.
According to the Detroit Free Press, Walid said that a group of imams were going to meet with the head of Detroit’s FBI office, Andrew Arena, to complain, about “linking the weapons and smuggling charges to the Muslim faith” – as if the FBI, rather than Luqman Abdullah, had done this. Arena probably won’t need much convincing: he has already asserted, without explanation, that Abdullah taught “a very hybrid radical ideology – one mainstream Muslims “would not recognize.” For his part, Walid also warned that the death of Abdullah and the arrests of other Masjid al-Haqq would anger Muslims and make them even more suspicious of law enforcement than they already are: “As much as our president says nice, flowery things about Muslims and Islam in Cairo or Istanbul, these types of stories just erode that.”
Meanwhile, the Muslim Alliance of North America, of which Abdullah was a member, complained about the shootout in a statement: “This tragic shooting raises deep concerns regarding the use of lethal force by law enforcement agents. We urge law enforcement and the media not to take undo advantage of this tragedy in order to demonize … African American Muslims in particular.”
These kinds of statements fall into a pattern that has played out many times before. An Islamic jihadist plots murder and mayhem, explicitly justifying it all by reference to Islamic texts and teachings. Then putatively moderate Muslims, instead of support law enforcement efforts, criticize them and complain about Muslims being victimized and Islam being unfairly linked to terrorism. Generally this is followed by the spectacle of media and law enforcement officials bending over backwards to make sure that no one gets the impression that Islam had anything to do with the bloody plots that the arrested parties were planning.
The problem with this pattern is that no one involved is doing anything to keep the story of Luqman Abdullah and the Masjid al-Haqq from being repeated in other mosques in the United States in the future. No one is challenging the Muslim community here to clean its own house and stop the dissembling and finger-pointing. No one is speaking openly and honestly about what the Qur’an really says, and what the implications are of that fact. No one, in short, is doing much of anything to ensure that Luqman Abdullah, one of the first clergymen in the United States to be killed in a shootout with the FBI, is not just the first of many.
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Counterterrorism: Shifting from 'Who' to 'How'
November 4, 2009 | 1918 GMT
By Scott Stewart and Fred Burton
In the 11th edition of the online magazine Sada al-Malahim (The Echo of Battle), which was released to jihadist Web sites last week, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) leader Nasir al-Wahayshi wrote an article that called for jihadists to conduct simple attacks against a variety of targets. The targets included "any tyrant, intelligence den, prince" or "minister" (referring to the governments in the Muslim world like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Yemen), and "any crusaders whenever you find one of them, like at the airports of the crusader Western countries that participate in the wars against Islam, or their living compounds, trains etc.," (an obvious reference to the United States and Europe and Westerners living in Muslim countries).
Al-Wahayshi, an ethnic Yemeni who spent time in Afghanistan serving as a lieutenant under Osama bin Laden, noted these simple attacks could be conducted with readily available weapons such as knives, clubs or small improvised explosive devices (IEDs). According to al-Wahayshi, jihadists "don't need to conduct a big effort or spend a lot of money to manufacture 10 grams of explosive material" and that they should not "waste a long time finding the materials, because you can find all these in your mother's kitchen, or readily at hand or in any city you are in."
That al-Wahayshi gave these instructions in an Internet magazine distributed via jihadist chat rooms, not in some secret meeting with his operational staff, demonstrates that they are clearly intended to reach grassroots jihadists -- and are not intended as some sort of internal guidance for AQAP members. In fact, al-Wahayshi was encouraging grassroots jihadists to "do what Abu al-Khair did" referring to AQAP member Abdullah Hassan Taleh al-Asiri, the Saudi suicide bomber who attempted to kill Saudi Deputy Interior Minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayef with a small IED on Aug. 28.
The most concerning aspect of al-Wahayshi's statement is that it is largely true. Improvised explosive mixtures are in fact relatively easy to make from readily available chemicals -- if a person has the proper training -- and attacks using small IEDs or other readily attainable weapons such as knives or clubs (or firearms in the United States) are indeed quite simple to conduct.
As STRATFOR has noted for several years now, with al Qaeda's structure under continual attack and no regional al Qaeda franchise groups in the Western Hemisphere, the most pressing jihadist threat to the U.S. homeland at present stems from grassroots jihadists, not the al Qaeda core. This trend has been borne out by the large number of plots and arrests over the past several years, to include several so far in 2009. The grassroots have likewise proven to pose a critical threat to Europe (although it is important to note that the threat posed by grassroots operatives is more widespread, but normally involves smaller, less strategic attacks than those conducted by the al Qaeda core).
From a counterterrorism perspective, the problem posed by grassroots operatives is that unless they somehow self-identify by contacting a government informant or another person who reports them to authorities, attend a militant training camp, or conduct electronic correspondence with a person or organization under government scrutiny, they are very difficult to detect.
The threat posed by grassroots operatives, and the difficulty identifying them, highlight the need for counterterrorism programs to adopt a proactive, protective intelligence approach to the problem -- an approach that focuses on "the how" of militant attacks instead of just "the who."
The How
In the traditional, reactive approach to counterterrorism, where authorities respond to a crime scene after a terrorist attack to find and arrest the militants responsible for the attack, it is customary to focus on the who, or on the individual or group behind the attack. Indeed, in this approach, the only time much emphasis is placed on the how is either in an effort to identify a suspect when an unknown actor carried out the attack, or to prove that a particular suspect was responsible for the attack during a trial. Beyond these limited purposes, not much attention is paid to the how.
In large part, this focus on the who is a legacy of the fact that for many years, the primary philosophy of the U.S. government was to treat counterterrorism as a law-enforcement program, with a focus on prosecution rather than on disrupting plots.
Certainly, catching and prosecuting those who commit terrorist attacks is necessary, but from our perspective, preventing attacks is more important, and prevention requires a proactive approach. To pursue such a proactive approach to counterterrorism, the how becomes a critical question. By studying and understanding how attacks are conducted -- i.e., the exact steps and actions required for a successful attack -- authorities can establish systems to proactively identify early indicators that planning for an attack is under way. People involved in planning the attack can then be focused on, identified, and action can be taken prevent them from conducting the attack or attacks they are plotting. This means that focusing on the how can lead to previously unidentified suspects, e.g., those who do not self-identify.
"How was the attack conducted?" is the primary question addressed by protective intelligence, which is, at its core, a process for proactively identifying and assessing potential threats. Focusing on the how, then, requires protective intelligence practitioners to carefully study the tactics, tradecraft and behavior associated with militant actors involved in terrorist attacks. This allows them to search for and identify those behaviors before an attack takes place. Many of these behaviors are not by themselves criminal in nature; visiting a public building and observing security measures or standing on the street to watch the arrival of a VIP at their office are not illegal, but they can be indicators that an attack is being plotted. Such legal activities ultimately could be overt actions in furtherance of an illegal conspiracy to conduct the attack, but even where conspiracy cannot be proved, steps can still be taken to identify possible assailants and prevent a potential attack -- or at the very least, to mitigate the risk posed by the people involved.
Protective intelligence is based on the fact that successful attacks don't just happen out of the blue. Rather, terrorist attacks follow a discernable attack cycle. There are critical points during that cycle where a plot is most likely to be detected by an outside observer. Some of the points during the attack cycle when potential attackers are most vulnerable to detection are while surveillance is being conducted and weapons are being acquired. However, there are other, less obvious points where people on the lookout can spot preparations for an attack.
It is true that sometimes individuals do conduct ill-conceived, poorly executed attacks that involve shortcuts in the planning process. But this type of spur-of-the-moment attack is usually associated with mentally disturbed individuals and it is extremely rare for a militant actor to conduct a spontaneous terrorist attack without first following the steps of the attack cycle.
To really understand the how, protective intelligence practitioners cannot simply acknowledge that something like surveillance occurs. Rather, they must turn a powerful lens on steps like preoperational surveillance to gain an in-depth understanding of them. Dissecting an activity like preoperational surveillance requires not only examining subjects such as the demeanor demonstrated by those conducting surveillance prior to an attack and the specific methods and cover for action and status used. It also requires identifying particular times where surveillance is most likely and certain optimal vantage points (called perches in surveillance jargon) from where a surveillant is most likely to operate when seeking to surveil a specific facility or event. This type of complex understanding of surveillance can then be used to help focus human or technological countersurveillance efforts where they can be most effective.
Unfortunately, many counterterrorism investigators are so focused on the who that they do not focus on collecting this type of granular how information. When we have spoken with law enforcement officers responsible for investigating recent grassroots plots, they gave us blank stares in response to questions about how the suspects had conducted surveillance on the intended targets. They simply had not paid attention to this type of detail -- but this oversight is not really the investigators' fault. No one had ever explained to them why paying attention to, and recording, this type of detail was important. Moreover, it takes specific training and a practiced eye to observe and record these details without glossing over them. For example, it is quite useful if a protective intelligence officer has first conducted a lot of surveillance, because conducting surveillance allows one to understand what a surveillant must do and where he must be in order to effectively observe surveillance of a specific person or place.
Similarly, to truly understand the tradecraft required to build an IED and the specific steps a militant needs to complete to do so, it helps to go to an IED school where the investigator learns the tradecraft firsthand. Militant actors can and do change over time. New groups, causes and ideologies emerge, and specific militants can be killed, captured or retire. But the tactical steps a militant must complete to conduct a successful attack are constant. It doesn't matter if the person planning an attack is a radical environmentalist, a grassroots jihadist or a member of the al Qaeda core, for while these diverse actors will exhibit different levels of professionalism in regard to terrorist tradecraft, they still must follow essentially the same steps, accomplish the same tasks and operate in the same areas. Knowing this allows protective intelligence to guard against different levels of threats.
Of course, tactics can be changed and perfected and new tactics can be developed (often in response to changes in security and law enforcement operations). Additionally, new technologies can emerge (like cell phones and Google Earth) -- which can alter the way some of these activities are conducted, or reduce the time it takes to complete them. Studying the tradecraft and behaviors needed to execute evolving tactics, however, allows protective intelligence practitioners to respond to such changes and even alter how they operate in order to more effectively search for potential hostile activity.
Technology does not only aid those seeking to conduct attacks. There are a variety of new tools, such as Trapwire, a software system designed to work with camera systems to help detect patterns of preoperational surveillance, that can be focused on critical areas to help cut through the fog of noise and activity and draw attention to potential threats. These technological tools can help turn the tables on unknown plotters because they are designed to focus on the how. They will likely never replace human observation and experience, but they can serve as valuable aids to human perception.
Of course, protective intelligence does not have to be the sole responsibility of federal authorities specifically charged with counterterrorism. Corporate security managers and private security contractors should also apply these principles to protecting the people and facilities in their charge, as should local and state police agencies. In a world full of soft targets -- and limited resources to protect those targets from attack -- the more eyes looking for such activity the better. Even the general public has an important role to play in practicing situational awareness and spotting potential terrorist activity.
Keeping it Simple?
Al-Wahayshi is right that it is not difficult to construct improvised explosives from a wide range of household chemicals like peroxide and acetone or chlorine and brake fluid. He is also correct that some of those explosive mixtures can be concealed in objects ranging from electronic items to picture frames, or can be employed in forms ranging from hand grenades to suicide vests. Likewise, low-level attacks can also be conducted using knives, clubs and guns.
Furthermore, when grassroots jihadists plan and carry out attacks acting as lone wolves or in small compartmentalized cells without inadvertently betraying their mission by conspiring with people known to the authorities, they are not able to be detected by the who-focused systems, and it becomes far more difficult to discover and thwart these plots. This focus on the how absolutely does not mean that who-centered programs must be abandoned. Surveillance on known militants, their associates and communications should continue, efforts to identify people attending militant training camps or fighting in places like Afghanistan or Somalia must be increased, and people who conduct terrorist attacks should be identified and prosecuted.
However -- and this is an important however -- if an unknown militant is going to conduct even a simple attack against some of the targets al-Wahayshi suggests, such as an airport, train, or specific leader or media personality, complexity creeps into the picture, and the planning cycle must be followed if an attack is going to be successful. The prospective attacker must observe and quantify the target, construct a plan for the attack and then execute that plan. The demands of this process will force even an attacker previously unknown to the authorities into a position where he is vulnerable to discovery. If the attacker does this while there are people watching for such activity, he will likely be seen. But if he does this while there are no watchers, there is little chance that he will become a who until after the attack has been completed.
This report may be forwarded or republished on your website with attribution to www.stratfor.com
-
http://frontpagemag.com/2009/11/06/jihad-at-fort-hood-by-robert-spencer/
Jihad at Ft. Hood
-
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=115218
The enemy within.
-
http://michellemalkin.com/2009/11/06/the-massacre-at-fort-hood-and-muslim-soldiers-with-attitude/
More on the jihad from within the ranks.
-
It is okay to be Muslim - or Jewish or Hamish or Atheist. It is NOT okay to be pulling for the other team. Tolerance for free speech is one thing but IMO we don't give power or paychecks to people who express that Americans deserved attack. Facts of this will sort out over time but it doesn't help the clarity in the armed forces that the Commander in Chief worshipped with a Reverend who expressed similar views and politicked with a group that called our general "Betray Us".
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http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2009/11/06/2009-11-06_police_sgt_kimberly_munley_credited_with_ending_fort_hood_gunman_maj_nidal_malik.html#ixzz0W5kobZLj
My hero.
-
COUNTERTERRORISM: SHIFTING FROM 'WHO' TO 'HOW'
By Scott Stewart and Fred Burton
In the 11th edition of the online magazine Sada al-Malahim (The Echo of Battle),
which was released to jihadist Web sites last week, al Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula (AQAP) leader Nasir al-Wahayshi wrote an article that called for jihadists
to conduct simple attacks against a variety of targets. The targets included "any
tyrant, intelligence den, prince" or "minister" (referring to the governments in the
Muslim world like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Yemen), and "any crusaders whenever you
find one of them, like at the airports of the crusader Western countries that
participate in the wars against Islam, or their living compounds, trains etc.," (an
obvious reference to the United States and Europe and Westerners living in Muslim
countries).
Al-Wahayshi, an ethnic Yemeni who spent time in Afghanistan serving as a lieutenant
under Osama bin Laden, noted these simple attacks could be conducted with readily
available weapons such as knives, clubs or small improvised explosive devices
(IEDs). According to al-Wahayshi, jihadists "don't need to conduct a big effort or
spend a lot of money to manufacture 10 grams of explosive material" and that they
should not "waste a long time finding the materials, because you can find all these
in your mother's kitchen, or readily at hand or in any city you are in."
That al-Wahayshi gave these instructions in an Internet magazine distributed via
jihadist chat rooms, not in some secret meeting with his operational staff,
demonstrates that they are clearly intended to reach grassroots jihadists -- and are
not intended as some sort of internal guidance for AQAP members. In fact,
al-Wahayshi was encouraging grassroots jihadists to "do what Abu al-Khair did"
referring to AQAP member Abdullah Hassan Taleh al-Asiri, the Saudi suicide bomber
who attempted to kill Saudi Deputy Interior Minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayef with
a small IED on Aug. 28.
The most concerning aspect of al-Wahayshi's statement is that it is largely true.
Improvised explosive mixtures are in fact relatively easy to make from readily
available chemicals -- if a person has the proper training -- and attacks using
small IEDs or other readily attainable weapons such as knives or clubs (or firearms
in the United States) are indeed quite simple to conduct.
As STRATFOR has noted for several years now, with al Qaeda's structure under
continual attack and no regional al Qaeda franchise groups in the Western
Hemisphere, the most pressing jihadist threat to the U.S. homeland at present stems
from grassroots jihadists, not the al Qaeda core. This trend has been borne out by
the large number of plots and arrests over the past several years, to include
several so far in 2009. The grassroots have likewise proven to pose a critical
threat to Europe (although it is important to note that the threat posed by
grassroots operatives is more widespread, but normally involves smaller, less
strategic attacks than those conducted by the al Qaeda core).
From a counterterrorism perspective, the problem posed by grassroots operatives is
that unless they somehow self-identify by contacting a government informant or
another person who reports them to authorities, attend a militant training camp, or
conduct electronic correspondence with a person or organization under government
scrutiny, they are very difficult to detect.
The threat posed by grassroots operatives, and the difficulty identifying them,
highlight the need for counterterrorism programs to adopt a proactive, protective
intelligence approach to the problem -- an approach that focuses on "the how" of
militant attacks instead of just "the who."
The How
In the traditional, reactive approach to counterterrorism, where authorities respond
to a crime scene after a terrorist attack to find and arrest the militants
responsible for the attack, it is customary to focus on the who, or on the
individual or group behind the attack. Indeed, in this approach, the only time much
emphasis is placed on the how is either in an effort to identify a suspect when an
unknown actor carried out the attack, or to prove that a particular suspect was
responsible for the attack during a trial. Beyond these limited purposes, not much
attention is paid to the how.
In large part, this focus on the who is a legacy of the fact that for many years,
the primary philosophy of the U.S. government was to treat counterterrorism as a
law-enforcement program, with a focus on prosecution rather than on disrupting
plots.
Certainly, catching and prosecuting those who commit terrorist attacks is necessary,
but from our perspective, preventing attacks is more important, and prevention
requires a proactive approach. To pursue such a proactive approach to
counterterrorism, the how becomes a critical question. By studying and understanding
how attacks are conducted -- i.e., the exact steps and actions required for a
successful attack -- authorities can establish systems to proactively identify early
indicators that planning for an attack is under way. People involved in planning the
attack can then be focused on, identified, and action can be taken prevent them from
conducting the attack or attacks they are plotting. This means that focusing on the
how can lead to previously unidentified suspects, e.g., those who do not
self-identify.
"How was the attack conducted?" is the primary question addressed by protective
intelligence, which is, at its core, a process for proactively identifying and
assessing potential threats. Focusing on the how, then, requires protective
intelligence practitioners to carefully study the tactics, tradecraft and behavior
associated with militant actors involved in terrorist attacks. This allows them to
search for and identify those behaviors before an attack takes place. Many of these
behaviors are not by themselves criminal in nature; visiting a public building and
observing security measures or standing on the street to watch the arrival of a VIP
at their office are not illegal, but they can be indicators that an attack is being
plotted. Such legal activities ultimately could be overt actions in furtherance of
an illegal conspiracy to conduct the attack, but even where conspiracy cannot be
proved, steps can still be taken to identify possible assailants and prevent a
potential attack -- or at the very least, to mitigate the risk posed by the people
involved.
Protective intelligence is based on the fact that successful attacks don't just
happen out of the blue. Rather, terrorist attacks follow a discernable attack cycle.
There are critical points during that cycle where a plot is most likely to be
detected by an outside observer. Some of the points during the attack cycle when
potential attackers are most vulnerable to detection are while surveillance is being
conducted and weapons are being acquired. However, there are other, less obvious
points where people on the lookout can spot preparations for an attack.
It is true that sometimes individuals do conduct ill-conceived, poorly executed
attacks that involve shortcuts in the planning process. But this type of
spur-of-the-moment attack is usually associated with mentally disturbed individuals
and it is extremely rare for a militant actor to conduct a spontaneous terrorist
attack without first following the steps of the attack cycle.
To really understand the how, protective intelligence practitioners cannot simply
acknowledge that something like surveillance occurs. Rather, they must turn a
powerful lens on steps like preoperational surveillance to gain an in-depth
understanding of them. Dissecting an activity like preoperational surveillance
requires not only examining subjects such as the demeanor demonstrated by those
conducting surveillance prior to an attack and the specific methods and cover for
action and status used. It also requires identifying particular times where
surveillance is most likely and certain optimal vantage points (called perches in
surveillance jargon) from where a surveillant is most likely to operate when seeking
to surveil a specific facility or event. This type of complex understanding of
surveillance can then be used to help focus human or technological
countersurveillance efforts where they can be most effective.
Unfortunately, many counterterrorism investigators are so focused on the who that
they do not focus on collecting this type of granular how information. When we have
spoken with law enforcement officers responsible for investigating recent grassroots
plots, they gave us blank stares in response to questions about how the suspects had
conducted surveillance on the intended targets. They simply had not paid attention
to this type of detail -- but this oversight is not really the investigators' fault.
No one had ever explained to them why paying attention to, and recording, this type
of detail was important. Moreover, it takes specific training and a practiced eye to
observe and record these details without glossing over them. For example, it is
quite useful if a protective intelligence officer has first conducted a lot of
surveillance, because conducting surveillance allows one to understand what a
surveillant must do and where he must be in order to effectively observe
surveillance of a specific person or place.
Similarly, to truly understand the tradecraft required to build an IED and the
specific steps a militant needs to complete to do so, it helps to go to an IED
school where the investigator learns the tradecraft firsthand. Militant actors can
and do change over time. New groups, causes and ideologies emerge, and specific
militants can be killed, captured or retire. But the tactical steps a militant must
complete to conduct a successful attack are constant. It doesn't matter if the
person planning an attack is a radical environmentalist, a grassroots jihadist or a
member of the al Qaeda core, for while these diverse actors will exhibit different
levels of professionalism in regard to terrorist tradecraft, they still must follow
essentially the same steps, accomplish the same tasks and operate in the same areas.
Knowing this allows protective intelligence to guard against different levels of
threats.
Of course, tactics can be changed and perfected and new tactics can be developed
(often in response to changes in security and law enforcement operations).
Additionally, new technologies can emerge (like cell phones and Google Earth) --
which can alter the way some of these activities are conducted, or reduce the time
it takes to complete them. Studying the tradecraft and behaviors needed to execute
evolving tactics, however, allows protective intelligence practitioners to respond
to such changes and even alter how they operate in order to more effectively search
for potential hostile activity.
Technology does not only aid those seeking to conduct attacks. There are a variety
of new tools, such as Trapwire, a software system designed to work with camera
systems to help detect patterns of preoperational surveillance, that can be focused
on critical areas to help cut through the fog of noise and activity and draw
attention to potential threats. These technological tools can help turn the tables
on unknown plotters because they are designed to focus on the how. They will likely
never replace human observation and experience, but they can serve as valuable aids
to human perception.
Of course, protective intelligence does not have to be the sole responsibility of
federal authorities specifically charged with counterterrorism. Corporate security
managers and private security contractors should also apply these principles to
protecting the people and facilities in their charge, as should local and state
police agencies. In a world full of soft targets -- and limited resources to protect
those targets from attack -- the more eyes looking for such activity the better.
Even the general public has an important role to play in practicing situational
awareness and spotting potential terrorist activity.
Keeping it Simple?
Al-Wahayshi is right that it is not difficult to construct improvised explosives
from a wide range of household chemicals like peroxide and acetone or chlorine and
brake fluid. He is also correct that some of those explosive mixtures can be
concealed in objects ranging from electronic items to picture frames, or can be
employed in forms ranging from hand grenades to suicide vests. Likewise, low-level
attacks can also be conducted using knives, clubs and guns.
Furthermore, when grassroots jihadists plan and carry out attacks acting as lone
wolves or in small compartmentalized cells without inadvertently betraying their
mission by conspiring with people known to the authorities, they are not able to be
detected by the who-focused systems, and it becomes far more difficult to discover
and thwart these plots. This focus on the how absolutely does not mean that
who-centered programs must be abandoned. Surveillance on known militants, their
associates and communications should continue, efforts to identify people attending
militant training camps or fighting in places like Afghanistan or Somalia must be
increased, and people who conduct terrorist attacks should be identified and
prosecuted.
However -- and this is an important however -- if an unknown militant is going to
conduct even a simple attack against some of the targets al-Wahayshi suggests, such
as an airport, train, or specific leader or media personality, complexity creeps
into the picture, and the planning cycle must be followed if an attack is going to
be successful. The prospective attacker must observe and quantify the target,
construct a plan for the attack and then execute that plan. The demands of this
process will force even an attacker previously unknown to the authorities into a
position where he is vulnerable to discovery. If the attacker does this while there
are people watching for such activity, he will likely be seen. But if he does this
while there are no watchers, there is little chance that he will become a who until
after the attack has been completed.
This report may be forwarded or republished on your website with attribution to
www.stratfor.com.
Copyright 2009 Stratfor.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2009/11/07/report-hasan-attended-same-radical-mosque-as-911-hijackers/
Of course, it's just second-hand PTSD. Pay no attention to the jihadist behind the curtain.
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GM: "Of course, it's just second-hand PTSD."
Very funny (not massacre humor but regarding the confuddled state of media and leadership thinking). Or as Mark Steyn put it, the first diagnosed case of Pre-Post-traumatic stress disorder.
The man is a mass murderer playing for the other team. Only question is whether we should have known and stopped him. At least in hindsight the answer is YES.
Both federal and Texas laws allow execution. Obama may be gone by then but otherwise I suspect he will pardon him or consult with jihad allies so as to not offend them and create more jihadists. :-(
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Nice find GM. It will help me nicely on a different forum.
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Nice find GM. It will help me nicely on a different forum.
Someone is trying to dispute the jihadist motive behind the attack? Really???
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http://abcnews.go.com/m/screen?id=9030873
Let's not jump to conclusions. Maybe he just wanted a referral to a nice flight school.
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GM:
http://fmatalk.com/showthread.php?t=6390
http://www.fmatalk.com/showthread.php?t=7107
No URL on this yet, but seems to be legit:
British spies help prevent al Qaeda-inspired attack on New York subway
The plan, which reportedly would have been the biggest attack on America since 9/11, was uncovered after Scotland Yard intercepted an email.
The force alerted the FBI, who launched an operation which led to airport shuttle bus driver Najibullah Zazi, 24, being charged with conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction
The Afghan is alleged to have been part of a group who used stolen credit cards to buy components for bombs including nail varnish remover.
The chemicals bought were similar to those used to make the 2005 London Tube and bus explosives which killed 52 people.
Zazi, from Denver, Colorado, is understood to have been given instructions by a senior member of al Qaeda in Pakistan over the internet.
US authorities allegedly found bomb-making instructions on his laptop and his fingerprints on batteries and measuring scales they seized.
A phone containing footage of New York's Grand Central Station, thought to have been made by him during a visit a week before his arrest, was also found along with explosive residue. Zazi was also said by informants to have attended a terrorist training camp in Pakistan.
The alleged plot was unmasked after an email address that was being monitored as part of the abortive Operation Pathway was suddenly reactivated.
Operation Pathway was investigating an alleged UK terrorist cell but went awry after the then Met Police counter-terrorism head Bob Quick was pictured walking into Downing Street displaying top secret documents.
Eleven Pakistani suspects were arrested immediately after the gaffe but later released without charge.
However, security staff continued to monitor the email address which eventually yielded results.
The British discovery also came at just the right time – the US had threatened to sever intelligence links over the release of Lockerbie bomber Al Megrahi.
A British security source told The Sun: "This was excellent work and highlights the fact we produce good information.
"(The US authorities) were delighted with the intelligence we gave them and believe it helped prevent a catastrophic attack.
Published: 1:00PM GMT 09 Nov 2009
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Amazing the level of willful ignorance and denial still present today. Imagine this sort of moronic drivel in 1944. "It's just a few bad nazis that make all nazis victims of profiling". :roll:
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"Nidal Hassan Did the Right Thing," by Anwar alAwlaki, November 9:
Nidal Hassan is a hero. He is a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people. This is a contradiction that many Muslims brush aside and just pretend that it doesn't exist. Any decent Muslim cannot live, understanding properly his duties towards his Creator and his fellow Muslims, and yet serve as a US soldier. The US is leading the war against terrorism which in reality is a war against Islam. Its army is directly invading two Muslim countries and indirectly occupying the rest through its stooges.
Nidal opened fire on soldiers who were on their way to be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. How can there be any dispute about the virtue of what he has done? In fact the only way a Muslim could Islamically justify serving as a soldier in the US army is if his intention is to follow the footsteps of men like Nidal.
The heroic act of brother Nidal also shows the dilemma of the Muslim American community. Increasingly they are being cornered into taking stances that would either make them betray Islam or betray their nation. Many amongst them are choosing the former. The Muslim organizations in America came out in a pitiful chorus condemning Nidal's operation.
The fact that fighting against the US army is an Islamic duty today cannot be disputed. No scholar with a grain of Islamic knowledge can defy the clear cut proofs that Muslims today have the right -rather the duty- to fight against American tyranny. Nidal has killed soldiers who were about to be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan in order to kill Muslims. The American Muslims who condemned his actions have committed treason against the Muslim Ummah and have fallen into hypocrisy.
Allah(swt) says: Give tidings to the hypocrites that there is for them a painful punishment - Those who take disbelievers as allies instead of the believers. Do they seek with them honor [through power]? But indeed, honor belongs to Allah entirely. (al-Nisa 136-137) [Koran 4:136-137]
The inconsistency of being a Muslim today and living in America and the West in general reveals the wisdom behind the opinions that call for migration from the West. It is becoming more and more difficult to hold on to Islam in an environment that is becoming more hostile towards Muslims.
May Allah grant our brother Nidal patience, perseverance and steadfastness and we ask Allah to accept from him his great heroic act. Ameen
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Hate speech! Hate speech! Oh wait, that's Hasan and 3 of the 9/11 hijackers former imam speaking.
NEVERMIND. :roll:
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"Hate speech! Hate speech! Oh wait, that's Hasan and 3 of the 9/11 hijackers former imam speaking. "
13 shot and killed and dozens more shot and injured does NOT constitute a 'hate crime' under the current regime and theri new, updated thought law. Un-f*cking believable. Think how much worse this would have been in their little minds if the victims were shot because they were black or gay, instead because they are patriotic Americans serving their country. It's not hate and it's not terror, because one regime can control and legislate our language. He will not be going to Guantanamo. Instead his free health care will be followed with free legal, endless appeals and no execution(?). Wouldn't be surprised if a book deal and some talk shows are in the making.
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Who is Anwar alAwlaki?
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***Think how much worse this would have been in their little minds if the victims were shot because they were black or gay, instead because they are patriotic Americans serving their country***
True. And think how much worse this would have been simply if W were still President. This to me is all about protecting the Obama.
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http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/56844
Alleged Fort Hood Gunman a Hero, Says Islamic Cleric With Suspected 9/11 Links
Monday, November 09, 2009
By Patrick Goodenough, International Editor
Spc. Ryan Howard of Niles, Mich., right and Spc. David Straub of Ardmore, Okla. wait for news of fellow soldiers while waiting at the gate of the Army base after a shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, Thursday, Nov. 5, 2009. (AP Photo)(CNSNews.com) – The Muslim U.S. Army major accused of shooting dead 13 people at Fort Hood last Thursday was a “hero” who faced a choice of betraying his nation or betraying Islam, according to a radical U.S.-born cleric whose possible links with Maj. Nidal Hasan are now under investigation.
The cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, led a Northern Virginia mosque in 2001 which Hasan attended – along with three of the 9/11 hijackers.
Questioned but not arrested after the 9/11 attacks, al-Awlaki is now based in Yemen, from where his online lectures have been inspiring jihadists in the years since the bombings on U.S. soil.
London’s Sunday Telegraph first reported at the weekend that Hasan had attended the Dar al Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church during Awlaki’s tenure in 2001. Officials subsequently told U.S. media outlets investigators were looking into possible links between Awlaki and Hasan.
In a posting on his Web site Monday, Awlaki praised Hasan, calling him “a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people.”
He criticized U.S. Muslim organizations for condemning the shooting attack, calling them hypocrites and – quoting from the Koran – saying “painful punishment” awaited them.
“Nidal opened fire on soldiers who were on their way to be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan,” Awlaki said. “How can there be any dispute about the virtue of what he has done?”
“In fact the only way a Muslim could Islamically justify serving as a soldier in the U.S. army is if his intention is to follow the footsteps of men like Nidal.”
Awlaki’s comments and reports of possible link between him and Hasan come amid ongoing speculation and debate about the motive for last Thursday’s deadly shooting. Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, was shot by police during the rampage and is in hospital.
Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who chairs the Senate Homeland Security committee, told Fox News Sunday that “there are very, very strong warning signs here that Dr. Hasan had become an Islamist extremist and, therefore, that this was a terrorist act.”
He called for an investigation into whether the military had missed warning signs in Hasan’s conduct prior to the attack.
Army Chief of Staff George Casey, on ABC’s This Week, said he could not rule out terrorism, but advised that “speculation could potentially heighten backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers.”
Islamic organizations in the U.S., which from the outset condemned the attack, have also warned against linking it to Hasan’s religion, while voicing concern about stepped-up “Islamophobia” and the potential for retaliation against Muslims.
The Muslim American Society’s Mahdi Bray cautioned against “drawing conclusions based on the ethnicity of the perpetrator of this tragic incident.”
American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee president Mary Rose Oakar said the attack was “morally reprehensible and has nothing to do with any religion, race, ethnicity, or national origin.”
A woman walks near the entrance to the Dar Al Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Va. on Sunday, Nov. 8, 2009. (AP Photo)Hijackers
Around the time Hasan was attending the Awlaki-run Dar al Hijrah Islamic Center, so two were three of the 9/11 hijackers: Hasan is known to have been going to the mosque in May 2001, as his mother’s funeral took place there that month; according to the 9/11 Commission report, 9/11 terrorists Nawaf al-Hazmi and Hani Hanjour started going to the mosque in early April 2001.
They and a third Saudi who also attended the mosque, Khalid al-Mihdhar, were among the five hijackers onboard American Airlines Flight 77 which took off from Dulles and was flown into the Pentagon on September 11.
Awlaki was questioned by the FBI after the attacks but information against him was not considered strong enough to support a criminal prosecution, the 9/11 Commission report said.
By the time the commission’s investigators tried to interview him in 2003, he had moved to Yemen. The commission’s attempts to arrange interviews with the help of the U.S. and Yemeni governments were unsuccessful.
The commission expressed strong suspicions about Awlaki (his name is rendered “Aulaqi” in the report), noting the “remarkable coincidence” that he had also had dealings with one of the three hijackers during his pre-Virginia posting, at a mosque in San Diego.
Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki (Photo: Cage Prisoners Web site)‘America cannot and will not win’
Awlaki was cited last year by a top Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official as an example of al-Qaeda’s “reach into the homeland.”
Addressing a conference in Nashville, then undersecretary for intelligence and analysis Charles Allen described Awlaki as a “U.S. citizen, al-Qaeda supporter, and former spiritual leader to three of the September 11 hijackers.”
Allen said he “targets U.S. Muslims with radical online lectures encouraging terrorist attacks from his new home in Yemen.”
During the 2008 trial of foreign-born Islamists who plotted to attack the Fort Dix military base in New Jersey an informant testified that some of the co-conspirators had been inspired to strike American soldiers by one of Awlaki’s online lectures.
Also last year, Indian security officials said Islamists there were citing Awlaki lectures in their emailed claims of responsibility, routinely sent after terrorist attacks in Indian cities.
And over the summer, the New York Times reported that a group of American Muslims of Somali descent who had gone to Somalia to fight alongside the Islamist group al-Shabaab, had also listened to Awlaki’s Internet lectures.
In an article on his Web site, dated Saturday, Awlaki – who calls himself “Sheikh Anwar” – declares that jihad is on the rise.
“America cannot and will not win,” he writes. “The tables have turned and there is no rolling back of the worldwide Jihad movement. The ideas of Jihad are proliferating around the world, the mujahideen movements are gaining strength and the battlefields are expanding with the mujahideen introducing new fronts.”
FBI suspicions
The 9/11 Commission report said Awlaki was born in New Mexico, grew up in Yemen and studied in the U.S. on a Yemeni government scholarship.
It said he came to the FBI’s attention in 1999, after it learned “that he may have been contacted by a possible procurement agent for [Osama] Bin Laden.”
“During this investigation, the FBI learned that Aulaqi knew individuals from the Holy Land Foundation and others involved in raising money for the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas,” it said.
The commission report said that 9/11 hijackers Hazmi and Mihdhar came into contact with Awlaki in 2000 when he served as imam at the Rabat mosque in San Diego, and that they reportedly respected him as a religious figure “and developed a close relationship with him.”
He then moved to Falls Church in early 2001 and “Hazmi eventually showed up at Aulaqi’s mosque in Virginia, an appearance that may not have been coincidental.”
A Jordanian also attending the mosque had helped to arrange an apartment for Hazmi and Hanjour in Alexandria, Va., the report said.
It said the Jordanian, Eyad al Rababah, said later he had just “happened to meet” the two at the mosque, but that some FBI agents suspected that Awlaki may in fact have commissioned Rababah to help the two Saudis – a suspicion shared by the commission.
Awlaki later moved to Yemen, where he was detained from August 2006 until December 2007. After his release he said he believed the U.S. government was behind his incarceration.
Awlaki denies links to the 9/11 hijackers. After Allen of the DHS described him last year as “a former spiritual leader to three of the September 11 hijackers,” he posted a denial on his Web site, saying “This is a baseless claim that I have refuted again and again.”
Last August, Awlaki made headlines in Britain when a Muslim advocacy group named Cage Prisoners invited him to speak via video link to an event at the Kensington town hall in London, to raise funds for terrorist suspects held at Guantanamo Bay.
After concerns were raised about his radical views, the local council prohibited him from taking part.
Cage Prisoners calls Awlaki “a prominent Muslim scholar highly regarded in English speaking Islamic circles.”
It says that while he was in the U.S. he had worked “hard to establish a reasoned, nuanced and just form of intellectual dissent in Western Muslims.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/us/10inquire.html?_r=2&hp=&pagewanted=print
Death by PC.
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http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2009/11/headline-roundup-1.html
Iowahawk's media roundup. :-D
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http://www.politico.com/blogs/joshgerstein/1109/Despite_ban_Holder_to_speak_to_CAIRlinked_group.html
Obama's Justice Department springs into action.
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http://www.nypost.com/f/print/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/the_military_blinders_DzsqB7A2dEuYAU7oZmfTaL
Updated: Sat., Nov. 7, 2009, 12:54 PM
The military's blinders
By PAUL SPERRY
Last Updated: 12:54 PM, November 7, 2009
Posted: 12:36 AM, November 7, 2009
Why did the US military ig nore the clear warning signs that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the suspected Ft. Hood shooter, had embraced radical Islam -- and thus become a danger to all around him?
It wasn't an oversight, it was policy -- one the Pentagon has been doubling down on ever since 9/11.
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http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/05/strategic_collapse_in_the_war.html
The first rule of jihad, don't talk about jihad (to the kuffar).
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http://www.nefafoundation.org/miscellaneous/FeaturedDocs/nefabackgrounder_alawlaki.pdf
More background on the Ft. Hood shooter's imam.
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http://michellemalkin.com/2009/11/09/the-beltway-snipers-and-the-fort-hood-killer-peas-in-a-jihad-inspired-pod/
Spot the parallels.
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http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=9048590
Senior Official: More Hasan Ties to People Under Investigation by FBI
Alleged Shooter Had "Unexplained Connections" to Others Besides Jihadist Cleric Awlaki
By MARTHA RADDATZ, BRIAN ROSS, MARY-ROSE ABRAHAM, and REHAB EL-BURI
Nov. 10, 2009 —
A senior government official tells ABC News that investigators have found that alleged Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan had "more unexplained connections to people being tracked by the FBI" than just radical cleric Anwar al Awlaki. The official declined to name the individuals but Congressional sources said their names and countries of origin were likely to emerge soon.
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U.S. Moves to Seize 4 Mosques and Skyscraper Tied to Iran
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
U.S. Moves to Seize 4 Mosques and Skyscraper Tied to Iran
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 12, 2009
Filed at 6:18 p.m. ET
NEW YORK (AP) -- Federal prosecutors took steps Thursday to seize four U.S. mosques and a Fifth Avenue skyscraper owned by a nonprofit Muslim organization long suspected of being secretly controlled by the Iranian government.
In what could prove to be one of the biggest counterterrorism seizures in U.S. history, prosecutors filed a civil complaint in federal court against the Alavi Foundation, seeking the forfeiture of more than $500 million in assets.
The assets include bank accounts; Islamic centers consisting of schools and mosques in New York City, Maryland, California and Houston; more than 100 acres in Virginia; and a 36-story glass office tower in New York.
Confiscating the properties would be a sharp blow against Iran, which has been accused by the U.S. government of bankrolling terrorism and trying to build a nuclear bomb.
A telephone call and e-mail to Iran's U.N. Mission seeking comment were not immediately answered. Nor was a call to the Alavi Foundation.
It is extremely rare for U.S. law enforcement authorities to seize a house of worship, a step fraught with questions about the First Amendment right to freedom of religion.
The action against the Shiite Muslim mosques is sure to inflame relations between the U.S. government and American Muslims, many of whom are fearful of a backlash after last week's Fort Hood shooting rampage, blamed on a Muslim American major.
The mosques and the skyscraper will remain open while the forfeiture case works its way through court in what could be a long process. What will happen to them if the government ultimately prevails is unclear. But the government typically sells properties it has seized through forfeiture, and the proceeds are sometimes distributed to crime victims.
Prosecutors said the Alavi Foundation managed the office tower on behalf of the Iranian government and, working with a front company known as Assa Corp., illegally funneled millions in rental income to Iran's state-owned Bank Melli. Bank Melli has been accused by a U.S. Treasury official of providing support for Iran's nuclear program, and it is illegal in the United States to do business with the bank.
The U.S. has long suspected the foundation was an arm of the Iranian government; a 97-page complaint details involvement in foundation business by several top Iranian officials, including the deputy prime minister and ambassadors to the United Nations.
''For two decades, the Alavi Foundation's affairs have been directed by various Iranian officials, including Iranian ambassadors to the United Nations, in violation of a series of American laws,'' U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement.
There were no raids Thursday as part of the forfeiture action. The government is simply required to post notices of the civil complaint on the property.
As prosecutors outlined their allegations against Alavi, the Islamic centers and the schools they run carried on with normal activity. The mosques' leaders had no immediate comment.
Parents lined up in their cars to pick up their children at the schools within the Islamic Education Center of Greater Houston and the Islamic Education Center in Rockville, Md. No notices of the forfeiture action were posted at either place as of late Thursday.
At the Islamic Institute of New York, a mosque and school in Queens, two U.S. marshals came to the door and rang the bell repeatedly. The marshals taped a forfeiture notice to the window and left a large document sitting on the ground. After they left a group of men came out of the building and took the document.
The fourth Islamic center marked for seizure is in Carmichael, Calif.
The skyscraper, known as the Piaget building, was erected in the 1970s under the shah of Iran, who was overthrown in 1979. The tenants include law and investment firms and other businesses.
The sleek, modern building, last valued at $570 million to $650 million in 2007, has served as an important source of income for the foundation over the past 36 years. The most recent tax records show the foundation earned $4.5 million from rents in 2007.
Rents collected from the building help fund the centers and other ventures, such as sending educational literature to imprisoned Muslims in the U.S. The foundation has also invested in dozens of mosques around the country and supported Iranian academics at prominent universities.
If federal prosecutors seize the skyscraper, the Alavi Foundation would have almost no way to continue supporting the Islamic centers, which house schools and mosques. That could leave a major void in Shiite communities, and hard feelings toward the FBI.
The forfeiture action comes at a tense moment in U.S.-Iranian relations, with the two sides at odds over Iran's nuclear program and its arrest of three American hikers.
But Michael Rubin, an expert on Iran at the American Enterprise Institute, said the timing of the forfeiture action was probably a coincidence, not an effort to influence Iran on those issues.
''Suspicion about the Alavi Foundation transcends three administrations,'' Rubin said. ''It's taken ages dealing with the nuts and bolts of the investigation. It's not the type of investigation which is part of any larger strategy.''
Legal scholars said they know of only a few cases in U.S. history in which law enforcement authorities have seized a house of worship. Marc Stern, a religious-liberty expert with the American Jewish Congress, called such cases extremely rare.
The Alavi Foundation is the successor organization to the Pahlavi Foundation, a nonprofit group used by the shah to advance Iran's charitable interests in America. But authorities said its agenda changed after the fall of the shah.
In 2007, the United States accused Bank Melli of providing services to Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile programs and put the bank on its list of companies whose assets must be frozen. Washington has imposed sanctions against various other Iranian businesses.
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Probably not coincidence this comes out NOW.
Notice the news channels fall for this hook line and sinker.
After days of embarassing day after day revelations coming out proving that Hassan got as far as he did due to political correctness we get a sudden out of know where "tough on terrorism" move by the Feds.
Then we are being told that Mohammed is being brought to NYC for trial to please the anti terrorism folks.
OBama had to do something - he is crashing in the polls and if he looked soft on terror (excuse me, I mean catching the bad boy banditos who commit these acts - not "terrorists") his ratings would really fall off a cliff.
Personally I prefer this guy NOT be tried in the media circus glare of NYC. The trial will go on for Gods knows how long and it will be a circus.
Give the guy his few days in court in the military and then execute him and get it over with.
Should have been done years ago. But why not save it for the political opportune moment such as NOW.
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CCP, I agree. This is a political stroke and a governing error that will likely blow up (figuratively) in their political face.
Some problems with criminalization of terror:
a) Suicide martyrs want to die anyway, love the attention, and are already incarcerated.
b) Goal of anti-terrorism is preemption / prevention; 'punishment' does nothing.
c) Discovery blows the cover of people and methods.
d) Defense will put USA, our anti-terrorism efforts and justice system on trial, while getting evidence thrown out.
Will the next Mohamed Atta or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed need to be caught exactly in the act, require probable cause to be bothered, be read his rights and consult an attorney, etc. before the US can take preventive, security actions??
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***Will the next Mohamed Atta or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed need to be caught exactly in the act, require probable cause to be bothered, be read his rights and consult an attorney, etc. before the US can take preventive, security actions??***
Exactly. Similar to the jerks on TV exclaiming they are WORRIED that Hassan can get a FAIR trial.
***Defense will put USA, our anti-terrorism efforts and justice system on trial, while getting evidence thrown out.****
Exactly. MSNBC will love the waterboarding thing. *We are the killers and torturers", etc!
Just let them try it. Hopefully this will blow up in their faces. Obama's too. But he will back off..... now that the damage is all done.
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http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/one-219268-hasan-diversity.html
More Steyn goodness.
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http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/11/13/a_web_of_lone_wolves
A Web of Lone Wolves
Fort Hood shows us that Internet jihad is not a myth.
BY EVAN KOHLMANN | NOVEMBER 13, 2009
Upon learning of the reported "missed" link between the alleged culprit responsible for the massacre at Ft. Hood -- Maj. Malik Nidal Hasan -- and Anwar al Awlaki, my heart sank for a multitude of reasons. Al Awlaki is an infamous character in the halls of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and he has been for several years at least. The cleric's recurring presence again in the Ft. Hood case seems to be powerful and disturbing evidence of how fringe extremists -- who otherwise might remain in obscurity with no real means of living out their private jihadi fantasies -- are quite literally being equipped for battle by so-called "theological" advisors known only to them through the Internet. In short, it is a reminder of how real online terrorism networks have become.
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http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=34479
Nidal Hasan’s Ominous Islam
by Robert Spencer
11/19/2009
Before he killed or wounded 54 Americans at Fort Hood on November 5, army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan had raised eyebrows with his Islamic proselytizing, which he carried on even when he was supposed to be conducting medical briefings. One such presentation has come to light: the June 2007 briefing which Hasan gave to other doctors at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Hasan’s PowerPoint slides say many of the same things found in jihadist literature and propaganda throughout the Middle East and among its apologists here in America.
Hasan’s Islam is rooted in traditional understandings of the faith as taught by the authoritative schools of Sunni Muslim jurisprudence. It also is the same Islam that is taught by groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Al-Qaeda.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/gallery/2009/11/10/GA2009111000920.html
See it yourself.
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http://www.jihadwatch.org/2009/11/american-convert-to-islam-says-it-is-not-permissible-for-muslims-to-join-an-infidel-army.html
American convert to Islam says it is not permissible for Muslims to join an Infidel army
Wait a minute. I thought only greasy Islamophobes believed that there was any problem with Muslims in the military. Will Honest Ibe Hooper of CAIR denounce Umar Lee as an "Islamophobe"?
Glossary: Kaafir, kufr = Infidel. Deen = religion. Ummah = global Islamic community. Ulamaa = Islamic scholars. Al wala wal bara = "Love and hate," i.e., love for Muslims and hatred for non-Muslims.
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By MATTHEW L. WALD
Published: November 22, 2009
WASHINGTON — The Department of Homeland Security has spent $230 million to develop better technology for detecting smuggled nuclear bombs but has had to stop deploying the new machines because the United States has run out of a crucial raw material, experts say.
The ingredient is helium 3, an unusual form of the element that is formed when tritium, an ingredient of hydrogen bombs, decays. But the government mostly stopped making tritium in 1989.
“I have not heard any explanation of why this was not entirely foreseeable,” said Representative Brad Miller, Democrat of North Carolina, who is the chairman of a House subcommittee that is investigating the problem.
An official from the Homeland Security Department testified last week before Mr. Miller’s panel, the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of the House Science Committee, that demand for helium 3 appeared to be 10 times the supply.
Some government agencies, Mr. Miller said, did anticipate a crisis, but the Homeland Security Department appears not to have gotten the message.
The department had planned a worldwide network using the new detectors, which were supposed to detect plutonium or uranium in shipping containers. The government wanted 1,300 to 1,400 machines, which cost $800,000 each, for use in ports around the world to thwart terrorists who might try to deliver a nuclear bomb to a big city by stashing it in one of the millions of containers that enter the United States every year.
At the White House, Steve Fetter, an assistant director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, said the helium 3 problem was short-term because other technologies would be developed. But, he said, while the government had a large surplus of helium 3 at the end of the cold war, “people should have been aware that this was a one-time windfall and was not sustainable.”
Helium 3 is not hazardous or even chemically reactive, and it is not the only material that can be used for neutron detection. The Homeland Security Department has older equipment that can look for radioactivity, but it does not differentiate well between bomb fuel and innocuous materials that naturally emit radiation — like cat litter, ceramic tiles and bananas — and sounds false alarms more often.
Earlier this year, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, part of the Energy Department, said in a report, “No other currently available detection technology offers the stability, sensitivity and gamma/neutron discrimination” of detectors using helium 3.
Helium 3 is used to detect neutrons, the subatomic particles that sustain the chain reaction in a bomb or a reactor. Plutonium, the favorite bomb-making material of most governments with nuclear weapons, intermittently gives off neutrons, which are harder for a smuggler to hide than other forms of radiation. (Detecting the alternative bomb fuel, enriched uranium, is a separate, difficult problem, experts say.)
Helium 3 is rare in nature, but the Energy Department accumulated a substantial stockpile as a byproduct of maintaining nuclear weapons. Those weapons use tritium, which is the form of hydrogen used in the H-bomb, but the hydrogen decays into helium 3 at the rate of 5.5 percent a year. For that reason the tritium in each bomb has to be removed, purified and replenished every few years. It is purified by removing the helium 3.
The declining supply is also needed for physics research and medical diagnostics.
The Energy Department used to make tritium in reactors at its Savannah River Site, near Aiken, S.C., but those were shut after many operational problems. It enlisted the Tennessee Valley Authority to make some tritium in a power reactor, using the same method it had used at Savannah River, breaking up another material, a form of lithium, with neutrons. One of the fragments is tritium. But that project has run into technical problems as well.
Mr. Miller estimated that demand for helium 3 was about 65,000 liters per year through 2013 and that total production by the only two countries that produce it in usable form, the United States and Russia, was only about 20,000 liters. In a letter to President Obama, he called the shortage “a national crisis” and said the price had jumped to $2,000 a liter from $100 in the last few years, which threatens scientific research.
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Am I surprised?
Not. One. Bit.
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Is this one of those rare metals the Chinese control?
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No, but with this president, it might as well be.
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Putting aside the utter stupidity of the Obama team's decision, Stratfor discusses some practical details:
A Terrorist Trial in New York City
November 18, 2009 | 2153 GMT
By Ben West and Fred Burton
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced Nov. 13 that the U.S. Justice Department had decided to try five suspected terrorists currently being held at Guantanamo Bay in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, located in lower Manhattan. The five suspects — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarek bin Attash, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ali Abdul-Aziz Ali and Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi — are all accused of being involved in the 9/11 plot, with Mohammed describing himself as the mastermind in a 2003 confession.
The announcement follows from U.S. President Barack Obama’s first executive order, which he signed on Jan. 22, to close the U.S. military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and another executive order to suspend the military tribunals set up under the Bush administration to try suspected terrorists. Holder’s decision has generated much debate and highlighted the legal murkiness concerning the status of Guantanamo detainees and how best to bring them to justice.
Beyond this murkiness is the perceived security threat of bringing five suspected terrorists accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to trial in New York City. Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that he thought holding the trial in New York would put residents at risk. And Andrew McCarthy, former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, wrote in The New Republic that the trial will “create a public-safely nightmare for New York City.” Numerous other observers and media outlets around the world have voiced similar security concerns about the New York trial.
Although there has been much criticism of the decision to hold the trial in New York City, when it comes to prosecuting terror suspects, the Southern District of New York knows what it’s doing. The staff of the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York has gained considerable knowledge and expertise prosecuting terror cases over the years, just as the U.S. Marshals Service Special Operations Group (SOG) has gained much experience providing security for those trials. It was in the Southern District of New York in 1995 that Omar Abdel Rahman, aka the Blind Sheikh, was tried for the so-called Landmarks Plot of 1993 and received a life sentence. In 1996, Abdel Basit (aka Ramzi Yousef) and two co-conspirators were also tried in the Southern District and sentenced to life in prison for their roles in the Bojinka Plot, which also included an indictment for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (the staff of the Southern District has been familiar with Mohammed for some time now). The attackers behind the 1998 attacks against the U.S. embassies were also prosecuted in the Southern District of New York and sentenced to life imprisonment. Few other courts have so much experience handling and prosecuting high-profile terrorism cases, so it should have come as no surprise that Holder named the district as the venue for the upcoming trial. On top of all this, the World Trade Center towers were also in the Southern District of New York, putting the deadliest site of the 9/11 attacks under the Southern District’s jurisdiction.
The case will be prosecuted jointly by the offices of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, led by Preet Bharara, and the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, led by Neil H. MacBride. The Eastern District of Virginia has also successfully prosecuted several terrorism cases, including those of John Walker Lindh in 2002, the Virginia Jihad Network in 2005 and Zacarias Moussaoui in 2006.
While some believe that trying the so-called “Gitmo Five” in New York City will result in more terrorist attacks in the city, STRATFOR does not anticipate a marked increase in the number of plots or attacks. New York City has long been a popular target for radical Islamists — there have been nine known plots involving targets in New York uncovered since the 9/11 attacks, including two in the past six months. In May 2009, four men were arrested for attempting to detonate explosives outside a synagogue in the Bronx, and in September, Najibullah Zazi was arrested for plotting to detonate backpack explosives on trains in New York City. Other plots have included a 2007 plan to detonate fuel tanks at John F. Kennedy International Airport, a 2006 plot to detonate explosives in the Holland Tunnel and a 2004 plot to attack a subway station near Madison Square Garden.
New York City remains an alluring target for jihadists because of its symbolism. Home to more than 8 million people, it is the largest city in the United States and a global financial and media center. Whatever happens there gets more exposure and publicity than virtually anywhere else in the world. It is also a perceived center of Jewish wealth and culture (New York has the second-largest Jewish population behind Tel Aviv), compounding the threat from Islamist radicals. New York City will remain a terrorist target for many reasons other than the Gitmo Five trial. It is also interesting to note that none of the city’s other high-profile terrorism trials has ever resulted in a retaliatory attack against the city.
In addition to the federal prosecutors who will be involved in the trial having experience dealing with terrorism cases, the New York Police Department has the training, manpower and focus to provide effective physical security. Federal agents, including those of the U.S. Marshals Service SOG, will be primarily responsible for handling the five suspects and providing security inside the federal courthouse. The building is one of the most secure federal courthouses in the country, equipped with anti-vehicle borne explosive device barricades, 24-hour guard posts and high-resolution video cameras. The U.S. Marshals will be augmented by NYPD “Hercules” teams (designed to provide a surge of police presence in an area to prevent or disrupt criminal and terrorist operations) and will likely place sniper teams on nearby rooftops for added security. Vehicular and pedestrian traffic around the courthouse will be severely limited, with nearby streets closed to traffic and nearby subway entrances closed to riders.
During the trial, the five defendants will be held at the Metropolitan Correctional Complex, which is connected to the courthouse via a third-of-a-mile-long underground tunnel. This significantly reduces the threat of terrorist attack or a disruption of the proceedings by allowing security forces to control the geography of the trial venue and spot unusual activity. Another geographic benefit is the fact that Manhattan is an island with limited access points (bridges and tunnels), which makes it easier to seal off the area and control who or what gets in or out. These factors do not necessarily preclude an attack, especially a suicide attack in which the perpetrator is undeterred by the risk of death, but do decrease the options of an attacker and increase the options of law enforcement personnel in dealing with the potential risks.
Because the courthouse will be under such tight security, any attacker able to penetrate the island cordon and slip into the area would likely go after softer targets surrounding the building. The NYPD will be responsible for protecting areas outside the courthouse and will probably create a secure buffer around the complex, the depth of which will depend on the severity of any given threat. Police would have the wherewithal to put whole sections of the city under heavy lockdown and provide a level of physical security designed to thwart terrorist activities that have reached the latter stages (deployment, attack and escape). This buffer would both protect softer targets nearby and make it that much harder for would-be attackers to infiltrate the courthouse. The NYPD also has the intelligence-collecting capabilities (informants, undercover officers, surveillants, analysts, etc.) to keep a close eye on any potential threat in the area leading up to and during the trial. The NYPD developed these capabilities with a vengeance following the 9/11 attacks, and in the years since it has become quite adept at conducting preventative counterterrorism investigations rather than just reactive ones.
In addition to the NYPD, other first-responders in New York — the fire department, emergency medical services and transportation agencies — are experienced and well-trained in dealing with terrorist attacks and can support security efforts surrounding the trial. Given the 9/11 experience, Manhattan residents and workers are also well-versed in emergency action plans and preparations.
Certainly, the fact that such a high-profile trial will be held in New York City will temporarily add to the workload of federal and municipal security and emergency personnel, but in some ways it will be little more than a routine effort. The city is used to high-profile events, regularly hosting such events as the U.N. General Assembly, with its attendant flow of international VIPs. New York City has been and will remain a prime terrorist target, and the people responsible for maintaining security in the city are very good at what they do. Indeed, Manhattan — given its recent history of civic trauma and intense focus on counterterrorism — may very well possess the safest civilian court in the country.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2009/12/08/breaking-tsa-posts-info-on-thwarting-security/
Epic fail.
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Oy fg vey. :cry:
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Fascinating article. It is from Pravda on the Beach (LA Times) so caveat lector.
Note the timidity of US officials, and the appearance of CAIR and Ibrahim Cooper-- in a good light according to POTB. Also, note that the families appear to have done the right thing.
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Reporting from Washington and Islamabad, Pakistan - A close-knit group of five American Muslims from suburban Virginia had been trying to join a militant group in the Al Qaeda stronghold of northwestern Pakistan when they were arrested this week, Pakistani authorities said Thursday.
Laptop computers, maps and extremist literature recovered in a raid on a house owned by the family of one of the five in Sargodha, in eastern Pakistan, suggest that the Americans wanted to train for jihad, or holy war, authorities said.
The young men had communicated with a militant group and may have intended to travel to Miran Shah, in the North Waziristan region dominated by Al Qaeda and the Taliban, authorities said.
"They were definitely planning jihad activity," said Usman Anwar, the top police official in Sargodha. "The planning was almost complete, but we arrested them and their plot has failed."
U.S. authorities were cautious about characterizing the latest in a series of cases in which American Muslims are suspected of seeking to join militant networks.
A U.S. anti-terrorism official said it did not appear that the men had been on the verge of violence.
The men, whose arrests were confirmed by authorities Wednesday, have not been charged with a crime, officials pointed out.
FBI agents based in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, have talked to the men, who were in Pakistani custody, a U.S. official said Thursday.
"I would describe it right now as a fact-finding mission because American citizens have been arrested in a foreign country," said the U.S. official, who requested anonymity because of the continuing investigation. "They are still trying to determine exactly what happened."
Conversations were underway about having the men turned over to the FBI, officials said.
A Pakistani Embassy spokesman in Washington said that on their visa applications, the Americans cited the wedding of a friend and sightseeing as their reasons for visiting Pakistan.
"One cannot say who their connections were, what was their purpose, what they were intending to do," spokesman Nadeem Kiani said.
The men flew into the southern port city of Karachi on Nov. 30, traveled to Lahore on Saturday and then to Sargodha before they were arrested after raising suspicions, Kiani said earlier.
Three of the men seemed emotionally overwhelmed by their arrest, said the anti-terrorism official, citing communications from investigators in Pakistan.
"I think they realized they were in deeper than they thought. They really want to get out of there and come home," said the official, who requested anonymity because the case remains open.
The five men are U.S. citizens of Pakistani, African and Egyptian descent and range in age from 18 to 24.
They worshiped together and lived in a working-class, ethnically mixed area of suburban Alexandria near a retail strip where a Mexican restaurant abuts a Chinese restaurant and an African American hair salon.
Their families became alarmed when the five left Washington for Karachi via London on Nov. 28, officials said.
Relatives found a videotape that depicted scenes of American casualties and a speech by one of the men talking about the need to defend Muslims, officials said.
The worried family members then contacted the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington-based Muslim group, which set up a meeting with the FBI on Dec. 1, according to Ibrahim Hooper, the group's national communications director.
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The U.S. is more cautious, with an official saying the five Muslims from suburban Virginia apparently weren't on the verge of violence. They may be handed over to the FBI.
"To varying degrees [the parents] were upset, devastated and frightened about what they were imagining might be happening," Hooper said. "At that point we had no idea what was going on. We had warning flags that they had possibly gone overseas without their parents."
A U.S. law enforcement official described the families as models of cooperation. In addition to sounding the alarm, they shared their sons' computers and other electronic devices with FBI agents from the Washington field office, the official said.
One urgent avenue of inquiry for U.S. investigators is how the men might have been radicalized and encouraged to go to Pakistan. A U.S. intelligence official said there was no immediate evidence of any U.S.-based accomplices or recruiters.
CAIR leaders said they hoped this case could be a turning point in a sometimes "strained" relationship between American Muslims and the FBI.
"The FBI was unaware of this case and unsure this had taken place," said Nihad Awad, CAIR's executive director. "It shows the importance of partnerships between parents and organizations like CAIR and law enforcement authorities. . . . We see it as a success story."
U.S. anti-terrorism officials said they believe the leader of the detainees is Ramy Zamzam, 22, an Egyptian-born dental student at Howard University. He is a former president of the Muslim Student Assn. in the Washington, D.C., area. Zamzam arrived in the United States at an early age and became a citizen in 1999, officials said.
Another member of the group, Umar Farooq Chaudhry, 24, born in Pakistan and naturalized three years ago, apparently provided a place for them to stay.
Pakistani police said the house where the group was captured in Sargodha belongs to Fahim Farooq, who is Farooq Chaudhry's uncle. But U.S. officials said they believe the house belongs to Farooq Chaudhry's father. The father is in Pakistan and has been trying to help the jailed men, the U.S. anti-terrorism official said.
The other men were all born in the United States, U.S. officials said. Pakistani American Waqar Khan, 22, is the only one with a criminal record, the anti-terrorism official said. In 2006, he was convicted of misdemeanor embezzlement and received a 12-month suspended sentence, the official said.
Amin Yemer, 18, is of Ethiopian descent and lived for a time in Seattle, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials. Ahmad Minni, 20, is apparently the son of Ethiopian immigrants, a Pakistani official said.
The group lived in modest houses, townhomes and apartments within a few blocks of one another. They were apparently roommates at different points, officials said.
Hooper, of CAIR, said the council was exploring the Internet as a prime source of extremist viewpoints that may have helped radicalize the men.
"That's why," he said, "we're putting together, over the next few weeks, a nationwide campaign challenging religious extremism and offering a mainstream viewpoint."
rotella@latimes.com
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http://hotair.com/archives/2009/12/08/breaking-tsa-posts-info-on-thwarting-security/
Epic fail.
Which is why every security professional I know laughs at TSA, and has been since its establishment.
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Another Dry Run? United Flight 227 - Dec 10, 2009
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http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/17836
It happened again on Wednesday, December 9, 2009, less than a month after the incident aboard AirTran Flight 297.
United Airlines Flight 227, scheduled to depart Denver International Airport at 1:50 pm Wednesday for Los Angeles was disrupted when several passengers who were described as Middle Eastern in appearance, confirmed by this investigator to be a group of Muslims traveling together, were removed from that aircraft due to suspicious behavior that originated in the terminal and continued to the airplane. Their behavior was consistent in some respects to the behavior of the Muslim passengers aboard AirTran Flight 297 on November 17, 2009 that caused a flurry of controversy over its legitimacy, and the now infamous case of the “Flying Imams” of 2006.
According to information obtained by this investigator, seven men of Middle Eastern appearance, boarded flight 227. Two took their seats in coach, while five took their seats in the first class section of the plane. At a critical pre-flight point, the individuals appeared to act in concert with one another, changing seats and moving stowed luggage to very specific areas of the aircraft, often having to move the stowed bags of other passengers to do so. They disobeyed or otherwise ignored the admonitions of the flight attendants to remain seated.
Their behavior was so overt and so apparently choreographed, according to our sources, that the flight crew demanded the passengers be removed from the aircraft. One report found on 9News in Denver quoted John Sloan, a passenger aboard that flight:
“I have never seen flight attendants so scared in my life. Everything turned out OK, but it was not a very good feeling..”
Following the removal of the passengers, officials brought a bomb-sniffing dogs aboard the aircraft, focusing of the first class section of the plane. Subsequent to the search that found nothing, the offending passengers were removed from the flight and rebooked on another aircraft to their destination. According to federal officials, no criminal investigation is being launched into this incident, which was described as a “customer service” matter.
Early this morning, this investigator spoke to a law enforcement source in Denver who is intimately familiar with the incident. Many details have not been publicly reported about this incident, although it is clear that there is an agenda at play. Based on information obtained from this source and others relating to the previous flights disrupted by the deliberate behavior of Muslim passengers, it is clear that the airline industry, as well as the sensibilities of normal Americans, is under attack through Islamic ideological jihad. Additional information will be provided once our investigation is complete.
__________________
Correlation from a Denver-based news outlet:
http://www.9news.com/news/article.as...8639&catid=222
DENVER - It's not entirely clear why some passengers were removed from a plane at Denver International Airport on Wednesday. United Airlines issued a statement suggesting that the passengers were "re-accommodated" onto another flight.
A spokesperson for the Denver Police Department confirms to 9NEWS that Denver Police officers were called to DIA on Wednesday, but declined to elaborate any further.
Flight 227 left DIA bound for Los Angeles nearly three hours late. It was scheduled to depart at 1:50 p.m., but ended up leaving at 4:32 p.m.
"Our crew followed recognized, industry standard procedures and re-accommodated some passengers on another flight. We are investigating this matter," read a Thursday morning statement from United. A United spokesperson declined to elaborate any further as well.
The United crew apparently noticed certain patterns they are trained to spot. Sources tell NBC News airline employees are trained to look for certain behaviors such as how a ticket is paid for, how often passengers get up to use the restroom, and even who their traveling companions are.
A spokesperson for the FBI, Kathy Wright, confirmed to 9NEWS that federal investigators were originally called to the scene after receiving a call on a "possible suspicious incident." Wright said eventually "we determined that it was not an FBI matter."
Passengers say a bomb-sniffing dog was brought onto the plane and passengers in the first-class cabin we're asked to go back to coach for a brief amount of time according to passengers on the plane.
John Sloan of Oxnard, California, was on board the flight on Wednesday.
"I have never seen flight attendants so scared in my life. Everything turned out OK, but it was not a very good feeling. It would have been nice to have been updated though this process," he told 9NEWS by phone.
Sloan says seven men were escorted off of the plane. Two of them were sitting in coach. The other five were sitting in first-class, he says. All were re-booked onto another flight according to United.
Sloan says the men were attempting to change seats with other passengers. Another passenger, who doesn't want his name used, says the men were also trying to move luggage while the plane was getting ready to push back.
Passengers tell 9NEWS all of the men looked to be "Middle Eastern," but United will not confirm the identity of the seven men.
Nothing criminal was found, and the flight was allowed to continue on to California.
Passengers also tell 9NEWS that former head coach of the Denver Broncos, Mike Shanahan, was seated in first class while this was all going on. Shanahan could not be reached for comment, and a spokesperson for the former coach simply told 9NEWS that he was "out of town."
There have been no arrests and investigators say there is no criminal investigation in connection to the incident.
If you have any information about what happened on Flight 227 on Thursday, please e-mail us at chris.vanderveen@9news.com.
(Copyright KUSA*TV, All Rights Reserved)
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http://www.nationalterroralert.com/u...ys-flight-297/
" A similar thing happened recently at the Pershing Square station in downtown LA. I was with one of my best friends waiting for the subway back to Union Station when a group of about 10 Middle Eastern men came onto the platform. I just thought they were going to a Mosque somewhere or another religious event. They all had backpacks and my friend thought they may be tourists. Well anyway, the subway came and the police did a routine sweep of the cars and we were waiting to board. I kept looking at the men and they were all splitting up from each other and going into different subway cars. I suddenly got very nervous and pulled my friend back out of the subway car. I didn’t explain but said we had to get out of there. I took a picture of the men as we rushed out of area. Nothing happened of course but I was very nervous thinking it could be a dry run or something. I contacted the LAPD and emailed them the picture I took of the men, I never heard anything back. I just found it funny that these men all walked down to the subway together, stood and talked to one another, and then split up into all different cars when it came time to board the subway."
__________________
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http://hotair.com/archives/2009/12/26/video-northwest-253-passengers-tell-of-thwarted-terror-attack/
The spirit of flight 93.
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Sigh, there is no such thing as perfectly safe, or perfect security. all you can do is raise the bar for "clearance" so someone has to do some serious planning before getting something on a plane. Individuals have always been responsible for their own health and security despite what modern people may expect. The passengers did a good job on this one, at least the terrorists are being forced to drug themselves calm, and are reduced to niusence (sp?) type attacks.
I would disagree with any further tightening of security, if we do too much, the terrorists are efectively winning by forcing restrictions on freedom.
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An important freedom is not having to decide to jump to your death or burn and get crushed by the collapsing building.
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life is risk- tried crossing the street lately? I do not need a daddy to hold my hand when doing so, do you?
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Can you move beyond childish macho posturing and actually contemplate policy? You might not be aware of it, but Las Vegas is a top tier target city for terror. Imagine a "Mumbai" attack on strip casinos or aircraft slamming into the MGM/New York-New York/Excalibur on a weekend night. Think the economy sucks there now? Let something like that happen and watch the ripple effects.
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http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2003/12/28/terror_threats_loom_over_las_vegas/
Terror threats loom over Las Vegas
Officials fear blow to economy
By Steve Friess, Globe Correspondent | December 28, 2003
LAS VEGAS -- A year ago, just before taking office, Las Vegas's newly elected sheriff committed what has been called a major faux pas: He gave an honest assessment of southern Nevada's terror risk.
"Being America's playground, we have to be a prime target for fundamentalists whose beliefs are radically different from ours," Sheriff Bill Young said at a hotel security conference in December 2002. "If we have a terrorist attack here, we're done as a community. We have only one industry -- importing people to come here to have a good time. And it's entirely predicated on people feeling safe and secure to come here."
Those remarks -- for which Young incurred anger from Nevada's political and tourism leaders -- had renewed resonance this week when a new report identified the city as a potential target of a suspected Christmas Day hijacking plot that prompted the cancellation of six Air France flights.
While law enforcement officials, including Young, insisted Friday that the Washington Post was merely speculating when it named Las Vegas as the most likely American city for the would-be hijackers of a Paris-to-Los Angeles flight to crash the airliner, the news brought to the forefront this tourist-dependent economy's sensitivity to even rumors of its vulnerability.
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The US is a plethora of soft, yet important targets. For example, not too many miles from my home there is the LA-Long Beach harbor, which is the largest port on the west coast of the western hemisphere and through which travels some 40% of America's imports IIRC-- not to mention the various refineries in the area.
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LA has been on AQ's to do list for more than a decade. If I recall correctly, there is some evidence that some pre-attack surveillance has been done at Orange county schools for a "Beslan".
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As best as I can tell, the simple fact is this: We are an open society and as such are full of soft targets. We'd best look to ourselves to protect ourselves. As the saying goes "I carry a gun because a policeman is to heavy to carry."
(for the record, as a subject of the People's Republic of California in Los Angeles I am not allowed to carry a gun and so do not-- this is a factor that weighs heavily upon my considerations to leave California)
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An armed, trained and aware populus is a good thing, but not the complete answer to counter-terrorism policy.
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Agreed!
Nor is putting everthing in the hands of an omniscient police power.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2009/12/26/investigators-terrorist-wore-suicide-underwear-made-by-top-aq-bombmaker-in-yemen/
Read/watch the above and tell me what sort of aviation security you want in place the next time you put your wife and kids on a flight.
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And what about this? :-o :-o :-o
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Abdullah Hassan Taleh al-Asiri has a big anus
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AQAP: Paradigm Shifts and Lessons Learned
September 2, 2009
Stratfor
By Scott Stewart
On the evening of Aug. 28, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the Saudi Deputy Interior Minister — and the man in charge of the kingdom’s counterterrorism efforts — was receiving members of the public in connection with the celebration of Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting. As part of the Ramadan celebration, it is customary for members of the Saudi royal family to hold public gatherings where citizens can seek to settle disputes or offer Ramadan greetings.
One of the highlights of the Friday gathering was supposed to be the prince’s meeting with Abdullah Hassan Taleh al-Asiri, a Saudi man who was a wanted militant from al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Al-Asiri had allegedly renounced terrorism and had requested to meet the prince in order to repent and then be accepted into the kingdom’s amnesty program. Such surrenders are not unprecedented — and they serve as great press events for the kingdom’s ideological battle against jihadists. Prince Mohammed, who is responsible for the Saudi rehabilitation program for militants, is a key figure in that ideological battle.
In February, a man who appeared with al-Asiri on Saudi Arabia’s list of most-wanted militants — former Guantanamo Bay inmate Mohammed al-Awfi — surrendered in Yemen and was transported to Saudi Arabia where he renounced terrorism and entered into the kingdom’s amnesty program. Al-Awfi, who had appeared in a January 2009 video issued by the newly created AQAP after the merger of the Saudi and Yemeni nodes of the global jihadist network, was a senior AQAP leader, and his renouncement was a major blow against AQAP.
But the al-Asiri case ended very differently from the al-Awfi case. Unlike al-Awfi, al-Asiri was not a genuine repentant — he was a human Trojan horse. After al-Asiri entered a small room to speak with Prince Mohammed, he activated a small improvised explosive device (IED) he had been carrying inside his anal cavity. The resulting explosion ripped al-Asiri to shreds but only lightly injured the shocked prince — the target of al-Asiri’s unsuccessful assassination attempt.
While the assassination proved unsuccessful, AQAP had been able to shift the operational paradigm in a manner that allowed them to achieve tactical surprise. The surprise was complete and the Saudis did not see the attack coming — the operation could have succeeded had it been better executed.
The kind of paradigm shift evident in this attack has far-reaching implications from a protective-intelligence standpoint, and security services will have to adapt in order to counter the new tactics employed. The attack also allows some important conclusions to be drawn about AQAP’s ability to operate inside Saudi Arabia.
Paradigm Shifts
Militants conducting terrorist attacks and the security services attempting to guard against such attacks have long engaged in a tactical game of cat and mouse. As militants adopt new tactics, security measures are then implemented to counter those tactics. The security changes then cause the militants to change in response and the cycle begins again. These changes can include using different weapons, employing weapons in a new way or changing the type of targets selected.
Sometimes, militants will implement a new tactic or series of tactics that is so revolutionary that it completely changes the framework of assumptions — or the paradigm — under which the security forces operate. Historically, al Qaeda and its jihadist progeny have proved to be very good at understanding the security paradigm and then developing tactics intended to exploit vulnerabilities in that paradigm in order to launch surprise attacks. For example:
•Prior to the 9/11 attacks, it was inconceivable that a large passenger aircraft would be used as a manually operated cruise missile. Hence, security screeners allowed box cutters to be carried onto aircraft, which were then used by the hijackers to take over the planes.
•The use of faux journalists to assassinate Ahmed Shah Masood with suicide IEDs hidden in their camera gear was also quite inventive.
•Had Richard Reid been able to light the fuse on his shoe bomb, we might still be wondering what happened to American Airlines Flight 63.
•The boat bomb employed against the USS Cole in October 2000 was another example of a paradigm shift that resulted in tactical surprise.
Once the element of tactical surprise is lost, however, the new tactics can be countered.
•When the crew and passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 learned what had happened to the other flights hijacked and flown to New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, they stormed the cockpit and stopped the hijackers from using their aircraft in an attack. Aircraft cockpit doors have also been hardened and other procedural measures have been put in place to make 9/11-style suicide hijackings harder to pull off.
•Following the Masood assassination, journalists have been given very close scrutiny before being allowed into the proximity of a VIP.
•The traveling public has felt the impact of the Reid shoe-bombing attempt by being forced to remove their shoes every time they pass through airport security. And the thwarted 2006 Heathrow plot has resulted in limits on the size of liquid containers travelers can take aboard aircraft.
•The U.S. Navy is now very careful to guard against small craft pulling up alongside its warships.
Let’s now take a look at the paradigm shift marked by the Prince Mohammed assassination attempt.
, , ,
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Yup.
So keeping that in mind, please describe for me the aviation security you want in place the next time your family flies that won't offend your libertarian sensibilities.
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My comments were directed at a society full of soft targets, and our ongoing conversation on this point has had to do with how much the State should have access to/records of our comings and going. None of this applies here.
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Aside from the screening at airports, there is a lot of protective intel gathering/analysis done by TSA/DHS. Should that end?
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TSA is gathering intel?!? That is news to me , , ,
Anyway, please do not paint me as an all or nothing cardboard stereotype. I think I have a pretty good record around here.
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It gathers incidents CONUS and OCONUS and performs analysis and dissemination on threats to aviation/transportation.
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As best as I can tell, the simple fact is this: We are an open society and as such are full of soft targets. We'd best look to ourselves to protect ourselves. As the saying goes "I carry a gun because a policeman is to heavy to carry."
(for the record, as a subject of the People's Republic of California in Los Angeles I am not allowed to carry a gun and so do not-- this is a factor that weighs heavily upon my considerations to leave California)
Amen, I do not need a cop to hold my hand crossing the street. That is the other aspect of what terrorism is about too. Tightening up a free society so much that it may as well be a totalitarian regime.
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http://www.hlswatch.com/2006/06/14/inside-tsas-intelligence-shop/
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If you think the US is a totalitarian country, you obviously haven't been to one.
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LOL, I said pushing to get activities like one. This is getting non-productive, I will ghost in relation to yout stuff from now on.......
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Yeah, well your mindless slogans and chest thumping will be missed.
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Not necessary that and I'd like to ask that we avoid that tone in the future. :-(
Returning to the subject at hand, my "libertarian sensibilities" (which I received from our Founding Fathers btw) have nothing to do with the apparent , , , missteps in the case of the moment.
According to reports I saw last night on Greta Van Sustern on FOX (i.e. one hopes for confirmation) the father of the jihadi is the head of the largest bank in Nigeria, is a Muslim and a prominent citizen, reported his own son over a month ago as a jihadi risk. The jihadi apparently has been on some lesser risk lists for some two years now. The jihadi got on the plane in Amsterdam with no luggage and paid cash. Frankly, it seems like the proper use of intel that was already possessed would have been sufficient to stop this one before it even got going.
Instead of a demand for bureaucratic competence, apparently the response is that the airlines get to save money by not being allowed to issue pillows and blankets because the jihadi fiddled to set his bomb underwear off under a blanket-- so people with have to bring their jackets on board if they don't want to run the risk of being cold. Shrewd :roll:
And because he made his attempt in the last hour of a transatlantic flight, we all now will be denied use of the bathroom for the last hour of the flight. Again, I am not sure of the logic. If the idea is to screw up the operations of an airport by blowing a plane up over it, tt would seem to me that it would make more sense to blow up the plane as it was taking off i.e. with full gas tanks-- but I am just a lay person winging it on this point. Regardless, does this no-bathroom-in-the-last-hour rule make sense to you?
Or maybe they should simply pay attention when a father warns them of his son, is on various lists, and pays with cash and gets on with no luggage? Maybe they should follow the El Al approach? I'd rather avoid proctology though, thank you very much-- which bring us to my intended point about the Saudi jihadi with the bomb up his anus:t maybe there are some risks which can not be prevented.
Anyway, God bless the American Unorganzed Militia, which saved us once again.
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Second post:
From an article by Randy Barnett titled, "The Unorganized Militia is Once Again Needed" found on the legal blog, volokh.com.....
According to press reports, a passenger helped subdue the terrorist who was attempting to bring down Northwest #253. This again highlights the importance of the unorganized militia in asymetric warfare. In Saved by the Militia, I offered this analysis in the wake of the success of the general militia on United Airlines #93 in defending Washington from terrorist attack on 9/11:
The characterization of these heroes as members of the militia is not just the opinion of one law professor. It is clearly stated in Federal statutes. Perhaps you will not believe me unless I quote Section 311 of US Code Title 10, entitled, “Militia: composition and classes” in its entirety (with emphases added):
“(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.
(b) The classes of the militia are —
(1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and
(2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.”
This is not to score political points at a moment of great tragedy, though had the murderers on these four airplanes been armed with guns rather than knives, reminders of this fact would never end. Rather, that it was militia members who saved whatever was the terrorists’ target — whether the White House or the Capitol — at the cost of their lives points in the direction of practical steps — in some cases the only practical steps — to reduce the damage cause by any future attacks.
You might want to click through to read the whole thing, which includes this:
Here is the cold hard fact of the matter that will be evaded and denied but which must never be forgotten in these discussions: Often — whether on an airplane, subway, cruise ship, or in a high school — only self defense by the “unorganized militia” will be available when domestic or foreign terrorists chose their next moment of murder. And here is the public-policy implication of this fact: It would be better if the militia were more prepared to act when it is needed. (emphasis in original)
And ends with this:
A well-regulated militia does not require a draft or any compulsory training. Nor, as Alexander Hamilton recognized, need training be universal. “To attempt such a thing which would abridge the mass of labor and industry to so considerable extent, would be unwise,” he wrote in Federalist 29, “and the experiment, if made, could not succeed, because it would not long be endured.” But Congress has the constitutional power to create training programs in effective self-defense including training in small arms — marksmanship, tactics, and gun safety — for any American citizen who volunteers. Any guess how many millions would take weapons training at government expense or even for a modest fee if generally offered?
Rather than provide for training and encouraging persons to be able to defend themselves — and to exercise their training responsibly — powerful lobbying groups have and will continue to advocate passivity and disarmament. The vociferous anti-self-defense, anti-gun crusaders of the past decades will not give up now. Instead they will shift our focus to restrictions on American liberties that will be ineffective against future attacks. [snip]
Rather than make war on the American people and their liberties, however, Congress should be looking for ways to empower them to protect themselves when warranted. The Founders knew — and put in the form of a written guarantee — the proposition that the individual right to keep and bear arms was the principal means of preserving a militia that was “essential,” in a free state, to provide personal and collective self-defense against criminals of all stripes, both domestic and foreign.
A renewed commitment to a well-regulated militia would not be a panacea for crime and terrorism, but neither will any other course of action now being recommended or adopted. We have long been told that, in a modern world, the militia is obsolete. Put aside the fact that the importance of the militia to a “the security of a free state” is hardwired into the text of the Constitution. The events of this week have shown that the militia is far from obsolete in a world where war is waged by cells as well as states. It is long past time we heeded the words of the Founders and end the systematic effort to disarm Americans. Now is also the time to consider what it would take in practical terms to well-regulate the now-unorganized militia, so no criminal will feel completely secure when confronting one or more of its members.
In this column, I was not advocating arming passengers on airplanes (though I would not rule out such a policy if properly regulated). My reference to weapons training concerned other sorts of terrorist attacks where weapons are essential for individual and collective self-defense. One recent example is the terrorist attack on Fort Hood–a mandated “gun free zone”–where military and civilians were slaughtered until armed police officers arrived on the scene and were able to incapacitate the attacker using their handguns. Yet another example of how demonized handguns are a useful tool when in the right hands. Lives would have been saved if some of the army and militia members in the kill zone had been armed. Instead of empowering them to act as militia members, however, they became victims.
One reaction to my column was to ridicule the identification of passengers with militia members. (Here some will predictably dismiss the point by noting that this passenger was a Dutchman, not an American.) Of course, if the general militia consists of the able bodied population as a whole, then this is simply what the word “militia” means, though some want to identify the term with the organized militia. (Of course, the U.S. Code should be revised to include women, and even folks my age.) So it is not lost, the point of my column was three fold:
Contrary to what is claimed by many, the need for a militia continues to exist even in a world of hyper-lethal armies, and especially when engaged in asymetric warfare;
Given this need, it would be better that the militia was well-regulated, which is within the enumerated powers of Congress;
This regulation need not entail any conscription, but voluntary training programs so people feel empowered to defend themselves, as Jasper Schuringa on Northwest #253 apparently did (though he reportedly had to dive over more passive passengers to get to the terrorist), and conscious of their responsibilities as militia members to act when an emergency arises that prevents organized law enforcement or military authorities from taking action.
For those who still resist this idea, let me suggest that general militia membership is a socially constructed state of mind and is one to be encouraged and honed rather than discouraged and ridiculed.
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"According to reports I saw last night on Greta Van Sustern on FOX (i.e. one hopes for confirmation) the father of the jihadi is the head of the largest bank in Nigeria, is a Muslim and a prominent citizen, reported his own son over a month ago as a jihadi risk. The jihadi apparently has been on some lesser risk lists for some two years now. The jihadi got on the plane in Amsterdam with no luggage and paid cash. Frankly, it seems like the proper use of intel that was already possessed would have been sufficient to stop this one before it even got going. "
**Yes, not exactly an example of omniscient police power.**
Keep in mind that if the device had functioned properly, then no passenger would have had an opportunity to intervene.
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GM,
It could be very rational to choose to have less security even with imminent terrorist threats. You could choose to have more risk in order to have more freedom.
Even in Israel you are 8 time more likely to die in car accident than by terrorism. We would have to have ( God forbid) a lot more terrorist attacks to make flying anywhere near as dangerous as driving to the airport. Is it worse to die in a terrorist attack than a car accident.?
I personally chose to spend all weekend driving around in sucky weather so I could see my friends and family. I passed several nasty accidents...
The problem with TSA is to me it seems like more security theater than security. We are always reacting to the last attack instead of preparing for future ones. If it actually made us safer I would be more tolerant of the inconvenience.Some of our current security procedures seem pointless to me.
In Israel which takes security very seriously I can wear my shoes the whole time. I don't need to separate out electronics or liquids and if you are not flying to the US you can carry a bottle of water. Why is that since I don't think we have a worse terrorism problem than Israel?
To be fair In a slightly amusing story. I was volunteering in Israel for the year during September 11 and a few months after that I flew round trip to Germany to visit a friend. Flying round trip to Germany from Israel with an American passport or something must have set off some alarm bells. I got called in for extra screening. I spent 45 minutes with one of the most attentive "dates" ever. He wanted to know my whole life story, my religious beliefs, all about my family and friends , and what exactly I had been doing in Germany. Three other guys searched my luggage both with a x-ray machine and by hand. They even opened my shampoo bottles and kinder eggs. There was a women who searched me including my ponytail. I didn't have take off my shoes though.
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The problem with TSA is to me it seems like more security theater than security.
Heh. Rock on Rachel. All the intrusions of an omniscient police state with none of the results. The Israeli regimen appears to be based on empiric results, the American one in ineffectually offending everyone to an equal degree.
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http://www.nypost.com/f/print/news/business/item_EnOOkzQvAgUbTJyeYv45dK
STILL FEELING EFFECTS OF 9/11 ATTACKS ON ECONOMY
By JOHN CRUDELE
Last Updated: 1:35 PM, September 12, 2008
Posted: 3:54 AM, September 11, 2008
SEVEN years ago today terrorists crashed four jetliners into the US economy.
It's downright callous, if not inhumane, of course, for me to talk about the financial fallout of Sept. 11, 2001, since 2,975 people were killed, thousands were injured and everyone was affected by those attacks.
And we will always remember, first and foremost, the human suffering caused by the small group of heartless cowards who hijacked those planes.
But it is a fact that a lot of the financial problems we are now experiencing - including federal deficits, a declining housing market, banking problems, the sickly dollar and a large drop in overall confidence - have, to one degree or another, grown from the aftermath of what happened seven years ago.
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Sa'id quotes Osama bin Laden on how the financial crisis plus the extended wars have weakened America's resolve: "This is America today, staggering under the strikes and consequences of the mujahideen. There is a human loss, a political beat, and a financial breakdown. Even it begs small, as well as big countries. Its enemies are no longer afraid of it, and its friends are no longer respects it."
Read more: http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2009/04/al_qaedas_shadow_arm.php#ixzz0aypAWWRh
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Beyond the direct costs in lives, how many more 9/11s can we take economically? I'm a fan of the El Al model of aviation security, what the US has is a reflection of our post-modern culture of victimhood rather than one structured to address the threat.
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25 Brits in jet bomb plots By ANTHONY FRANCE
Crime Reporter
and ALEX WEST
Published: Today
COPS fear that 25 British-born Muslims are plotting to bomb Western airliners.
The fanatics, in five groups, are now training at secret terror camps in Yemen.
It was there London-educated Umar Abdulmutallab, 23, prepared for his Christmas Day bid to blow up a US jet.
Read more: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article2785733.ece#ixzz0azDIkvLb
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http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/abdulmutallab-yemen/story?id=9430536
Abdulmutallab: More Like Me In Yemen
Accused Northwest Bomber Says More Bombers On the Way; Al Qaeda Promises to Hit Americans
By BRIAN ROSS and RICHARD ESPOSITO
Dec. 28, 2009
American officials have cause to worry there may be more al Qaeda-trained young men in Yemen planning to bring down American jets.
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab told FBI agents there are more just like him in Yemen.Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, charged with the attempted Christmas Day bombing of Northwest Airlines flight 253, told FBI agents there were more just like him in Yemen who would strike soon.
And in a tape released four days before the attempted destruction of the Detroit-bound Northwest plane, the leader of al Qaeda in Yemen boasted of what was planned for Americans, saying, "We are carrying a bomb to hit the enemies of God."
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The problem is that in the U.S., we have traded security for the illusion of security by implementing measures that look good on the outside, but are weak on the inside. While TSA works within the constraints and restrictions that are imposed upon them by the federal government, the fact is what they are doing does precious little to keep us safe. We should learn from the Israeli's about how to detect and foil terrorism before it happens and put political correctness aside. Searching Grandma holding onto a walker is idiotic, as much so as not searching the guy behind her that is wearing a turban, reading a Quran, has no luggage, and is paying with cash. This PC is going to be the death of America if we do not wise up.
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The world-wide war of Islamo Fascism on civilization continues and, stimulated by American and Western weakness, appears to enter a new phase.
GM, glad to see that you too are a fan of the Israeli approach.
I will reject the conclusion of the Crudelle piece though: "But it is a fact that a lot of the financial problems we are now experiencing - including federal deficits, a declining housing market, banking problems, the sickly dollar and a large drop in overall confidence - have, to one degree or another, grown from the aftermath of what happened seven years ago."
War is really expensive, but the problems we face are because of a government created credit bubble which burst. (The Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government pushing guaranteeing mortgages of the most insane sort, the Fed running interest rates that were effectively zero, the Community Reinvestment Act, the purchase of Congress by these interests, and so much more of this sort) We could afford this war but for the deranged policies being pursued by our President and his vast left wing conspiracy.
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Second post:
More Questions on Why Terror Suspect Was Not Stopped
By ERIC LIPTON and SCOTT SHANE
Published: December 27, 2009
WASHINGTON — When a prominent Nigerian banker and former government official phoned the American Embassy in Abuja in October with a warning that his son had developed radical views, had disappeared and might have traveled to Yemen, embassy officials did not revoke the young man’s visa to enter the United States, which was good until June 2010.
The police searched the basement of a building in London, where it is believed that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had been a student.
Instead, officials said Sunday, they marked the file of the son, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, for a full investigation should he ever reapply for a visa. And when they passed the information on to Washington, Mr. Abdulmutallab’s name was added to 550,000 others with some alleged terrorist connections — but not to the no-fly list. That meant no flags were raised when he used cash to buy a ticket to the United States and boarded a plane, checking no bags.
Now that Mr. Abdulmutallab is charged with trying to blow up a transcontinental airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day, some members of Congress are urgently questioning why, eight years after the Sept. 11 attacks, security measures still cannot keep makeshift bombs off airliners.
On Sunday, as criticism mounted that security lapses had led to a brush with disaster, President Obama ordered a review of the two major planks of the aviation security system — the creation of watch lists and the use of detection equipment at airport checkpoints.
At the same time, a jittery air travel system coped with a new scare. On the same flight that Mr. Abdulmutallab took on Friday — Northwest 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit — an ailing Nigerian man who spent a long time in the restroom inadvertently set off a security alert. It turned out to be a false alarm.
Officials in several countries, meanwhile, worked to retrace Mr. Abdulmutallab’s path and to look for security holes. In Nigeria, officials said he arrived in Lagos on Christmas Eve, just hours before departing for Amsterdam. American officials were tracking his travels to Yemen, and Scotland Yard investigators were checking on his connections in London, where he studied from 2005 to 2008 at University College London and was president of the Islamic Society.
Obama administration officials scrambled to portray the episode, in which passengers and flight attendants subdued Mr. Abdulmutallab and doused the fire he had started, as a test that the air safety system passed.
“The system has worked really very, very smoothly over the course of the past several days,” Janet Napolitano, the Homeland Security secretary said, in an interview on “This Week” on ABC. Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, used nearly the same language on “Face the Nation” on CBS, saying that “in many ways, this system has worked.”
But counterterrorism experts and members of Congress were hardly willing to praise what they said was a security system that had proved to be not nimble enough to respond to the ever-creative techniques devised by would-be terrorists.
Congressional leaders said the tip from Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father, Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, should have resulted in closer scrutiny of the suspect before he boarded the plane in Amsterdam. Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, the ranking minority member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said that his visa should have been revoked, or that he at least should have been given a physical pat-down or a full-body scan.
“This individual should not have been missed,” Ms. Collins said in an interview on Sunday. “Clearly, there should have been a red flag next to his name.”
The episode has renewed a debate that has quietly continued since the 2001 attacks over the proper balance between security and privacy. The government has spent the last several years cutting the size of the watch list, after repeated criticism that too many people were being questioned at border crossings or checkpoints. Now it may be asked to expand it again.
“You are second-guessed one day and criticized on another,” said one Transportation Security Administration official, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to discuss the matter.
Privacy advocates, for example, have tried to stop or at least slow the introduction of advanced checkpoint screening devices that use so-called millimeter waves to create an image of a passenger’s body, so officers can see under clothing to determine if a weapon or explosive has been hidden. Security officers, in a private area, review the images, which are not stored. Legislation is pending in the House that would prohibit the use of this equipment for routine passenger screening.
To date, only 40 of these machines have been installed at 19 airports across the United States — meaning only a tiny fraction of passengers pass through them. Amsterdam’s airport has 15 of these machines — more than just about any airport in the world — but an official there said Sunday that they were prohibited from using them on passengers bound for the United States, for a reason she did not explain.
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(Page 2 of 2)
Michael Chertoff, former secretary of homeland security, and Kip Hawley, who ran the Transportation Security Administration until January, said the new body-scanning machines were a critical tool that should quickly be installed in more airports nationwide.
Machines using millimeter-wave technology scan under passengers' clothes, but only 40 have been installed at U.S. airports.
For now, American aviation officials have mandated that airports across the world do physical pat-downs of passengers on flights headed to the United States, a practice that in the past has also raised privacy objections.
“I understand people have issue with privacy,” Mr. Hawley said Sunday. “But that is a tradeoff, and what happened on the plane just highlights what the stakes are.”
So far, an additional 150 full-body imaging machines have been ordered, but nationwide there are approximately 2,200 checkpoint screening lanes.
One subject of the administration’s security review will be the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or Tide, the extensive collection of data on more than 500,000 people into which the warning from Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father’s was entered.
A law enforcement official said it was not unusual that a one-time comment from a relative would not place a person on the far smaller no-fly list, which has only 4,000 names, or the so-called selectee list of 14,000 names of people who are subjected to more thorough searches at checkpoints.
The point of the Tide database, the official said, is to make sure even the most minor suspicious details are recorded so that they can be connected to new data in the future.
“The information goes in there, and it’s available to all the agencies,” the official said. “The point is to marry up data from different sources over time that may indicate an individual might be a terrorist.”
The debate over watch lists and screening will be shaped in part by the still-emerging details about Mr. Abdulmutallab, his radicalization, his alleged training in Yemen and the bombing attempt. On Sunday, officials were still examining his claim that he received help from a bomb expert in Yemen associated with Al Qaeda.
Mr. Abdulmutallab was moved on Sunday from a University of Michigan hospital and transferred to a federal prison in Milan, Mich.
Mr. Mutallab, the suspect’s father, was scheduled to make a public statement on Monday after talking to Nigerian security officials in Abuja. A cousin of Mr. Abdulmutallab, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to offend the family, said in an interview on Sunday that there was no sign of radicalism in Mr. Abdulmutallab while he was growing up in Nigeria, though he was devout.
“We understand that he met some people who influenced him while in London,” where Mr. Abdulmutallab studied engineering, the cousin said. “He left London and went to Yemen where, we suspect, he mixed up with the people that put him up to this whole business.”
He added: “I think his father is embarrassed by the whole thing, because that was not the way he brought the boy up. All of us are shocked by it.”
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The point is that 9/11 was more than the lives lost, it had symbolic and IMHO an economic impact that was intended as a form of "Unrestricted Warfare". AQ and others understand that if you kill America's economy, you kill it's military.
The TSA operates under this: http://www.justice.gov/crt/split/documents/guidance_on_race.php
I'm guessing El Al doesn't.
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I have no problem with profiling.
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Officials: Only A Failed Detonator Saved Northwest Flight
Screening Machines May Need to Be Replaced; Al Qaeda Aware of 'Achilles heel'
By RICHARD ESPOSITO and BRIAN ROSS
Dec. 26, 2009
Officials now say tragedy was only averted on Northwest flight 253 because a makeshift detonator failed to work properly.
Man accused of attempt to blow up plane was sent on mission by terror leaders. Bomb experts say there was more than enough explosive to bring down the Northwest jet, which had nearly 300 people aboard, had the detonator not failed, and the nation's outdated airport screening machines may need to be upgraded.
"We've known for a long time that this is possible," said Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism czar and ABC News consultant, "and that we really have to replace our scanning devices with more modern systems."
Clarke said full body scans were needed, "but they're expensive and they're intrusive. They invade people's privacy."
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http://hotair.com/archives/2009/12/28/state-department-ignored-warning-on-abdulmutallab/
I blame BoooOOOOOsh!
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http://formerspook.blogspot.com/2009/12/she-said-it.html
Pay no attention to the jihadist behind the curtain....
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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34592031/ns/us_news-security
U.S. security for air travel under new scrutiny
Authorities try to reassure public, although system didn't detect bomber
Adding to the airborne jitters, a second Nigerian man was detained Sunday from the same Northwest flight to Detroit after he locked himself in the plane's bathroom. Officials reported that he was belligerent but genuinely sick, and that, in an abundance of caution, the plane was taken to a remote location for screening before passengers were let off.
Investigators concluded he posed no threat.
In November, Abdulmutallab had been placed in a database of more than 500,000 names of people suspected of terrorist ties. But officials say there was not enough information about his terror activity that would have placed him on a watch list that could have kept him from flying.
'Sacrificing himself'
Officials said he came to the attention of U.S. intelligence last month when his father, a prominent Nigerian banker, reported to the American Embassy in Nigeria about his son's increasingly extremist views.
CNBC's Erin Burnett reported in Abuja, Nigeria, that family members had told her that Abdulmutallab's father had told embassy officials in a letter that his son had spoken of "sacrificing himself."
Still, in appearances on Sunday talk shows, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the traveling public "is very, very safe."
"This was one individual literally of thousands that fly and thousands of flights every year," Napolitano said. "And he was stopped before any damage could be done. I think the important thing to recognize here is that once this incident occurred, everything happened that should have."
Even so, airport security and intelligence played no role in thwarting the plot. Abdulmutallab was carrying PETN, also known as pentaerythritol, the same material convicted shoe bomber Richard Reid used when he tried to destroy a trans-Atlantic flight in 2001 with explosives hidden in his shoes. Abdulmutallab is alleged to have carried the explosive in condom-like pouches attached to his body.
Despite being in the database of people with suspected terrorist ties, Abdulmutallab, who comes from a prominent and wealthy Nigerian family, had a multiple-entry U.S. visa. It was issued last year.
Napolitano said Abdulmutallab was properly screened before getting on the flight to Detroit from Amsterdam.
Reviewing detection systems
The administration is also investigating aviation detection systems to see how the alleged attacker managed to get on board the Northwest flight in Amsterdam with explosive materials, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.
No other flights were known to have been targeted. However, Gibbs says federal authorities took precautionary steps "to assume and plan for the very worst." Napolitano said there is no indication yet Abdulmutallab is part of a larger terrorist plot, although his possible ties to al-Qaida are still under investigation.
The United States is reviewing what security measures were used in Amsterdam where he boarded the flight.
"Now the forensics are being analyzed with what could have been done," Napolitano said.
Additional security measures are in place at airports around the world that are likely to slow travelers. Napolitano advised getting to airports earlier.
Congress is preparing to hold hearings on what happened and whether rules need to be changed.
"It's amazing to me that an individual like this who was sending out so many signals could end up getting on a plane going to the U.S.," said Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader in the Senate.
On Saturday, two Middle Eastern men thought to have been acting suspicious aboard a flight bound for Phoenix were detained and questioned by federal anti-terrorism authorities before being released. That incident — and Sunday's incident in Detroit — led the Council on American-Islamic Relations to urge airline security personnel to avoid ethnic and religious profiling.
Gibbs appeared on ABC television's "This Week," NBC's "Meet the Press" and CBS' "Face the Nation." Napolitano spoke on CNN's "State of the Union" as well as on NBC and ABC. McConnell appeared on ABC.
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I am out the door for several hours.
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http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2009/12/27/could-obama-have-handled-the-christmas-day-attack-any-worse/
My pet goat, Hawaii edition.
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http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/12/28/al-qaeda-group-claims-responsibility-for-christmas-day-attack/
Merry Christmas, from your friends in Yemen.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2009/12/28/audio-jetblue-announces-dopey-new-tsa-regulations/
Wow. Now THIS is security theater. We are soooooooo fcuked.
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I agree with profiling and the Israeli model, mostly just a commitment to think clearly and try to stay a step ahead of the enemy, across the globe, 24/7. If TSA was any kind of an intelligence agency instead of a bureaucratic logistics operation of managing lines, gates, shifts and breaks, then by now they would know and recognize most of their law abiding regular customers. Every man-minute that they spend frisking my frequent business traveler sister is a minute they don't spend updating their system with Abdul Farouk Umar Abdulmutallab's Yemeni terror training certification. For some reason TSA can't stand it that I wrap my skis inside my ski bag inside of ski pants and a jacket to protect and cushion them a little flying to a ski destination; they always get opened and picked apart. But when a known terrorist buys a cash ticket to a major US airport, flies internationally trans-Atlantic, without luggage, on the only religious US federal holiday, after applying for student visas to bogus colleges... For the money we spend and the privacy we give up for this operation, we deserve a little more competence and some mission focus.
Or as the man made disaster Czar says, the system worked.
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I have no problem with profiling.
Me neither as long as it is about how they are ACTING, I will play 20 questions all day long rather than be comfortable with the random strip search stuff I keep hearing about.
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January 2009: WASHINGTON — AirTran Airways apologized Friday to nine Muslims kicked off a New Year's Day flight to Florida after other passengers reported hearing a suspicious remark about airplane security. One of the passengers said the confusion started at Reagan National Airport just outside Washington, D.C., when he talked about the safest place to sit on an airplane.
Orlando, Fla.-based AirTran said in a statement that it refunded the passengers' air fare and planned to reimburse them for replacement tickets they bought on US Airways. AirTran also offered to take the passengers back to Washington free of charge.
On November 17, 2009
A group of thirteen men dressed in traditional Muslim attire were among 73 passengers who boarded AirTran Flight 297 on Tuesday, 17 November 2009, a routine flight scheduled to depart Atlanta Hartsfield Airport, gate C-16 at 4:43 PM ET to Houston Hobby Airport. Reports developed by this investigator found two witnesses who observed direct interaction among all of these Muslim men at the terminal.
As the passengers boarded the aircraft, two of the Muslim men took seats in first class, while the remaining eleven were seated throughout the remaining rows of the aircraft. Most had carrying-on bags that they stowed in the overhead compartments above their seats.
As the aircraft began to taxi to the runway, a female flight attendant was beginning to issue the normal passenger advisories over the PA system. Almost on cue at the time passengers were told to turn off all electronic devices, one of the Muslim men seated in the front of the plane began to use his cell phone in a manner that was described by a flight attendant and passenger “as deliberate and obvious.” He was talking loudly in Arabic, nearly at the level of the flight attendant. Some reports suggest that this man actually called another Muslim passenger, although this has not been immediately confirmed. It is possible, however, as another passenger reported that a Muslim man seated toward the rear of the plane answered his cellular phone at the same time the man in the front began using his.
At this point, the flight attendant in the front of the plane approached the Muslim man using his telephone and instructed him to immediately turn it off. A second female flight attendant did the same at the rear of the aircraft. Concurrent with this cellular activity, two other Muslim men seated adjacent near the middle of the aircraft began operating what one passenger described as a palm type camcorder, ostensibly to view previously taken footage. It is possible, according to one flight attendant interviewed by this investigator, however, that the camcorder was being used for recording purposes. Whatever its use, a third flight attendant, aware of the incidents taking place in the front and rear of the aircraft, approached the two men for the purpose of securing the camcorder. At least two passengers reported that the men became abusive to the flight attendant and initially refused to comply with her request.
It was at this time that most of the passengers began to notice the multiple incidents involving over a dozen men dressed in Islamic attire. Next, as if previously rehearsed, at least ten of the 13 Muslim men aboard the aircraft began to leave their seats at the same time. At least one passenger stated she observed one of the Muslim passengers using his cell phone to take photos of other passengers on the aircraft, while one other Muslim passenger sang loudly in Arabic. According to information provided to this investigator from one of the flight crew who was alerted to an onboard emergency, the aircraft was now being taxied back to the terminal. The TSA, FAA and FBI were notified.
At the terminal
Once back at the terminal, the thirteen men were escorted from the aircraft by TSA and security officials. According to a report from an airline security official, their baggage was also removed and searched, the search finding nothing of apparent danger. According to a law enforcement official interviewed by telephone by this investigator on Monday, investigation revealed that all of the Muslim passengers are acquainted with each other and are associated with (or have ties to) a large Islamic center that has been the subject of investigative interest.
According to one aircraft passenger I interviewed, what happened next was “unbelievable” and caused a great deal of upset among the aircraft passengers and flight crew (some who opted off the flight in anger, fear, or admittedly, a mixture of both emotions).
After a lengthy delay while officials dealt with these Muslim passengers, ten (one uncorroborated report suggests 11) of the Muslim passengers were permitted to re-board the same aircraft to complete their flight. Some passengers and flight crew, traumatized by the blatant actions of the Muslim passengers, refused to travel with the Muslims who caused this orchestrated disturbance.
The flight continues
According to flight logs and information from one of the flight crew who continued with the flight, AirTran 297 ultimately departed Atlanta and arrived in Houston later that evening. The flight, however, was not without its curious incidents by the very same Muslim men who caused the initial delay and disturbance.
During the flight, one passenger interviewed by this investigator described the behavior of two of the Muslim passengers as less overt but still suspicious in nature. Without apparent legitimate purpose, one Muslim passenger moved a stowed bag from one part of the aircraft to another, well away from his seated position. Another spoke loudly in Arabic, with all appearing to interact in one form or another.
Ultimately, the flight landed safely and despite the early incidents in Atlanta, the Muslim passengers appeared able to leave freely from the terminal.
Comments from flight crew and airline personnel
As initially stated, proper and accurate investigation takes time to corroborate eyewitness accounts, which are often unreliable, contradictive and in cases like this, colored by emotion. Having interviewed a total of seven-(7) individuals directly involved in this incident over the last several days, including two law enforcement officers who handled the after action reports, the situation pertaining to the initial 13 and remaining 10 or 11 Muslim men allowed to continue their travels was far greater than an incident involving the unauthorized use of a cell phone that resulted in a minor flight delay, as reported by the mainstream media.
According to one airline security official, “This was a deliberate, well planned attempt to disrupt a domestic flight that was organized in advance of the boarding of these [Muslim] passengers. The purpose of their actions appeared to be multi-faceted, not the least of which was an attempt to change their status from passengers to victims of religious profiling. The situation was handled in a manner that we believe might have avoided an incident like USAir had in 2006, where everyone from the passengers who reported suspicious behavior to the airline was subjected to legal action by the Muslim passengers.”
While litigation might have been avoided, passengers and flight crew remain traumatized, and our air travel system was unnecessarily disrupted during one of the busiest air travel weeks in the U.S. The agenda of the Islamists behind this incident is clear, yet no one in the media seems to have the desire to expose these ideological cretins for what they are.
"We apologize to all of the passengers _ to the nine who had to undergo extensive interviews from the authorities and to the 95 who ultimately made the flight," the statement said. "Nobody on Flight 175 reached their destination on time on New Year's Day, and we regret it."
AirTran said the incident was a misunderstanding, but the steps taken were necessary.
Two U.S. Muslim advocacy groups, however, were critical of the airline's actions. The Muslim Public Affairs Council called on federal officials Friday to open an investigation. And the Council for American-Islamic Relations filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Transportation, saying "It is incumbent on any airline to ensure that members of the traveling public are not singled out or mistreated based on their perceived race, religion or national origin."
Bill Adams, a DOT spokesperson, said the department thoroughly investigates discrimination complaints but would not comment further.
One of the Muslim passengers, Atif Irfan, said the family probably would not fly home with AirTran because members had already booked tickets on another airline, but appreciated the apology.
"It's definitely nice to hear," he said.
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I have no doubt that this was an orchestrated and multi-pronged approach to disrupt not only American air travel, but to create sensitivities in our system to Muslims in order to lower our level of security screening they are put through. We have overt measures by some terrorists to bring down planes and kill Americans in other ways, and we have covert measures by other terrorists to cause law enforcement to be afraid to properly question and screen them. The ACLU and CAIR are as much players in this to use our own civil liberties against us as the overt acts of terror are. Multiple heads from the same snake, IMO.
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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-schoenfeld29-2009dec29,0,3794295.story
**How the American Criminal Liberties Union works to get you killed.**
The Bush administration was subjected to withering criticism for the way it managed the no-fly list. The American Civil Liberties Union put the system on its own list of the “Top Ten Abuses of Power Since 9/11,” asserting that “the uncontroversial contention that Osama bin Laden and a handful of other known terrorists should not be allowed on an aircraft” has been exploited “to create a monster.” In one of several lawsuits the group has filed involving terrorist lists, the ACLU alleged that they “violate airline passengers’ constitutional right to freedom from unreasonable search and seizure and to due process of law.”
Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has been one among a chorus of voices that accused the former administration of being far too sweeping, placing “infants, nuns and even members of Congress” on terrorist watch lists. The writer Naomi Wolf has called travel restrictions such as the no-fly list, “a classic part of the fascist playbook” akin to the depredations of Nazi Germany, where “families fleeing internment were traumatized by the uncertainties that they knew they faced at the borders.” This was hysteria directed against Bush counter-terrorism mechanisms that the Obama administration has left almost entirely unchanged.
The Department of Homeland Security has indeed received a high volume of complaints about airport screening by individuals attempting to travel. Yet only a minuscule 0.7% of the complaints stemmed from issues relating to the watch lists. And of that 0.7%, about 51% of the complaints led to the conclusion that the individual in question was appropriately on the watch list. Whatever problems exist, the system is not outrageously over-inclusive. Indeed, if anything, the opposite is the case.
We will never know whether fierce criticism from the left had any direct effect on the processing of Abdulmutallab’s file, but the political environment is important to consider going forward. The officials managing the watch lists are not eager to be hauled before a congressional committee if they blunder and bar innocent people from getting on flights. But they are also acutely aware of the potential price tag of being under-inclusive.
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I have no doubt that this was an orchestrated and multi-pronged approach to disrupt not only American air travel, but to create sensitivities in our system to Muslims in order to lower our level of security screening they are put through. We have overt measures by some terrorists to bring down planes and kill Americans in other ways, and we have covert measures by other terrorists to cause law enforcement to be afraid to properly question and screen them. The ACLU and CAIR are as much players in this to use our own civil liberties against us as the overt acts of terror are. Multiple heads from the same snake, IMO.
Exactly!!!
CAIR April Fools
By: Joe Kaufman
FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, March 31, 2006
Once every year, CAIR or the Council on American-Islamic Relations gathers its followers in various ‘hot spots’ around the nation to raise money and flaunt its homemade status as a “civil liberties group,” in an attempt to convince the world that they are something which they are not. This year’s annual banquet in Florida will fall fittingly on April 1st or April Fools. The title of the event is ‘Partners for Peace & Justice.’
The keynote speaker for this weekend’s event will be David Cole. Cole is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, a board member of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the Legal Affairs Correspondent for the publication, The Nation. As an attorney, he has been involved in a number of high profile cases. This includes United States v. Eichman, which established that the First Amendment allows for the burning of the American flag.
Cole also played the role of lead counsel for terror operative, Mazen Al-Najjar. Following a 1997 deportation order for overstaying his student visa, Al-Najjar was jailed as a potential threat to the United States public. In July, 2001, after a hard fought court battle, Cole and his legal team lost a federal appeal, thereby denying Al-Najjar asylum. In August of 2002, he was deported to Lebanon. [Al-Najjar would later be named as a co-defendant in the trial against his brother-in-law, Sami Al-Arian.]
Weighing in on the Al-Najjar case was the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which stated, in a May 2002 press release: “Mazen Al Najjar has never been charged with a crime, yet he has spent more than four years behind bars, first on secret evidence that he had no chance to rebut, and for the last six months on no evidence of dangerousness whatsoever.” But at the time, according to the Department of Justice, Al-Najjar “had established ties to terrorist organizations and held leadership positions in the Tampa-based Islamic Concern Project (ICP) and the World and Islam Studies Enterprise,” groups founded by Al-Arian.
This was not the first instance of the ACLU being wrong about those that fall under the inglorious title of ‘radical Islamist,’ and it seems that the group is continuing the trend, now with the appointment of a leader of CAIR to its ranks.
In a CAIR press release, dated March 8, 2006, the group announced to the world that its National Board Chairman, Parvez Ahmed, had been elected to the board of the ACLU of Florida. In the past, the ACLU had participated in events with the group and had even ‘locked arms’ in legal actions with CAIR, but never had it gone so far as to take one of its leaders into its ranks. About his new position, Ahmed, who is also a speaker at the April 1st fundraising dinner, stated: “American Muslims view the protection of civil liberties as one of the most important issues facing our nation today. By working with the ACLU in Florida, I hope to strengthen constitutional rights and help balance those rights with legitimate national security concerns.”
Ahmed’s reason for making that statement – and for getting involved with the ACLU – is apparent. Since CAIR has been in existence, it has lost a Civil Rights Coordinator, a fundraiser, a Director of Community Relations, and a founding Director of its Texas Chapter, all through conviction or deportation. CAIR is currently the defendant in a lawsuit put forward by the family of an FBI agent for his murder, during the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center. Bringing Ahmed into its organization, the ACLU gives CAIR the legitimacy it both craves and needs to survive.
For Parvez Ahmed, it’s just one more step on his quick rise to power. Ahmed, who is an assistant professor at the University of North Florida, became CAIR’s Chairman of the Board in May of 2005. He previously served as Board Chairman for the Florida Chapter of CAIR and as a CAIR National Board member. In addition to this, Ahmed incorporated – in Jacksonville, Florida, where he resides – CAIR’s now defunct Independent Writers Syndicate (IWS). According to CAIR, the syndicate was created, because “after 9/11… newspapers became hungry for input from Muslims.” The service would “distribute original commentaries to newspapers and web sites throughout North America.” Unfortunately, there were problems with many of the writers. They included:
•Arselan Tariq Iftikhar. Iftikhar, who is currently CAIR’s National Legal Director, wrote a June 2002 IWS piece, entitled ‘Bush’s Speech – An Interim Insult,’ in which he described Ariel Sharon as a “terrorist.” He stated, “Ariel Sharon is as much of a terrorist as Yasser Arafat, if not five times more.” In 2002, Iftikhar was a speaker at a Muslim Students Association (MSA) Conference, which featured numerous Islamist radicals, including Siraj Wahhaj, a man named as a potential co-conspirator to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Zulfiqar Ali Shah, the South Asia Director for KindHearts, an Islamic charity that was recently closed down by the United States government for financing Hamas.
•Riad Z. Abdelkarim. Abdelkarim was the Coordinator for IWS. He was also the co-founder of KinderUSA, which suspended operations in December of 2002, amidst an FBI investigation into its Hamas-related activities. In addition, he had been involved with the Holy Land Foundation (HLF), which the United States government shut down after 9/11, and he was on the Los Angeles board of CAIR. In May of 2002, Abdelkarim was detained by the Israeli government, along with fellow KinderUSA co-founder, Dallel Mohmed. The Israelis claimed that the two “charity” workers were “transferring money to sponsor suicide bombings.”
•Fedwa Wazwaz. In August of 2005, Wazwaz was a ‘Live Dialogue’ guest on Islam Online, a website that features live interviews with leaders of Hamas. She authored a libelous tirade against Middle East expert Daniel Pipes, in August of 2003, falsely accusing him of “bigotry.” The title of the piece was ‘Bush Appointee is a Bigot Disguised as a Scholar.’ Wazwaz also, in a November 2002 IWS piece, echoed a conspiracy theory about the Iraq war being started to assist Israel. She stated, “So the plan to attack Iraq was plotted six years ago by pro-Israelis who now hold key positions in the Pentagon.”
Parvez Ahmed has written some disturbing things in his own right. In December of 2005, he called for the release of terrorist Sami Al-Arian, in his op-ed entitled, ‘Al-Arian Verdict a Victory for Common Sense.’ Al-Arian had been the North American leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an organization that carries out suicide operations against innocent Israelis. Al-Arian had also been involved with CAIR’s parent organization, a Hamas-front called the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP). Ahmed stated, “The Justice Department should respect this sentiment and the verdict reached by Al-Arian’s peers by releasing him so that he may resume a normal life, or as close to normal as possible after such an ordeal.” Furthermore, Ahmed laments, in the piece, that “the government may retry him on the charges for which the jury could not reach a decision.”
Most of the time, though, Ahmed is smart and tries to put a positive spin on matters that would concern most Americans. In his August 2005 article entitled, ‘A moderate Muslim way to counter terrorism,’ he agrees with the rationale that says suicide bombings have “little to do with the teachings of any religion but [are] rather a response… designed to compel the retreat of an occupation force.” He says that “Islam… allows for defensive war against combatants but unequivocally forbids the killing of civilians.”
However, to Hamas – the organization that CAIR was born out of – targeting civilians is justified, because all Israelis serve in the military. And the Hamas charter states explicitly that Israel must be destroyed by religious means. According to the charter: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam witll obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it… It is necessary to instill the spirit of Jihad in the heart of the nation so that they would confront the enemies and join the ranks of the fighters… It is necessary to instill in the minds of the Moslem generations that the Palestinian problem is a religious problem, and should be dealt with on this basis.”
CAIR would not be around, if it weren’t for the fact that so many are willing to buy into the group’s ‘dog and pony show.’ With CAIR, the horrors of terrorism and destruction disappear like magic. Except that they’re not really gone. We’re just made to think they are. This April Fools, once again, CAIR will attempt their magic act on the world. And they’ll even throw in a comedian for good measure. If we fall for this act, the real fool is us.
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No idea as to the reliability of this site:
http://netrightnation.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1252234:napolitano-wants-to-unionize-tsa&catid=1:nrn-blog&Itemid=7
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No More Visas for the State Department
Move that law-enforcement function to DHS.
By Elliott Abrams
The mishandling of the would-be airplane bomber Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab’s visa is only the latest piece of evidence that the granting of visas should be taken away from the State Department. Doing so would improve our national security — and actually help the State Department itself.
The granting of visas has little to do with State’s main function, which is to manage relations with foreign governments. The department’s “mission statement” reads as follows:
Advance freedom for the benefit of the American people and the international community by helping to build and sustain a more democratic, secure, and prosperous world composed of well-governed states that respond to the needs of their people, reduce widespread poverty, and act responsibly within the international system.
Needless to say, there’s not a word there about “keeping terrorists out of our country,” and that is no surprise. Granting visas is a function that most people at State relegate to the margins of their activities. State’s mandarins — foreign service officers or “FSOs” — look down at the consular officials who handle visas. This is considered a third-rate assignment, something young FSOs have to suffer through for a few years at the very start of their careers. It is less a training assignment than a form of hazing. They then escape into “real” State Department work — diplomatic activity, conducted in the regional bureaus of the Department and in our embassies abroad. Relieving State of the need to manage the visa process would remove from it a task for which it has no enthusiasm — and for which its top officials have no expertise.
For the granting of visas — especially today, when terrorism is such a complex threat — is far closer to being a law-enforcement function. The obvious place for this task is the Department of Homeland Security, which houses Customs and Immigration enforcement already and which sees protecting the country from terrorism as its central focus. A consular corps could be created at DHS, and would likely attract people who want to see the world — and help protect America from terror. It’s logical that former military and police officials would apply, perhaps retired after 20 years of service but with plenty of energy and experience. And whoever applied would know his or her job was not to smooth relations with foreign governments, not to avoid unpleasant refusals of visa requests, not to attend cocktail parties; instead it would be to help manage a huge system that affects America’s commercial and economic interests, and nowadays our national security as well. Moreover, within DHS, such officials wouldn’t be second-rate citizens; their functions would be understood as part of the core mission of the department. Compare the DHS mission statement to that from State above:
This Department of Homeland Security’s overriding and urgent mission is to lead the unified national effort to secure the country and preserve our freedoms. . . . [T]he Department was created to secure our country against those who seek to disrupt the American way of life. . . .
Such a move would also downsize the State Department usefully: Literally thousands of consular officials at hundreds of posts around the world could be removed from the department, and 21 domestic offices that issue passports to Americans could also be moved over to DHS. As it happens, visa processing is often not even done physically at U.S. embassies abroad, but at other locations able to handle the huge lines that appear in many capitals. Keeping visa functions, and those long lines, away from our embassies can actually help the physical security of our embassies as well.
There are very few good arguments as to why this change from State to DHS should not be made right now. It’s sometimes argued that those early years on the visa line help young FSOs to get their feet on the ground and see reality, before the years on the diplomatic circuit remove them to the stratosphere. It’s a poor reason to keep a law-enforcement function at State, and there are plenty of other ways to expose young diplomats to life on the ground. Of course, all those positions processing U.S. visa requests won't be eliminated entirely, but by consolidation with the border, customs, and immigration functions already at DHS, one can at least hope for some greater efficiency and economies over time. And one can hope for greater security faster than that.
Moving visa functions to DHS is no panacea, obviously, but the case of the would-be airline bomber Abdul Mutallab is perhaps suggestive. His multiple-entry visa to the U.S. was not cancelled by State, not even after his own father alerted U.S. Embassy officials in Nigeria of the danger he might present. His visa to enter the United Kingdom was cancelled, however, months ago. But not by the Foreign Office, Britain’s equivalent of the State Department. In the U.K., the Foreign Office does not handle visas; they are the responsibility of the U.K. Border Agency, established in 2008 and “responsible for securing the United Kingdom’s borders and controlling migration,” just like our DHS. Let’s learn the lesson. Members of Congress seeking to react to the Detroit near-calamity in a useful way should hold hearings right after New Year’s and get a move on. No more visas for State.
— Elliott Abrams is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He served as the deputy national-security adviser handling Middle Eastern affairs in the George W. Bush administration.
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YWMzODAxNWIwNDM1YmEzNzZlZWY0NDAxZjQzNzgwZjg=
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http://hotair.com/archives/2009/12/29/video-former-el-al-security-official-explains-common-sense/
Crafty, BBG, you approve of El Al's methods?
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From what I know of it's behavioral aspects I've no issue with it. Don't have much issue with intelligence collection beyond our borders, but do get nervous when folks as incompetent as the TSA or as unscrupulous as the Obama administration start vacuuming up data on American citizens.
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So, how wquld you interdict blue eyed haji converts born and raised CONUS?
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Wait, wait, I know! Suspend habeas corpus and lock up everyone who doesn't pay lip service to the political sensitivities du jour while running roughshod over the rest of the constitution.
What did I win?
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U.S. Had Information Before Christmas of a Terror Plot
Two officials said the United States government had
intelligence from Yemen before Christmas that leaders of a
branch of Al Qaeda there were talking about "a Nigerian"
being prepared for a terrorist attack.
Read More:
http://www.nytimes.com?emc=na
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Wait, wait, I know! Suspend habeas corpus and lock up everyone who doesn't pay lip service to the political sensitivities du jour while running roughshod over the rest of the constitution.
What did I win?
A big button that says "I got nothin'".
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http://hotair.com/archives/2009/12/29/report-cia-knew-about-abdulmuttalab-in-august/comment-page-1/#comments
Not exactly all knowing.
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http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,581459,00.html
Better aviation security in Somalia?
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http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/%E2%80%9Cal-qaeda-practises-beating-body-scanners%E2%80%9D
A body scanner at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport would not necessarily have detected the explosives which the would-be syringe bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had sewn into his underwear. A Dutch military intelligence source told De Telegraaf newspaper that Al Qaeda has its own security scanners and has been practicing ways of concealing explosives.
The terrorist group has even carried out test runs at smuggling explosives through European airports, the paper reports.
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http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2009/dec/tsa-clears-illegal-aliens-work-ny-airport
TSA Clears Illegal Immigrants To Work At NY Airport
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Intelligence experts have heard chatter for months about the explosive allegedly used by the underwear bomber. So why has the U.S. cut back on machines that detect it?
U.S. security officials had become increasingly worried in the months leading up to the attempted airplane bombing on Christmas Day about terrorists using the explosive agent concealed by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, several counterterrorism experts tell The Daily Beast. Internet chatter about PETN spiked over the summer, as monitored by U.S. intelligence services, the sources add.
Yet over the past 18 months, a Transportation Security Administration employee tells me, the U.S. has stopped using more than half of the Explosive Trace Portals that have capability of detecting PETN. These are dubbed “puffer” machines because they release several puffs of air to shake loose trace explosive particles as passengers walk through. The TSA employee, who spoke to The Daily Beast on the condition of anonymity and does not agree with the reduced use of puffers, says that there are fewer than 40 machines deployed today, down from 94 in service (and more than 200 purchased).
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-12-30/the-terrorists-secret-weapon/full/
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http://www.thestar.com/news/world/ar...-little-bother
Quote:
While North America's airports groan under the weight of another sea-change in security protocols, one word keeps popping out of the mouths of experts: Israelification.
That is, how can we make our airports more like Israel's, which deal with far greater terror threat with far less inconvenience.
"It is mindboggling for us Israelis to look at what happens in North America, because we went through this 50 years ago," said Rafi Sela, the president of AR Challenges, a global transportation security consultancy. He's worked with the RCMP, the U.S. Navy Seals and airports around the world.
"Israelis, unlike Canadians and Americans, don't take s--- from anybody. When the security agency in Israel (the ISA) started to tighten security and we had to wait in line for — not for hours — but 30 or 40 minutes, all hell broke loose here. We said, 'We're not going to do this. You're going to find a way that will take care of security without touching the efficiency of the airport."
That, in a nutshell is "Israelification" - a system that protects life and limb without annoying you to death.
Despite facing dozens of potential threats each day, the security set-up at Israel's largest hub, Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport, has not been breached since 2002, when a passenger mistakenly carried a handgun onto a flight. How do they manage that?
"The first thing you do is to look at who is coming into your airport," said Sela.
The first layer of actual security that greets travellers at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion International Airport is a roadside check. All drivers are stopped and asked two questions: How are you? Where are you coming from?
"Two benign questions. The questions aren't important. The way people act when they answer them is," Sela said.
Officers are looking for nervousness or other signs of "distress" — behavioural profiling. Sela rejects the argument that profiling is discriminatory.
"The word 'profiling' is a political invention by people who don't want to do security," he said. "To us, it doesn't matter if he's black, white, young or old. It's just his behaviour. So what kind of privacy am I really stepping on when I'm doing this?"
Once you've parked your car or gotten off your bus, you pass through the second and third security perimeters.
Armed guards outside the terminal are trained to observe passengers as they move toward the doors, again looking for odd behaviour. At Ben Gurion's half-dozen entrances, another layer of security are watching. At this point, some travellers will be randomly taken aside, and their person and their luggage run through a magnometer.
"This is to see that you don't have heavy metals on you or something that looks suspicious," said Sela.
You are now in the terminal. As you approach your airline check-in desk, a trained interviewer takes your passport and ticket. They ask a series of questions: Who packed your luggage? Has it left your side?
"The whole time, they are looking into your eyes — which is very embarrassing. But this is one of the ways they figure out if you are suspicious or not. It takes 20, 25 seconds," said Sela.
Lines are staggered. People are not allowed to bunch up into inviting targets for a bomber who has gotten this far.
At the check-in desk, your luggage is scanned immediately in a purpose-built area. Sela plays devil's advocate — what if you have escaped the attention of the first four layers of security, and now try to pass a bag with a bomb in it?
"I once put this question to Jacques Duchesneau (the former head of the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority): say there is a bag with play-doh in it and two pens stuck in the play-doh. That is 'Bombs 101' to a screener. I asked Ducheneau, 'What would you do?' And he said, 'Evacuate the terminal.' And I said, 'Oh. My. God.'
"Take Pearson. Do you know how many people are in the terminal at all times? Many thousands. Let's say I'm (doing an evacuation) without panic — which will never happen. But let's say this is the case. How long will it take? Nobody thought about it. I said, 'Two days.'"
A screener at Ben-Gurion has a pair of better options.
First, the screening area is surrounded by contoured, blast-proof glass that can contain the detonation of up to 100 kilos of plastic explosive. Only the few dozen people within the screening area need be removed, and only to a point a few metres away.
Second, all the screening areas contain 'bomb boxes'. If a screener spots a suspect bag, he/she is trained to pick it up and place it in the box, which is blast proof. A bomb squad arrives shortly and wheels the box away for further investigation.
"This is a very small simple example of how we can simply stop a problem that would cripple one of your airports," Sela said.
Five security layers down: you now finally arrive at the only one which Ben-Gurion Airport shares with Pearson — the body and hand-luggage check.
"But here it is done completely, absolutely 180 degrees differently than it is done in North America," Sela said.
"First, it's fast — there's almost no line. That's because they're not looking for liquids, they're not looking at your shoes. They're not looking for everything they look for in North America. They just look at you," said Sela. "Even today with the heightened security in North America, they will check your items to death. But they will never look at you, at how you behave. They will never look into your eyes ... and that's how you figure out the bad guys from the good guys."
That's the process — six layers, four hard, two soft. The goal at Ben-Gurion is to move fliers from the parking lot to the airport lounge in a maximum of 25 minutes.
This doesn't begin to cover the off-site security net that failed so spectacularly in targeting would-be Flight 253 bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — intelligence. In Israel, Sela said, a coordinated intelligence gathering operation produces a constantly evolving series of threat analyses and vulnerability studies.
"There is absolutely no intelligence and threat analysis done in Canada or the United States," Sela said. "Absolutely none."
But even without the intelligence, Sela maintains, Abdulmutallab would not have gotten past Ben Gurion Airport's behavioural profilers.
So. Eight years after 9/11, why are we still so reactive, so un-Israelified?
Working hard to dampen his outrage, Sela first blames our leaders, and then ourselves.
"We have a saying in Hebrew that it's much easier to look for a lost key under the light, than to look for the key where you actually lost it, because it's dark over there. That's exactly how (North American airport security officials) act," Sela said. "You can easily do what we do. You don't have to replace anything. You have to add just a little bit — technology, training. But you have to completely change the way you go about doing airport security. And that is something that the bureaucrats have a problem with. They are very well enclosed in their own concept."
And rather than fear, he suggests that outrage would be a far more powerful spur to provoking that change.
"Do you know why Israelis are so calm? We have brutal terror attacks on our civilians and still, life in Israel is pretty good. The reason is that people trust their defence forces, their police, their response teams and the security agencies. They know they're doing a good job. You can't say the same thing about Americans and Canadians. They don't trust anybody," Sela said. "But they say, 'So far, so good'. Then if something happens, all hell breaks loose and you've spent eight hours in an airport. Which is ridiculous. Not justifiable
"But, what can you do? Americans and Canadians are nice people and they will do anything because they were told to do so and because they don't know any different."
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Excellent- The casinos in vegas work/ worked very much that way. Spot the strange, make sure it is just strange, and not a threat.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2009/09/27/video-the-implications-of-the-body-bomb/
Keep in mind that AQ will work to refine this.
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/01/02/newsweek-saudis-briefed-top-obama-official-about-underwear-bombers-in-october/
Gee, who coulda seen this coming???? :roll:
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I am in a conversation wherein someone has asserted the following article. Is the article sound or not? Why? Thanks for the help:
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Congress Has Assaulted Our Freedoms in the Patriot Act
by Andrew P. Napolitano
The compromise version of the Patriot Act to which House and Senate conferees agreed last week and for which the House voted yesterday is an unforgivable assault on basic American values and core constitutional liberties. Unless amended in response to the courageous efforts of a few dozen senators from both parties, the new Patriot Act will continue to give federal agents the power to write their own search warrants – the statute’s newspeak terminology calls them "national security letters" – and serve them on a host of persons and entities that regularly gather and store sensitive, private information on virtually every American.
Congress once respected the Fourth Amendment until it began cutting holes in it. Before Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1977, Americans and even non-citizens physically present here enjoyed the right to privacy guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment. That Amendment, which was written out of a revulsion to warrants that let British soldiers look for any tangible thing anywhere they chose, specifically requires that the government demonstrate to a judge and the judge specifically find the existence of probable cause of criminal activity on the part of the person whose property the government wishes to search. The Fourth Amendment commands that only a judge can authorize a search warrant.
FISA unconstitutionally changed the probable cause of criminality requirement to probable cause of employment by a foreign government, hostile or friendly. Under FISA, if the government can demonstrate the foreign agency or employment status of the person whose things it wishes to search, the secret FISA court will issue the search warrant.
But even FISA respects constitutional liberty, since it prohibits prosecutions based on evidence obtained from these warrants. Thus, if a FISA warrant reveals that the embassy janitor is really a spy who beats his wife, he would not and could not be prosecuted for either crime because the evidence of his crimes was obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of a judicial finding of probable cause of criminal activity. Instead of being prosecuted, he would be deported.
A year later in 1978, cutting yet another hole in the Fourth Amendment, Congress revealed its distaste for fidelity to the Constitution and its ignorance of the British government’s abuse of the colonists by enacting the Orwellian–named, Right to Financial Privacy Act. This statute, for the first time in American history, let federal agents write their own search warrants, but limited the subjects of those warrants to financial institutions. Just like FISA, it recognized the unconstitutional nature of evidence obtained by a self-written search warrant, and banned the use of such evidence in criminal prosecutions.
In 1986, Congress continued to cut. It disregarded yet again the Fourth Amendment’s protection of privacy when it enacted the Electronic Communications Privacy Act which allowed federal agents to serve self-written search warrants on collectors of digital financial data, but continued to recognize that evidence thus obtained was constitutionally incompetent for criminal prosecution purposes.
The deepest cut came on October 15, 2001 when Congress enacted the Patriot Act. With minimal floor debate in the Senate and no floor debate in the House (House members were given only 30 minutes to read the 315 page bill), Congress enacted this most unpatriotic rejection of privacy and constitutional guarantees. Together with its offspring the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal 2004 and the Intelligence Reform Act of 2004, the Patriot Act not only permits the execution of self-written search warrants on a host of new subjects, it rejects the no-criminal-prosecution protections of its predecessors by requiring evidence obtained contrary to the Fourth Amendment to be turned over to prosecutors and mandating that such evidence is constitutionally competent in criminal prosecutions.
The new version of the Patriot Act which the Senate will debate this weekend purports to make all of this congressional rejection of our history, our values, and our Constitution the law of the land.
So, if your representative in the House has voted, or your Senators do vote, for the House/Senate conference approved version, they will be authorizing federal agents on their own, in violation of the Constitution, and without you knowing it, to obtain records about you from your accountant, bank, boat dealer, bodega, book store, car dealer, casino, computer server, credit union, dentist, HMO, hospital, hotel manager, insurance company, jewelry store, lawyer, library, pawn broker, pharmacist, physician, postman, real estate agent, supermarket, tax collectors, telephone company, travel agency, and trust company, and use the evidence thus obtained in any criminal prosecution against you.
Why would Congress, whose members swore to uphold the Constitution, authorize such a massive evasion of it by the federal agents we have come to rely upon to protect our freedoms? Why would Congress nullify the Fourth Amendment–guaranteed right to privacy for which we and our forbearers have fought and paid dearly? How could the men and women we elect to fortify our freedoms and write our laws so naïvely embrace the less-freedom-equals-more-security canard? Why have we fought for 230 years to keep foreign governments from eviscerating our freedoms if we will voluntarily let our own government do so?
The unfortunate answer to these questions is the inescapable historical truth that those in government – from both parties and with a few courageous exceptions – do not feel constrained by the Constitution. They think they can do whatever they want. They have hired vast teams of government lawyers to twist and torture the plain meaning of the Fourth Amendment to justify their aggrandizement of power to themselves. They vote for legislation they have not read and do not understand. Their only fear is being overruled by judges. In the case of the Patriot Act, they should be afraid. The federal judges who have published opinions on the challenges to it have all found it constitutionally flawed.
The Fourth Amendment worked for 200 years to facilitate law enforcement and protect constitutional freedoms before Congress began to cut holes in it. Judges sit in every state in the Union 24/7 to hear probable cause applications for search warrants. There is simply no real demonstrable evidence that our American-value-driven-constitutional-privacy-protection-system is in need of such a radical change.
A self-written search warrant, even one called a national security letter, is the ultimate constitutional farce. What federal agents would not authorize themselves to seize whatever they wished? Why even bother with such a meaningless requirement? We might as well let the feds rummage through any office, basement, computer, or bedroom they choose. Who would trust government agents with this unfettered unreviewable power? The Framers did not. Why would government agents bother going to a judge with probable cause seeking a search warrant if they can simply write their own? Big Brother must have caught on because federal agents have written and executed self-written search warrants on over 120,000 unsuspecting Americans since October 2001.
Is this the society we want? Have we ultimately elected a government to spy on all of us? The Fourth Amendment is the lynchpin of our personal privacy and individual dignity. Without the Fourth Amendment’s protections, we will become another East Germany. The Congress must recognize this before it is too late.
December 16, 2005
Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel, and the author of Constitutional Chaos: What Happens When the Government Breaks Its Own Laws.
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http://volokh.com/posts/1116609947.shtml
Should the FBI Have Administrative Subpoena Authority?:
Yesterday's papers reported that Senator Roberts of the Senate Intelligence Committee has a bill in the works that would give the FBI the administrative subpoena authority it has been seeking in terrorism cases. So you're wondering: what's administrative subpoena authority? And should the FBI have it? I wanted to offer a few thoughts to shed light on the first question and frame the second. (Warning: long and inconclusive post ahead.)
First some background, taken largely from my recent testimony on the Patriot Act. At the most basic level, any modern legal regime that allows the government to investigate crime or terrorism must address a number of basic methods for acquiring information. In particular, the law must cover three basic types of authorities:
1) Authority to conduct physical searches to retrieve physical evidence or collect information.
2) Authority to compel third parties to produce physical evidence or disclose information.
3) Authority to conduct real-time monitoring over communications networks.
In the case of criminal investigations, the legal regime that covers these authorities is well established. The first authority is governed by the traditional Fourth Amendment warrant requirement. The police must have a search warrant based on probable cause to enter a home or business unless a person with apparent or actual authority over the place consents, exigent circumstances exist, or another exception to the warrant requirement applies.
The second authority is governed by the Fourth Amendment rules governing subpoenas. A subpoena is an order to compel: it requires the recipient to either report to testify or to disclose physical evifence at a particular time and place. Although many different types of subpoenas exist, the basic idea is that the subpoena authority is vested in some body, whether in the grand jury (which is really run by prosecutors, but at least in theory is just a groups of citizens) or a government agency. A subpoena can be issued under a wide range of circumstances: the information need only be relevant to the government’s investigation, and compliance with the subpoena cannot be overly burdensome to the subpoena recipient. No judge is consulted before the subpoena is issued; instead, the recipient of the subpoena can challenge it in court before complying.
So much for the regime applicable in criminal cases. What about the law for intelligence investigations? In these cases, the government is not trying to deter and punish crime, but rather to collect intelligence ifnromation about threats to the Nation so it can defend itself. The law governing monitoring for intelligence purposes is somewhat different than the law governing evidence collection for criminal cases. The Fourth Amendment’s requirements are much less clear – and generally less strong – than in the routine criminal context. As a general matter, the few courts that have confronted how the Fourth Amendment applies to intelligence collection have held that the rules are somewhat similar to the rules for criminal investigations but also more flexible. When the Fourth Amendment applies, information and evidence collection must be reasonable in light of the countervailing demands and interest of intelligence collection. See United States v. United States District Court, 407 U.S. 297, 323-24 (1972); In re Sealed Case, 310 F.3d 717, 745-46 (Foreign Int. Surv. Ct. Rev. 2002). This legal framework appears to place Congress in the primary role of generating the law governing intelligence collection, with the Fourth Amendment serving as a backstop that reviews Congress’s approach to ensure that it is constitutionally
reasonable.
Congress has responded to the challenge by passing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, also known as “FISA.” FISA attempts to create a statutory regime for intelligence monitoring that largely parallels analogous rules for gathering evidence in criminal cases. First, 18 U.S.C. §§ 1821-29 covers the authority to conduct physical searches, a parallel to the provision of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure that allows investigators to obtain a search warrant in criminal cases. Second, 18 U.S.C. §§ 1861-62 and 18 U.S.C. § 2709 covers authority to compel third-parties to disclose records and physical evidence, a parallel to the provision of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure that allows the issuance of subpoenas in criminal investigations.
Okay, enough background. The debates over the FISA-related provisions of the Patriot Act — and the current debate on whether the FBI should have administrative subpoena authority — focus primarily on the second type of authority: powers to compel third parties to produce physical evidence or disclose information. For the most part, such powers to compel are used to obtain business records from third parties, like the phone company, banks, Internet service providers, and the like that have records relating to what the suspect has been up to recently. (It generally doesn't work to serve an order to compel on a suspect directly, as that tips off the suspect to the surveillance and raises Fifth Amendment privilege issues.) Specifically, critics object to the weak privacy regulations found in provisions such as Section 215 of the Patriot Act that address the government’s power to compel third parties to produce physical evidence or disclose information in intelligence cases. And they object to vesting the power to issue such orders in an agency like the FBI. The general concern is that these orders to compel give the government too much power, as they allow the government to issue an order without getting careful judicial review of the order beforehand.
So what standard should apply? The difficult part about this question is finding the right frame of reference. If your frame of reference is the grand jury subpoena power in the criminal context, then giving the FBI administrative subpoena power probably doesn't seem so objectionable — it raises some concerns, but isn't entirely objectionable. The reason is that the grand jury subpoena power is already tremendously broad. The Supreme Court has held that a grand jury subpoena can be issued if the order to compel seeks information that may be relevant to a criminal investigation. See United States v. R. Enterprises, Inc., 498 U.S. 292 (1991). This authority “paints with a broad brush” by design, permitting subpoenas to be issued ordering third parties to disclose physical evidence and information “merely on suspicion that the law is being violated, or even just because . . . assurance [is sought] that it is not.” Id. at 297 (quoting United States v. Morton Salt Co., 338 U.S. 632, 642-643 (1950)). The Court has justified this low standard on the ground that orders to compel evidence from third parties are preliminary investigative tools designed to determine if more invasive forms of surveillance are necessary. "[T]he Government cannot be required to justify the issuance of a grand jury subpoena by presenting evidence sufficient to establish probable cause because the very purpose of requesting the information is to ascertain whether probable cause exists." See R. Enterprises, Inc., 498 U.S. at 297.
The question is, should the government have an analogous power in intelligence investigations, and if so, what is exactly is the intelligence analogy to traditional criminal grand jury subpoena authority? On one hand, it makes some sense to give the government that power: if the government has long had the power to issue subpoenas in minor crime cases, it seems a bit strange that they don't have this same power in terrorism cases. In that sense, giving the FBI administrative subpoena power simply recognizes the historically contingent limitations on the grand jury power. At the same time, it's not clear that FBI administrative subpoena power would really be analogous to the grand jury power. If an FBI agent wants a subpoena, he still needs to go to a prosecutor; the proseuctor issues the subpoena in the name of the grand jury. This introduces one important check on the system, as the investigative agency cannot issue the grand jury subpoena itself. If you want the FBI to be tempered in its efforts by the check of another agency, administrative subpoena authority can seem troublesome.
But once again, this depends on your frame of reference. More civil libertarian readers will object to the subpoena power, and argue that we should judge orders to compel evidence (category #2) based on the legal standards that traditionally govern orders to conduct direct searches (category #1). There are reasons why the law regulates category #2 less strongly than category #1 — Judge Friendly had the classic explanation in a case called United States v. Horowitz, and lawprof Bill Stuntz has doen a lot of great work on this area — but many will find these arguments unpersuasive and want orders to compel to follow the traditional warrant requirement. The subpoena power will seem like an end-run around the usual protections. At the same time, other readers may take the opposite frame of reference, and note that many agencies have had administrative subpoena power already, as detailed in this very good report from the Congressional Research Service. If lots of agencies have this power already, they'll reason, why not give it to the FBI for the most important of investigations?
As this inconclusive post suggests, I'm not sure of where I come out on the bottom line. On one hand, I do think that the regime of intelligence investigation needs some kind of subpoena equivalent. All successful regimes of evidence collection rely on a mix of low-threshold investigatory steps and higher-threshold investigatory steps; the idea is that investigators should be able to do the less-invasive low-threshold investigatory steps to get evidence to be able to rule out or reaffirm the need to conduct more-invasive higher-threshold investigatory steps. I don't see why intelligence investigations are different on that score. At the same time, I'm not sure that giving the FBI administrative subpoena authority is the way to go. While a number of agencies have such power, they tend to have more limited scope. My initial sense is that there must be ways of increasing oversight beyond that of administrative subpoenas without interfering with their effectiveness as investigative tools. I hope Congress takes a hard look at them before giving the FBI administrative subpoena authority.
Hat tip: Phil Carter, who also has thoughts on this.
Related Posts (on one page):
1.The Case for and Against Administrative Subpoenas:
2.Should the FBI Have Administrative Subpoena Authority?:
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http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=9471721
Extremists Online Discussed Blowing Up Planes Weeks Before Northwest Flight 253 Attempt
Online Extremists Recommended Methods Exactly Like Those Used by Abdulmutallab
By SIMON MCGREGOR-WOOD
JERUSALEM, Jan. 4, 2010 —
Extremist Internet forums discussed blowing up planes three weeks before the Detroit attempt -- and have also discussed ways of using deadly biological agents onboard planes.
A private Israeli intelligence company told ABC News Monday there was a surge of online discussions in extremist Islamic forums about blowing up planes three weeks before Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's attempt to bring down Northwest Flight 253. The discussions recommended using "improvised detonation chain" devices, exactly like the one used onboard the Detroit-bound flight.
The company has also tracked specific -- and in its view -- credible plans to attack planes using deadly biological agents.
The company, Terrogence, is run by former intelligence agents who for the last four years have monitored and occasionally participated anonymously in extremist Internet sites.
Three weeks ago company founder Gadi Aviran and colleagues noticed a surge in Internet traffic from well-known extremists talking about how to bring down planes using combinations of chemicals including PETN, the chemical used by Abdulmutallab on Christmas Day.
"These discussions were about the exact same technique used on the Detroit flight," he said. "There were very detailed instructions on how many grams of chemicals to use, so as to avoid detection. They also talked in great detail about what liquids should be used."
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No Comfort At All
Posted 07:26 PM ET
Security: The White House sent its point man on terrorism onto the airwaves to ease public fears after the botched al-Qaida Christmas Day airliner bombing. But his mealy-mouthed performance only worsened them.
Americans expect more from those charged with identifying this country's enemies and protecting the American people than the bobbing and weaving non-answers of politicians.
A year ago, Obama terrorism czar John O. Brennan was reportedly torpedoed as the president's choice for CIA director because he publicly supported enhanced interrogation as an anti-terror tool. That didn't seem to be the John Brennan we saw on the Sunday talk show circuit.
Brennan was asked by Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday" why the U.S. shouldn't halt all transfers of terrorist detainees to Yemen after alleged Christmas bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab told authorities that other al-Qaida operatives in Yemen were ready to follow in his footsteps.
Brennan's response sounded like he spends as much time reading Democratic National Committee talking points as he does perusing intelligence reports. The Obama administration has only released 42 detainees from Guantanamo Bay, he noted, compared with the Bush administration's 532. Seven of the 42 returned to Yemen during November and December, he said.
"We've had close dialogue with the Yemeni government about the expectations that we have as far as what they're supposed to do when these detainees go back," Brennan said, adding that "several of those detainees were put into Yemeni custody right away. We're continuing to talk with them. What we're trying to do is to do this in a very measured fashion."
The appropriate response might be: protecting Americans "in a very measured fashion" is no virtue.
"Close dialogue" is of very limited value when dealing with a nearly 100% Muslim nation where non-Muslims are constitutionally prohibited from holding elected office. Has Brennan been drinking the Kool-Aid at the White House Mess? Does he now think talk can be the chief weapon against terrorism?
It is outrageous to send any detainee in U.S. custody back to such a hotbed of terrorist plotting and training — even before what happened on Christmas Day.
According to Brennan, the "Guantanamo facility must be closed" because "it has served as a propaganda tool for al-Qaida." But giving al-Qaida propaganda victories beats giving them their operatives back.
At least as discouraging was Brennan's defense of treating Abdulmutallab as a civilian criminal rather than as an enemy combatant. As Wallace pointed out, "once he gets his Miranda rights, he doesn't have to speak at all." Brennan's inadequate answer: "He doesn't have to, but ... if he wants to, in fact, engage with us in a productive manner, there are ways that he can do that."
Fact is, once some ACLU-style lawyer explains to the likes of Abdulmutallab his rights, the U.S. government won't be getting any more potentially life-saving information from him.
When you cut through the verbal fog of the White House's terrorism chief, that's the kind of bad news that remains.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=517002&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EditorialRss+%28Editorial+RSS%29&utm_content=Twitter
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http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2010/01/nigerian-underwear-bomber.html
State Department leaps into action!
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http://wcbstv.com/local/newark.airport.continental.2.1407062.html
Jan 6, 2010 8:18 am US/Eastern
Comedy Of Errors: Cameras Didn't Work At Newark
Sources Tell CBS 2 That TSA Surveillance Cameras Were Inoperable At Time Of Terminal C Security Breach
TSA Apparently Didn't Know Number For Continental To Get Other Footage
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http://cnsnews.com/news/article/59330
Homeland Security’s National Operations Center ‘Unable’ to Do Its Job, Inspector General Finds
Wednesday, January 06, 2010
By Matt Cover, Staff Writer
CNSNews.com) – The Homeland Security Department’s National Operations Center (NOC) is “unable” to do its job of ensuring coordination among the 22 federal agencies that make up the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and focuses too much on disaster management rather than terrorism prevention, according to its own inspector general.
The National Operations Center, in fact, functions largely in name only, and current operations apparently have diminished its ability to respond to terrorist threats.
These assessments are presented in a redacted report from the DHS Office of Inspector General released in November and entitled “Information Sharing at the National Operations Center.”
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http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=9493323
Obama Orders Air Marshal Surge by Feb. 1: 'Race Against Time'
**All is well, all is well. Nothing to worry about, no actionable intel, just putting every federal gun and badge toter we have on every flight possible for no real reason.**
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Holder’s Haste Makes Waste of Intel
Abdulmutallab indictment is a bill of lost intelligence opportunities.
By Andrew C. McCarthy
Eric Holder’s Justice Department rushed to file an indictment Wednesday against Flight 253 terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. The telling document is a monument to lost opportunity. Come hell or high water, the Obama administration will press ahead with its commitment to treat al-Qaeda’s war against the United States as a crime wave best managed by the federal courts.
“Al-Qaeda,” in fact, is a term you will not find in the bare-bones, seven-page charging instrument. Nor will you encounter such words as “Yemen,” “jihad,” “terrorism” — neither “Islamic” or “Islamist.” And if you’re looking for the names of any co-conspirators — such as the al-Qaeda satellite (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) that has publicly claimed credit for the attempted Christmas Day atrocity, or the enemy combatants who’ve been running that outfit since their improvident release from Gitmo — you’d best look elsewhere.
Mentioning “enemy combatants,” of course, would be tantamount to saying there is an ongoing military conflict. It would be as if Congress had authorized the use of force after an attack against the United States — as if we had, say, a couple of hundred thousand American troops in harm’s way. There’s no hint of that in this indictment. Instead, we helpfully learn that Delta Airlines is a “United States commercial airline of which Northwest Airlines [is] a subsidiary.” We learn that Northwest’s Flight 253, along with the 289 passengers and crew onboard, were “at all times material to this Indictment . . . in the ‘special maritime jurisdiction of the United States.’”
That turns out to mean that we can have a civilian criminal prosecution in which “venue is proper in the Eastern District of Michigan.” What could possibly be more important than that?
Lots of things: gathering intelligence, for one. We have now had confirmed — by President Obama himself, along with top White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan — that, while Janet Napolitano’s system was working so well, Abdulmutallab was an untapped well of operational intelligence.
He’d been training with al-Qaeda for weeks in Yemen, now one of the hottest hubs of terror plotting. He was undoubtedly in a position to identify who had recruited him, who had dispatched him on his mission, and who had trained him in fashioning and detonating chemical explosives. He was in a position to tell us what al-Qaeda knows, that Janet Napolitano apparently doesn’t, about our porous airline-security system. He was, moreover, almost certainly in a position to pinpoint paramilitary training facilities, to tell us about other al-Qaeda trainees being taught to do what he was trying to do, and to fill many gaps in our knowledge of the terror network’s hierarchy, routines, and governmental connections in Yemen.
That was not to be. The Obama administration decided that forging ahead pell-mell with a criminal prosecution was more important than acquiring every morsel of useful information Abdulmutallab has to give. That meant telling him, immediately upon arrest, that he didn’t need to speak to the government at all if he didn’t want to. It meant promising to get him a lawyer. It meant he could only be questioned for a few hours — by agents who happened to be on the scene but probably didn’t know much about al-Qaeda’s Yemeni operation. It meant the assignment of a defense lawyer and required court appearances that instantly shut down all questioning.
And, yesterday, it meant the Justice Department had to file a “stop the clock” indictment. Under the Speedy Trial Act, when an arrested person is denied bail, the government has only ten business days to file formal charges.So the government hastily slaps together a very lean indictment. Prosecutors never want to allege anything they’re not positive they can prove. Blunders in an indictment signal that someone may have given false testimony in the grand jury or that the Justice Department’s theory of the case is flawed. Such errors are exploited to great effect by defense counsel at trial.
So, at this premature investigative stage, the government alleges only what it knows for sure. Indications are that it doesn’t know much. There are only six counts. They all charge Abdulmutallab alone, as if he were the only relevant actor in this conspiracy. Indeed, by the Justice Department’s lights, you can’t even call the case a “conspiracy.” DOJ hasn’t charged one — not with al-Qaeda, not with anyone.
For now, the indictment portrays Abdulmutallab as if he were the lone-wolf terrorist that Obama administration officials, including the president himself, absurdly labeled him to be in the initial hours after his capture, snug in their default denial of the fact that there is a war on and that jihadists still hate us — despite all the Cairo speechifying, the bowing, the engagement, and the new tone. Abdulmutallab is accused, by his lonesome, of trying to destroy an airplane, of using explosive devices, and of the attempted murder of 289 people — a number that apparently includes the terrorist himself. (That’s not likely to go over well with the president’s fans in the “right to die” community, but when you’re in a mad rush to meet a litigation deadline, these sorts of hiccups happen.)
#pageRest assured this won’t be the final indictment. The investigation is now scorching the earth with subpoenas. Phone and travel records are being combed. Old wiretaps are being scrubbed. Ultimately, there will be a superseding indictment, and it will probably include conspiracy charges. For now, though, the government is playing catch-up with events. More important, it is playing catch-up without Abdulmutallab. Because Obama is going the civilian prosecution route, there is no interrogating him without his lawyer’s okay — and that won’t be given unless the Justice Department is willing to plea bargain and make valuable concessions.
And that’s the point. Even the current skeletal indictment shows we can easily convict Abdulmutallab and get him sentenced to life imprisonment without knowing a single additional detail. We could do that tomorrow or five years from now. We don’t owe this terrorist any concessions. The case and the evidence are not going anywhere.
Prosecutorial success, however, has precious little to do with national-security success. For the latter, we need intelligence. We could have gotten it — and gotten it right now, when it would be most useful to U.S. military and intelligence officials trying to protect Americans.
President Obama could have designated Abdulmutallab an enemy combatant, detained him as a war prisoner, denied him counsel, and had him interrogated until we’d exhausted his reservoir of information. Indeed, the president could still do that. He could direct the attorney general to table the indictment. Then, some time down the road, he could hand Abdulmutallab back to the Justice Department for prosecution. No, we wouldn’t be able to use the fruits of his military interrogation against him. But as the indictment filed Wednesday shows, we don’t need those statements to convict him. We could convict him now.
To protect the United States, though, we don’t need Abdulmutallab’s conviction. We need his information. Wednesday’s indictment demonstrates what two weeks of Obama’s amateur-hour performance have suggested all along: We don’t have it.
— National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008).
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YmQwZWZlY2RjMTc0NjdhMTNjNzkyZjZiYTVlYTA3Yzc=
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A point as profoundly sound as it is obvious.
Maybe if we are nice, no more will come , , ,
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Man threatening Jews hauled off flight in Miami
MIAMI
Thu Jan 7, 2010 9:40am EST
MIAMI (Reuters) - A man who described himself as a Palestinian and said he wanted to "kill all the Jews" was hauled off a Detroit-bound Delta Air Lines flight in Miami and arrested, authorities said on Thursday.
The plane was taxiing away from the terminal at Miami International Airport on Wednesday night when 43-year-old Mansor Mohammad Asad of Toledo, Ohio, began making loud anti-Semitic comments and chanting, apparently in Arabic, Miami-Dade police said in a statement.
"I'm Palestinian and I want (to) kill all Jews," he said, according to witnesses.
The pilot returned the aircraft to the terminal and a Taser device was used to "neutralize" Asad after he charged an arresting officer, the police statement said.
The incident came amid heightened airline security concerns following the attempted bombing of a Northwest flight bound for Detroit on Christmas Day.
Police said Asad faced several criminal charges including threats against a public servant and disorderly conduct. The Delta plane departed for Detroit following a thorough security sweep.
(Reporting by Tom Brown; Editing by Will Dunham)
U.S.
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And so I have to wonder if the nice palestinian was just 5150 as they say in SoCal, or a probe.
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NCTC director Michael Leiter remained on ski slopes after Christmas Day airline bombing attempt
BY James Gordon Meek
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU
Thursday, January 7th 2010, 4:00 AM
Somodevilla/GettyMichael Leiter, head of the NCTC, set up after 9/11 to battle terror attacks, could be in hot water after remaining on ski slopes following Christmas Day jetliner bombing try. - The top official in charge of analyzing terror threats did not cut short his ski vacation after the underwear bomber nearly blew up an airliner on Christmas Day, the Daily News has learned.
Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center since 2007, decided not to return to his agency's "bat cave" nerve center in McLean, Va., until several days after Christmas, two U.S. officials said.
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2010/01/07/2010-01-07_antiterror_chief_took_ski_pass_remained_on_slopes_after_christmas_bomb_attempt.html#ixzz0bym35EPI
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Not saying I agree, but its good to step outside the box sometimes:
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Written by a British EOD (Explosive Ordinance Disposal) expert Lewis Page:
Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01...allab_comment/
Quote:
Trouser-bomb clown attacks - how much should we laugh?
Reg investigates case of the undertotally-pants bomber
By Lewis Page
Posted in Policing, 8th January 2010 14:37 GMT
Comment As the smoke clears following the case of Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, the failed Christmas Day "underpants bomber" of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 fame, there are just three simple points for us Westerners to take away.
First: It is completely impossible to prevent terrorists from attacking airliners.
Second: This does not matter. There is no need for greater efforts on security.
Third: A terrorist set fire to his own trousers, suffering eyewateringly painful burns to what Australian cricket commentators sometimes refer to as the "groinal area", and nobody seems to be laughing. What's wrong with us?
We'll look at the first part to begin with.
In order to destroy an airliner and kill everyone on board, one needs to do a certain amount of damage to it: a lot if it is on the ground without much fuel in it, not so much if it is fuelled up, less yet if it is flying at low altitude, and least of all if it is flying high up.
Formerly there was the option of gaining access to the flight deck - perhaps using the aircraft as a weapon, as on 9/11, perhaps to carry out a hostage strategy - but those days are gone. The 9/11 hijackers have seen to it that the best and most effective ways for terrorists to employ airliners are no longer open to them. Pilots will never open flight deck doors again, no matter the threat to hostages in the cabin; passengers will not permit themselves to be dominated; armed sky marshals are back. If all these fail, following the bloodbath at Ground Zero fighter pilots will not hesitate to shoot.
So the damage must nowadays be done by other means than crashing, most practically by detonating a charge of high explosives on the plane while in flight. This doesn't need to be too big, especially if the jet is at cruising height so that the explosive effects will be enhanced by depressurisation. This is why airliners are a favourite target: because a fairly small amount of explosive can potentially kill a large number of people in one go, which is not the case under most circumstances.
It is an unfortunate and pretty much unavoidable fact that the necessary amount of explosives can easily be carried through any current or likely-future airport security regime, short of universal strip + cavity searches and a total ban on carry-on luggage.
Let's consider, for instance, a future security check involving backscatter X-ray-through-clothes perv scans - much more effective than millimetre wave - and X-raying of carry-on bags as is already normal. There are several ways to beat this.
Firstly, detonators and firing devices can be disguised within permitted electronic equipment such that they will pass through X-raying without trouble. An AA battery casing full of hexamethylenetriperoxidediamine (HMTD) - or some similar sensitive primary - with a flashbulb filament in it is almost impossible for an X-ray operator to pick out from among others, and can be triggered by the flash circuits of any camera.
The difficult bit is the main charge, which needs to be a decent weight and volume of acceptably stable high explosive. But it's not that difficult. Here are just a few ideas:
Several terrorists - only one of whom would need to go aboard the target flight - could carry permissible amounts of liquid explosives through security, combining them later in the air-side lavatories.
Readily available plastic explosives can be rolled out into flat, uniform sheets - they can actually be bought in this form, for instance under the name "Sheetex" - and cut to shape with ease. Such sheets can easily be inserted into luggage, where they won't look noticeably different from normal cardboard or plastic structure, partitions etc under X-ray if they aren't too thick. There are many other ploys along these lines; a sensible and well-resourced terror group could probably buy an X-ray machine and develop a bag containing a charge, detonator and firing circuit which looked entirely legit under scan.
Reasonable amounts of main charge can be carried stuffed into body cavities, undetectable by any body-scan. They would need to be removed before use in order to escape the pronounced dampening effect of the human body, and probably combined with other such payloads to get a bang sure to do the job, but again teamwork and lavatories will see to this.
There's more scope still for the use of checked baggage. US and many other airports nowadays X-ray this (http://www.kodak.com/global/en/servi.../tib5201.shtml), but there are airports which don't. You can easily find out, as a terrorist organisation, routes on which a checked bag won't be X-rayed by packing some unexposed film and making some flights. Once you have identified an airport that doesn't X-ray checked bags, simply put a large time- or barometrically-triggered bomb into a suitcase and have your suicide operative check it before boarding.
The list goes on - and on. Any reasonably competent terrorist organisation, with access to funds, capable technical experts and a small number of operatives able to move about the world freely can blow up airliners in flight. You wouldn't even necessarily need suicide volunteers to carry the bombs, if you were cunning: dupes might be convinced that they were smuggling drugs, money or other contraband, or IRA-style "proxy bombers" could be forced to do your bidding by seizing and threatening their families.
OMG - why aren't we all already dead?
Even if a security miracle occurs and the option of sneaking a bomb onto planes is somehow removed, there still exists the option of shooting planes down. Shoulder-launched homing missiles can be had in some parts of the world. From those same parts of the world, huge tides of illegal immigrants and drugs routinely move into Western nations despite all our governments' efforts to stop them. It would not be hard to move small packages like "double-digit" (SA-14, -16, maybe even -18 if available) anti-aircraft missiles along the same routes.
So, assuming a well-funded, numerous, committed, competent terrorist enemy without scruples and with a broad base of support from which to draw numerous recruits, airliner attacks can't practically be prevented. Planes should be exploding every day, really: if not planes then trains, another situation where blast effects can be magnified. If neither should suit, a few men with automatic weapons can bring a city grinding to a halt fairly easily, as the residents of Mumbai will tell you.
But the truth of the matter is that there is no such enemy out there. Funds are occasionally available, true; the 9/11 plotters were quite well-backed, and even if a terrorist group has no access to oil or gas revenues there may be the option of dealing in heroin as the Taliban do. (Note that all of these sources of money ultimately come from us.)
But people who are willing to kill innocents en masse as a primary goal are fairly rare birds. In Afghanistan you can easily hire large numbers of men for quite small sums of money to do fantastically dangerous things like taking on the British and American armed forces in open combat; some will even cover their own expenses, and a fair few will happily mount a suicide strike against Western troops. In general, just like the Western troops themselves in many instances, these fighting men are quite willing to accept a lot of collateral damage to local people as a cost of doing their main business.
But an awful lot of them would no more intentionally blow up an airliner, nightclub or train full of peaceful folk, would no more open fire into a crowd of unarmed civilians, than a Western soldier would. The likelihood of such squeamishness goes up markedly when you're recruiting outside the unruly and often aggrieved warrior tribesmen of central Asia, as you'll probably have to do for operations against the West.
Assembling a team of committed, loyal mass-murderers is actually very difficult, then, as such people are rare and hard to find. In fact, as we've pointed out in these pages before, the average size of potential terror cells operating in the UK and known to MI5 is ten members. This strongly suggests that five people or so is the upper safe limit before there's a strong chance of a cell having an informer in its midst or among its acquaintance.
It's just about possible then that one might assemble a loyal team of five or a few more and manage to remain, if not off the security services' radar altogether - it normally turns out that successful terrorists were on file somewhere - then far enough down their list to give you some time before you get put under surveillance.
"The system worked" - or more accurately, it is working. Just fine
It's even remotely possible that this small, dedicated and thus unmonitored organisation may contain a few people with the technical skills or contacts to make or obtain bombs or other weapons which actually work. This is rare: more usually you'll get an embarrassing and often inadvertently-funny failure as in the cases of Richard Reid, the comically inept (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07...iocy_outbreak/) UK "car bombers" of 2007, Mr Mutallab this Christmas, etc etc.
Sometimes it will be 9/11, and there will be cash in good supply; sometimes it will be 7/7, and competent bomb-making will substitute for money. In neither of those cases, however, was the organisation capable enough to make an effective strike without the use of suicide tactics. Thus those two teams - two of the most serious ever seen in the West under the jihadi banner - wiped themselves out in just one operation. The Madrid bombers, another rare effective group, managed to avoid killing themselves during the operation but were subsequently caught and thus eliminated as a threat just as permanently.
So, even in the rare case where an operational jihadi terror unit is small and committed enough to avoid detection and yet has resources enough to make an effective strike, it is almost always out of play after just one operation. This wasn't true with the more effective terror groups of yesteryear, like the Provisional IRA; but their recruiting/commitment issues were easier, as they had a stated policy against mass murder of civilians (and they were riddled with informers anyway).
That's why planes and trains aren't blowing up every day; why people aren't opening fire into crowds every week (not even in Israel, quite a lot of the time). Because most people, even people who in all other respects you would describe as fanatical extremists, just aren't mass-murderer material - and those that are tend not to be the brightest or most competent buttons in the box*.
That's why the threat of terrorism in general, and airborne terrorism in particular, has been reduced to negligible levels by the measures already in place, and no more are necessary.
No, really. Don't worry about terrorism next time you take a flight. There is a very small risk, as an airline passenger, that you will die violently before you land, but it has nothing to do with terrorists. It is entirely down to the chance of an accident.
Consider this, if you don't believe it. The year 2001, which saw four entire airliners destroyed with total loss of life on 9/11, was not in fact a particularly dangerous year to go flying. More airline passengers died in the year 2000; nearly as many died in 2002. Twice as many were killed flying in 1972, despite the fact that many fewer people flew back then, because airliners were far less safe.
Terrorism simply isn't a visible factor in your chances of dying while flying, or indeed while doing anything else: it is insignificant, a problem that has been almost totally eliminated for Western citizens since its not-very-serious heyday in the 1970s and 80s, and you shouldn't worry about it. It would make absolutely no noticeable difference to your or my chances of violent death/injury if terrorism was eradicated overnight.
"The system worked," said US Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano shortly after the attack, and in the largest sense she was right. Terrorism, like polio, has been effectively stamped out in the developed world - had mostly been so before the Department of Homeland Security was even created, in fact, but that's by the by.
Napolitano was subsequently forced into an abrupt volte-face by sectarian US politics and cretinous media-pumped fear, but she was basically right first time. The free world's counterterrorism system as it stands is working as well as anyone could reasonably ask for.
In the end, the correct response to efforts like those of Mr Mutallab and his incendiary undergarments is not panic and more security, but laughter - much as one might also laugh at the idiotic bum-kamikaze (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/21/bum_bombing/) whose efforts, erm, backfired so messily in Saudi Arabia last summer.
Mr Mutallab should go down in history not as the underpants bomber, but simply as the completely pants bomber. ®
*Mutallab, quite apart from having a rubbish bomb which he should have known probably wouldn't work (he didn't study proper engineering as widely reported, but "Engineering with Business Finance") committed several other blunders. He should have tried to blow the plane up at height, not at low level; doubtless the idea was to bring the plane down into an urban area, but if Mutallab had been a real engineer he'd have known his pant-bomb needed all the help it could get from decompression. Then, he shouldn't have triggered his device such that everyone could see what he was doing and that he was responsible for it. He shouldn't have told his family he was off to become an extremist and cut off contact in the first place, which is what led to him being on various security-services lists - much good though that did.
All in all, a piss-poor performance even among today's generally rubbish terrorists.
Lewis Page went through a lot of quite stressful training and preparation to battle the terrorist threat before being assigned as a military bomb-disposal operator in support of the UK police from 2001-04. He has still never got over the disappointment of finding out just how incredibly rare it is, as a bomb-disposal man in mainland Britain, to encounter a terrorist/criminal bomb of any significance at all, let alone one which has not already either gone off or failed to do so.
You get a special tie if you ever do encounter such a device.
NB: Any terrorists reading this should be aware that an essential precaution has been left out of all the bombing plans above, without which any attack is 90 per cent or more likely to fail due to a classified security tactic in use by the UK (and presumably the US).
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That Damn Guantanamo!
Obama gave a rather incredible press conference about his review of security lapses. When he evoked Guantanamo, the president all at once (“make no mistake about it”) (a) promised to close it, (b) promised not to send any more detainees home to Yemen, and (c) claimed it was a recruiting tool for al-Qaeda (i.e., apparently Bush’s Gulag had prompted the likes of Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab to try to blow up an airliner).
This is nearly unhinged... ...Let us get this straight: for a decade in the 1990s an ascendant al-Qaeda committed serial attacks against the U.S. and its interests. All that culminated in 9/11. In reaction to the mass murder, and as part of efforts to go after al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, Bush opened Guantanamo Bay — after which we have seen no successful major attacks on U.S. soil comparable to 9/11.
So consider the logic: before Guantanamo, al-Qaeda achieved its greatest success in damaging America; after it, it suffered some of its most grievous defeats, but somehow its existence is counter-productive and a recruiting tool? What, Pray God, was the recruiting tool on September 10, 2001?
http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/
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I am glad I am not the only one that thinks the difficulty bar for security is high enough, and that we should not give up any more privacy/ freedoms to raise it higher.
We accept about 50,000 dead a year as a cost for the freedom of movement we gain in the privacy of our own automobile, and other countries accept a toll way higher. I suggest that people develop a sense of proportion about this airline stuff too, and dump some of the OMG tragedy programming that has been developed due to media sensationalism over the years. You want the convenience of traveling by air, accept some risk. If not there are trains, busses and other means.
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By SUZANNE SATALINE, ALEX P. KELLOGG and CHAD BRAY
NEW YORK -- Law-enforcement officials on Friday announced the arrest of two men linked to a suspect charged in September with planning what authorities have called the most serious home-grown terror plot since Sept. 11, 2001.
That alleged plot centered on Najibullah Zazi, an airport-shuttle driver from Aurora, Colo., who was indicted for planning to make bombs from hair products and household cleaners for attacks in the U.S.
Two men who traveled to Pakistan with Najibullah Zazi were arrested early Friday morning in New York. Video courtesy of Fox News.
Separately, the alleged Christmas bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, pleaded not guilty Friday in federal court in Detroit to charges that he attempted to detonate a bomb and murder 279 passengers and 11 crew members on board a Detroit-bound Northwest flight on Christmas. Outside the courtroom, scores of Muslim Americans held up anti-terrorism posters and waved American flags, while a handful of Nigerian-born Americans carried signs with slogans such as "Nigerians Are Against Terrorism."
The two men arrested Thursday, Zarein Ahmedzay and Adis Medunjanin, both of New York City, had ties to Mr. Zazi, the shuttle-bus driver. One of the men hasn't been issued terrorism charges; charges on the other man haven't been released, and a Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on what, if anything, he may be charged with.
Mr. Ahmedzay, a 24-year-old cab driver, was charged Friday by a federal grand jury with making false statements to federal authorities. The charging document said Mr. Ahmedzay failed to tell FBI agents every location he visited in Pakistan and Afghanistan during a trip that "occurred on or about and between August 28, 2008, and January 22, 2009."
The indictment also said he lied about his discussions with a person who had attended a military-style training camp in Pakistan during that time period.
Mr. Ahmedzay pleaded not guilty and was held without bail. As of Friday evening, Mr. Medunjanin was still in custody but had not been charged. His lawyer, Robert C. Gottlieb, said he expected his client to be arraigned today.
Mr. Medunjanin, 25 years old, is a part-time building superintendent, said Mr. Gottlieb, who also said he did not know where his client was being held, nor why. "The events are despicable...to deny him access to his lawyer,'' Mr. Gottlieb said.
"If they did question him, it would be an illegal interrogation," he said, adding that his client had been unaware he was under surveillance.
According to an FBI spokesman, the arrests are part of "an ongoing investigation" by the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York City, which includes the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the New York City Police Department.
Authorities believe Mr. Medunjanin and Mr. Ahmedzay accompanied Mr. Zazi on a 2008 trip to Pakistan, where the latter allegedly attended an al Qaeda training camp according to a law-enforcement official. FBI affidavits filed in Mr. Zazi's case said that he told FBI agents in interviews that he attended courses and received instruction on weapons and explosives at an al Qaeda training facility in Pakistan. Mr. Zazi has denied his involvement.
The two men arrested Thursday had been under surveillance since Mr. Zazi's arrest as part of the ongoing investigation.
Rick Nelson, director of the Homeland Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said homegrown terror cells are a major concern. "A U.S. resident or someone with a passport to get into the U.S. is the crown jewel for these terrorist organizations," he said. "This is a very real problem, something Europe has been dealing with a longer period of time than we have."
Initially, authorities went to Mr. Medunjanin's Queens apartment with a search warrant for his passport, the official said. Mr. Medunjanin surrendered the passport without incident.
Mr. Medunjanin left his apartment and began driving erratically on the Whitestone Expressway in Queens, N.Y., crashing into another car and fleeing the scene on foot, the official said. New York City police took him into custody for leaving the scene of an accident. He was treated for minor injuries at a local hospital. Mr. Ahmedzay was picked up Thursday by law enforcement while he was driving a cab in the Greenwich Village area of Manhattan.
Mr. Medunjanin's apartment was one of several that agents had searched in September around the time of Mr. Zazi's arrest, the lawyer said. At that time, they took some computers and unspecified literature, all of which were later returned, Mr. Gottlieb said. "There was nothing involving bombs or terror plots on the computer," the lawyer said. Mr. Medunjanin agreed at that time to be interviewed by the agents for several hours over two days, the attorney said. Mr. Gottlieb would not reveal what his client was asked.
Mr. Medunjanin, whose parents are from Bosnia, is a Muslim who attends a mosque, Mr. Gottlieb said. His client knows Mr. Zazi from the neighborhood, he added. He believed that both had attended the same local high school, although Mr. Gottlieb would not comment as to whether his client knows Mr. Zazi in any other capacity. Mr. Medunjanin received a bachelor of arts in economics in 2009 from Queens College, part of The City University of New York.
—Gary Fields contributed to this article.
Write to Suzanne Sataline at suzanne.sataline@wsj.com, Alex P. Kellogg at alex.kellogg@wsj.com and Chad Bray at chad.bray@dowjones.com
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http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/01/08/cbsnews_investigates/main6073415.shtml?tag=stack
Jan. 8, 2010
Suspect: 20 Others Trained to Blow Up Jets
CBS Exclusive: Terror Suspect Abdulmutallab Boasted 20 Other Muslim Men Being Prepared in Yemen to Mimic Christmas Bomb Plot
**So, if explosives being brought onto aircraft is such a useless tactic, why does AQ return to it over and over again?**
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Actually its a good question.
With the ending of that pre 911 Tom Clancy novel which ended with a jihadi flying an airliner into the Congress during the State of the Union speech, (thus getting the Prez, the Supremes, AND Congress) in mind, I am certainly not going to enter into specifics here, but I could come up with quite a few easier and far more effective things to do-- and I am sure that most of us here could do the same.
So why is the enemy so tunnel visioned on ineffective methodology?
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Actually its a good question.
So why is the enemy so tunnel visioned on ineffective methodology?
The cost of suicide bombers is very low and any payoff is gigantic. Great risk/reward ratio.
Even the failed crotch bomber is costing the west millions if not billions of dollars in body scanners, anti-terror staff, air traffic delays and general inconvenience. Think of the propaganda value of the crotch bomber trial. We send you a low cost Nigerian and it costs you billions. Not a bad deal for the terrorists.
Denny Schlesinger
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I can think of much better ways, but in case the enemy lurks here I will not articulate them :-)
By the way, may I suggest that we name the enemy? My preferred term for the enemy is "Islamo Fascists", others like "Jihadis", etc. But what I suggest is an error is to have a war on a technique (GWOT, GWon-made-disasters, etc.) instead of naming the enemy.
This error is due to PC excrement and leads to PC errors like the responses to the Fort Hood jihadi or the Crispy Weiner Christmas bomber.
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I would argue that AQ understands that attacks on the global aviation infrastructure provide a huge return on investment. It's not just the lives lost on a successful attack, it's the economic and psychological impact that provides the big payoff.
I prefer to call them Jihadis, since they are waging jihad against the unbelievers as required in the koran. Islamo-fascist is accurate, if a bit redundant.
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I see the "Eunuchbomber's" attempt as a "proof of concept" test rather than a serious attack. I would cite it as the Philippine Airlines Flight 434 of this version of the Bojinka attack. The real attack will surge multiple attacks on multiple transatlantic/pacific flights with a higher loss of life than what was seen on 9/11.
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"Islamo-fascist is accurate, if a bit redundant."
I understand the point, but what then are we to make of the actions of the father of Crispy Weiner Christmas bomber?
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A disagreement over methods instead of goals? Damage control?
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/01/flight-253-jihadists-father-leader-of-sharia-movement-in-nigeria.html
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http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NTE3NTI1MWViMzRjYWI5ODY1OTI0YWNiNWNkOTMxZTg=
As usual, Mark Steyn is brilliant.
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GM:
That Jihad Watch piece is interesting, but it would carry more a lot more weight if it were more identifiable.
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Problem with discrediting the father, rightly or wrongly, is that it doesn't take away from the accurate information he gave to the Americans about his son attending terror training seminars in Yemen. And his was not the only warning signal we had on him before issuing valid papers to gain entry into the U.S. Heads should roll (I mean people should be fired). We already know Nigeria is a screwed up place from top to bottom. (JMHO)
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GM:
That Jihad Watch piece is interesting, but it would carry more a lot more weight if it were more identifiable.
Agreed
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Keep in mind the CIA bomber was feeding us good intel we were using to kill Talibs/AQ until he gutted our Af-Pak operation.
When you play chess, are you willing to trade pawns for a checkmate?
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Flight 253 jihadist's father "leader of Sharia movement in Nigeria"
In that case why would he report his son to the American authorities? I think you need to think convoluted:
First of all, Islamic leaders don't suicide themselves, they send lower level soldiers to die for their god. They might talk loud about being willing martyrs but they only become martyrs when someone else blows them away. Suicide bombers are disposable assets. The way they breed, it makes sense. Saddam Hussein used to give ten or fifty thousand dollars to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers but he never suicided himself for Allah. As a matter of fact, he was against the Muslim clerics! In the Iran-Iraq war the Iranian Ayatollahs used children as mine sweepers, they were made to roll on the minefields to clear them. Children were of much less value than military equipment and much more fun to replace. The scenes, as you can imagine, were gruesome. Picking up pieces of blown up children is not a pleasant task. To improve things, they wrapped the children in blankets so the bodies would not fly apart as badly. What a bright idea!
So let me get to my point. The crotch bomber's dad probably figured that his son was not expendable as a suicide bomber but he could not publicly stop him, that would give the game away. One way to save his son was to have him put on the no-fly list. He gets brownie points with the CIA and he saves his son without actually stopping his son from stupidly suiciding himself. That the crotch bomber messed up the job just shows that he was not all that bright. Had he been bright, he would have sent some other poor bastard to blow himself up.
General George Patton is reputed to have said: "A good soldier does not die for his country. He makes sure the other poor bastard dies for his." Islamic leaders know this perfectly, they send disposable assets to the front line making them believe in 72 sex slaves for eternity. For Islam, women are disposable assets as well.
Denny Schlesinger
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Flight 253 jihadist's father "leader of Sharia movement in Nigeria"
In that case why would he report his son to the American authorities? I think you need to think convoluted:
First of all, Islamic leaders don't suicide themselves, they send lower level soldiers to die for their god. They might talk loud about being willing martyrs but they only become martyrs when someone else blows them away.
**Some may cynically voice approval of becoming a shaheed while seeking power and status in this life, but don't ignore that martyrdom is a mainstream element of both sunni and shia islamic theology. I might roll my eyes as I eat a bacon double cheeseburger at an observant jew keeping kosher, but the observant jew is worried about god and not my modern, jaded western perspective. The same applies to the jihadist, who often has lived in the west. We might roll our eyes at 72 virgins and rivers of milk, wine and honey in the afterlife, but that is to orthodox muslims as real as, if not more real than the material world.**
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Suicide bombers are disposable assets. The way they breed, it makes sense. Saddam Hussein used to give ten or fifty thousand dollars to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers but he never suicided himself for Allah.
**Saddam was a baathist and to my knowledge never religiously observant. He did try playing the allah akbar card at the end, but doubtful he believed in anything but himself.**
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As a matter of fact, he was against the Muslim clerics! In the Iran-Iraq war the Iranian Ayatollahs used children as mine sweepers, they were made to roll on the minefields to clear them. Children were of much less value than military equipment and much more fun to replace. The scenes, as you can imagine, were gruesome. Picking up pieces of blown up children is not a pleasant task. To improve things, they wrapped the children in blankets so the bodies would not fly apart as badly. What a bright idea!
So let me get to my point. The crotch bomber's dad probably figured that his son was not expendable as a suicide bomber but he could not publicly stop him, that would give the game away. One way to save his son was to have him put on the no-fly list. He gets brownie points with the CIA and he saves his son without actually stopping his son from stupidly suiciding himself. That the crotch bomber messed up the job just shows that he was not all that bright. Had he been bright, he would have sent some other poor bastard to blow himself up.
**Above is a viable scenario that could explain the eunuchbomber's father's actions. It's fun to mock the eunuchbomber, but he didn't lack in intelligence, just training. He was probably seen as not useful as an upper level operative due to some emotional/psych issues, so he was used like Richard Reid as a proof of concept rather than part of the signature AQ synchronized attack.**
General George Patton is reputed to have said: "A good soldier does not die for his country. He makes sure the other poor bastard dies for his." Islamic leaders know this perfectly, they send disposable assets to the front line making them believe in 72 sex slaves for eternity. For Islam, women are disposable assets as well.
Denny Schlesinger
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http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5gWPwM0vfFzmcs_AdWye-k1j3Bf2Q
Boston airport official says US failed to learn lessons of shoe bomb
By Glen Johnson (CP) – 4 days ago
BOSTON — The top security consultant at Logan International Airport in Boston says the United States has failed to learn the security lessons raised when a man tried to blow up a U.S.-bound airliner in 2001 with explosives in his shoes.
Rafi Ron, who once headed security at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound plane on Christmas Day shows the U.S. still relies too much on technology to prevent attacks.
Ron says there needs to be more personal screening of passengers, specifically at the point where a Transportation Security Administration officer compares their boarding pass and identification. Anyone deemed suspicious should receive an extended interview and more weapons screening, he said.
"We felt so comfortable with the use of technology, which is so politically safe for everybody, that we failed to see that we are not really fulfilling the role and providing a good level of security," said Ron.
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Politically Correct Screening of Terrorists is an Oxymoron!
Denny Schlesinger
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http://www.pjtv.com/v/2930?utm_source=pjm%2Btop%20nav%20bar&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=pjtv
The enemy within.
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http://www.sfexaminer.com/opinion/columns/james_carafano/Predicting-the-next-bomb-plot-81103217.html
Predicting the next bomb plot
By: James Carafano
Examiner Columnist
January 11, 2010 Muhammad bin Nayef is Saudi Arabia’s chief counterterrorism official. A member of the royal family, he’s in charge of fighting terrorists. That is why they tried to kill him.
Last August, a known terrorist — Abdullah Hassan Taleh al-Asiri — declared he wanted to surrender personally to the prince. Saudi officials regarded the announcement as a small victory in the war on terror.
Their policy is to actively encourage extremists to return home, turn themselves in and enter a rehabilitation program. Abdullah, they thought, was coming back to the fold. He waltzed through security and presented himself to the prince.
Unfortunately for the prince, Abdullah had a bomb on (or perhaps in) his body. The weapon was supplied by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, which operates out of Yemen and Saudi Arabia (the same group responsible for the Christmas day attack on the Detroit-bound flight). A cell phone triggered the device, hurling body parts in all directions. Luckily, the prince was only slightly injured.
The near-miss illustrates how al-Qaida often operates:
1. Rely on familiar tactics
2. Introduce a new wrinkle or two to improve the tactics and keep them “fresh”
3. Be patient, wait and attack again
The attack on the prince followed an old tradition in East Asian assassinations: Turn a royal audience into a suicide attack. Recently, the Taliban used the same trick to kill seven CIA agents in Afghanistan. Three days before 9/11 they used the tactic to assassinate an anti-Taliban warlord, Ahmad Shah Masood.
These attacks offer lessons for homeland security in the U.S. Combined with the 2006 London-based plot, they reveal a lot about what one kind of threat to expect in the future.
First, news flash: The terrorists will continue to target passenger aviation. Gravity works. Any successful attack on an airplane will likely have catastrophic results.
Moreover, when you attack a plane, you attack a network. Bring down one plane, and the whole worldwide system of passenger aviation goes into shock.
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http://www.pjtv.com/v/2934
and here's this strange developing detail in the Salahi affair, which no doubt will be ignored by the MSM:
DOES ANY HERE LOOK ILLEGAL?
DOES ANYONE HERE LOOK FAMILIAR??
I knew there was a “Paul Harvey” version to this story!!! (you know the line.....and NOW the rest of the story)
See the white guy in the white suit? Now see the blond with the white dress! See the guy in the middle huuuummmm.
This picture was taken 6/9/05. It seems Obama has known these two phoneys for awhile, at least when he was a Senator.
They’re getting all this press now as “party crashers” and the secret service is taking heat. Funny how this has not come out in the press isn’t it!
No wonder the couple who crashed Obama’s State dinner keep insisting they were invited guests. They know Barry from way back when he was still an Illinois Senator. Is Obama trying to throw the Secret Service under the bus?
Tareq and Michaele Salahi snapped the pic above with Obama at a “Rock The Vote” event on June 9, 2005
Michaele Salahi is getting quite a ribbing in the press for lying about being a Redskins cheerleader, but Tareq is the more interesting of the two to me.
He has ties to Palestinian terrorists.
Tareq is a board member of the ATFP- American Task Force on Palestine, which has quickly scrubbed it’s site of the fact. Thank the Lord for Google cache.
And just who are the ATFP?
The ATFP has ties to Chicago, ties to Muslim radicals, ties to Hamas, and ties to Saudi Wahhabists. It is arguably the American wing of Hamas. The group’s co-founder is Rashid Khalidi, the guy purported to have helped finance Obama’s Harvard education and who was also instrumental in getting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak at Columbia University.
During the Beruit war, Khalidi was a PLO spokesperson. After the war, he came back to teach at the University of Chicago. He is a virulent critic of Israel, and a strong supporter of Fatah terrorist Yassar Arafat. Obama has referred to Khalidi as someone who challenges his “own biases.”
Why do the same dubious tentacles seem to continually surround Obama? The fact that the ATFP is scrubbing information on Salahi from their website suggests possible damage control coordination between the ATFP and the White House. If the ATFP was acting independently, there would be no reason to scrub Salahi’s name from their site. It looks like Salahi was an invited guest to the dinner, that he was “outed” and the administration had to come up with a rational excuse for his presence.
The Secret Service has already apologized for the incident, but they may clear their names if the Salahis start singing. If someone with ties to the American wing of Hamas can get face to face with the President without the Secret Service realizing it that is a major security lapse. However, if Obama’s people knowingly allowed Salahi in and are now throwing the Secret Service under the bus to cover themselves, that would be a major scandal.
Some in Congress are calling for an investigation Something is VERY fishy in the White House.
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snopes reveals: http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/photos/crashers.asp
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Oh! This is very interesting! Comment Rachel?
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TSA Called Out on Full-Body Scanner Storage Capabilities, Health Risks Revealed
Jason Mick (Blog) - January 12, 2010 10:09 AM
Recent research has shown that T-Wave scanners like the full-body scanners at the airport can cause DNA damage, increasing the risk of cancer. (Source: MIT Technology Review)
Past research showed that scanners, pre-processing, have fully nude images, despite claims to the contrary. Now newly obtained documents reveal that the scanners can send and store pictures, despite TSA claims that they can't. (Source: Bloomberg)
More evidence indicates that body scanners aren't such a great idea
Body scanners seemed a promising way to protect against terrorists smuggling forbidden items onto airplanes. However, over the last year the argument for the devices weakened substantially as it was revealed that the scanners would do little to help and could pose serious privacy issues.
The first issue is the price. According to reports, current T-Wave (Terahertz-Wave) full-body scanners cost around $166K USD each. The Transportation Safety Administration has thus far been averaging about 2 scanners per airport. That could put the cost of President Obama's proposed full scale deployment at around $100M USD to cover all of the approximately 600 airports certified for large commercial aircraft (and as much as $3.2B USD to put a single scanner at all airports, including smaller private ones, in the U.S.).
Would that investment be worth it? Recent studies by the British government revealed that the current generation of full-body scanners are unable to detect lightweight materials like plastics, chemicals, or liquids. Bags of substances like the chemicals smuggled in the failed Christmas Day attack would likely slip through, as the scanners are unable to detect them.
The TSA claims that the health risk from the high-frequency scans is very low. However, in population groups with certain mutations that make them sensitive to radiation (typically due to lacking DNA repair mechanisms), this risk could become very serious, though. Furthermore, recent studies have revealed that this type of scan can cause mild DNA damage -- raising cancer concerns.
And then there's the mountain of privacy issues. Past reports have shown that the scanners do have fully naked images, generated by the hardware and momentarily stored as raw images, which then undergo processing to obscure breasts and genitalia. In theory, these images could be extracted, according to security experts.
Well, at least the scanners can't send or store images, said advocates. However, that turns out to be a false claim as well. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has received 2008 documents from the TSA which not only clearly state that the scanners could have such abilities, but they say that the scanners must have them.
The TSA documents state that all scanners need to be capable of storing and sending user images when in "test mode". Those documents, obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request, catch the TSA in an apparent lie. It's website claims, "The machines have zero storage capability."
A video on the site adds, "the system has no way to save, transmit or print the image."
A TSA official speaking on condition of anonymity claims that "strong privacy protections [are] in place", adding, "There is no way for someone in the airport environment to put the machine into the test mode."
EPIC Executive Director Marc Rotenberg points out that those claims could suggest any number of hardware or software protections. About the only way passengers would truly be protected would be if the TSA was removing non-replaceable hardware (such as PCBs) during device deployment. Mr. Rotenberg suggests that TSA insiders or hackers could overcome more mild obstacles, such as removed storage or software protections.
Mr. Rotenberg concludes, "I don't think the TSA has been forthcoming with the American public about the true capability of these devices. They've done a bunch of very slick promotions where they show people -- including journalists -- going through the devices. And then they reassure people, based on the images that have been produced, that there's not any privacy concerns. But if you look at the actual technical specifications and you read the vendor contracts, you come to understand that these machines are capable of doing far more than the TSA has let on."
The TSA official, speaking anonymously, claims the devices cannot be connected to a network. However, given the fact that past claims were disproven, one can only wonder if that's really the whole truth.
Amid this mountain of concerns, many critics are calling for the President and the TSA to reevaluate the costly program that may endanger both the health and privacy of U.S. travelers.
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=17376
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GM,
The below article was long on conjecture and short on facts.
Did you scroll down on the snopes article to the picture on the same night of the Salhis and McCain. Are they also best friends with him too?
I know a lot of people who have pictures of themselves and Obama. I personally have much better picture of that than myself and Giuliani.
Obama knows how to work a room. When he spoke at a pro Israel Event I attended he shook everyones hand included the wait staff and was the only politician present to do so. Would you mind sticking to legitimate criticism of Obama so I don't have keep defending him. It is annoying.
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http://www.myfoxdetroit.com/dpp/news/unruly-passengers-disrupt-northwest-flight-243-
Unruly Passengers Disrupt Northwest Flight 243
Updated: Tuesday, 12 Jan 2010, 5:26 PM EST
Published : Tuesday, 12 Jan 2010, 2:15 PM EST
Dennis Kraniak
MyFoxDetroit.com - Sources tell Fox 2 that a flight from Amsterdam into Detroit Metropolitan Airport was held on the tarmac after landing because of unruly behavior by some of the passengers.
((Watch the video to get passenger reaction from Fox 2's Simon Shaykhet.))
The source says four men from Saudi Arabai were saying something in Arabic that alarmed four on-board Federal Air Marshals. The Marshals speak Arabic. A decision was made to stop the plane on the tarmac away from the passenger terminal and remove the men from the plane.
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GM,
The below article was long on conjecture and short on facts.
Did you scroll down on the snopes article to the picture on the same night of the Salhis and McCain. Are they also best friends with him too?
I know a lot of people who have pictures of themselves and Obama. I personally have much better picture of that than myself and Giuliani.
Obama knows how to work a room. When he spoke at a pro Israel Event I attended he shook everyones hand included the wait staff and was the only politician present to do so. Would you mind sticking to legitimate criticism of Obama so I don't have keep defending him. It is annoying.
I thought it was interesting and asked for your comment. That's all.
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http://globalnation.inquirer.net/news/breakingnews/view/20100112-246948/Saudi-Arabian-posing-as-pilot-held-at-Manila-airport
Saudi Arabian posing as pilot held at Manila airport
Agence France-Presse
First Posted 19:24:00 01/12/2010
Filed Under: Police, Air Transport
MANILA, Philippines—A 19-year-old Saudi Arabian man dressed as a pilot was arrested Tuesday after he illegally entered a restricted area in the main airport in the Philippines, an airport official said.
"He was able to elude our security by misrepresenting himself as a pilot of Saudia," said airport general manager Alfonso Cusi, referring to the Saudi Arabian flag carrier.
The incident at Manila airport comes after officials in the Philippines and around the world said they would boost security after the botched attempt to blow up a US-bound airliner on Christmas Day.
The detained Saudi, identified by the local authorities as Hani Abdulelah Bukhari, told airport police he was there to meet his father, a retired Saudia pilot who later arrived on a flight from Saudi Arabia.
He was wearing a pilot's uniform from Saudia Airlines when airport security personnel noticed him lining up at the immigration section of the passenger terminal, Cusi told ABS-CBN television.
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GM,
I'm sorry if my reply was harsh. The article wasn't my thing.
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No worries.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/us/18intel.html
Review of Jet Bomb Plot Shows More Missed Clues
By ERIC LIPTON, ERIC SCHMITT and MARK MAZZETTI
Published: January 17, 2010
This article is by Eric Lipton, Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti.
The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs; the homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano; and the White House homeland security adviser, John O. Brennan, in a recent briefing on the security review of the Christmas Day bombing attempt.
WASHINGTON — Worried about possible terrorist attacks over the Christmas holiday, President Obama met on Dec. 22 with top officials of the C.I.A., F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security, who ticked off a list of possible plots against the United States and how their agencies were working to disrupt them.
In a separate White House meeting that day, Mr. Obama’s homeland security adviser, John O. Brennan, led talks on Yemen, where a stream of disturbing intelligence had suggested that Qaeda operatives were preparing for some action, perhaps a strike on an American target, on Christmas Day.
Yet in those sessions, government officials never considered or connected links that, with the benefit of hindsight, now seem so evident and indicated that the gathering threat in Yemen would reach into the United States.
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I see the "Eunuchbomber's" attempt as a "proof of concept" test rather than a serious attack. I would cite it as the Philippine Airlines Flight 434 of this version of the Bojinka attack. The real attack will surge multiple attacks on multiple transatlantic/pacific flights with a higher loss of life than what was seen on 9/11.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/bombing-attempt-was-a-test-run-ottawa-fears/article1429027/
Bombing attempt was a test run, Ottawa fears
By Colin Freeze
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
Public Safety Minister says Canadian airports to remain on heightened alert
The federal government fears that al-Qaeda's "underwear bomber" attack on a trans-Atlantic flight was simply a test run.
Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan suggested that Canada will be on a heightened state of aviation alert for the foreseeable future.
"That may very well have been, if you will, a kind of pilot project by the organization to see how viable [the bombing technology] was," he told reporters yesterday. "And we have reason to believe that we have to be concerned, all of the countries of the West."
After cabinet discussions earlier this week, Conservative ministers yesterday attempted to allay public fears about boarding aircraft. But without elaborating, they also said they have obtained "two or three" new intelligence tips concerning serious threats since the failed Christmas Day attack.
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Suspect in Recruit Shooting Claims Al Qaeda Ties
Friday , January 22, 2010
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. —
The man accused of killing one soldier and wounding another outside an Arkansas military recruiting center has asked a judge to change his plea to guilty, claiming ties to Al Qaeda.
Abdulhakim Muhammad's attorney, Claiborne Ferguson, said Thursday night that his client sent a letter earlier this month to the judge in his case asking to change his plea to capital murder and attempted capital murder charges.
Click here for photos.
Ferguson said he hadn't discussed the request with his client before the letter was sent. Under Arkansas law prosecutors would have to agree and waive the death penalty before the judge could consider it, Ferguson said.
Pvt. William Long of Conway was killed in the June 1 attack, and Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula was wounded.
Muhammad has called the shootings justified retaliation for U.S. military action in the Middle East. He told The Associated Press in a telephone interview last year that he doesn't believe he's guilty.
The New York Times, which first reported the letter on its Web site Thursday, said Muhammad described himself in the letter as a soldier in Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and called the shooting "a Jihadi Attack." The group has claimed responsibility for the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Detroit-bound American airliner.
"I wasn't insane or post traumatic, nor was I forced to do this act," Muhammad claimed in the handwritten letter, the newspaper reported.
Ferguson said he didn't know how seriously to take Muhammad's claims of terror ties and expressed frustration with his client sending the letter without consulting him beforehand.
"He's said lots of things. None of them seem to be real consistent with each other," Ferguson said. "I'm a little irritated with it."
Pulaski County Prosecutor Larry Jegley did not immediately return a message left on his cell phone Thursday night, but prosecutors have said they plan to seek the death penalty in the case.
Muhammad was arrested about eight miles from the recruiting center, on Interstate 630, shortly after the shootings. Police said they recovered Molotov cocktails, three guns and ammunition from his pickup truck. An internal law enforcement memo said Muhammad may have considered other targets, including military sites and Jewish organizations in the Southeast.
A law enforcement official told the AP in June that Muhammad had been under investigation by an FBI-led terrorism task force since he returned to the United States from Yemen in 2008. Muhammad, who was born Carlos Bledsoe, had moved to Little Rock to work in his father's Memphis-based tour bus company as it branched out.
Muhammad, who has called the AP twice since his arrest, has claimed responsibility for the shooting and said it was justified because of what he called American-directed hostilities toward the Muslim world.
Last week, Pulaski County Circuit Judge Herbert Wright Jr. ordered the state public defenders commission to pay some of the legal bills for Muhammad's trial, which is scheduled to begin in June. Ferguson was hired by Muhammad's family to represent him.
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http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/female-suicide-bombers-heading-yemen/story?id=9636341
Alert: Female Suicide Bombers May Be Heading Here From Yemen
U.S. Agents Told Women Believed Connected to Al Qaeda May Have Western Appearance and Passports
By RICHARD ESPOSITO, RHONDA SCHWARTZ and BRIAN ROSS
Jan. 22, 2010
American law enforcement officials have been told to be on the lookout for female suicide bombers who may attempt to enter the United States, law enforcement authorities tell ABC News.
Diane Sawyer talks to Brian Ross about Yemen and the war on terror.One official said at least two of them are believed to be connected to al Qaeda in Yemen, and may have a non-Arab appearance and be traveling on Western passports.
The threat was described as "current" but not imminent, said the official.
"They have trained women," said former White House counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, an ABC News consultant.
Separately, Britain raised its terrorism threat level to "severe," its second-highest level, days before London hosts major international meetings on how to deal with militancy in Afghanistan and Yemen. Britain's threat level had been labeled "severe" for several years before being lowered last summer to "substantial."
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Woof,
This is probably a serious threat: www.search.com/reference/Female_suicide_bomber
I think the latest attempts with these low level wannabe terrorist's, have been launched more as a harassing operation, meant to generally disrupt air travel and being a pain in the butt to deal with along with costing us millions in security measures. These bombers don't need to actually pull off downing a jet to be effective but if they manage to bring one down then that's a major victory for the terrorist's and all it cost them was the price of a ticket.
My worry is that while they are expending little time or effort on these type of attacks that they are using all their resources to stage another well planned and financed attack that will eclipse 9/11 in its size and impact and I think they are very close to pulling the trigger on it.
P.C.
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100124/ts_alt_afp/attacksusnigeriabinladenthreat_20100124182004
Bin Laden wording 'indicator' of upcoming attack: monitor
Sun Jan 24, 1:19 pm ET
WASHINGTON (AFP) – Osama bin Laden's word choice in the latest audio message attributed to him is seen as a "possible indicator" of an upcoming attack by his Al-Qaeda network, a US monitoring group warned Sunday.
IntelCenter, a US group that monitors Islamist websites, also said that manner of the release and the content of the message showed it was "credible" that it was a new release from the Saudi extremist.
"The Osama bin Laden audio message released to Al-Jazeera on 24 January 2010 contains specific language used by bin Laden in his statements in advance of attacks," IntelCenter said in a statement.
The group said it considered the language "a possible indicator of an upcoming attack" in the next 12 months.
"This phrase, 'Peace be upon those who follow guidance,' appears at the beginning and end of messages released in advance of attacks that are designed to provide warning to Al-Qaeda's enemies that they need to change their ways or they will be attacked," the group said.
In a statement carried by Al-Jazeera television, bin Laden praised the Nigerian man who allegedly tried to blow up a US airliner approaching Detroit on Christmas Day.
He warned the United States that, "God willing, our attacks against you will continue as long as you maintain your support to Israel."
IntelCenter said the audio statement "appears to be exactly what it purports to be, an audio message from bin Laden."
"The manner of release, content of message and other factors indicate it is a credible and new release from bin Laden," it said.
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The attempted Christmas Day destruction over Detroit of Northwest Flight 253 by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is fading from public memory as a fortunate near-miss. This incident should not fade from view. As more information emerges, the picture it paints about the antiterror mindset of the current U.S. government is—there is no other word—scary.
Last week in these columns, we discussed Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair's Congressional testimony on the Abdulmutallab case. This was Mr. Blair's famous "duh" remark about the government's failure to invoke the new High-Value Detainee Interrogration Group (HIG) to question Abdulmutallab. A remarkable Associated Press story this past weekend makes clear that "duh" was mainly another word for disgust inside the intelligence bureaucracy over what happened that day in Detroit.
Here, compressed, is AP's account of how Abdulmutallab was handled after the plane landed. Read it and weep.
He was taken to the hospital by U.S. Customs agents and local cops, to whom he babbled that he was trying to blow up the plane.
View Full Image
Associated Press
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab
.Agents from the FBI's Detroit bureau were called in about 2:15. He "spoke openly" and admitted he was from al Qaeda in Yemen. Under a Miranda exception meant to let officials find out fast if another bomb is imminent, the agents didn't issue the standard self-incrimination warning. He talked for 50 minutes. Then, to let the suspect's medications wear off, the interrogators stopped.
Five hours later, the FBI in Washington said it wanted a new interrogation team to do a second interview. This new group of FBI interrogators is called a "clean team."
The AP explains: "By bringing in a so-called 'clean team' of investigators to talk to the suspect, federal officials aimed to ensure that Abdulmutallab's statements would still be admissible if the failure to give him his Miranda warning led a judge to rule out the use of his first admissions . . . . In the end, though, the 'clean team' of interrogators did not prod more revelations from the suspect."
After he was rested and revived, Abdulmutallab was given his Miranda warning. He never said another thing.
On "Fox News Sunday," Chris Wallace asked White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs whether the President was told that Abdulmutallab was Mirandized after only 50 minutes of interrogation. Mr. Gibbs said the decision was made "by the Justice Department and the FBI" and insisted they got "valuable intelligence."
This is awful. This talky terrorist should have been questioned for 50 hours, not 50 minutes. More pointedly, Abdulmutallab should not have been questioned by local G-men concerned principally with getting a conviction in court. He should have been interrogated by agents who know enough about the current state of al Qaeda to know what to ask, what names or locations to listen for, and what answers to follow up. The urgent matter is deterring future plots, not getting Abdulmutallab behind bars.
It gets worse. Appearing before Congress last week, FBI Director Robert Mueller admitted that the HIG group essentially doesn't even exist yet. They haven't pulled it together.
Recall that in August Mr. Obama announced the intention to create a multi-agency HIG, transferring lead responsibility for interrogations away from the CIA and into the FBI, with techniques limited to the Army Field Manual.
And worse. As a Wall Street Journal account of last week's Senate Judiciary hearings noted, the HIG team is intended only for interrogations overseas; the Administration hasn't decided whether to use it domestically. In any event, that's moot until there is an HIG team.
We hope the appropriate committees of Congress do not let this drop, for many obvious reasons. We'll make one point:
Ultimately, the national security bureaucracies take their signals from the top. In August Mr. Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder made it clear that their war on terror would be fought inside the framework of Miranda and the civilian justice system. Before Justice ordered him Mirandized, would-be suicide bomber Abdulmutallab thus gave us 50 minutes in the mortal war against al Qaeda.
It has to get better than this. But it won't unless the President throws his weight publicly behind the officials who want to make it better than this.
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On Jan. 12, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad (aka Carlos Bledsoe), the man who allegedly shot and killed a U.S. soldier and wounded another outside a Little Rock, Ark., recruiting center in June 2009, wrote a letter to the judge in his case admitting his guilt and requesting to change his plea from innocent to guilty. In the letter, Muhammad also said he has ties to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and that he is part of “Abu Basir’s Army.” (Abu Basir is the honorific name, or kunya, for Nasir al-Wahayshi, the current leader of AQAP.)
If his claims are true — which is entirely possible — this is yet another example of AQAP striking targets far from Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula.
A Tennessee native and recent convert to Islam, Muhammad left Tennessee State University in September 2007 to travel to Yemen to learn Arabic and teach English. He was arrested in the southern Yemen city of Aden in November 2008 for overstaying his visa and was subsequently deported back to the United States months prior to the Arkansas attack.
Judging from Muhammad’s statement — which also claims, “this was [a] jihadi[st] attack on infidel forces that didn’t go as plan[ned]” — he appears to be a militant who undertook the type of “simple attack” that al-Wahayshi called for in late October 2009 — shortly before the Fort Hood shooting. In the analysis STRATFOR wrote on al-Wahayshi’s call for simple attacks (which was published the day before the Fort Hood shooting) we discussed the Little Rock shooting as an example of how easy as it is to conduct simple attacks using firearms.
It is also important to remember that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the perpetrator of the failed Christmas Day 2009 airline bombing, also was linked to AQAP. That attack demonstrated AQAP’s interest in targeting the United States, further supporting the premise that Muhammad could be linked to the group.
Considering the timing of the attacks and documented links between Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Hasan and Anwar al-Awlaki, a cleric who has been linked to AQAP, it will be even more important for the government to attempt to determine if both Hasan and Abdulmutallab were also a part of “Abu Basir’s army.”
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Visa Security: Getting Back to the Basics
February 18, 2010 | 1602 GMT
By Fred Burton and Scott Stewart
Usually in the STRATFOR Global Security and Intelligence Report, we focus on the tactical details of terrorism and security issues in an effort to explain those issues and place them in perspective for our readers. Occasionally, though, we turn our focus away from the tactical realm in order to examine the bureaucratic processes that shape the way things run in the counterterrorism, counterintelligence and security arena. This look into the struggle by the U.S. government to ensure visa security is one of those analyses.
As STRATFOR has noted for many years now, document-fraud investigations are a very useful weapon in the counterterrorism arsenal. Foreigners who wish to travel to the United States to conduct a terrorist attack must either have a valid passport from their country of citizenship and a valid U.S. visa, or just a valid passport from their home country if they are a citizen of a country that does not require a visa for short-term trips (called visa-waiver countries).
In some early jihadist attacks against the United States, such as the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the operatives dispatched to conduct the attacks made very clumsy attempts at document fraud. In that case, the two operational commanders dispatched from Afghanistan to conduct the attack arrived at New York’s Kennedy Airport after having used photo-substituted passports (passports where the photographs are literally switched) of militants from visa-waiver countries who died while fighting in Afghanistan. Ahmed Ajaj (a Palestinian) used a Swedish passport in the name of Khurram Khan, and Abdul Basit (a Pakistani also known as Ramzi Yousef) used a British passport in the name of Mohamed Azan. Ajaj attempted to enter through U.S. Immigration at Kennedy Airport using the obviously photo-substituted passport and was arrested on the spot. Basit used the altered British passport to board the aircraft in Karachi, Pakistan, but upon arrival in New York he used a fraudulently obtained but genuine Iraqi passport in the name of Ramzi Yousef to claim political asylum and was released pending his asylum hearing.
But the jihadist planners learned from amateurish cases like Ajaj’s and that of Ghazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer, a Palestinian who attempted to conduct a suicide attack against the New York subway system. U.S. immigration officials arrested him on three occasions in the Pacific Northwest as he attempted to cross into the United States illegally from Canada. By the Millennium Bomb Plot in late 1999, Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian who initially entered Canada using a photo-substituted French passport, had obtained a genuine Canadian passport using a fraudulent baptismal certificate. He then used that genuine passport to attempt to enter the United States in order to bomb Los Angeles International Airport. Ressam was caught not because of his documentation but because of his demeanor — and an alert customs inspector prevented him from entering the country.
So by the time the 9/11 attacks occurred, we were seeing groups like al Qaeda preferring to use genuine travel documents rather than altered or counterfeit documents. Indeed, some operatives, such as Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a Yemeni, were unable to obtain U.S. visas and were therefore not permitted to participate in the 9/11 plot. Instead, bin al-Shibh took on a support role, serving as the communications cutout between al Qaeda’s operational planner, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and al Qaeda’s tactical commander for the operation, Mohamed Atta. It is important to note, however, that the 19 9/11 operatives had obtained a large assortment of driver’s licenses and state identification cards, many of them fraudulent. Such documents are far easier to obtain than passports.
After the Sept. 11 attacks and the 9/11 Commission report, which shed a great deal of light on the terrorist use of document fraud, the U.S. government increased the attention devoted to immigration fraud and the use of fraudulent travel documents by terrorist suspects. This emphasis on detecting document fraud, along with the widespread adoption of more difficult to counterfeit passports and visas (no document is impossible to counterfeit), has influenced jihadists, who have continued their shift away from the use of fraudulent documents (especially poor quality documents). Indeed, in many post-9/11 attacks directed against the United States we have seen jihadist groups use U.S. citizens (Jose Padilla and Najibullah Zazi), citizens of visa-waiver countries (Richard Reid and Abdulla Ahmed Ali), and other operatives who possess or can obtain valid U.S. visas such as Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. These operatives are, for the most part, using authentic documents issued in their true identities.
Concerns expressed by the 9/11 Commission over the vulnerability created by the visa-waiver program also prompted the U.S. government to establish the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA), which is a mandatory program that prescreens visa-waiver travelers, including those transiting through the United States. The ESTA, which became functional in January 2009, requires travelers from visa-waiver countries to apply for travel authorization at least 72 hours prior to travel. This time period permits the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to conduct background checks on pending travelers.
Growing Complexity
Counterfeit visas are not as large a problem as they were 20 years ago. Advances in technology have made it very difficult for all but the most high-end document vendors to counterfeit them, and it is often cheaper and easier to obtain an authentic visa by malfeasance — bribing a consular officer — than it is to acquire a machine-readable counterfeit visa that will work. Obtaining a genuine U.S. passport or one from a visa-waiver country by using fraudulent breeder documents (driver’s licenses and birth certificates, as Ahmed Ressam did) is also cheaper and easier. But in the case of non-visa waiver countries, this shift to the use of genuine identities and identity documents now highlights the need to secure the visa issuance process from fraud and malfeasance.
This shift to genuine-identity documents also means that most visa fraud cases involving potential terrorist operatives are going to be very complex. Rather than relying on obvious flags like false identities, the visa team consisting of clerks, consular officers, visa-fraud coordinators and Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) special agents needs to examine carefully not just the applicant’s identity but also his or her story in an attempt to determine if it is legitimate, and if there are any subtle indicators that the applicant has ties to radical groups (like people who lose their passports to disguise travel to places like Pakistan and Yemen). As in many other security programs, however, demeanor is also critically important, and a good investigator can often spot signs of deception during a visa interview (if one is conducted).
If the applicant’s documents and story check out, and there are no indicators of radical connections, it is very difficult to determine that an applicant is up to no good unless the U.S. government possesses some sort of intelligence indicating that the person may be involved in such activity. In terms of intelligence, there are a number of different databases, such as the Consular Lookout and Support System (CLASS), the main State Department database and the terrorism-specific Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) system. The databases are checked in order to determine if there is any derogatory information that would preclude a suspect from receiving a visa. These databases allow a number of U.S. government agencies to provide input — CLASS is tied into the Interagency Border Inspection System (IBIS) — and they allow these other agencies to have a stake in the visa issuance process. (It must be noted that, like any database, foreign language issues — such as the many ways to transliterate the name Mohammed into English — can often complicate the accuracy of visa lookout database entries and checks.)
Today the lookout databases are a far cry from what they were even 15 years ago, when many of the lists were contained on microfiche and checking them was laborious. During the microfiche era, mistakes were easily made, and some officers skipped the step of running the time-consuming name checks on people who did not appear to be potential terrorists. This is what happened in the case of a poor old blind imam who showed up at the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum in 1990 — and who turned out to be terrorist leader Sheikh Omar Ali Ahmed Abdul-Rahman. As an aside, although Rahman, known as the Blind Sheikh, did receive a U.S. visa, DSS special agents who investigated his case were able to document that he made material false statements on his visa application (such as claiming he had never been arrested) and were therefore able to build a visa fraud case against the Sheikh. The case never proceeded to trial, since the Sheikh was convicted on seditious conspiracy charges and sentenced to life in prison.
The U.S. government’s visa fraud investigation specialists are the special agents assigned to the U.S. Department of State’s DSS. In much the same way that U.S. Secret Service special agents work to ensure the integrity of the U.S. currency system through investigations of counterfeiting, DSS agents work to ensure the inviolability of U.S. passports and visas by investigating passport and visa fraud. The DSS has long assigned special agents to high fraud-threat countries like Nigeria to investigate passport and visa fraud in conjunction with the post’s consular affairs officers. In the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, Congress ordered the State Department to establish a visa and passport security program. In response to this legislation, a memorandum of understanding was signed between the Bureau of Consular Affairs and the DSS to establish the Overseas Criminal Investigations Branch (OCI). The purpose of the OCI was to conduct investigations related to illegal passport and visa issuances or use and other investigations at U.S. embassies overseas. A special agent assigned to these duties at an overseas post is referred to as an investigative Assistant Regional Security Officer (or ARSO-I).
While the OCI and the ARSO-I program seemed promising at first, circumstance and bureaucratic hurdles have prevented the program from running to the best of its ability and meeting the expectations of the U.S. Congress.
Bureaucratic Shenanigans
As we’ve previously noted, there is a powerful element within the State Department that is averse to security and does its best to thwart security programs. DSS special agents refer to these people as Black Dragons. Even when Congress provides clear guidance to the State Department regarding issues of security (e.g., the Omnibus Diplomatic Security and Antiterrorism Act of 1986), the Black Dragons do their best to strangle the programs, and this constant struggle produces discernable boom-and-bust cycles, as Congress provides money for new security programs and the Black Dragons, who consider security counterproductive for diplomacy and armed State Department special agents undiplomatic, use their bureaucratic power to cut off those programs.
Compounding this perennial battle over security funding has been the incredible increase in protective responsibilities that the DSS has had to shoulder since 9/11. The bureau has had to provide a large number of agents to protect U.S. diplomats in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan and even staffed and supervised the protective detail for Afghan President Hamid Karzai for a few years. Two DSS special agents were also killed while protecting the huge number of U.S diplomats assigned to reconstruction efforts in Iraq. One agent was killed in a rocket attack on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and the other by a suicide car-bomb attack in Mosul.
The demands of protection and bureaucratic strangulation by the Black Dragons, who have not embraced the concept of the ARSO-I program, has resulted in the OCI program being deployed very slowly. This means that of the 200 positions envisioned and internally programmed by Bureau of Consular Affairs and DSS in 2004, only 50 ARSO-I agents have been assigned to posts abroad as of this writing, and a total of 123 ARSO-I agents are supposed to be deployed by the end of 2011. The other 77 ARSO-I positions were taken away from the OCI program by the department and used to provide more secretarial positions.
In the wake of State Department heel-dragging, other agencies are now seeking to fill the void.
The Vultures Are Circling
In a Feb. 9, 2010, editorial on GovernmentExecutive.com, former DHS Under Secretary for Border and Transportation Security Asa Hutchinson made a pitch for the DHS to become more involved in the visa-security process overseas, and he is pushing for funding more DHS positions at U.S. embassies abroad. To support his case that more DHS officers are needed for visa security, Hutchinson used the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as an example of why DHS needed a larger presence overseas.
Unfortunately, the Abdulmutallab case had nothing to do with visa fraud, and the presence of a DHS officer at post would certainly not have prevented him from receiving his initial visa. Abdulmutallab was first issued a U.S. visa in 2004, before he was radicalized during his university studies in the United Kingdom from 2005 to 2008, and he qualified for that visa according to the guidelines established by the U.S. government without fraud or deception. Of course, the fact that he came from a prominent Nigerian family certainly helped.
The problem in the Abdulmutallab case was not in the issuance of his visa in 2004. His identity and story checked out. There was no negative information about him in the databases checked for visa applicants. He also traveled to the United States in 2004 and left the country without overstaying his visa, and was not yet listed in any of the lookout databases, so his visa renewal in June 2008 in London was also not surprising.
The real problem in the Abdulmutallab case began when the CIA handled the interview of Abdulmutallab’s father when he walked into the embassy in November 2009 to report that his son had become radicalized and that he feared his son was preparing for a suicide mission. The CIA did not share the information gleaned from that interview in a terrorism report cable (TERREP), or with the regional security officer at post or the ARSO-I. (The fact that the CIA, FBI and other agencies have assumed control over the walk-in program in recent years is also a serious problem, but that is a matter to be addressed separately.) Due to that lack of information-sharing, Abdulmutallab’s visa was not canceled as it could have and should have been. His name was also not added to the U.S. government’s no-fly list.
Again, had there been a DHS officer assigned to the embassy, he would not have been able to do any more than the ARSO-I already assigned to post, since he also would not have received the information from the CIA that would have indicated that Abdulmutallab’s visa needed to be revoked.
Once again, information was not shared in a counterterrorism case — a recurring theme in recent years. And once again the lack of information would have proved deadly had Abdulmutallab’s device not malfunctioned. Unfortunately, information-sharing is never facilitated by the addition of layers of bureaucracy. This is the reason why the addition of the huge new bureaucracy called the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has not solved the issue of information-sharing among intelligence agencies.
Hutchinson is correct when he notes that the DHS must go back to basics, but DHS has numerous other domestic programs that it must master the basics of — things like securing the border, overseeing port and cargo security, interior immigration and customs enforcement and ensuring airline security — before it should even consider expanding its presence overseas.
Adding another layer of DHS involvement in overseeing visa issuance and investigating visa fraud at diplomatic posts abroad is simply not going to assist in the flow of information in visa cases, whether criminal or terrorist in nature. Having another U.S. law enforcement agency interfacing with the host country police and security agencies regarding visa matters will also serve to cause confusion and hamper efficient information flow. The problem illustrated by the Abdulmutallab case is not that the U.S. government lacks enough agencies operating in overseas posts; the problem is that the myriad agencies already there simply need to return to doing basic things like talking to each other. Getting the ARSO-I program funded and back on track is a basic step necessary to help in securing the visa process, but even that will not be totally effective unless the agencies at post do a better job of basic tasks like coordination and communication.
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A Mistake, Not a Model
In the wake of the Zazi episode, Holder caricatures the opposition to civilian trials for enemy combatants.
After last Friday night’s bad-news dump about the end of DOJ’s witch hunt against Bush-administration lawyers, you might have thought it impossible for our attorney general to outdo himself. But the redoubtable Eric Holder was right back at it on Monday. He convened a press conference to depict a botched investigation as a model for future counterterrorism and to proclaim this purported triumph as a vindication of the civilian justice system against accusations that had never been made.
The occasion for this bizarre performance was the guilty plea of Najibullah Zazi, entered in Brooklyn federal court. You may recall Zazi as the al-Qaeda-trained would-be bomber who targeted New York City last year on the anniversary of 9/11. (See here and here.) The case should have been a great coup for law enforcement. Alas, investigators interviewed an untrustworthy source, who promptly alerted Zazi that he was under surveillance. Zazi folded up the plot and skipped town. The other players — and there were several — vanished before agents could identify them. Zazi was finally arrested after refusing to give up his co-jihadists despite several days of questioning. That is, the government was left with a case against Zazi alone, having failed to identify, much less round up, the other terrorists.
Zazi has now, six months later, pleaded guilty. This is a good thing, and Holder was right to celebrate it. Hopefully, it will mean we can now compel the terrorist to tell us what he knows about the other terrorists — although one recalls that when the Justice Department tried to compel convicted terrorist Sami al-Arian to tell us what he knows about other terrorists, Yale law student Rashad Hussain complained that al-Arian was being persecuted — after which the president first hired Hussain as a top staffer and then promoted him to be the administration’s envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference.
In any event, the positive development of Zazi’s guilty plea does not transform the case into a model. To the contrary, it remains a screw-up.
Don’t get me wrong here. The civilian justice system hardly has the market cornered on screw-ups. There are plenty of them in the military justice system, too — just as there are in intelligence-gathering efforts, and in all human endeavors. Any prosecutor who tells you he’s never screwed up either is lying or was not good enough to be trusted with a challenging case. In a fast-moving investigation, it is always a tough call whether to approach a shady source: Will he break the case wide open, or will he destroy it? Here, investigators rolled the dice and it came up snake-eyes. It was a forgivable bad call — we’d much rather see our officials make aggressive mistakes than be caught asleep at the switch. But it was still a mistake.
But while the mistake does not condemn the civilian justice system, neither does the guilty plea establish anything conclusive about the effectiveness of the system. Even less does it demonstrate the system’s overall effectiveness against international terrorism.
If I were of a mind to demagogue the matter, as Holder seems determined to do, I suppose I could argue that, because law-enforcement tactics cost us the chance to identify potential terrorists, the Zazi episode shows it is foolhardy to rely on law enforcement. That, however, wouldn’t be true. The FBI did its usual stellar job. It wasn’t the bureau’s fault that another agency jumped the gun. If that hadn’t happened, the Feebs could very well have nabbed seven or eight terrorists red-handed. Next time, it’ll be done right, they’ll have better luck, and no one will be cheering louder than I.
And here is where Holder truly grates. Evidently, it is not enough for him to put the best face on a botched case, as any attorney general would do. He can’t just say, with the right mix of pride and humility, “Hey, it wasn’t pretty, but we stopped the bombing from happening, and now, with this plea, we have a better chance of catching the terrorists who got away six months ago.” No, he can’t help himself: Not only is the screw-up to be understood as law enforcement at its finest, Holder spins the episode, in the words of the Associated Press, to “rebut Republican critics who have said the Democratic administration should try such suspects before military tribunals rather than through civilian courts.” “To take this tool out of our hands” and “to denigrate this tool,” the attorney general declared, “flies in the face of facts and is more about politics than it is about facts.”
When the most political attorney general in history accuses others of playing politics, you know he is projecting his own flaws. After a year, that’s what we’ve come to expect. Almost as depressing, though, is that there’s no subtlety in Holder’s politicking. It’s transparently asinine.
Nobody is “trying to take this tool out of our hands.” Nobody is saying terrorism cases should never be tried in the civilian courts. The point of Bush counterterrorism was to correct the ineffective Clinton model, which treated international terrorism only as a crime, to be handled as such in all cases. It grossly oversimplifies the matter to say that the pre-9/11 error was to prosecute terrorism cases in civilian court. Rather, the error lay in (a) believing that we were dealing with mere crimes rather than a war, (b) therefore believing that all facets of terrorism, including atrocious acts of war, were fit for civilian prosecution, and (c) concluding that we could deter our enemies and protect our citizens with nothing more than civilian prosecution.
It does not “denigrate this tool” to acknowledge that civilian prosecution cannot be the point of the counterterrorism spear. That civilian prosecution should have a subordinate role does not mean it has an unimportant role. It is crucial. Nor does providing alternatives to civilian prosecution denigrate the Justice Department. Before the Obama administration pulled the plug on military commissions, Justice Department lawyers were making invaluable contributions to military-court proceedings. If we were to design a new system for addressing national-security cases, the Justice Department would be front and center in its creation and its operation. This is about learning from our past and designing the optimal approach. It is not about “denigrating” a “tool” that usually, but not always, works quite well.
In fact, we should want lots of terrorism cases — indeed, most terrorism cases — to be tried in civilian courts. The idea, though, is that these should be the cases that break up terrorist cells and plots before they materialize into mass-murder attacks. You can’t have a strategy that prevents massacres unless you aggressively use the civilian courts and the very strong Clinton-era anti-terrorism statutes to prosecute early-stage conspiracies like the Zazi episode. (Although it’s also worth noting that, if Zazi had been designated an enemy combatant and interrogated, we could have had the beans he is now spilling six months ago.) You must also exploit the same laws to hound people who provide material support to terrorist organizations — although, speaking of denigrating an important tool, the attorney general neglects to mention that President Obama is undermining the material-support laws by pandering to Islamist activists who grouse about crackdowns on Muslim “charitable” giving.
No one ever said such cases should not be tried in civilian court. Moreover, no one is saying that terrorism cases involving jihadist cells radicalized in the United States don’t belong in civilian court — at least presumptively. While those cells are usually inspired by al-Qaeda and its ideology, they are not actually affiliated with the terror network. That means they can be prosecuted in civilian court without risking disclosures of classified information about al-Qaeda that should be avoided during wartime.
The dispute here primarily involves alien enemy combatants affiliated with al-Qaeda who are captured in the act of carrying out, or after carrying out, acts of war against the United States. They are war criminals and should be treated as such. That means trial by the military commissions authorized by Congress, unless and until we come up with something better. And when such operatives are captured in the United States, they should be designated as enemy combatants and interrogated — without the obstructions of defense lawyers and complications of plea bargaining — until we are confident we don’t need them anymore. At that point, a decision can be made about whether they should be referred for a military or a civilian trial.
To grasp the perversity of cloaking the most atrocious alien war criminals in the majesty of the Bill of Rights — to understand that doing so rewards the very targeting of civilians that international humanitarian law seeks to discourage — is not to oppose all, or even most, civilian terrorism prosecutions. Coming to grips with reality does not disparage the dedicated efforts, day in and day out, of Justice Department prosecutors, FBI agents, and other federal and state police. Many of us were supporting that work, and doing it, while Mr. Holder was helping terrorists get pardons, accusing the United States of war crimes, and working at a firm that volunteered to serve our nation’s enemies free of charge.
Our goal must be to recognize what civilian justice can’t accomplish — how’s that 1998 indictment of Osama bin Laden working out? — while fully appreciating what it must accomplish if we are to remain secure. That will give us the right policy. We won’t get there by pretending that mistakes are models and portraying law enforcement’s friends as law enforcement’s foes.
— National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008).
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http://video.foxnews.com/v/4102363/new-concerns-in-bloody-border-battle
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Border down here is getting very worrisome. I heard a report that the housing market here in San Antonio is doing well. The richer Mexicans are moving here and buying houses, many with cash, to escape the violence on the border. I fear they will bring more of the drug violence this far north of the border.
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Jihadism: The Grassroots Paradox
March 18, 2010
By Scott Stewart
Last week, rumors that Adam Gadahn had been arrested in Karachi, Pakistan, quickly swept through the global media. When the dust settled, it turned out that the rumors were incorrect; the person arrested was not the American-born al Qaeda spokesman. The excitement generated by the rumors overshadowed a message from Gadahn that the al Qaeda media arm as Sahab had released on March 7, the same day as the reported arrest. While many of the messages from al Qaeda figures that as Sahab has released over the past several years have been repetitive and quite unremarkable, after watching Gadahn’s March 7 message, we believe that it is a message too interesting to ignore.
The Message
In the message, which was titled “A Call to Arms,” Gadahn starts by telling jihadists to strike targets that are close to them. He repeats the al Qaeda doctrinal position that jihad is a personal, religiously mandated duty for every able-bodied Muslim. He then tells his audience that “it is for you, like your heroic Mujahid brother Nidal Hasan, to decide how, when and where you discharge this duty. But whatever you do, don’t wait for tomorrow to do what can be done today, and don’t wait for others to do what you can do yourself.”
As the message progresses, Gadahn’s praise of Fort Hood shooter Hasan continues. Gadahn lifts up Hasan as an example for other Muslims to emulate: “the Mujahid brother Nidal Hasan is a pioneer, a trailblazer and a role-model who has opened a door, lit a path and shown the way forward for every Muslim who finds himself among the unbelievers and yearns to discharge his duty to Allah.” He adds that Hasan was the “ideal role model” for Muslims serving in the armed forces of Western countries and of their Muslim allies. Gadahn’s message is clearly intended to encourage more jihadists to emulate Hasan and conduct lone wolf terrorist attacks.
Regarding the planning of such attacks, Gadahn praises Hasan for being a careful planner and for not engaging in a hasty, reckless or poorly planned operation. He states that Hasan clearly learned from the mistakes of others and did not repeat them. Although Gadahn does not specify particular plots in which he believes mistakes were made by grassroots jihadists, he is undoubtedly referring to cases such as the May 2009 arrest of a group of grassroots jihadists in White Plains, N.Y., who came to the attention of authorities when they sought help from a man who turned out to be an FBI informant. Gadahn praises Hasan for practicing careful operational security by keeping his plans to himself and for not discussing them over the phone or Internet. He also notes that Hasan did not make the mistake of confiding in a person who might have been an FBI informant, as several other plotters have done. Gadahn also says Hasan “didn’t unnecessarily raise his security profile or waste money better spent on the operation itself by traveling abroad to acquire skills and instructions which could easily be acquired at home, or indeed, deduced by using one’s own powers of logic and reasoning.”
When discussing methods lone wolf jihadists can use to conduct their attacks, Gadahn notes that while Hasan used firearms in his assault at Fort Hood, jihadists are “no longer limited to bullets and bombs” when it comes to weapons. “As the blessed operations of September 11th showed, a little imagination and planning and a minimal budget can turn almost anything into a deadly, effective and convenient weapon which can take the enemy by surprise and deprive him of sleep for years on end.”
Gadahn then turns his attention to targeting. He counsels lone wolf jihadists to follow a three-pronged target selection process. They should choose a target with which they are well acquainted, a target that is feasible to hit and a target that, when struck, will have a major impact. He notes that Hasan’s choice of Fort Hood fit all three criteria, but that jihadists should not think that military bases are the only high-value targets in the United States or other Western countries. “On the contrary,” Gadahn insists, “there are countless other strategic places, institutions and installations which, by striking, the Muslim can do major damage.”
He then relates that jihadists must attempt to “further undermine the West’s already-struggling economies” by carefully timed and targeted attacks against symbols of capitalism in an effort to “shake consumer confidence and stifle spending.” (In this way, Gadahn’s message tracks with past messages of Osama bin Laden pertaining to economic jihad.) Gadahn notes that even apparently unsuccessful attacks on Western mass-transportation systems can bring major cities to a halt, cost billions of dollars and send corporations into bankruptcy. He also calls upon jihadists to kill or capture “leading Crusaders and Zionists in government, industry and media.”
To summarize his lessons on targeting, Gadahn urges jihadists to “look for targets which epitomize Western decadence, depravity, immorality and atheism — targets which the enemy and his mouthpieces will have trouble trying to pass off to the conservative Muslim majority as illegitimate targets full of innocent people.”
Implications
First, it is significant that Gadahn, a representative of the core al Qaeda group, is openly advocating a tactical approach to terrorist attacks that was first publicly laid out by the leader of one of the al Qaeda franchise groups. Nasir al-Wahayshi, head of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), authored an article that appeared in AQAP’s Sada al-Malahim online magazine in October 2009 that encouraged jihadists to conduct simple attacks with readily available weapons. Since that time, al-Wahayshi’s group has been linked to Hasan and the Fort Hood shooting, the attempt to destroy Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day 2009 and the June 1, 2009, attack against an armed forces recruitment center in Little Rock, Ark. Normally it is the al Qaeda core group that sets the agenda in the jihadist realm, but the success of AQAP has apparently caused the core group to jump on the AQAP bandwagon and endorse al-Wahayshi’s approach.
It is also telling that the core al Qaeda group chose to produce this particular video message using Gadahn as the spokesman and not one of their other talking heads like Ayman al-Zawahiri or Abu Yahya al-Libi. Gadahn, an American, is often used by the group to address the West, and English speaking-people in particular, so it is clear that the intended audience for his message was aspiring grassroots jihadists in the West. Indeed, Gadahn says in the video that his message is meant particularly for jihadists in the United States, United Kingdom and Israel. Presented in English, Gadahn’s video is more easily accessible to English-speakers than al-Wahayshi’s article, which was written in Arabic. Even though the al Qaeda core has been marginalized on the physical battlefield, when it comes to areas like militant philosophy, the pronouncements of the core group carry more influence with the wider jihadist world than statements from a regional franchise such as AQAP. When these two factors are combined, it is reasonable to assume that more people in the English-speaking world may pay attention to this call to simple attacks than they did to al-Wahayshi’s call in October 2009. Video is also a more viral type of media than the printed word, and video messages are known to be very appealing to aspiring jihadists.
Another thing this video reveals is the continued weakening of the core al Qaeda group. It has come a long way from the early days of as Sahab, when bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders issued defiant threats of launching a follow-on attack against the United States that was going to be even more destructive than 9/11. The group is now asking individual Muslims to conduct lone-wolf terrorist attacks and to follow the examples of Hasan and Mir Amal Kansi, the Pakistani citizen who conducted a shooting at a stoplight outside CIA headquarters in January 1993 that killed two CIA employees. STRATFOR has long been tracking the devolution of the jihadist threat from one primarily based upon al Qaeda the group to one based upon a wider jihadist movement, and this video is a clear indication that the trend toward decentralization is continuing.
This decentralization means grassroots operatives will continue to be a concern. The problems posed by such operatives are illustrated by recent cases involving American citizens like Colleen LaRose (aka Jihad Jane), Jamie Paulin-Ramirez and Sharif Mobley, who are all alleged to have been involved in recent jihadist plots. As blonde Caucasian women, LaRose and Paulin-Ramirez, in particular, do not fit the jihadist operative stereotype in most people’s minds and serve to illustrate the difficulty of creating a terrorist profile based on race, ethnicity or gender.
But decentralization can also mean diminished capability. Counseling jihadists against traveling to training camps in places like Pakistan or Yemen and advising them not to coordinate their attacks with others will increase a group’s operational security, but it can also have a serious impact on its operational effectiveness. Traditionally, one of the biggest problems for lone-wolf operators is acquiring the skills necessary to conduct a successful terrorist attack. Even though many Web sites and military manuals can provide instruction on such things as hand-to-hand combat and marksmanship, there is no substitute for hands-on experience in the real world. This is especially true when it comes to the more subtle skills required to conduct a complex terrorist attack, such as planning, surveillance and bomb making. This difficulty in translating intent into effective action explains why so few lone-wolf militants have been able to pull off spectacular, mass-casualty attacks.
Not putting their recruits through a more formal training regimen also makes it more difficult for groups to thoroughly indoctrinate recruits with jihadist ideology. In addition to physical training, individuals attending jihadist training camps typically receive hours of theological instruction every day that is intended to ground them in jihadist doctrine and motivate them to follow through with their plans to engage in attacks.
All that said, while the threat posed by grassroots jihadists is less severe than that posed by trained militant operatives from the core al Qaeda group or the regional franchises, grassroots operatives can still kill people — and they most certainly will continue to do so. Because of this, it is important to pay careful attention to the targeting criteria that Gadahn lays out. His focus on mass transportation targets means that historical jihadist targets such as airliners and subways continue to be at risk. For corporate security directors and the protective security details assigned to safeguard high-profile government officials and private individuals, the video should also serve as a reminder of the need to be vigilant. This is doubly true for those assigned to protect individuals of the Jewish faith, who could be thought to fit both the “Crusader” and “Zionist” labels in the mind of a prospective attacker.
For security personnel, the silver lining in all this is that grassroots operatives are often lacking in street skills and tend to be very sloppy when conducting preoperational surveillance. This means that, while these individuals are in many ways more difficult to identify before an attack than operatives who communicate with, or are somehow connected to, jihadist groups (indeed, lone wolves can seemingly appear out of nowhere), their amateurish methods tend to make them more vulnerable to detection than their better-trained counterparts. This is the paradox presented by this class of militant operative — and it is a paradox that will confront security, intelligence and law enforcement officers for many years to come.
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In Defense Of The Constitution
Anti-CAIR
News & Analysis
March 23, 2010
CAIR: Legitimacy Questioned
Several Oklahoma state lawmakers recently faced questions over their announced attendance at the Council on American-Islamic Relations Oklahoma chapter's annual banquet (CAIR-OK). CAIR sent an email touting the attendance of Lt. Gov. Jari Askins, Attorney General Drew Edmondson, Department of Corrections Director Justin Jones, two state senators and seven state representatives. The email featured photos of several people including State Rep. Richard Morrissette and Attorney General Drew Edmondson.
Morrissette and Edmondson later said they would not attend the CAIR event after learning of CAIR's disreputable background. While this was good news for those who support the marginalizing of Islamist hate groups generally, and CAIR in particular, there are questions that Oklahoma’s politicians should be called upon to answer.
• Did any state officials bother to do even a cursory check on CAIR’s background before accepting invitations from CAIR? Considering the threat of terror present in the country today, it would appear that people on some official’s staff are dropped the ball.
• If a background check was done on CAIR before accepting an invitation, who did the check and what was the result(s)? Was Oklahoma law enforcement consulted? If so, what was its opinion(s)?
• State Rep. Richard Morrissette says he was not intending to attend CAIR’s event and that after learning more about the issue he informed CAIR he was disassociating himself from the group. The question he should answer is if he was not intending to attend, why did CAIR feel free to use his photo and imply he would attend? In addition, Morrissette should explain what was his opinion of CAIR before his attendance became public? What specific information about CAIR made him change his mind?
• Attorney General Drew Edmondson, candidate for Governor, also opted out from attending. Why did CAIR feel empowered to use his photograph? How does AG Edmondson feel knowing that a Muslim Brotherhood front group created to support Hamas was using him as a shill to feign legitimacy? Why isn’t the AG, the top lawman in Oklahoma, better informed about CAIR? Shouldn’t Oklahoma's AG be better informed of the threat of radical Islam and Islamist supporting terrorist groups? The AG has a lot of explaining to do if he wants to be Governor.
Kevin Calvey, a former state representative and candidate for U.S. Congress says it is inappropriate for elected officials to attend any CAIR event. He notes court action and FBI evidence exposing CAIR's ties to Hamas. Calvey has personally attended protests denouncing CAIR and turned down meeting with Razi Hashmi, the executive director of CAIR Oklahoma’s chapter unless Hashmi denounced CAIR. In a bleating response to Calvey's challenge, Hashmi insisted that CAIR is all about "building bridges" and "defending civil rights" of Muslims. “Having me denounce CAIR, that’s out of the question,” ... “I’d never do that.”
If it weren’t such a tragedy it’d be comedic that CAIR claims to be “building bridges” when their brothers in Hamas are working so hard to come up with new ways to kill Jews, Americans, and anyone else who disagrees with their perverted religious ideology.
Razi Hashmi and his fellow Islamofascists at CAIR should never have legitimacy conferred on them or any group they associate with. Doing so gives aid and comfort to the very people that are working so hard to destroy our country from within.
CAIR and their fellow travelers must be shunned and exposed. The evidence against them is overwhelming and clear. Our political leadership, regardless of party, should be standing in the vanguard setting the example for the rest of us.
Or they should get out of the way of those who will.
Andrew Whitehead
Director
Anti-CAIR
ajwhitehead@anti-cair-net.org
www.anti-cair-net.org
Story Links
http://www.edmondsun.com/local/x282175338/Critics-Officials-should-bypass-CAIR
http://www.anti-cair-net.org/FBItiesCAIRHamas
http://ftpcontent.worldnow.com/griffin/NEWS9/PDF/1001/Calvey%20CAIR%20Release.pdf
http://www.txnd.uscourts.gov/judges/hlf2.html
http://crimeblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2008/10/fbi-cair-is-a-front-group-and.html
http://kosu.org/2010/01/candidate-to-protest-cair-meeting/
http://www.anti-cair-net.org/CAIRMuslimsTruth.html
http://www.anti-cair-net.org/EllisonsBehavior
http://www.anti-cair-net.org/CAIRDefendingMuslimBrotherhoodHamasHolyLandFoundation.html
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http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/04/07/air-marshals-reportedly-stop-attempted-shoe-bomb-attack/
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/7668606/Times-Square-car-bomb-police-investigate-South-Park-link.html
Times Square car bomb: police investigate South Park link
Police in New York are investigating whether a car bomb in Times Square was targeted on the makers of South Park over a controversial depiction of the Prophet Mohammed.
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http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/times-square-bomb-pakistan-migr-connecticut-arrested-times/story?id=10546387
Pakistan Émigré in Connecticut Arrested as Times Square Bomber
FBI Says Faisal Shahzad Bought Vehicle That Carried Bomb on April 24, After Trip to Pakistan
3 comments By RICHARD ESPOSITO, BRIAN ROSS and PIERRE THOMAS
May 4, 2010
FBI has arrested a 30-year old Bridgeport, Connecticut man in connection with the failed attempt to set off a car bomb in New York's Times Square, federal authorities told ABCNews.com late Monday night.
**Angry Buddhist? Fundamentalist Christian? Tea Party member?**
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Monday night's arrest of suspected Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad is both disconcerting and reassuring—proof that the world's jihadists are still targeting the U.S. homeland, yet also evidence that our antiterror fighters are getting better.
From the street vendors who alerted police to the smoking car, to the mounted officer who moved crowds away from it, to the impressive forensic and detective work that led to Shahzad's dramatic arrest as his flight was preparing for takeoff at Kennedy airport, to the international cooperation that led to the capture in Pakistan of one of his radical associates, things rapidly came together after the botched car bombing in a way they too rarely do outside the movies.
Surely all this deserves a cheer—and no small amount of credit goes to the Bush Administration for mobilizing this antiterror capability and mindset, which its successors have been able to exploit.
The bombing attempt is also a timely reminder that all the talk about the war on terror being over is nonsense. Astute police work foiled last year's plot to bomb New York's subway, as it did similar planned attacks against a New York synagogue and a Dallas skyscraper. But it was only luck that saved the passengers aboard Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day, just as it was luck and terrorist incompetence that prevented an atrocity at the corner of 45th Street and 7th Avenue. The victims of November's Fort Hood massacre were not as fortunate.
We will no doubt soon learn a great deal more about Shahzad and his links to radical groups in Pakistan, where he reportedly spent several months last year, including two weeks in or around the Taliban-saturated environs of Peshawar. The reality is that plots against the U.S. continue to be hatched and inspired in places like Pakistan and Yemen.
They demand that we continue to play offense against terrorists in these regions through the use of drone strikes, communications intercepts (even of U.S. citizens such as Shahzad), and various other measures that our friends on the left find so offensive when a Republican President is using them. One benefit of the Obama Presidency is that it has caused the left to acquiesce in such means, if only by their new silence.
These plots also demand that Pakistan continue its military sweep through the tribal areas near the border with Afghanistan. The Pakistan army has taken the offensive in the last year, and intelligence cooperation between its services and the CIA has by all accounts never been better. But Pakistan still has an obligation to ensure that none of its territory be a safe haven in which the Shahzads of the world can be trained in the uses of improvised explosive devices. Arresting the Taliban leaders of the so-called Quetta Shura would be a signal of Pakistani seriousness.
One regrettable part of this investigation so far is Shahzad's arraignment in a Manhattan court room yesterday on terrorism charges. This means he has been allowed to lawyer-up and told of his right to remain silent, rather than being subjected to more thorough interrogation as an enemy combatant. Attorney General Eric Holder said yesterday that Shahzad is cooperating, and we hope he is.
But the immediate goal should be to find out everything we can as soon as we can to deter future attacks and target the locations where he trained before the terrorists disperse. Shahzad can face a military commission or civilian trial later. Broadcasting that Shahzad was undergoing such interrogation would also warn other potential terrorists that they could face a similar grilling, not merely the company of an attorney.
Still, the events of the last 48 hours show that even as Islamist terrorists continue to wage a war against the West—"another sobering reminder of the times in which we live," as President Obama aptly put it yesterday—we also have the ability to respond. The very fact that Shahzad was unable to construct a working detonator shows that the jihadists have been unable to replicate the kind of ruthless, competent cell that killed so many on 9/11. There are surely other Shahzads awake in America today, but they are less likely to succeed than they were a decade ago.
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Uncomfortable Truths and the Times Square Attack
May 6, 2010
By Ben West and Scott Stewart
Faisal Shahzad, the first suspect arrested for involvement in the failed May 1 Times Square bombing attempt, was detained just before midnight on May 3 as he was attempting to depart on a flight from Kennedy International Airport in New York. Authorities removed Shahzad, a naturalized U.S. citizen of Pakistani descent, from an Emirates Airlines flight destined for Dubai. On May 4, Shahzad appeared at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan for his arraignment.
Authorities say that Shahzad is cooperating and that he insists he acted alone. However, this is contradicted by reports that the attack could have international links. On Feb. 3, Shahzad returned from a trip to Pakistan, where, according to the criminal complaint, he said he received militant training in Waziristan, a key hub of the main Pakistani Taliban rebel coalition, the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Authorities are reportedly seeking three other individuals in the United States in connection with the May 1 Times Square bombing attempt.
Investigative efforts at this point are focusing on identifying others possibly connected to the plot and determining whether they directed Shahzad in the bombing attempt or merely enabled him. From all indications, authorities are quickly collecting information on additional suspects from their homes and telephone-call records, and this is leading to more investigations and more suspects. While the May 1 attempt was unsuccessful, it came much closer to killing civilians in New York than other recent attempts, such as the Najibullah Zazi case in September 2009 and the Newburgh plot in May 2009. Understanding how Shahzad and his possible associates almost pulled it off is key to preventing future threats.
Shahzad’s Mistakes
U.S. Department of Justice via Getty Images
(click here to enlarge image)
While the device left in the Nissan Pathfinder parked on 45th Street, just off Times Square, ultimately failed to cause any damage, the materials present could have caused a substantial explosion had they been prepared and assembled properly. The bomb’s components were common, everyday products that would not raise undue suspicion when purchased — especially if they were bought separately. They included the following:
Some 113 kilograms (250 pounds) of urea-based fertilizer. A diagram released by the U.S. Department of Justice indicates that the fertilizer was found in a metal gun locker in the back of the Pathfinder. The mere presence of urea-based fertilizer does not necessarily indicate that the materials in the gun locker composed a viable improvised explosive mixture, but urea-based fertilizer can be mixed with nitric acid to create urea nitrate, the main explosive charge used in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. (It is not known if the fertilizer in the Pathfinder had been used to create urea nitrate.) Urea nitrate is a popular improvised mixture that can be detonated by a blasting cap and does not require a high-explosive booster charge like ammonium nitrate does; 250 pounds of urea nitrate would be enough to destroy the Pathfinder completely and create a substantial blast effect. If detonated near a large crowd of people, such an explosion could produce serious carnage.
Two 19-liter (5-gallon) containers of gasoline. If ignited, this fuel would have added an impressive fireball to the explosion but, in practical terms, would not have added much to the explosive effect of the device. Most of the damage would have been done by the urea nitrate. Reports indicate that consumer-grade fireworks (M-88 firecrackers) had been placed between the two containers of gasoline and were detonated, but they do not appear to have ruptured the containers and did not ignite the gasoline inside them. It appears that the firecrackers were intended to be the initiator for the device and were apparently the source of a small fire in the carpet upholstery of the Pathfinder. This created smoke that alerted a street vendor that something was wrong. The firecrackers likely would not have had sufficient detonation velocity to initiate urea nitrate.
Three 75-liter (20-gallon) propane tanks. Police have reported that the tank valves were left unopened, which has led others to conclude that this was yet another mistake on the part of Shahzad. Certainly, opening the tanks’ valves, filling the vehicle with propane gas and then igniting a spark would have been one way to cause a large explosion. Another way would have been to use explosives (such as the adjacent fertilizer mixture or gasoline) to rupture the tanks, which would have created a large amount of force and fire since the propane inside the tanks was under considerable pressure. Shahzad may have actually been attempting to blast open the propane tanks, which would explain why the valves were closed. Propane tanks are commonly used in improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in many parts of the world. Even without detonating, the propane tanks would have become very large and dangerous projectiles if the fertilizer had detonated.
That none of these three forms of explosive and incendiary materials detonated indicates that the bombmaker was likely a novice and had problems with the design of his firing chain. While a detailed schematic of the firing chain has not been released, the bombmaker did not seem to have a sophisticated understanding of explosive materials and the techniques required to properly detonate them. This person may have had some rudimentary training in explosives but was clearly not a trained bombmaker. It is one thing to attend a class at a militant camp where you are taught how to use military explosives and quite another to create a viable IED from scratch in hostile territory.
However, the fact that Shahzad was apparently able to collect all of the materials, construct an IED (even a poorly designed one) and maneuver it to the intended target without being detected exhibits considerable progress along the attack cycle. Had the bombmaker properly constructed a viable device with these components and if the materials had detonated, the explosion and resulting fire likely would have caused a significant number of casualties given the high density and proximity of people in the area.
It appears that Shahzad made a classic “Kramer jihadist” mistake: trying to make his attack overly spectacular and dramatic. This mistake was criticized by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) leader Nasir al-Wahayshi last year when he called for grassroots operatives to conduct simple attacks instead of complex ones that are more prone to failure. In the end, Shahzad (who was probably making his first attempt to build an IED by himself) tried to pull off an attack so elaborate that it failed to do any damage at all.
As STRATFOR has discussed for many years now, the devolution of the jihadist threat from one based primarily on al Qaeda the group to one emanating from a wider jihadist movement means that we will see jihadist attacks being carried out more frequently by grassroots or lone wolf actors. These actors will possess a lesser degree of terrorist tradecraft than the professional terrorists associated with the core al Qaeda group, or even regional jihadist franchises like the TTP. This lack of tradecraft means that these operatives are more likely to make mistakes and attempt attacks against relatively soft targets, both characteristics seen in the failed May 1 attack.
Jihadist Attack Models
Under heavy pressure since the 9/11 attacks, jihadist planners wanting to strike the U.S. mainland face many challenges. For one thing, it is difficult for them to find operatives capable of traveling to and from the United States. This means that, in many cases, instead of using the best and brightest operatives that jihadist groups have, they are forced to send whoever can get into the country. In September 2009, U.S. authorities arrested Najibullah Zazi, a U.S. citizen who received training at an al Qaeda camp in Pakistan in 2008 before returning to the United States to begin an operation that would involve detonating explosive devices on New York City subways.
Zazi’s journey likely raised red flags with authorities, who subsequently learned through communication intercepts of his intent to construct explosive devices. Zazi had no explosives training or experience other than what he had picked during his brief stint at the training camp in Pakistan, and he attempted to construct the devices only with the notes he had taken during the training. Zazi had difficulty producing viable acetone peroxide explosives, similar to what appears to have happened with Shahzad in his Times Square attempt. Zazi also showed poor tradecraft by purchasing large amounts of hydrogen peroxide and acetone in an attempt to make triacetone triperoxide, a very difficult explosive material to use because of its volatility. His unusual shopping habits raised suspicion and, along with other incriminating evidence, eventually led to his arrest before he could initiate his planned attack.
Other plots in recent years such as the Newburgh case as well as plots in Dallas and Springfield, Ill., all three in 2009, failed because the suspects behind the attacks reached out to others to acquire explosive material instead of making it themselves. (In the latter two cases, Hosam Smadi in Dallas and Michael Finton in Springfield unwittingly worked with FBI agents to obtain fake explosive material that they thought they could use to attack prominent buildings in their respective cities and were subsequently arrested.) In seeking help, they made themselves vulnerable to interception, and local and federal authorities were able to infiltrate the cell planning the attack and ensure that the operatives never posed a serious threat. Unlike these failed plotters, Shahzad traveled to Pakistan to receive training and used everyday materials to construct his explosive devices, thus mitigating the risk of being discovered.
A much more successful model of waging a jihadist attack on U.S. soil is the case of U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, who shot and killed 13 people at Fort Hood in Texas in November 2009. Instead of traveling to Yemen or Pakistan for training, which would have aroused suspicion, Maj. Hasan used skills he already possessed and simple means to conduct his attack, something that kept his profile low (although he was under investigation for posting comments online seemingly justifying suicide attacks). Ultimately, Hasan killed more people with a handgun than the recently botched or thwarted attacks involving relatively complicated IEDs.
With AQAP leader al-Wahayshi advocating smaller and easier attacks against softer targets in the fall of 2009 (shortly before Maj. Hasan’s attack at Fort Hood), it appears that the tactic is making its way through jihadist circles. This highlights the risk that ideologically radicalized individuals (as Shahzad certainly appears to be) can still pose to the public, despite their seeming inability to successfully construct and deploy relatively complex IEDs.
Slipping Through the Cracks?
It is likely that U.S. authorities were aware of Shahzad due to his recent five-monthlong trip to Pakistan. Authorities may also have intercepted the telephone conversations that Shahzad had with people in Pakistan using a pre-paid cell phone (which are more anonymous but still traceable). Such activities usually are noticed by authorities, and we anticipate that there will be a storm in the media in the coming days and weeks about how the U.S. government missed signs pointing to Shahzad’s radicalization and operational activity. The witch hunt would be far more intense if the attack had actually succeeded — as it could well have. However, as we’ve noted in past attacks such as the July 7, 2005, London bombings, the universe of potential jihadists is so wide that the number of suspects simply overwhelms the government’s ability to process them all. The tactical reality is that the government simply cannot identify all potential attackers in advance and thwart every attack. Some suspects will inevitably fly under the radar.
This reality flies in the face of the expectation that governments somehow must prevent all terrorist attacks. But the uncomfortable truth in the war against jihadist militants is that there is no such thing as complete security. Given the diffuse nature of the threat and of the enemy, and the wide availability of soft targets in open societies, there is simply no intelligence or security service in the world capable of identifying every aspiring militant who lives in or enters a country and of pre-empting their intended acts of violence.
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Second post of the day:
WSJ: Infiltrating Jihad
By JOEL STONINGTON
After the failed attempt to bomb Times Square, New York police are dispatching more officers to be seen on the streets, around landmarks and on subways. But there's one tactic they hope won't go noticed at all: getting inside the bands of terrorists-in-the-making.
That's why a young Bangladeshi immigrant working undercover found himself among a dozen men at an Islamic bookstore in Brooklyn one day in 2004 to watch videos of U.S. soldiers being slain.
"That made these guys pumped up and happy," the officer said. "It's like a party at a club. They were hitting the walls with excitement. One guy even broke a chair."
Among the revelers: Shahawar Matin Siraj, who would be sentenced in January 2007 to 30 years in prison for an August 2004 plot to blow up Herald Square. "He loved talking about doing jihad," said the officer.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the undercover officer described four years embedded with Brooklyn radicals, a stint which began a few months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks and ended with his testimony at Mr. Siraj's trial in mid-2006. Police and the officer declined to make his identity public. In court records in the trial of Mr. Siraj, he was identified by his undercover name, Kamil Pasha.
David Cohen, deputy commissioner for intelligence of the New York Police Department, said such undercover operations have become the city's main defense amid the escalation of threats and plots since the attack on the World Trade Center nearly a decade ago.
The 30-year-old officer spent his childhood in Brooklyn and Queens, where he went to high school. He joined the force after graduating from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in 2001. He said his undercover work has remained a secret to his friends, siblings and parents. During the posting, he told his parents he was working for a private security firm, and they now know he works for the police department. He received individualized training so few would know he was a police officer; there would be no buddies from the academy to recognize him on the street. He said undercover investigators must walk a delicate line by playing the role of a potential terrorist and friend while refraining from pushing a plot forward.
The officer said only a few other members of the department knew of the life he developed in Brooklyn, as he rented an apartment, bought furniture, joined a local gym and slowly sought to become part of the community. He attempted to maintain as much of his everyday personality as possible; he didn't change his habit of attending a mosque with some regularity, and he sought to make friends among the community.
The officer said he fit the profile of the young men he sought to meet: middle-class, first- or second-generation Americans in their late teens or early 20s. He said he watched the radicalization process of dozens. At times, it was so rapid that a year or two could separate clubbing in Miami from prayer five times a day.
The officer described Mr. Siraj's path. It unfolded in Brooklyn mosques, on local basketball courts and at an Islamic book store in Brooklyn that served as a gathering spot for radicals. The video, for example, that the officer said he watched with Mr. Siraj showed the "top 10" killings of U.S. soldiers in Iraq.
The groups he penetrated spoke frequently of jihad, or holy war, and enlisted him to train with them. By the time an attack on Herald Square was being plotted, the officer had decided to focus his time on another group in Borough Park that had converted to Islam while in prison.
Once with that group, he trained for jihad by going paintballing, climbing mountains late at night, shooting assault rifles at firing ranges. During one of these trips to a firing range, he says he felt the barrel of a 9mm handgun pressed to the back of his head. The officer said he was able to talk the youth down, though to this day he said he still doesn't know if he was being tested. Back at police headquarters, Mr. Cohen said officials mulled for days over whether to pull him from the assignment.
Eventually, the officer surfaced to testify in the case against Mr. Siraj, who claimed he had been entrapped by a government informant—not the officer himself—to bomb Herald Square before the 2004 Republican National Convention. Explosives were never obtained for the attack.
The undercover program is both secretive and controversial. Local Muslim groups have criticized the infiltration of the Muslim community by investigators from the Intelligence Division as a form religious profiling. The police deny that, saying they follow threats wherever they may lead.
Mr. Cohen declined to say how many undercover officers work for the department or in counterterrorism. Police spokesman Paul Browne said there are about 1,100 people assigned to counterterrorism throughout the department, with more than 300 of those in the Intelligence Division. Despite the reduction of the overall uniformed force—from 41,000 to 35,000 in the last eight years—Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has not scaled back the Intelligence Division.
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So, my question is to the libertarians is, should law enforcement have intelligence units and U/C officers?
What is the libertarian model for counterterrorism?
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Armed citizens can't do much regarding IEDs, can they?
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!!!
http://www.wsbtv.com/video/23438021/index.html
http://www.wsbtv.com/video/23438712/index.html
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Kansas City Man Admits to Funding Al Qaeda
Khalid Ouazzani, a Moroccan-Born U.S. Citizen and Auto Parts Dealer, Pleads Guilty in Federal Court
(AP) A Kansas City used car and auto parts dealer admitted Wednesday in federal court to sending money to al Qaeda, prosecutors said.
Khalid Ouazzani, 32, a Moroccan-born naturalized U.S. citizen, pleaded guilty to several terrorism-related charges, telling a judge that he sent $23,500 to the terrorist organization through a bank in the United Arab Emirates between August and November 2007, prosecutors said. He also admitted that in June 2008, he swore to an unnamed coconspirator an oath of allegiance to al Qaeda, prosecutors said.
Court records said Ouazzani "used various techniques to disguise their communications about their plans and assistance to support" al Qaeda.
Ouazzani also pleaded guilty to money laundering and bank fraud in a scheme to steal more than $174,000 from a bank using false and fraudulent financial information, prosecutors said.
Ouazzani has "acknowledged the wrongfulness of his acts," his attorneys said in a statement.
"He deeply regrets what he has done, and is taking steps to atone, to the extent he can, for his crimes. He will continue to do so," the statement read. His lawyers declined to comment further about the case and their client.
Ouazzani faces up to 65 years in prison without parole, prosecutors said. No sentencing date has been set.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2010/05/24/the-case-of-the-missing-wallet/
Hmmmmmm.....
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:-o :-o :x
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From Failed Bombings to Armed Jihadist Assaults
May 27, 2010
By Scott Stewart
One of the things we like to do in our Global Security and Intelligence Report from time to time is examine the convergence of a number of separate and unrelated developments and then analyze that convergence and craft a forecast. In recent months we have seen such a convergence occur.
The most recent development is the interview with the American-born Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki that was released to jihadist Internet chat rooms May 23 by al-Malahim Media, the public relations arm of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). In the interview, al-Awlaki encouraged strikes against American civilians. He also has been tied to Maj. Nidal Hasan, who was charged in the November 2009 Fort Hood shooting, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the perpetrator of the failed Christmas Day 2009 airline bombing. And al-Awlaki reportedly helped inspire Faisal Shahzad, who was arrested in connection with the attempted Times Square attack in May.
The second link in our chain is the failed Christmas Day and Times Square bombings themselves. They are the latest in a long string of failed or foiled bombing attacks directed against the United States that date back to before the 9/11 attacks and include the thwarted 1997 suicide bomb plot against a subway in New York, the thwarted December 1999 Millennium Bomb plot and numerous post-9/11 attacks such as Richard Reid’s December 2001 shoe-bomb attempt, the August 2004 plot to bomb the New York subway system and the May 2009 plot to bomb two Jewish targets in the Bronx and shoot down a military aircraft. Indeed, jihadists have not conducted a successful bombing attack inside the United States since the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Getting a trained bombmaker into the United States has proved to be increasingly difficult for jihadist groups, and training a novice to make bombs has also been problematic as seen in the Shahzad and Najibullah Zazi cases.
The final link we’d like to consider are the calls in the past few months for jihadists to conduct simple attacks with readily available items. This call was first made by AQAP leader Nasir al-Wahayshi in October 2009 and then echoed by al Qaeda prime spokesman Adam Gadahn in March of 2010. In the Times Square case, Shahzad did use readily available items, but he lacked the ability to effectively fashion them into a viable explosive device.
When we look at all these links together, there is a very high probability that jihadists linked to, or inspired by, AQAP and the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) — and perhaps even al Shabaab — will attempt to conduct simple attacks with firearms in the near future.
Threats and Motives
In the May 23 al-Malahim interview (his first with AQAP), al-Awlaki not only said he was proud of the actions of Hasan and Abdulmutallab, whom he referred to as his students, but also encouraged other Muslims to follow the examples they set by their actions. When asked about the religious permissibility of an operation like Abdulmutallab’s, which could have killed innocent civilians, al-Awlaki told the interviewer that the term “civilian” was not really applicable to Islamic jurisprudence and that he preferred to use the terms combatants and non-combatants. He then continued by noting that “non-combatants are people who do not take part in the war” but that, in his opinion, “the American people in its entirety takes part in the war, because they elected this administration, and they finance this war.” In his final assessment, al-Awlaki said, “If the heroic mujahid brother Umar Farouk could have targeted hundreds of soldiers, that would have been wonderful. But we are talking about the realities of war,” meaning that in his final analysis, attacks against civilians were permissible under Islamic law. Indeed, he later noted, “Our unsettled account with America, in women and children alone, has exceeded one million. Those who would have been killed in the plane are a drop in the ocean.”
While this line of logic is nearly identical to that historically put forth by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the very significant difference is that al-Awlaki is a widely acknowledged Islamic scholar. He speaks with a religious authority that bin Laden and al-Zawahiri simply do not possess.
On May 2, the TTP released a video statement by Hakeemullah Mehsud in which Mehsud claimed credit for the failed Times Square attack. In the recording, which reportedly was taped in early April, Mehsud said that the time was approaching “when our fedayeen [suicide operatives] will attack the American states in their major cities.” He also said, “Our fedayeen have penetrated the terrorist America. We will give extremely painful blows to the fanatic America.”
While TTP leaders seem wont to brag and exaggerate (e.g., Baitullah Mehsud falsely claimed credit for the April 3, 2009, shooting at an immigration center in Binghamton, N.Y., which was actually committed by a mentally disturbed Vietnamese immigrant), there is ample reason to believe the claims made by the TTP regarding their contact with Shahzad. We can also deduce with some certainty that Mehsud and company have trained other men who have traveled (or returned) to the United States following that training. The same is likely true for AQAP, al Shabaab and other jihadist groups. In fact, the FBI is likely monitoring many such individuals inside the United States at this very moment — and in all likelihood is madly scrambling to find and investigate many others.
Fight Like You Train
There is an old military and law-enforcement training axiom that states, “You will fight like you train.” This concept has led to the development of training programs designed to help soldiers and agents not only learn skills but also practice and reinforce those skills until they become second nature. This way, when the student graduates and comes under incredible pressure in the real world — like during an armed ambush — their training will take over and they will react even before their mind can catch up to the rapidly unfolding situation. The behaviors needed to survive have been ingrained into them. This concept has been a problem for the jihadists when it comes to terrorist attacks.
It is important to understand that most of the thousands of men who attend training camps set up by al Qaeda and other jihadist groups are taught the basic military skills required to fight in an insurgency. This means they are provided basic physical training to help condition them, given some hand-to-hand combat training and then taught how to operate basic military hardware like assault rifles, hand grenades and, in some cases, crew-served weapons like machine guns and mortars. Only a very few students are then selected to attend the more advanced training that will teach them the skills required to become a trained terrorist operative.
In many ways, this process parallels the way that special operations forces operators are selected from the larger military population and then sent on for extensive training to transform them into elite warriors. Many people wash out during this type of intense training and only a few will make it all the way through to graduation. The problem for the jihadists is finding someone with the time and will to undergo the intensive training required to become a terrorist operative, the ability to complete the training and — critically — the ability to travel abroad to conduct terrorist attacks against the far enemy. Clearly the jihadist groups are able to train men to fight as insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq, and they have shown the ability to train terrorist operatives who can operate in the fairly permissive environments of places like the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area. They also have some excellent bombmakers and terrorist planners in Iraq and Pakistan.
What the jihadists seem to be having a problem doing is finding people who can master the terrorist tradecraft and who have the ability to travel into hostile areas to ply their craft. There seems to be a clear division between the men who can travel and the men who can master the advanced training. The physical and intelligence onslaught launched against al Qaeda and other jihadist groups following the 9/11 attacks has also created operational security concerns that complicate the ability to find and train effective terrorist operatives.
Of course, we’re not telling the jihadists anything they don’t already know. This phenomenon is exactly why you have major jihadist figures like al-Wahayshi and Gadahn telling the operatives who can travel to or are already in the West to stop trying to conduct attacks that are beyond their capabilities. Gadahn and al-Awlaki have heaped praise on Maj. Hasan as an example to follow — and this brings us back to armed assaults.
In the United States it is very easy to obtain firearms and it is legal to go to a range or private property to train with them. Armed assaults are also clearly within the skill set of jihadists who have made it only through basic insurgent training. As we’ve mentioned several times in the past, these grassroots individuals are far more likely to strike the United States and Europe than professional terrorist operatives dispatched from the al Qaeda core group. Such attacks will also allow these grassroots operatives to fight like they have been trained. When you combine all these elements with the fact that the United States is an open society with a lot of very vulnerable soft targets, it is not difficult to forecast that we will see more armed jihadist assaults in the United States in the near future.
Armed Assaults
Armed assaults employing small arms are not a new concept in terrorism by any means. They have proved to be a tried-and-true tactic since the beginning of the modern era of terrorism and have been employed in many famous attacks conducted by a variety of actors. A few examples are the Black September operation against the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics; the December 1975 seizure of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries headquarters in Vienna, led by Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, aka “Carlos the Jackal”; the December 1985 simultaneous attacks against the airports in Rome and Vienna by the Abu Nidal Organization; and the September 2004 school seizure in Beslan, North Ossetia, by Chechen militants. More recently, the November 2008 armed assault in Mumbai demonstrated how deadly and spectacular such attacks can be.
In some instances — such as the December 1996 seizure of the Japanese ambassador’s residence in Lima, Peru, by the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement — the objective of the armed assault is to take and intentionally hold hostages for a long period of time. In other instances, such as the May 1972 assault on Lod Airport by members of the Japanese Red Army, the armed assault is planned as a suicide attack designed simply to kill as many people as possible before the assailants themselves are killed or incapacitated. Often attacks fall somewhere in the middle. For example, even though Mumbai became a protracted operation, its planning and execution indicated it was intended as an attack in which the attackers would inflict maximum damage and not be taken alive. It was only due to the good fortune of the attackers and the ineptitude of the Indian security forces that the operation lasted as long as it did.
We discussed above the long string of failed and foiled bombing attacks directed against the United States. During that same time, there have been several armed assaults that have killed people, such as the attack against the El Al ticket counter at the Los Angeles International Airport by Hesham Mohamed Hadayet in July 2002, the shooting attacks by John Muhammed and Lee Boyd Malvo in the Washington area in September and October 2002 and the June 2009 attack in which Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad allegedly shot and killed a U.S. soldier and wounded another outside a Little Rock, Ark., recruiting center. The most successful of these attacks was the November 2009 Fort Hood shooting, which resulted in 13 deaths. These attacks not only resulted in deaths but also received extensive media coverage.
Armed assaults are effective and they can kill people. However, as we have noted before, due to the proficiency of U.S. police agencies and the training their officers have received in active shooter scenarios following school shootings and incidents of workplace violence, the impact of armed assaults will be mitigated in the United States, and Europe as well. In fact, it was an ordinary police officer responding to the scene and instituting an active shooter protocol who shot and wounded Maj. Hasan and brought an end to his attack in the Soldier Readiness Center at Fort Hood. The number of people in the American public who are armed can also serve as a mitigating factor, though many past attacks have been planned at locations where personal weapons are prohibited, like the Los Angeles International Airport, Fort Hood and Fort Dix.
Of course, a Mumbai-like situation involving multiple trained shooters who can operate like a fire team will cause problems for first responders, but the police communication system in the United States and the availability of trained SWAT teams will allow authorities to quickly vector in sufficient resources to handle the threat in most locations — especially where such large coordinated attacks are most likely to happen, such as New York, Washington and Los Angeles. Therefore, even a major assault in the United States is unlikely to drag out for days as did the incident in Mumbai.
None of this is to say that the threats posed by suicide bombers against mass transit and aircraft will abruptly end. The jihadists have proven repeatedly that they have a fixation on both of these target sets and they will undoubtedly continue their attempts to attack them. Large bombings and airline attacks also carry with them a sense of drama that a shooting does not — especially in a country that has become somewhat accustomed to shooting incidents conducted by non-terrorist actors for other reasons. However, we believe we’re seeing a significant shift in the mindset of jihadist ideologues and that this shift will translate into a growing trend toward armed assaults.
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By Scott Stewart
On the afternoon of Sunday, May 30, an Aeromexico flight from Paris to Mexico City was forced to land in Montreal after authorities discovered that a man who was on the U.S. no-fly list was aboard. The aircraft was denied permission to enter U.S. airspace, and the aircraft was diverted to Trudeau International Airport in Montreal. The man, a Somali named Abdirahman Ali Gaall, was removed from the plane and arrested by Canadian authorities on an outstanding U.S. warrant. After a search of all the remaining passengers and their baggage, the flight was allowed to continue to its original destination.
Gaall reportedly has U.S. resident-alien status and is apparently married to an American or Canadian woman. Media reports also suggest that he is connected with the Somali jihadist group al Shabaab. Gaall was reportedly deported from Canada to the United States on June 1, and we are unsure of the precise charges brought against him by the U.S. government, but more information should be forthcoming once he has his detention hearing. From the facts at hand, however, it appears likely that he has been charged for his connection with al Shabaab, perhaps with a crime such as material support to a designated terrorist organization.
Last week, the Department of Homeland Security issued a lookout to authorities in Texas, warning that another Somali purportedly linked to al Shabaab was believed to be in Mexico and was allegedly planning to attempt to cross the border into the United States. This lookout appears to be linked to a U.S. indictment in March charging another Somali man with running a large-scale smuggling ring bringing Somalis into the United States through Latin America.
Taken together, these incidents highlight the increased attention the U.S. government has given to al Shabaab and the concern that the Somali militant group could be planning to conduct attacks in the United States. Although many details pertaining to the Gaall case remain unknown at this time, these incidents involving Somalis, Mexico and possible militant connections — and the obvious U.S. concern — provide an opportunity to discuss the dynamics of Somali immigration as it relates to the U.S. border with Mexico, as well as the possibility that al Shabaab has decided to target the United States.
The Somali Diaspora
In any discussion of al Shabaab, it is very important to understand what is happening in Somalia — and more important, what is not happening there. Chaos has long reigned in the African country, chaos that became a full-blown humanitarian crisis in the early 1990s due to civil war. Somalia never fully recovered from that war, and has lacked a coherent government for decades now. While Somalia does have a government in name, known as the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), it controls little apart from a few neighborhoods and outposts in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. In this vacuum of authority, warlords and pirates have thrived, along with a variety of militant Islamist groups, such as the jihadist group al Shabaab.
The decades of fighting and strife have also resulted in the displacement of millions of Somalis. Many of these people have moved into camps set up by humanitarian organizations inside the country to help the huge number of internally displaced people, but large numbers of Somalis have also sought refuge in neighboring countries. In fact, the situation in Somalia is so bad that many Somalis have even sought refuge in Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab world. Tens of thousands of Somalis have also been resettled abroad in places like the United States, Canada and Europe.
Unlike an earthquake, tsunami or other natural disaster, the man-made disaster in Somalia has continued for decades. As Somali refugees have been settled in places like the United States, they, like many other immigrants, frequently seek to have their relatives join them. Frequently, they are able to do this through legal means, but quite often, when the wait for legal immigration is deemed too long or an application is denied for some reason — such as the applicant’s having served in a militia — illegal means are sought to bring friends and relatives into the country. This is by no means a pattern exclusive to Somali immigrants; it is also seen by other immigrant groups from Asia, Africa and other parts of the world. For example, Christians from Iraq, Egypt and Sudan are frequently smuggled into the United States through Latin America.
In years past, a significant portion of this illegal traffic passed through Canada, but in the post-9/11 world, Canada has tightened its immigration laws, making it more difficult to use Canada as an entry point into the United States. This has driven even more immigrant traffic to Latin America, which has long been a popular route for immigrants seeking to enter the United States illegally.
Indeed, we have seen an expansion of Somali alien-smuggling rings in Latin America in recent years, and according to documents filed in court, some of these groups have been associated with militant groups in Somalia. In an indictment filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas on March 3, 2010, a Somali named Ahmed Muhammed Dhakane was charged with operating a large-scale alien-smuggling ring out of Brazil responsible for smuggling several hundred Somalis and other East Africans into the United States. The indictment alleges that the persons Dhakane’s organization smuggled included several people associated with al-Itihaad al-Islamiya (AIAI), a militant group linked to al Qaeda that was folded into the Supreme Islamic Courts Council (SICC) after the latter group’s formation. After Ethiopian forces invaded Somalia and toppled the SICC in late 2006, many of the more hardcore SICC militants then joined with the SICC youth wing, al Shabaab, to continue their armed struggle. The more nationalist-minded SICC members formed their own militant organization, called Hizbul Islam, which at various times either cooperates or competes with al Shabaab. The U.S. government officially designated AIAI a terrorist group in September 2001. The March indictment also alleged that Dhakane was associated with al-Barakat, a Somalia-based company that is involved in the transfer of money to Somalia. The U.S. government claims that al-Barakat is involved in funding terrorist groups and has designated the company a terrorist entity. Diaspora Somalis transfer a great deal of legitimate money to family members back in Somalia through organizations such as al-Barakat because there is no official banking system in the country, and militant groups like al Shabaab use this flow of money as camouflage for their own financial transactions.
Many other alien smugglers besides Dhakane are involved in moving Somalis through Latin America. Most of these smugglers are motivated by profit, but some like Dhakane who have ties to militant groups might not be opposed to moving people involved with militant groups — especially if they also happen to make more money in the process. Other smugglers might unknowingly move militants. Moreover, a number of front businesses, charities and mosques in the region more closely tied to militant groups of various stripes are used to raise funds, recruit and facilitate the travel of operatives through the region. Some of these entities have very close ties to people and organizations inside the United States, and those ties are often used to facilitate the transfer of funds and the travel of people.
Determining Intentions
Clearly, there are many Somalis traveling into the United States without documentation. According to the U.S. government, some of these Somalis have ties to jihadist groups such as AIAI and al Shabaab, like Dhakane and Gaall, respectively. Given the number of warlords and militias active in Somalia and the endemic lack of employment inside the country, it is not at all uncommon for young men there to seek employment as members of a militia. For many Somalis who are driven by the need merely to survive, ideology is a mere luxury. This means that unlike the hardcore jihadists encountered in Saudi Arabia or even Pakistan, many of the men fighting in the various Somali militias do not necessarily ascribe to a particular ideology other than survival (though there are certainly many highly radicalized individuals, too).
The critical question, then, is one of intent. Are these Somalis with militant ties traveling to the United States in pursuit of a better life (one hardly need be an Islamist bent on attacking the West to want to escape from Somalia), or are they seeking to travel to the United States to carry out terrorist attacks?
The situation becomes even more complex in the case of someone like Gaall, who came to the United States, reportedly married an American woman, received resident-alien status, but then chose to leave the comfort and security of the United States to return to Somalia. Clearly, he was not a true asylum seeker who feared for his life in Somalia, or he would not have returned to the African country. While some people become homesick and return home, or are drawn back to Somalia for some altruistic purpose, such as working with a non-governmental organization to deliver food aid to starving countrymen— or to work with the Somali government or a foreign government with interests in Somalia — some Somalis travel back to support and fight with al Shabaab. Since most of the previously mentioned activities are not illegal in the United States, the criminal charges Gaall faces likely stem from contact with al Shabaab.
Having contact with al Shabaab does not necessarily mean that someone like Gaall would automatically return to the United States intending to conduct attacks there. It is possible that he considered Somalia a legitimate theater for jihad but did not consider civilians in the United States legitimate targets. There is a great deal of disagreement in jihadist circles regarding such issues, as witnessed by the infighting inside al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb over target selection. There are also militant groups, like Hamas and Hezbollah, who consider the United States as a place to recruit and raise funds rather than a battlefield for jihad. U.S. authorities certainly would err on the side of caution regarding such people, and would charge them with any applicable criminal charges, such as material support of a terrorist group, rather than run the risk of missing an impending attack.
If it is determined that Gaall intended to conduct an attack inside the United States, the next question becomes whether he sought to conduct an attack of his own volition or was sent by al Shabaab or some other entity.
As we have previously discussed, we consider the current jihadist world to be composed of three different layers. These layers are the core al Qaeda group; the regional al Qaeda franchises (like al Shabaab); and grassroots jihadists — either individuals or small cells — inspired by al Qaeda and the regional franchises but who may have little if any actual connection to them. It will be important to determine what Gaall’s relationship was with al Shabaab.
To this point, the leadership of al Shabaab has shown little interest in conducting attacks outside Somalia. While they have issued threats against Uganda, Burundi, Kenya and Ethiopia (which invaded Somalia and deposed the SICC), al Shabaab has yet to act on these threats (though AIAI did conduct a series of low-level bombing attacks in Ethiopia in 1996 and 1997 and al Shabaab has periodic border skirmishes with the Kenyan military). Somalis have also been involved with the al Qaeda core for many years, and al Shabaab has sworn allegiance to Osama bin Laden — the reason we consider them an al Qaeda regional franchise group.
That said, we have been watching al Shabaab closely this year to see if they follow in the footsteps of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and become a transnational terrorist group by launching attacks against the West rather than just a group with a national or regional focus. While some al Shabaab members, like American-born Omar Hammami — who sings jihadi rap songs about bringing America to its knees — have threatened the West, it remains unclear whether this is rhetoric or if the group truly intends to attack targets farther afield. So far, we have seen little indication that al Shabaab possesses such intent.
Due to this lack of demonstrated intent, our assessment at the present time is that al Shabaab has not yet made the leap to becoming transnational. That assessment could change in the near future, however, as details from the Gaall case come out during court proceedings — especially if it is shown that al Shabaab sent Gaall to the United States to conduct an attack.
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No doubt with this man at DHS, the nation is safe:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VQbAhqHoAo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNZjTuevDfU&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqTaUQtRf_U&feature=related
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Ohio 6-Year-Old Turns Up on Terror Watch List
Updated: 15 hours 59 minutes ago
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(June 26) – The father of a 6-year-old Ohio girl who turned up on the U.S. government's terror watch list says the worst thing his daughter has ever done is probably been mean to her sister.
But Santhosh Thomas, a doctor from Westlake, Ohio, says he's sure that's not enough to land his 6-year-old Alyssa on the no-fly list of suspected terrorists. "She may have threatened her sister, but I don't think that constitutes Homeland Security triggers," he told CNN.
An airline ticket agent informed the family of their predicament when they embarked on recent trip from Cleveland to Minneapolis. "They said, 'Well, she's on the list.' We're like, okay, what's the story? What do we have to do to get off the list? This isn't exactly the list we want to be on," Thomas said.
The Thomases were allowed to fly that day, but authorities told them to contact the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to clear up the matter. Now they've received a letter from the government addressed to 6-year-old Alyssa, telling her that nothing in her file will be changed.
Federal authorities have acknowledged that such a no-fly list exists, but as a matter of national security, they won't comment on whose names are on it nor why. "The watch lists are an important layer of security to prevent individuals with known or suspected ties to terrorism from flying," an unnamed spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration told Fox News.
"She's been flying since she was two-months old, so that has not been an issue," Alyssa's dad said. "In fact, we had traveled to Mexico in February and there were no issues at that time."
That's likely because of a recent change by the Transportation Security Administration, which used to check only international passengers' names against the no-fly list, but since earlier this month has been checking domestic passengers as well.
The Thomases told CNN they plan on appealing Alyssa's status to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security again, and will be sure to leave plenty of extra time for check-in the next time they fly.
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By CHAD BRAY And CASSELL BRYAN-LOW
Federal prosecutors charged a senior al Qaeda leader Wednesday with helping to mastermind last year's attempted bombing of New York City's subway and said the effort was part of a larger plot that included a failed terrorist attempt in the U.K.
Three suspected al Qaeda members were arrested in Europe Thursday morning in what Norwegian and U.S. officials said was a bombing plot linked to the New York and U.K. plans.
In an indictment unveiled in federal court in Brooklyn Wednesday, prosecutors said 34-year-old Adnan el Shukrijumah, described as a leader of an al Qaeda program dedicated to terrorist attacks in the U.S. and other Western countries, "recruited and directed" three U.S. citizens to carry out suicide bombings in Manhattan in September 2009.
PM Report: NY Subway Bomb Plot Widens
9:25
Federal prosecutors claim senior al Qaeda leaders directed a failed plot to detonate homemade explosives in New York's subway last year. John Bussey and Michael Rothfeld discuss. Also, David Biderman and Jon Friedman on LeBron's next move.
.The indictment also charged Abid Naseer and Tariq ur Rehman, who were previously arrested by authorities in the U.K. as part of a raid in relation to suspected terrorist activity there. Prosecutors said the two cases were "directly related." The charges underscored "the global nature of the terrorist threat we face," said David Kris, assistant attorney general for national security.
On Wednesday, U.K. police again arrested Mr. Naseer, who is 24 years old and of Pakistani descent, in Middlesbrough, in the northeast of England, according to a police spokesman. Mr. Rehman isn't in custody and is believed to be in Pakistan. The last known lawyer for Mr. Naseer didn't respond to requests for comment. Mr. Rehman, 39, reached in Peshawar, North East Pakistan, said: "Of course I deny all these charges. Of course I will fight my case."
A day later, three men were arrested on suspicion of "preparing terror activities," the Norwegian Police Security Service said. Two of the men were arrested in Norway and one in Germany, said Janne Kristiansen, the head of Police Security Service. She said one of the men was a 39-year-old Norwegian of Uighur origin, who had lived in Norway since 1999. The other suspects were a 37-year-old Iraqi and a 31-year-old citizen of Uzbekistan, both of whom have permanent residency permits in Norway. The three had been under surveillance for more than a year.
Officials told the Associated Press that the men were attempting to make portable but powerful peroxide bombs, but it wasn't clear whether they had selected a target for the attacks. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they believe the plan was organized by Salah al-Somali, al Qaeda's former chief of external operations who was charge of plotting attacks world-wide but is believed to have been killed in a CIA drone airstrike last year.
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Court Halts U.K. Terror Extraditions
EU Approves U.S. Data-Sharing Deal
.U.S. prosecutors, meanwhile, said the New York and U.K. plots were directly linked by a man identified in court documents as "Ahmad," who was also charged on Wednesday, though he wasn't in custody and prosecutors said his identity was unknown. Prosecutors said Ahmad transported Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan native who worked as an airport shuttle driver in Colorado, and two others to Waziristan, Pakistan, so they could receive training. Mr. Shukrijumah recruited them at a camp there, prosecutors said.
The indictment, unveiled on the fifth anniversary of bombings in London's transport network, said that Mr. Shukrijumah, together with others, including Mr. al-Somali recruited individuals to conduct a terrorist attack in the U.S.
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A police officer aboard a New York City subway train earlier this year.
.Authorities in the U.S. have been searching for Mr. Shukrijumah, a Saudi Arabia native, for several years and are offering a $5 million reward for information leading to his capture. They are planning to put him on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's most-wanted list as early as Thursday.
Prosecutors described Ahmad as an "al Qaeda facilitator" and said he communicated separately with Mr. Naseer and Mr. Zazi, who were in Pakistan in the same period in 2008, according to the indictment.
Prosecutors said Mr. Naseer sent emails to the same account that Ahmad allegedly used to communicate with Mr. Zazi. Mr. Naseer referred to different explosives in coded language and spoke of planning a large "wedding" for numerous guests in April 2009, and said Ahmad should be ready, prosecutors alleged. A similar code, meaning an attack was ready to be executed, was used by Mr. Zazi when he discussed the planned New York attack with Ahmad, prosecutors said.
When Mr. Naseer and Mr. Rehman were arrested in the U.K. last year as part of a bigger raid that also led to the arrests of 10 others, U.K. authorities found large quantities of flour and oil, as well as surveillance photographs of public areas in Manchester, according to U.S. authorities.
But "Operation Pathway," which led to the arrests, was carried out prematurely after the U.K.'s top counterterrorism official at the time, Bob Quick, was photographed entering No. 10 Downing Street carrying documents that clearly identified key aspects of the operation. All of the men who were arrested were released without charge due to what U.K. prosecutors believed had been insufficient evidence.
British authorities tried to deport 11 of the men arrested, saying they posed a threat to national security. Mr. Naseer won an appeal in May in the Special Immigration Appeals Commission that stopped his deportation back to Pakistan. The U.S. government is seeking to extradite Mr. Naseer, according to London's Metropolitan police service.
In February, Mr. Zazi pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction and other charges. He admitted that he drove to New York last September with explosives and other bomb-making materials and intended to carry out an attack on Manhattan subway lines.
Two other men, Zarein Ahmedzay and Adis Medunjanin, allegedly traveled to Pakistan with Mr. Zazi. In April, Mr, Ahmedzay pleaded guilty to conspiracy and providing material support to al Qaeda.
Mr. Medunjanin, a part-time building superintendent in Queens, N.Y., has denied wrongdoing and is fighting the charges. Wednesday's indictment adds additional terrorism charges against Mr. Medunjanin, who was arrested in January after allegedly attempting to crash his car into another car on the Whitestone Expressway in Queens as a last attempt to carry out a suicide attack on American soil.
"There's nothing new in the indictment as it pertains to Mr. Medunjanin," said his lawyer, Robert C. Gottlieb. "The government from Day One threatened to add charges as well as defendants." He said his client isn't guilty and intends to proceed to trial.
—Alistair MacDonald and the Associated Press contributed to this article.
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http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/
A hidden world, growing beyond control
Monday, July 19, 2010; 1:53 AM
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http://formerspook.blogspot.com/2010/07/not-so-secret-america.html
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Not-So-Secret America
Judging from the first two installments, the Washington Post series on the intelligence community--and its over-reliance on contractors--is more marketing and hype, instead of original reporting.
With its flashy graphics (click on the map the see if there's an intel facility in your town!) and slick packaging, the highly-publicized series, authored by Dana Priest and William Arkin, practically screams "Pulitzer nominee," but there's little new information below the banner headlines.
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wtf?
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h111-5741
http://thomas.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:H.R.5741:
Why is this not on the "mainstream" media I can only find google links to the Examiner.
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Thanks for the info. I guess if they really wanted this it would have been in the financial or healthcare reform bills...
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I offer the challenge that no PATRIOT Act opponent has been able to answer thus far:
What freedom don't you have now that you had pre-PATRIOT act?
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"What freedom don't you have now that you had pre-PATRIOT act?"
I would second that question. I'm angry about freedoms we have lost, but the Patriot Act isn't of that at least on my list. If Khalid from Pashtun tries to reach Ahkbar in the London subway with some last minute details and because some sand got in his phone keyboard he dials your number instead, 10 minutes before detonation, and then his phone is recovered with your number in it, you might expect to have a little scrutiny coming from a curious government. I would hope.
The Healthcare Act OTOH is going to take away all kinds of liberties, choices and privacies that we once enjoyed.
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I offer the challenge that no PATRIOT Act opponent has been able to answer thus far:
What freedom don't you have now that you had pre-PATRIOT act?
Wrong question. The question should be:
What powers does the Federal Govt have now that it didn't have pre-PATRIOT act?
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None. It just streamlined legal investigative processes previously available through grand jury subpeonas and other warrants/court orders.
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http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guides/Straight%20Talk%20on%20Homeland%20Security1.htm
Straight Talk on Homeland Security
By Heather MacDonald
City Journal
August 11, 2003
Read it all.
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http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010...ve-google-cia/
http://www.analysisintelligence.com/?p=1059
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"Despite librarians’ fervent belief to the contrary, this analysis applies equally to library patrons’ book borrowing or Internet use. The government may obtain those records without violating anyone’s Fourth Amendment rights, because the patron has already revealed his borrowing and web browsing to library staff, other readers (in the days of handwritten book checkout cards), and Internet service providers. Tombstones declaring the death of the Fourth Amendment contain no truth whatsoever.
, , ,
"The target of this ire? A section that merely updates existing law to modern technology. The government has long had the power to collect the numbers dialed from, or the incoming numbers to, a person’s telephone by showing a court that the information is “relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation.” Just as in section 215 of the Patriot Act, this legal standard is lower than traditional Fourth Amendment “probable cause,” because the phone user has already forfeited any constitutional privacy rights he may have in his phone number or the number he calls by revealing them to the phone company."
GM, I confess to a visceral unease at the notion that I have no privacy rights about what I read or with whom I speak by telephone.
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The ability of law enforcement to subpeona library or phone records predates the PATRIOT act.
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But the standard now is lower, yes?
"the phone user has already forfeited any constitutional privacy rights he may have in his phone number or the number he calls by revealing them to the phone company"
The logic here makes me uneasy. Read that sentence carefully. Is the logic that anything not known only to me is devoid of privacy?
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And here's a different take on things from that of the article you posted:
http://www.eff.org/nsa/faq
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_war...ce_controversy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_call_database
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...raffic-too.ars
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I'm not talking about NSA, i'm talking about domestic law enforcement.
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So, you disapprove of what the NSA has been doing?
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Not of what I'm aware of, thus far.
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Ok, then I am not getting the importance of your distinction between the NSA and domestic enforcement.
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I don't know that the actual truth is known of exactly what the NSA has or hasn't done. I thought we were discussing the PATRIOT act hype vs. reality.
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I guess I was defining things more broadly, but that it is fair enough to focus on the Patriot Act , , , as long as we get to the big picture too.
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Ok, say you just got appointed Attorney General and BBG is DNI. Please give me a law enforcement and intelligence model that deals with the current threat profile without offending libertarian sensibilities.
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Yeah, and as that pesky Constitution clearly encumbers the current threat environment, justify its existence, too.
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I'm pretty sure Thomas Jeferson didn't have a conceptual model of a jihadist nuke going off in an American city when he was putting quill to paper, did he?
The 4th amd is based on a "reasonable expectation of privacy". The courts have shaped what is defined as "reasonable".
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" Please give me a law enforcement and intelligence model that deals with the current threat profile without offending libertarian sensibilities."
Two ears, one bullet.
I wouldn't have thrown Iraq away; I wouldn't tell the Taliban we're leaving; I'd cut a deal with the Pashtuns to unite Pashtunistan; I'd support the Iranian opposition; I'd get out of the way of Israel's right to self-defense including against Iran; I'd acknowledge that to the extent that Islam seeks theocracy that it is an anti-American political ideology and to that extent not protected by the First Amendment; I'd prosecute those who divulge military intelligence.
That would be before lunch on the first day.
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I'm pretty sure Thomas Jeferson didn't have a conceptual model of a jihadist nuke going off in an American city when he was putting quill to paper, did he?
Yes, there are always very good reasons to embrace despotism, which is why gents like Thomas Jefferson tried to make that impulse hard to realize.
We've had many versions of this conversation, and I understand you'll relentlessly embrace authoritarianism regardless of what I say, just as I'll err on the side of the founder's vision of a free society unfettered by bureaucratic scrutiny of any stripe as once you let the authoritarian djinn out of the bottle it's very unlikely it'll get stuffed back in.
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I'm pretty sure Thomas Jeferson didn't have a conceptual model of a jihadist nuke going off in an American city when he was putting quill to paper, did he?
Yes, there are always very good reasons to embrace despotism, which is why gents like Thomas Jefferson tried to make that impulse hard to realize.
**I guess there are very good reasons to avoid offering specfic policies, when you have nothing to offer but romantic sloganeering, devoid of tangible concepts.**
We've had many versions of this conversation, and I understand you'll relentlessly embrace authoritarianism regardless of what I say, just as I'll err on the side of the founder's vision of a free society unfettered by bureaucratic scrutiny of any stripe as once you let the authoritarian djinn out of the bottle it's very unlikely it'll get stuffed back in.
**So give me the libertarian national security model. Do it all devolve down to the Ron Paul "If we isolate ourselves, the bad people will go away and leave us alone"?
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" Please give me a law enforcement and intelligence model that deals with the current threat profile without offending libertarian sensibilities."
Two ears, one bullet.
I wouldn't have thrown Iraq away; I wouldn't tell the Taliban we're leaving; I'd cut a deal with the Pashtuns to unite Pashtunistan; I'd support the Iranian opposition; I'd get out of the way of Israel's right to self-defense including against Iran; I'd acknowledge that to the extent that Islam seeks theocracy that it is an anti-American political ideology and to that extent not protected by the First Amendment; I'd prosecute those who divulge military intelligence.
That would be before lunch on the first day.
Sounds good, but from the law enforcement perspective, how do you root out and prosecute jihadist cells CONUS prior to them going operational ? Or do we wait for the attacks before we prosecute any left alive?
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**I guess there are very good reasons to avoid offering specfic policies, when you have nothing to offer but romantic sloganeering, devoid of tangible concepts.**
Freedom is not a tangible concept? Interesting.
**So give me the libertarian national security model. Do it all devolve down to the Ron Paul "If we isolate ourselves, the bad people will go away and leave us alone"?
Speak softly and carry a big stick suits me.
You seem to be an all or nothing kind of guy. Is it not possible to want a strong national defense that doesn't do damage to the freedom it seeks to defend? Can one not state that US drug policy has failed without proposing something better? BHO's 2000 page healthcare takeover has yet to be implemented; do we have to wait for it to be irrevocably in place before we can object to it? I know how Stalin would answer these question, will your response be qualitatively different?
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**I guess there are very good reasons to avoid offering specfic policies, when you have nothing to offer but romantic sloganeering, devoid of tangible concepts.**
Freedom is not a tangible concept? Interesting.
**Freedom can be very tangible, like not having radioactive ash wafting down on one's head.**
**So give me the libertarian national security model. Do it all devolve down to the Ron Paul "If we isolate ourselves, the bad people will go away and leave us alone"?
Speak softly and carry a big stick suits me.
You seem to be an all or nothing kind of guy. Is it not possible to want a strong national defense that doesn't do damage to the freedom it seeks to defend? Can one not state that US drug policy has failed without proposing something better? BHO's 2000 page healthcare takeover has yet to be implemented; do we have to wait for it to be irrevocably in place before we can object to it? I know how Stalin would answer these question, will your response be qualitatively different?
No, i'm a pragmatic sort of guy that understands that the real world don't often comply with beatiful ivory tower theory. I'm interested in protecting this nation and ensuring it's survival. We face serious existential threats from many directions and a lack of awareness and apathy from the public for the most part.
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"walk softly and carry a big stick" would mean something more like: We ignore you as long as you do not come and attack us, however attack us and we will ERASE your government. Once that is done we will leave you alone....... We DO NOT stay in the country and try and impose our style on theirs, or create long term problems and drains that damage us more than it damages the attacker. A fairly quick 2-3 year war followed by us being gone as quickly as possible after dealing in a final fashion with the responsible parties............ It does not mean "running and hiding" that you seem to be implying.
Yes FREEDOM is as tangible as that nervous feeling you get in traffic when a cop come up behind you and follows your for a couple of blocks, you KNOW you have done nothing wrong but that feeling is there.......... Freedom is the absence of that. Right now we are not free......... when a cop can shoot a scared cowering dog, and not be responsible for restitution to the home owner. When police can take a gun from a CCW permit holder for safe keeping and require him to "come down to the station" to get it back instead of merely handing it back with his ID before they leave. When a SWAT team is dispatched for a theft of a playstation. (a few examples I have seen) We are not free and the government is not acting in compliance with its contract with the people. The Constitution is that contract. Any law passed that violates that is not a law- and there are lots of those and they are ENFORCED not by consent of the government, but by a man with a gun.
<SIGH> Time the continued condoned abuse makes it apparent where people stand here, time to do what a lot do disengage until the boxes are finally checked off for the final solution.
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No, i'm a pragmatic sort of guy that understands that the real world don't often comply with beatiful ivory tower theory. I'm interested in protecting this nation and ensuring it's survival. We face serious existential threats from many directions and a lack of awareness and apathy from the public for the most part.
And one of those existential threats that we faced before, are facing now, and will face again involves folks of an authoritarian bent using the existential threat du jour to eliminate perceived enemies, as Sacco and Vanzetti can attest. We saw it with the Alien and Seditions Act, we saw it where anarchists and wobblies were concerned, we saw it in the '50s, we saw it during the Civil Rights struggle, we saw it under Richard Nixon, and likely saw it numerous other times that aren't leaping to mind at the moment.
If we can't beat our enemies without becoming like them then we've lost the war already. If that puts me on the wrong side of things in your book, well, I'm in good company.
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"walk softly and carry a big stick" would mean something more like: We ignore you as long as you do not come and attack us, however attack us and we will ERASE your government.
So big chunks of DC and Manhattan disappear in a flash. AQ releases a martyrdom video from UK and German nationals claiming credit. Who exactly are you declaring war on?
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Rarick wrote:
"walk softly and carry a big stick" would mean something more like: We ignore you as long as you do not come and attack us, however attack us and we will ERASE your government. Once that is done we will leave you alone....... We DO NOT stay in the country and try and impose our style on theirs, or create long term problems and drains that damage us more than it damages the attacker. A fairly quick 2-3 year war followed by us being gone as quickly as possible after dealing in a final fashion with the responsible parties............ It does not mean "running and hiding" that you seem to be implying.
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This is exactly what Col. Ralph Peters proposed.
GM asks:
"So big chunks of DC and Manhattan disappear in a flash. AQ releases a martyrdom video from UK and German nationals claiming credit. Who exactly are you declaring war on?"
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A very pertinent question.
The larger point intended by my previous answer was that the answer lies not in defensively trying to plug all the holes here at home, because as an open society ultimately it cannot be done, but in aggressively going after the enemy on his home turf.
Yes I recognize that this does not solve the UK and German Islamo-fascists posited by GM's question, but what I said does go after the possible sources of nukes: Pakistan, Iran, etc.
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In this scenario, the post-blast analysis shows that the nuclear materials were probably produced by the Soviets in the cold war. What now?
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How'd the material get past the gamma ray detectors in C 130s flying 24/7 above DC & NY?
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I won't go into that in this venue.
BTW, aren't you outraged that fissionable material possessors might get Sacco and Vanzetti'ed by oppressive aircraft with Orwellian radiation detection equipment? Without a warrant, even!
:cry:
"First, they came after those with weapons grade fissionable materials, I didn't speak up, as I had no weapons grade fissionable material....."
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Oh, Sacco and Vanzetti might not be the innocents you imagine.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5245754
Sacco and Vanzetti were a cause célèbre during the 1920s. Left-leaning intellectuals, including Sinclair, championed their innocence. Their eventual execution in 1927 touched off riots in Paris and London. Upton Sinclair's letter reveals he knew more than he let on about the case. We've invited Upton Sinclair's biographer, Anthony Arthur, to tell us about it.
Hello.
Mr. ANTHONY ARTHUR (Upton Sinclair's Biographer): Hello, it's nice to be with you.
ELLIOTT: So in this letter, Sinclair describes a meeting with Fred Moore, who was Sacco and Vanzetti's lawyer at the time. They're meeting at a hotel in Denver. And he writes, quote, "Alone in a hotel room with Fred, I begged him to tell me the full truth. He then told me that the men were guilty and he told me in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them."
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BTW, aren't you outraged that fissionable material possessors might get Sacco and Vanzetti'ed by oppressive aircraft with Orwellian radiation detection equipment? Without a warrant, even!
Pshaw, if you are unable to make the distinction here no number of words I keyboard will do so for you.
But indeed, and as you should know from what I've posted and all the words we've exchanged, I don't have a problem applying the right tool for the right job. Start sucking up inordinate amounts of data from sources where there is an expectation of privacy in a manner where there is little accountability and a poor probability it will get to an investigator who really needs it unless it migrates on to a server so accessible the data soon shows up on Wikileaks, then yes, I have trouble with that sort of charlie foxtrot, and you ought to, also. As my gamma example ought to illustrate, however, is there are technological tools aplenty out there that can and are applied to the dire scenarios you posit as an excuse to toss this nations's founding principles on to the slag heap. Surely we are smart enough to perform a little technological triage before we start blue penciling the constitution?
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Oh, Sacco and Vanzetti might not be the innocents you imagine.
No doubt, though if their supposed crimes were transplanted to this day and age they'd be appearing on talk shows sitting next to Bill Ayers rather than heading to the gallows.
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I don't wander the halls of Langley or Ft. Meade, but I can tell you that for law enforcement there are strict rules and structures in place regarding intelligence systems. I recently did a 5 day course on the topic and they beat us over the head with 28 CFR 23 daily.
http://www.iir.com/28cfr/
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Yes FREEDOM is as tangible as that nervous feeling you get in traffic when a cop come up behind you and follows your for a couple of blocks, you KNOW you have done nothing wrong but that feeling is there.......... Freedom is the absence of that. Right now we are not free.........
**Well, traffic laws and traffic stops by police aren't going away in the US. So where are you moving to? I hear the tribal regions of Pakistan are lovely this time of year.**
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Speaking of "bully" feel about it, someone posted a while ago (I couldn't find it) that photography is allowed/protected in a public
place. I agree; I enjoy photography (film) and am up on the laws. Yet I find Police want to be exempt from the law - can't take the heat???
Or they just enjoy the intimidation? No matter how you look at it, it's wrong.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2008566,00.html?hpt=T2
Anthony Graber, a Maryland Air National Guard staff sergeant, faces up to 16 years in prison. His crime? He videotaped his March encounter with a state trooper who pulled him over for speeding on a motorcycle. Then Graber put the video — which could put the officer in a bad light — up on YouTube.
It doesn't sound like much. But Graber is not the only person being slapped down by the long arm of the law for the simple act of videotaping the police in a public place. Prosecutors across the U.S. claim the videotaping violates wiretap laws — a stretch, to put it mildly.
Law enforcement is fighting back. In the case of Graber — a young husband and father who had never been arrested — the police searched his residence and seized computers. Graber spent 26 hours in jail even before facing the wiretapping charges that could conceivably put him away for 16 years. (It is hard to believe he will actually get anything like that, however. One point on his side: the Maryland attorney general's office recently gave its opinion that a court would likely find that the wiretap law does not apply to traffic stops.)
The legal argument prosecutors rely on in police video cases is thin. They say the audio aspect of the videos violates wiretap laws because, in some states, both parties to a conversation must consent to having a private conversation recorded. The hole in their argument is the word "private." A police officer arresting or questioning someone on a highway or street is not having a private conversation. He is engaging in a public act.
Even if these cases do not hold up in court, the police can do a lot of damage just by threatening to arrest and prosecute people. "We see a fair amount of intimidation — police saying, 'You can't do that. It's illegal,'" says Christopher Calabrese, a lawyer with the ACLU's Washington office. It discourages people from filming, he says, even when they have the right to film.
Most people are not so game for a fight with the police. They just stop filming. These are the cases no one finds out about, in which there is no arrest or prosecution, but the public's freedoms have nevertheless been eroded.
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I sense we are drifting from the subject of this thread. JDN may I ask you to please post that at
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1336.50
The subject is an important one and deserves its own discussion.
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And that final line is why I geneally try and ignore you. Too bad this bbs does not have an ignore button, every once in a while I get the urge to tilt at windmills..............and end up with the same result a certain Castillian did.
Your outlook is one of the reasons I decided NOT to continue serving the country as a cop, it is definately anti-constitutional and has way too much of the "bully" feel about it.
**If you are opposed to traffic stops, exactly what were you planning on doing as a police officer?**
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I interrupt the witty repartee for this:
August 4, 2010 4:00 AM PDT
Feds admit storing checkpoint body scan images
by Declan McCullagh
TSA's X-ray backscatter scanning with "privacy filter"
(Credit: TSA.gov)
For the last few years, federal agencies have defended body scanning by insisting that all images will be discarded as soon as they're viewed. The Transportation Security Administration claimed last summer, for instance, that "scanned images cannot be stored or recorded."
Now it turns out that some police agencies are storing the controversial images after all. The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.
This follows an earlier disclosure (PDF) by the TSA that it requires all airport body scanners it purchases to be able to store and transmit images for "testing, training, and evaluation purposes." The agency says, however, that those capabilities are not normally activated when the devices are installed at airports.
Body scanners penetrate clothing to provide a highly detailed image so accurate that critics have likened it to a virtual strip search. Technologies vary, with millimeter wave systems capturing fuzzier images, and backscatter X-ray machines able to show precise anatomical detail. The U.S. government likes the idea because body scanners can detect concealed weapons better than traditional magnetometers.
This privacy debate, which has been simmering since the days of the Bush administration, came to a boil two weeks ago when Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced that scanners would soon appear at virtually every major airport. The updated list includes airports in New York City, Dallas, Washington, Miami, San Francisco, Seattle, and Philadelphia.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, has filed a lawsuit asking a federal judge to grant an immediate injunction pulling the plug on TSA's body scanning program. In a separate lawsuit, EPIC obtained a letter (PDF) from the Marshals Service, part of the Justice Department, and released it on Tuesday afternoon.
These "devices are designed and deployed in a way that allows the images to be routinely stored and recorded, which is exactly what the Marshals Service is doing," EPIC executive director Marc Rotenberg told CNET. "We think it's significant."
William Bordley, an associate general counsel with the Marshals Service, acknowledged in the letter that "approximately 35,314 images...have been stored on the Brijot Gen2 machine" used in the Orlando, Fla. federal courthouse. In addition, Bordley wrote, a Millivision machine was tested in the Washington, D.C. federal courthouse but it was sent back to the manufacturer, which now apparently possesses the image database.
The Gen 2 machine, manufactured by Brijot of Lake Mary, Fla., uses a millimeter wave radiometer and accompanying video camera to store up to 40,000 images and records. Brijot boasts that it can even be operated remotely: "The Gen 2 detection engine capability eliminates the need for constant user observation and local operation for effective monitoring. Using our APIs, instantly connect to your units from a remote location via the Brijot Client interface."
TSA's millimeter wave body scan
(Credit: TSA.gov)
This trickle of disclosures about the true capabilities of body scanners--and how they're being used in practice--is probably what alarms privacy advocates more than anything else.
A 70-page document (PDF) showing the TSA's procurement specifications, classified as "sensitive security information," says that in some modes the scanner must "allow exporting of image data in real time" and provide a mechanism for "high-speed transfer of image data" over the network. (It also says that image filters will "protect the identity, modesty, and privacy of the passenger.")
"TSA is not being straightforward with the public about the capabilities of these devices," Rotenberg said. "This is the Department of Homeland Security subjecting every U.S. traveler to an intrusive search that can be recorded without any suspicion--I think it's outrageous." EPIC's lawsuit says that the TSA should have announced formal regulations, and argues that the body scanners violate the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits "unreasonable" searches.
For its part, the TSA says that body scanning is perfectly constitutional: "The program is designed to respect individual sensibilities regarding privacy, modesty and personal autonomy to the maximum extent possible, while still performing its crucial function of protecting all members of the public from potentially catastrophic events."
Declan McCullagh has covered the intersection of politics and technology for over a decade. E-mail Declan.
__________________
www.NoPoliticalLemmings.com
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Woof,
Are the doors still open for 9/11 style attacks?
http://cis.org/faisal-shahzad (http://cis.org/faisal-shahzad)
P.C.
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Although AQ will return to aviation oriented attacks in the future, Beslan style or VBIED attacks are more easily done these days.
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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38790670/ns/technology_and_science-security/
Disturbing aviation security news.
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Woof,
Tis the season... www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gdDi_luupyZlcRMQLIlyqNh-NilQ
p.c.
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Pasting here GM's post from the US-Mexico thread because of its relevance to Homeland Security.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/aug/31/signs-in-arizona-warn-of-smuggler-dangers/
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Some points worth keeping in mind here:
=====================================
by Fareed Zakaria
September 04, 2010
What America Has Lost
It’s clear we overreacted to 9/11
Nine years after 9/11, can anyone doubt that Al Qaeda is simply not that deadly a threat? Since that gruesome day in 2001, once governments everywhere began serious countermeasures, Osama bin Laden’s terror network has been unable to launch a single major attack on high-value targets in the United States and Europe. While it has inspired a few much smaller attacks by local jihadis, it has been unable to execute a single one itself. Today, Al Qaeda’s best hope is to find a troubled young man who has been radicalized over the Internet, and teach him to stuff his underwear with explosives.
I do not minimize Al Qaeda’s intentions, which are barbaric. I question its capabilities. In every recent conflict, the United States has been right about the evil intentions of its adversaries but massively exaggerated their strength. In the 1980s, we thought the Soviet Union was expanding its power and influence when it was on the verge of economic and political bankruptcy. In the 1990s, we were certain that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear arsenal. In fact, his factories could barely make soap.
The error this time is more damaging. September 11 was a shock to the American psyche and the American system. As a result, we overreacted. In a crucially important Washington Post reporting project, “Top Secret America,” Dana Priest and William Arkin spent two years gathering information on how 9/11 has really changed America.
Here are some of the highlights. Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. The amount of money spent on intelligence has risen by 250 percent, to $75 billion (and that’s the public number, which is a gross underestimate). That’s more than the rest of the world spends put together. Thirty-three new building complexes have been built for intelligence bureaucracies alone, occupying 17 million square feet—the equivalent of 22 U.S. Capitols or three Pentagons. Five miles southeast of the White House, the largest government site in 50 years is being built—at a cost of $3.4 billion—to house the largest bureaucracy after the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs: the Department of Homeland Security, which has a workforce of 230,000 people.
This new system produces 50,000 reports a year—136 a day!—which of course means few ever get read. Those senior officials who have read them describe most as banal; one tells me, “Many could be produced in an hour using Google.” Fifty-one separate bureaucracies operating in 15 states track the flow of money to and from terrorist organizations, with little information-sharing.
Some 30,000 people are now employed exclusively to listen in on phone conversations and other communications in the United States. And yet no one in Army intelligence noticed that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had been making a series of strange threats at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he trained. The father of the Nigerian “Christmas bomber” reported his son’s radicalism to the U.S. Embassy. But that message never made its way to the right people in this vast security apparatus. The plot was foiled only by the bomber’s own incompetence and some alert passengers.
Such mistakes might be excusable. But the rise of this national-security state has entailed a vast expansion in the government’s powers that now touches every aspect of American life, even when seemingly unrelated to terrorism. The most chilling aspect of Dave Eggers’s heartbreaking book, Zeitoun, is that the federal government’s fastest and most efficient response to Hurricane Katrina was the creation of a Guantánamo-like prison facility (in days!) in which 1,200 American citizens were summarily detained and denied any of their constitutional rights for months, a suspension of habeas corpus that reads like something out of a Kafka novel.
In the past, the U.S. government has built up for wars, assumed emergency authority, and sometimes abused that power, yet always demobilized after the war. But this is a war without end. When do we declare victory? When do the emergency powers cease?
Conservatives are worried about the growing power of the state. Surely this usurpation is more worrisome than a few federal stimulus programs. When James Madison pondered this issue, he came to a simple conclusion: “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germs of every other … In war, too, the discretionary power of the executive is extended... and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people.
“No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual war,” Madison concluded.
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We didn't do enough, post 9/11. Unsecured borders, political correctness have hampered what needs to be done.
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Woof,
Earth to Fareed, that's how terrorism works. We didn't overreact, we reacted because we had no choice. 9/11 was an attack intended to get a reaction, it was intended to make us use valuable resources for security. It worked. Had we not reacted then there would have been more attacks until we did. Al-Qaeda is just as deadly a threat as it ever was and if we drop our guard they'll attack again. Terrorism is a tool that can be used and then set aside until it's needed again, it's only part of a strategy to weaken and over stretch American's resources. Yes, our bureaucrats have dealt with this problem as they have with all our problems, like imbeciles, but that does not mean that none of it was necessary or that it is now unnecessary. These fly by night jihadist are just useful idiots, if and when al-Qaeda wants to launch another attack on the U.S. trust me it will be well planned and they have plenty of quality terrorist willing to carry it out.
P.C.
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I would agree that we should evaluate and make new assessments as to what is effective security and what isn't but I'll remind you that after 9/11, until the American public felt the security standards were improved significantly enough, no one was flying and airlines and the tourism industry were going bankrupt. They pretty much had to do what they did in order to restore confidence at the time. I don't think that was an overreaction.
P.C.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_effects_arising_from_the_September_11_attacks
Exactly how many 9/11s are we supposed to just shrug off?
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http://hotair.com/archives/2010/09/07/ice-considering-changing-catch-and-release-to-just-release/
Let's just stop law enforcement. This should turn out well.
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http://www.frumforum.com/the-myths-of-911
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-09-10-flights-terror-targets_N.htm
Two relevant articles.
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GM:
Invariably you have excellent judgement in what you share, but may I ask for a bit more description to accompany the URLs? Thank you.
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Woof,
I have the same tendency but I really have very little time to type much out and my computer skills aren't up to speed as well, with how to cut and paste to a forum reply. However, I will try to add a little more text when I can.
P.C.
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Just a sentence or three to help people decide whether it is of sufficient interest to them to go to that site is all we are hoping for :-)
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Our man in Iraq reports today as follows:
"A few weeks back I told some of you I noticed a trend towards silenced pistols in hits. Well I spoke today to somebody who works closely with the Ministry of Interior, and he said attacks by silenced pistols are off the charts and are now a more likely occurrence than a non-silenced pistol.
"Since the jihadist movement learns from each other, and adopts each other's effective tactics, and since we know stuff happening stateside is only a matter of time, keep this in mind even in the homeland."
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http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/09/28/mumbai-style-terror-attack-thwarted-europe/
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**Just a reminder**
Patriot Act helped foil New York terror plot
Examiner Editorial
September 30, 2009
President George W. Bush signed the Patriot Act in 2001 after a hard-fought debate in Congress.
President Obama called New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly to thank him for his efforts in thwarting a planned terrorist attack on the city's subway system, which counterterrorism experts describe as the most serious terror plot since 9/11. But Obama should have also thanked his predecessor in the White House.
The arrest and indictment of Najibullah Zazi on charges of conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction was made possible by the "roving wiretaps" allowed by the Patriot Act, which was signed into law in 2001 by President George W. Bush. "All the layers of defense President Bush set up after Sept. 11 are working," Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., pointed out. The Patriot Act caused plenty of controversy, but it was key to the Bush administration's successful eight-year counterterrorism strategy that focused on disrupting terror attacks and thereby preventing the deaths of more Americans here at home.
Even the FBI's investigation into the 24-year-old airport shuttle driver began on Bush's watch. Agents tracked the Afghan native (and legal resident of the United States) when he traveled to the tribal areas of Pakistan last year, where he was allegedly taught how to make bombs by al Qaeda operatives. Nine pages of handwritten formulas for homemade explosives, fuses and detonators were later found on his laptop, e-mailed from an Internet account originating in Pakistan, court documents charge. This is exactly the kind of foreign communications the Patriot Act was designed to intercept.
After purchasing "unusually large quantities of hydrogen peroxide and acetone products from beauty supply stores" in Denver this summer, Zazi on Sept. 6 allegedly asked an unnamed individual to give him "the correct mixtures of ingredients to make explosives" before leaving acetone residue in a Colorado hotel room. Tailed by the FBI, he rented a car and drove to New York, where his fingerprints were reportedly found on batteries and a scale in a Queens home that law enforcement officials raided on Sept. 14.
Also indicted in the subway bombing plot was Queens imam Ahmad Wais Afzali -- who warned Zazi in a call intercepted by the FBI around Sept. 11 that he was under investigation, thus forcing officials to speed up the arrest. Again, this wiretap is exactly the kind of domestic communication the Patriot Act was designed to intercept in the effort to prevent new bloodshed.
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http://formerspook.blogspot.com/2010/09/connect-dots.html
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Connect the Dots
...Al Qaida was/is reportedly planning a Mumbai-style attack against cities in Western Europe.
...The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, is refusing comment. That's often a sign that the information is credible, and the spy masters are upset that someone blabbed before all the suspects could be rounded up, or the plot was completely foiled.
...Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal says a recent surge in U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan is part of an effort to disrupt possible attacks in Europe.
...And the U.S. is also a potential target, according to ABC News and Britain Sky News.
But before you say this is nothing out of the ordinary, consider this unusual twist that might related. On Tuesday, federal, state and local law enforcement agents were stopping--and inspecting--all west-bound tractor-trailers traveling on I-20 out of Atlanta. At the height of the evening rush hour, no less.
A spokesman for the TSA told WSB-TV that the search was part of a "training exercise." But the station's investigative reporter, Mark Winne, learned from other sources that the inspections are part of a counter-terrorism operation.
Obviously, there's a big difference between an "operation" and an "exercise." Additionally, we've never heard of this type of drill being conducted on a major interstate highway, during rush hour, with participation by all levels of law enforcement. So, it sounds like something beyond training prompted that traffic jam on I-20 Tuesday afternoon.
But, before we connect that final dot, it is worth noting that the European plot apparently didn't involve large trucks or radioactive devices. The trucks being searched on I-20 west of Atlanta were screened with a radiation detector (and other devices), according to WSB.
Ultimately, we will defer to the experts on this one. If you're a security or law enforcement official who can shed a little more light on this operation, please drop us a line at ftmeaderefugee@gmail.com, or icspook86@hotmail.com. Your confidentiality is assured.
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Failed Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad bragged that he hoped to murder at least 40 innocent victims and would have attempted a second attack two weeks later if he hadn't been busted, the feds revealed today.
The evil terrorist wannabe also admitted watching "real time video feeds" over the Web to plan his botched blast at the Crossroads of the World, court papers said.
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/times_square_bomber_planned_second_n5yDNjJEEya6gnFZ7IKf1H#ixzz112PljHD5
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http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2010/10/01/terror-prevention-what-a-difference-a-day-in-september-made/
Terror Prevention: What a Difference a Day in September Made
posted at 7:05 pm on October 1, 2010 by J.E. Dyer
If you have the perspective of informed hindsight – if you knew what the intelligence was in the months before 9/11 – then the information about the latest mega-plot to attack Western targets, and the peremptory response being mounted to it, are a study in moral contrasts.
The moral contrast lies in what we were willing to do before 9/11 and what we are willing to do today. The basis for comparison is strong: the character of information that tipped us to the threat before 9/11 was the same thing as what tipped us to the threat being revealed this week. Consider these passages from one of ABC’s earliest reports on the current plan against Europe and the US (linked by AP here):
A senior US official said that while there is a “credible” threat, no specific time or place is known. President Obama has been briefed about the threat, say senior US officials…
In testimony before Congress last week, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said, “We are all seeing increased activity by a more diverse set of groups and a more diverse set of threats.”
And this one from Newsweek (h/t AP again; link at top):
For weeks now, as missiles from American drones have snuffed out their leaders and terrorized their recruits in the remote mountains of Pakistan’s North Waziristan area, Al Qaeda fighters have kept their spirits up by telling each other they were about to have their revenge. “It’s like they’ve just been waiting for news, as if they were all excited about something big about to happen in the West,” says an Afghan Taliban intelligence officer known to NEWSWEEK who operates as a liaison between his organization and Al Qaeda.
A credible threat; no specific time or place known; increased activity by multiple groups; terrorist operatives talking about “something big” that was going to be done against the West – that describes perfectly the organized information US and other Western authorities had to work with before 9/11.
What we did not have before 9/11 was a military occupation and a cooperative government in Afghanistan, a detention center for terrorists in Bagram, a detainee interrogation program, the agreements with dozens of nations to take preemptive action against terrorists, or the willingness on our part to repeatedly conduct military attacks on terrorists operating in other nations’ sovereign territory, even when the other nations object (as Pakistan is doing), and when the terrorists haven’t committed their atrocities against us yet.
Each one of these measures and agreements has been essential to identifying the particulars of the current plot and acting effectively to avert it. In the absence of 9/11 itself, I cannot imagine Americans or other Western nations deciding to institute such measures or agreements. Yet if we were not willing to occupy the territory used by terrorists, and detain terrorists, interrogate them, and attack them in their strongholds before they can pull their plans off, we would be talking this fall about smoking rubble and charred bodies in Europe instead of terrorists being killed and their plots defeated.
Actionable prior intelligence on terror plots doesn’t just happen. The main things it takes are the things we weren’t willing to do – had no idea of doing – before 9/11. The events of the past week have clarified that, with a starkness we haven’t seen for quite a while. Something Americans must not forget is that if we weren’t keeping the nexus of this effort overseas, the price we would be paying would not just involve taking hits from terror attacks. Our people would be unwilling to simply do nothing and wait for the next hit. We would be focusing “prevention” inward – with less of an operational effect, but nevertheless rapidly destroying the civil liberties that make it matter to be an American in the first place.
I have strong reservations about Obama’s heavy reliance on drone strikes, which perilously skirts an ugly, amoral cynicism. In fact, I’m quite concerned about the direction he is taking our operations in both Afghanistan and Iraq. But with the larger strategy of fighting this war forward, we must agree, if we want to keep our own freedoms and have the highest likelihood of preventing future attacks. This war, started on George W. Bush’s terms, has had its “goods and others,” but it does ultimately represent the lowest cost of any alternative we have.
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http://www.politico.com/blogs/joshgerstein/1010/Target_of_FBI_terrorsupport_raid_visited_WH.html
Abudayyeh’s group, AAAN, briefly drew attention during the presidential campaign following reports that a foundation on whose board Obama served donated $40,000 to the group for “community organizing" in 2001. Conservative critics said the group and Abudayyeh have promoted anti-Israeli views. AAAN officials said the organization is strictly focused on local community issues and doesn’t get involved in international politics.
In 2003, Obama spoke at an AAAN-sponsored farewell dinner for Rashid Khalidi, a professor who was decamping from the University of Chicago to Columbia. During the 2008 campaign, the Los Angeles Times obtained a video of the event and reported that Obama lavished praise on Khalidi, who once served as a spokesman for the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Other speakers at the event railed against Israeli policies.
Late in the 2008 campaign, Republican nominee Sen. John McCain attacked the Times for failing to make the video public. The newspaper said it obtained the video on the condition that it not be released publicly.
High-level contacts between politically active Arab-American leaders and White House officials have stirred controversy in the past after the activists became caught up in terrorism-related probes. In some cases, defense attorneys for those charged have sought to use their White House visits to undermine the prosecution’s assertions that the individuals were dangerous.
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http://www.politico.com/blogs/joshgerstein/1010/Target_of_FBI_terrorsupport_raid_visited_WH.html?showall#
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Amazing how hard it is to find a muslim leader in this country that doesn't have a connection to terrorist groups. Boy, if I didn't know that islam was a religion of peace, i'd think there was problem with the core theology or something.....
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http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/terror-alert-continues-nypd-holds-drill-prep-mumbai/story?id=11879452
A good police department would plan and train for this no matter if there was intel or not. It will be interesting to see if other cities do this drill as well, however.
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"I'm thinking like Ellison is worthy of continued observation, perhaps on the Islam in America and/or the Homeland Security threads"
I'll put this here just because the underlying issue, nervous about Muslims on planes is about Homeland Security.
Note what a nut this guy is how reasonable and thoughtful he comes across.
Couple of straw men arguments, Juan didn't want the Muslims messed with, he was just saying how it made him feel, and Schulz jumps right over to the unFairness Doctrine which would solve absolutely nothing in American media or freedom.
Ellison is the strongest opinion I've heard supporting the NPR firing. He says Juan Williams is an "Un-American" " Bigot", and the leftist host agrees 100%. The host hates Fox and Ellison takes offense of the slam against Muslims. See the youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gYe0J3pRK4 . Found this through Powerline and they take the opportunity to rip him and his past pretty well:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/10/027531.php
Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Keith Ellison made his name as the first Muslim elected to Congress. It was therefore all but obligatory for him to weigh in on the firing of Juan Williams from NPR as a result of Williams's expression of his feelings on Fox News about seeing air passengers dressed in "Muslim garb," as he did last week on Ed Schultz's MSNBC show.
It's always illuminating to hear the deep thoughts of Keith Ellison on matters of public concern. We still await the enterprising journalist who will ask Ellison which branch of Islam it is that comports with the tenets of the Democratic agenda on the equality of women, abortion, gay rights and all the rest. Then we might learn something from him that we don't know.
Incidentally, Ellison used to hang with the gangbanging Minneapolis cop killer Sharif Willis. Now he hangs with the likes of Schultz, an altogether better class of thug. In his conversation with Schultz, Ellison announced he felt like taking Williams's books (referred to in in the singular as "that stuff") off the shelf "and putting it in the garbage."
Schultz elicited from Ellison the fevered charge that "Juan Williams contributes to profiling and harassing Americans." He doubts Williams's integrity -- this from a guy who predicated his first congressional campaign on three easily demonstrable lies.
Given the profile of the perpetrators of 9/11, Ellison makes the point that Williams's reaction to passengers in "Muslim garb" is misguided. Is Ellison chiding Williams for failing to observe that the rational fear would be focused on Muslims who blend in? Muslims like Keith Ellison? Let's consider the point duly noted. While Ellison's point has superficial plausibility, however, one should also consider the uses of "Muslim garb" in concealing the explosive vest that has proved so popular among Muslim terrorists.
It should be noted that Ellison lurked in the background of the November 2006 incident involving the flying imams at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. The whole point of the lawsuit brought by the flying imams was to disable law enforcement from acting on the justifiable concerns of ordinary citizens about ostentatious Muslims behaving in a manner that would cause rational concern.
The flying imams were removed from the aircraft and interrogated while the USAirways flight went on its way. USAirways and the law enforcement defendants in the flying imams' lawsuit paid an undisclosed but tidy sum to the flying imams to settle their lawsuit. The flying imams prevailed; the next time around, it will be the imams who fly and the other passengers who stay behind.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2010/10/29/breaking-bomb-found-on-yemen-to-us-cargo-flight/
I wonder if Robert Wright would feel nervous getting on a plane with a package mailed by a muslim.....
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For the First Time, the TSA Meets Resistance
OCT 29 2010, 12:20 PM ET
This past Wednesday, I showed up at Baltimore-Washington International for a flight to Providence, R.I. I had a choice of two TSA screening checkpoints. I picked mine based on the number of people waiting in line, not because I am impatient, but because the coiled, closely packed lines at TSA screening sites are the most dangerous places in airports, completely unprotected from a terrorist attack -- a terrorist attack that would serve the same purpose (shutting down air travel) as an attack on board an aircraft.
Agents were funneling every passenger at this particular checkpoint through a newly installed back-scatter body imaging device, which allows the agency's security officers to, in essence, see under your clothing. The machine captures an image of your naked self, including your genitals, and sends the image to an agent in a separate room. I don't object to stringent security (as you will soon see), but I do object to meaningless security theater (Bruce Schneier's phrase), and I believe that we would be better off if the TSA focused its attentions on learning the identity and background of each passenger, rather than on checking whether passengers are carrying contraband (as I suggested in this article, it is possible for a moderately clever person to move contraband through TSA screenings with a fair amount of ease, even with this new technology).
In part because of the back-scatter imager's invasiveness (a TSA employee in Miami was arrested recently after he physically assaulted a colleague who had mocked his modestly sized penis, which was fully apparent in a captured back-scatter image), the TSA is allowing passengers to opt-out of the back-scatter and choose instead a pat-down. I've complained about TSA pat-downs in the past, because they, too, were more security theater than anything else. They are, as I would learn, becoming more serious, as well.
At BWI, I told the officer who directed me to the back-scatter that I preferred a pat-down. I did this in order to see how effective the manual search would be. When I made this request, a number of TSA officers, to my surprise, began laughing. I asked why. One of them -- the one who would eventually conduct my pat-down -- said that the rules were changing shortly, and that I would soon understand why the back-scatter was preferable to the manual search. I asked him if the new guidelines included a cavity search. "No way. You think Congress would allow that?"
I answered, "If you're a terrorist, you're going to hide your weapons in your anus or your vagina." He blushed when I said "vagina."
"Yes, but starting tomorrow, we're going to start searching your crotchal area" -- this is the word he used, "crotchal" -- and you're not going to like it."
"What am I not going to like?" I asked.
"We have to search up your thighs and between your legs until we meet resistance," he explained.
"Resistance?" I asked.
"Your testicles," he explained.
'That's funny," I said, "because 'The Resistance' is the actual name I've given to my testicles."
He answered, "Like 'The Situation,' that guy from 'Jersey Shore?'"
Yes, exactly, I said. (I used to call my testicles "The Insurgency," but those assholes in Iraq ruined the term.)
I pointed out to the security officer that 50 percent of the American population has no balls (90 percent in Washington, D.C., where I live), so what is going to happen when the pat-down officer meets no resistance in the crotchal area of women? "If there's no resistance, then there's nothing there."
"But what about people who hide weapons in their cavities? I asked. I actually said "vagina" again, just to see him blush. "We're just not going there," he reiterated.
I asked him if he was looking forward to conducting the full-on pat-downs. "Nobody's going to do it," he said, "once they find out that we're going to do."
In other words, people, when faced with a choice, will inevitably choose the Dick-Measuring Device over molestation? "That's what we're hoping for. We're trying to get everyone into the machine." He called over a colleague. "Tell him what you call the back-scatter," he said. "The Dick-Measuring Device," I said. "That's the truth," the other officer responded.
The pat-down at BWI was fairly vigorous, by the usual tame standards of the TSA, but it was nothing like the one I received the next day at T.F. Green in Providence. Apparently, I was the very first passenger to ask to opt-out of back-scatter imaging. Several TSA officers heard me choose the pat-down, and they reacted in a way meant to make the ordinary passenger feel very badly about his decision. One officer said to a colleague who was obviously going to be assigned to me, "Get new gloves, man, you're going to need them where you're going."
The agent snapped on his blue gloves, and patiently explained exactly where he was going to touch me. I felt like a sophomore at Oberlin.
"I'm going to run my hands up your thighs, and then feel your buttocks, then I'm going to reach under you until I meet --"
"Resistance?" I interrupted.
"Yes, resistance. Do you want to go into a private room?" he asked.
"Are you asking me into a private room?" I said. He looked confused. I said, "No, here is fine."
He felt me up good, but not great. It was not in any way the best pat-down I've ever received. The most thorough search I've ever experienced was in the Bekaa Valley, by Hezbollah security officers. That took quite awhile, and the Resistance really manhandled my Resistance. There was no cavity search, of course -- no magazine story, even one about Hezbollah terrorism -- is worth that. But it was the fairly full Monty.
I draw three lessons from this week's experience: The pat-down, while more effective than previous pat-downs, will not stop dedicated and clever terrorists from smuggling on board small weapons or explosives. When I served as a military policeman in an Israeli army prison, many of the prisoners "bangled" contraband up their asses. I know this not because I checked, but because eventually they told me this when I asked.
The second lesson is that the effectiveness of pat-downs does not matter very much, because the obvious goal of the TSA is to make the pat-down embarrassing enough for the average passenger that the vast majority of people will choose high-tech humiliation over the low-tech ball check.
The third lesson remains constant: By the time terrorist plotters make it to the airport, it is, generally speaking, too late to stop them. Plots must be broken up long before the plotters reach the target. If they are smart enough to make it to the airport without arrest, it is almost axiomatically true that they will be smart enough to figure out a way to bring weapons aboard a plane.
UPDATE: Many people are asking me if I actually named my testicles "The Resistance." Of course not. I was just messing with the guy from TSA. My testicles are actually named "Tzipi" and "Bibi."
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/10/for-the-first-time-the-tsa-meets-resistance/65390/
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I'll take the pat down, if made to choose.
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"I believe that we would be better off if the TSA focused its attentions on learning the identity and background of each passenger, rather than on checking whether passengers are carrying contraband."
**Yes, good intelligence is important, isn't it, BBG?**
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Jesus dude, lighten up. If you can't tell the difference between effective and intrusive, if you think constitutional protections are trivialities to be circumvented, if you think that government can be trusted with unchecked power then you have more in common with the enemy than you do with most Americans. Either change sides or cut people who think liberty is not something to be lightly discarded some slack.
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I'm just glad you posted an article advocating for effective intelligence to counter the terrorist threat. Kudos!
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http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/208591
Explosives found inside a modified printer ink cartridge on board a cargo plane at East Midlands Airport were primed to detonate in mid-air.
The device was active when counter-terror police swooped on the aircraft early on Friday.
Yemen-based terrorists had built the bomb to go off in British air space, just like the Lockerbie atrocity of 1988 which killed 270 people.
Home Secretary Theresa May yesterday said: “I can confirm that the device was viable and could have exploded. The target may have been an aircraft and had it it detonated, the aircraft could have been brought down.”
Security chiefs initially believed the bomb, which was to be activated via a timer, was destined for a synagogue in the US.
But Mrs May said: “We do not believe that the perpetrators of the attack would have known the location of the device when it was planned to explode.”
Speaking at Chequers, David Cameron said: “We believe the device was designed to go off on the aeroplane.
“We cannot be sure about the timing when that was meant to take place.”
Had the plane exploded and crashed on to Nottingham, Leicester or Derby, all within a 10-mile radius of the airport, hundreds of lives would have been lost.
The alert was triggered by intelligence from a unit of GCHQ surveillance experts stationed in Afghanistan, the Sunday Express can reveal. Operating from a converted shipping container in Helmand, the team picked up the words “A wedding gift is being delivered”.
The phrase is an Al Qaeda code meaning a bomb is in transit.
With the help of Saudi agents, GCHQ alerted MI6, which raised the alarm in London and Washington.
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101030/ap_on_bi_ge/mail_bombs_flight_safety
LONDON – The mail bombs discovered aboard cargo jets in England and Dubai could very easily have ended up on passenger planes, which carry more than half of the international air cargo coming into the U.S., experts say.
And experts caution that cargo, even when loaded onto passenger planes, is sometimes lightly inspected or even completely unexamined, particularly when it comes from countries without well-developed aviation security systems.
About 60 percent of all cargo flown into the U.S. is on passenger planes, according to Brandon Fried, a cargo security expert and executive director of the Airforwarders Association. New jumbo jets flying in from overseas — like the Boeing 777 — have "cavernous" bellies where freight is stored, he said.
Most countries require parcels placed on passenger flights by international shipping companies to go through at least one security check. Methods include hand checks, sniffer dogs, X-ray machines and high-tech devices that can find traces of explosives on paper or cloth swabs.
But air shipping is governed by a patchwork of inconsistent controls that make packages a potential threat even to passenger jets, experts said Saturday. Security protocols vary widely around the world, whether they're related to passenger aircraft or cargo planes.
That at least two parcels containing explosives could be placed on cargo-only flights to England and Dubai, one in a FedEx shipment from Yemen, was a dramatic example of the risks, but the dangers have been obvious for years, analysts said.
Some Western countries, perhaps belatedly, are trying now to manage the risks.
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http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/LDE6A00J0.htm
Shin Bet director Yuval Diskin, in a rare public address, identified cyber technologies as an ascendant international security threat.
"Intelligence once enjoyed only by countries and world powers can now be obtained through Internet systems like Google Earth, Internet cameras that are deployed all over the world and linked to the Web, or applications for IPhone devices that allow for quality intelligence to be received in real-time," he told a homeland security conference in Tel Aviv.
In what appeared to be an allusion to two parcel bombs found on U.S.-bound planes on Friday, he said such a tactic had featured in "mounting debates" among Islamist militant groups over the Internet on how to exploit international aviation. (Writing by Dan Williams, Editing by Matthew Jones)
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http://hotair.com/archives/2010/11/01/bombs-in-aq-plot-designed-to-go-off-mid-air/
Bombs in AQ plot designed to go off mid-air
posted at 12:15 pm on November 1, 2010 by Ed Morrissey
Last Friday and Saturday, the Obama administration assured Americans that they had enough advance knowledge of the latest al-Qaeda-attempted terrorist attack to stop it in its tracks. Today, the Associated Press reports that their initial assessment of the targets was probably incorrect and that AQ actually intended to blow planes up mid-air. What’s more, they came close to succeeding, because two of the packages flew on passenger jets before being discovered:
The mail bomb plot stretching from Yemen to Chicago may have been aimed at blowing up planes in flight and was only narrowly averted, officials said Sunday, acknowledging that one device almost slipped through Britain and another seized in Dubai was unwittingly flown on two passenger jets.
Senior U.S. officials met to develop a response to the Al-Qaida faction linked to the powerful explosives addressed to synagogues in Chicago.
Investigators were still piecing together the potency and construction of two bombs they believe were designed by the top explosives expert working for Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, the Yemen-based militant faction thought to be behind the plot. Yemeni authorities hunted suspects linked to the group, but released a female computer engineering student arrested Saturday, saying someone else had posed as her in signing the shipping documents.
But authorities admitted how close the terrorists came to getting their bombs through, and a senior U.S. official said investigators are still trying to figure out if other devices remain at large.
The initial claim from the intel community was that they were aware of the threat for several days and timed their intervention to grab the packages before they could make it to the synagogues in Chicago. However, on Saturday NBC reported that more than two dozen potentially dangerous packages had yet to be found, and that the President had only been informed of the plot on Thursday night, hours before launching a global effort to find the packages. Had that effort actually begun several days before, as I remarked on Saturday, they should have stopped the packages from getting onto planes at all, let alone passenger planes bound for place like London, Paris, and Cologne.
Furthermore, the two bombs discovered made it unlikely that the targets were a delivery destination. One had a timer, the other a mobile phone for detonation systems. Given the inability to pinpoint a specific delivery time, both detonators make no sense for targeting a synagogue, where other types of letter-bomb detonation systems would work more reliably. The addresses were probably meant to send a message after the planes exploded in mid-flight, once the shippers had time to discover the paperwork for those packages.
And as the AP also reports, the failure to spot the bombs and suspicious packages beforehand also indicates a lack of prior knowledge of the plot.
Counterterrorism is a tough business, to be sure, and sometimes people can’t see vulnerabilities until terrorists exploit them. It is mainly a reactive effort in that sense, although one might think that securing the cargo industry would have taken a higher priority. The bigger question here isn’t how we missed the plot, but whether the administration gave us the straight truth in the aftermath.
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http://www.britainnews.net/story/700929
The suspect packages originated in Dubai prompting UPS and FedEx, the other cargo carrier involved, to suspend shipments from Yemen.
U.S. aviation authorities together with Dubai officials are already investigating the crash of a UPS Flight 6 from Dubai to Cologne in Germany which caught fire shortly after taking off from Dubai International Airport on September 3. The plane crashed soon after on Emirates Road, a major Dubai highway, killing the cargo plane's two crew members.
The Federal Aviation Administration says the crash is still under investigation and the cause has not been determined.
The authority did say however lithium batteries may have played a role in the crash.
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"one might think that securing the cargo industry would have taken a higher priority. The bigger question here isn’t how we missed the plot, but whether the administration gave us the straight truth in the aftermath."
I recall that the failure to secure the cargo industry, like the oil spill, is Bush's fault.
Frankly I care more that our own security apparatus tells each other the straight scoop and takes aggressive action. Saudi is a very strange and questionable ally, but possibly more reliable than Britain, France and Germany combined.
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Ever since OBL and the house of Saud had their falling out over Gulf War I, the Saudis have been tracking AQ quite closely.
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WTF?
Mystery Missile Launch Seen off Calif. Coast
Military Mum on Nature of "Big Missile" Rising Out of Pacific - a Possible Show of U.S. Military Might
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Kind of reminds me of the EMP attack scenario some have suggested. What if a bad actor like the NorKs tried but their nuke didn't pop?
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http://www.informationdissemination.net/2010/11/latest-on-mystery-missile-over-west.html
NORAD gave the LA Times blog a bit of non-information worth consideration.
"We are aware of the unexplained contrail reported off the coast of Southern California yesterday evening," according to a statement Tuesday from the North American Aerospace Defense Command and the U.S. Northern Command, which operates the U.S. and Canadian missile warning system. "At this time, we are unable to provide specific details but we are working to determine the exact nature of this event.
"We can confirm that there is no indication of any threat to our nation and we will provide more information as it becomes available," the statement said.
When someone makes an unannounced launch what looks to be a ballistic missile 35 miles from the nations second largest city (at sea in international waters), and 18 hours later NORAD still doesn't have any answers at all - that complete lack of information represents a credible threat to national security. If NORAD can't answer the first and last question, then I believe it is time to question every single penny of ballistic missile defense funding in the defense budget. NORTHCOM needs to start talking about what they do know, rather than leaving the focus on what they don't know.
If this missile was launched at sea, was it launched from a ship or sub? If it wasn't our ship or sub, then whose ship or sub was it? Did anyone cross-reference the launch with public AIS logs from the port of Los Angeles yet? How many dozens of times have we had someone give Congressional testimony regarding the scenario where a non-state actor launches a short ranged ballistic missile from a ship off the coast?
I raise that last point to note, if the mystery missile didn't come from our military, you have to start looking for alternatives... and most of those alternatives are a threat to national security.
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WTF?
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/mystery-missile-launched-near-calif-has-military-speechless/
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http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/11/mystery-missile-is-probably-a-jet/
L.A.’s Mystery ‘Missile’ Is Probably a Jet
**I don't know what to make of all this.**
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I think it's reasonable to assume that the news chopper crew is familiar with the skies around LA and found this to be very atypical. It would be nice if someone were to FOIA the FAA control tower comms and radar returns for the date and time the footage was taken for LAX and other SoCal airports.
So here is a theory:
Means: The People's Liberation Army Navy (Yes, that's their real name) has made serious improvements to their "blue water navy" and has surprised us in the past with their upgraded sub technology.
Motive: China has been very unhappy with the US Navy's navigation of international waters off of China's coast. There have been multiple confrontations and aggressive moves made by the PLAN towards US naval assets in those waters. Tensions in those waters have increased with the still unresolved disputes between China and Japan over uninhabited islands in the East China Sea (see my posts on the topic). Early on in the dispute, the SecDef and Adm. Mullen (If I recall correctly) made statements reaffirming thE US-Japan defense treaty. In addition, I recall at least one instance where a PLA general made a direct threat to Los Angeles, saying that China would be willing to trade Shanghai for it in a war with the US.
Opportunity: It is my understanding that the anti-submarine infrastructure we had in place during the cold war no longer exists, or is a shadow if it's former self, allowing a new, stealthy Chinese sub to approach the west coast and launch a test missile as both a proof of concept and a message to the president and DoD that a military conflict in the pacific today can involve both sides of the pacific.
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**Maybe not so tinfoil-hatted.**
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/8121612/Missile-fired-off-California-coast.html
Robert Ellsworth, a former US Deputy Secretary of Defence, told KFMB, a CBS affiliate in San Diego, one theory might be that it was a military muscle-flexing ploy.
"It could be a test firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile from an underwater submarine, to demonstrate mainly to Asia, that we can do that", he said.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/1917167/Chinese-nuclear-submarine-base.html
Satellite imagery, passed to The Daily Telegraph, shows that a substantial harbour has been built which could house a score of nuclear ballistic missile submarines and a host of aircraft carriers.
In what will be a significant challenge to US Navy dominance and to countries ringing the South China Sea, one photograph shows China’s latest 094 nuclear submarine at the base just a few hundred miles from its neighbours.
Other images show numerous warships moored to long jettys and a network of underground tunnels at the Sanya base on the southern tip of Hainan island.
Of even greater concern to the Pentagon are massive tunnel entrances, estimated to be 60ft high, built into hillsides around the base. Sources fear they could lead to caverns capable of hiding up to 20 nuclear submarines from spy satellites.
The US Department of Defence has estimated that China will have five 094 nuclear submarines operational by 2010 with each capable of carrying 12 JL-2 nuclear missiles.
The images were obtained by Janes Intelligence Review after the periodical was given access to imagery from the commercial satellite company DigitalGlobe.
Analysts for the respected military magazine suggest that the base could be used for "expeditionary as well as defensive operations" and would allow the submarines to "break out to launch locations closer to the US".
It would now be "difficult to ignore" that China was building a major naval base where it could house its nuclear forces and increase it "strategic capability considerably further afield".
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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/LC09Ad01.html
Yin Zhou has also called for China to build a naval base in the Middle East, which prompted China's Ministry of Defense to respond that, "China has no plans for an overseas naval base." [3]
A new book by PLA Air Force (PLAAF) Colonel Dai Xu also paints a very dark picture of the future. "China cannot escape the calamity of war, and this calamity may come in the not-too-distant future, at most in 10 to 20 years," writes Dai Xu, according to Reuters. "If the US can light a fire in China's backyard, we can also light a fire in their backyard." [4]
Dai Xu is a widely quoted military analyst who comments frequently about Chinese defense-related matters.
"In recent years, some parts of the Chinese media have become more commercialized. This has led some publishers to focus on publishing sensationalist and nationalistic views that can attract a mass audience," said Bonnie Glaser, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC.
"Academics and PLA officers have seized this opportunity to write books advocating controversial positions in order to make money. Several PLA officers appear as pundits on Chinese TV programs and write for newspapers, viewing this as a means to promote their hardline views, but also to supplement their salaries."
Glaser said that Luo Yuan and Rear-Admiral Yang Yi, an expert with the Institute of Strategic Studies at the National Defense University, were excellent examples of outspoken senior Chinese officers.
Abraham Denmark, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, DC, added China's former chief of military intelligence, General Xiong Guangkai, to this list. After his retirement in 2005, Xiong took charge of China's Institute for International Strategic Studies.
"He was very outspoken and rose to the rank of deputy chief of the general staff," said Denmark.
Xiong made huge headlines 15 years ago. At the end of a meeting in 1995 with former US ambassador Chas Freeman - news of the meeting would not be made public until early 1996 and even then Xiong's identity was not revealed - he reportedly said, "And finally, you do not have the strategic leverage that you had in the 1950s when you threatened nuclear strikes on us. You were able to do that because we could not hit back. But if you hit us now, we can hit back. So you will not make those threats. In the end you care more about Los Angeles than you do about Taipei."
Freeman would admit years later that he did not interpret these words as a threat. [6]
However, Xiong's comments in 1995 were not spontaneous or off-script, according to Bhaskar Roy, a strategic analyst and consultant with New Delhi-based South Asia Analysis Group.
"This was a message to the US from China's Central Military Commission [CMC], headed then by Jiang Zemin," said Roy. "On many military and strategic issues, the top echelon use military officials to float proposals either openly or in print, or surreptitiously to pry out reactions."
China does not rely on the PLA exclusively to get the word out. China threatened a military response to the perceived separatist statements of former Taiwan president Lee Teng-hui - "If the Taiwan authorities think the mainland can only launch a propaganda or psychological war, they are mistaken" - in an August 1999 editorial in China's Global Times magazine.
In that article, Global Times even took aim directly at US aircraft carriers by declaring that China's neutron bombs were more than enough to handle them.
This appeared just as China was preparing to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Communist Party rule, and just a few months after the US had bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese civilians in the process. So it is safe to say that the sense of Chinese national pride as well as the sense of collective outrage was running at fever pitch that year, and that the tone of these comments in Global Times probably reflected Chinese sentiments at the time.
"Over the past 10 years a clear pattern has emerged whereby Chinese military officers are allowed to be more outspoken - especially in response to US actions and decisions - whenever tensions over Taiwan are mounting. However, what we are seeing today is much milder than what we saw in 1999, for example," said Rodger Baker, director of East Asia analysis at Stratfor, a Texas-based global intelligence firm.
"Yang Yi and Luo Yuan have both been outspoken in reaction to the Taiwan arms sale. Note that both are now retired. PLA officers caution that those individuals do not speak for the PLA," said Glaser. "The Chinese government does not encourage any such outspoken rhetoric, but they also do not discourage it."
"It is likely that allowing such views to be aired in the media serves their interests. It is a way of letting those frustrated with the US vent their anger. It may stimulate others to echo those views, but it also causes others to challenge those views," said Glaser. "And allowing such a debate in the media is increasingly tolerated by the government/party/military. Debates over North Korea's nuclear test and how China should respond is another example in which this has occurred."
Rather than being outspoken, Roy described these PLA officers as merely reflecting China's growing military and economic power - which is "leading to arrogant statements".
"Military exercises such as 'Strike - 09' and the military parade commemorating the 60th anniversary of the PRC [People's Republic of China] last year were meant to demonstrate that China had arrived at the global table. All statements of national importance made by military officers are cleared by the CMC, if not also by a member of the politburo standing committee. Articles written by [military officials] also have clearance from the appropriate higher authorities," said Roy, who described Yang Yi as "one of the leading spokesmen for the CMC".
"[At the time of the 60th anniversary celebration], Yang Yi described this show as China's strategy of a 'rich nation and strong military' and 'active defense embodying the power to control a crisis situation in the neighborhood for a favorable security environment'. The Active Defense doctrine is China's right to intervene beyond its borders [land, sea and air]," said Roy.
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These are excellent posts GM, but may I ask that you put them in the China thread please?
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http://formerspook.blogspot.com/2010/11/mystery-missile.html
Tuesday, November 09, 2010
The Mystery Missile
This image, recorded by a Los Angeles TV news chopper, shows the contrail left behind by an aircraft or missile launch off the California coast on Monday. Officially, the Pentagon is still trying to determine the "exact nature of the event." (KCBS/KCAL video, via the Washington Times).
It's been the source of water cooler conversations and endless speculation on the internet. We refer to that mysterious smoke plume that appeared over the Pacific Ocean near Los Angeles. The plume, which may have been from an aircraft or a missile, was captured by a news helicopter from KCBS-TV and quickly became an on-line sensation, prompting all sorts of rumors about an accidental launch by the U.S. military; a show-of-force in support of President Obama's overseas trip, provocative test by the Chinese military, or (more likely) none of the above.
Still, more than 24 hours after the plume was first sighted, no one has offered a definitive explanation of what coastal residents witnessed with their own eyes, and millions more saw on television or the internet. If you're among the dozen or so people who haven't seen the video, you can watch it on the KCBS/KCAL website.
Officially, the Pentagon says it is still investigating the incident. Spokesman for the Air Force and the Navy claim there was no test activity in the area at the time of the event. However, the military frequently uses that section of California coastal waters for missile tests and training exercises.
This map shows that much of area north of Catalina Island (and just off-shore from Los Angeles) is reserved for military use. The USAF conducts periodic satellite launches--and occasional ICBM tests--from Vandenburg AFB, northwest of Santa Barbara, while Navy vessels conduct missile testing offshore. So, a military missile launch in the area is hardly unprecedented.
But the object in the KCBS video appears to be moving a bit slow for a land-based or sub-launched ballistic missile. Indeed, the event unfolded more than 30 miles off-shore, so you can rule out a Minuteman III test or Atlas rocket launch for Vandenburg. As for the USN, we have their assurances that no ships or aircraft were operating in the area at the time.
We can also rule out a possible "show-of-force" in support of Mr. Obama's visit to Asia. We've been launching missiles from Southern California for decades, and the tests are so routine, they generate little attention. It's hard to imagine China--or anyone else--getting excited about routine missile test in the area. Besides, if we were conducting a test, exclusion zones would have been declared around the launch site, and extending down range. Press accounts suggest that a Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) was posted only after the smoke plume was sighted last night.
And, it may disappoint the tinfoil hat crowd, but the chances of a missile launch from a Chinese or Russian sub near our coast are approximately zero (emphasis ours). While Moscow's ballistic missile fleet has declined dramatically over the past 20 years, the few boomers at sea can strike U.S. targets--with impressive accuracy--from bastion locations near the Russian coast.
As for the PRC, their ballistic missile sub fleet is still in its infancy, but the effective range of their SLBMs extends well beyond 35 miles, even if their accuracy is a bit suspect. Besides, the odds of an enemy sub approaching our coast--and launching a missile undetected--are decidedly slim. The U.S. has invested billions in attack subs, patrol aircraft and undersea sensors designed to keep enemy subs away from our shores. If a Russian or Chinese boat managed to close within 40 miles of Los Angeles (and conduct a missile test), heads would be rolling, from the SecDef on down.
Among the more plausible explanations, some have suggested the plume was caused by an aircraft, flying directly towards the camera. Still, that's a lot of smoke/contrail for a jet and besides, the object appears to be moving away from the news chopper, at least in the video we saw.
Readers will be pleased to learn that, according to NORAD, the missile/jet/UFO did not pose a threat to the homeland. Of course, NORAD and U.S. Northern Command apparently didn't learn of the incident until after it happened. The FAA was also out-of-the-loop, saying the object never appeared on air traffic control radars. From that, we can surmise that whatever it was, it wasn't squawking an IFF signal (surprise, surprise).
Of course, there are other possibilities. Maybe the Pentagon was conducting some sort of test, involving systems or technology they don't want to reveal to the public. As to what that might be, your guess is as good as ours. The object rising into the sky didn't appear to be cutting edge but then again, it might have been a target for some other sort of system, stationed farther out to sea.
Perhaps the most frightening possibility is that the government wasn't involved at all. Two years ago, the Rand Corporation published a lengthy monograph on the threat posed by terrorist-operated cruise missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles. Many of the scenarios discussed in the study envision maritime platforms (i.e. merchant vessels) being used as launch platforms.
Once the domain of advanced military forces, cruise missiles with limited range (less than 100 miles) are now available on the world arms market for less than $1 million. They would permit stand-off attacks against area targets (including population centers) and they can be employed with relatively little crew training and support infrastructure. And on the other side of the fence, detecting and defeating cruise missile threats from clandestine launch platforms is very, very difficult.
Given the existing holes in our cruise missile defenses, we should all hope that the smoke plume near L.A. was something innocuous.
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http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/11/10/earlyshow/main7040379.shtml
The video of what looks for all the world like the contrail of a missile was shot Monday evening by KCBS cameraman Gil Leyvas from a news helicopter over Los Angeles.
"I saw a big plume coming up, rising from looked like beyond the horizon and it continued to grow," Leyvas said.
He zoomed his camera in and stayed on it for about 10 minutes. To him it looked like an incoming missile.
"It was unique. It was moving," he said. "It was growing in the sky."
The Pentagon spends billions of dollars a year making sure it is never surprised by a missile launch - so finding out what the camera saw became a top priority. Both the Navy and the Air Force insisted they had not launched any missiles and the North American Air Defense Command - which is supposed to track incoming missiles - declared it had not been fired by any other military. But nobody could say what it was.
But Doug Richardson, the editor of Jane’s Missiles and Rockets, examined the video for the Times of London and said he was left with little doubt.
"It’s a solid propellant missile," he told the Times. "You can tell from the efflux [smoke]."
Richardson said it could have been a ballistic missile launched from a submarine or an interceptor, the defensive anti-missile weapon used by Navy surface ships.
________________________________________________________________________
Doug Richardson
Editor, Jane’s Missiles and Rockets
Doug Richardson is the editor of “Jane’s Missiles & Rockets”. After a career as an electronics engineer working in areas such as the development testing of radar and EW antennas for combat aircraft, integration of rocket engine electrical controls, the design of computer peripheral hardware, and the planning and post-flight analysis of guided missile trials, he became a journalist in 1976.
Since then he has served at various times as the defence editor of “Flight International”, editor of the German magazine “Military Technology”, managing editor of “Jane’s Defence Systems Modernisation” and technical editor of the Swiss magazine “Armada International”.
His work has appeared in many UK, US and international defence magazines. It covers a wide range of military technologies including military aircraft, guided missiles, radar, electronic warfare, information warfare, communications, satellite navigation systems, stealth technology, tanks, artillery, warships, submarines, small arms and ammunition, and more exotic areas such as space warfare and intelligence gathering.
Although missiles and missile-related technology are his primary interest, he also specialises in military electronics and optronics, and writes regularly on these topics for “Armada International” and other magazines.
Since 1981 he has written more than 20 books on aerospace and defence topics. Most have been published in British and US editions, but several have also appeared in French, German, Japanese and Portuguese versions.
Doug is based in the United Kingdom, and lives in the village of Roydon - 20 miles (32km) north-east of London - with his wife Linda Allen, a French Briard sheepdog, and five computers.
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http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/11/10/blogger-solved-california-missile-mystery/
Blogger Believes Webcam Image Solves 'Missile' Mystery
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http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/11/09/europe.plot/index.html
Hamburg, Germany (CNN) -- Al Qaeda is still planning Mumbai-style attacks in Europe, with the United States also possibly being targeted, counter-terrorism officials in Europe and the United States tell CNN.
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Authorities on Lookout for 2 Men Seen Videotaping D.C. Subway Station
Published November 12, 2010
| Associated Press
WASHINGTON -- Metro has circulated an internal memo asking employees to be on the lookout for two men seen videotaping the L'Enfant Plaza Metro station.
An internal memo says the individuals were "attempting to videotape inconspicuously, by holding the camera at their side, between their chest and waist." Metro was alerted by a rider who took a picture of the men last week while they were sitting on the train.
The alert comes just after the recent arrest of a Northern Virginia man in a sting where he videotaped two Metro facilities for what we thought was going to be an attack on the system.
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http://www.cnn.com/2010/TRAVEL/11/12/travel.screening/index.html?eref=mrss_igoogle_cnn
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THE INFLUENCE GAME: Shippers fought cargo controls
By SHARON THEIMER, Associated Press Sharon Theimer, Associated Press
Tue Nov 9, 12:56 pm ET
.WASHINGTON – Despite knowing for decades that terrorists could sneak bombs onto planes, the U.S. government failed to close obvious security gaps amid pressure from shipping companies fearful tighter controls would cost too much and delay deliveries.
Intelligence officials around the world narrowly thwarted an al-Qaida mail bomb plot last month, intercepting two explosive packages shipped from Yemen with UPS and FedEx.
But it was a tip from Saudi intelligence, not cargo screening, that turned up the bombs before they could take down airplanes. Company employees in Yemen were not required to X-ray the printer cartridges the explosives were hidden inside. Instead, they looked at the printers and sent them off, U.S. officials said.
The scare is prompting officials in Washington and around the world to rethink air cargo security. On Monday the Obama administration announced new cargo rules banning freight out of Yemen and Somalia. It also restricted the shipment of printer and toner cartridges weighing more than a pound on all passenger flights and some cargo flights. Overall cargo security rules were unchanged.
In Congress, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee plans a hearing Nov. 16 to look at whether changes are needed to improve air cargo security. Transportation Security Administration Administrator John Pistole has been asked to testify.
Lobbying by the multibillion-dollar freight industry has helped kill past efforts to impose tough rules.
In 2004, when the Transportation Security Administration considered requiring screening for all packages on all flights, the Cargo Airline Association downplayed a terrorist threat. It argued slowing down shipping for inspections would jeopardize the shipping industry and the world's economy.
"As a practical matter, all-cargo aircraft operators today are permitted to accept freight from all persons and entities all over the world, including unknown shippers,
precisely because of the lack of any credible threat to all-cargo aircraft," the association, whose members included FedEx, UPS and other shippers, told the agency.
The government agreed.
"TSA believes that a requirement to inspect every piece of cargo could result in an unworkable cost of more than $650 million" in the first year, the agency wrote in 2004. The government wanted security, TSA said, "without undue hardship on the affected stakeholders."
The U.S. requires all packages be screened before being loaded onto passenger flights originating in the U.S. But there's no such requirement enforced for all cargo loaded onto U.S.-bound international passenger flights or on cargo-only flights, such as UPS and FedEx planes.
Jetliner bombings in the 1970s and the explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 led the U.S. to examine cargo security long before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington made counterterrorism measures a top priority.
Those efforts came in fits and starts. For example, the Federal Aviation Administration and U.S. Postal Service once had such a poor relationship that neither agency carried out their part of a mail security agreement they reached in 1979 after a mail bomb blew up on an American Airlines flight, congressional investigators reported in 1994.
In 2007, a coalition of more than a dozen business groups lobbied against requiring close inspections of packages, arguing in a letter to then-Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, that applying the same rules to passenger baggage and air cargo would set "an unachievable standard."
Only in August, nine years after 9/11, did the U.S. require that all cargo be screened on U.S. passenger flights. That rule drew heavy lobbying from airlines, air cargo carriers and trade groups. They devoted at least $32 million last year and $28 million so far this year to lobbying in Washington on that and other matters.
The air transportation industry, meanwhile, donated at least $8.3 million to congressional candidates in the 2009-10 election cycle, split almost evenly between Democrats and Republicans, an analysis by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics found.
The TSA, carrying out a 2007 law requiring the screening of all cargo on passenger planes within three years, decided that starting last August it would mandate the screening of cargo on passenger planes loaded in the United States. It said its rule wouldn't apply to cargo placed on U.S.-bound passenger flights overseas, or to
cargo-only flights.
In leaving cargo loaded onto passenger flights outside the U.S. from the August requirement, the agency said it would work with other countries to try to standardize screening requirements and apply "risk assessment" to cargo headed for the U.S.
That decision drew praise from the International Air Cargo Association, whose members include FedEx, UPS and other major shippers.
The industry has long contended that requiring the careful inspection of every package would cost too much and take too long. Its companies want to be able to screen items quickly and they want the government to bear as much of the cost as possible.
A wide range of businesses and organizations have a stake in cargo screening rules. Among those lobbying, the National Funeral Directors Association wants to make sure the requirements do not delay the shipping of human remains and that remains are treated with dignity. The Association of Zoos & Aquariums doesn't want screening to harm animals as they are transported to zoos and other wildlife institutions, or endanger the people inspecting them.
Monday's announcement of new cargo rules came after Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano held a conference call last Wednesday with cargo industry giants FedEx, UPS, German-based shipper Deutsche Post DHL AG and Netherlands-based TNT. On the call, Napolitano "underscored her commitment to partnering with the shipping industry to strengthen cargo security," her agency said.
The air cargo industry isn't short of political connections. FedEx spent $19 million lobbying from January through September alone; its chief executive, Frederick W. Smith, raised campaign money for Republican President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama's 2008 GOP rival, Sen. John McCain, and has made the White House guest lists of at least three presidents: Obama, Bush and Bill Clinton.
FedEx and UPS have served on various federal agency advisory panels over the years, and the head of the Cargo Airline Association has been part of an aviation security advisory committee. Association lobbyist Gina Ronzello used to work for the U.S. Transportation Department's inspector general, with a focus on aviation issues, and was a congressional aide. A Bush administration Customs and Border Protection official, Michael Mullen, lobbied last year for the Express Association of America, whose members included FedEx, UPS, DHL and TNT.
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The problem is that there are no quick, easy, inexpensive, unobtrusive methods of screening passaengers and cargo.
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"no quick, easy, inexpensive, unobtrusive methods of screening passengers and cargo"
That's right. I hate to be facetious but we are getting to the point where we might just as well walk through airport screening buck naked. My answer has been mostly to drive which unfortunately increases the time and limits the distance I can travel.
Some improvements it seems to me could be made in identifying, discriminating and priortizing the passengers screened, and with those who packed, sealed and certified the cargo. For example, my sister who travels on business every week of the year should mostly have to just voluntarily prove that she is who she is, and speed through the fast lane. A frequently screened law abiding traveler with no suicidal leaning and no demographic or otherwise tendency toward blowing up planes doesn't need every crevice examined as closely as the unidentified or higher risk passenger. If I fly only once a year maybe they look a little closer because security doesn't know me. And if you are a young male of Saudi or Yemen origin, expired visa, one way cash ticket and ties to jihad, sorry but expect a closer look. If the science and the data supports discrimination, then discriminate. Our military discriminates what countries we go into. Marketers discriminate the markets they go into. Criminal investigators discriminate where they look for clues. Screeners need to discriminate at least to some degree or else fewer people and packages are going to be transported.
The problem widens as screening has moved to government buildings and to everywhere terrorists will choose to target next.
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When it comes to protecting against terrorism, this is how things usually go: A danger presents itself. The federal government responds with new rules that erode privacy, treat innocent people as suspicious and blur the distinction between life in a free society and life in a correctional facility. And we all tamely accept the new intrusions, like sheep being shorn.
Maybe not this time.
The war on terrorism is going to get personal. Very personal. Americans have long resented the hassles that go with air travel ever since 9/11 -- long security lines, limits on liquids, forced removal of footwear and so on. But if the Transportation Security Administration has its way, we will look back to 2009 as the good old days.
The agency is rolling out new full-body scanners, which eventually will replace metal detectors at all checkpoints. These machines replicate the experience of taking off your clothes, but without the fun. They enable agents to get a view of your body that leaves nothing to the imagination.
A lot of people, of course, couldn't care less if a stranger wants to gaze upon everything God gave them. But some retain a modesty that makes them reluctant to parade naked in front of people they don't know, even virtually. Henceforth, Jennifer Aniston is going to think twice before flying commercial.
Besides the indignity of having one's body exposed to an airport screener, there is a danger the images will find a wider audience. The U.S. Marshals Service recently admitted saving some 35,000 images from a machine at a federal courthouse in Florida. TSA says that will never happen. Human experience says, oh, yes, it will.
For the camera-shy, TSA will offer an alternative: "enhanced" pat-downs. And you'll get a chance to have an interesting conversation with your children about being touched by strangers. This is not the gentle frisking you may have experienced at the airport in the past. It requires agents to probe aggressively in intimate zones -- breasts, buttocks, crotches. If you enjoyed your last mammography or prostate exam, you'll love the enhanced pat-down.
Reviews of the procedure are coming in, and they are not raves. The Allied Pilots Association calls it a "demeaning experience," and one pilot complained it amounted to "sexual molestation." The head of a flight attendants' union local said that for anyone who has been sexually assaulted, it will "drudge up some bad memories."
But the option of the full-body scanner is not so appealing, either, even leaving out privacy concerns. Two pilots' unions have advised members not to go through the scanners because of the possible risks of being bombarded with low doses of radiation.
"There is good reason to believe that these scanners will increase the risk of cancer to children and other vulnerable populations," a group of scientists from the University of California at San Francisco informed the White House.
Aviation trade groups fear the public has finally been pushed over the edge. "We have received hundreds of e-mails and phone calls from travelers vowing to stop flying," Geoff Freeman, executive vice president of the U.S. Travel Association, told Reuters.
The new policy is being challenged in court by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which says it violates the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches. But don't expect judges to save us.
Says Stanford University law professor Robert Weisberg, with resignation in his voice, "Airports are pretty much a Fourth Amendment-free zone."
Though the harm to privacy is certain, the benefit to public safety is not. The federal Government Accountability Office has said it "remains unclear" if the scanners would have detected the explosives carried by the would-be Christmas Day bomber.
They would also be useless against a terrorist who inserts a bomb in his rectum -- like the al-Qaida operative who blew himself up last year in an attempt to kill a Saudi prince. Full-body scanning will sorely chafe many innocent travelers, while creating only a minor inconvenience to bloodthirsty fanatics.
_The good news is that last year, the House of Representatives voted to bar the use of whole-body scanners for routine screening. But only a sustained public outcry will force a change.
We will soon find out if there is a limit to the sacrifices of personal freedom that Americans will endure in the name of fighting terrorism. If we don't say no when they want to inspect and handle our private parts, when will we?
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Everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die. Everyone wants to fly safely but no one wants to be screened. Getting searched by TSA is invasive. Getting processed by the FBI as part of a crime scene is even more so. When you are nothing but burned and shattered pieces of bone and tissue, you really don't have any privacy.
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I don't think having any of the Thousands Standing Around, a.k.a. the TSA grabbing my balls or poking at my anus will really further security in the slightest.
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So we stop security screening at airports?
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http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2010/nov/13/muslim-who-shot-solider-arkansas-says-he-wanted-ca/
I'm just one Muhammad There are millions of Muhammads out there. And I hope and pray the next one be more deadlier than Muhammad Atta!! (peace be upon him) commander of the blessed raids in NY and D.C. on 9/11.
**He must have missed Obama's explanation of what jihad meant.**
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"So we stop security screening at airports?"
Don't be silly. No one here has suggested such a thing.
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A little vignette of what all this may turn into:
http://johnnyedge.blogspot.com/2010/11/these-events-took-place-roughly-between.html
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http://ecfr.gpoaccess.gov/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=ecfr&sid=2940ff80be1e46634f6deadcc8f79dbe&rgn=div5&view=text&node=49:9.1.3.5.10&idno=49#49:9.1.3.5.10.2.10.3
§ 1540.105 Security responsibilities of employees and other persons.
top
(a) No person may:
(1) Tamper or interfere with, compromise, modify, attempt to circumvent, or cause a person to tamper or interfere with, compromise, modify, or attempt to circumvent any security system, measure, or procedure implemented under this subchapter.
(2) Enter, or be present within, a secured area, AOA, SIDA or sterile area without complying with the systems, measures, or procedures being applied to control access to, or presence or movement in, such areas.
(3) Use, allow to be used, or cause to be used, any airport-issued or airport-approved access medium or identification medium that authorizes the access, presence, or movement of persons or vehicles in secured areas, AOA's, or SIDA's in any other manner than that for which it was issued by the appropriate authority under this subchapter.
(b) The provisions of paragraph (a) of this section do not apply to conducting inspections or tests to determine compliance with this part or 49 U.S.C. Subtitle VII authorized by:
(1) TSA, or
(2) The airport operator, aircraft operator, or foreign air carrier, when acting in accordance with the procedures described in a security program approved by TSA.
§ 1540.107 Submission to screening and inspection.
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(a) No individual may enter a sterile area or board an aircraft without submitting to the screening and inspection of his or her person and accessible property in accordance with the procedures being applied to control access to that area or aircraft under this subchapter.
(b) An individual must provide his or her full name, as defined in §1560.3 of this chapter, date of birth, and gender when—
(1) The individual, or a person on the individual's behalf, makes a reservation for a covered flight, as defined in §1560.3 of this chapter, or
(2) The individual makes a request for authorization to enter a sterile area.
(c) An individual may not enter a sterile area or board an aircraft if the individual does not present a verifying identity document as defined in §1560.3 of this chapter, when requested for purposes of watch list matching under §1560.105(c), unless otherwise authorized by TSA on a case-by-case basis.
[73 FR 64061, Oct. 28, 2008]
§ 1540.109 Prohibition against interference with screening personnel.
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No person may interfere with, assault, threaten, or intimidate screening personnel in the performance of their screening duties under this subchapter.
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http://www.tsa.gov/assets/pdf/enforcement_sanction_guidance_policy.pdf
B. Interference with screening
i. Including physical contact $1,500-$5,000
ii. Non-physical interference $500-$1,500
iii. False threats $1,000-$2,000
C. Entering sterile area without submitting to screening $1,000-$3,000
E. Entering or being present within a secured area, AOA, SIDA,
or sterile area without complying with the systems, measures,
or procedures being applied to control access to, or presence or
movement in, such areas $500-$3,000
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More trouble at security. Jay Leno reports that an older woman came out of TSA screening all out of breath, angry, crying and hollering to her husband, 'How come YOU never touch me like that anymore?!'
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I am curious.
I would bet my savings that Pelosi, and Reid, and all the rest of the bunch do NOT have to go through the scanners.
How about THEY go through and there scans get leaken online.
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If someone is protected by a law enforcement executive protection detail, they are exempt from checkpoint screening on commercial flights. Pelosi has been flown on "Air Force Pelosi" and not even flying commercial since she has been speaker.
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Next Speaker of the House Boener (pronounced "boner" if I am not mistaken-- many obvious jokes here :lol:) will be riding commercial. If he gets scanned so as to prove there is no profiling, what are the odds of his penis showing up on youtube?
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I'd expect that if any footage of anyone's body parts end up on the net from a TSA employee, that employee will trade in their TSA uniform for a BOP inmate uniform.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A5088-2001Nov9?language=printer
While Argenbright has tended to take the brunt of the public blame for recent security failures — it had screeners working at two of the three airports the terrorist hijackers flew out of on Sept. 11 — the problems go beyond any one segment of the system. Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta has warned airlines not to put convenience ahead of security and urged Federal Aviation Administration agents to be more aggressive in enforcing safety guidelines.
Dan Boelsche, a former Argenbright operations manager at Dulles, suggested that the problems go even further. “The public has some fault in it. They didn’t want good security [before Sept. 11], they wanted speed. They wanted a passenger’s bill of rights.”
Argenbright said it would invest a “substantial” amount of its own money to carry out the changes in its operations, though it also is trying to get its airline clients to kick in funding, and it will need help from government agencies to conduct more thorough background checks of its employees.
An official with the Department of Transportation said Argenbright’s proposals were a good first step. “We’ll see,” the official said. “We’ve heard promises before. We’re looking for results.”
Argenbright’s repeated involvement in airport security breaches has created increasing political problems for the company. One came this week, when Maryland Gov. Parris N. Glendening (D) publicly objected to the decision to hire Argenbright for security at BWI.
On Wednesday, three Argenbright baggage screeners were fired at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport for letting a man through their checkpoint with a bag filled with knives. Federal officials recently accused the company of continuing to hire people with criminal convictions despite a court order prohibiting the practice. They also found that seven out of a group of 20 baggage screeners at Dulles could not pass a basic skills test, and they arrested seven screeners at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport for being illegal aliens.
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"I'd expect that if any footage of anyone's body parts end up on the net from a TSA employee, that employee will trade in their TSA uniform for a BOP inmate uniform."
Coming from the hard-bitten practical LEO that you are, that is remarkabliy naive :lol:
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*
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So, (working from memory here) what happened to in the matter of those 30,000 scan-fotos wrongly saved by the US Marshals Service at some courthouse? Any heads roll?
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"The Transportation Security Administration's demeaning new 'enhanced pat-down' procedures are a direct result of the Obama administration's willful blindness to the threat from Islamic radicals. While better tools are available to keep air travelers safe, they would involve recognizing the threat for what it is, which is something the White House will never do. El Al, Israel's national airline, employs a smarter approach. Any airline representing the state of Israel is a natural -- some might say preeminent -- target for terrorist attacks. Yet El Al has one of the best security records in the world and doesn't resort to wide-scale use of methods that would under other circumstances constitute sexual assault. The Israelis have achieved this track record of safety by employing sophisticated intelligence analysis which allows them to predict which travelers constitute a possible threat and which do not. Resources are then focused on the more probable threats with minimal intrusion on those who are likely not to be terrorists. Here in the United States, these sophisticated techniques have roundly been denounced as discriminatory 'profiling.' ... TSA believes an 80-year-old grandmother deserves the same level of scrutiny at an airport terminal checkpoint as a 19-year-old male exchange student from Yemen. This policy not only is a waste of time and resources, it denies reality. ... Despite all the government bureaucracy and TSA's intrusive inspection practices, [al Qaeda underwear bomber Umar Farouk] Abdulmutallab's attack was only foiled because of a faulty bomb and the actions of alert passengers. Now all passengers have to pay the price by having their privacy (and their privates) invaded, which is the Obama administration's alternative to instituting a policy that will target the source of the problem." --The Washington Times
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I hope it's not true. I knew his father. My whole family did. He was our rabbi growing up:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xH-dpkJZiOM
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So Crafty, does this mean you are an advocate for adopting the Shin Bet model of domestic intelligence gathering, thus allowing for El Al-like aviation security?
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http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8VGOUA00&show_article=1
JERUSALEM (AP) - Israel's renowned airline security faced a legal challenge Wednesday from a civil rights group charging that its practice of ethnic profiling is racist because it singles out Arabs for tougher treatment.
At a Supreme Court hearing, civil rights lawyers demanded an end to the policy, which they say violates Israeli law. Such profiling is illegal in the U.S., where passengers must be singled out for security checks on a random basis.
But some terrorism experts say Israel's measures are effective precisely because they take ethnicity into account—and warn that equality at the airport could cost lives.
Israel is considered a prime target for hijackers and other attackers because of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Despite that, there hasn't been a successful attack on an Israeli airliner in decades, and experts point to Israel's security procedures as a key factor.
Many of the measures are kept secret, but known precautions on Israeli airliners include armored luggage compartments, armed sky marshals and reinforced cockpits. But a key to preventing attacks, experts say, is the screening process on the ground.
Israeli Jews and Arabs get dramatically different treatment when boarding Israeli planes.
Hanna Swaid, an Israeli Arab, remembers being strip-searched by gruff security guards and having his luggage taken apart piece by piece 20 years ago before he flew from Israel to London, where he was a post- doctoral student.
Today, Swaid is an Israeli Arab lawmaker, and he regularly receives complaints from Arab citizens about similar treatment.
The court appeal by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel—and any public debate of the policy—are hobbled by the government's refusal to discuss any of the policy's details.
In court, the government's attorneys would not reveal the screening criteria or acknowledge that ethnicity was one of them. They agreed to divulge the information only in a closed session that excluded everyone but the judges and themselves.
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"So Crafty, does this mean you are an advocate for adopting the Shin Bet model of domestic intelligence gathering, thus allowing for El Al-like aviation security?"
Expound please.
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http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/world/israel/shin_bet.htm
Israel Security Agency
Shin Bet
General Security Service
Sherut ha-Bitachon ha-Klali
Israel Security Agency (the ISA-formerly the General Security Service) -- Shin Bet, the Israeli counter-intelligence and internal security service, is believed to have three operational departments and five support departments.
* Arab Affairs Department is responsibile for antiterrorist operations, political subversion, and maintenance of an index on Arab terrorists. Shin Bet detachments, known as HENZA, worked with Aman undercover detachments [known as Mista'arvim (Marauders)] to counter the uprising. This Department has also been active in countering the military wing of Hamas.
* Non-Arab Affairs Department, formerly divided into communist and noncommunist sections, concerned itself with all other countries, including penetrating foreign intelligence services and diplomatic missions in Israel and interrogating immigrants from the Former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
* Protective Security Department is responsibile for protecting Israeli government buildings and embassies, defense industries, scientific installations, industrial plants, and the El Al national airline.
Shin Bet monitors the activities of and personalities in domestic right-wing fringe groups and subversive leftist movements. It is believed to have infiltrated agents into the ranks of the parties of the far left and had uncovered a number of foreign technicians spying for neighboring Arab countries or the Soviet Union. All foreigners, regardless of religion or nationality, are liable to come under surveillance through an extensive network of informants who regularly came into contact with visitors to Israel. Shin Bet's network of agents and informers in the occupied territories destroyed the PLO's effectiveness there after 1967, forcing the PLO to withdraw to bases in Jordan.
Shin Bet's reputation as a highly proficient internal security agency was tarnished severely by two public scandals in the mid-1980s. In April 1984, Israeli troops stormed a bus hijacked by four Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Although two of the hijackers survived, they were later beaten to death by Shin Bet agents. It appeared that the agents were acting under orders of Avraham Shalom, the head of Shin Bet. Shalom falsified evidence and instructed Shin Bet witnesses to lie to investigators to cover up Shin Bet's role. In the ensuing controversy, the attorney general was removed from his post for refusing to abandon his investigation. The president granted pardons to Shalom, his deputies who had joined in the cover-up, and the agents implicated in the killings.
In 1987, Izat Nafsu, a former IDF army lieutenant and member of the Circassian minority, was released after his 1980 conviction for treason (espionage on behalf of Syria) was overturned by the Supreme Court. The court ruled that Shin Bet had used unethical interrogation methods to obtain Nafsu's confession and that Shin Bet officers had presented false testimony to the military tribunal that had convicted him. A judicial commission set up to report on the methods and practices of Shin Bet found that for the previous seventeen years, it had been the accepted norm for Shin Bet interrogators to lie to the courts about their interrogation.
In 1987, the Israeli government-appointed Landau Judicial Commission condemned torture but allowed for the use of "moderate physical and psychological pressure" to secure confessions and obtain information. In addition, although the Israeli Penal Code prohibits the use of force or violence by a public official to obtain information, the GSS chief is permitted by law to allow interrogators to employ "special measures" that exceed the use of "moderate physical and psychological pressure" when it is deemed necessary to obtain information that could potentially save Israeli lives in certain "ticking bomb" cases. The GSS first permitted interrogators "greater flexibility" in applying the guidelines shortly after a bus bombing in Tel Aviv in October 1994 that killed 22 Israelis. The Government has not defined the meaning of "greater flexibility" or what might constitute a "ticking bomb" case. At roughly quarterly intervals, the Government has approved the continued use of "special measures." On August 22, Israel's ministerial committee on GSS interrogations authorized the continued use of "special measures," including shaking.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) declared in 1992 that such practices violate the Geneva Convention. Human rights groups and attorneys challenged the use of "special measures," especially shaking, before the Israeli High Court a number of times during the year. In each case the court either rejected the petition or ruled in favor of the GSS. Israeli authorities maintain that torture is not condoned but acknowledge that abuses sometimes occur and are investigated. However, the Government does not generally make public the results of such investigations. Israel conducted two official investigations into the 35 complaints received in 1997.
Shin Bet's reputation was further compromised by the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin in November 1995 by a right-wing Israeli extremist. In the aftermath of the ensuing scandal, the head of Shin Bet [Karmi Gillon] resigned in January 1996 and was succeeded by Rear Admiral Ami Ayalon.
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http://www.homelandsecurity.org/journal/Articles/tucker-israel.html
Israeli experts contend that beyond a vigilant citizenry, intelligence is the essential foundation of any systematic effort to combat terrorism. According to Gen. Dagan, “Investments in intelligence are invisible, whereas increased security is visible but often wasteful. The first priority must be placed on intelligence, then on counterterrorism operations, and finally on defense and protection.”16 To support its war on terrorism, Israel has developed a highly coordinated and efficient intelligence apparatus. Drawing on human and technical means, Israeli government agencies work continually to identify terrorist operatives and cells. Threats are categorized into those that appear imminent and require immediate attention, those that are less probable but could emerge later on, and those that are unlikely but still possible.17
In contrast to the infamous rivalry between the CIA and the FBI, Israeli foreign and domestic intelligence agencies cooperate well in collecting and sharing terrorism-related information. The Israel Security Agency, known as Shin Bet, reports directly to the Prime Minister and is responsible for domestic intelligence, counterespionage, internal security, and the prevention of terrorist acts. The Arab Affairs Division of Shin Bet conducts political subversion and surveillance of Arab terrorists, while the Protection and Security Division safeguards Israeli government buildings and embassies, defense contractors, scientific installations, key industrial plants, and the national airline El Al.18 Israel also has a foreign intelligence agency, Mossad (Hebrew for “institute”), and a military intelligence service, Aman. Shin Bet works closely with Mossad and Aman to prepare an annual terrorism threat assessment for the Prime Minister.
Israeli government agencies gather human intelligence on terrorism by deploying undercover agents in the Palestinian-controlled areas and by recruiting local informants inside or close to terrorist organizations. Several factors may lead Palestinians to collaborate with the Israeli authorities: cash incentives, non-monetary benefits such as a building permit or a cab license, and psychological factors such as a desire for revenge, ideology, or adventure.19 (Still, spying for Israel is extremely risky, and suspected collaborators are often executed or lynched by Palestinian mobs.) Israel also engages in frequent police operations in which large numbers of suspected Palestinian militants are rounded up and interrogated. Only rarely do such operations yield tactical warning of an imminent terrorist attack, however, and apparent tips obtained during interrogation may be disinformation designed to deflect attention from the real target.
In addition to human intelligence, Israel has developed sophisticated technologies for detecting explosives and arms at a distance, electronic eavesdropping and signals intelligence, and visual intelligence with unmanned aerial vehicles. Nevertheless, Israeli intelligence agencies give priority to human intelligence over high-tech methods and contend that the United States has placed too much emphasis on the latter at the expense of the former. Although a satellite image can reveal the location of a terrorist training camp, it cannot provide insights into the thinking of operatives planning an attack.
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http://www.homelandsecurity.org/journal/Articles/tucker-israel.html
Commercial Aviation Security
Israel’s expertise in aviation security is legendary, and this area remains a top priority because the stakes are so high. Large passenger aircraft are attractive targets for terrorists because once in the air, they are extremely vulnerable. A small explosion that might kill only a few people on the ground can bring down a jumbo jet, killing hundreds. Such a disaster would also attract extensive media coverage, magnifying its psychological, political, and economic impact.
El Al, the Israeli national airline, has a security budget of roughly $80 million, covering Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv and the airliners themselves. Terminal security has been a major concern for Israel since 1985, when Palestinian terrorists attacked the check-in counters at the airports in Rome and Vienna with guns and grenades, killing 18 people. Ben Gurion airport is protected by a defense in depth that begins with a checkpoint on the single access road, where armed guards examine vehicles and question suspicious-looking drivers or passengers. Additional plainclothes security officials monitor the entrances to the terminal, continually scan the crowds inside, and frequently check wastebaskets for explosive devices.
El Al’s passenger screening system, established in the early 1970s, relies on psychological profiling techniques backed up with high-technology equipment. This system has been highly effective: the last successful hijacking of an El Al jet was in 1968, when Palestinian terrorists diverted a flight from Rome to Algiers.34 Whereas the United States gives priority to screening baggage rather than people, Israel’s security model aims at ferreting out individuals with terrorist intentions. This profiling process relies on access to intelligence and careful observation of would-be passengers.
The main reason for Israel’s primary emphasis on human factors is that advances in explosives technology have made it increasingly difficult to find bombs hidden in luggage. Plastic explosives can now be disguised in almost every conceivable form, including shoe soles, toys, cell phones, and clothing. Moreover, the 11 September terrorists did not carry guns or explosive devices but used small, easily concealed weapons (box-cutters) to hijack four airliners and transform them into flying bombs. Although scissors and box-cutters are now banned from carry-on bags, determined terrorists could employ seemingly benign objects, such as the stiletto heel of a woman’s shoe or a man’s belt, to seize control of an aircraft in flight.
According to David Harel, an aviation security specialist with Shin Bet, some type of profiling system is essential because it is impractical to subject every passenger to a high level of scrutiny. Travelers on El Al are told to arrive at the airport three hours before a flight to go through preliminary screening. Passengers are categorized at the outset as to whether they are Israeli Jews, foreign-born Jews, and so forth, with Arabs and certain other foreigners most likely to be profiled. The fact that the El Al security system is owned and operated by the Israeli government facilitates the use of intelligence and law-enforcement databases to help identify the small minority of passengers who may have criminal or terrorist intent.35
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TSA Unionization: A $30 Million Annual Gift to Union Bosses
Another reward for union bosses; another slap in the face for Americans.
Posted by LaborUnionReport (Profile)
Wednesday, November 17th at 11:00AM EST
4 Comments
When we have an administration more concerned about rewarding its union cronies than the U.S. Constitution (see ObamaCare for reference), giving union bosses access to the wallets of TSOs was only a matter of time. Now, the Transportation Security Agency’s blue shirts who are doing Janet Napolitiano’s bidding frisking, groping, molesting and seemingly sexually assaulting the American public, are about to get license for further abuse—a union card.
In a significant victory for federal employee unions, the Federal Labor Relations Authority decided Friday that Transportation Security Administrationstaffers will be allowed to vote on union representation.
The decision clears the way for a campaign by the government’s two largest labor organizations, the American Federation of Government Employees and the National Treasury Employees Union, to represent some 50,000 transportation security officers.
It was bound to happen. Before it became an agency known as Fourth Amendment violators, due to its critical national security responsibilities, the TSA was created in 2001as a non-union agency As labor attorney Jay Sumner notes:
Enacted in 2001, the Aviation and Transportation Security Act (ATSA) provides that the Under Secretary of Transportation for Security has the power to, among other things, determine the compensation, terms and conditions of employment for employees who carry out security screening functions. Accordingly, in a 2003 memorandum, the Under Secretary declared that TSA officers, “in light of their critical national security responsibilities, shall not, as a term or condition of their employment, be entitled to engage in collective bargaining or be represented for the purpose of engaging in such bargaining by any representative or organization.”
While the Federal Labor Relations Authority (an agency that governs labor relations between the federal government and unions) recently granted permission to unionize the TSA, it has not yet ruled to give the unions collective bargaining rights—yet. But, it is only a matter of time.
“AFGE argued, and the FLRA agreed, that the right for employees to elect an exclusive representative and the right to engage in collective bargaining are two separate and distinct rights,” AFGE National President John Gage said. “We have always said the choice to unionize and the task of winning collective bargaining rights at TSA would be a two-part process.
“While we wait for the decision on collective bargaining rights that TSA Administrator Pistole has indicated will come soon, the election process can begin to move forward,” Gage added.
Here’s some informal statistics for you:
Number of TSA employees eligible for unionization: 50,000
TSA budget for FY 2010: $7.8 billion
Estimated Union Dues TSA unionization will provide union bosses at $50 per month:$2,500,000 per month or $30,000,000 per year.
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“I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as ABC, hold up truth to your eyes.” Thomas Paine, December 23, 1776
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"Passengers are categorized at the outset as to whether they are Israeli Jews, foreign-born Jews, and so forth, with Arabs and certain other foreigners most likely to be profiled."
- These strategies are illegal here(?) 4 choices: a) start profiling, b) stop flying, c) Let planes blow up, or d) the status quo with thousands standing around, naked and groped, and Muslims bypassed from search for religious objections. What are we teaching our kindergardners about good touch, bad touch?
Under the category of start profiling, I would add to the assignment of finding the potential bad guys, identify all the known good-guys (all-gender) that we can in this country and approve them for easy boarding with or without concealed carry of whatever the marshalls think is safe to discharge on a plane.
I notice that other than Cairo (and Amsterdam), El Al does not fly to Muslim countries. And Saudi airlines for example has no flights to Tel Aviv.
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I recall my first business trip overseas. It didn't occur to me that my briefcase with electronic design equipment might be suspicious or maybe they treated everyone this way. I was in London Gatwick, I think, entering the country rather than boarding an airplane, way-pre-911. I recall being very surprised by the very intense questioning with an intense questioner judging my response; it went like this:
Who are you?
Who are you REALLY??!
Why are you here?
Why are you REALLY here??!
I have re-told that story many times wondering in jest how many terrorists cave in on that follow up question and then tell them their plans, lol. I assume I was more surprised by the doubting followup question than a trained terrorist would be. Maybe the ordeal was just their way of treating a naive young American of Scottish-English origin the same way they would a Saudi or Yemeni national.
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"Passengers are categorized at the outset as to whether they are Israeli Jews, foreign-born Jews, and so forth, with Arabs and certain other foreigners most likely to be profiled."
- These strategies are illegal here(?)
**Yes they are. The DOJ makes it very clear they will take action against anyone using the kind of profiling as described above.**
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http://www.justice.gov/crt/split/documents/guidance_on_race.php
II. GUIDANCE FOR FEDERAL OFFICIALS ENGAGED IN LAW ENFORCEMENT ACTIVITIES INVOLVING THREATS TO NATIONAL SECURITY OR THE INTEGRITY OF THE NATION'S BORDERS
In investigating or preventing threats to national security or other catastrophic events (including the performance of duties related to air transportation security), or in enforcing laws protecting the integrity of the Nation's borders, Federal law enforcement officers may not consider race or ethnicity except to the extent permitted by the Constitution and laws of the United States.
Since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the President has emphasized that federal law enforcement personnel must use every legitimate tool to prevent future attacks, protect our Nation's borders, and deter those who would cause devastating harm to our Nation and its people through the use of biological or chemical weapons, other weapons of mass destruction, suicide hijackings, or any other means. "It is 'obvious and unarguable' that no governmental interest is more compelling than the security of the Nation." Haig v. Agee, 453 U.S. 280, 307 (1981) (quoting Aptheker v. Secretary of State, 378 U.S. 500, 509 (1964)).
The Constitution prohibits consideration of race or ethnicity in law enforcement decisions in all but the most exceptional instances. Given the incalculably high stakes involved in such investigations, however, Federal law enforcement officers who are protecting national security or preventing catastrophic events (as well as airport security screeners) may consider race, ethnicity, and other relevant factors to the extent permitted by our laws and the Constitution. Similarly, because enforcement of the laws protecting the Nation's borders may necessarily involve a consideration of a person's alienage in certain circumstances, the use of race or ethnicity in such circumstances is properly governed by existing statutory and constitutional standards. See, e.g., United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U.S. 873, 886-87 (1975). (6) This policy will honor the rule of law and promote vigorous protection of our national security.
As the Supreme Court has stated, all racial classifications by a governmental actor are subject to the "strictest judicial scrutiny."Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peña, 515 U.S. 200, 224-25 (1995). The application of strict scrutiny is of necessity a fact-intensive process. Id. at 236. Thus, the legality of particular, race-sensitive actions taken by Federal law enforcement officials in the context of national security and border integrity will depend to a large extent on the circumstances at hand. In absolutely no event, however, may Federal officials assert a national security or border integrity rationale as a mere pretext for invidious discrimination. Indeed, the very purpose of the strict scrutiny test is to "smoke out" illegitimate use of race, Adarand, 515 U.S. at 226 (quoting Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co., 488 U.S. 469, 493 (1989)), and law enforcement strategies not actually premised on bona fide national security or border integrity interests therefore will not stand.
In sum, constitutional provisions limiting government action on the basis of race are wide-ranging and provide substantial protections at every step of the investigative and judicial process. Accordingly, and as illustrated below, when addressing matters of national security, border integrity, or the possible catastrophic loss of life, existing legal and constitutional standards are an appropriate guide for Federal law enforcement officers.
* Example: The FBI receives reliable information that persons affiliated with a foreign ethnic insurgent group intend to use suicide bombers to assassinate that country's president and his entire entourage during an official visit to the United States. Federal law enforcement may appropriately focus investigative attention on identifying members of that ethnic insurgent group who may be present and active in the United States and who, based on other available information, might conceivably be involved in planning some such attack during the state visit.
* Example: U.S. intelligence sources report that terrorists from a particular ethnic group are planning to use commercial jetliners as weapons by hijacking them at an airport in California during the next week. Before allowing men of that ethnic group to board commercial airplanes in California airports during the next week, Transportation Security Administration personnel, and other federal and state authorities, may subject them to heightened scrutiny.
Because terrorist organizations might aim to engage in unexpected acts of catastrophic violence in any available part of the country (indeed, in multiple places simultaneously, if possible), there can be no expectation that the information must be specific to a particular locale or even to a particular identified scheme.
Of course, as in the example below, reliance solely upon generalized stereotypes is forbidden.
* Example: At the security entrance to a Federal courthouse, a man who appears to be of a particular ethnicity properly submits his briefcase for x-ray screening and passes through the metal detector. The inspection of the briefcase reveals nothing amiss, the man does not activate the metal detector, and there is nothing suspicious about his activities or appearance. In the absence of any threat warning, the federal security screener may not order the man to undergo a further inspection solely because he appears to be of a particular ethnicity.
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(http://images.mirror.co.uk/upl/m2/aug2006/8/5/0B8725B4-FA02-5052-5619C43B52861D23.jpg)
Donald Stewart- Whyte, a UK passport holder. Tell me how you'd profile him.
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"Donald Stewart- Whyte, a UK passport holder. Tell me how you'd profile him."
I assume you mean before he showed up as a terrorist on google. :-)
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article6825337.ece
Or when he didn't look like this picture:
(http://www.google.com/images?q=tbn:keiQdYwbkHkc_M::newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/47434000/jpg/_47434731_donald.jpg&t=1&h=78&w=138&usg=__SQnTz0Epjvj1EAK6wl7DpU6IaEw=)
Did he buy a one way cash ticket, I don't know. He did have a gun and I don't think anyone is ready to get rid of metal detectors.
Assuming intelligence had not penetrated any groups he joined, that we didn't know he was a recent Muslim convert who had changed name to Abdul Waheed and that we did not know of his mental health instabilities and suicidal tendencies... Assuming our intelligence missed all that, he still fits a partial demographic of young male in a certain age range, who rarely steps onto an airplane, from a country known for imported and home grown terrorists (UK). We would check him over closer than my sister or mother if the mission was strictly safety and security rather than equal treatment, which we don't seem to apply anywhere else in America.
Honestly I don't know if or how we would know GM, but if we could clear the names of most of the frequent flying no-threat public, we would have more time to search this guy's crevices.
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Jihadists have access to razors. The "crotch bomber" bought a round trip ticket, so I think we can safely assume that AQ is aware of the one way ticket selectee criteria we have in the US. Jihadists will not be so kind as to wear obvious muslim garb or "I *heart* jihad" t-shirts when going to board aircraft. So what does a muslim look like in the US? Can you imagine a scenario where a lebanese christian is getting tossed by TSA whilst a chechen, white convert and uighur pass by to wage jihad?
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Good point, the Chechen whites will be on my full screen list, guilty until proven innocent.
I think you ignored my point. Is your solution the status quo?
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Many muslim converts adopt an arabic name, but do not legally change their name, so someone born Keith Maurice Ellison might later call himself "Keith Hakim" or "Keith X Ellison" or "Keith Ellison-Muhammad", yet his driver's license would still say "Keith Maurice Ellison", unless he had legally changed it.
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Could you spot a chechen muslim in a crowd?
The hard truth is there are no simple answers to this problem. There is no viable technical panacea and aside from the legal issues related to profiling, without a massive domestic intelligence infrastructure, I don't think it's the answer either.
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Once again the big govt. "thinkers" have created a problem that they conveniently have had a solution for all along- in this case national ID cards.
I predict that within the next few months we get a HUGE push for National ID again. After all, they all ready have your biometric scan on file (that they swore was not saved),
so just get a NID card and you'll breeze right through the lines. Classic bait and switch.
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And what of the "cleanskin" homegrown terrorist with a shiny new Nat'l ID card?
I've worked for DHS, Chad. You give them way too much credit.
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@GM: I never assume what these people do make sense. In fact the less sense something they do makes, the more I worry. Seriously, screening pilots?
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If pilots are exempted from screening, then you have to worry about pilots willing to bring in threat items and those posing as pilots, who are not.
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United Airlines pilot charged with flying drugs to Shelby
By Tony Burbeck
NewsChannel 36
Posted: Saturday, Aug. 28, 2010
SHELBY - A United Airlines pilot based in San Francisco is charged with flying 173 pounds of marijuana to the Shelby-Cleveland County Regional Airport.
Read more: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2010/08/28/1648027/united-airlines-pilot-charged.html#ixzz15hBjmwlM
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PORT HURON, Mich. (AP) - An off-duty Northwest Airlines pilot was suspected of driving under the influence of cocaine when he headed the wrong way on an interstate to avoid the U.S.-Canada border and led deputies on a chase, authorities said Sunday.
Investigators said Walter L. Dinalko, a veteran pilot of 20 years, had flown to Detroit Metropolitan Airport Saturday afternoon and then rented a Hummer that he drove about 70 miles to Port Huron.
Dinalko turned around three times on the Blue Water Bridge, apparently changing his mind about heading into Sarnia, Ontario, said St. Clair County sheriff's Lt. A.J. Foster.
He then drove on the wrong side of the bridge and Interstate 94, Foster said.
U.S. Customs agents alerted sheriff's deputies, who closed down the expressway and gave chase, Foster said.
Deputies laid down stop sticks, which flattened the Hummer's tires. Dinalko stopped but refused to surrender to deputies, Foster said.
"He started giving them a hard time, and a tussle ensued," Foster said. Deputies subdued him and found suspected cocaine on the floor of the vehicle and in Dinalko's pocket, the lieutenant said.
Dinalko, 50, of St. Paul, Minn., was taken to a hospital for a drug test before he was taken to jail, said sheriff's Lt. Jim DeLacy.
"He appeared to be highly under the influence of narcotics," said DeLacy, who was on the scene of the arrest.
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(08-10) 04:00 PST Washington — 2002-08-10 04:00:00 PST Washington -- The Transportation Security Administration has warned airlines to be on the lookout for impostors wearing stolen uniforms trying to gain access to planes or airports, citing a series of recent thefts from flight crews.
Agency officials would not comment on the confidential warning, which was issued July 22 -- a week after burglars took airline uniforms, keys and identification tags from the New York apartment of two Delta Airlines flight attendants.
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I don't know how you can tell if a guy is under the influence of drugs by feeling his scrotum, but I'll take your word for it. :wink:
As for the impostors, the National ID/Biometrics will take care of that problem! Don't worry you can trust us, we're the govt! Oh, those syringes marked Syphilis? Thats just vitamin shots....
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Pilots leading less than legal lifestyles become vulnerable to blackmail.
"Take this package past the security checkpoint, or your wife, your boss and the FAA get a tape of you doing a line off the flight attendant's ass at the Hilton. Don't look inside.*
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Another TSA Outrage
Posted by Erick Erickson (Profile)
Thursday, November 18th at 6:28PM EST
64 Comments
A friend of mine sent me this about his TSA experience. He, unlike most of us, was coming back into the country from Afghanistan on a military charter.
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As the Chalk Leader for my flight home from Afghanistan, I witnessed the following:
When we were on our way back from Afghanistan, we flew out of Baghram Air Field. We went through customs at BAF, full body scanners (no groping), had all of our bags searched, the whole nine yards.
Our first stop was Shannon, Ireland to refuel. After that, we had to stop at Indianapolis, Indiana to drop off about 100 folks from the Indiana National Guard. That’s where the stupid started.
First, everyone was forced to get off the plane–even though the plane wasn’t refueling again. All 330 people got off that plane, rather than let the 100 people from the ING get off. We were filed from the plane to a holding area. No vending machines, no means of escape. Only a male/female latrine.
It’s probably important to mention that we were ALL carrying weapons. Everyone was carrying an M4 Carbine (rifle) and some, like me, were also carrying an M9 pistol. Oh, and our gunners had M-240B machine guns. Of course, the weapons weren’t loaded. And we had been cleared of all ammo well before we even got to customs at Baghram, then AGAIN at customs.
The TSA personnel at the airport seriously considered making us unload all of the baggage from the SECURE cargo hold to have it reinspected. Keep in mind, this cargo had been unpacked, inspected piece by piece by U.S. Customs officials, resealed and had bomb-sniffing dogs give it a one-hour run through. After two hours of sitting in this holding area, the TSA decided not to reinspect our Cargo–just to inspect us again: Soldiers on the way home from war, who had already been inspected, reinspected and kept in a SECURE holding area for 2 hours. Ok, whatever. So we lined up to go through security AGAIN.
This is probably another good time to remind you all that all of us were carrying actual assault rifles, and some of us were also carrying pistols.
So we’re in line, going through one at a time. One of our Soldiers had his Gerber multi-tool. TSA confiscated it. Kind of ridiculous, but it gets better. A few minutes later, a guy empties his pockets and has a pair of nail clippers. Nail clippers. TSA informs the Soldier that they’re going to confiscate his nail clippers. The conversation went something like this:
TSA Guy: You can’t take those on the plane.
Soldier: What? I’ve had them since we left country.
TSA Guy: You’re not suppose to have them.
Soldier: Why?
TSA Guy: They can be used as a weapon.
Soldier: [touches butt stock of the rifle] But this actually is a weapon. And I’m allowed to take it on.
TSA Guy: Yeah but you can’t use it to take over the plane. You don’t have bullets.
Soldier: And I can take over the plane with nail clippers?
TSA Guy: [awkward silence]
Me: Dude, just give him your damn nail clippers so we can get the f**k out of here. I’ll buy you a new set.
Soldier: [hands nail clippers to TSA guy, makes it through security]
This might be a good time to remind everyone that approximately 233 people re-boarded that plane with assault rifles, pistols, and machine guns–but nothing that could have been used as a weapon.
http://www.redstate.com/erick/2010/11/18/another-tsa-outrage/
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Nail clippers aren't a prohibited item.
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The prohibited items list is not intended to be all-inclusive and is updated as necessary. To ensure travelers' security, Transportation Security Officers (TSOs) may determine that an item not on the Prohibited Items List is prohibited.
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http://www.tsa.gov/press/releases/2002/press_release_0104.shtm
Items permitted in aircraft cabins:
* Pets (if permitted by airline check with airline for procedures)
* Walking canes and umbrellas (once inspected to ensure prohibited items are not concealed)
* Nail clippers with nail files attached
* Nail files
* Tweezers
* Safety razors (including disposable razors)
* Syringes (with medication and professionally printed label identifying medication or manufacturer’s name)
* Insulin delivery systems
* Eyelash curlers
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Q. What changes can the traveling public expect? What can passengers traveling on flights to the U.S. from international destinations expect?
A. On any given day, passengers traveling on flights to the U.S. from international destinations may notice enhanced, random security measures throughout the passenger check-in and boarding process. Aviation security is a shared responsibility and countries around the world are working together to increase the safety of air travel. Passengers traveling on flights to the U.S. from international last point of departure destinations are likely to notice enhanced measures including the increased use of the technology and processes such as explosives trace detection, canine teams, advanced imaging technology, and behavior detection among other measures.
For security reasons, the specific details of the directives are not public.
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http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/11/18/americas-war-texas-mounts-counterinsurgency-effort/#ixzz15eiV26Yv
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http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/19/no-security-pat-downs-for-boehner/
At a Capitol Hill news conference after Election Day, as Mr. Boehner began laying out the changes he would make when he becomes House Speaker, he announced that he would continue to fly commercial airlines (usually Delta) back to Ohio. It was a not-so-subtle dig at the outgoing Democratic speaker, Nancy Pelosi of California, who had been criticized by Republicans for flying military airplanes when she returned home to San Francisco.
“Over the last 20 years, I have flown back and forth to my district on a commercial aircraft,” Mr. Boehner said at the time, “and I am going to continue to do that.”
And so on Friday, he did. But not without the perquisites of office, including avoiding those security pat-downs that many travelers are bracing for as holiday travel season approaches.
Michael Steel, a spokesman for the Republican leader, said in a statement that Mr. Boehner was not receiving special treatment. And a law enforcement official said that any member of Congress or administration official with a security detail is allowed to bypass security.
“The appropriate security procedures for all Congressional leaders, including Speaker Pelosi and Senator Reid, are determined by the Capitol Police working with the Transportation Security Administration,” Mr. Steel said.
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http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/safety/the-truth-about-tsa-airport-scanning
The Truth About TSA Airport Scanning
What's all this about the government trying to give us cancer and storing clothing-free images? Here's the truth about what you'll encounter—the radio frequencies, radiation and patdowns—when flying during Thanksgiving
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joIxWcFO3bY&feature=player_embedded
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(http://www.danielpipes.org/img/blog_32.jpg) (http://www.edbrown.com/images/handguns/Mas1.jpg)
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My guess is that no authentic NRA member has ever taken down an airliner full of innocent people. I would profile him further (voluntary) and then let him carry the gun in case we misjudge the other guy.
Let's get closer to home. Which of the following will need full intrusive screening before an aircraft is safe to fly:
a) Crafty's mom
b) My sister
c) JDN's wife
d) none of the above
I will bet my life on none of the above and worry only about ice storms and engine failure.
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Anyone can buy an NRA jacket. Who gets profiled? One of those two is a convicted terrorist. Both were born in the US.
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One of these two was arrested on a traffic stop with an AK-47 type rifle. One of these two is known for his love of Rolling Rock beer.
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The TSA personnel and/or LEOs at the airport looking at the teeming masses lining up to fly don't know who Crafty's mom, your sister or JDN's wife are. They are looking for the terrorist needle in the haystack. And the needles aren't going to be nice enough to label themselves as such.
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GM:
What do you make of
a) that former DHS head Chertkoff (sp?) lobbied for the Rapiscan scanners? and/or
b) assertions that they do not spot items such as the Crispy Weiner bomber's bombs?
c) Also, what about the use of dogs instead of radiation and groping?
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a) that former DHS head Chertkoff (sp?) lobbied for the Rapiscan scanners? and/or
Having people leave either elected or appointed office to then lobby for private industry is nothing new.
b) assertions that they do not spot items such as the Crispy Weiner bomber's bombs?
To determine that, we'd need to experiment with the backscatter device as it's used by TSA. I don't know that the critics have done that.
c) Also, what about the use of dogs instead of radiation and groping?
Dogs are a useful tool, but they have a limited time they can be used, and they can't be used to detect all potential weapons/explosives. Some explosives are composed of such commonly available chemicals, that there would be an endless amount of false positives if the dogs were trained to detect them.
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Time then maybe to close down air travel and all public transportation. I suggested (repeatedly)that someone who travels every week on business could voluntarily submit to some kind of deeper profile check and then prove who he/she is at the airport and not be treated exactly the same as a complete unknown from a high risk group. That does not mean no screen at the airport. That means less aggressive groping would be necessary if you knew the first thing about them. Unburdened by some of the idiocy, we might better our chances of finding the 'needle'.
How could a convicted terrorist by a ticket? Why is he out? That problem is not at the groping station. Next they will embed the fluid in their stomach or under the skin. Where does this end?
What about these scanners? What is the radiation level? Are they safe for everyone? If so, why is there an opt out? I'll show you an opt out - don't buy a ticket. But these pictures coming back of highly invasive searches of complete non-suspects is going to kill the industry and maybe our society.
The terror planners in their caves watching hi-def footage of Americans fondling each other must find this comparable to the 911 inferno pictures themselves.
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Cleanskin-an undercover operative unknown to his or her targets, or a terrorist unknown to national security services.
Before Randall Todd Royer (Very profiling worthy name :roll:) developed his legal troubles, he would be free to sign up for a background check to fly with reduced screening. So could have Maj. Hasan, prior to the Ft. Hood shooting. Both were US born. Hasan had a secret level security clearance.
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a) that former DHS head Chertkoff (sp?) lobbied for the Rapiscan scanners? and/or
GM Having people leave either elected or appointed office to then lobby for private industry is nothing new.
Marc: Neither is corruption, the possibility of which is the point of my question.
b) assertions that they do not spot items such as the Crispy Weiner bomber's bombs?
GM: To determine that, we'd need to experiment with the backscatter device as it's used by TSA. I don't know that the critics have done that.
Marc: Nor am I aware of data showing that these things WOULD pick up Crispy Weiner bombs. You frequently amaze me with your ability to come up with citations for your positions. Please feel free to amaze me again. :-)
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(http://www.danielpipes.org/img/blog_32.jpg)
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
FRIDAY, APRIL 9, 2004
WWW.USDOJ.GOV
CRM
(202) 514-2008
TDD (202) 514-1888
RANDALL TODD ROYER AND IBRAHIM AHMED AL-HAMDI SENTENCED FOR PARTICIPATION IN VIRGINIA JIHAD NETWORK
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Attorney General John Ashcroft, Assistant Attorney General Christopher A. Wray of the Criminal Division, and U.S. Attorney Paul J. McNulty of the Eastern District of Virginia announced that Randall Todd Royer and Ibrahim Ahmed Al-Hamdi were sentenced today by U.S. District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema for their convictions on charges stemming from their participation in a network of militant jihadists centered in Northern Virginia.
Royer, 31, pled guilty in January 2004 to a two-count criminal information charging him with aiding and abetting the use and discharge of a firearm during and in relation to a crime of violence, and with aiding and abetting the carrying of an explosive during the commission of a felony. In his plea agreement, Royer admitted to aiding and abetting co-defendants Masoud Khan, Yong Ki Kwon, Muhammed Aatique and Khwaja Mahmoud Hasan in gaining entry to a terrorist training camp in Pakistan operated by Lashkar-e-Taiba, where they trained in the use of various weapons. Royer also admitted to helping co-defendant Ibrahim Ahmed Al-Hamdi gain entry to the Lashkar-e-Taiba camp, where Al-Hamdi received training in the use of a rocket-propelled grenade in furtherance of a conspiracy to conduct military operations against India.
Royer acknowledged that he committed his offenses to help other jihadists gain entry to the Lashkar-e-Taiba training camp following a meeting on Sept. 16, 2001, at which an unindicted conspirator said that the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, would be used as an excuse to trigger a global war against Islam, and that the time had come for them to go abroad and, if possible, join the mujahideen. Three other individuals attending that meeting, Yong Kwon, Muhammed Aatique, and Khwaja Hasan - all of whom pled guilty - stated that they went to the Lashkar-e-Taiba camp to obtain combat training for the purpose engaging in violent jihad in Afghanistan against the American troops that they expected would soon invade that country.
Royer was sentenced today to 20 years in prison. Judge Brinkema sentenced him to serve 10 years in prison on both counts, and the sentences are to run consecutively. In addition, he was sentenced to three years of supervised release.
Al-Hamdi, 26, pled guilty in January 2004 to Count 20 of the government’s Superseding Indictment, charging him with possessing a firearm during and in relation to a crime of violence, and to a one-count criminal information charging him with carrying an explosive during the commission of a felony. In his plea agreement, Al-Hamdi admitted to possessing a Saiga.308 caliber rifle with a telescopic sight and various ammunition, including tracer rounds, for the purpose of enhancing his ability to train for violent jihad in Chechnya, Kashmir or other places outside of the United States. Al-Hamdi also admitted to carrying a rocket-propelled grenade in furtherance of a conspiracy to undertake a military operation against India.
Al-Hamdi was sentenced today to 15 years in prison. Judge Brinkema sentenced him to serve five years in prison on the firearms count and 10 years on the explosives count; the sentences are to run consecutively to each other and to the 18-month sentence Al-Hamdi presently is serving for his illegal possession of a firearm as a non-immigrant alien. In addition, he was sentenced to three years of supervised release.
“Today’s sentences demonstrate the severe penalties for aiding terrorist causes,” said Attorney General John Ashcroft. “We will not allow terrorist groups to exploit America’s freedoms to pursue their deadly goals.”
The pleas by Royer and Al-Hamdi follow guilty pleas in the case in August and September 2003 by Donald Surratt, Muhammed Aatique, Yong Kwon and Khwaja Hasan, who were members of the same jihad network in Northern Virginia. Defendants Seifullah Chapman, Masoud Khan, and Hammad Abdur-Raheem were convicted of various terrorism-related offenses by Judge Brinkema on March 4, 2004, after a three-week trial in which Surratt, Aatique, Kwon, Hasan, and Al-Hamdi each testified.
Khan, who Royer helped reach the Lashkar-e-Taiba camp in Pakistan shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, was convicted for his actions after 9/11 of conspiracy to wage war against the United States and provide to support to the Taliban. Khan, Chapman and Hammad Abdur-Raheem all were convicted of conspiring to provide material support to Lashkar-e-Taiba, a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, and to attack India in violation of the Neutrality Act, as well as of various firearms related offenses, for conduct that spanned from 2000 to 2003. Two other defendants charged in the case, Caliph Basha Ibn Abdur-Raheem and Sabri Benkhala, were acquitted at trial.
The government’s investigation of the Virginia jihad network is continuing. Under the terms of their plea agreements, both Royer and Al-Hamdi are required to cooperate fully with the government in the investigation and prosecution of other individuals associated with this network.
This case was investigated by agents of the Washington Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Assistant United States Attorneys Gordon D. Kromberg and David H. Laufman, and Department of Justice Trial Attorney John T. Gibbs of the Counterterrorism Section of the Criminal Division, prosecuted the case for the United States.
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(http://www.edbrown.com/images/handguns/Mas1.jpg)
Massad F. Ayoob (born July 20, 1948) is an internationally known firearms and self-defense instructor. He was the director of the Lethal Force Institute in Concord, New Hampshire from 1981 to 2009,[1] has taught police techniques and civilian self-defense to both law enforcement officers and private citizens in numerous venues since 1974, and has appeared as an expert witness in several trials. He has served as a part-time police officer in New Hampshire since 1972 and holds the rank of Captain in the Grantham, New Hampshire police department.[2]
Ayoob has authored several books and more than 1,000 articles on firearms, combat techniques, self-defense, and legal issues, and has served in an editorial capacity for Guns Magazine, American Handgunner, Gun Week, and Combat Handguns. Since 1995, he has written self-defense- and firearms-related articles for Backwoods Home Magazine. He also has a featured segment on the television show Personal Defense TV, which airs on the Sportsman Channel in the United States.
While Ayoob has been in the courtroom as a testifying police officer, expert witness, and police prosecutor, he is not an attorney; he is, however, a former Vice Chairman of the Forensic Evidence Committee of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), and is believed to be the only non-attorney ever to hold this position.[3][4] His published work was cited by the Violence Policy Center in their amicus curiae brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court in the District of Columbia v. Heller case, and he himself filed a declaration in another amicus brief in this case.[5] His course for attorneys, titled "The Management of the Lethal Force/Deadly Weapons Case", was, according to Jeffrey Weiner (former president of NACDL), "the best course for everything you need to know but are never taught in law school."[4]
Ayoob remains an internationally prominent law enforcement officer training instructor. Since 1987, he has served as chairman of the Firearms Committee of the American Society of Law Enforcement Trainers (ASLET).[dated info] He also serves on the Advisory Board of the International Law Enforcement Educators’ and Trainers’ Association, and is an instructor at the National Law Enforcement Training Center.[5]
Ayoob is of Arab descent
**Mas likes his Rolling Rocks. I've seen him put away many at ASLET functions. His parents were Syrian immigrants.**
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a) that former DHS head Chertkoff (sp?) lobbied for the Rapiscan scanners? and/or
GM Having people leave either elected or appointed office to then lobby for private industry is nothing new.
Marc: Neither is corruption, the possibility of which is the point of my question.
b) assertions that they do not spot items such as the Crispy Weiner bomber's bombs?
GM: To determine that, we'd need to experiment with the backscatter device as it's used by TSA. I don't know that the critics have done that.
Marc: Nor am I aware of data showing that these things WOULD pick up Crispy Weiner bombs. You frequently amaze me with your ability to come up with citations for your positions. Please feel free to amaze me again. :-)
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/safety/the-truth-about-tsa-airport-scanning
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/safety/airport-security-vs-personal-privacy
I think Popular Mechanics is credible.
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http://www.jihadwatch.org/2005/04/witness-testifies-against-al-timimi.html
Witness testifies against Al-Timimi
The amazing story of Yong Ki Kwon, yet another convert to Islam who has misunderstood the religion. One would think, as long as we are being compelled by American Muslim advocacy groups and their allies in the media and government to swallow this farrago about how Islam is a peaceful religion that has been hijacked by "extremists," that at very least these advocacy groups would address this worldwide misunderstanding of Islam by the most pious Muslims. For here again, it is the Muslims who are most serious about Islam who are waging jihad, and those that are least devout and literal-minded who are staying home. Al-Timimi trial update, from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
FAIRFAX, Va. -- He never made it to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban, but Yong Ki Kwon -- a Northern Virginia engineer who fled the United States nine days after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks -- said it wasn't for lack of effort. Kwon, 29, is a South Korea-born graduate of Virginia Tech who is serving an 11-year prison sentence as a result of his guilty plea last year on federal conspiracy and weapons charges. He has emerged as the prosecution's star witness in the case against Ali Al-Timimi, an American Islamic scholar charged with recruiting soldiers for the Taliban just five days after Sept. 11....
Kwon, one of nine men convicted last year in the so-called "paintball jihad" network, told a chilling tale of the birth of an American jihad.
The holy war was conceived in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., in the dawn of the 21st century and was born at a meeting in his Fairfax, Va. apartment Sept. 16, 2001, when Kwon said he and several companions decided to heed the call of spiritual adviser Al-Timimi and to be trained to join the Taliban.
Four days later, Kwon was on a flight to Karachi, Pakistan.
The call to holy war took Kwon, who became a U.S. citizen in August 2001, to the mountain training camps of Lashkar-e-Taiba -- known as the LET -- a group that the U.S. placed on its terrorist list in December 2001.
Under the guidance of militants who trained holy warriors for battle in Afghanistan, Kwon honed his skills with semi-automatic weapons and learned to fire a grenade launcher.
Kwon, though, said he never was able to join the Taliban. He was simply too late. The border between Afghanistan and Pakistan closed as U.S. forces took control of Afghanistan shortly before Kwon completed his training at the LET camp.
He said his mentors offered him another option: Go back to the United States and gather information for the mujahadeen, or holy warriors....
Dressed in a dark-green prison jumpsuit, the tall, bearded Kwon told jurors how he first heard Al-Timimi speak in 1997 at an Islamic Assembly of North America conference in Chicago.
Born to Christian parents, Kwon converted to Islam in 1997 and quickly found scholar Al-Timimi lecturing regularly near his Northern Virginia home.
Al-Timimi was known in strict Muslim communities across the word for his taped and Internet lectures. Supporters point to well-known lectures calling for peace in the wake of the first World Trade Center attack in 1993.
Al-Timimi also was listed as an advisory board member of Assirat Al-Mustaqueem -- an international Arabic language magazine published in Pittsburgh from 1991 to 2000.
The magazine called for holy war against Christians and Jews. It also lauded the international army that Osama bin Laden assembled for the Taliban in Afghanistan. The magazine once featured an article lauding Shamil Basayev, the Chechen rebel who took credit for last fall's bloody Beslen school massacre in which more than 300 people -- many of them school children -- were slain.
Wait a minute. He called for "peace in the wake of the first World Trade Center attack in 1993" but stayed until 2000 on the advisory board of a magazine that "called for holy war against Christians and Jews" and "lauded the international army that Osama bin Laden assembled for the Taliban in Afghanistan"? Some Islamic apologists and their allies have criticized my use of the word "taqiyya" on this site, pointing out that taqiyya properly refers only to Shi'ites pretending to be Sunnis for fear of persecution. Very well. I won't call it "taqiyya" this time, although I am not going to be intimidated away from using a word that sums up very well the Islamic doctrine of religious deception. That doctrine allows Muslims to lie about their faith when under pressure (cf. Qur'an 16:106 and also 3:28) and when in battle (cf. Sahih Bukhari, vol. 4, book 52, nos. 268-270 and Sahih Muslim, book 32, no. 6303). Was al-Timimi practicing this deception that when he preached peace after the first WTC bombing? This is at least a question that prosecutors should investigate -- but they probably won't, because political correctness and fear will probably keep them from touching on any questions regarding Islam.
Kwon said he grew to know and respect Al-Timimi as he regularly attended lectures at Dar Al Arqam mosque in Falls Church, Va.
Al-Timimi's lectures on such topics as the purification of the soul and the new world order were only one side of Kwon's pursuit of Islam.
The other side played out among Kwon and a small group of Muslim friends on the paintball fields and target ranges ringing Washington. That side focused on jihad -- violent holy war. And that focus turned to an obsession among Kwon and his friends long before Sept. 11, 2001, Kwon testified.
The group, which included two U.S. military veterans and several engineers, gathered regularly, starting in early 2000, to talk about or prepare for jihad.
"Russian Hell" -- a jihad video that featured bloody clips of a Chechen Muslim rebel leader executing a Russian prisoner of war -- was a favorite among the videos that the group exchanged and discussed.
"They (the videos) motivated us. It was like they gave us inspiration," Kwon testified.
Martyrdom, too, was a topic.
"As a Muslim, it's something you aspire to," Kwon said, answering questions from assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Kromberg. "We talked about it. I don't know how realistic we were, but we talked about it because it was very noble," Kwon told the jury of nine men and five women before U.S. District Court Judge Leonie M. Brinkema.
Members of the group wanted to be ready to take up arms -- should the need to defend Islam arise, Kwon said -- and they began traveling to shooting ranges for target practice and to paintball fields to execute military maneuvers.
Al-Timimi never was a part of their games, Kwon said, but he and other witnesses said the man they characterized as a respected mentor was aware of them. Indeed, they consulted Al-Timimi when the FBI visited one of the members of their group with questions. Al-Timimi's advice: Be more circumspect about their activities, Kwon and others testified.
Kwon recalled driving Al-Timimi home from the mosque Sept. 11, 2001 after the terrorist attacks. He said Al-Timimi and another scholar argued, with Al-Timimi characterizing the attacks as a punishment of America from God, while his fellow scholar decried the attacks.
That night, as they drove from the mosque, Kwon said Al-Timimi had a request.
"He told me to gather some brothers, to have a contingency plan in case there were mass hostilities toward Muslims in America," Kwon said....
Then, Kwon said, Al-Timimi advised the group that the effort to spread Islam in the United States was over and that the only other options open to them were to repent, leave the U.S. and join the mujahadeen -- the holy warriors preparing to defend Afghanistan against the coming U.S. invasion.
Four days later, Kwon was on the plane to Pakistan, embarking on a jihad that would land him in prison.
"I made the decision to go, but (Al-Timimi) was a big part of my decision to go," Kwon said.
Al-Timimi was, of course, wrong in thinking that "the effort to spread Islam in the United States was over." He didn't realize that even several years after 9/11, American leaders would prate about the religion of "tolerance" and "peace," and that apologists for Islam would compile reading lists for American generals, and that editors of supposedly tough, no-nonsense "conservative" publications would -- without having bothered to study Islam themselves -- refuse to publish some of the most important writers on Islam today (most notably Bat Ye’or), remove advertisements for books under pressure from an American Muslim advocacy group that a U. S. Senator has identified as having ties to terror, and dismiss as attempting to "discredit Muhammad and Islam" those who think that it is reasonable, in discussions of terrorism, to discuss Qur'anic passages and events in the life of Muhammad that terrorists themselves point to as the justification for their actions. No, if al-Timimi had foreseen all that, he would have been quite optimistic indeed.
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So let's wave Randy Royer and Yong Ki Kwan through and pull Massad Ayoob and Piyush Amrit Jindal aside for extra screening, right profilers?
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http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-9th-circuit/1265662.html
UNITED STATES v. AUKAI
UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Daniel Kuualoha AUKAI, Defendant-Appellant.
No. 04-10226.
Argued and Submitted En Banc March 21, 2007. -- August 10, 2007
The Fourth Amendment requires the government to respect “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons ․ and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” U.S. Const. amend. IV. “A search or seizure is ordinarily unreasonable in the absence of individualized suspicion of wrongdoing. While such suspicion is not an ‘irreducible’ component of reasonableness, [the Supreme Court has] recognized only limited circumstances in which the usual rule does not apply.” City of Indianapolis v. Edmond, 531 U.S. 32, 37, 121 S.Ct. 447, 148 L.Ed.2d 333 (2000) (citations omitted). However, “where the risk to public safety is substantial and real, blanket suspicionless searches calibrated to the risk may rank as ‘reasonable’-for example, searches now routine at airports and at entrances to courts and other official buildings.” Chandler v. Miller, 520 U.S. 305, 323, 117 S.Ct. 1295, 137 L.Ed.2d 513 (1997) (holding Georgia's requirement that candidates for state office pass a drug test did not fit within this exception) (citing Nat'l Treasury Employees Union v. Von Raab, 489 U.S. 656, 674-76 & n. 3, 109 S.Ct. 1384, 103 L.Ed.2d 685 (1989) (upholding warrantless drug testing of employees applying for promotion to positions involving drug interdiction)). Thus, “where a Fourth Amendment intrusion serves special governmental needs, beyond the normal need for law enforcement, it is necessary to balance the individual's privacy expectations against the Government's interests to determine whether it is impractical to require a warrant or some level of individualized suspicion in the particular context.” Von Raab, 489 U.S. at 665-66, 109 S.Ct. 1384.
Under this rationale the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld the constitutionality of so-called “administrative searches.” 2 In New York v. Burger, 482 U.S. 691, 107 S.Ct. 2636, 96 L.Ed.2d 601 (1987), the Supreme Court upheld the warrantless search of a junkyard's records, permits, and vehicles. The Supreme Court reasoned: “Because the owner or operator of commercial premises in a ‘closely regulated’ industry has a reduced expectation of privacy, the warrant and probable-cause requirements, which fulfill the traditional Fourth Amendment standard of reasonableness for a government search have lessened application ․” Id. at 702, 107 S.Ct. 2636 (internal citation omitted). Thus, New York's interest in regulating the junkyard industry, in light of the rise of motor-theft and comprehensive motor vehicle insurance premiums, served as a “special need” allowing inspection without a warrant. Id. at 708-09, 107 S.Ct. 2636; see also id. at 702, 107 S.Ct. 2636. The regulatory statute also provided a “constitutionally adequate substitute for a warrant” because the statute informed junkyard operators that inspections would be made on a regular basis and limited the discretion of inspecting officers. Id. at 711, 107 S.Ct. 2636.
In Michigan Department of State Police v. Sitz, 496 U.S. 444, 110 S.Ct. 2481, 110 L.Ed.2d 412 (1990), Sitz challenged the constitutionality of suspicionless sobriety checkpoints conducted on Michigan's highways, contending that the program violated the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable seizures. Id. at 447-48, 110 S.Ct. 2481. The Supreme Court upheld the sobriety checkpoints because “the balance of the State's interest in preventing drunken driving, the extent to which [the sobriety checkpoints] can reasonably be said to advance that interest, and the degree of intrusion upon individual motorists who are briefly stopped, weighs in favor of” finding the sobriety checkpoints constitutionally reasonable. Id. at 455, 110 S.Ct. 2481.
Significantly, the Supreme Court has held that the constitutionality of administrative searches is not dependent upon consent. In United States v. Biswell, 406 U.S. 311, 92 S.Ct. 1593, 32 L.Ed.2d 87 (1972), the Supreme Court upheld the warrantless search of a pawn shop owner's gun storeroom. The search was authorized by a federal gun control statute. The Court held that, “n the context of a regulatory inspection system of business premises that is carefully limited in time, place, and scope, the legality of the search depends not on consent but on the authority of a valid statute.” 3 Id. at 315, 92 S.Ct. 1593. Thus, “[w]hen a[gun] dealer chooses to engage in this pervasively regulated business and to accept a federal license, he does so with the knowledge that his business records, firearms, and ammunition will be subject to effective inspection.” Id. at 316, 92 S.Ct. 1593.
We have held that airport screening searches, like the one at issue here, are constitutionally reasonable administrative searches because they are “conducted as part of a general regulatory scheme in furtherance of an administrative purpose, namely, to prevent the carrying of weapons or explosives aboard aircraft, and thereby to prevent hijackings.” United States v. Davis, 482 F.2d 893, 908 (9th Cir.1973); see also United States v. Hartwell, 436 F.3d 174, 178 (3d Cir.), cert. denied, 549 U.S. 945, 127 S.Ct. 111, 166 L.Ed.2d 255 (2006); Marquez, 410 F.3d at 616. Our case law, however, has erroneously suggested that the reasonableness of airport screening searches is dependent upon consent, either ongoing consent 4 or irrevocable implied consent.5
The constitutionality of an airport screening search, however, does not depend on consent, see Biswell, 406 U.S. at 315, 92 S.Ct. 1593, and requiring that a potential passenger be allowed to revoke consent to an ongoing airport security search makes little sense in a post-9/11 world.6 Such a rule would afford terrorists 7 multiple opportunities to attempt to penetrate airport security by “electing not to fly” on the cusp of detection until a vulnerable portal is found. This rule would also allow terrorists a low-cost method of detecting systematic vulnerabilities in airport security, knowledge that could be extremely valuable in planning future attacks. Likewise, given that consent is not required, it makes little sense to predicate the reasonableness of an administrative airport screening search on an irrevocable implied consent theory. Rather, where an airport screening search is otherwise reasonable and conducted pursuant to statutory authority, 49 U.S.C. § 44901, all that is required is the passenger's election to attempt entry into the secured area 8 of an airport. See Biswell, 406 U.S. at 315, 92 S.Ct. 1593; 49 C.F.R. § 1540.107. Under current TSA regulations and procedures, that election occurs when a prospective passenger walks through the magnetometer or places items on the conveyor belt of the x-ray machine.9 The record establishes that Aukai elected to attempt entry into the posted secured area of Honolulu International Airport when he walked through the magnetometer, thereby subjecting himself to the airport screening process.
To the extent our cases have predicated the reasonableness of an airport screening search upon either ongoing consent or irrevocable implied consent, they are overruled.
IV.
Although the constitutionality of airport screening searches is not dependent on consent, the scope of such searches is not limitless. A particular airport security screening search is constitutionally reasonable provided that it “is no more extensive nor intensive than necessary, in the light of current technology, to detect the presence of weapons or explosives [ ][and] that it is confined in good faith to that purpose.” Davis, 482 F.2d at 913. We conclude that the airport screening search of Aukai satisfied these requirements.
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http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/security/aviation/airport/securityscanners/securityscanner/
Assessment of comparative ionising radiation doses from the use of rapiscan secure 1000 x-ray backscatter security scanner
Published: 1 February 2010.
Health Protection Agency, Centre for Radiation, Chemical and Environmental Hazards January 2010 - Axel MacDonald, Phil Tattersall, John O’Hagan, Jill Meara, Richard Paynter, Peter Shaw.
The Government may require airport operators to use enhanced screening techniques using x-ray scanning equipment to safeguard flights from UK airports. The Justification of Practices Involving Ionising Radiation Regulations 2004 (SI 2004/1769)(Justification Regulations) came into force on 2 August 2004. These regulations are applied to new practices utilising ionising radiation that arose after May 2000. Those practices in use prior to May 2000 are regarded as existing practices and are not required to go through the justification process required of new practices, although any important new information on their effectiveness and potential doses may prompt a review of their justification. X-ray backscatter scanning systems to detect concealed items were in use prior to May 2000 and this is listed as an existing practice1.
This assessment addresses exposures and risks from the use of an x-ray backscatter body scanner, specifically a model that has been trialled in the UK in both a single scan and double scan (single pose) set-up. X-ray transmission body scanning systems, for instance those used by customs on those suspected of smuggling narcotics within their body, are not considered and it is thought that the use of such systems for routinely scanning passengers would be considered as a new practice. The Department of Energy and Climate Change hold a register of applications for new practices under the Justification Registrations2.
The effective dose from one scan from an x-ray backscatter unit (single or double scan) is 0.02 micro Sv or less (worst case scenario). Effective dose is a quantity that integrates radiation dose across the whole body. This dose is a small fraction of the annual background radiation.
People are constantly exposed to ionising radiation, most of which is from natural sources and medical exposures wherever they live. In the UK, the average dose to a member of the public from all sources (natural and artificial) is 2700 micro Sv/year. Natural radiation sources include cosmic rays, for which the radiation exposure increases with altitude; the typical dose rate during a commercial flight is approximately 5 micro Sv/h. In comparison, the dose rate from terrestrial and cosmic radiation sources at ground level is approximately 0.08 – 0.12 micro Sv/h.
Therefore the total radiation dose from an examination (which might involve 2 or 3 scans) is less than that received from two minutes flying at cruising altitude, or from one hour at ground level. However, it must be emphasised that these figures are based on the two variants (single and double scan) of the scanner model that HPA has assessed, and rely on the correct installation, operation and maintenance of the unit. Significantly higher doses may occur if these criteria are not satisfied.
HPA recommends a dose constraint of 300 micro Sv/year to a member of the public from practices involving the deliberate use of ionising radiation sources3. A passenger would need to be examined 5000 times before exceeding this constraint value (based on three scans per examination). It is concluded that the potential doses received from the use of a correctly installed and used x-ray backscatter body scanner are likely to be very low. Even in the case of frequent fliers the doses are unlikely to exceed 20 micro Sv/year.
It is important to note that the installation and use of this equipment will be subject to the requirements of the relevant radiation protection legislation4.
Comparative risks
The radiation doses from backscatter scanners are so low that the traditional radiation risk comparators, for example cancer risk may not provide the best illustration. A range of traditional and other comparators are given below. The data are taken from Office for National Statistics accident figures as presented on the ROSPA website5 and the JPNM “risk list” 6.
Whilst there are stages of pregnancy where a fetus is considered to be more susceptible to harm from radiation, the backscatter technology ensures that negligible doses are absorbed into the body (where the fetus is) and the fetal dose is thus much lower than the dose to a pregnant woman. Therefore for this comparison, which due to uncertainties only provides indicative risks, maternal and fetal dose can be considered the same. Similarly, because of the uncertainties at these low levels of exposure the risks to children, people with any type of illness or people undergoing any type of medical treatment are considered to be comparable to the risks to adults.
Therefore this risk assessment applies to the whole human population.
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http://www.securitymanagement.com/news/faqs-whole-body-imaging-006637
01/08/2010 -
The decision by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and his terrorist handlers to conceal high explosives in Abdulmutallab's underpants on a Detroit-bound flight on Christmas has led to renewed interest into whole body imaging technology, or full body scans, to detect contraband passengers may smuggle onboard an airplane.
Already, the British, French, Dutch, and Nigerian governments say they will embrace the technology, which allows operators to peer underneath a passenger's clothes and identify hidden threats on their body. The European Union, which overwhelmingly said no to the technology in 2008, is reconsidering its position post-Detroit, reports The Christian Science Monitor. And yesterday, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said her department will accelerate the deployment of whole body imaging technology at U.S. airports. There are already about 40 machines deployed at certain airports nationwide, but Napolitano said the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) will fast track at least another 300 units into the field this year.
This increased push for whole body imaging, however, has led to fears that the technology unnecessarily violates passengers' privacy rights and even their health. So what's true and false about whole body imaging technology? Security Management has scoured publicly available information to answer some of the most pressing questions.
How does whole body imaging technology work?
That depends, because there are two different ways to generate a full body image: millimeter wave technology and backscatter technology.
How do these technologies differ?
Millimeter wave technology beams the passenger with millimeter wave radio frequency (RF) energy from two antennas that spin around the passenger at very fast speeds from head to toe. The energy reflected off the body and other objects generates a three-dimensional image of the passenger's body and anything else carried on his person.
Backscatter technology, however, uses very weak X-rays to generate a two-sided image of a passenger and anything else on that person's body.
Do these technologies identify the same types of threats?
Yes. Manufacturers of each technology say their respective technologies can detect the same types of threats. L-3 Communications' machines, which use millimeter wave technology, boast that they can "reveal and pinpoint hidden weapons, explosives, drugs and other contraband."
RapiScan, which uses backscatter technology, states that its machines screen passengers "for a wide range of potential threats including liquids, contraband, ceramics, explosives, narcotics, concealed currency and weapons." American Science and Engineering (AS&E), another manufacturer of backscatter technology, says its system "displays both organic and inorganic materials, revealing objects such as guns and knives, liquid and plastic explosives, composite weapons, and other hidden threats and contraband."
On its Web page devoted to whole body imaging, the TSA makes no distinction between the types of threats each technology can detect.
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http://www.securitymanagement.com/article/new-views-airport-screening-004586?page=0%2C1
Passengers
Passenger screening is also evolving to keep up with changing threats. Threats now include not only guns, knives, and plastic explosives but also liquid explosives, radioactive materials, and pathogens. These threats have increased the need to move beyond the traditional metal detector, but that creates special challenges because humans cannot be subjected to the same x-rays as baggage.
Full-body imaging. One way that this challenge is being met is with the full-body scan systems, which use backscatter x-ray or millimeter wave technology. These generate much lower levels of radiation (less than 10 microREM versus 100 milliREM allowed per year). While they rely on different bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, backscatter and millimeter wave machines operate on the same principle. Like radar or sonar, the machines project energy onto an object, and the software interprets what is reflected back.
Generally, the waves penetrate clothing unaffected, are absorbed by hard objects like guns or explosives, and are “scattered,” or reflected back to varying degrees by organic material, including flesh.
A backscatter machine is about the size and shape of a vending machine; the subject gets scanned twice—once while standing facing the machine, then again while facing away from it. The millimeter wave machines that TSA has purchased, manufactured by L-3 Communications, are hexagonal booths with dual sensors that simultaneously sweep across a subject’s front and posterior. They produce a photo negative-like image of a bare body with inorganic threats in black.
The technology works, but it has run into opposition based on privacy concerns. The American Civil Liberties Union has dubbed the machines a “virtual strip search” and “an assault on the essential dignity of passengers that citizens in a free nation should not have to tolerate.”
TSA defends the technology. The agency notes that it is far less invasive than the traditional physical search. In fact, passengers subjected to secondary screening at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, when given a choice between a physical pat down and a full-body scan, choose the latter 90 percent of the time, according to TSA. Civil libertarians counter that most people don’t know exactly what the images entail.
“Determining how the public feels about this is going to affect the future of it,” Howe says.
To address the privacy concern, TSA has asked manufacturers to tweak the algorithm to blur the face in the image. Certain backscatter systems offer what may be a more desirable privacy feature: the subject’s body is presented not as a full image, but instead as a white outline reminiscent of the chalk outline at a crime scene. Threat objects are superimposed.
To boost privacy further, the TSO who views the full scans is sequestered from the checkpoint. If the TSO spots a potential threat, he or she radios the checkpoint to order a pat down.
In addition, the TSA’s policy requires that the scan images be deleted the moment review of the scan has been completed, Howe says. Asked about the value that such threat images might have in criminal investigations, prosecutions, or for intelligence, Howe says the TSA wrestled with the question, but opted to make a clear commitment for the sake of privacy.
“If [a suicide bomber] was going to get screened, they’d have blown themselves up already. And if you call over law enforcement, you’re not going to need the image,” because they will have the actual item, Howe says.
As of this summer, the TSA operated backscatter machines manufactured by American Science & Engineering Inc. (AS&E) at three airports—Los Angeles International, JFK, and Phoenix—for secondary screening versus a pat down. A total of 38 L-3 millimeter wave machines were in use at nine major airports for primary continuous screening, with three more airports planned by the end of the year, says Howe.
Howe notes that a millimeter wave scan takes 15 seconds compared to the backscatter’s 40 seconds—extra time that adds up at high-volume checkpoints.
Checkpoints also still use magnetometers. Given the prevalence of nonmetallic threats and the prevalence of harmless metal items both on—and in—passengers’ bodies, such as medical devices, Joe Reiss, vice president of marketing for AS&E, questions the ongoing value of magnetometers.
Howe, however, predicts that walk-through magnetometers will be present at TSA checkpoints for the foreseeable future. Each one costs about $5,000, while a new millimeter wave scanner costs roughly $200,000.
As for the privacy issue—it’s not going away. Cathleen A. Berrick, director of homeland security and justice issues for the independent Government Accountability Office, tells Security Management that the TSA has yet to fully allay privacy concerns surrounding the use of full-body scans.
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Rarick:
I will be interested to read GM's response to that.
GM:
Thank you for your offerings in response to my request for citations of efficacy; that said they are less than I look for. In them I see only assertions of efficacy by people whom I do not necessarily trust 100%. It seems to me it would be very simple to have someone strap on something imitating an underwear bomb and making a cliip of what it looks like on the scanner. 30-60 seconds on youtube should be enough. :-)
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"The 2001 law creating the TSA gave airports the right to opt out of the TSA program in favor of private screeners after a two-year period. Now, with the TSA engulfed in controversy and hated by millions of weary and sometimes humiliated travelers, Rep. John Mica, the Republican who will soon be chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, is reminding airports that they have a choice. Mica, one of the authors of the original TSA bill, has recently written to the heads of more than 150 airports nationwide suggesting they opt out of TSA screening. 'When the TSA was established, it was never envisioned that it would become a huge, unwieldy bureaucracy which was soon to grow to 67,000 employees,' Mica writes. 'TSA has grown larger, more impersonal, and administratively top-heavy. I believe it is important that airports across the country consider utilizing the opt-out provision provided by law.' In addition to being large, impersonal, and top-heavy, what really worries critics is that the TSA has become dangerously ineffective. Its specialty is what those critics call 'security theater' -- that is, a show of what appear to be stringent security measures designed to make passengers feel more secure without providing real security. 'That's exactly what it is,' says Mica. 'It's a big Kabuki dance.' Now, the dance has gotten completely out of hand." --columnist Byron York
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"After Muslim terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab of Nigeria tried to detonate explosive material in his underwear over Detroit last Christmas, the government began requiring nude body scans at airports. The machines, which cannot detect chemicals or plastic, would not have caught the diaper bomber. So, again, no hijackers were stopped, but being able to see passengers in the nude boosted the morale of airport security personnel by 22 percent. After explosives were inserted in two ink cartridges and placed on a plane headed to the United States from the Muslim nation of Yemen, the government banned printer cartridges from all domestic flights, resulting in no improvement in airport security, while requiring ink cartridges who traveled to take Amtrak. So when the next Muslim terrorist, probably named Abdul Ahmed al Shehri, places explosives in his anal cavity, what is the government going to require then? ... Only because the terrorists are Muslims do we pretend not to notice who keeps trying to blow up our planes. ... If the government did nothing more than have a five-minute conversation with the one passenger per flight born outside the U.S., you'd need 90 percent fewer Transportation Security Administration agents and airlines would be far safer than they are now. Instead, Napolitano just keeps ordering more invasive searches of all passengers, without exception -- except members of Congress and government officials, who get VIP treatment, so they never know what she's doing to the rest of us." --columnist Ann Coulter
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Crafty,
I couldn't myself vouch for the effectiveness of Rapidscan 1000. I doubt either the TSA or Rapiscan would allow me to run my own tests due to OPSEC.
AQ is known to employ the following process:
1. General target consideration/Intelligence gathering
2. Secondary target selection
3. Secondary intelligence gathering/analysis
4. Acute intelligence gathering, physical recon of target
5. Final target selection/operational planning
6. Finalization of plan/Logistics in place
TSA uses OPSEC as part of a strategy to deny AQ the ability to effective plan attacks. If your jihadist operatives do not anticipate success, it's difficult to recruit high quality operatives. 72 virgins and paradise are denied to those who get caught and die in a kufir prison. In planning, they are forced to assume that the Rapiscan 1000 is totally effective, no matter if it is or not in reality.
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http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/12/08/eveningnews/main5942088.shtml
WASHINGTON, Dec. 8, 2009
(CBS) It was a security breach and a big embarrassment for the Transportation Security Administration. A secret manual that tells airport screeners around the country how to do their jobs somehow wound up on line for all the world to see.
It detailed who should be screened, how often bags are checked for explosives, how to deal with CIA agents traveling with high-value intelligence assets - even provided images of various special identification cards, as CBS News correspondent Bob Orr reports.
The breach reveals some of the government's most sensitive aviation security secrets. A 93-page manual prepared for federal airport screeners shows samples of law enforcement and official credentials - federal air marshals, CIA officers, and members of Congress - IDs which criminals or terrorists could copy.
The document also reveals that travelers from a dozen countries including Cuba, North Korea, Somalia and Yemen are always subjected to extra screening.
The Transportation Security Administration says the security playbook, prepared in May 2008, is out of date and sensitive methods have been updated six times since then, adding in a statement that "TSA is confident that screening procedures currently in place remain strong."
**No matter what they say officially, this was a major fcukup. It gave AQ and everyone else our entire aviation security playbook. Jihadist sites today post copies of it.**
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________
**Not long after they get what they need to plan an attack, we get a proof of concept attack.**
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/12/27/national/main6026747.shtml
Airports worldwide tightened security a day after the passenger tried to detonate a device that contained a high explosive on a flight into Detroit. After that attack, passengers have had to contend with extra pat-downs before boarding, staying in their seats without blankets or pillows for the last hour of the flight and more bomb-sniffing dogs.
President Obama has called for a review of watch lists and screening procedures at airports in the wake of the attempted attack, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Sunday on CBS' "Face The Nation".
"The president has asked for two reviews to take place as a result of this potential terrorist attack," Gibbs said. "The first is a watch listing review… so we want to ensure that all of the information that needs to go to decision makers gets to where it needs to go. The president has asked for a review of the procedures that in some cases are several years old."
CBS News White House correspondent Peter Maer reports that Mr. Obama was briefed Sunday morning by Homeland Security and Counterterrorism advisor John Brenan and senior National Security official Denis McDonough.
White House spokesman Bill Burton said the briefing covered "security measures being taken to keep the traveling public safe, the most recent intelligence regarding that incident as well as reviews the president ordered into watch lists and detection capabilities."
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WASHINGTON, Dec. 29, 2009
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/12/29/eveningnews/main6035675.shtml?tag=mncol;lst;1
When Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab attempted to trigger an in flight explosion, he also rekindled the fear every security official has felt since 9/11 - of a passenger smuggling explosives on an airplane.
"The number one area we need to focus on, the biggest potential vulnerability, is a bomb on the body," said Kip Hawley, head of the TSA under George W. Bush.
Eliminating that vulnerability has been a problem. Eight years since Richard Reid, tried to ignite his shoes, and five years since the 9/11 commission pointedly said, "The TSA and Congress must give priority attention to (detecting) … explosives on passengers," no clear solution has emerged.
For example, when passengers remove their shoes the x-ray machine can detect metal, powder or alterations in the shoe, but not the chemicals from a bomb.
For years the TSA thought the solution was "puffer machines" which do sniff out explosives. But more than $30 million later, there's only one problem: "What we found is the machines were constantly clogging and were out of service and that you end up in a worse case than not having them at all," Hawley said.
Hawley and other officials say the next best choice is full body imaging machine. These don't detect chemicals either, but would have found the package Abdulmutallab sewed into his underwear.
The system is not defenseless against bombs. The TSA has greatly expanded the use of dogs to detect explosives, and the machines used for secondary screening - when a passenger's bags are swabbed - do detect bomb making chemicals.
Officials firmly believe that had Abdulmutallab been flagged he would have gone to secondary screening and been caught.
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Crafty,
Ann Could should stick to things she's good at, like snarky comments and looking like a post-op tranny. Aviation security isn't anything she knows anything about.
If Byron York had actually read the law and researched the topic, he'd know that there are a number of airports that used non-TSA screeners from the very beginning, the catch being that they MUST use the exact same techniques that TSA uses, and are still regulated by the TSA.
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(http://a.abcnews.com/images/International/abc_jihad_jane_02_100309_mn.jpg)
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Politics/jihad-jane-arrest-colleen-larose-raises-fears-homegrown/story?id=10056187
The arrest of a suburban Pennsylvania woman known by the alias Jihad Jane, who allegedly plotted with Islamic radicals abroad to kill a Swedish cartoonist, has raised fears about homegrown terrorists in the United States who may be difficult to spot.
"This woman might as well have advertised in the Washington Post," former White House counterterrorism official and ABC News consultant Richard Clarke said on "Good Morning America" today. "It was easy for the FBI to find her, but there are other people who are much more covert."
"There will likely be more attacks," Clarke said. "Hopefully, they will be small, and hopefully, we can catch them early." Colleen R. LaRose, 46, of Montgomery, Pa., was arrested in October 2009 and charged with trying to recruit Islamic fighters and plotting to assassinate a Swedish cartoonist who made fun of prophet Mohammed, according to a federal indictment unsealed Tuesday.
The FBI had kept the case secret while it looked for more suspects in the United States and abroad. The case was made public after seven men were arrested in Ireland this week, suspected of plotting to kill the Swedish cartoonist.
LaRose's case is rare, Clark said, but it shows the capability of international dissident groups to reach out to Americans via the Internet.
"This is a very rare case of a disturbed woman," he said, but it signifies how "the Internet not only allows them to communicate, it allows them to recruit."
Their persuasive speeches and sermons, which have been effective in recruiting men and women in the Middle East, are "beginning to work for some misfits in the United States," he said.
LaRose was arrested in Philadelphia Oct. 16, 2009, and has been in federal custody ever since, without bail. She has not entered a plea. If convicted, she faces a potential sentence of life in prison and a $1 million fine.
Her three federal public defender lawyers have yet to return calls from ABC News.
LaRose could easily fit the part of a soccer mom. She was described by neighbors as an average housewife.
"Oh, my God, unbelievable, I can't believe that," one neighbor told ABC News.
Another said the news was an "amazing, shocking surprise."
Clarke said there is likely a small group of people like LaRose. But their numbers are less of a concern than the idea that radical groups can convey their ideology via this "remote control through cyberspace," he said.
"I think it's very small but it doesn't have to be very large," he said. "So it's not so much a matter of size. It's the fact that it's going on."
Authorities said LaRose's U.S. citizenship and appearance made her appealing to the Islamic radicals she first contacted on the Internet.
"The terrorists figured out that they can't all look like Middle Eastern people, whether they be male or female," former FBI agent and ABC News consultant Brad Garrett said. "And so they've put a lot of time and energy particularly into the Internet, of recruiting people."
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Well yes, there are , , , what's the term I looking for , , , "outliers" I think it is-- those data points that lay outside the bulk of the distribution pattern.
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So how many planes would have to kaboom before you figured that the statistical outliers had been exhausted?
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http://www.usatoday.com/money/markets/us/2006-09-10-5-years-later_x.htm
Five years is a long time on Wall Street, except when it comes to erasing the psychological damage from the Sept. 11 attacks.
Stocks are up since then, though not by much: The Dow Jones industrial average is up 18.6% and the Standard & Poor's 500 18.9% from just before the attacks, a 3.5% annual return that's way below long-term averages.
It's impossible to know how much the terrorist attacks are to blame for the market's malaise. After all, an earnings recession started in late 2000, and the USA has just emerged from one of its worst periods of corporate fraud in at least a generation. But the attacks injected a new permanent variable into stocks: fear.
"There's a chronic sense of caution and pessimism" that didn't exist before the attacks, says Jim Paulsen of Wells Capital Management. That is showing up in:
•Depressed valuations. Heightened trepidation partly explains why investors won't pay as much for stocks, says Bob Doll, chief investment officer of Merrill Lynch Investment Managers.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. corporate profits have jumped nearly 75%. Yet that has minimal effect on stock prices, which have pushed the price-earnings ratio down. On Sept. 10, 2001, the S&P 500 traded for 23.2 times its earnings over the previous 12 months. That's sunk to 15.9. That quantifies reduced investor confidence. "The threat of terrorism is in people's minds, so it's in their investment lives," Doll says.
•Ripple effects. Since the attacks hit during a recession, it forced the Federal Reserve to slash short-term interest rates more than expected, says Liz Ann Sonders of Charles Schwab. Short-term rates hit an almost unheard of low of 1% in 2003, which helped inflate a housing bubble, she says. Now that bubble's deflation is haunting stocks as investors worry how consumers will be affected, she says.
•Faster reactions. Investors have learned to react more rapidly and less severely to terrorism, Doll says. When trading resumed after the Sept. 11 attacks, the S&P 500 initially tumbled 11.6% before bottoming. But investors collected themselves: The S&P was up 20.3% six months afterward. The Bali bombings in 2002 had a similar shock: The Jakarta composite index fell 10.4% at first and six months later was up 29.9%. Responses have been more muted since. The IBEX 35, FTSE 100 and BSE Sensex 30 indexes fell just 7.2%, 1.4% and 6.3%, respectively, after the 2004 Madrid, 2005 London and 2006 India bombings.
Investors realized many doomsday scenarios didn't materialize. "We now know that many of the fears ...that emerged in the wake of 9/11 proved to be unfounded," Joseph Quinlan of Bank of America wrote in a report. But Sonders hopes investors aren't forgetting the risk. "With additional time without an attack, (investors) may be lulled into the sense (terrorism) may not affect them."
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"So how many planes would have to kaboom before you figured that the statistical outliers had been exhausted?"
Being, like you, of triple digit IQ, I get that. :-)
That said, we must also look at the other side of the coin too. What happens if they bomb a train e.g. the AMTRAK one that then Senator Joe Biden used to take every day/weekend? Do we then institute the same level of security on trains? What if they bomb the DC or the NYC subway? Do we then institute the same level of security? What about buses? AQ now talks of a strategy of hemorraging us with tactics of a plethora of smaller and smaller attacks and bleeding us with the costs of our current responses.
The variety of ways in which an open society such as ours can be attacked is infinite? We cannot do "whatever it takes" to achieve perfect security.
Maybe we need a more aggro response-- more like El Al and more based on playing the probabilities.
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The post regarding the market since 9/11/2001 is interesting and accurate. They acknowledge that 2001 was already a recession. I would add a reminder of what turmoil the markets had gone through both on the up and then on the down starting with the crash of tech stocks in March 2000 and spilling over to the DOW and all stocks over the next year. Hard to find a stable point in that period to make long term comparisons.
The Fed's extreme reaction then was due to an abrupt end to air travel as we knew it, which meant impending failure of that sector, then hotels, rental cars and everything to do with tourism which includes the economies of major regions potentially failing. The Fed would have gone further than 1% (essentially zero interest) if it knew how to.
True that the housing bubble came out of that. Air travel and tourism/travel somewhat recovered and the Fed needed to rightsize sooner to avoid unintended consequences - it's been 10 years!
Today of course we face the same thing if we can't make travel secure without the pornography of unwilling participants.
I hear the warnings that the lines will be longer this Thanksgiving and Christmas. My expertise in efficiency :? tells me that a longer line doesn't get more people through and spending more time with each traveler doesn't get the same number of people through. Besides the increased time required for security, the cost of security is going up. If you pass that to the customer, air travel will go down as well, alleviating the lines but killing the industry...and even more expansionary Fed policy!?
I read the popular mechanics links on the scanners. Radiation levels are thousands of times lower than a chest x-ray (or nuclear war), not very reassuring if you must pass through thousands and thousands of times.
Small comment on the lady terrorist. Of course there will be exceptions and we need to find them. Looking at a photo without info would be the exact opposite of what I would call using some intelligent profiling. Also she may be capable of both but I draw a distinction between a criminal plot to muder one perceived enemy and someone willing to kill yourself, suicidal, homocidal plot to blow up innocent men, women and children.
Plenty of people might consider killing their worst enemy if they thought they could get away with it (and plenty do). The worst part of defending against terrorism IMO is these people's willingness to blow up themselves and the innocent around them.
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"So how many planes would have to kaboom before you figured that the statistical outliers had been exhausted?"
Being, like you, of triple digit IQ, I get that. :-)
That said, we must also look at the other side of the coin too. What happens if they bomb a train e.g. the AMTRAK one that then Senator Joe Biden used to take every day/weekend? Do we then institute the same level of security on trains? What if they bomb the DC or the NYC subway? Do we then institute the same level of security? What about buses? AQ now talks of a strategy of hemorraging us with tactics of a plethora of smaller and smaller attacks and bleeding us with the costs of our current responses.
http://homelandsecuritynewswire.com/tsa-joins-nypd-subway-baggage-screening
TSA joins NYPD in subway baggage screening
Published 22 April 2010
TSA joins BYPD in a trial for screening passengers' baggage on New York subways; TSA says it does not know how long the agency would run the program, but that mass transit riders should anticipate a TSA presence underground "for the foreseeable future"
Subway riders on their way to and from work Wednesday were surprised to see Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officials, who usually screen luggage in airports, checking bags at local subway stations.
The TSA launched a pilot partnership with the NYPD Wednesday morning to enhance security on city trains, a spokeswoman for the TSA said. About a dozen stations are covered daily, according to the NYPD. “While there is no specific threat to mass transit in the United States at this time, TSA and NYPD continuously work together to strengthen overall security efforts and keep the American people safe,” the administration said in a statement.
The variety of ways in which an open society such as ours can be attacked is infinite? We cannot do "whatever it takes" to achieve perfect security.
**There is no perfect security. We "harden the target" on the parts of our infrastructure that are the most vulnerable, where the terrorists get the most "bang for their buck". Wherever you have densely packed humans, such as aircraft and mass transit, you have the ideal target for AQ. When you do your cost/benefit analysis, you have to include not only the cost of the attack and the direct impact, but the ripples it sends through the economy and national psyche.**
Maybe we need a more aggro response-- more like El Al and more based on playing the probabilities.
**Again, El Al/Shin Bet can do things we can't because of the constitutional restrictions we operate under. Remember the screams from the left because we waterboarded 3 AQ terrorists, no matter how many lives we saved because President Bush decided that the trade off was worth it? Shall we revisit the the various privacy/libertarian threads here where anything done by law enforcement is seen as a totalitarian destruction of freedom as we know it?
You want me to address those people who are comparing the TSA to nazis? If Ron Paul and his paultards thought the TSA were nazis, they'd be hitting them up for political donations and support.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/11/the_ron_paul_campaign_and_its.html
How dumb, as well as morally blind does one have to be to associate an agency designed to protect the public from dying horribly to those who killed masses of people horribly? Well, Ron Paul stupid. Worried that some gubbamint employee will see your sub-normal genitals, Rarick? Don't fracking fly.
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Worried that some gubbamint employee will see your sub-normal genitals, Rarick?
link your reference.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropenis
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Ahem , , ,
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Crafty,
You've said you do want there to be some form of security screening at airports. What exactly would that look like were you running the TSA?
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I can say observing China's aviation security, their pre-flight screening is comparable to US screening pre-9/11. Why? Because China's Ministry for State Security has a dossier on every chinese citizen and every foreigner is under full spectrum surveillance. If you are seen as a threat, you won't be allowed anywhere near an airport, and are probably under some sort of detention anyway. Post 9/11, China simply banned muslims from flying for a while, and they know exactly who is or isn't muslim.
Again, the US doesn't have those databases of who is or isn't muslim and I doubt many people would advocate banning all muslims from flying. I expect that Israel has extensively researched potential jihadists within it's borders, but who here wants to see flyers and their luggage with distinctive labels denoting ethnicity and religion as El Al does?
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/08/shin-bet-islam-israel
Israel's secret police blocked a Muslim Arab citizen from being appointed to a publicly funded job, in its latest attempt to assert authority over public political debate in Israel, a case in Tel Aviv's labour court has revealed.
The case emerged when the state rejected Sheikh Ahmed Abu Awaja's application to serve as the imam at a mosque in Jaffa, a neighbourhood south of Tel Aviv. He appealed to Tel Aviv's labour court after he was told that he did not get the job even though he was the only candidate to meet the requirements. The court is due to deliver its decision today.
During the case the district prosecutor said that Abu Awaja had been rejected because the General Security Service, commonly known as the Shin Bet, believed he would "jeopardise peace and security in Jaffa, especially in view of the sensitivity of the delicate relationship between the city's Jewish and Muslim populations".
It has previously been revealed that the Shin Bet deems Israel's indigenous Arab minority population and public criticism of the state's Jewish character as security threats. It accuses Abu Awaja, who is a member of the Islamic Movement, of inciting hostility against Israel and its Jewish citizens.
The Islamic Movement is linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, which is opposed to Israel's existence, but Abu Awaja, who has been preaching for 15 years, says he has never advocated violence. "I have called on people to act within the law. The Shin Bet's interference in my nomination is political persecution and it's been going on for years," he told the daily Haaretz.
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (Acri), which released its annual state of human rights report yesterday, accused the Shin Bet of harassing Israel's indigenous minority Arab citizens and restricting freedom of expression. During the past year the security service has questioned Israeli-Arab MPs and Israeli-Arabs who work for human rights groups.
The Shin Bet makes "veiled, but occasionally overt" threats and "makes it clear" to those being questioned "that they are under constant surveillance, hints that there could be repercussions in their private life and [makes] warnings that if they continue with what they are doing they are liable to have criminal charges brought against them", Acri's report says.
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http://www.haaretz.com/misc/article-print-page/shin-bet-citizens-subverting-israel-key-values-to-be-probed-1.220965?trailingPath=2.169%2C2.216%2C
Shin Bet: Citizens subverting Israel key values to be probed
In letter to Arab rights group, Shin Bet head says role of security service is to uphold 'Jewish, democratic' state.
By Jack Khoury and Yuval Yoaz
The Shin Bet security service believes it is within its charter to carry out surveillance operations, such as phone taps, on individuals deemed as "conducting subversive activity against the Jewish identity of the state," even if their actions are not in violation of the law.
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There is no Israeli magic. We can have El Al like aviation security with no nekkid backscatter x-ray machines if we have Shin Bet like domestic intelligence gathering. Who's up for that?
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As is often the case you raise pertinent points and probing questions. Off the top of my head:
a) An interview with Peter Kant, VP of Rapiscan in today's LA Times makes the following points:
1) He asserts that the US Marshal's case invovled a different company's scanner and re-asserted the claim that Rapiscan's do not store images;
2) He states that Rapiscan will be "releasing in the next few months a threat recognition upgrade where the system never even uses an image. It just automatically detects any anomaly on the body and directs the TSA officer" to where on the body the anomaly is located. This would seem to solve quite a bit of the objections here.
b) I don't see that it is necessary to use the palm of the hand; wouldn't the back of the hand suffice?
c) I gather that dogs can be extremely useful, yet I have yet to see one in use
d) Although I wasn't impressed with the synopsis of Ron Paul's proposal posted here the other day, I did hear an interview with him wherein he sounded rather persuasive about what can be accomplished by allowing the private sector (e.g. the airlines) to take over; which the Homeland Security law which created the TSA allows.
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b) I don't see that it is necessary to use the palm of the hand; wouldn't the back of the hand suffice?
**The old TSA procedure was using the back of the hand for the "sensitive areas. The problem being that the back of the hand would probably detect a edged weapon or firearm, it has a lesser chance of detecting packet of powder or putty like explosive charges.**
c) I gather that dogs can be extremely useful, yet I have yet to see one in use
**Because unlike the checkpoints, the external security procedures at the airport are decided by the local airport authority/law enforcement agencies. For example, the number of dogs trained in explosive detection at LAX would be the responsibility of the LA airport police and/or LAPD, not the TSA.**
d) Although I wasn't impressed with the synopsis of Ron Paul's proposal posted here the other day, I did hear an interview with him wherein he sounded rather persuasive about what can be accomplished by allowing the private sector (e.g. the airlines) to take over; which the Homeland Security law which created the TSA allows.
**The airlines were running aviation security before 9/11 and contracted it out to security companies that hired convicted felons, illegal aliens and anyone else willing to work for minimum wage with no benefits. Airlines used their lobbying power in congress to fight every attempt to improve security prior to 9/11. The FAA was the airline's lapdog, not the watchdog. Of course, after 9/11, the airlines got bailed out by congress (meaning by us, the taxpayers) and spared the liability from their negligence that resulted in 9/11. Why would it be different this time?**
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http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/11/12/attack/main528967.shtml
A manual written by the airline industry years before the Sept. 11 attacks instructed airport screeners to confiscate from passengers boxcutters like those used by the hijackers, documents show.
Though the federal government did not specifically bar the objects before Sept. 11, the airlines were in charge of security and the manual they compiled was the guidebook for determining what items could be brought aboard flights.
The instructions were part of the Checkpoint Operations Guide, a manual issued by the Air Transport Association, which represents the major airlines, and the Regional Airline Association, the trade group for smaller carriers. The groups issued the guide to carry out Federal Aviation Administration regulations.
A copy of the 1994 manual was obtained by The Associated Press.
FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown said keeping boxcutters off planes was an industry requirement, not a government order. She said the FAA allowed airline passengers to carry blades less than four inches long before Sept. 11. Government rules now prohibit such items.
Other items allowed into airplane cabins, according to the manual, included baseball bats, darts, knitting needles, pocket utility knifes less than four inches long and scissors.
ATA spokesman Michael Wascom would say only: "Boxcutters were not prohibited by the FAA on 9-11-01." Officials of the regional airlines group declined comment.
Former FAA chief counsel Kenneth Quinn, now a lawyer representing several security companies, said the agency, not the industry, was responsible for keeping boxcutters off planes. "There's only one way to prohibit items from being carried on board airplanes, and that is through mandatory security directives from the FAA," Quinn said.
Before the terrorist attacks, the industry was responsible for security, under FAA oversight. The $15 billion airline aid bill enacted shortly after Sept. 11 limited the airlines' liability to the amount of their insurance coverage. The House Republican version of legislation creating a Homeland Security Department would give the same liability limits to screening companies.
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A bit unfair methinks to evaluate pre 911 behavior by post 911 standards.
Anyway, here's this overview by Stratfor, which does a rather nice job I think of synthesizing many of the points made by the various participants in our conversation here:
By Scott Stewart
Over the past few weeks, aviation security — specifically, enhanced passenger-screening procedures — has become a big issue in the media. The discussion of the topic has become even more fervent as we enter Thanksgiving weekend, which is historically one of the busiest travel periods of the year. As this discussion has progressed, we have been asked repeatedly by readers and members of the press for our opinion on the matter.
We have answered such requests from readers, and we have done a number of media interviews, but we’ve resisted writing a fresh analysis on aviation security because, as an organization, our objective is to lead the media rather than follow the media regarding a particular topic. We want our readers to be aware of things before they become pressing public issues, and when it comes to aviation-security threats and the issues involved with passenger screening, we believe we have accomplished this. Many of the things now being discussed in the media are things we’ve written about for years.
When we were discussing this topic internally and debating whether to write about it, we decided that since we have added so many new readers over the past few years, it might be of interest to our expanding readership to put together an analysis that reviews the material we’ve published and that helps to place the current discussion into the proper context. We hope our longtime readers will excuse the repetition.
We believe that this review will help establish that there is a legitimate threat to aviation, that there are significant challenges in trying to secure aircraft from every conceivable threat, and that the response of aviation security authorities to threats has often been slow and reactive rather than thoughtful and proactive.
Threats
Commercial aviation has been threatened by terrorism for decades now. From the first hijackings and bombings in the late 1960s to last month’s attempt against the UPS and FedEx cargo aircraft, the threat has remained constant. As we have discussed for many years, jihadists have long had a fixation with attacking aircraft. When security measures were put in place to protect against Bojinka-style attacks in the 1990s — attacks that involved modular explosive devices smuggled onto planes and left aboard — the jihadists adapted and conducted 9/11-style attacks. When security measures were put in place to counter 9/11-style attacks, the jihadists quickly responded by going to onboard suicide attacks with explosive devices concealed in shoes. When that tactic was discovered and shoes began to be screened, they switched to devices containing camouflaged liquid explosives. When that plot failed and security measures were altered to restrict the quantity of liquids that people could take aboard aircraft, we saw the jihadists alter the paradigm once more and attempt the underwear-bomb attack last Christmas.
In a special edition of Inspire magazine released last weekend, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) noted that, due to the increased passenger screening implemented after the Christmas Day 2009 attempt, the group’s operational planners decided to employ explosive devices sent via air cargo (we have written specifically about the vulnerability of air cargo to terrorist attacks).
Finally, it is also important to understand that the threat does not emanate just from jihadists like al Qaeda and its regional franchises. Over the past several decades, aircraft have been attacked by a number of different actors, including North Korean intelligence officers, Sikh, Palestinian and Hezbollah militants and mentally disturbed individuals like the Unabomber, among others.
Realities
While understanding that the threat is very real, it is also critical to recognize that there is no such thing as absolute, foolproof security. This applies to ground-based facilities as well as aircraft. If security procedures and checks have not been able to keep contraband out of high-security prisons, it is unreasonable to expect them to be able to keep unauthorized items off aircraft, where (thankfully) security checks of crew and passengers are far less invasive than they are for prisoners. As long as people, luggage and cargo are allowed aboard aircraft, and as long as people on the ground crew and the flight crew have access to aircraft, aircraft will remain vulnerable to a number of internal and external threats.
This reality is accented by the sheer number of passengers that must be screened and number of aircraft that must be secured. According to figures supplied by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), in 2006, the last year for which numbers are available, the agency screened 708,400,522 passengers on domestic flights and international flights coming into the United States. This averages out to over 1.9 million passengers per day.
Another reality is that, as mentioned above, jihadists and other people who seek to attack aircraft have proven to be quite resourceful and adaptive. They carefully study security measures, identify vulnerabilities and then seek to exploit them. Indeed, last September, when we analyzed the innovative designs of the explosive devices employed by AQAP, we called attention to the threat they posed to aviation more than three months before the Christmas 2009 bombing attempt. As we look at the issue again, it is not hard to see, as we pointed out then, how their innovative efforts to camouflage explosives in everyday items and hide them inside suicide operatives’ bodies will continue and how these efforts will be intended to exploit vulnerabilities in current screening systems.
As we wrote in September 2009, getting a completed explosive device or its components by security and onto an aircraft is a significant challenge, but it is possible for a resourceful bombmaker to devise ways to overcome that challenge. The latest issue of Inspire magazine demonstrated how AQAP has done some very detailed research to identify screening vulnerabilities. As the group noted in the magazine: “The British government said that if a toner weighs more than 500 grams it won’t be allowed on board a plane. Who is the genius who came up with this suggestion? Do you think that we have nothing to send but printers?”
AQAP also noted in the magazine that it is working to identify innocuous substances like toner ink that, when X-rayed, will appear similar to explosive compounds like PETN, since such innocuous substances will be ignored by screeners. With many countries now banning cargo from Yemen, it will be harder to send those other items in cargo from Sanaa, but the group has shown itself to be flexible, with the underwear-bomb operative beginning his trip to Detroit out of Nigeria rather than Yemen. In the special edition of Inspire, AQAP also specifically threatened to work with allies to launch future attacks from other locations.
Drug couriers have been transporting narcotics hidden inside their bodies aboard aircraft for decades, and prisoners frequently hide drugs, weapons and even cell phones inside body cavities. It is therefore only a matter of time before this same tactic is used to smuggle plastic explosives or even an entire non-metallic explosive device onto an aircraft — something that would allow an attacker to bypass metal detectors and backscatter X-ray inspection and pass through external pat-downs.
Look for the Bomber, Not Just the Bomb
This ability to camouflage explosives in a variety of different ways, or hide them inside the bodies of suicide operatives, means that the most significant weakness of any suicide-attack plan is the operative assigned to conduct the attack. Even in a plot to attack 10 or 12 aircraft, a group would need to manufacture only about 12 pounds of high explosives — about what is required for a single, small suicide device and far less than is required for a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device. Because of this, the operatives are more of a limiting factor than the explosives themselves; it is far more difficult to find and train 10 or 12 suicide bombers than it is to produce 10 or 12 devices.
A successful attack requires operatives who are not only dedicated enough to initiate a suicide device without getting cold feet; they must also possess the nerve to calmly proceed through airport security checkpoints without alerting officers that they are up to something sinister. This set of tradecraft skills is referred to as demeanor, and while remaining calm under pressure and behaving normally may sound simple in theory, practicing good demeanor under the extreme pressure of a suicide operation is very difficult. Demeanor has proved to be the Achilles’ heel of several terror plots, and it is not something that militant groups have spent a great deal of time teaching their operatives. Because of this, it is frequently easier to spot demeanor mistakes than it is to find well-hidden explosives. Such demeanor mistakes can also be accentuated, or even induced, by contact with security personnel in the form of interviews, or even by unexpected changes in security protocols that alter the security environment a potential attacker is anticipating and has planned for.
There has been much discussion of profiling, but the difficulty of creating a reliable and accurate physical profile of a jihadist, and the adaptability and ingenuity of the jihadist planners, means that any attempt at profiling based only on race, ethnicity or religion is doomed to fail. In fact, profiling can prove counterproductive to good security by blinding people to real threats. They will dismiss potential malefactors who do not fit the specific profile they have been provided.
In an environment where the potential threat is hard to identify, it is doubly important to profile individuals based on their behavior rather than their ethnicity or nationality — what we refer to as focusing on the “how” instead of the “who.” Instead of relying on physical profiles, which allow attack planners to select operatives who do not match the profiles being selected for more intensive screening, security personnel should be encouraged to exercise their intelligence, intuition and common sense. A Caucasian U.S. citizen who shows up at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi or Dhaka claiming to have lost his passport may be far more dangerous than some random Pakistani or Yemeni citizen, even though the American does not appear to fit the profile for requiring extra security checks.
However, when we begin to consider traits such as intelligence, intuition and common sense, one of the other realities that must be faced with aviation security is that, quite simply, it is not an area where the airlines or governments have allocated the funding required to hire the best personnel. Airport screeners make far less than FBI special agents or CIA case officers and receive just a fraction of the training. Before 9/11, most airports in the United States relied on contract security guards to conduct screening duties. After 9/11, many of these same officers went from working for companies like Wackenhut to being TSA employees. There was no real effort made to increase the quality of screening personnel by offering much higher salaries to recruit a higher caliber of candidate.
There is frequent mention of the need to make U.S. airport security more like that employed in Israel. Aside from the constitutional and cultural factors that would prevent American airport screeners from ever treating Muslim travelers the way they are treated by El Al, another huge difference is simply the amount of money spent on salaries and training for screeners and other security personnel. El Al is also aided by the fact that it has a very small fleet of aircraft that fly only a small number of passengers to a handful of destinations.
Additionally, airport screening duty is simply not glamorous work. Officers are required to work long shifts conducting monotonous checks and are in near constant contact with a traveling public that can at times become quite surly when screeners follow policies established by bureaucrats at much higher pay grades. Granted, there are TSA officers who abuse their authority and do not exhibit good interpersonal skills, but anyone who travels regularly has also witnessed fellow travelers acting like idiots.
While it is impossible to keep all contraband off aircraft, efforts to improve technical methods and procedures to locate weapons and IED components must continue. However, these efforts must not only be reacting to past attacks and attempts but should also be looking forward to thwart future attacks that involve a shift in the terrorist paradigm. At the same time, the often-overlooked human elements of airport security, including situational awareness, observation and intuition, need to be emphasized now more than ever. It is those soft skills that hold the real key to looking for the bomber and not just the bomb.
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There has been much discussion of profiling, but the difficulty of creating a reliable and accurate physical profile of a jihadist, and the adaptability and ingenuity of the jihadist planners, means that any attempt at profiling based only on race, ethnicity or religion is doomed to fail. In fact, profiling can prove counterproductive to good security by blinding people to real threats. They will dismiss potential malefactors who do not fit the specific profile they have been provided.
Yes.
MARC: Taking the liberty of inserting here:
As we have discussed for many years, jihadists have long had a fixation with attacking aircraft. When security measures were put in place to protect against Bojinka-style attacks in the 1990s — attacks that involved modular explosive devices smuggled onto planes and left aboard — the jihadists adapted and conducted 9/11-style attacks. When security measures were put in place to counter 9/11-style attacks, the jihadists quickly responded by going to onboard suicide attacks with explosive devices concealed in shoes. When that tactic was discovered and shoes began to be screened, they switched to devices containing camouflaged liquid explosives. When that plot failed and security measures were altered to restrict the quantity of liquids that people could take aboard aircraft, we saw the jihadists alter the paradigm once more and attempt the underwear-bomb attack last Christmas. In a special edition of Inspire magazine released last weekend, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) noted that, due to the increased passenger screening implemented after the Christmas Day 2009 attempt, the group’s operational planners decided to employ explosive devices sent via air cargo (we have written specifically about the vulnerability of air cargo to terrorist attacks).
MARC: Yes :wink:
Realities
While understanding that the threat is very real, it is also critical to recognize that there is no such thing as absolute, foolproof security. This applies to ground-based facilities as well as aircraft. If security procedures and checks have not been able to keep contraband out of high-security prisons, it is unreasonable to expect them to be able to keep unauthorized items off aircraft, where (thankfully) security checks of crew and passengers are far less invasive than they are for prisoners. As long as people, luggage and cargo are allowed aboard aircraft, and as long as people on the ground crew and the flight crew have access to aircraft, aircraft will remain vulnerable to a number of internal and external threats.
MARC: Yes.
GM: Never have argued that absolute security is possible. Of course there isn't absolute security. However, does not mean that you don't take reasonable steps to address a threat. If a car thief really wants to steal your car, he probably will be able to. Knowing this, do you leave your car unlocked with the keys in the ignition? No.
What do you do? You harden the target. You make it harder for those that wish you ill to be able to act on their intent. There are no silver bullets that magically resolve threats. Don't like TSA screening ?, well then just "profile" meaning, "screening for thee, not for me". I have already posted in great detail why this is not an answer. Just as there are no technological stand-alone fixes for this problem, neither is "profiling" the solution. Do I disagree with behavioral analysis? No, but I recognize it's inherent weaknesses within the American context. TSA has it as a tool as part of a strategy of layered security. It's a tool, and in most cases a minor one in the larger context.
Layered security is always the approach to take, even if you don't like some of the layers used by TSA. No matter if you are securing your home, you are doing EP for a principal or securing a correctional facility, you always strive to use multiple mechanisms between the threat and that which you wish to protect. You'd never say that you don't need to lock your home up at night, because you have a gun.
Chaos and entropy weigh on everyone, including al qaeda. When you raise the bar for AQ, they then have to address many more difficulties in planning and then successfully carrying out their attacks. Of course, aviation is far from their only target, but given the lethality and socio-economic impact from successful aviation attacks, we must invest resources to prevent future attacks, when possible.
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http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-11-23-whistle-blower-faa_x.htm
From 1995 to 2001, Bogdan Dzakovic served as a team leader on the Federal Aviation Administration's Red Team. Set up by Congress to help the FAA think like terrorists, the elite squad tested airport security systems.
In the years leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Dzakovic says, the team was able to breach security about 90% of the time, sneaking bombs and submachine guns past airport screeners. Expensive new bomb detection machines consistently failed, he says.
The team repeatedly warned the FAA of the potential for security breaches and hijackings but was told to cover up its findings, Dzakovic says.
Eventually, the FAA began notifying airports in advance when the Red Team would be doing its undercover testing, Dzakovic says. He and other Red Team members approached the Department of Transportation's Office of the Inspector General, the General Accounting Office and members of Congress about the FAA's alleged misconduct regarding the Red Team's aviation security tests. No one did anything, he says.
Then came 9/11.
"Immediately (after 9/11), numerous government officials from FAA as well as other government agencies made defensive statements such as, 'How could we have known this was going to happen?' " Dzakovic testified later before the 9/11 Commission. "The truth is, they did know."
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http://www.fas.org/irp/threat/212fin~1.html
Chapter Three:
Improving Security for Travelers
"We know we can't make the world risk-free, but we can reduce the risks we face and we have to take the fight to the terrorists. If we have the will, we can find the means."
President Clinton
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence sources have been warning that the threat of terrorism is changing in two important ways. First, it is no longer just an overseas threat from foreign terrorists. People and places in the United States have joined the list of targets, and Americans have joined the ranks of terrorists. The bombings of the World Trade Center in New York and the Federal Building in Oklahoma City are clear examples of the shift, as is the conviction of Ramzi Yousef for attempting to bomb twelve American airliners out of the sky over the Pacific Ocean. The second change is that in addition to well-known, established terrorist groups, it is becoming more common to find terrorists working alone or in ad-hoc groups, some of whom are not afraid to die in carrying out their designs.
Although the threat of terrorism is increasing, the danger of an individual becoming a victim of a terrorist attack -- let alone an aircraft bombing -- will doubtless remain very small. But terrorism isn't merely a matter of statistics. We fear a plane crash far more than we fear something like a car accident. One might survive a car accident, but there's no chance in a plane at 30,000 feet. This fear is one of the reasons that terrorists see airplanes as attractive targets. And, they know that airlines are often seen as national symbols.
When terrorists attack an American airliner, they are attacking the United States. They have so little respect for our values -- so little regard for human life or the principles of justice that are the foundation of American society -- that they would destroy innocent children and devoted mothers and fathers completely at random. This cannot be tolerated, or allowed to intimidate free societies. There must be a concerted national will to fight terrorism. There must be a willingness to apply sustained economic, political and commercial pressure on countries sponsoring terrorists. There must be an unwavering commitment to pursuing terrorists and bringing them to justice. There must be the resolve to punish those who would violate sanctions imposed against terrorist states.
Today's aviation security is based in part on the defenses erected in the 1970s against hijackers and on recommendations made by the Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism, which was formed in the wake of the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Improvements in aviation security have been complicated because government and industry often found themselves at odds, unable to resolve disputes over financing, effectiveness, technology, and potential impacts on operations and passengers.
Americans should not have to choose between enhanced security and efficient and affordable air travel. Both goals are achievable if the federal government, airlines, airports, aviation employees, local law enforcement agencies, and passengers work together to achieve them. Accordingly, the Commission recommends a new partnership that will marshal resources more effectively, and focus all parties on achieving the ultimate goal: enhancing the security of air travel for Americans.
The Commission considered the question of whether or not the FAA is the appropriate government agency to have the primary responsibility for regulating aviation security. The Commission believes that, because of its extensive interactions with airlines and airports, the FAA is the appropriate agency, with the following qualifications: first, that the FAA must improve the way it carries out its mission; and second, that the roles of intelligence and law enforcement agencies in supporting the FAA must be more clearly defined and coordinated. The Commission's recommendations address those conditions.
The terrorist threat is changing and growing. Therefore, it is important to improve security not just against familiar threats, such as explosives in checked baggage, but also to explore means of assessing and countering emerging threats, such as the use of biological or chemical agents, or the use of missiles. While these do not present significant threats at present, it would be short-sighted not to plan for their possible use and take prudent steps to counter them.
The Commission believes that aviation security should be a system of systems, layered, integrated, and working together to produce the highest possible levels of protection. Each of the Commission's recommendations should be looked upon as a part of a whole, and not in isolation. It should be noted that a number of the Commission's recommendations outlined in the previous chapter, particularly those relating to certification and regulation, apply to the FAA's security programs, as well.
Recommendations
3.1. The federal government should consider aviation security as a national security issue, and provide substantial funding for capital improvements.
The Commission believes that terrorist attacks on civil aviation are directed at the United States, and that there should be an ongoing federal commitment to reducing the threats that they pose. In its initial report, the Commission called for approximately $160 million in federal funds for capital costs associated with improving security, and Congress agreed. As part of its ongoing commitment, the federal government should devote significant resources, of approximately $100 million annually, to meet capital requirements identified by airport consortia and the FAA. The Commission recognizes that more is needed. The Commission expects the National Civil Aviation Review Commission to consider a variety of options for additional user fees that could be used to pay for security measures including, among others, an aviation user security surcharge, the imposition of local security fees, tax incentives and other means.
3.2. The FAA should establish federally mandated standards for security enhancements.
These enhancements should include standards for use of Explosive Detection System (EDS) machines, training programs for security personnel, use of automated bag match technology, development of profiling programs (manual and automated), and deployment of explosive detection canine teams.
3.3. The Postal Service should advise customers that all packages weighing over 16 ounces will be subject to examination for explosives and other threat objects in order to move by air.
The Postal Service now requires that packages weighing over 16 ounces must be brought to a post office, rather than be placed in a mailbox. To improve security further, the Postal Service should mandate that all mail weighing over 16 ounces contain a written release that allows it to be examined by explosive detection systems in order to be shipped by air. The Postal Service should develop and implement procedures to randomly screen such packages for explosives and other threat objects. If necessary, the Postal Service should seek appropriate legislation to accomplish this.
3.4. Current law should be amended to clarify the U.S. Customs Service's authority to search outbound international mail.
Currently, the Customs Service searches for explosives and other threat objects on inbound mail and cargo. This recommended legislative enhancement parallels the Customs Service's existing border search authority.
3.5. The FAA should implement a comprehensive plan to address the threat of explosives and other threat objects in cargo and work with industry to develop new initiatives in this area.
The FAA should place greater emphasis on the work of teams, such as the Aviation Security Advisory Committee and the Baseline Cargo Working Group, to address cargo issues. The Commission believes that the FAA should implement the Baseline Group's recommendation with regard to profiling by "known" and "unknown" shippers. In addition, unaccompanied express shipments on commercial passenger aircraft should be subject to examination by explosives detection systems; the FAA should work with industry to develop a computer assisted cargo profiling system that can be integrated into airlines' and forwarders' reservation and operating systems; requirements should be implemented requiring that trucks delivering cargo for loading on planes be sealed and locked; the FAA should develop and distribute air cargo security training materials; and enhanced forwarder and shipper employee screening procedures should be developed.
3.6. The FAA should establish a security system that will provide a high level of protection for all aviation information systems.
In addition to improving the physical security of the traveling public, information systems critical to aircraft, air traffic control and airports should also be protected. Although government is responsible for a great number of aviation related information systems, a partnership must be formed in order to create integrated protection among these and related private sector systems. Some protective measures will become the responsibility of airlines, some that of the airports and others of the aircraft and air traffic control systems manufacturers and maintenance providers. The National Security Agency must play a role in coordinating information security measures, setting standards and providing oversight of system security to ensure protection against outside interference, disruption and corruption. Specific legislation should be reviewed that makes willful interference with information systems a federal crime with substantial penalties to provide a clear deterrent.
3.7. The FAA should work with airlines and airport consortia to ensure that all passengers are positively identified and subjected to security procedures before they board aircraft.
Curb-side check-in, electronic ticketing, advance boarding passes, and other initiatives are affecting the way passengers enter the air transportation system. As improved security procedures are put into place, it is essential that all passengers be accounted for in that system, properly identified and subject to the same level of scrutiny. The Commission urges the FAA to work with airlines and airport consortia to ensure that necessary changes are made to accomplish that goal.
3.8. Submit a proposed resolution, through the U.S. Representative, that the International Civil Aviation Organization begin a program to verify and improve compliance with international security standards.
Although 185 nations have ratified the International Civil Aviation Organization convention, and the security standards contained in it, compliance is not uniform. This creates the potential for security vulnerabilities on connecting flights throughout the world. To help raise levels of security throughout the world, the International Civil Aviation Organization needs greater authority to determine whether nations are in compliance. Strong U.S. sponsorship for adding verification and compliance capabilities to the International Civil Aviation Organization could lead to enhanced worldwide aviation security.
3.9. Assess the possible use of chemical and biological weapons as tools of terrorism.
FAA should work with the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy on programs to anticipate and plan for changing threats, such as chemical and biological agents.
3.10. The FAA should work with industry to develop a national program to increase the professionalism of the aviation security workforce, including screening personnel.
The Commission believes it's critical to ensure that those charged with providing security for over 500 million passengers a year in the United States are the best qualified and trained in the industry. One proposal that could accomplish this goal is the creation of a nationwide non-profit security corporation, funded by the airlines, to handle airport security. This concept, under consideration by the major airlines, merits further review.
The Commission recommends that the FAA work with the private sector and other federal agencies to promote the professionalism of security personnel through a program that could include: licensing and performance standards that reflect best practices; adequate, common and recurrent training that considers human factors; emphasis on reducing turnover rates; rewards for performance; opportunities for advancement; a national rank and grade structure to permit employees to find opportunities in other areas; regional and national competitions to identify highly skilled teams; and, an agreement among users to hire based on performance, not just cost.
3.11 Access to airport controlled areas must be secured and the physical security of aircraft must be ensured.
Air carriers and airport authorities, working with FAA, must develop comprehensive and effective means by which to secure aircraft and other controlled areas from unauthorized access and intrusion. Use of radio frequency transponders to track the location of people and objects in airport controlled areas, including aircraft, offers significant advantages over the current security measures commonly used today. Where adequate airport controlled area and aircraft security are not assured by other means, this technology should be considered for use at both international and domestic airports.
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http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/2891
In mid-1996, President Clinton created the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security and assigned it three specific mandates: to look at the changing security threat, and how the US could address it; to examine changes in the aviation industry, and how government should adapt its regulation of it; to look at the technological changes coming to air traffic control, and what should be done to take best advantage of them.
In the wake of concerns over the crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800, President Clinton asked the commission to focus its attention first on the issue of security. He asked for an initial report on aviation security in 45 days, including an action plan to deploy new high technology machines to detect the most sophisticated explosives.
From its inception, the commission took a hands-on approach to its work. President Clinton announced the formation of the commission on July 25, 1996 and a few days later, Vice President Al Gore, commission chairman, led a site visit to Dulles International Airport where he and other commissioners saw airport and airline operations firsthand, and discussed issues with front line workers. This was the first of dozens of such visits. Over the next six months, the commission visited facilities throughout the United States and in various locations abroad.
The Gore Commission held six public meetings, hearing from over fifty witnesses representing a cross section of the aviation industry and the public, including families of victims of air disasters. Recognizing the increasingly global nature of aviation, the commission cosponsored an International Conference on Aviation Safety and Security with the George Washington University, attended by over 700 representatives from sixty-one countries
There were a number of recommendations made the by Gore Commission, whose commissioners included family members of the victims of Flight 800. The recommendations included several measures to improve screening company performance, including a national job grade structure for screeners and meaningful measures to reward employees. It also called for airlines to hire screening companies on the basis of performance, not the lowest bidder.
The Gore Commission called for criminal background and FBI fingerprint checks for all airport and airline workers who screen passengers for weapons or have access to secure areas. The airlines industry had long opposed mandatory criminal checks.
Two weeks later, as reported in the Boston Globe, Gore retreated from his own commission's proposals in a letter to Carol B. Hallett, president of the industry's trade group, the Air Transport Association. ''I want to make it very clear that it is not the intent of this administration or of the commission to create a hardship for the air transportation industry or to cause inconvenience to the traveling public,'' Gore wrote. To reassure Hallett, Gore added that the FAA would develop ''a draft test concept ... in full partnership with representatives of the airline industry."
The day after Gore's letter to the Air Transport Association, Trans World Airlines donated $40,000 to the Democratic National Committee. By the time of the presidential election, other airlines had poured large donations into Democrat Party committees: $265,000 from American Airlines, $120,000 from Delta Air Lines, $115,000 from United Air Lines, $87,000 from Northwest Airlines, according to an analysis done for the Boston Globe by the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks donations.A total of $627,000 was donated to the Democrats by major airlines.
Two of the commission members -- Victoria Cummock and Kathleen Flynn, who lost loved ones in the terrorist attack on Flight 800 -- believe that campaign contributions by the airline industry were a direct result of Al Gore backing away from the commission's security recommendations. Don't bet on the mainstream news media reminding Al Gore of this flagrant example of homeland security taking a back-seat to campaign cash the next time they quote one of his frequent fever-pitched rants.
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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3071583/
WASHINGTON, March 20, 2002 — When four hijacked airliners cost thousands of Americans their lives last September, the Bush administration vowed to make sweeping security changes. Yet six months after the attacks, those efforts are being hampered by a cost-conscious airline industry coupled with a federal aviation bureaucracy unwilling or unable to change, according to members of Congress, aviation officials and outside security experts.
The White House assured the public this week that new, stricter airport security measures make 24-hour fighter patrols above New York City unnecessary. That surprised many officials involved in revising aviation security regulations who say that changes since the Sept. 11 attacks have been largely cosmetic.
These officials, including several involved in monitoring the government’s implementation of new regulations, concede that locking cockpit doors, putting air marshals on some flights and increasing random checks of carry-on luggage - all instituted immediately after flights resumed in September - helped to improve security generally.
But they also say that a lack of urgency at the Department of Transportation and a sustained lobbying effort by the financially strapped airline industry have led to a go-slow approach to reforming a system that is itself a threat to the flying public.
“Now that they’ve got their bailout, the airlines have turned their money and attention to minimizing the number of permanent changes to the way they do business,” says one congressional staff member who deals with aviation issues.
**Snip**
Same old story?
Stories like this still make Bogdan Dzakovik’s blood boil. For over a decade, Dzakovik has worked on the FAA’s “Red Team,” a small unit of undercover investigators who test and retest airport security systems around the country. Risking his job, Dzakovik recently went public with allegations that, since the team began work in 1995, FAA superiors ignored an almost constant stream of reports about flaws and holes in security systems nationwide. He says the carnage of Sept. 11, and a dreadful feeling that it might have been prevented, finally convinced him he had to speak out.
The FAA has refused to comment on the allegations, though the inspector general at its parent agency, the Department of Transportation, has been ordered to investigate the charges under federal whistleblower statutes.
“We got all sorts of things through - pistols, grenades, even a rifle once,” Dzakovik says. “In each case, we would report the failure to our FAA bosses. And never once that I can remember in all those years was there any real follow-up.”
In fact, Dzakovik says, when Red Team reports began to show that security employees were failing to pick up weapons in baggage at a rate of 85 percent or more, “we were ordered to tip off the local security chief that we were there.” Invariably, that resulted in nearly perfect detection rates - a situation that seemed to please his bosses.
Again and again, Dzakovik argues, the results were rigged, or innovations proposed by the team to make the tests more realistic were rejected. Once, he said, the team wanted to try to smuggle liquid explosives past a checkpoint after al-Qaida terrorist Ramzi Yousef admitted to a plot involving such a compound in 1995. But the request was denied.
“We weren’t allowed to test for knives at all,” Dzakovik said. “We never tried realistic explosives. I mean, look at what these terrorists have done. We may not like them, but we can’t pretend they aren’t clever.”
Why would the FAA want to rig results? Dzakovik believes the answer is in the cozy relationship the agency developed with the airline industry over the years. “Security costs money, and that’s money that doesn’t go under the profit line,” he says. [Airlines] gave Congress something like $80,000 in the last election. They don’t do that just to be nice.”
[A week after this story appeared, the DOT confirmed that field tests conducted by its investigators after the attacks show major lapses at U.S. airports. Undercover inspectors tried to sneak guns, knives and other weapons through check pints. The results were jarring: guns got through screeners in over 30 percent of the tests; knives went undetected in 70 percent, and simulated explosives in over 60 percent of tests.]
Cozy relationship
Charges that the FAA has been soft on the industry it regulates are hardly new. Until 1996, in fact, the agency’s charge was to promote the growth of the industry as well as to regulate it, a legacy of the days when the airlines were aviation pioneers inaugurating historic trans-continental, trans-Atlantic and finally trans-Pacific services.
Those days are gone, but many believe the relationship hasn’t changed with the times.
Transcripts of congressional hearings on aviation - which in recent years have been dominated by “on-time departures and arrivals” and “air traffic capacity” and almost never by security issues - are evidence of that. Any suggestion that security procedures should be taken out of the airlines’ hands was branded a threat to their competitiveness.
There were exceptions. In the wake of every major airline terrorist incident of the past 15 years, there have been spikes in activity. But in almost every case, a triangle of mutual interest in not rocking the boat prevailed - a triangle with the airline lobby on one point, the campaign money hungry Congress on another and the regulators of the FAA on the other:
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Sent to me by a friend with a very interesting military background:
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/744199---israelification-high-security-little-bother
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More Israel marketing puff pieces. Kind of leaves out the Shin Bet intel gathering and the documented ethnic/religious profiling.
Again, there is no magical Israeli security profiling that allows them to gaze at the teeming throngs in line and find the sweating terrorist, without all the un-PC ethic/religious profiling and domestic intelligence.
There is nothing about body language, interview and interrogation and behavioral analysis that is known by guys named "Rafi" and "Avi" that isn't known by US law enforcement.
Here is the biggest problem not addressed by the Israelis, in the US, law enforcement cannot force anyone to answer questions. Not even in a criminal trial or a grand jury, much less a consensual contact, an investigative stop or an arrest.
TSA Behavior Detection Officer sees an anxious, fidgeting person in line, amongst bored, irritated passengers.
TSA: "Hi, how are you doing today? Where are you flying to?"
Twitchy guy in line: "Ron Paul and the voices in my head say the TSA are nazis. Are you a nazi?"
TSA: Um, no. Where did you say you were flying?"
Twitchy guy: "Don't touch my penis. I don't talk to nazis"
The TSA BDO summons the LEO assigned to the checkpoint
Officer Friendly: "Hi, I'm officer Friendly! The reason I'm talking to you is the TSA officer told me you seemed to be upset about something. Can I help you?"
Twitchy guy: "I complied with the screening process and let them look at my abnormally small penis with their evil machine. I don't want to talk to you. Am I under arrest? Am I free to go?"
Mr. Twitchy has no wants or warrants. He was screened and no threat items were found. No matter how much he's sweating, twitching and pissed off, in the US these are not grounds for arrest Even if he's obviously mentally ill, unless you can articulate that he's an imminent threat to self or others or gravely disabled, you cannot lawfully detain him on a 72 hr psych hold.
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KNOW YOUR LEGAL RIGHTS AS AN AIRLINE PASSENGER
As an airline passenger, you are entitled to courteous, respectful and non-stigmatizing treatment by airline and security personnel. You have the right to complain about treatment that you believe is discriminatory. If you believe you have been treated in a discriminatory manner, immediately:
1.
Ask for the names and ID numbers of all persons involved in the incident. Be sure to write this information down.
2.
Ask to speak to a supervisor.
3.
Ask if you have been singled out because of your name, looks, dress, race, ethnicity, faith, or national origin.
4.
Ask witnesses to give you their names and contact information.
5.
Write down a statement of facts immediately after the incident. Be sure to include the flight number, the flight date, and the name of the airline.
6.
Contact CAIR to file a report. If you are leaving the country, leave a detailed message, with the information above at 202-488-8787.
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Yes we get it. Tea partiers have small penii. :roll:
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There is a distinct difference between tea partiers and tinfoil hatted ronulans.
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As there is between Nazis and the TSA. My doggy nose detects of whiff of GM feeling a tad offended on that.
Moving along :-) GM, in one of my posts of yesterday I quoted a Rapiscan VP saying that the naked pictures will shortly not be necessary. Wouldn't this eliminate the source of all this discontent? The TSA gets a scan it says addresses the issue, and we don't have to get photo'd nude and trust the government to not keep the fotos or have to have some TSA person grabbing our junk (and asking us to cough? :lol: )
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Next step for body scanners could be trains, boats, metro
By Jordy Yager - 11/23/10 02:09 PM ET
The next step in tightened security could be on U.S. public transportation, trains and boats.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says terrorists will continue to look for U.S. vulnerabilities, making tighter security standards necessary.
“[Terrorists] are going to continue to probe the system and try to find a way through,” Napolitano said in an interview that aired Monday night on "Charlie Rose."
“I think the tighter we get on aviation, we have to also be thinking now about going on to mass transit or to trains or maritime. So, what do we need to be doing to strengthen our protections there?”
Napolitano’s comments, made a day before one of the nation’s busiest travel days, come in the wake of a public outcry over newly implemented airport screening measures that have been criticized for being too invasive.
The secretary has defended the new screening methods, which include advanced imaging systems and pat-downs, as necessary to stopping terrorists. During the interview with Rose, Napolitano said her agency is now looking into ways to make other popular means of travel safer for passengers and commuters.
Napolitano isn’t the only one who’s suggested that advanced scanning machines could be used in places beyond airports.
Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, introduced legislation this past September that would authorize testing of body scanners at some federal buildings.
Napolitano’s comments were in response to the question: “What will they [terrorists] be thinking in the future?” She gave no details about how soon the public could see changes in security or about what additional safety measures the DHS was entertaining.
The recently implemented airport screening methods have made John Pistole, who heads the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the focus of growing public ire.
On Monday, Pistole said he understood peoples’ privacy concerns and that the TSA would consider modifying its screening policies to make them “as minimally invasive as possible,” but he indicated the advanced-imaging body scans and pat-down methods would remain in place in the short term, including during the high-volume Thanksgiving period of travel.
Lawmakers from both parties have received hundreds of complaints about the new methods — some have likened the pat-downs to groping — and have called on Pistole to address the privacy concerns of their constituents, who were not informed about changes ahead of time.
Many lawmakers say the public should have been informed before the pat-downs and body-imaging techniques were put into practice. As a result, any move to implement new security screening measures for rail or water passengers is likely to be met with tough levels of scrutiny from lawmakers.
Pistole, who spent 26 years with the FBI, told reporters Monday that he rejected the advice of media aides who advised him to publicize the revised security measures before they took effect. Terrorist groups have been known to study the TSA’s screening methods in an attempt to circumvent them, he said.
Napolitano said she hoped the U.S. could get to a place in the future where Americans would not have to be as guarded against terrorist attacks as they are and that she was actively promoting research into the psychology of how a terrorist becomes radicalized.
“The long-term [question] is, how do we get out of this having to have an ever-increasing security apparatus because of terrorists and a terrorist attack?” she said. “I think having a better understanding of what causes someone to become a terrorist will be helpful."
DHS and intelligence officials are not as far along in understanding that process as they would like, Napolitano said, adding that until that goal is reached, steps need to be put in place to ensure the public’s safety.
“We don’t know much,” she said. “If you were to try and devise a template about what connects this terrorist to this terrorist and how they were raised and what schools they went to and their socioeconomic status, or this or that, it’s all over the map.
“I think there’s some important work that’s being done on that but … the Secretary of Homeland Security cannot wait for that.”
Source:
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/130549-next-step-for-body-scanners-could-be-trains-boats-and-the-metro-
The contents of this site are © 2010 Capitol Hill Publishing Corp., a subsidiary of News Communications, Inc.
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There is a frustration that we aren't smarter than terrorists, we are a step behind them, to them this is laughable, we have fallen into their traps to the point of hating, scanning and fondling each other, there is no easy answer, but worst I think is that we are not doing EVERYTHING ELSE we can do to make our nation safe BEFORE we need to touch and scan each other (such as secure the borders, crack down on existing laws etc.).
Imagine the uproar right now if George Bush was President during this! Imagine the leftist equivalent of a comment Rush L. made yesterday...
RUSH LIMBAUGH: "Remember when Obama went swimming in the Gulf with his daughters to show it was safe during the oil spill? How about taking his daughters through a screening? How about Obama take his daughters to the airport and have a TSA groper go through the exact routine everyone else is going through right now to show it is safe...
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2010/11/23/rush_obama_should_take_daughter_through_tsa_to_show_its_safe.html
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Only over the top if you think nothing is wrong with current procedure.
It may be a standard LE pat down, except that is done as I understand it with suspects, not all victims, witnesses, bystanders, etc. Our county government center now has a security check metal detector, but not the full pat down. Flying is 'optional' but not really for some jobs or for some people to be with family over the holidays. Appearing in a county courthouse can be mandatory and unavoidable in some situations.
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========
LA Times:
Reporting from Washington — New airport security procedures that have stirred the emotions of air travelers — full-body scans and aggressive pat-downs — were largely designed to detect an explosive powder called PETN, which has been a staple of Al Qaeda bomb makers for nearly a decade.
It was PETN that was molded into the sole of Richard Reid's black high-top sneaker when he walked onto American Airlines Flight 63 bound for Miami in December 2001.
It was PETN that was sewn into the underwear of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, authorities say, when he boarded Northwest Airlines Flight 253 for Detroit on Christmas Day 2009.
And it was PETN that suspected Al Qaeda operatives in Yemen packed inside computer printer cartridges that were shipped Oct. 28, intending to blow up planes en route to Chicago.
None of the plots succeeded in taking down an aircraft, but top U.S. officials are concerned about fresh indications that Al Qaeda remains determined to get PETN on airplanes by trying to exploit vulnerabilities in passenger and cargo screening.
Not only has the terrorist network acknowledged its role in bomb plots, it is also sharing what it knows about building bombs on the Web and elsewhere.
PETN, or pentaerythritol tetranitrate, presents some vexing problems for security experts. A powder about the consistency of fine popcorn salt, it will not trigger an alarm on a metal detector. Because of its more stable molecules, PETN gives off less vapor, making it more difficult to detect by bomb-sniffing dogs and the trace swabs used by the Transportation Security Administration.
PETN's stability makes it easy to hide and easily transformed. When mixed with rubber cement or putty, it becomes a rudimentary plastic explosive — a baseball-sized amount can blow a hole in an airplane fuselage.
"PETN is hard to detect and lends itself to being concealed," said an intelligence official who was not authorized to speak on the record. "It packs a punch."
One way to detect PETN is through its detonator, which typically uses materials that are easier to trace. Reid's shoe bomb combined PETN with a volatile explosive accelerant called TATP that can be made from dime-store nail polish and hydrogen peroxide. The Yemen printer cartridge bombs placed the PETN around small homemade blasting caps containing the chemical lead azide.
The fact that PETN has been the common denominator in all of the bombs is a major reason why the TSA is unlikely to yield substantially in its search for practical ways to prevent the deadly powder from making it aboard a plane.
The new aggressive pat-downs and the increased use of full-body scanners — there are more than 400 machines in 69 U.S. airports — were a direct response to last year's alleged bombing attempt on Christmas Day, when Abdulmutallab passed through screening with 80 grams of PETN, authorities say.
Some passengers have objected to the enhanced screening as an invasion of privacy, though several polls show air travelers consider safety far more important.
"I know people want to bomb us," TSA chief John Pistole told reporters Monday. Pistole isn't just worried about terrorists in Yemen. He said he is particularly concerned that home-grown terrorists might "get ahold of a PETN device."
PETN can be made in a rudimentary lab or salvaged from old munitions. It can scraped from old bombs or stripped out of detonator cord, a fast-burning fuse about the diameter of a clothesline that is commonly used in road construction and mining. The amount of PETN in 5 feet of detonator cord has enough explosive power to buckle the roof of a car.
Smuggling explosives onto airplanes is a vulnerability that the TSA has known about since 2005, when covert testing teams run by the Department of Homeland Security inspector general were able to penetrate TSA airport security with explosive-like test devices, Pistole said.
The best technological weapons that the TSA has now are body scans of passengers and X-rays of cargo and baggage. But the scanners can't see anything hidden inside body cavities, and their effectiveness relies on operators identifying something unusual.
The scanners are "just anomaly detectors. Someone has to notice, has to have some expertise," said former Homeland Security Inspector General Clark Kent Ervin, who managed covert testing teams in 2003 and 2004 that were able to get guns, knives and explosives through TSA screening.
There are new techniques available for cargo, baggage and passenger screening that can detect individual explosive molecules using mass spectrometry, a technology that would be better at identifying PETN than the swab machines in use by the TSA.
"There is no question that the technology now deployed can't do it," Ervin said.
Even technology can only detect so much. The printer cartridge bombs from Yemen were sealed in plastic and cleaned with solvents to remove PETN molecules. The packages were discovered because of a tip from Saudi intelligence services.
Frank Cilluffo, director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University, said security screening needed to be less predictable, "so Al Qaeda and our [other] adversaries can't simply game the system."
The TSA also should invest in better human intelligence and institute a method of questioning passengers that Israel uses at airport checkpoints, said Edward Luttwak, an expert on security strategy and a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
In recent discussions with members of the security services in Israel, Luttwak found "general puzzlement about TSA's enthusiasm for these machines."
The TSA's plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars deploying more than 1,000 full-body scanners by the end of 2011 "is a syndrome of having no budget limits and maybe aggressive salesmanship," Luttwak said.
Israeli screeners, he added, are not looking for people who fit a physical profile, but a behavioral profile of avoidance and inconsistency. In Luttwak's view, it is easier for terrorists to design a bomb that can get past a screening regime than it is to find someone who is both a good actor and willing to be a suicide bomber.
A TSA program to identify suspicious behavior in search lines has deployed about 3,000 agents in more than 160 U.S. airports. Officers are trained to identify suspicious facial expressions and body language by walking up and down the line, initiating conversations and pulling passengers for additional screening.
In a glossy, color magazine released this week by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the Yemeni-based group vowed to continue using PETN. The magazine, written in English, included photos and a detailed description of how the printer cartridge bombs were made and packaged to avoid detection by bomb-sniffing dogs.
The authors encouraged copycat attacks: "Do you think that our research will only be used by Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula and won't be shared with other mujahidin?"
The headline on the magazine was simply "$4,200" — the amount the group says it spent to build and ship the bombs.
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TSA Administrative Directive: Opt-Outters To Be Considered “Domestic Extremists”
Posted By Mac Slavo On November 24, 2010 @ 2:29 am In Headline News | 40 Comments
If the information recently acquired by Doug Hagmann of Northeast Intelligence Network [1] is accurate, then something really big is happening in America right now - and it’s most certainly not a step towards individual liberty [2].
According to Mr. Hagmann, he was contacted by a source within the DHS who provided an alarming memo detailing a new administrative directive agreed upon by DHS chief Janet Napolitano and the head of TSA John Pistole. The memo, according to Doug Hagmann, “officially addresses those who are opposed to, or engaged in the disruption of the implementation of the enhanced airport screening procedures as ‘domestic extremists’.”
The memo leaves no doubt as to who, exactly, is leading the charge to label Americans who refuse current security measures due to health and privacy concerns as extremists. “The measures to be taken in response to the negative public backlash as detailed [in this directive], have the full support of the President,” it says.
Under the new labeling procedures, those who choose to opt-out or are perceived as being troublemakers will be detained, questioned and processed for further investigation:
The terminology contained within the reported memo is indeed troubling. It labels any person who “interferes” with TSA airport security screening procedure protocol and operations by actively objecting to the established screening process, “including but not limited to the anticipated national opt-out day” as a “domestic extremist.” The label is then broadened to include “any person, group or alternative media source” that actively objects to, causes others to object to, supports and/or elicits support for anyone who engages in such travel disruptions at U.S. airports in response to the enhanced security procedures.
For individuals who engaged in such activity at screening points, it instructs TSA operations to obtain the identities of those individuals and other applicable information and submit the same electronically to the Homeland Environment Threat Analysis Division, the Extremism and Radicalization branch of the Office of Intelligence & Analysis (IA) [3] division of the Department of Homeland Security.
The United States government, under complete control and direction of our elected President, is now actively labeling anyone who exercises their 4th amendment Constitutional right which protects against warrantless and unreasonable searches and seizures as, essentially, engaging in terrorism as defined by Section 802 of the USA Patriot Act:
Section 802 [USA Patriot Act [4]]
(a) DOMESTIC TERRORISM DEFINED- Section 2331 of title 18, United States Code, is amended–
‘(5) the term `domestic terrorism’ means activities that–
‘(B) appear to be intended–
‘(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
‘(ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
Though it may seem a broad interpretation, the definitions for domestic terrorism are very vague, allowing for a variety of views depending on who happens to be making the decisions. The very fact that TSA is allegedly going to label opt-out travelers as ‘domestic extremists’ suggest that they are, by today’s standards, considered no different than terrorists - and thus - may have their Constitutional rights stripped and be held without trial. In a previous article we discussed Matt Kernan [5], who may have found a Constitutional argument that works to avoid enhanced security in the airport. But, what if the-powers-that-be determined, by whatever vague definition, that the Constitution doesn’t apply?
With the outrage from American travelers and the pressure being put on corporate profits, the President and TSA may eventually change their tune. But if they don’t, then we can expect more intrusive checkpoints from our government in the very near future. Ms. Napolitano has already publicly stated that DHS is looking at other mass transit systems like buses and trains as the next target.
Something big is happening. And either the American people are going to force the change - starting with each individual making a personal decision to stand up against policies that can be described as nothing less than tyrannical - or the expansion of surveillance and control systems will continue to spread.
If the American people fail this time as we did with bailouts and healthcare, the end result will be backscatter machines in schools, malls, stadiums, and any other public venue which is deemed a security threat by our government.
Sources: Northeast Intelligence Network [1], Electronic Privacy Information Center [4]
Article printed from SHTF Plan - When It Hits The Fan, Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You: http://www.shtfplan.com
URL to article: http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/tsa-administrative-directive-opt-outters-to-be-considered-domestic-extremists_11242010
URLs in this post:
[1] Northeast Intelligence Network: http://homelandsecurityus.com/
[2] not a step towards individual liberty: http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/lt-gen-ret-boykin-marxism-in-america_11012010
[3] Office of Intelligence & Analysis (IA): http://www.dhs.gov/xabout/structure/gc_1220886590914.shtm
[4] USA Patriot Act: http://epic.org/privacy/terrorism/hr3162.html
[5] Matt Kernan: http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/man-upholds-his-constitutional-rights-allowed-to-pass-without-backscatter-or-groping_11232010
Click here to print.
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Douglas Hagmann is far from credible. I do not doubt that individuals who cause a disturbance in a screening area will result in those individuals facing potential civil and criminal liability for those acts, and their information will be available through TSA's internal channels. I doubt very much the term "domestic extremists" would be used.
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http://aviationblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2010/11/tsa-outrage-theres-no-there-th.html
TSA "outrage": There's no "there" there.
1:11 PM Wed, Nov 24, 2010 | Permalink
Eric Torbenson/Reporter Bio | E-mail | News tips
A couple of hours at D/FW Airport this morning proved to me, at least, that the "fury" on the part of the passenger rights crowd about screening scanners and enhanced pat-downs seems essentially manufactured. And that the reliable media fell for it again.
Here's Howie Kurtz on the same subject.
Here's the Poynter Institute, our leading light in media self-examination, on the run-up and how mainstream media may have "missed" this issue initially. I'm quoted in this piece too saying how we would have liked to have jumped on it sooner, which is true in a sense that it was a topic worth exploring.
What I also expressed to that writer was the concern on my part that there's no real way of us knowing how "real" this "uprising" was because we had blog posts and loud voices on TV like Kate Hanni and some Twitter traffic and some outraged anecdotes, all of which seemed to point to some sort of groupthink uprising that would boil over on Wednesday, National Opt Out Day, at airports across the country.
Here's what's happened so far today at U.S. Airports: Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary for a Thanksgiving travel day.
Unless, of course, you believe everything the TSA is saying is lies. But other media haven't exactly found a different narrative.
Here's even more, this time from the NYT.
I guess we have to remove the fish hooks from our mouths as media.
My counter to the good folks at Poynter who suggest that the Fifth Estate is more nimble at seeing trends than the mainstream media is that what is really more likely the case is that bloggers and the Social Media sphere, at least to me, seem infinitely more likely to be hoodwinked and bamboozled seeing they generally lack any truth-finding powers and seem especially susceptible to Trending Twitter topics, a stray anecdote told through Facebook, a random link to a YouTube video that purports to show one thing, but actually isn't anything like what it appears to be at all.
Statistical significance still matters. Outliers are interesting and exciting, but they are nothing more than outliers and those who don't know the difference between significance and outliers are driving the narrative. It makes for headlines; does it make for better information?
It's exciting to be on that edge because of the speed and newness of finding out new information. The key to understanding what is really happening vs. some flash of insight is what we're still calling reporting and experience and context. That's still on our menu here at the DMN and in other places.
I stand ready to be wrong if there's some sort of surge of problems along the East Coast related to this. The day is still young. But so far it's a reminder that the loudest voices can be heard, but may not represent much more than a few people being loud.
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Nah, not posting what I think, too much abuse by the statists.........I guess they win, feel better?
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Douglas Hagmann is far from credible. I do not doubt that individuals who cause a disturbance in a screening area will result in those individuals facing potential civil and criminal liability for those acts, and their information will be available through TSA's internal channels. I doubt very much the term "domestic extremists" would be used.
I concede I jumped the gun on this one. SHTF I found out is a kook site.
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There is a frustration that we aren't smarter than terrorists, we are a step behind them, to them this is laughable, we have fallen into their traps to the point of hating, scanning and fondling each other, there is no easy answer, but worst I think is that we are not doing EVERYTHING ELSE we can do to make our nation safe BEFORE we need to touch and scan each other (such as secure the borders, crack down on existing laws etc.).
**The lack of border security is a legitimate issue. There is no excuse for it not having been secured years ago. Not only are the SIAs and OTMs serious potential threats, the more conventional illegals are also presenting serious threats to Americans. Border security as it is or as it should be, we still have to secure our aviation system.**
Imagine the uproar right now if George Bush was President during this! Imagine the leftist equivalent of a comment Rush L. made yesterday...
RUSH LIMBAUGH: "Remember when Obama went swimming in the Gulf with his daughters to show it was safe during the oil spill? How about taking his daughters through a screening? How about Obama take his daughters to the airport and have a TSA groper go through the exact routine everyone else is going through right now to show it is safe...
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2010/11/23/rush_obama_should_take_daughter_through_tsa_to_show_its_safe.html
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Only over the top if you think nothing is wrong with current procedure.
It may be a standard LE pat down, except that is done as I understand it with suspects, not all victims, witnesses, bystanders, etc. Our county government center now has a security check metal detector, but not the full pat down. Flying is 'optional' but not really for some jobs or for some people to be with family over the holidays. Appearing in a county courthouse can be mandatory and unavoidable in some situations.
**The leaked photos from courthouse security were from a federal courthouse. I doubt very much that many, if any non-federal courthouses use similar technology. People are free to choose to fly or not. If the current situation is untenable, then one is free to find other transportation. I personally hate flying and do so only when there is no other viable option.**
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(http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_himdawV7crE/TO1I_EJ-1xI/AAAAAAAAAOo/FZB8LqKKiQc/s1600/IMG00059-20101124-1151.jpg)
http://blog.tsa.gov/
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"People are free to choose to fly or not."
As Glenn Beck would say "Oh, really?"
I have a seminar in Vancouver the end of January and a seminar in Chicago the following week. What are my options other than flying?
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Drive, charter a plane, Greyhound, hitchhike, train, horseback, get a canoe and paddle up the coast.
Some are easier and cheaper than others. Chose what works best for you.
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GM, you are a bright guy and unusually well-informed, however what you just said is quite glib and facetious. Those are not realistic alternatives.
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http://tickets.amtrak.com/itd/amtrak
Departs: 10:15 AM
Wed Jan 26 2011
Los Angeles, CA - Union Station (LAX)
Station News
Arrives: 8:45 PM
Thu Jan 27 2011
Seattle, WA (SEA)
Station News
PT38H5M Duration: 34 hr, 30 min
Departs: 9:15 PM
Thu Jan 27 2011
Seattle, WA (SEA)
Station News
Arrives: 12:20 AM
Fri Jan 28 2011
Vancouver, BC (VAC) Vancouver, BC
Vancouver
(VAC)
Station News
Duration: 3 hr, 5 min
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Smart ass :lol:
Cost? Plus income not earned while I'm travelling? Time away from my family? Additional food costs while on the train?
http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2010/11/18/
http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2010/11/19/
http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2010/11/23/
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In your situation, I'd probably fly and go though the irritation of TSA screening, weighing it against the cost/benefit of other travel alternatives. But, you have choices that you can choose from according to your personal values.
I can say personally that I'll choose to be patted down rather than Rapiscanned when I have to fly. Yes, I'd rather not be pat searched, or screened. I'd also prefer not to be scattered human remains scattered amongst aircraft wreckage as well.
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http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/what-can-u-s-learn-from-israel-airport-security-1.326599
The possibility of adopting Israeli security methods has become a hot topic in the U.S. media as millions prepare to travel by air for the Thanksgiving holiday this weekend.
But while Israelis may enjoy the resulting prestige and commercial payoffs, there are those who doubt their methods would translate to places like the United States.
Differences in scale, budgets and sensitivity to accusations of "racial profiling" may be insuperable, they say. "
"We're not the smartest in the world, and I'm not sure I would even describe ours as the absolute best security in the world," a senior Israeli transport official said. "What we do have, though, is suited for our needs -- and that's enough."
Those needs centre on Ben-Gurion Airport, Israel's core international gateway. There's no full-body scanner yet -- one is to be installed next year -- and while staff are empowered to frisk and even strip-search passengers, most generally endure only the standard walk-through metal detectors.
Yet this overall painlessness is the end-product of a powerful, probing and often unseen screening system that kicks in before travelers have even set foot in Ben-Gurion.
Israeli intelligence agencies, working in lock-step with airport security, flag travelers deemed potentially dangerous -- a designation applied most readily, and controversially, to Arabs who make up 20 percent of the Jewish state's population.
Commensurate scrutiny follows: from the rifle-carrying guards that question the drivers of incoming cars, to the unsmiling sentries who eye passengers as they wheel in their luggage, to the security interrogations in the check-in lines.
As a last resort, on Israeli airlines at least, undercover sky marshals can be seated next to passengers seen as risky.
Budgets at U.S. airports -- especially international hubs that dwarf the mid-sized Ben-Gurion -- may not allow for qualified security personnel in such numbers, said Shlomo Dror, an Israeli defence official with extensive aviation experience.
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GM:
You make many points well, but
a) I repeat the line of inquiry about corruption: former DHS head Cherthoff (sp?) representing Rapiscan
b) I repeat the point made by Rapiscan's VP that Rapiscan will shortly have scanners that simply report anomalies and their general location-- which certainly would vitiate the issue of nudie pictures and what happens to them
c) As evidenced on the Privacy thread on our SCH forum and on this thread here, I think you fail utterly to appreciate that a goodly part of what motivates those here who disagree with you is not stupidity or the inability to follow a logical line of thought, but rather where your logic will take us when followed to its logical conclusions-- to a state where we are followed and recorded for posterity by cameras and microphones wherever we go and even the privacy of our own bodies is outweighed by the logic of eliminating all risk.
TAC,
Marc
====================
WSJ
By JOHN FUND
As millions of Americans travel to be with family on Thanksgiving, many will encounter the Transportation Safety Administration's new full-body scanners and pat-down searches at airports. Complaints are piling up and a new Washington Post poll finds 50% of Americans say the pat-down searches "go too far" in violating civil liberties.
But if you think TSA is dysfunctional and unpopular now, wait until it unionizes. This month, the Federal Labor Relations Authority ruled that 50,000 TSA personnel will be allowed to vote on whether or not to join a union with full collective bargaining rights. The American Federation of Government Employees and the National Treasury Employees Union are already gearing up their campaigns to win over the screeners.
After 9/11, Congress wisely decided to forbid TSA employees from coming under union work rules out of fear that it could compromise security. Imagine if every change in procedures had to be cleared with union shop stewards. While it is not easy to fire TSA personnel now, just think how difficult it will be to remove bad employees if they are covered by union job protection agreements.
But in 2007, the new Democratic Congress eliminated the ban on collective bargaining, and as soon as Barack Obama became president in 2009 his appointees began pushing unionization for TSA. Last year, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano admitted in Congressional testimony that she backs collective bargaining rights for TSA employees, overriding the considered judgment of all previous TSA administrators that such rights are at cross-purposes with the flexibility TSA needs to meet certain threats.
John Mica of Florida, the new GOP chair of the House Transportation Committee, told me last month that we should have followed the advice of Israeli security experts and used private contractors and psychological tests to counteract terrorism in the wake of 9/11. At least one busy airport -- Orlando International -- is preparing to dump TSA in favor of a private security company, which is allowed under an opt-out provision in the federal law governing airport security. "Having TSA going towards unionization is just the wrong way to go," said Mr. Mica.
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The alternative to flying to your business appointments is not canoeing up the coast or bicycling to Chicago. Like the goal of cap and traders, your alternative is to abandon much of your productive business activities. Shrink your business and shrink the business of everyone you touched along the way. Live in a failed economy and a bankrupt state because the terrorists in fact were smarter than us. But the flights that remain will still search grandmas visiting grandchildren with equal zest to the searches of young males with loose ties to terror camps.
Greyhounds do not travel at even the speed of driving. They get up to speed and then exit again at the next town and take union based driver breaks along the way. If we constructed high speed rail across the country, the terror threat would move right over.
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a) I repeat the line of inquiry about corruption: former DHS head Cherthoff (sp?) representing Rapiscan
**The Brits, the Dutch and Nigerians have or are adopting the RapiScan Secure 1000. I can't say that I know much about the procurement policies for those various nations, but I doubt Michael Chertoff's past with DHS would be that important to them.**
b) I repeat the point made by Rapiscan's VP that Rapiscan will shortly have scanners that simply report anomalies and their general location-- which certainly would vitiate the issue of nudie pictures and what happens to them
(http://www.tsa.gov/graphics/images/approach/backscatter_large.jpg)
http://www.tsa.gov/approach/tech/ait/how_it_works.shtm
c) As evidenced on the Privacy thread on our SCH forum and on this thread here, I think you fail utterly to appreciate that a goodly part of what motivates those here who disagree with you is not stupidity or the inability to follow a logical line of thought, but rather where your logic will take us when followed to its logical conclusions-- to a state where we are followed and recorded for posterity by cameras and microphones wherever we go and even the privacy of our own bodies is outweighed by the logic of eliminating all risk.
**My logic has never been that which favors a dystopian surveillance state. My logic is to apply the current case law and constitutional protections to emerging technology, not irrational hysteria that insists that any use of technology by law enforcement means we are but minutes away from rectally implanted GPS beacons and laser-etched bar codes on our foreheads.**
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The alternative to flying to your business appointments is not canoeing up the coast or bicycling to Chicago.
**How was business travel on 9/12/2001? There wasn't any by way of commercial aircraft, was there? I bet that hurt a lot of bottom lines of businesses, large and small.**
Like the goal of cap and traders, your alternative is to abandon much of your productive business activities.
**No, my goal is to balance the need to travel in commercial aircraft with the need of surviving the flight. Again, having law enforcement pick your body parts out of aircraft wreckage is bad for your productive business activities, is it not?**
Shrink your business and shrink the business of everyone you touched along the way. Live in a failed economy and a bankrupt state because the terrorists in fact were smarter than us. But the flights that remain will still search grandmas visiting grandchildren with equal zest to the searches of young males with loose ties to terror camps.
**Depending on what's known about a young male's ties to a terror camp he might be on the no fly list in the first place. Keep in mind that the 2006 UK transatlantic plotters were planning on taking their families along for a ride to the right hand of allah. Do not assume that there aren't grandmotherly jihadists.**
Greyhounds do not travel at even the speed of driving. They get up to speed and then exit again at the next town and take union based driver breaks along the way. If we constructed high speed rail across the country, the terror threat would move right over.
**The point being is that there are travel alternatives, they may not be great alternatives, but they exist. As I'm sure you know, high speed rail probably isn't economically viable, and AQ is more than happy to target railways as you said.**
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Replying to your prior post:
Regarding the last point first, I know that you don't want a dystopian surveillance state. My point is that the interface of the accelerating march of technology in this area and your conceptual framework is, in fact, headed that way.
Having the scanners upgrade from programs that show nude pictures to ones that simply report anomalies and their locations will meet the objections of many people.
Regarding safety, I sent you earlier a letter from scientists in a format that I can't post here the gist of which is that the apparently low radiation numbers are misleading because they are unlike the numbers to which they are being compared; the other numbers are for radiation which goes through the body, whereas here they all come to rest on the skin and that therefore the science on the safety/danger of this technology does not really exist yet.
For me, I think I will opt-out of the scanner and do the dance as the TSA agent grabs my pants. It irks me mightily that in making such a decision I have to wonder if this will put me forever on some DHS data base of "domestic extremists" :x
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Regarding the last point first, I know that you don't want a dystopian surveillance state. My point is that the interface of the accelerating march of technology in this area and your conceptual framework is, in fact, headed that way.
**By following the 4th amendment case law as it's been decided until now?
Having the scanners upgrade from programs that show nude pictures to ones that simply report anomalies and their locations will meet the objections of many people.
**Well, according to the TSA, that's what they are doing.
Regarding safety, I sent you earlier a letter from scientists in a format that I can't post here the gist of which is that the apparently low radiation numbers are misleading because they are unlike the numbers to which they are being compared; the other numbers are for radiation which goes through the body, whereas here they all come to rest on the skin and that therefore the science on the safety/danger of this technology does not really exist yet.
For me, I think I will opt-out of the scanner and do the dance as the TSA agent grabs my pants. It irks me mightily that in making such a decision I have to wonder if this will put me forever on some DHS data base of "domestic extremists" angry
**You'll note that several time here I have posted that the next time I'm forced to fly, I will choose to be pat searched rather than x-rayed, as until we don't have long term data on their safety, I'm just going to assume they are not unless proven otherwise. As long as you don't do something that generates paperwork, you won't be flagged by TSOC. Choosing to be pat searched does not meet that criteria.**
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a) As we have discussed in the privacy thread, IMHO the correct Constitutional analysis does not limit itself to the 4th; it includes the 9th, which IMO most certainly includes a right to privacy. Your analytical model allows for everyone to be tracked and recorded everywhere they go whenever they step outside their door.
b) In the VP of Rapiscan interview, the Veep said that they WILL be coming out with this program, not that they have already done so.
c) I certainly hope you are right, but in my travels I have had to deal with some serious TSA cases of cranial rectal interface.
Anyway, here's this from Stratfor a few years ago:
The Case for Screening Air Passengers Rather than Belongings
August 18, 2006 | 2319 GMT
PRINT Text Resize:
ShareThisIrish airline Ryanair issued an ultimatum to the British government Aug. 18 to restore normal airport security measures within a week or risk being sued by the company for compensation. Ryanair said it faces more than $3.7 million in losses from disrupted flight schedules in the aftermath of the plot to destroy aircraft in flight using liquid explosives. In announcing the foiled plot Aug. 10, the British government immediately banned passengers from bringing carry-on luggage and liquids of all kinds aboard planes originating in the United Kingdom.
Liquid explosives do pose a serious threat to airliners in flight, although a review of previous plots against planes indicates these types of explosives are not the only thing security services need to be concerned about. Moreover, militants can be expected to adapt to evolving airline security measures.
The British case is reminiscent of Operation Bojinka, a plot to use a modular explosive device made of a doll stuffed with nitrocellulose and augmented by a bottle of liquid explosive. North Korean agents used liquid explosive PLX, disguised as a fifth of liquor, to destroy KAL Flight 858 in 1987. A number of other powerful, commercially manufactured liquid explosives also could be used to attack an airliner, such as nitroglycerine and Astrolite. Improvised versions of these explosives also can be manufactured.
Creative bombmakers have hidden explosives in a number of imaginative ways, perhaps most notably the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), which did some outside-the-box thinking when it melted the explosives TNT and Composition B and cast them into a variety of shapes, including a tea set. PFLP-GC also hid Semtex and other plastic explosives in a variety of items, including running shoes and electronics.
In fact, electronics also have been a popular choice for bombmakers looking to smuggle an improvised explosive device (IED) aboard planes. Perhaps the most famous case is the Libyan-constructed device concealed inside a Toshiba radio cassette player that was used to bring down Pan Am Flight 103. Similar devices hidden in another model of Toshiba cassette player were found in a raid on a PFLP-GC safe house in Germany a few months before the Pan Am 103 bombing.
In the 1987 KAL case, the firing train and a small charge of C-4 hidden inside the radio were used to initiate the PLX. In a London case in 1986, Nezar Hindawi, a Jordanian who later acknowledged working for Syrian intelligence, gave his unwitting and pregnant Irish girlfriend an IED concealed in bag to take on an El Al flight from London to Tel Aviv. The timer and detonator for the device were concealed in a pocket calculator. El Al security detected the device before it could be taken aboard the plane, and Hindawi was quickly arrested. In 1996, Israelis used an IED concealed in a cell phone to assassinate Yahya Ayyash, aka “The Engineer,” an infamous Hamas bombmaker.
These are only past IED incidents involving airplanes, though it is important to point out that, as security measures change, terrorist tactics also will adapt, much as narcotics “mules” have adapted to efforts to prevent them from bringing narcotics aboard planes by using everything from body cavities to dead babies.
In addition to Richard Reid’s infamous shoe bomb, there are many other ways in which explosives could be “worn” onto a plane. In the bombing of Philippine Airlines Flight 434, Abdel Basit and his associates used nitrocellulose camouflaged inside a doll, though nitrocellulose also could be easily hidden in any number of clothing items that have fiber filling, such as mittens and winter coats. Additionally, the design of the ubiquitous suicide vests and belts could allow explosives to be walked through a magnetometer if all the metal components were removed. In August 2004, Israeli authorities found explosive underwear on a young Palestinian attempting to enter Israel at the Erez border crossing. Because of the Reid plot, all passengers must remove their shoes. Had the Palestinian been attempting to board a plane, there is no telling how the incident would now affect passengers at airline security checkpoints.
It is virtually impossible to use technical screening measures to absolutely prevent explosive material from being brought on board an aircraft. Prison authorities using magnetometers and strip searches have failed to completely prevent all contraband from slipping through. The need for a greater reliance on other methods — such as name checks, interviews and behavioral profiling — to keep airplanes safe seems apparent.
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a) As we have discussed in the privacy thread, IMHO the correct Constitutional analysis does not limit itself to the 4th; it includes the 9th, which IMO most certainly includes a right to privacy. Your analytical model allows for everyone to be tracked and recorded everywhere they go whenever they step outside their door.
**Please show me the caselaw related to law enforcement search and seizure that cites the 9th. I have not seen it. My model assumes that local government decides if cameras are posted and how they are use, if they are. Community values and local control and all that good stuff.
b) In the VP of Rapiscan interview, the Veep said that they WILL be coming out with this program, not that they have already done so.
According to TSA, all the TSA officer in the remote room viewing the RapiScan backscatter images sees is the "ghost" outline with any potential threat images. http://www.tsa.gov/approach/tech/ait/how_it_works.shtm
c) I certainly hope you are right, but in my travels I have had to deal with some serious TSA cases of cranial rectal interface.
**Unless a TSA supervisor shows up to do paperwork, you can probably assume that there is not a TSOC report being made.
"It is virtually impossible to use technical screening measures to absolutely prevent explosive material from being brought on board an aircraft. Prison authorities using magnetometers and strip searches have failed to completely prevent all contraband from slipping through. The need for a greater reliance on other methods — such as name checks, interviews and behavioral profiling — to keep airplanes safe seems apparent."
**We already do name checks. If someone seems enough of a threat, then they can be placed on a no fly list. Again, in the US system, you cannot compel someone to speak to you. TSA has Behavioral Detection Officers already in many airports. Just how big of a domestic intelligence agency do you want? Do you wish to negate the civil liberty/privacy protections in place that regulate law enforcement intelligence databases in the US?
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"How was business travel on 9/12/2001?" - 100% true, but my point is that we do not succeed if we inflict the same economic damage on ourselves that they were trying to do.
"Do not assume that there aren't grandmotherly jihadists" - That is the same level of intelligence as finding a terrorist from a photo. Some grandmas will never be terrorists and I know several. We are already incorporating some intelligence information. It needs to do better and same goes for borders, sanctuaries, released terrorists, any case law regarding fairness or anti-discrimination that hampers intelligent security, and a census that finds every person then shares no useful information to law enforcement, ICE, IRS or the intelligence agencies. If we are going to radiate ourselves and photograph and touch our mothers and daughters genetilia, then this is war and wartime rules and strategies should apply IMHO. In other words, if we are going to harass 100% of the innocent, we need to throw the full force of our four trillion dollar federal government plus state and local at the known guilty. For one example, how many hijackers had expired visas? How many expired visas are out there today? 24 recent al qaida related arrests in the twin cities alone - I assume they did not get all of them - and these people were traveling freely back to join wars in their homeland or plot things here, going through the same treatment as grandma and the Obama daughters if their dad did not have a taxpayer plane.
Regarding alternatives, Crafty already said it well but the business schedule alternative to flying is not going. I am currently not flying but my business lacks any energy or benefit it could attain from a seminar or conference in Vancouver, Chicago or Slovenia.
Pulling a partial sentence out I found a point maybe intended facetious but that I think I agree with: "we are but minutes away from rectally implanted GPS beacons and laser-etched bar codes on our foreheads". How much worse is that than the status quo?
"Just how big of a domestic intelligence agency do you want? Do you wish to negate the civil liberty/privacy protections in place that regulate law enforcement intelligence databases in the US?"
Can't speak for others but a 'voluntary' check fora frequent flier isn't any further out of bounds than authorizing a background check for employment (IMO) as you would have at the airline or the TSA. How do YOU know that the guy watching the scanner isn't the jihadist if every grandma could be one?
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"How was business travel on 9/12/2001?" - 100% true, but my point is that we do not succeed if we inflict the same economic damage on ourselves that they were trying to do.
**That is why the TSA attempts to balance the need to travel with the need to arrive alive at your destination.**
"Do not assume that there aren't grandmotherly jihadists" - That is the same level of intelligence as finding a terrorist from a photo. Some grandmas will never be terrorists and I know several. We are already incorporating some intelligence information. It needs to do better and same goes for borders, sanctuaries, released terrorists, any case law regarding fairness or anti-discrimination that hampers intelligent security, and a census that finds every person then shares no useful information to law enforcement, ICE, IRS or the intelligence agencies. If we are going to radiate ourselves and photograph and touch our mothers and daughters genetilia, then this is war and wartime rules and strategies should apply IMHO. In other words, if we are going to harass 100% of the innocent, we need to throw the full force of our four trillion dollar federal government plus state and local at the known guilty. For one example, how many hijackers had expired visas? How many expired visas are out there today? 24 recent al qaida related arrests in the twin cities alone - I assume they did not get all of them - and these people were traveling freely back to join wars in their homeland or plot things here, going through the same treatment as grandma and the Obama daughters if their dad did not have a taxpayer plane.
**As of 2005, there are about 799,659 local level law enforcement officers. 101,752 for State level and 154,298 Federal. This covering a nation of 310,779,000 isn't much at all. The vast majority of the state and local level officers are uniformed, doing basic patrol level services. What if the gave a dystopian police state and no police came? Look at our current budget crises at all levels of gov't. You are seeing less cops being hired, if any and you are seeing specialized units being gutted to put bodies into uniforms to catch calls for service. You'll also note that in most cases, local/state level cops are forbidden from enforcing immigration laws.
Because of due process/equal protection concerns, even putting your local level, semi-literate gang-banger into your local gang database is time consuming and creates potential liability for the officer and their agency if all the I's are not dotted and T's crossed.See below for an example. For US LEOs, recognizing a gang or STG for inclusion in an intel database generally requires a "reasonable suspicion" standard.**
Reasonable suspicion is a legal standard standard of proof in United States law that is less than probable cause, the legal standard for arrests and warrants, but more than an "inchoate and unparticularized suspicion or 'hunch' ";[1] it must be based on "specific and articulable facts", "taken together with rational inferences from those facts".
____________________________________________________________
http://www.dc.state.fl.us/pub/gangs/faq.html
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did the Florida Legislature address the criminal street gang issue?
* To maintain public order and safety.
* To respond to the ever increasing crime caused by street gangs that threatens and terrorizes peaceful citizens.
* To stop this mounting criminal activity.
* To provide for increased penalties for those found guilty of criminal gang involvement and eliminate the patterns, profits, and property helping criminal street gang activity, including street gang recruitment.
What is a criminal gang?
A formal or informal ongoing organization, association, or group that has as one of its primary activities the commission of criminal or delinquent acts, and that consists of three or more persons who have a common name or common identifying signs, colors, or symbols, including, but not limited to, terrorist organizations and hate groups.
Who is a criminal gang associate?
"Criminal gang associate" means a person who:
1. Admits to criminal gang association; or
2. Meets any single defining criterion for criminal gang membership described in subsection (3).
"Criminal gang member" is a person who meets two or more of the following criteria:
1. Admits to criminal gang membership.
2. Is identified as a criminal gang member by a parent or guardian.
3. Is identified as a criminal gang member by a documented reliable informant.
4. Adopts the style of dress of a criminal gang.
5. Adopts the use of a hand sign identified as used by a criminal gang.
6. Has a tattoo identified as used by a criminal gang.
7. Associates with one or more known criminal gang members.
8. Is identified as a criminal gang member by an informant of previously untested reliability and such identification is corroborated by independent information.
9. Is identified as a criminal gang member by physical evidence.
10. Has been observed in the company of one or more known criminal gang members four or more times. Observation in a custodial setting requires a willful association. It is the intent of the Legislature to allow this criterion to be used to identify gang members who recruit and organize in jails, prisons, and other detention settings.
11. Has authored any communication indicating responsibility for the commission of any crime by the criminal gang.
When we talk about the gang and security threat group subculture, what are the main gang categories or influences?
The world of gangs and threat groups can become very complex. Knowing this, it helps to divide these groups into some basic categories that will form a firm foundation to learning and understanding. Most gangs or STGs you will encounter will fall into one of these basic categories:
* Street Gangs
* Prison Gangs
* White Supremacy Groups
* Motorcycle/Biker Gangs
* Subversive Groups
* Cult Groups
Why is there a Security Threat Group Management program in the Department of Corrections?
To ensure the safe, secure, and orderly operations for staff, visitors, and inmate/offenders throughout the department by identifying, validating, and certifying STGs and their members and monitoring STG activities.
What is a Security Threat Group (STG)?
Formal or informal ongoing groups, gangs, organization or associations consisting of three or more members who have a common name or common identifying signs, colors, or symbols. A group whose members/associates engage in a pattern of gang activity or department rule violation.
Why do we call them STGs?
To eliminate any recognition these criminals may draw from publicity about their gang or its activities. Also, STG accurately describes how these groups can impact the security of institutional operations.
How does the STG member certification process work?
The STG validation process involves, but is not limited to:
* Identifying individual gang members, not gangs themselves;
* Observing behavior;
* Locating graffiti;
* Observing scars, marks and tattoos;
* Noticing certain clothing arrangements; and
* Gathering information from reliable sources.
Information collected is then assigned a point value through a validation work sheet. When a suspect reaches a certain point value, he/she is certified as either a suspect member or confirmed member based on their accumulated point value.
Can I get information about a specific inmate's gang involvement?
No. Although we are committed to sharing information related to gangs that are active within our state, specific intelligence related to a particular inmate's involvement is confidential and for law enforcement use only. Criminal justice agencies, please contact us for more information.
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http://www.azcorrections.gov/adc/STG/Jeff_STG.aspx
Security Threat Group Unit
This section contains some mature content
* Frequently Used Terminology
* STG Earmarks
* Membership Validation Criteria
* Security Threat Groups
* Associated Sites
* FAQs
* Contact
The Security Threat Group Unit collects information and intelligence on prison gang members and validates inmates as being members of prison gangs.
What is a Security Threat Group?
Any organization, club, association or group of individuals, either formal or informal (including traditional prison gangs), that may have a common name or identifying symbol, and whose members engage in activities that include, but are not limited to planning, organizing, threatening, financing, soliciting, committing or attempting to commit unlawful acts that would violate the Department's written instructions, which detract from the safe and orderly operations of prisons.
Frequently Used Terminology
"AIMS": Adult Information Management System
"GRITS": Gang Related Inmate Tracking System
"S": Suspect- Have at least 2 points of validation criteria evidence
"V": Validated - Validated member with 10 or more points
"D": Debriefed
"STG Unit": Investigations staff
"SSU": Special Services Unit. Uniformed staff on unit level that monitor STG activity
"SSU Lt": Complex Lt. Coordinating SSU's collection of STG validation evidence on STG members
Return to top
STG Earmarks
* Bylaws or a Constitution: Usually will include a "Blood In/Blood Out" rule
* Tattoos, logos, symbolism: Members will display STG specific tattoo.
* Drawings (art work, graffiti) of STG specific symbols will be found
* Rank Structure; Council system, La Mesa (The Table), Military type rank system, One Man Leadership, etc
* Membership Rosters
* Leaders, members, probates, associates, wannabes, dropouts, debreifers (defectors), & enemies
* May develop a "hit list"
* Will usually establish "missions" for members and/or probationary members to follow inside/outside of prison
Return to top
Membership Validation Criteria
* Self admission = 5 pts
* Tattoos = 7 pts
* Symbolism = 2 pts
* Documents = 5 pts
* Publications = 1 pt
* Authorship = 7 pts
* Court Records = 9 pts
* Group Photos = 2 pts
* Association = 2 pts
* Contacts = 2 pts
* C/I/ Information = 2 pts
* Membership = 9 pts
* Other Agencies = 8 pts
* Media = 5 pts
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Security Threat Groups
STGs Certified STGs Monitored
* Arizona Aryan Brotherhood
* Border Brothers
* "New" Mexican Mafia
* "Old" Mexican Mafia
* Grandel
* Mau Mau
* Warrior Society
* Surenos
* Dine' Pride
* African American Council
* La Raza
* Nazi Low Riders
* Skinheads
* Westside City
STG Artwork and Tattoos
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Associated Sites
You may find these sites on the web helpful in furthering your understanding of gangs and security threat groups:
National Major Gang Task Force page. National Level Gang Investigators Association. Listing of State leadership. An excellent contact source
* Arizona Gang Investigators Association
http://www.arizonagia.com
* Rocky Mountain Information Network
http://rmin.rissinfo.com/
* California Gang Investigators Association page
http://www.cgiaonline.org
* Anti-Defamation League. Good Hate Group site
http://www.adl.org
* Midwest Gang Investigators Association page. Midwestern STG and Street Gang information
http://www.mgia.org
* Florida Gang Investigators Association page. Good source for East Coast Gang information page
http://www.fgia.com
* Texas Gang Investigators Association page. Good information on Southwest STG's and Street gangs in Texas area
http://www.tgia.net
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Contact ADC's STG Unit
You may contact the Arizona Department of Corrections STG Unit at:
Arizona Department of Corrections
Security Threat Group Unit
Mail Code 930
1831 W. Jefferson
Phoenix, Arizona 85007
Tel. (602) 771-2100 ext. 324
email:azprisongangs@hotmail.com
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Pulling a partial sentence out I found a point maybe intended facetious but that I think I agree with: "we are but minutes away from rectally implanted GPS beacons and laser-etched bar codes on our foreheads". How much worse is that than the status quo?
**Uh, much worse. Despite the hysteria expressed by some, there are still very concrete constitutional protections and limitations on law enforcement in the US, and if you'll look at the powers granted to law enforcement of other nations, especially related to terrorism you'll see that the US is far from becoming like the UK or France, much less Russia or China.**
"Just how big of a domestic intelligence agency do you want? Do you wish to negate the civil liberty/privacy protections in place that regulate law enforcement intelligence databases in the US?"
Can't speak for others but a 'voluntary' check fora frequent flier isn't any further out of bounds than authorizing a background check for employment (IMO) as you would have at the airline or the TSA. How do YOU know that the guy watching the scanner isn't the jihadist if every grandma could be one?
**Well, the vetting for TSA employment involves extensive background checks.**
https://hraccess-assessment.tsa.dhs.gov/TSOFAQs/BackgroundRequirements.pdf
The mission of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is to protect the United States
transportation systems. To ensure the accomplishment of this mission, TSA requires each and every
employee to be reliable and trustworthy. To meet these standards, all TSOs must pass a very stringent
background review process.
First, to become a TSO, you must be a U.S. citizen or a U.S. National.1 If you are not a U.S.
citizen or a U.S. National, you are not eligible for employment with TSA. Next, as a part of the
application process, you will be required to pass an Enter-On-Duty (EOD) Suitability Determination,
which is based on criminal history records checks (including FBI fingerprint submissions) and local law
enforcement agency information. By law, TSA is prohibited from employing persons with certain
convictions, which are identified below. In addition, the EOD Suitability Determination will include an
evaluation of your credit report to determine if you have disqualifying financial delinquencies. Lastly, the
EOD Suitability Determination involves a review of information provided by you in a Declaration for
Federal Employment (OF306) form, which you will be required to complete later in the application
process if you are called for an interview.
A final suitability determination will be made after you enter-on-duty and have undergone a
background investigation conducted by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. You will be required
to complete a Standard Form 86, Questionnaire for National Security Positions (SF86) to initiate the
background investigation.
TSA is very serious about the reliability and trustworthiness of individuals hired into the
Agency. Below is a list
**Here is the SF-86 mentioned above.**
http://www.opm.gov/forms/pdf_fill/SF86.pdf
"How do YOU know that the guy watching the scanner isn't the jihadist if every grandma could be one?"
**You'll note that the TSA has the TSA officer monitoring the images from the RapiScan 1000 in another room, with the facial images blurred by the software. Maybe they though this through and looked to make it harder for a compromised officer to wave a IED through screening.**
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(http://media.oregonlive.com/portland_impact/photo/9079708-small.jpg)
http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2010/11/fbi_thwarts_terrorist_bombing.html
The FBI thwarted an attempted terrorist bombing in Portland's Pioneer Courthouse Square before the city's annual tree-lighting Friday night, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Oregon.
A Corvallis man, thinking he was going to ignite a bomb, drove a van to the corner of the square at Southwest Yamhill Street and Sixth Avenue and attempted to detonate it.
However, the supposed explosive was a dummy that FBI operatives supplied to him, according to an affidavit in support of a criminal complaint signed Friday night by U.S. Magistrate Judge John V. Acosta.
Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, a Somali-born U.S. citizen, was arrested at 5:42 p.m., 18 minutes before the tree lighting was to occur, on an accusation of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. The felony charge carries a maximum sentence of life in prison and a $250,000 fine.
The arrest was the culmination of a long-term undercover operation, during which Mohamud had been monitored for months as his alleged bomb plot developed.
"The device was in fact inert, and the public was never in danger," according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney's Office.
The investigation involved the FBI, Oregon State Police, Portland Police Bureau, Corvallis Police Department and Lincoln County Sheriff's Office.
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"A Corvallis man... Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, a Somali-born U.S. citizen"
a) male, and
b) 19 yrs old, and
c) Somali born, and
d) interested in explosives - "classmates recalled he once gave a presentation on how to make an explosive device" - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40389899/ns/us_news-security/, and
e) interested in Jihad: "Mohamud said he had been interested in jihad since an early teen even writing for a jihadist website", "friends say Mohamud... would joke about being a terrorist. they thought nothing of that until now.
Nice job by the FBI with timely work! Whatever profiling or infiltrating they were doing to find this guy - I likely approve. I note that they did not give up their methods in the news story.
In other news, no examples of:
a) female, and
b) Jewish or Lutheran, and
c) active in her faith, and
d) over 50,
e) with 7 or more grandchildren... (or draw your own profile criteria here)
ever bowing up an airliner full of innocent men, women and children.
Note the logic string connector 'and'. No one said looks Muslim or looks white, or person of certain age, gender or ethnicity alone.
--------
Regarding TSA vetting, I only meant that if vetting is possible it could be applied to our extremely frequent fliers on a voluntary basis as well and free up more resources for the unrecognized fliers, like me.
TSA vetting isn't foolproof either: http://www.wsbtv.com/news/25911785/detail.html
TSA security worker accused of abducting and sexually assaulting a woman had previously been convicted of misdemeanor harassment and stalking. (Atlanta 11/24/2010)... King (previously) was charged with nine offenses of harassment and stalking by communication in January 2001. A court clerk told Regan that King pleaded guilty and spent three months in jail for skipping a court appearance.
TSA has a long list of “disqualifying offenses” for employment at the federal agency that operates airport security. Those offenses include felonies, violent crimes, theft, and crimes involving security and transportation. Regan checked the list and found that it did not include misdemeanor offenses of harassing and stalking.
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(http://a.abcnews.com/images/International/abc_jihad_jane_02_100309_mn.jpg)
**Colleen LaRose is 47 years old.**
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/jihad-jane-husband-speaks-terror-suspect/story?id=10080443
The former husband of "Jihad Jane," the Pennsylvania woman whom authorities accused of helping terrorists and plotting to kill a Swedish cartoonist, said she used to be a Bible-carrying churchgoer and "a good person."
"I don't know what happened over the years," Rudy Cavazos said in an exclusive interview with ABC News.
Colleen LaRose was indicted Tuesday on charges she tried to help recruit Islamic fighters and plotted to kill a Swedish cartoonist who made fun of the Muslim prophet Mohammed. But the woman who faces these allegations bears no resemblance to the one to whom he was married for a decade, Cavazos said.
Indeed, he said, LaRose used to carry a Bible and attended church regularly.
"We used to go to church on Sundays and pray … just like everybody else," he said.
"She was a good person. … I don't know what happened over the years."
Federal authorities said they have an idea.
LaRose, 46, of Montgomery, Pa., conspired to provide material support to terrorists and to kill in a foreign country, court papers allege. LaRose reached out through the Internet to jihadist groups, saying she was "desperate to do something to help" suffering Muslim people, and that she desired to become a martyr, according to the papers.
Her indictment shocked people across the nation and in her community.
Neighbors describe LaRose as an average "housewife." To federal authorities, though, the woman is better known as Fatima Rose or Jihad Jane, the latter a moniker she apparently coined herself.
**Snip**
By 2008, FBI agents said, LaRose was working with radicals on the Internet to recruit candidates for suicide missions. She and others plotted to kill Lars Vilks, a Swedish cartoonist who depicted Mohammed as a dog in 2007, authorities allege.
Vilks' actions offended many Muslims, earning him death threats and setting off protests around the world.
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Public Law 107-71
107th Congress
``Aviation and Transportation Security Act''
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-107publ71/html/PLAW-107publ71.htm
`(A) Qualifications.-- <<NOTE: Deadline.>> Within
30 days after the date of enactment of the Aviation and
Transportation Security Act, the Under Secretary shall
establish qualification standards for individuals to be
hired by the United States as security screening
personnel. Notwithstanding any
[[Page 115 STAT. 617]]
provision of law, those standards shall require, at a
min-
imum, an individual--
``(i) to have a satisfactory or better score
on a Federal security screening personnel
selection examination;
``(ii) to be a citizen of the United States;
``(iii) to meet, at a minimum, the
requirements set forth in subsection (f);
``(iv) to meet such other qualifications as
the Under Secretary may establish; and
``(v) to have the ability to demonstrate daily
a fitness for duty without any impairment due to
illegal drugs, sleep deprivation, medication, or
alcohol.
``(B) Background checks.--The Under Secretary shall
require that an individual to be hired as a security
screener undergo an employment investigation (including
a criminal history record check) under section
44936(a)(1).
``(C) Disqualification of individuals who present
national security risks.--The Under Secretary, in
consultation with the heads of other appropriate Federal
agencies, shall establish procedures, in addition to any
background check conducted under section 44936, to
ensure that no individual who presents a threat to
national security is employed as a security screener.
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DEFINITION clean-skin ter•ror•ist n. A potential attacker with a spotless record whose documents don't arouse suspicion
CONTEXT U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told a British newspaper that the U.S. fears its next major terrorist attack could be carried out by "clean-skin terrorists" in Europe who feel they are treated as second-class citizens. He warned that the visa-waiver program, which allows citizens from some European countries to enter the U.S. without a visa, could be an open door for the terrorists.
USAGE The term clean-skin, once used to describe drug traffickers without a record, morphed in the late 1990s to characterize potential terrorists who weren't on any watch lists. But several have already proved their deadly capabilities: the British government classified the four July 2005 London train bombers as clean-skins. Richard Reid, the would-be shoe bomber, was a clean-skin as well.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1609777,00.html#ixzz16bf9R8eJ
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GM, I assume you (re)posted that (Jihad Jane) to bolster my point. :-)
Close but does not fit the sample criteria I laid out, I think she hit one of my 6 criteria - she is female. I assume Jihad Jane ("a moniker she apparently coined herself") was not an extremely frequent flyer and would not have submitted to or passed a voluntary frequent flyer background check that I suggested. If 'Jihad Jane' was so clean that she would pass all our tests (and I don't think she would) then she could also be the attendant at the search or scanner when 'Jihad Joe' goes through with the liquids, the whole purpose of the gropedown is negated.
Once again, for the 4th or 5th time, I did not say judge them by their appearance.
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You want to fight the last war, or do you want to anticipate future threats, Doug?
It's a matter of numbers. The more people you feed into a system, the greater the opportunity for the terrorist infiltrator to gain access. Jihad Jane was focused on killing a Mohammed cartoonist, but there is nothing to say that she might not have decided to become a martyr by IED on an aircraft, had the FBI not intervened.
AQ and other terror groups are constantly learning and adapting to law enforcement's investigative and protective measures. If Jihad Jane were not so obvious in her internet postings, she might have well avoided detection until it's too late.
In the US, we don't track people religious activities. There is no central database to verify someone's Jewish or Lutheran status and degree of activity within the religion.
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http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/Headley-posed-as-Jew-for-Nariman-House-recce/articleshow/5293911.cms
'Headley posed as Jew for Nariman House recce'
MUMBAI: Laskhar-e-Taiba (LeT) operative David Headley, posing as a Jew, had visited Nariman House in the first half of last year. The statements of some of the witnesses who had either seen or accompanied Headley to Nariman House, also known as Chabad House, have been recorded by the investigating agencies. A rabbi and his wife were among the six killed in the 26/11 terror attack at Nariman House last year.
The attack by LeT terrorists in the five-storeyed house, which can be approached only through narrow lanes and by-lanes of Colaba, had led the security agencies to deduce that a proper recce had been conducted before the srike.
One of the witnesses told the investigators that Headley went inside the house and interacted with the residents for a long time. Another witness recalled that Headley had taken a round with him around the area to ascertain the entry and exit points of the Nariman House, sources said.
Headley, who was arrested by the FBI at the airport in Chicago in October for allegedly plotting to carry out terror strikes in India and Denmark, had told his investigators that he had learnt praying like Jews at the instance of a former Major General Sajid Mir of Pakistan army, who was now emerging as one of the masterminds behind 26/11. Mir wanted Headley to learn praying like Jews so that he could conduct a recce of Nariman House, sources said, adding that he has been arrested in Pakistan. However, this could not be independently verified.
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(http://www.channel4.com/news/media/images/Channel4/news/articles/headley_final_k.jpg)
http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/world/asia_pacific/david+headley+stranger+than+fiction/3511057.html
David Coleman Headley, aka Daood Syed Gilani, has a half-brother in Pakistan who is the Pakistan prime minister's press secretary. Danyel Gilani said that he last saw his half-brother in Pakistan a few days after their father, Syed Saleem Gilani, died, in December 2008. That was just one month after the Mumbai attacks. Headley is apparently not related to the Pakistan Prime Minister himself, Yousaf Raza Gilani.
**Snip**
Indian and Israeli intelligence claim that while conducting surveillance in India for the jihadi group Lashkar-e-Toiba, David Headley posed as a Jew, even entering Mumbai's Jewish centre, passing himself off as a potential donor. The FBI says that after his arrest, a book entitled "How to Pray Like a Jew" was found at his home in Chicago.
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Fast Facts:
• Born Daood Gilani in Washington, D.C., in 1960 to a Pakistani father and an American mother. Lives with his wife and children in Chicago.
• After his parents' divorce, returned to Pakistan with his father and was raised in a traditional Muslim household until moving to Philadelphia at age 17 to live with his mother.
• Attended the Community College of Philadelphia, but left school before receiving a degree.
• Worked in a bar and a series of video stores after leaving school.
• Convicted on heroin-smuggling charges in 1998; served 15 months in prison. Headley later worked for the Drug Enforcement Administration, in part to avoid a lengthier jail sentence.
• Allegedly received training from Kashmiri separatist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) from February 2002 to December 2003. The group, which aims to drive Indian forces out of the disputed territory of Kashmir, is considered a foreign terrorist operation by the U.S. government.
• Changed his name to David Headley (Headley being his mother's maiden name) in 2005. Authorities say the change was made to ease travel and make him seem more American while working for LeT.
• Since his alleged training with LeT, has traveled frequently between Pakistan, India, the Middle East and the U.S.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1946462,00.html#ixzz16c23k4k3
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(http://www.jamestown.org/index.php?eID=tx_cms_showpic&file=uploads%2Fpics%2FGanczarski_01.jpg&width=500m&height=500&bodyTag=%3Cbody%20bgColor%3D%22%23ffffff%22%3E&wrap=%3Ca%20href%3D%22javascript%3Aclose%28%29%3B%22%3E%20%7C%20%3C%2Fa%3E&md5=24a78b5754ad2733f52dfc5b23fb8e57)
Christian Ganczarski, a 36-year-old German citizen of Polish descent
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,1564,891855,00.html
German police questioned Ganczarski last year about the Djerba attack after it was established he had telephoned with one of the suicide bombers shortly before the attack. He was detained but then later released when no direct involvement in the incident could be found. Shortly thereafter he moved to Saudi Arabia.
Although during his time in training camps in Afghanistan he was known as “Ibrahim the German,” Ganczarski is of Polish descent. Born in southern Poland in 1966, he later moved to Germany with his parents and became a naturalized citizen. He and his wife are converts to Islam. Trained as a locksmith, he eventually became know as a “computer expert” in extremist circles.
Germany has been a focal point for investigations into al Qaeda terrorist activity ever since it was discovered that several of the key figures in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States had lived in Hamburg for years.
Ganczarski is suspected of having contact with the Moroccan Mounir El Motassadeq, a Hamburg resident who has been sentenced to 15 years in jail for supporting some of those involved in the attacks on New York and Washington.
Ganczarski also reportedly knows another Moroccan extremist named Karim Mehdi, who was detained at Charles de Gaulle on June 1. Mehdi, who has lived in Germany for years, was allegedly plotting attacks on the island of La Reunion in the Indian Ocean and against U.S. military bases in Germany. French authorities say he has alleged that Ganczarski also had a role in the planning of the attacks, though they never happened.
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(http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-39511-7.html)
http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-39511-6.html
Christian Ganczarski, seen here in a December 2001 file photo, has denied any connection with the Djerba plot.
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http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,605911,00.html
02/06/2009
18 Years for Al-Qaida Member
Paris Court Finds German Guilty of Tunisian Attack
A French court on Thursday found a German man guilty of plotting a deadly 2002 Tunisian terror attack where a gas-laden truck smashed into a synagogue, killing 21 people. Christian Ganczarski was sentenced to 18 years -- but his lawyer pledged to appeal the "unacceptable" verdict.
A French court on Thursday ruled that a German al-Qaida member had played a central role in the deadly 2002 suicide bombing of a Tunisian synagogue which killed 21 people. Christian Ganczarski, a 42-year-old Islamic convert who had visited Afghan and Pakistani militant camps and had met Osama bin Laden, was found guilty of being complicit in the murders and of membership of a terrorist group. He was given an 18-year sentence.
The attack, which was claimed by al-Qaida, targeted the historic Ghriba synagogue on the Tunisian island of Djerba, a magnet for tourists. Suicide bomber Nizar Naouar slammed into the building in a fuel tanker laden with explosives. In total, 14 German tourists, five Tunisians and two French nationals were killed and many more people were injured. The trial started in January.
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(http://i.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01009/nicky-reilly-460_1009572c.jpg)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3201462/Muslim-convert-admits-attempted-suicide-terror-attack.html
Nicky Reilly, 22, who uses the Muslim name Mohamed Abdulaziz Rashid Saeed-Alim, pleaded guilty to launching the failed attack on a busy family restaurant at the Princesshay shopping centre in Exeter in May this year
Reilly researched how to make a bomb, acquired the components and made three devices using caustic soda, paraffin and aluminium foil, along with nails, which he had put in glass soft drink bottles.
But when he attempted to assemble one of the soft drink bottle bombs in the lavatory cubicle of the restaurant it exploded in his hands.
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http://www.jihadwatch.org/2008/07/ibrahim-islams-appeal-and-captain-hook.html
In recent headlines, three American converts to Islam—Gregory Patterson, Levar Wasington, and Kevin James—were recently arrested and tried for intending to wage jihad against the U.S. They are by no means the first American converts to Islam to go terrorist.
There was Christopher Paul, who was tried for conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction; John Walker Lindh, who, as a “warrior of Islam,” was captured post 9/11 fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan; “Azzam the American” (formerly “Adam Gadahn”) who, after being graciously introduced by al-Qaeda leader Aymin Zawahiri on a video made some months ago proceeded to harangue and mock his fellow Americans—including JW’s own Robert Spencer—into abandoning Christianity and submitting to Allah; and Jose Padilla (aka “Abdullah al-Muhajir”).
Then, of course, there are the countless European converts. There’s the British “shoe-bomber,” Abdul Rahim (formerly “Richard Reid”) who attempted to achieve “martyrdom” by detonating explosives in his shoes while aboard a passenger aircraft; the late Abdullah Shaheed (formerly “Germaine Lindsay”) who did achieve “martyrdom” by killing himself and 56 of his fellow citizens, and injuring over 700, in the London bombings of 2005; and Abu Abdullah (original name unknown), the native Briton turned fiery Islamist preacher who, before finally being arrested, made no secret of his vitriolic hatred of the West (all, of course, while enjoying Western liberties, such as freedom of speech).
At any rate, what causes such men, born and raised in the West, often from Christian backgrounds, to abandon their heritage, embrace Islam, and conspire to kill the very people they grew up with?
As for Islam’s “intrinsic” appeal, it has long been argued that, unlike Christianity, which can be "heavy" on theology, Islam is relatively simple and straightforward. So while Christianity revolves around metaphysical concepts and topics, such as the Trinity, Christology, the nature of salvation, grace, free-will vs election, and the futility of the law, Islam, in black and white terms, commands its adherents to do this and not do that. In fact, the Arabic word “sharia,” that comprehensive body of laws Muslims must follow, means the “pathway”—as in, “the pathway to paradise.” (In pre-Islamic Arabic, of course, it specifically means pathway to water for camels.)
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(http://www.adl.org/NR/rdonlyres/esrtbszdwqyb7ddlrobam2osygrtcaoesbcpsdesfq2uqidw7lzuv7x66ul6qbp3u67y6id3lmwsao/njresalessaandalmonte1.jpg)
http://www.adl.org/main_Terrorism/new_jersey_al_shabaab.htm
New Jersey Residents Arrested for Attempting to Join Somali-Based Terrorist Group
Updated: September 20, 2010
Posted: June 7, 2010
Two Americans who allegedly planned to kill American soldiers overseas are the latest in a wave of Americans traveling to Somalia to fight with an Al Qaeda-linked terrorist group.
A criminal complaint unsealed in a New Jersey federal court on June 6, 2010, charged Mohamed Mahmood Alessa, 20, and Carlos Eduardo Almonte, 24, with conspiring to kill, maim, and kidnap persons outside the United States. The men, who planned to travel to Somalia to fight with Al Shabaab, an Al Qaeda-linked terrorist organization based in Somalia, each face a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted.
Alessa, an American citizen of Palestinian descent, and Almonte, a naturalized U.S. citizen from the Dominican Republic, were arrested at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport on June 5, 2010, as they attempted to board separate flights to Egypt. According to the affidavit filed in support of the criminal complaint, the men planned to travel from Egypt to Somalia to join Al Shabaab.
Federal authorities began investigating Alessa and Almonte, a convert to Islam who goes by the name Omar, in October 2006 after receiving a tip through the FBI's Web site about the men's online activities. "All they look for is all those terrorist videos about the Islam holly [sic] war and where they kill US soldiers," the tip read, "they keep saying that Americans are their enemies, that everybody other than Islamic followers are their enemies…and they all must be killed."
An undercover officer from the New York Police Department's intelligence unit subsequently recorded numerous meetings and conversations with the men. According to the affidavit, the recordings show Alessa and Almonte discussing ways to prepare themselves to "wage violent jihad" and to kill American troops who they thought would soon be deployed to Somalia to help fight Al Shabaab. "My soul cannot rest until I shed blood," Alessa said in November 2009 before threatening to "start doing killing here" if he and Almonte fail to join the terrorist group overseas.
Alessa and Almonte allegedly engaged in paramilitary training by shooting paintball guns and practicing other attack techniques, including hand-to-hand fighting tactics and shooting and crawling positions. Additionally, the men physically conditioned themselves by hiking in snow and mud and by lifting weights. The affidavit also alleged that Alessa and Almonte procured military gear and engaged in "simulated combat" using first-person-shooter computer software, which allows users to employ a variety of realistic weapons and simulate combat experiences from the perspective of a soldier.
The affidavit further outlined Alessa's and Almonte's extensive use of the Internet to view various documents and recordings that promoted "violent jihad," including documents authored by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda's second-in-command. The men also allegedly watched videos of Al Shabaab fighters in Somalia and other videos depicting attacks on uniformed personnel in Iraq.
Alessa and Almonte also watched video and audio recordings by Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born Muslim cleric living in Yemen who targets English-speaking Muslim audiences with radical online lectures that encourage attacks against the West and non-Muslims. In May 2010, for example, Alessa and Almonte watched a video interview in which al-Awlaki warned of future attacks against Americans both in the U.S. and abroad. "Oh America, if you attack us, we will attack you, and if you kill us, we will kill you… These American soldiers heading to Afghanistan and Iraq will be killed. We will kill them if we can, there in Fort Hood, or we will kill them in Afghanistan and Iraq."
Alessa and Almonte also listened to another al-Awlaki sermon entitled, "Constants on the Path of Jihad." In the lecture, which has been posted on several Web sites commonly used by Muslim extremists and is based on the writings of Yousef al-Ayyiri, the founder of Al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, al-Awlaki says, "Jihad will also carry on until the Day of Judgment since we are told to wipe out kufr [non-Muslims] from the world."
Al-Awlaki has been linked to several other accused terrorists who have carried out attacks against the U.S., including Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged gunman who killed 13 people at the Fort Hood Army base in Texas in November 2009. In the weeks following the shooting at Fort Hood, Alessa allegedly threatened to "do twice what he [Hasan] did."
According to the affidavit, Alessa and Almonte were also influenced by several other American-born Muslim ideologues who have encouraged attacks and provided ideological motivation for engaging in terrorist activities. In March 2010, the men viewed an Al Qaeda video in which Adam Yahiye Gadahn, an American Muslim convert from California who joined Al Qaeda in the late 1990s, encouraged followers to carry out attacks against high-value targets in America and the West to "further our global agenda and long-range strategic objectives." The men also watched videos featuring Omar Hammami, a Muslim convert from Alabama who has appeared in a number of online videos urging Americans men "to come and live the life of a mujahid [Muslim warrior]" in Somalia and join Al Shabaab.
In addition to their online activity, both Alessa and Almonte attended a number of events held by the Islamic Thinkers Society (ITS) and Revolution Muslim (RM), New York-based groups that justify terrorist attacks and other forms of violence in order to create a global Islamic state. At one of the protests, on May 23, 2010, against the Israeli Day Parade in New York, Alessa led a chant with the anti-Jewish slogan, "Khaibar, Khaibar ya Yahud, jaish Muhammad sawfa ya'ud," evoking the Quran's account of a battle between the Prophet Muhammad and the Jews of the town of Khaibar, which resulted in the subjugation of the Jews of Arabia.
Alessa also attended ITS and RM rallies in Washington, D.C. in March 2010, where he appeared in videos standing next to emerging RM leader Zachary Chesser, an online blogger who has distributed jihadist materials and promoted violence against non-Muslims through a variety of online platforms. Chesser has since been arrested and charged for attempting to join Al Shabaab in Somalia.
**Note that Zachary Chesser was a Jew prior to his "reversion" to the religion of pieces.**
In addition, Almonte posted a picture on his Facebook profile of himself at another anti-Israel rally in December 2008, attended by members of ITS and RM, where he is carrying a sign that reads, "Death to All (zionist) Juice."
Alessa and Almonte had previously traveled to Jordan and attempted to cross the border into Iraq to join terrorist groups, according to New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly. Almonte later told the undercover police officer that he and Alessa sought unsuccessfully to become "mujahideen," or Muslim warriors, when they traveled to Jordan in February 2007.
In September 2010, New Jersey resident Mohamed Osman, 19, pleaded guilty to lying to federal authorities investigating Alessa and Almonte. When questioned by federal authorities three months earlier, Osman denied knowing about Alessa and Almonte’s plans to travel to Somalia to fight against government and multinational peacekeeping forces.
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Reading the FBI affidavit describing Islamist terror suspect Mohamed Osman Mohamud's plan to bomb a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland's Pioneer Courthouse Square is a chilling experience. Mohamud, a Somali-born naturalized U.S. citizen who attended Oregon State University, told undercover FBI agents he dreamed of performing acts of jihad in which hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Americans would die. "Do you remember when 9/11 happened when those people were jumping from skyscrapers?" Mohamud asked the agents, according to the affidavit. "I thought that was awesome."
In months of preparation with men he thought were co-conspirators but were in fact undercover agents, Mohamud backed up his talk with action. After initially making email contact with Islamist radicals in Pakistan, he took part in constructing what he hoped would be an extraordinarily powerful bomb, scouted the best location for the attack, parked the van containing the bomb near the Christmas tree crowd, and, finally, dialed the cell phone number he believed would detonate the explosives. "I want whoever is attending that event to leave either dead or injured," Mohamud said of the 25,000 people expected to take part in the event.
That Mohamud was arrested and no one was hurt is a testament to good intelligence and law enforcement work. Having Mohamud behind bars has undoubtedly saved lives in Portland; had he not encountered the undercover FBI agents, he might have worked with actual terrorists to construct a bomb, or he might have simply gotten a gun and carried out "an operation here, you know, like something like Mumbai," as he told the agents.
What is ironic is that the operation that found and stopped Mohamud is precisely the kind of law enforcement work that Portland's leaders, working with the American Civil Liberties Union, rejected during the Bush years. In April 2005, the Portland city council voted 4 to 1 to withdraw Portland city police officers from participating in the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force. Mayor Tom Potter said the FBI refused to give him a top-secret security clearance so he could make sure the officers weren't violating state anti-discrimination laws that bar law enforcement from targeting suspects on the basis of their religious or political beliefs.
Other city leaders agreed. "Here in Portland, we are not willing to give up individual liberties in order to have a perception of safety," said city commissioner Randy Leonard. "It's important for cities to know how their police officers are being used."
Local officials were also angry about the FBI's mistaken arrest of Brandon Mayfield, a Portland lawyer and convert to Islam, for the 2004 train bombings in Madrid, Spain. But well before the Mayfield case, Portland had a history of rejecting Bush administration efforts to fight terrorism. "Portland's decision would not be the first time the city has taken a contrary stand in the war on terrorism," the Los Angeles Times reported in 2005. "In the months after Sept. 11, city leaders refused to cooperate with federal efforts to interview thousands of local Muslims. In 2003, the City Council criticized and called for radical changes in the USA Patriot Act, the much-debated federal anti-terrorism legislation."
In the Mohamud case, it appears that Portland's anti-law enforcement stand might actually have influenced Mohamud's decision to undertake an attack in the city. According to the FBI affidavit, the undercover agents asked whether he worried that law enforcement would stop him. "In Portland?" Mohamud replied. "Not really. They don't see it as a place where anything will happen. People say, you know, why, anybody want to do something in Portland, you know, it's on the west coast, it's in Oregon, and Oregon's, like you know, nobody ever thinks about it."
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/2010/11/politically-correct-portland-rejected-feds-who-saved-city-terrori?#ixzz16cPl2xCz
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I'm back from my journeys, and a bit worse for wear due to 'em, so bear with me as I make a scattershot response to some of the points raised since my absence.
Case law. I've read case law declaring blacks to be 3/5's of a human being. Don't really care what case law says about why a bunch of federal employees can grope or irradiate my kids towards ends that are likely more theatrical than practical. The Bill of Rights was written for a reason and creating various zones where it's clear goals are rendered meaningless would make the framers cringe.
Oregon kid arrested. More theater, IMO. Notice how every couple months we have a new sap, or set of saps, paraded in front of the media? Looks like the feds go trolling for yo yos who don't do a very good job of keeping their mouths shut, and 3 or 4 times a year give 'em a dummy bomb to not detonate that leads to an arrest and another passion play. Whatever happened to the Huatree militia anyway?
Fighting the last war. Is exactly what we are doing, frisking grandmas and kids while toner cartridges for known terrorist hotbeds are put on planes unexamined. The only reason we have not lost a plane of late is that our enemies have chosen not to try to do so. When they decide to do so, they will using a method that would not have been caught by irradiation or groping.
Hysteria. Why is that term so commonly applied to any benefit/cost analysis where freedoms lost are compared to supposed security gains? I mean airports are now the nanny state incarnate where freedoms, dignity, means of self defense, time, comfort, and so on are all surrendered to the state on the assumption nothing bad will happen, yet when it does those efforts are redoubled. It's hysterical to look at all the time, energy, and surrendered freedoms? Just how many terrorists has the TSA caught anyway?
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"Case law. I've read case law declaring blacks to be 3/5's of a human being."
**I haven't seen case law that said that. I have seen this: "Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."
Where did I see that? Article I. Section II of the constitution. Perhaps less time wrapping yourself in it and more time reading it would be helpful? The point of it being a way to keep slave states from being over-represented in the House, not as a comment on the humanity of slaves or indians.
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The last sentence there is a point worth noting.
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"Oregon kid arrested. More theater, IMO. Notice how every couple months we have a new sap, or set of saps, paraded in front of the media? Looks like the feds go trolling for yo yos who don't do a very good job of keeping their mouths shut, and 3 or 4 times a year give 'em a dummy bomb to not detonate that leads to an arrest and another passion play."
**After 9/11, a decision was made that the FBI wouldn't just wait for the next mass casualty attack so they could sweep up the body parts and process the crime scene. Rather than being a mostly neglected duty, it was to be one of the Bureau's primary jobs and done as to roll up attacks before there were more smoking craters in our cities. So they look for those predisposed to doing such things and then give them enough legal rope while controlling the situation so that no actual smoking craters happen. Should the FBI just have sat back until our Somali friend hooked up with real bomb makers or figured out how to make a functional device on his own? I guess there would be a lot less liberal voters in Portland after that. Probably more money for law enforcement in the aftermath of a mass fatality even in the pacific northwest. So in preventing such a thing, it's again their own interest and allows critics such as yourself to continue denying that there is a real threat that has to be addressed.
"Whatever happened to the Huatree militia anyway?"
**Still going through pre-trial motions. Still indicted, still awaiting their time in court.
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After 9/11, a decision was made that the FBI wouldn't just wait for the next mass casualty attack so they could sweep up the body parts and process the crime scene. Rather than being a mostly neglected duty, it was to be one of the Bureau's primary jobs and done as to roll up attacks before there were more smoking craters in our cities. So they look for those predisposed to doing such things and then give them enough legal rope while controlling the situation so that no actual smoking craters happen. Should the FBI just have sat back until our Somali friend hooked up with real bomb makers or figured out how to make a functional device on his own? I guess there would be a lot less liberal voters in Portland after that. Probably more money for law enforcement in the aftermath of a mass fatality even in the pacific northwest. So in preventing such a thing, it's again their own interest and allows critics such as yourself to continue denying that there is a real threat that has to be addressed.
Wow, how's that for overwrought? Nothing like citing smoking craters and body parts spread thin to breath life into the tale of a dumba$$ who likely couldn't assemble an explosive device in the first place. Just hope all the time and energy spent creating perp walks for the media to hold in thrall doesn't distract the Bureau from interdicting folks who actually have the ability to create the smoking holes you are so fond of citing.
As for the whole against their own interests actions allowing critics like me--who can see the difference between a schnook groomed for the cameras and a true terrorist threat--somehow making it more difficult for the FBI to address this true threat . . . huh? Pointing out security theater is security theater does this how? Maybe it would be simpler to state "if you aren't with us then you are against us." Or is dissent no longer allowed?
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Where did I see that? Article I. Section II of the constitution. Perhaps less time wrapping yourself in it and more time reading it would be helpful? The point of it being a way to keep slave states from being over-represented in the House, not as a comment on the humanity of slaves or indians.
It was also cited in Dred Scott, both in the court actions leading up to and in the Supreme Court decision.
But I'll make you a deal, you quit shredding the constitution for reasons of expediency and I'll quit trying to stitch it back together and causing you distress by "wrapping" myself with the results.
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My last cooking job was 20 odd years ago working at Dulles airport for a very poorly managed operation. I only lasted a couple months and walked out over a disagreement about serious quality control issues. Be that as it may, those few months were eye opening, the folks I worked with could just walk out the back door on to the tarmac, and after I stormed out and the company tried to collect my security credentials I told 'em they could send someone out to pick 'em up as I wasn't setting foot in that hellhole again. Still have the credentials.
TSA's double standard
In the uproar about scanners and pat-downs, no one seems to have noticed that one group is exempt from inspection
BY PATRICK SMITH
AP/Jeff Roberson
Baggage handlers at Lambert St. Louis International Airport.
Late last week, the Transportation Security Administration, bowing to controversy and the threat of lawsuits, ruled that airline pilots will no longer be subject to the backscatter body scanners and invasive pat-downs at TSA airport checkpoints.
For pilots like myself this is good news, though at least for the time being we remain subject to the rest of the checkpoint inspection, including the X-raying of luggage and the metal detector walk-through. Eventually, we are told, the implementation of so-called CrewPASS will allow us to skirt the checkpoint more or less entirely.
Not everybody agrees that air crews deserve this special treatment. That's not an unreasonable point of view, and I don't disagree with it, necessarily. As security experts like Bruce Schneier point out, if you are going to screen at all, it is important to screen everybody, lest the system become overly complicated and prone to exploitable loopholes.
(Incidentally, the requirement that crews undergo checkpoint screening was imposed by the Federal Aviation Administration after the crash of a Pacific Southwest Airlines flight in 1987. A recently terminated flight attendant, David Burke, used his credentials, which the airline had failed to recover, to carry a concealed handgun onto Flight 1771 from Los Angeles to San Francisco. En route, he shot both pilots and nosed the airplane into the ground near Harmony, Calif., killing all 44 on board.)
But this is a useful approach only if the system is rational and effective to start with. As a pilot I would have no problem going through screening together with everybody else -- just not the screening we currently have in place, with its bullying and its mindless protocols and its wasteful obsession with minutiae.
And by "contradictory," here's some blockbuster news: Although the X-ray and metal detector rigmarole is mandatory for pilots and flight attendants, many other airport workers, including those with regular access to aircraft -- to cabins, cockpits, galleys and freight compartments -- are exempt. That's correct. Uniformed pilots cannot carry butter knives onto an airplane, yet apron workers and contract ground support staff -- cargo loaders, baggage handlers, fuelers, cabin cleaners, caterers -- can, as a matter of routine, bypass TSA inspection entirely.
All workers with airside privileges are subject to fingerprinting, a 10-year criminal background investigation and crosschecking against terror watch lists. Additionally they are subject to random physical checks by TSA. But here's what one apron worker at New York's Kennedy airport recently told me:
"All I need is my Port Authority ID, which I swipe through a turnstile. The 'sterile area' door is not watched over by any hired security or by TSA. I have worked at JFK for more than three years now and I have yet to be randomly searched. Really the only TSA presence we notice is when the blue-shirts come down to the cafeteria to get food."
Actually, this is something I wrote about, to no measurable reception, in a column over five years ago. Little has changed since then. With all of the recent talk about airport security, this ought to be a bombshell of a story. Every media outfit in the country should be covering it. It undermines almost everything TSA has told us from the beginning about the "need" to screen pilots and flight attendants, and if there is a more ringing "let me get this straight ..." scenario anywhere in the realm of airport security, I’d like to hear it.
This is one of the reasons I've been somewhat disappointed by all of the recent attention and controversy over body scanners and pat-downs. Sure, the deployment of the scanners is rightfully controversial; the devices raise important privacy issues, and possibly health issues as well. (And, yes, it is heartening that finally, after almost 10 years, we're seeing a groundswell of resistance against TSA.) The downside to this conversation, however, is that it distracts us from asking important questions about the agency's approach to security overall.
The purpose of highlighting this loophole is not to scare or sensationalize, and enacting yet another layer of zero-tolerance screening, this time for ground workers, is possibly the exact wrong response. The answer, if you ask me, rests in the middle. I would propose somewhat tougher screening for underwing employees, while ratcheting down somewhat the overzealous scrutiny of pilots and flight attendants. You may or may not agree, but in the meantime one thing is certain: This is, for now, a double standard so brazen and hypocritical as to be almost unbelievable.
Patrick Smith is an airline pilot. More Patrick Smith
http://www.salon.com/technology/ask_the_pilot/2010/11/22/tsa_screening_of_pilots/index.html
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Testing the TSA with Titanium Man
Mike Shaughnessy at 10:00 PM Monday, Nov 29, 2010
Guestblogger Dr. Michael Shaughnessy is a German professor who specializes in computer assisted language learning and visual representations of culture at Washington & Jefferson College. He is the director of the CAPL project to provide free CC licensed media to language and culture instructors worldwide.
I have been covertly testing airport security since early 2002. I file no reports and the only notes I take are mental. I am the person that knows when the airport has security holes and still boards the plane. I am titanium man.
OK, enough of the dramatic science fiction; the truth is stranger. I have a few replacement parts installed in my body. Both my right and left humerus are constructed of titanium pins and plates with a number of screws in each arm and my right tibia has a full titanium core with a number of screws to fix it to my ankle and up by my knee. The details of how they all got there would be book length. The short version is that in early 2002 I had to get around in a wheel chair for a while, learn to walk, write, dress myself, eat, cook, all over again. It was an odd rebirth with metal ersatz bones to keep me all together. Unable to use my arms for much at the time due to their reconstruction, I managed to get around by dragging my left foot against the ground to propel the wheelchair. It was much like skateboarding when you get enough momentum to get from place to place.
Oddly enough, one of the first things I did after 4 months in a skilled nursing facility was fly to Canada. At the airport I first noticed how little security there was for me, despite the increased vigilance resulting from 9-11. I was 'wanded' in my wheelchair and of course beeped when wanded on my arms and right leg. After a brief visual inspection, I was simply pushed on by security. At the time, there was no security check of my wheelchair and I could have brought anything stashed in my chair or thick seat cushion. I felt sick being simply pushed by security as I watched a grandmother get special scrutiny. Flying wheelchair bound opened my eyes to the oddities of airport security.
I (re)learned to walk a bit later and was a happy boy when the insurance company knocked on my door to repossess my Quickie brand chair, an awesome piece of equipment I must admit. Then I flew, again and again, and noticed at many airports the same trend: massive inconsistency and the reliance on devices to make us feel safe.
Simply put: I carry enough titanium in with me to set off most metal detectors, unless their settings are on low. Therein lies the truth that I see every time I fly: The security system in the aviation world was, is, and will always be a sham to a certain extent. There are way too many holes to call it secure.
Why are metal detectors manufactured with settings of low, mid, and high? Shouldn't there just be one setting? I flew last week and the metal detectors at both Pittsburgh and Boston were set to low. When they are, I most often walk on through with no problem. This summer in Albany, I set the detector off and got a very thorough secondary screening. I don't mind being wanded and having my limbs touched for security purposes. I admit, almost all of the time it is done in a professional and dignified way by the TSA agents.
At many airports on most days there is a low security concern and the rules are lax. I skip through unnoticed and board my plane. When there is a real terror concern, however, I start to beep. If the airport has a specific threat like when I was in Munich last year, I beep and get some sort of secondary screening. In Munich I had a nice chat (and a thorough wanding) with a gentleman who was clearly not a standard security checkpoint screener. He asked behavioral type questions and I think he was concerned that I could conduct the interview in German. (Apparently, being an American who speaks a language with a degree of competency is a red flag.)
These days are good. I go through security, set off an alarm, am treated with caution and respect and get to go home with a real sense that someone is paying attention. I worry most when I get through secondary screenings without a second glance. 7 times (2 alone at the Dayton airport) the batteries of the hand wands were low or empty and therefore didn't go off during my secondary screening. Once I think the device was not even turned on as the green light wasn't lit. The TSA agent simply waved it over me as a rote motion, and then told me to be on my way. I stood there the first time in disbelief as I know how much metal I have on me and I know how those wands go off when they get near me.
Of course, I also know what happens if I say something and alert the security to their "problem". The airport gets shut down, the gates are cleared and we all go through it again because some TSA agent forgot to charge the batteries or turn the thing on. So I just go to my gate and get on the plane. Perhaps it is irresponsible, but I have seen all of the airport security holes and know that terrorists are not stopped at the security checkpoint by the system we have created. That is my reality and my perception. It may be somewhat flawed, but I am not alone in this viewpoint.
And now we have backscatter technology to fix the holes. It is humorous to me that this is the device that causes the most outrage us because it exposes us physically. I don't personally mind if some TSA agent in a back room sees the size of my schnitzel. My issue with the scanners is that it is more of the same bullshit heaped upon the existing pile of bullshit we already take for a security system. Shoes, liquids, printer toner, nail clippers, whathaveyou. All are smoke screens to have us not ask the harder questions about issues of what actually makes us secure. It is that general feeling that we are not doing security in the right way and that in itself makes us feel insecure.
This insecurity logically leads to questions about the process. Now, something has changed for the worse. You are punished for refusing a specific device. The 'thorough pat-down' recently introduced is the TSA's method of quelling dissent by subjecting flyers to an invasive and undignified physical search. It is the spanking for simply questioning the veracity of the process. We ask, "Will the photos be stored?" The answer, "not possible, of course not." The geeks know differently. They probably programmed the machine and so we cry foul. Why are the geeks the ones who cry the hardest? Because we are inherently people of science and ultimately we know the limits of technology. We are the ones who understand that these new devices are no solution to our problems, but are most likely simple the new panacea, brought to us by a new lobbyist until the next great machine comes along. We know this because we have bought smaller versions of these devices all these years thinking that this device was 'it'. Was I the only person with a Sony Clié?
So pat me down, wand me, find my metal, but do it in a dignified way. Don't expect me to believe that this new device will find everything or that a groping will find things either. And please replace or charge the batteries in the hand wands. If you are so worried about touching us intimately and seeing us naked, you might miss the obvious.
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Where did I see that? Article I. Section II of the constitution. Perhaps less time wrapping yourself in it and more time reading it would be helpful? The point of it being a way to keep slave states from being over-represented in the House, not as a comment on the humanity of slaves or indians.
It was also cited in Dred Scott, both in the court actions leading up to and in the Supreme Court decision.
But I'll make you a deal, you quit shredding the constitution for reasons of expediency and I'll quit trying to stitch it back together and causing you distress by "wrapping" myself with the results.
Please show me where the Scott v. Sanford case uses the phrase "3/5 of a human being" or anything similar.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h2933t.html
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Being a Libertarian means never having to say you're sorry. As in, being a fringe party almost never entrusted by the public with any position of authority means you are free to create your imaginary utopias then throw rocks at those that actually shoulder real burdens with real consequences.
So, what, if any aviation security would you have? How does it work?
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After 9/11, a decision was made that the FBI wouldn't just wait for the next mass casualty attack so they could sweep up the body parts and process the crime scene. Rather than being a mostly neglected duty, it was to be one of the Bureau's primary jobs and done as to roll up attacks before there were more smoking craters in our cities. So they look for those predisposed to doing such things and then give them enough legal rope while controlling the situation so that no actual smoking craters happen. Should the FBI just have sat back until our Somali friend hooked up with real bomb makers or figured out how to make a functional device on his own? I guess there would be a lot less liberal voters in Portland after that. Probably more money for law enforcement in the aftermath of a mass fatality even in the pacific northwest. So in preventing such a thing, it's again their own interest and allows critics such as yourself to continue denying that there is a real threat that has to be addressed.
Wow, how's that for overwrought? Nothing like citing smoking craters and body parts spread thin to breath life into the tale of a dumba$$ who likely couldn't assemble an explosive device in the first place.
**I was in a training class where we watched the testimony from a OCPD officer that was one of the first responders to the Oklahoma City bombing. He recounted how he had assisted in extracting this child from the rubble.
http://oklahomacitybombing.com/oklahoma-city-bombing-pictures-1.html
He stated the he then found another tiny foot protruding from the wreckage. He and others carefully dug to extract the child, only to find that it was just a toddler's leg, severed at the hip.
(http://oklahomacitybombing.com/oklahoma-city-bombing-pictures-1.html)
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It does not take a terrorist mastermind to create a VBIED capable of turning masses of innocents into a scene from an inner ring of hell.
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**At least she didn't have to face screening from the TSA, right BBG?**
http://articles.cnn.com/2006-04-10/justice/moussaoui.victims_1_world-trade-center-tower-dna-samples?_s=PM:LAW
Jurors at Zacarias Moussaoui's death penalty trial heard wrenching accounts Monday about the 9/11 attacks' youngest victim and the World Trade Center firm that suffered the largest human toll.
One after the other, a diverse parade of government witnesses cried or fought back tears as they testified.
Seven of the 15 government witnesses lost two or more relatives in the trade center attacks. The jury also heard a pair of phone calls from victims trapped inside the towers.
Lee Hanson, 73, described how he watched on television as his son, Peter, 32, daughter-in-law, Sue Kim, 35, and granddaughter, Christine, perished aboard United Airlines Flight 175 as it slammed into the trade center's south tower.
Christine, 2 1/2 years old, was the youngest of the 2,973 victims.
"She was the sweetest little girl," her grandfather recalled. "She was love personified."
Peter had planned to combine a business trip with a family visit to Disneyland and his in-laws, who are Korean immigrants.
He called his father as the hijackings unfolded, describing in a soft voice how a flight attendant had been stabbed, Hanson testified.
When he called a second time, Peter said the hijackers' flying was so bumpy that passengers were vomiting.
"I think they're going to try to crash this plane into a building," the son told his father. " 'Don't worry, Dad. If it happens, it will be quick,' " Hanson quoted his son as saying.
Moments later, as his son whispered, "Oh, my God," into the phone three times, Lee Hanson watched on television as the plane struck the tower and burst into a fireball.
"They took away our dreams. They took away our future," Hanson testified.
He described how he later went to his son's house to collect toothbrushes and picked hair off brushes so medical examiners could obtain DNA samples to identify remains.
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http://www.petehansonandfamily.com/
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Please show me where the Scott v. Sanford case uses the phrase "3/5 of a human being" or anything similar.
The article and section was cited in various arguments I read back when I studied the case for a civil liberties class. Think I still have the texts laying about and will try to dig up specific references.
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Being a Libertarian means never having to say you're sorry. As in, being a fringe party almost never entrusted by the public with any position of authority means you are free to create your imaginary utopias then throw rocks at those that actually shoulder real burdens with real consequences.
So, what, if any aviation security would you have? How does it work?
And being an Authoritarian means you can present stark scenarios and then give people grief for not wholly embracing all tyrannies you prescribe as a result.
Is there any part of the founding documents of this country you won't toss down the oubliette for security's sake? Are you able to note that the kind of disruptions and heavy handed tactics being embraced are exactly the results our enemies hope for? Do you think playing into our enemy's hands counts as a victory? Do the 7,000,000 flights and 9,000,000,000 passengers screened by the TSA without finding a single bomb (they do claim 150 "items of interest," but won't tell anyone what they are) count as a measure of success? Should we grope everyone's groin every time there is a none in 9 billion chance that something bad might happen? Should I start posting pictures of car accidents and relating sad stories of people who drove and died rather than undergo the indignities of air travel? In view of the OK bombing maybe everyone who rents a U-Haul should also be groin gripped? And those who purchase fertilizer? Diesel fuel?
I could go on, but at some point doesn't rational risk assessment informed by our national values have to enter into the conversation or do all of us who hold the concept of liberty dear just have to stand there and be flailed by severed baby limbs wielded by authoritarian hands?
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And being an Authoritarian means you can present stark scenarios and then give people grief for not wholly embracing all tyrannies you prescribe as a result.
**I give you grief for never having concrete, tangible policies as alternatives to the current structures in place you criticize.**
Is there any part of the founding documents of this country you won't toss down the oubliette for security's sake?
**Were it only so simple as be a binary "free/unfree" decision. "The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact."-Associate Justice Robert Jackson
Are you able to note that the kind of disruptions and heavy handed tactics being embraced are exactly the results our enemies hope for?
**I can suggest some books for you to read that will explain to you what our enemies hope for. I can tell you that TSA screening isn't giving any of them cause to run a victory lap.**
Do you think playing into our enemy's hands counts as a victory? Do the 7,000,000 flights and 9,000,000,000 passengers screened by the TSA without finding a single bomb (they do claim 150 "items of interest," but won't tell anyone what they are) count as a measure of success?
**The measure of success is the fact the 7,000,000 flights and 9,000,000,000 passengers screened by the TSA didn't die enroute to their destination from terrorist actions. That is indeed a record of success. Thanks for pointing it out.**
Should we grope everyone's groin every time there is a none in 9 billion chance that something bad might happen?
**Lacking better options (I'm still waiting for your Libertarian-friendly aviation security policies) we have use what we have available to address real threats.**
Should I start posting pictures of car accidents and relating sad stories of people who drove and died rather than undergo the indignities of air travel?
**Should you rail on how traffic laws and law enforcement oppresses drivers by imposing speed limits and insisting you drive on the correct side of the road while sober? Oh where will the statist oppression end?**
In view of the OK bombing maybe everyone who rents a U-Haul should also be groin gripped? And those who purchase fertilizer? Diesel fuel?
**Post-OK City, and especially after 9/11, new laws and new programs were introduced to make it harder for those with criminal intent to purchase the precursor chemicals to make explosives. It's not impossible, but it's more difficult, and someone trying to make a large amount of ANFO will be much more likely to end up coming to the attention of law enforcement. Is that a bad thing?**
I could go on, but at some point doesn't rational risk assessment informed by our national values have to enter into the conversation or do all of us who hold the concept of liberty dear just have to stand there and be flailed by severed baby limbs wielded by authoritarian hands?
**Like anything, it's a matter of finding a rational balance between national security/public safety concerns with individual freedoms. Something long recognized by the courts. We could never prevent every terrorist attack, no matter what was done. However, we can harden our targets, proactively seek out and make cases on those with the intent to engage in terrorism and wage war on those that wish to command, motivate and train those who would carry out future attacks on us, all while preserving core constitutional freedoms.**
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/sheriff-decides-to-burn-down-house-filled-with-too-many-explosives/
The audience gasped as the sheriff and other county officials showed slides of the rental home of George Djura Jakubec, which was full of hand grenades and powdered explosives in jars and in clumps on the floor.
Last week, explosives experts pulled out of the house in unincorporated Escondido, about 20 miles north of San Diego, saying it was too dangerous to continue investigating and removing the substances.
Gore said the house will be destroyed on Dec. 8 or after, depending on the weather.
“As soon as we get a clear weather pattern, we’re going to go,” he said.
But first, protective barriers will have to be built around the house, Gore said, and before the operation much of the surrounding neighborhood will be evacuated and Interstate 15 will be shut down.
The county declared a public emergency Tuesday to make the destruction possible.
Jakubec, a 54-year-old unemployed software consultant, pleaded not guilty last week to illegally making and possessing explosives and to robbing banks. Investigators suspect him of committing two holdups in San Diego County over the summer. He remained jailed on $5.1 million bail.
Authorities say it is unclear what Jakubec may have planned to do with the materials.
The explosives were discovered after a gardener was injured earlier this month in a blast that occurred when he stepped on explosive powder in the backyard, authorities said. Mario Garcia, 49, suffered eye, chest and arm injuries and was recovering.
The same types of chemicals have been used by suicide bombers and insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. They included Pentaerythritol tetranitrate, or PETN, which was used in the 2001 airliner shoe-bombing attempt as well as in last month’s airplane cargo bombs, authorities said.
The other chemicals were highly unstable Hexamethylene triperoxide diamine, or HMTD, and Erythritol tetranitrate, or ETN, authorities said.
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http://moelane.com/2010/11/21/rsrh-interesting-thought-re-tsa/
Glenn Reynolds, on the news that the TSA is probably contributing to more accidents on the road:
“Of course, a few thousand extra highway deaths don’t produce the national trauma of a 9/11, and that’s a reasonable thing to factor in somehow.”
It’s the qualitative difference between ‘tragedy’ and ‘atrocity,’ Glenn. There is no organized conspiracy to kill American citizens via car crashes, so each death is an separate tragedy, and even in the rare cases where actual malice is involved in the crash it’s an individual malice. But 9/11 was the result of an organized conspiracy; and a failed one, at that. They were trying to kill 50,000 people, after all.
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I stand corrected. Scott didn't declare blacks to be 3/5s of a human, stating instead that they were an inferior race incapable of exercising citizenship and, as such, white slave owners couldn't be deprived of their chattel or the labor thereof without substantive due process. Rather than under the guise of security, freedom was denied on the grounds of property rights. Having spent most the day reading this depressing opinion I certainly wouldn't advise doing so, but anyone seeking to feel glum over the convolutions some will go through to deprive others of freedom can do so here:
http://digital.wustl.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=dre;cc=dre;view=text;idno=dre1857.0105.108;rgn=div1;node=dre1857.0105.108%3A1
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So rather than nazis, the intelligent and nuanced opinion is that the TSA is morally equivalent to slavery?
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**I give you grief for never having concrete, tangible policies as alternatives to the current structures in place you criticize.**
There are plenty of folks who have the security creds to criticize the current security theater of which we partake and suggestions for improvement. You have the google-fu to find them, leaving me of the opinion your goal is not so much to expand understanding on the subject, but to get me to ground where I have no particular expertise. As that may be, I have and will certainly post the informed security suggestions I encounter.
**Were it only so simple as be a binary "free/unfree" decision. "The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact."-Associate Justice Robert Jackson
For someone who traffics so frequently in stark questions that shoulder aside shades of gray I guess this admission can be seen as progress. Still, your willingness to shuck aside just about every freedom and constitutional principle is pursuit of security remains chilling nonetheless.
**I can suggest some books for you to read that will explain to you what our enemies hope for. I can tell you that TSA screening isn't giving any of them cause to run a victory lap.**
If you can cite a source, please do. I've been studying low intensity conflict for quite some time and have read plenty of source material from Che to Mao to Giap to Hoffman and so on that state one of the goals in this type of warfare is to alienate the citizens of a combatant country from its government. The Islamofascist appear to me to follow a former combloc schema with a theological overlay. Are you suggesting they don't seek to create these sorts of schisms over here? Do you think they don't snicker into their fists over the resources spent creating the current security theater? Do you have any doubt at all that they've already gamed out an attack that would render these measures irrelevant?
**The measure of success is the fact the 7,000,000 flights and 9,000,000,000 passengers screened by the TSA didn't die enroute to their destination from terrorist actions. That is indeed a record of success. Thanks for pointing it out.**
You are very welcome. And now, having established there is a none in 9 billion chance of TSA catching a bomber should we apply that standard to the local stop and rob? Since there is likely greater than a 0 in 9 billion chance something bad will happen there should we unleash the fired congressmen to lobby for their former corporate sponsors to provide high end, federally mandated security measures for all 7/Elevens? My math skills aren't my strong suit but if I remember correctly one nine billionth of zero is still zero so shouldn't we apply strong security measures anywhere there is greater than a zero chance of something bad happening lest someone like you come along and start flailing us with dead baby limbs? I mean we gotta be consistent, right?
**Lacking better options (I'm still waiting for your Libertarian-friendly aviation security policies) we have use what we have available to address real threats.**
Uh huh, and back in my high school days it was thought that the best post-coitus anti-pregnancy option was to shake up a coke and squirt it up certain nether regions. Best available option available to high schoolers back then so we should embrace it, right? Or at some point does effectiveness and rational risk assessment come into play?
**Should you rail on how traffic laws and law enforcement oppresses drivers by imposing speed limits and insisting you drive on the correct side of the road while sober? Oh where will the statist oppression end?**
If you can't tell the difference between grabbing septuagenarian scrotums, fondling granny breasts and driving on the right side of the street I'm not sure any amount of keyboarding I'll do can express the sarcasm your sarcasm deserves.
**Post-OK City, and especially after 9/11, new laws and new programs were introduced to make it harder for those with criminal intent to purchase the precursor chemicals to make explosives. It's not impossible, but it's more difficult, and someone trying to make a large amount of ANFO will be much more likely to end up coming to the attention of law enforcement. Is that a bad thing?**
Not calling it a bad thing, but am suggesting that rational risk assessment requires a commensurate degree of restraint where air travel is concerned. Lotta precursors I can snag without having any undue invasions of my privacy. Why is that the case for diesel fuel but not air travel?
**Like anything, it's a matter of finding a rational balance between national security/public safety concerns with individual freedoms. Something long recognized by the courts. We could never prevent every terrorist attack, no matter what was done. However, we can harden our targets, proactively seek out and make cases on those with the intent to engage in terrorism and wage war on those that wish to command, motivate and train those who would carry out future attacks on us, all while preserving core constitutional freedoms.**
I can agree with a lot of that while still feeling that our current measure will do little to prevent a future attack other than line the pockets of various companies selling solutions meant to thwart the attack that last occurred. Does that really count as security?
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So rather than nazis, the intelligent and nuanced opinion is that the TSA is morally equivalent to slavery?
No I'd say they are equivalent to folks who say slaughter chickens in the hope of some sort of supernatural intervention that will keep bad things from happening. In the current instance freedom is sacrificed under the assumption our opponents are too stupid to game around current security arrangements.
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"There are plenty of folks who have the security creds to criticize the current security theater of which we partake and suggestions for improvement. You have the google-fu to find them, leaving me of the opinion your goal is not so much to expand understanding on the subject, but to get me to ground where I have no particular expertise. As that may be, I have and will certainly post the informed security suggestions I encounter."
Is it possible I have some relevant training and experience beyond just google-fu that informs my opinion?
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"For someone who traffics so frequently in stark questions that shoulder aside shades of gray I guess this admission can be seen as progress. Still, your willingness to shuck aside just about every freedom and constitutional principle is pursuit of security remains chilling nonetheless."
Oh really? Where have I expressed my willingness to shuck aside just about every freedom and constitutional principle?
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Bomb Plot Foiled in Oregon
Patriot Post
Last Friday, federal agents foiled yet another terrorist plot -- the attempted bombing of a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon. Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a 19-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen born in Somalia, told FBI agents that his goal was to kill Americans as they celebrated the holidays. He believed he would be successful, he said, because no one would expect an attack in Oregon.
Mohamud first appeared on the anti-terror radar after exchanging emails with an "unindicted associate" in northwest Pakistan, a known terrorist breeding ground. After expressing his desire to engage in "violent jihad," Mohamud was approached by FBI agents posing as terrorists. Over the next several months, Mohamud plotted with them, even mailing them materials from which they were to assemble the bomb. Recorded conversations show that Mohamud was given more than one chance to back out, but he refused, saying that he had been planning this since he was 15 and that "it's gonna be fireworks ... a spectacular show."
On the day of the ceremony, Mohamud parked a van loaded with what he believed to be explosives at the site and then went to a nearby train station, where he twice attempted to detonate the device with a mobile phone. As agents surrounded him, Mohamud kicked them, screaming "Allahu Akbar" (Allah is great). He's been charged with attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction.
Despite the incredible work of our law enforcement agencies, we are often merely putting out fires instead of dealing with the larger issue. On the same day as the thwarted attack, U.S. District Judge Jorge Solis released evidence that three major Islamic organizations are -- surprise! -- fronts for the terrorist group Hamas. Solis' 20-page ruling in the 2008 Holy Land Terror trial, which had been sealed until last week, reveals that the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) have direct financial ties to suicide bombers working for Hamas. The ISNA, NAIT and CAIR maintain offices around the U.S., lobby Congress on Muslim-related issues, and are considered charitable organizations (and therefore tax exempt) by the IRS.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/8177475/US-facing-attacks-by-home-grown-terrorists-senior-adviser-warns.html
US facing attacks by home-grown terrorists, senior adviser warns
The sheer volume of terror plots against the US means that the country will become unable to prevent a fatal terror attack by a new breed of extremists radicalised in America's towns and cities, the top counter-terrorism official has warned.
In unusually candid remarks, Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Centre, said that the nation's defences would be probably be breached by a home-grown radical, after a year-long period containing several failed or thwarted attacks that had seen the most intense terror activity since September 11, 2001.
"Although we aim for perfection, perfection will not be achieved. Just like any other endeavour, we will not stop all the attacks," he said.
"If there is an attack, it may well be tragic. Innocent lives will be lost. But we still have to be honest, and we have to be honest that some things will get through."
He said: "To say that we will not successfully defend against all attacks is certainly not to say that we are not trying to stop all attacks. We are."
The FBI last week arrested Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a 19-year-old Somali-born American, for plotting to detonate a bomb as thousands of people attended the lighting of the Christmas tree in the centre of Portland, Oregon.
Speaking at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, Mr Leiter, who advises the US government on the terrorist threat, said: "In this era of a more complicated threat, a more diverse threat and lower-scale attacks to include individuals who have been radicalised here in the homeland, stopping all the attacks has become that much harder."
The threat has risen in part because of the increased involvement of the Yemen-based al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born radical cleric.
Known as AQAP, it has pursued smaller attacks perpetrated by lone operators which have complicated the challenges facing the US security services still battling the threat of another attack on the scale of September 11.
AQAP and Al-Awlaki, now living in Yemen, have been linked to Maj Nidal Hasan, an army psychiatrist, is accused of killing 13 people during a shooting spree at Fort Hood, Texas in November, 2009, and to Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab, the Nigerian student suspected of the failed attempt to blow up a flight headed for Detroit last Christmas.
Other "lone wolf" plotters based in the US have operated with a small amount of contact with any handlers in Pakistan's tribal areas, where Osama bin Laden and the core leadership is now based.
In October Faisal Shahzad, an American citizen born in Pakistan, was sentenced to life imprisonment after pleading guilty to planning to blow up a car packed with explosives in New York's Times Square. The FBI recently arrested a man who had allegedly surveyed train stations in the Washington area as potential targets of terror.
Conceding that the anti-terror services had made errors under President Barack Obama, particularly in the Christmas plot, Mr Leiter however asserted that hard work played a part in bringing about what critics have called lucky outcomes.
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Is it possible I have some relevant training and experience beyond just google-fu that informs my opinion?
No doubt, yet your posts on the subject all trend toward abridgment of 4th amendment protections, while there are certainly plenty of folks with security creds that doubt current security theater amounts to much.
Oh really? Where have I expressed my willingness to shuck aside just about every freedom and constitutional principle?
Just about every time a conversation occurs where a constitutional protection has to be balanced against a police or intelligence need you tend to favor the need over the constitutional protection and then label folks hysterics who err on the side of freedom instead. Be it data intercepts, police surveillance, genitalia grabs, or other issues I could catalog were I to go through other posts you invariably err on a side that interprets the security need having to trump the constitutional protection.
I'll note that there are costs associated with tyranny that exceed the zero in nine billion ratio I brought up. The population of the Soviet Union after WWII is thought to have been around 170,000,000; Stalin put a dent in that number by 20,000,000 or more, depending on how you like your corpses stacked. China's population was less than a billion when Mao ran his various pogroms estimated to have killed 200,000,000, though that is only a guess. Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Serbia/Croatia/et al have all show that unchecked government manages to very handily exceed the zero in nine billion ratio when their power is unfettered. In short there are some numbers out there that suggest hysterics like me may have math on our side when governments start trending toward unchecked power.
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As usual, you can't debate a point, so you default to the "Mao! Pol Pot!" routine.
Sorry if my posting of actual caselaw and law enforcement training documents clashes with your Libertarian fantasies. Sorry I assumed that you could actually come up with realistic alternatives to what you call "security theater". My mistake.
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The population of the Soviet Union after WWII is thought to have been around 170,000,000; Stalin put a dent in that number by 20,000,000 or more, depending on how you like your corpses stacked. China's population was less than a billion when Mao ran his various pogroms estimated to have killed 200,000,000, though that is only a guess. Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Serbia/Croatia/et al have all show that unchecked government manages to very handily exceed the zero in nine billion ratio when their power is unfettered. In short there are some numbers out there that suggest hysterics like me may have math on our side when governments start trending toward unchecked power.
**Yes, I think everyone is aware how all these countries started out with aviation security programs that quickly turned into gulags and mass executions. I guess aviation security is like a gateway drug, one week, you try a hit off a joint, by the next week you're smoking crack and mainlining meth. That's how it always works, right?**
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You know dude, there's been a lot of non-responsiveness on your end too that I suppose I could bludgeon you with if I found that worth doing. When tangling with you, alas, I find the debate involves getting dragged on to ground from which you can deliver authoritative and authoritarian pronouncements rather than being about expanding understanding of the issue and all its sides. I'm not here to get into tinkling contests, and I have background enough with authoritarians that I chafe when again enduring their tender ministrations. Sorry if that doesn't conform to the strictures you'd impose on all who dare debate you.
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Well, lets see if I can play a different tact here with a small thought experiment.
We had the Shoe Bomber and so now we take off our shoes. We had the Undie Bomber and now we are either scanned by a scanner that claims to radiate only the skin or get our groins grabbed. And a few months ago, Saudi Arabia had a bomber with a bomb us his anus explode himself in an attempt to kill a Saudi prince.
So, here's the question: What do we do in the wake of such an attack in an airport or on an airplane in the US? What security measures do we take?
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http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/09/30/saudi.arabia.attack/index.html?eref=igoogle_cnn
Saudi investigation: Would-be assassin hid bomb in underwear
CNN National Security Analyst
(CNN) -- The would-be assassin of Saudi Arabia's Prince Mohammed bin Nayef hid his bomb in his underwear, apparently believing that cultural taboos would prevent a search in that part of his body, according to a Saudi government official close to the investigation.
Saudi Arabia's Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, head of counterterrorism, was slightly injured in August.
The prince was slightly injured when the bomb exploded in the August attack. Several news reports this week have said the assailant hid the bomb inside his rectum, but according to the Saudi official, the government assessment discounted those reports, based on various factors.
Among them: When the bomb went off there was a flash of light, suggesting that the bomb was not hidden inside the assassin's body. Also, doctors consulted by the government judged that the toxicity of the plastic explosives would make them hard to hold for many hours inside the rectum, and the environment in this area of the body would make detonation "difficult," according to the Saudi official close to the investigation.
The Saudis said they think the bomb weighed 100 grams and was made with a plastic explosive, to avoid detection by metal detectors through which the would-be assassin had to pass before he was allowed to meet with the prince.
The official said the explosive was PETN, which was used by the so-called shoe bomber Richard Reid, who attempted to blow up an American Airlines flight between Paris, France, and Miami, Florida, in December 2001.
The Saudis are exploring the possibility that the prince's assailant exploded the device using a detonator that used a chemical fuse, which would not be detected by a metal detector.
The would-be assassin -- a Saudi member of al Qaeda who had fled to Yemen, identified as Abdullah Hassan al Asiri -- posed as a member of the terror group willing to surrender personally to Prince Nayef.
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In the corrections world, using the rectum to smuggle contraband items is nothing new, it's commonly known as "keistering". Those inmates who decide to use this method often learn is that there can be serious medical consequences for such methods. Talk to any ER doc/nurse and you'll be amazed at the amazing variety of items that people "fall" on and have to have extracted by medical personnel.
I've seen an x-ray from a prison inmate that successfully "Keistered" a Derringer and a handcuff key (You could clearly see the perfect outline of both items in the x-ray). He however found that he was not able to remove those items and ended up seeking medical help as a result.
Aside from the cultural taboos that might discourage the use of this method by jihadists, the practical aspects also raise many operational problems for them. As we've seen with the undie bomber's painful failure and the Times Square bomber, attempts to alter the construction of IEDs to avoid detection may also result in the devices not detonating as desired.
As it's been said that "success has a thousand fathers while failure is an orphan", seriously burned genitals and an orange inmate jumpsuit is a serious damper on AQ's recruiting efforts.
IEDs concealed in body cavities or surgically implanted may be theoretically possible, but chaos and entropy in the personage of "Mr. Murphy" visits the jihadists just as he visits us. When we harden our target, they then have to recruit viable operatives and design devices around our security methods. In doing so, we reduce the odds of them being successful in their attempts to target the global aviation system.
They are not omnipotent supervillains with infinite resources, and every failure makes their next attempt more difficult. We may not like the TSA/USG's aviation security methods, but there are no simple, easy, unobtrusive solutions.
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Well, it looks like you get to evade my question , , , until AQ gets the kiestering technology down :-) , , , or you can accept the hypothetical: What if AQ does succeed or make a credible effort with keister bombs? Just how far is the TSA and/or you willing to go on this?
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I don't know that there are any additional screening techniques easily incorporated to meet the various demands on the system. The "nekkid scanners"/pat searches are imperfect answers to the undie bomber threat, but we don't have the luxury of throwing up our hands and doing nothing. As much as a vocal minority might voice their displeasure at these methods, a few successful bombings of aircraft would see a renewed appreciation for what is incorrectly derided as "security theater".
If AQ masters the ass-bombing technique where they can use it at will, global aviation as we know it ceases to exist.
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How about bomb sniffing dogs? :lol:
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Don't all dogs sniff there anyway?
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http://govpro.com/issue_20060101/gov_imp_30474/
During the 10-week training course, officers were provided instruction on handler skills, explosives safety, and safe handling and accountability of explosives canine training aids. They spent much of their time searching for explosives in specialized indoor and outdoor training areas that resemble the transportation environment, including aircraft and terminals. The teams also practice searching warehouses, luggage and a parking lot filled with cars, trucks, vans and buses.
"This graduating class increases TSAs field resources, and provides greater flexibility in securing transportation resources across modes, said Dave Kontny, Director of TSAs National Explosives Detection Canine Team Program. From long-time partners like the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority to new additions like the airports in Tamuning, Reno and Little Rock, TSA is working closely with our partners in local law enforcement to further secure our transportation systems.
After returning to their facilities, the teams will complete a local orientation and certification. Upon certification, the teams will continue to conduct several hours of proficiency training each week in their operational environment. To ensure these teams stay sharp, they are certified annually by TSA evaluators.
Canine teams combine excellent mobility with reliable detection rates. Their uses include searching areas in response to bomb threats and investigating unattended packages in airports and other transportation terminals, vehicles, luggage, cargo and other areas, as well as serving as a proven deterrent to would-be terrorists or criminals.
The TSA Explosives Detection Canine Team Program is a cooperative partnership with participating transportation systems. TSA provides the canine, in-depth training for the handler, and partially reimburses the participating agency for costs associated with the teams, such as salaries, overtime, canine food and veterinary care. TSA-certified canine teams reflect the core values of the Department of Homeland Security providing first responders with the right tools, technical assistance and funding to protect our nation's interest.
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http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/RS21920.pdf
Detection of Explosives on Airline
Passengers: Recommendation of the 9/11
Commission and Related Issues
Dana A. Shea and Daniel Morgan
Analysts in Science and Technology Policy
Resources, Science, and Industry Division
Summary
The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, known as
the 9/11 Commission, recommended that Congress and the Transportation Security
Administration give priority attention to screening airline passengers for explosives.
The key issue for Congress is balancing the costs of mandating passenger explosives
detection against other aviation security needs. Passenger explosives screening
technologies have been under development for several years and are now being deployed
in selected airports. Their technical capabilities are not fully established, and
operational and policy issues have not yet been resolved. Critical factors for
implementation in airports include reliability, passenger throughput, and passenger
privacy concerns. Presuming the successful development and deployment of this
technology, certification standards, operational policy, and screening procedures for
federal use will need to be established. This topic continues to be of congressional
interest, particularly as the 110th Congress reexamines implementation of the 9/11
Commission’s recommendations via H.R. 1 and S. 4.
**Snip**
The olfactory ability of dogs is sensitive enough to detect trace amounts of many
compounds, but several factors have inhibited the regular use of canines for passenger
screening. Dogs trained in explosives detection can generally only work for brief periods,
have significant upkeep costs, are unable to communicate the identity of the detected
explosives residue, and require a human handler when performing their detection role.5
In addition, direct contact between dogs and airline passengers raises liability concerns.
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BY TOM WRIGHT
NEW DELHI—India expects Washington to apologize for the patting down of the Indian ambassador to the U.S. during a security check at an airport in Mississippi, a senior Indian diplomat said Thursday.
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Blacklisted pilot wins rights case against Bombardier
ARI ALTSTEDTER
From Thursday's Globe and Mail
Canada’s human-rights laws trump American anti-terrorism efforts in Canada, the Quebec Human Rights Tribunal says in a decision released Tuesday.
The tribunal awarded a Pakistani-born Canadian man $319,000 in damages, ruling his human rights were violated when Bombardier Inc. barred him from flight training at a Montreal facility because U.S. authorities had designated him a security threat.
The decision amounts to a repudiation of the process that U.S. authorities use to label people security threats. The Quebec tribunal decided that because of the secrecy of the process, the lack of appeals and alleged racial profiling in an array of national security practices, applying U.S. threat designations in Canada must be considered a violation of Charter rights.
The rejection that sparked the complaint was actually Javed Latif’s second. He had first applied for training under his U.S. pilot’s licence, which alerted Bombardier to his designation as a security threat by American officials. According to the tribunal, the violation occurred when Mr. Latif applied for training under his Canadian pilot’s licence, and was rejected because of the American threat label.
“Those rules do not apply here in Canada, were not adopted here in Canada by Canadian law,” said Athanassia Bitzakadis, the lawyer who represented the Quebec Human Rights Commission, which brought the case before the tribunal. “So Bombardier cannot simply refer to those rules to justify a discriminatory decision to refuse to someone a service, a service that they offer to everyone here in Quebec.”
Tribunal judge Michele Rivet criticized Bombardier for taking the U.S. designation on faith and not objectively assessing whether Mr. Latif was a security threat. She also said Bombardier could have consulted Transport Canada or the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
Testifying before the tribunal, Steven Gignac, the Bombardier official who denied Mr. Latif’s request, said he considered the U.S. authorities credible when they had deemed Mr. Latif a threat. He said if he agreed to train him there would have been “serious consequences for Bombardier Inc.”
At the time of the incident in 2004, Mr. Latif had been a pilot for 25 years and had flown over U.S. airspace many times.
In 2008, U.S. authorities removed Mr. Latif’s designation as a threat to national security, and he has since trained with Bombardier in Montreal on three occasions.
According to Mr. Latif’s lawyer, Catherine McKenzie, he now works for an airline based in the Middle East, and she has not been able to reach him with word of the decision.
Much of the Quebec Human Rights Commission’s case rested on testimony from Reem Bahdi, an expert on U.S. national security practices. Prof. Bahdi, of the University of Windsor, argued that because of broadly discriminatory practices, a U.S. threat designation must be considered discriminatory if no specific reasons are given. One example she cited was the National Security Entry and Exit Regulation System, which requires citizens of specific countries, all of which happen to be Muslim, to register upon entering and exiting the U.S.
“Basically what they [the tribunal] were presented with was a whole series of policies that targeted Arabs and Muslims alongside a policy that said, and by the way, all of these policies, all of this decision making is going to take place in secret,” she said.
The amount awarded to Mr. Latif by the tribunal includes moral and material damages as well as the highest amount for punitive damages that the tribunal has ever given, $50,000.
Bombardier is reviewing the decision and considering whether to appeal.
Whatever happens, Prof. Bahdi said, this decision must have an effect on how other cross-border companies operate in Canada.
“What this decision says is that Canadian companies have to conform to Canadian standards of justice,” she said. “And we in Canada still take quite seriously the notions of due process, and individuals not being tarnished with the terrorist label and having no ability to clear their names.”
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http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2010/12/06/
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Pardon my absence. Had to swing several hatchets last week, which made for enough drama without soliciting more.
The issue of TSS's nude scan or get groped policy strikes me as fairly unambiguous. The Fourth Amendment reads:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
By many metrics generally applied to the Fourth Amendment the TSA's searches appear to be unconstitutional. There is a reasonable expectation of privacy when standing in line waiting for transportation. TSD's policy goes well beyond that granted in Terry v. Ohio to LEO's to stop and frisk suspects for which they can articulate a reasonable suspicion. Please note here Terry applies to sworn officers--it's my understanding most TSD employees don't fit that bill, while TSA appears to throw the reasonable articulation out the window. It's worth also noting here that due process and probable cause are also sacrificed on the altar of security.
If a case regarding these intrusive searches does make it to court I expect the concept of "seizure" will also come into play. Definite shows of authority and occasional use of force are part of these searches. Exceptions are granted, again to LEOs, but travelers are not free to disregard search requests, which to my mind throws seizure issues into play. Toss in laptops, cell phones, and other devices for which access to and passwords for have been demanded and I believe a strong argument can be made that the TSA serially disregards Fourth Amendment protections.
As far as I'm concerned that's game, set, and match right there; if the TSA can't find security experts able to design a constitutional security regimen then they ought to fire their current ones and then fire themselves in the hope their replacements are actually acquainted with the US Constitution and the protections enshrined therein.
But let's pretend that there is some sort of "case law" out there that allows low paid, non-sworn, rudimentarily trained TSA staff to ignore black letter constitutional protections. Even granting that, their obtrusive scans are pointless as they've already been beaten. Many have heard of the suicide bomber who went after a Saudi prince with an explosive contained in his rectum. Fewer may have heard rumors circulating that jihadi females are receiving explosive breast implants, though the latter has not been confirmed and may just be meant as disinformation to see what sort of extra-constitutional invasion that rumor will inspire.
None the less, those embracing the "airport security über alles" ethic are not consistent if they do not demand that the TSA incorporate body cavity searches and some form of mammography that can tell saline, from silicon, from semtex into its security regimen. Their failure to do so suggests there are some security extremes they will not go to. Indeed, a recent paper looking at the efficacy of the nudie scanners notes:
Little information exists on the performance of x-ray backscatter machines now being deployed through UK, US and other airports. We implement a Monte Carlo simulation using as input what is known about the x-ray spectra used for imaging, device specifications and available images to estimate penetration and exposure to the body from the x-ray beam, and sensitivity to dangerous contraband materials. We show that the body is exposed throughout to the incident x-rays, and that although images can be made at the exposure levels claimed (under 100 nanoGrey per view), detection of contraband can be foiled in these systems. Because front and back views are obtained, low Z materials can only be reliable detected if they are packed outside the sides of the body or with hard edges, while high Z materials are well seen when placed in front or back of the body, but not to the sides. Even if exposure were to be increased significantly, normal anatomy would make a dangerous amount of plastic explosive with tapered edges difficult if not impossible to detect.
Full text here: http://springerlink.com/content/g6620thk08679160/fulltext.pdf
Moreover, as GAO noted in October of 2009:
. . . (S)ince TSA’s creation, 10 passenger screening technologies have been in various phases of research, development, procurement, and deployment, including the Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT)—formerly known as the Whole Body Imager. TSA expects to have installed almost 200 AITs in airports by the end of calendar year 2010 and plans to install a total of 878 units by the end of fiscal year 2014. In October 2009, GAO reported that TSA had not yet conducted an assessment of the technology’s vulnerabilities to determine the extent to which a terrorist could employ tactics that would evade detection by the AIT. Thus, it is unclear whether the AIT or other technologies would have detected the weapon used in the December 25 attempted attack. GAO’s report also noted the problems TSA experienced in deploying another checkpoint technology that had not been tested in the operational environment. Since GAO’s October report, TSA stated that it has completed the testing as of the end of 2009. We are currently verifying that all functional requirements of the AIT were tested in an operational environment. Completing these steps should better position TSA to ensure that its costly deployment of AIT machines will enhance passenger checkpoint security.
http://www.gao.gov/highlights/d10401thigh.pdf
As we have untested equipment now in a front line role, clearly the only way we can prevent children's limbs from protruding though smoking wreckage is to strip and body cavity search and then MRI all flyers, yet we hear no such call. Is some sort of limit to invasiveness being tacitly acknowledged? Might the tools of risk assessment allow us to extrapolate these finding to other invasive search methods and develop a search regimen that is both effective and constitutional?
Beyond the constitutional argument, beyond the ineffectiveness of TSA techniques to deal with known threats lies an allocation of resources issue. Airport staff are a gaping security hole. According to a WSJ report (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703581204574599953475913542.html) from last year, baggage theft is on the rise. Airlines are not required to report these thefts so it's hard to define scope, but it's clear all sorts of stuff is walking out from secure zones and no one appears to be measuring how much is walking in. Worse yet, those involved with luggage thefts are exposed by both avarice and extortion to more nefarious recruitment efforts. Seeing how our hit rate when screening passengers is zero in 9 billion, and knowing that more than one piece of luggage is stolen every day, there is a strong argument to be made that the TSA is focussing resources where there is little demonstrable threat while not effectively dealing with an area where there is.
Stolen luggage is hardly the only demonstrable threat, alas. Combining two favorite areas of contention, one notes that 199 lbs. of heroin was found by Customs agents on commercial aircraft in 2009 (http://www.justice.gov/ndic/pubs38/38661/movement.htm). How many aircraft could 200 lbs. of semtex take down? And that's just the one variety of dope they found. How much other stuff went unnoticed? Note further that most the drugs were found as folks tried to disembark; someone looking to blow up a plane only has to get in onboard and does not have to worry about getting off the plane with it. Add in the printer cartridge scare of a month or so back and there are plenty of reasons to suspect that efforts should be applied to real threats rather than hapless air travelers.
So we have a system in place that violates the spirit, letter, and framer's intent when it comes to the Bill of Rights, a system that fails to guard against known threats, has been shown to be ineffective, and that diverts resources from areas where threats have been demonstrated. Does all this folly really need a solution in place before we call it what it is? At some point isn't it incumbent on security professionals--who are supposed to have the tools and requisite schools to do so--to propose and implement a constitutional and effective airport security system?
GAO documents (http://www.gao.gov/docsearch/featured/transportationsecurity.html) instead suggest that metrics are lacking, effectiveness not demonstrated, goals poorly stated, implementation more than uneven and so on. The cynics among us might go so far to say that the TSA has instead embraced security theater, imposing high profile methods known not to detect current threats, while spending vast amounts of money on heavily lobbied for equipment to give the appearance of a diligence that does not stand up to any sort of scrutiny. This is supposed to leave us feeling safe? This is how a Republic applies its founding ideals to the problem at hand? The questions answer themselves. Or ought to.
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Suppose the unthinkable happened, and terrorists struck New York or another big city with an atom bomb. What should people there do? The government has a surprising new message: Do not flee. Get inside any stable building and don’t come out till officials say it’s safe.
The advice is based on recent scientific analyses showing that a nuclear attack is much more survivable if you immediately shield yourself from the lethal radiation that follows a blast, a simple tactic seen as saving hundreds of thousands of lives. Even staying in a car, the studies show, would reduce casualties by more than 50 percent; hunkering down in a basement would be better by far.
But a problem for the Obama administration is how to spread the word without seeming alarmist about a subject that few politicians care to consider, let alone discuss. So officials are proceeding gingerly in a campaign to educate the public.
“We have to get past the mental block that says it’s too terrible to think about,” W. Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said in an interview. “We have to be ready to deal with it” and help people learn how to “best protect themselves.”
Officials say they are moving aggressively to conduct drills, prepare communication guides and raise awareness among emergency planners of how to educate the public.
Over the years, Washington has sought to prevent nuclear terrorism and limit its harm, mainly by governmental means. It has spent tens of billions of dollars on everything from intelligence and securing nuclear materials to equipping local authorities with radiation detectors.
The new wave is citizen preparedness. For people who survive the initial blast, the main advice is to fight the impulse to run and instead seek shelter from lethal radioactivity. Even a few hours of protection, officials say, can greatly increase survival rates.
Administration officials argue that the cold war created an unrealistic sense of fatalism about a terrorist nuclear attack. “It’s more survivable than most people think,” said an official deeply involved in the planning, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “The key is avoiding nuclear fallout.”
The administration is making that argument with state and local authorities and has started to do so with the general public as well. Its Citizen Corps Web site says a nuclear detonation is “potentially survivable for thousands, especially with adequate shelter and education.” A color illustration shows which kinds of buildings and rooms offer the best protection from radiation.
In June, the administration released to emergency officials around the nation an unclassified planning guide 130 pages long on how to respond to a nuclear attack. It stressed citizen education, before any attack.
Without that knowledge, the guide added, “people will be more likely to follow the natural instinct to run from danger, potentially exposing themselves to fatal doses of radiation.”
Specialists outside of Washington are divided on the initiative. One group says the administration is overreacting to an atomic threat that is all but nonexistent.
Peter Bergen, a fellow at the New America Foundation and New York University’s Center on Law and Security, recently argued that the odds of any terrorist group obtaining a nuclear weapon are “near zero for the foreseeable future.”
But another school says that the potential consequences are so high that the administration is, if anything, being too timid.
“There’s no penetration of the message coming out of the federal government,” said Irwin Redlener, a doctor and director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University. “It’s deeply frustrating that we seem unable to bridge the gap between the new insights and using them to inform public policy.”
White House officials say they are aware of the issue’s political delicacy but are nonetheless moving ahead briskly.
The administration has sought “to enhance national resilience — to withstand disruption, adapt to change and rapidly recover,” said Brian Kamoie, senior director for preparedness policy at the National Security Council. He added, “We’re working hard to involve individuals in the effort so they become part of the team in terms of emergency management.”
A nuclear blast produces a blinding flash, burning heat and crushing wind. The fireball and mushroom cloud carry radioactive particles upward, and the wind sends them near and far.
The government initially knew little about radioactive fallout. But in the 1950s, as the cold war intensified, scientists monitoring test explosions learned that the tiny particles throbbed with fission products — fragments of split atoms, many highly radioactive and potentially lethal.
But after a burst of interest in fallout shelters, the public and even the government grew increasingly skeptical about civil defense as nuclear arsenals grew to hold thousands of warheads.
In late 2001, a month after the Sept. 11 attacks, the director of central intelligence told President George W. Bush of a secret warning that Al Qaeda had hidden an atom bomb in New York City. The report turned out to be false. But atomic jitters soared.
“History will judge harshly those who saw this coming danger but failed to act,” Mr. Bush said in late 2002.
In dozens of programs, his administration focused on prevention but also dealt with disaster response and the acquisition of items like radiation detectors.
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“Public education is key,” Daniel J. Kaniewski, a security expert at George Washington University, said in an interview. “But it’s easier for communities to buy equipment — and look for tech solutions — because there’s Homeland Security money and no shortage of contractors to supply the silver bullet.”
Dr. Irwin Redlener of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness says new insights are not reaching the public.
Multimedia
Graphic
Duck and Cover
After Hurricane Katrina in 2005 revealed the poor state of disaster planning, public and private officials began to question national preparedness for atomic strikes. Some noted conflicting federal advice on whether survivors should seek shelter or try to evacuate.
In 2007, Congress appropriated $5.5 million for studies on atomic disaster planning, noting that “cities have little guidance available to them.”
The Department of Homeland Security financed a multiagency modeling effort led by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The scientists looked at Washington, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and other big cities, using computers to simulate details of the urban landscape and terrorist bombs.
The results were revealing. For instance, the scientists found that a bomb’s flash would blind many drivers, causing accidents and complicating evacuation.
The big surprise was how taking shelter for as little as several hours made a huge difference in survival rates.
“This has been a game changer,” Brooke Buddemeier, a Livermore health physicist, told a Los Angeles conference. He showed a slide labeled “How Many Lives Can Sheltering Save?”
If people in Los Angeles a mile or more from ground zero of an attack took no shelter, Mr. Buddemeier said, there would be 285,000 casualties from fallout in that region.
Taking shelter in a place with minimal protection, like a car, would cut that figure to 125,000 deaths or injuries, he said. A shallow basement would further reduce it to 45,000 casualties. And the core of a big office building or an underground garage would provide the best shelter of all.
“We’d have no significant exposures,” Mr. Buddemeier told the conference, and thus virtually no casualties from fallout.
On Jan. 16, 2009 — four days before Mr. Bush left office — the White House issued a 92-page handbook lauding “pre-event preparedness.” But it was silent on the delicate issue of how to inform the public.
Soon after Mr. Obama arrived at the White House, he embarked a global campaign to fight atomic terrorism and sped up domestic planning for disaster response. A senior official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the new administration began a revision of the Bush administration’s handbook to address the issue of public communication.
“We started working on it immediately,” the official said. “It was recognized as a key part of our response.”
The agenda hit a speed bump. Las Vegas was to star in the nation’s first live exercise meant to simulate a terrorist attack with an atom bomb, the test involving about 10,000 emergency responders. But casinos and businesses protested, as did Senator Harry Reid of Nevada. He told the federal authorities that it would scare away tourists.
Late last year, the administration backed down.
“Politics overtook preparedness,” said Mr. Kaniewski of George Washington University.
When the administration came out with its revised planning guide in June, it noted that “no significant federal response” after an attack would be likely for one to three days.
The document said that planners had an obligation to help the public “make effective decisions” and that messages for predisaster campaigns might be tailored for schools, businesses and even water bills.
“The most lives,” the handbook said, “will be saved in the first 60 minutes through sheltering in place.”
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http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/holiday-terror-warning-cites-car-bombs-small-arms/story?id=12417968
Holiday Terror Warning Cites Car Bombs and Small Arms Attack
Authorities Worry About Christmas Attack For 'Psychological Impact'
By RICHARD ESPOSITO
Dec. 17, 2010
Federal law enforcement terror bulletins have become as much a part of the holiday season in the past decade as egg nog and department store Santas.
But this year, which ends amid a heightened concern over terror, is a little different. A Department of Homeland Security bulletin sent to law enforcement nationwide Thursday says that federal authorities worry terrorists will try to rattle Americans by attacking during the holidays, and lists concerns including car bombs, trucks ramming crowds and a Mumbai-style small arms attack.
"We are concerned these terrorists may seek to exploit the likely significant psychological impact of an attack targeting mass gatherings in large metropolitan areas during the 2010 holiday season, which has symbolic importance to many in the United States," The "Security Awareness for the Holiday Season" bulletin states.
**Must be christians, because the bible is more violent than the koran or something.....
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http://fromtheold.com/news/entertainment/japanese-version-tsa-20798
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http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d05646r.pdf
"Undocumented Americans" Harry Reid calls them.
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""Undocumented Americans" Harry Reid calls them."
- Control of the terminology has been the weapon ever since people tolerated calling the convenience killing of an unborn child a 'choice'. Now government takeover of healthcare is the 'Affordability Act', and whether you sneak over the border or kill a border agent to get in, you are document-challenged. Granting citizenship to trespassers is to 'DREAM'.
"Why not break EVERY law?"
- Perfectly logical to break laws we don't enforce. The Feds won't enforce and won't let states enforce. So why not a) crack down on the crimes around the crime, and b) have states put pocketbook pressure back on the Feds.
Illegals tend to have false ID, don't they? Why not elevate and prosecute laws for displaying false identification to an officer, an employer, an aid worker as a version of felony identity theft? The financial component of the crime alone often reaches felony levels. Then perhaps going home could be an option offered in lieu of jail time.
When the states fail to follow a federal guideline like drinking age 21 or a federal freeway speed limit standard, the Feds cut off federal funds. Don't states have similar financial leverage? Revoke the property tax exemption on federal properties for malfeasance. Require border enforcement for preferential treatment on property taxation. Foreclose and sell off those properties in sheriff auctions, just as the taxing authority would for anyone else? Why are local property taxes zero for federal office buildings? Who pays for the teachers and the schools if property taxes are at zero? The local streets in front of Federal buildings cost money to build and maintain. Post Office property taxes are zero. How much do their competitors pay? Even it up.
Revoke their state sales tax exemption for malfeasance - not operating as a federal government, failure to perform a basic function: border enforcement. No?
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It's a constitutional question I have no answer for. But I like the idea! The federal gov't is tasked with securing the borders, and instead attacks states like Arizona for trying to protect the citizens the USG won't.
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IThe federal gov't is tasked with securing the borders, and instead attacks states like Arizona for trying to protect the citizens the USG won't.
The federal government is also tasked with foreign policy (yes I agree I am not impressed). I suppose we could simply shoot
each illegal alien as they cross the border, but I hardly think that would help our foreign policy. And CA complains a lot about the cost of
illegal aliens, but loves those low cost workers around their house.
My point is that it is not an easy solution. And deportation, which is not only impractical, would cost billions and billions of dollars.
Better to find a solution that is practical from all aspects.
While I am against illegal immigration and would vote against the DREAM bill, if you look deeper at your statistics you posted
regarding crime there is a direct correlation between education level (crime committed by the 60% that did not finish high school) and crime.
By the way, in the spirit of full disclosure those immigration statistics you posted in "Rest in Peace" were misleading.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/immigration/taxes.asp
It would be nice one day, if a reasonable and practical compromise could be reached between "deport them all" versus "full amnesty for all".
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DREAM Act.
Forget for a moment the part about granting illegal alien students legal status here in the U.S., what do you think about granting
legal status to illegal aliens who serve in our Military and fight for our country?
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Illegal aliens cannot legally serve in the US military. Normally, for enlistment one must be a permanent resident alien (green card holder), although recently there was a program opened for lawful non-resident aliens (such as those here on a student visa or other lawful purpose) to enlist as interpreters if they spoke a needed language. I'm aware of only one illegal alien who used bogus documents to enlist (a felony) that in his case was not prosecuted when discovered and allowed to stay in.
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Illegal aliens cannot legally serve in the US military. Normally, for enlistment one must be a permanent resident alien (green card holder), although recently there was a program opened for lawful non-resident aliens (such as those here on a student visa or other lawful purpose) to enlist as interpreters if they spoke a needed language. I'm aware of only one illegal alien who used bogus documents to enlist (a felony) that in his case was not prosecuted when discovered and allowed to stay in.
Yes, that is true, however the DREAM Act provides that if illegal aliens meet certain conditions and serve two years in the military, they will
be given a path to legal status. The Pentagon seems to support this provision; offering a pool of potential enlistees.
My question was, "Do you think this is a good idea?"
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Well, some years back, we trained elite Mexican paratroopers in special operation/counterterrorist techniques to fight the drug cartels. Upon their return to Mexico, many deserted and went to work for the cartels, forming Los Zetas.
It's known that some gangs pay large bonuses to members for enlisting in the military for the training and access to weaponry. So, let's make that problem worse?
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http://www.gangsorus.com/military.htm
Street Gangs Are Training In The Military
Using military to spread their reach
It is sad, but true, that street gang members have infiltrated our U.S. armed forces. They appear to be volunteering, not to serve our country, but to learn how to use military tactics and to learn how to kill. There is evidence of these gang bangers appearing with more and more frequency in many parts of the world - where ever our military forces are serving.
The following news article appeared in the "Stars and Stripes" the military newspaper for all branches of services. It contains alarming news about this growing problem.
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http://idtheft.about.com/od/leagalconcerns/a/IDT_Immigrants.htm
Social Security Fraud and Identity Theft
Stolen Social Security Numbers
By Jake Stroup, About.com Guide
Illegal aliens use stolen social security numbers to work in the US. They get the money, you get a headache.
Most people seem to think identity theft is a government issue, that our elected officials need to make some laws to stop identity theft.
The good news is, they already have. A series of data security regulations have been put in place to help protect our private information. Laws like FACTA and HIPAA have created fines for companies that let our identities slip into criminal hands. A big area of concern is stolen social security numbers, used for social security identity theft (usually just called Social Security Fraud.)
The odds of going to jail for identity theft are 1-in-1,000. Laws have been put in place to punish identity thieves. But the arrest rate is low – just one-in-twenty reported cases. The conviction rate is even lower, one-in-fifty.
In fact, looking over the past decade, the government seems to be encouraging identity theft among illegal immigrants. A major factor in identity theft (and the US economy in general) is illegal immigration. Nobody wants to talk about it, because of the political aspects.
Everyone knows you must give your employer a social security number to work in the United States. There are also laws requiring companies to verify that information, but an employee can work while the company waits for the response, even if they are using a stolen social security number.
Various law enforcement agencies have used the Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act to fight illegal aliens using stolen social security numbers. That was a good start, and helped slow down identity theft between 2005 and 2008. But that changed in the spring of 2009.
The US Supreme Court ruled that an illegal immigrant has not committed a crime unless s/he knew the stolen social security number they used belonged to a US citizen. In other words, saying “I didn’t know.” can be a defense if you work in the US illegally. After this ruling, hundreds of previous convictions were appealed, and social security fraud is suddenly back on the rise.
None of the agencies involved are trying to tackle the problem because they all benefit from it, as does corporate America. Here’s an example:
* The Social Security Administration (SSA) collects money from all workers, including identity thieves.
* If a name and number reported doesn’t match the name the SSA has on file, the money goes into an “Earnings Suspense File.” That fund held nearly $500 billion in 2006.
* The SSA will only pay benefits to one individual.
From that perspective, there is no reason to tell anyone they have a stolen social security number. In fact, it’s against the Internal Revenue code for the SSA to notify you that someone else is using your number.
The companies that pull your credit report know, too. But once again, they aren’t allowed to tell you. All three credit bureaus sell a specialized report, which shows all activity under a social security number. If there are two names associated with a certain SSN, two different files are made to track the credit, but both of them are associated with that SSN. Companies that want to give you credit can buy these reports, but they cannot tell you what they find.
So you may think you have perfect credit, and still get turned down for a loan. The company that denies your credit application will tell you to get a copy of your credit report. But that copy won’t show you everything they see in the credit file. Everyone knows you’re a victim of identity theft, but nobody can tell you. It’s as if the laws are set-up to make sure the last person to find out is the victim.
This is not a failure to communicate, it’s a shocking lack of concern toward protecting Americans. While the Department of Homeland Security insists on accuracy in financial records the IRS and SSA are taking cash from whoever sends it in. While congress is making laws to protect us, the Supreme Court tells us those laws don’t apply to the people breaking them. While we’re trying to buy a home or car, the loan company can’t tell us why they are denying the loan.
What can you do? For starters, vote. When your elected official needs to pay attention to something, write him/her a letter. Until the government addresses the illegal immigration issue, consider putting a credit freeze in place.
And above all protect your social security number until the government finds a better way to track citizens.
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http://www.cis.org/identitytheft
Illegal, but Not Undocumented: Identity Theft, Document Fraud, and Illegal Employment
By Ronald W. Mortensen
June 2009
Backgrounders and Reports
Download this Backgrounder as a pdf
Ronald W. Mortensen, PhD, is a retired career U.S. Foreign Service Officer and former Society for Human Resource Management senior executive.
This Backgrounder examines illegal immigration-related document fraud and identity theft that is committed primarily for the purpose of employment. It debunks three common misconceptions: illegal aliens are “undocumented;” the transgressions committed by illegal aliens to obtain jobs are minor; and illegal-alien document fraud and identity theft are victimless crimes. It discusses how some community leaders rationalize these crimes, contributing to a deterioration of the respect for laws in our nation, and presents a variety of remedies, including more widespread electronic verification of work status (E-Verify and the Social Security Number Verification Service) and immigrant outreach programs to explain the ramifications and risks of document fraud and identity theft.
The findings include:
* Illegal immigrants are not “undocumented.” They have fraudulent documents such as counterfeit Social Security cards, forged drivers licenses, fake “green cards,” and phony birth certificates. Experts suggest that approximately 75 percent of working-age illegal aliens use fraudulent Social Security cards to obtain employment.
* Most (98 percent) Social Security number (SSN) thieves use their own names with stolen numbers. The federal E-Verify program, now mandated in only 14 states, can detect this fraud. Universal, mandatory use of E-Verify would curb this and stop virtually 100 percent of child identity theft.
* Illegal immigration and high levels of identity theft go hand-in-hand. States with the most illegal immigration also have high levels of job-related identity theft. In Arizona, 33 percent or all identity theft is job-related (as opposed to identity theft motivated simply by profit). In Texas it is 27 percent; in New Mexico, 23 percent; in Colorado, 22 percent; California, 20 percent; and in Nevada, 16 percent. Eight of the 10 states with the highest percentage of illegal aliens in their total population are among the top 10 states in identity theft (Arizona, California, Florida, Texas, Nevada, New York, Georgia, and Colorado).
* Children are prime targets. In Arizona, it is estimated that over one million children are victims of identity theft. In Utah, 1,626 companies were found to be paying wages to the SSNs of children on public assistance under the age of 13. These individuals suffer very real and very serious consequences in their lives.
* Illegal aliens commit felonies in order to get jobs. Illegal aliens who use fraudulent documents, perjure themselves on I-9 forms, and commit identity theft in order to get jobs are committing serious offenses and are not “law abiding.”
* Illegally employed aliens send billions of dollars annually to their home countries, rather than spending it in the United States and helping stimulate the American economy. In October 2008 alone, $2.4 billion was transferred to Mexico.
* Tolerance of corruption erodes the rule of law. Corruption is a serious problem in most illegal aliens’ home countries. Allowing it to flourish here paves the way for additional criminal activity and increased corruption throughout society.
* Leaders support perpetrators and ignore victims. Political, civic, religious, business, education, and media leaders blame Americans for “forcing” illegal aliens to commit document fraud and identity theft. No similar concern is expressed for the American men, women, and children whose lives are destroyed in the process.
* The Social Security Administration and Internal Revenue Service facilitate illegal immigrant-driven identity theft. Both turn a blind eye to massive SSN fraud and take no action to stop it. The Social Security Administration assigns SSNs to new-born infants that are being used illegally. The IRS demands that victims pay taxes on wages earned by illegal aliens using their stolen SSNs, while taking no action to stop the identity theft.
* State and local governments need to adopt tougher laws to supplement federal efforts. The Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is targeting large document fraud rings and the most egregious employers, but their resources are limited and stretched across multiple priorities. In 2007, identity theft cases represented only 7 percent of the total ICE case load.
* Employers must do their part. They can ensure that they have a legal workforce by using a combination of the federal government’s E-Verify and Social Security Number Verification Service systems and by signing up for the federal government’s IMAGE program or privately conducted audits.
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http://www.cis.org/Costs
Much better than snopes. Aside from the corrosion of the rule of law and people harmed by illegal aliens, there are real financial costs.
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http://www.cis.org/Costs
Much better than snopes. Aside from the corrosion of the rule of law and people harmed by illegal aliens, there are real financial costs.
"Much better than snopes" ???
Snopes is impartial.
The CIS webpage is blatantly biased and opinionated against immigration!
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**And what is the snopes.com pedigree?
http://www.cis.org/About
About the Center for Immigration Studies
Who We Are
The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit, research organization. Since our founding in 1985, we have pursued a single mission – providing immigration policymakers, the academic community, news media, and concerned citizens with reliable information about the social, economic, environmental, security, and fiscal consequences of legal and illegal immigration into the United States.
The Center is governed by a diverse board of directors that has included active and retired university professors, civil rights leaders, and former government officials. Our research and analysis has been funded by contributions and grants from dozens of private foundations, from the U.S. Census Bureau and Justice Department, and from hundreds of generous individual donors.
Our board, our staff, our researchers, and our contributor base are not predominantly "liberal" or predominantly "conservative." Instead, we believe in common that debates about immigration policy that are well-informed and grounded in objective data will lead to better immigration policies.
The data collected by the Center during the past quarter-century has led many of our researchers to conclude that current, high levels of immigration are making it harder to achieve such important national objectives as better public schools, a cleaner environment, homeland security, and a living wage for every native-born and immigrant worker. These data may support criticism of US immigration policies, but they do not justify ill feelings toward our immigrant community. In fact, many of us at the Center are animated by a "low-immigration, pro-immigrant" vision of an America that admits fewer immigrants but affords a warmer welcome for those who are admitted.
Center Staff
Mark Krikorian, Executive Director
Steven A. Camarota, Director of Research
Cynthia Owens, Director of Administration
John Wahala, Assistant Director
Jessica Vaughan, Director of Policy Studies
Janice Kephart, Director of National Security Policy
Stephen Steinlight, Senior Policy Analyst
Jerry Kammer, Senior Research Fellow
Jon Feere, Legal Policy Analyst
Thomas P. Redding, Research Associate
Bryan Griffith, Multimedia Director
Ashley Monique Webster, Demographer
Zack Nunez, News Editor
Tomika Herrien, Project Assistant
Center Fellows
Don Barnett
Glynn Custred
Michael Cutler
Marti Dinerstein
James R. Edwards, Jr.
John Miano
Ronald W. Mortensen
David North
Stanley Renshon
David Seminara
Jan Ting
Board of Directors
Peter Nunez, Chairman of the Board of Directors
Vernon M. Briggs, Jr.
Thomas C.T. Brokaw
William W. Chip
T. Willard Fair
Otis Graham, Jr.
George Grayson
Carol Iannone
Frank Morris, Sr.
Harry E. Soyster
Anita Winsor-Edwards
The Katz Award for Excellence in the Coverage of Immigration
The Center hopes to raise the bar in immigration coverage by the media making an annual award to the journalist who best challenges the norm of immigration reporting. Read about our winners.
Internship Program
The Center for Immigration Studies is the nation’s only think tank devoted exclusively to the research of U.S. immigration policy and is a leading voice in the drive to inform policymakers and the public about immigration’s far-reaching impact. The Center is animated by a unique pro-immigrant, low-immigration vision which seeks fewer immigrants but a warmer welcome for those admitted.
Undergraduate interns are accepted for all semesters. Work hours, typically 20-35 hours per week, are flexible and unpaid. Interns assist the Center’s staff with a variety of research, media relations, and administrative tasks. Also, interns will likely attend and summarize into blog postings the Center’s events, Congressional hearings, and other immigration related events.
Applications are accepted year-round, though earlier applicants will have a particular advantage. To apply, please send you cover letter and resume as an e-mail attachments to press@cis.org.
Media References
Lexis Nexis was used to search media references that discussed both immigration and the organizations below.
Organization 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 Total
Pew Hispanic Center 570 621 1,489 3,136 1,854 1,577 9,247
Center for Immigration Studies 1,190 966 1,281 2,237 1,756 1,119 8,549
National Council of La Raza 509 872 735 1,256 1,314 1,200 5,886
FAIR 654 835 710 1,197 1,209 831 5,436
AILA 579 535 509 750 806 586 3,765
National Immigration Forum 233 283 415 671 643 187 2,432
Urban Institute 346 486 335 370 512 263 2,312
Migration Policy Institue 207 267 297 529 578 441 2,319
Kudos for the Center
“The Center for Immigration Studies brings a credible and articulate voice to a very
contentious debate.”
U.S. Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX)
“The Center for Immigration Studies is one of the best organizations working on one of America’s most important problems.”
Richard D. Lamm, former Democratic Governor of Colorado
“Most of us don’t have time to go out and crunch the numbers and census data and go through all of this. I just want to thank CIS for providing invaluable research. You can be sure the other side has plenty of money and plenty of numbers, a lot of it not very accurate.”
U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL)
"I want to congratulate the Center for Immigration Studies and especially Jessica Vaughn for their – for her very important work on this issue that is, I think, the key to understanding the solution to the problem we face today with illegal immigration."
Former U.S. Representative John Hostettler (R-IN)
"CIS has of course been the premier think tank on immigration issues…"
U.S. Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA)
“I don't necessarily agree with the positions…but I greatly value the clear and non-vituperative way you express a set of arguments that my students really need to wrestle with. Some are even persuaded.”
David Martin, University of Virginia Law Professor, Principal Deputy General Counsel of the DHS, former State Department Official and former General Counsel to the INS
“The Center is a leading voice in the drive to inform policymakers and the public about immigration’s far-reaching impact.”
Former U.S. Senator Alan Simpson (R-WY), Immigration Subcommittee Chairman
“I’ve found your insights keen, your reports provocative, and your news service quite useful . . . you guys are the ones who have raised the tone in the immigration debate.”
Scott Baldauf, Christian Science Monitor
“The Center is doing important work to focus attention on the important role of the current rapid U.S. population growth in dealing with the many environmental problems we face in this country.”
Doug La Follette, Wisconsin’s Democratic Secretary of State; Sierra Club National Board Member
“The reliable and credible reports issued by your organization are a tremendous asset to our country.”
Phyllis Schlafly, Eagle Forum
“Your analyses and other immigration reporting are excellent and I want to congratulate you and CIS for keeping this vital policy issue on the front burner.”
Joaquin Otero, former Deputy Under Secretary of Labor, and AFL-CIO Vice President
“I’ll applaud CIS again, they’ve done - to my knowledge - the first comprehensive study of what it means if Americans simply stand up and say, “we believe in the rule of law and we want elected officials that will enforce the law.”
Former U.S. Representative Tom Feeney (R-FL)
“The Center’s work is truly first rate.”
Frank Gaffney
Mark Krikorian is a “great national resource.”
William Bennett, Washington Fellow of the Claremont Institute
“I rely on the work of the Center of Immigration studies all the time. The Center brings a responsible, fact-based approach to a hot-button issue, and is an invaluable asset to the cause of sensible immigration reform. Its research routinely debunks entrenched misconceptions about our immigration policy. I can't say enough about the Center - its work is intelligent, courageous, and altogether indispensable.”
Rich Lowry
“CIS is the most reliable source of solid research on immigration issues.”
Former U.S. Representative Tom Tancredo (R-CO)
“…[J]ust thankful you guys are out there doing this great work.”
Robert J. Bodisch, Deputy Director, Office of Homeland Security
"The Center has established itself in the immigration debate as a body which, while being restrictionist in its general outlook, nonetheless produces economic research on immigration that is valuable to all sides in the debate."
John O'Sullivan, Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute
“I just received Jessica [Vaughan]'s newest critique of the US-VISIT Program, and like it a lot. . . . I don't see anybody else doing what she's done in the reporting of the problems with exit recording and estimating overstays.”
Senior Analyst, U.S. Government Accountability Office
“The materials sent to me are invaluable for my work.”
Shmuel Adler, Director, Israeli Ministry of Immigrant Absorption
“[The Center’s website]…is best used by more sophisticated researchers than undergraduates.”
F. J. Augustyn Jr., Library of Congress, Choice Review, April 2003
“Intelligence Squared U.S., the Oxford style, three-on-three debate series sponsored by The Rosenkranz Foundation, announced the results of Tuesday night's debate [that included Mark Krikorian] on the motion, "Let's stop welcoming undocumented immigrants." A packed audience at Asia Society and Museum, New York City voted 60% for the motion and 37% against at the conclusion of the debate.”
Intelligence Squared U.S.
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Surely you jest?
Check out their "unbiased" publication list...
http://www.cis.org/publications
On this very long supposedly impartial list, did you find any publications in favor of immigration?
Or their "Costs of Immigration" page...
http://www.cis.org/Costs
Did you find any articles about the possible benefits of immigration?
Or their "impartial" Home Page...
http://www.cis.org/
Best of all, on the Home Page I just love CIS's impartial VISION; :-o
We have a "vision of an America that admits fewer immigrants". Wow!
But they say they offer a warm welcome to the few they admit. But frankly
I can't find any pro immigration articles or publications.
Now that's what I call an "impartial" pedigree.
As for me, I'm just looking for a neutral source; that's why I picked Snopes.
Often called, "The definitive Internet reference source for misinformation."
At least they tell you when stuff doesn't pass the smell test like some of the articles
posted on CIS.
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Uh yeah, snopes is fine for "Will Bill Gates pay me 5 bucks for forwarding a chain email?" questions, not answers to serious policy issues.
Disregard CIS if you wish. Let's ask a simple question: How's that illegal immigration working out for California? You guys getting rich from all the illegals?
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http://formerspook.blogspot.com/2010/12/crash-program.html
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Crash Program
Since 9-11, various government officials have warned about the possibility of a terrorist attack using a radiological weapons (say, a "dirty bomb"), or an actual nuclear device. It remains one of the most frightening scenarios for those charged with keeping us safe.
But such warnings often carried caveats, to mitigate public fears. For example, despite Al-Qaida's demonstrated interest in nuclear and radiological weapons, we were told it would "be difficult" for terrorists to fabricate or obtain such devices, and smuggle them into America for detonation. The government has also spent freely in an effort to deter potential terrorist attacks using nuclear or radiological weapons, investing hundreds of millions of dollars into detection technology alone.
Some of that investment was on display in the Atlanta area last month, as federal, state and local agents scanned hundreds of trucks along Interstate 20, looking for radiological material. The event, which lasted for several days, was described as an "exercise." A few analysts expressed doubt about that explanation, given the scope of the drill, and the fact that continued during the Atlanta rush hour, snarling traffic for miles on either side of the checkpoints.
And federal preparations for the unthinkable aren't limited to scanners and search exercises. There's been a flurry of activity in recent months surrounding a new drug called CBLB502 and a company called Cleveland BioLabs. Less than two weeks ago, the Food and Drug Administration took the unusual step of labeling CBLB502 as an "orphan drug," reserved for medications used to treat rare diseases and conditions. The orphan drug designation came only four months after the FDA granted "fast track" status for CBLB502, accelerating its development and potential introduction.
Why those designations for Cleveland BioLab's new product? Because CBLB502 is the only drug available to reduce the risk of death due to total body irradiation. The most likely cause of that condition: a radiological or nuclear disaster.
While orphan drug status is often reserved for medications with limited market potential, Cleveland BioLabs has already found a buyer for CBLB502: the U.S. military. Back in September, the Pentagon gave the firm a $14.8 million contract for an injectable form of the drug, to protect troops during a nuclear catastrophe. That contract allowed Cleveland BioLabs to complete more tests and the application process with the FDA.
Since Congress passed the Orphan Drug Act 27 years ago, less that 250 new medications and treatments have reached the market, so that means CBLB502 is in very select company. It is the first designed to combat the effects of a massive radiation dose.
The rush to get the drug on the market raises a rather obvious question. The threat of a nuclear or radiological attack by terrorists has existed for more than a decade. If their capabilities in those areas have remained rather crude, why expedite production and introduction of CBLB502? Why not spend the money on more pressing homeland security needs?
The answer can probably be told by intelligence dispatches that haven't been featured in WikiLeaks. Based on the recent spate of CBRN exercises (and the accelerated introduction of CBLB502), it appears the feds are more concerned than ever about the possibility of a terrorist attack, using a nuclear bomb or a radiological device. And, since the drug is used for treatment after radiation exposure, the government isn't taking any chances. Doses of CBLB502 will be administered to military personnel responding to a nuclear or radiological attack, allowing them to do their job in the days following the catastrophe.
Production of the drug also affirms our worst fears about that scenario. Despite all the equipment, all the personnel and all that money, the terrorists still have a reasonable chance of success, once they get a dirty bomb (or a full-up nuke) in our territory. That's why the crash program for CBLB502 is clearly aimed at the aftermath. From the homeland security perspective, it makes sense to prepare now, for an attack that may be on the way, and could very well succeed when the elements come together.
One final note: some reports peg the government's initial order of the drug at 37,000 doses. That quantity is sufficient for military responders, but not for civilians living in the disaster zone. Without larger purchases, civilians exposed to high doses of radiation during terrorist attacks will be on their own. Welcome to government-run healthcare.
***
ADDENDUM: Here's another element of this crash program that we find rather revealing. While Al-Qaida's interest in WMD has never waned, there is no evidence of a recent breakthrough in terms of their capabilities to produce such weapons. The government's rush to get CBLB502 into production suggests a growing concern over bin Laden simply purchasing the needed weaponry from Iran or friendly elements within the Pakistan military. And judging by the timeline for the anti-radiation drug program, U.S. officials see a rapidly escalating CBRN threat against the homeland over the next five years.
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"protect your social security number until the government finds a better way to track citizens."
Good luck getting mandatory car or health insurance without giving your ss no. out to private cos.
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Effective advocacy does not mean you don't need to get your facts right. Calling your self non-partisan and unbiased doesn't in my experience (with Snopes or anyone else) make it so.
The cost of illegal aliens to federal, state and local governments is IMO a symptom, not the central problem. If the new people all came here fully employed as rocket scientists would there still not be an issue of enforcing our borders in order to remain a sovereign nation with borders, citizenship and a rule of law?
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Part of the "Transformation of America" Obama promised was the end of the rule of law and the creation of a permanent democrat underclass. That what these various attempts at amnesty are intended to do.
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http://abcnews.go.com/US/counterterror-officials-terror-chatter-rise-holiday-travel-season/story?id=12449231&page=2
Brennan and Napolitano knew of the arrests and said that the plot would not have threatened the United States, but Director Clapper, who briefs the president daily on the nation's security, appeared to be unfamiliar with the events in London.
"First of all, London," Sawyer said. "How serious is it? Any implication that it was coming here? ... Director Clapper?"
"London?" Clapper said, before Brennan entered the conversation explaining the arrests.
Later in the interview, Sawyer returned to the subject.
"I was a little surprised you didn't know about London," Sawyer told Clapper.
"Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't," he replied.
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Woof,
Well, won't that help us sleep better at night. Makes you wonder what else they are clueless about. :-P
P.C.
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Well, AG Holder is concerned about homegrown terrorists while the Obama administration continues to cuddle with muslim brotherhood front groups.
Holder told ABC News yesterday: "It is one of the things that keeps me up at night. You didn't worry about this even two years ago – about individuals, about Americans, to the extent that we now do. And – that is of – of great concern.
"The threat has changed from simply worrying about foreigners coming here, to worrying about people in the United States, American citizens – raised here, born here, and who for whatever reason (whatever reason?), have decided that they are going to become radicalized and take up arms against the nation in which they were born," he said.
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http://www.strategypage.com/on_point/20101221225721.aspx
Season's Greetings From Al-Qaida
by Austin Bay
December 21, 2010
"Just how real is the holiday terrorist threat?"
The question isn't rhetorical, nor is it an arid theoretical. Since Thanksgiving, it's been the query of the season, reflecting the uneasy spirit of our times. I've had it popped on me at parties, in the gym, on the phone and by my wife.
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DECEMBER 20, 2010
By SEAN GARDINER for The Wall Street Journal
Earlier this month the New York Police Department ran an antiterrorism exercise simulating an attack on the city.
A team of terrorists unleashed a coordinated series of bombings and gun attacks around the city in the simulation. At one point, terrorists attacked New York police officials visiting wounded officers in a hospital. By the time the daylong attacks were over, dozens of people had been killed and many more wounded.
The NYPD simulation was different from any of the terrorist incidents that have actually hit New York, such as the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks where terrorists hijacked planes to destroy the World Trade Center, or the foiled Times Square car-bombing attempt in May of this year.
Instead, the simulation deliberately mirrored the 2008 massacre in Mumbai. Within minutes of one another on the night of Nov. 26, 2008, 10 gunmen attacked various locations in the Indian city, including two luxury hotels, a hospital and a railway station. The attack stretched on for three days as hostages were taken at several of the locations. Ultimately, 174 people were killed.
Until Mumbai, NYPD counterterrorism officials felt reasonably comfortable that they were prepared for any type of terrorist attack. But that comfort level was built on preparing for a single event, not a series of coordinated attacks that would terrorize a city for days on end.
"The Mumbai attack two years ago was a bit of a game changer," Mitchell Silber, head of the NYPD's intelligence analysis division, said. "It was a model that most counterterrorism practitioners hadn't really considered. The armed gunmen roaming around the city taking hostages, that wasn't something we had seen by any jihadist group. That was a real eye-opener." Mr. Silber said the more NYPD officials learned about the Mumbai attacks "the more similarities we saw between Mumbai city and New York City." Both, he said, are financial centers; both are surrounded by water on three sides; both get intense media attention.
The latest simulation made additional sense, he said, in light of the rumors this past fall that jihadists were planning another "Mumbai-style" attack somewhere in Europe.
So on Dec. 3, the NYPD's top brass gathered inside the department's headquarters in downtown Manhattan, in the Police Academy on East 20th Street and a third location, which police don't want to identify, that will be activated in the event police headquarters is destroyed. More than 40 senior commanders took part, and a facilitator introduced "injects," or new complications, into the exercise.
According to a memo reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, the police were given a fictional scenario that began with President Barack Obama visiting New York for a bill signing. At the same time, convicted Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad was scheduled to appear in federal court. The attacks began with bombings in downtown that resulted in 18 dead and dozens injured. The president went ahead with the bill signing at the World Trade Center site, when another bomb went off nearby. He was whisked away.
The attack wasn't over. Six gunmen piled out of a van at Herald Square and opened fire on shoppers and pedestrians. They then entered the Macy's department store and took 26 hostages.
As in Mumbai, police in the simulation had trouble containing and anticipating the terrorists. At one point, police who tried to rescue hostages were shot by snipers. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Chief of Department Joseph Esposito went to Bellevue Hospital to visit wounded police officers, then both were incapacitated when a bomb exploded inside the emergency room, according to the simulation.
This is the eighth such large-scale tabletop exercise held by the NYPD since Mumbai, according to Paul Browne, the NYPD's spokesman. He said this exercise provided several valuable lessons. For instance, conventional wisdom was that the best way to deal with multiple subway bombings was to shut down all mass transportation and evacuate everyone by foot, Mr. Browne said. But the exercise showed the advantage of continuing to use buses during an attack to shepherd civilians out of lower Manhattan.
The exercise also showed that the first responding officers to Macy's shouldn't have evacuated people and waited for reinforcements, the traditional response in a hostage situation. Instead, the police could have minimized casualties by quickly finding and killing the terrorists who were shooting people.
Mr. Browne said the exercise also served as a reminder that the NYPD needs to obtain or update floor plans of the city's large department stores in case hostage-taking or some other standoff occurs there. Currently, the NYPD keeps floor plan copies for all of the city's major hotels and many popular buildings.
The department has taken other steps to prepare for a similar attack. Since Mumbai, Mr. Browne said, the NYPD has trained and equipped an addition 375 officers to use "heavy weapons" for a prolonged siege situation. The heavy weapons—MP5 submachine guns and Mini-14 semiautomatic carbine rifles—are needed to counteract military-style assault weapons like the ones used in Mumbai.
Lastly, police are preparing for more chaos. They now assume that when they advise civilians to "shelter in place," many will flee the island on foot as they did during the last major power blackout. That means police will need to protect pedestrians leaving Manhattan via the East River bridges or ferries.
sean.gardiner@wsj.com
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Heckler & Koch probed over Mexico arms sales
Published: 22 Dec 10 11:47 CET
Online: http://www.thelocal.de/national/20101222-31963.html
Police have searched the premises of renowned German gun maker Heckler & Koch on suspicion that the firm was breaking a ban on weapons sales to parts of Mexico that are plagued by bloody drug gang warfare.
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http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/12/28/indiana-grandmother-muslim-convert-investigated-possible-terror-link/
A 46-year-old Indiana grandmother is under investigation for her possible ties to suspected and convicted international terrorists, FoxNews.com has learned.
Muslim-convert Kathie Smith, 46, a U.S. citizen living in Indianapolis who has blogged about her granddaughter, last year married a suspected German jihadist, and has been flying back and forth between the U.S. and Germany as recently as two weeks ago.
A pro-jihadist video featuring Smith and her husband – alongside photos of members of the Islamic Jihad Union charged with plotting failed terror attacks against U.S. targets in Germany -- is being investigated by the Indiana Intelligence Fusion Center. The center is a counterterror intelligence clearinghouse staffed by law enforcement officers from local and federal agencies, including the FBI and Department of Homeland Security.
“Certainly, it’s being looked at and evaluated by Indiana State Police, which runs Indiana Intelligence Fusion Center, ” Indiana Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Emily Norcross told FoxNews.com, adding that the video would be passed along to appropriate law enforcement for further investigation.
FBI spokeswoman Jenny Shearer said: “As you’re aware, FBI and DOJ policy precludes us from confirming or denying the existence of an investigation.”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Washington office did not respond to a request for comment.
Interpol, which helps government law enforcement agencies track crime suspects around the world, declined to comment, citing policy.
The FBI also did not respond to an e-mail from FoxNews.com asking why Smith is not on the federal government’s no-fly list. Smith, meanwhile, said she believes her name is on some kind of government “watch list.”
In lengthy e-mail exchanges with FoxNews.com, Smith claimed that she has been repeatedly subjected to hours-long interrogations by Homeland Security every time she travels. She said her luggage has been subjected to bomb residue tests, and that officials asked her numerous detailed questions about her husband. She also claims DHS officials on more than one occasion escorted her onto a departing airplane.
DHS did not respond to FoxNews.com’s request for comment on Smith’s allegations.
Smith — who now calls herself Zubaida — added that she and her husband were met and interrogated by German police while in a taxi in October 2009.
German police, however, said they were not currently investigating an American woman, but declined to say whether they were aware of Smith.
In lengthy e-mail exchanges with FoxNews.com, Smith alternatively defended her online postings, denied being anti-American, called the Sept. 11 attacks an inside job, the U.S. a terrorist organization and praised the American-born radical Muslim cleric Anwar al Awlaki -- architect, trainer and inspiration for many of the recent terrorist attacks attempted or committed against the U.S. President Obama last April approved Awlaki's inclusion on the CIA's targeted killing list.
In one e-mail to FoxNews.com, Smith wrote:
“If your neighbor was being attacked by a perpetrator, would you just stand there and say, 'Oh I will let someone come who has a gun to help them'? No, you would rush to their defense. And use any type of "weapon" to help that person... this is what I am doing. I am defending the defenseless. I am defending my home and family and their right to safety. No matter who it is at my door. These are the rights the Constitution gives me. The very right this Communistic government is trying to take away from me and the rest of the Americans.”
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/12/28/indiana-grandmother-muslim-convert-investigated-possible-terror-link
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Separating Terror from Terrorism
December 30, 2010
By Scott Stewart
On Dec. 15, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sent a joint bulletin to state and local law enforcement agencies expressing their concern that terrorists may attack a large public gathering in a major U.S. metropolitan area during the 2010 holiday season. That concern was echoed by contacts at the FBI and elsewhere who told STRATFOR they were almost certain there was going to be a terrorist attack launched against the United States over Christmas.
Certainly, attacks during the December holiday season are not unusual. There is a history of such attacks, from the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 on Dec. 21, 1988, and the thwarted millennium attacks in December 1999 and January 2000 to the post-9/11 airliner attacks by shoe bomber Richard Reid on Dec. 22, 2001, and by underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on Dec. 25, 2009. Some of these plots have even stemmed from the grassroots. In December 2006, Derrick Shareef was arrested while planning an attack he hoped to launch against an Illinois shopping mall on Dec. 22.
Mass gatherings in large metropolitan areas have also been repeatedly targeted by jihadist groups and lone wolves. In addition to past attacks and plots directed against the subway systems in major cities such as Madrid, London, New York and Washington, 2010 saw failed attacks against the crowds in New York’s Times Square on May 1 and in Pioneer Courthouse Square in downtown Portland, Ore., on Nov. 26.
With this history, it is understandable that the FBI and the DHS would be concerned about such an attack this year and issue a warning to local and state law enforcement agencies in the United States. This American warning also comes on the heels of similar alerts in Europe, warnings punctuated by the Dec. 11 suicide attack in Stockholm.
So far, the 2010 holiday season has been free from terrorist attacks, but as evidenced by all the warnings and concern, this season has not been free from the fear of such attacks, the psychological impact known as “terror.” In light of these recent developments, it seems appropriate discuss the closely related phenomena of terrorism and terror.
Propaganda of the Deed
Nineteenth-century anarchists promoted what they called the “propaganda of the deed,” that is, the use of violence as a symbolic action to make a larger point, such as inspiring the masses to undertake revolutionary action. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, modern terrorist organizations began to conduct operations designed to serve as terrorist theater, an undertaking greatly aided by the advent and spread of broadcast media. Examples of attacks designed to grab international media attention are the September 1972 kidnapping and murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics and the December 1975 raid on OPEC headquarters in Vienna. Aircraft hijackings followed suit, changing from relatively brief endeavors to long, drawn-out and dramatic media events often spanning multiple continents.
Today, the proliferation of 24-hour television news networks and the Internet have allowed the media to broadcast such attacks live and in their entirety. This development allowed vast numbers of people to watch live as the World Trade Center towers collapsed on Sept. 11, 2001, and as teams of gunmen ran amok in Mumbai in November 2008.
This exposure not only allows people to be informed about unfolding events, it also permits them to become secondary victims of the violence they have watched unfold before them. As the word indicates, the intent of “terrorism” is to create terror in a targeted audience, and the media allow that audience to become far larger than just those in the immediate vicinity of a terrorist attack. I am not a psychologist, but even I can understand that on 9/11, watching the second aircraft strike the South Tower, seeing people leap to their deaths from the windows of the World Trade Center Towers in order to escape the ensuing fire and then watching the towers collapse live on television had a profound impact on many people. A large portion of the United State was, in effect, victimized, as were a large number of people living abroad, judging from the statements of foreign citizens and leaders in the wake of 9/11 that “We are all Americans.”
During that time, people across the globe became fearful, and almost everyone was certain that spectacular attacks beyond those involving the four aircraft hijacked that morning were inevitable — clearly, many people were shaken to their core by the attacks. A similar, though smaller, impact was seen in the wake of the Mumbai attacks. People across India were fearful of being attacked by teams of Lashkar-e-Taiba gunmen, and concern spread around the world about Mumbai-style terrorism. Indeed, this concern was so great that we felt compelled to write an analysis emphasizing that the tactics employed in Mumbai were not new and that, while such operations could kill people, the approach would be less successful in the United States and Europe than it was in Mumbai.
Terror Magnifiers
These theatrical attacks have a strange hold over the human imagination and can create a unique sense of terror that dwarfs the normal reaction to natural disasters that are many times greater in magnitude. For example, in the 2004 Asian tsunami, more than 227,000 people died, while fewer than 3,000 people died on 9/11. Yet the 9/11 attacks produced not only a sense of terror but also a geopolitical reaction that has exerted a profound and unparalleled impact upon world events over the past decade. Terrorism clearly can have a powerful impact on the human psyche — so much so that even the threat of a potential attack can cause fear and apprehension, as seen by the reaction to the recent spate of warnings about attacks occurring over the holidays.
As noted above, the media serve as a magnifier of this anxiety and terror. Television news, whether broadcast on the airwaves or over the Internet, allows people to remotely and vicariously experience a terrorist event, and this is reinforced by the print media. While part of this magnification is due merely to the nature of television as a medium and the 24-hour news cycle, bad reporting and misunderstanding can also help build hype and terror. For example, when Mexican drug cartels began placing small explosive devices in vehicles in Ciudad Juarez and Ciudad Victoria this past year, the media hysterically reported that the cartels were using car bombs. Clearly, the journalists failed to appreciate the significant tactical and operational differences between a small bomb placed in a car and the far larger and more deadly vehicle-borne explosive device.
The traditional news media are not alone in the role of terror magnifier. The Internet has also become an increasingly effective conduit for panic and alarm. From breathless (and false) claims in 2005 that al Qaeda had pre-positioned nuclear weapons in the United States and was preparing to attack nine U.S. cities and kill 4 million Americans in an operation called “American Hiroshima” to claims in 2010 that Mexican drug cartels were still smuggling nuclear weapons for Osama bin Laden, a great deal of fearmongering can spread over the Internet. Website operators who earn advertising revenue based on the number of unique visitors who read the stories featured on their sites have an obvious financial incentive for publishing outlandish and startling terrorism claims. The Internet also has produced a wide array of other startling revelations, including the oft-recycled e-mail chain stating that an Israeli counterterrorism expert has predicted al Qaeda will attack six, seven or eight U.S. cities simultaneously “within the next 90 days.” This e-mail was first circulated in 2005 and has been periodically re-circulated over the past five years. Although it is an old, false prediction, it still creates fear every time it is circulated.
Sometimes a government can act as a terror magnifier. Whether it is the American DHS raising the threat level to red or the head of the French internal intelligence service stating that the threat of terrorism in that country has never been higher, such warnings can produce widespread public concern. As we’ve noted elsewhere, there are a number of reasons for such warnings, from trying to pre-empt a terrorist attack when there is incomplete intelligence to a genuine concern for the safety of citizens in the face of a known threat to less altruistic motives such as political gain or bureaucratic maneuvering (when an agency wants to protect itself from blame in case there is an attack). As seen by the public reaction to the many warnings in the wake of 9/11, including recommendations that citizens purchase plastic sheeting and duct tape to protect themselves from chemical and biological attack, such warnings can produce immediate panic, although, over time, as threats and warnings prove to be unfounded, this panic can turn into threat fatigue.
Those seeking to terrorize can and do use these magnifiers to produce terror without having to go to the trouble of conducting attacks. The empty threats made by bin Laden and his inner circle that they were preparing an attack larger than 9/11 — threats propagated by the Internet, picked up by the media and then reacted to by governments — are prime historical examples of this.
In recent weeks, we saw a case where panic was caused by a similar confluence of events. In October, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) issued the second edition of Inspire, its English-language magazine. As we discussed in our analysis of the magazine, its Open Source Jihad section pointed out a number of ways that attacks could be conducted by grassroots jihadists living in the West. In addition to the suggestion that an attacker could weld butcher knives onto the bumper of a pickup truck and drive it through a crowd, or use a gun as attackers did in Little Rock and at Fort Hood, another method briefly mentioned was that grassroots operatives could use ricin or cyanide in attacks. In response, the DHS decided to investigate further and even went to the trouble of briefing corporate security officers from the hotel and restaurant industries on the potential threat. CBS news picked up the story and ran an exclusive report compete with a scary poison logo superimposed over photos of a hotel, a dinner buffet and an American flag. The report made no mention of the fact that the AQAP article paid far less attention to the ricin and cyanide suggestion than it did to what it called the “ultimate mowing machine,” the pickup with butcher knives, or even the more practical — and far more likely — armed assault.
This was a prime example of terror magnifiers working with AQAP to produce fear.
Separation
Groups such as al Qaeda clearly recognize the difference between terrorist attacks and terror. This is seen not only in the use of empty threats to sow terror but also in the way terrorist groups claim success for failed attacks. For example, AQAP declared the failed Christmas Day 2009 “underwear” bombing to be a success due to the effect it had on the air-transportation system. In a special edition of Inspire magazine published in November following the failed attack against cargo aircraft, AQAP trumpeted the operation as a success, citing the fear, disruption and expense that resulted. AQAP claimed the cargo bomb plot and the Christmas Day plot were part of what it called “Operation Hemorrhage,” an effort to cause economic damage and fear and not necessarily kill large numbers of people.
As we’ve noted before, practitioners of terrorism lose a great deal of their ability to create terror if the people they are trying to terrorize adopt the proper mindset. A critical part of this mindset is placing terrorism in perspective. Terrorist attacks are going to continue to happen because there are a wide variety of militant groups and individuals who seek to use violence as a means of influencing a government — either their own or someone else’s.
There have been several waves of terrorism over the past century, but it has been a fairly constant phenomenon, especially over the past few decades. While the flavors of terror may vary from Marxist and nationalist strains to Shiite Islamist to jihadist, it is certain that even if al Qaeda and its jihadist spawn were somehow magically eradicated tomorrow, the problem of terrorism would persist.
Terrorist attacks are also relatively easy to conduct, especially if the assailant is not concerned about escaping after the attack. As AQAP has noted in its Inspire magazine, a determined person can conduct attacks using a variety of simple weapons, from a pickup to a knife, axe or gun. And while the authorities in the United States and elsewhere have been quite successful in foiling attacks over the past couple of years, there are a large number of vulnerable targets in the open societies of the West, and Western governments simply do not have the resources to protect everything — not even authoritarian police states can protect everything. This all means that some terrorist attacks will invariably succeed.
How the media, governments and populations respond to those successful strikes will shape the way that the attackers gauge their success. Obviously, the 9/11 attacks, which caused the United States to invade Afghanistan (and arguably Iraq) were far more successful than bin Laden and company could ever have hoped. The London bombings on July 7, 2005, where the British went back to work as unusual the next day, were seen as less successful.
In the final analysis, the world is a dangerous place. Everyone is going to die, and some people are certain to die in a manner that is brutal or painful. In 2001, more than 42,000 people died from car crashes in the United States and hundreds of thousands of Americans died from heart disease and cancer. The 9/11 attacks were the bloodiest terrorist attacks in world history, and yet even those historic attacks resulted in the deaths of fewer than 3,000 people, a number that pales in comparison to deaths by other causes. This is in no way meant to trivialize those who died on 9/11, or the loss their families suffered, but merely to point out that lots of people die every day and that their families are affected, too.
If the public will take a cue from groups like AQAP, it too can separate terrorism from terror. Recognizing that terrorist attacks, like car crashes and cancer and natural disasters, are a part of the human condition permits individuals and families to practice situational awareness and take prudent measures to prepare for such contingencies without becoming vicarious victims. This separation will help deny the practitioners of terrorism and terror the ability to magnify their reach and power.
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The (In)Humanity of it all:
http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=mpg&mpid=105&load=4753
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Its Pravda on the Beach (LA Times) so caveat lector; that said this case seems quite awful.
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Mother describes border vigilante killings in Arizona
Gina Gonzalez says her 9-year-old daughter, Brisenia Flores, pleaded for her life. Opening arguments begin in the trial of Shawna Forde of the Minutemen movement, who is accused in the killing of the girl and her father.
By Nicholas Riccardi, Los Angeles Times
January 25, 2011, 8:55 p.m.
Reporting from Tucson —
As her mother tells it, 9-year-old Brisenia Flores had begged the border vigilantes who had just broken into her house, "Please don't shoot me."
But they did — in the face at point-blank range, prosecutors allege, as Brisenia's father sat dead on the couch and her mother lay on the floor, pretending that she too had been killed in the gunfire.
Even as this city continues to mourn the victims in the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, another tragedy took center stage Tuesday, as opening arguments began in the trial of a member of a Minutemen group accused of killing Brisenia and her father, Raul Flores Jr.
Prosecutors allege that in May 2009, Shawna Forde decided to strike an odd alliance with drug dealers in southern Arizona: Forde would help the traffickers ransack their rivals' houses for stashes of drugs and cash, which could then fund her fledgling group, Minutemen American Defense.
She and another border vigilante, dressed in uniforms, identified themselves as law enforcement officers before bursting into the Flores home, prosecutors allege. If convicted, Forde could face the death penalty.
That second member of Forde's group is scheduled to go on trial next month, as is the alleged drug dealer with whom prosecutors say the Minutemen collaborated. But on Tuesday it was the turn of the woman who prosecutors contend masterminded the attack.
"Shawna Forde organized and planned this event," prosecutor Kellie L. Johnson told a Pima County Superior Court jury.
Forde's trial was almost delayed by the Giffords shooting. Her attorneys questioned whether an accused murderer allegedly driven by right-wing passions could get a fair trial here. The man charged in the Giffords rampage left behind a trail of writings with no coherent ideology, but Pima County Sheriff Clarence W. Dupnik set off a national firestorm by insisting that Arizona's conservative politics played a role in that attack.
Forde's lawyer, Kevin Larson, told jurors that there is no evidence she was in the Flores house during the attack.
"The state will present to you absolutely no witnesses that will put her in that home on May 30," Larson said. He said his client was simply guilty of being "an exaggerator extraordinaire" for boasting of her plans to rob drug smugglers.
Forde spent several years as a bit player in the national Minutemen movement, a loose-knit affiliation of groups that believe that if the federal government cannot secure the border, armed citizens should do the job.
Prosecutors say that in April 2009, Forde told two members of the movement in Denver that she had linked up with drug dealers in the tiny town of Arivaca, Ariz., just north of the Mexican border and about 50 miles southwest of Tucson. She proposed helping the dealers raid a rival's house, which would be full of drug profits she could steal, prosecutors allege.
The plan so alarmed the members, prosecutors say, that they contacted the FBI. But Larson said it was such an obviously outlandish idea that the FBI did nothing with it.
On Tuesday, Johnson and Brisenia's mother, Gina Gonzalez, outlined the chilling sequence of events in the attack.
Shortly before 1 a.m. on May 30, 2009, Gonzalez was woken by her husband, who told her that police seemed to be at the door. The two went to the front room, where their daughter Brisenia was sleeping on the couch so she could be close to her new dog.
There were two people in camouflage outside — a short, heavyset woman who did all the talking and a tall man carrying a rifle and pistol, his face blackened by greasepaint, Gonzalez said. The woman told them they were accused of harboring fugitives and needed to open the door.
Once the pair were inside, the man —identified by authorities as Jason Bush — told Flores, "Don't take this personal, but this bullet has your name on it," Gonzalez testified Tuesday.
According to testimony, Bush shot Flores, then Gonzalez. Gonzalez was hit in the shoulder and leg and slumped to the floor. She testified that she played dead as she heard Bush pump more bullets into her husband as Brisenia woke up.
"Why did you shoot my dad?" the girl asked, sobbing, according to Gonzalez's testimony. "Why did you shoot my mom?"
Gonzalez said she heard Bush slowly reload his gun and that he then ignored Brisenia's pleas and fired.
More men entered the house and ransacked the place. After they left, Gonzalez called 911. On a tape of the recording, played for the jury Tuesday, she suddenly realized that the attackers were returning, and crawled to the kitchen to grab her husband's gun.
Prosecutors say Bush came back in and fired on Gonzalez, who returned fire and apparently hit him, forcing him to retreat.
Gonzalez testified that the woman in the house looked like Forde, but she said she couldn't definitively say it was her "because I don't know her personally." She failed to identify Forde in a police lineup after the shooting.
Forde had Gonzalez's wedding ring and jewelry with her when she was arrested days after the shooting, authorities say. Shortly after her arrest, members of the Minutemen movement disavowed her, saying they did not trust her and that she had stayed on its fringes.
nicholas.riccardi@latimes.com
Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times
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GM wrote regarding the gun smuggling, "Perhaps Mexico should secure it's border....."
Mexico of course isn't going to do it and can't. I hate to say it, but isn't it only a matter of time before the U.S.military needs to secure and control both sides of that non-existent border, assuming the private vigilante system described is not a great solution...
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Criminals sometimes claim a political motivation behind their crimes. Sometimes there is a political agenda, more often it's just window dressing for typical criminal conduct.
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This thread now has over 100,000 reads 8-)
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http://thehill.com/homenews/house/143127-napolitano-warns-lawmakers-of-threat-from-homegrown-radicalization-domestic-terrorism
Napolitano warns of threat from homegrown radicalization, terrorism
By Jordy Yager - 02/09/11 07:00 PM ET
Homeland security and counter-terrorism officials warned lawmakers Wednesday that the nation is increasingly threatened by foreign terrorists who seek to recruit U.S. citizens.
The largest threat to the U.S. is no longer Osama Bin Laden, according to the director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCIC), Michael Leiter, but is now Anwar Al-Awlaki, the head of the Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula group based out of Yemen.
The increased threat that Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula poses revolves heavily around its ability to attract and reach U.S.-natives who want to be trained in terrorism techniques, and who could fall beneath the radar of intelligence circles more easily.
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http://liveshots.blogs.foxnews.com/2011/02/21/hezbollah-working-with-cartels/
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http://liveshots.blogs.foxnews.com/2011/02/21/hezbollah-working-with-cartels/
Only thing new there is the media attention.
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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42041567/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts
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(PJM Exclusive) DOJ Memo Confirms Terrorists Have Crossed the Border
PJM reveals a court filing showing that federal prosecutors have admitted a terror threat involving an Al-Shabaab human smuggler who claimed asylum.
March 23, 2011 - by Patrick Poole
A potentially explosive admission by federal prosecutors in the pending sentencing of Ahmed Muhammed Dhakane in a San Antonio federal courtroom could aid the case of border states looking to take the initiative to stem the flood of illegal immigrants coming into the U.S.
In this court filing, provided exclusively here at Pajamas Media, prosecutors admit that Dhakane, who ran a human smuggling ring based in Brazil for the Somali Al-Shabaab terrorist group, transported “violent jihadists” into the country. He stated that “he believed they would fight against the U.S. if the jihad moved from overseas locations to the U.S. mainland.” (p. 7)
The contents and implications of this admission by DOJ will be one of the items discussed when my colleagues Army Lt. Col Joseph Myers (ret.), Mark Hanna, and I will be testifying Wednesday before the Arizona House Military Affairs and Public Safety Committee on the topic of “Cross-border Terror Threats and Islamic Radicalization in Arizona.”
Dhakane was charged in March 2010 with lying about his terror ties when he applied for asylum in 2008, specifically omitting information that he had worked for two specially designated global terrorist entities (SDGT). He pleaded guilty earlier this year to lying to the FBI and awaits sentencing next month. Rather than trying him on terror charges, federal prosecutors are asking for terror enhancements on the sentence for lying to the FBI.
In the DOJ sentencing memorandum, federal prosecutors explain that Dhakane knowingly smuggled violent jihadists into the country:
More importantly, based on the Defendant’s recorded statements and admissions made to law enforcement agents, the Defendant was a former member, or at the very least, associated with [Al-Ittihad al-Islami] AIAI, an SDGT, and that he believed that there was no separation of personnel between AIAI, the Council of Islamic Courts, and Al-Shabbab, a designated [Foreign Terrorist Organization] FTO.
He admits that he knowingly believed he was smuggling violent jihadists into the United States with the full knowledge that if the decision was made by the SDGT, for which he was associated with in the past, to commit terrorist acts in the United States, these jihadists would commit violent acts in and against the United States. Because the law enforcement authorities are constantly trying to investigate, detect, and prevent the infiltration of potentially violent jihadists, the Defendant’s lies hid critical information from the United States authorities regarding his successful smuggling activities. Thus, the preponderance of the evidence proves that the other obvious motivation for him to lie on his asylum application was to cover up and obstruct the fact from United States authorities that he facilitated the smuggling of violent jihadists who are now present into the United States. (pp. 10-11)
This is far from the first time that Islamic terrorists are known to have attempted to enter the U.S, or actually succeeded. Just last year Homeland Security authorities put out an alert concerning a group of terror-tied Somalis who were attempting to enter the country through Mexico. Then last May another terror alert was issued for a known Al-Shabaab official, Mohamed Ali, who was suspected of trying to cross the border from Mexico. And in February 2010, a Virginia convert to Islam who was in contact with Al-Shabaab officials, Anthony Joseph Tracy, was charged for his role in an international smuggling ring that brought at least 200 Somalis into the U.S. on Cuban travel documents.
Other terrorist operatives are known to have successfully crossed the border:
•In February 2001, Mahmoud Kourani crossed the border from Tijuana in the trunk of a car, eventually settling in Dearborn, Michigan. Kourani, who federal prosecutors claimed had received training in weapons, intelligence, and spy craft in Iran, bribed a Mexican embassy official in Beirut to obtain a visa. Kourani’s brother is known to be Hezbollah’s security chief in southern Lebanon.
•In December 2002, Salim Boughader was arrested for smuggling 200 Lebanese, including Hezbollah operatives, across the border. Boughader had previously worked for Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV satellite network.
•In July 2004, Farida Goolam Mohamed Ahmed was arrested at a Texas airport boarding a flight to New York. According to the Washington Post, she was connected to a Pakistani terrorist group. Believed to be ferrying instructions to U.S.-based al-Qaeda operatives, authorities issued a terror alert for Washington D.C., New York, and New Jersey.
•In January 2005, two Hamas operatives, Mahmoud Khalil and Ziad Saleh, were arrested as part of a criminal enterprise in Los Angeles. Both had entered the U.S. after paying a smuggler $10,000 each to take them across the border.
•Rep. John Culberson said in November 2005 that an Iraqi al-Qaeda operative on the terror watch list was captured living near the Mexico-Texas border.
During our testimony before the Arizona legislature on Wednesday, Lt. Col. Myers will be discussing the nexus between the South American drug cartels and Islamic terrorist organizations, including al-Qaeda. With cartel violence already spilling across the border, and U.S. Border Patrol agents armed with beanbags being gunned down in the field by smuggling operatives, when might we see terrorist groups attempting to open up a new front against the U.S. across the vast stretches of our unguarded border?
Today we will be discussing what states might be able to do to confront this problem in the absence of federal attention to the border and exactly who might be on our side of the border ready to help terrorist groups. As DOJ has admitted in the Dhakane case, terrorist operatives are already inside the U.S. and are prepared to go operational at the command of their leadership. If the issue of homegrown terrorism is already keeping Attorney General Eric Holder awake at night, why aren’t similar concerns being translated into action to defend Americans from cross-border terror threats?
Patrick Poole is a regular contributor to Pajamas Media, and an anti-terrorism consultant to law enforcement and the military.
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:-o :-o :-o
URL please!!!
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http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/doj-memo-confirms-terrorists-have-crossed-the-border-pjm-exclusive/
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Amnesty International USA v. Clapper and Standing to Challenge Secret Surveillance Regimes
Orin Kerr • March 24, 2011 2:46 am
On Monday, the Second Circuit handed down a very important decision on standing to challenge secret surveillance programs in Amnesty International USA v. Clapper. The decision, by Judge Gerard Lynch and joined by Judges Calabresi and Sack, offers a very easy way for plaintiffs to have Article III standing to challenge secret surveillance statutes. The opinion strikes me as puzzling, however, and it appears to be in conflict with other Courts of Appeals cases on standing to challenge surveillance regimes. I suspect Supreme Court review is a serious possibility.
The new decision holds that the plaintiffs have established Article III standing to challenge Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which creates new procedures for authorizing government electronic surveillance targeting non-United States persons outside the United States for purposes of collecting foreign intelligence. The plaintiffs in the case are attorneys, journalists, and labor, legal, media, and human rights organizations who claim to believe that they may be monitored in the future pursuant to the statute, and they are claiming that their fear of surveillance — and costly measures they have taken to circumvent the monitoring that they think is likely — gives them Article III standing to challenge the surveillance program. Article III standing requires three elements: (1) injury in fact, which means an invasion of a legally protected interest that is concrete and particularized; (2) a causal relationship between the injury and the challenged conduct, which means that the injury fairly can be traced to the challenged action of the defendant, and (3) a likelihood that the injury will be redressed by a favorable decision.
The opinion is pretty complicated, but here’s the basic idea as I understand it. According to Judge Lynch, there is obviously injury in fact: By spending money to avoid surveillance, the plaintiffs suffered an injury-in-fact of losing money. Judge Lynch then concludes that the injury is fairly traceable to the surveillance if the plaintifs’ belief that they are going to be monitored is reasonable. Here’s the key passage:
If the plaintiffs can show that it was not unreasonable for them to incur costs out of fear that the government will intercept their communications under the FAA, then the measures they took to avoid interception can support standing. If the possibility of interception is remote or fanciful, however, their present-injury theory fails because the plaintiffs would have no reasonable basis for fearing interception under the FAA, and they cannot bootstrap their way into standing by unreasonably incurring costs to avoid a merely speculative or highly unlikely potential harm. Any such costs would be gratuitous, and any ethical concerns about not taking those measures would be unfounded. In other words, for the purpose of standing, although the plaintiffs’ economic and professional injuries are injuries in fact, they cannot be said to be “fairly traceable” to the FAA – and cannot support standing – if they are caused by a fanciful, paranoid, or otherwise unreasonable fear of the FAA.
Of course, no one really knows who is being monitored or when. But Judge Lynch concludes that the plaintiffs have standing because their fear of being monitored does not seem fanciful based on “a realistic understanding of the world.” From the opinion:
The plaintiffs have established that they suffered present injuries in fact – economic and professional harms – stemming from a reasonable fear of future harmful government conduct. They have asserted that the FAA permits broad monitoring through mass surveillance orders that authorize the government to collect thousands or millions of communications, including communications between the plaintiffs and their overseas contacts. The FAA is susceptible to such an interpretation, and the government has not controverted this interpretation or offered a more compelling one.
. . . .
The [plaintiff’s] fears are fairly traceable to the FAA because they are based on a reasonable interpretation of the challenged statute and a realistic understanding of the world. . . . . These plaintiffs . . . . have successfully demonstrated that their legitimate professions make it quite likely that their communications will be intercepted if the government – as seems inevitable – exercises the authority granted by the FAA.
The government argues the plaintiffs have failed to establish standing because the FAA does not itself authorize surveillance, but only authorizes the FISC to authorize surveillance. As a result, the government says the plaintiffs must speculate about at least two intervening steps between the FAA and any harm they might suffer as a result of the government conducting surveillance: first, that the government will apply for surveillance 6 authorization under the FAA, and, second, that the FISC will grant authorization.
But this argument fails. The presence of an intervening step does not, as a general rule, by itself preclude standing. Nor do the particular intervening steps the government identifies here – the government’s seeking authorization and the FISC’s approving it – preclude standing. With respect to the first step, as discussed above, it is more than reasonable to expect that the government will seek surveillance authorization under the FAA. We therefore cannot say that uncertainty about this step significantly attenuates the link between the FAA and the plaintiffs’ harms. Nor does the second intervening step add significant uncertainty. . . . It verges on the fanciful to suggest that the government will more than rarely fail to comply with the formal requirements of the FAA once it has decided that the surveillance is warranted.
How do the judges know these things? As best I can tell, they just sort of know, based on some news stories, an occasional FISA report, and their “realistic understanding of the world.”
If this new decision is right, then challenging secret surveillance statutes would seem to be pretty easy — in stark contrast with the previous understanding that it was extremely difficult. Other courts have held that standing requires a showing of actually being monitored. Under that standard, it is almost impossible to challenge new statutory surveillance authorities under the Fourth Amendment.
According to Judge Lynch, however, a reasonable fear of being monitored is enough. Since no one knows what the new secret programs actually are, but lots of people fear that they are very broad, you just need to get a broad class of people together who are really afraid of the surveillance, and then have them spend some money. On summary judgment, the plaintiff’s facts will be treated as true. Since the Government won’t say what the new secret surveillance program is, but the news reports usually report the scope of surveillance programs as extremely broad, no one will rebut the fears of surveillance and the judges will find the fears reasonable, creating Article III standing. True, the judges won’t know what the program is, either. But because they believe their own opinions are realistic, their lack of actual knowledge is no longer a barrier to standing. If this new decision holds, Article III standing to challenge surveillance programs would seem to now be pretty simple.
Whether you like the new decision or not, I suspect it’s not the last we’ve heard on this issue. The opinion strikes me as in pretty direct tension with cases like ACLU v. NSA, the 6th Circuit’s case rejecting standing for the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program during the Bush years. Given the importance of the issue, and the tensions among the circuits, I would suspect this case may be headed upstairs.
http://volokh.com/2011/03/24/amnesty-international-usa-v-clapper-and-standing-to-challenge-secret-surveillance-regimes/
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/3-mid-east-men-allegedly-try-to-infiltrate-marine-base-after-making-terrorist-threats/
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http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/national/remote-control-computer-programs-pose-terror-risks-to-aeroplanes/story-e6freooo-1226032870380
'Remote control' computer programs pose terror risks to aeroplanes
Alex Dickinson
From:The Courier-Mail
April 04, 201112:01AM
AEROPLANES could be taken over by remote control and forced to crash with the use of newly invented computer software.
Cyber attacks are now viewed by experts as the second-biggest risk to aviation behind natural disasters.
Representatives from Qantas and Virgin Airlines were warned of the threat at the Asia-Pacific Aviation Security Conference in Hong Kong.
Australian cyber-security expert Ty Miller, from Pure Hacking, told the conference whole fleets of planes could be affected.
"The stereotypical Die Hard 2 airport attack, where aircraft controls can be taken over, is no longer just a movie script. It's an actual reality,'' Mr Miller said.
"Depending on what information was accessed . . . the control of the aircraft themselves could be compromised.
"You could deal with planes so that when they're in the air they all of a sudden start dumping all of their fuel, or force the planes to take a nose-dive. And it's not necessarily one plane it could be a whole fleet of planes.''
Mr Miller's firm engages in "ethical hacking'', which involves testing the security of a network by trying to crack its systems.
Posing as a rogue employee with general access to an airline's systems, Mr Miller was recently able to take over the airline's entire network within a day.
"That would give us full administrator access to the whole computer system and access to potentially sensitive documents and data,'' he said.
He cited the Stuxnet worm incident, where an unknown attacker last year used the software to sabotage one of Iran's uranium enrichment plants.
The Stuxnet attack overwhelmed the nuclear facility's internal network, causing it to go offline.
"The analysis of the Stuxnet attack (on Iran) showed that it would have required a team of five or ten people working for at least six months,'' Mr Miller said.
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How to Tell if Your Neighbor is a Bombmaker
April 7, 2011
By Scott Stewart
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) released the fifth edition of its English-language jihadist magazine “Inspire” on March 30. AQAP publishes this magazine with the stated intent of radicalizing English-speaking Muslims and encouraging them to engage in jihadist militant activity. Since its inception, Inspire magazine has also advocated the concept that jihadists living in the West should conduct attacks there, rather than traveling to places like Pakistan or Yemen, since such travel can bring them to the attention of the authorities before they can conduct attacks, and AQAP views attacking in the West as “striking at the heart of the unbelievers.”
To further promote this concept, each edition of Inspire magazine has a section called “Open Source Jihad,” which is intended to equip aspiring jihadist attackers with the tools they need to conduct attacks without traveling to jihadist training camps. The Open Source Jihad sections in past editions have contained articles such as the pictorial guide with instructions titled “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom” that appeared in the first edition.
In this latest edition of Inspire there are at least three places where AQAP encourages jihadists to conduct “lone wolf” attacks rather than coordinate with others due to the security risks inherent in such collaboration (several jihadist plots have been thwarted when would-be attackers have approached government informants looking for assistance). In recent years there have been a number of lone wolf attacks inside the United States, such as the June 2009 shooting at an armed forces recruiting center in Little Rock, Ark.; the November 2009 Fort Hood shooting; and the failed bombing attack in New York’s Times Square in May 2010. Of course, the lone wolf phenomena is not just confined to the United States, as evidenced by such incidents as the March 2 shooting attack against U.S. military personnel in Frankfurt, Germany.
In the past, STRATFOR has examined the challenges that lone wolf assailants and small, insulated cells — what we call grassroots jihadists — present to law enforcement and intelligence agencies. We have also discussed the fact that, in many cases, grassroots defenders such as local police officers can be a more effective defense against grassroots attackers than centralized federal agencies.
But local federal agents and local police officers are not the only grassroots defenders who can be effective in detecting lone wolves and small cells before they are able to launch an attack. Many of the steps required to conduct a terrorist attack are undertaken in a manner that makes the actions visible to any outside observer. It is at these junctures in the terrorist attack cycle that people practicing good situational awareness can detect these attack steps — not only to avoid the danger themselves, but also to alert the authorities to the suspicious activity.
Detecting grassroots operatives can be difficult, but it is possible if observers focus not only on the “who” aspect of a terrorist attack but also the “how” — that is, those activities that indicate an attack is in the works. In the past we’ve talked in some detail about detecting preoperational surveillance as part of this focus on the “how.” Now, we would like to focus on detecting another element of the “how” of terrorism and discuss the ways one can detect signs of improvised-explosives preparation — in other words, how to tell if your neighbor is a bombmaker.
IEDs and Explosive Mixtures
In the 11th edition of “Sada al-Malahim,” AQAP’s Arabic-language online jihadist magazine, Nasir al-Wahayshi noted that jihadists “don’t need to conduct a big effort or spend a lot of money to manufacture 10 grams of explosive material” and that they should not “waste a long time finding the materials, because you can find all these in your mother’s kitchen, or readily at hand or in any city you are in.” Al-Wahayshi is right. It truly is not difficult for a knowledgeable individual to construct improvised explosives from a wide range of household chemicals like peroxide and acetone or chlorine and brake fluid.
It is important to recognize that when we say an explosive mixture or an explosive device is “improvised,” the improvised nature of that mixture or device does not automatically mean that the end product is going to be ineffective or amateurish. Like an improvised John Coltrane saxophone solo, some improvised explosive devices can be highly-crafted and very deadly works of art. Now, that said, even proficient bombmakers are going to conduct certain activities that will allow their intent to be discerned by an outside observer — and amateurish bombmakers are even easier to spot if one knows what to look for.
In an effort to make bombmaking activity clandestine, explosive mixtures and device components are often manufactured in rented houses, apartments or hotel rooms. We have seen this behavior in past cases, like the December 1999 incident in which the so-called “Millennium Bomber” Ahmed Ressam and an accomplice set up a crude bombmaking factory in a hotel room in Vancouver, British Colombia. More recently, Najibullah Zazi, who was arrested in September 2009, was charged with attempting to manufacture the improvised explosive mixture tri-acetone tri-peroxide (TATP) in a Denver hotel room. In September 2010, a suspected lone wolf assailant in Copenhagen, accidentally detonated an explosive device he was constructing in a hotel. Danish authorities believe the device was intended for an attack on the Jyllands-Posten newspaper, which was targeted because of its involvement in publishing the controversial cartoons featuring the Prophet Mohammed.
Similar to clandestine methamphetamine labs (which are also frequently set up in rental properties or hotel rooms), makeshift bombmaking operations frequently utilize volatile substances that are used in everyday life. Chemicals such as acetone, a common nail polish remover, and peroxide, commonly used in bleaching hair, can be found in most grocery, beauty, drug and convenience stores. Fertilizers, the main component of the bombs used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the 1993 World Trade Center attack, can be found in large volumes on farms or in farm supply stores in rural communities.
However, the quantities of these chemicals required to manufacture explosives is far in excess of that required to remove nail polish or bleach hair. Because of this, hotel staff, landlords and neighbors can fairly easily notice signs that someone in their midst is operating a makeshift bombmaking laboratory. They should be suspicious, for example, if a new tenant moves several bags of fertilizer into an apartment in the middle of a city, or if a person brings in gallons of acetone, peroxide or sulfuric or nitric acid. Furthermore, in addition to chemicals, bombmakers also utilize laboratory implements such as beakers, scales, protective gloves and masks — things not normally found in a hotel room or residence.
Additionally, although electronic devices such as cell phones or wristwatches may not seem unusual in the context of a hotel room or apartment, signs that such devices have been disassembled or modified should raise a red flag, as these devices are commonly used as initiators for improvised explosive devices. There are also certain items that are less commonly used in household applications but that are frequently used in bombmaking, things like nitric or sulfuric acid, metal powders such as aluminum, magnesium and ferric oxide, and large quantities of sodium carbonate — commonly purchased in 25-pound bags. Large containers of methyl alcohol, used to stabilize nitroglycerine, is another item that is unusual in a residential or hotel setting and that is a likely signal that a bombmaker is present.
Fumes from the chemical reactions are another telltale sign of bombmaking activity. Depending on the size of the batch being concocted, the noxious fumes from an improvised explosive mixture can bleach walls and curtains and, as was the case for the July 2005 London attackers, even the bombmakers’ hair. The fumes can even waft outside of the lab and be detected by neighbors in the vicinity. Spatter from the mixing of ingredients like nitric acid leaves distinctive marks, which are another way for hotel staff or landlords to recognize that something is amiss. Additionally, rented properties used for such activity rarely look as if they are lived in. They frequently lack furniture and have makeshift window coverings instead of drapes. Properties where bomb laboratories are found also usually have no mail delivery, sit for long periods without being occupied and are occupied by people who come and go erratically at odd hours and are often seen carrying strange things such as containers of chemicals.
The perpetrators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing manufactured the components for the truck bomb used in that attack in a rented apartment in Jersey City, N.J. The process of cooking the nitroglycerine used in the booster charges and the urea nitrate used in the main explosive charge created such strong chemical fumes that some of the paint on the walls was changed from white to blue and metal doorknobs and hinges inside of the apartment were visibly corroded. The bombmakers also flushed some of the excess chemicals down the toilet, spilling some of them on the bathroom floor and leaving acidic burn marks. The conspirators also spilled chemicals on the floor in other places, on the walls of the apartment, on their clothing and on other items, leaving plenty of trace evidence for investigators to find after the attack.
Given the caustic nature of the ingredients used to make homemade explosive mixtures — chemicals that can burn floors and corrode metal — and the very touchy chemical reactions required to make things like nitroglycerin and TATP, making homemade explosives can be one of the most dangerous aspects of planning an attack. Indeed, Hamas militants refer to TATP as “the Mother of Satan” because of its volatility and propensity to either severely burn or kill bombmakers if they lose control of the chemical reaction required to manufacture it.
In January 1995, an apartment in Manila, Philippines, caught fire when the bombmaker in the 1993 World Trade Center attack, Abdel Basit (aka Ramzi Yousef), lost control of the reaction in a batch of TATP he was brewing for his planned attack against a number of U.S. airliners flying over the Pacific Ocean — an operation he had nicknamed Bojinka. Because of the fire, authorities were able to arrest two of Basit’s co-conspirators and unravel Bojinka and several other attack plots against targets like Pope John Paul II and U.S. President Bill Clinton. Basit himself fled to Pakistan, where he was apprehended a short time later. This case serves to highlight the dangers presented by these labs to people in the vicinity — especially in a hotel or apartment building.
Another form of behavior that provides an opportunity to spot a bombmaker is testing. A professional bombmaker will try out his improvised mixtures and components, like improvised blasting caps, to ensure that they are functioning properly and that the completed device will therefore be viable. Such testing will involve burning or detonating small quantities of the explosive mixture, or actually exploding the blasting cap. The testing of small components may happen in a backyard, but the testing of larger quantities will often be done at a more remote place. Therefore, any signs of explosions in remote places like parks and national forests should be immediately reported to authorities.
Obviously, not every container of nitric acid spotted or small explosion heard will be absolute confirmation of bombmaking activity, but reporting such incidents to the authorities will give them an opportunity to investigate and determine whether the incidents are indeed innocuous. In an era when the threat of attack comes from increasingly diffuse sources, a good defense requires more eyes and ears than the authorities possess. As the New York Police Department has so aptly said, if you see something, say something.
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http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/did-obama-and-holder-scuttle-terror-finance-prosecutions/?singlepage=true
(PJM Exclusive) Did Obama and Holder Scuttle Terror Finance Prosecutions?
High-level source concedes DOJ let off CAIR co-founders and others for political reasons.
April 14, 2011 - by Patrick Poole
During the House Homeland Security hearing last month on the topic of radicalization in the American Muslim community, one exchange between L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca and Rep. Chip Cravaack (R-MN) concerned the relationship between the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department and Hamas terrorist front the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Sheriff Baca told the congressman:
We don’t play around with criminals in my world. If CAIR is an organization that is a quote “criminal organization,” prosecute them. Hold them accountable and bring them to trial.
But according to a high-ranking source within the Department of Justice, who spoke exclusively to Pajamas Media on the condition of anonymity, Sheriff Baca, a long-time supporter of CAIR, was probably already in on the joke.
The joke is that a number of leaders of Islamic organizations (all of whom publicly opposed the King hearings on Muslim radicalization) were about to be indicted on terror finance support charges by the U.S. attorney’s office in Dallas, which had been investigating the case for most of the past decade.
But those indictments were scuttled last year at the direction of top-level political appointees within the Department of Justice (DOJ) — and possibly even the White House.
Included in those indictments was at least one of the co-founders of CAIR, based on “Declination of Prosecution of Omar Ahmad,” a March 31 DOJ legal memo from Assistant Attorney General David Kris to Acting Deputy Attorney General Gary Grindler. A second DOJ official familiar with the investigation independently confirmed these details. Omar Ahmad is one of CAIR’s co-founders and its chairman emeritus. He was personally named, along with CAIR itself, as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror finance trial in 2007 and 2008. During the trial FBI Agent Lara Burns testified that both Omar Ahmad and current CAIR executive director Nihad Awad were caught on FBI wiretaps attending a 1993 meeting of Hamas leaders in Philadelphia.
Dean Boyd, public affairs representative for the DOJ National Security Division, declined to provide me a copy of the March 31, 2010, memo dropping the Omar Ahmad prosecution. Directing me to submit a FOIA request, Boyd did say that “as a general rule, internal DOJ deliberation memos spelling out arguments for or against potential prosecution of any particular suspect are not public.”
Pajamas Media will be filing a FOIA request for all the related documents in this case.
According to my source, the chief reason outlined in the DOJ memo declining to prosecute CAIR co-founder Omar Ahmad was the issue of potential jury nullification. The first Holy Land Foundation trial in 2007 ended in a hung jury. When the case was retried in 2008, all five defendants, former executives of the Holy Land Foundation, were convicted on all 108 counts.
But, according to our DOJ source, possible jury nullification was hardly the primary issue in the DOJ’s scuttling of the terror finance prosecutions. “This was a political decision from the get-go,” the source said.
It was always the plan to initially go after the [Holy Land Foundation] leaders first and then go after the rest of the accomplices in a second round of prosecutions. From a purely legal point of view, the case was solid. Jim Jacks [the U.S. attorney in Dallas who prosecuted the Holy Land Foundation executives] and his team were ready to go. There’s a mountain of evidence against all of these groups that was never introduced during the Holy Land trial and it is damning. We’ve got them on wiretaps. That’s exactly why many of these leaders and groups were named unindicted co-conspirators in the first round of prosecutions.
But from a political perspective there was absolutely no way that they could move forward. That’s why this decision came from the top down. These individuals who were going to be prosecuted are still the administration’s interfaith allies. Not only would these Muslim groups and their friends in the media be screaming “Islamophobia” at the top of their lungs and that this is a war against Islam, but the administration would look like absolute fools. It’s kind of hard to prosecute someone on material support for terrorism when you have pictures of them getting handed awards from DOJ and FBI leaders for their supposed counter-terror efforts. How would Holder explain that when we’re carting off these prominent Islamic leaders in handcuffs for their role in a terror finance conspiracy we’ve been investigating for years? This is how bad the problem is. Why are we continuing to have anything to do with these groups knowing what we know?
“By closing down these prosecutions,” the source added, “the evidence we’ve collected over the past decade that implicates most of the major Islamic organizations will never see the light of day.”
The FBI still has boxes and boxes of stuff that has never even been translated — just like what happened in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. But it’s already been made public that they have copies of money transfers sent by NAIT [the North American Islamic Trust, which holds the property titles of many of the mosques in America -- Ed.] directly to known Hamas entities and Hamas leaders. Those came out during the [Holy Land Foundation] trial. But what if we won the case against NAIT and its leaders and the U.S. government finds itself the landlord to hundreds of mosques across the country? How well do you think that would that play in the Muslim community?
The actions by the DOJ to crush these prosecutions are just another schizophrenic episode in the U.S. government’s ongoing relationship with Islamic organizations, especially CAIR. After CAIR was named unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land trial, the FBI was forced to cut ties with the group. In an April 2009 letter to Sen. Jon Kyl, FBI Assistant Director Richard Powers said that “the FBI does not view CAIR as an appropriate liaison partner.”
And a February 2010 letter from Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich to four congressmen who inquired about the termination of the relationship between the FBI and CAIR — just weeks before the DOJ officially ceased further prosecutions, including of CAIR co-founders — elaborated on the evidence about CAIR that had emerged from the Holy Land trial. Yet, according to my DOJ source, CAIR leaders continue to be regularly received by top DOJ and FBI officials despite the official ban and these statements made to members of Congress.
And just last November, a significant July 2009 memorandum order by Judge Jorge Solis, who supervised the initial Holy Land Foundation trial, was unsealed under direction of the Court of Appeals. It provides the court’s reasons for refusing to remove CAIR and two other prominent Islamic groups, the Islamic Society of North America and NAIT, from the list of unindicted co-conspirators in the case. Judge Solis concluded that “the four pieces of evidence the government relies on, as discussed below, do create at least a prima facie case as to CAIR’s involvement in a conspiracy to support Hamas” (p. 7), specifically naming Omar Ahmad’s part in the conspiracy (p. 6) and adding later that “the Government has produced ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR, ISNA and NAIT with HLF, the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) and with Hamas” (p. 15).
As I reported here at Pajamas Media, FBI Director Robert Mueller reiterated these reasons for cutting ties with CAIR before a recent House Judiciary Committee meeting — just two days before The Daily Caller reported that White House officials had publicly praised CAIR.
Adding to the hypocrisy, after the Obama administration scuttled the next round of prosecutions in the Hamas terror financing investigation last March, Attorney General Eric Holder gave the prosecutors and FBI investigators in the Holy Land Foundation case the AG’s Award for Distinguished Service last October for their work in the case.
I asked my DOJ source why they decided to come forward now. The source said:
This is a national security issue. We know that these Muslim leaders and groups are continuing to raise money for Hamas and other terrorist organizations. Ten years ago we shut down the Holy Land Foundation. It was the right thing to do. Then the money started going to KindHearts. We shut them down too. Now the money is going through groups like Islamic Relief and Viva Palestina. Until we act decisively to cut off the financial pipeline to these terrorist groups by putting more of these people in prison, they are going to continue to raise money that will go into the hands of killers. And until Congress starts grilling the people inside DOJ and the FBI who are giving these groups cover, that is not going to change. My biggest fear is that Americans are going to die and it will be the very Muslim leaders we are working with who will be directly or indirectly responsible.
But if the U.S. government publicly acknowledges the terror ties of these groups why do they continue to deal with them?
We tried to do what we could during the Bush administration. After 9/11, we had to do something and [the Holy Land Foundation] was the biggest target. If the mistrial hadn’t have happened, we probably would have gone through the second round of prosecutions before the change in administrations.
To say things are different under Obama and Holder would be an understatement. Many of the people I work with at Justice now see CAIR not just as political allies, but ideological allies. They believe they are fighting the same revolution. It’s scary. And Congress and the American people need to know this is going on.
It remains to be seen how Congress, the American people, and the establishment media — who always seem eager to rise to the defense of CAIR and the other terror-tied Islamic groups — will proceed.
Patrick Poole is a regular contributor to Pajamas Media, and an anti-terrorism consultant to law enforcement and the military.
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Please continue to follow this for us GM!
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http://www.theneweditor.com/index.php?/archives/12884-When-Allahu-Akbar-Means-I-Have-a-Bathroom-Emergency!.html
Yesterday, on a flight from Chicago to San Francisco, a man was subdued by the plane's passengers after he charged up the airplane's aisle yelling "Allahu Akbar!" and began pounding on the cockpit door.
However, in the original AP article on the story, AP's writers helpfully informed its readers, "Authorities do not yet have a motive."
Further on in the article, in the 13th paragraph, AP attempted to shed some light on the man's intentions by quoting a relative of the man who helpfully suggested, "He might have seriously mistaken the cockpit for the bathroom.... He's only been on three planes in his whole life."
In paragraph 15 and 16, AP 's writers remember to explain that the man was yelling "God is great!" or "Allahu Akbar!" as he charged up the aisle.
Clearly, this was a 'bathroom emergency' of some immediate urgency.
Thank goodness for the Associated Press and its fearless reporting!
Remember, bathroom emergencies are nothing to laugh at...
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"Allahu Akbar!"
It is my understanding that Islamic tradition holds one should scream, "God is great" when one tries to go potty.
****Lead StoryNothing to see here, move along
By Michelle Malkin • May 10, 2011 09:29 AM
Photo taken by passenger Andrew Wai
Look, up in the air: Classic symptoms of what Daniel Pipes calls “Sudden Jihad Syndrome”.
If you see something, say something — and do something. Fortunately, the crew and passengers of AA Flight 1561 did — tackling a nutball Yemeni Muslim shouting “Allahu Akbar” as he beat on the cockpit door of their plane.
Now, watch law enforcement authorities downplay the incident as nothing-burger:
The passengers sat stunned as they watched a man walk quickly toward the front of American Airlines Flight 1561 as it was descending toward San Francisco. He was screaming and then began pounding on the cockpit door.
“I kept saying to myself: ‘What’s he doing? Does he have a bomb? Is he armed?’” passenger Angelina Marty said.
Within moments Sunday, a flight attendant tackled Rageh Almurisi. Authorities do not yet have a motive.
While authorities said that Almurisi, 28, of Vallejo, Calif., has no clear or known ties to terrorism, the incident underscored fears that extremists may try to mount attacks to retaliate for the death of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden last week.
Federal agents are investigating Almurisi’s background. He was carrying a Yemeni passport and a California identification card, authorities said.
…Marty, 35, recalled that she and other passengers on the plane were stunned when they saw Almurisi walking down the aisle. She said a woman in a row across from her who speaks Arabic translated that Almurisi said “God is Great!” in Arabic.
Andrew Wai, another passenger, told KGO-TV on Monday that the wife of one of the men who took Almurisi down later said Almurisi was yelling “Allahu Akbar.”
“There was no question in everybody’s mind that he was going to do something,” Marty said.
A male flight attendant tackled Almurisi, and other crew members and passengers, including a retired Secret Service agent and a retired San Mateo police officer, helped subdue him as he banged on the door, police said. The flight attendant put plastic handcuffs on him.
Funny how you can scream “Allahu Akbar” at the top of your lungs and still have authorities proclaim your motives unknown.
It’s not the first time.
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http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/stowaway_has_port_on_terror_alert_E6i2U79BQ0tqsNpJlV3vnI
Stowaway at Port Newark sparks terror probe
By PHILIP MESSING
Last Updated: 11:09 AM, May 23, 2011
Posted: 3:06 AM, May 23, 2011
More Print
EXCLUSIVE
A shadowy man suspected of fighting against US soldiers in Iraq has sparked a far-flung terror probe after entering New York Harbor as a stowaway aboard a freighter and taking up residence in a fenced-off Port Authority warehouse, The Post has learned.
Asem Ellbahnsany Haroon, 26, managed to easily infiltrate Port Newark -- where there are just the kind of oil refineries that Osama bin Laden talked about blowing up as part of a global-chaos plot in papers found in his Pakistan hideout.
"There have been reports . . . that indicate al Qaeda is trying to use explosive to blow up oil tankers to disrupt the world's economy. What's right next door to Port Newark? All of these oil refineries that line the highway there," said one law-enforcement source.
Asem Ellbahnsany Haroon
Authorities are now scrambling to figure out how Haroon managed to elude border checkpoints at the port -- and they are also nervously wondering whether he came here with others who have yet to be caught.
Haroon was arrested Jan. 31 after Port Authority cops found him hunkered down near the waterfront inside a warehouse that has remained unoccupied for about a year.
When Haroon was found, it appeared he had been squatting inside for several days and had set up a makeshift camp.
"When I first saw him, he was so weak," a law-enforcement source said.
"But he might be a terrorist and possibly be a threat because none of the answers he gave ever made any sense."
Haroon told investigators that he was an Iraqi citizen who had arrived at Port Newark two weeks earlier on an unspecified Italian freighter.
It turns out he's an Egyptian who was once denied a visa to enter the United States. Federal authorities told a judge that Haroon "had fought as an insurgent against the American forces in Fallujah."
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/stowaway_has_port_on_terror_alert_E6i2U79BQ0tqsNpJlV3vnI
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Woof,
If or when I should say, we get hit with another terrorist attack here in the U.S. I wonder, are we going to let these idiots that refuse to enforce our laws as a way of buying votes, off the hook again?
www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2011/may/u-s-loses-track-millions-who-overstay-visas (http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2011/may/u-s-loses-track-millions-who-overstay-visas)
www.judicialwatch.org/files/documents/2010/verdict-immigration-112010-1.pdf (http://www.judicialwatch.org/files/documents/2010/verdict-immigration-112010-1.pdf)
P.C.
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Harlequin novel, version 2011
He grasped me firmly, but gently, just above my elbow and guided me into a room, his room. Then he quietly shut the door and we were alone. He approached me soundlessly, from behind, and spoke in a low, reassuring voice close to my ear.
"Just relax."
Without warning, he reached down and I felt his strong, calloused hands start at my ankles, gently probing, and moving upward along my calves, slowly but steadily. My breath caught in my throat.
I knew I should be afraid, but somehow I didn't care. His touch was so experienced, so sure. When his hands moved up onto my thighs, I gave a slight shudder, and partly closed my eyes. My pulse was pounding. I felt his knowing fingers caress my abdomen, my ribcage. And then, as he cupped my firm, full breasts in his hands, I inhaled sharply.
Probing, searching, knowing what he wanted, he brought his hands to my shoulders, slid them down my tingling spine and into my panties.. Although I knew nothing about this man, I felt oddly trusting and expectant. This is a man, I thought. A man used to taking charge. A man not used to taking ‘No for an answer. A man who would tell me what he wanted. A man who would look into my soul and say . . . .
"Okay ma'am, you can board your flight now."
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I doubt very much the TSA is doing cross-gender searches. :roll:
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GM:
My informed friend responds to your question:
Marc
"What of a High Energy Radio Frequency burst directed to the "fly by wire" system?"
"Electrical and Avionics systems must all test a series of “HIRF” tests: High Intensity Radio Frequency. Components are put in a sealed room and blasted with a wide range of frequencies and the whole aircraft is subjected to a system test which I believe is conducted in an empty hangar with lots of antennas pumping electromagnetic energy around. And there are also lightning tests, direct hits to boxes, and direct hits to larger subassemblies including cable assemblies. At least that was the protocol years ago. I am sure it is more thorough now. It is one reason why these things cost so much."
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/safe-cellphone-plane/story?id=13791569
Is It Really Safe to Use a Cellphone on a Plane?
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Umm , , , GM , , , the Harlequinn paraody was/is a joke :roll:
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Umm , , , GM , , , the Harlequinn paraody was/is a joke :roll:
I know, but with the TSA-related hysteria I commonly see on the net, it's important to point things like that out.
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Great joke! Just wanted to add an opinion to the safety of the cell phone on the airplane question.
I asked a family member with degrees in avionics about it a few years back. He basically said no. If navigation equipment could be confused by a cell signal you are already in big trouble.
From my technology past I would point out that all the sensitive wiring within the plane can be done in fiber optics with zero susceptibility to all electrical interference. To the extent they aren't doing that yet, it is because they don't believe they need to, not because it isn't available:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/09/060918164717.htm
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/news/NewsReleases/2008/08-31.html
http://www.aviation-ia.com/aeec/projects/fos/09_004_FosApim.pdf
It is pretty hard to imagine a wireless code division multiplexed cell signal with a passenger telling her husband the arrival time received by the navigation system as a command to switch the plane in or out of auto-pilot. If true, it is time to stop flying.
If the issue is terrorists sending a disrupting signal, asking passengers to end their calls doesn't fix that.
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From DougMacG: "Just wanted to add an opinion to the safety of the cell phone on the airplane question."
At least the plane will remain cancer free.
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By Scott Stewart
A new video from al Qaeda’s media arm, As-Sahab, became available on the Internet on June 2. The video was 100 minutes long, distributed in two parts and titled “Responsible Only for Yourself.” As the name suggests, this video was the al Qaeda core’s latest attempt to encourage grassroots jihadists to undertake lone-wolf operations in the West, a recurrent theme in jihadist messages since late 2009.
The video, which was well-produced and contained a number of graphics and special effects, features historical footage of a number of militant Islamist personalities, including Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Abdullah Azzam and Abu Yahya al-Libi.
In addition to al-Libi, who is considered a prominent al Qaeda ideological authority, the video also features an extensive discourse from another Libyan theologian, Sheikh Jamal Ibrahim Shtaiwi al-Misrati. Al-Misrati (who is from Misurata, as one can surmise from his name) was also featured in a March 25 As-Sahab message encouraging jihadists in Libya to assume control of the country and place it under Shariah once the Gadhafi regime is overthrown. The still photo used over the March message featuring al-Misrati was taken from the video used in the June 2 message, indicating that the recently released video of al-Misrati was shot prior to March 25. The video also contains a short excerpt of a previously released Arabic language Al-Malahim media video by Anwar al-Awlaki and an English-language statement by Adam Gadahn that is broken up into small segments and appears periodically throughout the video.
Despite the fact that many of the video segments used to produce this product are quite dated, there is a reference to bin Laden as a shaheed, or martyr, so this video was obviously produced after his death.
Unlike the As-Sahab message on the same topic featuring Adam Gadahn released in March 2010 and the English-language efforts of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s “Inspire” magazine, this video is primarily in Arabic, indicating that it is intended to influence an Arabic-speaking audience.
To date, much of the media coverage pertaining to the release of this video has focused on one short English-language segment in which Adam Gadahn encourages Muslims in the United States to go to gun shows and obtain automatic weapons to use in shooting attacks. This focus is understandable given the contentiousness of the gun-control issue in the United States, but a careful examination of the video reveals far more than just fodder for the U.S. gun-control debate.
Contents of the Video
The first 36 minutes of the video essentially comprise a history lesson of militants who heard the call to jihad and then acted on it. Among the examples are individuals such as ElSayyid Nosair, the assassin of Jewish Defense League founder Meir Kahane; Abdel Basit (also known as Ramzi Yousef), the operational planner of the 1993 World Trade Center attack and the thwarted Bojinka plot; Mohammed Bouyeri, the assassin of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh; and Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan. Others include the leader of the team of assassins who killed Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and the militants behind the Mumbai attacks.
Then, after listing those examples, the video emphasizes the point that if one is to live in the “real Islamic way,” one must also follow the examples of the men profiled. Furthermore, since the “enemies of Islam” have expanded their “attacks against Islam” in many different places, the video asserts that it is not only in the land of the Muslims that the enemies of Islam must be attacked, but also in their homelands (i.e., the West). In fact, the video asserts that it is easy to strike the enemies of Islam in their home countries and doing so creates the biggest impact. And this is the context in which Gadahn made his widely publicized comment about Muslims buying guns and conducting armed assaults.
Now, it is important to briefly address this comment by Gadahn: While it is indeed quite easy for U.S. citizens to legally purchase a wide variety of firearms, it is illegal for them to purchase fully automatic weapons without first obtaining the proper firearms license. This fixation with obtaining fully automatic rifles instead of purchasing readily available and legal semi-automatic weapons has led to the downfall of a number of jihadist plots inside the United States, including one just last month in New York. Therefore, aspiring jihadists who would seek to follow Gadahn’s recommendations to the letter would almost certainly find themselves quickly brought to the attention of the authorities.
When we look at the rest of Gadahn’s comments in this video, it is clear the group is trying to convey a number of other interesting points. First, Gadahn notes that jihadists wanting to undertake lone-wolf activities must take all possible measures to keep their plotting secret, and the first thing they should do is avail themselves of all the electronic manuals available on the Internet pertaining to security.
A few minutes later in the video, Gadahn remarks on a point made in a segment from a U.S. news program that the Hollywood perception of the capabilities of the National Security Agency (NSA) is nowhere near what those capabilities are in real life and that, while the NSA and other Western intelligence agencies collect massive amounts of data, it is hard for them to link the pieces together to gain intelligence on a pending attack plan. This is true, and the difficulty of putting together disparate intelligence to complete the big picture is something STRATFOR has long discussed. Gadahn notes that the downfall of most grassroots operations is loose lips and not the excellence of Western intelligence and urges aspiring grassroots jihadists to trust no one and to reveal their plans to no one, not even friends and family members. This claim is also true. Most thwarted grassroots plots have been uncovered due to poor operational security and sloppy tradecraft.
The video also contains lengthy theological discussions justifying the jihadist position that jihad is a compulsory, individual obligation for every able-bodied Muslim. As the video turns to the necessity of attacking the enemies of Islam in their homelands, Gadahn notes that Americans are people who crave comfort and security and that terrorist attacks scare them and take away their will to fight Muslims. According to Gadahn, terrorist attacks also cause the people to object to leaders who want to attack Islam, and the people will not vote for those leaders.
Throughout the video, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is depicted several times, and it is asserted that the United States and the West are controlled by Jewish interests. Gadahn says that influential figures in the Zionist-controlled Western governments, industries and media should be attacked, and that such attacks will weaken the will of the masses to fight against Islam. He also says that attacks against such targets are not hard and that, from recent examples of people who have assaulted the pope and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, it is evident that if jihadists trust their efforts to Allah and choose the right place, time and method, they can succeed in their attacks.
But armed assaults are not the only type of attacks being advocated in the video. The message also contains several minutes of material dedicated to encouraging cyber-jihadists to conduct electronic attacks against the United States. This concept was supported by several excerpts from a segment of the U.S. television program 60 Minutes pertaining to the cyber threat and featuring U.S. experts discussing their fears that terrorists would attack such targets as the electrical grid. Again, this is an old threat, and acquiring the skills to become a world-class hacker takes time, talent and practice. This means that, in practical terms, the threat posed by such attacks is no greater than it was prior to the release of this video.
Tactical Implications
First, it needs to be recognized that this video does not present any sort of new threat. As far as Gadahn’s pleas for American Muslims to buy firearms and conduct armed assaults, we wrote an analysis in May 2010 discussing many failed jihadist bomb plots and forecasting that the jihadists would shift to armed assaults instead. Furthermore, jihadist websites have long been urging their followers to become cyber-jihadists and to create viruses that would cripple the economies of the United States and the West, which are so dependent on computerized systems.
Even the calls to target industrial and media leaders are not new. Jihadist publications such as the now-defunct online magazine of al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, Maaskar al-Battaar, encouraged attacks against such targets as far back as 2004.
This means that this latest As-Sahab message merely echoes threats that have already existed for some time now, such as threats emanating from grassroots jihadists. The grassroots threat is real and must be guarded against, but it is not nearly as acute as the threat posed by other, more skillful terrorist actors. Grassroots operatives do not often possess good terrorist tradecraft, and their attacks tend to be poorly planned and executed and susceptible to discovery and disruption.
However, killing people is not difficult, and even amateurs can be deadly. As we examine these repeated pleas by al Qaeda for grassroots jihadists to conduct attacks in the West, and then consider the ease with which such attacks can be conducted — evidenced by Hasan’s actions at Fort Hood — it raises an interesting question: Why haven’t we seen more of these attacks?
Certainly we’ve seen some thwarted attempts like the previously mentioned plot in New York in May 2011 and a successful attack in March on U.S. Air Force personnel in Frankfurt, Germany, but overall, the jihadist message urging Muslims to take up arms and conduct attacks simply does not appear to be gaining much traction among Muslims in the West — and the United States in particular. We have simply not seen the groundswell of grassroots attacks that was initially anticipated. The pleas of Gadahn and his companions appear to be falling upon deaf ears and do not seem to resonate with Muslims in the West in the same way that the cries of the pro-democracy movements in the Middle East have in recent months.
In theory, these grassroots efforts are supposed to supplement the efforts of al Qaeda to attack the West. But in practice, al Qaeda and its franchise groups have been rendered transnationally impotent in large part by the counterterrorism efforts of the United States and its allies since 9/11. Jihadist groups been able to conduct attacks in the regions where they are based, but grassroots operatives have been forced to shoulder the bulk of the effort to attack the West. In fact, the only successful attacks conducted inside the United States since 9/11 have been conducted by grassroots operatives, and in any case, grassroots plots and attacks have been quite infrequent. Despite the ease of conducting such attacks, they have been nowhere near as common as jihadist leaders hoped — and American security officials feared.
One reason for this paucity of attacks may be the jihadist message being sent. In earlier days, the message of Islamist militants like Abdullah Azzam was “Come, join the caravan.” This message suggested that militants who answered the call would be trained, equipped and put into the field of battle under competent commanders. It was a message of strength and confidence — and a message that stands in stark contrast to As-Sahab’s current message of “Don’t come and join us, it is too dangerous — conduct attacks on your own instead.” The very call to leaderless resistance is an admission of defeat and an indication that the jihadists might not be receiving the divine blessing they claim.
Read more: Al Qaeda's New Video: A Message of Defeat | STRATFOR
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From Glenn Beck's newsletter today:
The TSA is defending a recent controversial screening in which a 95-year-old with cancer was forced to take off her diaper for a pat down. You'd think a 95-year-old in a wheelchair wouldn't pose much of a risk, but the TSA said their team responded to the diaper 'security alarm' in a 'professional' manner according to proper procedure.
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Yes, it clearly states in the jihadist handbook that children and the disabled will never be used to smuggle explosives or weapons onto aircraft. Stupid TSA!
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Why Was a Man in Panties and a Bra Allowed to Fly?
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Dennis Prager
On June 9, a man boarded a US Airways flight from Fort Lauderdale to Phoenix, dressed in women's panties, a bra and thigh-high stockings.
No US Airways employee at the Fort Lauderdale airport asked him to cover himself. Nor did any flight attendant ask him to do so. And obviously, no one demanded that he get off the plane.
US Airways spokeswoman Valerie Wunder was asked how the airline allowed a nearly naked cross-dresser to board a plane and sit next to other passengers who, one assumes, did not appreciate being seated next to an exhibitionist.
As reported by the San Francisco Examiner, she "said employees had been correct not to ask the man to cover himself. 'We don't have a dress code policy. Obviously, if their private parts are exposed, that's not appropriate. ... So if they're not exposing their private parts, they're allowed to fly.'"
The decline of American civilization since the 1960s has been so fast and so dramatic that it takes one's breath away.
That a woman speaking on behalf of a major airline can say with a straight face that her airline allows anyone dressed or undressed to fly on its airplanes so long as they do not expose their genitals perfectly encapsulates this decline.
The only question is: How did we get here?
For one thing, the concept of decency is dying. I suspect that if an adult were to say to a group of randomly chosen American college students that this man indecently exposed himself and should not have been allowed to fly, that adult would be a) not understood -- what does "indecent" mean? -- and/or b) roundly condemned for intolerance and bigotry.
To judge this man as acting indecently, not to mention to bar him from flying, is to engage in violating the only values a generation of Americans has been taught: not to judge, not to discriminate, to welcome diversity and to fully accept those who are different, especially in the sexual arena.
That is why I think it is very difficult to have a dialogue on this matter. For those who believe in public "decency," the matter is as clear as a bell -- this was profoundly indecent -- and for those who do not believe in such a concept, the matter is equally clear -- "decency" is an anachronism.
One caller to my radio talk show simply could not see what was so bad about what the man did and that US Airways allowed him to fly. I asked my caller if he thought an airline should ban naked passengers. While he acknowledged that public nudity is against the law, he saw no reason that it should be so. Basically, I suspect that in my caller's view, my opposition to this man being allowed to fly constituted a "hang up."
So the god of tolerance is one reason for the death of the concept of "public decency."
Another is the age of secularism in which we live. In a more religious America, the human being was regarded as created in God's image, a being that ideally aspires to a level of holiness. As secularism proceeds with the increasing force of an avalanche, however, man is increasingly regarded as just another animal.
One way in which higher civilizations have demonstrated the human-animal difference has been the wearing of clothing. Animals are naked in public; humans are clothed. But secularism eats away at such religious ideals. Thus religion-based concepts such as holiness and decency die out. You can see it in the widespread acceptance of public cursing as well as in public exhibitionism, among many other manifestations.
I don't know if US Airways is alone among airlines in allowing anyone to fly as long as their genitals are covered. But it seems to me that if restaurants can post dress codes and announce that they reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, an airline -- in which people, unlike in restaurants, are forced to sit two inches from strangers -- should be able to do so.
In the meantime, this is the Brave New World that mindless tolerance, diversity and lawsuits on their behalf have wrought.
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By Scott Stewart
Stratfor:
On June 22 in a Seattle warehouse, Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif pulled an unloaded M16 rifle to his shoulder, aimed it, and pulled the trigger repeatedly as he imagined himself gunning down young U.S. military recruits. His longtime friend Walli Mujahidh did likewise with an identical rifle, assuming a kneeling position as he engaged his notional targets. The two men had come to the warehouse with another man to inspect the firearms the latter had purchased with money Abdul-Latif had provided him. The rifles and a small number of hand grenades were to be used in an upcoming mission: an attack on a U.S. Military Entrance Processing Station (MEPS) in an industrial area south of downtown Seattle.
After confirming that the rifles were capable of automatic fire and discussing the capacity of the magazines they had purchased, the men placed the rifles back into a storage bag intending to transport them to a temporary cache location. As they prepared to leave the warehouse, they were suddenly swarmed by a large number of FBI agents and other law enforcement officers and quickly arrested. Their plan to conduct a terrorist attack inside the United States had been discovered when the man they had invited to join their plot (the man who had allegedly purchased the weapons for them) reported the plot to the Seattle Police Department, which in turn reported it to the FBI. According to the federal criminal complaint filed in the case, the third unidentified man had an extensive criminal record and had known Abdul-Latif for several years, but he had not been willing to undertake such a terrorist attack.
While the behavior of Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh in this plot demonstrates that they were amateur “wannabe” jihadists rather than seasoned terrorist operatives, their plot could have ended very differently if they had found a kindred spirit in the man they approached for help instead of someone who turned them into the authorities. This case also illustrates some important trends in jihadist terrorism that we have been watching for the past few years as well as a possible shift in mindset within the jihadist movement.
Trends
First, Abu-Khalid Abdul-Latif and Walli Mujahidh, both American converts to Islam, are prime examples of what we refer to as grassroots jihadists. They are individuals who were inspired by the al Qaeda movement but who had no known connection to the al Qaeda core or one of its franchise groups. In late 2009, in response to the success of the U.S. government and its allies in preventing jihadist attacks in the West, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) began a campaign to encourage jihadists living in the West to conduct simple attacks using readily available items, rather than travel abroad for military and terrorism training with jihadist groups. After successes such as the November 2009 Fort Hood shooting, this theme of encouraging grassroots attacks was adopted by the core al Qaeda group.
While the grassroots approach does present a challenge to law enforcement and intelligence agencies in that attackers can seemingly appear out of nowhere with no prior warning, the paradox presented by grassroots operatives is that they are also far less skilled than trained terrorist operatives. In other words, while they are hard to detect, they frequently lack the skill to conduct large, complex attacks and frequently make mistakes that expose them to detection in smaller plots.
And that is what we saw in the Seattle plot. Abdul-Latif had originally wanted to hit U.S. Joint Base Lewis-McChord (formerly known as Fort Lewis and McChord Air Force Base), which is located some 70 kilometers (44 miles) south of Seattle, but later decided against that plan since he considered the military base to be too hardened a target. While Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh were amateurs, they seem to have reached a reasonable assessment of their own abilities and which targets were beyond their abilities to strike.
Another trend we noted in this case was that the attack plan called for the use of firearms and hand grenades in an armed assault, rather than the use of an improvised explosive device (IED). There have been a number of botched IED attacks, such as the May 2010 Times Square attack and Najibullah Zazi’s plot to attack the New York subway system.
These were some of the failures that caused jihadist leaders such as AQAP’s Nasir al-Wahayshi to encourage grassroots jihadists to undertake simple attacks. Indeed, the most successful jihadist attacks in the West in recent years, such as the Fort Hood shooting, the June 2009 attack on a military recruitment center in Little Rock, Ark., and the March 2011 attack on U.S. troops at a civilian airport in Frankfurt, Germany, involved the use of firearms rather than IEDs. When combined with the thwarted plot in New York in May 2011, these incidents support the trend we identified in May 2010 of grassroots jihadist conducting more armed assaults and fewer attacks involving IEDs.
Another interesting aspect of the Seattle case was that Abdul-Latif was an admirer of AQAP ideologue Anwar al-Awlaki. Unlike the Fort Hood case, where U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had been in email contact with al-Awlaki, it does not appear that Abdul-Latif had been in contact with the AQAP preacher. However, from video statements and comments Abdul-Latif himself posted on the Internet, he appears to have had a high opinion of al-Awlaki and to have been influenced by his preaching. It does not appear that Abdul-Latif, who was known as Joseph Anthony Davis before his conversion to Islam, or Mujahidh, whose pre-conversion name was Frederick Domingue Jr., spoke Arabic. This underscores the importance of al-Awlaki’s role within AQAP as its primary spokesman to the English-speaking world and his mission of radicalizing English-speaking Muslims and encouraging them to conduct terrorist attacks in the West.
Vulnerabilities
Once again, in the Seattle case, the attack on the MEPS was not thwarted by some CIA source in Yemen, an intercept by the National Security Agency or an intentional FBI undercover operation. Rather, the attack was thwarted by a Muslim who was approached by Abdul-Latif and asked to participate in the attack. The man then went to the Seattle Police Department, which brought the man to the attention of the FBI. This is what we refer to as grassroots counterterrorism, that is, local cops and citizens bringing things to the attention of federal authorities. As the jihadist threat has become more diffuse and harder to detect, grassroots defenders have become an even more critical component of international counterterrorism efforts. This is especially true for Muslims, many of whom consider themselves engaged in a struggle to defend their faith (and their sons) from the threat of jihadism.
But, even if the third man had chosen to participate in the attack rather than report it to the authorities, the group would have been vulnerable to detection. First, there were the various statements Abdul-Latif made on the Internet in support of attacks against the United States. Second, any Muslim convert who chooses a name such as Mujahidh (holy warrior) for himself must certainly anticipate the possibility that it will bring him to the attention of the authorities. Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh were also somewhat cavalier in their telephone conversations, although those conversations do not appear to have brought them to the attention of the authorities.
Perhaps their most significant vulnerability to detection, aside from their desire to obtain automatic weapons and hand grenades, would have been their need to conduct preoperational surveillance of their intended target. After conducting some preliminary research using the Internet, Abdul-Latif quickly realized that they needed more detailed intelligence. He then briefly conducted physical surveillance of the exterior of the MEPS to see what it looked like in person. Despite the technological advances it represents, the Internet cannot replace the physical surveillance process, which is a critical requirement for terrorist planners. Indeed, after the external surveillance of the building, Abdul-Latif asked the informant to return to the building under a ruse in order to enter it and obtain a detailed floor plan of the facility for use in planning the attack.
In this case, the informant was able to obtain the information he needed from his FBI handlers, but had he been a genuine participant in the plot, he would have had to have exposed himself to detection by entering the MEPS facility after conducting surveillance of the building’s exterior. If some sort of surveillance detection program was in place, it likely would have flagged him as a person of interest for follow-up investigation, which could have led authorities back to the other conspirators in the attack.
A New Twist
One aspect of this plot that was different from many other recent plots was that Abdul-Latif insisted that he wanted to target the U.S. military and did not want to kill people he considered innocents. Certainly he had no problem with the idea of killing the armed civilian security guards at the MEPS — the plan called for the attackers to kill them first, or the unarmed still-civilian recruits being screened at the facility, then to kill as many other military personnel as possible before being neutralized by the responding authorities. However, even in the limited conversations documented in the federal criminal complaint, Abdul-Latif repeated several times that he did not want to kill innocents. This stands in stark contrast to the actions of previous attackers and plotters such as John Allen Mohammed, the so-called D.C. sniper, or Faisal Shahzad, who planned the failed Times Square attack.
Abdul-Latif’s reluctance to attack civilians may be a reflection of the debate we are seeing among jihadists in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan and even Algeria over the killing of those they consider innocents. This debate is also raging on many of the English-language jihadist message boards Abdul-Latif frequented. Most recently, this tension was seen in the defection of a Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan faction in Pakistan’s Kurram agency.
If this sentiment begins to take wider hold in the jihadist movement, and especially the English-speaking jihadist community in the West, it could have an impact on the target-selection process for future attacks by grassroots operatives in the West. It could also mean that commonly attacked targets such as subway systems, civilian aircraft, hotels and public spaces will be seen as less desirable than comparably soft military targets. Given the limitations of grassroots jihadists, and their tendency to focus on soft targets, such a shift would result in a much smaller universe of potential targets for such attacks — the softer military targets such as recruit-processing stations and troops in transit that have been targeted in recent months.
Removing some of the most vulnerable targets from the potential-target list is not something that militants do lightly. If this is indeed happening, it could be an indication that some important shifts are under way on the ideological battlefield and that jihadists may be concerned about losing their popular support. It is still too early to know if this is a trend and not merely the idiosyncrasy of one attack planner — and it is contrary to the target sets laid out in recent messages from AQAP and the al Qaeda core — but when viewed in light of the Little Rock, Fort Hood and Frankfurt shootings, it is definitely a concept worth further examination.
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303365804576429741400016376.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories
U.S. NEWSJULY 6, 2011, 12:51 P.M. ET.
U.S. Warns Airlines on Human Bomb Implants .
By KEITH JOHNSON And SIOBHAN GORMAN
Militants from al Qaeda's branch in Yemen are mulling plans to surgically implant explosive devices in would-be suicide bombers, possibly targeting airlines, U.S. officials said Wednesday.
That intelligence about al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, considered the group's most dangerous affiliate, led the Obama administration to warn foreign governments and American and international airline executives over the past several days that terrorists might attempt to board planes with explosives concealed in their bodies.
"It's more than aspirational," a U.S. official said. "They're trying to make this happen."
The Department of Homeland Security hasn't warned of a specific plot, White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters. But the specter of militants carrying bombs within them will prompt additional security measures at U.S. airports and overseas airports serving U.S. destinations, the Transportation Security Administration said in a written release.
Mr. Carney said terrorists have repeatedly expressed interest in trying new techniques to conceal explosives.
"That fact that terrorists are interested in finding ways to attack us is pretty much self-evident," Mr. Carney said. "Our security procedures are multifaceted, and we adjust them according to the threat all the time."
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BTW, note the role of the gun store owner.
http://enews.earthlink.net/article/us?guid=20110728/afbed598-085d-480e-bfec-eba126496407
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http://hotair.com/archives/2011/07/28/surprise-anti-war-group-a-little-embarrassed-by-connection-to-abdo/
Surprise: Anti-war group a little embarrassed by connection to Abdo
posted at 6:54 pm on July 28, 2011 by Ed Morrissey
Raw Story should get a lot of credit for covering the attempted cover-up by a well-known anti-war group after cause celebre-turned-embarrassment Nasser Jason Abdo’s arrest earlier today. Earlier today, commenters reminded us of the sympathetic treatment Abdo got from CNN for borderline insubordination when Abdo decided that he suddenly didn’t want to go to Afghanistan after, er, enlisting in the Army while we were at war there. At least they didn’t scrub their sites of the connection:
Pfc. Nasser Abdo, the 21-year-old soldier arrested Thursday in connection with an alleged plot to attack Fort Hood, had ties to a number of prominent anti-war organizations, including Iraq Veterans Against the War and Courage to Resist, Raw Story can confirm.
Abdo, who went AWOL from duty over the July 4 weekend after being charged with possession of child pornography, was an applicant for conscientious objector (CO) status, supported by the Oakland-based GI rights group Courage to Resist. In turn, his efforts to resist deployment were supported by Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), one of the best-known anti-war groups in the nation. …
In the wake of Abdo’s arrest, Courage to Resist removed a page on their website that detailed Abdo’s plight, but it was preserved through Google cache. Reached by Raw Story, Jeff Paterson, the group’s project director, acknowledged that they had tried to cover up their involvement with the soldier and said they would be issuing a statement in the coming hours.
IVAW hasn’t done anything to cover up its link to Abdo, but they hastened to tell Raw Story that they’re ditching him now. Or, more accurately, they’re denying that there is any connection to ditch:
“We have worked with him in the past, but he was not ever a member of this organization,” the spokesperson said. “We have had three interactions with him in the past: We supported his application as a conscientious objector; we publicized a statement by him condemning Islamophobia; and finally, he lended his support to our ‘Operation Recovery’ campaign last Veteran’s Day. Besides that, we do not have a concrete link with him.
That makes the same kind of sense as Abdo’s enlisting in the military during a war in Afghanistan and then suddenly declaring he has moral compunctions about the war in Afghanistan. Here’s a clue, folks; if he worked on your campaign and you published his statement, then you’re connected to him. It doesn’t take a W-4 or a membership card to make that connection, especially if the group publicly defended Abdo for his odd request.
Raw Story’s source at Courage to Resist engages in a little more denial as well:
“We’re shocked [at Abdo's arrest],” Paterson said. “I believe he had some significant mental health issues that became apparent as we worked with him. He had a particular version of Islam that was certainly … He was disrespectful to women. These were the kinds of issues we argued over late last year. It’s not a religious thing, it’s a matter of human decency.”
I suspect that the “thing” will turn out to be religious at least on Abdo’s part, just as it was on Nidal Hasan’s part when he massacred 14 people at Fort Hood almost two years ago. The question will be whether Abdo had connections to certain other groups — like, for instance, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, as Hasan did — and whether the Army knew that Abdo presented a risk and didn’t address it, as also happened with Hasan.
CBS has a feel-good update to the story this afternoon. Abdo got caught because of an alert retired police officer — who happens to work at a gun store:
A law enforcement official told CBS News that Abdo had asked how to build explosives at a gun store near Fort Hood. His questions about explosives made the gun store worker suspicious and contact police, the official said. When police questioned Abdo at his motel, he made references to a plan to kill or injure people.
Gun store clerk Greg Ebert, a 17-year veteran of the Killeen police force who retired in 2010, said a customer arrived by taxi Tuesday at Guns Galore LLC, where the 2009 Fort Hood rampage suspect bought a pistol used in the attack. The customer bought 6 pounds of smokeless gunpowder, three boxes of shotgun ammunition and a magazine for a semi-automatic pistol, paying about $250. …
“(We) felt uncomfortable with his overall demeanor and the fact he didn’t know what the hell he was buying,” Ebert said. “I thought it prudent to contact the local authorities, which I did.”
As we continue to press the Obama administration on their Fast and Furious debacle, which seems as if it was aimed to paint gun shops as enablers of arms trafficking, this serves as a good reminder that the employees at these stores are usually conscientious about their work.
Update: Andrew Malcolm noticed the retired-cop connection earlier today.
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http://thisainthell.us/blog/?p=25999
"Isn’t a phobia an irrational fear? Well if Abdo is found to have been part of a terror plot, I guess he wasn’t experiencing an irrational fear."
Read it all.
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http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2011/07/major-islamic-attack-on-fort-hood-thwarted-very-devoutly-religious-muslim-abdo-ululated-nidal-hasan-.html
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I note with pride that this thread too has well over 100,000 reads. Be proud of our work gentlemen!
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/new-warning-about-muslim-brotherhoods-influence-on-white-house-from-liberal-marxist-muslim/
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The chance of drowning in a bathtub is more dangerous than Muslim terrorists. Obviously, there is a long long list of dangers greater than Muslim terrorists. Besides the paranoia, the emotional fear of Islam, why do we spend billions upon billions every year? Imagine if the government said we are going to spend billions upon billions of dollars to stop the chance of people being killed by lightening? Does it make sense? Or could the money be better spent?
"The number of people worldwide who are killed by Muslim-type terrorists, Al Qaeda wannabes, is maybe a few hundred outside of war zones. It's basically the same number of people who die drowning in the bathtub each year," said John Mueller, an Ohio State University professor who has written extensively about the balance between threat and expenditures in fighting terrorism.
"So if your chance of being killed by a terrorist in the United States is 1 in 3.5 million, the question is, how much do you want to spend to get that down to 1 in 4.5 million?" he said.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/september11/la-na-911-homeland-money-20110828,0,5318393.story
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The chance of drowning in a bathtub is more dangerous than Muslim terrorists. Obviously, there is a long long list of dangers greater than Muslim terrorists. Besides the paranoia, the emotional fear of Islam, why do we spend billions upon billions every year? Imagine if the government said we are going to spend billions upon billions of dollars to stop the chance of people being killed by lightening? Does it make sense? Or could the money be better spent?
"The number of people worldwide who are killed by Muslim-type terrorists, Al Qaeda wannabes, is maybe a few hundred outside of war zones. It's basically the same number of people who die drowning in the bathtub each year," said John Mueller, an Ohio State University professor who has written extensively about the balance between threat and expenditures in fighting terrorism.
"So if your chance of being killed by a terrorist in the United States is 1 in 3.5 million, the question is, how much do you want to spend to get that down to 1 in 4.5 million?" he said.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/september11/la-na-911-homeland-money-20110828,0,5318393.story
Anything from Leftangeles times would have to be this stupid. It's like the static tax analysis, you just assume that there are not large shifts in behavior in reaction to policy shifts. If the results wouldn't be so horrific, I'd like to see the Libertarians shut down the TSA for a while just to see how bloody and expensive it would be in very short order.
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JDN:
I get the point, but for arguments sake lets say that the measures taken have been effective and have stopped additional 911 attacks. As best as I can tell the numbers this guy is using cannot measure and therefore do not take account of, this possibility, yes? And as such, the value of the numbers is , , , less than as presented, yes?
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" "So if your chance of being killed by a terrorist in the United States is 1 in 3.5 million, the question is, how much do you want to spend to get that down to 1 in 4.5 million?" he said."
Correcting his math, how much did we spend to get it down from 1 in 1, certain death, to 1 in 3.5 million and was it worth it.
If at some point you will have to fight or die, at what point, as your enemy builds in numbers, weaponry, organization and momentum, would you like to get started?
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With no offense Doug, I think that was the author's point. In our lifetime, our children's lifetime and more, and throughout the past 100's of years, the supposed "enemy", i.e. Muslim terrorists have never been able and frankly never will be able to "build in numbers, weaponry, organization and momentum" to directly threaten America. Unlike Israel, we don't have to "fight or die" because they will never be sending overwhelming troops or military to our soil. As you erroneously reference, it will never be "1 in 1, certain death". I worry far more about China, or Russia's resurgence than I do the Muslim "military" attacking America (that's a joke right?) yet I don't begrudge the money spent during the cold war. Russia was a real threat to America's survival. Nor am I denigrating that there is a terrorist threat, nor am I advocating that we do nothing, we need to be vigilant, and I acknowledge as Crafty has pointed out, our actions "may" have stopped additional attacks, but the author's question and my question is, "At what cost"? Cost in terms of billions upon billions upon billions of dollars. The price has been almost unfathomable. Plus, costs in terms of our personal freedom.
Let's forget bath water for the moment which as the author pointed out, kills more people every year than Muslim terrorists. In LA alone, to date this year (remember, the year is only a little more than half over) 377 people were killed. As terrible as it is, if terrorists do blow up a plane, or a train, the death toll is still far less than just one county's death toll from violent crime in America than terrorists. Why is death by terrorism more important?
http://projects.latimes.com/homicide/map/
Now I'm sure we are spending money to stop homicides, but it's a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the resources being applied to "terrorism". Yet statistically, far far more die in just one American county by homicide (violent crime) than supposed terrorism will ever threaten America. Doug, don't "correct the math" just do the actual math. I suppose Martians might invade too, probably the odds of that happening are higher than Muslim terrorist military invading America and causing "certain death" to "1 in 1" American.
Of course we want zero tolerance. No terrorism. But again it begs the question, at what cost? The question is allocation of limited (money) resources. Where can it be better spent? Where will more lives be saved? How about medical research? Find a cure for cancer and you will save far far more lives than the threat of Muslim terrorism will ever be to America. Not to mention our freedom being terribly infringed.
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What's the cost of a nuke detonating in a cargo container in Long Beach? What's the cost of a 9/11 every week?
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What's the cost of the Martians invading? That's about the same probability as "a 9/11 every week".
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OK then, how about a 911 every month? every quarter? semi-annually? annually? Bi-annually? At what point does it get your attention?
Remember 911 was the second time they went after the WTC. Also to be remembered is that plane #3 was targeting the White House (and went after the Pentagon after it missed) and Flight 93 was after either the Capitol Building or Three Mile Island. Methinks the one in 3.5 million datum misses quite a bit and misleads quite a bit.
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Crafty, I understand your point, although the numbers are accurate. But your point, what if.... is true.
My only point is that can you imagine (I can't) the cost we have paid? In money? In freedom....
And realistically? They are not a military threat to America. Doug's comment of everyone dying, everyone fighting for their life (certain death) in America is absurd.
Of course we need to be diligent. And proactive. Still, we need to consider risk/cost. But I do know if we spent half as much (how many billion is that?) and used the rest for cancer or to reduce homicides, or heart attacks, we would statistically be much further off on number of lives saved. Yet terrorism gets the headlines; even if only 5 die. Front page. Nearly 400 have died in LA this year and 95% don't even make the paper. I find that an interesting dichotomy. I've always wondered why terrorist acts get the attention and others don't. Why those who helped at 9/11 are rewarded over and over again with money, yet policeman and fireman who die every week are rarely recognized nor are they given $100,000's of dollars those at 9/11 have received. What is the difference? They all died serving us. They are ALL heroes to me.
It's just a thought. I have no desire to debate the subject. Just ask you to think about it.
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JDN,
You might want to read up on the word defined below:
asymmetric warfare
noun
warfare in which opposing groups or nations have unequal military resources, and the weaker opponent uses unconventional weapons and tactics, as terrorism, to exploit the vulnerabilities of the enemy.
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GM; I know and understand "asymmetric warfare". I don't doubt it's effectiveness. And no doubt it costs lives and property. And in the name of
security; our freedoms. It needs to be addressed and fought.
But in a world, our world, of limited financial resources, the question is where to allocate resources? If we used, for example, half of the billions upon
billions we spend on Homeland Security, not even counting the daily private intangibles which are huge, and spent that money on one area, be it crime, gangs, or cancer, heart attacks or whatever, would that save more lives in the next 20 years than spending the money on terrorism? And I think this author's point is that, "Yes, more lives would be saved".
Terrorism is terrible, but it is not a "we all die" scenario like Doug erroneously points out. That might be true if Russia had attacked or even China one day. But not middle eastern camel jockeys who probably can't even swim. It's as you point out, asymmetric warfare. Effective, disruptive, but no threat to everyman dying in America. Yes, a few might die; that's tragic. But all sudden death is tragic. But as the author points out, bath water is more fatal. As I pointed out, homicides in just one American County are far far more prevalent than death from terrorist attacks. And Cancer and Heart Attacks kills far far more than terrorism in America. Think of the lives we would save spending this money on Cancer and Heart Disease. Far more than the money saved spending it on terrorism.
We are not, like Israel, literally fighting Muslims for our lives and worried about the enemies overwhelming boots on the ground. It will never happen here. So I don't understand this "fear".
So the author's question is good; given limited resources, should we be allocating some of these resources to areas that best save lives in America? Simple Risk/Reward analysis.
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Because modern technology allows for "mass casualty" terrorism that wasn't possible in the past. Nation states like Iran or our dear friends in Pakistan can use "non-state" actors such as AQ to detonate a "loose nuke" in an American city. What's the cost/benefit ratio in us avoiding that?
No one is arguing that AQ will do a Normandy-style invasion of America and roll tanks across the heartland. What the global jihad wants is to collapse us from within, including "creeping sharia" within our legal system.
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On 9/11 they had two hits on what they consider symbolic for the business center of the US (WTC), and they hit the Pentagon and almost / would have hit the White House. 3000 dead, that's the carnage. 300 million terrorized, that was the point. Add in the attacks that followed in western Europe and it is more like a half billion terrorized.
Does anyone remember the first Superbowl after 9/11. The game was delayed by a week because of 9/11. There was a feeling in the air that they would love to blow up 73,000 in the Superdome with 100 million watching, maybe right while U2 was playing Beautiful Day. What are the odds of that - with and without security? [Reading the posts since writing, how about with half the place secured, or half of known al Qaida terrorists on the run, lol] One reason they didn't was because the master planners were running and hiding and having their satellite phones monitored.
Asymmetric warfare, yes, to their advantage. I have no idea how to fight back against someone who is willing to blow themselves up to accomplish a point I can't understand. We had to throw out our own rules of innocent until proven guilty. They are pulling mostly young Arab-Islamic men, and GM would argue from all demographics, individuals from a pool of over a billion potential who are willing to do this. They want Israel. They want Western Europe. They want Russia. They want China, and they want the USA. Of course they won't kill every one of us because we will fight back at some point. Sooner is better than later in terms of when to fight back. Post-911 is not the time to fight back? They would have quit attacking? It's not true, they didn't. Just write it off as small numbers of casualties and ignore it? Why? It's not small in numbers or locations. They are trying to build a base of operations nearly everywhere. If you don't believe everywhere, then try Madrid, London, NYC, LA and Minneapolis. Do none of those hit close enough to home for you? They do for me.
Regarding the radical-Islam threat being unreal, because it happened before I was born, Hitler's march seems unreal to me as well, no one would even want to do that or ever get any support - but it happened! He took Germany without force, no problem. Then he took Austria, Czechoslovakia, part of Lithuania, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, The Channel Islands (UK), Greece, Yugoslavia (Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia), Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia... and some were still arguing here that he didn't pose a threat here. From my secure midwest location, the local police and the water patrol are strict enough. I am thankful they don't display Nazi flags and enter my home. If that analogy fails it is because Jihadists have far less compassion.
The best way to understand who the jihad wants to kill would be to listen to them. They want to kill you.
The math-logic problem in the piece is that they measure the losses with a decade of our offense in place, including taking down all bases of harbor we could find and hunting down and killing their leaders, and with all our defenses in place including search and seizure of everyone in almost every public place. To then say those efforts weren't that necessary because we are suffering so few deaths is absurd. If you don't see a flaw in that math I unfortunately cannot help you. Once again, they have said they want to kill you. From their point of view: so many infidels, so little time.
[There are other places to cut the budget!]
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I was in a law enforcement training class where we were shown a power point presentation AQ had on their 100 year plan to islamicize the world, that was captured in Afghanistan early on in the war after 9/11.
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doug, somehow you are missing the point. Of course they want to kill us. Probably if you asked a variety of dictators and despots they all want to kill us. So what? They don't realistically have the means. In your previous quote, you worried about everyone of us dying. It's not going to happen. As GM even agreed, they will never put boots on the ground and overwhelm America. We are blessed with distance and might. Israel on the other hand, very existence is threatened. Every life. Any nickel they spend on defense against Muslims is money well spent.
But if we could solve Cancer for example we save millions of lives in America. if we could prevent homicides in Los Angeles County, just one county in America, we would save more lives than terrorism takes. Those are bigger threats to America than terrorism.
Nor is anyone saying we shouldn't be diligent. Or not spend billions on defense. But if we allocated half the money to Cancer or Homicides we would save more lives. And frankly, infringe on my personal freedoms a lot less.
You do cost analysis when you buy property. You compare two or more properties before spending the money. You ask yourself where is the greater risk and potential greater reward. The author is merely pointing out that some of the money could be better allocated and would save more lives elsewhere.
Doug, if I remember, you have a daughter; what are the odds of her dying from a terrorist attack, a homicide, or Cancer?
GM "AQ 100 year plan is to conquer the world". That's about as realistic as my 100 year plan to be the richest person in the world. 100 year plans are dreams; then there is reality. IMHO I suggest we focus on reality. And think about cost/benefits.
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Working from memory: Pakistan is now the 4th largest nuke power in the world. The irresponsibility of those running it is well established and the risk of hand off to AQ et al or loss of materials or bombs to AQ et al is substantial. Their will to act is irrefutable.
Sounds to me like this is well worth dealing with NOW.
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I agree. When you recognize a specific threat, do something about it.
That said, Pakistan presents a difficult challege. What should be done
and what would the ramifications be is not easy to decide. But if a palatable solution
can be found, it's money well spent.
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Pakistan, Afpakia really, IS a fiendish problem-- as together we document in the Afpakia thread.
In that it seems we are not likely to succeed in dealing with it there, where then are we to deal with hand-off and related risks if not here?
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There are some like Ron Paul who think they will stop attacking if we stay home and stop fighting back. Some like Huntsman share the JDN view that we mostly stay home and just strike out in perfect high threat situations like the Osama kill op. But that intelligence comes only from being out there chasing every threat, and the information even then is never perfect.
Unfortunately :wink: it has been GM and Crafty who have been right on this. Their commitment and patience to attack can be measured in hundreds or thousands of years, and look at us, losing our patience and commitment after about 10 pretty good years at home filled with horrific, mostly failed attempts.
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These photos certainly bring the horror of that day back to "life":
http://news.yahoo.com/photographer-behind-9-11-falling-man-retraces-steps-recalls-unknown-soldier.html
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Why Al Qaeda is Unlikely to Execute Another 9/11
September 1, 2011
Related Special Topic Page
The Devolution of Al Qaeda
STRATFOR Book
The Devolution of Jihadism: From Al Qaeda to Wider Movement
By Scott Stewart
It is Sept. 1, and that means we are once again approaching the anniversary of al Qaeda’s Sept. 11, 2001, attacks against the United States. In the 10 years that have passed since the attacks, a lot has happened and much has changed in the world, but many people can still vividly recall the sense of fear, uncertainty and helplessness they felt on that September morning. Millions of people watched United Airlines flight 175 smash into the south tower of the World Trade Center on live television. A short while later they heard that another plane had struck the Pentagon. Then they watched in horror as the World Trade Center’s twin towers buckled and collapsed to the ground.
It was, by any measure, a stunning, cataclysmic scene, a kind of terrorist theater that transformed millions of television viewers into vicarious victims. Excerpts of the just-released memoir of then-Vice President Dick Cheney demonstrate that it was not just ordinary people who were affected by the attacks; America’s leaders where shocked and shaken, too. And judging from the statements of foreign citizens and leaders in the wake of 9/11, those who proclaimed, “We are all Americans,” it was also apparent that the toll on vicarious victims did not stop at the U.S. border.
One result of this vicarious victimization and the fear and helplessness it produced was that many people became fixated on the next attack and began anxiously “waiting for the other shoe to drop.” This spawned an entire industry of fear as dire warnings were propagated by the Internet of the impending “American Hiroshima” that was certain to result when al Qaeda detonated all the nuclear devices it had hidden in major U.S. cities. Chain emails were widely circulated and recirculated quoting a dubious Israeli “security expert” who promised simultaneous catastrophic terrorist attacks against a number of American cities — attacks that never materialized outside of Hollywood productions.
Fast forward a decade and we are now commemorating 9/11’s 10th anniversary, which seems more significant somehow because it is a round number. Perhaps of more meaningful significance is that this anniversary closely follows the death of al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden on May 2, 2011. Indeed, the buzz regarding this coincidence has caused many of our clients and readers to ask for our assessment of the terrorist threat inside the United States on this 10th anniversary of 9/11.
While we believe that today holds some degree of symbolism for many, the threat of an attack on Sept. 11, 2011, is no higher than it was on Aug. 11 or than it will be on Sept. 12, and below we explain why.
The State of Al Qaeda and the Jihad
All threats have two basic components: intent and capability. Al Qaeda’s leaders have threatened to conduct an attack more terrible than 9/11 for nearly a decade now, and the threats continue. Here’s what Ayman al Zawahiri, now al Qaeda’s No. 1, said to his followers on Aug. 15, 2011, in a message released on the internet via as-Sahab media:
“Seek to attack America that has killed the Imam of the Mujahideen and threw his corpse in the sea and then imprisoned his women and children. Seek to attack her so history can say that a criminal state had spread corruption on earth and Allah sent her his servants who made her a lesson for others and left her as a memory.”
The stated intent of al Qaeda and the rest of the jihadist movement is, and has been, to strike the United States as hard and as often as possible. It logically follows, then, that al Qaeda would strike the United States on Sept. 11 — or any other day — if possible. With intent thus established, now we need to focus on capability.
One of the primary considerations regarding al Qaeda’s capability to strike the United States is the state of the jihadist movement itself. The efforts of the U.S. government and its allies against the core al Qaeda group, which is based in Pakistan, have left it badly damaged and have greatly curtailed its operational ability, especially its ability to conduct transnational attacks. In January we forecast that we believed the al Qaeda core was going to be marginalized on the physical battlefield in 2011 and that it would also struggle to remain relevant on the ideological battlefield. Indeed, it has been our assessment for several years now that al Qaeda does not pose a strategic threat to the United States.
Since we published our 2011 forecast, bin Laden has been killed as well as senior al Qaeda leader Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, who reportedly died in a strike by a U.S. unmanned aerial vehicle Aug. 22 in Pakistan’s North Waziristan region. We continue to believe that the al Qaeda core group is off balance and concerned for its security — especially in light of the intelligence gathered in the raid on bin Laden’s hideout. The core group simply does not enjoy the operational freedom it did prior to September 2001. We also believe the group no longer has the same operational capability in terms of international travel and the ability to transfer money that it had prior to 9/11.
Some people believe there is a greater chance of an attack on this year’s 9/11 anniversary because of the killing of bin Laden, while others note that al Zawahiri may feel pressure to conduct an attack in order to prove his credibility as al Qaeda’s new leader.
Our belief, as noted above, is that al Qaeda has been doing its utmost to attack the United States and has not pulled any punches. Because of this, we do not believe it possesses the ability to increase this effort beyond where it was prior to bin Laden’s death. As to the pressure on al Zawahiri, we noted in December 2007 that the al Qaeda core had been under considerable pressure to prove itself relevant for several years and that, despite this pressure, had yet to deliver. Because of this, we do not believe that the pressure to conduct a successful attack is any heavier on al Zawahiri today than it was prior to bin Laden’s death.
Finally, we believe that if al Qaeda possessed the capability to conduct a spectacular attack it would launch the attack as soon as it was operationally ready, rather than wait for some specific date. The risk of discovery is simply too great.
There are also some who still believe that al Qaeda maintains a network of “sleeper operatives” inside the United States that can be called upon to conduct a spectacular terrorist attack. We do not believe this for two reasons. First, because the pressure on the core al Qaeda leadership to conduct an attack in the United States has been so high for several years there is no reason that it would not have activated any sleepers by now. It would certainly not be in the group’s best interest to keep any such operatives idle for a decade, especially since U.S. intelligence has made such headway in rolling up the organization. Al Qaeda has been faced with a use-it-or-lose-it scenario.
Second, while there is a long history of al Qaeda and other jihadist groups employing covert operatives and inspiring jihadist grassroots operatives or lone wolves like Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan, there is no history of al Qaeda employing true sleeper operatives, that is, operatives who burrow undetected into a society and then remain dormant until called upon to act. Because of this, we remain extremely skeptical that al Qaeda has ever had a sleeper network in the United States. If it had, it would have used it by now.
Would the al Qaeda core leadership like to conduct a spectacular terror attack on the 9/11 anniversary? Absolutely. Does it have the capability? It is unlikely.
A Grassroots Focus
As we noted in our annual jihadist forecast, we believe the greatest threat to the United States and the rest of the West in 2011 emanates from grassroots jihadists and regional franchises. However, the civil war in Yemen and developments in Somalia have preoccupied the attention of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and al Shabaab — the two regional jihadist franchises that have shown the intent and capability to conduct transnational attacks — leaving them very little opportunity to do so. Therefore, we believe the greatest threat of an attack on the 9/11 anniversary will come from the grass roots.
The bad news is that grassroots operatives can be hard to identify, especially if they operate alone; the good news is that they tend to be far less capable than well-trained, more “professional” terrorist operatives. And this means they are more likely to make critical mistakes that will allow their attacks to be detected and thwarted.
As the past few years has demonstrated, there are almost certainly grassroots jihadists operating in small cells or as lone wolves who are presently planning attacks. In fact, we know that since at least 1990 there has not been a time when some group of grassroots jihadists somewhere in the United States has not been planning some kind of attack.
Is it possible, then, that such individuals could be inspired to try to conduct an attack on the 9/11 anniversary if they can coordinate their attack cycle in order to be ready on that date. However, given the increased law enforcement vigilance that will be in place at hard targets on that day and the capabilities of most grassroots operatives, we can anticipate that such an attempt would be conducted against a soft target rather than some more difficult target such as the 9/11 Memorial or the White House. We also believe that any such attack would likely continue the trend we have seen away from bombing attacks toward more simple (and effective) armed assaults.
It must be remembered that simple terrorist attacks are relatively easy to conduct, especially if the assailant is not concerned about escaping after the attack. As jihadist groups such as AQAP have noted in their online propaganda, a determined person can conduct attacks using a variety of simple weapons, from a pickup truck to a knife, axe or gun. Jihadist ideologues have repeatedly praised Nidal Hassan and have pointed out that jihadists operating with modest expectations and acting within the scope of their training and capability can do far more damage than operatives who try to conduct big, ambitious attacks that they lack the basic skills to complete.
And while the authorities in the United States and elsewhere have been quite successful in foiling attacks over the past couple of years, there are a large number of vulnerable targets in the open societies of the West, and Western governments simply do not have the resources to protect everything. Indeed, as long as the ideology of jihadism survives, its adherents will pose a threat.
All this means that some terrorist attacks will invariably succeed, but in the current context, it is our assessment that a simple attack in the United States or some other Western country is far more likely than a complex and spectacular 9/11-style operation. In their primary areas of operation, jihadists have the capability to do more than they do transnationally.
Indeed, despite the concept of a “war on terrorism,” the phenomenon of terrorism can never be completely eliminated, and terrorist attacks can and will be conducted by a wide variety of actors (recently illustrated by the July 22 attacks in Norway). However, as we’ve previously noted, if the public will recognize that terrorist attacks are part of the human condition like cancer or hurricanes, it can take steps to deny the practitioners of terrorism the ability to terrorize.
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WASHINGTON (AP) — We are safer, but not safe enough.
In the decade since the Sept. 11 attacks, the government has taken giant steps to protect the nation from terrorists, spending eye-popping sums to smarten up the federal bureaucracy, hunt down enemies, strengthen airline security, secure U.S. borders, reshape America's image and more. Still, the effort remains a work in progress, and in some cases a work stalled.
Whole alphabets of acronyms have been born and died in pursuit of homeland security, a phrase that wasn't even used much before 9/11.
Hello, TSA, DNI, DHS, NCTC, CVE, NSI and ICE. Goodbye, TTIC, INS and more.
How quaint that travelers used to be asked a few questions about whether they'd packed their own bags. Now, people routinely strip off their belts and shoes, dump their gels in small plastic bags, power up their laptops to prove they aren't bombs and submit to full body scans and pat downs once reserved for suspected criminals.
We have gone from "Let's roll" to "Don't touch my junk."
The bipartisan Sept. 11 Commission in 2004 laid out a 585-page road map to create an America that is "safer, stronger, wiser."
Many of the commission's recommendations are now reality. But in some cases, results haven't lived up to expectations. Other proposals are just that, ideas awaiting action.
"What I've come to appreciate is there's no magic wand on some of these things," says Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who says that progress overall has been significant.
But remember how some of the police and firefighters who rushed to the twin towers in New York couldn't talk to one other because their radios weren't in sync? There's still no nationwide communications network for disasters, as the commission envisioned, although individual cities have made progress.
It's understandable if you've never heard of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, created to ensure that the government doesn't go overboard with new terrorism-fighting powers bestowed by the Patriot Act and other counterterrorism measures. The board has no members, no staff, no office.
Despite a top-to-bottom reorganization of the country's intelligence superstructure, it's still a challenge for analysts to tease out the critical clues needed to prevent an attack.
On Christmas Day 2009, lots of people in government had information about a Nigerian man whose behavior was raising red flags. But because no one had pieced all the information together, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab managed to stroll on to a plane headed for Detroit with a bomb in his underwear. Only his failure to detonate the explosives properly saved the people on that plane.
Lee Hamilton, a co-chairman of the Sept. 11 commission, says it's probably a combination of hard work and good luck that's kept the U.S. from experiencing another all-out terrorist attack. But he worries that success is breeding complacency.
"The lack of urgency concerns me," Hamilton says. "The likelihood is that sometime in the future, we will be attacked again."
A look at some of the 9/11 commission's recommendations, and the results:
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RECOMMENDATION: Tighter security checks on all airline passengers. The Transportation Security Administration and Congress "must give priority attention to improving the ability of screening checkpoints to detect explosives on passengers."
RESULT: There have been awkward moments as the government searches for a system that will protect passengers without infuriating them: A gravely ill 95-year-old woman had to remove her wet diaper before she could get through security in Florida in June. Video of a 6-year-old girl getting frisked in Louisiana in March went viral. "Don't touch my junk," became a national rallying cry.
The TSA was created soon after the attacks, underscoring the priority placed on securing the sky. Since then, the U.S. has poured $50 billion into aviation security. The commission suggested specific actions for the agency: check travelers against terrorist watch lists and screen every passenger who warrants extra security for explosives. Both are now being done. But airport security procedures continue to evolve as the threat mutates. Those intrusive pat-downs began after Abdulmutallab boarded that flight for Detroit.
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RECOMMENDATION: "We recommend the establishment of a National Counterterrorism Center. ... The current position of Director of Central Intelligence should be replaced by a National Intelligence Director."
RESULT: The government has turned its intelligence-sharing policies nearly upside down as it tries to make it easier to manage and share all the rushing streams of information that flow through 15 agencies. There's a new National Counterterrorism Center; its mission is to bring together intelligence and analysts from across the government. There's a new director of national intelligence, a distinct agency, to coordinate it all. Overall, the intelligence budget has more than doubled since Sept. 11.
But Hamilton says "it's not clear that the DNI is the driving force for intelligence community integration that the commission envisioned."
The vision of a strong director supreme over all the intelligence agencies has yet to be fully realized in large part because of the way the job is structured, with lots of responsibility but not much authority. In a town where dollars equal clout, the intelligence director has no ability to redirect, cut off or increase spending at the different agencies.
The position, sometimes derided as the "convener-in-chief," is fast becoming one of the most thankless jobs in Washington. Three directors have come and gone since the job was created in 2005. Each was engaged in turf battles with the CIA and the National Security Council.
Retired Adm. Dennis Blair, who held the job from 2009 to 2010, complained in a recent address that the White House had undermined his authority.
"They sided enough with the CIA in ways that were public enough that it undercut my position," Blair said.
Asked with whom the president would side among current officials at the DNI, CIA and Pentagon, Blair said the White House would do the coordinating. He then added, "My experience is that the White House isn't a very good place to coordinate intelligence, much less to integrate it."
The current director, retired three-star Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, is said to be well thought of by the White House, partly because he is openly deferential to the CIA.
After the 9/11 attacks, the government did work to combine its terrorist watchlists. Now even a beat cop in Seattle can check to see if the person pulled over for speeding is a known or suspected terrorist.
There are some worries that all this broad sharing of information has made it too easy for national secrets to leak. Think WikiLeaks.
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RECOMMENDATION: Creation of a nationwide radio network to allow different public safety agencies to communicate with one another during disasters. "Congress should support pending legislation which provides for the expedited and increased assignment of radio spectrum for public safety purposes."
RESULT: Still no network, legislation still pending.
As fires raged at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, firefighters, police and other emergency personnel couldn't effectively communicate with one another because of their archaic and incompatible radios.
To fix the problem, the commission recommended creating a network that would allow different public safety agencies to talk to each other during disasters, from forest fires to terrorist attacks.
But lawmakers, public safety officials and telecommunications companies have spent years haggling over the best way to build the system, which would cost billions to construct and operate. Legislation backed by the Obama administration would devote high-quality radio spectrum to a nationwide wireless public safety network, and raise the money to pay for it by auctioning other airwaves to spectrum-hungry wireless companies.
Even if a law is enacted this year, setting up the network would take time. "Congress must not approach this urgent matter at a leisurely pace, because quite literally lives are at stake," Hamilton and commission co-chairman Tom Kean said in a June letter to the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.
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RECOMMENDATION: "There should be a board within the executive branch to oversee adherence to the guidelines we recommend and the commitment the government makes to defend our civil liberties."
RESULT: Within weeks of the attacks, President George W. Bush signed the Patriot Act, giving the government powers to search records and conduct roving wiretaps in pursuit of terrorists. That generated worries that personal and civil liberties would be overrun.
The five-person Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board was established and operated for a few years. But since 2008 it has been dormant. President Barack Obama nominated two people to serve, but they have not been confirmed by the Senate.
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RECOMMENDATION: "Afghanistan must not again become a sanctuary for international crime and terrorism." The commission called for a "long-term commitment to a secure and stable Afghanistan."
RESULT: And how: The U.S. commitment has been long term, both in dollars and military might. But Afghanistan is far from secure. Afghan civilian deaths remain alarmingly high. President Hamid Karzai's corruption-riddled government has little power outside of Kabul. As Obama seeks to pull out combat troops over the next three years, the government's hand may weaken further. Al-Qaida, however, has had to relocate much of its operational planning to Pakistan and Yemen, where weak governments leave terrorists an opening.
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RECOMMENDATION: "The United States should support Pakistan's government in its struggle against extremists with a comprehensive effort that extends from military aid to support for better education, so long as Pakistan's leaders remain willing to make difficult choices of their own."
RESULT: Pakistan has embraced democracy, after years under the military-led regime of Pervez Musharraf. Increased U.S. aid has helped shore up the weak democratic government and deliver some counterterrorism successes.
Yet all of Washington's money and support haven't severed links between militants and Pakistan's army and intelligence services. The Taliban can cross into Afghanistan freely to fight U.S. forces, and Pakistanis harbor extremely negative opinions of the U.S.
Relations between U.S. and Pakistani authorities have been consistently difficult. The U.S. discovery and killing of Osama bin Laden in a military town near Pakistan's capital in May only deepened the mutual mistrust and tension. Pakistani officials were furious that the raid was carried out without any warning to authorities in Islamabad, and that has jeopardized cooperation in the fight against al-Qaida. The U.S. has provided about $20 billion in assistance to Pakistan since 9/11, and many Americans are questioning the wisdom of giving more.
The country's direction is very unpredictable.
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RECOMMENDATION: "The problems in the U.S.-Saudi relationship must be confronted, openly."
RESULT: The Saudi government has fought al-Qaida on its own turf and proved a sturdy ally of the U.S. against Iran, yet has struggled to stem the flow of support for groups hostile to the United States. The two countries also haven't seen eye to eye on the wave of protests in North Africa and the Middle East. The commission's call for a "shared commitment to political and economic reform" is unfulfilled.
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RECOMMENDATION: A new approach to the Muslim world, one less tolerant of undemocratic governments. "One of the lessons of the long Cold War was that short-term gains in cooperating with the most repressive and brutal governments were too often outweighed by long-term setbacks for America's stature and interests."
RESULT: The Obama administration has seized on the anti-government uprisings of the Arab spring to reposition U.S. foreign policy, moving away from support for strongmen such as Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and more toward democratic reforms and respect for human rights. The administration hopes that new democracies in the region will offer frustrated young men greater dignity and new economic opportunities, leaving them less vulnerable to the appeal of extremism. But efforts to re-establish the U.S. as a moral leader around the globe have been hindered somewhat by the stalled U.S.-led peace effort between Israelis and Palestinians, high civilian death rates in Afghanistan and Obama's failure to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay as he promised.
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RECOMMENDATION: "The United States should engage other nations in developing a comprehensive coalition strategy against Islamist terrorism."
RESULT: Bush got strong backing from much of the world after 9/11, but that unity splintered when the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003. Still, countries are sharing more intelligence and working together to combat terrorist financing. No government has permitted al-Qaida to operate freely within its borders. Obama's election ushered in a new spirit of cooperation among countries which had often complained of U.S. heavy-handedness and unilateralism under Bush.
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RECOMMENDATION: "Congress should create a single, principal point of oversight and review for homeland security."
RESULT: When the Sept. 11 commission issued its report, 88 congressional committees, subcommittees and caucuses claimed at least some jurisdiction over the Department of Homeland Security.
The commission called the oversight system splintered, dysfunctional, an impediment to improving national security. It also was keenly aware of how hard it is to pry even one inch of turf away from a power-hungry member of Congress, warning presciently that "few things are more difficult to change in Washington than congressional committee jurisdiction and prerogatives."
By 2011, the number of congressional panels claiming jurisdiction had risen to 108. In 2009 alone, the department calculated it spent a collective 66 work years responding to questions from Congress.
"We are constantly briefing staff, appearing at hearings, preparing reports, responding to inquiries," says Napolitano. "It is a problem." And the problem goes way beyond the hassle of answering to lots of congressional chieftains. Hamilton warns: "When everyone has oversight, nobody has oversight."
P.C.
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Although not a perfect fit, I post this here because much of the book is about Homeland Security
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/05/books/counterstrike-by-eric-schmitt-and-thom-shanker-review.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha28
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Woof,
I'm putting this here just to remind folks that illegal immigration and the border isn't just about a few farmhands sneaking in to pick crops. Luckily this guy wasn't out to do anything but the potential harm that could come from an enemy of the U.S. doing the same thing is off the chart. Which begs the question, how many are already here?
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Police officer who faked U.S. citizenship gets 3 months in jail
By Yereth Rosen | Reuters – Thu, Aug 25, 2011tweet4Share0EmailPrintANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - An illegal immigrant from Mexico who admitted faking U.S. citizenship while serving as an Anchorage police officer for six years was sentenced on Thursday to three months in prison.
Rafael Mora-Lopez, 47, who pleaded guilty in June to federal charges of passport fraud and falsely claiming to be a citizen, was also fined $10,000 and ordered placed on three years of supervised release after his jail term.
Mora-Lopez, who was known for two decades in Anchorage under the assumed name of Rafael Espinoza, was a local police officer from 2005 until he was arrested in April of this year.
The real Rafael Espinoza is a natural-born U.S. citizen who was a neighbor of Mora-Lopez's wife in Guadalajara in the 1980s.
According to court documents and Mora-Lopez's admissions, he claimed the birth date and Social Security number of the other man in a fraud that came to light when both men applied for passport renewals.
The revelation shocked fellow police officers, Anchorage Police Chief Mark Mew said at the time, because the man known as Rafael Espinoza was an exemplary officer who was popular with co-workers. Shortly before he was arrested, he had been formally commended for helping rescue a hypothermic hiker.
He had worked as a city bus driver before being hired by the police department.
Several of Mora-Lopez's former colleagues and friends wrote letters to the judge seeking leniency and expressing hope that he will be able to remain in the United States. Many attended the sentencing.
Whether he will be deported is a matter for federal immigration officials to decide, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tom Bradley said.
Mora-Lopez's wife is a naturalized citizen, but her status was granted on the basis of her husband's supposed citizenship, Bradley said. The two have a daughter who is a citizen, he added.
(Editing by Steve Gorman and Cynthia Johnston)
P.C.
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By JUDITH MILLER A specter has haunted the New York Police Department during this week's torrent of 10th anniversary commemorations of 9/11—the 13 terrorist plots against the city in the past decade that have failed or been thwarted thanks partly to NYPD counterterrorism efforts.
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly and his 50,000-strong department know that the 9/11 gatherings are an occasion not only to reflect on that terrible day. They're also a prime target for al Qaeda and other Islamist extremists who long to convince the world, and perhaps themselves, that they're still capable of killing in the name of their perverse interpretation of Islam.
Commissioner Kelly allocates some $330 million of his $4.6 billion annual budget and 1,200 of his staff to counterterrorism. He and his staff, not surprisingly, spent the week bolstering security at the remembrance gatherings throughout the city. On Wednesday, he came to the Manhattan Institute to tout the NYPD's counterterrorism record and defend his department against press allegations that his intelligence division has been spying illegally on Muslims and infringing on their privacy and civil rights.
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New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly
.The police have to factor terrorism into "everything we do," Mr. Kelly said. If that means following leads that take NYPD undercover detectives into mosques, Islamic bookstores, Muslim student associations, cafes and nightclubs, so be it. Mr. Kelly vowed to continue stationing liaisons in 11 cities abroad to "ask the New York question"—much to the occasional chagrin of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the CIA.
It was an undercover officer in an Islamic bookstore who helped stop Shahawar Matin Siraj, a homegrown Muslim extremist and self-professed al Qaeda admirer, from bombing the Herald Square subway station during the 2004 Republican convention, Mr. Kelly said. Another undercover officer prevented homegrown terrorists Ahmed Ferhani, 26, and Mohamed Mamdouh, 20, from bombing a Manhattan synagogue and trying to "take out the entire building."
Would he continue sending NYPD officers across the Hudson into deepest, darkest New Jersey? Yes, he declared, if that was what was needed to keep tabs on the likes of Carlos Almonte and Mohammed Alessa—al Qaeda sympathizers arrested en route to Somalia at JFK Airport in 2010 "who were determined to receive terrorist training abroad only to return home to kill us here."
Michael Sheehan, a former NYPD deputy commissioner for counterterrorism, says that the NYPD has succeeded thanks to its collection and sharing of domestic and foreign intelligence through "humint" (human sources) and "sigint" (signals intelligence) such as electronic intercepts and the monitoring of Internet, cellphone and other communications. Tip-offs from concerned family or community members have also been vital.
Related Video
Former editorial page deputy editor Melanie Kirkpatrick recollects her experiences on September 11th.
..Sigint was key in disrupting at least two of the most serious al Qaeda plots targeting New York since 9/11: the 2006 "Liquid Bomb Plot," or "Operation Overt," in which 25 British citizens of Pakistani descent targeted some seven transatlantic commercial flights from London to North America; and Operation Highrise, an attempt to use suicide bombers to blow up New York City subways in 2009.
The homegrown Islamist in that plot was Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan immigrant with al Qaeda ties who grew up in New York City and staged his operation from there and Colorado. In Zazi's case, investigators say, officials were initially tipped off by the intercept of an email he sent from Colorado to an address in Pakistan that was associated with another group of terrorists who had been arrested earlier that year in Manchester, England.
The "link man," or coordinator in Pakistan, writes Mitchell D. Silber, director of Intelligence Analysis for the New York Police Department, in his forthcoming book, "The Al Qaeda Factor," was corresponding with operatives in three different al Qaeda plots. Zazi's New York subway plot took off only after he contacted the coordinator, identified only as "Ahmad," and informed him that the "wedding," or suicide operation, "was ready to proceed," writes Mr. Silber.
Another serious plot that was disrupted thanks to Internet intercepts was a 2006 scheme by Assem Hammoud, a 31-year-old Lebanese al Qaeda member, and several other still unnamed Islamists—all overseas—to flood Lower Manhattan by setting off explosives in the PATH railway tunnels under the Hudson River. While no arrests in America were made, several suspects have been detained in Lebanon and other Arab states.
Mr. Silber argues that humint has proven even more valuable than sigint in detecting and thwarting homegrown threats—the fastest-growing category of militant Islamist terror. This explains Mr. Kelly's determination to preserve the NYPD's vast intelligence capabilities, even if he's forced to scale back elsewhere in the department due to budget cuts.
With Osama bin Laden dead and al Qaeda under pressure, some terrorism experts argue, as does Peter Bergen, author of the book "The Longest War," that al Qaeda, or at least its "core," "no longer poses a national security threat" to America "that could result in a mass-casualty attack anywhere close to the scale of 9/11."
Mr. Kelly isn't buying it. He's fixated on the recent jump in homegrown extremist plots throughout the country—to 10 in 2009 and 12 in 2010 from four in 2007 and just one in 2005. The increase, says John Miller, a former deputy director for analysis for the Director of National Intelligence, is most likely due to the influence of Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American cleric now hiding in Yemen whose stirring Internet sermons have inspired many of the would-be jihadis detained in recent plots.
Mr. Kelly also knows that in too many cases, New York has been lucky. Faisal Shazad, a middle-class Pakistani–American resident of Connecticut, failed last year to detonate a bomb in Times Square only because he received too little training in Pakistan.
Mr. Kelly calls the killing of bin Laden "success with complications." Those include the numerous references to New York found in his documents in Abbottabad, all of which suggest that bin Laden never abandoned his dream of striking the city again. The discovery on Thursday night of a specific and "credible" al Qaeda linked plot tied to the 9/11 commemorations suggests that Mr. Kelly's concern is justified.
Ms. Miller is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a commentator for Fox News.
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There remains a line of thought within our political spectrum that our own foreign policy is the problem and that our response should be to absorb the losses, bring forces home, and move on. This seems to me a moment to remember that related attacks on Americans and American interests were occurring before 9/11 and have continued since. Examples include the 1993 WTC bombing, two 1998 embassy bombings, and the 2000 USS Cole bombing. Our strategy of not responding or not being able to respond to these attacks against us served only to embolden and empower, not to dissuade the planners and perpetrators of the devastating attacks that followed.
Always prudent to question the details and strategies of war but I cannot ever agree that it is sufficient or wise to absorb and accept losses and not take war to our enemies wherever they are for as long as they are committed to destroy us.
To point out the obvious: The carnage of terror and the war against terror and against the terrorists and those who plan, harbor or help the destruction is the fault of the forces of destruction, not of those who seek to stop and end it.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqQPzmKSnIA&feature=youtu.be
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"Who is being told to keep quiet here and why? Posted by Robert Spencer today:"
www.jihadwatch.org/2011/09/fbi-covering-up-florida-based-saudi-familys-link-to-911-jihad-plot.html
FBI covering up Florida-based Saudi family's link to 9/11 jihad plot?
This family abruptly fled the country shortly before 9/11, "leaving behind three vehicles, food in the refrigerator and toys in the swimming pool." Mohammed Atta may have visited their home. The FBI insists they had nothing to do with the 9/11 jihad plot, and has been extremely reticent about sharing information about their investigation.
Just how compromised is the FBI? First we see their full retreat from telling anti-terror investigators the truth about Islam after a hard-Left journalist and Hamas-linked CAIR complained, and now this. "FBI: No link between Sarasota family and 9/11 plot," by Dan Christensen for The Miami Herald, September 16 (thanks to Ken):
A top Florida FBI agent said Thursday that members of a Saudi family living quietly near Sarasota were questioned after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but no evidence was found that linked them to the hijackers who slammed jetliners into New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
A week after The Miami Herald published a story showing ties between the family and some of the terrorists, Tampa’s head FBI agent, Steven Ibison, released a statement Thursday saying the FBI investigated “suspicions surrounding” the Sarasota home, but never found evidence tying the family members to the hijackers.
“There was no connection found to the 9/11 plot,” said the statement, released to the St. Petersburg Times.
The agency’s statement came just days after U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Fla., asked for a House investigation into the events surrounding the Sarasota family, which abruptly left the home several days before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, leaving behind three vehicles, food in the refrigerator and toys in the swimming pool.
The FBI’s official version, the second in a week, conflicts sharply with reports from people who worked at the homeowners’ association and a counterterrorism officer who joined the investigation.
A senior administrator at the luxury community told The Herald that cars used by the 9/11 hijackers — the tag numbers noted by security guards at the gate — drove to the entrance asking to visit the family at various times before the attacks. One of the cars was linked to terrorist leader Mohamed Atta, said administrator Larry Berberich.
In addition, a counterterrorism officer who requested anonymity said agents also linked telephone calls between the home and known hijacking suspects in the year before the attacks.
So far, the FBI’s response to the discovery has drawn criticism from former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., who said he was never told of the Sarasota investigation when he was co-chair of the congressional inquiry into the 9/11 attacks. Thursday’s FBI statement said the agency provided all the information to the congressional inquiry.
Graham, who appeared on national television this week, said the FBI failed to provide information in the years after 9/11 linking members of the terrorist team to other Saudis in California until congressional investigators discovered it themselves.
“It was not because the FBI gave us the information. We had a very curious and effective investigator who found out,” Graham told the MSNBC cable television network.
In an appearance Monday on MSNBC, Graham said he spoke with President Barack Obama’s counterterrorism advisor. He said he has gone to the White House’s chief of counterterrorism to ask that the administration look into the Sarasota case.
Oh, that's gonna help.
The FBI, which has not released any results of its investigation, said family members who lived in the home owned by Saudi financier Esam Ghazzawi were tracked down and interviewed about the case after the attacks.
It was not clear from Thursday’s statement whether the FBI or Saudi intelligence conducted the interrogations. The family was believed to have flown to Saudi Arabia after briefly stopping in Virginia several days before Sept. 11....
Where in Virginia, and for what purpose?
Posted by Robert on September 19, 2011 2:38 AM | 18 Comments
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Cutting Through the Lone-Wolf Hype
September 22, 2011
By Scott Stewart
Lone wolf. The mere mention of the phrase invokes a sense of fear and dread. It conjures up images of an unknown, malicious plotter working alone and silently to perpetrate an unpredictable, undetectable and unstoppable act of terror. This one phrase combines the persistent fear of terrorism in modern society with the primal fear of the unknown.
The phrase has been used a lot lately. Anyone who has been paying attention to the American press over the past few weeks has been bombarded with a steady stream of statements regarding lone-wolf militants. While many of these statements, such as those from President Barack Obama, Vice President Joseph Biden and Department of Homeland Security Director Janet Napolitano, were made in the days leading up to the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, they did not stop when the threats surrounding the anniversary proved to be unfounded and the date passed without incident. Indeed, on Sept. 14, the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Matthew Olsen, told CNN that one of the things that concerned him most was “finding that next lone-wolf terrorist before he strikes.”
Now, the focus on lone operatives and small independent cells is well founded. We have seen the jihadist threat devolve from one based primarily on the hierarchical al Qaeda core organization to a threat emanating from a broader array of grassroots actors operating alone or in small groups. Indeed, at present, there is a far greater likelihood of a successful jihadist attack being conducted in the West by a lone-wolf attacker or small cell inspired by al Qaeda than by a member of the al Qaeda core or one of the franchise groups. But the lone-wolf threat can be generated by a broad array of ideologies, not just jihadism. A recent reminder of this was the July 22 attack in Oslo, Norway, conducted by lone wolf Anders Breivik.
The lone-wolf threat is nothing new, but it has received a great deal of press coverage in recent months, and with that press coverage has come a certain degree of hype based on the threat’s mystique. However, when one looks closely at the history of solitary terrorists, it becomes apparent that there is a significant gap between lone-wolf theory and lone-wolf practice. An examination of this gap is very helpful in placing the lone-wolf threat in the proper context.
The Shift Toward Leaderless Resistance
While the threat of lone wolves conducting terrorist attacks is real, the first step in putting the threat into context is understanding how long it has existed. To say it is nothing new really means that it is an inherent part of human conflict, a way for a weaker entity — even a solitary one — to inflict pain upon and destabilize a much larger entity. Modern lone-wolf terrorism is widely considered to have emerged in the 1800s, when fanatical individuals bent on effecting political change demonstrated that a solitary actor could impact history. Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist who assassinated U.S. President William McKinley in 1901, was one such lone wolf.
The 1970s brought lone wolf terrorists like Joseph Paul Franklin and Ted Kaczynski, both of whom were able to operate for years without being identified and apprehended. Based on the success of these lone wolves and following the 1988 Fort Smith Sedition Trial, in which the U.S. government’s penetration of white hate groups was clearly revealed, some of the leaders of these penetrated groups began to advocate “leaderless resistance” as a way to avoid government pressure. They did not invent the concept, which is really quite old, but they readily embraced it and used their status in the white supremacist movement to advocate it.
In 1989, William Pierce, the leader of a neo-Nazi group called the National Alliance and one of the Fort Smith defendants, published a fictional book under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald titled “Hunter,” which dealt with the exploits of a fictional lone wolf named Oscar Yeager. Pierce dedicated the book to Joseph Paul Franklin and he clearly intended it to serve as an inspiration and model for lone-wolf operatives. Pierce’s earlier book, “The Turner Diaries,” was based on a militant operational theory involving a clandestine organization, and “Hunter” represented a distinct break from that approach.
In 1990, Richard Kelly Hoskins, an influential “Christian Identity” ideologue, published a book titled “Vigilantes of Christendom” in which he introduced the concept of the “Phineas Priest.” According to Hoskins, a Phineas Priest is a lone-wolf militant chosen by God and set apart to be God’s “agent of vengeance” upon the earth. Phineas Priests also believe their attacks will serve to ignite a wider “racial holy war” that will ultimately lead to the salvation of the white race.
In 1992, another of the Fort Smith defendants, former Ku Klux Klan Leader Louis Beam, published an essay in his magazine “The Seditionist” that provided a detailed roadmap for moving the white hate movement toward the leaderless resistance model. This roadmap called for lone wolves and small “phantom” cells to engage in violent action to protect themselves from detection.
In the white-supremacist realm, the shift toward leaderless resistance — taken because of the government’s success in penetrating and disrupting group operations — was an admission of failure on the part of leaders like Pierce, Hoskins and Beam. It is important to note that in the two decades that have passed since the leaderless-resistance model rose to prominence in the white-supremacist movement there have been only a handful of successful lone-wolf attacks. The army of lone wolves envisioned by the proponents of leaderless resistance never materialized.
But the leaderless resistance model was advocated not only by the far right. Influenced by their anarchist roots, left-wing extremists also moved in that direction, and movements such as the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front actually adopted operational models that were very similar to the leaderless-resistance doctrine prescribed by Beam.
More recently, and for similar reasons, the jihadists have also come to adopt the leaderless-resistance theory. Perhaps the first to promote the concept in the jihadist realm was jihadist military theoretician Abu Musab al-Suri. Upon seeing the success the United States and its allies were having against the al Qaeda core and its wider network following 9/11, al-Suri began to promote the concept of individual jihad — leaderless resistance. As if to prove his own point about the dangers of belonging to a group, al-Suri was reportedly captured in November 2005 in Pakistan.
Al-Suri’s concept of leaderless resistance was embraced by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the al Qaeda franchise group in Yemen, in 2009. AQAP called for this type of strategy in both its Arabic-language media and its English language magazine, “Inspire,” which published long excerpts of al-Suri’s material on individual jihad. In 2010, the al Qaeda core also embraced the idea, with U.S.-born spokesman Adam Gadahn echoing AQAP’s calls for Muslims to adopt the leaderless resistance model.
However, in the jihadist realm, as in the white-supremacist realm before it, the shift to leaderless resistance was an admission of weakness rather than a sign of strength. Jihadists recognized that they have been extremely limited in their ability to successfully attack the West, and while jihadist groups welcomed recruits in the past, they are now telling them it is too dangerous because of the steps taken by the United States and its allies to combat the transnational terrorist threat.
Busting the Mystique
Having established that when a group promotes leaderless resistance as an operational model it is a sign of failure rather than strength, let’s take a look at how the theory translates into practice.
On its face, as described by strategists such as Beam and al-Suri, the leaderless-resistance theory is tactically sound. By operating as lone wolves or small, insulated cells, operatives can increase their operational security and make it more difficult for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to identify them. As seen by examples such as Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hassan and Roshonara Choudhry, who stabbed British lawmaker Stephen Timms with a kitchen knife in May 2010, such attacks can create a significant impact with very little cost.
Lone wolves and small cells do indeed present unique challenges, but history has shown that it is very difficult to put the lone-wolf theory into practice. For every Eric Rudolph, Nidal Hasan and Anders Breivik there are scores of half-baked lone-wolf wannabes who either botch their operations or are uncovered before they can launch an attack.
It is a rare individual who possesses the requisite combination of will, discipline, adaptability, resourcefulness and technical skill to make the leap from theory to practice and become a successful lone wolf. Immaturity, impatience and incompetence are frequently the bane of failed lone-wolf operators, who also frequently lack a realistic assessment of their capabilities and tend to attempt attacks that are far too complex. When they try to do something spectacular they frequently achieve little or nothing. By definition and operational necessity, lone-wolf operatives do not have the luxury of attending training camps where they can be taught effective terrorist tradecraft. Nasir al-Wahayshi has recognized this and has urged jihadist lone wolves to focus on simple, easily accomplished attacks that can be conducted with readily available items and that do not require advanced tradecraft to succeed.
It must also be recognized that attacks, even those conducted by lone wolves, do not simply materialize out of a vacuum. Lone wolf attacks must follow the same planning process as an attack conducted by a small cell or hierarchical group. This means that lone wolves are also vulnerable to detection during their planning and preparation for an attack — even more so, since a lone wolf must conduct each step of the process alone and therefore must expose himself to detection on multiple occasions rather than delegate risky tasks such as surveillance to someone else in order to reduce the risk of detection. A lone wolf must conduct all the preoperational surveillance, acquire all the weapons, assemble and test all the components of the improvised explosive device (if one is to be used) and then deploy everything required for the attack before launching it.
Certainly, there is far more effort in a truck bomb attack than a simple attack with a knife, and the planning process is shorter for the latter, but the lone wolf still must follow and complete all the steps. While this operational model offers security advantages regarding communications and makes it impossible for the authorities to plant an informant in a group, it also increases operational security risks by exposing the lone operator at multiple points of the planning process.
Operating alone also takes more time, does not allow the lone attacker to leverage the skills of others and requires that the lone attacker provide all the necessary resources for the attack. When we consider all the traits required for someone to bridge the gap between lone-wolf theory and practice, from will and discipline to self-sufficiency and tactical ability, there simply are not many people who have both the ability and the intent to conduct such attacks. This is why we have not seen more lone-wolf attacks despite the fact that the theory does offer some tactical advantages and has been around for so long.
The limits of working alone also mean that, for the most part, lone-wolf attacks tend to be smaller and less damaging than attacks conducted by independent cells or hierarchical organizations. Breivik’s attack in Norway and Hasan’s attack at Fort Hood are rare exceptions and not the rule.
When we set aside the mystique of the lone wolf and look at the reality of the phenomenon, we can see that the threat is often far less daunting in fact than in theory. One of the most vocal proponents of the theory in the white supremacist movement in the late 1990s was a young California neo-Nazi named Alex Curtis. After Curtis was arrested in 2000 and convicted of harassing Jewish figures in Southern California, it was said that when he made the jump from “keyboard commando” to conducting operations in the physical world he proved to be more of a “stray mutt” than a lone wolf.
Lone wolves — or stray mutts — do pose a threat, but that threat must be neither overstated nor ignored. Lone attackers are not mythical creatures that come out of nowhere to inflict harm. They follow a process and are vulnerable to detection at certain times during that process. Cutting through the hype is an important step in dispelling the mystique and addressing the problems posed by such individuals in a realistic and practical way.
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U.S. says it foiled Iranian-backed terror plot targeting Saudi ambassador
By Laura Rozen
Senior Foreign Affairs Reporter
PostsEmailRSSBy Laura Rozen | The Envoy – 7 mins agotweet0Share0EmailPrint
The United States accused Iranian-backed agents Tuesday of plotting a foiled terrorist plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States, the Justice Department said Tuesday.
The stunning accusations came in a Justice Department criminal complaint unsealed Tuesday afternoon at a press conference featuring Attorney General Eric Holder, FBI Director Robert Mueller and a team of Justice Department prosecutors. The key suspected charged in the terror plot, identified as Manssor Arbabsiar, an Iranian-American, was arrested late last month at JFK Airport; a second accused conspirator named in the complaint, an alleged Iranian Qods Force official identified as Gohlam Shakuri, remains at large and is believed to be in Iran. The five-count criminal complaint also discusses other unidentified conspirators in the plot and suggested they were members of the Qods force in Iran.
The alleged assassination plot--unraveled by federal agents with the Drug Enforcement Agency and FBI--was "conceived, sponsored and was directed from Iran" Holder said in a statement Tuesday. "The U.S. is committed to holding Iran accountable for its actions."
Federal officials "said the plot included the assassination of the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States, Adel Al-Jubeir, with a bomb and subsequent bomb attacks on the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Washington, D.C.," ABC News reported on the complaint.
"The new case, called Operation Red Coalition, began in May when an Iranian-American from Corpus Christi, Texas,"--Arbabsiar--"approached a DEA informant seeking the help of a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate the Saudi ambassador," the ABC News report on the unsealed complaint said.
But the man Arbabsiar approached who he thought to be a member of a brutal Mexican drug cartel turned out to be a confidential informant for the Drug Enforcement Agency.
From May through September, Arbabsiar traveled to Mexico twice to meet with the DEA Confidential Informant to arrange the assassination. Arbabsiar is also accused in the complaint of having transfered $100,000 to the recruited-assassin's bank account--the downpayment on what he said would be $1.5 million paid in total after the assassination.
Arbabsiar, 56, "thought he was dealing with a member of the feared Zetas Mexican drug organization," ABC News reported. He claimed "he was 'directed by high-ranking members of the Iranian government,' including a cousin who was 'a member of the Iranian army but did not wear a uniform.'" Officials suggested the cousin may be a member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards corps' Qods force.
The United States has previously accused the Qods Force of sponsoring militant attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"Arbabsiar and a second man, Gohlam Shakuri, an Iranian official, were named in a five-count criminal complaint filed Tuesday afternoon in federal court in New York," ABC reported. "They were charged with conspiracy to kill a foreign official and conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction, a bomb, among other counts. Shakuri is still at large in Iran, Holder said."
"U.S. officials said Arbabsiar met twice in July with the DEA informant in the northern Mexico city of Reynosa, across the border from McAllen, Texas, and negotiated a $1.5 million payment for the assassination of the Saudi ambassador," ABC reported. "As a down payment, officials said Arbabsiar wired two payments of $49,960 on Aug. 1 and Aug. 9 to an FBI undercover bank account after he had returned to Iran."
The Saudi King sent a private letter to President Obama in September hand-delivered by Saudi ambassador to the United States al-Jubeir, who has been frequently absent from Washington much of that month. U.S. National Security Advisor Tom Donilon traveled to meet with the Saudi King in Riyadh earlier this month.
Sounds like it came right out of the book I'm writing. :-D Of course we don't need no stinking fence and why on earth would we enforce our immigration laws?
P.C.
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It was "Operation Bombwalker" that Iranian law enforcement set up to catch high ranking terrorists willing to use WMD in the US.
Nothing to see here, move along.... :wink:
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One month to the day after the 10th anniversary of 9/11 comes a sobering moment in the history of the U.S. war on terror: The Department of Justice has charged that "factions of the Iranian government" plotted to assassinate Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States by blowing him up inside a Washington, D.C., restaurant.
Had it succeeded, this would have constituted an act of terror by the Islamic Republic of Iran on U.S. soil, and arguably an act of war. To those, notably an emerging isolationist wing in the Republican party, who've argued lately that the U.S. should pull its efforts back from a waning international terrorist threat to focus on domestic concerns, this event is a wake-up call.
Related Video
Matt Kaminski on Iranian plots to bomb the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Washington D.C.
..One of the two central figures in the alleged plot, Manssor Arbabsiar—described as a 56-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen with Iranian and U.S. passports—was arrested September 29 at JFK Airport in New York. At a July 17 planning meeting in Mexico, an undercover U.S. agent suggested to Arbabsiar that the assassination would cause mass casualties. Arbabsiar replied: "They [the Iranians] want that guy done; if the hundred go with him, f**k 'em."
The announcement was made yesterday in Washington by Attorney General Eric Holder, FBI Director Robert Mueller, an assistant attorney general for national security and the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. In short, this is not a group of American guys gone off the rails in New Jersey.
The second figure named in the alleged plot, and Arbabsiar's Iranian contact, was identified as Gholam Shakuri, a member of Iran's Qods force and still at large. Qods is described in the Justice charge sheet as "a special operations unit of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps that is said to sponsor and promote terrorist activities abroad."
Justice also makes clear that this effort in Iran extended beyond these two men, referring several times to their "Iran-based co-conspirators." After Arbabsiar's arrest, he was directed to phone Shakuri in Iran, who said on October 5, last Wednesday: "[j]ust do it quickly; it's late . . ."
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U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder at a news conference on the details of a bomb plot targeting the Saudi ambassador to the United States.
.This appalling news needs to be placed in the broader context of Iran's behavior. One of the charges brought by the U.S. against the two men is "conspiracy to commit an act of international terrorism transcending national boundaries." That aptly describes what seems to occupy much of the Iranian government's waking hours.
This June, the International Atomic Energy Agency made public its recent reporting on Iran's nuclear program. Listed in the report's suspected activities were "producing uranium metal . . . into components relevant to a nuclear device" and "missile re-entry vehicle redesign activities for a new payload assessed as being nuclear in nature."
The good news in yesterday's announcement, and in earlier successes, is that U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence appear to have taken the lessons of 9/11 to heart. They got serious about terror and are able to thwart potential disasters such as this, though we wonder how many others are in train.
Less reassuring is the lapsed seriousness by the West's political leadership about Iran's threat. The U.S. and its allies have imposed sanction regimes on Iran, but they have allowed legalistic definitions to free Iranian officials with ties to its nuclearization program to flout travel bans and such.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad arrives annually to rant from a podium at the United Nations on the East River. Iran is about much more than these antic rants, and its resources are vastly greater than al Qaeda's. It sees itself as at war with the U.S., Europe, Israel and now obviously Saudi Arabia. As obvious, it sees itself as immune to effective retaliation against its repeated, or planned, offensives. It's past time for U.S. policy toward Iran to reflect the reality of what it is dealing with.
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Iran has been waging war on us since 1979. Unfortunately, it's been totally one sided.
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GM:
Forgive me, but that is quite incomplete. Before '79 we were more than a little involved in its internal affairs and we acatively supported Saddam in his war with Iran, a war which cost some million plus lives.
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Growing Concern Over the NYPD's Counterterrorism Methods
October 12, 2011
By Scott Stewart
In response to the 9/11 attacks, the New York Police Department (NYPD) established its own Counter-Terrorism Bureau and revamped its Intelligence Division. Since that time, its methods have gone largely unchallenged and have been generally popular with New Yorkers, who expect the department to take measures to prevent future attacks.
Preventing terrorist attacks requires a much different operational model than arresting individuals responsible for such attacks, and the NYPD has served as a leader in developing new, proactive approaches to police counterterrorism. However, it has been more than 10 years since the 9/11 attacks, and the NYPD is now facing growing concern over its counterterrorism activities. There is always an uneasy equilibrium between security and civil rights, and while the balance tilted toward security in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, it now appears to be shifting back.
This shift provides an opportunity to examine the NYPD’s activities, the pressure being brought against the department and the type of official oversight that might be imposed.
Under Pressure
Reports that the NYPD’s Intelligence Division and Counter-Terrorism Bureau engage in aggressive, proactive operations are nothing new. STRATFOR has written about them since 2004, and several books have been published on the topic. Indeed, police agencies from all over the world travel to New York to study the NYPD’s approach, which seems to have been quite effective.
Criticism of the department’s activities is nothing new, either. Civil liberties groups have expressed concern over security methods instituted after 9/11, and Leonard Levitt, who writes a column on New York police activities for the website NYPD Confidential, has long been critical of the NYPD and its commissioner, Ray Kelly. Associated Press reporters Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo have written a series of investigative reports that began on August 24 detailing “covert” NYPD activities, such as mapping the Muslim areas of New York. This was followed by the Aug. 31 publication of what appears to be a leaked NYPD PowerPoint presentation detailing the activities of the Intelligence Division’s Demographics Unit.
In the wake of these reports, criticism of the NYPD’s program has reached a new level. Members of the New York City Council expressed concern that their constituents were being unjustly monitored. Six New York state senators asked the state attorney general to investigate the possibility of “unlawful covert surveillance operations of the Muslim community.” A group of civil rights lawyers also asked a U.S. district judge in Manhattan to force the NYPD to publicize any records of such a program and to issue a court order to prevent their destruction. In response to the AP investigation, two members of Congress, Reps. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., and Rush Holt, D-N.J., asked the Justice Department to investigate. The heat is on.
After an Oct. 7 hearing regarding NYPD intelligence and counterterrorism operations, New York City Council Public Safety Committee Chairman Peter Vallone said, “That portion of the police department’s work should probably be looked at by a federal monitor.”
Following Vallone’s statement, media reports cited Congressional and Obama administration officials saying they have no authority to monitor the NYPD. While Vallone claims the City Council does not have the expertise to oversee the department’s operations, and the federal government says that it lacks the jurisdiction, it is almost certain that the NYPD will eventually face some sort of new oversight mechanisms and judicial review of its counterterrorism activities.
New York City and the Terrorist Threat
While 9/11 had a profound effect on the world and on U.S. foreign policy, it had an overwhelming effect on New York City itself. New Yorkers were willing to do whatever it took to make sure such an attack did not happen again, and when Kelly was appointed police commissioner in 2002, he proclaimed this as his primary duty (his critics attributed the focus to ego and hubris). This meant revamping counterterrorism and moving to an intelligence-based model of prevention rather than one based on prosecution.
The NYPD’s Intelligence Division, which existed prior to 9/11, was known mainly for driving VIPs around New York, one of the most popular destinations for foreign dignitaries and one that becomes very busy during the U.N. General Assembly. Before 9/11, the NYPD also faced certain restrictions contained in a 1985 court order known as the Handschu guidelines, which required the department to submit “specific information” on criminal activity to a panel for approval to monitor any kind of political activity. The Intelligence Division had a very limited mandate. When David Cohen, a former CIA analyst, was brought in to run the division, he went to U.S. District Court in Manhattan to get the guidelines modified. Judge Charles Haight modified them twice in 2002 and 2003, and he could very well review them again. His previous modifications allowed the NYPD Intelligence Division to proactively monitor public activity and look for indications of terrorist or criminal activity without waiting for approval from a review panel.
The Counter-Terrorism Bureau was founded in 2002 with analytical and collection responsibilities similar to those of the Intelligence Division but involving the training, coordination and response of police units. Differences between the two units are mainly bureaucratic and they work closely together.
As the capabilities of the NYPD’s Intelligence Division and Counter-Terrorism Bureau developed, both faced the challenges of any new or revamped intelligence organization. Their officers learned the trade by taking on new monitoring responsibilities, investigating plots and analyzing intelligence from plots in other parts of the United States and abroad. One of their biggest challenges was the lack of access to information from the federal government and other police departments around the United States. The NYPD also believed that the federal government could not protect New York. The most high-profile city in the world for finance, tourism and now terrorism, among other things, decided that it had to protect itself.
The NYPD set about trying to detect plots within New York as they developed, getting information on terrorist tactics and understanding and even deterring plots developing outside the city. In addition to the challenges it also had some key advantages, including a wealth of ethnic backgrounds and language skills to draw on, the budget and drive to develop liaison channels and the agility that comes with being relatively small, which allowed it to adapt to changing threat environments. The department was creating new organizational structures with specific missions and targeted at specific threats. Unlike federal agencies, it had no local competitors, and its large municipal budget was augmented by federal funding that has yet to face cyclical security budget challenges.
Looking for Plots
STRATFOR first wrote about the NYPD’s new proactive approach to counterterrorism in 2004. The NYPD’s focus moved from waiting for an attack to happen and then allowing police and prosecutors to “make the big case” to preventing and disrupting plots long before an attack could occur. This approach often means that operatives plotting attacks are charged with much lower charges than terrorism or homicide, such as document fraud or conspiracy to acquire explosives.
The process of looking for signs of a terrorist plot is not difficult to explain conceptually, but actually preventing an attack is extremely difficult, especially when the investigative agency is trying to balance security and civil liberties. It helps when plotters expose themselves prior to their attack and ordinary citizens are mindful of suspicious behavior. Grassroots defenders, as we call them, can look for signs of pre-operational surveillance, weapons purchasing and bombmaking, and even the expressed intent to conduct an attack. Such activities are seemingly innocuous and often legal — taking photos at a tourist site, purchasing nail-polish remover, exercising the right of free speech — but sometimes these activities are carried out with the purpose of doing harm. The NYPD must figure out how to separate the innocent act from the threatening act, and this requires actionable intelligence.
It is for this reason that the NYPD’s Demographics Unit, which is now apparently called the Zone Assessment Unit, has been carrying out open observation in neighborhoods throughout New York. Understanding local dynamics, down to the block-by-block level, provides the context for any threat reporting and intelligence that the NYPD receives. Also shaping perceptions are the thousands of calls to 911 and 1-888-NYC-SAFE that come in every day, partly due to the city’s “If you see something, say something” campaign. This input, along with observations by so-called “rakers” (undercover police officers) allows NYPD analysts to “connect the dots” and detect plots before an attack occurs. According to the AP reports, these rakers, who go to different neighborhoods, observe and interact with residents and look for signs of criminal or terrorist activity, have been primarily targeting Muslim neighborhoods.
These undercover officers make the same observations that any citizen can make in places where there is no reasonable expectation of privacy. Indeed, law enforcement officers from the local to the federal level across the country have been doing this for a long time, looking for indicators of criminal activity in business, religious and public settings without presuming guilt.
Long before the NYPD began looking for jihadists, local police have used the same methods to look for mafia activity in Italian neighborhoods, neo-Nazis at gun shows and music concerts, Crips in black neighborhoods and MS-13 members in Latino neighborhoods. Law enforcement infiltration into white hate groups has disrupted much of this movement in the United States. Location is a factor in any counterterrorism effort because certain targeted groups tend to congregate in certain places, but placing too much emphasis on classifications of people can lead to dangerous generalizations, which is why STRATFOR often writes about looking for the “how” rather than the “who.”
Understanding New Threats and Tactics
As the NYPD saw it, the department needed tactical information as soon as possible so it could change the threat posture. The department’s greatest fear was that a coordinated attack would occur on cities throughout the world and police in New York would not be ramped up in time to prevent or mitigate it. For example, an attack on transit networks in Europe at rush hour could be followed by an attack a few hours later in New York, when New Yorkers were on their way to work. This fear was almost realized with the 2004 train attacks in Madrid. Within hours of the attacks, NYPD officers were in Madrid reporting back to New York, but the NYPD claims the report they received from the FBI came 18 months later. There was likely some intelligence sharing prior to this report, but the perceived lack of federal responsiveness explains why the NYPD has embarked on its independent, proactive mission.
NYPD officers reportedly are located in 11 cities around the world, and in addition to facilitating a more rapid exchange of intelligence and insight, these overseas operatives are also charged with developing liaison relationships with other police forces. And instead of being based in the U.S. embassy like the FBI’s legal attache, they work on the ground and in the offices of the local police. The NYPD believes this helps the department better protect New York City, and it is willing to risk the ire of and turf wars with other U.S. agencies such as the FBI, which has a broader mandate to operate abroad.
Managing Oversight and Other Challenges
The New York City Council does not have the same authority to conduct classified hearings that the U.S. Congress does when it oversees national intelligence activity. And the federal government has limited legal authority at the local level. What Public Safety Committee Chairman Vallone and federal government sources are implying is that they are not willing to take on oversight responsibilities in New York. In other words, while there are concerns about the NYPD’s activities, they are happy with the way the department is working and want to let it continue, albeit with more accountability. As oversight exists now, Kelly briefs Vallone on various NYPD operations, and even with more scrutiny from the City Council, any operations are likely be approved.
The NYPD still has to keep civil rights concerns in mind, not only because of a legal or moral responsibility but also to function successfully. As soon as the NYPD is seen as a dangerous presence in a neighborhood rather than a protective asset, it will lose access to the intelligence that is so important in preventing terrorist attacks. The department has plenty of incentive to keep its officers in line.
Threats and Dimwits
One worry is that the NYPD is overly focused on jihadists, rather than other potential threats like white supremacists, anarchists, foreign government agents or less predictable “lone wolves.”
The attack by Anders Breivik in Oslo, Norway, reminded police departments and security services worldwide that tunnel vision focused on jihadists is dangerous. If the NYPD is indeed focusing only on Muslim neighborhoods (which it probably is not), the biggest problem is that it will fail in its security mission, not that it will face prosecution for racial profiling. The department has ample incentive to think about what the next threat could be and look for new and less familiar signs of a pending attack. Simple racial profiling will not achieve that goal.
The modern history of terrorism in New York City goes back to a 1916 attack by German saboteurs on a New Jersey arms depot that damaged buildings in Manhattan. However unlikely, these are the kinds of threats that the NYPD will also need to think about as it tries to keep its citizens safe. The alleged Iranian plot to carry out an assassination in the Washington area underscores the possibility of state-organized sabotage or terrorism.
That there have been no successful terrorist attacks in New York City since 9/11 cannot simply be attributed to NYPD. In the Faisal Shahzad case, the fact that his improvised explosive device did not work was just as important as the quick response of police officers in Times Square. Shahzad’s failure was not a result of preventive intelligence and counterterrorism work. U.S. operations in Afghanistan and other countries that have largely disrupted the al Qaeda network have also severely limited its ability to attack New York again.
The NYPD’s counterterrorism and intelligence efforts are still new and developing. As such, they are unconstrained compared to those of the larger legacy organizations at the federal level. At the same time, the department’s activities are unprecedented at the local level. As its efforts mature, the pendulum of domestic security and civil liberties will remain in motion, and the NYPD will face new scrutiny in the coming year, including judicial oversight, which is an important standard in American law enforcement. The challenge for New York is finding the correct balance between guarding the lives and protecting the rights of its people.
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http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/10/19/terror-alert-bomb-scare-after-san-antonio-courthouse-break-in/?test=latestnews#ixzz1bEc9d78e
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This is rather pathetic from a security perspective. If they could steal the entire truck unhindered, then they could just as easily have planted explosives in the President's lecterns.
Do you really want to count on a dog sweep (highly probable) as your only layer of security between the President and an item he might be standing right next to? I see this as no better than leaving a protectee's vehicle unsecured at night.
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Obama’s speech equipment stolen in Virginia: report
By David Nakamura
Washington Post October 19, 2011
GREENSBORO, N.C. — Opportunistic thieves, opposition party operatives or just fans of President Obama really eager to know what he has to say?
A Henrico, Va., television station, WWBT-NBC12, is reporting that a truck carrying $200,000 worth of equipment — including several lecterns with the presidential seal, teleprompters and portable audio equipment — for Obama’s appearance in Chesterfield on Wednesday was stolen outside a Marriott hotel.
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"fans of President Obama really eager to know what he has to say? "
I thought those were extinct, banished far and away to times of long ago.
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This is rather pathetic from a security perspective. If they could steal the entire truck unhindered, then they could just as easily have planted explosives in the President's lecterns.
Do you really want to count on a dog sweep (highly probable) as your only layer of security between the President and an item he might be standing right next to? I see this as no better than leaving a protectee's vehicle unsecured at night.
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Obama’s speech equipment stolen in Virginia: report
By David Nakamura
Washington Post October 19, 2011
GREENSBORO, N.C. — Opportunistic thieves, opposition party operatives or just fans of President Obama really eager to know what he has to say?
A Henrico, Va., television station, WWBT-NBC12, is reporting that a truck carrying $200,000 worth of equipment — including several lecterns with the presidential seal, teleprompters and portable audio equipment — for Obama’s appearance in Chesterfield on Wednesday was stolen outside a Marriott hotel.
There has been some serious security breaches in recent times that demonstrate some serious problems within the US Secret Service.
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Reflections on the Iranian Assassination Plot
October 20, 2011
By Scott Stewart
On Oct. 11, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that two men had been charged in New York with taking part in a plot directed by the Iranian Quds Force to kill Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir, on U.S. soil.
Manssor Arbabsiar and Gholam Shakuri face numerous charges, including conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction (explosives), conspiracy to commit an act of terrorism transcending national borders and conspiracy to murder a foreign official. Arbabsiar, who was arrested Sept. 29 at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, is a U.S. citizen with both Iranian and U.S. passports. Shakuri, who remains at large, allegedly is a senior officer in Iran’s Quds Force, a special unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) believed to promote military and terrorist activities abroad.
Between May and July, Arbabsiar, who lives in the United States, allegedly traveled several times to Mexico, where he met with a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) confidential informant who was posing as an associate of the Mexican Los Zetas cartel. The criminal complaint charges that Arbabsiar attempted to hire the DEA source and his purported accomplices to kill the ambassador. Arbabsiar’s Iranian contacts allegedly wired two separate payments totaling $100,000 in August into an FBI-controlled bank account in the United States, with Shakuri’s approval, as a down payment to the DEA source for the killing (the agreed-upon total price was $1.5 million).
Much has been written about the Arbabsiar case, both by those who believe the U.S. government’s case is valid and by those who doubt the facts laid out in the criminal complaint. However, as we have watched this case unfold, along with the media coverage surrounding it, it has occurred to us that there are two aspects of the case that we think merit more discussion. The first is that, as history has shown, it is not unusual for Iran to employ unconventional assassins in plots inside the United States. Second, while the DEA informant was reportedly posing as a member of Los Zetas, we do not believe the case proves any sort of increase in the terrorist threat emanating from the United States’ southern border.
Unconventional Assassins
One argument that has appeared in media coverage and has cast doubt on the validity of the U.S. government’s case is the alleged use by the Quds Force of Arbabsiar, an unemployed used car salesman, as its interlocutor. The criminal complaint states that Arbabsiar was recruited by his cousin, Abdul Reza Shahlai, a senior Quds Force commander, in spring 2011 and then handled by Shakuri, who is Shahlai’s deputy. The complaint also alleges that, initially, Arbabsiar was tasked with finding someone to kidnap al-Jubeir, but at some unspecified point the objective of the plot turned from kidnapping to murder. After his arrest, Arbabsiar told the agents who interviewed him that he was chosen for the mission because of his business interests and contacts in the United States and Mexico and that he told his cousin that he knew individuals involved in the narcotics trade. Shahlai then allegedly tasked Arbabsiar to attempt to hire some of his narco contacts for the kidnapping mission since Shahlai believed that people involved in the narcotics trade would be willing to undertake illegal activities, such as kidnapping, for money.
It is important to recognize that Arbabsiar was not just a random used car salesman selected for this mission. He is purportedly the cousin of a senior Quds Force officer and was in Iran talking to his cousin when he was recruited. According to some interviews appearing in the media, Arbabsiar had decided to leave the United States and return permanently to Iran, but, as a naturalized U.S. citizen, he could have been seen as useful by the Quds Force for his ability to freely travel to the United States. Arbabsiar also was likely enticed by the money he could make working for the Quds Force — money that could have been useful in helping him re-establish himself in Iran. If he was motivated by money rather than ideology, it could explain why he flipped so easily after being arrested by U.S. authorities.
Now, while the Iranian government has shown the ability to conduct sophisticated operations in countries within its sphere of influence, such as Lebanon and Iraq, the use of suboptimal agents to orchestrate an assassination plot in the United States is not entirely without precedent.
For example, there appear to be some very interesting parallels between the Arbabsiar case and two other alleged Iranian plots to assassinate dissidents in Los Angeles and London. The details of these cases were exposed in the prosecution and conviction of Mohammad Reza Sadeghnia in California and in U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks pertaining to the Sadeghnia case.
Sadeghnia, who was arrested in Los Angeles in July 2009, is a naturalized U.S. citizen of Iranian descent who at one point ran a painting business in Michigan. Sadeghnia was apparently recruited by the Iranian government and allegedly carried out preoperational surveillance on Jamshid Sharmahd, who made radio broadcasts for the Iranian opposition group Tondar from his residence in Glendora, Calif., and Ali Reza Nourizadeh, who worked for Voice of America in London.
Sadeghnia’s clumsy surveillance activities were a testament to his lack of tradecraft and were noticed by his targets. But even though he was fairly inept, a number of other factors seem to support claims that he was working as an agent for the Iranian government. These include his guilty plea, his international travel, and the facts that he conducted surveillance on two high-profile Iranian dissidents on two continents, was convicted of soliciting someone to murder one of them and then returned to Tehran while on supervised release.
Sadeghnia’s profile as an unemployed housepainter from Iran who lived in the United States for many years is similar to that of Arbabsiar, a failed used car salesman. Sadeghnia pleaded guilty of planning to use a third man (also an Iranian-American) to run over and murder Sharmahd with a used van Sadeghnia had purchased. Like the alleged Arbabsiar plot, the Sadeghnia case displayed a lack of sophisticated assassination methodology in an Iranian-linked plot inside the United States.
This does raise the question of why Iran chose to use another unsophisticated assassination operation after the Sadeghnia failure. On the other hand, the Iranians experienced no meaningful repercussions from that plot or much negative press.
For Iranian operatives to be so obvious while operating inside the United States is not a new thing, as illustrated by the case of David Belfield, also known as Dawud Salahuddin, who was hired by the Iranian government to assassinate high-profile Iranian dissident Ali Akbar Tabatabaei in July 1980. Salahuddin is an African-American convert to Islam who worked as a security guard at an Iranian diplomatic office in Washington. He was paid $5,000 to shoot Tabatabaei and then fled the United States for Iran, where he still resides. In a plot reminiscent of the movie Three Days of the Condor, Salahuddin, who had stolen a U.S. Postal Service jeep, walked up to Tabatabaei’s front door dressed in a mail carrier’s uniform and shot the Iranian diplomat as he answered the door. It was a simple plot in which the Iranian hand was readily visible.
There also have been numerous assassinations and failed assassination attempts directed against Iranian dissidents in Europe and elsewhere that were conducted in a rudimentary fashion by operatives easily linked to Iran. Such cases include the 1991 assassination of Shapour Bakhtiar in Paris, the 1989 murder of Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou in Vienna and the 1992 killing of three Iranian-Kurdish opposition leaders at the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin.
All that said, there was a lengthy break between the Iranian assassinations in the West in the 1980s and 1990s and the Sadeghnia and Arbabsiar cases. We do not know for certain what could have motivated Iran to resume such operations, but the Iranians have been locked in a sustained covert intelligence war with the United States and its allies for several years now. It is possible these attacks are seen as an Iranian escalation in that war, or as retaliation for the assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists in Iran, which the Iranians claim were conducted by the United States and Israel.
South of the Border
One other result of the Arbabsiar case is that it has re-energized the long-held U.S. fears of foreign entities using the porous U.S.-Mexico border to conduct terrorist attacks inside the United States and of Mexican cartels partnering with foreign entities to carry out such attacks.
But there are reasons this case does not substantiate such fears. First, it is important to remember that the purported Iranian operative in this case who traveled to the United States, Arbabsiar, is a naturalized U.S. citizen. He is not an Iranian who illegally crossed the border from Mexico. Arbabsiar used his U.S. passport to travel between the United States and Mexico.
Second, while Arbabsiar, and purportedly Shahlai, believed that the Los Zetas cartel would undertake kidnapping or assassination in the United States in exchange for money, that assumption may be flawed. Certainly, while Mexican cartels do indeed kidnap and murder people inside the United States (often for financial gain), they also have a long history of being very careful about the types of operations they conduct inside the United States. This is because the cartels do not want to incur the full wrath of the U.S. government. Shooting a drug dealer in Laredo who loses a load of dope is one thing; going after the Saudi ambassador in Washington is quite another. While the payoff for this operation seems substantial ($1.5 million), there is no way that a Mexican cartel would jeopardize its billion-dollar enterprise for such a small one-time payment and for an act that offered no other apparent business benefit to the cartel. While Mexican cartels can be quite violent, their violence is calculated for the most part, and they tend to refrain from activities that could jeopardize their long-term business plans.
One potential danger in terms of U.S. mainland security is that the Arbabsiar case might focus too much additional attention on the U.S.-Mexico border and that this attention could cause resources to be diverted from the northern border and other points of entry, such as airports and seaports. While it is relatively easy to illegally enter the United States over the southern border, and the United States has no idea who many of the illegal immigrants really are, that does not mean that resources should be taken from elsewhere.
As STRATFOR has noted before, many terrorist plots have originated in Canada — far more than have had any sort of nexus to Mexico. These include plots involving Ghazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer, a Palestinian who was convicted of planning a suicide bombing of the New York subway system in 1997; Ahmed Ressam, who was arrested when he tried to enter the United States with explosives in 1999; and the so-called Toronto 18 cell, which was arrested in 2006 and later convicted of planning a string of attacks in Canada and the United States.
Moreover, most terrorist operatives who have traveled to the United States intending to participate in terrorist attacks have flown directly into the country from overseas. Such operatives include the 19 men involved in the 9/11 attacks, the foreigners involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the follow-on New York landmarks bomb plot, as well as failed New York subway bomber Najibulah Zazi and would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad. Even failed shoe bomber Richard Reid and would-be underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to fly directly into the United States.
While there is concern over security on the southern U.S. border, past plots involving foreign terrorist operatives traveling to the United States have either involved direct travel to the United States or travel from Canada. There is simply no empirical evidence to support the idea that the Mexican border is more likely to be used by terrorist operatives than other points of entry.
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http://news.yahoo.com/georgia-men-charged-plotting-ricin-012138938.html
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It will be interesting to see how this develops.
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I wonder if they conspired with the Huatree Militia. :roll:
So they got four geriatric gentlemen on conspiracy, what's the chance that one of them is an informer? Or was there some other intel gathered on their castor bean research?
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So they got four geriatric gentlemen on conspiracy, what's the chance that one of them is an informer? Or was there some other intel gathered on their castor bean research?
From the article, they had an informant and some very incriminating statements, all you need in addition is an overt act to have a case.
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What is the sit rep on the Huatree militia folks trial?
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What is the sit rep on the Huatree militia folks trial?
http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=news/iteam&id=8415879&rss=rss-wls-article-8415879
First guilty plea in Hutaree militia case
Updated at 09:42 AM today
Joshua Clough
November 2, 2011 (CHICAGO) (WLS) -- On Wednesday afternoon, there will be one down and eight to go in the federal case of a militia group aimed at violently overthrowing the United States.
Defendant Joshua Clough will enter a guilty plea at 3 p.m. in a Detroit courtroom, according to records filed Wednesday with the federal clerk.
The high-profile domestic terrorism case includes charges against Thomas Piatek, of Whiting, Indiana, who is scheduled to stand trial with most of the others Feb. 7.
Story: Lawyer argues for Indiana militia member's release
Piatek was arrested in west suburban Clarendon Hills last year after authorities say he and the Hutaree militia group planned to kill police officers, a bloody rampage intended to spark an overthrow of the federal government, according to prosecutors.
U.S. agents found guns and ammunition in Piatek's northwest Indiana garage and say that he was an active participant in the sedition plot. Piatek has been held in Michigan on the charges that include the planned use of weapons of mass destruction to carry out the attack.
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A part of the indictment of the geriatric gang. You do have to be a special kind of stupid to launch these sorts of conspiracies, particularly with what appears to be a fifth person in the room recording you, but I'm getting kinda tired of these half-fannyed "right wing" fruit loops being rolled out for the cameras. Aren't there any left wing folks running their mouths about violent stuff?
BACKGROUND OF THE INVESTIGATION
5. On March 17, 2011 the government's confidential human source (CHS1) consensually recorded a clandestine meeting involving members of a fringe group of a known militia organizationl with the fringe group calling itself the "covert group." The meeting occurred at the residence of Frederick W. Thomas (THOMAS) located at 2265 Dean Mountain Road, Cleveland, Georgia, 30528 1 and attendees at the meeting included THOMAS, Emory Dan Roberts (ROBERTS), and others. At the outset of this meeting, the attendees began discussing and then displaying various weapons each one was carrying on his person. THOMAS mentioned to the group that he had enough weapons to arm everyone at the table. ROBERTS and CHSl either did not have weapons, or did not make them visible.
6. THOMAS became the primary speaker for the meeting and began discussing overt and covert operations for the group. He mentioned a fictional novel he had read on-line in which an antigovernment group killed a large number of federal Department of Justice attorneys, and then he stated, "Now of course, that's just fiction, but that's a damn good idea. 1I THOMAS described a scenario in which he felt would be the "line in the sand" that would result in the activation of militias. THOMAS believed that soon, during a protest action, a protestor would be shot. It is his opinion the militias would act and respond by openly attacking the police. He then openly discussed having compiled what he called the "Bucket List" which is a list of government employees, politicians, corporate leaders and members of the media he feels needed to be "taken out" to "make the country right again." THOMAS told the group he sent the list to a web blog.
7. During the meeting, THOMAS made the following statements:
a. "The right people have to be taken down, and taken down soon."
b. "There is no way for us, as militiamen, to save this country, to save Georgia, without doing something that's highly highly illegal. Murder. That's fucking
illegal, but it's gotta be done."
c. "When it comes time to saving the Constitution, that means some people gotta die."
8. When murder was mentioned, ROBERTS said he knew people in Habersham County [Georgia] who had a substance that could kill people with a very small amount. CHS1 suggested ROBERTS was talking about ricin, and someone else agreed, adding that ricin is made from castor beans. The conversation then went into a discussion about castor beans and possible ways to obtain them.
9. THOMAS spoke of the need for the group to acquire more weapons, ammo, food, and survival gear and then discussed the need for the group to establish a silent means of taking people out. THOMAS suggested silencers for handguns, stating, "In order to do what we want to do, take out the right people, we have to have some silent means of doing it. That means suppressors on handguns."
10. THOMAS stated they needed to find a machinist with the ability to manufacture silencers and not register them with the ATF. THOMAS said this was necessary to prevent them from being traced back to an owner if they were lost. THOMAS also mentioned a gun store near the Georgia/South carolina border that manufactures silencers and he commented that they should consider "hitting the truck," meaning they should steal the silencers from the trucks.
11. On April 3, 2011, CHSI consensually recorded a meeting with THOMAS and ROBERTS at a restaurant in northeast Georgia. The attendees talked about acquiring ammunition and equipment, particularly silencers for firearms. THOMAS suggested that they buy, steal, make, or attack a manufacturer's truck in order to obtain the silencers. THOMAS also talked again about his "Bucket List" of people he thought should be killed. During the meeting, THOMAS stated that he thought they could "fight off a SWAT team." He also stated, "I've been to war, and I've taken life before, and I can do it again."
12. On April 16, 2011, CHSI consensually recorded another meeting of the "covert group, /I again at the residence of THOMAS located at 2265 Dean Mountain Road, Cleveland, Georgia, 30528. Attendees included CHSl, THOMAS, ROBERTS and others. During the meeting THOMAS discussed the need for the group to start moving forward with taking action in some of their previously discussed plans, including a number of assassinations on various government officials.
13. THOMAS also explained to the others present that he intended to model their actions on the plot of an online novel called Absolved. The plot of Absolved involves small groups of citizens attacking United States federal law enforcement
representatives and federal judges. THOMAS expressed his belief that they should conduct a number of assassinations on various government officials, and he particularly expressed a desire to kill Department of Justice (DOJ) and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) employees.
14. During the meeting, THOMAS made the following statements:
a. "Civilian government operatives is who we're going to be shooting at: IRS, ATF, FBI, and the COpS."
b. "Who is the primary topics, targets? DOJ. Everybody in DOJ. That includes judges, ATF, IRS, and the hierarchy thereof."
c. "I could shoot ATF and IRS all day long. All the judges and the DOJ and the attorneys and prosecutors."
15. On April 29, 2011 and April 30, 2011, CHS1 consensually recorded conversations between, CHS1, THOMAS and ROBERTS while traveling to and from a meeting held in south Georgia on 04/30/2011. During a conversation on April 30, 2011, THOMAS mentioned that, while at the meeting, he spoke to a second confidential source (CHS2) about acquiring silencers. THOMAS reiterated the need for the group to obtain silencers to shoot people quietly. THOMAS suggested they obtain unregistered, .22 caliber long rifles, cut them down and thread them to accommodate a silencer. During the ride, THOMAS asked ROBERTS whether he (ROBERTS) thought they should try to grow their group larger, "or stick to what we are planning on, assassinating 4 or 5 guys and that's it?" ROBERTS replied, "I think probably we need both."
16. On May 17, 2011, CHS1 met with THOMAS and ROBERTS to further discuss the group's plans. (This meeting was not recorded. ) CHS1 reported that THOMAS indicated the group was ready to move forward with acquiring silencers. At some point in the conversation, explosives were mentioned and THOMAS became very excited and said the group really needed to get some explosives. THOMAS mentioned that he is very disgruntled with the IRS and the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). THOMAS indicated that he was considering driving to the Atlanta area to survey/locate IRS and ATF buildings.
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A part of the indictment of the geriatric gang. You do have to be a special kind of stupid to launch these sorts of conspiracies, particularly with what appears to be a fifth person in the room recording you, but I'm getting kinda tired of these half-fannyed "right wing" fruit loops being rolled out for the cameras. Aren't there any left wing folks running their mouths about violent stuff?
Aside from the New Black Panther Party? I'm sure AG Holder will get right on them right after he sorts out "Gunwalker".
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Stonewall: Napolitano, DHS Still Silent on Mohamed Elibiary
Posted By Patrick Poole On November 28, 2011 @ 11:45 am In Homeland Security | 15 Comments
It’s been nearly five weeks since I broke the story [1] exclusively at PJ Media: Homeland Security Advisory Council member [2] Mohamed Elibiary downloaded sensitive Texas Department of Public Safety reports from the Homeland Security State and Local Intelligence Community of Interest [3] (HS SLIC) database, then shopped them to at least one left-leaning media outlet. Elibiary claimed the reports represented a pattern of “Islamophobia” under GOP presidential hopeful Rick Perry’s watch.
As I reported, the publication declined to publish anything on the leaked materials — which were marked “For Official Use Only” (FOUO) — after finding that there was no “Islamophobia” to be found. TX DPS Director Steve McCraw confirmed to me that Elibiary had in fact accessed and downloaded his agency’s reports on the HS SLIC. Elibiary also serves on the TX DPS Advisory Council.
In the five weeks since, neither Secretary Napolitano nor the Department of Homeland Security has commented on the matter.
Before publishing the original article, I spoke with DHS spokesman Chris Ortman. After grilling me about the nature of my source, he immediately terminated the conversation after I asked him how and when Elibiary got access to the HS SLIC system, telling me he would have to get back to me.
Needless to say, I’m still waiting for that return phone call, despite follow-up emails.
The questions I am looking to get answered:
1) When did Elibiary get access to the HS SLIC system, and who approved it?
2) Why was Elibiary the only member [4] of the Homeland Security Advisory Council — he is one of 26 members — to get access to that system?
3) What is the status of the investigation requested by TX DPS Director McCraw [5] into Elibiary’s leaking his agency’s documents to the media?
4) What other sensitive government databases did/does Elibiary still have access to, since he works with other agencies (e.g., FBI, National Counterterrorism Center, Office of the Director of National Intelligence)?
5) Is there evidence that Elibiary leaked sensitive documents and reports to other media outlets?
Admittedly, I’m not alone in failing to get answers about the matter. When Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) questioned [6] Napolitano about Elibiary when she was before the House Judiciary Committee the day my initial report appeared, Napolitano feigned ignorance (we know her senior aides had been briefed by TX DPS the night before):
Gohmert: Secretary, were you aware that a week ago today, from his home computer, he accessed the SLIC database, got information off and has been shopping a story to national media on islamophobia … [inaudible] … at the Governor of Texas and the security folks in Texas. Were you aware of that?
Napolitano: No.
Gohmert: I’m telling you, it happened. Do we need to appoint somebody or will you have that investigated yourself, and if so, by whom?
Napolitano: Well, since I don’t know the facts, I’ll have to look into that.
In the video, Napolitano seemed unfazed that one of her top advisers was being accused of leaking sensitive intelligence for partisan political purposes, with corroborating evidence being given by the director of one of the top state homeland security agencies in the country. Was she lying about not knowing? If she wasn’t, it doesn’t speak well of her staff that they failed to inform her. Perhaps that’s something for Congress to take a look at as well.
But it isn’t just Congress that’s being stonewalled on the Elibiary matter.
More than two weeks ago, my colleague Erick Stakelbeck of CBN News contacted DHS spokesman Chris Ortman — the person who told me he would get back to me, and hasn’t — to ask many of the same questions for a video report [7]. The response? Here’s his report [8] about confronting the DHS stonewall:
When I spoke to Ortman last week, I was greeted with a heavy dose of skepticism. His general attitude seemed to be that this was a non-story being peddled by a lone right-wing blogger who had it in for Muslims (presumably my colleague Patrick Poole, the intrepid investigative journalist who broke [1] the story).
Still, Ortman promised to get back to me before my deadline. And he surely would have had I belonged to The New York Times, MSNBC, CNN, or any of the other countless Obama-friendly, mainstream media mouthpieces.
Well, the deadline came and went. My report [7] on the Elibiary scandal aired on Tuesday’s The 700 Club for a viewing audience of 1 million. It was also picked up [9] by Glenn Beck’s website, The Blaze (50 million hits per month) and Fox Nation.com [10].
…
In short, this story is gathering steam, and much to the chagrin of Ortman and others in the DHS Public Affairs office, is not going away. To that end, I sent the following email to Ortman yesterday (Ed: 11/9):
Hi Chris,
Just wondering if you had found anything out yet on the Mohamed Elibiary leak case. My story aired yesterday, but I would still love to update it with some kind of statement from DHS. Fox, Glenn Beck and a few others have picked it up over the past 24 hours, so it would seem that this warrants some kind of explanation, e.g., Is Elibiary still on the DHS Advisory Council and are these charges being investigated?
He was also apparently the only member on the Advisory Council to be granted this kind of access to the database. Why? I think these are all very reasonable and relevant questions, regardless of whether a “right-wing blogger” broke the story. It seems that allegedly leaking sensitive government docs is a big deal, whether the perpetrator is a Muslim or not.
Thanks,
Erick
His response? More silence. Now, I’ve been doing this for a while and have been around the block a few times. This isn’t the first time I’ve been subjected to the trusty old “stonewall” tactic. But the charges against Elibiary are so egregious, and the implications for our national security so alarming, that it simply demands a response from someone at DHS.
So Stakelbeck too was promised answers by DHS, but none were forthcoming. On it’s face, it would seem in the department’s best interest to resolve the matter, if only to clear their adviser Elibiary. But there is more at work than meets the eye.
As I’ll report later this week, there may be substantial reasons why Napolitano and DHS want absolutely no investigation into Elibiary. As one source told me a few weeks ago:
For them to even ask whether Elibiary was a bad actor who has penetrated our highest and most sensitive intelligence and homeland security agencies has the potential for such catastrophic consequences … they don’t even want the question asked. The likelihood that there will be an actual investigation can be calculated between zero and none no matter how overwhelming the evidence.
The only way that Napolitano can succeed is if Congress refuses to act. In the coming days we will give them more reasons why they may want to look into this matter, and Elibiary’s involvement with other government agencies, much more closely.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Article printed from PJ Media: http://pjmedia.com
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/stonewall-napolitano-dhs-still-silent-on-mohamed-elibiary/
URLs in this post:
[1] broke the story: http://pjmedia.com/blog/breaking-homeland-security-adviser-allegedly-leaked-intel-to-attack-rick-perry/
[2] member: http://www.dhs.gov/files/committees/editorial_0858.shtm#9
[3] Homeland Security State and Local Intelligence Community of Interest: http://www.dhs.gov/journal/leadership/2008/09/homeland-security-state-and-local.html
[4] only member: http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2011/11/03/alleged-dhs-leaker-elibiary-the-only-adviser-given-access-to-sensitive-law-enforcement-database/
[5] requested by TX DPS Director McCraw: http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2011/10/30/texas-homeland-security-requests-investigation/
[6] questioned: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=354GJU3X54Y
[7] video report: http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2011/November/Homeland-Security-Advisor-Accused-of-Leaking-Docs/
[8] Here’s his report: http://blogs.cbn.com/stakelbeckonterror/archive/2011/11/10/stonewall-dept.-of-homeland-security-silent-on-elibiary-document-leak.aspx
[9] picked up: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/muslim-homeland-security-advisor-accused-of-leaking-documents-to-prove-islamophobia-damage-rick-perry/
[10] Fox Nation.com: http://tinyurl.com/brkt8gh
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Woof All:
I'm on the road and so my usual level of access to data is less than usual. I've heard something about Sen. McCain has proposed a bill that would end posse commitatus?!?
Anyone have anything on this?
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I'm not seeing anything thus far. Wading through the fever swamps these days? :-D
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Woof Guro,
I believe you are referring to this:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/29/senate-votes-to-let-military-detain-americans-indefinitely_n_1119473.html
Woof All:
I'm on the road and so my usual level of access to data is less than usual. I've heard something about Sen. McCain has proposed a bill that would end posse commitatus?!?
Anyone have anything on this?
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From the detainment piece: Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.)..."We are not a nation that locks up its citizens without charge."
With a degree in history, I am surprised she isn't aware of WWII. This would be for cause where FDR's Executive Order 9066 was for ethnicity.
No one IMO likes waiving fair trial rights, but terrorism and war is different than crime. It is good news that both support and opposition to this not partisan. 16 Democrats voted for the "harsh detainee rules": Sens. Bob Casey (Pa.), Kent Conrad (N.D.), Kay Hagan (N.C.), Daniel Inouye (Hawaii), Herb Kohl (Wis.), Mary Landrieu (La.), Carl Levin (Mich.), Joe Manchin (W. Va.), Clair McCaskill (Mo.), Robert Menendez (N.J.), Ben Nelson (Neb.), Mark Pryor (Ark.), Jack Reed (R.I.), Jeanne Shaheen (N.H.), Debbie Stabenow (Mich.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.). plus Sen. Joe Lieberman (Conn.).
Minneapolis' Somali population had 24 al Qaida related arrests last year. Carl Levin's Michigan is home to Detroit suburb Dearborn, MI which has the highest concentration of Arab and Islam of any American city (about 1/3 of 100,000) and some radical Islam problems. Both Michigan Dems voted for it; neither of the MN Dems did.
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This is truly a terrible law and should be vetoed.
A declaration of war by congress is one thing. What is "terrorism"? Something the administration in power defines? At least a declaration of war usually has an identifiable beginning and end. With terrorism....
Where do you draw the line?
I have no sympathies for terrorist or traitors if proven guilty, but arresting and holding an American Citizen indefinitely without basic constitutional privileges
based upon someone's say so is terribly wrong. The concept is fraught with danger far worse than any possible terrorist act.
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"Where do you draw the line?"
Yes. Draw the line. We are at war. Traditional punishments don't apply to suicide bombing. What is an after the fact answer for suicide bombing? The last big one brought us two wars and 10 years in Afghanistan.
What is "terrorism"? - Really? Still confused after all these years, all these attacks? 9/11, WTC-I, Cole, embassies, London, Madrid, Bali. Anyone remember Munich?
These aren't either party's political opponents we are housing at Guantanamo.
This rule doesn't say lock anyone up, it says don't tie the hands of the people we elect and choose to protect us.
It is a harsh rule, so don't have even casual contact with known terrorists. If you call a known terrorist by accident, hang up quickly. If you go to their meeting by mistake, try to get out, stay off their mailing list and speed dial. We are at war.
2 of the Dem senators leading the effort were from Michigan which was both a stronghold and a target. LAX was a target too, IIRC. Would you like it protected, then these are the tools. Senators on key committees see intelligence that we don't see. You would think the heavy number of liberty seeking peace loving Democrats alone, along with those liberty hating war mongering Republicans would demonstrate that current, known threats are still quite strong.
Proof beyond all reasonable doubt doesn't apply in war and the fight against homegrown terrorism is certainly the hardest war to fight.
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I'm torn on this. In light of this administration's destruction of the rule of law/mainstreaming Chicago-style "gangster govenment" my faith in our institutions has been serious damaged.
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Torn makes sense and so does distrust. The gunrunner op makes you wonder. I hate the airport security drill and being their subject. Still, we give them the tools. How would you prove the Delray Beach Florida residents with expired visas in the summer of 2001 were going to blow up airplanes, catch them with a box cutter? A meeting in Hamburg, a camp in Afghan? I don't know but I wish we had disrupted them. If enough pieces of the puzzle form around you, I want tools to be available for your detention. If you are innocent but carrying too many pieces of the puzzle and too close to the people who are involved, there is no good answer to that, it may take time to sort that out. Every drone strike and every war hits innocent people too. I really don't believe we will fill Guantanamo with peace seeking, law abiding citizens.
Indefinitely only means we hold will you until radical Islam quits its war against us.
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I do not like this at all.
BD, without limitation on anyone else, may I ask you to take the lead on keeping an eye on WTF this is about?
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Woof,
McCain continues to show his true colors when it comes to pushing for government powers that Stalin would be proud of, but his constituents seem to be death, dumb, and blind to it and he keeps getting reelected, so I hope if any innocent citizens get caught up in this, that they are from AZ.
P.C.
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Well, Arizona has had some not so innocent citizens that waged jihad.
http://www.myfoxphoenix.com/dpp/news/only_on_fox/homegrown-terrorism-5-4-2011
Arizona has a long history of being a hotbed of terrorist activity, particularly al Qaeda -- including an infamous first.
"The first al Qaeda cell in the United States was located right here in Arizona in Tucson," says Poole.
The 9-11 commission report contains 59 references to terrorist activity in Arizona. It also mentioned the existence of a CIA/FBI report titled "Arizona's Long Range Nexus for Islamic Extremists." The report has still not been made public.
"We have a number of examples of terrorist operatives who have crossed the border."
According to Poole, our state's border with Mexico is apparently attracting terrorist infiltrators.
"We also know that back in June 2010, two terrorist operatives out of Bangladesh were arrested attempting to cross the border in Naco," says Poole.
But it's been the dramatic increase in homegrown terror that worries Poole the most.
"In the past year what we've seen is a full out effort by al Qaeda to recruit Americans… not just with Anwar Al-Awlaki and his internet postings and internet videos, but al Qaeda itself under Al-Awlaki auspices has been producing magazines English language magazines called Inspire."
**Then again, any attempt to secure the border will get the full fury of Buraq and Holder's DOJ.
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Of course, sir.
I do not like this at all.
BD, without limitation on anyone else, may I ask you to take the lead on keeping an eye on WTF this is about?
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I should add that my support for any enhanced police power in the name of terrorism includes this caveat : any law enforcement officer or government official who uses this power for purposes other than what is specified and intended shall also be detained indefinitely at Guantanamo.
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"I'm torn on this. In light of this administration's destruction of the rule of law/mainstreaming Chicago-style "gangster govenment" my faith in our institutions has been serious damaged."
No small statement this. I would add it show intellectual integrity.
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Well, if you told me a year ago that multiple federal agencies would conspire to violate various federal laws to import firearms into a friendly country to create a loss of life to justify new gun control laws, I'd have said "NFW".
It's one thing to have some people within an agency that go outside the lines, but when those in positions of authority of those agencies don't tell the political appointees to go pound sand when this idea was floated and then try to crush the line level whistleblowers, this says very bad things about where we are as a nation.
The feds are supposed to be the gold standard for LE. If we can't count on that, then I fear our very foundations are turning to sand under our feet.
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http://volokh.com/2011/11/30/defense-bill-will-allow-president-to-indefinitely-detain-american-citizens/
Defense bill will allow President to indefinitely detain American citizens
David Kopel • November 30, 2011 4:11 pm
H.R. 1540, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, has already passed the House, and is currently before the Senate. One section of the bill gives the President the authority to detain indefinitely American citizens, picked up on American soil, because they are allegedly supporting the enemy:
SEC. 1034. AFFIRMATION OF ARMED CONFLICT WITH AL QAEDA, THE TALIBAN, AND ASSOCIATED FORCES.
Congress affirms that—
(1) the United States is engaged in an armed conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces and that those entities continue to pose a threat to the United States and its citizens, both domestically and abroad;
(2) the President has the authority to use all necessary and appropriate force during the current armed conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107–40; 50 U.S.C. 23 1541 note);
(3) the current armed conflict includes nations, organization, and persons who—
(A) are part of, or are substantially supporting, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners; or
(B) have engaged in hostilities or have directly supported hostilities in aid of a nation, organization, or person described in subparagraph (A); and
(4) the President’s authority pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 11 107–40; 50 U.S.C. 1541 note) includes the authority to detain belligerents, including persons described in paragraph (3), until the termination of hostilities.
Yesterday the Senate rejected an amendment by Senator Mark Udall (D-Colo.) that would have stricken the detention provisions, and required the Executive branch to submit a report (within 90 days) on the the legal and practical issues involving detention, and required Congress to hold hearings on the detention within the next 45 days after receipt of the report.
The bill also includes provisions to prevent civilian trials of prisoners currently held at Guantanamo. The Obama administration is threatening to veto the bill, although the objections appear to involve Guantanamo-type issues, and not the expansion of the executive’s detention powers. [Note: The bill version quoted above is the version as passed by the House and sent to the Senate. It is the latest version available on Thomas. The numbering for some sections may be different in earlier versions of the bill.] Kudos to Senator Udall, one of the few genuine civil libertarians in Congress, for taking the lead on this issue.
UPDATE: A commenter points out that, according to Senator Carl Levin, it was the Obama administration which told Congress to remove the language in the original bill which exempted American citizens and lawful residents from the detention power. See the C-Span video of the debate on the floor of the Senate, at 4:43:29. This is not the Obama I caucused for in Feb. 2008.
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http://volokh.com/2004/04/21/detainees-and-unlawful-combatants-vs-pows/
Detainees and unlawful combatants vs. POWs:
Eugene Volokh • April 21, 2004 11:26 am
My post about Guantanamo brought several messages about this perennial issue. Some complained that the Administration is trying to have it both ways by coming up with some novel category of non-POW detainees. Others didn’t complain about the Administration’s actions as such, but simply suggested that the courts could come up with a dividing line for habeas purposes — POWs don’t get habeas review, detainees do. Such a line, they pointed out, would reduce the burden on the court system to manageable limits, since the great majority of the hundreds of thousands of enemy soldiers that would be detained during a major war would be POWs.
I’ve blogged about this general question before, but it seems worth mentioning again; so here are a few thoughts.
1. There’s nothing at all novel about the concept of an enemy detainee who isn’t a POW. To the best of my knowledge, the practice of civilized nations has long recognized that there are two categories of wartime military captives. The first involves (more or less) soldiers who were fighting in uniform within organized command structures; these are generally seen as being entitled to “prisoner of war” status, which means (a) humane treatment, (b) limits on certain kinds of interrogations, and (c) immunity from being tried for actions that consist of “lawful warfare,” e.g., shooting at our soldiers (while fighting in uniform within organized command structures). Usually shooting at a U.S. soldier is murder or attempted murder, and voluntarily being part of a group that goes to shoot at a U.S. soldier is conspiracy to commit murder. But if you’re doing it while fighting in uniform within organized command structures, you get immunity from that sort of punishment — though you may still be detained as a POW for the duration of the war, and in some measure beyond the cessation of hostilities.
The second category, which I stress again has long been recognized by “the laws of war” — in America, it dates back to the Revolutionary War, as the Supreme Court recognized in Ex parte Quirin — is that of unlawful combatants. The quintessential examples are spies and saboteurs, but more generally it also includes soldiers who do not fight in uniform within organized command structures. Unlawful combatants are generally not protected in the ways I describe above; they have many fewer rights (I speak here of rights under international conventions and conventional practice) than lawful POWs. In particular, unlawful combatants may be tried and often executed for their unlawful conduct; they don’t have the “lawful combatant” immunity from murder laws, for example.
“Enemy detainees” is a good term to cover both categories, both POWs and unlawful combatants; though since POWs have a familiar name (POWs), “detainees” has often been used during this conflict to refer specifically to unlawful combatants. So the Administration’s conduct is amply precedented, and generally consistent with American (and, to my knowledge, world) military traditions and “the laws of war.” It’s possible that the Administration has erred in classifying some detainees as unlawful combatants rather than POWs; and there’s debate about whether it has complied with some of its duties under the Geneva Convention to provide a “competent tribunal” (a military tribunal, mind you, not a civilian one) for determining whether those detainees about whose status there’s a legitimate dispute are entitled to POW status. But that’s a matter of implementing the unlawful combatant vs. POW distinction. The distinction itself is very well accepted.
2. This also suggests, I think, that it doesn’t make much sense for purposes of American constitutional law, or the American law of habeas corpus, to provide habeas to unlawful combatants but not to POWs. The distinction is a matter of miiltary practice and treaty law, not of U.S. constitutional law. What’s more, it doesn’t make a huge deal of sense. Unlawful combatants and POWs are both deprived of their liberty by U.S. forces. Both can claim that they really weren’t enemy soldiers, but were caught by mistake. If anything, the detainees who are detained on the grounds that they are thought to be unlawful combatants are likely to be more dangeorus than the POWs.
The conditions of confinement might be somewhat different, especially as to the degree of interrogation to which the detainees are being subjected. (The U.S. has agreed to provide humane treatment to the detainees — consistently, of course, with the need to maintain security — so that potential difference between unlawful combatants and POWs doesn’t much come into play.) But I don’t see why this distinction should make a difference to deciding who’s entitled to habeas and who isn’t, especially since this distinction has historically been an artifact of treaty law and traditional military practice, not a matter of domestic constitutional obligation. More broadly, the historical U.S. constitutional practice has long been to treat all detainees alike for purposes of U.S. constitutional law.
3. Now there is of course one important potential difference, which I alluded to in the first item. Once an unlawful combatant is tried and convicted for his unlawful actions, then he does stand in a different position from the POWs: He’s not just being detained as a prophylactic measure for the duration of hostilities (however long that might take), but he’s being imprisoned for a longer time as a punishment, or even being executed. At that point, there’s a more credible case for civilian court review. I think it’s probably still pretty weak, for various reasons. But he can no longer be squarely analogized to the bulk of other detainees.
But none of the Guantanamo detainees has been tried yet on those grounds. Perhaps most won’t be. Nor is there any obligation — certainly no obligation under U.S. constitutional law, but I think not even under international treaties — to try the unlawful combatants immediately, or within some time of their detention. Since even perfectly lawful combatants may be detained indefinitely, without trial, unlawful combatants may likewise be detained indefinitely, until their trial (or until the government decides, as it may wish to, to release them or reclassify them as lawful combatants).
The current litigation thus isn’t challenging punitive detention or execution, which hasn’t taken place. Rather, it’s challenging prophylactic detention — the very sort of thing that was indeed done to German and Japanese soldiers captured during World War II. And, for the reasons I mentioned above, there’s no reason in the U.S. Constitution or U.S. habeas corpus law for treating challenges to detention filed by alleged unlawful combatants more favorably than similar challenges filed by lawful combatants.
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Yes, GM's response knocked me off my chair - a Nixon going to China moment. Maybe we take up drug legalization during his unexplained softness. :wink:
The plot thickens on the Kopel post last paragraph update. The first story left the impression that the house and Senate were giving powers to the administration that they would veto, but their objection is allegedly not directed at that. This needs to be sorted out.
I don't like to be on the side of limiting freedom, especially arguing alone to limit freedom in America, but there is some burden on the opponents to say how you will then fight large scale terrorism.
Sending it back to committee or running a 40% deficit in terror fighting successes for a dozen years doesn't work in this case if the need is now.
Rand Paul video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rghhz_t5POo&feature=player_embedded
He is the lead opponent and makes great points, but the speech was already written with his opposition to the Patriot Act, to the Iraq war and to any power that goes beyond traditional law enforcement. That does not answer the threat IMO. If they blow up the Superdome this winter like the Oklahoma City bombing and then track back the clues for a couple of years and maybe catch and prosecute two guys. It doesn't work that way; suicide bombers are immune to prosecution and the timeline is backwards. We don't know about the destruction until after it happens; the 'law enforcement' operation must be conducted in advance of 'the crime' or it is of no value.
Hypothetical: It is the summer of 2001 again. We are partly onto the hijacker plot to destroy the largest symbols of America. We have about half the pieces of the puzzle put together and are missing the other half. Your team is in charge of disrupting the operation. Assume these players are American citizens this time, not Saudi nationals on expired visas that cops pulled over and let go. But each player and each piece of the puzzle looks small when viewed alone and the larger plan looks like a fantasy when articulated to a local judge. I want the operation disrupted. No one wants abuse of the powers but I want emergency powers to be available.
I don't know what liberty Rand Paul refers to if we live in terror.
Ten years since the Patriot Act (Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism), it wasn't ordinary Americans who lost liberties, it is the ones with unexplained contacts and cooperation with enemies sworn to destroy us. When you take up the cause of the enemy at a time like this while we are actively under attack, your 'citizenship' is a bookkeeping error to me. If you are fully innocent and uninvolved and your contact with a known terrorist was accidental, I sincerely doubt your detention will be permanent. It is the people operating in the gray areas such as meeting regularly with (free speech?) and/or supporting in small ways the forces of our destruction that have the potential to lose rights here.
I am grateful to be on this board where questions like this are brought forward and scrutinized.
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Senators Demand the Military Lock Up of American Citizens in a “Battlefield” They Define as Being Right Outside Your Window
UPDATE III: The Senate rejected the Udall amendment 38-60.
While nearly all Americans head to family and friends to celebrate Thanksgiving, the Senate is gearing up for a vote on Monday or Tuesday that goes to the very heart of who we are as Americans. The Senate will be voting on a bill that will direct American military resources not at an enemy shooting at our military in a war zone, but at American citizens and other civilians far from any battlefield — even people in the United States itself.
Senators need to hear from you, on whether you think your front yard is part of a “battlefield” and if any president can send the military anywhere in the world to imprison civilians without charge or trial.
The Senate is going to vote on whether Congress will give this president—and every future president — the power to order the military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial civilians anywhere in the world. Even Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) raised his concerns about the NDAA detention provisions during last night’s Republican debate. The power is so broad that even U.S. citizens could be swept up by the military and the military could be used far from any battlefield, even within the United States itself.
The worldwide indefinite detention without charge or trial provision is in S. 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act bill, which will be on the Senate floor on Monday. The bill was drafted in secret by Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) and passed in a closed-door committee meeting, without even a single hearing.
I know it sounds incredible. New powers to use the military worldwide, even within the United States? Hasn’t anyone told the Senate that Osama bin Laden is dead, that the president is pulling all of the combat troops out of Iraq and trying to figure out how to get combat troops out of Afghanistan too? And American citizens and people picked up on American or Canadian or British streets being sent to military prisons indefinitely without even being charged with a crime. Really? Does anyone think this is a good idea? And why now?
The answer on why now is nothing more than election season politics. The White House, the Secretary of Defense, and the Attorney General have all said that the indefinite detention provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act are harmful and counterproductive. The White House has even threatened a veto. But Senate politics has propelled this bad legislation to the Senate floor.
But there is a way to stop this dangerous legislation. Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) is offering the Udall Amendment that will delete the harmful provisions and replace them with a requirement for an orderly Congressional review of detention power. The Udall Amendment will make sure that the bill matches up with American values.
In support of this harmful bill, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) explained that the bill will “basically say in law for the first time that the homeland is part of the battlefield” and people can be imprisoned without charge or trial “American citizen or not.” Another supporter, Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) also declared that the bill is needed because “America is part of the battlefield.”
The solution is the Udall Amendment; a way for the Senate to say no to indefinite detention without charge or trial anywhere in the world where any president decides to use the military. Instead of simply going along with a bill that was drafted in secret and is being jammed through the Senate, the Udall Amendment deletes the provisions and sets up an orderly review of detention power. It tries to take the politics out and put American values back in.
In response to proponents of the indefinite detention legislation who contend that the bill “applies to American citizens and designates the world as the battlefield,” and that the “heart of the issue is whether or not the United States is part of the battlefield,” Sen. Udall disagrees, and says that we can win this fight without worldwide war and worldwide indefinite detention.
The senators pushing the indefinite detention proposal have made their goals very clear that they want an okay for a worldwide military battlefield, that even extends to your hometown. That is an extreme position that will forever change our country.
Now is the time to stop this bad idea. Please urge your senators to vote YES on the Udall Amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act.
UPDATE I: Don’t be confused by anyone claiming that the indefinite detention legislation does not apply to American citizens. It does. There is an exemption for American citizens from the mandatory detention requirement (section 1032 of the bill), but no exemption for American citizens from the authorization to use the military to indefinitely detain people without charge or trial (section 1031 of the bill). So, the result is that, under the bill, the military has the power to indefinitely imprison American citizens, but it does not have to use its power unless ordered to do so.
But you don’t have to believe us. Instead, read what one of the bill’s sponsors, Sen. Lindsey Graham said about it on the Senate floor: “1031, the statement of authority to detain, does apply to American citizens and it designates the world as the battlefield, including the homeland.”
There you have it — indefinite military detention of American citizens without charge or trial. And the Senate is likely to vote on it Monday or Tuesday.
UPDATE II: The debate on NDAA has begun. Your Senator needs to hear from you RIGHT NOW! >>
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http://defensesystems.com/Articles/2011/11/29/Senate-NDAA-Udall-amendment-fails.aspx
Terrorism detainment provision overshadows 2012 defense bill
By Amber CorrinNov 30, 2011
The Senate has taken up the 2012 Defense Authorization Act, which will fund and dictate policy for the Defense Department for the fiscal year, and so far debate has been dominated by a provision that allows the military to indefinitely detain citizens suspected of terrorism in the U.S. and around the world without going through the U.S. justice system -- even on American soil.
The Senate has also approved an amendment providing for the inclusion of the National Guard as a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
This week's floor action thus far has overshadowed other parts of the bill expected to be debated, including the approval of funding for Joint Urgent Operational Needs and the acquisition of cyber defenses. The bill also calls for, and discussion is expected about, the development of capabilities that detect previously unknown cyberattacks.
The controversial detainee language in the Senate defense bill sparked tension on and beyond the Hill, with Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.), in particular going head to head on the Senate floor Nov. 29.
Paul, along with Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), who sponsored a failed amendment striking the bulk of the detainee language, argued that the provision dealing with the handling of suspected terrorists could be a threat to civil liberties. Udall stressed the opposition of high-profile figures like Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and former FBI Director Robert Mueller, who have publicly expressed concern over the measure.
“Should we err today and remove some of the most important checks on state power in the name of fighting terrorism? Well, then the terrorists have won,” Paul said. “Detaining American citizens without a court trial is not American.”
But McCain and others who supported the measure, including Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), argued that the measure is vital to protecting U.S. security in wartime.
“An individual, no matter who they are, if they pose a threat to the security of the United States of America, should not be allowed to continue that threat,” McCain said. “We need to take every step necessary to prevent that from happening, that’s for the safety and security of the men and women who are out there risking their lives ... in our armed services.”
Udall’s measure was defeated 37-61 Nov. 29. The Senate will continue to debate the bill and is expected to vote on it soon.
The overall bill budgets for $663 billion in military spending for military personnel, weapons systems and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. The House passed its own version of the defense authorization in May.
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http://www.businessinsider.com/the-medias-blackout-of-the-national-defense-authorization-act-is-shameful-2011-12
The Media's Blackout Of The National Defense Authorization Act Is Shameful
The broadcast media's ignorance and unwillingness to cover the National Defense Authorization Act, a radical piece of legislation which outrageously redefines the US homeland as a "battlefield" and makes US citizens subject to military apprehension and detainment for life without access to a trial or attorney, is unacceptable.
Guys, this is far more important than Penn State's Disgusting Creep of the Decade, or even Conrad Murray's sentencing.
Call it what you will: a military junta, a secret invalidation of Americans' civil rights, a Congress gone mad. Whatever it is, it needs to be covered by the press, and quickly.
Anderson Cooper, Brian Williams, Rachel Maddow, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Neil Cavuto and the other handful of household names that mainstream America relies on for news should be talking about this non-stop.
I emailed producers and on-air talent at the three major cable news networks yesterday: not one of them was willing to step up to the plate and report on this appalling legislation, which would give Americans roughly the same protections as citizens in China or Saudi Arabia.
Bloggers and the ACLU's analysis have already made the work easy for you guys. Even an ADD segment producer can do the math:
- Pay special attention to Section 1031 of the bill.
- This bill violates the Posse Comitatus Act (18 U.S.C. § 1385), as it will allow federal military personnel to engage in domestic law enforcement. This is profoundly unconstitutional and scary.
- Also read Sen. Lindsey Graham's chilling defense of the offending provision in this bill, calling to make the homeland a "battlefield." Has anyone told these guys that Osama bin Laden and his deputies are dead? Those still alive are running from drone strikes on a daily basis. So who exactly are we fighting against? Are you protecting us from a handful of (almost entirely peaceful) college kids at the Occupy protests? If so, martial law and throwing out 200+ years of basic civil rights seems rather excessive.
- Finally, as the ACLU points out, you won't have any trouble booking an expert talking head who will tell you how dangerous and counterproductive the National Defense Authorization Act is: "The Secretary of Defense, the Director of National Intelligence, the Director of the FBI and the head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division have all said that the indefinite detention provisions in the NDAA are harmful and counterproductive." Book one of them on your program, and do it quickly. The Senate has already rejected an amendment which would have banned the indefinite detention provisions from the bill.
Please, do your jobs. This is the kind of story that wins journalism awards and makes careers. It's the kind of story that makes viewers trust you.
UPDATE: To the mainstream media's credit, Keith Olbermann of Current TV has now mentioned the NDAA's harmful provision, and I've been told that Dylan Ratigan of MSNBC is drawing attention to it as well. A good start, but not nearly enough.
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http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:S.1867:
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Answering some ACLU arguments:
ACLU: "American citizens and people picked up on American or Canadian or British streets being sent to military prisons indefinitely without even being charged with a crime. Really? Does anyone think this is a good idea?"
Sounds like innocent people picked up randomly - no, no one thinks that is a good idea.
"The answer on why now is nothing more than election season politics."
Election season politics? Not actionable intelligence. What poll says people want this? Assuming they are not in on intelligence briefing and many of the 61 Senators were, I would say they are willing to say anything.
"Hasn’t anyone told the Senate that Osama bin Laden is dead..."
Mission Accomplished, Deja Vu?
"...a worldwide military battlefield, that even extends to your hometown."
Yes, my hometown I wrote yesterday had 24 al Qaida related arrests last year and is an active recruiting point for operations at home and overseas. We were also home to where Zacarias Moussaoui learned to land jet airliners in an equal opportunity, career advancing, training center. And the Imams demanding buckle extensions.
Whose hometown is not affected by terrorism??
ACLU suing the Bush administration over the Patriot Act: http://articles.cnn.com/2003-07-30/justice/patriot.act_1_lawsuit-challenges-patriot-act-searches?_s=PM:LAW "The ACLU filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Michigan on behalf of six mostly Arab and Muslim-American groups."
So far, heavy hitters here are the only ones favoring the other powers but drawing a line at this one.
I don't know the right answer to this at all but current policy is that we will relentlessly chase to the furthest corners of the earth with all means possible including UAV attacks in sovereign countries killing suspected terrorists along with known innocents, but we will not stop you if you hide right here in plain sight.
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Great coverage on the issue by bigdog.
This story about the Obama administration's view does not mention the bill.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_TARGETED_KILLING?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2011-12-01-10-42-54
Dec 1, 1:27 PM EST
Obama lawyers: Citizens targeted if at war with US
By MATT APUZZO
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) -- U.S. citizens are legitimate military targets when they take up arms with al-Qaida, top national security lawyers in the Obama administration said Thursday.
...
U.S. citizens don't have immunity when they're at war with the United States.
Johnson [Pentagon lawyer] said only the executive branch, not the courts, is equipped to make military battlefield targeting decisions about who qualifies as an enemy.
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I'm exhausted by another long day of work, but very glad to see that we are working together to get and stay on top of this. Keep up the good work gentlemen!
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I heard Glen Beck today outraged by this clause today. He makes the distinction I noticed from the Pentagon lawyer story that the determination has shifted from the military to the DOJ.
There must be another way of strengthening the hand of those disrupting cells and attacks by citizens inside our borders using imperfect information short of proof beyond all reasonable doubt in a public court but short of indefinite detention judged solely by the DOJ. Ideas?
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http://paul.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=399
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Looking at bigdog's link I think my earlier post is wrong. The controversial provision is NOT in the bill that passed, if I now understand it correctly. Senators vote differently depending on how the roll call is taken or did they get that many calls last night? I will come back to repair that post of mine. Another version of the story:
http://www.huntingtonnews.net/14849
Detainee Amendment Defeated in Senate; Sen. Paul Forced Voice Vote to Prevent Erosionn of Constitutional Rights
Friday, December 2, 2011 - 14:25 Special to HuntingtonNews.Net
Sen. Rand Paul prevented the passage of an amendment that would have further eroded Americans' constitutional rights. Offered to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal 2012 (S.1867), amendment No. 1274 would have allowed the U.S. government to detain an American citizen indefinitely, even after they had been tried and found not guilty, until Congress declares an end to the war on terror.
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Gentlemen:
For the purpose of aiding the value of this forum as a research tool, please remember to put something specific in the Subject line of your posts.
Too tired at the moment to read all this.
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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45539772/ns/us_news-the_new_york_times/
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Prosecutor Warns Not to Ignore al-Shabaab Threat
IPT News
December 6, 2011
http://www.investigativeproject.org/3323/prosecutor-warns-not-to-ignore-al-shabaab-threat
U.S. policymakers need "to take al-Shabaab seriously" when the Somali terror group talks about targeting the United States, longtime federal prosecutor W. Anders Folk told the Investigative Project on Terrorism.
He emphasized that Al-Shabaab, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and the larger al-Qaida organization share a common ideology: one marked by virulent hostility towards America.
Al-Shabaab's ideology "is almost word for word similar to what we heard from al-Qaida pre-9/11 and what we have heard post-9/11. What we hear is an ideology that endorses murder of innocent civilians," Folk said in an interview. "We see al-Shabaab training their recruits in tactics and techniques similar to what recruits learn in Afghanistan and Pakistan."
As with al-Qaida, al-Shabaab recruits receive military training and Islamist religious indoctrination. They are taught skills that "have been constants from terrorist training camp to terrorist training camp," Folk said.
According to an investigative report issued in July by the House Homeland Security Committee's majority staff, Shabaab-related federal indictments "account for the largest number and significant upward trend in homegrown terrorism cases" filed by the Justice Department, with at least 38 cases unsealed since 2009.
Folk, who prosecuted many of those as an assistant United States attorney for Minnesota from 2005-10, joined the Minneapolis law firm Leonard, Street and Deinard. He emphasized that al-Shabaab's strategic goals are not limited to seizing power in Somalia.
The July 2010 twin bombings in Kampala, Uganda which killed 76 people demonstrated that al-Shabaab "is operational outside Somalia," Folk said. "They have actively sought out through the Internet and other digital media recruits from the West, [and] we've heard at least one of these recruits discussing a call to jihad by individuals in the United States."
Folk was referring to Abdisalan Ali of Minneapolis, identified by al-Shabaab as the suicide bomber in an Oct. 29 attack in Mogadishu that killed 10 people. "My brothers and sisters, do jihad in America, do jihad in Canada, do jihad in England, anywhere in Europe, in Asia, in Africa, in Australia," Ali said in an audiotape message released by al-Shabaab.
He was the third Somali-American since October 2008 to blow himself up while fighting for al-Shabaab. The House Homeland Security Committee concluded that 40 or more Americans have joined the group, with at least 15 of them dying while fighting alongside al-Shabaab. "Nowhere near that number of Americans have been killed fighting with any other foreign terrorist group," the panel said. "At least 21 or more American Shabaab members overseas remain unaccounted for and pose a direct threat to the U.S. homeland."
Asked about assertions that al-Shabaab is too small to endanger the United States, Folk responded that said many people believed the same thing about al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) right up to Christmas Day 2009, when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian national, tried to carry out a suicide attack on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 using explosives concealed in his underwear.
The attempted attack on the plane, which was flying from Amsterdam to Detroit, showed that AQAP could no longer be dismissed as a purely regional threat. Folk believes that al-Shabaab, which has made numerous threats against the United States, could also develop its own capability to target this country.
The failure to prevent Abdulmutallab from boarding Flight 253 offers a "sobering" assessment of the gaps in U.S. security procedures, he said.
Abdulmutallab's father, a prominent Nigerian businessman and former cabinet minister, had repeatedly warned U.S. officials that Umar was dangerous. He tried to persuade American diplomats that as a radicalized Muslim who had dropped out of school in Great Britain and traveled to Yemen, a hotbed of radicalism, his son posed a threat.
U.S. officials said the information provided by the father was not specific enough to take away Umar's visa or place him on a no-fly list. He was instead put on a lower-security "watch list," allowing him to board the U.S.-bound flight he attempted to bomb hours later.
In Somalia, a country without a functioning central government, U.S. security officials face much greater challenges in obtaining information about jihadist threats. Somalia "lacks any infrastructure, any real central government," Folk said. "There's no passport control, no border or customs, no central computers to monitor whether people are coming and going through the country."
Al-Shabaab Continues Recruiting Americans
Perhaps no community has been more heavily impacted by al-Shabaab activities in the United States than Somalis in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. Since September 2007, more than 20 men,most of them ethnic Somalis, left the Twin Cities and traveled to Somalia to train with al-Shabaab.
Al-Shabaab's recruiting includes Internet videos aimed at glamorizing its activities. They celebrate the deaths of "martyrs" in fighting for jihad and ridicule their enemies in Somalia and the West.
In Minneapolis, al-Shabaab also used its American recruits to recruit new jihadists, Folk said. One of those he prosecuted was Mahamud Said Omar. A Somali-American and legal permanent resident of the United States, Omar was extradited back to America from the Netherlands in August to stand trial on charges of providing material support for terrorism.
The first group of Minnesota men to go to Somalia to join al-Shabaab left in December 2007. According to a federal affidavit outlining the government's case against Omar, he "provided money to members of the conspiracy to facilitate their travel to Somalia and told the men that he would support them financially in Somalia."
In January 2008, Omar traveled from Minnesota to Somalia, where he visited some of the Minnesotans at an al-Shabaab safe house, the affidavit said. He stayed there overnight and provided money to support operations there and purchase an AK-47 assault rifle. Omar returned to Minneapolis, and in August 2008, he allegedly accompanied two Shabaab recruits from Minnesota to the airport to begin their travel to Somalia.
According to Folk, a violent, tumultuous one-week period in the fall of 2008 serves to illustrate the power of al-Shabaab's jihadist message.
On Oct. 29, 2008, one of the men who had left Minnesota the year before and had stayed at the same safe house as Omar participated in one of five simultaneous suicide bombings in northern Somalia which killed 20 people. He was Shirwa Ahmed, 26, who drove a Toyota truck packed with explosives into an office of the Puntland Intelligence Service. A naturalized U.S. citizen, Ahmed became the first American suicide bomber in Somalia.
Prosecutors say that a few days after Ahmed blew himself up, Omar hosted a gathering for several men who were about to leave Minneapolis for Somalia. Two of those who attended the gathering left the Twin Cities days later to join al-Shabaab.
This combination of mass-casualty terror followed by additional jihadist recruitment provides the best evidence of the power of al-Shabaab's message, Folk told the IPT. It tells the American people "everything you need to know" about the effectiveness of the rhetoric al-Shabaab uses to recruit new members.
Federal authorities wiretapped Omar's telephone while investigating the disappearances. Investigators say they recorded conversations in which he expressed concern about the "uproar" over the disappearances and said he might leave town.
Omar left the United States in late November 2008.
A federal grand jury indicted Omar in August 2009 for providing material support to terrorism. Arrested by Dutch authorities several months later, Omar was extradited to the United States in August. He pled not guilty and remains in jail awaiting trial.
Despite a continuing U.S. government campaign against al-Shabaab, the group shows no signs of ending its efforts to recruit Americans. Folk believes that Omar Hammami (AKA Abu Mansur al-Amriki), a Muslim convert from Alabama who is a senior al-Shabaab commander, "is a great PR tool to recruit Westerners," telling people that "You too can come over to Somalia and enjoy great success and power like I did. You can speak English and that'll work just fine."
In order to defeat al-Shabaab, "you have to have a multi-pronged attack," he added. This approach would range from outreach to Somali communities in the United States, to "expanding bases in the Horn of Africa," and "the increased use of drone surveillance and drone strikes as a way to kind of get at the root of the problem in Somalia."
In addition, the federal government must use "all means at its disposal, including electronic surveillance, and all of the other tools" law enforcement has "to identify whether there are criminal conspiracies in the United States reaching back to Somalia to support Shabaab."
Al-Shabaab has many reasons to continue recruiting Americans, because they provide an important source of manpower for the terrorist enterprise. The Minneapolis recruits have worked in "all aspects" of the al-Shabaab's operations, Folk said, including combat, suicide bombings and military recruitment. In addition, Americans could prove useful in attaining another Shabaab goal – striking the United States.
"Travel documents are quite important because it's difficult to get into the United States," he said. "If you have U.S. travel documents, it reduces the barriers to entry."
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/12/05/the-national-defense-authorization-act-is-the-greatest-threat-to-civil-liberties-americans-face/
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http://gawker.com/5865089/20-things-you-should-know-about-americas-most-horrifying-new-law
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/us/senate-declines-to-resolve-issue-of-american-qaeda-suspects-arrested-in-us.html?_r=1 (from a link in the above article)
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Insider: $56 Billion Later, Airport Security Is Junk
By Spencer Ackerman Email Author December 6, 2011 | 6:30 am | Categories: Crime and Homeland Security
Follow @attackerman
The Department of Homeland Security has spent billions since 9/11 trying to keep dangerous people and dangerous explosives off airplanes, and treating us all air travelers like potential terrorists in the process. But according to a former security adviser to a leading airline, the terrorists have changed the game — and the government hasn’t yet caught on.
According to Ben Brandt, a former adviser to Delta, the airlines and the feds should be less concerned with what gels your aunt puts in her carry-on, and more concerned about lax screening for terrorist sympathizers among the airlines’ own work force. They should be worried about terrorists shipping their bombs in air cargo. And they should be worried about terrorists shooting or bombing airports without ever crossing the security gates.
Brandt says aviation security needs a fundamental overhaul. Not only is the aviation industry failing to keep up with the new terrorist tactics, TSA’s regimen of scanning and groping is causing a public backlash. “From the public’s perspective, this kind of refocusing would reduce the amount of screening they have to put up with in the United States,” Brandt tells Danger Room, “and refocus it where it’s needed.”
In the new issue of the CTC Sentinel, a wonky security newsletter published by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, Brandt all but indicts his former industry and its government protectors. “Government regulators suffer from a lack of imagination in anticipating and mitigating emergent and existing threats” to air travel, he writes.
Think first about what aviation security is. Since 9/11, it’s largely been a line of defense ahead of a departure gate to keep dangerous people and dangerous materials off a plane. By Brandt’s calculations, it’s cost $56 billion since 9/11. In one sense, it’s worked as planned: No planes have been blown up or hijacked for a decade.
But the last several years’ worth of plots on the friendly skies indicate the terrorists have switched their game plans. In January, a suicide bomber didn’t try to board a plane at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport. He detonated before going through security, in the crowded entranceway, killing 35 people and wounding over 150 more. Last fall, al-Qaida’s Yemen branch skipped the boarding call and shipped bombs packed in printer cartridges back to the States.
Less conspicuously, terrorists have started to infiltrate the airlines and airports themselves. Rajib Karim, for instance, worked as an IT specialist for British Airways. But inspired by al-Qaida YouTube preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, Karim offered to help al-Qaida sneak bombs aboard planes at London’s Heathrow airport, and claimed to have support from sympathetic airport workers. The airlines and airports barely conduct employee background checks, Brandt claims — and of course, none of those employees need to go through a “porno scanner,” get a pat-down or have their luggage rifled through.
Speaking of those scanners: We all remember how on Christmas Day 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab packed explosives into his underwear and headed on a flight to Detroit. That plot that failed only because of Abdulmutallab’s inability to light himself on fire. That’s how we got the invasive new scanners, which seek to catch the explosives or components that traditional metal detectors miss. But Brandt says they’re not so great: They “detect only two popular explosive compounds,” he writes. (He declines to name them in the interest of public safety; the Department of Homeland Security opted not to comment on Brandt.) Explosives detection equipment “is also not designed to detect the components of improvised incendiary devices (IIDs), making the use of these correspondingly attractive to terrorists.”
TSA is trying to get away from its stigma of being the guys who grope and photograph you. It’s taking the porno out of the scanners by getting rid of the “nude” imaging displays. Its director, John Pistole, talks about becoming an “intelligence driven” agency that compiles behavioral profiles of potential terrorists and — someday — targeting its toughest screening on only those who fit the profile. Kids no longer have to take their shoes off before boarding a plane.
Just one problem, according to Brandt: The behavioral science is no panacea. “The scientific community is divided as to whether behavioral detection of terrorists is viable,” he writes. According to the Government Accountability Office, TSA put together a behavioral profiling program “without first validating the scientific basis for identifying suspicious passengers in an airport environment.” Even if the science was sound, the office found last year, TSA officers “lack a mechanism to input data on suspicious passengers into a database used by TSA analysts and also lack a means to obtain information from the Transportation System Operations Center on a timely basis.”
Pistole talks about creating a “robust and multi-layered system” of defense, in case a certain measure fails. That’s a worthy effort, but it needs even more layers, Brandt argues. Abdulmutallab boarded his flight in Amsterdam — taking advantage of its relatively lax security, a harbinger of threats to come. ”Given that most aviation-focused attacks are likely to originate outside the U.S., it would seem to make more sense to upgrade screening for U.S. airline operations at those airports,” Brandt says.
None of this is going to be easy, or cheap. Brandt proposes that the government subsidize airlines for better employee background checks or explosives detection tech. But that’s could strike taxpayers as a bailout.
On the other hand, he and Pistole actually share the same headspace, so it’s possible that TSA will buy his overall critique. “The best defense is still developing solid intelligence on terrorist groups interested in targeting aviation,” Brandt says. Beats treating us all like terrorists.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/12/unsafe-skies/
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In support of one of the points BBG's posted article makes, I remember getting a ride to the airport with an Afghani taxi driver. As is my wont, I started a friendly conversation with him: "Its so hard to tell what is going on over there, what do you make of it?" etc. Amongst the things I gleaned from the conversation was that the time and way he came in to the US should have made him a high risk candidate for his first job: working at the airport loading cargo.
:-o :-o :-o
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/see-becks-passionate-interview-with-allen-west-over-indefinite-detention-bill-stance/
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Answer, no-- but interesting questions are presented nonetheless.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/did-federal-agents-really-raid-a-mormon-food-storage-facility/
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http://www.businessinsider.com/ndaa-set-to-become-law-the-terror-is-nearer-than-ever-2011-12#ixzz1gf5oyjR6 :x :x :? :-(
It turns out that destroying the American democratic republic was easy to accomplish, historians will write someday. Simply get the three major cable news networks to blather on about useless bull**** for a few days, while legislators meet in secret behind closed doors to rush through the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA), and its evil twin sister, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which is a clever name for an Internet censorship bill straight out of an Orwellian nightmare
And there is more on this, including Obama repealing his veto threat.
Is our work here done, or is there a new beginning?
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Ummm , , , what is wrong with SOPA? I see not one specific accusation, let alone any specifics, in the article.
Nor is there much specific in the article about NDAA. Does the author agree or disagree with the notion that those that war on the US fall outside of ordinary criminal due process?
Be clear, I am DEEPLY concerned about what I have been hearing about NDAA. The silence of the Pravdas is deafening. But I sure would like to see some specifics , , ,
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Mother Jones' take on NDAA:
http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/12/defense-bill-passed-so-what-does-it-do-ndaa
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Compromise language: "Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States."
I am still confused by the status of the controversial clause, holding indefinitely (or not) US citizens taken on US soil believed to be terrorists, and perhaps the confusion is intentional in the compromise language. This author is saying (if I am reading him correctly) that the other media's take on it is wrong and that the actual meaning will have to be determined in the courts once a President acts on it.
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Quoting the Mother Jones author: "It does not, contrary to what many media outlets have reported, authorize the president to indefinitely detain without trial an American citizen suspected of terrorism who is captured in the US. A last minute compromise amendment adopted in the Senate, whose language was retained in the final bill, leaves it up to the courts to decide if the president has that power, should a future president try to exercise it. But if a future president does try to assert the authority to detain an American citizen without charge or trial, it won't be based on the authority in this bill.
So it's simply not true, as the Guardian wrote yesterday, that the the bill "allows the military to indefinitely detain without trial American terrorism suspects arrested on US soil who could then be shipped to Guantánamo Bay." When the New York Times editorial page writes that the bill would "strip the F.B.I., federal prosecutors and federal courts of all or most of their power to arrest and prosecute terrorists and hand it off to the military," or that the "legislation could also give future presidents the authority to throw American citizens into prison for life without charges or a trial," they're simply wrong.
The language in the bill that relates to the detention authority as far as US citizens and permanent residents are concerned is, "Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States."
As I've written before, this is cop-out language. It allows people who think the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force against the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks gives the president the authority to detain US citizens without charge or trial to say that, but it also allows people who can read the Constitution of the United States to argue something else. "
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It seems to me that the author is trying to bring intellectual honesty to the issue.
IF what he says is accurate, my first reaction is that I cannot say the NDAA as written is a terrible thing, indeed it may have merit-- but as is always the case with anything, I reserve the right to evolve in my opinion.
That said, I strongly dislike how this thing was hurried through without a proper discussion with the American people-- or within the Congress for that matter. These are important issues, and it should not be so hard for citizens to know what a bill says or to inform their elected representatives of their thoughts on the matter.
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Good points Crafty. I am moved both by your position and by GM being 'torn' on it. There is an awkwardness of opposing sides exposed in the video I posted of Glen Beck and Allen West. Neither side can answer the concern of the other: You cannot stop a terrorist in a terror act because you may never have criminal court level proof in place in advance of the destruction. And of course the other side of it, that you potentially give up all freedoms and rights if your government declares you a terrorist.
Let's assume for a moment there is a plot in place in need of disruption right now and maybe a good part of congress and the executive branch have been briefed. Moving at government subcommittee or supercommittee speed is not necessarily good enough. We may have to make very tough choices right now, either way. Keep our principles - lose a city, or avert an attack but give up our principles. Not great choices.
I agree it was not right for the public to be completely left out of the debate and/or misinformed on the outcome.
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They key element for me is there has to be a due process safeguard in place. A military tribunal would meet that just fine in my mind, just as we did with German saboteurs in WWII.
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Ummm , , , what is wrong with SOPA?
This link may address some of your question.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57344507-281/internet-is-for-porn-pops-up-during-house-sopa-debate/?tag=mncol%3BsubStories
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My family and I are hurt badly by internet piracy every day. The fruit of my labor, my property, is stolen from me. Seems to me like a quintessential job for government.
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Woof Guro... I completely understand your position, and the reasons why you have this position. And, I also believe in the importance of intellectual property.
You asked the question, and I tried to find an article that addressed it with more specifics than the article you took to task.
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I get that BD.
My question was that of an innocent-- I simply am not up to speed on SOPA or why anyone of good faith would oppose it.
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National Guard at border cut to about 300
Remaining troops will focus on aerial surveillance missions using helicopters and airplanes
Ross D. Franklin / AP file
A United States National Guard unit patrols the Arizona-Mexico border in Sasabe, Ariz., on Jan. 19, 2007. The contingent of National Guard troops working at the Mexican border will be cut from 1,200 to about 300 in the coming year.
By ALICIA A. CALDWELL
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration will keep a reduced contingent of National Guard troops working along the Mexican border for the next year, the Defense Department said Tuesday.
Starting in January, the force of 1,200 National Guard troops at the border will be reduced to fewer than 300 at a cost of about $60 million, said Paul Stockton, assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense.
The remaining troops will shift their focus from patrolling the border on the ground looking for illegal immigrants and smugglers to aerial surveillance missions using military helicopters and airplanes equipped with high-tech radar and other gear. Exactly where those troops will fly or how many aircraft will be used has not been decided, he said.
"We are basically going from boots on the ground to boots in the air," said David Aguilar, deputy commissioner for Customs and Border Protection.
Border Patrol Chief Michael Fisher said his agency is working on identifying the "areas of greatest concern" along the border — areas that include Arizona and South Texas — and will station troops and aircraft accordingly.
President Barack Obama ordered a second round of Guard troops to the border last year, with the first of those troops arriving in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas in August 2010. President George W. Bush first ordered Guard troops to the southern from 2006 to 2008. They were supposed to be in place for about a year but Obama extended the deployment earlier this year. The smaller force is now expected to remain until the end of 2012.
Stockton said the remaining troops are "transitioning to much more effective support."
"This provides us with more flexibility in dealing with the persistent challenges posed by cross-border movement and illegal crossings," Stockton said.
According to the Government Accountability Office, the Pentagon has previously spent about $1.35 billion for the deployments under Bush and Obama.
Stockton said the Pentagon has budgeted about $60 million for the mission in 2012.
Congressional Republicans have objected to reducing the number of troops, arguing that the border isn't secure and reducing the number of people patrolling the area doesn't help security.
"If the Obama administration's goal is border security, their actions undermine their objective," said Rep. Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. "The administration's decision to draw down the National Guard troops along the U.S-Mexico border makes an already porous border worse."
Aguilar, who previously led the Border Patrol, said Tuesday there is still work to be done at the border but that successes in securing the frontier have allowed DHS to reduce the number of troops and change the mission.
In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 Border Patrol agents at the southern border made 327,577 arrests, the fewest since 1972. There are also more than 18,500 agents patrolling the border, the highest number in the agency's history.
When Bush first deployed the National Guard, there were just over 11,000 Border Patrol agents in the area who made more than one million arrests.
P.C.
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Woof,
AZ deputies turn in their their badges for immigration enforcement.
http://www.myfoxphoenix.com/dpp/news/crime/ice-trained-mcso-deputies-turn-in-badges-12-21-2011
P.C.
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I get that BD.
My question was that of an innocent-- I simply am not up to speed on SOPA or why anyone of good faith would oppose it.
Your training videos get put on youtube. Under the new law, this would be youtube's fault, instead of just the poster, sort of in the same way people would like to be able to sue Ford when someone runs through a stop sign with an F150 because they were texting.
Youtube, live journal, and many other sites are the sources of free speech for people all over the world. SOPA is going to make it possible, and likely, that Big Sis is going to block these very important websites. The US has a lot of power over the WWW.
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Ah, that helps me understand CW, thank you.
At the same time there is the matter of sites that are deliberately created to facilitate pirating/ripping/etc enabled and protected by just the logic that you describe. :x :x :x
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Ah, that helps me understand CW, thank you.
At the same time there is the matter of sites that are deliberately created to facilitate pirating/ripping/etc enabled and protected by just the logic that you describe. :x :x :x
Piracy is a service problem, not a legal one. For example, I play a videogame online called Call of Duty. In that game, I log on with a dozen other people so that we can shoot at each other. I could have easily stolen the game, but I didn't, because a stolen copy won't let me log on.
Training DVDs are the same way. They are basically begging to be stolen because there isn't any incentive to buy a new copy. I don't know what exactly the answer is, but the fact that there isn't a service attached means no one has an incentive, besides honor, to keep from stealing them. Honestly, I sort of doubt too many people are ripping yours off though just from the anecdotal evidence that I don't know anyone who stole them, and I know a lot of martial artists who pirate. Anyone with them did, infact, buy them.
Maybe you could come up with a benefit for owning a unique copy. They aren't cheap. Maybe you could make a website or something where people can upload videos of themselves training the material and if you actually sold them a copy off your website or they give you a code that was in the box, you give them private instruction or pointers or something.
I'm very against any sort of law that will erode the internet. There are a lot of companies doing a great job overcoming piracy. LastFM, iTunes, I Heart Radio... why go through all the trouble of downloading a bunch of crappy, virus infected torrents to find a magical good copy of a song when there are all these really good services?
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"Piracy is a service problem, not a legal one."
:? :roll:
"For example, I play a videogame online called Call of Duty. In that game, I log on with a dozen other people so that we can shoot at each other. I could have easily stolen the game, but I didn't, because a stolen copy won't let me log on."
Training DVDs are the same way."
Umm, no they are not as you yourself point out in your next paragraph.
"They are basically begging to be stolen because there isn't any incentive to buy a new copy. I don't know what exactly the answer is, but the fact that there isn't a service attached means no one has an incentive, besides honor (for some people this is a consideration), to keep from stealing them."
Especially so in an environment where it is quite easy to go to some site that specializes in this facilitating this sort of theft and stealing with a few clicks on one's keyboard.
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Fair enough.
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Thank you.
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It has always surprised and infuriated me how many otherwise honest people seem to think there is nothing wrong with stealing intellectual property. Music, software, anything that is produced by the sweat of one's brow ought to be protected, and penalties exacted for theft thereof. I fail to see what about this is wither complicated or difficult to understand.
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Several websites, including Reddit and Wikipedia will be offline all or part of tomorrow.
http://redtape.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/13/10151672-sopa-opponents-gaining-momentum-wikipedia-to-join-blackout
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http://www.mpaa.org/Resources/1227ef12-e209-4edf-b8b8-bb4af768430c.pdf
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cant pick sides at this point, but several purely technical issues at hand present even greater moral and criminal issues if SOPA gets passed. Simply said, the technical side of HOW it will actually work, is very shady indeed
it builds upon the protect IP act from 08
http://www.circleid.com/pdf/PROTECT-IP-Technical-Whitepaper-Final.pdf
especially
3C1 and 3C2
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/12/16/founder-internet-fears-unprecedented-web-censorship-from-sopa/
"Requiring search engines to delete a domain name begins a worldwide arms race of unprecedented 'censorship' of the Web," Cerf wrote in a letter to Chairman Lamar Smith that Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) presented to the panel Thursday.
http://torrentfreak.com/the-privatization-of-copyright-lawmaking-111112/
"Much of what will happen under SOPA will occur out of the public eye and without the possibility of holding anyone accountable. For when copyright law is made and enforced privately, it is hard for the public to know the shape that the law takes and harder still to complain about its operation."
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/11/dangerous-bill-would-threaten-legitimate-websites/248619/
In addition to domain-name filtering, SOPA would impose an open-ended obligation on Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to prevent access to infringing sites. This means that SOPA would impose an unprecedented responsibility on ISPs to scrutinize and screen all user traffic. Preventing access to specific sites would require ISPs to inspect all the Internet traffic of its entire user base....
Now that bolded part sounds frigging scary. A move worthy of Stalinesque state control :mrgreen: If only there was such fiery support of the state in the fiscal and monetary sector, teeheee :evil:
all in all, I think the majority of the tech savy experts that counter the bill is not on its "moral" stand, but on its technical inferiority. It will be more costly, less user friendly, a downright b!tch to finance and it will only drive the pirates deeper underground.
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Wikipedia and many other websites are shutting down today to oppose a proposal in Congress on foreign Internet piracy, and the White House is seconding the protest. The covert lobbying war between Silicon Valley and most other companies in the business of intellectual property is now in the open, and this fight could define—or reinvent—copyright in the digital era.
Everyone agrees, or at least claims to agree, that the illegal sale of copyrighted and trademarked products has become a world-wide, multibillion-dollar industry and a legitimate and growing economic problem. This isn't college kids swapping MP3s, as in the 1990s. Rather, rogue websites set up shop oversees and sell U.S. consumers bootleg movies, TV shows, software, video games, books and music, as well as pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, fashion, jewelry and more.
Often consumers think they're buying copies or streams from legitimate retail enterprises, sometimes not. Either way, the technical term for this is theft.
The tech industry says it wants to stop such crimes, but it also calls any tangible effort to do so censorship that would "break the Internet." Wikipedia has never blacked itself out before on any other political issue, nor have websites like Mozilla or the social news aggregator Reddit. How's that for irony: Companies supposedly devoted to the free flow of information are gagging themselves, and the only practical effect will be to enable fraudsters. They've taken no comparable action against, say, Chinese repression.
Meanwhile, the White House let it be known over the weekend in a blog post—how fitting—that it won't support legislation that "reduces freedom of expression" or damages "the dynamic, innovative global Internet," as if this describes the reality of Internet theft. President Obama has finally found a regulation he doesn't like, which must mean that the campaign contributions of Google and the Stanford alumni club are paying dividends.
Enlarge Image
AFP/Getty Images
The House bill known as the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, and its Senate counterpart are far more modest than this cyber tantrum suggests. By our reading they would create new tools to target the worst-of-the-worst black markets. The notion that a SOPA dragnet will catch a stray Facebook post or Twitter link is false.
Under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998, U.S. prosecutors and rights-holders can and do obtain warrants to shut down rogue websites and confiscate their domain names under asset-seizure laws. Such powers stop at the water's edge, however. SOPA is meant to target the international pirates that are currently beyond the reach of U.S. law.
The bill would allow the Attorney General to sue infringers and requires the Justice Department to prove in court that a foreign site is dedicated to the wholesale violation of copyright under the same standards that apply to domestic sites. In rare circumstances private plaintiffs can also sue for remedies, not for damages, and their legal tools are far more limited than the AG's.
If any such case succeeds after due process under federal civil procedure, SOPA requires third parties to make it harder to traffic in stolen online content. Search engines would be required to screen out links, just as they remove domestic piracy or child pornography sites from their indexes. Credit card and other online financial service companies couldn't complete transactions.
(Obligatory housekeeping: We at the Journal are in the intellectual property business, and our parent company, News Corp., supports the bills as do most other media content companies.)
Moreover, SOPA is already in its 3.0 version to address the major objections. Compromises have narrowed several vague and overly broad provisions. The bill's drafters also removed a feature requiring Internet service providers to filter the domain name system for thieves—which would have meant basically removing them from the Internet's phone book to deny consumer access. But the anti-SOPA activists don't care about these crucial details.
The e-vangelists seem to believe that anybody is entitled to access to any content at any time at no cost—open source. Their real ideological objection is to the concept of copyright itself, and they oppose any legal regime that values original creative work. The offline analogue is Occupy Wall Street.
Information and content may want to be free, or not, but that's for their owners to decide, not Movie2k.to or LibraryPirate.me or MusicMP3.ru. The Founders recognized the economic benefits of intellectual property, which is why the Constitution tells Congress to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" (Article I, Section 8).
The Internet has been a tremendous engine for commercial and democratic exchange, but that makes it all the more important to police the abusers who hijack its architecture. SOPA merely adapts the current avenues of legal recourse for infringement and counterfeiting to new realities. Without rights that protect the creativity and innovation that bring fresh ideas and products to market, there will be far fewer ideas and products to steal.
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Probably this simple. Although probably not through simple email or the like.
Must happen all day long:
http://www.mycentraljersey.com/article/20120117/NJNEWS/301170036/Chemist-admits-stealing-sanofi-aventis-secrets?odyssey=mod|mostview
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http://americancensorship.org/infographic.html
A serious question, Guro: Is there a chance that if SOPA were passed, could www.dogbrothers.com be blacked given the number of links and quotes, etc. posted on the forum from other web sites? Based on my understanding of the law, the critics (at least) seem to think this type of issue is a possibility.
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Lets take this over to the Internet thread on the SCH forum.
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1167.new#new
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10 Reasons The U.S. Is No Longer The Land Of The Free
Published 1, January 15, 2012 Academics , Columns , Congress , Constitutional Law , Free Speech , International , Media , Politics , Society , Supreme Court 295 Comments
Below is today’s column in the Sunday Washington Post. The column addresses how the continued rollbacks on civil liberties in the United States conflicts with the view of the country as the land of the free. If we are going to adopt Chinese legal principles, we should at least have the integrity to adopt one Chinese proverb: “The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.” We seem as a country to be in denial as to the implications of these laws and policies. Whether we are viewed as a free country with authoritarian inclinations or an authoritarian nation with free aspirations (or some other hybrid definition), we are clearly not what we once were.
Every year, the State Department issues reports on individual rights in other countries, monitoring the passage of restrictive laws and regulations around the world. Iran, for example, has been criticized for denying fair public trials and limiting privacy, while Russia has been taken to task for undermining due process. Other countries have been condemned for the use of secret evidence and torture.
Even as we pass judgment on countries we consider unfree, Americans remain confident that any definition of a free nation must include their own — the land of free. Yet, the laws and practices of the land should shake that confidence. In the decade since Sept. 11, 2001, this country has comprehensively reduced civil liberties in the name of an expanded security state. The most recent example of this was the National Defense Authorization Act, signed Dec. 31, which allows for the indefinite detention of citizens. At what point does the reduction of individual rights in our country change how we define ourselves?
While each new national security power Washington has embraced was controversial when enacted, they are often discussed in isolation. But they don’t operate in isolation. They form a mosaic of powers under which our country could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian. Americans often proclaim our nation as a symbol of freedom to the world while dismissing nations such as Cuba and China as categorically unfree. Yet, objectively, we may be only half right. Those countries do lack basic individual rights such as due process, placing them outside any reasonable definition of “free,” but the United States now has much more in common with such regimes than anyone may like to admit.
These countries also have constitutions that purport to guarantee freedoms and rights. But their governments have broad discretion in denying those rights and few real avenues for challenges by citizens — precisely the problem with the new laws in this country.
The list of powers acquired by the U.S. government since 9/11 puts us in rather troubling company.
Assassination of U.S. citizens
President Obama has claimed, as President George W. Bush did before him, the right to order the killing of any citizen considered a terrorist or an abettor of terrorism. Last year, he approved the killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaqi and another citizen under this claimed inherent authority. Last month, administration officials affirmed that power, stating that the president can order the assassination of any citizen whom he considers allied with terrorists. (Nations such as Nigeria, Iran and Syria have been routinely criticized for extrajudicial killings of enemies of the state.)
Indefinite detention
Under the law signed last month, terrorism suspects are to be held by the military; the president also has the authority to indefinitely detain citizens accused of terrorism. While Sen. Carl Levin insisted the bill followed existing law “whatever the law is,” the Senate specifically rejected an amendment that would exempt citizens and the Administration has opposed efforts to challenge such authority in federal court. The Administration continues to claim the right to strip citizens of legal protections based on its sole discretion. (China recently codified a more limited detention law for its citizens, while countries such as Cambodia have been singled out by the United States for “prolonged detention.”)
Arbitrary justice
The president now decides whether a person will receive a trial in the federal courts or in a military tribunal, a system that has been ridiculed around the world for lacking basic due process protections. Bush claimed this authority in 2001, and Obama has continued the practice. (Egypt and China have been denounced for maintaining separate military justice systems for selected defendants, including civilians.)
Warrantless searches
The president may now order warrantless surveillance, including a new capability to force companies and organizations to turn over information on citizens’ finances, communications and associations. Bush acquired this sweeping power under the Patriot Act in 2001, and in 2011, Obama extended the power, including searches of everything from business documents to library records. The government can use “national security letters” to demand, without probable cause, that organizations turn over information on citizens — and order them not to reveal the disclosure to the affected party. (Saudi Arabia and Pakistan operate under laws that allow the government to engage in widespread discretionary surveillance.)
Secret evidence
The government now routinely uses secret evidence to detain individuals and employs secret evidence in federal and military courts. It also forces the dismissal of cases against the United States by simply filing declarations that the cases would make the government reveal classified information that would harm national security — a claim made in a variety of privacy lawsuits and largely accepted by federal judges without question. Even legal opinions, cited as the basis for the government’s actions under the Bush and Obama administrations, have been classified. This allows the government to claim secret legal arguments to support secret proceedings using secret evidence. In addition, some cases never make it to court at all. The federal courts routinely deny constitutional challenges to policies and programs under a narrow definition of standing to bring a case.
War crimes
The world clamored for prosecutions of those responsible for waterboarding terrorism suspects during the Bush administration, but the Obama administration said in 2009 that it would not allow CIA employees to be investigated or prosecuted for such actions. This gutted not just treaty obligations but the Nuremberg principles of international law. When courts in countries such as Spain moved to investigate Bush officials for war crimes, the Obama administration reportedly urged foreign officials not to allow such cases to proceed, despite the fact that the United States has long claimed the same authority with regard to alleged war criminals in other countries. (Various nations have resisted investigations of officials accused of war crimes and torture. Some, such as Serbia and Chile, eventually relented to comply with international law; countries that have denied independent investigations include Iran, Syria and China.)
Secret court
The government has increased its use of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has expanded its secret warrants to include individuals deemed to be aiding or abetting hostile foreign governments or organizations. In 2011, Obama renewed these powers, including allowing secret searches of individuals who are not part of an identifiable terrorist group. The administration has asserted the right to ignore congressional limits on such surveillance. (Pakistan places national security surveillance under the unchecked powers of the military or intelligence services.)
Immunity from judicial review
Like the Bush administration, the Obama administration has successfully pushed for immunity for companies that assist in warrantless surveillance of citizens, blocking the ability of citizens to challenge the violation of privacy. (Similarly, China has maintained sweeping immunity claims both inside and outside the country and routinely blocks lawsuits against private companies.)
Continual monitoring of citizens
The Obama administration has successfully defended its claim that it can use GPS devices to monitor every move of targeted citizens without securing any court order or review. It is not defending the power before the Supreme Court — a power described by Justice Anthony Kennedy as “Orwellian.” (Saudi Arabia has installed massive public surveillance systems, while Cuba is notorious for active monitoring of selected citizens.)
Extraordinary renditions
The government now has the ability to transfer both citizens and noncitizens to another country under a system known as extraordinary rendition, which has been denounced as using other countries, such as Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan, to torture suspects. The Obama administration says it is not continuing the abuses of this practice under Bush, but it insists on the unfettered right to order such transfers — including the possible transfer of U.S. citizens.
These new laws have come with an infusion of money into an expanded security system on the state and federal levels, including more public surveillance cameras, tens of thousands of security personnel and a massive expansion of a terrorist-chasing bureaucracy.
Some politicians shrug and say these increased powers are merely a response to the times we live in. Thus, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) could declare in an interview last spring without objection that “free speech is a great idea, but we’re in a war.” Of course, terrorism will never “surrender” and end this particular “war.”
Other politicians rationalize that, while such powers may exist, it really comes down to how they are used. This is a common response by liberals who cannot bring themselves to denounce Obama as they did Bush. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), for instance, has insisted that Congress is not making any decision on indefinite detention: “That is a decision which we leave where it belongs — in the executive branch.”
And in a signing statement with the defense authorization bill, Obama said he does not intend to use the latest power to indefinitely imprison citizens. Yet, he still accepted the power as a sort of regretful autocrat.
An authoritarian nation is defined not just by the use of authoritarian powers, but by the ability to use them. If a president can take away your freedom or your life on his own authority, all rights become little more than a discretionary grant subject to executive will.
The framers lived under autocratic rule and understood this danger better than we do. James Madison famously warned that we needed a system that did not depend on the good intentions or motivations of our rulers: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”
Benjamin Franklin was more direct. In 1787, a Mrs. Powel confronted Franklin after the signing of the Constitution and asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got — a republic or a monarchy?” His response was a bit chilling: “A republic, Madam, if you can keep it.”
Since 9/11, we have created the very government the framers feared: a government with sweeping and largely unchecked powers resting on the hope that they will be used wisely.
The indefinite-detention provision in the defense authorization bill seemed to many civil libertarians like a betrayal by Obama. While the president had promised to veto the law over that provision, Levin, a sponsor of the bill, disclosed on the Senate floor that it was in fact the White House that approved the removal of any exception for citizens from indefinite detention.
Dishonesty from politicians is nothing new for Americans. The real question is whether we are lying to ourselves when we call this country the land of the free.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University.
Washington Post (Sunday) January 15, 2012
http://jonathanturley.org/2012/01/15/10-reasons-the-u-s-is-no-longer-the-land-of-the-free/
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There is much to quibble with in that piece, but the examples given are not the only ones.
==========================
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/01/17/nypd-researching-gun-scanning-technology-for-city-streets/
NYC police pursuing technology to scan pedestrians for guns
www.foxnews.com
The NYPD is working in conjunction with the Department of Defense to further crack down on illegal guns in the city by researching technology that could detect concealed weapons on people as they walk down the street, the New York Post reports.
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Man arrested after ejaculating during TSA pat-down : Dead Serious News
www.deadseriousnews.com
A 47 year old gay man was arrested at San Francisco International Airport after ejaculating while being patted down by a male TSA agent. Percy Cummings, an interior designer from San Francisco, is being held without bail after the alleged incident, charged with sexually assaulting a Federal agent.
SEn. Rand Paul on his incident:
Sen. Rand Paul on The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer - 1/23/12
www.youtube.com
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http://www.kfiam640.com/pages/NEWS.html?article=9653697
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I find it hard to believe that there are 100,000 of this belief and disconcerting to see the FBI tying this belief to those who believe in the gold standard.
http://rt.com/news/fbi-sovereign-citizens-violent-673/
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Hearing docs on Fast and Furious.
http://oversight.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1573%3A2-2-2012-qfast-a-furious-management-failures-at-the-department-of-justiceq&catid=12&Itemid=20
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Alexander's Essay – February 9, 2012
FBI Terrorist Alert: Beware of Those Who 'Reference the Constitution or Bible'
Memo to Ron Paul supporters -- and anyone else interested in restoring constitutional integrity
"Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression." --James Madison (1788)
The FBI held a press conference this week on a terrorist alert bulletin, which it sent to every federal, state and local law enforcement agency across the country. Unfortunately, that bulletin continued a trend of "terrorist profiles" issued since Barack Hussein Obama has been in office. This particular alert identified such broad ideological characteristics that it can be construed to include the activities of tens of millions of law-abiding Americans.
The FBI counterterrorism division report concluded that those who believe that our government has exceeded its constitutional limits or are protesting for restoration of constitutional integrity might pose a threat. By that definition, anyone associated with the "Tea Party movement" is suspect, and that's the problem with this sweeping and politically motivated "bureaucrap."
Make no mistake: There are some deadly anti-government socialist and fascist radicals in America. For example, consider the man who launched someone's political career in 1994 -- Obama mentor William Ayers, who was previously the leader of the Weathermen, a murderous group of radical "useful idiots." They bombed the U.S. Capitol twice, the Pentagon, the Department of State, several federal courthouses, plus state and local government buildings -- with intent to kill. Unfortunately, the FBI never assembled sufficient evidence to convict Ayers. (Lucky break for Obama's career!)
Or how about Obama's radical, racist, hate-spewing pastor, Jeremiah Wright? This is the man who married the Obamas and baptized their children; the same man who regularly sermonized about "the US-KKK-A" with assertions that "The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color;" the man who said that the U.S. government "gives [black people] drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strikes law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, g-d d--- America!"
Does that constitute a threat to the government?
Post Your Opinion
The aforementioned FBI alert focused on the so-called "sovereign citizen" movement, which the FBI believes may have more than 500,000 members -- though it has no leaders, no membership roster, no organization at all. There is a "sovereign citizens" website which notes boldly, "We do NOT endorse non-payment of taxes or violence to achieve these changes. We do NOT endorse giving up a social security number and we do NOT endorse violence against the police or the government."
According to the FBI, some of those associated with this movement are engaged in crimes like underpaying taxes and other fraud, none of which should be classified as terrorism. According to a Reuters report on the press release, "Legal convictions of such extremists, mostly for white-collar crimes such as fraud, have increased from 10 in 2009 to 18 in 2011, FBI agents said."
We did the math, and that's an increase of eight convictions.
Meanwhile, more than 5,200 of Obama's Occupy movement radicals were arrested in 2011, many for violent offenses, and some of those directed at police.
This is not to say that the FBI didn't have reason to warn law enforcement agencies. In May of 2010, two sociopaths, one of whom had mentioned "sovereign citizen" on a website, murdered two Arkansas police officers. But why wait almost two years to issue the warning?
Now, I spent some years in law enforcement, and some of those devoted to counter-terrorism. I still hold a reserve national security position with the Department of Homeland Security and, as such, maintain threat currency and contacts with both domestic counter-terrorism folks. I mention this to say I can assure you that most federal, state and local law enforcement personnel abide by their oath to "support and defend the Constitution" and are steadfastly accountable to that oath. In other words, they understand that broadly labeling as "terrorists" those who support constitutional limits on government is offensive to that oath.
However, we now have an established Obama-era pattern of applying such broad labels, which began in 2009 when the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis issued a report on "Right-Wing Extremism." It claimed that those who use terms including "patriot" or "constitutionalist," and "link their beliefs to those commonly associated with the American Revolution," are a threat. It even went so far as to identify returning war veterans as "potential threats."
That report was so repulsive that it received a prompt rebuke from liberal Democrat Bennie Thompson, then chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, and Republican Peter King, its ranking member. Thompson wrote, "This report appears to raise significant issues involving the privacy and civil liberties of many Americans. ... Freedom of association and freedom of speech are guaranteed to all Americans. ... I am disappointed that the Department would allow this report to be disseminated to its State and local partners. ... I am dumbfounded that I&A released this report."
Thompson protested that the DHS report "blurred the line" between legal and illegal activity.
At the time, DHS spokesperson Amy Kudwa claimed the report was not finished and had been recalled: "This product is not, nor was it ever, in operational use." That notwithstanding, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano defended the report and insisted, "We do not -- nor will we ever -- monitor ideology or political beliefs. We take seriously our responsibility to protect the civil rights and liberties of the American people." (Trust her, she's from the government!)
However, such monitoring is not the contiguous prerogative of DHS, but that of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies. This is why the latest national alert issued by the FBI should raise many red flags with overseers in the House and Senate.
Here are some excerpts from the FBI bulletin: "This ... domestic terrorist movement, which, scattered across the United States, has existed for decades. ... They do not represent an anarchist group, nor are they a militia. ... They operate as individuals without established leadership and only come together in loosely affiliated groups to ... socialize and talk about their ideology. They may refer to themselves as 'constitutionalists.' ... Several indicators can help identify these individuals. References to the Bible, The Constitution of the United States, U.S. Supreme Court decisions, or treaties with foreign governments..."
Share Your Opinion
Those clips are taken out of context, but the problem with such broad profiles is that by the time they filter down through the channels, there are, inevitably, those who are not able to distinguish good from evil, or those whose political bias blinds them from such distinctions.
For example, shortly after DHS released its "Right-Wing Extremist" profile, I was contacted by Patriot readers, both officers and enlisted personnel, about a security exercise scenario at Ft. Knox. That scenario identified attackers as "Tea Party members" among "white supremacists" armed with "military grade weapons" and "bomb making components." (In fact, many military and law enforcement personnel identify with the Tea Party movement, which is why we were contacted by military readers.)
Within hours of posting that report, senior command staff at Ft. Knox contacted us and conceded that an officer in the security loop altered the scenario to include "the Tea Party in order to make it more realistic." The commanding officer assured us, "an official investigation has been initiated to determine the manner in which this information was included in the exercise scenario."
To make it "more realistic"? Every reader of this column can accurately profile the political views and racial/ethnic identity of the individual who "altered the scenario."
So, given the current FBI profile, if these "terrorists" are members of an organization with no leaders, no membership and, in fact, no organization, how exactly are they to be distinguished from law-abiding political activists who believe our government has exceeded its constitutional authority? How are they to be distinguished from patriotic Americans who advocate for the restoration of constitutional integrity and proper limits on the role of government? There are plenty of us who, in the course of our objections to the erosion of the Rule of Law, might make "references to the Bible, The Constitution of the United States, U.S. Supreme Court decisions, or treaties with foreign governments..."
What purpose does this FBI memo really serve?
In October 2011, DHS attempted to make amends by publishing a training guide for "Countering Violent Extremism." In that directive, Section 2 notes, "Training should be sensitive to constitutional values," and it asserts, "training should support the protection of civil rights and civil liberties as part of national security. Don't use training that equates religious expression, protests, or other constitutionally protected activity with criminal activity."
Perhaps Obama's executive appointees to the FBI should adopt a similar policy and -- unlike DHS -- abide by it. In the meantime, we are waiting for objections from oversight committee Republicans concerning Obama's latest attack on Bible-citing, Constitution-abiding Patriots....
Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
Libertas aut Mortis!
Mark Alexander
Publisher, The Patriot Post
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Sorry, don't have the URL handy
By MITCHELL D. SILBER
On Monday, Israeli embassy workers in the capital cities of India and Georgia were targeted in terrorist attacks that Israeli officials believe were planned and carried out by Iran and its client, the militant group Hezbollah. The bomb in Tbilisi was defused, but the bomb in New Delhi, planted in an embassy worker's car, exploded and injured at least two.
Iran's next target could well be on American soil. In Senate testimony last month, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper stated that Iranian officials "are now more willing to conduct an attack in the United States in response to real or perceived U.S. actions that threaten the regime."
As evidence, Mr. Clapper cited an alleged plot foiled last October in which a naturalized U.S. citizen of Iranian descent, directed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, hired a member of a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States. The plan involved blowing up a Washington, D.C., restaurant—potentially killing hundreds of Americans in the process.
Iran has a proven record of using its official presence in a foreign city to coordinate attacks, which are then carried out by Hezbollah agents from abroad, often leveraging the local community—whether wittingly or not—as facilitators. Most notable are the 1992 and 1994 bombings of Israeli and Jewish targets in Argentina, which killed 29 and 85 people, respectively. The New York City Police Department, where I work as director of Intelligence Analysis, sent a team to Argentina to study the modus operandi of those attacks and to meet with Argentine security officials who worked the investigations. Coupled with open source information, this is what the NYPD learned:
Iranian agents were sent to Argentina years before the attacks, where they integrated into society and became Argentine nationals. Mohsen Rabbani is believed to have been in charge of coordinating the 1994 attack and is subject to an Interpol arrest warrant for his involvement. He first came to Argentina in 1983, where he subsequently became the main imam at At-Tauhid, an Iranian-funded mosque in Buenos Aires.
After traveling to Iran in August 1993 to participate in a meeting that allegedly gave the planned attack the green light, Mr. Rabbani returned to Argentina as a cultural attaché to the Iranian Embassy, conveniently providing him diplomatic immunity. Then, Hezbollah agents from abroad received logistical support from members of the local Lebanese-Shiite community and the Iranian Embassy to carry out the attack.
The Argentine attacks were by no means isolated incidents. Hezbollah has been tied to failed attacks in 2009 against Israeli and Jewish interests in Azerbaijan, Egypt and Turkey. Last month, Thai officials arrested a suspected Hezbollah militant for possibly planning attacks there or perhaps facilitating the movement of weapons through Bangkok.
The NYPD must assume that New York City could be targeted by Iran or Hezbollah. On Feb. 3, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei threatened that Iran "had its own tools" to respond to sanctions and threats of military action against it. Indeed, as the West's conflict with Iran over its nuclear program continues to heat up, New York City—especially with its large Jewish population—becomes an increasingly attractive target.
This is neither an idle nor a new threat. As one example of Iranian agents acting in New York, in 2004 two security guards attached to the Iranian mission to the United Nations were sent home by the State Department after being caught conducting surveillance of city subways and landmarks. Iran's U.N. mission allows officials from Iran's Ministry of Intelligence to live and operate in New York with official diplomatic cover.
Iran also has a presence in New York via the Alavi Foundation, a nonprofit ostensibly devoted to charity works and promoting Islamic culture. In December 2009, Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, described Alavi as having "effectively been a front for the government of Iran." A contemporaneous complaint filed by Mr. Bharara's office led to the seizure of Alavi's assets—including the Islamic Institute of New York, the largest Shiite mosque in the city and the location most closely affiliated with Iran's U.N. mission. The NYPD Intelligence Division also played a role during the initial stages of the Alavi investigation.
Hezbollah and its supporters have a presence in New York and the surrounding area as well. In 2008, two Staten Island men pleaded guilty to providing material support to Hezbollah. Just down the road in Philadelphia, 26 people—including a former Brooklyn resident—were indicted in federal court in 2009 for conspiring to provide material support to the terrorist group.
Lebanese-linked businesses in the tri-state area and elsewhere have been implicated in a massive money-laundering scheme benefiting Hezbollah. This scheme was revealed in a civil suit filed against several Lebanese financial institutions last December by the Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Meanwhile, at least 18 other Hezbollah-related cases have been brought in federal courts across the United States since 2000.
Given the alleged plot against a foreign diplomat in Washington, Iran's increasingly bellicose rhetoric and its long history of sponsoring terror attacks abroad, the NYPD must remain vigilant in attempting to detect and disrupt any attack by Iran or its proxies. Anything less would be abdicating our duty to protect New York City and its residents.
Mr. Silber is director of intelligence analysis for the New York City Police Department.
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203824904577215592376556800.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
Sorry, don't have the URL handy
By MITCHELL D. SILBER
On Monday, Israeli embassy workers in the capital cities of India and Georgia were targeted in terrorist attacks that Israeli officials believe were planned and carried out by Iran and its client, the militant group Hezbollah. The bomb in Tbilisi was defused, but the bomb in New Delhi, planted in an embassy worker's car, exploded and injured at least two.
Iran's next target could well be on American soil. In Senate testimony last month, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper stated that Iranian officials "are now more willing to conduct an attack in the United States in response to real or perceived U.S. actions that threaten the regime."
As evidence, Mr. Clapper cited an alleged plot foiled last October in which a naturalized U.S. citizen of Iranian descent, directed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, hired a member of a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States. The plan involved blowing up a Washington, D.C., restaurant—potentially killing hundreds of Americans in the process.
Iran has a proven record of using its official presence in a foreign city to coordinate attacks, which are then carried out by Hezbollah agents from abroad, often leveraging the local community—whether wittingly or not—as facilitators. Most notable are the 1992 and 1994 bombings of Israeli and Jewish targets in Argentina, which killed 29 and 85 people, respectively. The New York City Police Department, where I work as director of Intelligence Analysis, sent a team to Argentina to study the modus operandi of those attacks and to meet with Argentine security officials who worked the investigations. Coupled with open source information, this is what the NYPD learned:
Iranian agents were sent to Argentina years before the attacks, where they integrated into society and became Argentine nationals. Mohsen Rabbani is believed to have been in charge of coordinating the 1994 attack and is subject to an Interpol arrest warrant for his involvement. He first came to Argentina in 1983, where he subsequently became the main imam at At-Tauhid, an Iranian-funded mosque in Buenos Aires.
After traveling to Iran in August 1993 to participate in a meeting that allegedly gave the planned attack the green light, Mr. Rabbani returned to Argentina as a cultural attaché to the Iranian Embassy, conveniently providing him diplomatic immunity. Then, Hezbollah agents from abroad received logistical support from members of the local Lebanese-Shiite community and the Iranian Embassy to carry out the attack.
The Argentine attacks were by no means isolated incidents. Hezbollah has been tied to failed attacks in 2009 against Israeli and Jewish interests in Azerbaijan, Egypt and Turkey. Last month, Thai officials arrested a suspected Hezbollah militant for possibly planning attacks there or perhaps facilitating the movement of weapons through Bangkok.
The NYPD must assume that New York City could be targeted by Iran or Hezbollah. On Feb. 3, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei threatened that Iran "had its own tools" to respond to sanctions and threats of military action against it. Indeed, as the West's conflict with Iran over its nuclear program continues to heat up, New York City—especially with its large Jewish population—becomes an increasingly attractive target.
This is neither an idle nor a new threat. As one example of Iranian agents acting in New York, in 2004 two security guards attached to the Iranian mission to the United Nations were sent home by the State Department after being caught conducting surveillance of city subways and landmarks. Iran's U.N. mission allows officials from Iran's Ministry of Intelligence to live and operate in New York with official diplomatic cover.
Iran also has a presence in New York via the Alavi Foundation, a nonprofit ostensibly devoted to charity works and promoting Islamic culture. In December 2009, Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, described Alavi as having "effectively been a front for the government of Iran." A contemporaneous complaint filed by Mr. Bharara's office led to the seizure of Alavi's assets—including the Islamic Institute of New York, the largest Shiite mosque in the city and the location most closely affiliated with Iran's U.N. mission. The NYPD Intelligence Division also played a role during the initial stages of the Alavi investigation.
Hezbollah and its supporters have a presence in New York and the surrounding area as well. In 2008, two Staten Island men pleaded guilty to providing material support to Hezbollah. Just down the road in Philadelphia, 26 people—including a former Brooklyn resident—were indicted in federal court in 2009 for conspiring to provide material support to the terrorist group.
Lebanese-linked businesses in the tri-state area and elsewhere have been implicated in a massive money-laundering scheme benefiting Hezbollah. This scheme was revealed in a civil suit filed against several Lebanese financial institutions last December by the Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Meanwhile, at least 18 other Hezbollah-related cases have been brought in federal courts across the United States since 2000.
Given the alleged plot against a foreign diplomat in Washington, Iran's increasingly bellicose rhetoric and its long history of sponsoring terror attacks abroad, the NYPD must remain vigilant in attempting to detect and disrupt any attack by Iran or its proxies. Anything less would be abdicating our duty to protect New York City and its residents.
Mr. Silber is director of intelligence analysis for the New York City Police Department.
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Obama Wants to Kill Armed Pilots Program
Posted by Brian Darling (Diary)
Wednesday, February 15th at 7:15PM EST
The President’s wants to end the Federal Flight Deck Officer Program (FFDO), also known as the armed pilots program. If Congress were to follow President Obama’s recommendation contained in his $3.8 trillion FY2013 budget proposal, they would be making a huge mistake. This anti-terrorism program has been a success and a cost effective means to protect the cockpits of commercial aviation from 9-11 style terrorism.
The President’s budget lists the FFDO program as one of the few “cuts” to federal spending. They have reduced the program from the $25 million they received this year to $12 million for FY2013. This massive cut to the program would destroy it. Consider this evidence that the Obama Administration would be more happy to rely on intrusive screening procedures being applied to toddlers, the elderly, and Senators, rather than pilots with guns to provide a last line of defense to aviation terrorism.
There is a saying in sports that the best referees are the ones you don’t even notice. Not many Americans understand the breadth and effectiveness of the armed pilots program, because the program has been scandal free. Our nation has not experienced another 9-11 style terrorist attack thanks in no small part to armed pilots in the cockpits of commercial aircraft to stop terrorists intent on using planes as weapons of mass destruction.
According to the Obama Administration’s budget proposal the goal of security at airports is to ”mitigate the highest amount of risk at the lowest cost.”
The voluntary FFDO program was created as a “last defense” layer of security at a time when comprehensive aviation screening and other physical security measures were not fully developed or deployed on a system-wide basis.
This claim is false. The Obama Administration is arguing that the FFDO program was to be a band aid until the federal government could set up screening to prevent another incident of aviation hijacking and terrorism. They are wrong, because a rational screening and security regime would include a last line of defense for pilots if other security measures fail.
Look at the history of the program if you need more evidence of the fallacy of this claim. On September 5, 2002, Senators Bob Smith (R-NH) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) teamed up on an amendment to the bill that created the Department of Homeland security. The amendment passed overwhelmingly and created the armed pilots program while increasing anti-terrorism training for flight attendants. These ideas were supposed to be permanent programs to provide a last line of defense to terrorism for flight attendants and pilots.
This program is large. The numbers of pilots in the program is considered secret, yet USA Today reported in 2008 that one in ten pilots were armed and cleared to carry a firearm while flying.
More than one in 10 of the nation’s airline pilots are cleared to carry a handgun while flying, and the number will continue to grow, according to a Transportation Security Administration projection. The TSA, which has declined to disclose the number of armed pilots, revealed in a recent budget document that 10.8% of airline crewmembers were authorized to carry guns.
The fact that a large number of pilots are in the program today is evidence that it is working quietly to protect passengers and the public. A bipartisan majority in the House and Senate supported the creation of this program in both 2001 and 2002, yet both the Bush Administration and now the Obama Administration have been hostile to this program. This idea by the Obama Administration will put Americans in harms way and it should be opposed.
According to the Obama Administration in the justification to cut FFDO the following:
Since 2001, however, there have been a number of enhancements to aviation security. TSA now conducts 100 percent screening of all passengers and their carryon items, has overseen installation of reinforced and locking cockpit doors on aircraft that operate in U.S. airspace, and has increased passenger and flight crew awareness to address security risks. Combined, these improvements have greatly lowered the chances of unauthorized cockpit access and represent a comprehensive and redundant risk-mitigation strategy that begins well before passengers board the aircraft.
For a President who proposes $3.8 trillion in spending next year, it is odd that he has targeted the one program in the TSA that is scandal free and providing a quiet deterrent to terrorists planning future attacks. If President Obama is successful in killing this program and winding it down, he will be to blame if a pilot is attacked in the cockpit of a commercial aircraft. This is a terrible idea and one hopes that Members of Congress do not follow the Obama Administration’s recommendations on this very important national security issue.
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http://thehill.com/homenews/news/211447-authorities-foil-planned-suicide-bombing-attack-on-capitol-building
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Why Muslim Student Group Concerned the NYPD
IPT News
February 24, 2012
http://www.investigativeproject.org/3460/why-muslim-student-group-concerned-the-nypd
The Muslim community expressed its outrage this week over a New York Police Department surveillance report from 2006 that the Associated Press reported on Monday. The report disclosed that the NYPD monitored Muslim Students Association (MSA) chapters in the Northeast. The outrage, centered on the perceived violation of privacy, is based on an incorrect presumption that law enforcement had no cause for concern with the MSA.
The organization's history with radical dogma, convicted terrorists and radicalized alumni tell a different story.
NYPD officials visited websites and forums of different MSAs and noted the posted information, all of which was in the public domain. No one hacked into any email accounts or sites as part of the surveillance. A separate story reports that an undercover officer attended a rafting trip with more than a dozen MSA members.
But NYPD officials say critics are off base when they claim the department did something wrong.
"There is no constitutional prohibition against a police department collecting information," city senior counsel Peter Farrell told reporters Thursday.
"What's unconstitutional is if they then use that information to chill someone's First Amendment rights or to impose harm on them."
The AP report chronicles different events that some MSAs held and speakers that chapters hosted on campus and provides some lists of event attendees. The surveillance was intended to track any potential radical speakers or behaviors of the different chapters or individual members.
The report lists six different incidents of monitoring in 2006 at the University of Buffalo, New York University, and Rutgers University. It also lists 12 other MSAs that were tracked, but did not provide "significant information posted to their web sites, forums, blogs and groups."
"Some of the most dangerous Western Al Qaeda-linked/inspired terrorists since 9/11 were radicalized and/or recruited at universities in MSAs," NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said as an explanation for the surveillance. "We were focused on radicalization and/or recruitment, specifically by groups like Al Muhajiroun, Islamic Thinkers Society, Revolution Muslim and others."
Criticism of the NYPD surveillance has been swift.
"We believe that the NYPD clearly overstepped its boundaries when it began spying on average American Muslim college students who were simply taking whitewater rafting trips or innocently participating in school activities at their college or university campus," said MSA National President Zahir Latheef.
"University officials may be the last line of defense for Muslim students whose rights were apparently violated by the clearly unconstitutional -- and possibly illegal -- tactics used by the NYPD," Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) spokesperson Ibrahim Hooper said. "The NYPD continues to act as if it is somehow above the law that governs all other individuals and institutions."
Cyrus McGoldrick of CAIR- NY said, "It's very clear that this is not about police work this is about monitoring people based on ideology."
"They're just going out and casting a wide net around a whole community, so they're criminalizing in a way a whole community based on their religion," said CAIR-Connecticut Director Mongi Dhaouadi.
The Rutgers MSA called on the community to "openly condemn the clear violations of the NYPD, who conducted illegitimate profiling outside of their jurisdiction and breached the constitutional rights of an individual."
Leaders Found Trouble
The NYPD has a duty to protect New York City from terrorist attacks. And MSA leaders and members have been convicted of terrorist activities and plots.
The list is extensive, but among the MSA alumni who went on to terrorist involvement are:
Anwar al-Awlaki, an influential American-born al-Qaida cleric who recruited a series of homegrown jihadists before being killed by a U.S. drone strike;
Aafia Siddiqui, convicted of attempted murder and assault on U.S. officers and employees in Afghanistan;
Zachary Chesser, convicted of attempting to provide material support to the Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab and soliciting attacks on "South Park" producers for an episode in which the prophet Muhammad was shown in a bear suit;
Jesse Morton, convicted with Chesser of threatening the South Park producers with murder;
Adam Gadahn, an al-Qaida spokesman who is on the FBI's Most Wanted List for treason and material support to al-Qaida;
Waheed Zaman, who was convicted of plotting to blow up transatlantic flights;
Adis Medunjanin, who is awaiting trial for plotting to bomb New York subways;
Ramy Zamzam, who was convicted in Pakistan of conspiring to carry out terrorist attacks;
Omar Hammami, who was indicted on charges of providing material support to al-Shabbab and is designated by the U.S. Treasury Department for his terrorist connections;
Muhammad Junaid Babar, who pled guilty to his support to al-Qaida; and
Syed Hashmi, who pled guilty to providing material support to al-Qaida.
MSA was founded in the United States in 1963 by members of the Egyptian-based Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood seeks a global Islamic state and has spawned leaders of a series of Sunni terrorist groups, including al-Qaida, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
The Muslim Brotherhood motto established by founder Hassan al-Banna is, "God is our objective, the Quran is our Constitution, the Prophet is our leader, jihad is our way, and death for the sake of God is the highest of our aspirations."
MSA members remain faithful to Brotherhood ideology. At the closing session of the MSA West conference in January 2011 at UCLA, attendees recited a pledge, "Allah is my lord, Islam is my life, the Quran is my guide, the Sunna is my practice, Jihad is my spirit, righteousness is my character, paradise is my goal. I enjoin what is right, I forbid what is wrong, I will fight against oppression, and I will die to establish Islam."
One student attracted NYPD scrutiny in 2006, the AP report said, after forwarding a promotional posting about a conference in Toronto featuring "highly respected scholars."
But many speakers at the Reviving the Islamic Spirit conference in Toronto had lengthy records of harsh anti-American rhetoric and of trading in conspiracy theories:
For example, Siraj Wahhaj is a radical imam who was listed as a possible unindicted coconspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing prosecution. During remarks given at his Al-Taqwah mosque in 1995, Wahhaj blasted America as "a garbage can. It's filthy, filthy and sick. This country is taking our children. We're trying to raise them up righteous. And you with your sick, low morals grabbing them, trying to teach a man how to be respectful towards his wife. And you got perversity all over. Wicked filth everywhere."
Zaid Shakir is lauded by some as a moderate Muslim voice, but his speeches and writing show that he believes America poses "the single greatest threat to world peace." He has suggested the FBI was involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and decried "glaring weaknesses and inconsistencies in the official narrative" about the 9/11 attacks.
Hamza Yusuf is a founder of the Zaytuna College in California who has called America "one of the most virulent kufars [infidels] that has ever attacked the social body" and says that he believes American culture "revels in" war and violence.
Another speaker, Tariq Ramadan, is the grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna. He was barred from entering the United States at the time of the conference due to concerns he supported a charity tied to Hamas.
The AP report does allude to Wahhaj's past, noting that he "has attracted the attention of authorities for years." But it offers no context or background on Shakir and Yusuf, simply telling readers that they are "two of the nation's most prominent Muslim scholars."
The Toronto conference previously attracted government concern.
The U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had "reason to believe that certain individuals who were associated with terrorist organizations or activities might pose a danger to the Unites States, or who were associated with organizations that provide financial support to terrorists, would be in attendance at the 2004 RIS conference," a Second Circuit Court of Appeals decision said. CBP was also concerned that the conference "would serve as a possible meeting point for terrorists."
More MSA Radicalism
Last May, the MSA chapter at the University of California, Irvine (known there as the Muslim Student Union or MSU), hosted an event with Amir Mertaban who is a former president of MSA West. During a 2007 conference, Mertaban urged students not to "ever compromise on your Muslim brothers and sisters in which you have no evidence. Osama bin Laden- I don't know this guy. I don't know what he did. I don't know what he said. I don't know what happened. But we defend Muslim brothers and we defend our Muslim sisters to the end. Is that clear?"
That didn't mean people should support terror, he said, but they should never compromise on their faith "Because Islam is a perfect religion."
Invited back in 2011, Mertaban admitted to having supported the Taliban in the 1980s, and refused to condemn the terrorist organization Hamas, claiming that it has done a lot of good in terms of social and political programming. In a subsequent interview with the Investigative Project on Terrorism, Mertaban emphasized that he does not know if Osama bin Laden was responsible for 9/11, refused to recognize Israel as a sovereign nation and said he supports Hamas "freedom fighting missions."
MSA's history and various connections are significant in evaluating the NYPD's surveillance. Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended the action as an important countermeasure to terrorist activity. "Of course, we're going to look at anything that's publicly available, in the public domain. We have an obligation to do so," he said.
NYPD spokesman Paul Browne added that "tudents who advertised events or sent emails about regular events should not be worried about a terrorism file being kept on them. NYPD only investigated persons who we had reasonable suspicion to believe might be involved in unlawful activities."
One student who was on the rafting trip understood this. The AP quoted Ali Ahmed saying the NYPD was doing its job. "There's lots of Muslims doing some bad things and it gives a bad name to all of us," he said, "so they have to take their due diligence."
If Ahmed's views represented the MSA, rather than the radical ideas and actions of past leaders, NYPD would lose interest much faster.
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The NYPD does very good work in this area.
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http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/03/04/attorney-questions-promotion-terrorist-defender-to-head-gitmo-policy-at-justice/
Attorney questions promotion of terrorist defender to head of Gitmo policy at Justice
Published March 04, 2012
FoxNews.com
A former Justice Department attorney who blew the whistle on his department's policies is now questioning the promotion of a former defense attorney for an American terrorist to the No. 3 spot at the Justice Department -- specifically charged with crafting U.S. policy on Guantanamo detainees.
J. Christian Adams, once an elections lawyer who accused the Justice Department of racial bias in its decision to not prosecute a voter intimidation case involving the New Black Panther Party, said Tony West's promotion from assistant attorney general for the Civil Division to acting associate attorney general is one more step toward letting radicals run the Justice Department.
"The most dangerous thing is that West is overseeing Gitmo policy. It's not that he's just some guy at the Justice Department licking envelopes," Adams told Fox News on Sunday.
Judicial Watch, a government watchdog group, noted that in Holder's announcement of West's promotion, he "conveniently omitted" West's role as the defense attorney for convicted Al Qaeda terrorist John Walker Lindh, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence after being captured in Afghanistan in 2001 while fighting with the Taliban.
"He actually pleaded guilty to aiding the Taliban and carrying explosives while fighting U.S. troops in the region," Judicial Watch noted of Lindh.
Adams said not only did West represent Lindh, but his firm was also involved in two other defense cases for terrorists working against the U.S.
"Tony West took on, and his firm, took some of the most radical causes for America's enemies before coming to the Justice Department," he said.
"When he took on the representation of John Walker Lindh, even after the sentencing, he was out shilling for him. He said things like ... 'I think he'll have a lot to offer after he gets out of jail.' I mean, what is he going to have to offer after when he gets out of jail? How to endear yourself to prominent Democrat lawyers? I mean there's no reason to be talking like that."
West has previously defended his work for Lindh, saying, "I fully believe that in working on that case, I was recommitting myself to those principles of due process, fairness -- things that separate us from most nations in this world."
West was promoted a week ago. In the announcement, Attorney General Eric Holder said West and Stuart Delery, who was tapped to fill the spot West is leaving, "bring a wealth of experience to their new positions."
"I'm confident they will provide invaluable leadership and will play a critical role in furthering the department's key priorities and fulfilling its traditional missions," he said.
West, who was a a finance co-chairman in President Obama's 2008 election, was nominated for his Civil Division post in January 2009 and approved by the Senate in April of that year. Prior to joining the administration, he was a special assistant attorney general in California and a lawyer at a San Francisco firm.
At the Justice Department, West was already responsible for litigating national security cases like habeas corpus petitions brought by detainees at Guantanamo Bay. He also was the top lawyer defending the president's health care reform legislation against constitutional challenges and leading civil enforcement actions filed after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. His department defends federal officials in lawsuits filed against them.
Adams, who now runs the Election Law Center blog, said in another era, being a defense attorney for America's enemies would not have qualified someone for a job at the Justice Department.
"It would have disqualified you," he said. Now, though, many of the very people who worked for detainees at Guantanamo "are in charge of Gitmo policy."
Holder is expected to deliver remarks on Monday on national security matters and the Obama administration's counterterrorism efforts
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/03/04/attorney-questions-promotion-terrorist-defender-to-head-gitmo-policy-at-justice/#ixzz1oCrnxYiX
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Is this the same one we saw before?
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/secret-militias-rise-us-15881829
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Is this the same one we saw before?
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/secret-militias-rise-us-15881829
The SPLC has zero credibility.
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204781804577267840307094310.html?mod=opinion_newsreel
By RICHARD CLARKE, JUDITH MILLER AND R.P. EDDY
Should a police department identify and engage those citizens most likely to be involved with terrorism? Should police understand the historic and current ties of certain communities to militant groups that export violent extremism? The current debate over the New York Police Department's counterterrorism surveillance reflects fundamental disagreements over such issues.
Start with a given: The threat of terrorism is no excuse to run roughshod over civil liberties. The leeway given New York's police in combating terrorism is spelled out in the "Handschu Guidelines," federal court-sanctioned rules in force since 1985 and amended in 2002.
NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly says he has followed these guidelines to the letter, but since last summer a series of Associated Press articles has accused the NYPD of "wholesale surveillance of places where Muslims eat, shop, work and pray"—spying that ostensibly violates their civil rights. Now U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has asked the Justice Department to review the NYPD program.
Yet NYPD efforts to engage with and selectively surveil at-risk populations are not only legal but essential. In 2002, Mr. Kelly decided that a "broad base of knowledge" about who lives in the New York area was crucial to preventing terrorism. "It was precisely our failure to understand the context in 1993"—after the first World Trade Center bombing—"that left us vulnerable in 2001," he said. So police tried to determine "how individuals seeking to do harm might communicate or conceal themselves. Where might they go to find resources or evade the law?" Such "geographically-based knowledge" saved "precious time in stopping fast-moving plots," he said last weekend.
Identifying such "hot spots" was legal, appropriate—and no secret: NYPD officials testified publicly before Congress about their work. The Handschu guidelines authorize the police to "visit any place and attend any event that is open to the public" and "conduct online search activity and to access online sites and forums on the same terms . . . as members of the public."
Enlarge Image
CloseAssociated Press
New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly
.Criminals often share ethnic backgrounds. For police to look for certain criminals among certain ethnic groups is only logical, and it doesn't suggest a belief that all, or even a significant minority, of that group are criminals. Cops look for Cosa Nostra members in Italian communities, for Yakuza criminals among Japanese, for Triad criminals among Chinese. To look for al Qaeda members in Muslim communities is not to disparage such communities. Indeed many Muslims help law enforcement identify such potential threats.
What about the NYPD's six-month surveillance of college campuses in the New York area and the Northeast Corridor, in particular of the Muslim Students Association (MSA), which has come under fire?
In 2006, police had ample cause to fear that chapters of the MSA, founded in the U.S. by the militant Muslim Brotherhood, might unwittingly host terrorists or serve as recruiting grounds. "Some of the most dangerous Western al Qaeda linked or inspired terrorists since 9/11 were radicalized or recruited at universities in Muslim Student Associations," said NYPD Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne.
Anwar al-Awlaki, the former head of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula who was killed in a U.S. drone strike last year, was president of the MSA at Colorado State University. Umar Abdulmutallab, the al Qaeda "underwear" bomber who tried blowing up a jet over Detroit in 2009, headed the MSA at the University College of London.
The NYPD asserts, contrary to Associated Press claims, that it surveilled MSA members only after finding signs of terrorist-related activity in the course of other investigations, not from open sources. Leads from those investigations, Mr. Kelly says, triggered preliminary inquiries and, if needed, full-blown investigations using undercover police.
Another misplaced criticism is that the NYPD received assistance from the CIA, thus blurring the line "between foreign and domestic spying," as the AP put it. The architect of the NYPD's intelligence program was CIA vet David Cohen, and the CIA seconded Larry Sanchez to work with Mr. Cohen after 9/11. But this interaction not only has been widely reported for years—it is precisely the kind of expertise-sharing that the 9/11 Commission so strongly urged.
The CIA is rightly precluded from spying on Americans on U.S. soil, but the 1947 National Security Act (as amended) authorizes it to assist local law enforcement "when lives are endangered." That's not a loophole—it's necessary cooperation as terrorism threatens cities. continued
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Is this the same one we saw before?
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/secret-militias-rise-us-15881829
The SPLC has zero credibility.
http://reason.com/blog/2012/03/09/the-southern-poverty-law-center-is-now-w
Speaking of the SPLC and zero credibility......
Is Bill Maher on their list? I'd bet not.....
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http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/nypd_says_iranian_spies_have_conducted_eeJK35zlbA20w7AkNXtPdK
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http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/nypd_says_iranian_spies_have_conducted_eeJK35zlbA20w7AkNXtPdK
"Iran has a proven record of using its official presence in a foreign city to coordinate attacks, which are then carried out by Hizbollah agents from abroad, often leveraging the local community -- whether wittingly or not -- as facilitators," Silber said.
And what is the official presence that allows Iran in NYC? Let's see who can answer this first......
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U.S. Moves to Ease Limits on Use of Data in Counterterror Analysis
The Obama administration is moving to relax restrictions on how counterterrorism analysts may access, store and search information about Americans gathered by government agencies for purposes other than national security threats.
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is expected on Thursday to sign new guidelines for the National Counterterrorism Center, which was created in 2004 to foster intelligence sharing and to serve as a clearinghouse for terrorism threats, according to officials.
The guidelines will lengthen to five years — from 180 days — the center’s ability to retain private information about Americans when there is suspicion that they are tied to terrorism, intelligence officials said. The guidelines are also expected to result in the center making more copies of entire databases and “data-mining them” — using complex algorithms to search for patterns that could indicate a threat — than it currently does.
Read More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/us/politics/us-moves-to-relax-some-restrictions-for-counterterrorism-analysis.html?emc=na
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but the subject matter continues to be important:
Obama Assumes Dictatorial Powers
By DICK MORRIS
Published on DickMorris.com on March 23, 2012
Printer-Friendly Version
With two presidential signatures- one on New Year's Day and the other issued last week - President Barack Obama has assumed the right to assert dictatorial powers over almost all aspects of the U.S. economy and to hold American citizens indefinitely without trial!
(This is not some "Space Aliens Invade" story. It is really happening).
On New Year's Day, Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to fund the Pentagon. But smuggled into its language is an explicit authority "allowing him to indefinitely detain [US] citizens" according to Jonathan Turley writing in the U.K. Guardian newspaper.
While the story was buried in the American media, Turley notes that it is "one of the greatest rollbacks of civil liberties" in American history.
At first, Obama "insisted that he signed the bill simply to keep funding for the troops." But, Turley reports, "that spin ended after sponsor Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) disclosed that it was the White House that insisted that there be no exception for [US] citizens in the indefinite detention provision."
Turley is critical of "reporters [who] continue to mouth the claim that this law only codifies what is already the law. That is not true.
The administration has fought any challenges to indefinite detention to prevent a true court review."
Read the full text of Turley's article at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/02/ndaa-historic-assault-american-liberty
Perhaps even more terrifying is the executive order President Obama signed on Friday, March 16 giving him vast powers to control every aspect of the U.S. economy in the event of war or even during a peacetime "emergency." Edwin Black, writing for the liberal-oriented Huffington Post, says that the order "may have quietly placed the United States on a war preparedness footing" possibly in anticipation of "an outbreak of war between Israel, the West, and Iran."
Read the full text of Black's article at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/edwin-black/obama-national-defense-resources-preparedness_b_1359715.html
The Order entitled "National Defense Resources Preparedness" gives the president the power "to take control of all civil energy supplies, including oil and natural gas, control and restrict all civil transportation," according to Black. It also even allows a draft "in order to achieve both the military and non-military demands of the country."
Obama's order would be effective both during times of war and times of other emergencies. It says the purpose of the order is to assure that "the United States [has] an industrial and technological base capable of meeting national defense requirements and capable of contributing to the technological superiority of its national defense equipment in peacetime and in times of national emergency." (Emphasis added)
The far reaching order authorizes the president "in the event of a potential threat to the security of the United States, to take actions necessary to ensure the availability of adequate resources and production capability, including services and critical technology, for national defense requirements."
Likely the president already has most of the enumerated powers as part of his role as commander in chief. So, why the order right now?
Black speculates that it is related to the tensions over Iran's nuclear program. Is the president reminding big oil that he would take over their industry in the event of war? Or is Obama equipping himself with vast powers to be used even in peacetime as a result of whatever he decides is a "national emergency." Could the rise in gas prices constitute such an "emergency?" Is the issuance of this order right now a shot across the bow of oil companies to get them to go easy on oil prices? Where are we? Stalinist Russia?
In any case, these two presidential signatures - one on a law and the other on an order - together constitute a massive power grab totally unsuited to a democracy. The idea that he would be preparing to assume dictatorial powers seems so remote that the mainstream media has not even reported on these initiatives. But they should give all of us pause.
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This from a site of completely unknown reliability:
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012/03/23/deception-by-prosecutors-may-lead-to-mistrial-in-hutaree-militia-case/
Deception By Prosecutors May Lead to Mistrial in Hutaree Militia Case
10Judge Considering Motion
By Michael Chester
In the latest twist in the Hutaree Militia trial in Detroit’s Federal Court, on Wednesday, defense attorneys made a motion for a mistrial based on the prosecution failing to turn over information concerning the undercover FBI agent who infiltrated the group. The defense attorneys found out earlier this week that agent Steve Haug was the FBI handler for a New Jersey man who was paid to gather information on a white supremacist group beginning in 2003. In this case, which is not connected to the current trial, right wing talk show host and blogger, Hal Turner made threats against public officials and critics while being paid by the FBI.
Under federal law, the government is required to provide the defense with all information which can be used to impeach the testimony of a witness or aid in the defendant’s defense. William Swor, the attorney for Militia leader David Stone said that the prosecution failed to meet their obligations. Though no actual attack occurred, the case hinges on the interpretation of hateful anti-government speech. They are alleged to have conspired to kill a police officer and then to set off bombs at his funeral to kill more police officers. Even in the prosecution’s version, it never progressed beyond the talking stage.
Swor told Federal Judge, Victoria Roberts, “We were cut off from a whole line of investigation.” He contends that the defense had a right to know about Haug’s involvement with the controversial informant in the New Jersey case. Turner was a paid FBI informant from 2003 through 2007 and in 2010 was convicted of making threats against three federal judges. He is currently serving a 33 month prison sentence. He had no part in the Michigan case.
The prosecution had been expected to rest its case on Wednesday, but motions and arguments about Haug took over two hours to complete. Judge Roberts has not ruled on the motion for mistrial as of yet. If she grants the motion, the government would have the option to drop the charges or re-file them and have another trial. Estimates of the actual costs of the current trial exceed a million dollars with the total of the investigation, infiltration, informant payments, raids, incarcerations and trial estimated at over ten million tax dollars.
Last week, Judge Roberts ordered the prosecution to submit a written outline of their case and what supporting evidence they had for the charges. While she did not specifically say why she wanted this information, from my perspective it appears that she feels that the prosecution has not presented evidence of actual crimes being committed. Of course, she cannot come out and say this unless she decides to dismiss the charges. I am sure that she is under a great deal of pressure from her superiors to not do this, however from all appearances, she has worked very hard to insure a fair trial, going as far as shielding the identity of the jurors as much as possible to protect them from threats during or after the trial.
The trial began on February 13 and is expected to run into mid April. Most of the defendants have been held without bail since their arrest in March of 2010.
Aside from the FBI agent, the main prosecution witness was a paid informant with a very questionable background. Dan Murray was officially paid $31,000 by the FBI to gather evidence against the militia group. During his cross examination by the defense, he admitted a history of alcohol abuse and mental illness. He was also forced to describe the time he stabbed himself in the belly with a 14 inch knife and tried to blame it on his wife. “I cut myself, yes sir,” Murray testified in court, where defense attorney James Thomas pressed him to admit that he initially falsely accused his wife of stabbing him in April 2010. “That was a lie, yes,” Murray said, later adding, ” I told them the truth as soon as I could … I said she didn’t do it. I did.”
Murray also was forced to admit that one month prior to the arrest of the militia members, he had been arrested for shooting a gun in the direction of his wife during an argument. Of course, he denies shooting at his wife, saying, “I did not shoot at my wife … I shot my gun at a door,” Murray testified, adding he set the gun down afterward and went outside and waited for police to come.
Murray, who remains married, ended up pleading guilty to discharging a weapon at a building and received three years probation in Wayne County Circuit Court. Defense lawyers have argued that Murray, who was initially charged with three felonies, got special treatment in that case because the federal government intervened on his behalf because he was an informant. The U.S. Attorneys office and Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy’s office have denied the claim.
Miraculously, he was not charged under Michigan’s gun crime law. This law automatically adds a two year prison sentence to any crime committed with a gun. The mandatory two years, which is supposed to be non-negotiable, is to be served before beginning the sentence for the underlying crime.
While I cannot say with all certainty that he received special treatment, it certainly appears that way. I would expect that under normal circumstances, a person shooting near where his wife stood, would be charged with attempted murder or at the very least, assault with a deadly weapon. He would also get the mandatory 2 year gun sentence. Since all parties deny a Quid Pro Quo, and we all know that the government would not lie to us, we will just have to consider Murray very lucky.
As a final insult to the system, Murray failed to pay income tax on the reported $31,000 he received from the FBI.
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http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/an-idea-with-tentacles/28982
Rafe Sagarin trained as a marine ecologist but was working as a science adviser for a member of Congress when Washington began to take on strange traits.
It was 2002, and as Sagarin walked the sidewalks and Congressional corridors in the post-9/11 city, he saw it sprout uniformed police officers, Jersey barriers, and metal detectors. Mail arrived late after being screened for bombs and anthrax, and chemical masks were stored under desks. He saw Washington as an ecosystem, not that different from the tidal pools he had studied near Monterey, Calif.
“Frankly, I was becoming quite alarmed at what I was seeing,” says Sagarin, now an assistant research scientist at the University of Arizona’s Institute of the Environment. What bothered him was not the heightened security, but the rigid nature of it. When he viewed the federal government as an organism, he saw it reacting to a past threat rather than increasing its ability to adapt to new threats. The government was doing a bad job in its given ecosystem.
Sagarin eventually assembled a working group with biologists and social scientists of different stripes alongside warfare experts, security analysts, and spies. He asked a simple question: “What can we learn about security in society from security in nature?”
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"If y'all come to get me, bring body bags."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-03-30/anti-government-militia-groups-freeman/53873496/1
Sequestered on a 50-acre, wooded compound in East Texas since jumping bail more than a decade ago, Gray and his clan have effectively outlasted the administrations of four local sheriffs, all of whom have decided that John Joe's arrest is not worth the risk of a violent confrontation.
"The risk of loss of life on both ends is far too great," said Anderson County District Attorney Doug Lowe, who first sought to prosecute Gray for the alleged Christmas Eve 1999 assault of Texas Trooper Jim Cleland. "I believed it then; I still feel that way."
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"If y'all come to get me, bring body bags."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-03-30/anti-government-militia-groups-freeman/53873496/1
Sequestered on a 50-acre, wooded compound in East Texas since jumping bail more than a decade ago, Gray and his clan have effectively outlasted the administrations of four local sheriffs, all of whom have decided that John Joe's arrest is not worth the risk of a violent confrontation.
"The risk of loss of life on both ends is far too great," said Anderson County District Attorney Doug Lowe, who first sought to prosecute Gray for the alleged Christmas Eve 1999 assault of Texas Trooper Jim Cleland. "I believed it then; I still feel that way."
He's lucky I'm not sheriff there.
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IPT Exclusive: State Department Barred Inspection of Muslim Brotherhood Delegation
by Steven Emerson
IPT News
April 9, 2012
http://www.investigativeproject.org/3525/ipt-exclusive-state-department-barred-inspection
The State Department broke with normal procedures last week when it ordered the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) not to conduct a secondary inspection on members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) on their way to visit government officials and think tanks in the United States.
This happened despite the fact that one member of the delegation had been implicated – though not charged – in a U.S. child pornography investigation, the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) has learned.
According to senior enforcement sources and documents reviewed by the IPT, investigators had information tying Abdul Mawgoud Dardery to the pornography investigation that was based in Pennsylvania. He was the senior member in the four-person FJP delegation which held court with academic groups and met with senior officials at the White House and State Department last week. (For more on what they said, click here.)
The FJP recently won a plurality of seats in recent elections to determine makeup of the next Egyptian Parliament.
Before returning to Egypt, Dardery lived in the United States long enough to attain legal permanent residency, known as a green card. That status lapsed after he left the country for more than six months. The child pornography investigation took place during Dardery's time here and was noted in his immigration file. It surfaced when CBP officials learned of his pending visit.
A U.S. official familiar with immigration procedures told the IPT that extra inspection is standard operating procedure when a foreign visitor has been tied to criminal or terrorist activities. "Secondary inspections" involve going through the visitor's baggage and viewing the contents of computers and other electronic devices to search for evidence of illicit activity. Agents would typically search other members of the party to ensure Dardery did not hand off his computer equipment to an associate to avoid detection.
In addition, the Brotherhood's relationship with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas would have triggered extra scrutiny for the incoming delegation. But that "secondary inspection" never happened, a law enforcement source said. The State Department ordered CBP not to do it.
The State Department issued a cable specifically barring Customs officials from carrying out any inspections of Dardery and the other members of the delegation on their arrival at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport. The immigration official described this action by the State Department as "extraordinary."
Beyond the State Department's prohibition on conducting extra scrutiny of Dardery and members of his delegation, the State Department barred US Customs officials from carrying out even the standard inspection mandated for foreigners arriving from Egypt, where an enhanced security program is in place as a result of the 9-11 attacks.
The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 with the goal of establishing a worldwide Islamic state through jihad and martyrdom. The group is considered the parent of all Sunni terrorist groups, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
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IPT Exclusive: State Department Barred Inspection of Muslim Brotherhood Delegation
by Steven Emerson
IPT News
April 9, 2012
http://www.investigativeproject.org/3525/ipt-exclusive-state-department-barred-inspection
The State Department broke with normal procedures last week when it ordered the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) not to conduct a secondary inspection on members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) on their way to visit government officials and think tanks in the United States.
This happened despite the fact that one member of the delegation had been implicated – though not charged – in a U.S. child pornography investigation, the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) has learned.
Shocking and horrific.
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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2012/04/08/bloomberg_articlesM1K3W40UQVI901-M24XZ.DTL&type=printable
American Universities Infected by Foreign Spies Detected by FBI
Daniel Golden, ©2012 Bloomberg News
Monday, April 9, 2012
April 9 (Bloomberg) -- Michigan State University President Lou Anna K. Simon contacted the Central Intelligence Agency in late 2009 with an urgent question.
The school's campus in Dubai needed a bailout and an unlikely savior had stepped forward: a Dubai-based company that offered to provide money and students.
Simon was tempted. She also worried that the company, which had investors from Iran and wanted to recruit students from there, might be a front for the Iranian government, she said. If so, an agreement could violate federal trade sanctions and invite enemy spies.
The CIA couldn't confirm that the company wasn't an arm of Iran's government. Simon rejected the offer and shut down undergraduate programs in Dubai, at a loss of $3.7 million.
Hearkening back to Cold War anxieties, growing signs of spying on U.S. universities are alarming national security officials. As schools become more global in their locations and student populations, their culture of openness and international collaboration makes them increasingly vulnerable to theft of research conducted for the government and industry.
"We have intelligence and cases indicating that U.S. universities are indeed a target of foreign intelligence services," Frank Figliuzzi, Federal Bureau of Investigation assistant director for counterintelligence, said in a February interview in the bureau's Washington headquarters.
'Academic Solicitation'
While overshadowed by espionage against corporations, efforts by foreign countries to penetrate universities have increased in the past five years, Figliuzzi said. The FBI and academia, which have often been at loggerheads, are working together to combat the threat, he said.
Attempts by countries in East Asia, including China, to obtain classified or proprietary information by "academic solicitation," such as requests to review academic papers or study with professors, jumped eightfold in 2010 from a year earlier, according to a 2011 U.S. Defense Department report. Such approaches from the Middle East doubled, it said.
"Placing academics at U.S. research institutions under the guise of legitimate research offers access to developing U.S. technologies and cutting-edge research" in such areas as information systems, lasers, aeronautics and underwater robots, the report said.
World-Class Talent
Welcoming world-class talent to American universities helps the U.S. sustain global supremacy in science and technology, said University of Maryland President Wallace Loh. He chairs the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's academic advisory council, which held its first meeting March 20 and is expected to address such topics as federal tracking of international students.
Foreign countries "can never become competitive by stealing," he said. "Once you exhaust that technology, you have to start developing the next generation."
Foreigners on temporary visas made up 46 percent of science and engineering graduate students at Georgia Institute of Technology and Michigan State and 41 percent at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2009, according to a federal survey. China sent 76,830 graduate students to U.S. universities in 2010-2011, more than any other country and up almost 16 percent from the prior year, according to the Institute of International Education in New York.
Finding Recruits
While most international students, researchers and professors come to the U.S. for legitimate reasons, universities are an "ideal place" for foreign intelligence services "to find recruits, propose and nurture ideas, learn and even steal research data, or place trainees," according to a 2011 FBI report.
In one instance described in the report, the hosts of an international conference invited a U.S. researcher to submit a paper. When she gave her talk at the conference, they requested a copy, hooked a thumb drive to her laptop and downloaded every file. In another, an Asian graduate student arranged for researchers back home to visit an American university lab and take unauthorized photos of equipment so they could reconstruct it, the report said.
A foreign scientist's military background or purpose isn't always apparent. Accustomed to hosting visiting scholars, Professor Daniel J. Scheeres didn't hesitate to grant a request several years ago by Yu Xiaohong to study with him at the University of Michigan. She expressed a "pretty general interest" in Scheeres's work on topics such as movement of celestial bodies in space, he said in a telephone interview.
Unaware of Credentials
She cited an affiliation with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a civilian organization, Scheeres said. The Beijing address Yu listed in the Michigan online directory is the same as the Academy of Equipment Command & Technology, where instructors train Chinese military cadets and officers. Scheeres said he wasn't aware of that military connection, nor that Yu co-wrote a 2004 article on improving the precision of anti- satellite weapons.
Once Yu arrived, her questions made him uncomfortable, said Scheeres, who now teaches at the University of Colorado. As a result, he stopped accepting visiting scholars from China.
"It was pretty clear to me that the stuff she was interested in probably had some military satellite-orbit applications," he said. "Once I saw that, I didn't really tell her anything new, or anything that couldn't be published. I didn't engage that deeply with her."
Wrote About NASA
Yu later wrote a paper on the implications for space warfare of the NASA Deep Impact mission, which sent a spacecraft to collide with a comet. She couldn't be reached for comment.
American universities have also trained Chinese researchers who later committed corporate espionage. Hanjuan Jin, a former software engineer at Motorola Inc., was found guilty in February in federal court of stealing the Schaumburg, Illinois-based company's trade secrets and acquitted of charges she did so to benefit China's military. She is scheduled for sentencing in May and has also filed a motion for a new trial.
Jin joined the company, now known as Motorola Solutions Inc., after earning a master's degree from the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. While at Motorola, she received a second master's, this time in computer science, from the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. IIT's own research wasn't compromised, institute spokesman Evan Venie said in an e-mail. A Notre Dame spokesman declined to comment.
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Border Patrol on the job in the Pacific Northwest, Pravda on the Hudson harrumphs.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/us/hard-by-canada-border-fears-of-crackdown-on-latino-immigration.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120529
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Border Patrol union blasts Homeland Security instructions to 'run away' and
'hide' from gunmen
By Perry Chiaramonte
Published June 29, 2012
FoxNews.com
Border Patrol agents in Arizona are blasting their bosses for telling them, along with all other Department of Homeland Security employees, to run and
hide if they encounter an "active shooter."
It's one thing to tell civilian employees to cower under a desk if a gunman starts spraying fire in a confined area, say members of Tucson Local 2544/National Border Patrol Council, but to give armed law enforcement professionals the same advice is downright insulting. The instructions from DHS come in the form of pamphlets and a mandatory computer tutorial.
“We are now taught in an ‘Active Shooter’ course that if we encounter a shooter in a public place we are to ‘run away’ and ‘hide’" union leader Brandon Judd wrote on the website of 3,300-member union local. “If we are cornered by such a shooter we are to (only as a last resort) become ‘aggressive’
and ‘throw things’ at him or her. We are then advised to ‘call law enforcement’ and wait for their arrival (presumably, while more innocent victims are slaughtered)."
The FEMA-administered computer course, entitled “IS-907- Active Shooter:
What You Can Do,” is a 45-minute tutorial that provides guidance to all employees on how to recognize indicators of possible workplace violence and what
to do should their office be invaded by gunmen and focuses around three main options; either evacuate, hide out, or in dire circumstances, take action.
Main Points of the "Active Shooter" training course
Evacuate: If there is an accessible escape path, attempt to evacuate the premises.
Hide out: If evacuation is not possible, find a place to hide where the active shooter is less likely to find you.
Take action: As a last resort, and only when your life is in imminent danger, attempt to disrupt and/or incapacitate the active shooter.
Once the course is completed, employees are urged to download additional materials including a summary booklet and pocket-sized card outlining protocol, which was also handed out to employees two months ago.
One DHS employee told FoxNews.com the instruction cards were handed out to employees six weeks ago. At the time, he assumed they were only for civilian employees, not armed law enforcement officers within the department, which oversees the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
"Requiring BP agents to follow the same steps is egregious,” he said.
DHS officials maintain that the Active Shooter course was designed for all employees—civilian and law-enforcement officers-- and no one should rush into a situation where they, or others around them, could get hurt.
“The Department of Homeland Security takes very seriously its responsibility to protect all of its employees from threats that may surface in the workplace,” U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Michael Friel said in a written statement to FoxNews.com
“CBP workforce training is designed to prepare all employees, including leaders, managers, supervisors, law enforcement personnel and non-law enforcement personnel, to understand their own roles and the roles of their fellow employees in responding to threats. In an active shooter scenario, employees are taught to take actions that keep them alive.”
But members of Local 2544 say they are obligated to protect the public in such a situation, whether they are on duty or not. Given the instructions, some wonder if they would be disciplined for taking down a gunman in a situation like the Fort Hood shooting or the January, 2011 case in Casa Adobes, in which a deranged gunmen shot 19 people, including Democratic Rep.
Gabrielle Giffords. Six people were killed.
“It is always comforting to know that for those of us who carry a weapon when we are off-duty, if we should encounter such a situation, stop a shooter and save countless lives, we can look forward to being disciplined or fired by the Border Patrol because we should have run away to hide and then maybe thrown objects at the deranged killer instead of taking action and stopping him with a firearm,” the union local's website says.
_http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/06/29/border-patrol-union-claims-homeland-se
curity-safety-course-promotes/#ixzz1zHiUxvm9_
(http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/06/29/border-patrol-union-claims-homeland-security-safety-course-promotes/
#ixzz1zHiUxvm9)
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Covert FBI Power to Obtain Phone Data Faces Rare Test
By JENNIFER VALENTINO-DEVRIES
In a rare test of a tool expanded in the U.S. Patriot Act, a telecom company is fighting the government's use of a secretive tool called a national security letter to get access to customer records without a court order. WSJ's Jennifer Valentino-DeVries reports.
Early last year, the Federal Bureau of Investigation sent a secret letter to a phone company demanding that it turn over customer records for an investigation. The phone company then did something almost unheard of: It fought the letter in court.
The U.S. Department of Justice fired back with a serious accusation. It filed a civil complaint claiming that the company, by not handing over its files, was interfering "with the United States' sovereign interests" in national security.
The legal clash represents a rare and significant test of an investigative tool strengthened by the USA Patriot Act, the counterterrorism law enacted after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
FAQ: The Case of the National Security Letter
A mobile and long distance company is challenging a counter-terrorism tool known as a national security letter. Take a look at important documents related to the case, and what they tell us about the issue.
The case is shrouded in secrecy. The person at the company who received the government's request—known as a "national security letter," or NSL—is legally barred from acknowledging the case, or even the letter's existence, to almost anyone but company lawyers.
"This is the most important national-security-letter case" in years, said Stephen Vladeck, a professor and expert on terrorism law at the American University Washington College of Law. "It raises a question Congress has been trying to answer: How do you protect the First Amendment rights of an NSL recipient at the same time as you protect the government's interest in secrecy?"
The confidentiality requirements make it impossible to definitively identify the company fighting the case. Its name and other identifying details have been redacted in court documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal.
The phone company's lawyer declined to name his client or respond to questions about its identity.
There are thousands of telecom companies in the U.S. However, the court papers offer clues that can be used to narrow down the list. The Journal cross-referenced the court papers against corporate websites and Federal Communications Commission records of telecom firms, and identified five firms that appeared to be possible matches with the company described in the case.
Four of the five companies denied any involvement in the case and declined to be interviewed about national security letters. At the fifth company, a top executive declined to confirm or deny, either on or off the record, whether his firm had received an NSL or is involved in the case.
That company, Working Assets Inc., runs a San Francisco-based telecom subsidiary called Credo, and uses some of its revenue to support liberal causes. The chief executive of Credo, Michael Kieschnick, offered his firm's view, in general terms, of these types of government requests. "There is a tension between privacy and the legitimate security needs of the country," he said. "We think it is best to resolve this through grand jury or judicial oversight."
Unlike search warrants, NSLs don't require a judge's oversight.
National security letters, which date back to the 1980s, have become more common since the passage of the Patriot Act, which expanded the government's ability to use them to collect information about people. As long as the head of an FBI field office certifies that the records would be relevant to a counterterrorism investigation, the bureau can send an NSL request without the backing of a judge or grand jury.
Nicholas Merrill mounted an early attack on 'national security letters' in 2004, forcing a change in the law, which previously offered no clear way for the letters to be challenged.
Since the 1970s, the Supreme Court has largely held that authorities don't need a full search warrant to obtain information that people have stored with "third parties"—such as their bank or phone company—on the principle that people have already willingly given up that data.
NSLs generally seek financial, phone and Internet records but don't request information about the content of emails, texts or phone calls. According to a Justice Department report, the FBI sent 192,499 such requests between 2003 and 2006. The vast majority go uncontested.
In the challenge playing out in California, the company is fighting the letters on constitutional grounds. It is arguing, among other things, that the gag orders associated with most of these letters improperly restrain speech without a judge's authorization.
The FBI says it must maintain the secrecy of national security letters to avoid tipping off potential terrorists. The letters are "critical to our ability to keep the country safe," then-Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security Todd Hinnen told the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security last year.
National security letters were originally for FBI investigations where there were "specific and articulable facts" indicating the information was related to a foreign agent. The Patriot Act eliminated the requirements for specific facts and a link to a foreign agent.
Since then, use of the letters has increased. In 2000, there were about 8,500 such requests; last year, the FBI made 16,511, according to the Justice Department. That number includes letters asking for things such as records of the numbers called by a phone, or the "to" and "from" lines of emails, but it doesn't count requests that ask only what subscriber is associated with an account. Including those, more than 49,000 requests were sent in 2006, according to a report from the Justice Department's inspector general.
Justice Department officials have testified that NSLs have been instrumental in breaking up terrorist cells in Lackawanna, N.Y., and northern Virginia. But the department's inspector general also reported in 2007 that the FBI sometimes used the letters improperly, and in more than 700 cases circumvented the law altogether. To speed the processing of letters, phone-company representatives were embedded with the FBI and sometimes let investigators see data even without proper NSLs, the inspector general said in a separate finding. After the 2007 report, the FBI said it put a new system in place to address the problems.
The first public legal challenge to national security letters came in 2004. Nicholas Merrill, founder of a small New York Internet service provider, disputed the law's constitutionality after receiving an NSL. That year, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York found the law was unconstitutional in part because there was no clear way to challenge the letters. Congress changed the law in 2006 to explicitly allow challenges.
The company in the current California case is challenging the letter as well as the gag order, arguing that the national security letter statute itself is unconstitutional. The 2006 amendment allows such a challenge, the company says.
Such challenges appear to be unusual. A 2010 letter from the Office of the Attorney General indicated that over nearly two years, there were only four challenges to a letter's gag order. Statistics on challenges to the letters themselves aren't available.
The Justice Department argues that people who get these letters can't use the 2006 amendment to contest the law itself, only to fight individual letters and secrecy orders. A challenge to the law itself would need to be brought under the Constitution, not the amendments to the law, a Justice Department spokesman said. The government also said the company is violating federal law because it "has not complied with" the request in the letter.
Rep. Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican who crafted the 2006 amendment, said the law means that people who challenge a letter don't need to provide the information sought by the government until the court orders them to do so.
The Justice Department also argues that the court doesn't have the right to determine the constitutionality of the law in this case because of "sovereign immunity," a long-standing legal principle that exempts the government from lawsuits unless the government consents.
Orin Kerr, a professor at George Washington University Law School and former computer-crime attorney at the Justice Department, said sovereign immunity usually is applied in lawsuits against the government that seek monetary damages, not in cases disputing the constitutionality of a law.
"I would say this is a puzzling argument," he said. "There has to be a way to challenge the constitutionality of the law."
The Justice Department declined to comment on the matter of sovereign immunity.
The Justice Department's civil suit against the unnamed telecom company seeks a judge's order compelling the firm to give up the data. The government has agreed to a temporary stay of that lawsuit, a Justice Department spokesman said. But the government is still separately seeking the judge's order to compel release of the data.
Matt Zimmerman, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil-liberties group that is representing the telecom company, said his client intends to comply with the outcome of the judicial process. "We don't appreciate the assertion that we are trying to break the law," he said.
The NSL sent to Mr. Zimmerman's client, which isn't on the regular public docket but is available for review at the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California, states that the recipient has a right to challenge "if compliance would be unreasonable, oppressive, or otherwise unlawful."
The letter in the case is one of the more limited types of NSLs: It asks for the name, address and length of service associated with one or more accounts.
While it is impossible to identify the firm with certainty, court documents suggest it is an atypical phone company. Particularly, a line from the government's court papers suggests the company may be involved in actions that aren't telecom-related.
For example, the company's argument rests partly on the idea that disclosing a customer's name would impinge on the First Amendment right of free association. The government responds by saying it served the NSL on the firm "solely in its corporate capacity as a telephone company."
That exchange implies the company has other activities, perhaps involving the principle of free association.
Credo, the firm that agreed to speak with the Journal, is unusual in that it is also engaged in activities largely unrelated to telecommunications. It is active in funding and helping to organize left-leaning political events and activities. Some of its recent efforts include one to "jail Wall Street crooks" and to call on the FCC to "revoke the broadcast licenses held by Rupert Murdoch's media empire." (Mr. Murdoch is the chief executive of News Corp., which owns the Journal.)
Credo has fought various parts of the Patriot Act in the past. It also sends a percentage of its revenues to what it describes on its website as "progressive nonprofit groups" including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the legal counsel in the California case. This year, Credo started a "super PAC," a political-action committee, aimed at ousting 10 Tea Party Republicans from Congress.
Credo has about 120,000 mobile customers and three million activists on its rolls, it says.
Three of the five other companies identified by the Journal as possibly being involved in the case are more traditional small telecoms. They are: Michigan-based Long Distance Consolidated Billing Co., California-based Network Enhanced Technologies Inc. and Telecare Inc., which is based in Indiana. The fourth company, Cause Based Commerce Inc., located in Ohio, donates proceeds from its business to Catholic and antiabortion charities.
Executives at all four of these companies said they weren't familiar with or involved in the case. The CEO from Credo, Mr. Kieschnick, said he was willing to discuss NSLs in general terms in order to tell his customers that his company can't protect their privacy in all situations.
It remains unclear whether Credo is the recipient of the NSL in the court fight in California. If Credo is the company, Mr. Kieschnick is taking a risk by speaking. The penalty for knowingly breaking the gag order with the intent to interfere with an investigation is up to five years in prison.
In its legal arguments, the Justice Department says the company in question "remains free" to talk about national security letters generally, as long as it didn't get the information from the investigation. "The object of the nondisclosure provision is not to censor private speech," the Justice Department says in its filings.
Write to Jennifer Valentino-DeVries at jennifer.valentino-devries@wsj.com
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb2_3R6oHSQ
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http://www.anh-usa.org/the-backlash-against-backscatter/
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http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2012/08/prosecutors-us-soldiers-plotted-kill-president-obama/56238/
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IF TRUE this is terrible, but I'd like to see more substantiation before getting worked up about this.
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In that our embassy's are American soil, I suppose this goes here:
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/09/14/Obama-releases-sequester-report-cuts-defense-embassy-budget
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http://news.yahoo.com/teen-charged-trying-blow-chicago-bar-203440707.html
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ATF’s latest gun grab
Agency reduces due process for seizing firearms
The Obama administration is making it easier for bureaucrats to take away guns without offering the accused any realistic due process. In a final rule published last week, the Justice Department granted the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) authority to “seize and administratively forfeit property involved in controlled-substance abuses.” That means government can grab firearms and other property from someone who has never been convicted or even charged with any crime.
It’s a dangerous extension of the civil-forfeiture doctrine, a surreal legal fiction in which the seized property — not a person — is put on trial. This allows prosecutors to dispense with pesky constitutional rights, which conveniently don’t apply to inanimate objects. In this looking-glass world, the owner is effectively guilty until proved innocent and has the burden of proving otherwise. Anyone falsely accused will never see his property again unless he succeeds in an expensive uphill legal battle.
Such seizures are common in drug cases, which sometimes can ensnare people who have done nothing wrong. James Lieto found out about civil forfeiture the hard way when the FBI seized $392,000 from his business because the money was being carried by an armored-car firm he had hired that had fallen under a federal investigation. As the Wall Street Journal reported, Mr. Lieto was never accused of any crime, yet he spent thousands in legal fees to get his money back.
Law enforcement agencies love civil forfeiture because it’s extremely lucrative. The Department of Justice’s Assets Forfeiture Fund had $2.8 billion in booty in 2011, according to a January audit. Seizing guns from purported criminals is nothing new; Justice destroyed or kept 11,355 guns last year, returning just 396 to innocent owners. The new ATF rule undoubtedly is designed to ramp up the gun-grabbing because, as the rule justification claims, “The nexus between drug trafficking and firearm violence is well established.”
The main problem is that civil forfeiture creates a perverse profit motive, leaving bureaucrats with strong incentives to abuse a process that doesn’t sufficiently protect those who may be wrongly accused. Criminal forfeiture is more appropriate because it’s tied to a conviction in a court with the option of a jury trial and evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. Innocents like Mr. Lieto have to fight against the might of the U.S. government with a watered-down standard that stacks the legal deck so prosecutors can get a quick win.
The rule extending civil-forfeiture power to the ATF recognizes this dynamic, stating with perhaps unconscious cynicism that an uncontested civil forfeiture “can be perfected for minimal cost” compared to the “hundreds or thousands of dollars” and “years” needed for judicial forfeiture. Nowhere is there any recognition of the burden placed on innocent citizens stripped of their property, or of the erosion of their civil liberties. In fact, the rule argues that, because in the past the ATF could turn over requests for civil forfeiture to the Drug Enforcement Administration, there has been no change in “individual rights.”
Instead of expanding the profit motive in policing, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. should be working to eliminate it.
Nita Ghei is a contributing Opinion writer for The Washington Times.
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President Obama's National Defense Resources Preparedness Executive Order of March 16 does to the country as a whole what the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act did to the Constitution in particular -- completely eviscerates any due process or judicial oversight for any action by the Government deemed in the interest of "national security." Like the NDAA, the new Executive Order puts the government completely above the law, which, in a democracy, is never supposed to happen. The United States is essentially now under martial law without the exigencies of a national emergency.
Even as the 2012 NDAA was rooted in the Patriot Act and the various executive orders and Congressional bills that ensued to broaden executive power in the "war on terror," so the new Executive Order is rooted in the Defense Production Act of 1950 which gave the Government powers to mobilize national resources in the event of national emergencies, except now virtually every aspect of American life falls under ultimate unchallengeable government control, to be exercised by the president and his secretaries at their discretion.
The 2012 NDAA deemed the United States a "battlefield," as Senator Lindsey Graham put it, and gave the president and his agents the right to seize and arrest any U.S. citizen, detain them indefinitely without charge or trial, and do so only on suspicion, without any judicial oversight or due process. The new Executive Order states that the president and his secretaries have the authority to commandeer all U.S. domestic resources, including food and water, as well as seize all energy and transportation infrastructure inside the borders of the United States. The Government can also forcibly draft U.S. citizens into the military and force U.S. citizens to fulfill "labor requirements" for the purposes of "national defense." There is not even any Congressional oversight allowed, only briefings.
In the NDAA, only the president had the authority to abrogate legitimate freedoms of U.S. citizens. What is extraordinary in the new Executive Order is that this supreme power is designated through the president to the secretaries that run the Government itself:
• The Secretary of Defense has power over all water resources;
• The Secretary of Commerce has power over all material services and facilities, including construction materials;
• The Secretary of Transportation has power over all forms of civilian transportation;
• The Secretary of Agriculture has power over food resources and facilities, livestock plant health resources, and the domestic distribution of farm equipment;
• The Secretary of Health and Human Services has power over all health resources;
• The Secretary of Energy has power over all forms of energy.
The Executive Order even stipulates that in the event of conflict between the secretaries in using these powers, the president will determine the resolution through his national security team.
The 2012 NDAA gave the Government the right to abrogate any due process against a U.S. citizen. The new Executive Order gives the government, through the Secretary of Labor, the right to proactively mobilize U.S. citizens for "labor" as the government deems necessary and to coordinate with the Secretary of Defense to maintain data to coordinate the nation's work needs in relation to national defense.
What is extraordinary about the Executive Order is that, like the NDAA, this can all be done in peacetime without any national emergency to justify it. The language of the Order does not state that all these extraordinary measures will be done in the event of "national security" or a "national emergency." They can simply be done for "purposes of national defense," clearly a broader remit that allows the government to do what it wants, when it wants, how it wants, to whomever it wants, all without any judicial restraint or due process. As Orwell famously said in 1984, "War is peace. Peace is war." This is now the reality on the ground in America.
Finally, the 2012 NDAA was hurried through the House and Senate almost like a covert op with minimal public attention or debate. It was then signed by the president at 9:00 PM on New Year's Eve while virtually nobody was paying attention to much other than the approaching new year. This new Executive Order was written and signed in complete secret and then quietly released by the White House on its website without comment. All this was done under a president who studied constitutional law at Harvard.
It is hard to know what to say in the face of such egregious disregard for the integrity of what America has stood and fought for since its founding. It is hard in part because none of us thought such encroachments would ever happen here, certainly not under the watch of a "progressive" like Obama.
At one level, the prospect for war with Iran is probably an immediate justification. But the comprehensiveness of the Executive Order, like that of the 2012 NDAA, speaks to something much deeper, more sinister. I would suggest that this Order, like the NDAA, has been in the works for some time and is simply the next step in the logic of the "global war on terror." Our political elites have come to consider democracy an impediment to effective governance and they are slowly and painstakingly creating all the democratic legalities necessary to abridge our democratic rights with impunity, all to ensure our "security." Of such measures do republics fall and by such measures tyrants emerge.
The only thing that really remains is the occasion to test the new rules of the game. Perhaps that will be war with Iran, perhaps some contrived emergency, or perhaps, as long as the public and media remain asleep, no occasion will be necessary at all. It will just slowly happen of its own accord and we, like the frog in the pot of slowly boiling water, will just sit there and be consumed by our own turpitude.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-garrison/martial-law-under-another_b_1370819.html
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http://www.texastribune.org/texas-education/higher-education/university-responses-bomb-threats-undergo-scrutiny/
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Various media reporting that Univision has a powerful piece on Fast and Furious (Operation Dead Mexicans and Border Agent) airing today, Sunday at 7pm eastern time, 4pm pacific.
(http://noticias.univision.com/aqui-y-ahora/):
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2012/0929/Univision-The-untold-story-of-what-Fast-and-Furious-wrought-in-Mexico
Univision: The untold story of what 'Fast and Furious' wrought in Mexico
Sunday evening, Univision airs an investigative report on how the botched 'Fast and Furious' program resulted in a deadly toll in Mexico when US authorities allowed guns to 'walk' across the border.
By Patrik Jonsson, Staff writer / September 29, 2012
The ATF is under fire over a Phoenix-based gun-trafficking investigation called "Fast and Furious," in which agents allowed hundreds of guns into the hands of straw purchasers in hopes of making a bigger case.
When a journalist for Univision asked President Obama last week why he hasn’t fired Attorney General Eric Holder over the “Fast and Furious” gun walking fiasco, the reporter, it turns out, had an inside scoop that added urgency to the question.
At 7 p.m. on Sunday, Univision says it’ll air a blockbuster investigation detailing the impact of the deeply flawed gunrunning investigation, which operated between Oct. 2009 and January 2011.
The Spanish-language channel says the “Aqui y Ahora” program will expose the true deadly toll of a covert program where US officials allowed over 2,000 high-powered rifles to “walk” into the hands of violent Mexican cartels. Expecting American interest, Univision will caption the program in English.
In the US, “Fast and Furious” is most noted for its ties to the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and for political fallout over the extent of involvement of the Obama administration, including Attorney General Holder. But in Mexico, the program may reignite furor over how a US government that had promised to try to halt the border gun traffic instead covertly contributed to it.
“Americans have been getting a lot of information about the possible cover-up in the Justice Department, the tragedy of Brian Terry getting killed, but what about the Mexicans?” says Miami-based Gerardo Reyes, Univision’s director of investigative reporting, in an interview Saturday with the Monitor.
“The sinister part of this, and I know it sounds very hard, is that the success of this operation depended in part on the fact that the guns were used in Mexico to kill,” says Mr. Reyes. “In order to reach the target of the operation, which was identifying the drug traffickers who were using the guns, [ATF agents] were waiting for the guns to be used. And how are guns used in Mexico? Killing people. I talked to an ATF agent who said there was no other way to explain it.”
By cross referencing gun tracing data, Univision identified 57 weapons linked to murders and crimes in Mexico, and used that data to highlight “the face of the tragedy in Mexico,” says Mr. Reyes.
Reyes said the program will detail Fast and Furious ties to the massacre of 16 teenage boys and girls in Ciudad Juarez, the nation-shaking murder of Mario Gonzalez Rodriguez, the brother of the former Chihuahua attorney general, the extent to which the Mexican government knew about the program, and an interview with a drug trafficker who says he heard from colleagues that the US government was selling guns to the cartels.
The program comes two weeks after a long-awaited DOJ inspector general report was met with bipartisan approval as it chided the Justice Department and ATF for allowing Fast and Furious to ever happen, identified 14 people who should be held responsible, and suggested that the program was ultimately what Obama and Eric Holder originally said after Agent Terry’s murder: The product of an ill-advised ATF gambit in Phoenix, where employees later tried to cover up the fact that gunwalking was occurring.
The author of the report, Michael Horowitz, did note to the House Oversight Committee that a person who could have possibly connected Fast and Furious to the White House refused to be interviewed. Mr. Horowitz also faulted the Department of Justice for failing to pick up on what the program entailed, which could have been easily gleaned from wiretap applications sent for approval to the department in Washington.
Under the program, about 2,000 mostly AK-47s and some .50 caliber guns were allowed to be purchased by known straw buyers and “walk” without trace into Mexico. The gunwalking was at first denied by the Justice Department, which then had to concede that the government did indeed knowingly allow guns to cross the border.
President Obama has called the program a mistake, but it had an honorable intent: Under intense pressure to stymie tens of thousands of illegal guns flowing across the border, ATF, building on a smaller Bush-era program that cooperated with Mexican authorities, hoped agents could trace the guns beyond low-level straw buyers and to the highest levels of cartel. Some 40 people were indicted on charges brought using intelligence gleaned from Fast and Furious.
The question remains how far up in the Justice Department knowledge of the program went. Some Republicans suspect that it was a ploy brewed up at the highest levels, including Holder and President Obama, to foment support for more domestic gun restrictions.
But Michael Horowitz, the inspector general, found only blame at the lower reaches of justice, positing that it was the product of a regional taskforce not a national subterfuge intended by the administration to sway policy.
No matter how far up knowledge of Fast and Furious actually went, exposure of its true toll in Mexico will likely raise new questions about how such a fatally flawed operation could ever have happened.
In a press release for Sunday’s program, Univision says, “Univision News’ Investigative Unit was also able to identify additional guns that escaped the control of ATF agents and were used in different types of crimes throughout Mexico. Furthermore, some of these guns – none of which were reported by Congressional investigators – were put in the hands of drug traffickers in Honduras, Puerto Rico, and Colombia. A person familiar with the recent Congressional hearings called Univision’s findings ‘the holy grail’ that Congress had been searching for.”
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Thanks, Doug. I hope to see more on this, though I don't have Univision at home.
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BD, I don't have Univision here either and I assume it will be in Spanish language. Hoping for followup later from others.
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http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/10/02/2-us-border-agents-shot-1-killed-near-major-drug-cooridor-in-arizona/
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_NDT7am2VWw
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http://www.hsgac.senate.gov/subcommittees/investigations/media/investigative-report-criticizes-counterterrorism-reporting-waste-at-state-and-local-intelligence-fusion-centers
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http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/10/08/confusion?page=0,0
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http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/10/08/confusion?page=0,0
There may be problems with these fusion centers but to claim that there are no domestic terror threats is beyond laughable.
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Stopping 'Predisposed' Terrorists Is giving a fake bomb to an eager, aspiring jihadist entrapment?
By L. GORDON CROVITZ
For the 53rd time since Sept. 11, 2001, authorities this month thwarted a terror attack in the U.S. The attack was discovered and prevented through intelligence gathered by tricking the would-be terrorist into working with undercover agents. These successes should be a cause for celebration, but instead there are calls to go back to the pre-9/11 era, when the role of law enforcement was only to investigate crimes after they occurred, not to prevent them.
The accusation is that the FBI and local police are entrapping people who wouldn't be able to carry out terror attacks anyway. But informants and sting operations are crucial to stopping terror attacks. It's wrong to suggest that exposing would-be terrorists amounts to unlawful or unethical entrapment.
Consider the latest of the 15 plots in New York, which have included plans to blow up subways, bridges, tunnels and several iconic buildings. Earlier this month, Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, a 21-year-old man from Bangladesh, thought he was blowing up the New York Federal Reserve when he remotely triggered 1,000 pounds of explosives he left in a van parked outside the bank. The bomb was a fake, provided by a supposed co-conspirator who was an undercover FBI agent.
Mr. Nafis, who entered the U.S. early this year on a student visa, made the mistake of trying to recruit a person into a jihadist cell who then contacted the FBI. Mr. Nafis told the anonymous informant that all Muslims in the U.S. are "talafi," meaning not true Muslims, that he admired "Sheikh O" (Osama bin Laden) and wanted to commit terror. Mr. Nafis used Facebook FB -2.74%to ask al Qaeda for help.
Enlarge Image
Close
Associated Press
This image taken from the social networking site Google Plus shows an undated photo of Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis.
.
According to the criminal complaint, Mr. Nafis met an undercover officer in Central Park and told him, "I just want something big. Something very big. Very very very very big, that will shake the whole country . . . make one step ahead for the Muslims . . . that will make us one step closer to run the whole world." He said he was inspired by Anwar al-Awlaki, the al Qaeda online recruiter killed in a drone strike last year. After considering several targets, Mr. Nafis decided on the Fed.
Lawyers for terrorist defendants often claim entrapment, but this defense has failed in every post-9/11 case, according to a report by the New York University School of Law. Under federal law, the test for whether law enforcement has entrapped someone is whether the defendant was "predisposed" to commit the crime. The accused might not have all the resources he needs, but so long as his goal is to commit acts of terror, it's permissible for authorities to conduct a sting to prove willingness to act on evil intentions.
Some commentators claim this is unfair, with headlines including "Terrorist Plots, Hatched by the FBI" (New York Times), "To Protect Freedom, U.S. Jurists Must Pardon Terror Suspects Caught by Entrapment" (Christian Science Monitor) and "How Terrorist 'Entrapment' Ensnares Us All" (London's Guardian).
But try this thought experiment: Can anyone be entrapped to carry out an act of terror? People either want to commit terrorist acts or they don't. In a typical case where law enforcement has been found to have wrongly entrapped, a defendant says he was lured into buying drugs for the first time. That's very different from a terrorist looking for collaborators.
"If the recruits were susceptible to the undercover agent, they would also be 'recruit material' for the real terrorists," wrote law professor Dru Stevenson in a 2008 Boston College Law Review article. "We can infer predisposition merely from the fact that the person agreed to engage in such a horrible act, and other evidence of predisposition is unnecessary." In the case of Mr. Nafis, the criminal complaint cites evidence that he wanted to serve al Qaeda from the time he arrived in the U.S.
Even with informants and stings, it's important to keep in mind that the FBI and local police now must wear two different hats. They're gathering intelligence to stop terrorism while also having their traditional role of prosecuting criminals after the fact. One sign of how different intelligence gathering is from law enforcement is that the New York City Police Department now has 1,000 officers working on counterterrorism.
The Heritage Foundation, which tracked the 53 failed Islamist terror plots against the U.S. since 9/11, notes that key provisions of the Patriot Act, including for electronic surveillance, require annual reauthorizations. The Obama administration has only partly launched a program of background checks on high-risk people seeking visas. Overseas, President Obama's order limiting interrogation of terrorists caught on the battlefield has reduced intelligence.
There are still plenty of people who enter the U.S. expressly to commit terrorism—they're predisposed and thus not subject to wrongful entrapment. Better for them to be caught through informants and sting operations than to remain free to plot and perhaps commit acts of terror.
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Crovitz is exactly right.
Stopping 'Predisposed' Terrorists Is giving a fake bomb to an eager, aspiring jihadist entrapment?
By L. GORDON CROVITZ
For the 53rd time since Sept. 11, 2001, authorities this month thwarted a terror attack in the U.S. The attack was discovered and prevented through intelligence gathered by tricking the would-be terrorist into working with undercover agents. These successes should be a cause for celebration, but instead there are calls to go back to the pre-9/11 era, when the role of law enforcement was only to investigate crimes after they occurred, not to prevent them.
The accusation is that the FBI and local police are entrapping people who wouldn't be able to carry out terror attacks anyway. But informants and sting operations are crucial to stopping terror attacks. It's wrong to suggest that exposing would-be terrorists amounts to unlawful or unethical entrapment.
Consider the latest of the 15 plots in New York, which have included plans to blow up subways, bridges, tunnels and several iconic buildings. Earlier this month, Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, a 21-year-old man from Bangladesh, thought he was blowing up the New York Federal Reserve when he remotely triggered 1,000 pounds of explosives he left in a van parked outside the bank. The bomb was a fake, provided by a supposed co-conspirator who was an undercover FBI agent.
Mr. Nafis, who entered the U.S. early this year on a student visa, made the mistake of trying to recruit a person into a jihadist cell who then contacted the FBI. Mr. Nafis told the anonymous informant that all Muslims in the U.S. are "talafi," meaning not true Muslims, that he admired "Sheikh O" (Osama bin Laden) and wanted to commit terror. Mr. Nafis used Facebook FB -2.74%to ask al Qaeda for help.
Enlarge Image
Close
Associated Press
This image taken from the social networking site Google Plus shows an undated photo of Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis.
.
According to the criminal complaint, Mr. Nafis met an undercover officer in Central Park and told him, "I just want something big. Something very big. Very very very very big, that will shake the whole country . . . make one step ahead for the Muslims . . . that will make us one step closer to run the whole world." He said he was inspired by Anwar al-Awlaki, the al Qaeda online recruiter killed in a drone strike last year. After considering several targets, Mr. Nafis decided on the Fed.
Lawyers for terrorist defendants often claim entrapment, but this defense has failed in every post-9/11 case, according to a report by the New York University School of Law. Under federal law, the test for whether law enforcement has entrapped someone is whether the defendant was "predisposed" to commit the crime. The accused might not have all the resources he needs, but so long as his goal is to commit acts of terror, it's permissible for authorities to conduct a sting to prove willingness to act on evil intentions.
Some commentators claim this is unfair, with headlines including "Terrorist Plots, Hatched by the FBI" (New York Times), "To Protect Freedom, U.S. Jurists Must Pardon Terror Suspects Caught by Entrapment" (Christian Science Monitor) and "How Terrorist 'Entrapment' Ensnares Us All" (London's Guardian).
But try this thought experiment: Can anyone be entrapped to carry out an act of terror? People either want to commit terrorist acts or they don't. In a typical case where law enforcement has been found to have wrongly entrapped, a defendant says he was lured into buying drugs for the first time. That's very different from a terrorist looking for collaborators.
"If the recruits were susceptible to the undercover agent, they would also be 'recruit material' for the real terrorists," wrote law professor Dru Stevenson in a 2008 Boston College Law Review article. "We can infer predisposition merely from the fact that the person agreed to engage in such a horrible act, and other evidence of predisposition is unnecessary." In the case of Mr. Nafis, the criminal complaint cites evidence that he wanted to serve al Qaeda from the time he arrived in the U.S.
Even with informants and stings, it's important to keep in mind that the FBI and local police now must wear two different hats. They're gathering intelligence to stop terrorism while also having their traditional role of prosecuting criminals after the fact. One sign of how different intelligence gathering is from law enforcement is that the New York City Police Department now has 1,000 officers working on counterterrorism.
The Heritage Foundation, which tracked the 53 failed Islamist terror plots against the U.S. since 9/11, notes that key provisions of the Patriot Act, including for electronic surveillance, require annual reauthorizations. The Obama administration has only partly launched a program of background checks on high-risk people seeking visas. Overseas, President Obama's order limiting interrogation of terrorists caught on the battlefield has reduced intelligence.
There are still plenty of people who enter the U.S. expressly to commit terrorism—they're predisposed and thus not subject to wrongful entrapment. Better for them to be caught through informants and sting operations than to remain free to plot and perhaps commit acts of terror.
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Yes, Sean Hannity is frequently an ass, and yes this is over three years old, but IMHO yes these camps are probably still here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WubEFsN5pk8&feature=youtu.be
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The F.B.I. investigation that toppled the director of the C.I.A. and has now entangled the top American commander in Afghanistan underscores a danger that civil libertarians have long warned about: that in policing the Web for crime, espionage and sabotage, government investigators will unavoidably invade the private lives of Americans.
On the Internet, and especially in e-mails, text messages, social network postings and online photos, the work lives and personal lives of Americans are inextricably mixed. Private, personal messages are stored for years on computer servers, available to be discovered by investigators who may be looking into completely unrelated matters.
In the current F.B.I. case, a Tampa, Fla., woman, Jill Kelley, a friend both of David H. Petraeus, the former C.I.A. director, and Gen. John R. Allen, the top NATO commander in Afghanistan, was disturbed by a half-dozen anonymous e-mails she had received in June. She took them to an F.B.I. agent whose acquaintance with Ms. Kelley (he had sent her shirtless photos of himself — electronically, of course) eventually prompted his bosses to order him to stay away from the investigation.
But a squad of investigators at the bureau’s Tampa office, in consultation with prosecutors, opened a cyberstalking inquiry. Although that investigation is still open, law enforcement officials have said that criminal charges appear unlikely.
In the meantime, however, there has been a cascade of unintended consequences. What began as a private, and far from momentous, conflict between two women, Ms. Kelley and Paula Broadwell, Mr. Petraeus’s biographer and the reported author of the harassing e-mails, has had incalculable public costs.
The C.I.A. is suddenly without a permanent director at a time of urgent intelligence challenges in Syria, Iran, Libya and beyond. The leader of the American-led effort to prevent a Taliban takeover in Afghanistan is distracted, at the least, by an inquiry into his e-mail exchanges with Ms. Kelley by the Defense Department’s inspector general.
For privacy advocates, the case sets off alarms.
“There should be an investigation not of the personal behavior of General Petraeus and General Allen, but of what surveillance powers the F.B.I. used to look into their private lives,” Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in an interview. “This is a textbook example of the blurring of lines between the private and the public.”
Law enforcement officials have said they used only ordinary methods in the case, which might have included grand jury subpoenas and search warrants. As the complainant, Ms. Kelley presumably granted F.B.I. specialists access to her computer, which they would have needed in their hunt for clues to the identity of the sender of the anonymous e-mails. While they were looking, they discovered General Allen’s e-mails, which F.B.I. superiors found “potentially inappropriate” and decided should be shared with the Defense Department.
In a parallel process, the investigators gained access, probably using a search warrant, to Ms. Broadwell’s Gmail account. There they found messages that turned out to be from Mr. Petraeus.
Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, said the chain of unexpected disclosures was not unusual in computer-centric cases.
“It’s a particular problem with cyberinvestigations — they rapidly become open-ended because there’s such a huge quantity of information available and it’s so easily searchable,” he said, adding, “If the C.I.A. director can get caught, it’s pretty much open season on everyone else.”
For years now, as national security officials and experts have warned of a Pearl Harbor cyberattack that could fray the electrical grid or collapse stock markets, policy makers have jostled over which agencies should be assigned the delicate task of monitoring the Internet for dangerous intrusions.
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Advocates of civil liberties have been especially wary of the National Security Agency, whose expertise is unrivaled but whose immense surveillance capabilities they see as frightening. They have successfully urged that the Department of Homeland Security take the leading role in cybersecurity.
That is in part because the D.H.S., if far from entirely open to public scrutiny, is much less secretive than the N.S.A., the eavesdropping and code-breaking agency. To this day, N.S.A. officials have revealed almost nothing about the warrantless wiretapping it conducted inside the United States in the hunt for terrorists in the years after 2001, even after the secret program was disclosed by The New York Times in 2005 and set off a political firestorm.
The hazards of the Web as record keeper, of course, are a familiar topic. New college graduates find that their Facebook postings give would-be employers pause. Husbands discover wives’ infidelity by spotting incriminating e-mails on a shared computer. Teachers lose their jobs over impulsive Twitter comments.
But the events of the last few days have shown how law enforcement investigators who plunge into the private territories of cyberspace looking for one thing can find something else altogether, with astonishingly destructive results.
Some people may applaud those results, at least in part. By having a secret extramarital affair, for instance, Mr. Petraeus was arguably making himself vulnerable to blackmail, which would be a serious concern for a top intelligence officer. What if Russian or Chinese intelligence, rather than the F.B.I., had discovered the e-mails between the C.I.A. director and Ms. Broadwell?
Likewise, military law prohibits adultery — which General Allen’s associates say he denies committing — and some kinds of relationships. So should an officer’s privacy really be total?
But some commentators have renewed an argument that a puritanical American culture overreacts to sexual transgressions that have little relevance to job performance. “Most Americans were dismayed that General Petraeus resigned,” said Mr. Romero of the A.C.L.U.
That old debate now takes place in a new age of electronic information. The public shaming that labeled the adulterer in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter” might now be accomplished by an F.B.I. search warrant or an N.S.A. satellite dish.
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Lame. In any job where you have some element of governmental authority, your off duty behavior can be investigated and result in bad things for you, potentially. There is caselaw upholding a Police Chief's ability to punish an officer because his unkempt lawn angered his neighbor. Some agencies in the flyover states can and will terminate an officer for adultery.
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I agree with GM (write the date down!). When you take a job with a TS clearance, you waive your privacy rights is some important ways.
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http://lawenforcementtoday.com/2012/11/16/informant-islamic-compounds-in-america-are-training-for-jihad/
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Why is there an NYPD informer at a camp 150 miles from NYC?
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Ummm , , ,forgive the smartass response BD, but it could be because the facts led them there? Because there are these things called cars that could carry them from there to and from NYC?
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I will forgive it, Guro, but it was asked for real. Are there not jurisdictional issues? Is it not possible that the state police should be handling this matters, what with these "cars" you mention which might mean that it is a state, not local, issue? Or, for that matter, is this a state AND federal issue with the alleged presenece of these camps in multiple states? Where is the fusion center in all of this?????
Ummm , , ,forgive the smartass response BD, but it could be because the facts led them there? Because there are these things called cars that could carry them from there to and from NYC?
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My understanding is this:
NYC is and has been a major target for Islamo-fascism for a long time (e.g. the effort to take down the WTC in 1993 and various other attempts in addition to 911). As a result the NYPD has developed serious intel capabilities against Islamo-fascists. DHS regularly confers with them. I do not find it inherently implausible that their investigations in NYC would have led them to have professional interest of certain individuals who are at this camp. The fact that they are outside of NYC at the time does not mean that they are not working on attacking NYC.
Certainly this does not pre-empt Federal action (FBI, DHS, and?) but I do not see that NYPD is blocked from going where their investigations lead them; there is no objection here from the State of NY or the Feds-- not that I am sure that it would matter if there were.
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Why is there an NYPD informer at a camp 150 miles from NYC?
http://www1.whdh.com/news/articles/national/12007244414171/bomb-maker-in-nyc-subway-plot-testifies/
The testimony ended Tuesday before Zazi could describe how he relocated to the Denver area, where he used beauty supplies to try and cook up explosives in a hotel room and set out for New York around the time of the eighth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Once he suspected he was under surveillance, he aborted the mission and returned to Colorado, where he was arrested.
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http://www.theonion.com/articles/shiite-terrorists-cross-county-line,1636/
Shi'ite Terrorists Cross County Line
May 7, 1997 | ISSUE 31•17 | More News
TANNER COUNTY, GA—A pair of Islamic Shi'ite terrorists, wanted in connection with a string of airport bombings dating back to 1983, broke out of Tanner County Jail Monday, escaping justice by crossing the county line, sources close to the sheriff said.
Enlarge Image
Sheriff Buford Colfax gives up his hot pursuit of Hezbollah terrorists Ahmad and Gamel Farouk after the pair jumped across Crooked Creek in their souped-up Mustang.
Cousins Ahmad and Gamel Farouk, longtime Hezbollah members and internationally wanted terrorists, are believed to be hiding out in neighboring Calhoun County, beyond the jurisdiction of Tanner County authorities.
"We'll never get 'em now," said Deputy Clem Pickett, who fell asleep while guarding the Islamic extremists and woke up tied to his chair. "Once somebody crosses that county line, it's over."
"Them boys done hijacked that Pan Am Flight 140 and killed 11 passengers back in '92," Sheriff Buford Colfax said. "That ain't right."
At 2 p.m., Colfax received an emergency CB transmission reporting that Ahmad and Gamel Farouk had escaped from jail and were headed for the county line in their souped-up Mustang, the affectionately nicknamed "General Habib."
Colfax then chased the Islamic fundamentalists to Crooked Creek. "I thought I had them trapped there," he said. "After all, everyone knows that ever since the bridge washed out in the big flood there's been no way to get across Crooked Creek."
The Shi'ites, however, were not deterred by the missing bridge. Using nearby road construction as a makeshift ramp, the pair jumped all the way across the creek. Stunned by their bold move, Colfax drove into the creek, wrecking his car and soaking himself and his lethargic bloodhound, Willie.
Witnesses said that Colfax then crawled out from under his overturned police cruiser and threw his hat to the ground, shouting, "Ooh, them Shi'ites!"
After landing on the far side of Crooked Creek, the Shi'ites easily penetrated a county-line roadblock set up by the sheriff's department by driving the General Habib on two wheels, squeezing through a gap between two parked patrol cars. Deputies gave chase, but were forced to stop upon reaching the sign for Calhoun County.
In a statement from his compound in Beirut, Hezbollah leader Mahmoud al-Aziz praised the two fugitive terrorists. "Allah straightens the curves, and in his might, hills are made flat. Sooner will the mountain catch the Farouk boys than the law."
Ahmad and Gamel Farouk.
Ever since the escape, federal anti-terrorist agents have been working closely with Sheriff Colfax on a plan to lure the Farouks back to Tanner County. Though details of the plan have been kept a secret, it is widely believed to involve the planting of a fake treasure map that purports to lead to a stash of machine guns, plastic explosives and more than 40 million dinar buried behind Old Man Potter's place.
Tanner County law officers are also preparing for any potential tricks the terrorists may play on them. In 1995, Deputy Pickett almost caught the two Islamic fundamentalists, but lost them when Fatma al-Qaawi, the pair's sexy cousin, clad in a skimpy outfit of cutoff jeans and a knotted, midriff-revealing blouse, asked him to help her fix her broken truck. She then distracted Pickett by bending over the radiator while the General Habib drove off behind him.
"Them Farouk boys won't be so lucky this time," Pickett said. "Maybe they can get away with this stuff over and over again with the Israelis, but we won't fall for it here in Tanner County."
Calhoun County Sheriff Duane Parsons could not be reached for comment, as he was cleaning hay and chickens out of his car after chasing the Shi'ites through an abandoned barn.
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http://www.city-journal.org/2011/21_3_terrorism-threat.html
Judith Miller
New York 9/11/11
Ten years after the terror attacks, the city is safer, thanks to the NYPD—but the threat remains.
On a clear summer day, Lieutenant Isa Abbassi and Officer Jamal Kilkenny are taking in the sights, NYPD-style. Their Agusta A119 helicopter, bearing the NYPD’s distinctive blue and white markings, soars 700 feet above the East River, its single engine purring at top speed. Heading north at 70 miles per hour, the chopper whirls by the Brooklyn and Williamsburg Bridges as Kilkenny points its L-3 Wescam multisensor camera at various tourist destinations: the South Street Seaport, the United Nations’ headquarters, the 59th Street Bridge. Fifteen minutes later, the chopper circles the Staten Island Ferry and the Statue of Liberty, scanning the statue’s base for anything suspicious—for example, the wrong boat in the wrong place or scuba divers off Lady Liberty’s dock.
Abbassi and Kilkenny also check out sites that the public doesn’t visit—the army base at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn; the alleys, warehouses, and storage areas near LaGuardia and John F. Kennedy Airports; a power plant in Queens; the giant ventilator shafts that aerate the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels; and the entrance in Queens to the Buckeye Pipeline—which carries millions of gallons of jet fuel to JFK and which was the target of a foiled Islamist terrorist attack in 2007. From time to time, Kilkenny monitors his radiation detectors, technology so sensitive that it sometimes mistakes crates of potassium-rich bananas for nuclear material. It takes just 25 minutes for the chopper to circumnavigate the five boroughs of New York and the more than 100 “critical locations” that the 62-person aviation unit patrols day and night.
The NYPD’s fleet now has seven helicopters: four Agusta A119s and three Bell 412s, larger twin-engine choppers that can transport 15 SWAT-team members to a rescue scene. The aircraft contain an arsenal of monitoring equipment powerful enough to read a license plate or the name of a book in a pedestrian’s hand almost a mile away. Their satellite navigation system lets pilots zoom in on any location simply by typing in an address on a keyboard, while their giant strobe lights can turn night into day on dark rooftops or bridges. The choppers also have compartments for .50 caliber swiveling machine guns and other heavy weapons. Such capability isn’t cheap: the Agustas cost $4.5 million apiece, and the Bells $14 million. But Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly says that the aviation unit is vital to protecting New York City from terrorism. “We could not cover this much territory in such depth so quickly and thoroughly any other way,” Kelly says.
The fleet’s size, activity, and capabilities make it a good symbol of the NYPD’s relentless focus on counterterrorism since the attacks of September 11, 2001. No other city in America has a comparable fleet; then again, no other city faces comparable danger. Since 2001, at least 11 serious plots against New York have failed or been thwarted, police say. Preventing another terrorist catastrophe is Kelly’s paramount mission. A decade after 9/11, the NYPD has adapted to the challenge and become not just the nation’s most highly regarded police department but the nation’s most effective counterterrorism force.
The extent of the NYPD’s fight against terrorism is enormous. Few New Yorkers know that each of the department’s 76 precincts dedicates at least one patrol car to routine checks on houses of worship and other sites that terrorists might try to strike. Or that Kelly allocates some $330 million of his $4.6 billion annual budget to counterterrorism-related activities, with 1,200 of his 50,000 employees assigned to the war on terror. Or that he has continued to give priority to counterterrorism during the budget-mandated shrinkage of his force, which now has about 10 percent fewer officers than it did in 2001. (The force has still achieved a 40 percent drop in serious crime since Kelly returned to the commissioner’s job in 2002.)
A recent demonstration of the NYPD’s ongoing engagement with terrorism came on May 1, after Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. The audacious raid, Kelly told his top aides, was “good news—with complications.” Those complications included the possibility that some of bin Laden’s followers would seek to avenge his death by attacking the global jihad’s top target: New York. By the time President Obama made the late-night announcement that bin Laden was dead, a message instructing police officers to prepare for trouble had already gone out to all commands, and precincts were heightening security around station houses and the city’s iconic sites. A midnight tour of cops working transit hubs was held over, almost doubling the number of officers deployed in subways and around the city’s train and ferry stations. The next morning, New Yorkers on their way to work found extra police, bomb-sniffing dogs, and bag-check posts in subway and train stations; a similar increase was ordered for the evening rush hour.
Some of those emergency measures remained in force weeks later, as the heat of summer began. While Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano stressed that her agency had received no warnings that would elevate its now colorless alert system to a higher level, Kelly continued to believe that the threat to New York had increased, at least in the short run. “Threats to New York keep coming out in bin Laden’s notes,” Kelly tells me. So far, the material that the SEALs plucked from bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound has not revealed the existence of a specific plot aimed at New York, a senior official in Washington says. But the material apparently does show that bin Laden kept thinking about how to attack Gotham. References to New York—as well as to Chicago, Los Angeles, and other leading American destinations—show up repeatedly in the documents, photos, e-mails, and other material that the CIA and other intelligence agencies are currently analyzing.
Ray Kelly begins each working day with a briefing on terrorist trends from two top aides: David Cohen, his chief of intelligence and a former chief of the CIA’s operations division; and Richard Daddario, his deputy for counterterrorism. Since early June, the sessions have taken place in Kelly’s sleek new Executive Command Center on the 11th floor of One Police Plaza, the department’s dilapidated 1970s-era headquarters overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge. From 9 to 10 am, the three men sit at the center’s long oval table and pore over reports of terrorism incidents at home and abroad; ongoing investigations; splits and internal ideological shifts in militant jihadist groups; and developments in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. As they talk, television broadcasts fill the giant wall-to-wall screens that surround them—Al Jazeera in English and Arabic; New York
One, which monitors developments in the city; breaking news from Fox, MSNBC, and CNN; and alerts from the all-important Weather Channel. The screens can also display live video feeds from some 200 subway cameras and from the NYPD’s helicopters. The windowless room, which can seat up to 40, is “secure”: with its own independent air and electrical supply, officials can seal it off in an emergency.
On a typical morning, a police source says, Cohen outlines reports from the department’s 11 overseas liaisons—detectives embedded in local police forces in London, Lyons, Jerusalem, Amman, Singapore, and other terrorist hot spots. The presence of the department’s eyes and ears abroad has occasionally rankled the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which has its own extensive network of overseas agents. But Kelly insists on receiving terrorism-related information in a timely manner. “This was our way of ensuring that the New York question in any terror investigation is always asked,” says Paul Browne, the deputy commissioner for public information and Kelly’s long-standing confidant.
One morning in June, the official says, the trio discussed the commissioner’s plans for the NYPD’s World Trade Center Command, a temporary post of 200 to 240 cops and support staff assigned to protect the new memorial at Ground Zero, which is scheduled to open on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Eventually, says Kelly, as many as 700 officers may be assigned to secure the 16-acre World Trade Center site, which, as currently configured, will house the 9/11 memorial, five towers, an arts center, and a transit hub that the NYPD will police in cooperation with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns much of the land. Terrorists have already attacked the World Trade Center twice, of course, and in 2006, the police disrupted a plot to bomb a train tunnel and a retaining wall at Ground Zero. Browne calls the site the “Number One target in the city that remains the nation’s top target.”
Unsurprisingly, many of the department’s most ambitious counterterrorism undertakings aim to enhance security in lower Manhattan. In November 2008, Kelly quietly opened a high-tech command center in a nondescript downtown office building to monitor 150 closed-circuit cameras, 30 license-plate readers, and other sensors operating around Wall Street; within a year, there may be as many as 1,500 public- and private-sector cameras in operation downtown, Kelly says, all of which the NYPD can access. This is the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, modeled in part on the “Ring of Steel,” a surveillance system set up in London’s financial district after terrorists there killed 56 people and wounded more than 700 in 2005. But New York’s version exceeds London’s in sophistication and scope. The New York cameras, for instance, are programmed with an algorithm that instructs them to send an alert when a package or briefcase is left unattended for too long or when people make certain physical movements, which the NYPD declines to discuss.
Last September, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that the NYPD and the Metropolitan Transit Authority were extending the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative into midtown Manhattan. Ultimately, some 1,500 more cameras, license-plate readers, and environmental monitors will be integrated into the system. The cameras are now installed in some of the city’s busiest transport hubs—Grand Central Terminal, Penn Station, and the subway station at Times Square. Washington will pick up virtually all of the security initiative’s $200 million tab.
These projects have alarmed some civil libertarians. Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, has wrangled with Kelly’s NYPD over a myriad of issues, including its “stop and frisk” policies; spot checks of backpacks, handbags, and briefcases in subways; and surveillance tactics used to protect the Republican National Convention in 2004. She accuses the department of trying to turn New York into a “surveillance society” in which “every move you make is recorded by the police department and no one knows if there are rules in place to protect privacy or sufficient independent oversight of the system.” In September 2008, the NYCLU sued the police in the state’s supreme court for refusing to disclose information about how the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative would safeguard privacy. In June of the following year, it filed a federal lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, seeking to learn, among other things, how the police and Washington planned to use the information and with whom they planned to share it. Both lawsuits are still pending.
Browne says that the surveillance system has strict privacy safeguards. The pictures and data collected won’t be stored for longer than 30 days unless they’re part of an ongoing investigation, he notes. Further, he says, several agencies and individuals have the authority to investigate potential wrongdoing in the camera project and in the NYPD’s other counterterrorism programs: five district attorneys, two U.S. attorneys, and an independent Civilian Complaint Review Board, not to mention the city council’s oversight committees on finance and public safety.
Cohen says that similar safeguards apply to the deployment of undercover cops who infiltrate suspected terrorist groups—the heart of the NYPD’s intelligence-collection effort. “At virtually every meeting, we have a legal counsel who oversees ongoing investigations,” he says. Both deputies deny the assertions of some Muslim activists, who have charged that the department discriminates against Muslims by performing undercover surveillance in mosques when not pursuing particular leads in an investigation. “We don’t target mosques,” says Browne. “We follow leads.”
However, two recently published reports have raised questions about whether the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslim individuals and groups violates federal civil liberties and privacy laws. Last month, the Associated Press reported that the NYPD had targeted ethnic communities “in ways that would run afoul of civil liberties rules if practiced by the federal government.” It also questioned the department’s relationship with the CIA, alleging that the NYPD’s intelligence division’s employment of CIA officials, as well as its undercover activities, had “blurred the line between foreign and domestic spying.” The NYPD strongly denied the reports, saying that no spying had occurred without a criminal lead.
But this week, NYPD Confidential, a well-read blog among law enforcement officials, published an internal NYPD intelligence-division report challenging the NYPD’s assertion that it only follows tips. The 2006 document, according to the blog, showed that the police had compiled information on 250 mosques; 12 Islamic schools; 31 Muslim student associations; 263 places called “ethnic hotspots,” such as businesses and restaurants; and 138 “persons of interest.” Together, the reports could prompt more calls for federal and independent oversight of the NYPD’s counterterrorism activities.
While much of the press coverage of the NYPD has focused on the department’s cutting-edge technology—Kelly is a self-confessed “gadget guy”—he and other senior officials insist that the department’s true strength in fighting terrorism is its people. “The continuity of leadership is key,” says Cohen. “I’m in my tenth year in this job,” he says; so are at least half of the counterterrorism division’s employees. “There is no supervisor who doesn’t understand the mission; they are expert at what they do.”
Another personnel advantage is the NYPD’s diverse makeup, which mirrors the city’s own. Kelly points out that the department’s recruits over the past five years were born in 88 different countries. The chopper pilots who flew me around the city are a case in point: Abbassi, head of the department’s aviation unit, is of Arab descent; Kilkenny’s family, despite his Irish surname, is from Guyana. This diversity gives the NYPD an enviable language capability and an edge in its undercover work, recruitment of informants, informal neighborhood surveys, and cyber-unit, which monitors radical websites in several languages. Not even the FBI’s linguistic depth and range are as great, Kelly asserts.
The terrorism threat has evolved sharply since early 2002, when Kelly first sketched out his plan for countering it on a piece of paper for Mayor Bloomberg. Al-Qaida’s “core,” as counterterrorism experts call the organization that bin Laden headed, does remain a threat. U.S. intelligence officials guess that more than two-thirds of its leadership cadre have been killed or jailed during the past decade, but underestimating the organization could still be disastrous. Last May, Steve Kappes, a former deputy CIA director, told an NYPD gathering of public and private security professionals that al-Qaida was the “most adaptive terrorist entity” he had encountered in his 30-year intelligence career. Even without bin Laden, he said, its threat might not be “significantly diminished” for years to come.
Another danger is the expansion of what Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism analyst at Georgetown University, calls the “al-Qaida universe.” In 2008, there were seven al-Qaida networks or theaters of operation; last year, there were 11. Such groups find political vacuums in failed and failing states very attractive. Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, has grown increasingly lethal and ambitious in Yemen; in Somalia, al-Shabaab has attracted several young Somali-Americans to its ranks from Minnesota, of all places.
Among the most ominous recent trends is the surge in “homegrown” terrorism, which was initially identified in 2007 by NYPD analysts Arvin Bhatt and Mitchell Silber. That threat came home dramatically to the NYPD in 2004, when it arrested two immigrants, Shahawar Matin Siraj and James Elshafay, for planning to bomb the Herald Square subway station during the 2004 Republican National Convention. Elshafay cooperated with prosecutors and got a plea deal; Siraj was convicted on four counts of conspiracy and received a 30-year prison sentence. The fact that Siraj had emigrated as a child from Pakistan, had grown up in the United States, but still wanted to kill Americans made a strong impression on the police department, Cohen recalls: “It was the first homegrown case against a U.S. target that resonated so deeply.” Homegrown terrorism captured headlines again in May 2010, when Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized Pakistani-American and middle-class Connecticut resident, tried to blow up his SUV in Times Square. Only luck and his insufficient training kept Shahzad from carrying out his martyrdom mission, the police concede.
The homegrown trend has severely complicated counterterrorism efforts. In 2009, at least 43 American citizens or residents were charged with terrorism crimes, according to Hoffman’s count; last year, the number was at least two dozen. At a counterterrorism meeting in New York last winter, Silber warned that more homegrown plots would be likely in the near future, not just in the United States but in Europe, Canada, and Australia as well. In fact, he said, the preponderance of major terrorist plots against Americans since 9/11 have been homegrown, and between 2004 and 2009, 90 percent of the “core conspirators” of jihadist plots against the West were radicalized in the West. While al-Qaida remains a serious problem, Silber argues, the threat today comes mainly from “younger Muslim men between the ages of 15 and 35” who are middle-class and have no direct al-Qaida connection but have been radicalized by an “extreme and minority interpretation” of Islam. Brian Jenkins, a veteran counterterrorism guru at the RAND Corporation, says that a related problem is the emergence of “do-it-yourself” terrorism, more diffuse and less predictable than centrally directed plots.
What keeps Kelly and his team awake at night? Not the historical rivalries and resentments between the FBI and the NYPD, they say. Kelly maintains that the two organizations now work together well. The police department once had only 12 detectives on the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces; today, it has 120. “The major source of information for us is the JTTF,” Kelly says. Cohen agrees: “Cooperation today between the police and the JTTF is standard operating procedure.” Of course, the department still gets annoyed when the FBI decides not to pursue an investigation developed by the NYPD or asserts jurisdiction over one that the NYPD wants to lead.
The NYPD has also negotiated protocols with other city agencies that often figure in terror investigations—New York’s vast public-health service, for instance, the police department’s partner in efforts to hunt down pathogens and viruses that could be used in a terrorism attack. But Kelly does worry about what he and his counterterrorism division cannot control unilaterally—for instance, the policing and protection of bridges, tunnels, and the Hudson River, whose surveillance is shared with the Port Authority and the Metropolitan Transit Authority. A related concern is the inability or unwillingness of neighboring jurisdictions to implement counterterrorism measures similar to New York’s—one reason for the NYPD’s Sentry program, which trains cops in the tristate area in counterterrorism techniques in order to foster intelligence-sharing.
And, of course, Kelly worries about an attack using nuclear weapons or other WMDs. Daddario, the counterterrorism division chief, has thought long and hard about how New Yorkers would evacuate the city in the event of a widespread biological or nuclear attack. The NYPD has drawn up evacuation plans, but they’re of limited value, he says; in such an emergency, the police department would have to rely on “self-evacuation”—individual decisions by hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers to leave the city, even on foot and across bridges. Daddario also admits that the state-of-the-art air sniffers that are supposed to detect anomalous airborne pathogens need improvement. “The technology is not there yet,” he says.
Another terrorism-related anxiety for Kelly, aides say, is that the government’s visa policies and the country’s easily penetrable borders mean that he doesn’t know who’s living in New York. In 2005, Congress passed the REAL ID act, requiring states to issue driver’s licenses that could be readily authenticated through encryption and biometrics after a background check. But many states have rebelled against implementing it, citing cost, privacy, and other concerns. It’s hard to protect the nation, warned former White House terrorism advisor Richard Clarke in his 2008 book Your Government Failed You, if the government doesn’t know who is in it.
Perhaps the greatest challenge to the NYPD’s efforts, however, is the way we think about terrorism. “Americans like to see conflicts as finite, with a beginning and an end,” says Jenkins. “But that will not be the case in the struggle against terrorism. This challenge adapts and morphs and is constantly evolving. It won’t end. It’s hard for any individual or government agency to accept that.” Even in New York.
Judith Miller is a contributing editor of City Journal, an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and a FOX News contributor.
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How TSA Kills People
from John Stossel by John Stossel
There are plenty of news stories this Thanksgiving about TSA incompetence. But having to deal with lines, groping, and rude agents may not be the worst thing about the TSA. The worst thing may be that, to avoid the TSA, some people drive instead of fly - and that is far more likely to get them killed.
As Bloomberg writer Charles Kenney points out:
"To make flying as dangerous as using a car, a four-plane disaster on the scale of 9/11 would have to occur every month, according to analysis published in the American Scientist. Researchers at Cornell University suggest that people switching from air to road transportation in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks led to an increase of 242 driving fatalities per month-which means that a lot more people died on the roads as an indirect result of 9/11 than died from being on the planes that terrible day."
The trend towards driving instead of flying has grown since the TSA started. This Thanksgiving, AAA estimates that 4.5 million people will fly for the holiday and 31 million will drive. Before the TSA, on Thanksgiving AAA estimated there would be 6 million flyers and 28 million drivers.
Thanksgiving travelling
.............2000.........2012
Flying.....6 million....4.5 million
Driving...28 million...31 million
Slate blogger Matt Yglesias is right to question whether the TSA is so bad that even having NO airport security might be better.
The best solution would be to allow airports and private companies to set their own security measures, as I reported in this segment.
http://www.foxbusiness.com/on-air/stossel/blog/2012/11/21/how-tsa-kills-people-0
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Do the people in the buildings struck by hijacked aircraft get a voice in the matter?
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Me thinks you should watch this:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXYEG5o1-5Q[/youtube]
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Do the people in the buildings struck by hijacked aircraft get a voice in the matter?
No more voice than the 250 a month dying on the highways do as part of the TSA's ongoing production of Security Theater. Or are we in some sort of zone where benefits and costs aren't allowed to be weighed or even mentioned?
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Do the people in the buildings struck by hijacked aircraft get a voice in the matter?
No more voice than the 250 a month dying on the highways do as part of the TSA's ongoing production of Security Theater. Or are we in some sort of zone where benefits and costs aren't allowed to be weighed or even mentioned?
Smoking rubble filled with body parts where towers once stood is part of the cost, which is ignored by the article you posted. How many 9/11 attacks a week can we absorb until we move back to trying to secure aviation ? Or did I miss out on the al qaeda surrender ceremony?
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Smoking rubble filled with body parts where towers once stood is part of the cost, which is ignored by the article you posted. How many 9/11 attacks a week can we absorb until we move back to trying to secure aviation ? Or did I miss out on the al qaeda surrender ceremony?
An appeal to emotion. What a surprise. Remind me again how many terrorist plots the TSA has foiled. Some number less than one, yes?
And did you read the news about how the nudie scanners were prone to breakdown and generally gumming up the flow through security so they've been removed from large airports and sent to smaller ones . . . that are too small to accommodate them and so now that critical piece of infrastructure that formerly was all that stood between us and more postulated smoking holes sit in warehouses across the country. Couple billion burnt on the altar of security theater. Lovely planning abilities shown by the folks in charge of airport security. Confidence inspiring.
Then there's the fact the TSA regularly fails security audits, is currently unionizing, and regularly produces nasty employees that make it into the news. Hardly inspires confidence in the organization and its management abilities, either. Add to that the smoking holes were created by a couple smuggled box cutters; do you have any doubt that a couple more box cutters could be smuggled past these clowns? The TSA appears to be of the opinion American citizens are sheep that need to be herded on to aircraft, yet the only instances where Al Qaeda was foiled in their attempts occurred when non-sheep stepped up and shut the attacks the fornication down. But hey, let's keep trying to cow Americans into meekly submitting to "security" measures that in fact would do little to slow a committed terrorist down.
The reason there have not been more smoking holes is because our enemies have opted not to commit the resources to creating them. They have in fact succeeded in creating ongoing disruptions having enlisted the petty and short sighted bureaucrats of the TSA to impose ham-fisted security theater measures that regularly fail when audited and no doubt would do so again when dedicated terrorists get around to attacking the air travel infrastructure. But hey, in the interim let's kill 250 Americans a month on roads while wasting countless man hours standing in dubious security theater lines so the TSA can conjure and illusion of security while practicing DC CYA along the way. The bad guys need a good laugh every now and then too; I've little doubt the TSA provides them.
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"Smoking rubble filled with body parts" ... "An appeal to emotion."
Yes, I think terror is the emotion, not the carnage or the body count.
I rarely fly anymore. My extreme distaste for the TSA treatment and general aversion to being treated like cattle is a part of it.
"...how many terrorist plots the TSA has foiled. Some number less than one, yes?" ...
"TSA regularly fails security audits, is currently unionizing, and regularly produces nasty employees..."
We might all agree (?) that the current methods of current TSA are badly flawed but transportation security done wisely and effectively is a legitimate function of government.
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Smoking rubble filled with body parts where towers once stood is part of the cost, which is ignored by the article you posted. How many 9/11 attacks a week can we absorb until we move back to trying to secure aviation ? Or did I miss out on the al qaeda surrender ceremony?
An appeal to emotion. What a surprise. Remind me again how many terrorist plots the TSA has foiled. Some number less than one, yes?
You seem unfamiliar with the concept of deterrence. Using your logic, the razor wire and gun towers that guard the perimeters of medium/high security prisons are unneeded, as they rarely have prisoners try to escape that way.
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And did you read the news about how the nudie scanners were prone to breakdown and generally gumming up the flow through security so they've been removed from large airports and sent to smaller ones . . . that are too small to accommodate them and so now that critical piece of infrastructure that formerly was all that stood between us and more postulated smoking holes sit in warehouses across the country. Couple billion burnt on the altar of security theater. Lovely planning abilities shown by the folks in charge of airport security. Confidence inspiring.
Because the American public demands security and also demands convenience and the USG lunges for every high tech "solution" drug before it in an attempt to placate the citizens.
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Then there's the fact the TSA regularly fails security audits, is currently unionizing, and regularly produces nasty employees that make it into the news. Hardly inspires confidence in the organization and its management abilities, either. Add to that the smoking holes were created by a couple smuggled box cutters; do you have any doubt that a couple more box cutters could be smuggled past these clowns? The TSA appears to be of the opinion American citizens are sheep that need to be herded on to aircraft, yet the only instances where Al Qaeda was foiled in their attempts occurred when non-sheep stepped up and shut the attacks the fornication down. But hey, let's keep trying to cow Americans into meekly submitting to "security" measures that in fact would do little to slow a committed terrorist down.
You kind of gloss over how important it is to keep flammibles and explosives off of aircraft, as well as firearms. All of which TSA does do on a regular basis. Even with FFDOs in the cockpit and FAMs on board, do you think a team of armed and trained jihadists couldn't seize aircraft? What's the libertarian solution to this threat?
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Good points on both sides! I'm enjoying this-- thank you gentlemen :-)
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You seem unfamiliar with the concept of deterrence. Using your logic, the razor wire and gun towers that guard the perimeters of medium/high security prisons are unneeded, as they rarely have prisoners try to escape that way.
Poor analogy. Razor wire demonstrably keeps felons in prison, security theater demonstrably does not keep box cutters out of secure airport areas.
Because the American public demands security and also demands convenience and the USG lunges for every high tech "solution" drug before it in an attempt to placate the citizens.
Correct, and thanks for making my security theater argument for me, though I wouldn't characterize the current autocratic regimen as "convenient."
You kind of gloss over how important it is to keep flammibles and explosives off of aircraft, as well as firearms.
While you gloss over how easy it's proven to get the same past the TSA. Is effectiveness not something we can demand, or is confusing gross and ineffective intrusions for security acceptable to you?
BTW, as I've already mentioned, a bomb placed up a person's rectum has been used in an assassination attempt, while rumors abound regarding explosive breast implants. By you logic shouldn't Americans be dropping trou, bending over, and coughing or getting mammograms before boarding an aircraft? Your security uber alles take on things would seem to necessitate those sorts of intrusions. Why are you not making arguments for those measures? You're not weighing the benefits and costs of doing so while taking me to task for suggesting the same, are you?
What's the libertarian solution to this threat?
Get the vast, ineffective, bumbling, autocratic TSA out of the picture and let private firms run security as they are all ready doing at other airports with measurably better results. I'd also start talking to the American people like adults, rather than treating them like sheep, telling them that we live in a violent world with violent people and that it is not possible to anticipate or address all possible threats, and indeed that attempts to do so in fact play in to the hands of our enemies as those measures create the exact kinds of disruptions our enemies intended. I would make the actuarial point that the amount of time currently spent in line awaiting security theater performances greatly exceeds the number of life hours lost in past attacks and so some sort of rational benefit/risk assessment has to come into play as it does in all other activities from driving to walking into a 7/11 at night.
I note, by the way, when we get into these exchanges you regularly disparage my Libertarian creed, and I confess that grates on me as it doesn't seem too far removed from denigrating someone's religion or heritage. You've made it abundantly clear that you feel the founding values of this nation are an inconvenience where security is concerned and that extra-constitutional end runs are therefor more than justified; as such I understand you view my embrace of liberty as a trifling thing to be dismissed with disdain, along with all those dead white guys who attempted to found a nation based on inexpedient principles of liberty. While doing so, however, it'd be nice if you could find a way to be dismissive based less on my creed and more on the issue at hand.
As that may be, is it safe to assume you have no issue with 250 Americans dying a month directly due to TSA's onerous and ineffective measures? If so, how many Americans are too many to kill to keep Americans safe?
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These are difficult questions and both of you are making good points.
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"Poor analogy. Razor wire demonstrably keeps felons in prison, security theater demonstrably does not keep box cutters out of secure airport areas."
It's not "security theater" when you catch real threats.
http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/ten-years-tsa-continues-evolve
TSA agents confiscate on-average four firearms per day in carry-on baggage, and in 2011 alone, agents seized over 1000 firearms.[/b]
*Snip*
As evidence, the TSA chief showed a number of examples of items seized thanks to AIT scans, which have detected hundreds of prohibited and dangerous items since their deployment last year.
In one slide, an individual had wrapped over 700 grams of cocaine around his legs using ace bandages. Pistole noted that the drugs could have easily been explosives. In another slide, a passenger at Miami International Airport was found with a nine-inch ceramic knife. In neither example would the contraband have been discovered using a standard metal-detector.
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Correct, and thanks for making my security theater argument for me, though I wouldn't characterize the current autocratic regimen as "convenient."
It would be "security theater" if it weren't actually seizing dangerous items and creating obstacles for those wishing to target aviation. Know what's not convenient? Having your charred body parts picked out of wreckage by government employees. That really impedes the travel process.
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"While you gloss over how easy it's proven to get the same past the TSA."
Really? How many bombs have gotten though TSA checkpoints?
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BTW, as I've already mentioned, a bomb placed up a person's rectum has been used in an assassination attempt, while rumors abound regarding explosive breast implants.
Why was this? Because existing security measures forced the terrorists to use more exotic and difficult techniques to try to circumvent them. The more exotic and difficult, the greater the chance they fail or are intercepted prior to the attempt. The more they fail, the harder it is to recruit, as there is no reward from allah for dying in a supermax prison of old age.
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"Get the vast, ineffective, bumbling, autocratic TSA out of the picture and let private firms run security as they are all ready doing at other airports with measurably better results."
Do you mean the private contractors that are supervised and regulated by TSA in some airports today, or the pre-9/11 contractors that were minimum wage employees, many with felony convictions and/or illegal aliens?
Ah, the good old days....
Transportation Secretary cracks down on airport security violations
By Mark Murray November 9, 20010
Since the September 11 terrorist attacks, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta has probably dreaded thumbing through his press clippings. Day after day, it seems, journalists highlight every hole in the country's airport security system and each lapse by airport screeners.
Last month, the media had a field day reporting that Argenbright Security Inc., one of the nation's largest screening firms, had hired convicted felons and illegal aliens. And then there was the startling story about how one airline passenger--who said he had forgotten he was carrying a loaded gun--had slipped through the security checkpoint in New Orleans.
On October 30, Mineta finally had had enough. At a transportation security summit, he announced that the Federal Aviation Administration would begin to crack down on all security lapses. If secure airport areas are breached, he said, the FAA will immediately stop flights, empty the concourse, and rescreen all passengers. In addition, if the FAA finds untrained or incompetent screeners, officials will order a similar rescreening process.
"I want consistent accountability," he told summit participants. "I want confidence restored in the screening system, and the way to accomplish that goal under the current system is to know that when people fail to meet the current requirements, it is going to sting."
And that hasn't been a hollow promise. In the past several days, the FAA has taken the following actions:
■Delayed seven flights and ordered more than 1,000 passengers to pass through security a second time at the American Airlines concourse at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport after agents discovered that one screener wasn't using a metal-detector wand.
■Demanded a recheck of nearly 500 Vanguard Airlines passengers at Kansas City International Airport, because a screener didn't have the appropriate training and wasn't being supervised.
■Shut down the Southwest Airlines concourse at Baltimore/Washington International Airport when a female passenger breached security.
■And perhaps most notably, Mineta announced that the FAA will retrain all of the screeners at Chicago O'Hare International Airport--and possibly levy a large fine against United Air Lines--after a man carrying several knives, a can of pepper spray, and a stun gun was able to pass through the security checkpoint as he tried to board a United flight. Mineta called the security breach "a failure of dramatic dimensions."
Yet what is most striking about the FAA's new crackdown is that it is such a stark departure from the apparently cozy relationship that the agency has had with airlines and airport security firms. The Los Angeles Times recently reported, for example, that the FAA has previously tipped off security companies about upcoming inspections and has also discouraged its agents from pursuing enforcement cases. Moreover, airlines have successfully scuttled past recommendations to improve airport security.
Scott Brenner, the FAA's assistant administrator for public affairs, admits that the agency hasn't been as tough on security matters in the past, because security screening has always been a responsibility of the airlines, not the federal government. Still, he disputes the notion that the FAA is some sort of lackey to the airline industry. When it comes to airplane safety and design, he contends, the FAA and the industry have worked well together. "Our safety record is unmatched," he said.
Brenner believes that the FAA crackdown will produce some beneficial side effects. For starters, he said, it will force the airlines and the security firms to make needed improvements in their security procedures. Indeed, Argenbright--the firm responsible for the lapse at O'Hare--said this week that it was implementing new security measures that go "above and beyond current FAA regulations."
Forcing these kinds of improvements, Brenner says, is particularly important, since no one knows how long it will take Congress to finalize legislation transferring some or all of the responsibility for security screening to the federal government. Furthermore, the FAA hopes that the tough crackdown will help restore the public's confidence in the nation's aviation system.
Of course, shutting down concourses and delaying flights just because one screener forgets to frisk a passenger with a metal-detector wand will certainly hurt airlines' bottom lines, which are already in trouble. But, at least for now, airlines say they support the FAA's tougher stance.
"We wholeheartedly share the Secretary's concerns," said Michael Wascom, the spokesman for the Air Transport Association, which represents the major U.S. airlines. "Ignorance or incompetence is no excuse."
Southwest Airlines agrees. "We realize it is an inconvenience to our customers," said spokeswoman Beth Harbin. "[But] your average person--because it is about security--believes that it is well worth it."
Yet one airline lobbyist wonders how long the public will put up with constant shutdowns and delays caused by security lapses. "You can't travel freely in this country and ... not [find] some holes [in security]. There always will be holes," the lobbyist said.
But since September 11, with Americans skittish about aviation safety and security, the holes in the system have become magnified.
"We never tolerated them before, and we certainly don't tolerate them now," said Southwest's Harbin. "Unfortunately, they've just taken on a different level now."
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I'd also start talking to the American people like adults, rather than treating them like sheep, telling them that we live in a violent world with violent people and that it is not possible to anticipate or address all possible threats, and indeed that attempts to do so in fact play in to the hands of our enemies as those measures create the exact kinds of disruptions our enemies intended.
Remember how after 9/11, much of the parking close to ther Terminals was closed as an anti-VBIED precaution, forcing the statistically fattest population in the world to walk some distance before reaching automated walkways and Cinnabuns? That went away after 6 months or so, because of public complaints.
As far as disruptions our enemies intended? Standing in line and getting searched is way too subtle for our enemies. Mass body counts are what they want, not sniveling inconveniences.
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"I would make the actuarial point that the amount of time currently spent in line awaiting security theater performances greatly exceeds the number of life hours lost in past attacks and so some sort of rational benefit/risk assessment has to come into play as it does in all other activities from driving to walking into a 7/11 at night."
Past attacks, what of future attacks? Did the global jihad end when OBL had his fate SeAL'ed? How many more successful aviation attacks would push people into cars? How many airline would we have left after more 9/11s? In your vision of aviation security, or lack thereof, does the airline that has minimal or no screening have any civil or criminal liability for successful mass casualty attacks using their aircraft? How expensive is their liability insurance going to be? How expensive would it be to insure skyscrapers in NYC or other major cities in this scenario?
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"As that may be, is it safe to assume you have no issue with 250 Americans dying a month directly due to TSA's onerous and ineffective measures? If so, how many Americans are too many to kill to keep Americans safe?"
How many died driving when all US aviation was shut down after 9/11? How many more would die if we had successful attacks on a regular basis, both directly and indirectly?
What exactly would your screening program look like, if you ran the TSA?
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Pro-Islamist Losing Grip on Republican Party
Arnold Ahlert - November 28, 2012 - www.radicalislam.org
Anti-tax promoter Grover Norquist is losing his vice-like grip on the Republican party. The head of Americans for Tax Reform, who as recently as last year counted 238 members of the House and 41 members of the Senate among those who had signed his anti-tax pledge, has seen those numbers decline to 217 in the House, one shy of the 218 needed for a majority, and 39 in the Senate.
Both totals represent an all-time low. Last Wednesday, Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) disavowed his pledge not to raise taxes, even as he acknowledged doing so could hurt his reelection chances in 2014. ”I don’t worry about that because I care too much about my country,” he said. “I care a lot more about it than I do Grover Norquist.” Americans might not like seeing their taxes go up, but Grover Norquist’s fall from grace has its benefits: As he goes down, so goes his pro-Islamist agenda.
That agenda was laid bare by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) in a speech on the House floor, October 4, 2011. “My conscience has compelled me to come to the floor today to voice concerns I have with the influence Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, has on the political process in Washington,” said Wolf. “My issue is not with ATR’s goal of keeping taxes low ... My concern is with the other individuals, groups and causes with whom Mr. Norquist is associated that have nothing to do with keeping taxes low.”
Wolf mentioned Norquist’s “association and representation” of terrorist financier and vocal Hamas supporter Abdurahman Alamoudi and terrorist financier Sami Al-Arian.
In 2004, Alamoudi, one of the most prominent and influential Muslim Brothers in the United States, was sentenced to 23 years in prison for supporting terror. Alamoudi, a self-described supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah, had cultivated ties with the Clinton White House that eventually enabled him and his associates to select, train and certify Muslim chaplains for the U.S. military.
Fearing a loss by Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election, Alamoudi befriended Norquist to ensure his access to senior levels of the U.S. government would be maintained if Republicans took charge. He gave Norquist $20,000 to establish the Islamic Free Market Institute and Alamoudi’s longtime deputy, Khaled Saffuri, became the founding director.
Norquist and Saffuri eventually became an integral part of the Bush administration’s Muslim outreach efforts during the 2000 campaign, with Saffuri named as Muslim Outreach Coordinator. During that campaign, Bush was also introduced to Sami Al-Arian. In 2006, Al-Arian was sentenced to 57 months in prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy to provide support to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).
Wolf illuminated the bigger picture of that relationship, noting that Norquist was an “outspoken supporter of Al-Arian’s effort to end the use of classified evidence in terror trials.”
Al-Arian ran the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom (NCPPF), and Norquist supported their efforts to weaken or repeal the Patriot Act as well, despite the terrorist atrocities perpetrated on 9/11.
Wolf also revealed that Norquist “was scheduled to lead a delegation to the White House on September 11, 2001, that included a convicted felon and some who would later be identified by federal law enforcement as suspected terrorist financiers.” One of the members of that delegation was Omar Ahmed, co-founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). CAIR was named an un-indicted co-conspirator when the Holy Land Foundation was convicted of sending million of dollars in funding to Hamas and other Islamic terrorist organizations.
Another relationship Norquist cultivated was with Suhail Khan, who has ties to a variety of Islamist movements. Khan’s father, the late Mahboob Khan, was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and one of the founders of the Muslim Students Association (MSA), whose anti-Semitic activities at American colleges has been documented on numerous occasions, including their latest attempt to organize a divestment campaign against Israel at the University of California, Irvine.
In 2007, Norquist promoted Suhail Khan’s candidacy for election to the American Conservative Union’s (ACU) board of directors. He was subsequently appointed. In 2012, at an irregular meeting of that organization, the board voted to dismiss accusations made against both Khan and Norquist by Frank Gaffney, head of the Center for Security Policy and a former defense official in the Reagan administration.
Gaffney has been hammered by the ACU and others for suggesting that the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood reached the highest levels of the U.S. government despite the reality that it was Gaffney who drew attention to Abdurahman Alamoudi and Sami Al-Arian, both of whom ended up as convicted felons for their terrorist activity. Yet it is Gaffney’s credibility that has been called into question for daring to draw attention to Norquist’s unseemly activity.
Wolf also pointed out that Norquist was “an outspoken advocate for moving Guantanamo Bay detainees to the United States,” and “led a public campaign to undermine Republican-led efforts to block the Obama Administration’s transfer of 9/11 mastermind Khaled Sheik Mohammed to New York City” in 2009.
In 2010, Norquist inserted himself into the Ground Zero Mosque controversy, which he characterized as a “Monica Lewinsky ploy,” distracting from the core Republican message heading into the 2010 elections. Yet according to Wolf, Norquist “used Americans for Tax Reform to circulate a petition in support of the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’” completely undermining his own contention that the issue was a distraction.
For years, Grover Norquist’s reputation as a staunch anti-tax advocate has overshadowed his dubious associations with Islamists, and anyone who has dared to criticize him for those associations has drawn rebuke from both sides of the aisle.
Thus, it is more than a little ironic that his ability to influence Republicans with respect to taxes is waning, even as Islamists, most notably Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, who are attempting to establish a dictatorship in Egypt, are becoming ever more powerful.
Sen. Chambliss isn’t the only Republican distancing himself from Norquist. House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-OH) has referred to him as “some random person.” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) noted that “fewer and fewer people are signing this, quote, pledge.” Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK.) called the pledge a “tortured vision of tax purity.” House newcomer Rep. Ted Yoho, (R-FL), who declined to sign the pledge, was sarcastic. “I’ll pledge allegiance to the flag. I’ll pledge to be faithful to my wife,” he quipped.
Yet it was Rep. Peter King (R-NY) who best summed up the growing rebellion. “A pledge is good at the time you sign it,” he said. “In 1941, I would have voted to declare war on Japan. But each Congress is a new Congress. And I don’t think you can have a rule that you’re never going to raise taxes or that you’re never going to lower taxes. I don’t want to rule anything out.”
Republicans can resist raising taxes without signing a pledge should they choose to do so for the good of the nation. Yet without the pledge Grover Norquist has long wielded like a hammer, his leverage among Republicans is precipitously diminished. Considering his dubious ties to Islamists and their agenda, that’s more than a reasonable tradeoff.
Arnold Ahlert is a former NY Post op-ed columnist. He may be reached at atahlert@comcast.net
Copyright © 2009 Clarion Fund, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Gitmo North Returns: Obama's Shady Prison Deal
Michelle Malkin Nov 30, 2012
Gitmo North Returns: Obama's Shady Prison Deal
If you thought President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder had given up on closing Guantanamo Bay and bringing jihadists to American soil, think again. Two troubling developments on the Gitmo front should have every American on edge.
The first White House maneuver took place in October, while much of the public and the media were preoccupied with election news. On Oct. 2, Obama's cash-strapped Illinois pals announced that the federal government bought out the Thomson Correctional Center in western Illinois for $165 million. According to Watchdog.org, a recent appraisal put the value of the facility at $220 million.
Democratic Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin led the lobbying campaign for the deal, along with Illinois Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn, who is overseeing an overall $43 billion state budget deficit and scraping for every available penny. The Thomson campus has been an empty Taj Mahal for more than a decade because profligate state officials had no money for operations. Economic development gurus (using the same phony math of federal stimulus peddlers) claim the newly federalized project will bring in $1 billion.
Durbin told a local Illinois paper that "the decision to move ahead came directly from President Barack Obama" and that he had secured the green light during a discussion on Air Force One earlier in the spring. But this gift to Obama's Illinois homeboys wasn't just a run-of-the-mill campaign favor.
Obama's unilateral and unprecedented decision steamrolled over bipartisan congressional opposition to the purchase. That opposition dates back to 2009, when the White House first floated the idea of using Thomson to house jihadi enemy combatants detained in Cuba. As you may recall, the scheme caused a national uproar. Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee overseeing the Justice Department's budget, blocked the administration from using unspent DOJ funds for the deal. With bipartisan support, Congress passed a law barring the transfer of Gitmo detainees to Thomson or any other civilian prison.
The message was clear: Taxpayers don't want manipulative Gitmo detainees or their three-ring circuses of transnationalist sympathizers and left-wing lawyers on American soil. Period.
But when this imperial presidency can't get its way in the court of public opinion, it simply circumvents the deliberative process. As Wolf noted: The shady deal "directly violates the clear objection of the House Appropriations Committee and goes against the bipartisan objections of members in the House and Senate, who have noted that approving this request would allow Thomson to take precedence over previously funded prisons in Alabama, Mississippi, West Virginia and New Hampshire."
Obama and his Illinois gang insist that Thomson will not become Gitmo North. But denial is more than a river in the Muslim Brotherhood's homeland.
The 9/11 Families for a Safe and Strong America, which spearheaded the movement against shipping jihadi detainees to the mainland, exposed the fine print of the Obama DOJ's deal with the state of Illinois. The purpose of the Thomson facility acquisition, according to the DOJ notice filed in the D.C. courts, included this clause:
"... as well as to provide humane and secure confinement of individuals held under authority of any Act of Congress, and such other persons as in the opinion of the Attorney General of the United States are proper subjects for confinement in such institutions."
Guess whom that covers? Yup: Gitmo detainees, who are being held under the 2001 congressional act known as the Authorization for Use of Military Force.
Now, bear all this in mind as you consider the second and more recent Gitmo gambit. On Wednesday, in response to a whistleblowing report from Fox News homeland security reporter Catherine Herridge, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., released a General Accounting Office report exploring the feasibility of transferring the Gitmo gang to civilian prisons.
Lo and behold, Feinstein concluded, the report "demonstrates that if the political will exists, we could finally close Guantanamo without imperiling our national security."
The "political will" does not exist now, nor has it ever. But thanks to Obama's sneaky, back-door misappropriation of government funds to buy Thomson, the feds have exactly what they need to fulfill the progressive-in-chief's Gitmo closure promise: a shiny, turnkey palace in crony land tailor-made for union workers, lawyers and terror plotters to call their new home.
http://townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/2012/11/30/gitmo_north_returns_obamas_shady_prison_deal
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These could go in many different threads, but I want to keep them together. I think this is the best individual thread for them. Guro, of course, feel free to place them as needed on other threads (or direct if you wish).
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-12-07/opinions/35701353_1_osama-bin-laden-assassination-navy-seals
"After the terrorist bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, the Clinton administration launched cruise missiles against suspected terrorist camps in Afghanistan, hoping bin Laden was there. If the missiles had killed him, would this have been improper? In March 2003, in the hours before the invasion of Iraq, the George W. Bush administration, thinking it knew where Saddam Hussein was, launched a cruise-missile strike against one of his compounds. Was it wrong to try to economize violence by decapitating his regime? Would it have been morally preferable to attempt this by targeting, with heavy bombing, not a person but his neighborhood? Surely not."
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/12/slugger-george-will-strikes-out-in-his-column-on-drones/266111/
"It is irresponsible to concede that America is engaged in an "undefined war with a limitless battlefield," in part because both claims are false. Constitutionally, the so-called War on Terrorism is defined by the Authorization for Use of Military Force, which Obama is arguably exceeding, and I very much doubt Will really believe the battlefield to be limitless. Does he think Obama is empowered on no authority but his own to order a drone strike in Beijing? London? How about San Francisco? To grant Yoo's framing is often to concede dictatorial power to the president without quite realizing the sweep of the precedent you've unwittingly set. "
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-january-11-2010/john-yoo-pt--1 (j. Yoo on TDS)
http://washingtonindependent.com/73759/john-yoo-wins-battle-of-the-daily-show (a reaction to Yoo on TDS)
http://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Terror-American-National-Security/dp/1594035628 (link to Yoo's book)
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/05/dont-let-john-yoo-talk-you-into-domestic-drone-use-by-police/257667/
"Yoo ought to understand why that is so. He's the sort of complacent lawyer that power-hungry leaders rely upon when they want to torture or spy without warrants or extrajudicially kill in secret. The monopoly on force that the state enjoys, the tremendous power wielded by its functionaries, the incentives to target political enemies, and the frequency with which abuses occur are all reasons why restraining official use of this technology ought to be an urgent priority. There's also the reality that, whatever the future brings, government use of drones is now much more common."
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/12/11/josh-begley-tweets-entire-history-of-u-s-drone-attacks.html?source=socialflow&account=thedailybeast&medium=twitter
"It’s a decade-long story that Josh Begley believes too few Americans know about. A story, he says, “that fundamentally shifts how we understand what war is.” It’s the story of unmanned drones redefining the front lines in the U.S. War on Terror. And a story of Apple—one of the most powerful and profitable corporations in the world—rejecting Begley’s iPhone application that maps strikes and alerts users to new attacks as they happen."
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WND is not my idea of a reliable site. However, sometimes it does get things right, so I post this here. Certainly the essence of the idea is not implausible.
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http://www.wnd.com/2012/12/next-911-...squad-is-here/
Quote:
Iran has infiltrated a team of Quds Force terrorist leaders into the United States to attack from within in 2013, according to a source.
The source within the office of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of the Islamic regime, said the team is to create instability in America through terrorism should the U.S. fail to accept the regime’s illicit nuclear program, increase sanctions, confront Iran militarily or intervene in the Syrian civil war.
Members of the team, no more than 10 Quds Force officers, each lead cells totaling about 50 terrorists already in the U.S.
The source is risking his life not only to reveal the terror operation but to warn that Iran is pursuing its nuclear bomb program around the clock from several secret sites.
Details of the terror plot, meant to disrupt the West, have been passed on to U.S. officials, who are taking countermeasures.
The source said the team members, unlike the alleged Iranian operative Manssor Arbabsiar, who was arrested in a plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, D.C. in 2011, are highly trained and sophisticated.
The team leaders are all senior Revolutionary Guard officers who were recruited for this specific mission nine years ago on the recommendation of the Quds Force commander, Qassem Soleimani, and with the approval of security advisers to Khamenei.
Some of these individuals held high-level posts before joining the mission. One served as the security officer in the supreme leader’s office, another was a member of the special forces for intelligence and security in charge of protecting regime officials, two were in charge of security of ground and air transportation, another was a commander of recruiting assets, and others had experience in security and intelligence.
Most of the team members have been in America for a year; a few were successfully placed here about five years ago.
The families of the team members are financially supported by the regime, but team members are financially supported through various means as they do not maintain any contact with Iran.
Two wealthy Iranian businessmen in Iran with ties in Europe are used to finance the team; one routinely travels to the U.S.
One well-established Iranian businessman in America who often travels to Iran was approached by the Quds Force for his collaboration in return for incentives in Iran. He acts as the sponsor of the team, transfers cash to team members, hosts meetings at his residence and passes on information from the regime to the team. He also takes care of any legal issues, leases, contracts and such.
Information and pictures of potential targets have been submitted for Khamenei’s approval, the source added. They include high-voltage towers to create blackouts, cell towers, water supplies, public transportation and various other buildings belonging to the Defense Department and military.
The source said the planned attacks could be greater than what happened on 9/11 and that in the last phase of the attack, al-Qaida operatives will also be involved.
After Osama bin Laden’s death, Khamenei has taken a greater role in leadership on the collaboration with al-Qaida, and according to the source, four top al-Qaida commanders visit Khamenei every two months.
The plan is that if by next six months America does not accept Iran’s nuclear program and either increases sanctions or a military confrontation occurs, the assets have been ordered to carry out their mission. The regime feels it must act by then because current sanctions, which have already had a serious effect on Iran’s economy, could spark civilian rioting.
As reported in the Washington Times on Oct. 5, a secret memo by the regime’s Intelligence Ministry warned that deteriorating economic conditions from international sanctions had greatly increased the possibility of an uprising and urged them to take appropriate action.
The United States has set a March deadline for Iran to comply with International Atomic Energy Agency demands on its nuclear program or face much harsher measures.
The regime believes, the source said, that if the U.S. fails to accept Iran’s nuclear program, Israel will be much more likely to attack its nuclear facilities and military installations.
Previously an exclusive report in WND revealed that terror cells of the Islamic regime were on high alert to attack targets in America. Gen. Massoud Jazayeri, deputy head of Iran’s armed forces, stated that, “In the face of any attack, we will have a crushing response. In that case, we will not only act in the boundaries of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, no place in America will be safe from our attacks.”
Iranian officials also see the possible overthrow of Syrian President Bashar Assad as a red line, and with the looming confrontation over their nuclear program, they have taken several measures, one of which is to retaliate against Israel through several fronts and in coordination with their proxies, such as Hezbollah. As reported in WND, 170 ballistic missiles have been pre-targeted on Tel Aviv alone, some with biological warheads. And an attack on America from within would create economic havoc on the fragile U.S. economy.
The source warned that the IAEA has no idea that the Islamic regime is actively working on its nuclear bomb program at secret sites, that it has even enriched uranium to over 90 percent – weaponization grade – and that with the help of North Korea, it is working on a plutonium bomb.
The assumption that Iran is far from accomplishing its goals is a hoax, the source warned. The regime next year will make operational intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the U.S. Armed with nuclear weapons, it would be too late for the world, he said.
Reza Kahlili is a pseudonym for a former CIA operative in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and author of the award-winning book “A Time to Betray” (Simon & Schuster, 2010). He serves on the Task Force on National and Homeland Security and the advisory board of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran (FDI).
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Also see
http://www.amazon.com/Lightning-Out-Lebanon-Hezbollah-Terrorists/dp/0891418709/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1355328259&sr=8-1&keywords=lightning+out+of+lebanon
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Decades old news.
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U.S. NEWSDecember 12, 2012, 10:30 p.m. ET.U.S. Terrorism Agency to Tap a Vast Database of Citizens .
By JULIA ANGWIN
Top U.S. intelligence officials gathered in the White House Situation Room in March to debate a controversial proposal. Counterterrorism officials wanted to create a government dragnet, sweeping up millions of records about U.S. citizens—even people suspected of no crime.
Not everyone was on board. "This is a sea change in the way that the government interacts with the general public," Mary Ellen Callahan, chief privacy officer of the Department of Homeland Security, argued in the meeting, according to people familiar with the discussions.
A week later, the attorney general signed the changes into effect.
More
A Comparison of the 2008 and 2012 NCTC Guidelines
The NCTC Controversy -- A Timeline
Documents
NCTC Guidelines – 2012
View Interactive
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NCTC Guidelines -- 2008
View Interactive
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Homeland Security Department Email about the NCTC Guidelines
View Interactive
Through Freedom of Information Act requests and interviews with officials at numerous agencies, The Wall Street Journal has reconstructed the clash over the counterterrorism program within the administration of President Barack Obama. The debate was a confrontation between some who viewed it as a matter of efficiency—how long to keep data, for instance, or where it should be stored—and others who saw it as granting authority for unprecedented government surveillance of U.S. citizens.
The rules now allow the little-known National Counterterrorism Center to examine the government files of U.S. citizens for possible criminal behavior, even if there is no reason to suspect them. That is a departure from past practice, which barred the agency from storing information about ordinary Americans unless a person was a terror suspect or related to an investigation.
Now, NCTC can copy entire government databases—flight records, casino-employee lists, the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students and many others. The agency has new authority to keep data about innocent U.S. citizens for up to five years, and to analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior. Previously, both were prohibited. Data about Americans "reasonably believed to constitute terrorism information" may be permanently retained.
The changes also allow databases of U.S. civilian information to be given to foreign governments for analysis of their own. In effect, U.S. and foreign governments would be using the information to look for clues that people might commit future crimes.
"It's breathtaking" in its scope, said a former senior administration official familiar with the White House debate.
Counterterrorism officials say they will be circumspect with the data. "The guidelines provide rigorous oversight to protect the information that we have, for authorized and narrow purposes," said Alexander Joel, Civil Liberties Protection Officer for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the parent agency for the National Counterterrorism Center.
The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution says that searches of "persons, houses, papers and effects" shouldn't be conducted without "probable cause" that a crime has been committed. But that doesn't cover records the government creates in the normal course of business with citizens.
Congress specifically sought to prevent government agents from rifling through government files indiscriminately when it passed the Federal Privacy Act in 1974. The act prohibits government agencies from sharing data with each other for purposes that aren't "compatible" with the reason the data were originally collected.
Three Years of WSJ Privacy Insights
The Wall Street Journal is conducting a long-running investigation into the profound transformation of personal privacy in America.
Selected findings:
Companies today are increasingly tying people's real-life identities to their online browsing habits.
Two students are outed as gay—provoking a crisis within their families—by a Facebook privacy loophole . (10/12/12)
Suspicious spouses are taking investigations into their own hands as snooping technologies become cheaper and easier to use. (10/6/12)
Americans' license plates are now being tracked not only by the government, but also by repo men who hope to profit from the information. (10/2/12)
Google bypassed the privacy settings on millions of Web browsers on Apple iPhones and computers— tracking the online activities of people who intended that kind of monitoring to be blocked. (2/17/12)
The government follows the movements of thousands of Americans a year by secretly monitoring their cellphone records . (9/9/11)
iPhone and Android apps secretly shared data about their users, a Journal investigation found. (12/10/10)
Top apps on Facebook transmit personal identifying details to tracking companies, a Journal investigation found. (10/18/10)
One of the fastest growing online businesses is that of spying on Americans as they browse the Web. (6/30/10)
Plus, the global surveillance bazaar , a secretive phone-tracking "stingray" and RapLeaf's clever way of figuring out Web surfers' real names .
See full privacy coverage
.But the Federal Privacy Act allows agencies to exempt themselves from many requirements by placing notices in the Federal Register, the government's daily publication of proposed rules. In practice, these privacy-act notices are rarely contested by government watchdogs or members of the public. "All you have to do is publish a notice in the Federal Register and you can do whatever you want," says Robert Gellman, a privacy consultant who advises agencies on how to comply with the Privacy Act.
As a result, the National Counterterrorism Center program's opponents within the administration—led by Ms. Callahan of Homeland Security—couldn't argue that the program would violate the law. Instead, they were left to question whether the rules were good policy.
Under the new rules issued in March, the National Counterterrorism Center, known as NCTC, can obtain almost any database the government collects that it says is "reasonably believed" to contain "terrorism information." The list could potentially include almost any government database, from financial forms submitted by people seeking federally backed mortgages to the health records of people who sought treatment at Veterans Administration hospitals.
Previous government proposals to scrutinize massive amounts of data about innocent people have caused an uproar. In 2002, the Pentagon's research arm proposed a program called Total Information Awareness that sought to analyze both public and private databases for terror clues. It would have been far broader than the NCTC's current program, examining many nongovernmental pools of data as well.
"If terrorist organizations are going to plan and execute attacks against the United States, their people must engage in transactions and they will leave signatures," the program's promoter, Admiral John Poindexter, said at the time. "We must be able to pick this signal out of the noise."
Adm. Poindexter's plans drew fire from across the political spectrum over the privacy implications of sorting through every single document available about U.S. citizens. Conservative columnist William Safire called the plan a "supersnoop's dream." Liberal columnist Molly Ivins suggested it could be akin to fascism. Congress eventually defunded the program.
The National Counterterrorism Center's ideas faced no similar public resistance. For one thing, the debate happened behind closed doors. In addition, unlike the Pentagon, the NCTC was created in 2004 specifically to use data to connect the dots in the fight against terrorism.
Even after eight years in existence, the agency isn't well known. "We're still a bit of a startup and still having to prove ourselves," said director Matthew Olsen in a rare public appearance this summer at the Aspen Institute, a leadership think tank.
The agency's offices are tucked away in an unmarked building set back from the road in the woodsy suburban neighborhood of McLean, Va. Many employees are on loan from other agencies, and they don't conduct surveillance or gather clues directly. Instead, they analyze data provided by others.
The agency's best-known product is a database called TIDE, which stands for the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment. TIDE contains more than 500,000 identities suspected of terror links. Some names are known or suspected terrorists; others are terrorists' friends and families; still more are people with some loose affiliation to a terrorist.
Intelligence officials met at the White House in March to discuss the NCTC proposal with John Brennan, the president's chief counterterrorism adviser.
TIDE files are important because they are used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to compile terrorist "watchlists." These are lists that can block a person from boarding an airplane or obtaining a visa.
The watchlist system failed spectacularly on Christmas Day 2009 when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian man, boarded a flight to Detroit from Amsterdam wearing explosives sewn into his undergarments. He wasn't on the watchlist.
He eventually pleaded guilty to terror-related charges and is imprisoned. His bomb didn't properly detonate.
However, Mr. Abdulmutallab and his underwear did alter U.S. intelligence-gathering. A Senate investigation revealed that NCTC had received information about him but had failed to query other government databases about him. In a scathing finding, the Senate report said, "the NCTC was not organized adequately to fulfill its missions."
"This was not a failure to collect or share intelligence," said John Brennan, the president's chief counterterrorism adviser, at a White House press conference in January 2010. "It was a failure to connect and integrate and understand the intelligence we had."
As result, Mr. Obama demanded a watchlist overhaul. Agencies were ordered to send all their leads to NCTC, and NCTC was ordered to "pursue thoroughly and exhaustively terrorism threat threads." Quickly, NCTC was flooded with terror tips—each of which it was obligated to "exhaustively" pursue. By May 2010 there was a huge backlog, according a report by the Government Accountability Office.
Legal obstacles emerged. NCTC analysts were permitted to query federal-agency databases only for "terrorism datapoints," say, one specific person's name, or the passengers on one particular flight. They couldn't look through the databases trolling for general "patterns." And, if they wanted to copy entire data sets, they were required to remove information about innocent U.S. people "upon discovery."
But they didn't always know who was innocent. A person might seem innocent today, until new details emerge tomorrow.
"What we learned from Christmas Day"—from the failed underwear bomb—was that some information "might seem more relevant later," says Mr. Joel, the national intelligence agency's civil liberties officer. "We realized we needed it to be retained longer."
Late last year, for instance, NCTC obtained an entire database from Homeland Security for analysis, according to a person familiar with the transaction. Homeland Security provided the disks on the condition that NCTC would remove all innocent U.S. person data after 30 days.
After 30 days, a Homeland Security team visited and found that the data hadn't yet been removed. In fact, NCTC hadn't even finished uploading the files to its own computers, that person said. It can take weeks simply to upload and organize the mammoth data sets.
Homeland Security granted a 30-day extension. That deadline was missed, too. So Homeland Security revoked NCTC's access to the data.
To fix problems like these that had cropped up since the Abdulmutallab incident, NCTC proposed the major expansion of its powers that would ultimately get debated at the March meeting in the White House. It moved to ditch the requirement that it discard the innocent-person data. And it asked for broader authority to troll for patterns in the data.
As early as February 2011, NCTC's proposal was raising concerns at the privacy offices of both Homeland Security and the Department of Justice, according to emails reviewed by the Journal.
Privacy offices are a relatively new phenomenon in the intelligence community. Most were created at the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission. Privacy officers are often in the uncomfortable position of identifying obstacles to plans proposed by their superiors.
At the Department of Justice, Chief Privacy Officer Nancy Libin raised concerns about whether the guidelines could unfairly target innocent people, these people said. Some research suggests that, statistically speaking, there are too few terror attacks for predictive patterns to emerge. The risk, then, is that innocent behavior gets misunderstood—say, a man buying chemicals (for a child's science fair) and a timer (for the sprinkler) sets off false alarms.
An August government report indicates that, as of last year, NCTC wasn't doing predictive pattern-matching.
The internal debate was more heated at Homeland Security. Ms. Callahan and colleague Margo Schlanger, who headed the 100-person Homeland Security office for civil rights and civil liberties, were concerned about the implications of turning over vast troves of data to the counterterrorism center, these people said.
They and Ms. Libin at the Justice Department argued that the failure to catch Mr. Abdulmutallab wasn't caused by the lack of a suspect—he had already been flagged—but by a failure to investigate him fully. So amassing more data about innocent people wasn't necessarily the right solution.
The most sensitive Homeland Security data trove at stake was the Advanced Passenger Information System. It contains the name, gender, birth date and travel information for every airline passenger entering the U.S.
Mary Ellen Callahan, then-chief privacy officer of the Department of Homeland Security: 'This is a sea change in the way that the government interacts with the general public.'
Previously, Homeland Security had pledged to keep passenger data only for 12 months. But NCTC was proposing to copy and keep it for up to five years. Ms. Callahan argued this would break promises the agency had made to the public about its use of personal data, these people said.
Discussions sometimes got testy, according to emails reviewed by the Journal. In one case, Ms. Callahan sent an email complaining that "examples" provided to her by an unnamed intelligence official were "complete non-sequiturs" and "non-responsive."
In May 2011, Ms. Callahan and Ms. Schlanger raised their concerns with the chief of their agency, Janet Napolitano. They fired off a memo under the longwinded title, "How Best to Express the Department's Privacy and Civil Liberties Concerns over Draft Guidelines Proposed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Counterterrorism Center," according to an email obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The contents of the memo, which appears to run several pages, were redacted.
The two also kept pushing the NCTC officials to justify why they couldn't search for terrorism clues less invasively, these people said. "I'm not sure I'm totally prepared with the firestorm we're about to create," Ms. Schlanger emailed Ms. Callahan in November, referring to the fact that the two wanted more privacy protections. Ms. Schlanger returned to her faculty position at the University of Michigan Law School soon after but remains an adviser to Homeland Security.
To resolve the issue, Homeland Security's deputy secretary, Jane Holl Lute, requested the March meeting at the White House. The second in command from Homeland Security, the Justice Department, the FBI, NCTC and the office of the director of national intelligence sat at the small conference table. Normal protocol for such meeting is for staffers such as Ms. Callahan to sit against the walls of the room and keep silent.
By this point, Ms. Libin's concern that innocent people could be inadvertently targeted had been largely overruled at the Department of Justice, these people said. Colleagues there were more concerned about missing the next terrorist threat.
That left Ms. Callahan as the most prominent opponent of the proposed changes. In an unusual move, Ms. Lute asked Ms. Callahan to speak about Homeland Security's privacy concerns. Ms. Callahan argued that the rules would constitute a "sea change" because, whenever citizens interact with the government, the first question asked will be, are they a terrorist?
Mr. Brennan considered the arguments. And within a few days, the attorney general, Eric Holder, had signed the new guidelines. The Justice Department declined to comment about the debate over the guidelines.
Under the new rules, every federal agency must negotiate terms under which it would hand over databases to NCTC. This year, Ms. Callahan left Homeland Security for private practice, and Ms. Libin left the Justice Department to join a private firm.
Homeland Security is currently working out the details to give the NCTC three data sets—the airline-passenger database known as APIS; another airline-passenger database containing information about non-U.S. citizen visitors to the U.S.; and a database about people seeking refugee asylum. It previously agreed to share databases containing information about foreign-exchange students and visa applications.
Once the terms are set, Homeland Security is likely to post a notice in the Federal Register. The public can submit comments to the Federal Register about proposed changes, although Homeland Security isn't required to make changes based on the comments.
Write to Julia Angwin at julia.angwin@wsj.com
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http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/dr20121220-budget-cuts-cause-states-to-lose-ground-on-emergency-preparedness
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Well at least public sector employees continue to make more money than the private sector so it is worth it , , ,
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10-43: All Units...
with Doug Wyllie, PoliceOne Editor in Chief
Active shooters in schools: The enemy is denial
Preventing juvenile mass murder in American schools is the job of police officers, school teachers, and concerned parents
Editor's Note: Visit the Newtown Shooting special coverage page for more perspectives on active shooters in schools, including my article "Active shooters in schools: Should teachers be trained by police firearms instructors?" Have a perspective on this issue? Leave it in the comments below.
“How many kids have been killed by school fire in all of North America in the past 50 years? Kids killed... school fire... North America... 50 years... How many? Zero. That’s right. Not one single kid has been killed by school fire anywhere in North America in the past half a century. Now, how many kids have been killed by school violence?”
So began an extraordinary daylong seminar presented by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a Pulitzer Prize nominated author, West Point psychology professor, and without a doubt the world’s foremost expert on human aggression and violence. The event, hosted by the California Peace Officers Association, was held in the auditorium of a very large community church about 30 miles from San Francisco, and was attended by more than 250 police officers from around the region.
Grossman’s talk spanned myriad topics of vital importance to law enforcement, such as the use of autogenic breathing, surviving gunshot wounds, dealing with survivor guilt following a gun battle, and others. But violence among and against children was how the day began, and so I'll focus on that issue here.
Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, pictured with PoliceOne Senior Editor Doug Wyllie, spoke before a crowd of more than 250 police officers in an event hosted by the California Peace Officers Association. (PoliceOne image)
Related Articles:
Arming campus cops is elementary
A decade after Columbine we're still learning, teaching
Related Resources:
Book Excerpt: On Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs
Visit the Killology Research Group website
Related Feature:
Helping schools prepare for an active-shooter showdown
Sheriff Fred Wegener says that preparing schools for an active shooter is community policing at its best.
“In 1999,” Grossman said, “school violence claimed what at the time was an all time record number of kids’ lives. In that year there were 35 dead and a quarter of a million serious injuries due to violence in the school. How many killed by fire that year? Zero. But we hear people say, ‘That’s the year Columbine happened, that’s an anomaly.’ Well, in 2004 we had a new all time record — 48 dead in the schools from violence. How many killed by fire that year? Zero. Let’s assign some grades. Put your teacher hat on and give out some grades. What kind of grade do you give the firefighter for keeping kids safe? An ‘A,’ right? Reluctantly, reluctantly, the cops give the firefighters an ‘A,’ right? Danged firefighters, they sleep ‘till they’re hungry and eat ‘till they’re tired. What grade do we get for keeping the kids safe from violence? Come on, what’s our grade? Needs improvement, right?”
Johnny Firefighter, A+ Student
“Why can’t we be like little Johnny Firefighter?” Grossman asked as he prowled the stage. “He’s our A+ student!”
He paused, briefly, and answered with a voice that blew through the hall like thunder, “Denial, denial, denial!”
Grossman commanded, “Look up at the ceiling! See all those sprinklers up there? They’re hard to spot — they’re painted black — but they’re there. While you’re looking, look at the material the ceiling is made of. You know that that stuff was selected because it’s fire-retardant. Hooah? Now look over there above the door — you see that fire exit sign? That’s not just any fire exit sign — that’s a ‘battery-backup-when-the-world-ends-it-will-still-be-lit’ fire exit sign. Hooah?”
Walking from the stage toward a nearby fire exit and exterior wall, Grossman slammed the palm of his hand against the wall and exclaimed, “Look at these wall boards! They were chosen because they’re what?! Fireproof or fire retardant, hooah? There is not one stinking thing in this room that will burn!”
Pointing around the room as he spoke, Grossman continued, “But you’ve still got those fire sprinklers, those fire exit signs, fire hydrants outside, and fire trucks nearby! Are these fire guys crazy? Are these fire guys paranoid? No! This fire guy is our A+ student! Because this fire guy has redundant, overlapping layers of protection, not a single kid has been killed by school fire in the last 50 years!
“But you try to prepare for violence — the thing much more likely to kill our kids in schools, the thing hundreds of times more likely to kill our kids in schools — and people think you’re paranoid. They think you’re crazy. ...They’re in denial.”
Teaching the Teachers
The challenge for law enforcement agencies and officers, then, is to overcome not only the attacks taking place in schools, but to first overcome the denial in the minds of mayors, city councils, school administrators, and parents. Grossman said that agencies and officers, although facing an uphill slog against the denial of the general public, must diligently work toward increasing understanding among the sheep that the wolves are coming for their children. Police officers must train and drill with teachers, not only so responding officers are intimately familiar with the facilities, but so that teachers know what they can do in the event of an attack.
“Come with me to the library at Columbine High School,” Grossman said. “The teacher in the library at Columbine High School spent her professional lifetime preparing for a fire, and we can all agree if there had been a fire in that library, that teacher would have instinctively, reflexively known what to do.
"But the thing most likely to kill her kids — the thing hundreds of times more likely to kill her kids, the teacher didn’t have a clue what to do. She should have put those kids in the librarian’s office but she didn’t know that. So she did the worst thing possible — she tried to secure her kids in an un-securable location. She told the kids to hide in the library — a library that has plate glass windows for walls. It’s an aquarium, it’s a fish bowl. She told the kids to hide in a fishbowl. What did those killers see? They saw targets. They saw fish in a fish bowl.”
Grossman said that if the school administrators at Columbine had spent a fraction of the money they’d spent preparing for fire doing lockdown drills and talking with local law enforcers about the violent dangers they face, the outcome that day may have been different.
Rhetorically he asked the assembled cops, “If somebody had spent five minutes telling that teacher what to do, do you think lives would have been saved at Columbine?”
Arming Campus Cops is Elementary
Nearly two years ago, I wrote an article called Arming campus cops is elementary. Not surprisingly, Grossman agrees with that hypothesis.
“Never call an unarmed man ‘security’,” Grossman said.
“Call him ‘run-like-hell-when-the-man-with-the-gun-shows-up’ but never call an unarmed man security.
"Imagine if someone said, ‘I want a trained fire professional on site. I want a fire hat, I want a fire uniform, I want a fire badge. But! No fire extinguishers in this building. No fire hoses. The hat, the badge, the uniform — that will keep us safe — but we have no need for fire extinguishers.’ Well, that would be insane. It is equally insane, delusional, legally liable, to say, ‘I want a trained security professional on site. I want a security hat, I want a security uniform, and I want a security badge, but I don’t want a gun.’ It’s not the hat, the uniform, or the badge. It’s the tools in the hands of a trained professional that keeps us safe.
“Our problem is not money,” said Grossman. “It is denial.”
Grossman said (and most cops agree) that many of the most important things we can do to protect our kids would cost us nothing or next-to-nothing.
Grossman’s Five D’s
Let’s contemplate the following outline and summary of Dave Grossman’s “Five D’s.” While you do, I encourage you to add in the comments area below your suggestions to address, and expand upon, these ideas.
1. Denial — Denial is the enemy and it has no survival value, said Grossman.
2. Deter — Put police officers in schools, because with just one officer assigned to a school, the probability of a mass murder in that school drops to almost zero
3. Detect — We’re talking about plain old fashioned police work here. The ultimate achievement for law enforcement is the crime that didn’t happen, so giving teachers and administrators regular access to cops is paramount.
4. Delay — Various simple mechanisms can be used by teachers and cops to put time and distance between the killers and the kids.
a. Ensure that the school/classroom have just a single point of entry. Simply locking the back door helps create a hard target.
b. Conduct your active shooter drills within (and in partnership with) the schools in your city so teachers know how to respond, and know what it looks like when you do your response.
5. Destroy — Police officers and agencies should consider the following:
a. Carry off duty. No one would tell a firefighter who has a fire extinguisher in his trunk that he’s crazy or paranoid.
b. Equip every cop in America with a patrol rifle. One chief of police, upon getting rifles for all his officers once said, “If an active killer strikes in my town, the response time will be measured in feet per second.”
c. Put smoke grenades in the trunk of every cop car in America. Any infantryman who needs to attack across open terrain or perform a rescue under fire deploys a smoke grenade. A fire extinguisher will do a decent job in some cases, but a smoke grenade is designed to perform the function.
d. Have a “go-to-war bag” filled with lots of loaded magazines and supplies for tactical combat casualty care.
e. Use helicopters. Somewhere in your county you probably have one or more of the following: medevac, media, private, national guard, coast guard rotors.
f. Employ the crew-served, continuous-feed, weapon you already have available to you (a firehouse) by integrating the fire service into your active shooter training. It is virtually impossible for a killer to put well-placed shots on target while also being blasted with water at 300 pounds per square inch.
g. Armed citizens can help. Think United 93. Whatever your personal take on gun control, it is all but certain that a killer set on killing is more likely to attack a target where the citizens are unarmed, rather than one where they are likely to encounter an armed citizen response.
Coming Soon: External Threats
Today we must not only prepare for juvenile mass murder, something that had never happened in human history until only recently, but we also must prepare for the external threat. Islamist fanatics have slaughtered children in their own religion — they have killed wantonly, mercilessly, and without regard for repercussion or regret of any kind. What do you think they’d think of killing our kids?
“Eight years ago they came and killed 3,000 of our citizens. Do we know what they’re going to do next? No! But one thing they’ve done in every country they’ve messed with is killing kids in schools,” Grossman said.
The latest al Qaeda charter states that “children are noble targets” and Osama bin Laden himself has said that “Russia is a preview for what we will do to America.”
What happened in Russia that we need to be concerned with in this context? In the town of Beslan on September 1, 2004 — the very day on which children across that country merrily make their return to school after the long summer break — radical Islamist terrorists from Chechnya took more than 1,000 teachers, mothers, and children hostage. When the three-day siege was over, more than 300 hostages had been killed, more than half of whom were children.
“If I could tackle every American and make them read one book to help them understand the terrorist’s plan, it would be Terror at Beslan by John Giduck. Beslan was just a dress rehearsal for what they’re planning to do to the United States,” he said.
Consider this: There are almost a half a million school buses in America. It would require almost every enlisted person and every officer in the entire United States Army to put just one armed guard on every school bus in the country.
As a country and as a culture, the level of protection Americans afford our kids against violence is nothing near what we do to protect them from fire. Grossman is correct: Denial is the enemy. We must prepare for violence like the firefighter prepares for fire. And we must do that today.
Hooah, Colonel!
About the author
Doug Wyllie is Editor in Chief of PoliceOne, responsible for setting the editorial direction of the website and managing the planned editorial features by our roster of expert writers. In addition to his editorial and managerial responsibilities, Doug has authored more than 600 feature articles and tactical tips on a wide range of topics and trends that affect the law enforcement community. Doug is a member of International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association (ILEETA), and an Associate Member of the California Peace Officers' Association. He is also a member of the Public Safety Writers Association, and is a two-time (2011 and 2012) Western Publishing Association "Maggie Award" Finalist in the category of Best Regularly Featured Digital Edition Column. Even in his "spare" time, he is active in his support for the law enforcement community, contributing his time and talents toward police-related charitable events as well as participating in force-on-force training, search-and-rescue training, and other scenario-based training designed to prepare cops for the fight they face every day on the street.
P.C.
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http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/01/03/exclusive-al-awlaki-booked-pre-11-air-travel-for-hijackers-fbi-documents-show/#ixzz2Gyi0ZO5q
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http://www.ctc.usma.edu/posts/challengers-from-the-sidelines-understanding-americas-violent-far-right
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http://www.ctc.usma.edu/posts/challengers-from-the-sidelines-understanding-americas-violent-far-right
Your link doesn't work.
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I just clicked on it and it is working for me , , ,
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I just clicked on it and it is working for me , , ,
Now it works for me. Huh.
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Enemies Domestic
Jose Padilla may have been an idiot who thought he could make a nuclear bomb by swinging uranium around in a bucket, but that doesn't mean he wasn't dangerous..
By ALI SOUFAN
In 1992, Tarik Shah, an accomplished jazz musician, played at Bill Clinton's presidential inauguration. In 2004, he was being monitored by the FBI as he developed plans to train (he was also a martial-arts master) and recruit fighters for al Qaeda.
The FBI started focusing on Shah after learning he had been making inquiries into joining al Qaeda. Then a search of his car—occasioned by his arrest for petty larceny—uncovered the contact information of extremists with ties to al Qaeda. An informant sent to befriend Shah introduced him to an undercover FBI agent posing as a personal representative of Osama bin Laden. Over the course of the next year, Shah met and communicated with the agent numerous times. In May 2005, in an apartment in the Bronx, Shah and an associate pledged an oath of allegiance to bin Laden through the agent. The next day they were arrested.
In his telling of this story in "The Terror Factory," Trevor Aaronson omits some key facts. He doesn't mention, for example, Shah's early attempts to join al Qaeda or the evidence found in connection with his larceny arrest. Instead he portrays Shah as an otherwise innocent man entrapped by FBI informants. Mr. Aaronson should know better. He interviewed me (I was the undercover FBI agent), the court documents are public, and I told the entire story in my book "The Black Banners." Shah's lawyers certainly knew better and advised their client to plead guilty, whereupon a judge sentenced him to 15 years in prison.
Shah's story is buried among the many that Mr. Aaronson tells in a book trying to show that there is no threat from terrorism here in the U.S., only terrorists manufactured by the FBI to be caught by the FBI. He writes that the bureau "currently spends $3 billion annually to hunt an enemy that is largely of its own creation" and that those arrested are "nothing more than FBI creations, impressionable men living on the edge of society who become bomb-triggering would-be killers only because of the actions of FBI informants."
The Terror Factory
By Trevor Aaronson
(Ig, 272 pages, $24.95)
It doesn't take access to a classified FBI database to see that the reality is otherwise. Richard Reid tried to detonate a shoe bomb on a plane in December 2001; Jose Padilla flew into Chicago in May 2002 planning to build and set off a bomb; and Faisal Shahzad almost succeeded in blowing up his car in Times Square in May 2010. All developed their plots without any input from the FBI.
Typical of the cases Mr. Aaronson discusses is that of Michael Curtis Reynolds. In 2005, Reynolds logged into an Internet chat forum called "OBLcrew" and described his dream of bombing the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. He repeatedly requested assistance, and eventually someone claiming to be an al Qaeda operative responded. When they finally met, Reynolds found himself surrounded by FBI agents.
To most people that was a job well done by the FBI. As you can't prosecute someone just for professing a desire to kill Americans, and you can't read minds to determine if they really intend to carry out their threats, either you wait to see if the real al Qaeda gets in contact—and hope you can track them—or you intercede. Most Americans would no doubt prefer the latter option to taking a serious gamble with civilian lives.
Mr. Aaronson disagrees. He says Reynolds was "unemployed, broke, and living with his mother at middle age, a caricature of the all-American loser"—implying that such a man wouldn't have the ability to be a terrorist. As the recent tragic massacre of school children in Newtown, Conn., reminds us, however, being considered a loser doesn't mean you aren't a threat to society. You don't today have to go to Afghanistan to get al Qaeda training—it is available on the Internet—and it is very easy to acquire serious weaponry in the U.S.
Many terrorists are literally idiots. Padilla thought he could make a viable nuclear bomb by swinging uranium around in a bucket about his head. But that doesn't mean that they aren't dangerous, and if al Qaeda gets their hands on them, they will utilize them (as happened with Padilla).
Where Mr. Aaronson is on solid ground is in discussing how FBI dealings with the Muslim community have backfired and alienated potential allies. He is correct that some "Muslims today see FBI agents as potential enemies, not as neighbors with a mutual interest in keeping the local community safe from harm." And he is right that "this means that credible and actionable tips from within Muslim communities—from the people with the best vantage points to see early problems or threats—are going unreported."
The U.S. government needs to do a better job of managing domestic antiterrorism efforts. The most successful such programs are holistic in nature, drawing on community-relations specialists, NGOs, psychologists and others—not putting everything on the back of the FBI. This is critical because as effective as the FBI and local police forces have been, sooner or later people slip through (like Shahzad). We need the Muslim community to be our ally, as they have shown they can be. For instance, in the 2009 case of five Virginia men traveling to Pakistan in hopes of fighting against U.S. forces in Afghanistan, it was their families who tipped off the FBI.
An impartial review of the FBI's efforts to fight terrorism after 9/11 would give it high marks overall. It gets hundreds of leads daily, and it has a duty to check them all out, no matter how dismissible they appear. The Iranian regime's 2011 plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., which was uncovered thanks to a Drug Enforcement Administration informant, is a reminder of why. Unfortunately Mr. Aaronson fails to appreciate this, and instead uses most of his pages to accuse the FBI of entrapment. Tellingly, he notes toward the end that "I am frequently asked why entrapment has never been an effective defense in the terrorism cases. I've struggled with the answer to this question." The answer, of course, is that the evidence shows that these were real threats to the U.S., and we are fortunate that the FBI intercepted them.
Mr. Soufan, an FBI supervisory special agent from 1997 to 2005, is CEO of the Soufan Group and the author of "The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al Qaeda."
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http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2013/01/many_definitions.html
From the article:
The existence of multiple, overlapping and inconsistent definitions of the term “homeland security” reflects and reinforces confusion in the homeland security mission, according to a newly updated report from the Congressional Research Service.
“Ten years after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the U.S. government does not have a single definition for ‘homeland security.’ [Instead,] different strategic documents and mission statements offer varying missions that are derived from different homeland security definitions.”
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http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2013/01/many_definitions.html
From the article:
The existence of multiple, overlapping and inconsistent definitions of the term “homeland security” reflects and reinforces confusion in the homeland security mission, according to a newly updated report from the Congressional Research Service.
“Ten years after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the U.S. government does not have a single definition for ‘homeland security.’ [Instead,] different strategic documents and mission statements offer varying missions that are derived from different homeland security definitions.”
Not surprised to read this at all. I was recently talking to a Deputy Sheriff who had been in the USGC before and after DHS was formed. His opinion of DHS and it's way of doing business wasn't favorable.
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A tiny ray of light shines through 2nd term changes, the diplomat assigned to handle the Guantanamo closing transition has been quietly reassigned.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/29/us/politics/state-dept-closes-office-working-on-closing-guantanamo-prison.html?_r=0
Drones flying at all hours and torture facilities kept open, good thing this guy is a liberal or he would be lambasted, if that is still legal.
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Suspecting some sort of trickery, I've been ignoring the apparent spam showing up in my mailbox with subject headings abotu 500,000 coffins and massive ammo purchases by DHS. However today someone I know sent me an actual URL:
http://www.examiner.com/article/dhs-adds-200-000-rounds-to-its-2-billion-round-stockpile
Very odd assertions concerning the purported seller , , ,
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Suspecting some sort of trickery, I've been ignoring the apparent spam showing up in my mailbox with subject headings abotu 500,000 coffins and massive ammo purchases by DHS. However today someone I know sent me an actual URL:
http://www.examiner.com/article/dhs-adds-200-000-rounds-to-its-2-billion-round-stockpile
Very odd assertions concerning the purported seller , , ,
I'm not sure what to make of this. Strange....
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/02/08/civil-war-california-man-planned-to-frame-anti-government-right-wing-groups-in-bank-bomb-plot/
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http://www.examiner.com/article/obama-executive-order-would-seize-us-infrastructure-citizens-for-nat-l-defense
Obama Executive Order would seize US infrastructure, citizens for nat'l defense
Barack Obama
March 18, 2012
By: Joe Newby
Subscribe
Obama signs Executive Order giving government complete control of all US infrastructure, food, water and citizens for "national defense" preparation.
On Friday, President Obama signed a sweeping Executive Order that would effectively nationalize everything - including food, water and U.S. citizens - in order to prepare for national defense.
Worse yet, the order would also allow for a civilian draft - the conscription of “persons of outstanding experience or ability” without compensation.
A post at Current.com adds:
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The EO also states that the President and his Secretaries have the authority to seize all transportation, energy, and infrastructure inside the United States as well as forcibly induct/draft American citizens into the military. The EO also contains a vague reference in regards to harnessing American citizens to fulfill “labor requirements” for the purposes of national defense.
Not only that, but the authority claimed inside the EO does not only apply to National Emergencies and times of war. It also applies in peacetime.
"The National Defense Resources Preparedness Executive Order exploits the “authority” granted to the President in the Defense Production Act of 1950 in order to assert that virtually every means of human survival is now available for confiscation and control by the President via his and his Secretaries’ whim," Current notes.
Oddly enough, the order does not say these are actions to be taken “in the event of a national emergency.” Instead, it uses the term “purposes of national defense.”
Under the section dealing with labor, the order says:
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Sec. 601. Secretary of Labor. (a) The Secretary of Labor, in coordination with the Secretary of Defense and the heads of other agencies, as deemed appropriate by the Secretary of Labor, shall:
(1) collect and maintain data necessary to make a continuing appraisal of the Nation's workforce needs for purposes of national defense;
(2) upon request by the Director of Selective Service, and in coordination with the Secretary of Defense, assist the Director of Selective Service in development of policies regulating the induction and deferment of persons for duty in the armed services;
(3) upon request from the head of an agency with authority under this order, consult with that agency with respect to: (i) the effect of contemplated actions on labor demand and utilization; (ii) the relation of labor demand to materials and facilities requirements; and (iii) such other matters as will assist in making the exercise of priority and allocations functions consistent with effective utilization and distribution of labor;
In order to prevent shortfalls in resources, the order also gives various cabinet-level secretaries the authority "to guarantee loans by private institutions," and gives the Treasury Secretary and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget complete authority to set terms, interest rates and maximum amounts to be paid.
If you think you can move to a farm in the country in order to escape the long arm of the regime, think again.
According to the "Definitions" section of the order, absolutely everything - including farm equipment, all food, water and medicine, energy, fertilizer and all forms of "civil transportation" - would be seized by the government. Even repair parts for farm equipment would fall under government jurisdiction.
The order does note, however, that "'[c]ivil transportation' shall not include transportation owned or controlled by the Department of Defense, use of petroleum and gas pipelines, and coal slurry pipelines used only to supply energy production facilities directly."
'Energy, for example, is defined as: "...all forms of energy including petroleum, gas (both natural and manufactured), electricity, solid fuels (including all forms of coal, coke, coal chemicals, coal liquification, and coal gasification), solar, wind, other types of renewable energy, atomic energy, and the production, conservation, use, control, and distribution (including pipelines) of all of these forms of energy."
The post at Current asks:
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Nevertheless, some have no doubt begun to wonder why the President has signed such an order. Not only that, but why did he sign the order now? Is it because of the looming war with Iran or the Third World War that will likely result from such a conflict? Is it because of the ticking time bomb called the economy that is only one jittery move or trade deal away from total disintegration? Is it because of a growing sense of hatred of their government amongst the general public? Is there a coming natural disaster of which we are unaware? Are there plans for martial law?
Finance Examiner Kenneth Schortgen, Jr., notes that previous administrations have taken actions limiting individual rights in the past. During the Civil War, President Lincoln suspended Habeus Corpus and Woodrow Wilson used an Executive Order giving him authority "over businesses, industry, transportation, food, and other economic policies" during World War 1.
"In both cases," Schortgen wrote, "it was only after the death of each President that full Constitutional powers were restored to the citizens of the United States."
This order, however, goes far beyond what either Lincoln or Wilson did, and if invoked, would basically turn the United States into a totalitarian regime with Obama as its dictator.
In June, 1966, Robert Kennedy said:
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There is a Chinese curse which says 'May he live in interesting times.' Like it or not we live in interesting times. They are times of danger and uncertainty; but they are also more open to the creative energy of men than any other time in history.
Indeed, we seem to be living in very interesting times.
Update: A number of people have commented that this is simply an update of an existing Executive Order (EO 12919) dating back to 1994, but that does not negate the fact that President Obama signed the order on Friday, nor does it change the contents of the order, which can be seen at the White House website here, and about which Ed Morrissey of Hot Air says is "really nothing to worry about at all." We'll let the reader be the judge of that.
Updaye 2: One of the criticisms that has been leveled is that the Executive Order supposedly does not allow the President or one of his Secretaries to hire civilians without compensation, however, Section 502 reads (emphasis added):
“
Sec. 502. Consultants. The head of each agency otherwise delegated functions under this order is delegated the authority of the President under sections 710(b) and (c) of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2160(b), (c), to employ persons of outstanding experience and ability without compensation and to employ experts, consultants, or organizations.
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I can only smile.
"Some people just want to see the world burn."
But not for the reason one may think; sometimes it's better than what has been going on.
Sometimes one just needs to start from scratch.
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Sorry, do not have an URL for this:
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Pro-Taliban terrorist tries to blow up Oakland bank — and blame it on the Right — to start civil war
FBI thwarts terrorism meant as false-flag operation to ignite left-vs.-right armed conflict in the U.S.
by Zombie
February 8, 2013
Breaking:
A would-be Islamic terrorist tried to ignite a civil war this morning by bombing a bank in Oakland, California, saying that “he wanted the bank bombing to be blamed on anti-U.S. government militias”; luckily, the FBI thwarted his plan:
A man who was hoping to start a civil war in the United States with a terrorist attack in the Bay Area was arrested early Friday after trying to detonate what he thought was a car bomb at a Bank of America branch in Oakland, federal prosecutors said.
Matthew Aaron Llaneza, 28, of San Jose was taken into custody near the bank at 303 Hegenberger Road after pressing a cell-phone trigger device that was supposed to detonate the explosives inside an SUV and bring down the building, prosecutors said.
His supposed accomplice was an undercover FBI agent who had been meeting with him since Nov. 30, according to an FBI declaration filed in federal court. The declaration said the FBI had built the purported bomb, which posed no threat to the public.
…
The FBI agent quoted Llaneza as saying he supports the Taliban and wants to engage in violent jihad.
In the Nov. 30 meeting with an agent who posed as someone connected to the Taliban in Afghanistan, Llaneza said he wanted the bank bombing to be blamed on anti-U.S. government militias, triggering a government crackdown, a right-wing response and a civil war, the FBI declaration said….
Additional details, if any, will appear here as we learn of them.
UPDATE 1:
Here’s a photo of the bank branch at 303 Hegenberger he tried to destroy:
UPDATE 2:
Here is the official FBI press release about the incident, released a few minutes ago:
OAKLAND, CA—Federal agents arrested Matthew Aaron Llaneza, age 28, of San Jose, California, this morning after he allegedly attempted to detonate a vehicle-borne explosive device at a bank branch in Oakland.
Llaneza’s arrest was the culmination of an undercover operation during which he was closely monitored by the FBI’s South Bay Joint Terrorism Task Force. Unbeknownst to Llaneza, the explosive device that he allegedly attempted to use had been rendered inoperable by law enforcement and posed no threat to the public. Llaneza was charged this morning by criminal complaint with attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction against property used in an activity that affects interstate or foreign commerce.
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According to the affidavit filed in support of the criminal complaint, on November 30, 2012, Llaneza met with a man who led him to believe he was connected with the Taliban and the mujahidin in Afghanistan. In reality, this man was an undercover FBI agent. At this initial meeting, Llaneza proposed conducting a car-bomb attack against a bank in the San Francisco Bay Area. He proposed structuring the attack to make it appear that the responsible party was an umbrella organization for a loose collection of anti-government militias and their sympathizers. Llaneza’s stated goal was to trigger a governmental crackdown, which he expected would trigger a right-wing counter-response against the government followed by, he hoped, civil war.
The complaint further alleges that Llaneza subsequently selected the Bank of America branch at 303 Hegenberger Road in Oakland as the target for the attack. Llaneza ultimately specified a spot next to a support column of the bank building as a good location for the bomb, expressed a desire for the bomb to bring down the entire bank building, and offered to drive the car bomb to the bank at the time of the attack.
According to the complaint, in January and February 2013, Llaneza and the undercover agent constructed the purported explosive device inside a sport utility vehicle (SUV) parked inside a storage facility in Hayward, California. As part of the process of assembling the device, Llaneza purchased two cell phones to be used in creating and operating the trigger device for the car bomb. One of these cell phones was incorporated into the trigger device itself. The other was reserved for use on the night of the attack.
The criminal complaint alleges that on the evening of February 7, 2013, Llaneza drove the SUV containing the purported explosive device to the target bank branch in Oakland. He parked the SUV beneath an overhang of the bank building where he armed the trigger device. He then proceeded on foot to a nearby location a safe distance from the bank building, where he met the undercover agent. Once there, Llaneza attempted to detonate the bomb by using the second cell phone he had purchased to place two calls to the trigger device attached to the car bomb. Federal agents then arrested him.
…
UPDATE 3:
A few more sickening details at the Huffington Post:
[Llaneza] laughed and hugged the undercover agent after the agent showed him the SUV in a storage unit rented by the FBI. Llaneza also stated he wanted to travel to Afghanistan so he could train Taliban fighters, according to authorities.
UPDATE 4:
Someone with the name Matthew Aaron Llaneza founded an Arizona LLC in 2008 called “Sand Fire Tactical.” The State of Arizona’s official “Arizona Corporation Commission” has scans of the LLC’s Articles of Organization, which you can also see here:
Same guy? Most likely. Does the name “Sand Fire Tactical” have anything to do with his earlier assault weapons conviction? (I.e. does the “tactical” refer to tactical weapons?) He describes his business type as “Internet sales, light manufacturing.” Was he making illegal weaponry and selling it over the Internet? Or was this business completely innocuous?
UPDATE 5:
The Phoenix Fox affiliate is searching for people who might have known Matthew Llaneza, adding to the likelihood of an Arizona connection:
Good afternoon… Kristen Keogh here. We are trying to find someone who knows a man named Matthew Llaneza….KSAZ FOX 10 News myfoxphoenix
UPDATE 6:
“Findthecompany.com” claims that
Sand Fire Tactical LLC had $58,000 in 2011 revenue (Estimated data).
Still not clear what “Sand Fire Tactical” sold, or if this revenue data is accurate or just a generic estimate.
UPDATE 7:
Someone named Matthew Llaneza graduated from Red Mountain High School in 2003. Anyone who graduated from high school in 2003 would now be exactly 28 years old…the same age as the suspect. And where is Red Mountain High School? Mesa, Arizona, naturally, the same city where Sand Fire Tactical was founded.
UPDATE 8:
Lots of new details in a San Jose Mercury News article published 4 minutes ago:
Court records stemming from a 2011 weapons conviction show that the one-time Marine likely suffered from mental illness that included bouts of paranoia, suicidal tendencies, hallucinations and voices in his head, and had a vast working knowledge of weaponry.
Those same records show that Llaneza’s father long had concerns about his son’s stability, keeping him at arm’s length after he returned to San Jose from several years living with grandparents in Arizona and having abruptly converted to Islam.
During the planning of the attack, Llaneza also allegedly said “he would dance with joy when the bomb exploded.” After the attack, Llaneza had intended to flee by boat to Pakistan and then travel to Afghanistan to train with Taliban fighters….
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Records indicate that the U.S.-born Llaneza lived with his grandparents in Mesa, Ariz., until 2011, when he moved back to California to live with his father in North San Jose in an RV parked out front. During his time in Arizona, Llaneza described himself as an “armorist” who was proficient in weapons assembly, and records show that in February 2008 founded Sand Fire Tactical LLC, which he described in its articles of organization as an “internet sales, light manufacturing” firm located in Mesa.
The complaint describes Llaneza as a detail-oriented person intent on an eye-catching act of terrorism that he believed would foment civil unrest. Court records in Santa Clara County seemingly set the foundation for those thoughts after he was convicted in 2011 for illegally having an AK-47 assault rifle and accompanying high-capacity magazines he purportedly purchased and registered in Arizona.
That discovery came out of an emergency call April 17 that year to the home of Steve Llaneza, who had recently allowed his son to live in an RV outside. Appearing under the influence of alcohol and marijuana — with a history of hard-drug use — the son threatened to kill himself and was hospitalized under a mental health hold.
Ensuing investigations by San Jose police led to them finding the assault rifle and magazines, which prompted officers to take Matthew Llaneza out of the hospital and into custody. He was convicted of the weapons offenses, and given a suspended sentence after having served six months in County Jail.
During the investigation and a corresponding preliminary hearing, Llaneza was described as being in and out of mental-health treatment, instead self-medicating with medically-obtained marijuana. He told interrogating officers about suffering from depression and post-traumatic stress from what he said were attempts by Arizona gangs to recruit him, expressing a fear of drug cartels and saying, “Someday you are going to find me dead in the desert.”
By the time of that 2011 arrest, Llaneza told police he was going by the name of Tarq Kahn and that he believed “secret police or government is trying to follow him.” His father told investigators that his son had briefly served in the Marine Corps before being discharged for an undisclosed reason.
…
Initially, Llaneza proposed attacking the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco or another unspecified target. He later decided that there would too much security at the Federal Reserve Bank and instead began scouting Bank of America locations in Oakland — because of the symbolism of the name and his belief of Oakland being a center of protests.
…
UPDATE 9:
As of 4:55pm, there is absolutely zilch on the Web about the name “Tarq Kahn” aside from that SJ Mercury News article. Could “Tarq” be a misspelling of “Tariq”? If so, there’d be little chance of digging up any info about him anyway, as “Tariq Khan” is an extremely common name.
UPDATE 10:
Here’s the FBI Criminal Complaint and Affidavit leading to Llaneza’s arrest.
(Thanks to reader Paula B. for bringing this link to our attention.)
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Buraq could always tap Llaneza for SecDef so as to have a nominee more pro-Israel than Hagel.
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2281769/Parents-fury-TSA-detains-wheelchair-bound-daughter-3-theyre-trying-fly-Disney-World-family-vacation.html
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www.wnd.com/wnd_video/latest-homeland-security-armored-vehicle/
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http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2013/03/homeland-security-has-purchased-2700.html
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On the Web: http://patriotpost.us/editions/17122
Printer Friendly: http://patriotpost.us/editions/17122/print
PDF Version: http://pdf.patriotpost.us/2013-03-08-digest-4ca9a648.pdf
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"There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it
steadily." --George Washington
The last few months have seen troubling news of massive government purchases
of ammunition. Agencies from the Social Security Administration to the
Department of Agriculture to the Department of Homeland Security have
purchased millions of rounds. But is the whole thing more hype than substance?
Ever since Barack Obama was first elected in 2008, he has been selling guns
and ammunition at a faster clip than any gun salesman could hope for. And
since his re-election, citizens have been faced with severe shortages of both.
This can only be exacerbated by large government purchases. The Social
Security Administration (SSA), for example, purchased 174,000 rounds and the
Department of Agriculture (USDA) bought 320,000 rounds. More understandable in
purpose but also perhaps more staggering in scale, the Department of Homeland
Security (DHS) put in a request for 450 million rounds, while the FBI intends
to purchase 100 million.
The headlines are ominous, but some of the hype can be put in perspective by
doing a little math. National Review's Charles C. W. Cooke does just that. The
SSA's request for 174,000 rounds amounts to just 590 rounds for each of its
295 inspector general agents "who investigate Social Security fraud and other
crimes." Some of us might go through 590 rounds in an afternoon at the range.
As for the USDA, 320,000 is enough to provide the same number of rounds for
542 agents, and, through the Forest Service, those agents have an area the
size of Pakistan to cover.
When it comes to the bigger orders, Cooke writes, "The FBI and DHS's
apparently vast orders are deceptively presented by the conspiracy theorists.
It is true that in 2011, the FBI ordered up to 100 million bullets for its
13,913 special agents (which works out to 7,187 per agent). And, yes, the
Department of Homeland Security -- a composite department that oversees USCIS,
Customs and Border Protection, FEMA, ICE, the TSA, the Coast Guard, the Secret
Service, and the National Protection Directorate -- placed a request for up to
450 million rounds for its 65,000 armed personnel (which works out to 6,923
per agent). But in the real world, ammunition is not divided up and handed out
on such a basis. What is bought is stockpiled and then allocated on the basis
of need. The DHS's order is expected to last for at least five years, and it
was placed up front primarily as a cost-saving measure." Indeed, DHS is not
even bound to buy that much; they merely have a tab on which to order more
rounds as needed.
That certainly doesn't mean there aren't questions or that we should simply
shrug and look the other way. For starters, the Department of Education
recently placed an order for "27 Remington Brand Model 870 police 12-gauge
shotguns." This might lead any reasonable person to ask, as Cooke does,
"Whether it is in possession of one bullet or 1 million bullets, should the
federal Department of Education be armed in the first place? If so, why?" We
would add, should there even be a Department of Education? But that's a topic
for another day. The DoE has been known to botch raids when it was the wrong
enforcement vehicle from the start.
The same questions could be asked of any number of bureaucracies. Does the
Social Security Administration really need an armed enforcement division?
We've known some unruly seniors in our day, but that seems to be overkill.
Then there's the information that's just plain false. Reports have been
circulating that DHS has procured 2,717 Mine Resistant Armor Protected (MRAP)
vehicles. The truth is, DHS has had retrofitted MRAPs since 2008, and now has
16 of them for serving "high-risk warrants." The figure of 2,717 comes from a
delivery to the Marine Corps, not DHS. None of that, however, takes away from
the problem that these are more properly military vehicles for war zones, not
law enforcement tools. The militarization of law enforcement is undeniably
troublesome. Furthermore, DHS is the same bureaucracy that claims right-wing
extremists pose a threat, and it's run by an administration that thinks that
"weapons of war" shouldn't be on our streets. Unless they're the ones driving
them, apparently.
There are certainly troubling trends here and very real threats to our
Liberty, but we must be careful not to exaggerate. While readers know that we
never minimize the outrageous growth of government beyond its constitutional
bounds, it also doesn't seem to us that the government is, as some have put
it, "stockpiling bullets in case of civil unrest." Questions about
procurements and functions? Absolutely. Apocalypse? Not yet.
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By Scott Stewart
Vice President of Analysis
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula released the 10th edition of its English-language magazine, Inspire, on March 1. After discussing its contents with our analytical team, initially I decided not to write about it. I concluded that Inspire 10 conformed closely to the previous nine editions and that our analysis of the magazine, from its inception to its re-emergence after the death of editor Samir Khan, was more than adequate.
Since making that decision, however, I have been very surprised at how the media and other analysts have received the magazine. Some have overhyped the magazine even as others have downplayed -- even ridiculed -- its content. I have heard others say the magazine revealed nothing about al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. All these reactions are misguided. So in response, I've endeavored to provide a more balanced assessment that can be placed in a more appropriate perspective.
A Balanced Assessment
I am certainly not among those who want to sensationalize the threat the magazine poses. Inspire 10 is not going to launch the grassroots jihadist apocalypse al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula seeks to foment any more successfully than the magazine's previous nine editions. The fact that a photograph of Austin, Texas, appears in the magazine does not mean that the city is somehow being secretly targeted for attack by jihadist sleeper cells.
But laughing at the magazine or dismissing it as irrelevant would be imprudent. The magazine has in fact inspired several terrorist plots. In some cases, the connections to the magazine have been obvious, as in cases where plotters have attempted to assemble improvised explosive devices using instructions provided in Inspire magazine's first edition. This happened in July 2011, when U.S. Army Pfc. Naser Jason Abdo was arrested as he attempted to assemble explosive devices he planned to use in an attack against a restaurant in Killeen, Texas, that was popular with soldiers from nearby Fort Hood.
In November 2011, the New York Police Department arrested Jose Pimentel, also known as Muhammad Yusuf, a 27-year-old Dominican-American. Pimentel was arrested at an apartment in Manhattan as he was allegedly constructing homemade improvised explosive devices, again following the instructions provided in Inspire.
Other cases have not been as blatant as those involving Abdo and Pimentel. However, they have involved individuals who were radicalized or motivated by Inspire. As recently as March 15, three men in the United Kingdom pleaded guilty to terrorism charges related to attending terrorism training camps in Pakistan. The men allegedly were motivated by Inspire. They had discussed attack ideas from the magazine, and the wife of one of the men was convicted in December 2012 on charges of possessing two digital copies of the magazine on a memory card.
There are several other recent and notable cases connected to Inspire magazine.
■On Nov. 29, 2012, two brothers from Florida, Raees Alam Qazi and Sheheryar Alam Qazi, were arrested and charged with plotting attacks in New York. Prosecutors noted that the pair had been motivated by Inspire magazine.
■On Oct. 17, 2012, Bangladeshi national Quazi Nafis was arrested as part of an FBI sting operation after he attempted to detonate a vehicle bomb outside New York's Federal Reserve Bank. Nafis reportedly was an avid reader of Inspire magazine.
■On Sept. 15, 2012, Adel Daoud, another avid Inspire reader, was arrested after he parked a Jeep Cherokee outside a Chicago bar and attempted to detonate the bomb he thought it contained. His was also an FBI sting operation.
■On April 25, 2012, four men were arrested in the British town of Luton and charged with plotting attacks against a British army base. The four were also charged with downloading and possessing six editions of Inspire magazine. They pleaded guilty March 1, 2013.
Target Audience
Some commentators have noted that most of the suspects arrested in connection with these plots were fairly hapless and clueless -- the type of individuals we have long referred to as "Kramer jihadists." Though partly incompetent, these grassroots operatives are exactly the demographic al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is targeting for radicalization and mobilization.
Inspire seeks to reach amateur terrorists living in the West; professional terrorists already know how to create pipe bombs. For this reason, the magazine urges amateurs to undertake simple attacks rather than the complex attacks. Too often they find assistance from an FBI informant.
It is a grave error to dismiss Kramer jihadists and assume they pose no threat. They can indeed kill people if they heed the advice of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and conduct simple attacks that are within their capability. That is what Maj. Nidal Hasan did in Fort Hood in November 2009 and what Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, also known as Carlos Bledsoe, did in June 2009. Both men were inspired to action by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
Kramer jihadists can also be deadly if they actually find a real terrorist, rather than a government informant, to assist or equip them. It is very important to remember that amateur, committed jihadists such as shoe bomber Richard Reid and underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab nearly succeeded in destroying an airliner.
Twenty years ago last month, I witnessed firsthand the dangers of discounting Kramer jihadists when I peered into a massive crater in the floor of the World Trade Center parking garage. The FBI had deemed those responsible for the attack too hapless to do much more than assassinate the leader of the Jewish Defense League in a midtown Manhattan hotel. And they were -- until a trained terrorist operative traveled to New York and organized their efforts, enabling them to construct, deliver and detonate a massive 590-kilogram (1,300-pound) truck bomb.
I also take umbrage at those who snicker at the thought of grassroots jihadists lighting fires. As noted last month, I believe that fire is an underappreciated threat. Many people simply do not realize how deadly a weapon it can be, even though starting fires does not require sophisticated terrorist tradecraft.
Some Revelations
Despite claims to the contrary, Inspire 10 reveals much about al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Like all propaganda and political rhetoric, its assertions must not be taken at face value. But to claim that the magazine tells us nothing about al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is simply lazy analysis.
Clearly, the concept of reaching out and attempting to radicalize and equip English-speaking jihadists was not something promoted only by Anwar al-Awlaki and Khan. English-speaking outreach has continued after their deaths. The group maintains that traveling to places such as Yemen for training is too dangerous.
That al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula continues to publish Inspire, which takes time and resources to produce, is also revelatory. The group has been under increased pressure over the past 18 months. The jihadists have been pushed back to their desert hideouts from much of the territory they conquered in southern Yemen. Yet despite these setbacks, they continue to devote resources to publishing Inspire, they have people with access to computers and the Internet, and they remain in contact with jihadists in other parts of the world, such as Pakistan and Mali.
The copyediting in Inspire 10 was also cleaner than the previous edition, which had a major typo on the front cover. The new editor, who uses the nom de guerre Yahya Ibrahim, has worked with Khan since the first edition of the magazine. He is a native English speaker who is familiar with Western culture and idioms. Ibrahim was clearly influenced by Khan and has attempted to continue Khan's work, but he lacks Khan's acerbic wit and irreverence. In Inspire 10, for example, Ibrahim attempts to replicate the insulting one-page "advertisements" that Khan included in earlier editions of the magazine -- one in particular racially derided U.S. President Barack Obama -- but they lack the bite and general snark of Khan. Inspire seems to be more serious and less edgy than when Khan was in charge. This may dull its appeal to its targeted audience.
Another thing we can ascertain from Inspire 10 is that, despite al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's continued commitment to foment grassroots terrorism in the West, the group is clearly disappointed by the response it has gotten. The magazine has mobilized some jihadists but probably not as many as the group would like. Those who have been inspired have not been very successful in their attacks.
The Open Source Jihad section also continues to show the low view that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's professional terrorist cadre has for grassroots operatives. They see them as not-so-exceptional individuals incapable of much more than simple attacks. Yet, since al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula lacks the ability to attack the West, the group must depend on these less than ideal individuals to do so for them.
In addition to what it reveals about al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Inspire 10 can also tell us some important things about what tactics we can expect the group to use and what locations we can expect it to target. Clearly the magazine continues to focus on targets in the West that have insulted the Prophet Mohammed. It revives the "the dust has not settled" theme from the first edition of the magazine and provides an updated hit list of individuals who have insulted Mohammed, including Terry Jones, the controversial Koran-burning pastor; Morris Sadek, who made a controversial film that disparaged Islam; and Stephane Charbonnier of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo.
We have seen several attacks and thwarted plots directed against these individuals in the past. In fact, in November 2011, Charlie Hebdo's office was completely destroyed by fire, which was started by the very type of accelerant and match attack promoted in Inspire 10. We believe we will continue to see grassroots plots against these targets.
Despite the weakening of the al Qaeda core group and the serious blows that regional franchises such as al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and al Shabaab have suffered in recent months, jihadism continues to attract new adherents. And Inspire hopes to motivate and equip them to conduct attacks in the West.
Read more: Assessing Inspire Magazine's 10th Edition | Stratfor
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http://www.clarionproject.org/news/saudi-travelers-us-be-given-expedited-clearance/#fm
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Unanswered Questions After the Boston Marathon Blasts
April 15, 2013 | 2344 GMT
Two deadly blasts disrupted the Boston Marathon today. The people of Boston have been terrorized and are panicked. International media are seeking information and inadvertently magnifying and spreading fear, while federal, state and metropolitan authorities are working to secure the city, treat the wounded, investigate the scene and hunt down the perpetrator(s).
With the attack over, everyone is left waiting for answers. Why was the marathon attacked? Who conducted the attack? What was the motive? In some attacks, the answers come quickly, as with the July 7, 2005, London transit bombings. In other cases, it can take years before those answers appear, as with the 1996 Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta.
The attack venue will greatly aid the search for answers. The heavy presence of people and media that presumably drew the attacker to target the Boston Marathon may prove to be the perpetrator's undoing if someone captured a photo of them delivering the devices. Indeed, there are reports that a man was photographed carrying multiple backpacks near the scene of the attack -- although at a major marathon the sight of a person carrying multiple backpacks or gear bags to friends at the finish line is not unusual.
At first look, the devices used in the attack appear to have been rudimentary explosive devices constructed with a common homemade explosive mixture. In other words, virtually anyone could have constructed them using readily available items. Although made of common items, it appears the bombmaker intended the devices to cause maximum casualties by adding shrapnel to multiple devices planted at a heavily congested event.
Still, investigators will painstakingly search the crime scene for evidence that could help identify the bombmaker. They will look for fragments of the device that they can use to potentially trace their origin. They will also be looking for evidence that could identify the bombmaker, such as fingerprints, fiber evidence and traces of DNA. If reports of multiple undetonated devices being located are true -- and they may not be, since in the wake of a blast everything tends to look like an improvised explosive device -- then the undetonated devices will provide a treasure trove of forensic evidence for the investigators to work with.
While any number of actors could have conducted this attack based on the simplicity of the devices, it took some degree of planning to create and place multiple devices. Many different types of groups have used multiple devices in terrorist attacks, so that fact alone does not help identify the culprits. But if there were multiple unexploded devices recovered from different areas in Boston in addition to the two that did detonate, this would indicate that more than one person carried out the attacks, meaning an organized group was involved rather than a lone wolf. Multiple unexploded devices could suggest some sort of tactical incompetence presented by the attackers. Long race venues such as the Boston Marathon also spread out security resources over large areas, likely allowing the attackers to more easily plant multiple devices throughout the city without being detected.
The identity of the perpetrator(s) will be critical to determining the U.S. reaction to the attack. A domestic group, or even a grassroots group without direct external connections, would cause a different reaction than if the attacker or attackers have direct connections to a foreign terrorist group like al Qaeda or one of its regional franchises.
But we will have to wait for that answer.
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Read more: Unanswered Questions After the Boston Marathon Blasts | Stratfor
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Having unexploded devices is a big plus for the investigation.
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Unusual security measures:
http://www.local15tv.com/news/local/story/UM-Coach-Bomb-Sniffing-Dogs-Spotters-on-Roofs/BrirjAzFPUKKN8z6eSDJEA.cspx
A suspect:
http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2013/04/16/
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Unusual security measures:
http://www.local15tv.com/news/local/story/UM-Coach-Bomb-Sniffing-Dogs-Spotters-on-Roofs/BrirjAzFPUKKN8z6eSDJEA.cspx
A suspect:
http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2013/04/16/
Using explosive detection dogs to check the marathon route wouldn't be unusual.
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If the explosive is TATP, this suggests Jihadists.
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http://gopthedailydose.com/2013/04/15/u-s-arrests-saudi-student-in-bomb-plot/
Notice how much the government was tapped into his email, google searches, etc.
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By DEVLIN BARRETT
The powerful blasts at the Boston Marathon finish line Monday underscore why the Federal Bureau of Investigation has spent years refining its "tripwire'' system for catching would-be bomb makers before they can build a deadly device.
For years, federal agents have asked businesses that sell materials useful in making bombs to alert authorities to any suspicious orders. The types of tripwires in place have shifted over the years. In the 1990s, law enforcement worried mostly about fertilizer-based bombs after such devices were used in the Oklahoma City attacks of April 1995. In the past decade, chemical-based bombs have come into focus as authorities adapt to the changing threat.
"The tripwires have certainly been successful in the past,'' said Don Borelli, a former counterterrorism official at the FBI who now works for Soufan Group.
He pointed to the case of a Saudi man, Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari, who was convicted last year of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. That case began in February 2011 with a tip from a North Carolina chemical-supply company about a suspicious $435 order by Mr. Aldawsari, who was legally in the U.S. on a student visa. A shipping company separately notified authorities the same day that it had similar suspicions because the order didn't appear intended for commercial use.
In a matter of weeks, agents had secretly searched the suspect's apartment, as well as his computer and email. The FBI found a journal entry by Mr. Aldawsari in which he wrote that he had been planning a terror attack in the U.S. for years. Authorities say that he was trying to make a chemical explosive similar to TNT. FBI experts said the amounts that were used in the Aldawsari case would have yielded nearly 15 pounds of explosives. He was convicted in June 2012.
The tripwire program can work even when suspects don't buy the materials that counterterrorism officials worry about. When Faisal Shahzad tried to detonate a car bomb in Times Square in May 2010, he intentionally worked with less-powerful substances. He was worried that if he bought materials to carry out the recipe of his Pakistani-based handlers, store owners would alert the FBI, according to statements he later made to investigators.
Investigators haven't said yet what explosives were used in Monday's attack in Boston, so it is unclear if any purchases could have been picked up by the FBI's tripwire efforts.
The tripwires aren't always successful. In a 2009 plot to bomb the New York City subway system, suspect Najibullah Zazi was able to purchase significant quantities of hydrogen peroxide, which he hoped to distill to a higher concentration that would make an effective bomb. Law-enforcement sources say Mr. Zazi's plot wasn't uncovered by the tripwire system, but through international intelligence-gathering. He eventually pleaded guilty to plotting with others to bomb the subway system.
Bomb plots, successful or not, typically prompt counterterrorism officials to review the tripwire system and look for possible improvements, a process just beginning in the Boston investigation.
After the explosions near the marathon finish line, counterterrorism officials scrambled to inspect a large number of discarded bags in and around Boston. They found some additional suspicious items and were investigating Monday evening whether they were bombs, according to people briefed on the matter. A law-enforcement official said late Monday that investigators initially believed some devices could be bombs, but closer examination led them to doubt that was the case.
The suspicious items were discovered over the course of a frantic inspection of packages, many of them abandoned as pedestrians, runners and others rushed away from crowded public streets.
The head of the Boston FBI office, Richard DesLauriers, said the agency's joint terrorism task force would take the lead on the investigation, and federal agents were already traveling to the area. He asked for the public's help to generate tips and leads in the case.
Any unexploded devices would be valuable evidence for investigators to determine who was behind the bombing. Even without unexploded devices, investigators can still sift through the blast marks of the detonated devices to determine how the bombs were constructed.
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Third post of the morning:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=boston-marathon-bomb-attack
Aftermath of Boston Marathon Bombing: How Do Terrorists Use Improvised Explosive Devices?
Two IEDs were detonated near the race’s finish line. An expert explains how they work and how they can lead investigators back to the bomb makers
By Larry Greenemeier
The bombing near the finish line of the 117th Boston Marathon on Monday killed two and injured more than 100 people on site. Now comes the search for who planted and detonated the explosives, and the motive.
The first bomb was detonated at about 2:45 P.M. local time near one of the many classic storefronts lining the marathon’s home stretch. The second explosive followed within minutes about 50 to 100 yards away. Law enforcement later found and dismantled at least two more explosive devices, according to various news reports.
Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) such as those used to attack the marathon are sometimes triggered remotely by cell phones. TheAssociated Press initially reported that law enforcement had the cell network in the vicinity of the finish line shut down after the incident, but later reports contradicted this, indicating that problems receiving a signal were due to the volume of cell phone users on the network.
Federal authorities classified the bombings as a terrorist attack as of Monday evening and indicated that both of the detonated bombs were small and did not contain C-4 or other high-grade explosives, CNN reported. Explosive devices have their own signatures, even those that have been pulverized by the force of their detonation.
Scientific American spoke with AJ Clark, a former military intelligence analyst with deployments to Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, about how IEDs work, how they are used and how they can be used to find those behind such an attack.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
Reports indicate that IEDs were responsible Monday’s attack on bystanders at the Boston Marathon. Most people have heard the term “IED” in relation to combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, but what, exactly, is an IED?
Most improved explosive devices include the following components: a cheap cell phone, electrical wire, a fuse, batteries (AA or 9-volt), electrical tape and a thyristor (a solid-state semiconductor device). This last piece provides the option of letting you wire into the positive and negative diodes of the speaker on the cell phone board.
Two common ways to complete the circuit between these components is to use the vibrating mechanism on the cell phone or the speaker—this could be either the speaker used to make your phone a speaker phone, or the speaker that you put up to your ear during a normal conversation. We found that the speaker phone has more power going to it and was more commonly used. When the phone is called, it activates the ringer, which makes the connection between those two components and kicks off the signal to detonate the explosive.
The typical makeup when you find these things will be based on the contents that the bomb maker had at their disposal and what it is they are trying to do. Over in Iraq, we had a lot of what are called explosively formed penetrators, where whole IED is designed to explode up under a vehicle to create the greatest destruction possible. In something that is meant to detonate in a crowd of people, a bomb maker would pack into the IED whatever they had at their disposal—such as nails or ball bearings.
How are IEDs different in a war zone, as opposed to something that is used in a city or other civilian area?
You wrap the fragments around some type of explosive or ordinance. In a warzone you have lots of access to ordinance. Here you probably would probably try to find an explosive for blasting, say dynamite or C-4. Generally speaking a person wouldn’t use fertilizer in this situation, the way they did during the Oklahoma City bombing, because you need a lot of fertilizer—enough to fill a 5-gallon bucket or larger drum—to generate a decent-sized explosion. In a situation like this, you’re going to look for a something denser that you could put in a small location and then attach your cellular trigger to it.
How are these explosives detonated remotely?
The concept is, I need to create the signal between my positive and negative circuit and then set off my fuse. The problem with a timed fuse is that it doesn’t necessarily happen when they want it to.
How do cell phones change this?
The distance someone can be from the blast area is much greater. Generally speaking someone is in a crowd when they use these. Cell phones are also more reliable than other methods of detonating explosives. Within about 30 minutes, someone can buy a $10 phone and be able to set off the device.
What can an examination of the detonated device tell investigators?
We can look and see the method of operations or the signature that the bomb maker had in terms of how they set up the fuse and what type of material they used. That’s our best way of tracking down who is responsible.
How badly are these bombs damaged during a detonation (such that it’s difficult to analyze the pieces for criminal evidence)?
It varies, but you’ll find remnants, wires for example. You might even find a scrap like a red piece of tape that looks the kind of tape used at another bomb site. They’ll also see the complexity of how the bomb was put together. That’s really important too. Some bomb makers will also use other pieces of technology, like using a thyristor instead of connecting directly to the battery. A thyristor acts as a switch when an electrical signal is sent to it. That’s directly connected to the positive and negative diodes in the cell phone. Where you’ll get a real break is if a second or third bomb is found before detonation and the bomb squad is able to dismantle them and analyze how they were built.
Early reports out of Boston were that law enforcement had the cell network in the area around the finish line shut down (although the mobile service providers disputed that they had shut down their networks). Regardless, why would law enforcement want to cut off cell service?
In shutting down cell service, you block the ability to create that circuit and ignite that fuse. In the military we would use jamming devices on our trucks, sometimes seven or eight of them on a single vehicle. Some of them work, some don’t. If law enforcement in Boston did shut down the service it could have been because they found other, undetonated IEDs that were equipped with cell phones.
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Bombings End Decade of Strikingly Few Successful Terrorism Attacks in U.S.
By SCOTT SHANE
Published: April 16, 2013
WASHINGTON — The bombing of the Boston Marathon on Monday was the end of more than a decade in which the United States experienced strikingly few terrorist attacks, in part because of the far more aggressive law enforcement tactics that arose after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
In fact, the Sept. 11 attacks were an anomaly in an overall gradual decline in the number of terrorist attacks since the 1970s, according to the Global Terrorism Database, one of the most authoritative sources of terrorism statistics, which is maintained by a consortium of researchers and based at the University of Maryland.
Since 2001, the number of fatalities in terrorist attacks has reached double digits in only one year, 2009, when an Army psychiatrist killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex., officials say. That was a sharp contrast with the 1970s, by far the most violent decade since the tracking began in 1970, the database shows.
But the toll of injuries in the double bombing in Boston, with 3 dead and 176 wounded, ranks among the highest casualty counts in recent American history, exceeded only by Sept. 11, the 1993 World Trade Center attack, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the poisoning of restaurant salad bars with salmonella bacteria by religious cultists in Oregon in 1984.
“I think people are actually surprised when they learn that there’s been a steady decline in terrorist attacks in the U.S. since 1970,” said Gary LaFree, a University of Maryland criminologist and the director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, which maintains the database.
In the 1970s, about 1,350 attacks were carried out by a long list of radical groups, including extremists of the left and the right, white supremacists, Puerto Rican nationalists and black militants, Dr. LaFree said. The numbers fell in the 1980s, as the groups were eroded by arrests and defections, and again in the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had inspired or covertly supported some violent leftist groups, Dr. LaFree said.
He said there were about 40 percent more attacks in the United States in the decade before Sept. 11 than in the decade after.
“As a result of 9/11, there’s been a revolution in the way law enforcement treats this problem,” Dr. LaFree said. “Police agencies, led by the F.B.I., are far more proactive. They’re interrupting the plots before the attacker gets out the door.”
Spectators at the Boston Marathon described a heavy security presence, as has become standard at public events since 2001, including bomb-sniffing dogs that were deployed before the race. But the attack demonstrated an adage in counterterrorism: security officials have to be good all the time, and terrorists have to be good only once.
The terrorism consortium counted six past marathons disrupted by violent episodes: three in Northern Ireland and one each in Bahrain, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The only deaths occurred in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in 2008, when a Tamil Tiger militant blew himself up as a marathon started, killing 14 people and wounding 83 others.
Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University, said that a marathon was a particularly difficult event to secure. “It’s a 26-mile route, densely packed in places, and you can’t search people the way you can for a stadium event,” he said.
One other statistic offers a cautionary note as investigators search for clues about the identity of the perpetrators of the Boston attack. About half of the attacks worldwide, and nearly a third of those in the United States, have never been solved, Dr. LaFree said.
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http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/294461-second-poison-letter-sent-to-white-house
From the article:
Authorities have intercepted a letter to the White House that tested positive for ricin poison, according to multiple media reports.
The Secret Service has acknowledged the letter addressed to President Obama contained a suspicious substance but has not stated it was ricin, a deadly poison.
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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/04/stories-in-the-smoke-what-a-bomb-expert-sees.html
Dr. Adam B. Hall, a forensic chemist and former crime-scene analyst for the Massachusetts State Police, teaches at the Boston University School of Medicine, home to a highly regarded forensic-science program. He had just left campus on Monday, around 3 P.M., when ambulances screamed past him on Massachusetts Avenue, which connects the South End of the city with the Back Bay, where thousands of marathon runners were still making their way toward the finish line, at Copley Square. Hall figured the urgency was due to an unusually high number of fatigued or injured runners. Then along came a bomb-squad truck, an unmistakable sight for Hall, who has processed hundreds of crime scenes, most involving arson and explosives.
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http://thehill.com/homenews/news/294675-suspect-arrested-in-ricin-letters-case
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If he is guilty, attempted murder of the President and a US Senator calls for the longest possible sentence!
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http://shoebat.com/2013/04/18/exclusive-photo-of-alharbi-in-hospital-and-more-evidence-of-coverup/
Foto of suspects:
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/feds_have_men_in_sights_j43UJwXZncr0wmysU42scJ
===========================
Also, beware of scams etc:
Continue to be on the lookout for SCAMs related to the Boston Marathon bombing..
UPDATE: Now Over 125 Domains Related To Boston Explosion Including “Relief” Domains (The Domains) There are now at least 125 domain names that have been recently registered relating to the explosions at the Boston Marathon today and most troubling many that look like charitable domains that can be be used to raise money for the victims. Over 20 of the domain .com/.net domains registered today sound like they could be used for fundraising efforts for the victims so we need to watch those to make sure they are only used by licensed and regulated charities…
Boston-Related Malware Campaigns Have Begun (Internet Storm Center) About mid-afternoon yesterday (Central time - US), Boston related spam campaigns have begun. The general "hook" is that it sends a URL with a subject about the video from the explosions. Similar to when Osama Bin Laden was killed and fake images were used as a hook, in this case, the video is relevant to the story and being used as a hook. Right now, very roughly 10-20% of all spam is related to this (some spamtraps reporting more, some less). Similar IPs have also been sending pump & dump scams so likely the same group has re-tasted itself. Here is a list of subjects I've seen hit spam traps…
Fake Boston Marathon Scams Update (Internet Storm Center) Yesterday, TheDomains reported there was 125 potentially fake domains registered just hours after the attack in Boston. By my current count, I see 234. Some of these are just parked domains, some are squatters who are keeping the domains from bad people. A couple are soliciting donations (one is soliciting bitcoins, oddly enough). So far, there has been no reports of any spam related to this but there have been a few fake twitter accounts which are fairly quickly getting squashed. Oh, and one lawsuit-lawyer related site in connection to the event but that's a different kind of scum then we typically deal with here. But so far, most of the domains are parked (typically at GoDaddy, but don't read that as a swipe at them) or they don't resolve anywhere…
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There are several clips at this URL as well as the following text:
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/04/18/report-saudi-national-ruled-out-as-suspect-in-boston-marathon-bombings-to-be-deported-on-national-security-grounds-next-week/
Exclusive: Saudi National Once Considered ‘Person of Interest’ May Be Deported on ‘Security’ Grounds — And How It’s Supposed to Be Framed
Apr. 18, 2013 12:30am
UPDATE 4:10 — Immigrations and Customs Enforcement responded to TheBlaze’s report on Al Alharbi, calling it “categorically false. Read the update here.
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Editor’s note: Please see the Editors’ UPDATES we will be placing in order of most-recent below. TheBlaze’s Jonathon M. Seidl contributed to this report.
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Key points:
•On Sean Hannity’s Fox News program Wednesday night, terror expert Steve Emerson cited sources saying Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi, the Saudi national who was briefly named a “person of interest” in the Boston Marathon bombings, is being deported on Tuesday.
•Thursday morning, Glenn Beck revealed on radio that TheBlaze was informed by sources that the Saudi national’s visa had been revoked and he was, in fact, going to be deported on “security and related grounds.”
•Among other things, sources told TheBlaze that the Saudi national had ties to a well-connected Saudi family and that his deportation was set to be framed as a “voluntary” departure to be with his family.
•A file, called an “event,” was started on him three days ago.
•While discussing the issue on radio, TheBlaze’s Chief Content Officer Joel Cheatwood revealed that the government is now considering not deporting Ali Alharbi.
UPDATE VI (12:50 pm ET):
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano had a fiery exchange with Rep. Jeff Duncan during a House hearing Thursday morning over reports that Al Alharbi is being considered for deportation.
Napolitano refused to entertain a question regarding if it would be “negligence” to deport someone who just days ago was a person of interest.
.
“I’m not going to answer that question,” she shot back after being pressed by Duncan and denying any knowledge of such a plan. “That question is so full with misstatements and misapprehensions that it is not worthy of an answer.”
Watch her response and read her other fiery comments in our full write-up here.
UPDATE V (12:13 pm ET):
Sen. Rand Paul reacted to TheBlaze’s report during a radio interview with Glenn Beck by saying he will be “looking into” the report. He also added that in general the United States needs to “have more scrutiny on these students when they arrive.”
Read the full report here.
UPDATE IV:
You can watch Glenn Beck break the news on radio below:
Your browser does not support iframes.
UPDATE III (10:50 am ET):
TheBlaze Chief Content Officer Joel Cheatwood reported on “The Glenn Beck Program” Thursday morning that TheBlaze has been informed that the government is now considering not deporting Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi.
“Just got a note from one of our investigative reporters that she has been told that there is now discussion that they may not allow this man to be deported,” Cheatwood said.
UPDATE II:
The blog Shoebat.com, run by anti-Islamist Walid Shoebat, has posted two pictures allegedly of Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi smiling in the hospital:
A photo allegedly of Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi in the hospital.
Another alleged photo of Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi. It’s unclear who the man on the right is.
At least one of the photos appears to either have originated from, or is at least included in, an Arabic language report here.
UPDATE I:
Sources tell TheBlaze that the Saudi national is set to be deported on “security and related grounds.” His visa also has been revoked. Below is some of the information that has been communicated to us:
1. One source at the FBI and another at the Saudi Embassy referred to the student as connected to an important Saudi family.
2. An “event” was created on this guy three days ago. An event is a file. The file contains his deportation record and the reason he is being deported. According to ICE the reason is under section 212 3B — “Security and related grounds” — “Terrorist activities”
3. His visa has been revoked.
4. The FBI said a file was started “just in case he was found to be connected to the crime,” however, the file shows he was scheduled to be deported. This was not a precaution, it was in “orders.”
5. One source said they believe a “voluntary” departure has been signed — that means the Saudi Student could be out of the country as early as today.
6. The file was immediately classified. We believe the deportation order will be classified as well — requiring a FOIA to get it.
7. The story was going to be “he wanted to go home,” however he was actually being deported.
8. Our source said the FBI believes the Saudi student is tied to 2 to 3 more people.
9. Our source said this “looks like they were trying to make this a ‘lone wolf’ crime so, the Saudi government would be spared embarrassment and the U.S. would avoid explaining how a terror cell was active when we had AQ on the run.”
–
Appearing on “Hannity” Wednesday night, the Investigative Project on Terrorism’s Steve Emerson reported that Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi, the Saudi national who was briefly named a “person of interest” in the Boston Marathon bombings, is being deported on Tuesday. He based his information on a number of his confidential sources.
“I just learned from my own sources that he is now going to be deported on national security grounds next Tuesday,” Emerson said.
Host Sean Hannity referenced a report by Reuters that revealed President Barack Obama met with Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal at the White House Wednesday. They reportedly discussed the conflict in Syria.
“The meeting was not on Obama’s public schedule,” the report adds.
Watch below via Fox News:
Emerson’s claims have not been verified.
TheBlaze’s Jonathon M. Seidl contributed to this report.
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http://www.rollcall.com/news/ricin_case_an_inside_look_at_capitol_polices_role_in_investigation-224151-1.html?ET=rollcall:e15512:105450a:&st=email&pos=eam
From the article:
The Capitol Police took the key first step: It asked Wicker’s office whether it had ever had any correspondences with a constituent who had the initials “KC.”
It turned out, the Washington office had heard multiple times from someone named Paul Kevin Curtis, who in each correspondence signed off with the line “This is KEVIN CURTIS and I approve this message.”
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http://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/chechen-president-blames-american-upbringing-for-suspected-b
----------------------------------------------
IPT News
April 19, 2013
http://www.investigativeproject.org/3981/bombing-suspects-lauded-jihad
While police in and around Boston hunt for 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the suspected Boston Marathon bombers, information gathered from various social media outlets indicate that he and his brother, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, harbored radical Islamic beliefs.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed overnight as police closed in on him and the hunt for Dzhokhar remains active. An MIT security officer was shot and killed in the firefight.
This is believed to be Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's Youtube page. Several of the posts feature radical Islamic rhetoric. In addition, a graphic video about Syria appears on Tsarnaev's page on a Russian version of Facebook.
The brothers came to the United States from Chechnya, a predominantly Muslim state which declared independence from Russia in 1991, resulting in years of violence and terrorist strikes. Another video Tsarnaev posted was simply called "Terrorists." But that video has been taken down. Yet another that was posted last summer, lauds "The promised emergence of the black flags from the promised land of Khorasan." It celebrates jihadis posing "with a flag of the Taliban's Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan," the Long War Journal reported. The video has an apocalyptic message anticipating a time when the forces of Islam, led by the Mahdi, the Guided One, will conquer the world prior to the Day of Judgment. Part of this battle will be the conquest of the Holy Land.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a boxer who told an interviewer in 2009 that he had no American friends. "I don't understand them," he said. An Amazon.com wish list believed to be Tamerlan's includes several books on forgery and the books The Lone Wolf And the Bear: Three Centuries of Chechen Defiance of Russian Rule and Allah's Mountains: The Battle for Chechnya, New Edition.
Eric Mercado, a former high school classmate of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, told CNN that he and his friends remember a conversation in which Tsarnaev said, "When justified, terrorism isn't necessarily a bad thing." The comment was dismissed as outlandish. "No one wants to believe that their friend from high school is a quote-unquote 'terrorist,'" Mercado said.
The bombs, reportedly packed inside pressure cookers, bear striking resemblances to instructions offered by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula's Inspire magazine. One article suggested that pressure cooker bombs should be "placed in crowded areas and left to blow up. More than one of these could be planted to explode at the same time. However, keep in mind that the range of the shrapnel in this operation is short range so the pressurized cooker or pipe should be placed close to the intended targets and should not be concealed from them by barriers such as walls."
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Very interesting!
http://imgur.com/a/sUrnA
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This from the Oath Keepers web site - the group had planned a rally today on Lexington Green of former military and law enforcement members:
It strikes us as perverse and absurd that the people in Watertown are being told to stay indoors and let the "professional protectors" handle it. That is exactly backwards from what a free people in a Republic are supposed to do. In the Founders time, the hue and cry would have gone up, the people would have turned out en mass, muskets and hatchets in hand, and hunted the bastard(s) down post-haste.
How could a jihadist on the run escape if everyone in the community is actively hunting for him? They all know who lives in their neghborhood and who doesn't. They could all search their own houses and help search their neighbors' homes in short order and hunt him down.
But the message from the government is "there's a wolf on the loose! So all you sheep must stay in your pens and barns and let us authorized professional sheperds and sheep dogs handle it. Be afraid! Don't try to stop the wolf. We will search your pens one by one till we find him. Till then you can not come out of your pens, or we will punish you.". Disgusting.
How far we have fallen into slavery and servile dependence. And how far from being a strong, free people in a free Republic.
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Here is the story from Breitbart.com - very suspicious indeed what goes on with Saudis in this country in the immediate aftermath of terrorist attacks:
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/04/18/Acts-of-War-Dont-Get-Diplomatic-Immunity
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I couldn't disagree more.
This from the Oath Keepers web site - the group had planned a rally today on Lexington Green of former military and law enforcement members:
It strikes us as perverse and absurd that the people in Watertown are being told to stay indoors and let the "professional protectors" handle it. That is exactly backwards from what a free people in a Republic are supposed to do. In the Founders time, the hue and cry would have gone up, the people would have turned out en mass, muskets and hatchets in hand, and hunted the bastard(s) down post-haste.
How could a jihadist on the run escape if everyone in the community is actively hunting for him? They all know who lives in their neghborhood and who doesn't. They could all search their own houses and help search their neighbors' homes in short order and hunt him down.
But the message from the government is "there's a wolf on the loose! So all you sheep must stay in your pens and barns and let us authorized professional sheperds and sheep dogs handle it. Be afraid! Don't try to stop the wolf. We will search your pens one by one till we find him. Till then you can not come out of your pens, or we will punish you.". Disgusting.
How far we have fallen into slavery and servile dependence. And how far from being a strong, free people in a free Republic.
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GM - Are you being sarcastic?
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GM - Are you being sarcastic?
Nope, a high risk scenario like that has the potential to go very wrong, so clearing the field of non-combatants was exactly the right thing to do.
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So, now that we know that not ALL Muslims bombed Boston this week, will the white house declare it "workplace violence" or a "spontaneous protest" resulting from a YouTube video?
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GM:
Would you break down for us please the law and the logic of not mirandizing the captured killer?
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G M - I'm not suggesting that citizens ought to have taken to the streets to hunt this guy(s) down, but it's undeniable that during a week when the Senate voted to infringe upon the rights of gun owners, the residents in Boston were cowering in fear and locked in their homes hoping that one of the two bombers didn’t go into their homes and take them hostage while they’re hiding from the cops. I think that's the larger point I was actually attempting to make by quoting Oath Keepers' statement.
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GM:
Would you break down for us please the law and the logic of not mirandizing the captured killer?
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/us/25miranda-text.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print
"There may be exceptional cases in which, although all relevant public safety questions have been asked, agents nonetheless conclude that continued unwarned interrogation is necessary to collect valuable and timely intelligence not related to any immediate threat, and that the government's interest in obtaining this intelligence outweighs the disadvantages of proceeding with unwarned interrogation. [4] In these instances, agents should seek SAC approval to proceed with unwarned interrogation after the public safety questioning is concluded. Whenever feasible, the SAC will consult with FBI-HQ (including OGC) and Department of Justice attorneys before granting approval. Presentment of an arrestee may not be delayed simply to continue the interrogation, unless the defendant has timely waived prompt presentment."
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Today's WSJ editorial suggested that the Miranda issue is not really what is important here-- there is already enough evidence to convict-- and that the real issue is whether to declare him an enemy combatant. I gather that this will not be done and that this will be treated as a criminal case.
What are our thoughts on this?
Also, what are our thoughts on the way the city was shut down? What criteria should guide such a decision?
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http://youtu.be/4nrkcUV_7Qk
http://youtu.be/FQ1-ZUN3Li0
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GM:
Would you break down for us please the law and the logic of not mirandizing the captured killer?
From my experience, (not playing at the federal level i'll note) Miranda hasn't even been a big deal as long as you are smooth in your delivery and only do it one time as part of the Q and A routine once you've established a degree of rapport with the suspect. As far as the legal complexities, I'll defer to Orin Kerr below.
http://www.volokh.com/2013/04/20/tsarnaev-and-miranda-rights/
Tsarnaev and Miranda Rights
Orin Kerr • April 20, 2013 2:18 am
Law enforcement has successfully captured Dzhokar Tsarnaev, and DOJ has announced that Tsarnaev is being interrogated without first being read his Miranda rights because the DOJ thinks that the public safety exception to Miranda applies. Back in 2010, I blogged a lot about Miranda in this setting. Here are a few reminders about the law here:
1) A lot of people assume that the police are required to read a suspect his Miranda rights upon arrest. That is, they assume that one of a person’s rights is the right to be read their rights. It often happens that way on Law & Order, but that’s not what the law actually requires. The police aren’t required to follow Miranda. Miranda is a set of rules the government can chose to follow if they want to admit a person’s statements in a criminal case in court, not a set of rules they have to follow in every case. Under Chavez v. Martinez, 538 U.S. 760 (2003), it is lawful for the police to not read a suspect his Miranda rights, interrogate him, and then obtain a statement. Chavez holds that a person’s Miranda rights are violated only if the statement is admitted in court, even if the statement is obtained in violation of Miranda. See id. at 772-73. Further, the prosecution is even allowed to admit any physical evidence discovered as a fruit of the statement obtained in violation of Miranda — only the actual statement can be excluded. See United States v. Patane, 542 U.S. 630 (2004). So, contrary to what a lot of people think, it is legal for the government to even intentionally violate Miranda so long as they don’t try to seek admission of the suspect’s statements in court.
2) Even if we assume that the police later seek to admit a statement from Tsarnaev from post-arrest custodial interrogation outside Miranda, a court would allow an initial pre-Miranda interrogation to be admissible under the public safety exception of New York v. Quarles, 467 U.S. 649 (1984). It’s not clear how long the public safety exception will continue to apply: At some point in time, it becomes harder to say that the agents needed to dispense with Miranda in light of the threat to public safety. We don’t have good cases on when that line might be crossed, in part because (fortunately) there aren’t many similar cases. So the longer investigators interrogate Tsarnaev outside Miranda, the more they run the risk that some statements they obtain from him may be inadmissible. But recall that under (1), the government is still free to question Tsarnaev outside Miranda as long as the government accepts the uncertainty of whether those statements would be admissible in a criminal case against him. Assuming that the evidence against Tsarnaev’s many different crimes over the last week is likely to be overwhelming, agents may not need any statements from him for a criminal case. They may simply want whatever intelligence he can provide for use in broader antiterrorism efforts, and Miranda is no impediment in that case. The agents are free to question Tsarnaev outside Miranda to gather intellligence as long as they don’t cross the line into coercing statements from him. See, e.g., Townsend v. Sain, 372 U.S. 293 (1963).
3) It is true that, under existing law, interviewing Tsarnaev for an extended period without reading him his Miranda rights and obtaining a waiver creates a risk that any incriminating statements made after an extended period may not be admissible in court in a criminal prosecution against Tsarnaev. However, if Tsarnaev does end up making incriminating statements that fall outside the public safety exception, and the government wants to use those statements in court against him, the government has a possible remedy to get the substance of even those statements admitted. At the end of the interrogation, agents can give him his Miranda warnings, see if he will waive his rights waiver, and, if he does, try to get Tsarnaev to repeat his pre-waiver incriminating statements. Because the two-stage interview likely would not be deemed an intentional two-step interrogation technique designed to circumvent Miranda, a court would very likely allow the post-Miranda, post-waiver statement under Justice Kennedy’s controlling opinion in Missouri v. Seibert, 542 U.S. 600 (2004).
UPDATE: I have fiddled with the post a bit to make it clearer.
ANOTHER UPDATE: If Tsarnaev is going to be charged in federal court, the more pressing limit on his interrogation may be the limits imposed by Rule 5 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. See generally Corley v. United States (2009).
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G M - I'm not suggesting that citizens ought to have taken to the streets to hunt this guy(s) down, but it's undeniable that during a week when the Senate voted to infringe upon the rights of gun owners, the residents in Boston were cowering in fear and locked in their homes hoping that one of the two bombers didn’t go into their homes and take them hostage while they’re hiding from the cops. I think that's the larger point I was actually attempting to make by quoting Oath Keepers' statement.
I think most cops, even in the Northeast tend to think armed citizens are a good thing in general and using them to protect their homes is reasonable.
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Thank you. As usual, a good, pertinent citation.
As I continue to reflect upon the questions presented by all this, here is the current state of my thinking.
a) OK to not have mirandized.
b) On the Brett Baier Roundtable tonight (with a cameo by Britt Hume) it came out that the declaration of EC can be contested in front of a federal judge and that EC does not necessarily mean a military tribunal trial. After the interrogation is over (with no lawyer present) the accused can be tossed back into the criminal system. Knowing these things, it seems to me that the better course of action would have been to declare him an enemy combatant for now.
c) In that it has been decided to treat this as a criminal matter, it was correct to mirandize him today.
==========================
Noonan:
The past few days I’ve looked through news reports searching in vain for one item: how did the brothers get their money? Did they ever have jobs? Who or what supported them? They had cellphones, computers, stylish clothes, sunglasses, gym equipment and gym membership, enough money to go out to dinner and have parties. They had an arsenal of guns and money to make bombs. The elder brother, Tamerlan, 26, had no discernible record of employment and yet was able to visit Russia for six months in 2012. The FBI investigated him. How did they think he was paying for it? The younger brother, Dzhokhar, was a college student, but no word on how he came up with spending money. The father doesn’t seem to have had anything—he is said to have sometimes fixed cars on the street when he lived in Cambridge, for $10 an hour cash. The mother gave facials at home. Anyway, the money lines. Where did it come from?
* * *
My mind also has been going back to the first decades of the 20th century and the wave of anarchist bombings that swept New York and Washington. The bombings were politically and ideologically inspired, but the anarchists’ target was not the general population. They went after political officials, public figures, Wall Street. They tried to kill John D. Rockefeller. They bombed the Washington home of the U.S. attorney general, Mitchell Palmer, who in response put together an investigative unit headed by an eager young G-man, as they would be called, named J. Edgar Hoover. Two things followed the anarchist bombings, which were part of, and became conflated in the public mind with, the Red Scare of the 1920s. The first was increased power for the federal government. Hoover would go on to head the new Federal Bureau of Investigation, which grew mightier by the decade. The other was America’s first move, after the great wave of European immigration that had hit America’s shores from 1840 through 1920, to slow immigration through new, generally applicable federal laws.
So: unrest, clashing ideologies, bombings, followed by enhanced power for and funding of the federal government, and a public reaction, resulting in law, against heavy and open immigration. Is past prologue? Having seen all the city, state and federal muscle brought to bear in Boston—thermal imaging done from helicopters—it’s hard to imagine the law enforcement end can or will be dramatically beefed up further. But the FBI and Homeland Security will want more resources for tracking sketchy characters like the brothers Tsarnaev. As for immigration, it’s hard to believe that under the present circumstances there will be great public clamor to support the Gang of Eight bill to legalize and regularize. Something tells me it’s going to be back to the drawing board for immigration reform.
A major problem for those who want an immigration bill is lack of faith in government to do all the jobs it’s set itself well. People don’t trust it to be able to execute—to do, adequately, the thing it’s set itself to do in its big new laws. We always look at the motives and politics behind a big bill, and talk about that. But simple noncrisis execution—the ability to track and deal with a Tamerlan Tsarnaeu, or to patrol and control a huge border—is a big reason why which people lack faith. Because, you know, they read the papers.
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Pasted from another forum which prefers to remain low-key with permission of the author:
**********WARNING: layman about to delve into the murky waters of the realm of law**********
First, the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bill of Rights
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Probable cause being defined as:
Quote:
In General
A. Probable cause exists when the facts and circumstances within an officer’s knowledge, and of which she has reasonably trustworthy information, are sufficient in themselves to permit a person of reasonable caution to believe that:
1. Arrests
An offense has been committed, and the person to be arrested committed it.
2. Searches
The item to be searched for is present at a certain place at a certain time and is either:
A. The fruit of a crime;
B. The instrumentality of a crime;
C. Evidence of a crime; or
D. Contraband.
http://sparkcharts.sparknotes.com/le...e/section6.php
or [emphasis added]
Quote:
Generally speaking, probable cause is described from the point of view of a reasonable person. In other words, probable cause is an objective test and therefore, it can’t simply stem from a police officer’s hunch or suspicion that a crime has been committed. Specific facts and circumstances are required to make an adequate showing of probable cause that a crime has been committed or that evidence of a crime exists at the location that is to be searched.
http://www.4thamendment.net/probablecause.html
Blanket searches are prohibited:
Quote:
Blanket searches are unreasonable, however 'evenhanded' they may be, in the traditional criminal law enforcement context. See, e.g., Ybarra v. Illinois, 444 U.S. 85, 91-2, 92 n.4 ('79) (invalidating a blanket patdown search of all patrons in a tavern, even though there was probable cause to search the bartender and the premises). The ill that the Fourth Amendment prevents is not merely the arbitrariness of police discretion to single out individuals for attention, but also the unwarranted domination and control of the citizenry through fear of baseless but 'evenhanded' general police searches.
http://www.lectlaw.com/def/f081.htm
The only potentially applicable exception I can find is for Exigent Circumstances [emphasis added]:
Quote:
There are also "exigent circumstances" exceptions to the warrant requirement. Exigent circumstances arise when the law enforcement officers have reasonable grounds to believe that there is an immediate need to protect their lives, the lives of others, their property, or that of others, the search is not motivated by an intent to arrest and seize evidence, and there is some reasonable basis, to associate an emergency with the area or place to be searched.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth...s_Constitution
or
Quote:
There is also an exception to the requirement of probable cause in certain emergency situations. If there is a threat to public safety or a risk that evidence will be lost or destroyed, police are not required to make a showing of probable cause in order to conduct a search and seizure.
http://www.4thamendment.net/probablecause.html
So, some questions that come to mind are:
1. If the police cordon off a 30-block area (or whatever it was) does the exigent circumstance of a dangerous suspect they believe to be on the loose in that area give them carte blanche authority to barge into and search each and every home in that large area they so choose whether or not they have any articulable suspicion the suspect is in a particular home?
2. If they lack that specific reason and remove residents from an arbitrary house are they actually placing those residents, previously holed up in their home in relative safety, at increased danger from the suspect believed to be in the area?
3. If they don't have the authority to search homes door-to-door, might they instead search the yards and/or curtilage of the homes in the area for evidence of the suspect, particularly signs of forced entry, which would then give them the probable cause for a search of the home in question? Wouldn't this be a more efficient method of searching the area anyway and in fact likely have most quickly led to the location of the suspect in this case?
4. If they announce their intention to search an arbitrary occupied home in the cordoned area without any particular suspicion and are met by armed residents who do not match the suspect description, affirm that the suspect is not in the home and refuse/resist entry by the police, will the police take the time out from their search to engage the residents by force, up to and including deadly force, in order to conduct that search, or back off and move along to the next house? Recall, this is all ostensibly justified in order to protect the public from danger.
Inquiring minds want to know....
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http://www.conservativerefocus.com/blog5.php
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Third post of the morning:
The Boston Bombing and the Case for FBI Stings
IPT News
April 22, 2013
http://www.investigativeproject.org/3985/the-boston-bombing-and-the-case-for-fbi-stings
With a few lucky breaks, last week's Boston Marathon bombing could have had a dramatically different outcome. Had Tamerlan or Dzhokhar Tsarnaev sought help building their bombs on jihadist web forums, FBI agents likely would have detected it. They would have sent in an undercover operative or an informant. And the Tsarnaevs would have been arrested as they tried to detonate their bombs, which had been rendered inert by the FBI.
And it would have elicited howls of protest from Islamists and their supporters.
Instead, four people are dead, including the MIT police officer killed in Friday's shootout, and more than 150 people are injured. Many have lost limbs. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was charged Monday with using a weapon of mass destruction.
It is easy to imagine the reaction had investigators discovered him and his brother sooner.
"Entrapment!" defense attorneys would argue. "The FBI is fabricating terror threats, using hapless stooges incapable of harming anyone," Islamist advocacy groups would say.
We know this because this is how the scenario has played out dozens of times in recent years. But last week's bombing shows you don't need to be a master criminal to murder and maim innocent people. The ingredients to build the pressure-cooker bombs came straight out of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula's Inspire magazine. The brainchild of American-born operative Samir Khan – killed in a 2011 drone strike along with fellow American Anwar al-Awlaki – Inspire offered suggestions for small-scale, homegrown jihadi attacks in each issue.
Instructions for the pressure-cooker bomb came from an article headlined "Make a bomb in the kitchen of your Mom." A subsequent article referred to that recipe and advised that pressure cooker bombs should be "placed in crowded areas and left to blow up. More than one of these could be planted to explode at the same time. However, keep in mind that the range of the shrapnel in this operation is short range so the pressurized cooker or pipe should be placed close to the intended targets and should not be concealed from them by barriers such as walls."
The Boston Marathon bombs blew up within 12 seconds of each other, about a block apart.
The Tsarnaevs succeeded in carrying out an attack where others have come close, but failed. At least two other would-be terrorists came chillingly close to attacks that likely would have triggered more casualties than were suffered in Boston. Faisal Shahzad parked an explosive-laden car in Times Square. But he made mistakes in the chemical composition and it failed to detonate.
In Texas, Naser Jason Abdo had copies of Inspire magazine in his hotel room, and ingredients for pressure-cooker bombs, when police swooped in. Abdo was nabbed thanks to an alert gun store owner who took notice and called authorities after Abdo arrived by taxi cab to a fairly remote outlet and acted suspiciously.
His plan was to detonate the bombs at a restaurant popular with Fort Hood personnel and then shoot survivors as they scrambled out of the debris. He did it out of a sense of religious duty.
But, as we have repeatedly chronicled, FBI sting operations meant to interdict terrorists before they strike, are condemned routinely as misguided and unnecessary. Islamist advocacy groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) say the FBI is creating terrorists who otherwise would not turn violent.
The FBI, "by using informants acting as agent provocateurs, has recruited more so called extremist Muslims than al-Qaida themselves," CAIR-Michigan Director Dawud Walid said in 2010. The use of informants are among "self-deluding initiatives that seem to seek terror-case quotas," CAIR Chicago's Ahmed Rehab wrote in 2009.
"What the FBI came and did was enable them to become actual terrorists, and then came and saved the day," CAIR-San Francisco's Zahra Billoo said in 2010. The FBI "is creating these huge terror plots where they don't exist."
But Ali Soufan, a former FBI supervisory special agent and a veteran of some sting operations, defended the practice as vital for national security.
"As you can't prosecute someone just for professing a desire to kill Americans, and you can't read minds to determine if they really intend to carry out their threats, either you wait to see if the real al Qaeda gets in contact—and hope you can track them—or you intercede," he wrote in a Wall Street Journal book review. "Most Americans would no doubt prefer the latter option to taking a serious gamble with civilian lives."
How many Boston Marathon attacks does it take to emphasize that point? How many dead 8 year olds, exchange students or innocent young women are enough to make interdiction acceptable?
In these stings, agents are careful to give the target an out – offering other ways to serve the cause of jihad without killing innocent people. But the suspects reject those or there wouldn't be a prosecution.
In Portland, Mohamed Mohamud would not budge from his ambition to blow up a bomb at a crowded downtown Christmas tree lighting ceremony packed with women and children. He was arrested after trying to detonate the bomb, only to discover the FBI rendered it inoperable.
On Feb. 17, 2012, Amine El-Khalifi thought he was about to become the first suicide bomber in America. He planned to shoot guards at the entrance to the U.S. Capitol, force his way in, and detonate a suicide bomb packed into his jacket. He practiced the attack in a hotel room three days earlier. FBI agents arrested him as he walked alone, carrying the MAC-10 automatic and wore the bomb jacket.
Who would prefer leaving El-Khalifi alone to his own devices? Who doesn't wish the Tsarnaevs had met a similar fate?
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Why the Boston Bombers Succeeded
April 23, 2013 | 0900 GMT
By Scott Stewart
Vice President of Analysis
When seeking to place an attack like the April 15 Boston Marathon bombing into context, it is helpful to classify the actors responsible, if possible. Such a classification can help us understand how an attack fits into the analytical narrative of what is happening and what is likely to come. These classifications will consider factors such as ideology, state sponsorship and perhaps most important, the kind of operative involved.
In a case where we are dealing with an apparent jihadist operative, before we can classify him or her we must first have a clear taxonomy of the jihadist movement. At Stratfor, we generally consider the jihadist movement to be divided into three basic elements: the al Qaeda core organization, the regional jihadist franchises, such as al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and grassroots operatives who are radicalized, inspired and perhaps equipped by the other two tiers but who are not members of either.
Within the three-tier jihadist movement there exist two distinct types of operatives. One of these is the professional terrorist operative, a person who is a member of the al Qaeda core or of one of the regional franchises. These individuals swear loyalty to the leader and then follow orders from the organization's hierarchy. Second, there are amateur operatives who never join a group and whose actions are not guided by the specific orders of a hierarchical group. They follow a bottom-up or grassroots organizational model rather than a hierarchical or top-down approach.
There is a great deal of variety among professional terrorists, especially if we break them down according to the functions they perform within an organization, roles including that of planners, finance and logistics specialists, couriers, surveillance operatives, bombmakers, et cetera. There is also a great deal of variety within the ranks of grassroots operatives, although it is broken down more by their interaction with formal groups rather than their function. At one end of the grassroots spectrum are the lone wolf operatives, or phantom cells. These are individuals or small groups that become radicalized by jihadist ideology but that do not have any contact with the organization. In theory, the lone wolf/phantom cell model is very secure from an operational security standpoint, but as we've discussed, it takes a very disciplined and driven individual to be a true lone wolf or phantom cell leader, and consequently, we see very few of them.
At the other end of the grassroots spectrum are individuals who have had close interaction with a jihadist group but who never actually joined the organization. Many of them have even attended militant training camps, but they didn't become part of the hierarchical group to the point of swearing an oath of allegiance to the group's leaders and taking orders from the organization. They are not funded and directed by the group.
Indeed, al Qaeda trained tens of thousands of men in its training camps in Afghanistan, Sudan and Pakistan but very few of the men they trained actually ended up joining al Qaeda. Most of the men the group instructed received basic military training in things like using small arms, hand-to-hand combat and basic fire and maneuver. Only the very best from those basic combat training courses were selected to receive advanced training in terrorist tradecraft techniques, such as bombmaking, surveillance, clandestine communications and document forgery. But even of the students who received advanced training in terrorist tradecraft, only a few were ever invited to join the al Qaeda core, which remained a relatively small vanguard organization.
Many of the men who received basic training traveled to fight jihad in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya or returned home to join insurgent or militant groups. Others would eventually end up joining al Qaeda franchise groups in places like Yemen, Iraq, Libya and Algeria. Still others received some basic training but then returned home and never really put their new skills into practice.
Most grassroots jihadists fall along a continuum that stretches between the lone wolf and someone who received advanced terrorist training but never joined al Qaeda or another formal militant group.
Whether the two men suspected of carrying out the April 15 Boston Marathon attack knowingly followed al Qaeda's blueprint for simple attacks by grassroots actors, their actions were fairly consistent with what we have come to expect from such operatives. Certainly based upon what we have seen of this case so far, the Tsarnaev brothers did not appear to possess sophisticated terrorist tradecraft.
For example, regarding the bombs employed in the attack and during the police chase, everything we have seen still points to very simple devices, such as pipe bombs and pressure cooker devices. From a bombmaking tradecraft standpoint, we have yet to see anything that could not be fabricated by reading Inspire magazine, spending a little bit of time on YouTube and conducting some experimentation. As a comparison, consider the far larger and more complex improvised explosive device Anders Behring Breivik, the Oslo bomber, constructed. We know from Breivik's detailed journal that he was a self-taught bombmaker using directions he obtained on the Internet. He was also a lone wolf. And yet he was able to construct a very large improvised explosive device.
Also, although the Tsarnaev brothers did not hold up a convenience store as initially reported, they did conduct an express kidnapping that caused them to have extended contact with their victim while they visited automatic teller machines. They told the victim that they were the bombers and then allowed the victim to live. Such behavior is hardly typical of professional terrorist operatives.
Grassroots Theory
As it has become more difficult for professional terrorists to travel to the United States and the West in general, it has become more difficult for jihadist organizations to conduct attacks in these places. Indeed, this difficulty prompted groups like al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to attempt to attack the United States by dispatching an operative with an underwear bomb and to use printer cartridge bombs to attack cargo aircraft. In response to this difficulty, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula began to adopt the grassroots into their operational doctrine. They first began promoting this approach in 2009 in their Arabic-language magazine Sada al-Malahim. The al Qaeda core organization embraced this approach in May 2010 in an English-language video featuring Adam Gadahn.
In July 2010, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula launched an English-language magazine called Inspire dedicated to radicalizing and equipping grassroots jihadists. Despite the losses that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has experienced on the battlefield, it has continued to devote a great deal of its limited resources toward propagating this concept. It has continued to publish Inspire even after the magazine's founder and editor, Samir Khan, was killed in an American missile strike in Yemen.
The grassroots strategy was perhaps most clearly articulated in the third edition of Inspire magazine, which was published in November 2010 following the failed October 29, 2010, printer bomb operation. In a letter from the editor in which Khan explained what he referred to as "Operation Hemorrhage," he wrote:
"However, to bring down America we do not need to strike big. In such an environment of security phobia that is sweeping America, it is more feasible to stage smaller attacks that involve fewer players and less time to launch and thus we may circumvent the security barriers America has worked so hard to erect. This strategy of attacking the enemy with smaller, but more frequent operations is what some may refer to the strategy of a thousand cuts. The aim is to bleed the enemy to death."
In Adam Gadahn's May 2010 message entitled "A Call to Arms," Gadahn counsels lone wolf jihadists to follow a three-pronged target selection process. They should choose a target with which they are well acquainted, a target that is feasible to hit and a target that, when struck, will have a major impact. The Tsarnaev brothers did all three in Boston.
Implications
Yet despite this clearly articulated theory, it has proved very difficult for jihadist ideologues to convince grassroots operatives to conduct simple attacks using readily available items like in the "build a bomb in the kitchen of your mom" approach, which they have advocated for so long.
This is because most grassroots jihadists have sought to conduct huge, spectacular attacks -- attacks that are outside of their capabilities. This has meant that they have had to search for help to conduct their plans. And that search for help has resulted in their arrest, just as Adam Gadahn warned they would be in his May 2010 message.
There were many plots disrupted in 2012 in which grassroots operatives tried to act beyond their capabilities. These include:
■On Nov. 29, 2012, two brothers from Florida, Raees Alam Qazi and Sheheryar Alam Qazi, were arrested and charged with plotting attacks in New York.
■On Oct. 17, 2012, Bangladeshi national Quazi Nafis was arrested as part of an FBI sting operation after he attempted to detonate a vehicle bomb outside New York's Federal Reserve Bank.
■On Sept. 15, 2012, Adel Daoud was arrested after he parked a Jeep Cherokee outside a Chicago bar and attempted to detonate the bomb he thought it contained. This was also an FBI sting operation.
But the carnage and terrorist theater caused by the Boston attack have shown how following the simple attack model can be highly effective. This will certainly be pointed out in future editions of Inspire magazine, and grassroots operatives will be urged to follow the model established by the Tsarnaev brothers. Unlike operatives like Faisal Shahzad who attempted to go big themselves and failed, the brothers followed the blueprint for a simple attack and the model worked.
It is quite possible that the success of the Boston bombing will help jihadist ideologues finally convince grassroots operatives to get past their grandiose plans and begin to follow the simple attack model in earnest. If this happens, it will obviously have a big impact on law enforcement and intelligence officials who have developed very effective programs of identifying grassroots operatives and drawing them into sting operations. They will now have to adjust their operations.
While these grassroots actors do not have the capability of professional terrorist operatives and do not pose as severe a threat, they pose a much broader, amorphous threat. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies generally do not deal well with ambiguity.
There are simply too many soft targets to protect and some of these simple attacks will inevitably succeed. This means that this low-level broad threat will persist and perhaps even intensify in the immediate future.
As we've previously discussed, the best defense against the grassroots threat are grassroots defenders. These include the police and alert citizens who report suspicious activity -- like people testing bomb designs -- a frequent occurrence before actual bomb attacks. The slogan "If you see something, say something," has been mocked as overly simplistic, but it is nonetheless a necessity in an environment where the broad, ambiguous threat of grassroots terrorism far outstrips the ability of the authorities to see everything. Taking a proactive approach to personal and collective security also beats the alternative of living in terror and apprehensively waiting for the next simple attack.
It is also very important for people to maintain the proper perspective on terrorism. Like car crashes and cancer and natural disasters, terrorism is part of the human condition. People should take prudent, measured actions to prepare for such contingencies and avoid becoming victims (vicarious or otherwise). It is the resilience of the population and its perseverance that will ultimately determine how much a terrorist attack is allowed to terrorize. By separating terror from terrorism, citizens can deny the practitioners of terror the ability to magnify their reach and power.
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Read more: Why the Boston Bombers Succeeded | Stratfor
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Taxpayers Supported Terrorist with Welfare Benefits
Marathon bombings mastermind Tamerlan Tsarnaev was living on taxpayer-funded state welfare benefits even as he was delving deep into the world of radical anti-American Islamism, the Herald has learned. State officials confirmed last night that Tsarnaev, slain in a raging gun battle with police last Friday, was receiving benefits along with his wife, Katherine Russell Tsarnaev, and their 3-year-old daughter.
Married into Terrorism
The FBI is probing whether suspected Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev's widow knew about his deadly marathon plot, a law- enforcement source told The Post yesterday. Federal agents made three visits to the Rhode Island home of the parents of Katherine Russell, 24, an all-American-girl- turned-terrorist's-bride.
America's Insane Asylum for Jihadists
In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon killing spree by foreign-born jihadists, see-no-evil bureaucrats in Washington are stubbornly defending America's lax asylum policies. DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano told the Senate Tuesday that the screening process is rigorous, effective and extensive.
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People are wondering how the events in Boston will affect the immigration debate.
Maybe we should also question how our WELFARE policies affect terror and violence.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/tamerlan-tsarnaev-and-family-received-welfare_719056.html
http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/2013/04/tamerlan_tsarnaev_got_mass_welfare_benefits
In the threads 'America's Inner City' and 'Government Programs' I have attempted to present the problem in welfare-state America that able bodied Americans on welfare end up with idle time on their hands that potentially turns into a force for negativity and evil. Others such as George Gilder in 'Wealth and Poverty' and 'Men and Marriage' argue that the responsibilities associated with productive work and supporting a family tend to turn men away from drug traffic, crime and violence. When you are invested, you have something to lose.
Maybe if these Chechen-American-Massachusites were required to go out and work for a living they might have assimilated, made friends and set some goals and behaviors other than the blow up America message they were receiving over at the Jihad. Interesting that the inner city gangs and the Jihad largely go after the same 18-34 year old male demographic.
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The FBI's Boston File
It turns out this was not a model of post-9/11 antiterror coordination..
Article Comments (143) more in Opinion | Find New $LINKTEXTFIND$ ».
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As it played out last week, the Boston bombing case was declared—by media and political consensus—a model of post-9/11 coordination among federal, state and local law enforcement. "They all worked as they should, as a team," President Obama said on Thursday evening, after the surviving Tsarnaev brother was captured alive. If only this Boston story were that neat and reassuring.
Revelations have since raised serious questions about America's antiterror defenses. Over the weekend, the FBI confirmed what first emerged from press interviews with the mother of the Tsarnaev brothers: In March 2011, the bureau received a tip from the Russians that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was "a follower of radical Islam" and questioned him and his family members. The FBI says its investigation turned up nothing and the Russians didn't reply to a request for additional information.
The FBI also says it didn't know Tamerlan Tsarnaev spent months in 2012 in Dagestan, a restive Muslim region in southern Russia next to Chechnya. A senior FBI official told some Members of Congress his name and date of birth were incorrectly entered—by the CIA, in one account—into a database that checks flight manifests against a list of potential terrorists. Another report said the airline made the spelling mistake.
This Keystone Cops routine gets worse. In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on Tuesday said that her department's "system pinged when he was leaving" the U.S. So DHS knew that Tamerlan Tsarnaev—who had been put on the Treasury Enforcement Communications System, or TECS—was headed back to Russia, but the FBI and CIA didn't. DHS didn't tell anyone else, apparently.
Tamerlan's return to the U.S. last summer failed to "ping" at DHS. His listing on TECS had lapsed, since the FBI had closed his file. Tamerlan's return to Russia should at least have extended his stay on the watch list. The Patriot Act and other policy changes after 9/11 were meant to prevent this kind of cock-up. One arm of America's intelligence and law enforcement apparatus is supposed to know what the other arm is doing.
There are other questions about the FBI's handling of the Tsarnaev case that Congress needs to investigate. It'd be good to know what prompted the tip from the Russians. Was it Tamerlan's electronic contacts with known Islamists in Chechnya or Dagestan? How often do the Russians alert the U.S. about potential extremists and how many leads does the FBI track down?
The FBI's explanation so far is that its agents asked Tamerlan if he was a terrorist, and he said no. The bureau looked and found no other evidence, so it closed the books and in any case had no legal authority to do more. But it would have had such authority if it had sought a surveillance warrant from the FISA court that was established precisely to be able to monitor potential terror risks. Why didn't it seek such a warrant?
We appreciate that pre-empting terror attacks is difficult work, especially involving homegrown jihadists who may not be part of known terror networks. But Tamerlan Tsarnaev did not appear at the Boston marathon out of nowhere. The FBI had interviewed him and he had posted jihadist videos on the Internet. Someone dropped the ball, and dozens of Americans will be scarred forever. The public deserves a full accounting from FBI Director Robert Mueller, not merely an apologia.
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I'm sure this has nothing to do with the CAIR approved terrorism training and purge of anyone who might find a link between the "I" word and terrorism since Buraq became president....
The FBI's Boston File
It turns out this was not a model of post-9/11 antiterror coordination..
Article Comments (143) more in Opinion | Find New $LINKTEXTFIND$ ».
smaller Larger facebooktwittergoogle pluslinked ininShare.0EmailPrintSave ↓ More .
.
smaller Larger
As it played out last week, the Boston bombing case was declared—by media and political consensus—a model of post-9/11 coordination among federal, state and local law enforcement. "They all worked as they should, as a team," President Obama said on Thursday evening, after the surviving Tsarnaev brother was captured alive. If only this Boston story were that neat and reassuring.
Revelations have since raised serious questions about America's antiterror defenses. Over the weekend, the FBI confirmed what first emerged from press interviews with the mother of the Tsarnaev brothers: In March 2011, the bureau received a tip from the Russians that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was "a follower of radical Islam" and questioned him and his family members. The FBI says its investigation turned up nothing and the Russians didn't reply to a request for additional information.
The FBI also says it didn't know Tamerlan Tsarnaev spent months in 2012 in Dagestan, a restive Muslim region in southern Russia next to Chechnya. A senior FBI official told some Members of Congress his name and date of birth were incorrectly entered—by the CIA, in one account—into a database that checks flight manifests against a list of potential terrorists. Another report said the airline made the spelling mistake.
This Keystone Cops routine gets worse. In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on Tuesday said that her department's "system pinged when he was leaving" the U.S. So DHS knew that Tamerlan Tsarnaev—who had been put on the Treasury Enforcement Communications System, or TECS—was headed back to Russia, but the FBI and CIA didn't. DHS didn't tell anyone else, apparently.
Tamerlan's return to the U.S. last summer failed to "ping" at DHS. His listing on TECS had lapsed, since the FBI had closed his file. Tamerlan's return to Russia should at least have extended his stay on the watch list. The Patriot Act and other policy changes after 9/11 were meant to prevent this kind of cock-up. One arm of America's intelligence and law enforcement apparatus is supposed to know what the other arm is doing.
There are other questions about the FBI's handling of the Tsarnaev case that Congress needs to investigate. It'd be good to know what prompted the tip from the Russians. Was it Tamerlan's electronic contacts with known Islamists in Chechnya or Dagestan? How often do the Russians alert the U.S. about potential extremists and how many leads does the FBI track down?
The FBI's explanation so far is that its agents asked Tamerlan if he was a terrorist, and he said no. The bureau looked and found no other evidence, so it closed the books and in any case had no legal authority to do more. But it would have had such authority if it had sought a surveillance warrant from the FISA court that was established precisely to be able to monitor potential terror risks. Why didn't it seek such a warrant?
We appreciate that pre-empting terror attacks is difficult work, especially involving homegrown jihadists who may not be part of known terror networks. But Tamerlan Tsarnaev did not appear at the Boston marathon out of nowhere. The FBI had interviewed him and he had posted jihadist videos on the Internet. Someone dropped the ball, and dozens of Americans will be scarred forever. The public deserves a full accounting from FBI Director Robert Mueller, not merely an apologia.
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Although police feared he was heavily armed, the suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing had no firearms when he came under a barrage of police gunfire that struck the boat where he was hiding, according to multiple federal law enforcement officials.
Authorities said they were desperate to capture Dzhokhar Tsarnaev so he could be questioned. The FBI, however, declined to discuss what prompted the gunfire.
Speaking at the memorial service of slain MIT police officer Sean Collier, who was killed while pursuing the Boston bombing suspects, Vice President Biden praised Collier as "a wonderful kid" and promised, “we will not yield to fear.”
Other law enforcement officials said the shooting may have been prompted by the chaos of the moment and some action that led the officers to believe Tsarnaev had fired a weapon or was about to detonate explosives.
These new details emerged as investigators continued their examination of the movements and motives of Tsarnaev, 19, and his brother, Tamerlan, in last week’s coordinated bombing, which killed three people and wounded more than 250. Law enforcement officials said they do not believe the brothers were connected with a terrorist organization, but they cautioned that the inquiry is at an early stage.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was killed in a confrontation with police in the early morning hours Friday, four days after the marathon bombing. A transit police officer was seriously wounded in the exchange, in which more than 200 rounds were fired and the suspects lobbed homemade explosives at police. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev escaped and was the subject of a massive manhunt. He was cornered hiding in a boat in the driveway of a house in Watertown, Mass., on Friday evening.
Law enforcement officials described the 30 minutes before the arrest of Tsarnaev as chaotic. One characterized it as “the fog of war” and said that in a highly charged atmosphere, one accidental shot could have caused what police call “contagious fire.”
Officers from several agencies gathered around the Watertown house as darkness fell. The FBI was in charge of the scene, but there also were officers from the Massachusetts State Police, local police and transit police.
“They probably didn’t know whether he had a gun,” said one law enforcement official, who like others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. “Hours earlier, he and his brother had killed a police officer, shot another officer and thrown explosives out of their cars as the police were chasing them. They couldn’t assume that he did not have a gun and more explosives.”
The FBI declined to discuss the exact sequence of events that led officers to open fire on Tsarnaev’s hiding place and whether the dozens of bullets that struck the boat caused any of his gunshot wounds.
A spokesman for the FBI said law enforcement agents were tracking an extremely dangerous suspect who had used guns and explosives on a public street to avoid arrest.
“Law enforcement was placed in an extraordinarily dangerous situation,” said FBI spokesman Paul Bresson. “They were dealing with an individual who is alleged to have been involved in the bombings at the Boston Marathon. As if that’s not enough, there were indications of a carjacking, gunfire, an ambushed police officer and bombs thrown earlier. In spite of these extraordinary factors, they were able to capture this individual alive with no further harm to law enforcement. It was a tremendously effective outcome under dire circumstances.”
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Judith Miller: How to Stop Terrorists Before They Kill
The NYPD's surveillance program was designed to detect local terrorists before they strike—and it's working..
By JUDITH MILLER
WSJ
The Boston Police Department responded with extraordinary skill to last week's marathon bombing, but some terrorism experts say that the attack, which killed three people and injured more than 200, may well have been prevented entirely had the perpetrators lived in New York City.
Part of the difference is a matter of numbers and resources. The New York Police Department has a vastly larger force—roughly 35,000 uniformed officers versus Boston's 2,000—and a far larger budget. The NYPD spent $330 million of its $4.6 billion annual budget in 2011 combating terrorism. Yet that is perhaps not New York's most telling advantage.
In the dozen years since 9/11, the city has developed a counterterror program that is a model of how to identify and stop killers like the Tsarnaev brothers before they strike. The 1,000 cops and analysts who work in the NYPD's intelligence and counterterrorism divisions, for instance, would likely have flagged Tamerlan Tsarnaev for surveillance, given Police Commissioner Ray Kelly's insistence on aggressively monitoring groups and individuals suspected of radicalization.
New York cops almost surely would have monitored Tamerlan—the elder of the two brothers—if they had known that Russia had warned the FBI in 2011 that he was an Islamic radical, that he was potentially dangerous, and that he had spent several months in Dagestan, a Russian republic with an Islamic insurgency, in 2012. "We would have been very reluctant to shut down an investigation if we knew all that it seems the bureau knew or could have known, especially once he had traveled to a region of concern," says Mitchell Silber, the former director of intelligence analysis for the NYPD, who now works at K2, a New York-based private security firm.
In August 2007, Mr. Silber and Arvin Bhatt, then also an NYPD analyst, wrote what was then considered a controversial police-department report arguing that with the attrition of al Qaeda's leadership, the primary threat to New York would come from "homegrown" Muslims under the age of 35 who had become Islamists in the West.
Based on an analysis of 11 plots against Western targets between 9/11 and 2006, their report, "Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat," concluded that most of the plotters were "unremarkable" citizens who had undergone often rapid radicalization, 90% of them in the West. The analysts identified a pattern of radicalization and listed common characteristics before a person committed a terrorist act. The report also warned: "The Internet is a driver and enabler for . . . radicalization."
Since 2007, the NYPD has looked for such warning signs among New York's Muslim population of 600,000 to 750,000—about 40% of whom are foreign-born—as homegrown terrorist plots have increased. In 2005, there was one homegrown terrorist plot in the U.S.; by 2010, there had been 12.
Tim Connors served as an Army officer in Afghanistan and now works for CAAS LLC, a New York-based consulting company that, among other things, trains police officers. He says that Tamerlan Tsarnaev fit the NYPD's radicalization profile perfectly. "His behavioral changes alone—never mind his overseas trip and Russia's warning to the FBI that he was a radical—would have been more than enough to trigger NYPD scrutiny," Mr. Connors says.
For instance, Tamerlan experienced a "family crisis" when his father left his mother in 2010 and then returned home to Dagestan. The 2007 NYPD report warned that such incidents often trigger radicalization. He also began exhibiting what the report calls "self-identification," when a person begins exploring radical ideas and dramatically changing his behavior—for instance, "giving up cigarettes, drinking, gambling and urban hip-hop gangster clothes" in favor of "traditional Islamic clothing" and "growing a beard."
Another red flag would have been Tamerlan's ejection from his local mosque, the Islamic Society of Boston, as reported by the Los Angeles Times. The paper disclosed last week that the elder brother was thrown out of the mosque after a shouting match with the imam during a Friday prayer service. The paper quoted several worshipers as saying that Tamerlan had yelled at the imam for having cited Martin Luther King Jr. as a role model for Muslims. Tamerlan protested, the paper said, because King was "not a Muslim."
(Marc: Let us note and give credit to this mosque for the respect it gave to MLK and that it threw Tamerlan out)
The NYPD report cites "withdrawal from the mosque" as an indication of the onset of the "indoctrination" phase of radicalization. That is when a believer rejects traditional Islamic mentors in favor of "Salafist," or more radical, fundamentalist preachers and friends.
In New York, Tamerlan Tsarnaev's mosque quarrel and his sudden behavioral changes might well have been reported by concerned worshipers, the imam himself, or other fellow Muslims. The NYPD maintains close ties to Muslim preachers and community leaders, as well as a network of tipsters and undercover operatives.
Once the department had Tamerlan under surveillance, the NYPD's cyberunit might have detected his suspicious online viewing choices and social-media postings. Other detectives might have picked up his purchase of a weapon, gunpowder and even a pressure cooker—an item featured in an article, "How to Build a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom," in the online al Qaeda magazine Inspire.
Even if the NYPD hadn't been watching Tamerlan, it might have been tipped off to such suspicious purchases thanks to its Nexus program. Since the program's launch in 2002, the department has visited more than 40,000 businesses in the metropolitan area, encouraging business owners and managers to report suspicious purchases or other activities potentially related to terrorism.
The NYPD also maintains a "Ring of Steel," a network of 4,000 sophisticated security cameras that feed information into a central monitoring system to detect questionable or unlawful activity. It is at least possible that these cameras might have alerted officials to the presence of the abandoned backpacks containing the bombs. The department has focused its camera network on the Financial District in Lower Manhattan and on such iconic sites as the Empire State Building and Grand Central Terminal. Yet at least 220 cameras have been installed with views of Central Park, where the New York Marathon reaches its finish line.
Finally, there is the NYPD's continuing effort to understand Muslim communities and follow tips and leads by sending plainclothes officers to mosques, restaurants and other public venues where Muslims congregate. This effort—which follows court-ordered guidelines—might have secured information preventing last week's bombings.
Reporters for the Associated Press won a Pulitzer Prize last year for a series of articles critical of the NYPD's surveillance program. But the NYPD credits the program with helping to thwart as many as 16 terrorist attacks on the city since 9/11. That sort of police work isn't singled out for prizes, but maybe it will inspire police in other American cities—wondering about stopping their own version of the Tsarnaevs—to take a fresh look at how New York does it.
Ms. Miller is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a Fox News contributor and a City Journal contributing editor.
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Patrick administration refuses to release Tsarnaev brothers' records
Thursday, April 25, 2013
By:Chris Cassidy, Laurel J. Sweet, Dave Wedge, Erin Smith and Richard Weir
The Patrick administration clamped down the lid yesterday on Herald requests for details of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s government benefits, citing the dead terror mastermind’s right to privacy.
Across the board, state agencies flatly refused to provide information about the taxpayer-funded lifestyle for the 26-year-old man and his brother and accused accomplice Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19.
On EBT card status or spending, state welfare spokesman Alec Loftus would only say Tamerlan Tsarnaev, his wife and 3-year-old daughter received benefits that ended in 2012. He declined further comment.
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On unemployment compensation, labor department spokesman Kevin Franck refused to say whether Tamerlan Tsarnaev ever collected, saying it was “confidential and not a matter of public record.”
On Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s college aid, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth spokesman Robert Connolly said, “It is our position — and I believe the accepted position in higher education — that student records including academic records and financial records (including financial aid) cannot under federal law be released without a student’s consent.”
On cellphones, the Federal Communications Commission would not say whether either brother had a government-paid cellphone, also citing privacy laws.
On housing, Cambridge officials and the family’s landlord ducked questions on whether the brothers were ever on Section 8 assistance.
The Herald reported yesterday that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, his wife and 3-year-old daughter collected welfare until 2012 and that both Tamerlan and Dzhokhar received benefits through their parents “for a limited portion” of the time after they came to the U.S., which was around 2002.
However, the Department of Transitional Assistance wouldn’t release information about how long or how much they received.
It remains unclear how the accused bomber brothers financed their heartless attacks on the marathon.
The administration was slammed by a Democratic congressman who insisted the public has a right to know how taxpayers were underwriting the accused jihadist Tsarnaevs.
“It’s certainly relevant information that should be made public,” U.S. Rep. Stephen F. Lynch told the Herald. “There’s a national security interest No. 1. Secondly, there’s also a public interest in finding out whether these individuals were able to exploit the system and get benefits they weren’t entitled to.”
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev lies hospitalized and facing capital charges that include using a weapon of mass destruction that killed three people and injured 260 near the Boston Marathon finish line.
Taxpayers — already on the hook for Tsarnaev’s court-appointed attorneys in the terror plot — continue to pay his mounting medical bills at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
The public also paid for Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s attorney when the Russian national successfully fought criminal charges in 2009 that he battered a former girlfriend.
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http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2013/04/25/boston-bombing-social-media-student-brown-university-reddit/2112309/?csp=fbfanpage
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Obama Administration Received Warning LAST YEAR about Boston Bomber
By GOPUSA Staff May 1, 2013 12:39 pm
http://www.gopusa.com/freshink/2013/05/01/obama-administration-received-warning-last-year-about-boston-bomber/
It's clear that Barack Obama and his administration have no idea how to keep Americans safe. Whether it's the fiasco in Benghazi, Libya or the bombings in Boston, this administration doesn't have a clue. Actually, that's not quite accurate. They have PLENTY of clues, but they just refuse to act. Now, information has come out that Saudi Arabia warned the United States in 2012 about one of the Boston bombers.
As reported by The Daily Mail, the fact that Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his brother carried out the terrorist attack during the Boston Marathon should come as NO surprise to anyone.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia sent a written warning about accused Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2012, long before pressure-cooker blasts killed three and injured hundreds, according to a senior Saudi government official with direct knowledge of the document.
The Saudi warning, the official told MailOnline, was separate from the multiple red flags raised by Russian intelligence in 2011, and was based on human intelligence developed independently in Yemen.
Citing security concerns, the Saudi government also denied an entry visa to the elder Tsarnaev brother in December 2011, when he hoped to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, the source said. Tsarnaev's plans to visit Saudi Arabia have not been previously disclosed.
The report adds that the written letter to the Department of Homeland Security mentioned Tamerlan SPECIFICALLY, and the letter was also shared with the British government. A DHS official is quoted in the report as denying that any such letter was received.
'DHS has no knowledge of any communication from the Saudi government regarding information on the suspects in the Boston Marathon Bombing prior to the attack,' MailOnline learned from one Homeland Security official who declined to be named in this report.
The White House took a similar view. 'We and other relevant U.S. government agencies have no record of such a letter being received,' said Caitlin Hayden, a spokesperson for the president’s National Security Council.
So what is going on here? We are now learning that THREE additional suspects have been picked up in conjunction with the Boston bombing. It sure is looking less and less like two disgruntled brothers and more and more like an organized terrorist attack.
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GOPUSA Editor's Note: This afternoon the Saudi embassy in Washington issued a statement denying the Daily Mail report.
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Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty
May 2, 2013
What Was In the Water of That School?
These Kazakh college friends aren't quite as bad as the Boston bombers. But they're bad:
Kadyrbayev, 19, texted Tsarnaev that evening around 8:40 to ask [why he resembled the bombers in the released FBI videos].
"Tsarnaev's return texts contained 'lol' and other things KADYRBAYEV interpreted as jokes," according to a federal criminal complaint released today, "such as 'you better not text me' and 'come to my room and take whatever you want.'" That turned out to be a fateful series of texts.
According to the complaint, earlier that day, Kadyrbayev and their mutual friend Azamat Tazhayakov entered Tsarnaev's dorm room at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth the following day, between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. They watched an unspecified movie with Tsarnaev's roommate while Tazhayakov noticed that Dzhokhar's backpack contained "fireworks." Allegedly, Kadyrbayev put two and two together when he saw the empty fireworks containers — it's unclear if that happened before he texted Tsarnaev — and figured their friend was the bomber. News reports on the room TV showing the fateful footage of Tsarnaev, followed by his texts, confirmed it.
Then they decided to help their bro.
According to the complaint, Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov gathered up the backpack, Tsarnaev's laptop — apparently to avoid making the roommate think they were stealing Tsarnaev's stuff — and placed it into a trash bag. During that crucial evening, Tsarnaev allegedly texted his friends, "I'm about to leave if you need something in my room take it." The next morning, Kadyrbayev allegedly placed the bag into a dumpster near Tsarnaev's Carriage Place apartment.
How twisted do you have to be to suddenly realize that someone you know, a friend, is actually a terrorist who killed three people and injured and maimed hundreds more, and your first thought is how to help him get away with it?
What, does UMass-Dartmouth have some sort of special jihadist student-exchange program? Do they cluster them together in one dorm?
And yes, there is an immigration angle to this story:
A federal law enforcement official says one of the students from Kazakhstan arrested Wednesday in the Boston Marathon bombings was allowed to return to the United States this year despite not having a valid student visa. Authorities say that after the explosions he helped remove a laptop and backpack from the bombing suspect's dormitory room before the FBI searched it.
Federal authorities on Wednesday arrested three college friends of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a bombing suspect, including Azamat Tazhayakov, a friend and classmate of Tsarnaev's at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Tazhayakov left the U.S. in December and returned Jan. 20. But in early January, his student-visa status was terminated because he was academically dismissed from the university, the official told the AP.
Hey, if he's academically dismissed, just what is he doing in this country, if he's no longer going to school? How's he paying his expenses?
Very few people believe the promises of the Gang of Eight, because the government does such a lousy job of enforcing the laws on the books already.
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Ordinary Citizens: The Last Line of Defense Against Terrorism
May 9, 2013 | 0902 GMT
Stratfor
By Scott Stewart
Vice President of Analysis
The April 15 Boston Marathon bombing has rekindled interest in the topic of grassroots terrorism, specifically the kind conducted by grassroots jihadists. We define grassroots jihadists as individuals who have been inspired by the al Qaeda core or franchise groups but who are not members of these groups.
Some grassroots operatives, such as Najibullah Zazi, who pleaded guilty to charges related to a New York City Subway bomb plot in 2009, travel to places, such as Pakistan, Somalia or Yemen, where they receive training from jihadist franchise groups. Other grassroots jihadists, such as accused Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, communicate but have no physical interaction with members of a franchise group. Some grassroots militants have no direct contact with other jihadist elements. Lastly, some would-be grassroots militants seek out other jihadist elements but accidentally make contact with government informants. In recent years, such cases have been occurring more frequently, resulting in sting operations and arrests.
Stratfor first began discussing the threat posed by grassroots jihadists in 2005, when we described how the al Qaeda threat was devolving from one based on the core al Qaeda group to a wider movement. But in the big picture, grassroots actors are not just a jihadist phenomenon. We've also extensively discussed the move to leaderless resistance operational models by both left- and right-wing extremists.
Grassroots operatives are a very big problem for government counterterrorism efforts. Indeed, that is why militant ideologues promote the leaderless resistance model. That doesn't mean that such operatives cannot be stopped, but in order to stop them, citizens must think differently about counterterrorism. In the face of a growing grassroots threat there is a growing need for what Stratfor calls "grassroots defenders."
Grassroots Threats
In recent decades, governments have become fairly efficient at identifying and gathering intelligence on known groups that could conduct violent attacks. This is especially true in the realm of technical intelligence, where dramatic improvements have been made in the ability to capture and process huge amounts of data from landline, cellphone and Internet communications. Governments have also become quite adept at penetrating known groups and recruiting informants. Even before 9/11, government successes against militant groups had led white supremacist and militant animal rights and environmentalist groups to adopt a leaderless resistance model for their violent and illegal activities.
In the post-9/11 world, intelligence and security services dramatically increased the resources dedicated to counterterrorism, and the efforts of these services have proved very effective when focused on known organizations and individuals. In fact, because of these successes we have seen jihadist groups, such as al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the al Qaeda core, since 2009 encourage aspiring militants to undertake lone wolf and small-cell activities rather than travel to places like Pakistan and Yemen to link up with the groups and receive training in terrorist tradecraft.
We see no sign that this trend toward leaderless resistance will reverse in the near future, and our forecast is that the grassroots threat will continue to grow, not only from the jihadist realm but also from far-right and far-left actors.
Stretched Thin
As noted above, most counterterrorism intelligence efforts have been designed to identify and track people with links to known militant groups, and in that regard such efforts are fairly effective. By contrast, counterterrorism efforts have been largely ineffective in identifying those grassroots militants who do not contact known terrorist entities. The focus on identifying and monitoring the activities of someone connected to an established militant group is understandable given that operatives belonging to groups such as Hezbollah or al Qaeda have access to much better training and far greater resources than their grassroots counterparts. Simply put, counterterrorism agencies focus more of their attention on the more potent threat.
However, grassroots operatives can and do kill people. Although they tend to focus on softer targets than operatives connected to larger groups, some grassroots attacks have been quite deadly. For example, the July 2005 London bombings killed 52 people, and Anders Behring Breivik was able to kill 77 in his July 2011 twin attacks in Norway. While the Boston Marathon bombing killed only three, it wounded hundreds.
One problem for most counterterrorism agencies is that counterterrorism is not their sole mission -- or in some cases even their primary mission. Often, as is the case with MI5 in the United Kingdom, the primary counterterrorism agency also has substantial foreign counterintelligence responsibilities. In the case of the FBI, it has not only counterterrorism and foreign counterintelligence missions but also a host of other responsibilities, such as investigating bank robberies, kidnappings, white-collar crime, online crime and public corruption. Also, while counterterrorism was the primary focus of almost every law enforcement and intelligence agency immediately after 9/11, as time has passed, the emphasis on counterterrorism has lessened.
The resources of the primary counterterrorism agencies are also quite finite. For example, the FBI has fewer than 14,000 special agents to fulfill its many responsibilities, and while counterterrorism has become its top mission in the post-9/11 era, only a portion of its agents (estimated to be between 2,500 and 3,000) are assigned to counterterrorism investigations at any time. Some FBI contacts also tell us that counterterrorism assignments are not viewed as career enhancing, and thus many billets remain vacant.
Counterterrorism investigations can also be very labor intensive. Even in a case in which a subject is under electronic surveillance, it takes a great deal of manpower to file all the paperwork required for the court orders, monitor the surveillance equipment and, if necessary, translate conversations and run down or task out additional investigative leads developed during the monitoring. Seemingly little things like conducting a "trash cover" on the subject (sifting through a subject's trash for evidence and intelligence) can add hours of investigative effort every week. If full, 24/7 physical and electronic surveillance is put in place on a subject, it can tie up as many as 100 special agents, surveillance operatives, technicians, photographers, analysts, interpreters, lawyers and supervisors.
It is also important to recognize that the bar is set pretty high for the FBI to investigate people. The FBI cannot just open an investigation on someone on a whim. It needs an identifiable objective and purpose in order to open a preliminary inquiry into a potential suspect, what is referred to as an "assessment." The FBI can't open a case based on activity protected by the First Amendment or on a subject's race, ethnicity, religion or national origin. Even once an assessment is launched, it can't become a full field investigation unless it finds some indication that there is a potential criminal violation. Assessments also have a limited time frame and must be closed unless an indication of a criminal violation is found.
Again, given the potential threat posed by known or suspected al Qaeda, Hezbollah or domestic terrorist suspects, it is understandable that most of the counterterrorism resources would be devoted to investigating and neutralizing that threat. However, the problem with the focus on known actors is that it leaves very little resources for proactive counterterrorism tasks such as looking for signs of potential operational activities, including pre-operational surveillance and weapons acquisition, conducted by previously unknown individuals. Such efforts are a huge undertaking for agencies with limited resources.
Furthermore, in the case of a lone wolf or small cell, there simply may not be any clear-cut chain of command, a specific building to target or a communication network to compromise -- the specialties of Western intelligence agencies. The leaderless resistance organization is, by design, nebulous and hard to map and quantify. This lack of structure and communication poses a problem for Western counterterrorism agencies. Also, since the grassroots threat can emanate from a variety of actors, it is impossible to profile potential militants based on race, religion or ethnicity. Instead, their actions must be scrutinized for indicators of radicalization and attack planning.
Law enforcement has thwarted many grassroots plots, but in those plots the suspects have either planned an attack that was beyond their means, leading them to seek assistance from someone who turned out to be a government informant, or they have contacted a known militant actor and, in doing so, come to the attention of the authorities. Grassroots actors who do not seek assistance and who do not get caught communicating with known terrorist entities can often launch their attacks undetected. In those cases, the attack will either fail, like the 2010 Times Square bombing, or succeed, like the Boston Marathon bombing.
Grassroots Defenders
All grassroots militants engage in activities that make their plots vulnerable to detection. Due to the limited number of dedicated counterterrorism practitioners, these indicators (and sometimes blatant mistakes) are far more likely to be witnessed by someone other than an FBI or MI5 agent. This fact highlights the importance of what we call grassroots defenders -- that is, a decentralized network of people practicing situational awareness who notice and report possible indications of terrorist behavior such as acquiring weapons, building bombs and conducting preoperational surveillance.
It is important to note that grassroots defenders are not vigilantes, and this is not a call to institute the type of paranoid informant network that existed in East Germany. It is also not a call to Islamophobia -- the Muslim community is an important component of grassroots defense, and many plots have been thwarted based upon tips from the Muslim community. Grassroots defenders are citizens who take responsibility for their own security and for the security of society and who report possible terrorist behavior to the authorities.
The most important pool of grassroots defenders is police officers on patrol. While there are fewer than 14,000 FBI agents in the entire United States, there are some 34,000 officers in the New York City Police Department alone and an estimated 800,000 local and state police officers across the United States. While the vast majority of these officers are not assigned primarily to investigate terrorism, they often encounter grassroots militants who make operational security errors or who are in the process of committing crimes in advance of an attack, such as document fraud, illegally obtaining weapons or illegally raising funds for an attack.
For example, in July 2005, police in Torrance, Calif., thwarted a grassroots plot that was uncovered during the investigation of a string of armed robberies. After arresting one suspect, Levar Haney Washington, police searching his apartment uncovered material indicating that Washington was part of a small jihadist cell that was planning to attack a number of targets. Hezbollah's multimillion-dollar cigarette smuggling network was uncovered when a sharp North Carolina sheriff's deputy found the group's activities suspicious and tipped off the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, launching the massive Operation Smokescreen investigation.
Traffic stops by regular cops also have identified several potential grassroots jihadists. In August 2007, two Middle Eastern men stopped by a sheriff's deputy for speeding near Goose Creek, S.C., were charged with possession of a destructive device. Likewise, a traffic stop in September 2001 in Alexandria, Va., led to an investigation that uncovered the so-called Virginia Jihad Network. In fact, at the time of the 9/11 attacks, the operation's leader, Mohamed Atta, was the subject of an outstanding bench warrant for failing to appear in court after being stopped for driving without a license.
But police are not the only grassroots defenders. Other people, such as neighbors, store clerks, landlords and motel managers, can also notice operational planning activities. Such activities can include purchasing bombmaking components and firearms, creating improvised explosive mixtures and conducting pre-operational surveillance.
On July 27, 2011, an alert gun store clerk in Killeen, Texas, called the local police after a man who came into the store to buy smokeless powder exhibited an unusual demeanor. They located the individual and, after questioning him, learned he was planning to detonate an improvised explosive device and conduct an armed assault at a local Killeen restaurant popular with soldiers from nearby Fort Hood. The clerk's situational awareness and decision to call the police likely saved many lives. There are reports that just last week authorities in Montevideo, Minn., arrested a man who was reportedly preparing to conduct an attack. Concerned neighbors alerted authorities of his suspicious behavior. The man, a convicted felon, was reportedly affiliated with a militia group. Authorities allegedly found an AK-style rifle, Molotov cocktails and pipe bombs during a search of his home.
Ordinary citizens exercising situational awareness can and have saved lives. This reality has been the driving force behind programs like the New York Police Department's "If You See Something, Say Something" campaign, a program subsequently adopted by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as a means of encouraging citizens to report potential terrorist behavior.
It is unrealistic to expect the government to uncover and thwart every plot. There are too many potential actors and too many vulnerable targets. Individuals need to assume some responsibility for their own security and the security of their communities. This does not mean living in fear and paranoia, but rather living with a relaxed level of situational awareness, being cognizant of potential dangers and alert to indicators of them. People who accept this responsibility and who practice this awareness are the true grassroots defenders.
Read more: Ordinary Citizens: The Last Line of Defense Against Terrorism | Stratfor
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http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/mounting-evidence-boston-bombers-involved-2011-triple-murder/story?id=19151271#.UY5PMsrNkUT
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By MATTHEW DOLAN
DETROIT—A man with a Saudi Arabian passport will be held in custody until a hearing Tuesday after customs agents charged him with lying about a pressure cooker found in his luggage.
Hussain Al Khawahir, 33 years old, appeared briefly in U.S. District Court Monday afternoon, but his detention hearing was postponed until Tuesday. He didn't enter a plea, according to officials.
"Although we never want to jump to conclusions, we also have a duty to conduct an appropriate investigation to protect the public," U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade for the Eastern District of Michigan said in a statement provided by her office.
The case involving a pressure cooker comes almost one month after two men allegedly used pressure cookers in bombings that killed three people and injured dozens of others during the Boston Marathon in April. It was unclear Monday whether federal authorities in Detroit believe the case of the Saudi national is terrorism-related.
Mr. Al Khawahir landed Saturday at Metropolitan Wayne County Airport on a flight that came via Amsterdam, according to charging documents dated Sunday. He told officials he flew to the U.S. to visit his nephew, a student at the University of Toledo.
Customs agents noticed that the man's passport was missing a page. Mr. Al Khawahir said he didn't know how that happened since the passport had been locked in a box in his home where only he, his wife and two children had access, according to the charging documents.
In his luggage, authorities said, was a pressure cooker. He initially told agents the cooker was for his nephew because pressure cookers weren't sold in the U.S., according to court documents. "The Defendant then changed his story and admitted his nephew had purchased a pressure cooker in America before but it 'was cheap' and broke after the first use," the customs officer wrote in her affidavit filed in federal court.
At that point, Mr. Al Khawahir was read his Miranda rights and invoked his right to remain silent, according to authorities.
The Associated Press reported that in an interview, the suspect's nephew, identified as Nasser Almarzooq, said he had asked his uncle to bring him a pressure cooker because the ones he bought in the U.S. didn't work.
On Monday afternoon, Mr. Al Khawahir appeared before Magistrate Judge R. Steven Whalen, who ordered the case continued until Tuesday. The assistant U.S. Attorney handling the case, Jonathan Turkel, is the same prosecutor who tried the case against the so-called Christmas Day underwear bomber convicted of trying to blow up a commercial airliner over the Detroit area in 2009.
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http://www.montenews.com/article/20130513/BLOGS/305139989/-1/blogs01?refresh=true
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http://www.longislandpress.com/2013/05/14/u-s-military-power-grab-goes-into-effect/
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Nothing to see here: Arrest in MA shrugged off
What happens when authorities find a group of foreign nationals from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, who all recently graduated with chemical engineering degrees from different U.S. colleges, trespassing at a major reservoir outside of Boston at 12:30AM? Nothing, of course. Glenn Beck has more on radio today.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/22/ibragim-todashev-confession-tsarnaev-triple-murder_n_3322105.html
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I just noticed this post by BD. Quite odd indeed , , ,
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http://droneconference.org/ 8-) 8-)
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http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/05/29/2075191/leader-of-armed-march-on-washington-calls-for-revolutionary-army-to-topple-government/?mobile=nc
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Inspire Magazine No. 11: Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula Touts Its Influence
Analysis
MAY 31, 2013 | 0700 Print - Text Size +
A screenshot of the cover of Inspire Magazine's 11th edition.
Summary
The 11th edition of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's Inspire magazine, subtitled "Who and Why," began to circulate the Internet on May 30. This issue of the English-language magazine focuses heavily on the April 15 Boston Marathon bombing and claims credit for influencing the two brothers responsible for the attack, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Overall, the edition underscores the persistent if low-level threats posed by grassroots jihadists, and the challenge governments face in eliminating lone-wolf attacks.
Analysis
The purpose of the 11th edition appears to be twofold: First, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is seeking to trumpet Inspire's apparent role in motivating and guiding the Tsarnaev brothers. In an article entitled "Inspired by Inspire," Editor Yahya Ibrahim touted the widespread attention Inspire received after the Boston bombings, and the issue also included several media quotes connecting the Tsarnaev brothers to the magazine. Second, the Yemen-based jihadist group is seeking to encourage other Muslims living in the West to emulate the brothers. Thus, the "Who" in the edition's title refers to Muslims in the West. The "Why" refers to U.S. policy, which the issue discusses at length in the cover story.
In an article entitled "Message to the American People," Qasim al-Raymi, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's operations chief, writes:
Lastly, to the oppressed and subdued in America among the brothers of religion and creed. We encourage you to carry on with this way, be steadfast on this deen (faith). Carry out your obligations, defend your religion and follow in the footsteps of those who supported their religion and ummah whilst they are in their enemy's den.
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's mufti, or religious leader, a Saudi named Ibrahim Suleiman al-Rubaish, encourages readers to "have Tawakkul (reliance on Allah), surveil an enemy and pull the trigger, or detonate the 'kitchen stuff'. Indeed the sharpest of people are those who bury their acts in their trustworthy hearts." The involvement of al-Rubaish is significant because two previous theological commenters in Inspire -- American-born Anwar al-Awlaki and Yemeni cleric Adel bin Abdullah al-Abab, the head of the group's Sharia Council -- were killed by missile strikes.
In some ways, this edition of Inspire is reminiscent of the third and seventh editions of the magazine, which commemorated earlier attacks. In the third edition, published in November 2010, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula trumpeted the Oct. 29, 2010 attempt to attack targets in the United States -- though the attack failed -- using explosive devices hidden inside printer cartridges and shipped via air cargo. The seventh issue, published in September 2011, commemorated the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
Like the third and seventh editions, which also bore "special issue" banners on their covers, this issue does not contain certain features that have appeared regularly in previous editions, such as the Open Source Jihad section, which aims to equip grassroots jihadists with the skills to conduct attacks in the West, or a question and answer section. However, the group recently published what it called The Lone Mujahid Pocketbook -- a compilation of all the Open Source Jihad sections from previous editions.
The issue also contains a brief article by Mohammed al Sanani titled "An Eye for an Eye" that mentions the May 22 murder of British soldier Lee Rigby in London, complete with an iconic image of one of the alleged killers, Michael Adebolajo, with bloodied hands, a knife and a cleaver. Another brief article mentions the tornado that devastated Moore, Okla., on May 20. Ibrahim's ability to work these recent events into this edition demonstrates a nimbleness we have not seen in Inspire Magazine since the death of former editor Samir Khan in 2011. This indicates Ibrahim and his team are growing more comfortable with the publishing process.
The edition echoes a theme Stratfor has long discussed -- the impossibility for Western governments of protecting every possible target from attack. In the cover story, an author called Abu Abdullah al-Moravid (likely a Moroccan based on his kunya, or honorific title) wrote:
It also seems that Obama will have to announce a new
type of Lone Jihad which is impossible to counter and stop, except when basic cooking ingredients and building material become illegal!
Yes, this is the only solution. A Lone Jihad operation like that of Boston Marathon requires nothing more than a few utensils, some matchsticks, a box of nails and a clock for timing. Another ingredient which I should mention is a group of American citizens gathered in a ceremony, sport event or just surprising time and place.
This focus underscores the importance of what we call grassroots defenders -- citizens who detect and report suspicious behavior to the authorities. It also highlights the need to keep terrorism in perspective, bearing in mind its rarity as well as its inevitability to help deny the practitioners of terror such as al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and their grassroots followers the ability to magnify their reach and power.
Send us your thoughts on this
Read more: Inspire Magazine No. 11: Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula Touts Its Influence | Stratfor
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Obama's Snooping Excludes Mosques, Missed Boston Bombers
Posted 06/12/2013 06:34 PM ET
Homeland Insecurity: The White House assures that tracking our every phone call and keystroke is to stop terrorists, and yet it won't snoop in mosques, where the terrorists are.
That's right, the government's sweeping surveillance of our most private communications excludes the jihad factories where homegrown terrorists are radicalized.
Since October 2011, mosques have been off-limits to FBI agents. No more surveillance or undercover string operations without high-level approval from a special oversight body at the Justice Department dubbed the Sensitive Operations Review Committee.
Who makes up this body, and how do they decide requests? Nobody knows; the names of the chairman, members and staff are kept secret.
We do know the panel was set up under pressure from Islamist groups who complained about FBI stings at mosques. Just months before the panel's formation, the Council on American-Islamic Relations teamed up with the ACLU to sue the FBI for allegedly violating the civil rights of Muslims in Los Angeles by hiring an undercover agent to infiltrate and monitor mosques there.
Before mosques were excluded from the otherwise wide domestic spy net the administration has cast, the FBI launched dozens of successful sting operations against homegrown jihadists — inside mosques — and disrupted dozens of plots against the homeland.
If only they were allowed to continue, perhaps the many victims of the Boston Marathon bombings would not have lost their lives and limbs. The FBI never canvassed Boston mosques until four days after the April 15 attacks, and it did not check out the radical Boston mosque where the Muslim bombers worshipped.
The bureau didn't even contact mosque leaders for help in identifying their images after those images were captured on closed-circuit TV cameras and cellphones.
One of the Muslim bombers made extremist outbursts during worship, yet because the mosque wasn't monitored, red flags didn't go off inside the FBI about his increasing radicalization before the attacks.
This is particularly disturbing in light of recent independent surveys of American mosques, which reveal some 80% of them preach violent jihad or distribute violent literature to worshippers.
What other five-alarm jihadists are counterterrorism officials missing right now, thanks to restrictions on monitoring the one area they should be monitoring?
Read More At Investor's Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/061213-659753-all-intrusive-obama-terror-dragnet-excludes-mosques.htm
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Obama's Snooping Excludes Mosques, Missed Boston Bombers
http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/061213-659753-all-intrusive-obama-terror-dragnet-excludes-mosques.htm
If we are going after all data of all people, 'Why Didn't NSA Catch The Tsarnaev Brothers?'
My theory on supporting the Patriot Act was that if my number turned up in a terrorist's call history, for any reason - even by misdial, then I should expect that in these times of fighting to prevent more terrorist attacks I will be looked at until cleared.
These guys traveled to training camps and made multiple web visits to bomb making websites.
Instead we used our scarce resources to scrutinize west suburban tea party members for anti-socialism rhetoric.
So Why Didn't NSA Catch The Tsarnaev Brothers?
http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/061313-659930-patriot-act-did-not-authorize-nsa-prism.htm#ixzz2WCbQDi4W
One person whose privacy was not invaded by U.S. intelligence was Tamerlan Tsarnaev, as he repeatedly visited the al-Qaida online magazine Inspire for its recipe "Build a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom."
The NSA's blanket surveillance did not detect Tsarnaev's interest in building the pressure cooker bombs he would use to devastating effect at the Boston Marathon. The massive databases that we are building a massive facility in Utah to store also failed to uncover the online communications that Tsarnaev had with a known Muslim extremist in Dagestan.
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"Why Didn't NSA Catch The Tsarnaev Brothers?"
I am working on an answer to IBD's question. 11% of adults admit to sexting, while our government is giving 29 year old single males who live in their mother's basements access to all our 'data'. These un-screened, unsupervised, surveillance 'professionals' (making a quarter million a year) are finding material more interesting than Islamist extremists visiting training camps, meeting in Mosques with known terrorists and studying the art of kitchen bomb building.
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If your net is too wide, you won't catch anything, or they were too busy looking at the people Buraq considers enemies.
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Have not had a chance to look at this
http://list.dickmorris.com/t/490614/613051/4294/4/
but this seems interesting
THE PATRIOT POST
Voice of Essential Liberty
Friday Digest -- June 14, 2013
====================
On the Web: http://patriotpost.us/editions/18668
Printer Friendly: http://patriotpost.us/editions/18668/print
PDF Version: http://pdf.patriotpost.us/2013-06-14-digest-1f1e581a.pdf
====================
Is Snowden a Patriot or a Traitor?
"Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be
connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection
on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of
government. What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on
human nature?" --James Madison
Intense debate continues to rage over the legality, constitutionality and
morality of the National Security Agency's data collection, as well as the
status of Edward Snowden, the contract employee who leaked the documents to a
British newspaper last week. Is he a Patriot or a traitor, or somewhere in the
middle?
(Regarding the program itself, read Mark Alexander's essay, It's the
Profiling, Stupid! One noteworthy addition to the essay is that the
administration's surveillance seems to have excluded mosques, which are often
jihadi programming centers. Target conservatives with the IRS, but don't mess
with Muslims.)
Snowden is a 29-year-old former contract employee of Booz Allen Hamilton,
which in turn provided technical service to the NSA. He also spent time
previously working for the CIA. Though he worked as a computer technician in
several positions with some level of security clearance, he never completed
high school, dropped out of community college and overstated his pay grade at
Booz Allen Hamilton by about 40 percent, calling into question his veracity.
He was also a Ron Paul donor who was reportedly disappointed to discover that
Barack Obama didn't fix everything upon taking office.
He opined to the UK's Guardian newspaper, "I can't in good conscience allow
the U.S. government to destroy privacy, Internet freedom and basic liberties
for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're
secretly building." No question he put his money where his mouth is, giving up
a comfortable life with a (we suppose) secure job to stand for his
convictions. Then again, he argues, "I have done nothing wrong." That must be
why he fled to Hong Kong -- a rather ironic choice for a lover of "privacy,
Internet freedom and basic liberties" given that the city is a Special
Administrative Region of Communist China.
If conscience was such a problem, Snowden could have taken any number of other
jobs. He also had much better options than the Leftmedia to make his concerns
known. If not the chain of command in place within the NSA, he likely would
have received a fair hearing by approaching a senator opposing the NSA's
programs.
Perhaps something can be learned from Snowden's choice of Glenn Greenwald as
the journalist to whom he would leak: Greenwald is a well-known hard-left
attack dog and supporter of U.S. Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, currently facing
court martial for having aided our enemies by leaking to WikiLeaks the largest
trove of classified documents in U.S. history.
Snowden claims that he was motivated by a self-defined mission of
"transparency," and that "I don't want the story to be about me." Yet he
effectively made himself the issue anyway, rather than the potentially
unconstitutional actions of the Obama administration. His leak also served as
a diversion from the other scandals at the IRS, the Justice Department and the
State Department. In fact, Obama benefits from so many things happening at
once because focus is scattered -- almost, one might say, as if through a
PRISM (the name of the NSA's email-tracking program).
There are 4.8 million federal employees and contractors that hold security
clearance. Some 1.2 million hold top-secret clearances -- and a third of those
are private contractors. This amounts to unprecedented access to highly
classified information, likely as a result of the pressure to have enough
analysts to direct intel to the right folks. There is currently a push in
Congress to move classified contractors to government positions where they
might be better monitored -- you know, like IRS agents in Cincinnati.
No one seems to know (or at least no one is saying) how an employee in
Snowden's position could gain access to the classified court orders he
released to the media. Did he have help higher up? Either way, never mind
algorithms to comb through the phone records of every American -- the NSA
clearly has difficulty determining which of its own employees can or can't be
trusted, even with a team dedicated to that task. And that's a big problem
with the apparatus itself.
This Week's 'Braying Jackass' Award
"I don't have to listen to your phone calls to know what you're doing. If I
know every single phone call you've made, I'm able to determine every single
person you talk to; I can get a pattern about your life that is very, very
intrusive. The real question here is what do they do with this information
that they collect that does not have anything to do with al-Qa'ida? ... But
this idea that ... we're going to trust the president and vice president of
the United States that we're doing the right thing -- don't count me in on
that." --then-Senator Joe Biden in 2006
Don't count us in on trusting this president or vice president, either.
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http://enews.earthlink.net/article/top?guid=20130615/13e5be58-371f-4eb8-ba92-2e84d9dba18f
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Why This Gigantic "Intelligence" Apparatus?
Mises Daily: Tuesday, June 18, 2013 by Robert Higgs
[From the Beacon blog of the Independent Institute (2010).]
On July 19, 2010, the Washington Post publishedthe first of three large reports by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin on the dimensions of the gigantic US apparatus of "intelligence" activities being undertaken to combat terrorist acts against the United States, such as the 9/11 attacks. To say that this activity amounts to mobilizing every police officer in the country to stop street fights in Camden only begins to suggest its almost-unbelievable disproportion to the alleged threat.
Among Priest and Arkin's findings from a two-year study are the following:
The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.
[We] discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.
Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.
An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001.
Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings — about 17 million square feet of space.
Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.
Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year — a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.
According to retired admiral Dennis C. Blair, formerly the director of national intelligence, after 9/11 "the attitude was, if it's worth doing, it's probably worth overdoing." I submit that this explanation does not cut to the heart of the matter. As it stands, it suggests a sort of mindless desire to pile mountains of money, technology, and personnel on top of an already-enormous mountain of money, technology, and personnel for no reason other than the vague notion that more must be better. In my view, national politics does not work in that way.
As Priest and Arkin report, "The U.S. intelligence budget is vast, publicly announced last year as $75 billion, 2 ½ times the size it was on September 10, 2001. But the figure doesn't include many military activities or domestic counterterrorism programs." Virtually everyone the reporters consulted told them in effect that "the Bush administration and Congress gave agencies more money than they were capable of responsibly spending." To be sure, they received more than they could spend responsibly, but not more than they were eager to spend irresponsibly. After all, it's not as if they were spending their own money.
"The most plausible reason why so few attacks have occurred is that very few persons have been trying to carry them out."
Why would these hundreds of organizations and contracting companies be willing to take gigantic amounts of the taxpayers' money when everyone agrees that the money cannot be spent sensibly and that the system already in place cannot function effectively or efficiently to attain its ostensible purpose? The question answers itself. It's loot for the taking, and there has been no shortage of takers. Indeed, these stationary bandits continue to demand more money each year.
And for what? The announced goal is to identify terrorists and eliminate them or prevent them from carrying out their nefarious acts. This is simultaneously a small task and an impossible one.
It is small because the number of persons seeking to carry out a terrorist act of substantial consequence against the United States and in a position to do so cannot be more than a handful. If the number were greater, we would have seen many more attacks or attempted attacks during the past decade — after all, the number of possible targets is virtually unlimited, and the attackers might cause some form of damage in countless ways. The most plausible reason why so few attacks or attempted attacks have occurred is that very few persons have been trying to carry them out. (I refer to genuine attempts, not to the phony-baloney schemes planted in the minds of simpletons by government undercover agents and then trumpeted to the heavens when the FBI "captures" the unfortunate victims of the government's entrapment.)
So the true dimension of the terrorism problem that forms the excuse for these hundreds of programs of official predation against the taxpayers is small — not even in the same class with, say, reducing automobile-accident or household-accident deaths by 20 percent.
Yet, at the same time, the antiterrorism task is impossible because terrorism is a simple act available in some form to practically any determined adult with access to Americans and their property at home or abroad. It is simply not possible to stop all acts of terrorism if potential terrorists have been given a sufficient grievance to motivate their wreaking some form of havoc against Americans. However, it is silly to make the prevention of all terrorist acts the goal. What can't be done won't be done, regardless of how many people and how much money one devotes to doing it. We can, though, endure some losses from terrorism in the same way that we routinely endure some losses from accidents, diseases, and ordinary crime.
The sheer idiocy of paying legions of twenty-something grads of Harvard and Yale — youngsters who cannot speak Arabic, Farsi, Pashtun, or any of the other languages of the areas they purport to be analyzing and who know practically nothing of the history, customs, folkways, and traditions of these places — indicates that no one seriously expects the promised payoff in intelligence to emerge from the effort. The whole business is akin to sending a blind person to find a needle inside a maze buried somewhere in a hillside.
That the massive effort is utterly uncoordinated and scarcely able to communicate one part's "findings" to another only strengthens the conclusion that the goal is not stopping terrorism, but getting the taxpayers' money and putting it into privileged pockets. Even if the expected damage from acts of terrorism against the United States were $10 billion per year, which seems much too high a guess, it makes no sense to spend more than $75 billion every year to prevent it — and it certainly makes no sense to spend any money only pretending to prevent it.
What we see here is not really an "intelligence" or counterterrorism operation at all. It's a rip-off, plain and simple, fed by irrational fear and continually stoked by the government plunderers who are exercising the power and raking in the booty to "fight terrorism."
Robert Higgs is senior fellow in political economy for the Independent Institute and editor of The Independent Review. He is the 2007 recipient of the Gary G. Schlarbaum Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Cause of Liberty. Send him mail. See Robert Higgs's article archives.
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I think we have gone beyond the point where we are getting diminishing returns, in addition, the corrosion of professionalism within the USG and the naked politicization of some of the elements have done much to erode my faith in it.
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(http://cdn.pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/tsarnaev-600x453.jpg)
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"I think we have gone beyond the point where we are getting diminishing returns, in addition, the corrosion of professionalism within the USG and the naked politicization of some of the elements have done much to erode my faith in it."
Knowing you GM, that says quite a lot. :cry:
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"I think we have gone beyond the point where we are getting diminishing returns, in addition, the corrosion of professionalism within the USG and the naked politicization of some of the elements have done much to erode my faith in it."
Knowing you GM, that says quite a lot. :cry:
Yes.
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http://www.barenakedislam.com/2013/06/18/chilling-the-muslim-in-chief-has-ordered-massachusetts-police-not-to-charge-the-7-muslims-who-were-caught-snooping-around-a-critical-boston-infrastructure-a-water-reservoir/
Saudi access to US airspace
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jun/5/deal-gives-saudi-arabia-unrestricted-access-us-air/
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Al Qaeda Terrorist Threat Is Growing
Official, private assessments contradict president’s claim that group is on ‘path to defeat’
BY: Bill Gertz
June 19, 2013 5:00 am
The threat posed by al Qaeda terrorism around the world continues to increase despite President Barack Obama’s recent claim that the central group behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks is on the path to defeat, according to U.S. and foreign counterterrorism officials and private experts.
Obama said in a speech to the National Defense University May 23 that because of the death of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and most of his top aides, “we are safer.”
While terrorist threats still exist, “the core of al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan is on the path to defeat,” the president said.
However, a U.S. counterterrorism official said the threat posed by al Qaeda is growing. “From Africa to Pakistan, it is spreading systematically,” the official said.
The official blamed the Obama administration policy of focusing its counterterrorism efforts almost exclusively on central al Qaeda.
The focus on Pakistan and Afghanistan resulted in a lack of targeted counterterrorism efforts in other locations, the official said. The official added that counterterrorism efforts have been weakened by the administration’s policy of dissociating Islam from al Qaeda and other Islamist terrorism. The policy was a key effort of John Brennan, White House counterterrorism chief during the first Obama administration. As CIA director, Brennan has expanded the policy of limiting links between Islam and terrorism at the agency.
The result is that Islamist terror groups are flourishing, posing direct threats to the United States and to U.S. interests outside the country, the official said.
That assessment is bolstered by a new report by the private Lignet intelligence group. The report made public Tuesday says the U.S. government’s overreliance on sanctions and surveillance has limited the war on terror.
The result is “a decentralized al Qaeda structure—and a much greater threat,” the report said.
“Al Qaeda has transitioned from a hierarchical cell structure to a franchise organization that is now responsible for four times as many terrorist attacks a year as it was before 9/11,” the report said.
“Al Qaeda training camps are now being established on the Arabian Peninsula, in Africa, countries of the former Soviet Union, and Southeast Asia.”
U.S. counterterrorism efforts in Southwest Asia, including a steady series of armed drone attacks against al Qaeda leaders, have resulted in central al Qaeda moving out of the region.
York Zirke, head of Germany’s federal criminal police agency, told a conference in Russia recently that al Qaeda and other terrorist groups are shifting operations from Pakistan and Afghanistan to Syria, northern Africa, Yemen, and other countries.
“Speaking about the situation in the world, it has to be reiterated that al Qaeda and organizations associated with it are not halting their activities, but the centers of its activities have moved from the area close to the Pakistani and Afghani borders to other regions such as Syria, Northern Africa, Mali, and Yemen,” Zirke said during a conference in Kazan, Russia, on June 6, according to Interfax.
The U.S. official outlined gains by al Qaeda both ideologically and operationally in expanding its reach as well as developing affiliates in key regions targeted by Islamists over the past several months.
Al Qaeda has moved rapidly to expand in parts of east, west, and north Africa, helped by the so-called Arab Spring.
A key affiliate, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, known as AQIM, and the Somalia-based al Shabaab group are the two main groups operating and expanding in Africa. The Nigerian al Qaeda group Boko Haram also emerged as a new affiliate and is posing a significant threat to the region.
About 4,000 French troops were dispatched to Mali in January to battle al Qaeda terrorists.
AQIM is expanding despite the French military intervention. A BBC report from May 29 stated that the expansion is not new. “Militants and armed radical groups have expanded and entrenched their positions throughout the Sahel and Sahara over the last decade under the umbrella of [AQIM].”
French troops announced a day later they had uncovered an AQIM bomb factory engaged in making suicide bomber vests in northern Mali.
U.S. intelligence agencies recently identified a new AQIM training base near Timbuktu in Mali. An al Qaeda training manual discovered in Mali revealed that terrorists are training with SA-7 surface-to-air missiles, the Associated Press reported.
Al Qaeda affiliates in Libya are moving into the power vacuum left by the ouster of the regime of Muammar Gadhafi. The main al Qaeda affiliate there is Ansar al Sharia, blamed for the Sept. 11, 2012, attack against the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi that killed four Americans, including Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens.
France’s government recently said Paris has become increasingly alarmed about al Qaeda activities in Libya and is considering a deployment of troops near Libya for counterterrorism operations.
French President Francois Hollande said in a speech last month that Libya-based jihadists represent the main security threat to North Africa and also to Europe. He told a reporter May 23 that the terrorist threat in Mali “began in Libya and is returning to Libya.”
The concerns are based on recent intelligence reports that al Qaeda and other jihadists groups have new training camps in the southern Libyan desert.
Further east in Africa, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood government is creating an environment that is allowing al Qaeda to develop in that country.
A U.S. intelligence official has said reports from Egypt identified al Qaeda groups operating Al-Azhar University in Cairo. The university is said to be a covert base for al Qaeda organizational and training activities that is developing a jihadist network made up of many different nationalities.
Al Shabaab in Somalia continues to conduct attacks, although there are signs the group is fragmented, with some armed fighting among various groups within al Shabaab. The group remains a key al Qaeda affiliate.
Attacks related to al Shabaab continue to increase, according to U.S. officials.
One particular concern for security officials are reports that al Qaeda is moving into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. A U.S. official said in May that al Qaeda elements were conducting small arms training in the mountainous areas of the Sinai Peninsula in preparation for fighting alongside jihadist rebels in Syria.
The al Qaeda affiliate in the Sinai was identified by U.S. officials as Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis (ABM). The group’s logo is similar to that of al Qaeda—a black flag, an AK-47, and a globe.
Saudi Arabia has been battling the affiliate al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which tried several high-profile airline bombings against the United States. The group is led by several former inmates of the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and is very active against the government of Yemen.
Earlier this year, a leaked memorandum from Saudi Arabia’s Interior Ministry revealed that Riyadh is exporting al Qaeda terrorists to Syria. The memo from April 2012 disclosed that 1,239 prisoners who were to be executed were trained and sent to “jihad in Syria” in exchange for a full pardon. The prisoners included 212 Saudis and the rest were foreigners from Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Sudan, Egypt, Jordan, Somalia, Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Iraq and included Palestinians.
Syria’s al Qaeda group is the al Nusra Front, which has emerged as the most powerful rebel group opposing the forces of the Bashar al-Assad regime.
Obama said in his National Defense University speech that the “lethal yet less capable al Qaeda affiliates” and domestic jihadists remain a threat.
“But as we shape our response, we have to recognize that the scale of this threat closely resembles the types of attacks we faced before 9/11.”
The Lignet report said the use of sanctions and financial penalties against al Qaeda produced the unintended consequence of transforming al Qaeda into a coalition of loose, localized, autonomous terror cells.
“In terms of financing, al Qaeda’s shuria or high command council, no longer plays a central role in allocating expenditures or soliciting funds,” the report said. “Instead, terrorist financing has moved further into the ‘gray’ economy. Cells raise funds from a combination of charities, independent criminal ventures, and licit businesses.”
Crime is now the main source of al Qaeda funds and criminal activities by the group include extortion, hijacking, theft, blackmail, the drug trade, and kidnapping for ransom.
“Counterterrorism efforts that target the financing of terrorism are a work in process,” the report concludes. “The measures employed by the United States and others in the last 12 years have reshaped rather than resolved the terrorist threat. It remains to be seen if the United States will be able to in turn adapt to al Qaeda’s new and alarming franchise cell structure and finance methods.”
Joseph Myers, a retired Army officer and specialist on the ideology of Islamist terror, said U.S. efforts to target and kill al Qaeda leaders have been successful. But al Qaeda affiliates are spreading “from the Horn of Africa, across North Africa and post-Gaddafi Libya into central Africa to Dagestan and like-minded bombers in Boston,” he noted.
“Al Qaeda is an idea, not simply an organization and ideas are not easily ‘killed,’” Myers said in an email.
The U.S. government’s counterterrorism paradigm is misguided because the forefront of global Islamic jihad is not al Qaeda, but the Muslim Brotherhood “we are now partnering with as a matter of policy,” he said.
The doctrine of Islamic jihad remains the key ideological threat that must be recognized, he said. Until that is realized, “we will continue to have national security failures of analysis and prediction and not only al Qaeda, but other Islamic jihadist groups will continue to emerge and spread,” Myers said.
Fred Fleitz, a former intelligence analyst now with Lignet, said al Qaeda has shifted tactics toward “a multitude of smaller, low-probability attacks.”
“This includes recruiting members behind U.S. borders through Internet-based efforts to find and radicalize ‘home grown terrorists,’” Fleitz said in an email.
“I am especially concerned about the recent plot to bomb a Toronto to New York train which was backed by al Qaeda members in Iran,” Fleitz said. “This was a good example of what al Qaeda can still do.”
“We are also seeing al Qaeda franchises and other Islamist groups growing in strength in Mali, Somalia, and Nigeria. Seven of nine Syrian rebel groups are Islamist and there is an al Qaeda presence in Syria.”
Sebastian Gorka, a counterterrorism expert and military affairs fellow with the Foundation for Defense for Democracies, said the administration has created a narrative that asserts the United States is solely at war with the remnants of al Qaeda Central and that the group is on the decline since bin Ladin was killed.
“The rest of the national security mission in counterterrorism has been reduced to the amorphous ‘counter violent extremism’ which is of course fallacious since as a nation we are not threatened by general violent extremism – Basque separatists or abortion clinic bombers – but a specific brand of religious extremism: global jihad,” Gorka said in an email.
“Anything that countermands the official narrative, such as the the Fort Hood shooter or the Boston bombers, has to be undermined with labels such ‘workplace violence’ or ‘loser jihadis’ since anything else would mean that al Qaeda is very much alive and well,” said Gorka, who teaches U.S. national security at Georgetown University. “This represents a politically driven distortion of objective threat assessments.”
This entry was posted in Middle East, National Security, Obama Administration and tagged Al Qaeda. Bookmark the permalink.
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http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/06/27/the_nsa_cant_tell_the_difference_between_an_american_and_a_foreigner
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http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=-LIpAxjPt9U
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Reliability unknown. Can anyone confirm or deny?
http://www.inquisitr.com/828674/russian-troops-on-american-soil-confirmed/
http://beforeitsnews.com/politics/2013/07/update-obama-requests-15000-russian-troops-for-upcoming-disaster-in-america-2531316.html
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second post
The Problems with Background Investigations
Security Weekly
Thursday, July 4, 2013 - 04:00 Print Text Size
Stratfor
By Scott Stewart
In the wake of the case of National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, the company that conducted the background investigation for his security clearance is under heavy scrutiny. USIS has received significant media attention and is under investigation by the inspector general of the U.S. government's Office of Personnel Management. While such investigations of government contractors happen frequently, this particular case is interesting in that it concerns background investigations, which are considered by many to be a critical component of protecting national security.
However, background investigations as currently designed and conducted are fundamentally flawed. They are more effective at providing bureaucratic cover than they are at catching spies or preventing moles from penetrating the system.
Background Investigations
As a bit of disclosure, I have had several U.S. government background investigations conducted on me. I was first subject to full-field background investigations as an Army Intelligence Officer and then later as a Diplomatic Security Service special agent. I have also conducted background investigations, first as a Diplomatic Security Service special agent domestically and while assigned to a U.S. embassy overseas, and then later as a contract investigator for the State Department. I have also been interviewed by scores of investigators conducting background investigations on my friends, colleagues and former interns and employees. All this to say that my experience as a subject and source in various investigations, and as an investigator who has conducted hundreds of background investigations myself, has given me some insight into the problems of the current process.
National security background investigations in the United States date back to efforts to prevent potential Nazi and communist spies from infiltrating the government. Today, every federal government employee is subjected to a basic criminal and credit history check as part of the hiring process. Those employees who require access to classified information as part of their duties will also be subjected to a national security background check. These can vary from a perfunctory national agency records check for confidential or secret clearances to full-field background checks for access to top-secret material and sensitive compartmented information. Some agencies, such as the CIA and FBI, also mandate full lifestyle polygraph examinations as part of the clearance process. People holding a security clearance are also subjected to a periodic reinvestigations.
One of the biggest problems with personnel security investigations is the sheer number of them that are conducted. The State Department, which has fewer than 19,000 U.S. employees, conducts some 20,000 of them each year. When one considers the 240,000 employees at the Department of Homeland Security and the 3.23 million employed by the Department of Defense, as well as myriad other agencies and contractors with government security clearances, the number of personal security investigations conducted each year is staggering.
Going back to the State Department example, with only about 2,000 Diplomatic Security Service special agents worldwide, and the vast majority of them assigned to duties other than background investigations, the bulk of the investigations are conducted by contractors. But beyond sheer manpower considerations, most special agents simply do not view background investigations as important. Speaking from personal experience, I was far more motivated to investigate a bombing attack against an embassy or arresting a drug smuggler, terrorist or pedophile for passport fraud than I was to interview a potential employee's neighbors or former bosses. Because background investigations are not exciting and sexy, conducting them is also not considered particularly career enhancing compared to other assignments. I know from talking with friends from other agencies that agents there had similar views. Even many investigators working for investigation companies view their jobs more as stepping stones to other occupations, such as being a federal agent.
This disdain for background investigations by the people conducting them is compounded by the people who manage personnel security investigations. Because of the massive volume of cases involved, program managers tend to be focused on speed, efficiency and cost far more than on thoroughness. They encourage investigators to do the absolute minimum to meet the requirements as outlined in Executive Order 12968, which sets the standards for access to classified information, rather than to focus on really investigating and understanding the background of the subject of the investigation. In the case of a for-profit company like USIS, the bottom line is also a factor. Streamlining the efficiency of the process means doing the very least amount of work required to complete the specific task, thus maximizing profit and satisfying the board of directors.
Agents and investigators who sense something is not right and want to dig deeper and interview additional developed sources are frequently criticized for missing deadlines or conducting unnecessary interviews. Contract investigators who do this are also often accused of milking the system. Many investigators therefore find it easier to just do the minimum required rather than have to go back to their supervisors to get permission to conduct additional interviews beyond what was initially assigned to them.
There is a very real tension between managers who want streamlined investigations done within deadlines and good investigators who want to conduct a thorough investigation. A good investigator is methodical and persistent in his craft, but methodical and persistent investigations often take longer and cost more than investigation program managers will allow. Good investigators also frequently want to follow hunches and instincts, and it is very hard to convince managers to permit that type of latitude, and so the investigations rarely go very deep.
Interviews
Even the interviews tend to be shallow. Most investigators merely read Privacy Act and Freedom of Information Act warning statements followed by a list of obligatory, scripted questions rather than really probe during an interview.
While most agencies and companies do not permit investigators to conduct phone interviews except in exigent circumstances, some investigators have become masters of eliciting people to request telephonic interviews. By conducting interviews by phone, a contract investigator can cut down on travel time and complete more interviews more quickly -- thus making more money per hour. I live in a very remote area, and most investigators do not want to make the effort to drive out to interview me in person, so I often get this approach by investigators who are conducting investigation on friends and former employees. Since I know the game, when I am solicited for a telephonic interview, I refuse and make the investigator drive out to talk to me in person.
The problem with telephonic interviews is that the people being interviewed via telephone are far less likely to provide derogatory information than people interviewed in person. I experienced this several times while conducting split investigations, in which another investigator and I both identified and interviewed the same developed source. In one case, I interviewed a woman who provided some incredibly significant derogatory information about a subject indicating he had lied about his background. During our interview, she also told me that another investigator had interviewed her. When I asked her if she had also related this critical information to the other investigator, she said no, because he had only conducted a telephonic interview and had not asked her any specific questions that would have led to the information.
Dishonest investigators are also known to fabricate interviews they never conducted. While some investigators do this out of greed, others do it out of frustration when they have attempted to reach a source several times and a manager is pressuring them to close out a case. A good investigator will resist this pressure, because he or she has the mindset that the source may be able to provide a critical piece of information needed to break open the case. The poor investigator just sees the interview as a yet another meaningless task to complete, and therefore feels less guilt about the fabrication. Such conduct is criminal, and several investigators have been prosecuted in recent years for such activity. Agencies and companies are supposed to audit the work of investigators to protect against such things, but this auditing also takes time and money -- according to the Washington Post, one of the things USIS is being investigated for is failure to conduct sufficient audits.
I have found that the prevailing attitude among managers and investigators is that background investigations are perfunctory tasks that only require the minimum work necessary to check off the prerequisite boxes and get the investigation over as quickly -- and as superficially -- as possible. This means that the subject of the investigation can greatly influence its scope just by the information he or she provides -- or withholds -- in questionnaires and interviews.
Outdated practices
Moreover, the background investigations currently being conducted were developed decades ago when the world was a far different place. They are not really designed to deal with the complexity of the modern world. In the Internet age, people no longer must to go to Klan meetings, neo-Nazi rallies, anarchist bookstores or jihadist mosques to be exposed to such ideas or radicalized by them. In much the same way that people can become grassroots terrorists through such a self-radicalization process, they can also become a grassroots intelligence threat. The low-key methods of recruitment and radicalization mean that this potential threat may not be visible to others. This very real limitation is then compounded by the fact that personal security investigations have become meaningless bureaucratic processes that lack the ability to uncover the type of information required to catch an infiltrator who does not want to be caught.
The investigations are also only looking for very specific behaviors in the subject's past, such as criminal behavior, debt, mental health issues or drug use. These things are merely outward indicators, not real insights into the subject. Besides, a lack of these indicators does not necessarily mean that the subject will not compromise national security in the future, especially if the person is motivated toward espionage or a massive public disclosure of classified information by ideology or ego. Even many of the people motivated by money have done so more out of greed than by any demonstrable history of financial problems.
Furthermore, with the transient nature of today's society, where people frequently change jobs and addresses, neighbors and co-workers simply do not know people as well as they did in the 1950s. I have interviewed countless neighbors and co-workers who had absolutely no relevant knowledge of the subject I was investigating. Yet these interviews were deemed sufficient to check off a required box. The problem is that a person who does not know their neighbor is simply in no position to provide a reason that neighbor should not be considered suitable for a position of trust and confidence with the U.S. government.
Polygraphs are not much more effective. As we've discussed in relation to previous cases, polygraph examinations work well when administered to honest people, but they are not very helpful in cases where an individual has no compunction against lying or where the subject has received training in deceiving the polygraph. Even in cases where the polygraph is effective on a subject, it will only catch past nefarious behavior -- it cannot detect or prevent future espionage.
The U.S. government is spending billions of dollars on a national security background investigation system that is archaic and largely ineffective. The system works on honest people or stupid spies, but is quite simply not very effective in uncovering the lies of clever, duplicitous people. It is also clearly not designed to anticipate future behavior. The Office of Personnel Management's inspector general is attempting to hold USIS accountable for some allegations of sub-standard performance, but who is holding the entire system accountable? The only thing the current system does well is provide cover for bureaucrats who can point to a completed investigation as proof they are not culpable for a security breach.
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APPLE VALLEY, Minn. — WHEN President Obama nominated James B. Comey to lead the F.B.I., he lauded Mr. Comey as someone who understands the challenge of “striking a balance” between security and privacy, and had been “prepared to give up a job he loved rather than be part of something he felt was fundamentally wrong.”
Related
High praise, but was it deserved? We may find out today, when the Senate Judiciary Committee holds a hearing on his confirmation.
Mr. Comey’s reputation for courage and probity rests largely on a dramatic episode in March 2004 when he and the current F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, tried to squelch the George W. Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. But that was just one night in the 20 months that Mr. Comey served as deputy attorney general.
And while it was not the only time he expressed reservations, Mr. Comey apparently did eventually sign off on most of the worst of the Bush administration’s legal abuses and questionable interpretations of federal and international law. He ultimately approved the C.I.A.’s list of “enhanced interrogation” techniques, including waterboarding, which experts on international law consider a form of torture. He defended holding an American citizen, Jose Padilla, without charges for more than three years as an “enemy combatant,” and subjecting him to interrogation without counsel to obtain information from him. (Mr. Padilla was ultimately convicted of terrorism charges in civilian court.)
Mr. Mueller and Mr. Comey famously thwarted efforts by two Bush officials, Alberto R. Gonzales and Andrew H. Card Jr., to pressure a hospitalized Attorney General John Ashcroft to sign off on Mr. Bush’s warrantless monitoring order after the Justice Department found it illegal. But within days, Mr. Mueller and Mr. Comey, having threatened to resign, spoke with Mr. Bush. Whatever assurances the president may have given them are not (and may never be) known — but we know that the surveillance program continued, perhaps with modification, and certainly without further public dissent from Mr. Mueller and Mr. Comey.
I suggest that the senators ask Mr. Comey these questions:
1. Will you maintain the F.B.I. ban on torture and coercing of statements and confessions? Would you instruct F.B.I. agents to investigate all credible reports, including those involving other federal personnel, of violations of Sections 2340 and 2441 of Title 18 of the United States Code, which define torture and war crimes? (In 2002, according to a Justice Department report, F.B.I. agents at Guantánamo Bay created a “war crimes file” to document accusations of prisoner mistreatment by American military personnel, but an F.B.I. official ordered that the file be closed in 2003.)
2. In March 2004, you argued that the N.S.A. surveillance program was illegal. Do you still believe that the domestic communications of American citizens can be legally monitored by the government only with a judicially approved warrant? If so, what assurances about the warrantless surveillance scheme did Mr. Bush offer that persuaded you to stop opposing the program?
3. Do you stand by your statement, made at a Justice Department news conference in June 2004, that it was right to hold Jose Padilla, an American citizen who was arrested on American soil, in a military brig (for two years at that point) without charges?
4. Why, in April 2005, did you approve 13 harsh interrogation tactics, including waterboarding and up to 180 hours of sleep deprivation, for use on suspects by officers of the C.I.A.?
5. Do you stand by a speech in March 2009 in which you spoke of the need to “incapacitate” terrorists who could not be prosecuted, either because of a lack of sufficient evidence or because the information had been secretly provided by a foreign country? Do you believe that since procedures exist for “preventative detention” of people with dangerous mental illness, there should be a similar way to detain terrorism suspects without trial?
6. Do you believe there is a trade-off between civil liberties and national security, or do you think, as Mr. Obama stated when he ran for president, that this is a false choice? Where do you believe the balance between privacy and safety can be found, when the government has ready access to vast amounts of data collected by communications companies?
7. The N.S.A.’s data-mining operations seem to be sweeping up information involving foreigners and American citizens alike. How can we preserve the distinction between “non-U.S. persons” abroad, on whom officials have virtually unlimited authority to conduct surveillance, and “U.S. persons” inside our borders, on whom they lack authority to conduct warrantless surveillance?
8. Can you explain why the F.B.I. has submitted requests to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for phone call data, even though the data is to be directly furnished to the N.S.A.? How does the F.B.I. follow up on such requests to ensure that the N.S.A. is protecting the rights of American citizens?
9. Are the N.S.A.’s data-gathering efforts, disclosed in recent weeks, an outgrowth of Mr. Bush’s earlier warrantless surveillance program, to which you objected? Do they relate to the “Total Information Awareness” scheme proposed by John M. Poindexter, a retired admiral and former aide to Ronald Reagan, that was terminated after it was made public in 2002?
10. Do you believe that the F.B.I., in investigating a leak of classified information, was right in 2010 to call James Rosen, a Fox News reporter, a potential “co-conspirator”?
11. Officials say that great national harm will result from the disclosure of secret activities that are legally questionable. What do you think of this proposed remedy: The government should abide by international law and refrain from infringing on the rights of American citizens in the first place?
Coleen Rowley, a special agent for the F.B.I. from 1981 to 2004, testified before Congress about the F.B.I.’s failure to help prevent the 9/11 attacks.
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The Laws You Can’t See
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Published: July 8, 2013 203 Comments
In the month since a national security contractor leaked classified documents revealing a vast sweep of Americans’ phone records by the federal government, people across the country have disagreed about the extent to which our expectation of personal privacy must yield to the demands of national security.
Related
In Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers of N.S.A. (July 7, 2013)
Under normal circumstances, this could be a healthy, informed debate on a matter of overwhelming importance — the debate President Obama said he welcomed in the days after the revelations of the surveillance programs.
But this is a debate in which almost none of us know what we’re talking about.
As Eric Lichtblau reported in The Times on Sunday, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has for years been developing what is effectively a secret and unchallenged body of law on core Fourth Amendment issues, producing lengthy classified rulings based on the arguments of the federal government — the only party allowed in the courtroom. In recent years, the court, originally established by Congress to approve wiretap orders, has extended its reach to consider requests related to nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks. Its rulings, some of which approach 100 pages, have established the court as a final arbiter in these matters.
But the court is as opaque as it is powerful. Every attempt to understand the court’s rulings devolves into a fog of hypothesis and speculation.
The few public officials with knowledge of the surveillance court’s work either censor themselves as required by law, as Senator Ron Wyden has done in his valiant efforts to draw attention to the full scope of these programs, or they offer murky, even misleading statements, as the director of national intelligence, James Clapper Jr., did before a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in March.
As outrageous as the blanket secrecy of the surveillance court is, we are equally troubled by the complete absence of any adversarial process, the heart of our legal system. The government in 2012 made 1,789 requests to conduct electronic surveillance; the court approved 1,788 (the government withdrew the other). It is possible that not a single one of these 1,788 requests violated established law, but the public will never know because no one was allowed to make a counterargument.
When judicial secrecy is coupled with a one-sided presentation of the issues, the result is a court whose reach is expanding far beyond its original mandate and without any substantive check. This is a perversion of the American justice system, and it is not necessary.
Even before the latest revelations of government snooping, some members of Congress were trying to provide that check. In a letter to the court in February, Senator Dianne Feinstein and three others asked that any rulings with a “significant interpretation of the law” be declassified. In response, the court’s presiding judge, Reggie Walton, wrote that the court could provide only summaries of its rulings, because the full opinions contained classified information. But he balked at releasing summaries, which he feared would create “misunderstanding or confusion.” It is difficult to imagine how releasing information would make the confusion worse.
Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, recently reintroduced a bill that would require declassification. It was defeated in December. In light of the national uproar over the most recent revelations, the leadership in Congress should push to pass it and begin to shine some light on this dark corner of the judicial system.
We don’t know what we’ll find. The surveillance court may be strictly adhering to the limits of the Fourth Amendment as interpreted by the Supreme Court. Or not. And that’s the problem: This court has morphed into an odd hybrid that seems to exist outside the justice system, even as its power grows in ways that we can’t see.
Meet The New York Times’s Editorial Board »
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Reliability unknown. Can anyone confirm or deny?
http://www.inquisitr.com/828674/russian-troops-on-american-soil-confirmed/
http://beforeitsnews.com/politics/2013/07/update-obama-requests-15000-russian-troops-for-upcoming-disaster-in-america-2531316.html
Crafty, beforeitsnews.com makes infowars look like quality reporting..... :roll:
http://ace.mu.nu/
OMFG Obama To Deploy 15,000 Russian Troops in US Under DHS Orders!!!!!
An unsettling report prepared by the Emergencies Ministry (EMERCOM) circulating in the Kremlin today on the just completed talks between Russia and the United States in Washington D.C. says that the Obama regime has requested at least 15,000 Russian troops trained in disaster relief and "crowd functions" [i.e. riot control] be pre-positioned to respond to FEMA Region III during an unspecified "upcoming" disaster.
Well actually no.
In fact Stacy McCain actually did some digging and found that the story is bullshit:
That article is bullshit, so far as I can tell. It links to a seemingly legitimate Russian news site's report about the U.S.-Russian meeting, but that article says nothing at all about a report "circulating in the Kremlin" or Janet Napolitano requesting 15,000 Russian troops. The EU Times (bullshit) article also says this:
FEMA Region III, the area Russian troops are being requested for, includes Washington D.C. and the surrounding States of Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia, "strongly suggesting" that the Obama regime has lost confidence in its own military being able to secure its survival should it be called upon to do so.
We have zero official sources for this, and good luck finding any mainstream news organization - Associated Press, Washington Post, Reuters, etc. - that has even taken notice of the June 25 U.S.-Russian meeting which (a) we know actually happened, based on a statement from the Russian agency, but which (b) apparently wasn't considered important enough to merit a press release from FEMA.
Apparently officials from FEMA and the Russian equivalent did meet in June but the result seems to have been the usual nicey-nice-let's-agree-to-share-experiences-and-training-tips bureaucratic argle-bargle. Not a mention of any troops or really anything claimed in the article.
By the way the EU Times isn't a newspaper, isn't affiliated with the EU, and apparently will print anything that people send in as long as it gets hits. The fact that they have a Zionism section, lots of links to Infowars, and stories like this, this and this tells you pretty much where they're coming from and how much credibility they deserve.
In fact this whole story is a case study of how click-attracting bullshit gets peddled and passed into the conservative blogosphere. Here's what the actual June press release from the Ministry of the Russian Federation for Civil Defense and Emergencies said:
The Russian Emergency Situations Ministry and the USA Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) are going to exchange experts during joint rescue operations in major disasters. This is provided by a protocol of the fourth meeting of the U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission Working Group on Emergency Situations and seventeenth meeting of Joint U.S.-Russia Cooperation Committee on Emergency Situations, which took place in Washington on 25 June.
The document provides for expert cooperation in disaster response operations and to study the latest practices.
In addition, the parties approved of U.S.-Russian cooperation in this field in 2013-2014, which envisages exchange of experience including in monitoring and forecasting emergency situations, training of rescuers, development of mine-rescuing and provision of security at mass events.
And here's how the EU Times (and Infowars and many other cut-and-paste sites) reported it:
Russian Forces to Provide "Security" At US Events
As part of a deal signed last week in Washington DC between the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry and FEMA, Russian officials will provide "security at mass events" in the United States, a scenario that won't sit well with Americans wary of foreign assets operating on US soil.
According to a press release by the Ministry of the Russian Federation for Civil Defense and Emergencies, US and Russian officials met on June 25 at the 17th Joint U.S.-Russia Cooperation Committee on Emergency Situations.
Are these even vaguely the same thing? Hell no. And this exaggeration and deliberate misinterpretation is no mistake or accident. You see it in article after article. And sadly quite a few well-known conservative blogs also engage in the same bullshit-bait-and-switch as well.
So why do they do it when it's so obvious? Because they think you're stupid and gullible. And because it works.
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And so it is added to the Undesirables list with Infowars and Debka.
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http://www.siotw.org/modules/news_english/item.php?itemid=1209
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http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2013/07/youth-looting-the-dead-at-french-rail-crash-.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=facebook
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James Jaeger Is Interviewed by Anthony Wile For The Daily Bell
James Jaeger of Matrix Entertainment
Oath Keepers is pleased to direct our readers to a very interesting interview with James Jaeger at The Daily Bell. I have included here some excerpts, but there is much more in this surprising interview - topics range from Hollywood to Edward Snowden, from the NSA to the Constitution. Oath Keepers salutes both James Jaeger and Anthony Wile. Read them here:
http://www.thedailybell.com/29359/Anthony-Wile-James-Jaeger-on-His-Documentaries-the-Danger-of-Hollywood-Blockbusters-and-the-Reality-of-Snowden
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Just a few excerpts for teasers -
Daily Bell: What's going on? How have you been?
James Jaeger: I have been quite busy since last March working with Edwin Vieira and Oath Keepers on a new movie entitled "MOLON LABE - How the Second Amendment Guarantees America's Freedom." We have an incredible "cast" of experts in the can: Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan, Alex Jones, G. Edward Griffin, Chuck Baldwin, Stewart Rhodes, Larry Pratt, David R. Gillie, Jack Rooney and Edwin Vieira, who wrote the book, The Sword and Sovereignty, which inspired the movie. The first rough-cut is done and the movie will be released hopefully on Labor Day or Constitution Day. You can watch a trailer with clips of the experts at http://youtu.be/Ay7Thif3UOQ.
Daily Bell: You've been tracking the Snowden affair. Give us your take.
James Jaeger: This exercise gives everyone the opportunity to really see who is who on the world stage. Americans (and the rest of the world) seem to be abhorred with the Empire's surveillance - all neatly "justified" by the War of Terror, yet their elected representatives in Congress and the executive (and the government's lapdogs in the mainstream media) continue to work for the military-industrial complex and the globalists' agenda. It's as if the Fourth Amendment didn't even exist...
Daily Bell: You've been tracking the Snowden affair. Give us your take.
James Jaeger: This exercise gives everyone the opportunity to really see who is who on the world stage. Americans (and the rest of the world) seem to be abhorred with the Empire's surveillance - all neatly "justified" by the War of Terror, yet their elected representatives in Congress and the executive (and the government's lapdogs in the mainstream media) continue to work for the military-industrial complex and the globalists' agenda. It's as if the Fourth Amendment didn't even exist.
Daily Bell: It's like a Hollywood movie, almost too good to be true. Are we too cynical?
James Jaeger: You can be sure more than one screenplay is being written right this second. In fact, I would even be one of the writers if someone were to engage me for at least Writer's Guild minimum. So no, you are certainly NOT being too cynical. And you know what, as much as I bitch and moan about Hollywood, I think Hollywood has the right attitude about the Snowden affair: he's a hero exposing one of the main rungs of the police state the Globalists are attempting to build.
But at this time any screenplay on the Snowden affair can obviously only be a work-in-progress because things are still developing. Like Robert Redford in "THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR," Snowden has probably researched every plot and will hopefully end the show with a twist none of the movie-challenged apologists of the Empire will have foreseen.
My continuing observation of the MSM, however, indicates that they have pretty much covered over Snowden with Zimmerman....
Daily Bell: The AP says its reporting has been chilled by surveillance. Any response?
James Jaeger: Well, figure it out. A 5 zettabyte site is 5.0 X 10 , 21st bytes of information and a 1 yottabyte site is 3 orders of magnitude (1,000 times) larger at 10 , 24th bytes. That's a 10 with 24 zeros after it. This "thing" - which is going operational in September - will be able to record all emails, phone conversations, TV, radio shows, YouTube videos, photographs, websites, Internet searches and even parking receipts, travel itineraries and bookstore purchases for every person on the planet Earth for the next 100 years.
Even still, an NSA spokesperson had the gall to state: "Many unfounded allegations have been made about the planned activities of the Utah Data Center and one of the biggest misconceptions about NSA is that we are unlawfully listening in on, or reading emails of, US citizens. This is simply not the case."
Well, that may 'not be the case' with the PRISM program, but come September 2013, all bets are off. The NSA will have the capacity of "listening in" so why wouldn't they? This places a chill over every citizen in not only America but the world. It should also chill all news reporters, pundits, filmmakers, writers, thinkers, philosophers, patent and copyright holders, strategists and communicators in every branch of the arts and sciences. Maybe TODAY you are like John Stossel - more concerned about the other "100 things government does" - but TOMORROW you may decide it's necessary to become the next Thomas Paine in order to arrest further destruction of the Declaration of Independence. BUT you're in the 5 zettabyte sys, so you chill and go back to eating your spaghetti and hot dogs. You're chilled because your rogue gov has mapped your social network and can send in a drone to wipe you and your kitchen table off the map any time it wants. Nice. And no one would even know about it because they could wipe you before the public was even aware you EXISTED! So when police state apologists like Cheney, Alexander, King, Woolsey, Hague and Clapper tell you that "we are only collecting metadata" - you should go into HIGH ALERT.
Metadata is what computers use to "talk" to each other - no humans even needed. It's part of what's called the "semantic web" and it's been in development for years. By connecting origination and termination points of all phone numbers, IP Addresses and MAC numbers, they can identify every device you own or use: your phone, your computer, your routers and other machines (as MAC means Machine Access Code).
A phone number takes very few bytes of storage because a phone number is only 10 digits long (xxx-xxx-xxxx). That's only 10 bytes of storage. Connect two citizens' phones and that's only 20 bytes. Connect all 100 family, friends and associates of a citizen and that's only about 1,000 bytes of storage (10 X 100 = 1,000). Now add in another 1,000 bytes for the addresses of their major nodes (the handful of people they call most) - and you need maybe 2,000 bytes to store, or "quarry" all this innocent METADATA. But let's be conservative; let's say we use 1 million bytes, one meg, of data for each and every citizen in the US, such being 230 million people. That's 230,000,000 X 1,000,000 = or 23 terabytes (2.3 X 10 , 14th bytes). Any film editor in Hollywood has 23 terabytes on his NLE computer system, whereas the Bluffdale data storage center will have between 10 , 21st and 10 , 24th bytes. That's 7 to 10 orders of magnitude more capacity, so they could easily allocate a meg per year to all 7 billion people on Earth for the next 100 years. A meg for all 7 billion people would only be 7 x 10 , 15 bytes per year and for 100 years it would only be 7 X 10 , 17th bytes. Recall, Bluffdale will store as much as 10 , 24th bytes, 7 orders of magnitude more than the mere 10 , 17th bytes needed for every human on Earth. Factor in the wash that less than half the human population doesn't have computers and the other half uses storage-intensive applications (one of the most intense at this time being 1080p video) and we can see that the Bluffdale site will also be able to easily handle that. So all porn will easily be storable for the next 100 years along with each and every user. AND, if the NSA really likes porn, it will even be able to store it in 1080p (for future "evaluations"). Once quantum computing comes online, as futurists expect, the Bluffdale site's storage capacity will be available on USB thumb drives.
But how does all this apply to the Bill of Rights, which states in the 4th Amendment:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
The key words are SEARCHES and SEIZURES and with these words, the NSA's assurance that they are not "unlawfully listening in " is made invalid. When the government "quarries records from the telecom providers," as the former NSA chief stated on national TV, it is, in essence, seizing the "papers and effects" of WE THE PEOPLE. It may only be seizing a copy of our "papers and effects" but the fact that that copy embodies intellectual property that has an automatic COPYright on it the moment it is put into tangible form as an email, phone recording, photograph, website or motion picture makes the act of "quarrying" information with the PRISM program or in the Bluffdale servers illegal not only under copyright law but constitutional law. The act of quarrying data is that act of seizing data, and data is the same as the "papers and effects" referred to in the Fourth....
Daily Bell: Do these sorts of investigations make us safer?
James Jaeger: Well, to answer that, let me put those statistics into perspective. According to the National Counter Terrorism Center and the GAO (Government Accounting Office), about 1,900 people are killed by international terrorism every year and about 70 of them are Americans. Concomitant with this, about 140 people are killed by peanut allergies each year and about 450,000 die from coronary heart disease. Even given this, our Lindsey Graham-infested Congress - with its deserved, 20% approval rating - sees fit to spend over $160 billion a year on the "war on terror" but only spends about $3 billion each year on the "war on heart disease." So each year 6,429 times more Americans die from heart disease than terrorism yet Congress spends 53 times more money to save 70 lives than it does to save 450,000 lives. NOW the government wants to make the 70 people killed by terrorism even MORE "secure" by constructing a $4 billion surveillance complex in Bluffdale, Utah that will have the ability to snoop on every man, woman and child on Earth.
It's obvious that the surveillance machinery being built is NOT for any so-called "war on terror." It's to dominate and control the peoples of the Earth by the globalist power elite - less than .001% of the population. THIS is what Edward Snowden means by the term, "turnkey tyranny."
- End excerpts from interview at The Daily Bell. Read the whole interview here:
http://www.thedailybell.com/29359/Anthony-Wile-James-Jaeger-on-His-Documentaries-the-Danger-of-Hollywood-Blockbusters-and-the-Reality-of-Snowden
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From Crafty's post above.
"places a chill over every citizen in not only America but the world. It should also chill all news reporters, pundits, filmmakers, writers, thinkers, philosophers, patent and copyright holders, strategists and communicators in every branch of the arts and sciences."
One can forget about intellectual property being protected except by the very rich and powerful.
Finally, at least a few people are recognizing this. Way too late for me. Probably too late for all of us.
I know I am a minority on this board. But I still think Snowden is a hero.
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Do note that I posted the piece I just posted.
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Indictment: Jacksonville Man Tried to Join AQAP
by Abha Shankar • Jul 18, 2013 at 8:00 pm
http://www.investigativeproject.org/4090/indictment-jacksonville-man-tried-to-join-aqap
A 19-year-old Jacksonville, Fla. man trained for violent jihad and traveled to the Middle East in hopes of joining a notorious al-Qaida branch. Shelton Thomas Bell was charged Thursday with two counts of conspiracy and attempting to provide material support to the terrorist group Ansar al Sharia, also known as al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).
AQAP is the al-Qaida branch which successfully got would-be suicide bomber and Nigerian national Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab onboard a Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam on Christmas Day in 2009. Abdulmutallab hoped to bring the plane down over Detroit, but the bomb sewn into his underwear failed to detonate.
Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born AQAP cleric, inspired several homegrown American terrorists through his radical online teachings. Awlaki was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in September 2011.
According to the indictment, Bell and an unnamed juvenile engaged in physical fitness and firearms training to prepare for armed conflict. Bell also made video and audio recordings to solicit and recruit others to join him in jihad. In furtherance of their efforts to "promote the jihad," Bell and his accomplice undertook a night-time "mission" in which they "dressed in dark clothing, wore masks and gloves, wrapped their footwear in tape, and, caused significant damage to religious statues at the Chapel Hills Memorial Gardens Cemetery."
Bell said he was 'partaking in the training of jihad," actively seeking participation in jihad," and "looking for an active objective." He identified his target as "[n]ot the American people, just the flag and the Government." A woman identifying herself as Bell's mother told the Jacksonville Times Union that he had converted to Islam.
Bell and the unnamed accomplice leased a laptop computer to communicate with people after he traveled to the Middle East and bought "gauze pads, batteries, athletic tape, razors, and a computer storage device" as part of their plan. Bell then bought a one-way ticket for both him and his friend to fly to Tel Aviv, Israel. They made the trip last September but were denied entry. After going to Jordan, they reached out to people named Nidal and Sheik Yussef seeking help finding a way into Yemen. It is not clear when he returned to Jacksonville or why he never made it to Yemen. He has been in the county jail since January on an unrelated grand theft charge, a Jacksonville television station reports.
Bell faces a maximum of 15 years in prison if convicted.
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My vacillation on this subject continues , , ,
Republicans for Snowden
A left-right House coalition rushes to stop metadata collection.
Few things are more dangerous than Congress in heat, and so it is this week as a libertarian-left wing coalition in the House of Representatives is rushing to neuter one of the National Security Agency's antiterror surveillance programs.
The chief instigator is Michigan Republican Justin Amash, the 33-year-old second-termer who has made opposition to the country's post-9/11 security programs a personal crusade. In previous years, he's attempted to ban the military interrogation and detention of any terrorist caught on U.S. soil. The effect would be to treat terrorists better if they blow up Times Square—where they'd receive U.S. civilian due-process protections if captured—than if they stayed overseas. Mr. Amash lost on the House floor, but you catch his drift.
Now he's back with an amendment to this year's defense spending bill that would bar the NSA from collecting metadata except when specific individuals are already being investigated and are subject to a court order. This would effectively end one of the two programs exposed by admitted NSA leaker and fugitive, Edward Snowden.
Metadata are the general phone records—numbers called, duration of the calls—not the content of the conversations. Searching through metadata amounts to searching the haystack to find a needle. But under Mr. Amash's amendment, the NSA could only gather metadata if it has already found the needle.
This would greatly complicate the job of preventing future terrorist attacks, because metadata can link a known suspect to a terrorist or terror cell that U.S. officials weren't aware of. The sifting of metadata helped the FBI locate and stop the New York subway bomber.
Mr. Amash has no experience on the Armed Services, Intelligence or Foreign Affairs committees, but he nonetheless claims to know that his amendment wouldn't hurt U.S. security. He's teaming up with Michigan Democrat John Conyers and other anti-antiterror liberals who want the U.S. to return to a pre-9/11 mindset of treating terrorists like street burglars.
A better guide to reality are those who have had experience defending the country. House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers and ranking Democrat Dutch Ruppersberger issued a statement Tuesday saying that "premature reactions" to the NSA leaks such as Mr. Amash's "would endanger our national security."
Several former Bush security officials on Tuesday also released an open letter to Congress supporting the NSA programs as lawful, carefully limited and essential to U.S. security. The signers include former Attorneys General Michael Mukasey and Alberto Gonzales, former CIA directors Michael Hayden and Porter Goss, former national security adviser Stephen Hadley, and former secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff.
By all means Congress should debate the NSA programs now that they are public, but any new limits ought to be carefully vetted for their potential consequences. The last thing Congress should do is kill a program in a rush to honor the reckless claims of Mr. Snowden and his apologists.
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Snowden could have been a legitimate whistleblower. Instead he fled the country and fed very valuable secrets to beacons of freedom like the Chinese ministry for State Security and the KGB (Ok, officially they are the FSB now, but internally they still call themselves the KGB).
Then again, given Buraq's "freedom to manuver" after the last election and his known distribution of classified information to America's enemies, perhaps Snowden can plea down his charges to "Impersonating Obama".
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http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57595202-38/feds-put-heat-on-web-firms-for-master-encryption-keys/
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http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57595202-38/feds-put-heat-on-web-firms-for-master-encryption-keys/
Good news for web firms based outside the US.
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http://www.clarionproject.org/analysis/muslim-brotherhood-groups-full-court-press-against-ray-kelly
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http://www.clarionproject.org/analysis/muslim-brotherhood-groups-full-court-press-against-ray-kelly
I couldn't imagine a better endorsement.
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Given the security implications, I post this one here:
http://www.ihatethemedia.com/weiner-mother-in-law-is-part-of-muslim-brotherhood
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/29/us/politics/momentum-builds-against-nsa-surveillance.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130729&_r=0
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jul/30/homeland-security-loses-track-of-1-million-foreign/?page=all#pagebreak
The Homeland Security Department has lost track of more than 1 million people who it knows arrived in the U.S. but who it cannot prove left the country, according to an audit Tuesday that also found the department probably won’t meet its own goals for deploying an entry-exit system.
The findings were revealed as Congress debates an immigration bill, and the Government Accountability Office’s report could throw up another hurdle because lawmakers in the House and Senate have said that any final deal must include a workable system to track entries and exits and cut down on so-called visa overstays.
The government does track arrivals, but is years overdue in setting up a system to track departures — a goal set in a 1996 immigration law and reaffirmed in 2004, but which has eluded Republican and Democratic administrations.
“DHS has not yet fulfilled the 2004 statutory requirement to implement a biometric exit capability, but has planning efforts under way to report to Congress in time for the fiscal year 2016 budget cycle on the costs and benefits of such a capability at airports and seaports,” GAO investigators wrote.
Outside business groups and Republican donors are trying to breathe life into the push for getting an immigration bill through Congress this year.
Nearly 100 top donors and former party officials signed a letter Tuesday pleading with House Republicans to pass a bill legalizing illegal immigrants, saying it could open the door to earning immigrants’ political support.
“Doing nothing is de facto amnesty. We need to take control of whom we let in our country and we need to make sure everybody plays by the same rules,” the donors said in their letter.
They aimed their pitch at House Republicans, who are trying to figure out a way forward and find themselves trapped between rank-and-file Republican voters who say legalizing illegal immigrants is an amnesty, and the party’s elites and donors who say the party cannot survive nationally without embracing legalization as part of a strategy to win over Hispanic voters.
SEE ALSO: Immigration officers union says agency can’t handle legalization
The donor letter was sent the same day that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and 400 other businesses and umbrella groups fired off a letter to House leaders of both parties, urging them to pass something — though the business leaders did not specifically call for legalizing illegal immigrants.
The business leaders and donors appeared to be sensing the momentum for immigration slipping away, little more than a month after the Senate passed its version on a bipartisan 68-32 vote.
How to handle visa overstays was a major part of the Senate bill debate when it came through the Judiciary Committee, though the issue received less attention on the Senate floor.
Under current law, the government is supposed to be developing a system to check every visitor’s entry and departure from the country, using biometric identifiers such as fingerprints. The system is supposed to apply to air, land and sea ports of entry.
But members of both parties have said that is a giant task. The Senate bill waters down those requirements, saying only that there must be a biographic-based system, which means using a photo, and that it be limited to air and sea ports.
The GAO said most of the overstays came by airplane, but 32 percent came through land ports of entry, and 4 percent came by sea. The average length of overstay was 2.7 years.
The Congressional Budget Office, which analyzed the Senate bill, said it will cut out about half of all illegal immigration. CBO said stiffer border security will limit those crossing the border illegally but that the system would boost the chances for illegal immigrants to come to the U.S. under new guest-worker programs and stay beyond their visas.
The executive branch is supposed to report annually to Congress on how many people have overstayed their visas but has failed to do so for the past two decades, saying the information isn’t reliable enough.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet A. Napolitano told the Senate this year that her department would begin to report in December, but the GAO said Homeland Security officials aren’t sure what methodology they will use.
The department has repeatedly pushed back its deadlines for setting up an exit system at airports, telling GAO investigators this year that it will finalize plans in the near future. But GAO said the department is already behind its own schedule.
“For example, DHS had planned to begin scenario-based testing for biometric air exit options in August 2013; however, according to DHS officials, the department now plans to begin such testing in early 2014,” the auditors said.
The total of 1 million potential overstays in the country is an improvement from two years ago, when the GAO found Homeland Security had lost track of 1.6 million people.
Homeland Security went back and looked at those names and found that more than half had either actually left the country unbeknownst to the government, or had gained legal status that allowed them to remain in the U.S.
Of the others, the department decided most were deemed not to be security risks and so there was no need to track them down. But 1,901 of them were deemed significant national security or public safety threats, and 266 of those were still unaccounted for as of March.
In its official response to the GAO report, the Homeland Security Department said it is creating a working group to try to improve its data, and pointed to its success in reducing the backlog of overstay cases from 1.6 million to 1 million.
“DHS remains committed to strengthening and building upon existing capabilities to better identify and report on potential overstays,” said Jim H. Crumpacker, the department’s liaison to GAO.
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Timothy Edgar: Big Transparency for the NSA
I've seen the safeguards in place. The public would be reassured if these measures were made generally known.
By TIMOTHY EDGAR
'Big data" is one name for the insight that collecting all the information in a massive database will uncover facts that collecting only some of the information cannot. This is not news to Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency. Gen. Alexander is a zealous advocate of getting it all whenever practically and legally possible. He sees increased agility in uncovering terrorist connections by acquiring vast databases of telephone records, including those of American citizens.
Now the intelligence community's big-data ambitions have prompted big privacy alarms. Edward Snowden's reckless dump of top-secret documents and bizarre flight to those new crusaders against electronic snooping—China and Russia—should have turned Americans against him. Instead, a national poll shows a solid majority believe that Mr. Snowden is a whistleblower, not a traitor. The House of Representatives recently fell just a few votes shy of cutting off funding for Gen. Alexander's bulk data collection.
The nation's intelligence chief, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, is struggling with how to restore trust. Mr. Clapper briefed Congress on the phone-records program but has since apologized for his public testimony in March denying that the NSA has the records of millions of Americans. The testimony, he has said, was "the least untruthful statement" he could have made in public about a bulk data-collection program that officials in the Obama and George W. Bush administrations unwisely chose to keep secret. Mr. Clapper and his successors should not be put in that position again.
I am a civil-liberties lawyer who has worked both for Mr. Clapper and for the American Civil Liberties Union. I have a unique perspective on the vast gulf between the way the public views spy agencies and the way the intelligence community views itself.
The intelligence community believes that it protects the public from dire threats, subject to strict oversight. Indeed, it was career national-security lawyers who were most disturbed by President George W. Bush's detour into executive unilateralism and warrantless wiretapping. They breathed a sigh of relief when that era came to an end. Following an intense and highly classified dialogue in which I participated during the latter half of the Bush administration, the intelligence community persuaded the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to authorize bulk collection of phone records while putting these activities under a robust and highly detailed set of privacy and civil-liberties constraints.
Queries of telephone-call records require that the targeted number is connected to an international terrorist organization. The targeted numbers must meet a well-defined legal standard—that of reasonable, articulable suspicion—and may only then be used to uncover, through sophisticated data analysis, the network of numbers with which the target has been in contact over time. Privacy safeguards are administered by teams of national-security lawyers in multiple agencies, and the entire process is subject to both congressional oversight and review by the FISA court. When the court and Congress identified compliance issues, the NSA took them seriously, overhauling their systems and creating a new office of compliance to address them.
What, then, accounts for the public mistrust? Intelligence officials forget that the public sees none of this. Where the government sees three branches of government working together in harmony, the public sees a disturbing pattern of secret law and secret government accompanied by demands to "trust us, we are keeping you safe." Secret checks and balances appear to be nothing more than a pale shadow of our constitutional design.
The FISA court may have reviewed the programs, but the public never got its day in court. The ACLU has challenged the constitutionality of NSA surveillance programs for years, but that case never got to the issue of constitutional rights. The intelligence community argued, and the Supreme Court agreed, that the civil-liberties groups couldn't maintain their lawsuit. Civil-liberties advocates represented a variety of people with entirely reasonable fears of monitoring. Whether they were actually under surveillance was a secret (and properly so). The government argued vigorously that this secrecy meant the case could not go forward, and the court agreed.
Sens. Ron Wyden and Mark Udall encountered a similar Catch-22 in 2011 when trying to raise questions about the NSA call-records program, when the Patriot Act was up for review. Although they were briefed on the program behind closed doors, they made no headway in arguing for greater transparency with the public. The resulting debate was highly skewed. Administration officials were free to make misleading arguments that the Patriot Act was just like an ordinary subpoena. Any member of Congress willing to spend a few hours in a small room in the Capitol knew that secret court opinions had approved collection that reached far wider than any subpoena. Those who did know about the opinions could not express any concerns in open debate. Secrecy prevented the Congress, like the Supreme Court, from having a real argument over surveillance powers.
Despite the Obama administration's best efforts, transparency is now on the rise. Mr. Clapper has chosen greater openness in reacting to the leak of the call-records program. Instead of providing the terse "no comment" that would have allowed the government to argue that legal challenges must be thrown out on secrecy grounds, in June Mr. Clapper confirmed the leaked program and provided details on its safeguards. The ACLU, seeing a stronger argument, promptly refiled its suit. Mr. Clapper made the right call—the government should welcome, not sidestep, debate on whether its programs are constitutional.
President Obama should go further, wresting control from the leakers and restoring trust with the public. He should ask Mr. Clapper to look across the intelligence community and disclose to the public the types of large databases it collects in bulk, under what legal powers or interpretations, and pursuant to what safeguards to protect Americans' privacy—while keeping necessary details secret.
Many aspects of surveillance must remain secret. For example, the government should never provide a list of companies from which it acquires big data sets. Despite what Americans see in the movies, the NSA doesn't actually collect everything. Knowing which companies are included and which are not would tip off terrorists about how to avoid detection—telling them which providers to use and which to avoid. Likewise, the government will never be able to confirm or deny whether particular people are under surveillance, but it should avoid the temptation to use this necessary secrecy to avoid meeting legal challenges to its activities. The government has good arguments for why its programs are both vital for national security and perfectly constitutional. It should make them.
The intelligence community has already taken significant steps in this direction. Mr. Clapper has declassified FISA court orders and congressional oversight reports. His lawyer, Bob Litt, has detailed the legal reasoning and privacy safeguards behind bulk collection. The intelligence community's civil-liberties officer, Alex Joel, has successfully pushed for transparency about the kinds of big financial and border databases that civilian agencies share with the intelligence community. Similarly, the FISA court is pushing back on excessive secrecy, hardly in keeping with the accusation that it is a rubber stamp.
Openness is a value in itself, but it is also a necessary precondition to the effective functioning of our three branches of government. President Obama has called for a "national conversation" about "the general problem of data, these big data sets" and their implications for privacy. A Privacy and Civil Liberties Board, recommended by the 9/11 Commission but moribund for years, is back in business, just in time to lead it. A national conversation will be meaningful only if a new policy of openness continues and deepens. It is long overdue.
Mr. Edgar is a visiting fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Affairs.
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There was a time when we didn't have to wonder about excrement like this , , ,
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/08/government-knocking-doors-because-google-searches/67864/
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/06/us/tsa-expands-duties-beyond-airport-security.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130806
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http://www.examiner.com/article/obama-lays-framework-for-purge-of-online-opponents
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F.B.I. Sharpens Scrutiny of Syrians in U.S. for Signs of Retaliation
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/us/fbi-sharpens-scrutiny-of-syrians-in-us-for-signs-of-retaliation.html?_r=0
Michael Yon asks:
How is it that just days after the alleged chemical attack, we have sufficient "proof" that Assad did it to wage war, yet after all this time we have so little on Benghazi?
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Kuwait Funding Muslim Brotherhood Growth in Western Mosques
by Abigail R. Esman
Special to IPT News
September 13, 2013
http://www.investigativeproject.org/4160/kuwait-funding-muslim-brotherhood-growth-in
The completion of a new mosque in Amsterdam is doing more than opening the doors of worship to Dutch Muslims; it is opening new windows into unexpected avenues of terrorist financing and funding for the growth of radical Islam in the West.
For years, Western counterterrorism officials and pundits have expressed concern about the sponsorship of European and American mosques, Islamic schools, and other Muslim organizations by the Saudi government in efforts to its own extremist version of Islam, Wahhabism. Wahhabis adhere to strict, literal interpretations of the Quran and defend the use of violence against those who do not – Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
Now, however, it seems we've been so focused on the Saudis, we may have missed a potentially even greater source of radicalization, and certainly a fast-growing one: the Muslim Brotherhood. And the government of Kuwait, with ties to al-Qaida groups and Hamas, appears to be among the largest financiers of Brotherhood infiltration into Europe.
This is where the Amsterdam mosque comes in. Located in the largely Muslim neighborhood of Sloterdijk, the Blue Mosque has been the subject of controversy in the Dutch press since its conception. A report that the government of Kuwait was paying salaries to its imam and other officers recently propelled the mosque – and its organization – into the headlines. Those reports have since been challenged, but the gist of them remains true: through a pan-European organization called the Europe Trust, Kuwait is tying Dutch and other European Muslims directly into the Muslim Brotherhood via complex financial, non-profit and religious networks that stretch from Spain to Ireland – and across the Atlantic to New York.
Based in the UK, the Europe Trust is funded largely by Kuwait (with help from the UAE-based Makhtoum Foundation, about which, more later), and, according to the Middle East Quarterly, "channels money from the Persian Gulf to groups sympathetic to the Brotherhood in Europe, primarily to build mosques." Indeed, the Blue Mosque was funded entirely by Kuwait, working through the offices of the Europe Trust Nederland (ETN). Others have tied the Europe Trust to the Brotherhood as well; but particularly notable is the fact that the Trust is led by Ahmed Al-Rawi, a UK-based Muslim Brotherhood leader, and Nooh al Kaddo, a Dublin-based Iraqi who runs the Islamic Cultural Center of Ireland (ICCI), well known as a Brotherhood institution. The ICCI also houses the European Council of Fatwa and Research, whose director, the Egyptian cleric Yusuf al Qaradawi, has reportedly "defended suicide bombing and advocated the death sentence for homosexuals, according to the Irish Independent. (Kaddo, for his part, defends Qaradawi, describing his views in the Independent as "representative of Islamic teachings and not assumed to be a violation of same.")
But here's what else: al-Kaddo, who serves as a trustee of the Hamas-linked charity, Human Appeal International, also directs the largest mosque in Western Europe: the Al Salam mosque in Rotterdam, a controversial monument whose 50-meter high minarets form the highest point in the city. And like the ICCI, Al Salam (also known as Essalam) was financed entirely by Hamdan ben Rashid Al-Makhtoum, deputy ruler of Dubai and (conveniently) UAE Minister of Finance. Makhtoum, as it happens, also is a generous donor to Hamas-linked CAIR in the U.S. (The Sheik has also provided funds for other European mosques.)
Thirty-five miles away, Amsterdam's Blue Mosque also has al-Kaddo to thank for his efforts to secure the money that built it – an achievement made possible in part through his affiliation with Yahia Bouyafa, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Netherlands and director (among other things) of the Federation of Islamic Organizations in the Netherlands (FION). FION, in turn, is a member of the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe (FIOE) – which the Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report identifies as a Brotherhood umbrella group that also embraces al-Kaddo's Europe Trust – and thus the Al Salam mosque in Rotterdam.
All in the same web. But there's more.
According to a fact sheet published by the Blue Mosque itself, a partnership developed early in the planning stages placed the ETN and FION – or al-Kaddo and Bouyafa – in charge of raising funds for the building. Bouyafa approached Kuwait's Ministry of Religious Affairs. But when his proposal was rejected, another local imam, Yassin Elforkani – suspected of ties to the Brotherhood – was called in to take over. With a few clever alterations to the construction and financing plan, Elforkani convinced Kuwait to provide the needed €2 million.
But with Kuwait now owning the building, sponsoring the ETN, and with extensive ties to Kaddo and Bouyafa (who has regularly exchanged places with Elforkani as director of FION and of the mosque board), the next step was inevitable: the appointment of Kuwaiti Minister for Religious Affairs (Awaqf) Mutlaq al-Qarawi, as chairman of the European Trust Nederland.
This means that one of the most active Muslim organizations in the Netherlands is now led not by a Dutch citizen, not even by a Dutch-speaking foreign imam, but by the government of Kuwait. More specifically, the Trust now sits in the hands of the Kuwaiti Ministry of Religious Affairs, which takes as its mandate spread of Islam to nonbelievers (dawah).
The Europe Trust has also not limited itself to Northern Europe: the NEFA Foundation has tied the group to properties in France, Greece, Romania, and Germany, where, NEFA notes, "funds for real estate purchased […] on behalf of a German Islamic association also came from the Makhtoum Foundation as well as the Awaqf Ministry [Ministry of Religious Affairs] in Kuwait and the Bayt al-Zakat in Dubai."
If all this sounds remote for Americans, too far across the oceans to matter very much, think again. According to a 2003 statement from former National Security and Counter-terrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke before the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, "several Al Qida operatives have allegedly been associated with the Kuwaiti Muslim Brotherhood," including 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramsi Yousef, a key figure in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
What's more, Clarke testified, "The Kuwaiti government allegedly provides substantial funding to charities controlled by the Kuwait Muslim Brotherhood, such as Lajnat al-Dawa. The U.S. Department of Treasury and the United Nations Security Council designated Lajnat al-Dawa on January 9, 2003 as a supporter of Al Qida. Lajnat al-Dawa and its affiliates had offices in the U.S. in Michigan, Colorado, and Northern Virginia."
If that's not enough, cables published by Wikileaks regarding the problems of policing money flowing to terrorist groups are even more damning. The New York Times summed up a series of these cables, which described Kuwait, the only Gulf country where terrorist funding has not been criminalized, as "a key transit point."
Other ties have been suggested between U.S. mosques and the Brotherhood, most notably the renowned Islamic Cultural Center in New York, founded by Egyptian-born
Muhammad Abdul Rauf – father of former Ground Zero Mosque/Park51 imam Faisal Rauf – and funded in large measure by the Kuwaiti government.
Meanwhile, al-Kaddo, with continuing support from the Muslim Brotherhood in Kuwait, is gathering funds for even more mosques throughout Europe. While the ETN, he insists, does not define the positions of those mosques, it does use its power to hire, appoint, and fire each mosque's officers and imams – all carefully selected from an inside Brotherhood group – and many of whom have ties to Hamas or al-Qaida.
With Europe now becoming one of the richest resources for Islamic jihad, and with the free ability of its citizens to travel visa-free to the United States, the threat a growing, radicalized European Brotherhood network poses is a lot closer than it seems.
Abigail R. Esman, the author, most recently, of Radical State: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy in the West (Praeger, 2010), is a freelance writer based in New York and the Netherlands.
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second post
http://www.glennbeck.com/2013/09/12/think-the-border-is-secure-for-the-record-exposes-the-truth-of-violence-on-the-border/?utm_source=Daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2013-09-13_256855&utm_content=5054942&utm_term=_256855_256869
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http://www.bizpacreview.com/2013/09/13/muslim-brotherhood-supporter-gets-homeland-security-promotion-83259
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/11/us/imagining-a-cyberattack-on-the-power-grid.html?src=recg&_r=0
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/23/us/bodies-pile-up-in-texas-as-immigrants-adopt-new-routes-over-border.html?WT.mc_id=AD-D-E-OTB-WRLD-0913-&WT.mc_ev=click&WT.mc_c=__CAMP_UID__&_r=1&
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http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/09/30/Exclusive-Feds-Cooking-Books-on-Illegal-Immigration-says-Border-Patrol-Union
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This from someone in a position to know:
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Sen McCain and Rep. Cuellar pressed CBP/DHS about the numbers this year in congressional hearings. They used to keep apprehensions, turn backs, and got-aways. As McCain protested, i believe now only apprehensions are tracked. So he asked how can you state you have operational control of the border when you don't maintain metrics that can substantiate it?
Here's a good read about it. No understandable metrics and a lot of mealy mouth tap dancing from the agency to congress.
http://www.cis.org/asking-for-trust-evading-validation-chronology-of-border-patrol-and-dhs-positions
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Uh oh , , ,
http://www.wtsp.com/news/topstories/article/339104/250/INVESTIGATORS-Memo-warns-of-terrorist-dry-runs-on-planes
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Uh oh , , ,
http://www.wtsp.com/news/topstories/article/339104/250/INVESTIGATORS-Memo-warns-of-terrorist-dry-runs-on-planes
I thought terrorism ended after Buraq became president.
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http://www.buzzfeed.com/bennyjohnson/brave-tourists-are-blatantly-defying-the-us-governments-dema
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/10/17/exclusive-jeh-johnson-tapped-to-lead-department-of-homeland-security.html
From the article:
Throughout his tenure at the Defense Department, Johnson deftly navigated Washington's ideological crosscurrents. He developed strong relationships with the military brass as well as with member of Congress on both sides of the aisle. He's even managed to become a favorite of Rachel Maddow, the progressive talk show host on MSNBC.
As the Pentagon's top lawyer, Johnson was deeply involved in hundreds of sensitive counterterrorism and military operations. His views evolved on targeted killings, leading him over time to believe that the administration needed clearer and more transparent procedures for the controversial strikes. He played a key role in developing the policy to start shifting the drone policy away from the CIA and over to the military.
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"As the Pentagon's top lawyer, Johnson was deeply involved in hundreds of sensitive counterterrorism and military operations."
Among Jeh Johnson's 'achievements' is the advice to grant civilian trials in NYC to terrorists.
"He's even managed to become a favorite of Rachel Maddow, the progressive talk show host on MSNBC."
Yes.
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In addition to the forgoing there is the simple question presented: How does being a lawyer prepare one for running DHS? (compare Charlotte Lamb being head of security for Dept of State-- also completely lacking in security background-- look at how well that turned out :cry: )
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There have been many lawyers in leadership roles at DHS. I don't follow you here.
In addition to the forgoing there is the simple question presented: How does being a lawyer prepare one for running DHS? (compare Charlotte Lamb being head of security for Dept of State-- also completely lacking in security background-- look at how well that turned out :cry: )
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And how has that worked out?
I gather the NYC police chief was under consideration. As far as the critierion under discussion goes, that would be a much more logical choice by my lights.
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I still don't follow you. What about a police commissioner makes that a better choice than a former top Pentagon attorney who has extensive national security experience?
I think you may be ignoring issues like poor institutional design OF DHS with poor performance IN DHS. Your (seeming) derision of attorneys is something I still don't understand, and to be honest, something I find surprising.
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Given that DHS is a massive law enforcement entity, you'd think that executive level leadership over a massive law enforcement agency type experience would be important.
Then again, competence and ability has never been a requirement for this administration.
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Given that DHS is a massive law enforcement entity, you'd think that executive level leadership over a massive law enforcement agency type experience would be important.
Then again, competence and ability has never been a requirement for this administration.
You misunderstand what DHS is. While there are law enforcement agencies within it, it isn't itself a "law enforcement entity." Inclusion of entities such as FEMA, the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, Office of Health Affairs and the Science and Technology directorate would suggest that. FEMA's budget (FY 2012) was $10.6B. Total DHS funding was about $57B. FEMA's budget was, I think, the largest single outlay for a component part of the DHS.
Additionally, the missions of DHS include things like domestic cybersecurity and ensuring resilience to disaster. While these are related to law enforcement, they are hardly the sole domain of law enforcement.
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Ah, so Johnson's lack of experience in those areas as well is a plus then? I guess NYPD has nothing to do with infrastructure protection or disaster response.
On the plus side, he's donated a lot of money to dems.
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As, so, having had your error pointed out to you change reasons why his appointment is questionable (to you)?
Perhaps I think Pentagon experience is experience is security. And perhaps you don't?
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His military experience is?
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"Perhaps I think Pentagon experience is experience is security. And perhaps you don't"
Perhaps I am missing something here, but I was under the impression that his experience at the Pentagon had to do with legal issues pertaining to security-- certainly an element here, but not really the central one IMHO.
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The question might be, what is the closest experience he has to running a similar 230,000 employee law enforcement / national security operation - at a time when we are under attack.
Another question might be, what would be the Dem reaction be if a Republican president chose a totally unqualified partisan to run a crucial national security agency.
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1. He is not unqualified.
2. His military experience is leading large portions of it.
3. Relevant work experience includes serving as AF General Counsel, DoD General Counsel, where he led 10,000 employees, and where he was instrumental in forming and articulating the nation's drone policy.
4. You not liking him does not make him inexperienced.
5. And you not liking attorneys does not make his nomination sound.
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I'm certainly not going to the mattresses over this, , , :-)
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As, so, having had your error pointed out to you change reasons why his appointment is questionable (to you)?
Perhaps I think Pentagon experience is experience is security. And perhaps you don't?
What exactly did he do at the Pentagon? Can you cite any accomplishments of note in his CV that would suggest he's not just another AA empty suit valued mostly for his "political reliability"?
My error? Let's look at the DHS mission statement:
Mission 1: Preventing Terrorism and Enhancing Security
• Goal 1.1: Prevent Terrorist Attacks
• Goal 1.2: Prevent the Unauthorized Acquisition or Use of Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear Materials and Capabilities
• Goal 1.3: Manage Risks to Critical Infrastructure, Key Leadership, and Events
Mission 2: Securing and Managing Our Borders
• Goal 2.1: Effectively Control U.S. Air, Land, and Sea Borders
• Goal 2.2: Safeguard Lawful Trade and Travel
• Goal 2.3: Disrupt and Dismantle Transnational Criminal Organizations
Mission 3: Enforcing and Administering Our Immigration Laws
• Goal 3.1: Strengthen and Effectively Administer the Immigration System
• Goal 3.2: Prevent Unlawful Immigration
Mission 4: Safeguarding and Securing Cyberspace
• Goal 4.1: Create a Safe, Secure, and Resilient Cyber Environment
• Goal 4.2: Promote Cybersecurity Knowledge and Innovation
Mission 5: Ensuring Resilience to Disasters
• Goal 5.1: Mitigate Hazards
• Goal 5.2: Enhance Preparedness
• Goal 5.3: Ensure Effective Emergency Response
• Goal 5.4: Rapidly Recover
Or, you can ask Crafty what they teach here:
(http://dogbrothers.com/wp-content/gallery/2013-misc/dynamic/2013-10-customs-nggid046997-ngg0dyn-600x0x100-00f0w010c010r110f110r010t010.jpg)
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I am aware of what the mission of DHS. In fact, my points above were taken from that statement. Did you note that the mission goes well beyond law enforcement, as I stated?
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I am aware of what the mission of DHS. In fact, my points above were taken from that statement. Did you note that the mission goes well beyond law enforcement, as I stated?
Law Enforcement's mission isn't strictly law enforcement, no matter if it's local, state or federal. It's a very big umbrella that cover a wide variety of duties.
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I am aware of what the mission of DHS. In fact, my points above were taken from that statement. Did you note that the mission goes well beyond law enforcement, as I stated?
Law Enforcement's mission isn't strictly law enforcement, no matter if it's local, state or federal. It's a very big umbrella that cover a wide variety of duties.
http://www.cliffsnotes.com/more-subjects/criminal-justice/police-function/the-nature-of-police-work
The Nature of Police Work
The myth of police as crime‐fighters has been conveyed to the American people through television dramas, comic strips, and newspaper articles. It conjures up in one's mind an image of a police officer doing a dangerous job that requires him or her to outshoot, outpunch, and outwit dangerous criminals. For most American police, there is little correspondence between this image and reality. In a major metropolitan area (where crime rates are the highest), half of the officers in the local department will not make a felony arrest during a given year. The total annual rate of weapon discharges per hundred police officers is in the range of two to six.
What do the police really do?
Three functions
Even though we refer to the police as law enforcement officers, the enforcement of criminal law (in other words, investigating crime and apprehending criminals) is only one of several functions that the police perform. The functions of the American police include providing basic social services, maintaining order, and controlling crime.
•
In the area of social service, the police help people who need emergency assistance, whether it is giving first aid or finding lost children. Typically, over 50 percent of the telephone calls to the police requesting assistance involve social service as compared with less than 20 percent relating to crime.
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Among the order‐maintenance activities are traffic control, crowd control, resolving domestic disputes, and moving prostitutes from the streets. The focus of order maintenance is on handling situations to preserve the peace rather than enforcing the letter of the law. The appropriate order‐maintenance solution may be making an arrest (for example, in case of domestic violence), but it often consists of some less formal action (for example, getting an illegal panhandler to move on).
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In the area of crime control, the police engage in a range of activities, such as patrol and criminal investigation.
Major responsibilities
The American Bar Association's Standards Relating to the Urban Police Function lists these 11 responsibilities:
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To identify criminal offenders and criminal activity and, when appropriate, to apprehend offenders and participate in later court proceedings.
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To reduce the opportunities for the commission of some crimes through preventive patrol and other measures.
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To aid individuals who are in danger of physical harm.
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To protect constitutional guarantees.
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To facilitate the movement of people and vehicles.
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To assist those who cannot care for themselves.
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To resolve conflict.
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To identify problems that are potentially serious law enforcement or government problems.
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To create and maintain a feeling of security in the community.
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To promote and preserve civil order.
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To provide other services on an emergency basis.
Factors shaping police work
Several factors shape what the police do. Twenty‐four hour availability broadens police contacts with the public. People call the police because there is no other agency available. A disadvantage is that such availability gives police a heavy workload. The authority to use force stamps police work with a uniqueness that sets it apart from other lines of work. Force includes the right to use deadly force, to arrest people, and to use physical force. Whatever aspect of the police mission is emphasized—whether it involves checking on suspicious persons who appear to be out of place or responding to reports of crime—the police have to be willing, in the last analysis, to threaten force and to back up the threat with action. Discretion leaves an imprint on all areas of policing. Police are often free to choose among alternative courses of action or inaction. They routinely rely on their own experience, training, common sense, and judgment to make decisions involving the life and liberty of citizens. Examples of discretionary decision making include decisions involving arrests, traffic tickets, deadly force, and domestic abuse. In each of these situations, officers determine whether or not to invoke the power of the law.
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MARINE: Strict Rules Of Engagement Are Killing More Americans Than Enemy In This Lost War
Paul Szoldra
When I deployed to Afghanistan as an infantry squad leader in 2004, I had the utmost confidence in my superiors, our mission to restore order to Afghanistan, and to help the Afghan people.
At the time of my deployment, we had clear rules of engagement (ROE): if you ever feel that your life is threatened, you can respond with force to include deadly force.
Beyond this, we also patrolled our area of operations with the knowledge that if we ever radioed "troops in contact," our requests for air or artillery support would be approved.
Thankfully, I never had to make that radio call. During my seven-month tour with 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines in Khost Province, combat was light. We encountered many more weapons caches than we did enemy attacks. I never once fired my weapon. The hotspot at the time was Iraq. Our war, it seemed, was won.
When I returned and transitioned to a role as an infantry instructor in 2006, my peers—who only had deployed to Iraq—quipped that I was part of the “forgotten war.”
And where are we today?
Six years after hearing those jokes, the war is forgotten by everyone except the men and women who continue to fight it. My mostly quiet wartime memory of 2005 has exploded into a battlefield of heavy combat with the casualties to go along with it.
And yet all the blood, destruction—all the efforts of our military—cannot change the unfortunate and highly probable outcome that our 2014 exit from Afghanistan will be marked as a failure.
I don’t want to believe it, but we are losing this war.
Each day our soldiers and Marines leave the wire, only to face increasing attacks from a determined enemy. An insurgency that continues to enjoy support—even from inside a corrupt government in Kabul as well as Islamabad.
And they don’t just face Taliban AK-47s and improvised explosives. They also continue to face the guns of their supposed allies, Afghan National Army and Police forces, who have killed over 30 U.S. military personnel just this year alone.
As we try to win hearts and minds, the Taliban uses fear—and in a culture of tribalism and tradition, it is fear that works.
Instead of being afraid of the might of U.S. firepower, enemy fighters use our rules of engagement and restrictions on air support against us. When faced with a split-second decision of whether to shoot, soldiers many times must hesitate—or be investigated. Or, as in the case of the 2009 Battle of Ganjgal, excessive restrictions on air and artillery assets unfortunately meant excessive American deaths.
“We are willing to restrict ourselves to the point of helplessness to avoid even a possibility of civilian casualties,” said one military officer who I’ll refer to as Evan, speaking on condition of anonymity. “I have personally watched the same man arm and disarm 12 improvised explosive devices (IEDs) over a week, with no strikes allowed due to collateral concerns.”
The failure of the war does not rest at the hands of the brave troops who patrol every day. It lies with top military leadership and politicians, who have effectively choked our troops so badly that their mission has become impossible.
“I cannot emphasize just how badly the pullout date has ruined our efforts over here,” said Evan. “Down to the lowest soldier, there is a very palpable sense that everything we’ve done is too little, too late.”
As many leaders and politicians continue to plead with a public weary to continue their support for the war, they say, as they said similarly during the war in Vietnam, that “the deaths of our soldiers should not be in vain.”
I disagree. The death of a brother in arms, while tragic and equally heartbreaking, should not be used as a political tool. The fallen heroes of this war are lost forever and will never see a battlefield again. They should not be used to further justify its expansion.
There is an economic theory that supports my reasoning: It’s called a sunk cost dilemma. The theory presents a problem of having to choose between ending an activity immediately or choosing to continue with an uncertain outcome that already involves considerable investment. The investment, whether it be time, money, or in the case of the Afghan war, lives, can never be recovered, and is called a sunk cost.
I believe that we should allow our soldiers to be able to fight this war. As Lt Col. Christian Cabaniss tells his Marines in the documentary Obama’s War, “Make no mistake, we are experts in the application of violence.”
Despite being experts at warfare, the military, much like a professional boxer, will never win a fight when their hands are tied behind their back. Unfortunately, it is our own Generals and politicians that have done the tying.
“We’ve embraced the counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine without remembering to maintain the true power of the US military, which is an unstoppable killing machine,” Evan told me. “Now the buzz words are ‘development’ [and] ‘partnership’. These things brief well, but they must be used hand in hand with a tolerant and permissive ROE that allows us to flex our full potential when we need to.”
As we look forward to 2014 and our strategy of withdrawal that President Obama has announced, I can tell you some of what the future holds. As the example of the sunk cost dilemma states, we are choosing to continue with an uncertain outcome. This is not entirely true.
If we do not allow our military to carry out their mission—to locate, close with, and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver, as is the infantry’s goal, and support them with the assets they need, then the next two years will be marked with more American deaths, many more wounded, continued training failure and eventual stall in recruitment of Afghan security forces, and a country left in ruins.
Make no mistake: our enemy is resilient. But they are not impossible to defeat. When our Marines and soldiers were unleashed—with tanks, artillery, air support, and rules of engagement that favored the U.S. instead of the insurgency during the second Battle of Fallujah in 2004—the fighters soon realized how tough our military was.
“We are fighting, but the Marines keep coming!” said a frantic Fallujah insurgent to other fighters in an intercepted radio communication. “We are shooting, but the Marines won’t stop!”
We need to stop lying to ourselves.
Let our troops do the job that we, united as Americans, know they can do, or withdraw them immediately and save us a predictable and tragic two more years of war.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/one-marines-views-on-afghanistan-2012-8
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Why on earth is this in this thread? Better in Afpakia, yes? Or the Military thread, yes?
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Why on earth is this in this thread? Better in Afpakia, yes? Or the Military thread, yes?
Just pointing out Jeh Johnson's "accomplishments" that got him the DHS slot.
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Homeland Security Secretary nominee Jeh Johnson is loyal to the
Constitution I mean Obama
4:22 PM 10/18/2013
Jim Treacher
Here’s the guy Obama is expected to nominate to replace Janet Napolitano. He’s talking about being in NYC on 9/11:
“When that bright and beautiful day, a day something like this, was shattered by the largest terrorist attack on our homeland in history, I wandered the streets of New York that day and wonderered, and asked, ‘What can I do?’ Since then, I have tried to devote myself to answering that question. I love this country. I care about the safety of our people. I believe in public service. And I remain loyal to you, Mr. President.”
He remains loyal to Barack Obama? What happened to supporting and defending the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and bearing true faith and allegiance to the same? Isn’t that how it’s supposed to go?
Or did that dusty old piece of parchment get snubbed on purpose? Obama certainly doesn’t have much use for it when it interferes with his whims.
Gather ’round, kids. We’ve made a few changes:
“I pledge allegiance to Barack, not the United States of America, and to the repugnance for which he stands, one narcissist, his own god, insufferable, with little but injustice for all.”
Welcome to Utopia. Ain’t it grand?
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/18/homeland-security-secretary-nominee-jeh-johnson-is-loyal-to-the-constitution-obama/
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Again, just because you don't like them doesn't make them unqualified.
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Again, just because you don't like them doesn't make them unqualified.
Yes, which is why I've provided evidence showing why Johnson isn't qualified.
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No, you haven't. You have taken position that attorneys don't have a place in war. That is not true. And the idea that someone can't/shouldn't be loyal to a person is silly.
Again, just because you don't like them doesn't make them unqualified.
Yes, which is why I've provided evidence showing why Johnson isn't qualified.
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No, my position is that a bar card and fundraising for the dems aren't qualifiers to run DHS. This country is suffering enough due to empty suits in positions of power.
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And my position is that having served as the USAF and DoD general counsel (a position that put him in a policymaking role) makes him not an "empty suit."
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And my position is that having served as the USAF and DoD general counsel (a position that put him in a policymaking role) makes him not an "empty suit."
So, let's look at the ROEs that have served to get troops killed and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in A-stan. That's his qualification?
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No, let's not, and here's why: every time I shoot down one of your arguments you change the target. First you claim DHS is a law enforcement agency. Then you say "my position is that a bar card and fundraising for the dems aren't qualifiers to run DHS. This country is suffering enough due to empty suits in positions of power." Now, confronted with the fact that this position is also false, you change arguments again. Let me repeat, just because you don't like someone (or his policy) doesn't make them unqualified.
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Law enforcement entity. Words mean things, pay attention to detail, please. I worked for a DHS agency, I have trained with DHS personnel. I deal with ICE on a regular basis in my current job.
I know quite a bit about the dysfunction within DHS and the jeopardy it places the public in. Do you think the political hacks in other sensitive positions have served this country well?
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Law enforcement entity. Words mean things, pay attention to detail, please.
I have already: "You misunderstand what DHS is. While there are law enforcement agencies within it, it isn't itself a "law enforcement entity." Inclusion of entities such as FEMA, the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, Office of Health Affairs and the Science and Technology directorate would suggest that. FEMA's budget (FY 2012) was $10.6B. Total DHS funding was about $57B. FEMA's budget was, I think, the largest single outlay for a component part of the DHS.
Additionally, the missions of DHS include things like domestic cybersecurity and ensuring resilience to disaster. While these are related to law enforcement, they are hardly the sole domain of law enforcement."
Then you changed the subject. Again.
I know quite a bit about the dysfunction within DHS and the jeopardy it places the public in. Do you think the political hacks in other sensitive positions have served this country well?
As do I. And that isn't the issue. The issue is that you think that Johnson is an "empty suit." Or thought that, until corrected. I'm done with the conversation, GM.
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(I should stay out, but...) I wrote "totally unqualified" and should clarify. Anyone who can get nominated and confirmed is arguably qualified. And legal training is a plus, not a minus, same for loyalty if it is well-directed.
Johnson's "policy making role" was to advise policy makers; he was not a policy maker. (No one said he was.) On that, he has no experience or track record, which unfortunately is a plus in the eyes of the President - for confirmation purposes.
A better question than is he qualified: who is MOST qualified for that job? On that I would start with the people who have run the most similar operations successfully. If you started at the top of that list and headed down it forever, his name will never come up.
Is management and policy making experience a crucial qualification for a job managing the performance of 230,000 security and law enforcement agents? I think so!
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Law enforcement entity. Words mean things, pay attention to detail, please.
I have already: "You misunderstand what DHS is. While there are law enforcement agencies within it, it isn't itself a "law enforcement entity." Inclusion of entities such as FEMA, the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, Office of Health Affairs and the Science and Technology directorate would suggest that. FEMA's budget (FY 2012) was $10.6B. Total DHS funding was about $57B. FEMA's budget was, I think, the largest single outlay for a component part of the DHS.
Additionally, the missions of DHS include things like domestic cybersecurity and ensuring resilience to disaster. While these are related to law enforcement, they are hardly the sole domain of law enforcement."
Then you changed the subject. Again.
I know quite a bit about the dysfunction within DHS and the jeopardy it places the public in. Do you think the political hacks in other sensitive positions have served this country well?
As do I. And that isn't the issue. The issue is that you think that Johnson is an "empty suit." Or thought that, until corrected. I'm done with the conversation, GM.
As I posted earlier in an attempt to explain to someone lacking any real world experience in law enforcement, law enforcement is a big umbrella where a variety of tasks not directly related to the core mission of enforcement also fall to both individuals and agencies. As an example, many Sheriff's Office's have medical care expenses for inmates at the jail as the biggest budget item. That doesn't mean the county jail is a hospital. What do you define DHS as then?
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http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/10/02/Exclusive-Border-Patrol-Management-Orders-Agents-to-Stand-Down-While-Tracking-Smugglers
Exclusive--Border Patrol Rep Claims Agents Being Ordered to Stand Down
by Brandon Darby 3 Oct 2013
The National Border Patrol Council has come forward to reveal to the American public once again management practices that could be risking the lives of Americans -- and the lives of illegal immigrants.
Shawn Moran, Vice President of the National Border Patrol Council, spoke exclusively with Breitbart News and claimed that Border Patrol management has begun the practice of ordering Border Patrol Agents to stand down and cease pursuing drug smugglers, human smugglers and traffickers, and illegal aliens. He also warned it could lead to illegal aliens entering the country from nations associated with terrorism.
“It doesn’t matter whether it’s drugs, bodies, or how large the group is, our agents are being ordered to stand down by Border Patrol management,” said Moran. "I have received reports from our agents in every single sector from San Diego to the Rio Grande Valley in Texas that they are receiving these orders."
"They are not being relieved in place, they are simply being told that someone else is being dispatched, but none of us have seen that occur," he explained. "We are simply being ordered to stand down and stop tracking and trying to apprehend the criminals.” He discussed the importance of agents being relieved in place when tracking an individual or group.
"Border Patrol senior leadership says the stand downs are a means of addressing budgetary shortfalls and making sure agents aren’t working longer shifts," Moran said. "The Border Patrol has a larger budget than ever, but the agents on the ground have not seen the benefits of an increased budget. The increased budget has not trickled down to the men and women with their boots on the ground."
"They are placing the budgetary concerns before the security of our border," Moran stated. "We have situations where top-level bureaucrats in the U.S. Border Patrol and in the Customs and Border Protection Agency are receiving massive bonuses -- some up to $64,000 --- for finding ways to reduce the pay Border Patrol Agents receive."
"Groups that are outside of human trafficking, human smuggling, and drug smuggling are going to exploit these stand down orders as well, not only cartels but illegal aliens from nations that are tied to terrorism,” he warned.
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http://www.redflagnews.com/headlines/alert-fox-news-reporting-dept-of-homeland-security-preparing-for-riots-on-nov-1-2013-video
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http://www.redflagnews.com/headlines/alert-fox-news-reporting-dept-of-homeland-security-preparing-for-riots-on-nov-1-2013-video
Sooner rather than later.
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http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/10/28/Middle-Eastern-Immigration-Fraud-Ring-Busted-in-U-S
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- The Daily Caller - http://dailycaller.com -
Obama’s nominee for Homeland Security ‘intimidated’ law enforcement
Posted By Charles C. Johnson On 3:14 AM 10/28/2013 In | No Comments
Homeland Security nominee Jeh Johnson orchestrated a controversial prosecution of a highly decorated immigration officer in what became the first prosecution of a law enforcement official for civil rights violations. The case attracted national condemnation from advocates of law enforcement and ultimately led to a federal commutation.
Immigration and Naturalization Service agent Joseph Occhipinti was sentenced to 37 months in prison for an illegal consent search of Dominican-drug cartel connected businesses as part of Project Bodega in 1991.
Project Bodega was based on intelligence that the Dominican cartels were buying up Dominican-owned groceries in New York City to help distribute drugs.
Occhipinti made a series of routine consent searches of Dominicans in and around those shops that landed him in hot water. He did not fill out the paperwork but asked suspects if they would consent to the searches. Occhipinti said they did and he thought the matter was over. It wasn’t.
Though normally dealt with administratively, Occhipinti’s searches became the subject of a federal inquiry once Johnson, who had previously worked with Occhipinti on Project Esquire as an assistant U.S. Attorney, saw the case as a way of advancing himself politically, says Occhipinti.
As the former INS Chief for Anti-Smuggling, Occhipinti led numerous drug interdiction programs and task force operations that successfully prosecuted major organized crime figures. For five years, Occhipinti worked undercover infiltrating the ”Dominican Federation,” a front for the cartel, where he exposed corruption and is credited for one of the largest seizures recorded.
According to congressional and court testimony, during a police homicide investigation in 1988, Occhipinti uncovered evidence that a Dominican drug cartel reportedly employed a former federal prosecutor who allegedly held private sex and drug parties to get more lenient sentences for the cartel’s members. Occhipinti’s Project Esquire had revealed that there was corruption within Johnson’s office before it was mysteriously shut down.
Occhipinti testified that Johnson should have recused himself as the prosecutor for conflict of interest since he was intimately involved in the Operation Esquire investigation, which alleged official corruption at the SDNY [the Southern District of New York], Occhipinti testified before Congress in 2000.
Occhipinti pressed forward through the support of state prosecutors and developed “Operation Bodega” to target the cartel that was using area grocery stores to facilitate their drug trafficking and money laundering activities.
As Occhipinti got closer to identifying the web of corruption, there was political pushback, he says.
On April 4, 1989, the ”Dominican Federation”, a front for the Dominican drug cartel according to the NYPD, held a press conference at City Hall calling the operation a ”Republican Conspiracy” that was sabotaging the 1990 census. They accused the operation of violating the federal civil rights of hard working Dominican merchants.
The Occhipinti trial and verdict received national attention and became the subject of congressional inquiries. According to Occhipinti, Professor Bennett L. Gershman of Pace University, the nation’s leading expert on prosecutorial misconduct, has testified that the Occhipinti case is one of the worst examples of misconduct he has ever seen. Gershman, however, did not recall making those comments when reached by The Daily Caller.
Johnson, who was then an assistant U.S. attorney, did not advise the grand jury of exculpatory evidence from a NYPD detective that clearly showed the involvement of a Dominican drug cartel in the public relations campaign, Occhipinti told the House Judiciary Committee in 2000.
Occhipinti says that Johnson should have recused himself because of his close social ties to Judge Constance Baker Motley, the federal judge for whom he had clerked and with whom he remained close. During the trial it appeared that Johnson had some ex-parte communications with the judge without the approval of the defense. Johnson also went to the media and criticized reporters who defended Occhipinti.
A New American (Brooklyn, NY), article (February 21, 1994) reported on
There was bad blood between [Johnson] and Occhipinti as a result of the Project Esquire investigation of corruption within [Johnson’s] office. Further some of Johnson’s associates alleged that he had boasted that an Occhipinti conviction would land him a high-paying private sector job—a prediction that was fulfilled. Today, Johnson’s office walls at the prestigious New York law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkin, Wharton and Garrison are adorned with artists’ renderings of the Occhipinti trial, which Johnson regards as “trophies.”
Reached for comment at his home, Occhipinti stressed that he harbors no ill will toward Johnson but said that it is “undeniable” that Johnson’s aggressive prosecution of Occhipinti has harmed law enforcement’s “ability to do their job.”
“It’s not just me saying it,” Occhipinti told The Daily Caller. “Ever since the trial there has been a chilling effect on law enforcement’s ability to do routine police work, especially as it relates to immigration [issues].”
Occhipinti wouldn’t comment on whether he thought Johnson was a good choice to head Homeland Security, saying only that he had moved on with his life.
Occhipinti sounded worried throughout the call. He had declined comment in a previous email but consented to speak after this reporter followed up.
The case has had political implications. Then likely mayoral candidate Rudi Guiliani backed a new trial for Occhipinti. Borough President Guy V. Molinari of Staten Island resigned his involvement with the Bush-Quayle campaign because he felt not enough was being done to address Occhipinti’s case by Justice Department officials. President George H. W. Bush ultimately gave Occhipinti a commutation over the objections of his own Justice Department.
Occhipinti was put into jail with the very same Dominican drug lords he put away. “I’m lucky to be alive,” he said. Today Occhipinti heads the National Police Defense Foundation, one of the nation’s largest law enforcement foundations, where he helps defend other police officers from going through what he did.
Occhipinti hopes the Obama administration takes up his pardon request. The Obama White House has pardoned several drug traffickers but rejected Occhipinti’s request.
Johnson could not be reached for comment. He pledged his loyalty to President Obama during the nomination speech earlier this week.
Follow Charles on Twitter
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Article printed from The Daily Caller: http://dailycaller.com
URL to article: http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/28/obamas-nominee-for-homeland-security-intimidated-law-enforcement/
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I apologize for the source, having recently learned that quoting the Huffington Post is always a mistake.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/01/paul-anthony-ciancia-lax-shooting-suspect_n_4194156.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000009
From the article:
Law-enforcement officials tell NBC News that that Paul Anthony Ciancia, 23, entered the airport around 9:20 a.m., Pacific Time, and opened fire inside Terminal 3. The Associated Press also reported that authorities named Ciancia as the suspect.
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Did they blame Sarah Palin for this shooting as well?
I apologize for the source, having recently learned that quoting the Huffington Post is always a mistake.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/01/paul-anthony-ciancia-lax-shooting-suspect_n_4194156.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000009
From the article:
Law-enforcement officials tell NBC News that that Paul Anthony Ciancia, 23, entered the airport around 9:20 a.m., Pacific Time, and opened fire inside Terminal 3. The Associated Press also reported that authorities named Ciancia as the suspect.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/22/business/security-check-now-starts-long-before-you-fly.html?_r=1&
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/22/business/security-check-now-starts-long-before-you-fly.html?_r=1&
This is a good policy, I think.
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http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/11/05/border-patrol-reportedly-rejects-recommended-curbs-on-deadly-force-against-rock/?intcmp=latestnews
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http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/11/05/border-patrol-reportedly-rejects-recommended-curbs-on-deadly-force-against-rock/?intcmp=latestnews
PERF is a lefty police admin group responsible for most of the stupid ideas in law enforcement today.
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http://www.hsgac.senate.gov/templates/watch.cfm?id=c9fd31e9-5056-a032-5201-35d120157715
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CIA's Financial Spying Bags Data on Americans
Information on International Money Transfers Includes Financial and Personal Data of Americans
bt Siobhan Gorman, Devlin Barrett and Jennifer Valentino-DeVries
Nov. 14, 2013 7:39 p.m. ET
The Central Intelligence Agency is building a vast database of international money transfers that includes millions of Americans' financial and personal data, officials familiar with the program say.
The program, which collects information from U.S. money-transfer companies including Western Union, WU -2.06% is carried out under the same provision of the Patriot Act that enables the National Security Agency to collect nearly all American phone records, the officials said. Like the NSA program, the mass collection of financial transactions is authorized by a secret national-security court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
The CIA, as a foreign-intelligence agency, is barred from targeting Americans in its intelligence collection. But it can conduct domestic operations for foreign intelligence purposes. The CIA program is meant to fill what U.S. officials see as an important gap in their ability to track terrorist financing world-wide, current and former U.S. officials said.
The program serves as the latest example of blurred lines between foreign and domestic intelligence as technology globalizes many activities carried out by citizens and terrorists alike. The CIA program also demonstrates how other U.S. spy agencies, aside from the NSA, are using the same legal authority to collect data such as details of financial transactions.
In this case, the secret surveillance court has authorized the Federal Bureau of Investigation to work with the CIA to collect large amounts of data on international transactions, including those of Americans, as part of the agency's terrorism investigations.
The data collected by the CIA doesn't include any transactions that are solely domestic, and the majority of records collected are solely foreign, but they include those to and from the U.S., as well. In some cases, it does include data beyond basic financial records, such as U.S. Social Security numbers, which can be used to tie the financial activity to a specific person. That has raised concerns among some lawmakers who learned about the program this summer, according to officials briefed on the matter.
Former U.S. government officials familiar with the program said it has been useful in discovering terrorist relationships and financial patterns. If a CIA analyst searches the data and discovers possible suspicious terrorist activity in the U.S., the analyst provides that information to the FBI, a former official said.
The CIA declined to comment on specific programs but said its operations comply with the law and face oversight from Congress, the FISA Court and internal watchdogs. "The CIA protects the nation and upholds the privacy rights of Americans by ensuring that its intelligence-collection activities are focused on acquiring foreign intelligence and counterintelligence in accordance with U.S. laws," said agency spokesman Dean Boyd.
The FBI declined to comment.
A U.S. intelligence official said that any spy-agency operation under FISA Court orders require "strict compliance with the law and with those court orders." Orders would include procedures to safeguard the privacy of people in the U.S.; require training of those with access to information; prohibit searches not specifically authorized; and limit how long data may be retained, the official said.
In a typical money transfer, a person goes to a company such as Western Union and uses cash or a credit card to send funds to someone else. The recipient can pick up funds at a local money-transfer office. This process differs from, say, a bank transfer, in which funds might be moved from one account to another.
Details about money transfers are kept by the companies providing the service; that information is turned over to the CIA under court orders. Former officials named wire-transfer giant Western Union as a participant.
The full roster of participants couldn't be learned. Other large, global money-transfer companies include MoneyGram; there are numerous smaller firms.
"We collect consumer information to comply with the Bank Secrecy Act and other laws," said Western Union spokeswoman Luella D'Angelo, naming a law that requires banks to report suspicious transactions. "In doing so, we also protect our consumers' privacy and work to prevent consumer fraud."
A MoneyGram spokeswoman said, "We have reporting obligations related to suspicious transactions, money laundering and other financial crimes around the world. The laws to which we are subject generally prohibit us from discussing details." She also said, "We value our customers' privacy and work hard to protect it."
The data is obtained from companies in bulk, then placed in a dedicated database. Then, court-ordered rules are applied to "minimize," or mask, the information about people in the U.S. unless that information is deemed to be of foreign-intelligence interest, a former U.S. official said.
A limited number of analysts are allowed to search the database with queries that meet court-approved standards. This is similar to the way NSA handles its phone-data program.
Money-transfer companies are "highly, highly aware of their obligations under the Patriot Act," said Robert Pargac, a director in global investigations and compliance at Navigant Consulting Inc. who has worked at several such companies. Western Union said last month it would be spending about 4% of its revenue in 2014 on compliance with rules under the Patriot Act, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control and other anti-money-laundering and terrorist-financing requirements.
The likely existence of bulk collection programs other than phone-records data has been mentioned in a recently declassified opinion from a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which approves such programs.
This past September, the Director of National Intelligence declassified FISA Court opinions that sharply criticized NSA for operating the phone program in violation of court-ordered privacy standards. The court also criticized NSA for repeatedly misrepresenting surveillance programs to it. Former officials said that CIA has run into some compliance issues, but they weren't on par with the problems NSA encountered.
Some officials who have overseen surveillance programs, like Timothy Edgar, a former top privacy lawyer at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Security Council in the Bush and Obama administrations, say it is time for the government to make known what categories of data are being obtained under broad Patriot Act authorities.
"The public has a right to know about the broad outlines of how the government is collecting information on them," he said, noting that the FISA Court has noted the existence of other collection programs. "As a matter of basic good governance, the government should be more transparent about these kinds of collection programs."
The CIA and the Treasury Department have a different program that collects transactions between financial institutions from the Belgian cooperative known as the Society for Worldwide Interbank Communication, or Swift. That program doesn't collect data from person-to-person transfers.
The money-transfer program appears to have been inspired by details of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist plot, in which the al Qaeda hijackers were able to move about $300,000 to U.S.-based bank accounts without arousing suspicion. In part, it was because the transactions were comparably small and fit the pattern of the remittances used by immigrants or foreign visitors to send money home.
Some of the transfers were between bank accounts, but some moved through person-to-person transfers. In 2000, Sept. 11 plot facilitator Ramzi Binalshibh made a series of transfers, totaling more than $10,000, from Germany to the U.S., where they were collected by hijacker Marwan al-Shehhi. Two transfers were through MoneyGram and two through Western Union.
After the 2001 attacks, the CIA worked with Western Union, which voluntarily helped set up a program to collect data on money transfers between the U.S. and overseas, as well as purely foreign ones with voluntary compliance from companies, as has been previously reported.
That program was institutionalized by 2006 and continues under a controversial authority tucked into a part of the Patriot Act known as Section 215. That law permits the government to obtain "tangible things," including records, as long as the government shows it is reasonable to believe they are "relevant" to a terrorism investigation.
Under that provision, the U.S. government secretly interpreted the term "relevant" to permit collection of records on millions of people not necessarily under suspicion. That secret interpretation, used to justify the legality of the phone-records program, was brought to light in the wake of the revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
The interpretation also was used by CIA as the legal underpinning of its bulk financial-records effort under the money-transfer program, officials said.
Money transfer forms differ depending on location and type. But they ask for the names, addresses and telephone numbers of senders and receivers. Depending on the transfer, senders and receivers also may be asked to provide the date and place of their birth. In most locations in the U.S., people sending $1,000 or more must provide an ID such as a driver's license. People sending $3,000 or more must provide additional ID, such as a Social Security number or passport.
Lawmakers have asked repeatedly whether intelligence agencies are using the Patriot Act to collect financial or other information in bulk outside the phone-records program. In public forums, officials have either mentioned that the information is classified or focused on whether the NSA collects such data, with no mention of the CIA or other agencies. Several lawmakers from both parties are seeking to curb the ability to use the Patriot Act for bulk collection of records.
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I notice that this thread has passed 200,000 reads.
Well done gentlemen!
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http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/al-qaeda-kentucky-us-dozens-terrorists-country-refugees/story?id=20931131&singlePage=true
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http://libertyunyielding.com/2013/11/29/border-agents-attacked-in-organized-mass-border-crossing-attempt/
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http://dcclothesline.com/2013/10/03/yellowstone-supervolcano-alert-the-most-dangerous-volcano-in-america-is-roaring-to-life/
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Cindy and I were just watching a NatGeo piece on what would happen if a mini-black hole (100 yards across) were to hit earth. Short answer, it would travel through and come out the other side in about six minutes and hurtle along its merry way, leaving a de-stabilized earth core in its wake, quite possibly setting off every major volcano on the planet, threatening life itself, what BD's post describes would happen on a planet wide basis.
It's easy enough to play ostrich on the chances of a mini-black hole hitting earth, but this is one helluva lot scarier. :-o :-o :-o
PS: I just noted that this thread has hit 200,000 reads!
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Do you ever read Gregg Easterbrook? He has recurring theme that boils down to this: why has NASA funding been cut? There are enough meteors that come close to Earth, including some that serve to be wicked surprises that diminishing space travel and related themes could spell the demise of mankind. I'll look at some point soon to try to find an example.
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Yes, please do find and post here in the Outer Space thread.
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"He has recurring theme that boils down to this: why has NASA funding been cut? There are enough meteors that come close to Earth, including some that serve to be wicked surprises that diminishing space travel and related themes could spell the demise of mankind."
I have been skeptical of NASA and space spending, but this point is a good answer as to why public investment of this kind may be well-justified. If true, it is one more reason why we should not settle for economic policies that leave us broke, stagnant and mostly unemployed. These programs and capabilities are expensive!
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/12/23/blaze-exclusive-pakistani-terror-group-threatens-deadly-attacks-on-new-york-washington-d-c/
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http://complex.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/12/24/power-station-military-assault?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Flashpoints%20Complete%2010%2F7&utm_campaign=Flashpoints%2001-02-14#sthash.bOw5tZgS.dpbs
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The good news that since homeland security is basically only law enforcement, if the volcano threatens to blow then it can be taken in for questioning.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/volcanoes-60-minutes/
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2013/12/the-yellowstone-supervolcano-2-12-times-larger-than-earlier-estimates-potential-to-erupt-2000-times-.html
http://www.livescience.com/20714-yellowstone-supervolcano-eruption.html
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The good news that since homeland security is basically only law enforcement, if the volcano threatens to blow then it can be taken in for questioning.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/volcanoes-60-minutes/
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2013/12/the-yellowstone-supervolcano-2-12-times-larger-than-earlier-estimates-potential-to-erupt-2000-times-.html
http://www.livescience.com/20714-yellowstone-supervolcano-eruption.html
gee, I guess law enforcement doesn't respond to natural disasters, does it? If a local, state or federal LEO digs you out of tornado wreckage, be sure to point that out to them. Explain you are an academic and thus know more than the lesser beings that actually work in the field.
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http://news.ebru.tv/media/2013/05/21/oklahoma-tornado-rescue-workers-help-free-victim-stuck-in-building.jpg@protect,0,0,1000,1000@crop,800,450,c.jpg
(http://news.ebru.tv/media/2013/05/21/oklahoma-tornado-rescue-workers-help-free-victim-stuck-in-building.jpg@protect,0,0,1000,1000@crop,800,450,c.jpg)
Why are those cops arresting that tornado victim? After all, law enforcement just enforces laws and has no other duties that fall under that job description.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/image/4702392-16x9-512x288.jpg
(http://www.abc.net.au/news/image/4702392-16x9-512x288.jpg)
Why are fire fighters here? I don't see any fires....
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Silly Las Vegas Metro police....
http://www.lvmpd.com/Sections/HomelandSecurity.aspx
Homeland Security
Assistant Sheriff Greg McCurdy
The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, like other police departments, federal agencies, and the nation as a whole had to adjust to the circumstances of September 11, 2001. We entered into a new arena - dealing with terrorism at the local law enforcement level. The Department’s Homeland Security Division is comprised of the Airport Bureau, Organized Crime Bureau, and the Homeland Security Bureau. The Southern Nevada Counter-Terrorism Center (Fusion Center) serves as the State of Nevada’s designated Fusion Center and is housed with the Homeland Security Bureau.
In conjunction with our department's coordinated efforts with our state and federal counterparts, the Department has committed additional personnel to supporting the national effort against terrorism via the Southern Nevada Joint Terrorism Task Force. We have also harnessed the flexibility and ingenuity of officers in our newly created counter-terrorism section, our existing criminal intelligence section, technical and surveillance section, and our special investigations section in an all encompassing evaluation of community wide sources of information in the war against terrorism. The Homeland Security Bureau has also expanded and enhanced our capacity to more accurately define and mitigate emerging events with the creation of our all-hazard ARMOR response unit and our emergency management section.
We need and solicit our community's assistance as we all think globally and act locally in our collective war on terrorism. Links in this section provide further detailed information on terrorism topics. Please report any unusual terrorism-related matters to our terrorism hotline at 828-8386, or visit www.SNCTC.org to submit an electronic Suspicious Activity Report.
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We interrupt GM's death-by-blizzard-of-citations rant to bring you this:
http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2014/01/05/fbi_drops_law_enforcement_as_primary_mission#sthash.0UGnYquX.D4o2YMjL.dpbs
Guess we won't be seeing the FBI at any tornadoes, fires, quakes, etc any time soon , , ,
Good luck BD!
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The good news that since homeland security is basically only law enforcement, if the volcano threatens to blow then it can be taken in for questioning.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/volcanoes-60-minutes/
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2013/12/the-yellowstone-supervolcano-2-12-times-larger-than-earlier-estimates-potential-to-erupt-2000-times-.html
http://www.livescience.com/20714-yellowstone-supervolcano-eruption.html
(http://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/images/2011-04-05-ice-training-using-armored-vehicles.JPG?itok=fmMSA_1q)
The DHS Anti-volcano team trains up for something that has nothing to do with law enforcement.
(http://www.policemag.com/_Images/photogallery/L-MilitarySurplus-MRAP.jpg)
Ignore the police markings on this vehicle.
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I thanked my local enforcement officer for coaching little league and he explained it was for homeland security. I learned that anything a LEO does, anything at all, is homeland security. Never mind the titular fact of "law enforcement" in the law enforcement officer.
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In an underreported story, all of those non-uniformed people in the OK tornado picture were arrested immediately afterword for impersonating a law enforcement officer.
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It's odd that FP would quote a mere academic on the subject:
"...Marquette University professor Athan Theoharis agreed that the changes reflect what's really happening at the agency, but said the timing isn't clear. "I can't explain why FBI officials decided to change the fact sheet... unless in the current political climate that change benefits the FBI politically and undercuts criticisms," he said. He mentioned the negative attention surrounding the FBI's failure in April to foil the bomb plot at the Boston Marathon by Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev."
We interrupt GM's death-by-blizzard-of-citations rant to bring you this:
http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2014/01/05/fbi_drops_law_enforcement_as_primary_mission#sthash.0UGnYquX.D4o2YMjL.dpbs
Guess we won't be seeing the FBI at any tornadoes, fires, quakes, etc any time soon , , ,
Good luck BD!
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Because academics read an article or attend a seminar and thusly deem themselves experts and quotable when the media needs a soundbite.
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I thanked my local enforcement officer for coaching little league and he explained it was for homeland security. I learned that anything a LEO does, anything at all, is homeland security. Never mind the titular fact of "law enforcement" in the law enforcement officer.
Wow.Fieldwork! Be sure to add that to your cv!
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That's was I was thinking, too. FP, upon not getting an answer on your cell, being up shi+ creek, had to reach out for their second choice, the editor/author of a mere 20 books.
Because academics read an article or attend a seminar and thusly deem themselves experts and quotable when the media needs a soundbite.
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That's was I was thinking, too. FP, upon not getting an answer on your cell, being up shi+ creek, had to reach out for their second choice, the editor/author of a mere 20 books.
Because academics read an article or attend a seminar and thusly deem themselves experts and quotable when the media needs a soundbite.
Here is a crazy idea, they could actually ask the FBI for an explanation or talk to a retired FBI agent who might have an insight. The FBI isn't known for being media shy.
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There were at least three such quotes in the article.
That's was I was thinking, too. FP, upon not getting an answer on your cell, being up shi+ creek, had to reach out for their second choice, the editor/author of a mere 20 books.
Because academics read an article or attend a seminar and thusly deem themselves experts and quotable when the media needs a soundbite.
Here is a crazy idea, they could actually ask the FBI for an explanation or talk to a retired FBI agent who might have an insight. The FBI isn't known for being media shy.
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And yet you again focus on credentialed over educated, again and again...
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And you failed to see the thing you called for... three times. :roll:
And yet you again focus on credentialed over educated, again and again...
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And you failed to see the thing you called for... three times. :roll:
And yet you again focus on credentialed over educated, again and again...
I guess I didn't treat an exchange that started with a reference to a volcano being brought in for questioning with the seriousness it deserved.My bad.
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Given the number of posts you dedicated to the discussion, including all those pictures you rustled up, you seem to have been quite engaged.
And you failed to see the thing you called for... three times. :roll:
And yet you again focus on credentialed over educated, again and again...
I guess I didn't treat an exchange that started with a reference to a volcano being brought in for questioning with the seriousness it deserved.My bad.
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Strangely enough, finding pictures of DHS engaged in what appears to be law enforcement related activities is really easy to find on a Google image search.
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Given all your front line experience I was sure they were from your personnel file.
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Ummm , , , while the snark has been entertaining, I am getting confused as to what the point is at this point , , ,
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http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/08/homeland-security-4-0-overcoming-centralization-complacency-and-politics
Executive Summary
Getting the national homeland security enterprise right is among the most difficult challenges in Washington because the problems in protecting the homeland are rooted in overcentralization, pervasive complacency, and entrenched politics—problems that often cause Washington to not work properly. This report marks a path through this obstacle course.
The recommendations in this report are essential steps in establishing the right type of homeland security for the United States—one that is enduring and efficacious. The experience of the past decade is a better guide to the future than what was thought in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. These recommendations are drawn from research by Heritage Foundation analysts over the past decade and from extensive outreach to and engagement with many of the stakeholders in the homeland security enterprise.
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http://www.myfoxphoenix.com/story/23101374/2013/08/10/loophole-people-being-told-to-use-key-words-to-cross-border
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http://www.examiner.com/article/retired-general-muslim-brotherhood-inside-u-s-government
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/west-virginia-water-emergency-nears-fifth-day-with-no-end-in-sight/2014/01/12/9d0959bc-7b88-11e3-9556-4a4bf7bcbd84_story.html
From the article:
A chemical used in coal processing has leaked from an old tank along the Elk and invaded the water supply, a crisis that has affected nearly 300,000 people in nine counties and effectively closed the largest city in the state. You can’t drink the water, bathe in it or do laundry with it. It’s good only for flushing.
Monday will mark the fifth day of the water emergency, which began early Thursday when people all over town registered a powerful odor like black licorice.
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Ummm , , , not sure why this is posted in this thread-- perhaps the Water thread on SCH would be better , , ,
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Because I consider 300,000 people without water due to chemicals leaking into the water supply a homeland security issue.
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Ummm , , , I suppose, but it makes more sense to me to think of HS involving the risk or actuality an attack of some sort , , ,
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FEMA responded.
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Uhhh , , , so?
FEMA is for storms, tornados, floods, etc. yes?
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And is in DHS.
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Well, if you are telling me that DHS is an overbroad fustercluck we are in complete agreement :-D
This would be more my idea of homeland security related:
IPT Exclusive: Radical Syrian Cleric Secures US Visa Despite Endorsing Suicide Bombings
by John Rossomando
IPT News
January 14, 2014
http://www.investigativeproject.org/4265/ipt-exclusive-radical-syrian-cleric-secures-us
A Syrian sheik who labeled all Jews as legitimate targets for suicide bombers and who supports the death penalty for homosexuals is the latest extremist Muslim cleric raising money for Syrian-American groups supporting dictator Bashar al-Assad's ouster.
Sheik Mohammad Rateb al-Nabulsi is in the middle of an 11-city tour across America on co-sponsored by the Syrian American Council (SAC) and the Wylie, Texas-based Shaam Relief. A promotional announcement hails al-Nabulsi as "an internationally-known Muslim scholar, renowned for his scholarship of Islam, who has lent his formidable clerical authority to support human rights, tolerance and respect for all."
But tolerance is not part of his preaching when it comes to perceived enemies. Asked about Palestinian suicide bombings in April 2001, al-Nabulsi said he was "too insignificant to give a Sharia ruling or fatwa." Instead, he extensively cited from two previous fatwas from radical clerics which bless such attacks.
"All the Jewish people are combatants" acceptable as targets for attacks in Israel, al-Nabulsi wrote in his "ruling on martyrdom operations in Palestine. They do not have a career that a military rank does not encounter: doctor, pilot, engineer, for example, is a tank commander. Every civilian, citizen," he wrote. "They do not have a regular army; they have a reserve army, and all the people can fight, so this is essentially an entirely aggressive entity from A to Z. This is the Sharia ruling."
Al-Nabulsi's comments on suicide bombings remain on his website.
Suicide bombings are acceptable because of the overwhelming disadvantage Palestinians have in fighting Israel, he said. And they are effective.
"Therefore beware, the enemy calls the operations suicide, they say: suicide operation to deceive
Muslims, that this is suicide, but we should call them martyrdom operations. A young man in the prime of his years sacrifices his life and shakes an entity," he wrote. "There is frightening talk. Soon tourism in Israel has become zero; soon immigration to Israel became thirty percent from the impact of these actions. It fell thirty percent. The real fact us that it began now. By God Almighty it was proven to them, It gives victory over them, and inspires us to help them in any way."
He called Jews the "worst enemies of God" and Islam and "a hotbed of vices and evils."
The scope of his fatwa is limited to Israel. But it is not his only call to violence. Al-Nabulsi believes that Muslims should violently fight those who "impose their culture … and pornography" on them, as well as those who humiliate Muslims, occupy their lands and take their money, an August 2006 sermon shows.
Yet, al-Nabulsi apparently obtained a visa from the State Department allowing him to conduct his fundraising tour. Under current policy, a foreign national applying for a U.S. visa who is known to have promoted jihad and suicide bombings would be ordinarily deemed "undesirable" and denied a visa, government officials who have been involved in deciding who gets a visa from hostile countries told the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT).
The State Department declined to comment. "Visa records are confidential under U.S. law under the Immigration and Nationality Act," State Department spokeswoman Katherine Pfaff said in response to an IPT query.
Al-Nabulsi already has visited Spring Hill, Fla., near Tampa; Orlando; Charleston, W.Va.; Milwaukee; Paterson, N.J.; and Falls Church, Va., for the two groups. Shaam Relief raised $65,000 during the Tampa-area stop, according to the charity's Facebook page. In Tampa, al-Nabulsi posed for a photograph with Hatem Fariz. In 2006, Fariz pleaded guilty to conspiring to provide goods or services to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. In doing so, he admitted communicating with Ramadan Shallah, who has been the PIJ secretary general since 1995, about a shipment of tapes of Shallah's statements about the PIJ.
In Paterson Thursday, al-Nabulsi spoke at the Islamic Center of Passaic County. That mosque is led by Mohamed Qatanani, who is fighting deportation efforts based on a 1993 arrest in Israel in which he admitted being a member of Hamas. In addition, Qatanani advocates for blasphemy laws, saying free speech does not give Americans the right to mock things holy to Islam.
Al-Nabulsi will be making two stops in the Detroit area this coming weekend before concluding his tour Jan. 25 in Dallas.
In November, a similar fundraising tour featured Sheik Osama al-Rifai, who endorsed a coalition of jihadist groups called the Islamic Front. He helped raise $3.6 million for the Syrian Sunrise Foundation, which shares several board members with the SAC.
The SAC is one of the major groups lobbying in Washington for support against Assad in Syria.
Many of the Syrian American Council's members are former members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, Molham al-Droubi, a member of the Syrian Brotherhood's executive committee told the IPT in an exclusive interview. Al-Droubi, however, said there were not any institutional links between the SAC and the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood.
SAC President Talal Sunbulli is among the current or former members of the Muslim Brotherhood who enjoy a role in the organization, according to an international phone book of Muslim Brotherhood members seized by federal investigators. Hussam Ayloush, who runs the Council on American-Islamic Relations' (CAIR) Los Angeles office, serves as chairman of the organization's board of directors.
The SAC's leaders have a history of minimizing the radical Islamist threat in Syria.
Its government relations director Mohammed Ghanem criticized the United States for classifying Jabhat al-Nusra, one of al-Qaida's two Syrian affiliates, as a terrorist organization in a December 2012 column published in the Washington Post. Ghanem said the move was "disastrous" for how "mainstream" Syrians viewed the United States.
Jabhat al-Nusra's connection with al-Qaida was known about several months before Ghanem wrote his piece.
Meanwhile, al-Nabulsi's calls for violent jihad are not limited to Jews in Israel. He includes the Western push for same-sex marriage among the things Muslims need to fight in their jihad.
"So as they would not impose their pornography, and so as not to give us a lesson that marriage is a contract between two persons; not necessarily a man and a woman; it may be between two men or two women," he wrote in 2010. The message is followed by a verse from the Quran: "And fight them until there's no more fitnah (disbelief and worshipping of others along with Allah). And (all and every kind of) worship is for Allah (Alone). " [Al-Baqarah : 193]
Al-Nabulsi took his jihad against homosexuals a step further during an April 2011 talk on Hamas's al-Aqsa TV.
"Homosexuality offers a filthy place and does not generate offsprings. Homosexuality leads to the destruction of the homosexual," Al-Nabulsi said. "That's why homosexuality carries the death penalty."
Inviting Nabulsi to speak on behalf of the SAC is ironic considering Ayloush's past statements.
"t is also extremely important to remember that even one person's support for targeting civilians is one too many. Regardless of one's religion or belief system, any support for violence should never go unnoticed or unaddressed," Ayloush wrote in a June 2007 commentary in the Los Angeles Daily News.
Yet Ayloush has been silent about al-Nabulsi's visit on his Facebook page and in his Twitter feed. Ayloush did not respond to an IPT question sent to his Twitter account asking if he had any objections to al-Nabulsi's invitation.
But Ayloush is quick to dismiss anyone who connects Islam with violence and hatred as a bigot or an "Islamophobe."
A Muslim who claims that Islam sanctions bombing innocent civilians was no different than a "KKK member who claims a biblical basis in committing bigoted crimes," Ayloush told a Southern California newspaper after last April's Boston Marathon bombing.
"Islam's teachings are very clear in protecting the sanctity of life," Ayloush said. "Anyone who claims to be a Muslim cannot act in opposition to those teachings."
Ayloush denounced anti-Semitism during the 2009 Gaza War in a column he wrote for the Jewish Journal, saying that Islam condemns "all forms of bigotry."
"Islam not only denounces, in the strongest manner possible, all forms of bigotry," he wrote, "but specifically teaches Muslims to revere and follow all Hebrew prophets who are praised in the Quran."
Ayloush's organization, CAIR, was created by members of a Muslim Brotherhood network in the United States called the Palestine Committee, the committee's own records show. These records were seized by federal investigators and admitted into evidence in 2007 and 2008 during prosecutions of another Palestine Committee branch called the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. Internal documents seized by the FBI show that CAIR and its founders, Omar Ahmad and Nihad Awad, were a part of the Palestine Committee. Both men appear on a telephone list of Palestine Committee members (Ahmad is listed under a pseudonym "Omar Yehya), and CAIR is listed on a meeting agenda listing the committee's branches.
" ntil we can resolve whether there continues to be a connection between CAIR or its executives and HAMAS," an FBI official wrote in 2009, "the FBI does not view CAIR as an appropriate liaison partner." In a 2009 ruling, the presiding judge wrote that he saw "ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR ... with Hamas."
Asked to condemn Hamas as recently as November, Ayloush angrily said the very act of asking the question was "not acceptable," and "proves that you have nothing but bigotry in you." In a blog post a year ago, Ayloush offered his view of groups deserving the label "terrorist."
"It is used by Israel to describe Palestinians who oppose its illegal and brutal occupation of their land," he wrote. When it came time to name groups Ayloush accepts as terrorist, no Palestinian entities were included. Instead, he listed "Al Qaeda, Jewish Defense League, KKK, Neo-Nazis, and many others which have engaged in terrorism."
Fateen Atassi, who also heads the group's Chicago chapter, is another SAC board member who has had close relations with CAIR. Atassi appeared at a joint press conference with the CAIR Chicago's Executive Director Ahmed Rehab in August 2012 to protest against the bloodshed in Syria.
Shaam Relief, the other sponsor of al-Nabulsi's tour, has its own radical streak. Director Ghassan Hitto actively supported the defendants during the Holy Land Foundation's Hamas-support trial. Hitto pushed the talking point that HLF's only crime was helping suffering Palestinian children during a July 2007 event in Plano, Texas sponsored by a pro-Holy Land Foundation coalition called the Hungry for Justice Coalition.
"Hungry for Justice is a coalition that strongly believes feeding hungry children, orphans, widows or men is not a crime," he said. "Hungry for Justice is a coalition that strongly believes opposing the brutal Israeli occupation of Palestine is not a crime. Hungry for Justice is a coalition that strongly believes in due process. Hungry for Justice is a coalition that strongly believes in the first amendment and the freedom of speech."
Last March the Syrian National Council, the main political arm of the anti-Assad uprising, named Hitto as its interim prime minister. Hitto served in this post until July when he resigned because he could not form an interim government. He was a member of the SAC's board of directors prior to his appointment as prime minister.
The SAC is not alone among Syrian-American groups in working with pro-jihadist clerics. Last month Mouaz Moustafa, who heads the Syrian Emergency Taskforce (SETF), argued that the United States should reach out to the Islamic Front. He called the jihadist coalition the "best hope" for the West to fight al-Qaida in Syria, although some of the Front's leaders have friendly relations with Jabhat al-Nusra.
"They should also be seen as the best hope against al-Qaida and the extremists in Syria and also against Hizballah and Assad," Moustafa said in a podcast. "I think the international community and the West in general must engage with the Islamic Front and need to be more pragmatic and realistic about what is going on ground in Syria in order to bring them on board with whatever political solution will happen in the future."
Inviting al-Nabulsi and al-Rifai, together with Moustafa's favorable statements about the Islamic Front suggest that the leaders of these Syrian-American groups may not be as moderate as they publicly claim.
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http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/01/16/us/politics/us-to-expand-rules-limiting-use-of-profiling-by-federal-agents.html?from=homepage
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http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/01/16/us/politics/us-to-expand-rules-limiting-use-of-profiling-by-federal-agents.html?from=homepage
Laying the groundwork for the next 9/11.
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http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/01/new-jersey-muslim-freed-from-pipe-at-water-treatment-plant-faces-criminal-charges.html
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http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/_national/government_attacks/index.html?SITE=MOSTP
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A US embassy is American soil, hence my posting this http://news.yahoo.com/israel-says-foiled-al-qaida-plot-us-embassy-212356519.html in this thread
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A US embassy is American soil, hence my posting this http://news.yahoo.com/israel-says-foiled-al-qaida-plot-us-embassy-212356519.html in this thread
Israel has an unfair advantage over our Intel agencies. Primarily they get to operate without CAIR overseeing their training and personnel.
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Subtle Signs That May Mark You an Airport Security Risk
The Pros and Cons of TSA's Behavior-Detection Program
By Scott McCartney
Jan. 22, 2014 7:29 p.m. ET
Ever feel like you're being watched at an airport? You are, and it's not just the surveillance cameras. Scott McCartney explains the program that has thousands of TSA agents roaming airports with an eye for suspicious behavior. Photo: AP.
Ever feel like you're being watched at an airport? You are, and it isn't just the ubiquitous surveillance cameras.
The Transportation Security Administration has about 3,000 officers trained to detect behavioral clues of "mal-intent." They eye travelers at checkpoints and throughout the airport for signs of above-normal stress, fear and deception, and sometimes engage in casual conversation to measure reactions. After the fatal shooting of a TSA officer in Los Angeles in November, the Behavior Detection Officers, or BDOs, have increased roaming in public areas of airports.
The Government Accountability Office, the auditing arm of Congress, concluded in a recent report there is no credible evidence that TSA's behavior-detection program, which costs about $200 million a year, is effective. Scientific studies in general show human ability to identify deceptive behavior without conversation is at best only slightly better than 50-50 chance, the November report said. GAO urged Congress to cut back funding.
TSA says the program is a vital part of a multilayered regimen, crucial to the agency's effort to get smarter about risk-based, targeted security.
TSA Administrator John Pistole, a former FBI official, likens the BDOs in 176 U.S. airports to cops on a beat. He notes that law enforcement and military have been using behavior-detection techniques for generations. The 94 different indicators that BDOs hunt for, such as fidgeting, excessive sweating and wearing heavy clothes in a warm climate, were developed largely from FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration criteria. And instead of reacting to the latest threat—whether it be box cutters or liquid explosives or bombs in underwear—the BDOs are proactive in looking for bad people regardless of weapon.
Wesley Bedrosian
"A lot of it is common sense," Mr. Pistole said in an interview last month in Houston. Effectiveness can be seen in arrests, he said. "We've found hundreds of people who had false IDs, who had drugs or cash or warrants or were in this country illegally. They demonstrated suspicious behavior and any one of them could have been a terrorist."
BDOs, usually in uniform, work in pairs to scan travelers from different angles and use a point system to score suspicious behavior. It takes a cluster of indications to trigger a referral, which means the passenger is singled out for enhanced screening at checkpoints, including a pat-down and search of personal property. During the screening, which takes 13 minutes on average, BDOs check travel documents and engage the passenger in voluntary conversation. If something suspicious is found or the traveler exhibits more suspicious behavior, law enforcement is called.
Last year, TSA referred more than 2,100 passengers singled out by BDOs to local law enforcement, resulting in 181 arrests, plus an additional 79 investigations and 30 other boarding denials.
In addition to patrolling airport terminals, uniformed BDOs "walk the line," in TSA-speak. One BDO watches passenger reactions while a partner walks down the checkpoint line, engaging passengers in chitchat or commenting on a bag or clothing. "Engagement may escalate someone with mal-intent," said a TSA official in Washington, D.C.
TSA officials say BDOs don't just look for nervousness or anxiety. They say it is a misconception that just being anxious can land you in extra screening. "Most people are agitated or a little bit in a rush," said the TSA official. "We're not looking for [the typical harried person] who's often late for the plane and can't find his or her ID."
The program, which started at airports in 2007, has been criticized for snaring people who pose no threat to aviation. Most arrests are for fake IDs and drug possession.
TSA has also faced complaints of racial profiling, or simply being too subjective with its referrals. Anecdotal evidence in the GAO report seemed to back this up. The GAO said 21 of the 25 BDOs it interviewed said some behavioral indicators are subjective. Five of the 25 said they believed some profiling was occurring.
The American Civil Liberties Union accused TSA BDOs of racial profiling at Boston's Logan Airport after eight TSA officers went to ACLU with concerns that colleagues were trying to boost BDO arrest numbers by seeking out minorities who might be more likely to have immigration issues or arrest warrants. That sparked an investigation by the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general. A synopsis of the inspector general's report made public in September found no indication BDOs were targeting minorities to meet quotas. The ACLU in a Boston Globe report said the investigation was inadequate, noting that TSA doesn't record information about the race of people referred for enhanced screening.
Nationwide, the GAO said BDOs averaged 1.6 referrals over 160 hours worked. But that rate varied significantly between airports, GAO found, ranging from 0 to 26 referrals per 160 hours. "Subjectivity and variation raise questions about continued use of behavioral indicators," GAO said.
TSA says it prohibits racial profiling and has enhanced its training and oversight of BDOs.
An outside firm is currently evaluating the 94 different indicators of suspicious behavior that BDOs use, trying to standardize a more-manageable list with less subjectivity. TSA says it started collecting new data about BDO referrals, and is studying whether it can begin tracking race and national origin of passengers referred for enhanced screening.
BDOs get five days of classroom training and two days of on-the-job training. They must pass a written test every year and be observed by a manager annually to stay certified. There is also recurrent training, TSA says.
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/01/31/i-saw-you-naked-and-yes-we-were-laughing-ex-tsa-employees-shocking-confessions/
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Assault on California Power Station Raises Alarm on Potential for Terrorism
April Sniper Attack Knocked Out Substation, Raises Concern for Country's Power Grid
By Rebecca Smith
Feb. 4, 2014 10:30 p.m. ET
SAN JOSE, Calif.—The attack began just before 1 a.m. on April 16 last year, when someone slipped into an underground vault not far from a busy freeway and cut telephone cables.
Within half an hour, snipers opened fire on a nearby electrical substation. Shooting for 19 minutes, they surgically knocked out 17 giant transformers that funnel power to Silicon Valley. A minute before a police car arrived, the shooters disappeared into the night.
A sniper attack in April that knocked out an electrical substation near San Jose, Calif., has raised fears that the country's power grid is vulnerable to terrorism. WSJ's Rebecca Smith has the details. Photo: Talia Herman for The Wall Street Journal
With over 160,000 miles of transmission lines, the U.S. power grid is designed to handle natural and man-made disasters, as well as fluctuations in demand. How does the system work? WSJ's Jason Bellini has #TheShortAnswer.
To avoid a blackout, electric-grid officials rerouted power around the site and asked power plants in Silicon Valley to produce more electricity. But it took utility workers 27 days to make repairs and bring the substation back to life.
Nobody has been arrested or charged in the attack at PG&E Corp.'s PCG -0.41% Metcalf transmission substation. It is an incident of which few Americans are aware. But one former federal regulator is calling it a terrorist act that, if it were widely replicated across the country, could take down the U.S. electric grid and black out much of the country.
The attack was "the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred" in the U.S., said Jon Wellinghoff, who was chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission at the time.
The Wall Street Journal assembled a chronology of the Metcalf attack from filings PG&E made to state and federal regulators; from other documents including a video released by the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Department; and from interviews, including with Mr. Wellinghoff.
Related
Q&A: What You Need to Know About Attacks on the U.S. Power Grid
The 64-year-old Nevadan, who was appointed to FERC in 2006 by President George W. Bush and stepped down in November, said he gave closed-door, high-level briefings to federal agencies, Congress and the White House last year. As months have passed without arrests, he said, he has grown increasingly concerned that an even larger attack could be in the works. He said he was going public about the incident out of concern that national security is at risk and critical electric-grid sites aren't adequately protected.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation doesn't think a terrorist organization caused the Metcalf attack, said a spokesman for the FBI in San Francisco. Investigators are "continuing to sift through the evidence," he said.
Some people in the utility industry share Mr. Wellinghoff's concerns, including a former official at PG&E, Metcalf's owner, who told an industry gathering in November he feared the incident could have been a dress rehearsal for a larger event.
"This wasn't an incident where Billy-Bob and Joe decided, after a few brewskis, to come in and shoot up a substation," Mark Johnson, retired vice president of transmission for PG&E, told the utility security conference, according to a video of his presentation. "This was an event that was well thought out, well planned and they targeted certain components." When reached, Mr. Johnson declined to comment further.
A spokesman for PG&E said the company takes all incidents seriously but declined to discuss the Metcalf event in detail for fear of giving information to potential copycats. "We won't speculate about the motives" of the attackers, added the spokesman, Brian Swanson. He said PG&E has increased security measures.
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Utility executives and federal energy officials have long worried that the electric grid is vulnerable to sabotage. That is in part because the grid, which is really three systems serving different areas of the U.S., has failed when small problems such as trees hitting transmission lines created cascading blackouts. One in 2003 knocked out power to 50 million people in the Eastern U.S. and Canada for days.
Many of the system's most important components sit out in the open, often in remote locations, protected by little more than cameras and chain-link fences.
Transmission substations are critical links in the grid. They make it possible for electricity to move long distances, and serve as hubs for intersecting power lines.
Within a substation, transformers raise the voltage of electricity so it can travel hundreds of miles on high-voltage lines, or reduce voltages when electricity approaches its destination. The Metcalf substation functions as an off-ramp from power lines for electricity heading to homes and businesses in Silicon Valley.
The country's roughly 2,000 very large transformers are expensive to build, often costing millions of dollars each, and hard to replace. Each is custom made and weighs up to 500,000 pounds, and "I can only build 10 units a month," said Dennis Blake, general manager of Pennsylvania Transformer in Pittsburgh, one of seven U.S. manufacturers. The utility industry keeps some spares on hand.
A 2009 Energy Department report said that "physical damage of certain system components (e.g. extra-high-voltage transformers) on a large scale…could result in prolonged outages, as procurement cycles for these components range from months to years."
Mr. Wellinghoff said a FERC analysis found that if a surprisingly small number of U.S. substations were knocked out at once, that could destabilize the system enough to cause a blackout that could encompass most of the U.S.
Not everyone is so pessimistic. Gerry Cauley, chief executive of the North America Electric Reliability Corp., a standards-setting group that reports to FERC, said he thinks the grid is more resilient than Mr. Wellinghoff fears.
"I don't want to downplay the scenario he describes," Mr. Cauley said. "I'll agree it's possible from a technical assessment." But he said that even if several substations went down, the vast majority of people would have their power back in a few hours.
The utility industry has been focused on Internet attacks, worrying that hackers could take down the grid by disabling communications and important pieces of equipment. Companies have reported 13 cyber incidents in the past three years, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of emergency reports utilities file with the federal government. There have been no reports of major outages linked to these events, although companies have generally declined to provide details.
"A lot of people in the electric industry have been distracted by cybersecurity threats," said Stephen Berberich, chief executive of the California Independent System Operator, which runs much of the high-voltage transmission system for the utilities. He said that physical attacks pose a "big, if not bigger" menace.
There were 274 significant instances of vandalism or deliberate damage in the three years, and more than 700 weather-related problems, according to the Journal's analysis.
Until the Metcalf incident, attacks on U.S. utility equipment were mostly linked to metal thieves, disgruntled employees or bored hunters, who sometimes took potshots at small transformers on utility poles to see what happens. (Answer: a small explosion followed by an outage.)
Last year, an Arkansas man was charged with multiple attacks on the power grid, including setting fire to a switching station. He has pleaded not guilty and is undergoing a psychiatric evaluation, according to federal court records.
Overseas, terrorist organizations were linked to 2,500 attacks on transmission lines or towers and at least 500 on substations from 1996 to 2006, according to a January report from the Electric Power Research Institute, an industry-funded research group, which cited State Department data.
An attack on a PG&E substation near San Jose, Calif., in April knocked out 17 transformers like this one. Talia Herman for The Wall Street Journal
To some, the Metcalf incident has lifted the discussion of serious U.S. grid attacks beyond the theoretical. "The breadth and depth of the attack was unprecedented" in the U.S., said Rich Lordan, senior technical executive for the Electric Power Research Institute. The motivation, he said, "appears to be preparation for an act of war."
The attack lasted slightly less than an hour, according to the chronology assembled by the Journal.
At 12:58 a.m., AT&T fiber-optic telecommunications cables were cut—in a way that made them hard to repair—in an underground vault near the substation, not far from U.S. Highway 101 just outside south San Jose. It would have taken more than one person to lift the metal vault cover, said people who visited the site.
Nine minutes later, some customers of Level 3 Communications, LVLT +10.00% an Internet service provider, lost service. Cables in its vault near the Metcalf substation were also cut.
At 1:31 a.m., a surveillance camera pointed along a chain-link fence around the substation recorded a streak of light that investigators from the Santa Clara County Sheriff's office think was a signal from a waved flashlight. It was followed by the muzzle flash of rifles and sparks from bullets hitting the fence.
The substation's cameras weren't aimed outside its perimeter, where the attackers were. They shooters appear to have aimed at the transformers' oil-filled cooling systems. These began to bleed oil, but didn't explode, as the transformers probably would have done if hit in other areas.
About six minutes after the shooting started, PG&E confirms, it got an alarm from motion sensors at the substation, possibly from bullets grazing the fence, which is shown on video.
Four minutes later, at 1:41 a.m., the sheriff's department received a 911 call about gunfire, sent by an engineer at a nearby power plant that still had phone service.
Riddled with bullet holes, the transformers leaked 52,000 gallons of oil, then overheated. The first bank of them crashed at 1:45 a.m., at which time PG&E's control center about 90 miles north received an equipment-failure alarm.
Five minutes later, another apparent flashlight signal, caught on film, marked the end of the attack. More than 100 shell casings of the sort ejected by AK-47s were later found at the site.
At 1:51 a.m., law-enforcement officers arrived, but found everything quiet. Unable to get past the locked fence and seeing nothing suspicious, they left.
A PG&E worker, awakened by the utility's control center at 2:03 a.m., arrived at 3:15 a.m. to survey the damage.
Grid officials routed some power around the substation to keep the system stable and asked customers in Silicon Valley to conserve electricity.
In a news release, PG&E said the substation had been hit by vandals. It has since confirmed 17 transformers were knocked out.
Mr. Wellinghoff, then chairman of FERC, said that after he heard about the scope of the attack, he flew to California, bringing with him experts from the U.S. Navy's Dahlgren Surface Warfare Center in Virginia, which trains Navy SEALs. After walking the site with PG&E officials and FBI agents, Mr. Wellinghoff said, the military experts told him it looked like a professional job.
In addition to fingerprint-free shell casings, they pointed out small piles of rocks, which they said could have been left by an advance scout to tell the attackers where to get the best shots.
"They said it was a targeting package just like they would put together for an attack," Mr. Wellinghoff said.
Mr. Wellinghoff, now a law partner at Stoel Rives LLP in San Francisco, said he arranged a series of meetings in the following weeks to let other federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, know what happened and to enlist their help. He held a closed-door meeting with utility executives in San Francisco in June and has distributed lists of things utilities should do to strengthen their defenses.
A spokesman for Homeland Security said it is up to utilities to protect the grid. The department's role in an emergency is to connect federal agencies and local police and facilitate information sharing, the spokesman said.
As word of the attack spread through the utility industry, some companies moved swiftly to review their security efforts. "We're looking at things differently now," said Michelle Campanella, an FBI veteran who is director of security for Consolidated Edison Inc. ED -0.37% in New York. For example, she said, Con Ed changed the angles of some of its 1,200 security cameras "so we don't have any blind spots."
Some of the legislators Mr. Wellinghoff briefed are calling for action. Rep. Henry Waxman (D., Calif.) mentioned the incident at a FERC oversight hearing in December, saying he was concerned that no one in government can order utilities to improve grid protections or to take charge in an emergency.
As for Mr. Wellinghoff, he said he has made something of a hobby of visiting big substations to look over defenses and see whether he is questioned by security details or local police. He said he typically finds easy access to fence lines that are often close to important equipment.
"What keeps me awake at night is a physical attack that could take down the grid," he said. "This is a huge problem."
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http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304675504579386740992812348?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsForth
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/us/borders-new-sentinels-are-robots-penetrating-deepest-drug-routes.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20140223&_r=0
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WND is not always reliable, but , , ,
http://www.wnd.com/2006/02/34858/
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Ray Kelly Was Right
A federal judge affirms that it's constitutional to look for terrorists.
Feb. 26, 2014 7:30 p.m. ET
Put an asterisk next to the prizes for the Associated Press for its 2011 series on the New York City Police Department's search for terrorists. The stories suggested that police monitoring of Muslim communities threatened civil liberties and might not stand up in court. Federal Judge William Martini has now ruled otherwise.
Former NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly believes that when AP reporters embarked on their series, they were largely ignorant of the "Handschu" rules on police surveillance. These were the result of a 1980s consent decree, and Mr. Kelly insisted all along that his cops were following the rules and acting within the law. When we asked him last year what the department had changed in the wake of the AP reporting, he said: "Nothing."
A group of plaintiffs, including Muslim businesses and associations, nonetheless sued the department. They claimed they had suffered, and would suffer in the future, from their identification as targets of police surveillance.
But last week Judge Martini tossed their case out of court. He ruled that police didn't harm the plaintiffs, but he also suggested that if any harm was done to the plaintiffs, it was done by the AP. "None of the Plaintiffs' injuries arose until after the Associated Press released unredacted, confidential NYPD documents and articles expressing its own interpretation of those documents," he wrote.
Judge Martini also drop-kicked the notion that the plaintiffs had been unfairly targeted simply because of their religion. He wrote, "The more likely explanation for the surveillance was a desire to locate budding terrorist conspiracies. The most obvious reason for so concluding is that surveillance of the Muslim community began just after the attacks of September 11, 2001."
The judge further reasoned that the police "could not have monitored New Jersey for Muslim terrorist activities without monitoring the Muslim community itself." Judge Martini concluded that "the motive for the Program was not solely to discriminate against Muslims, but rather to find Muslim terrorists hiding among ordinary, law-abiding Muslims." Which is exactly what New Yorkers want their police department to do.
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Ilhamdullah! Some clear thinking from the bench!
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http://www.redflagnews.com/headlines/22-jihad-terror-training-centers-discovered-in-america-fbi-hands-tied-because-obama-refuses-to-declare-group-a-foreign-terrorist-organization
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http://foxnewsinsider.com/2014/02/23/ex-navy-seal-christopher-mark-heben-power-grid-%E2%80%98amazingly-easy-dismantle%E2%80%99
I am intrigued here by the apparent reference to non-nuclear EMP , , ,
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http://foxnewsinsider.com/2014/02/23/ex-navy-seal-christopher-mark-heben-power-grid-%E2%80%98amazingly-easy-dismantle%E2%80%99
I am intrigued here by the apparent reference to non-nuclear EMP , , ,
Why? It's hardly classified technology.
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Well, I don't know everything -- twas news to me :-)
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http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/hpm.htm
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Excellent find GM, as always your google fu amazes.
From what I can tell, it appears that this technology is only available to advanced State actors.
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Excellent find GM, as always your google fu amazes.
From what I can tell, it appears that this technology is only available to advanced State actors.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/13942
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FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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http://www.theblaze.com/blog/2014/03/26/a-detailed-look-at-the-purge-of-u-s-counter-terrorism-training-by-the-obama-administration/
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Gee, I wonder how the FBI missed the Boston Marathon bombers, even after being tipped off by the Russians...
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New York Police Unit That Spied on Muslims Is Disbanded
The New York Police Department has abandoned a secretive program that dispatched plainclothes detectives into Muslim neighborhoods to eavesdrop on conversations and built detailed files on where people ate, prayed and shopped, the department said.
The decision by the nation’s largest police force to shutter the surveillance program represents the first sign that William J. Bratton, the department’s new commissioner, is backing away from some of the post-9/11 intelligence-gathering practices of his predecessor. The move comes as the federal government reconsiders and re-evaluates some of its post-9/11 policies, including the National Security Agency’s bulk data collection.
READ MORE »
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/16/nyregion/police-unit-that-spied-on-muslims-is-disbanded.html?emc=edit_na_20140415
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New York Police Unit That Spied on Muslims Is Disbanded
The New York Police Department has abandoned a secretive program that dispatched plainclothes detectives into Muslim neighborhoods to eavesdrop on conversations and built detailed files on where people ate, prayed and shopped, the department said.
The decision by the nation’s largest police force to shutter the surveillance program represents the first sign that William J. Bratton, the department’s new commissioner, is backing away from some of the post-9/11 intelligence-gathering practices of his predecessor. The move comes as the federal government reconsiders and re-evaluates some of its post-9/11 policies, including the National Security Agency’s bulk data collection.
READ MORE »
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/16/nyregion/police-unit-that-spied-on-muslims-is-disbanded.html?emc=edit_na_20140415
What could go wrong?
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/travel/speedy-airport-security-should-you-apply.html
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/11/nyregion/new-york-police-recruit-muslims-to-be-informers.html?emc=edit_th_20140511&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193&_r=0
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/11/nyregion/new-york-police-recruit-muslims-to-be-informers.html?emc=edit_th_20140511&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193&_r=0
How dare the NYPD try to stop the next9/11!
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http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2014/05/dhs-emails-reveal-u-s-may-terrorist-hands-list/
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Scurrilous NYT Informant Story Ignores Successes
by Patrick Dunleavy
Special to IPT News
May 12, 2014
http://www.investigativeproject.org/4382/scurrilous-nyt-informant-story-ignores-successes
Exaggeration is often the tool of a disingenuous person, but when it comes to reporting, there seems to be no bounds. Case in point, the most recent article in the New York Times regarding the NYPD's Counterterrorism program, "New York Police Recruit Muslims to be Informers."
Leaving the facts behind, the reporter goes on a mission to expose what he claims is the improper questioning of individuals arrested and being held in jails. Specifically, he decries the singling out of a specific group of criminals, Muslims.
The article claims that law enforcement personnel changed their focus of questions to home in on a specific area, religion. The writer states, "They [NYPD] showed that religion had become a normal topic of police inquiry in the city's holding cells and lockup facilities."
A new technique of interrogation? I think not. As the former deputy inspector general of the New York State Department of Corrections, I can state emphatically that arrestees have been asked the question "what is your religion" for more than 40 years. It is a core part of the initial intake assessment of an individual about to be admitted to a jail. It goes part and parcel with height, weight, color of eyes, ethnicity, etc.
The writer wants the reader to believe that this type of questioning only began after 9/11.
Why? It goes along with the mantra that Muslims were being singled out arbitrarily by police and intelligence officials when it comes to crime. Not so. I doubt the reporter has ever really sat in on an intake interview of an arrestee. If he had, he would have seen the line of questioning of an arrestee / inmate is founded in the historical fundamental belief by cops, that whenever a crime is committed, either someone in jail did it, or knows who did it. In gathering intelligence on specific threat groups, be they, the Mafia, the Latin Kings, the Chinese Ghost Shadow Gangs, the Russian Mob, etc., you're going to ask a specific group of people about a specific group of criminals, and radical Islamic terrorism is a form of criminal activity. My good friend John Cutter, former deputy chief of NYPD's Intelligence Division, put it most succinctly when he said, "I know we're the police department and we deal with crime, but terrorism is just a higher level of crime, and we have to know about it. If it's in our midst, I need someone to investigate it."
There are numerous examples of successful cases where terrorist acts were thwarted due to intelligence gathered from speaking to an individual in jail.
In the case of the Newburgh Four, now a cause célèbre for some, religion was core to identifying group leader James Cromartie.
Cromartie was a career criminal who had often changed his religious affiliation when he was arrested. Information obtained through a jail intelligence program led to the apprehension of the group before they could bomb Jewish synagogues or shoot down Air National Guard aircraft with Stinger missiles as they had planned.
In regard to whether the question of "what mosque do you attend?" is valid or harassing, it should be noted that several convicted terrorists had ties to specific mosques in the greater New York City area. El Sayyid Nosair, one of the architects of the first World Trade Center bombing, was in contact with those mosques while in both the city jail and Attica State prison.
Rashid Baz, the Brooklyn Bridge shooter, was spurred on to commit his terrorist act after attending the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge's mosque and hearing a sermon encouraging the killing of Jewish civilians.
Edwin Lorenzo Lemmons a former New York inmate was arrested for illegal firearms possession by members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Florida after disembarking from a flight from Egypt. Authorities learned of his radicalization and tactical training he received in the Middle East through information directly provided by an individual who had recently been arrested.
Given examples like these, it would seem that the New York Times article overlooks the necessary importance of intelligence gathering and exaggerates to a fault the grievances of a few disgruntled arrestees.
This is another example yellow journalism. Akin to the previous AP articles that sought to diminish the effectiveness of the NYPD's counterterrorism program and tarnish the reputation of the men and women who dedicated their lives to protecting the city against another attack by Islamic terrorists. In that case, the court saw through the exaggeration. Hopefully the public will as well.
Patrick Dunleavy is the former Deputy Inspector General for New York State Department of Corrections and author of The Fertile Soil of Jihad. He currently teaches a class on terrorism for the United States Military Special Operations School.
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It’s Not Just Obama That’s Screwing America : Congress Reaffirms NDAA
Monday, 26 May 2014 16:27 M.D. Creekmore - www.alt-market.com
This article was written by M.D. Creekmore and originally published at TheSurvivalistBlog.net
That’s right folks, it isn’t just our fearless leader B.O. that’s wiping his butt on the Constitution and the Bill of rights, it’s congress too, and before you go off blaming the democrats, no matter how evil they are, I should point out that this monstrosity against American citizens, was reaffirmed with the support of a majority of republicans – see the full congressional member roll-call and how they voted here.
The “No” votes are votes against amendment H.Amdt. 676 sponsored Rep Adam Smith (D) to eliminate indefinite detention of American citizens, without due process of law under the NDAA H.R. 4435.
In total 214 republicans voted against amendment H.Amdt. 676 that would have eliminated the power given to the president and the executive branch allowing for the indefinite detention of American citizens under NDAA without formal charges, or due process of law.
Looking to my state of TN Republican “representatives” Phil Roe R, Chuck Fleischmann, Scott DesJarlais, Diane Black, Marsha Blackburn, and Stephen Fincher all voted against the amendment that would have eliminated the power of indefinite detention of Americans given to the president under NDAA.
They are an embarrassment to the state of TN and to America as a whole.
What exactly is the National Defense Authorization Act you ask? Well it essentially does away with the constitutionally guaranteed right to a due process and a fair trial by providing the executive branch of government with the power to arrest and detain indefinitely any US citizen, without charge or due process of law.
Via The New Ameriican
One of the most noxious elements of the NDAA is that it places the American military at the disposal of the president for the apprehension, arrest, and detention of those suspected of posing a danger to the homeland.
Furthermore, a key component of the NDAA mandates a frightening grant of immense and unconstitutional power to the executive branch. Under the provisions of Section 1021 the president is afforded the absolute power to arrest and detain citizens of the United States without their being informed of any criminal charges, without a trial on the merits of those charges, and without a scintilla of the due process safeguards protected by the Constitution of the United States.
Further, in order to execute the provisions of Section 1021, Section 1022 (among others) unlawfully gives the president the absolute and unquestionable authority to deploy the armed forces of the United States to apprehend and to indefinitely detain those suspected of threatening the security of the “homeland.” In the language of this legislation, these people are called “covered persons.”
The universe of potential “covered persons” includes every citizen of the United States of America. Any American could one day find himself or herself branded a “belligerent” and thus subject to the complete confiscation of his or her constitutional civil liberties and nearly never-ending incarceration in a military prison.
What this amounts to is essentially a repeal of the sixth amendment and once again our so-called “conservatives republicans” have showed where they stand, how they stand and what they stand for. Why we keep voting either one of these political parties (republican – democrat / democrat – republican) and their attached evils into office to “lead” OUR country, is beyond me.
Folks we don’t have a two-party system as we’ve been lead to believe. Many Americans think that they have a choice when they enter the voting booth. Well guess what we don’t – republicans and democrats, democrats and republicans what’s the difference? Neither political party actually represents the American people nor do they care about defending individual American rights or the Constitution
In the U.S. we have a one party system masquerading as a two party system, to give voters the illusion of having a choice and hope for change, but both parties are controlled by the same people who really run the country. The system is rigged and we don’t have a choice…
And unfortunately, I don’t expect a third party like The Tea Party to ever take a majority of Congress, the Senate or the Presidency, the people who really run things won’t let it happen or maybe it’s because the American people care more about the next football game or American Idol than what is really happening to OUR country… Nope Democrats and and Republicans and business as usual…
Want proof, we need to look no further than the recent senate race in KY where “Republican Mitch McConnell Crushes Tea Party Challenger Matt Bevin“… But I digress…
The republicans think that no one will know, remember or care how that they voted on this, prove them wrong. Take a look at your state and write down how each one of your “representatives” voted on this and then you vote to throw them out of office during the next election.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/us/nsa-collecting-millions-of-faces-from-web-images.html?emc=edit_th_20140601&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193&_r=0
N.S.A. Collecting Millions of Faces From Web Images
By JAMES RISEN and LAURA POITRASMAY 31, 2014
The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents.
The spy agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications, the N.S.A. documents reveal. Agency officials believe that technological advances could revolutionize the way that the N.S.A. finds intelligence targets around the world, the documents show. The agency’s ambitions for this highly sensitive ability and the scale of its effort have not previously been disclosed.
The agency intercepts “millions of images per day” — including about 55,000 “facial recognition quality images” — which translate into “tremendous untapped potential,” according to 2011 documents obtained from the former agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. While once focused on written and oral communications, the N.S.A. now considers facial images, fingerprints and other identifiers just as important to its mission of tracking suspected terrorists and other intelligence targets, the documents show.
Photo
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, left, who tried to bomb an airplane, and Faisal Shahzad, who tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square. The attempts prompted more image gathering. Credit Reuters; U.S. Marshals Service, via Associated Press
“It’s not just the traditional communications we’re after: It’s taking a full-arsenal approach that digitally exploits the clues a target leaves behind in their regular activities on the net to compile biographic and biometric information” that can help “implement precision targeting,” noted a 2010 document.
One N.S.A. PowerPoint presentation from 2011, for example, displays several photographs of an unidentified man — sometimes bearded, other times clean-shaven — in different settings, along with more than two dozen data points about him. These include whether he was on the Transportation Security Administration no-fly list, his passport and visa status, known associates or suspected terrorist ties, and comments made about him by informants to American intelligence agencies.
It is not clear how many people around the world, and how many Americans, might have been caught up in the effort. Neither federal privacy laws nor the nation’s surveillance laws provide specific protections for facial images. Given the N.S.A.’s foreign intelligence mission, much of the imagery would involve people overseas whose data was scooped up through cable taps, Internet hubs and satellite transmissions.
Because the agency considers images a form of communications content, the N.S.A. would be required to get court approval for imagery of Americans collected through its surveillance programs, just as it must to read their emails or eavesdrop on their phone conversations, according to an N.S.A. spokeswoman. Cross-border communications in which an American might be emailing or texting an image to someone targeted by the agency overseas could be excepted.
Civil-liberties advocates and other critics are concerned that the power of the improving technology, used by government and industry, could erode privacy. “Facial recognition can be very invasive,” said Alessandro Acquisti, a researcher on facial recognition technology at Carnegie Mellon University. “There are still technical limitations on it, but the computational power keeps growing, and the databases keep growing, and the algorithms keep improving.”
State and local law enforcement agencies are relying on a wide range of databases of facial imagery, including driver’s licenses and Facebook, to identify suspects. The F.B.I. is developing what it calls its “next generation identification” project to combine its automated fingerprint identification system with facial imagery and other biometric data.
The State Department has what several outside experts say could be the largest facial imagery database in the federal government, storing hundreds of millions of photographs of American passport holders and foreign visa applicants. And the Department of Homeland Security is funding pilot projects at police departments around the country to match suspects against faces in a crowd.
The N.S.A., though, is unique in its ability to match images with huge troves of private communications.
“We would not be doing our job if we didn’t seek ways to continuously improve the precision of signals intelligence activities — aiming to counteract the efforts of valid foreign intelligence targets to disguise themselves or conceal plans to harm the United States and its allies,” said Vanee M. Vines, the agency spokeswoman.
She added that the N.S.A. did not have access to photographs in state databases of driver’s licenses or to passport photos of Americans, while declining to say whether the agency had access to the State Department database of photos of foreign visa applicants. She also declined to say whether the N.S.A. collected facial imagery of Americans from Facebook and other social media through means other than communications intercepts.
“The government and the private sector are both investing billions of dollars into face recognition” research and development, said Jennifer Lynch, a lawyer and expert on facial recognition and privacy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. “The government leads the way in developing huge face recognition databases, while the private sector leads in accurately identifying people under challenging conditions.”
Ms. Lynch said a handful of recent court decisions could lead to new constitutional protections for the privacy of sensitive face recognition data. But she added that the law was still unclear and that Washington was operating largely in a legal vacuum.
Laura Donohue, the director of the Center on National Security and the Law at Georgetown Law School, agreed. “There are very few limits on this,” she said.
An excerpt of a document obtained by Edward J. Snowden, a former contractor with the National Security Agency, referring to the agency’s use of images in intelligence gathering.
Congress has largely ignored the issue. “Unfortunately, our privacy laws provide no express protections for facial recognition data,” said Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, in a letter in December to the head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which is now studying possible standards for commercial, but not governmental, use.
Facial recognition technology can still be a clumsy tool. It has difficulty matching low-resolution images, and photographs of people’s faces taken from the side or angles can be impossible to match against mug shots or other head-on photographs.
Dalila B. Megherbi, an expert on facial recognition technology at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, explained that “when pictures come in different angles, different resolutions, that all affects the facial recognition algorithms in the software.”
That can lead to errors, the documents show. A 2011 PowerPoint showed one example when Tundra Freeze, the N.S.A.’s main in-house facial recognition program, was asked to identify photos matching the image of a bearded young man with dark hair. The document says the program returned 42 results, and displays several that were obviously false hits, including one of a middle-age man.
Similarly, another 2011 N.S.A. document reported that a facial recognition system was queried with a photograph of Osama bin Laden. Among the search results were photos of four other bearded men with only slight resemblances to Bin Laden. But the technology is powerful. One 2011 PowerPoint showed how the software matched a bald young man, shown posing with another man in front of a water park, with another photo where he has a full head of hair, wears different clothes and is at a different location.
It is not clear how many images the agency has acquired. The N.S.A. does not collect facial imagery through its bulk metadata collection programs, including that involving Americans’ domestic phone records, authorized under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, according to Ms. Vines.
The N.S.A. has accelerated its use of facial recognition technology under the Obama administration, the documents show, intensifying its efforts after two intended attacks on Americans that jarred the White House. The first was the case of the so-called underwear bomber, in which Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian, tried to trigger a bomb hidden in his underwear while flying to Detroit on Christmas in 2009. Just a few months later, in May 2010, Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-American, attempted a car bombing in Times Square.
The agency’s use of facial recognition technology goes far beyond one program previously reported by The Guardian, which disclosed that the N.S.A. and its British counterpart, General Communications Headquarters, have jointly intercepted webcam images, including sexually explicit material, from Yahoo users.
The N.S.A. achieved a technical breakthrough in 2010 when analysts first matched images collected separately in two databases — one in a huge N.S.A. database code-named Pinwale, and another in the government’s main terrorist watch list database, known as Tide — according to N.S.A. documents. That ability to cross-reference images has led to an explosion of analytical uses inside the agency. The agency has created teams of “identity intelligence” analysts who work to combine the facial images with other records about individuals to develop comprehensive portraits of intelligence targets.
The agency has developed sophisticated ways to integrate facial recognition programs with a wide range of other databases. It intercepts video teleconferences to obtain facial imagery, gathers airline passenger data and collects photographs from national identity card databases created by foreign countries, the documents show. They also note that the N.S.A. was attempting to gain access to such databases in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran.
The documents suggest that the agency has considered getting access to iris scans through its phone and email surveillance programs. But asked whether the agency is now doing so, officials declined to comment. The documents also indicate that the N.S.A. collects iris scans of foreigners through other means.
In addition, the agency was working with the C.I.A. and the State Department on a program called Pisces, collecting biometric data on border crossings from a wide range of countries.
One of the N.S.A.’s broadest efforts to obtain facial images is a program called Wellspring, which strips out images from emails and other communications, and displays those that might contain passport images. In addition to in-house programs, the N.S.A. relies in part on commercially available facial recognition technology, including from PittPatt, a small company owned by Google, the documents show.
The N.S.A. can now compare spy satellite photographs with intercepted personal photographs taken outdoors to determine the location. One document shows what appear to be vacation photographs of several men standing near a small waterfront dock in 2011. It matches their surroundings to a spy satellite image of the same dock taken about the same time, located at what the document describes as a militant training facility in Pakistan.
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http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=844
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http://pamelageller.com/2014/06/fbi-minnesota-muslims-leave-us-wage-jihad-syria.html/
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/14/isis-leader-see-you-in-new-york.html
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http://www.tpnn.com/2014/06/27/act-of-war-mexican-military-crosses-border-fires-on-u-s/
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http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/mexico-invades-texas-33-soldiers-cross-border-humvees/story?id=14173304
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/29/us/obama-to-seek-funds-to-stem-border-crossings-and-speed-deportations.html?emc=edit_th_20140629&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193
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And not a partisan hack, or so I've been told.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/382038/will-illegal-children-be-deported-eliana-johnson
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And not a partisan hack, or so I've been told.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/382038/will-illegal-children-be-deported-eliana-johnson
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-Texas/2014/07/07/Leaked-Internal-DHS-Report-Admits-Lack-of-Deportation-Significant-Factor-in-Border-Crisis
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http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/columnists/adriana_cohen/2014/07/adriana_cohen_immigration_mess_grows_as_obama_plays
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http://samuel-warde.com/2014/07/armed-anti-government-militia-groups-texas-border/
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This clip is a year old, but what I want to know is: If CBP had their hands full BEFORE they were spending 100% of their time offering up a national welcome, how many OTM's are getting through now? These guys are willing to strap TNT to their chests and blow themselves up... I can think of two or three scenarios off the top of my head that I am not even going to articulate that could be very, very serious for our country. We need a secure border, period.
http://www.mrconservative.com/2013/06/18667-muslim-terrorists-caught-crossing-us-border/
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/07/11/illegal-immigrants-are-reportedly-being-allowed-to-fly-without-verifiable-id-no-photo-no-watermark-nothing/
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/07/11/illegal-immigrants-are-reportedly-being-allowed-to-fly-without-verifiable-id-no-photo-no-watermark-nothing/
Citizens are second class citizens.
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/07/14/urdu-dictionary-found-on-texas-ranch-near-border-we-just-dont-know-whos-here-already/
(Woof Mike: Nice find. To help future research efforts, please put something descriptive in the subject line, e.g. as I have done for you here-- TIA, Marc)
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/07/13/the-deadly-combination-in-the-middle-east-causing-extreme-extreme-concern-in-the-white-house/
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/07/13/the-deadly-combination-in-the-middle-east-causing-extreme-extreme-concern-in-the-white-house/
I'm assuming the explosives they are worried about are TATP or other peroxide based explosives, which have been commonly used by jihadists for decades.
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Noted, sorry!
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http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-Sports/2014/07/16/US-Open-Al-Qaeda?utm_source=e_breitbart_com&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Breitbart+News+Roundup%2C+July+17%2C+2014&utm_campaign=20140717_m121376408_Breitbart+News+Roundup%2C+July+17%2C+2014&utm_term=More
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http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-Sports/2014/07/16/US-Open-Al-Qaeda?utm_source=e_breitbart_com&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Breitbart+News+Roundup%2C+July+17%2C+2014&utm_campaign=20140717_m121376408_Breitbart+News+Roundup%2C+July+17%2C+2014&utm_term=More
Wait, I was told that al qaeda was on the run. What happened?
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http://www.glennbeck.com/2014/07/21/it-is-a-horrifying-place-to-be-glenn-reflects-on-his-visit-to-the-rio-grande-river-with-louie-gohmert/
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http://freebeacon.com/national-security/dia-chief-al-qaeda-ideology-rapidly-expanding/
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:x
"Why do these boys have so many matches, lighters and pocket knives on them?!!!"
First hand account from the scout troop detained at the Canadian border. This would be an incredible (yet typical) example of pedantic abuse of power in any context, in light of what is happening at our Southern border it is angering.
http://benswann.com/exclusive-leader-of-scout-troop-confronted-by-armed-border-patrol-speaks-out/
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And not a partisan hack, or so I've been told.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/382038/will-illegal-children-be-deported-eliana-johnson
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-Texas/2014/07/07/Leaked-Internal-DHS-Report-Admits-Lack-of-Deportation-Significant-Factor-in-Border-Crisis
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/07/30/exclusive-report-reveals-disturbing-trend-brazen-attacks-against-border/
Care to comment on the awesome job Jeh Johnson is doing, BD?
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The REAL Pandemic Threat: BioBombers
Hope for the Best -- Prepare for the Worst
By Mark Alexander • August 6, 2014
"A universal peace, it is to be feared, is in the catalogue of events, which will never exist but in the imaginations of visionary philosophers, or in the breasts of benevolent enthusiasts." --James Madison (1792)
The 24-hour news recyclers have lately devoted a lot of airtime to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa and concerns about its spread to the U.S.
In recent weeks, more than 1,300 Africans have been infected with the deadly virus, and most of them have died. There would likely not be much coverage of this regional epidemic if not for the fact that two "humanitarian workers" (read: heroic Christians), an American doctor and nurse, are infected with the virus and have been transported to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta for treatment.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has assured Americans that, while Ebola is deadly in each of its variant forms -- it is much like AIDS or HIV -- transmission requires substantial direct contact with an infected person. Of course, given that in the last three months the CDC's stellar status was tarnished by reports that its personnel were very careless with some deadly pathogens -- including anthrax, avian flu and smallpox -- it's understandable many Americans question CDC's assessment of the Ebola risk.
The fact is, CDC's risk assessment regarding the threat of an Ebola epidemic in the U.S. is correct. There is, however, right now, a very real pandemic threat posed by what we can call "BioBombers."
BioBombers are Islamist "martyrs" who, instead of strapping on a bomb and detonating themselves in a crowded urban area, become human hosts for virulent strains of deadly contagions. Once infected, they fly into the U.S. legally and park themselves in major airport hubs around the nation for days, where they can infect others traveling across country whose symptoms may take days to manifest -- which is to say others unknowingly become hosts and spread the virus to a much wider circle in their communities and work places.
For historical background, the greatest mortal threat to indigenous American populations when 15th- and 16th-century European explorers arrived was not from armed conflict with other native peoples; it was from European strains of diseases for which they had no immunity. The reverse was also true -- many Europeans suffered from American diseases.
In the 19th century, of the estimated 620,000 deaths recorded in the War Between the States, more than 430,000 died from "camp diseases." When soldiers and support personnel from different regions of the country congregated in camps, those who arrived with a virulent strain of influenza or other contagion quickly passed it on to others, and the consequences were devastating.
In the 20th century, there were 5.1 million combatant deaths in the four years of World War I, but the 1918 H1N1 influenza virus, commonly referred to as the "Spanish Flu," infected an estimated 500 million people globally, including even those in remote Pacific and Arctic regions. Indeed, as many as 75-100 million people died in that pandemic -- up to five percent of the world's population, in two years.
In World War II, disease in the Pacific campaign claimed far more casualties than combat.
So how have we avoided another devastating Spanish Flu pandemic?
We've learned how to restrain the spread of these diseases because of our notable early detection of outbreaks and well-rehearsed preventive measures to contain and isolate the infected. (Early detection and containment is critical when dealing with bacterial and viral infections.)
We have learned a lot from managing outbreaks. In 1976, a bacterial contagion called Legionnaires' disease claimed 29 victims in Philadelphia. More recently, a viral SARS outbreak killed 775 people in 37 countries, most of them in Asia. There have also been recurring concerns about "bird flu," which has been spreading worldwide since 2003 and claimed its first victim two years ago in Canada.
There are also inoculation programs that have helped eliminate the spread of disease, and treatment is much better now than it was in the early part of the 20th century.
But pathogens such as these are decimating if health care providers are slow to recognize the symptoms and correctly diagnose the disease. They can spread quickly if not properly reported to the CDC for entry into its early warning and response protocols. Fortunately, dangerous strains of H5N1 influenza and other flu viruses have not adapted, or mutated, into dramatically more virulent and deadly strains.
But there are plenty of artificially engineered bio-warfare viral strains that, if released into urban population centers, would overwhelm medical facilities and claim millions of casualties. The prospect of bio-terrorism, particularly a simultaneous attack across the nation from a cadre of BioBombers, would quickly overload health care service providers and exhaust pharmaceutical reserves. In the event of such an attack, the CDC's epidemic early warning detection map would not merely blink with one or two markers -- the entire board would light up, and the probability of containment would be lost.
In fact, the possibility of such an attack was the impetus last week for the largest bio-terrorism drill in New York City's history.
So, how real is the threat?
The primary symmetric deterrent to weapons of mass destruction in warfare between nation states is the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. But in asymmetric warfare, where Islamic martyrs serve as surrogates for states like Iran, the MAD doctrine is of little deterrence.
The prospect of another catastrophic attack on our homeland by asymmetric terrorist actors is greater now than it was in 2001, and the reason is as plain as it was predictable. But the impact of BioBombers on continuity of government and commerce will be far greater than 9/11.
In his first annual address to the nation in 1790, George Washington wrote, "To be prepared for war, is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace." The eternal truth of those words is plainly evident today.
Indeed, as our nation's erstwhile "community organizer" leads our nation's retreat from its post as the world's sole superpower, the inevitable consequences have been dramatic. Of greatest concern now is the resurgence of the enemies of Liberty, most notably al-Qa'ida jihadists in the wake of the Middle East meltdown (AKA, Arab Spring) in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Jordan, and now the disintegration of Iraq and the conflagration in Gaza.
At present, all eyes are on the unabated rise of the nuclear Islamic Republic of Iran, a major benefactor of worldwide Islamic terror. Iran could eventually put a compact fissile weapon into the hands of Jihad surrogates with the intent of detonating that weapon in a U.S. urban center.
But the scope and consequences of a coordinated attack by Islamic BioBombers is far greater than that of a nuclear attack. The impact on continuity of government and commerce will be far greater than the 9/11 attack.
So if the threat of a catastrophic bio-terrorism attack has increased, and if the CDC and our homeland security apparatus are not properly prepared to respond to such an attack (the response to Hurricane Katrina comes to mind), then what can be done?
Fact is, there is a lot you can do to protect yourself and your family in the event of a biological attack on our nation with a little knowledge, preparation and not much expense -- and that preparation will also suffice for other types of emergencies.
The bedrock foundation of survival is individual preparedness and being prepared is not difficult. The primary means of protection in a pandemic is sheltering in place. But the Web is flooded with all kinds of preparedness and overwhelming advice from doomsday preppers. But your Patriot Post team has prepared a one-stop reliable reference page with basic instructions and advice.
As a resource to communities across the nation, we convened a knowledgeable team of emergency preparedness and response experts in 2012, including federal, state and local emergency management professionals, and specialists from the fields of emergency medicine, urban and wilderness survival, academia, law enforcement and related private sector services. They compiled basic individual preparedness recommendations to sustain you and your family during a short-term crisis. The result is a Two Step Individual Readiness Plan that enables you to shelter in place in the event of a local, regional or national catastrophic event, including a pandemic.
The most likely scenario requiring you to shelter in place would be the short-term need to isolate yourself from chemical, biological or radiological contaminants released accidentally or intentionally into the environment. (This could require sheltering for 1-7 days.)
But in the event of a bio-terrorism attack setting into motion a pandemic or a panic, you must be prepared to isolate yourself and your family from other people in order not to contract an illness. The best location to shelter in place during such an event is in your residence, and the length of time required could be 1-6 weeks.
Be prepared.
1. Link to our Disaster Preparedness Planning resource page.
2. Link to our Two Step Individual Readiness Plan
Pro Deo et Constitutione — Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis
Mark Alexander
Publisher, The Patriot Post
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AYf_epdETg
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/08/22/u-s-senators-chilling-warning-about-what-islamic-state-is-doing-to-threaten-america-people-just-cant-believe-thats-happening/
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/08/22/u-s-senators-chilling-warning-about-what-islamic-state-is-doing-to-threaten-america-people-just-cant-believe-thats-happening/
Wow, it wasn't long ago we were being told that these were the junior varsity.
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You mean you don't have to be Kobe Bryant to cut off someone's head with a fishing knife?
Remember when people were scratching their heads wondering why we didn't send the jets in when they were crossing the desert.
It was like have Osama bin Laden in your sights and fail to do anything until it is much harder later.
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You mean you don't have to be Kobe Bryant to cut off someone's head with a fishing knife?
Remember when people were scratching their heads wondering why we didn't send the jets in when they were crossing the desert.
It was like have Osama bin Laden in your sights and fail to do anything until it is much harder later.
Like Bill Clinton did with bin Laden?
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The Terrorist Tradecraft Conundrum
Security Weekly
Thursday, August 21, 2014 - 03:20 Print Text Size
Stratfor
By Scott Stewart
In last week's Security Weekly, I discussed how the lack of terrorist tradecraft skills has long plagued the jihadist movement. The al Qaeda core has had the most success projecting terrorist power transnationally, but even its operatives have often practiced sloppy terrorist tradecraft. Tradecraft mistakes by al Qaeda operatives have led to plots being detected or botched, including the millennium bomb plots and Operation Bojinka. Sloppy tradecraft also jeopardized successful attacks such as the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing and the 9/11 attacks.
This amateurish level of tradecraft was sufficient in an era such as the early 1990s, when few people were aware of the threat posed by the jihadist movement and few resources were dedicated to countering the threat. However, in the wake of 9/11 the environment became far more hostile to jihadist plotters, and as the focus of every intelligence and law enforcement agency became firmly fixed on the jihadist threat, terrorist operatives' ability to operate transnationally was severely diminished. That is the reason the threat of a spectacular follow-up attack to 9/11 never materialized.
Terrorist threats must be assessed considering two elements: intent and capability. Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups clearly have the intent to attack the U.S. homeland, something that is evident in their rhetoric and their repeated attempts to strike. But what these jihadist groups lack is the capability to fulfill their intent. They do not possess the terrorist tradecraft necessary to bypass the security measures instituted in the wake of the 9/11 attacks or the subsequent enhancements to those measures. Tradecraft is also not quickly or easily learned, and acquiring it through practical experience is difficult for a movement that often uses suicide operatives. These constraints have resulted in terrorist operatives with limited tradecraft capabilities.
Response to Limited Capability
The frustration that jihadists have experienced because of their inability to attack the United States through traditional forms of terrorism -- most notably by sending terrorist operatives to the United States to conduct attacks -- has prompted them to explore alternate approaches. One such strategy has been to attack U.S. aircraft from overseas, circumventing the need to operate inside the United States. This was really a re-emergence of an old tactic, which had previously been employed by Palestinian terrorist groups in various attacks including Pan Am 830, by the Libyans in Pan Am 103 and al Qaeda in the aborted Operation Bojinka (though these past plots did not involve the more recent al Qaeda innovation of suicide operatives.) Since 9/11, we have seen many other plots to attack U.S. aircraft with devices originating from abroad such as the shoe bomb plot, the liquid bomb plot, two underwear bomb plots and the printer bomb plot.
In addition to attempting to directly conduct terrorist attacks themselves, militant ideologues began using their influence to radicalize grassroots jihadists already living in the United States and the West, encouraging those radicalized individuals to conduct terrorist attacks where they live. Initially, this tactic seemed to be successful, producing the Little Rock and Ft. Hood shootings in the United States. Indeed, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula founded their English-language Inspire Magazine in the wake of these two attacks to radicalize grassroots jihadists and to instruct them how to conduct simple attacks. A year later, the al Qaeda core group embraced this approach, releasing a video by Adam Gadahn that encouraged grassroots jihadists to conduct simple attacks where they live.
The Conundrum
Gadahn and al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula ideologue Anwar al-Awlaki urged grassroots jihadists to conduct "simple attacks" using knives, firearms or simple explosive devices. "Build a bomb in the kitchen of your mom" and use them against soft targets, they said. Simple attacks are within the reach of untrained grassroots jihadists. They are also very well suited to the skillsets of jihadists who have received basic military training in places like Syria and Iraq. In other words, they are people who know how to handle firearms and who understand the basics of tactical shooting but lack training in sophisticated terrorist tradecraft.
The poor terrorist tradecraft most jihadists possess and the type of training most receive in places such as Iraq, Syria and Yemen have meant that when jihadists have attempted to plan and conduct spectacular bombings, they have almost always been botched or uncovered by the authorities. An example of a botched attack is the May 2010 Times Square attack, in which Faisal Shahzad was able to obtain the materials required to build a car bomb but was unable to properly assemble a functional improvised explosive device. An example of a plot that was uncovered and thwarted by the authorities is the September 2009 plot to bomb the New York subway system that involved Najibullah Zazi.
In 2010, considering the training and capability of most jihadist militant actors and the new emphasis on simple attacks, I concluded we were about to see a shift in jihadist terrorist tactics away from failed bombings and toward armed assaults. However, the attempt by jihadist ideologues to change the mentality of jihadist operatives has been largely unsuccessful, and it did not produce the volume of expected attacks. We have seen a few simple attacks conducted by such people, including shootings in Frankfurt, Germany, in March 2011; in Toulouse, France, in April 2012; and in Brussels, Belgium, in June 2014. The April 2013 Boston Marathon bombing is a case of unsophisticated jihadists using the bomb-making instructions in Inspire Magazine to conduct a simple attack.
Despite the intensive media coverage and hysteria caused by a simple attack like the Boston Marathon bombing, we have yet to see a large percentage of the grassroots jihadist militant world adopt the "simple attack" concept. For every successful simple attack we have seen, there have been multiple would-be militants such as Terry Lowen, Adel Daoud and Quazi Nafis who have aspired to attacks beyond their capabilities and failed.
This is partly because, apparently, most jihadists prefer to fight on the battlefield against foes like the Syrian military rather than attack civilian soft targets. But beyond the jihadist preference to travel to fight rather than to conduct attacks at home, there is another conundrum that puzzles me. Although most jihadists believe that it is permissible to give one's life during an attack, they continue to aspire to spectacular attacks that are beyond their capabilities and that have a very high chance of failure rather than to simple attacks that are certain to succeed. I am not a psychologist, but I speculate that perhaps there is something in the psychological makeup of people drawn to the ideology of jihadism that causes them to gravitate toward the spectacular rather than the obtainable. Perhaps they also believe that in order to justify their suicide, the attack must be spectacular.
I am not the only one puzzled by this tendency. It also appears to confound the al Qaeda ideologues who do not see the "harvest" of attacks they anticipated. Such people are used to seeing their directives carried out on the battlefield, and they surely must be perplexed that grassroots jihadists continue to botch attacks or walk into sting operations rather than conduct simple attacks within their capabilities.
But it does appear that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is attempting to adapt to the situation. In response to the ambition of grassroots jihadists, the group has attempted to equip them to conduct the types of spectacular attacks they aspire to. In the 12th edition of Inspire Magazine, published in March 2014, the Open Source Jihad section was titled "Car Bombs Inside America" and contained instructions for building a vehicle bomb. The group republished the section Aug. 16 along with some other previously published material (including the pressure cooker bomb plans used in the Boston Marathon bombing) in a publication entitled "Palestine Betrayal of the Guilty Conscience."
So far, we have not seen any attacks, attempted attacks or thwarted plots containing these vehicle bomb instructions. Still, the instructional material is out there, and given the number of past plots in which individuals attempted to follow the magazine's pipe bomb and pressure cooker bomb instructions, it may only be a matter of time before we see someone attempt to build and deploy a car bomb using these plans. In the meantime, the directions contained in "Car Bombs Inside America" have given intelligence and law enforcement officers new indicators of bomb making activity to look for.
Read more: The Terrorist Tradecraft Conundrum | Stratfor
Follow us: @stratfor on Twitter | Stratfor on Facebook
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http://www.westernjournalism.com/jihadi-serial-killer-ones-talking/#EDuK867Q3KpftgHw.99
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http://www.westernjournalism.com/jihadi-serial-killer-ones-talking/#EDuK867Q3KpftgHw.99
Funny how the MSM has totally missed the story.
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http://www.tpnn.com/2014/08/29/video-illegals-have-taken-their-invasion-of-our-border-to-a-whole-new-level/
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http://www.judicialwatch.org/bulletins/imminent-terrorist-attack-warning-feds-us-border/
Imminent Terrorist Attack Warning By Feds on US Border
AUGUST 29, 2014
Islamic terrorist groups are operating in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez and planning to attack the United States with car bombs or other vehicle born improvised explosive devices (VBIED). High-level federal law enforcement, intelligence and other sources have confirmed to Judicial Watch that a warning bulletin for an imminent terrorist attack on the border has been issued. Agents across a number of Homeland Security, Justice and Defense agencies have all been placed on alert and instructed to aggressively work all possible leads and sources concerning this imminent terrorist threat.
Specifically, Judicial Watch sources reveal that the militant group Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) is confirmed to now be operating in Juarez, a famously crime-infested narcotics hotbed situated across from El Paso, Texas. Violent crimes are so rampant in Juarez that the U.S. State Department has issued a number of travel warnings for anyone planning to go there. The last one was issued just a few days ago.
Intelligence officials have picked up radio talk and chatter indicating that the terrorist groups are going to “carry out an attack on the border,” according to one JW source. “It’s coming very soon,” according to this high-level source, who clearly identified the groups planning the plots as “ISIS and Al Qaeda.” An attack is so imminent that the commanding general at Ft. Bliss, the U.S. Army post in El Paso, is being briefed, another source confirms. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not respond to multiple inquiries from Judicial Watch, both telephonic and in writing, about this information.
The disturbing inside intelligence comes on the heels of news reports revealing that U.S. intelligence has picked up increased chatter among Islamist terror networks approaching the 13th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. While these terrorists reportedly plan their attack just outside the U.S., President Obama admits that “we don’t have a strategy yet” to combat ISIS. “I don’t want to put the cart before the horse,” the commander-in-chief said this week during a White House press briefing. “I think what I’ve seen in some of the news reports suggest that folks are getting a little further ahead of what we’re at than what we currently are.”
The administration has also covered up, or at the very least downplayed, a serious epidemic of crime along the Mexican border even as heavily armed drug cartels have taken over portions of the region. Judicial Watch has reported that the U.S. Border Patrol actually ordered officers to avoid the most crime-infested stretches because they’re “too dangerous” and patrolling them could result in an “international incident” of cross border shooting. In the meantime, who could forget the famous words of Obama’s first Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano; the southern border is “as secure as it has ever been.”
These new revelations are bound to impact the current debate about the border crisis and immigration policy.
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:-o :-o :-o :x :x :x :x :x :x
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kKr44Ey8WU&feature=youtu.be
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AND Ws too and Clintons(???). Could anyone imagine this happening during WW2? Freedom of the Press or freedom to a reporter to make money for himself? What say u
Why The Obama Administration Wants This Journalist In Jail
Business Insider
By Brett LoGiurato 4 hours ago
REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
President Barack Obama came into office in 2009 promising a new era of unprecedented transparency in his administration. But when he leaves office, reporters may remember him for an effort that has largely turned out to be the opposite — and for being what one affected reporter has called the "greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation."
At a time when journalists' roles in covering different, critical conflict zones have been under the microscope, renewed attention has come to the case involving James Risen. He is the New York Times journalist who has been fighting efforts by two different Departments of Justice — under Presidents Obama and George W. Bush — to compel him to identify sources from a 2006 book that reveals a secret CIA plan to sabotage Iran's budding nuclear program.
For the past five years, he has battled the Obama administration's Justice Department, which in 2009 took a rather unprecedented step of renewing a subpoena scheduled to expire that year. From his case and others the Obama administration has pursued, Risen told The Times' Maureen Dowd recently that Obama represented a fundamental obstacle for press freedom.
"It’s hypocritical," Risen said. "A lot of people still think this is some kind of game or signal or spin. They don’t want to believe that Obama wants to crack down on the press and whistleblowers. But he does. He’s the greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation."
Risen's Case
There's a perception, many observers of Risen's case say, that Obama is viewed by the public as different and as overtly friendly with the press. They think that perception is wrong.
They point to the Obama administration's use of the Espionage Act to prosecute government employees more than any other administration in history, saying it is borne out of a necessity to viciously control the flow of information. In 2009, when Risen's subpoena first expired, the Obama administration took the unusual step of renewing it and continuing to pursue the case.
"He promised to be a different kind of president," said Jerry Kammer, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who now works at the Center for Immigration Studies. "But he has only suppressed efforts to disclose the government's misdeeds. His administration has been untransparent at so many levels."
Kammer was one of 14 Pulitzer Prize winners, spanning 1982 to 2014, who issued statements earlier this month in support of Risen. The group that put together the statements, Roots Action, also delivered a petition with more than 100,000 signatures to the Justice Department's Washington headquarters.
Earlier this summer, Risen failed in an attempt to have the Supreme Court review an order compelling him to testify about the sources in a book he published in 2006. He has vowed to fight on, but he has exhausted all legal options to halt the Justice Department's pursuit of him. He has vowed he is ready to go to jail, even telling his paper he has the books he will take with him already picked out. He could be the first reporter since The Times' Judith Miller in 2005 to go to jail for refusing to reveal the name of a source.
"The government likes to keep its house in order and likes to go after every possible leaker it can find," said Gregg Leslie, the legal defense director at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. "They really just don't believe in whistleblowers or leakers."
In 2006, Risen published "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration." One chapter in the book detailed a secret CIA plan — started under the administration of then-President Bill Clinton and supported by the Bush administration — to sabotage Iran's then-budding nuclear program. (You can read an excerpt of the chapter here at The Guardian.)
It was an embarrassment for the CIA and for the government. The CIA chose a Russian defector to give deliberately flawed nuclear blueprints to Iranian officials. The flaws, however, were easily detectable, and the Russian defector tipped off the Iranians to maintain his credibility and not draw suspicion as a source, according to the book. In the end, "Operation Merlin," as it was codenamed, may have aided Iran in its plans to develop a nuclear weapon.
" This espionage disaster, of course, was not reported. It left the CIA virtually blind in Iran, unable to provide any significant intelligence on one of the most critical issues facing the US — whether Tehran was about to go nuclear," Risen wrote.
In late 2010, the federal government indicted Jeffrey A. Sterling, a former CIA operative, with leaking the classified information to Risen. The government wants to compel Risen to reveal his source independently.
Observers of the case view it as pure retaliation. There is a compelling interest to know when the government screws up, Leslie said. And if Risen is compelled to reveal his sources, it could have a "chilling effect" on other government whistleblowers who would be willing to share that information with journalists.
"This is what the American people need to know," Leslie said.
"If we're talking constantly about how evil the Iranian government is and how dangerous it is that they're getting weapons-grade nuclear materials — and we had a role in getting that to them. Whether accidentally or stupidly or however, the American people need to know that."
The Justice Department declined to comment about an ongoing case.
'Here In The United States Of America'
Some reporters and observers of the Risen case say it is especially important in light of recent world events. In Ferguson, Missouri, where racially charged protests raged for more than a week after the killing of an unarmed black teenager, multiple journalists were arrested.
In one high-profile incident emerging from the Ferguson protests, reporters from The Washington Post and The Huffington Post were arrested in a local McDonald's. The outrage that ensued prompted a personal response from the president.
" Here, in the United States of America, police should not be bullying or arresting journalists who are just trying to do their jobs and report to the American people on what they see on the ground," Obama said in a statement from Martha's Vineyard the next day.
Police treatment of journalists and civilians in Ferguson, Missouri, has drawn scrutiny.
But that is exactly what many people think he's doing in the case of prosecuting Risen and others. Under Obama, the Justice Department has broadly increased leak investigations.
"There's far more ramifications for journalists from this case," Kammer said, "than anything that happened in a McDonald's restaurant in Ferguson."
In the investigation stemming from a 2009 leak of classified information involving North Korea, for example, investigators probed security-badge access records to monitor the comings and goings of Fox News reporter James Rosen with the State Department.
An FBI agent also wrote in an affidavit that by soliciting classified information from Stephen J. Kim, a former State Department official, Rosen was an "aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator" in leaking the information and could be charged as a "co-conspirator" in the case.
Weeks after the case involving Risen was reported last year, the Associated Press revealed that federal investigators obtained nearly two years of phone records from its reporters in another leak case.
One former Justice Department official told Business Insider the Obama administration's increased pursuance of leak cases was mostly a product of having so many new tools available at its disposal to track down the leakers.
It is also a product, the official said, of a more sensitive world post-Sept. 11, 2001. The official said it was likely to only escalate with future presidencies, as the U.S. continues to grapple with a copious number of global threats.
Leslie, the legal defense director at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, also noted the government's capabilities to find out where leaks originate.
"The point I always make is that I'm not sure it's the Obama administration alone, but rather the institutional government that's going to be here no matter which party is in control of the White House," he said.
"They've got new, invasive, and incredibly advanced tools for discovering information. And they're going to exploit those as much as they can. I don't see much animus on the part of the administration or from Obama himself. It's more that the post-9/11 reality seems that they are going to relentlessly pursue every leaks case."
He added: "I say that not to give Obama an excuse but to say that, no matter who's elected next, it's going to continue — unless something is done about it."
That would take a groundswell of public outcry — or perhaps a legislative fix. At this point, neither seems likely.
For example, pollsters found it difficult to poll Americans on their opinions of the Justice Department's subpoenaing of the Associated Press reporters' phone records, in part because public attention was not at all focused on the story. According to a Pew Research Center poll, Americans said they disapproved of the Justice Department's actions by only an 8-point margin.
Meanwhile, a federal version of a shield law, which does not exist, has languished in Congress, and no action is likely this year. The best chance for a law this year is an amendment to the Justice Department's appropriations act offered by Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Florida), which passed in late May. But it is unclear if that amendment will survive the reconciliation process.
The Risen case, Leslie said, provides a clear picture for why a federal shield law is needed to complement similar laws in 49 states. The Supreme Court's dismissal of his petition, Leslie said, is more evidence of what he called a "disturbing" trend — federal courts have been less and less willing to side with reporters' arguments.
Said Leslie: "If courts can not give you that relief, then you need legislative relief. It has to happen."
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http://www.policeone.com/border-patrol/articles/7514553-Border-Patrol-agent-fires-at-armed-militia-member/
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http://hotair.com/archives/2014/09/03/video-dead-american-jihadi-once-worked-at-minneapolis-st-paul-airport/
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http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/09/08/us-federal-air-marshal-attacked-with-syringe-in-lagos-airport/
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/387188/foreign-legion-losers-jonah-goldberg
A big threat.
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http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/09/video-robert-spencer-on-newsmax-tv-on-the-domestic-jihad-terror-threat
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/09/20/cancelled-facing-threat-of-mass-violence-organizer-nixes-border-protest-hours-before-it-was-supposed-to-start/
Not impossible that this group is fibbing to cover what would have been a poor turnout.
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/sep/18/dems-block-cruz-strip-citizenship-isis-defectors/
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WASHINGTON — As the United States begins what could be a lengthy military campaign against the Islamic State, intelligence and law enforcement officials said another Syrian group, led by a shadowy figure who was once among Osama bin Laden’s inner circle, posed a more direct threat to America and Europe.
American officials said that the group called Khorasan had emerged in the past year as the cell in Syria that may be the most intent on hitting the United States or its installations overseas with a terror attack. The officials said that the group is led by Muhsin al-Fadhli, a senior Qaeda operative who, according to the State Department, was so close to Bin Laden that he was among a small group of people who knew about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks before they were launched.
There is almost no public information about the Khorasan group, which was described by several intelligence, law enforcement and military officials as being made up of Qaeda operatives from across the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa. Members of the cell are said to be particularly interested in devising terror plots using concealed explosives. It is unclear who, besides Mr. Fadhli, is part of the Khorasan group.
The director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., said on Thursday that “in terms of threat to the homeland, Khorasan may pose as much of a danger as the Islamic State.”
Some American officials and national security experts said the intense focus on the Islamic State had distorted the picture of the terrorism threat that has emerged from the chaos of Syria’s civil war, and that the more immediate threats still come from traditional terror groups like Khorasan and the Nusra Front, which is Al Qaeda’s designated affiliate in Syria.
Mr. Fadhli, 33, has been tracked by American intelligence agencies for at least a decade. According to the State Department, before Mr. Fadhli arrived in Syria, he had been living in Iran as part of a small group of Qaeda operatives who had fled to the country from Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks. Iran’s government said the group was living under house arrest, but the exact circumstances of the Qaeda operatives were disputed for years, and many members of the group ultimately left Iran for Pakistan, Syria and other countries.
In 2012, the State Department identified Mr. Fadhli as Al Qaeda’s leader in Iran, directing “the movement of funds and operatives” through the country. A $7 million reward was offered for information leading to his capture. The same State Department release said he was working with wealthy “jihadist donors” in Kuwait, his native country, to raise money for Qaeda-allied rebels in Syria.
In a speech in Brussels in 2005, President George W. Bush referred to Mr. Fadhli as he thanked European countries for their counterterrorism assistance, noting that Mr. Fadhli had assisted terrorists who bombed a French oil tanker in 2002 off the coast of Yemen. That attack killed one and spilled 50,000 barrels of oil that stretched across 45 miles of coastline.
The Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, is viewed as more focused on consolidating territory it has amassed in Syria and Iraq than on attacking the West. Some even caution that military strikes against the Islamic State could antagonize that group into planning attacks on Western targets, and even benefit other militant organizations if more moderate factions of the rebellion are not ready to take power on the ground.
The Islamic State’s recent statements, including a video using a British captive as a spokesman, have sought to deter American action against the group and threatened attacks only as revenge for American strikes.
At the same time, the rise of the Islamic State has blunted the momentum of its rival groups in Syria, including the Nusra Front, once considered to be among the most capable in the array of Syrian rebel groups. The Islamic State’s expansion across northern Iraq and in oil-rich regions of eastern Syria has sapped some of the Nusra Front’s resources and siphoned some of its fighters — who are drawn by the Islamic State’s battlefield successes and declaration of a caliphate, the longtime dream of many jihadists.
It is difficult to assess the seriousness and scope of any terror plots that Khorasan, the Nusra Front or other groups in Syria might be planning. In several instances in the past year, Nusra and the Islamic State have used Americans who have joined their ranks to carry out attacks inside Syria — including at least one suicide bombing — rather than returning them to the United States to strike there.
Beyond the militant groups fighting for control of territory, Syria has become a magnet for Islamic extremists from other nations who have used parts of the country as a sanctuary to plot attacks.
“What you have is a growing body of extremists from around the world who are coming in and taking advantage of the ungoverned areas and creating informal ad hoc groups that are not directly aligned with ISIS or Nusra,” a former senior law enforcement official said.
Spokesmen for the C.I.A. and the White House declined to comment for this article.
Continue reading the main story
Graphic: How ISIS Works
The grinding war in Syria, well into its fourth year, has led to a constant shifting of alliances among the hard-line rebel groups.
Ayman al-Zawahri, the head of Al Qaeda, anointed the Nusra Front as its official branch in Syria and cut ties with the Islamic State early this year after it refused to follow his orders to fight only in Iraq. Officials said that Khorasan was an offshoot of the Nusra Front. According to a new report by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a nonprofit research and analysis organization, the rifts among these various groups “threaten to create a conflict throughout the jihadist movement that is no longer confined to Syria and Iraq.”
While Nusra has been weakened, it remains one of the few rebel organizations that has active branches throughout Syria. Analysts view the organization as well placed to benefit from American strikes that might weaken the Islamic State.
Jennifer Cafarella, a Syria analyst with the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, said that American strikes could benefit the Nusra Front if the United States did not ensure that there was another force ready to take power on the ground.
“There is definitely a threat that, if not conducted as a component of a properly tailored strategy within Syria, the American strikes would allow the Nusra Front to fill a vacuum in eastern Syria,” she said.
She noted that the Nusra Front had been the primary force in the eastern province of Deir al-Zour before it was pushed out by the Islamic State earlier this year, and that the group had maintained better relationships with the local tribes than ISIS had. This could make it easier for the group to return if ISIS is chased out by American airstrikes.
While the Nusra Front does not openly call for attacks on the West, it remains loyal to Mr. Zawahri, whose clout among jihadists has waned with the rise of the Islamic State.
A great deal remains uncertain about the Nusra Front’s ultimate aims inside Syria. Hamza al-Shimali, the head of the American-backed rebel group the Hazm Movement, said that he and his allies did not trust the Nusra Front. He said he feared that one day he would have to fight the Nusra Front in addition to the Syrian government and the Islamic State.
American intelligence officials estimate that since the Syrian conflict began, about 15,000 foreigners, including more than 100 Americans and 2,000 Europeans, have traveled to the country to fight alongside rebel groups. Syria’s porous borders make it relatively easy to get in and out of the country, raising concerns among Western officials that without markings on their passports they could slip back undetected into Europe or the United States.
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So, since the white house intruder successfully climbed the fence and made it to the front door, shouldn't he be free to live there without fear of prosecution or ejection?
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http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2014/01/14/emps-how-to-detect-blast-that-could-darken-world/
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So, since the white house intruder successfully climbed the fence and made it to the front door, shouldn't he be free to live there without fear of prosecution or ejection?
G M hit this one out of the park!!
By reaching inside safely, the intruder is entitled to possession of a wing of the White House, golf and Air Force One privileges, free healthcare, and gratis enrollment for his children at the Obamas' private school.
Or is there a different set of rules for protecting the powerful and elite than for protecting the rest of us?
They require full Picture ID to enter and oppose voter ID at their political conventions and traveled more than a million jet miles to fight the CO2 emissions of little people at the global warming summit.
Hypocrisy is a feature, not a bug of liberalism.
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http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2014/09/30/To-Better-Protect-Muslims-AG-Holder-Set-To-Ban-Religious-Profiling
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/352208.php
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http://www.glennbeck.com/2014/10/02/why-does-glenn-think-ebola-is-the-ultimate-weapon/
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I have not had a chance to read this thoroughly and reflect upon each point, but it seems to me to be a conversation that is needed.
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/american-freedom-defense-initiative-announces-platform-for-defending-freedom-in-wake-of-boston-jihad-204432411.html
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http://pamelageller.com/2014/10/islamic-state-plots-to-attack-us-with-ebola-jihadists-to-send-infected-militants-to-america-to-spread-disease.html/
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Second post
http://pamelageller.com/2014/10/when-did-we-last-have-immigrants-warning-wed-lose-their-loyalty-in-a-foreign-conflict.html/
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third post
http://www.israelvideonetwork.com/thanks-to-israel-illegal-aliens-on-arizonas-border-with-mexico-wont-stand-a-chance?omhide=true&utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Israel+Breaking+News+Video%3A+Islamic+State+Eyeing+Iran%E2%80%99s+Nuclear+Secrets&utm_campaign=20141005_m122447119_10%2F05+Israel+Breaking+News+Video%3A+Islamic+State+Eyeing+Iran%E2%80%99s+Nuclear+Secrets&utm_term=Finally_2C+something+to+stop+ISIS+from+entering+the+US+border___
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http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2014/10/06/fbi-isis-could-strike-in-us-very-soon-n1901401?utm_source=thdailypm&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm
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2007-CDC maintains 'no fly list' in conjunction with DHS...
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5737a1.htm?mobile=nocontent
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Fascinating and 'not just slightly disturbing' interview with scientist who discovered Ebola.
The more I read, the more convinced I become that the world * really* nerds to get in front of this, and soon.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/04/ebola-zaire-peter-piot-outbreak
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2007-CDC maintains 'no fly list' in conjunction with DHS...
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5737a1.htm?mobile=nocontent
Good to see this threat tied to homeland security. One more reason to take borders, security and immigration law seriously. (Meanwhile our President laughs about smuggling illegals into an event in his limousine).
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A couple more I found this morning, Doug. To your point about Obama, Thomas Sowell had a really good editorial... not really 'news' to anyone who has followed the Obama presidency, per se, but it was on point regarding his apparent 'President of the World, First, complex' I thought.
http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2014/10/07/ebola-and-obama-n1901524?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook#!
Secondly, a follow-up on the CDC travel ban...
http://patdollard.com/2014/10/obama-quietly-dumped-bush-era-quarantine-proposal-that-would-prevent-travelers-from-spreading-infectious-diseases/
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Good thing we have the qualified Jeh Johnson doing an outstanding job protecting the White House and the nation!
Or so I was told...
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http://hotair.com/archives/2014/10/07/la-times-some-experts-worried-that-ebola-may-spread-more-easily-than-thought/
Hey, the preezy says no problema!
If you like your pandemic, you can keep your pandemic.
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Hope this will be well done:
https://www.teapartypatriots.org/theborderstates/
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http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/389873/state-department-endorses-canadian-islamist-manual-describes-jihad-noble-andrew-c
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second post
Guest Column: Terror's Virus on the Northern Border
by David B. Harris
Special to IPT News
October 7, 2014
http://www.investigativeproject.org/4602/guest-column-terror-virus-on-the-northern-border
Ever since full-blown cases of the disease hit the United States, Canadians have dreaded the contagion's arrival north of the 49th parallel.
Its effects: blindness and a deadly incapacity to recognize and adapt to reality.
The malady? The White House's refusal to identify the leading terrorist enemy by name and combatant doctrine.
President Obama began his administration by avoiding counterterror language likely to link Islam with violence. This reflected a civilized and practical impulse to avoid alienating Muslims at home and abroad.
But perhaps influenced by the demonstrable fact that President Obama, as former terror prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy put it, "made Islamic supremacists key administration advisors," this effort quickly got out of control. Now the White House fetishizes and enforces on its security agencies, a refusal to identify the doctrine underlying the bulk of the world's terrorism woes: radical Islamism.
Remarkable, considering that Muslims sounded the alarm years ago.
"Obviously not all Muslims are terrorists but, regrettably, the majority of the terrorists in the world are Muslims," wrote Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed in a 2004 Al-Sharq Al-Awsat article flagged by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).
Despite this, the Obama White House banned words like "Islamists," "Muslims" and "jihad" from security documents, even from FBI and other government agencies' counterterror training manuals.
Lawyer and retired US military intelligence officer Major Stephen C. Coughlin exposed the censorship's extent at a February 2010 conference. In 2004, he noted, the 9/11 Commission Report made 126 mentions of "jihad," 145 of "Muslim," and used the word "Islam" over 300 times. No surprise.
But Washington later purged such terms completely from the FBI counterterrorism lexicon (2008), National Intelligence Strategy (2009) and even the 2010 panel reviewing jihadi Nidal Malik Hasan's 2009 Fort Hood massacre – except as unavoidable parts of names of terror organizations or the like. The practice seems to continue.
Consequences?
Understanding the threat – extremist Muslims, in this case – requires understanding their doctrine. If terrorists were invoking Christianity – it has happened – security and intelligence organizations would focus on problematic churches and related facilities connected to radical preaching, funding and recruitment. Christian holy literature would be scrutinized, in order to anticipate terrorists' plans, targets and attack-dates. Redouble the guard on Christmas or Easter? Could atheists, Muslims or Jews be targets? Regardless whether extremists' interpretations should, in any objective sense, be true or false representations of the ideology in question, serious intelligence must look at these things in order to understand and master the threats posed by all extremist strains of religion or other ideologies. Politicians and the public must discuss them. Public education, transparency, democracy and our defense, demand this. Anything else is misleading, self-deceiving and likely self-defeating.
Northern Exposure
So it was that, three years ago, the Canadian government published the first of its annual series of public threat reports. This straight-talking assessment pinpointed "Sunni Islamist extremism" as a primary menace to Canadians.
But, tragically, the D.C. disease had overtaken Canada's security bureaucracy by the time August brought the 2014 Public Report On The Terrorist Threat to Canada. This report expunges all direct references to Islamists, other than in terror-organization names.
Take, for example, the latest report's warning about Canadians joining terror outfits abroad. Gone are terms like "Islamist extremists" and even "violent jihad." The report's authors – apparently burdened by "advice" from misguided outreach to Canadian Islamists – slavishly substituted generic terms like "extremist travellers" for language revealing the religious claims, affiliations, motivations and doctrines of our enemies. "Extremist travellers" appears dozens of times to the exclusion of meaningful nomenclature – an editing embarrassment, on top of a national-security one. From the 2014 report:
Europol estimates that between 1,200 and 2,000 European extremist travellers took part in the conflict in Syria in 2013. There appears to be an increase in extremist travellers. This suggests that the threat posed to Europe by returning extremist travellers may be more significant than the threat facing North America because greater numbers of extremist travellers are leaving, then returning to Europe, than are leaving and later returning to North America. This difference between Canada and Europe in numbers of extremist travellers can be attributed to a variety of factors. Regardless, Europe and Canada face a common, interconnected threat from extremist travellers. [Emphasis added.]
In just one paragraph, Canada's self-censoring report says that many Europeans are "fighting abroad as extremist travellers"; "they attract extremist travellers … and continue to draw European extremist travellers"; there were "European extremist travellers in Syria and other conflict zones"; the "influx of these extremist travellers into Syria" increases the European terror risk; "an extremist traveller who returned from Syria" allegedly slaughtered several Belgians. (Emphasis added.)
This doubletalk undermines public awareness, public confidence in authorities and the ability of officials and citizens alike to recognize, assess and confront terrorist and subversive enemies and their doctrine.
We saw the absurd far reaches of this self-blinding mentality a few years ago when Canadian police officers at a terrorism news conference thanked "the community" for facilitating an Islamist terrorist take-down. When a journalist asked which community they meant, the officers – not daring to say "Muslim" – all but froze, thawing only enough to become caricatures of stymied stumbling. Because paralyzing PC protocols banned the M-word, the conference ended without the officers having been able explicitly to thank the deserving "Muslim community."
How has Canada come to this?
Among other sources, Canadian security officials get advice from their federal government's Cross-Cultural Roundtable on Security. Prominent member Hussein Hamdani reportedly campaigned to drop language implicating things "Islamic." Meanwhile, Hamdani, the subject of a just-released report by Canada's Point de Bascule counter extremist research organization, remains vice-chair of the North American Spiritual Revival (NASR) organization. On its website, NASR boasts – as it has done for years – of sponsoring an appearance in Canada by U.S. Imam Siraj Wahhaj, frequently tagged a radical and a 1993 World Trade Center bombing unindicted co-conspirator. Fellow American Muslim Stephen Suleyman Schwartz, executive director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism, once said of Wahhaj: "He's the No. 1 advocate of radical Islamic ideology among African-Americans. His stuff is very appealing to young Muslims who are on a radical path."
Hamdani's NASR also brought American Imam Ziad Shakir to Canada. His disturbing ideology, as I've written elsewhere, "was condemned by moderate American Muslim leader and retired U.S. naval Lt. Cmdr Zuhdi Jasser, and by the American Anti-Defamation League." Some have other concerns about Hamdani.
Now comes word that Hamdani, squired by Angus Smith, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) analyst sometimes linked to the censorship policy, will appear on a Montgomery County, Md. panel tomorrow to enlighten Americans about radicalism and the ISIS terror threat.
THE RCMP JOINS FORCES
This isn't the least of it. Days before the scheduled visit, it was discovered that RCMP outreachers inconceivably had collaborated for months with the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM) in producing "United Against Terrorism," an erstwhile counter-radicalization handbook. Inconceivably, because NCCM is the renamed Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-CAN), the Canadian chapter of CAIR, a Saudi-funded U.S. unindicted co-conspirator group. (In its July 2013 name-change announcement, NCCM admitted, with respect to CAIR-CAN, that "We remain the same organization," leading to suspicions that the adjustment was a cosmetic attempt to kick over documented CAIR-CAN traces to radicalism.)
As for CAIR-CAN/NCCM's U.S. mother organization: "The [US] Government has produced ample evidence," concluded the relevant U.S. district court's decision, "to establish the associations of CAIR, ISNA and NAIT …with Hamas."
In addition, several senior CAIR staffers and affiliated persons – including CAIR's former national civil liberties coordinator – have done pen-time for terrorism-related offenses. But the Canadian chapter has yet to condemn publicly and by name the U.S. organization and these convicts, or reveal fully the nature of past or present financial and other dealings with CAIR.
The Islamic Social Services Association (ISSA), led by Shahina Siddiqui, joins the NCCM and RCMP in authorship on the handbook's cover. Canada's outreach counter-radicalization world seems to be a small, if not inbred, one, for Siddiqui happens also to be a member of both the NCCM's board, and the RCMP's national and Manitoba "diversity" committees.
Another curiosity of authorship involves the only named RCMP official identified in the book's "Consultants & Contributors" section: "TASLEEM BUDHWANI, PHD, C.PSYCH, Federal Policing Strategy, RCMP." A profile has this psychologist busy "enhancing partnerships between law enforcement and various sectors including NGOs … in the prevention of individual radicalization to violence." It is not known what Budhwani's views would be about national police force involvement with NGOs of the NCCM sort.
As for the handbook, it would ban all the usual terms, even declaring verboten the expression "moderate Muslims," because, said the authors, the expression is meant to imply that Muslims are not uniformly moderate. Parents are warned to be on the lookout for "External and overt expression of hyper-religiosity that is uncharacteristic of family culture," although one can only guess what to do, should this hyper-religiosity be altogether characteristic "of family culture." Elsewhere, the handbook seems a bit too eager to divorce radicalism and intense religiosity from the risk of religious violence. There was also rather too much emphasis, for some tastes, on Muslims' legal right to avoid cooperating with the RCMP. Readers would also recognize a continuation of the hallmarked NCCM/CAIR-CAN and CAIR campaign to push the generally unconvincing – and increasingly alienating and dangerous – Muslim victimhood narrative. This came replete with familiar attempts to propagate the word "Islamophobia," a term condemned by moderate Muslims as too-often wielded by Islamists to silence debate.
As Tarek Fatah, a well-known Pakistani-Canadian moderate, wrote, a few years ago:
Canada is a country where Muslims are respected and accommodated like in no other land on Earth, including Saudi Arabia and Iran. It is immoral for the Islamists to slander my country with the slur of Islamophobia. As Statistics Canada has shown, incidents of racism in Canada are far more likely to affect Christian black Canadians and Jewish Canadians than Muslims. …
"However," he concluded, "truth is the first casualty in this propaganda war being waged against Canada by its own Islamists."
For all this, the NCCM-ISSA-RCMP handbook then managed to go one better.
"Whom do we consult to gain an accurate understanding of our faith?" it asked. The answer was a list of scholar-interpreters of Islam who could apparently be relied upon in the delicate counter-radicalization context. The list reveals that it is not merely in the censorship department that Islamists have put one over on unduly compliant – and perhaps intimidated – RCMP outreach officers.
Among the recommended scholars, there's the startlingly hardline Ingrid Mattson (name misspelled in the handbook), former head of the Islamic Society of North America, an unindicted co-conspirator organization that was connected by the already-mentioned district court to Hamas. Mattson's Islamic chair at Huron University College, Ontario, notoriously benefits from significant radical-Islamic endowments. The scholar was last seen fending off complaints from a student claiming to have been jettisoned from Mattson's tax-funded classroom because he was non-Muslim.
Then there's the distinguished Imam Siraj Wahhaj, of the World Trade Center Wahhajs. His patchwork record involves alternately condemning violence and appearing to lust after it. Plus, the unappetizing Ziad Shakir. Not to mention the inevitable Jamal Badawi, former long-time CAIR-CAN/NCCM official. He's an unindicted co-conspirator his own right, someone who sat on ISNA's executive board (majlis). Badawi advocates light physical sharia discipline for errant wives. It remains unclear how the Badawi matrimonial approach aligns with the high-thinking and good works of handbooker Shahina Siddiqui and her Islamic Social Services Association.
Such are the moderate sherpas who guide the perplexed up counter-radicalization's gentle slopes.
No wonder many members of the public reacted with disbelief and disgust to the handbook fiasco. Or that RCMP ranks fell into a mass of post-publication panic and confusion. The day after the handbook's roll-out, a blushed-out RCMP, getting desperate enquiries from Canada's now-mortified Office of the Minister of Public Safety, scrambled out a news release. It said that the force was responsible for only one (benign) section of the handbook, and claimed improbably that the "tone" of some of the publication had caused the RCMP to pull out of the project at the last minute. Awfully "last minute," considering it was the day after launch that the RCMP news release emerged.
Thus, Mountie supremos regard bad "tone" as the actionable offense, rather than content prescribing self-hobbling wartime censorship and jihad-happy fire-breathers as counter-radical consultants. And no explanation why, days later, the handbook still bears the horsemen's name and logo. Or why the force hadn't publicly threatened legal action to have their name removed from it. Nor was there a commitment that RCMP HQ would at long last heed warnings, quit self-defeating, hardline-Islamist outreach, and publicly condemn the NCCM and its ilk – in the same way the Canadian prime minister's own director of communications had condemned NCCM for alleged Hamas-type connections, in January.
Especially in light of the contretemps between the prime minister's office and NCCM, there is floating over the handbook the unmistakable odor of a settling of accounts, an odor that might make the RCMP commissioner and his boss, the Public Safety minister, queasy about their continuing government employability. It was, after all, their diligence-free outreach that gave NCCM and ISSA the chance to make a fool out of the Prime Minister of Canada. For deep within the little handbook (p.34), comes a warning that law enforcement should never use the term "Islamicism." In Canada, this ungainly word – never in common use elsewhere, "Islamism" instead prevailing – is almost exclusively associated with a remark by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, one that was condemned by Islamists. "[T]he major threat," said Harper, in a headline-making 2011 CBC television interview, "is still Islamicism." The Islamists were riled up by Harper's effrontery, at the time, and so seem to have incorporated a touch of revenge in the handbook. This would not be the first RCMP outreach-driven embarrassment for a Canadian government, including a mess-up that may have involved an Iranian government operative.
In any event, the more nasty of observers looked at the RCMP's follow-on news release and wondered. Why, given the embarrassment and damage – and knuckle-rapping insult to their prime minister – did the release pull so many punches? Could this restraint mean that certain senior officials, compromised by outré outreach, were now scared to bear down? Was there a belief that Islamist "partners" should not be alienated, lest they be tempted to expose details of years of misguided interaction upon which certain RCMP executives had built careers?
The answer remains a mystery. But skeptical interpretations became more plausible to some, when the force's non-condemnatory news release came out more or less simultaneously with an NCCM release saluting RCMP cooperation with the Islamist group. Had all the loose liaising achieved the ultimate inversion, with the RCMP – and through it, the government – being turned into strange victims in a counter-radicalization Stockholm syndrome? Why, for that matter, are reliably moderate Canadian Muslim organizations like Muslims Facing Tomorrow and the Muslim Canadian Congress, enjoying hardly a fraction of the reinforcing, and capacity-building attentions splashed all over Islamists?
So, did the RCMP realize that it would be taken to the cleaners, and wind up helping NCCM and ISSA launder language and radicals via a counter-radicalization handbook? Maybe. But perhaps self-stifling in national security is now so internalized in the United States and Canada that it never occurs to some that certain people are radicals, and that radicals are not always our friends. Or the best guides to counter radicalization.
Burgeoning threats mean that citizens must press Washington and Ottawa to return to good sense, and put a stop to the deadly contagion of self-censorship and self-deceit – and worse – now hazarding national security and public safety.
Americans and Canadians must defeat the disease by curing their thinking.
A lawyer with 30 years' experience in intelligence affairs, David B. Harris is director of the International Intelligence Program, INSIGNIS Strategic Research Inc, Ottawa, Canada. The author is not responsible for the accuracy of, or views conveyed in, material in the links provided.
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/nov/12/terrorists-smuggled-across-us-southern-border-befo/
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http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/12/executive-amnesty-order-what-order.php
Funny, who could have foreseen such a thing?
Homeland Security Secretary nominee Jeh Johnson is loyal to the Constitution I mean Obama
4:22 PM 10/18/2013
Jim Treacher
Here’s the guy Obama is expected to nominate to replace Janet Napolitano. He’s talking about being in NYC on 9/11:
“When that bright and beautiful day, a day something like this, was shattered by the largest terrorist attack on our homeland in history, I wandered the streets of New York that day and wonderered, and asked, ‘What can I do?’ Since then, I have tried to devote myself to answering that question. I love this country. I care about the safety of our people. I believe in public service. And I remain loyal to you, Mr. President.”
He remains loyal to Barack Obama? What happened to supporting and defending the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and bearing true faith and allegiance to the same? Isn’t that how it’s supposed to go?
Or did that dusty old piece of parchment get snubbed on purpose? Obama certainly doesn’t have much use for it when it interferes with his whims.
Gather ’round, kids. We’ve made a few changes:
“I pledge allegiance to Barack, not the United States of America, and to the repugnance for which he stands, one narcissist, his own god, insufferable, with little but injustice for all.”
Welcome to Utopia. Ain’t it grand?
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/18/homeland-security-secretary-nominee-jeh-johnson-is-loyal-to-the-constitution-obama/
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2910327/Democrats-appoint-Muslim-House-Intelligence-Committee-said-schools-like-Islamic-madrassas-warned-law-enforcement-Allah-not-allow-stop-us.html
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2910327/Democrats-appoint-Muslim-House-Intelligence-Committee-said-schools-like-Islamic-madrassas-warned-law-enforcement-Allah-not-allow-stop-us.html
Worrying about infiltration by those hostile to this country is so 2007.
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jan/24/border-patrol-agents-say-gops-border-security-bill/
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jan/24/border-patrol-agents-say-gops-border-security-bill/
Rino-tastic! :roll:
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Every Gun-Control Advocate Should Watch This:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=pELwCqz2JfE
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http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/01/30/state-dept-muslim-brotherhood-us-trip-organized-and-funded-by-georgetown-university/
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This doesn't surprise me.
I have a degree from George Washington Univ from the late 70's. I remember the Iranians protesting on one side of the block at the United States and Americans telling them to go home on the other.
It was well known mucho Middle Eastern money was going to the school.
One rumor (not sure if true) that one of the engineering buildings was built with Iranian and/or Saudi money.
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Lots of Saudi money working to shape US policy since WWII.
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That may not be his goal, but he clearly doesn't care if it happens...
Is Obama Trying to Kill President Bush?
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On February 2, 2015
Ask the White House and it’ll tell you that Al Qaeda is on the run. But it conveniently neglects specifying which direction it’s running in.
While Obama and his small army of spokesmen mumble something about degrading and destroying ISIS, his policies pad out the ranks of Al Qaeda and ISIS with experienced recruits released from Gitmo.
It’s still unclear whether there is any Gitmo terrorist that Obama will not free.
Outgoing Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has said that the White House pressured him to free more Gitmo terrorists faster. White House reports suggested that Obama fired Hagel because he had been moving too slowly on freeing terrorists, making him guilty of thwarting Obama’s plot to close Gitmo.
That would make Hagel the first Secretary of Defense to be fired for failing to undermine national security.
But considering the rate at which terrorists are being released, the only way to empty Jihad Alcatraz any faster would be by moving the whole base to Pakistan overnight.
Obama already freed key Al Qaeda figures, including members of precursor ISIS groups. He freed Abdul Bin Mohammed Abis Ourgy, a bombmaker whom authorities suspected may have known about 9/11. He freed Mohammed Zahir, the Secretary General of the Taliban’s Intelligence Directorate, who was caught with nuclear materials to be used to build a bomb. He was also involved in smuggling drugs to the US.
Each new release explores the outer limits of the type of terror that Obama will reward with amnesty. Now that we know that Obama will release nuclear terrorists, is there any place where he will draw the line? Would he release presidential assassins? As long as their target was President George W. Bush.
Two of the Gitmo terrorists released by Obama had threatened to assassinate Bush.
Muhammed Ali Husayn had “addressed letters to the US President and Congress threatening punishment from Allah, stating that it is ‘time to be destroyed, suffer and lose.’ Detainee has also threatened that the US President would ‘taste the death,’ telling him to await ‘the humiliation by the swords of Islam.’
Obama assumes that Muhammed’s swords of Islam won’t be headed his way. He is the progressive who is closing Gitmo. Muhammed wouldn’t possibly dream of swinging a sword of Islam in his direction.
Muhammed was sent off to Kazakhstan despite an executive assessment stating that without rehabilitation he would go back to his old pals in Al Qaeda. Or maybe this former Koran teacher will go back to the University of Pakistan to finish that unfinished degree in Islamic Studies. Then he’ll have the proper background for making infidels “taste the death” in the appropriately peaceful Islamic way.
Considering that Kazakhstan has its own terrorist groups, he can rejoin the Jihad without too much travel time.
But releasing Muhammed was an easy call compared to freeing Adel Al-Hakeemy.
Adel was a senior member of the Global Jihadist Support Network which is exactly what it sounds like. He was a military advisor to Osama bin Laden and had ties to multiple terrorist groups in North Africa. He can counterfeit money, forge passports, command troops and fought us in Afghanistan.
His Gitmo file rates him as posing a high risk to Americans and having a high intelligence value.
He is, in short, exactly the sort of terrorist you don’t want to set free, even assuming that you have for some reason decided to release terrorists.
Adel has joined Muhammed in sunny Kazakhstan. His plans for the future doubtlessly include walks on Kazakhstan’s many moonlit beaches, a graduate degree in the fine arts and a career in standup comedy.
Or we could just pay attention to what he told interrogators in Guantanamo Bay.
“Detainee stated if the detainees at JTF-GTMO are released, they are going to exact revenge against the US. Detainee also stated that he would kill President Bush if given the chance.”
Obama freed a veteran terrorist who had vowed to attack America and kill Bush. Not only has he chosen to disregard American national security and the lives of Americans, but he also chose to disregard the safety of his White House predecessor.
While Obama’s supporters did tend to fantasize about the assassination of President Bush, they didn’t actually do anything about it. By freeing two terrorists, one of them a trained killer, who had threatened to kill Bush, Obama has actually put the life of a former president in danger.
That’s extreme behavior even by Democratic standards.
President Clinton had bombed Saddam Hussein over a plot to assassinate George H.W. Bush.
“The Iraqi attack against President Bush was an attack against our country and against all Americans,” President Clinton told the nation. “We could not, and have not, let such action against our nation go unanswered.”
Obama clearly has a different opinion. He has reversed Clinton by going so far as to free Al Qaeda terrorists who expressed designs on the life of a president making it clear that he has utter contempt not only for the lives of Americans, but also for the life of a former Republican president. There is no terrorist, whether he plots to detonate a nuclear bomb or to kill a president, whom he will not free.
Maybe if Adel Al-Hakeemy had threatened to kill Obama, he would still be sitting in Gitmo.
It was not all that long ago that Obama’s fellow anti-war protesters were marching around with signs calling for the death of President Bush. In contrast to the firestorms that resulted when a rodeo clown mocked Obama or when an outhouse labeled as Obama’s presidential library was featured on a parade float (resulting in a Justice Department intervention), these death threats went unpunished.
Even Secretary of State John Kerry had winkingly gotten in on the act, joking, “I could have gone to 1600 Pennsylvania and killed the real bird with one stone.”
New York State Comptroller Alan Hevesi had praised Senator Schumer at a public event by saying that, “We really feel bad for poor Chuck, United States senator, the man who, uh, uh, how do I phrase this diplomatically – will put a bullet between the president’s eyes if he could get away with it.”
Unlike Sarah Palin’s target map, the media was quick to dismiss these as just jokes. But jokes can be revealing. They can tell us what someone is really thinking. And back then a lot of top Democrats thought that killing Bush was a good thing.
Now Obama is freeing Islamic terrorists who agree. Is that a coincidence?
None of the anti-war protesters waving signs calling for Bush’s head ever had the guts to follow through on it. Maybe someone in the White House is hoping that Muhammed and Adel will.
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http://www.capoliticalreview.com/capoliticalnewsandviews/obama-orders-border-patrol-to-put-illegal-alien-drunk-drivers-on-the-road/
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http://www.capoliticalreview.com/capoliticalnewsandviews/obama-orders-border-patrol-to-put-illegal-alien-drunk-drivers-on-the-road/
Funny how that works, as for state/local law enforcement, there is caselaw that says if you fail to act when contacting a drunk driver and they kill/injure someone, you are personally liable.
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http://www.glennbeck.com/2015/03/11/does-this-progressive-gop-leader-have-ties-to-the-muslim-brotherhood/
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YES - Norquist has quite well-documented ties to terrorist-sponsoring organizations and has facilitated the infiltration of Muslim Brotherhood operatives into both the Bush and Obama administrations. I believe I've posted about this on the Islam in America thread. Frank Gaffney and David Horowitz, as well as Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer have been writing about this for years.
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27 Mar 15
This from a friend in Manila. We’ll soon see this here, and in most of
Western Europe:
“The Philippine approach to security in business districts and hotels where
most foreigners hang-out is much more rigorous than we see at home, and is
surely a sign of things to come.
You go through metal-detectors to get into malls. There is highly-visible
armed security at every intersection in the business area. Lots of p
istol-gripped shotguns, revolvers with soft-lead bullets in loops on gun belts,
and M16s. Equipment looks well used. Security guys seem fit and all have
good situational awareness.
When you drive to western hotels, there is a tall, fit Filipino standing at
the S-curve with a 12-gauge AR15 variant, extra magazines, and hard-shell
knee pads. The shotgun is loaded exclusively with slugs, so that he has
some chance of being able to penetrate vehicles.
Once you get past him, you arrive at a gate where there is another armed
security guard and a bomb-dog. Trunks are popped open, and the driver is
interviewed.
Once you get to the entrance of the actually hotel lobby, there is another
dog (usually a beagle), smelling bags. You then go through double-doors of
the lobby where there are two more people with handheld metal-detectors.
They don’t wand western-looking guests, but all the Filipinos, and
particularly middle-easterners, get scanned. No problem here with ‘racial
profiling!’
This is ‘security theater,’ and it is much more serious and convincing
than what we see in CONUS.”
Comment: We better all get used to it, since respect and reverence for
Western culture and resolve is now a worldwide joke. This is what happens
when civilizations, by choice, decline!
“Pacifism is merely cowardice, masquerading as piety”
Anon
******
Molon Labe
******
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http://sofrep.com/40783/jade-helm-shouldnt-make/
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http://pamelageller.com/2015/04/isis-terror-camp-a-few-miles-from-texas.html/
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Official Identifies One Suspect in Attack at Texas Anti-Islam Event
A law enforcement official Monday identified one of two gunmen who opened fire at an anti-Islam event in Garland, Tex., as Elton Simpson of Phoenix, and the police and F.B.I. agents in that city searched an apartment believed to be connected to him, with much of the Autumn Ridge apartment complex cordoned off through the night. At the same time, the F.B.I. office in Dallas confirmed that it was providing investigators and a bomb technician to aid the police in Garland, a city just outside Dallas.
Officials did not give a motive for the attack Sunday evening, in which a security guard was wounded before the two attackers were shot and killed by police officers. But at the Texas event, people were invited to present cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, which are considered offensive by many Muslims and have drawn violent responses in the past. Shortly before the shooting, messages were posted on Twitter with the hashtag #texasattack, including one saying, “May Allah accept us as mujahideen.”
In 2010, federal prosecutors in Arizona charged an Elton Simpson with plotting to travel to Somalia “for the purpose of engaging in violent jihad,” and then lying to a federal agent. A judge found him guilty of lying to the agent, but said the government had not proved that his plan involved terrorism, and sentenced him to three years’ probation.
The shooting began shortly before 7 p.m. outside the Curtis Culwell Center at an event organized by the American Freedom Defense Initiative, which also uses the name Stop Islamization of America and is based in New York.
READ MORE »
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/05/us/garland-texas-shooting-muhammad-cartoons.html?emc=edit_na_20150504
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Strange that a muslim convert missed the part where islam is a religion of peace. How could he not know?
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Strange that a muslim convert missed the part where islam is a religion of peace. How could he not know?
CAIR has come out against the shooting, sort of.
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2015/05/04/cair-we-condemn-the-terror-attack-in-texas-but-pamela-geller-totally-had-it-coming-n1994252
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The words are OK, their sincerity is highly dubious.
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http://bearingarms.com/pushed-forward-brave-garland-police-officer-advanced-brought-garland-terrorists/
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U.S. Policies Succeed in Garland
Security Weekly
May 7, 2015 | 08:00 GMT
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By Scott Stewart
On Monday, I read an editorial in the National Review claiming that the events that transpired in Garland, Texas, on Sunday evening, when a security guard shot dead two would-be terrorists, were the result of "luck." The author went on to criticize the U.S. government for its inability to prevent a known jihadist sympathizer from launching an attack.
However, if one looks at the Garland attack thoughtfully — and in the context of the overall dynamic of the jihadist threat in the post-9/11 world — it is apparent that this was not just a matter of mere happenstance. Indeed, the poorly executed attack launched by two untrained jihadist wannabes was clearly the result of the devolution of the jihadist threat in response to U.S. counterterrorism efforts, a phenomenon we at Stratfor have been carefully tracking for a decade now.
Let's take a closer look at how Sunday's incident, and the events leading up to it, fit into our larger analytical narrative.
Background
On the evening of May 3, Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi drove up to the entrance of the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland, Texas. Finding the entrance blocked by a police squad car, they got out of their vehicle and opened fire with their AK-style rifles, wounding a school district security officer before being shot and killed by police.
The two gunmen had traveled to Garland from Phoenix, Ariz., to attack the provocative event, in which the organizers were offering a prize for the best cartoon depiction of the Prophet Mohammed. The keynote speaker at the event was Geert Wilders, a Dutch lawmaker with a long history of involvement in events critical of Islam. Wilders offended most Muslims — and not just the violent jihadists — with his 2008 film Fitna. These actions landed Wilders on an al Qaeda hit list.
Simpson, a Muslim convert, was previously arrested for attempting to travel to Somalia to fight with al Shabaab, a jihadist group that has since become an al Qaeda franchise. In March 2011, Simpson was found guilty of making false statements to special agents of the FBI. Simpson reportedly first came to the attention of the FBI because of his connection to Paul Hall, aka Hassan Abu Jihaad, a former U.S. Navy sailor aboard the USS Benfold who was arrested in 2007 and later convicted for passing military intelligence to al Qaeda.
Once the FBI opened an investigation into Simpson, the agency asked a Phoenix-based informant to approach him to determine if he posed a threat. According to court documents from the case, Simpson told the informant he planned to travel to South Africa in January 2010 under the auspices of attending an Islamic seminary. Once in South Africa, Simpson planned to make his way to Somalia to train and fight with al Shabaab. FBI agents questioned Simpson in January 2010 about his pending travel, and he denied the plans. The FBI then arrested him and charged him with making false statements, preventing him from leaving the United States. Prosecutors attempted to get the penalty of Simpson's false statement charge increased by arguing that there was a nexus to terrorism, but in March 2011 the federal district judge presiding over the case ruled that the government did not sufficiently prove the terrorism nexus, so Simpson was sentenced to only three years' probation.
Soofi, who coincidentally was born in Garland to an American mother and Pakistani father, was Simpson's roommate. Soofi had no criminal history, and there was little preventing him from legally purchasing the semi-automatic AK-style rifles used in the attack.
From the manner in which the Garland attack unfolded, it is readily apparent that Simpson and Soofi were not well trained and did not make much effort to plan their attack. They were winging it.
Conversation: A Grassroots Threat Deterred in Garland, Texas
The Dynamic
As noted above, Stratfor has been discussing the devolution of the jihadist threat posed to the West for many years now. Prior to 9/11, the threat stemmed predominately from professional terrorist cadre dispatched by the al Qaeda core. But in the post-9/11 world, the threat now emanates primarily from grassroots jihadists who live in the West.
This change has come about not because of luck but as a direct result of the United States and its allies placing an incredible amount of effort and resources into their counterterrorism efforts. The five levers of counterterrorism — intelligence, law enforcement, military, diplomacy and financial sanctions — have been employed in a relentless manner against al Qaeda and its franchise groups. Despite a few well-publicized instances of mismanagement, abuse and blunders, the U.S.-led counterterrorism campaign has severely damaged al Qaeda to the point that the core group has not been able to conduct its long-threatened follow-up attack to 9/11. It is also reasonable to argue that one of the significant elements that led to the Islamic State's rapid expansion in recent months was al Qaeda's weakness.
As a result of the immense and unrelenting pressure the United States and its allies applied to al Qaeda, as early as 2004, jihadist ideologues such as Abu Musab al-Suri began to publicly advocate that jihadists should abandon the hierarchical operational model and embrace a leaderless resistance model of operations. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula repeated those calls in 2009, and the al Qaeda core followed suit in 2010. Most recently, the Islamic State has called for its followers living in the West to adopt the same model.
Switching from a hierarchical operational model to a leaderless resistance model is a sign of weakness, not strength. While leaderless resistance is by design far more challenging for counterterrorism forces to track and defeat, it also means that the would-be attackers are far less capable because they do not have access to the resources and capabilities of a professional terrorist organization. Certainly these less capable attackers can and do kill people, but since they lack sophisticated terrorist tradecraft they usually conduct less-than-optimal attacks and frequently botch them, especially if they try to attack well-protected targets.
Following the Garland attack, some have commented that there has been a recent shift toward armed assaults by grassroots jihadists, but this trend is actually something we forecasted five years ago in May 2010, and we made that forecast specifically because of the shift toward the leaderless resistance model.
The Islamic State has taken credit for the failed Garland attack. That such a powerful group would feel compelled to take credit for such a tactically flawed operation clearly demonstrates the limit of their assets inside the United States. It also emphasizes the Islamic State's heavy reliance on grassroots attackers to conduct attacks outside the group's core operational areas in Iraq and Syria. While the group has proved quite proficient at carrying out attacks and assassinations within its primary areas of operation, it has long struggled to project its terrorist capabilities beyond those core areas, much less transnationally. The reliance on grassroots jihadists to conduct attacks means that the Islamic State lacks the capability to control, train and assist such operatives. As a result, many grassroots attacks are amateurish.
This is exactly what we saw from Simpson and Soofi. One of the reasons Simpson lacked the terrorist tradecraft to plan and conduct a successful attack is that he was prevented from traveling to Somalia in 2010. The sting operation that resulted in Simpson's 2011 conviction also likely left him leery of reaching out to more capable jihadists for help. As we've seen in prior cases, such as shoe bomber Richard Reid and underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, even an unskilled grassroots jihadist is capable of killing hundreds of people if he is trained and equipped by a professional terrorist organization. Keeping grassroots jihadists from making contact with trained terrorist operatives is an important goal.
The FBI will be criticized for not tracking Simpson more carefully and stopping the attack before it could be launched. But the truth is that there are simply too many potential attackers in the West for the government to keep them under constant surveillance. Furthermore, the efforts of the government are focused primarily on tracking and countering professional, trained terrorist operatives who pose a more severe threat. Moreover, until someone breaks a law, it is difficult to take them out of circulation. This means that some of these grassroots actors will inevitably slip through the cracks and launch attacks. Some of these attacks will be botched and others will kill people.
Simpson and Soofi conducted a half-baked attack. It now appears that they attacked a target that was beyond their capabilities because of encouragement from Islamic State figures on Twitter. But their incompetence was not a result of sheer luck. Instead, it was the result of a long history of counterterrorism efforts that have shaped the current dynamic. As long as jihadism exists as an ideology and is able to seduce people such as Simpson and Soofi and prod them into action, these types of attacks are going to continue.
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http://www.newschannel10.com/story/28603897/isis-releases-kill-list-seven-texas-cities-included
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http://patriotpost.us/articles/35145
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Don't Take Terrorism Threats at Face Value
Security Weekly
May 14, 2015 | 08:00 GMT
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By Scott Stewart
The Islamic State has demonstrated in the past year that it is quite adept in its use of social media as a tool to raise money, recruit fighters and inspire grassroots jihadists to conduct attacks. This week, however, its social media network was heavily focused on making threats. On May 11, Twitter users associated with the Islamic State unleashed two seemingly unrelated threat campaigns. One using the hashtag #LondonAttack, displayed photos of London and weapons (including AK-47 rifles and what appeared to be suicide bombs) and urged Muslims in the United Kingdom not to visit shopping malls. The second campaign threatened to launch a cyber war against the United States and Europe.
The Islamic State took credit for the botched May 3 attack in Garland, Texas, saying it would carry out harder and "more bitter" attacks inside the United States. Coinciding with the Islamic State's threats, FBI Director James Comey warned that his agency does not have a handle on the grassroots terrorism problem in the United States. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson noted that the United States has entered "a new phase in the global terrorist threat, where the so-called lone wolf could strike at any moment." Michael Morell, the former Deputy Director of the CIA, added his voice by claiming that the Islamic State has the ability to conduct a 9/11-style attack today.
While these statements and warnings paint a bleak picture, a threat should never be taken at face value — when placed into context, these claims aren't as dire as they seem.
Analyzing Threats
When analyzing a direct threat from a person or organization it is important to understand that in most cases they come from a position of weakness rather than power. The old saying "all bark and no bite" is based on this reality. This applies to personal threats as well as terror-related threats. Terrorism is frequently used by weak actors as a way of taking asymmetrical military action against a superior opponent. Despite its battlefield successes against the Iraqi and Syrian governments and militant groups, the Islamic State is certainly far weaker militarily than the United States and Europe.
An important part of threat evaluation is assessing if the party making the threat possesses both the intention to conduct such an action and the capability to carry out that intent. Indeed, many threats are made by groups or individuals who have neither intent nor capability. They are made simply to create fear and panic or to influence the conduct or behavior of the target, as in the cases of a person who sends a "white powder" letter to a government office or a student who phones in a bomb threat to his school to get out of taking a test.
Generally, if a person or group possesses both the intent and capability to conduct an act of violence, they just do it. There is little need to waste the time and effort to threaten what they are about to do. In fact, by telegraphing their intent they might provide their target with the opportunity to avoid the attack. Professional terrorists often invest a lot of time and resources in a plot, especially a spectacular transnational attack. Because of this, they take great pains to hide their operational activity so that the target or authorities do not catch wind of it and employ countermeasures that would prevent the successful execution of the scheme. Instead of telegraphing their attack, terrorist groups prefer to conduct the attack and exploit it after the fact, something sometimes called the propaganda of the deed.
Certainly, people who possess the capability to fulfill the threat sometimes make threats. But normally in such cases the threat is made in a conditional manner. For example, the United States threatened to invade Afghanistan unless the Taliban government handed over Osama bin Laden. The Islamic State, however, is not in that type of dominating position. If it dispatched a team or teams of professional terrorist operatives to the United States and Europe to conduct terrorist attacks, the very last thing it would want to do is alert said countries to the presence of those teams and have them get rolled up. Trained terrorist operatives who have the ability to travel in the United States or Europe are far too valuable to jeopardize with a Twitter threat.
Rather than reveal a network of sophisticated Islamic State operatives poised to conduct devastating attacks on the United States and Europe, these threats are meant to instill fear and strike terror into the hearts of one of their intended audiences: the public at large. I say one of their audiences because these threats are not only aimed at the American and European public. They are also meant to send a message to radicalize and energize grassroots jihadists like those who have conducted Islamic State-related attacks in the West.
Examining the Statements
First, it is important to understand the context of the statements made by FBI Director Comey, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Johnson and former CIA Deputy Director Morell.
Comey's statement about not having a complete handle on the grassroots terrorist threat is true. The very nature of such operatives makes them difficult for governments to combat. However, the FBI has been very successful in interdicting grassroots plots in recent months. In fact, I cannot recall so many grassroots operatives being arrested so closely together. However, one of the factors driving Comey's recent remarks is his steadfast belief that technological developments, such as encryption, are creating "dark spaces" that the FBI does not have the ability to investigate. Comey contends that there is no place in the physical world that the FBI cannot get a warrant to search, but technology has permitted criminals and terrorists to create virtual places where the FBI simply cannot penetrate even if they procure the proper search warrants. Comey's recent statement is part of his campaign to convince the public and congress that the FBI needs the ability to investigate those places.
Secretary Johnson's statement about the new jihadist threat is also nothing new. Indeed, I heard him make the same statement last November and took issue with it then. Leaderless resistance, the terrorist operational model that stresses the importance of lone wolf operatives, is simply not a new problem in the United States. It has existed for decades and been actively promoted in the jihadist world since at least 2004.
Michael Morell is on a book tour and attempting to sell as many books as possible. One way to accomplish that is to make eye-popping claims. If the Islamic State had the capability to launch a 9/11-style attack inside the United States, or a similar spectacular terrorist attack, it would have already done so. Instead, the Islamic State has been forced to rely on grassroots operatives to conduct less than spectacular attacks on its behalf. Furthermore, the pre-9/11 paradigm has changed and there is simply no way an airline captain is going to relinquish control of his aircraft to be used as a guided cruise missile — nor would the passengers permit it. Because of this, it is very hard to imagine the Islamic State conducting a 9/11-style attack.
Certainly, the Islamic State is making threats and government officials are concerned, but in practical terms today's jihadist threat is no more severe than it has been in the past several years. Frankly, there has not been a time since 1992 when some jihadist somewhere was not plotting an attack against the United States, and occasionally some of them succeed.
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http://allenwestrepublic.com/2015/05/16/breaking-isis-promises-to-behead-barack-obama-posted-this-photo/
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/05/18/glenn-beck-says-this-is-why-americans-should-prepare-for-all-out-war/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Firewire_Morning_Test&utm_campaign=Firewire%20Morning%20Edition%20Recurring%20v2%202015-05-19
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The Problem with Jade Helm
Posted By Arnold Ahlert On May 22, 2015 @ frontpagemag.com
Jade Helm 15, a large-scale military operation conducted [2] by U.S. Army Special Operations Command and service members from the military’s four branches, scheduled to take place in several states [3] between July 15 and September 15, 2015, has elicited a firestorm of criticism. Many have gone so far as to claim the exercises are a prelude to the imposition [4] of martial law, especially in Texas, one of the states designated [5] as “hostile” territory. However, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) puts [6] the issue in the proper perspective, noting why it’s reasonable that Americans would be concerned about the operation.
Gohmert first reveals his office “has been inundated with calls” regarding the mission, and acknowledges that this “military practice has some concerned that the U.S. Army is preparing for modern-day martial law.” “Certainly, I can understand these concerns,” he writes. “When leaders within the current administration believe that major threats to the country include those who support the Constitution, are military veterans, or even ‘cling to guns or religion,’ patriotic Americans have reason to be concerned.”
Gohmert is spot on. In February, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) intelligence assessment focused [7] on the threat posed by right-wing, sovereign citizen extremist groups. As reported by the Washington Times, some law enforcement officials believe the threat posed by these groups “is equal to, and occasionally greater than, the threat from Islamic extremist groups.”
It’s not the first time DHS has made such a delusional assessment. In 2009 the agency was worried about the possible recruitment of military veterans into such groups, eliciting blowback from rightly offended veterans. Adding to the absurdity (and hypocrisy as well) the February report was released while Obama was conducting [8] his Summit on Countering Violent Extremism, during which the president took great pains to separate [9] such extremism from all things Islamic.
That would be the same president who demonstrated no similar reticence whatsoever with regard to Christianity. At the National Prayer Breakfast that same month, Obama was more than willing to remind [10] Americans “that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.” In over six years in office there hasn’t been a single occasion when Obama referred to any of the innumerable depredations committed by Muslim extremists as being perpetrated “in the name of Mohammed.”
Thus, when Gohmert addresses “the contempt and antipathy for the true patriots or even Christian saints persecuted for their Christian beliefs,” demonstrated by this administration, he correctly asserts “it is no surprise that those who have experienced or noticed such persecution are legitimately suspicious.”
The Congressman acknowledges the need for training and that part of it requires Special Forces to move unobserved among civilian populations absent their discovery, as well as the need to handle various threat scenarios. However, like many of his constituents, he is appalled by the idea that portions of the country have been deemed “hostile,” adding that designation has never been employed before. Citing his own experience in military science classes and active duty, Gohmert explained the military would “use fictitious names before we would do such a thing.” Moreover, he can’t help noticing “the hostile areas amazingly have a Republican majority and believe in the sanctity of the United States Constitution,” he states sarcastically.
He also believes such labeling raises suspicions among people regarding “whether their big brother government anticipates certain states may start another civil war or be overtaken by foreign radical Islamist elements which have been reported to be just across our border,” and that it “is an affront to the residents of that particular state considered as hostile, as if the government is trying to provoke a fight with them.”
Indeed, the Obama administration has demonstrated an undue level of antipathy towards the Lone Star State on a number of occasions. In 2011, the Department of Justice threatened [11] a complete suspension of air travel in and out of Texas if the state Senate approved HB 1937 [12]. That bill would have banned “intrusive touching of persons seeking access to public buildings and transportation,” aimed at derailing the TSA’s intimate pat-downs absent the probable cause guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment [13]. The bill was ultimately shelved. In August of 2013, the administration sued [14] the state because it passed a voter ID law. The suit was in complete defiance of a Supreme Court decision the previous June striking down portions of the 1965 Voting Rights Acts that had required states to “preclear” any changes to their voting laws. And when the border surge of illegals crossing into Texas occurred last year, and then-Gov. Rick Perry sent Texas National Guard troops there to deal with the onslaught, Obama made it clear [15] he would not take unilateral action to stem the tide.
On April 27, the military sent Army Lt. Col. Mark Lastoria, a spokesman for Army Special Operations Command, to Bastrop, TX on April 27 in an effort to address [16] local concerns. He explained that Jade Helm 15 is a routine, but necessary endeavor, because modern warfare requires soldiers to maneuver through civilian populations rather than fight on a battlefield. He further insisted Texas provided the ideal terrain for such an exercise, and noted that soldiers will wear either uniforms or orange arm bands to show that they are part of it, and there will be no attempt to move through the population undetected.
Newly-elected Texas Governor Greg Abbott nonetheless expressed concerns. He has sent a letter [17] to Maj. Gen. Gerald Betty, commander of the Texas State Guard, directing the Guard to monitor Jade Helm 15. “During the training operation, it is important that Texans know their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed,” Abbott wrote. “By monitoring the Operation on a continual basis, the State Guard will facilitate communication between my office and commanders of the Operation to ensure that adequate measures are in place to protect Texans.”
Gohmert has another idea that might assuage a number of concerns. “The map of the exercise needs to change, the names on the map need to change, and the tone of the exercise needs to be completely revamped so the federal government is not intentionally practicing war against its own states,” he declared.
While some of the concern over Jade Helm might be misguided, none of it has occurred in a vacuum. It arises from more than six years of an administration that has demonstrated an overt willingness to squander the trust of millions of Americans in pursuit of its agenda—by any means necessary. Americans would much prefer to see the military training to defend the homeland against ISIS rather than engage in insulting exercises against the “hostile” heartland of liberty.
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The Other Terror Threat
By CHARLES KURZMAN and DAVID SCHANZERJUNE 16, 2015
NY Times
THIS month, the headlines were about a Muslim man in Boston who was accused of threatening police officers with a knife. Last month, two Muslims attacked an anti-Islamic conference in Garland, Tex. The month before, a Muslim man was charged with plotting to drive a truck bomb onto a military installation in Kansas. If you keep up with the news, you know that a small but steady stream of American Muslims, radicalized by overseas extremists, are engaging in violence here in the United States.
But headlines can mislead. The main terrorist threat in the United States is not from violent Muslim extremists, but from right-wing extremists. Just ask the police.
In a survey we conducted with the Police Executive Research Forum last year of 382 law enforcement agencies, 74 percent reported anti-government extremism as one of the top three terrorist threats in their jurisdiction; 39 percent listed extremism connected with Al Qaeda or like-minded terrorist organizations. And only 3 percent identified the threat from Muslim extremists as severe, compared with 7 percent for anti-government and other forms of extremism.
The self-proclaimed Islamic State’s efforts to radicalize American Muslims, which began just after the survey ended, may have increased threat perceptions somewhat, but not by much, as we found in follow-up interviews over the past year with counterterrorism specialists at 19 law enforcement agencies. These officers, selected from urban and rural areas around the country, said that radicalization from the Middle East was a concern, but not as dangerous as radicalization among right-wing extremists.
An officer from a large metropolitan area said that “militias, neo-Nazis and sovereign citizens” are the biggest threat we face in regard to extremism. One officer explained that he ranked the right-wing threat higher because “it is an emerging threat that we don’t have as good of a grip on, even with our intelligence unit, as we do with the Al Shabab/Al Qaeda issue, which we have been dealing with for some time.” An officer on the West Coast explained that the “sovereign citizen” anti-government threat has “really taken off,” whereas terrorism by American Muslim is something “we just haven’t experienced yet.”
Last year, for example, a man who identified with the sovereign citizen movement — which claims not to recognize the authority of federal or local government — attacked a courthouse in Forsyth County, Ga., firing an assault rifle at police officers and trying to cover his approach with tear gas and smoke grenades. The suspect was killed by the police, who returned fire. In Nevada, anti-government militants reportedly walked up to and shot two police officers at a restaurant, then placed a “Don’t tread on me” flag on their bodies. An anti-government extremist in Pennsylvania was arrested on suspicion of shooting two state troopers, killing one of them, before leading authorities on a 48-day manhunt. A right-wing militant in Texas declared a “revolution” and was arrested on suspicion of attempting to rob an armored car in order to buy weapons and explosives and attack law enforcement. These individuals on the fringes of right-wing politics increasingly worry law enforcement officials.
Law enforcement agencies around the country are training their officers to recognize signs of anti-government extremism and to exercise caution during routine traffic stops, criminal investigations and other interactions with potential extremists. “The threat is real,” says the handout from one training program sponsored by the Department of Justice. Since 2000, the handout notes, 25 law enforcement officers have been killed by right-wing extremists, who share a “fear that government will confiscate firearms” and a “belief in the approaching collapse of government and the economy.”
Despite public anxiety about extremists inspired by Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, the number of violent plots by such individuals has remained very low. Since 9/11, an average of nine American Muslims per year have been involved in an average of six terrorism-related plots against targets in the United States. Most were disrupted, but the 20 plots that were carried out accounted for 50 fatalities over the past 13 and a half years.
In contrast, right-wing extremists averaged 337 attacks per year in the decade after 9/11, causing a total of 254 fatalities, according to a study by Arie Perliger, a professor at the United States Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center. The toll has increased since the study was released in 2012.
Other data sets, using different definitions of political violence, tell comparable stories. The Global Terrorism Database maintained by the Start Center at the University of Maryland includes 65 attacks in the United States associated with right-wing ideologies and 24 by Muslim extremists since 9/11. The International Security Program at the New America Foundation identifies 39 fatalities from “non-jihadist” homegrown extremists and 26 fatalities from “jihadist” extremists.
Meanwhile, terrorism of all forms has accounted for a tiny proportion of violence in America. There have been more than 215,000 murders in the United States since 9/11. For every person killed by Muslim extremists, there have been 4,300 homicides from other threats.
Public debates on terrorism focus intensely on Muslims. But this focus does not square with the low number of plots in the United States by Muslims, and it does a disservice to a minority group that suffers from increasingly hostile public opinion. As state and local police agencies remind us, right-wing, anti-government extremism is the leading source of ideological violence in America.
Correction: June 17, 2015
An earlier version of this article omitted the given name of a professor at West Point who studies counterterrorism. He is Arie Perliger.
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Rep. Nunes: America Faces Highest Terror Threat Level Ever
Posted By Michael Cutler On June 25, 2015
Usually the first challenge I face in writing my commentaries is to come up with a concise title that captures the most salient part of the issue I am writing about. Today I found this task easy, I simply borrowed the headline from CBS News’ Face the Nation article that quoted none other than Congressional Representative Devin Nunes, the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
That headline is concise and echoes the very same concerns I have had in reviewing all of the publicly available information on the issue of threats posed by international terrorists.
What is impossible to understand is how the administration, members of Congress, local and state politicians and journalists have been absolutely unwilling to “connect the impossible to ignore dots” that are flashing, not unlike the strobe lights on a police car or other emergency vehicle.
Here is the segment of the article that accompanied the headline and addressed the topic of the threat of terrorism in the United States today:
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-California, said the nation faces “the highest threat level we have ever faced in this country” due to the flow of foreign fighters to and from Iraq and Syria and the radicalization of young people on the Internet.
U.S. officials have been warning for months about the threat posed by people from America or Western Europe who travel to the Middle East to fight with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS [2]) and then return to their home countries, where they may carry out attacks. Nunes said the U.S. is not aware of all the people who have made the trek or who have now come back, although FBI Director James Comey has said there are cases open in all 50 states.
Officials are increasingly looking for ways to combat radical jihadists’ effectiveness [3] in recruiting supporters through social media.
“They’re very good at communicating through separate avenues where it’s very difficult to track,” he said. “That’s why when you get a young person who is willing to get into these chat rooms, go on the Internet and get radicalized, it’s something we are not only unprepared [for], we are also not used to it in this country.”
He said that investigations often “do no good” in encrypted chat rooms where those communications take place, so Americans should be diligent about reporting suspicious activity to the proper authorities because “we are having a tough time tracking terrorist cells within the United States.”
The warnings are particularly pertinent with the July 4 holiday approaching. Nunes noted that there will be large gatherings in every city across America.
“It’s just tough to secure those types of areas if you have someone who wants to blow themselves up or open fire or other threats of that nature and we just don’t know or can track all of the bad guys that are out there today,” he said.
The famed playwright, George Bernard Shaw’s statement says it all:
“We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.”
If our leaders were to seek to learn history’s lessons they should read the appropriate history books.
The 9/11 Commission Report [4] and the “9/11 and Terrorist Travel [5] – Staff Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States” are the most complete and authoritative “history books” concerning the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 and even included evaluations of vulnerabilities that led to previous terror attacks — both those that succeeded and those that failed. These books were prepared by the government of the United States in response to the horrific terror attacks that left more than 3,000 innocent victims dead.
My May 22, 2015 commentary for the Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS) website, “Bin Laden, The 9/11 Commission Report and Immigration [6],” addressed the fact that when the U.S. Navy SEALS raided the bin Laden compound, among the documents found in his library were a copy of the 9/11 Commission Report and a copy of an application for United States citizenship. It must be presumed that he had no intentions of filing for U.S. citizenship himself, but was contemplating embedding his terrorist operatives in the United States through the naturalization process.
Presumably bin Laden read that report — the obvious question that has no obvious answer, is “how many member of the administration, Congress, political leaders in states and cities around the United States and journalists who are quick to chime in with their proclamations about how to ‘fix’ the ‘broken’ immigration system have actually read those reports?”
The damage inflicted on the United States and indeed the world by those attacks, has been inestimable and it continues to reverberate in so many ways. These reports both addressed the issue of the ways in which the 9/11 terrorists were able to enter the United States and embed themselves in the United States. The latter of those two reports (the Staff Report) obviously focused the ways that the terrorists were able to travel around the world as they went about their deadly preparation and on flaws and vulnerabilities in the immigration system that failed to prevent the entry and subsequent embedding of not only the 19 hijackers, but other terrorists who were identified as operating in the United States in the decade leading up to the attacks of 9/11.
In point of fact, the investigation upon which these reports were based determined that the ability of the terrorists to travel around the world and cross international borders, especially the borders of the United States, were essential to the ability of the terrorists to carry out those deadly attacks.
The preface of the report begins with the following three paragraphs and makes it clear that this report sought information from as many credible sources as possible:
It is perhaps obvious to state that terrorists cannot plan and carry out attacks in the United States if they are unable to enter the country. Yet prior to September 11, while there were efforts to enhance border security, no agency of the U.S. government thought of border security as a tool in the counterterrorism arsenal. Indeed, even after 19 hijackers demonstrated the relative ease of obtaining a U.S. visa and gaining admission into the United States, border security still is not considered a cornerstone of national security policy. We believe, for reasons we discuss in the following pages, that it must be made one.
Congress gave the Commission the mandate to study, evaluate, and report on “immigration, nonimmigrant visas and border security” as these areas relate to the events of 9/11. This staff report represents 14 months of such research. It is based on thousands of pages of documents we reviewed from the State Department, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, approximately 25 briefings on various border security topics, and more than 200 interviews. We are grateful to all who assisted and supported us along the way.
The story begins with “A Factual Overview of the September 11 Border Story.” This introduction summarizes many of the key facts of the hijackers’ entry into the United States. In it, we endeavor to dispel the myth that their entry into the United States was “clean and legal.” It was not. Three hijackers carried passports with indicators of Islamic extremism linked to al Qaeda; two others carried passports manipulated in a fraudulent manner. It is likely that several more hijackers carried passports with similar fraudulent manipulation. Two hijackers lied on their visa applications. Once in the United States, two hijackers violated the terms of their visas. One overstayed his visa. And all but one obtained some form of state identification. We know that six of the hijackers used these state issued identifications to check in for their flights on September 11. Three of them were fraudulently obtained.
Page 46 and 47 of this report noted:
By analyzing information available at the time, we identified numerous entry and embedding tactics associated with these earlier attacks in the United States.
The World Trade Center Bombing, February 1993. Three terrorists who were involved with the first World Trade Center bombing reportedly traveled on Saudi passports containing an indicator of possible terrorist affiliation. Three of the 9/11 hijackers also had passports containing this same possible indicator of terrorist affiliation.5
In addition, Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the attack, and Ahmad Ajaj, who was able to direct aspects of the attack despite being in prison for using an altered passport, traveled under aliases using fraudulent documents. The two of them were found to possess five passports as well as numerous documents supporting their aliases: a Saudi passport showing signs of alteration, an Iraqi passport bought from a Pakistani official, a photo-substituted Swedish passport, a photo-substituted British passport, a Jordanian passport, identification cards, bank records, education records, and medical records.6
“Once terrorists had entered the United States, their next challenge was to find a way to remain here. Their primary method was immigration fraud. For example, Yousef and Ajaj concocted bogus political asylum stories when they arrived in the United States. Mahmoud Abouhalima, involved in both the World Trade Center and landmarks plots, received temporary residence under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers (SAW) program, after falsely claiming that he picked beans in Florida.” Mohammed Salameh, who rented the truck used in the bombing, overstayed his tourist visa. He then applied for permanent residency under the agricultural workers program, but was rejected. Eyad Mahmoud Ismail, who drove the van containing the bomb, took English-language classes at Wichita State University in Kansas on a student visa; after he dropped out, he remained in the United States out of status.
Page 61 contained this passage:
Exploring the Link between Human Smugglers and Terrorists
In July 2001, the CIA warned of a possible link between human smugglers and terrorist groups, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and Egyptian Islamic Jihad.149 Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that since 1999 human smugglers have facilitated the travel of terrorists associated with more than a dozen extremist groups.150 With their global reach and connections to fraudulent document vendors and corrupt government officials, human smugglers clearly have the “credentials” necessary to aid terrorist travel.
This paragraph is found on page 98 under the title “Immigration Benefits:”
“Terrorists in the 1990s, as well as the September 11 hijackers, needed to find a way to stay in or embed themselves in the United States if their operational plans were to come to fruition. As already discussed, this could be accomplished legally by marrying an American citizen, achieving temporary worker status, or applying for asylum after entering. In many cases, the act of filing for an immigration benefit sufficed to permit the alien to remain in the country until the petition was adjudicated. Terrorists were free to conduct surveillance, coordinate operations, obtain and receive funding, go to school and learn English, make contacts in the United States, acquire necessary materials, and execute an attack.”
Both reports made it abundantly clear that had our immigration system worked, the attacks could not have been carried out.
Engineers use the term “root cause” to describe a fundamental failure from which all else that went wrong happened. For example, if a car’s brakes fail and the car hits a tree, the fact that the airbags failed to deploy is important, but the point is that the crash would not have happened in the first place if the brakes had worked.
Similarly, the terror attacks that have been carried out in the United States all resulted by the “root cause” of failures of the immigration system to prevent the terrorists from entering the United States in the first place.
The next failure of the immigration system occurred when terrorists were able to embed themselves in the United States. In this regard two factors came into play.
1. Terrorists who violated their immigration status were not apprehended even when they interacted with local police, leaving them free to remain at large.
2. Terrorists were able to acquire many identity documents — some actually issued by state governments — in false names, concealing their identities and movements.
Today most politicians have accepted the deceptive language first implemented by Carter administration when the former INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) mandated that its employees refer to aliens illegally present in the United States as being “undocumented immigrants,” an obfuscating and purposefully innocuous sounding term.
This was obviously done to create the misimpression that these individuals were simply immigrants who needed a piece of paper. Therefore the only thing we needed to do was give them the bureaucratic equivalent of a “hall pass” to make things okay.
The truth could not be more different from this lie that was and continues to be foisted on Americans by our own government. Aliens who evade the inspections process conducted at ports of entry should be referred to by the term that immigration enforcement personnel use, “EWI (Entry Without Inspection). This is the equivalent of trespassing or “breaking and entering.”
Such aliens are unscreened. We have no record of their entry and they may well be fugitives from justice in other countries, may have links to criminal or terrorist organizations.
The 9/11 Commission Report [4] addressed the importance of the immigration inspections process conducted at ports of entry noting:
Inspectors at the ports of entry were not asked to focus on terrorists. Inspectors told us they were not even aware that when they checked the names of incoming passengers against the automated watchlist, they were checking in part for terrorists. In general, border inspectors also did not have the information they needed to make fact-based determinations of admissibility.The INS initiated but failed to bring to completion two efforts that would have provided inspectors with information relevant to counterterrorism—a proposed system to track foreign student visa compliance and a program to establish a way of tracking travelers’ entry to and exit from the United States.
The 9/11 Commission Staff Report on Terrorist Travel [5] detailed numerous examples of instances where terrorists made use of visa and immigration benefit fraud, including political asylum fraud, to enter and embed themselves in the United States.
Page 54 contained this excerpt under the title “3.2 Terrorist Travel Tactics by Plot.”
Here is an excerpt from that report that makes the above issues crystal clear:
Although there is evidence that some land and sea border entries (of terrorists) without inspection occurred, these conspirators mainly subverted the legal entry system by entering at airports.
In doing so, they relied on a wide variety of fraudulent documents, on aliases, and on government corruption. Because terrorist operations were not suicide missions in the early to mid-1990s, once in the United States terrorists and their supporters tried to get legal immigration status that would permit them to remain here, primarily by committing serial, or repeated, immigration fraud, by claiming political asylum, and by marrying Americans. Many of these tactics would remain largely unchanged and undetected throughout the 1990s and up to the 9/11 attack.
Thus, abuse of the immigration system and a lack of interior immigration enforcement were unwittingly working together to support terrorist activity. It would remain largely unknown, since no agency of the United States government analyzed terrorist travel patterns until after 9/11. This lack of attention meant that critical opportunities to disrupt terrorist travel and, therefore, deadly terrorist operations were missed.
Meanwhile there are mayors of some cities and even governors of some states that have created “sanctuaries” for aliens who evaded the inspections process at ports of entry that represent both our first line of defense and last line of defense against international terrorists, transnational criminals and others whose presence in the United States poses a threat to national security and the safety and well-being of Americans — and even members of the ethnic immigrant communities of which they are a part, irrespective of what their native countries might be. These politicians are even providing driver’s licenses and municipal identification documents, ignoring the fact that criminals and terrorists use changes in identity the way that chameleons use changes in coloration to hide in plain sight, often among their intended victims.
How can our nation’s leaders be so blind or corrupt as to ignore what should be commonsense issues that were clearly identified in the 9/11 Commission Report and the companion report I have noted above?
On July 27, 2006 I testified before the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims on the topic: Whether the Attempted Implementation of the Reid-Kennedy Immigration Bill Will Result in an Administrative and National Security Nightmare. [7]
At that hearing I noted [8] that advocates for amnesty for millions of illegal aliens should get the “MVP Award” from al Qaeda or other terrorist organizations. That statement applies today more than ever before.
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/07/09/another-govt-agency-is-buying-massive-amounts-of-ammo/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Firewire&utm_campaign=Firewire%20-%20HORIZON%207-9-15%20FINAL
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http://countercurrentnews.com/2014/07/pentagon-is-preparing-for-mass-civil-breakdown/
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1. He is not unqualified.
2. His military experience is leading large portions of it.
3. Relevant work experience includes serving as AF General Counsel, DoD General Counsel, where he led 10,000 employees, and where he was instrumental in forming and articulating the nation's drone policy.
4. You not liking him does not make him inexperienced.
5. And you not liking attorneys does not make his nomination sound.
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2015/07/15/surprise-homeland-security-chief-doesnt-know-who-kate-steinle-was/
Qualified!
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Homeland Security Secretary nominee Jeh Johnson is loyal to the Constitution I mean Obama
4:22 PM 10/18/2013
Jim Treacher
Here’s the guy Obama is expected to nominate to replace Janet Napolitano. He’s talking about being in NYC on 9/11:
“When that bright and beautiful day, a day something like this, was shattered by the largest terrorist attack on our homeland in history, I wandered the streets of New York that day and wonderered, and asked, ‘What can I do?’ Since then, I have tried to devote myself to answering that question. I love this country. I care about the safety of our people. I believe in public service. And I remain loyal to you, Mr. President.”
He remains loyal to Barack Obama? What happened to supporting and defending the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and bearing true faith and allegiance to the same? Isn’t that how it’s supposed to go?
Or did that dusty old piece of parchment get snubbed on purpose? Obama certainly doesn’t have much use for it when it interferes with his whims.
Gather ’round, kids. We’ve made a few changes:
“I pledge allegiance to Barack, not the United States of America, and to the repugnance for which he stands, one narcissist, his own god, insufferable, with little but injustice for all.”
Welcome to Utopia. Ain’t it grand?
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/18/homeland-security-secretary-nominee-jeh-johnson-is-loyal-to-the-constitution-obama/
Qualified!
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http://heavy.com/news/2015/07/muhammad-youssef-abdulazeez-chattanooga-shooter-shooting-shot-killed-marines-recruiting-center-islam-muslim-terrorism-photos-facebook-twitter-age-bio/
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http://heavy.com/news/2015/07/muhammad-youssef-abdulazeez-chattanooga-shooter-shooting-shot-killed-marines-recruiting-center-islam-muslim-terrorism-photos-facebook-twitter-age-bio/
Workplace violence
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https://www.facebook.com/BradleeDeanSOL/photos/a.292070200923771.1073741828.289189664545158/500850713379051/?type=1
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http://pamelageller.com/2015/07/immigration-to-swell-u-s-muslim-population-to-6-2-million.html/
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http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/07/17/exclusive-rand-paul-on-tennessee-terror-restrict-immigration-from-muslim-nations/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/07/20/legendary-seal-marcus-luttrell-seemingly-sends-clear-four-word-message-to-obama-over-chattanooga-shooting/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Firewire&utm_campaign=Firewire%20-%20HORIZON%207-21-15%20Build-TUES
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http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/07/21/mother-of-son-murdered-by-illegal-alien-slams-sanctuary-cities-politicians-your-silence-speaks-volumes/
I am sure the qualified Jeh Johnson will get right on this!
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaPwqokBn9M
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http://www.militarytimes.com/story/military/2015/07/18/marine-recruiters-told-not--wear-uniforms-offices-closed/30353587/
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Analysis
By Fred Burton
Editor's Note: The following piece is part of an occasional series in which Fred Burton, our vice president of intelligence, reflects on his storied experience as a counterterrorism agent for the U.S. State Department.
After decades of hostility, the United States and Cuba finally seem to be reconciling. On July 1, U.S. President Barack Obama announced that Washington will reopen its embassy in Havana. For the first time since 1961, when the two countries severed ties, U.S. diplomats and staff will fill the embassy and the surrounding city streets, as will a U.S. Marine detachment working security detail.
But even as the embassy in Havana now stands as a monument to improved U.S.-Cuban relations, it will make the United States much more vulnerable to monitoring and infiltration by Cuban intelligence agencies. And today foreign spies pose as real and immediate a threat to U.S. interests as they did during the Cold War.
A History of Espionage
In the 1970s and 1980s, counterterrorism agents like myself witnessed the United States gear its entire national security apparatus toward countering Soviet influence. Looking back, I believe our fixation on the Soviet Union actually caused us to underestimate other countries' agencies. We believed Cuba's Directorate of Intelligence, trained by Moscow though it may have been, was significantly less effective than Russia's KGB.
Indeed, our preoccupation with the Soviet Union blinded us to the fact that Cuba quietly operated assets inside the United States. Among the many spies they recruited were Kendall Myers and his wife, Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers. When the Cubans first recruited the Myerses in 1979, Kendall Myers was a part-time instructor at the State Department's Foreign Service Institute, where U.S. diplomats and other professionals train before they receive their overseas assignments. He later became a senior analyst at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR). From my own time in the intelligence business, I know that INR analysts have access to highly classified information from virtually every government agency — and since Myers was working for Havana, so, too, did Cuban intelligence.
The Myerses were finally discovered and put on trial in 2006. But as we would learn four years after the trial, the Cubans had someone with even more insight into the United States' national security apparatus: Ana Montes, a double agent who worked as an analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Cuban intelligence turned her in 1985, and she passed classified information to Havana for years thereafter.
In the 1980s, when Montes was spying for Cuba, I worked in the burgeoning counterterrorism arm of the Department of State's Diplomatic Security Service. I was far more concerned with Libya and Iran than with Cuba, since so many of my cases involved Soviet actors and KGB agents. Like the rest of the U.S. intelligence community, I saw the Soviet Union as the primary threat. But all along, despite all our efforts to defend U.S. intelligence and assets, our national security agencies were being repeatedly infiltrated by Cuban intelligence.
Hidden Threats
Now, with the U.S. Embassy opening in Havana, Cuba will monitor and attempt to recruit U.S. employees as actively as it did during the Cold War. Cuban intelligence will build case files on every American official who travels in country. It will surveil diplomatic staffers as it looks for potential recruits and as it tries to identify U.S. agents.
Cuban intelligence will do so using techniques new and old alike. In the past, the Cuban Directorate of Intelligence employed tactics it learned from the Soviet KGB to collect information and communicate with its operatives. Spies such as Myers and Montes received encrypted radio messages from their Cuban handlers and passed information using dead drops, in which agents leave information at a secret location, and brush passes, in which they physically hand over material in a brief encounter.
Havana will also likely plant listening devices in hotel rooms, taxis and rental cars to monitor on the U.S. diplomatic mission. Operatives will take photographs of the embassy staff as they come and go, locate employees' homes and even plan honeypots and male raven operations, during which an undercover agent acts like a love interest to collect intelligence. In short, with a reopening embassy, the Cubans will have ample opportunity to undermine U.S. national security.
U.S. intelligence agencies are well aware of the Cuban threat. As the embassy opens in Havana, CIA and FBI agents will constantly be briefing State Department staff on situational awareness and counterintelligence. Those who are unaware of long history of espionage may call the countless warnings excessive and deem Washington's intelligence community over-cautious. But the threat is real, regardless of whether embassy workers heed the warnings. As those in the intelligence business often say, the Cold War, in a sense, never really ended. Foreign policy can change at a moment's notice. Strategic alliances never mean absolute trust. And in a world full of hidden threats, there is no such thing as a friendly intelligence service.
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http://www.wsj.com/articles/attacks-on-fiber-networks-in-california-baffle-fbi-1439417515
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Jihad and Girl Power: How ISIS Lured 3 London Teenagers
By KATRIN BENNHOLDAUG. 17, 2015
Continue reading the main story Video
At Home in London, Girls Chose ISIS
A look into the world of three teenage girls who abandoned their lives in London to join the Islamic State.
By MONA EL-NAGGAR and BEN LAFFIN on Publish Date August 17, 2015. Watch in Times Video »
LONDON — The night before Khadiza Sultana left for Syria she was dancing in her teenage bedroom. It was a Monday during the February school vacation. Her niece and close friend, at 13 only three years younger than Khadiza, had come for a sleepover. The two girls wore matching pajamas and giggled as they gyrated in unison to the beat.
Khadiza offered her niece her room that night and shared a bed with her mother. She was a devoted daughter, particularly since her father had died.
The scene in her bedroom, saved on the niece’s cellphone on Feb. 16 and replayed dozens of times by Khadiza’s relatives since, shows the girl they thought they knew: joyful, sociable, funny and kind.
As it turned out, it was also the carefully choreographed goodbye of a determined and exceptionally bright teenager who had spent months methodically planning to leave her childhood home in Bethnal Green, East London, with two schoolmates and follow the path of another friend who had already traveled to the territory controlled by the Islamic State.
On Tuesday morning, Khadiza got up early and put on the Lacoste perfume both she and her niece liked. She told her mother that she was going to school to pick up some workbooks and spend the day in the library. She grabbed a small day pack and promised to return by 4:30 p.m.
It was only that night that the family realized something was wrong. When Khadiza had not come back by 5:30, her mother asked her oldest sister, Halima Khanom, to message her, but there was no reply. Ms. Khanom drove to the library to look for her sister, but she was not there. She went to the school, but the staff said no student had come in that day.
By the time she came back home, her mother had checked Khadiza’s wardrobe and found that besides some strategically arranged items it was empty. “That’s when I started panicking,” Ms. Khanom, 32, said in a recent interview at the family home. Two tote bags were missing from the house. “She must have taken her things gradually and packed a suitcase somewhere else.”
Early the next morning her family reported Khadiza missing. An hour later, three officers from SO15, the counterterrorism squad of the Metropolitan Police, knocked on the door. “We believe your daughter has traveled to Turkey with two of her friends,” one said.
Even then, Ms. Khanom said, recalling the conversation, “Syria didn’t come into my mind.”
The next time she saw her sister was on the news: Grainy security camera footage showed Khadiza and her two 15-year-old friends, Shamima Begum and Amira Abase, calmly passing through security at Gatwick Airport for Turkish Airlines Flight 1966 to Istanbul and later boarding a bus to the Syrian border.
“Only when I saw that video I understood,” Ms. Khanom said.
These images turned the three Bethnal Green girls, as they have become known, into the face of a new, troubling phenomenon: young women attracted to what some experts are calling a jihadi, girl-power subculture. An estimated 4,000 Westerners have traveled to Syria and Iraq, more than 550 of them women and girls, to join the Islamic State, according to a recent report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which helps manage the largest database of female travelers to the region.
The men tend to become fighters much like previous generations of jihadists seeking out battlefields in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq. But less is known about the Western women of the Islamic State. Barred from combat, they support the group’s state-building efforts as wives, mothers, recruiters and sometimes online cheerleaders of violence.
Many are single and young, typically in their teens or early 20s (the youngest known was 13). Their profiles differ in terms of socioeconomic background, ethnicity and nationality, but often they are more educated and studious than their male counterparts. Security officials now say they may present as much of a threat to the West as the men: Less likely to be killed and more likely to lose a spouse in combat, they may try to return home, indoctrinated and embittered.
One in four of the women in the Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s database are already widowed. But if women are a strategic asset for the Islamic State, they are hardly ever considered in most aspects of Western counterterrorism.
The Bethnal Green girls, slender teenagers with ready smiles and London accents, were praised by teachers and admired by fellow students at Bethnal Green Academy.
Khadiza, with straight chocolate-colored hair and thick-rimmed glasses, had been singled out as one of the most promising students in her year, according to a letter her mother received after mock exams only weeks before she left. In her bedroom, she kept a copy of a novel that a teacher had given to her with a handwritten dedication inside, dated January 2015: “Well done for working hard and exceeding your target grade for English language.” In her spare time she tutored less gifted peers.
Her bubbly friend Amira was a star athlete and a respected public speaker, once debating the rights of Muslim women to wear the veil. She was a regular at the local library, where she read voraciously. (After her disappearance, when the police went to check the list of books she had borrowed, one title, “Insurgent,” briefly rang alarm bells — until the officer realized that it was part of a popular dystopian teenage trilogy set in Chicago.)
“They were the girls you wanted to be like,” said one 14-year-old from the grade below.
Perhaps that is why everyone failed to respond to the many signs that foreshadowed their dark turn. The families, who noticed the girls’ behavior changing, attributed it to teenage whims; school staff members, who saw their homework deteriorate, failed to inform the parents or intervene; the police, who spoke to the girls twice about their friend who had traveled to Syria, also never notified the parents.
They were smart, popular girls from a world in which teenage rebellion is expressed through a radical religiosity that questions everything around them. In this world, the counterculture is conservative. Islam is punk rock. The head scarf is liberating. Beards are sexy.
Ask young Muslim women in their neighborhood what kind of guys are popular at school these days and they start raving about “the brothers who pray.”
“Girls used to want someone who is good-looking; nowadays girls want Muslims who are practicing,” said Zahra Qadir, 22, who does deradicalization work for the Active Change Foundation, her father’s charity in East London. “It’s a new thing over the last couple of years. A lot of girls want that, even some nonpracticing girls.”
The rows of housing complexes behind Bethnal Green’s main street are home to a deeply conservative Muslim community where the lines between religion and extremism can be blurred, including in at least one of the girls’ families. In this community, the everyday challenges that girls face look very different from those of their male counterparts.
The Islamic State is making a determined play for these girls, tailoring its siren calls to their vulnerabilities, frustrations and dreams, and filling a void the West has so far failed to address.
In post-9/11 austerity Britain, a time when a deep crisis of identity and values has swept the country, fitting in can be harder for Muslim girls than for boys. Buffeted by a growing hostility toward Islam and deep spending cuts that have affected women and young people in working-class communities like their own, they have come to resent the Western freedoms and opportunities their parents sought out. They see Western fashions sexualizing girls from an early age, while Western feminists look at the hijab as a symbol of oppression.
Asked by their families during sporadic phone calls and exchanges on social media platforms why they had run away, the girls spoke of leaving behind an immoral society to search for religious virtue and meaning. In one Twitter message, nine days before they left Britain, Amira wrote: “I feel like I don’t belong in this era.”
Muslim girls generally outperform the boys in school but are kept on a shorter leash at home. Many, like Khadiza, have sisters whose marriages were arranged when they were teenagers. Ms. Khanom, now 32, was 17 when she was wed, just a year older than Khadiza. And they wear head scarves, which identify them as Muslims in often-hostile streets.
In their world, going to Syria and joining the so-called caliphate is a way of “taking control of your destiny,” said Tasnime Akunjee, a lawyer who represents the families of the three girls.
“It’s about choice — the most human thing,” Mr. Akunjee said. “These girls are smart, they are A students. When you are smarter than everyone else, you think you can do anything.”
Since they left their homes, bits and pieces have emerged about the three friends revealing a blend of youthful naïveté and determination.
Khadiza’s friend Amira, an acquaintance of the family said, “fell in love with the idea of falling in love.” At one point, she posted the image of a Muslim couple with the caption: “And he created you in pairs.”
Khadiza, by contrast, told her sister in one of the first Instagram conversations after her arrival in Syria: “I’m not here just to get married.”
The Islamic State has proved adept at appealing to different female profiles, using girl-to-girl recruitment strategies, gendered imagery and iconic memes.
As Muslims, the girls would be treated very differently from women and girls of the Yazidi minority, who are taken by the Islamic State as slaves and raped with the justification that they are unbelievers.
The group runs a “marriage bureau” for single Western women. This year, the media wing of Al Khanssaa Brigade, an all-female morality militia, published a manifesto stipulating that women complete their formal education at age 15 and that they can be married as young as 9, but also praising their existence in the Islamic State as “hallowed.”
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed caliph of the Islamic State, took a young German woman of Iraqi descent as his third wife and put her in charge of women’s issues in the caliphate, according to information circulating among Islamic State-affiliated social media accounts.
Social media has allowed the group’s followers to directly target young women, reaching them in the privacy of their bedrooms with propaganda that borrows from Western pop culture — images of jihadists in the sunset and messages of empowerment. A recent post linked to an Islamic State account paraphrased a popular L’Oréal makeup ad next to the image of a girl in a head scarf: “COVERed GIRL. Because I’m worth it.”
“It’s a twisted version of feminism,” said Sasha Havlicek, a co-founder and the chief executive of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, who testified about Western women under the group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on July 29.
“For the girls, joining ISIS is a way to emancipate yourself from your parents and from the Western society that has let you down,” Ms. Havlicek said. “For ISIS, it’s great for troop morale because fighters want Western wives. And in the battle of ideas they can point to these girls and say: Look, they are choosing the caliphate over the West.”
In January 2014, one of Khadiza’s best friends, Sharmeena Begum, no relation to Shamima, lost her mother to cancer. Her father soon started courting a woman who would become his second wife.
An only child, Sharmeena was deeply shaken. Until then, she had not been very religious, friends say. “She was barely practicing before,” according to one acquaintance of the family. After her mother died, she started praying regularly and spending more time at the mosque.
But there were signs she was not just turning toward religion for comfort. Bethnal Green Academy is a state-funded secondary school with just over 900 students, the majority of them Muslim. At one point last year, Sharmeena had a heated exchange with a teacher, defending the Islamic State. The teacher, also a Muslim, disagreed, and Sharmeena “flipped out,” a witness said.
Her closest friends started changing, too.
Khadiza stopped wearing trousers and began covering her hair after the summer vacation, at first only in school but gradually at home as well. It was a big change for a girl who “loved” her hair and styled the women in her family on festive occasions.
One day last fall, she asked her older brother Shuyab Alom, a science student who sometimes helped her with homework, what his thoughts were on Syria.
“She asked a very general question as to what I thought about what’s happening over there,” Mr. Alom recalled. “And I said how it was, the fact that it seems that the Syrian regime, you know, the majority of the people oppose the regime.”
Around the same time other friends at school noticed the girls’ lunchtime conversations changing. One friend, whose passport has since been seized because it was feared that she, too, might go to Syria (she denies this), reported a “noticeable” change in attitude.
When Sharmeena’s father remarried in the fall, Khadiza accompanied her to the wedding. Soon after, on Saturday, Dec. 6, Sharmeena disappeared.
“She was vulnerable; she had a trauma,” said Mr. Akunjee, the lawyer, who does not represent Sharmeena’s family but is familiar with her case. “She didn’t get a body piercing or a drug-dealer boyfriend. She went to ISIS.”
Khadiza did not tell her family that Sharmeena had run away. When a school staff member called to inform the family that Khadiza’s friend had “gone missing,” the official did not specify that she was believed to have traveled to Syria, Ms. Khanom, Khadiza’s sister, recalled.
Her mother asked Khadiza regularly whether she had news of her friend. “And she’d be like, ‘Well, I don’t know, I don’t know,’” Ms. Khanom said. “And I thought that was weird.”
Sharmeena’s father, Mohammad Uddin, said he had been surprised that the other girls had not left with his daughter. He told The Daily Mail that he had urged the police and the school to keep a close eye on them, though the police say the formal statement Mr. Uddin gave to them on Feb. 10 — a week before the three girls left — contained no such warning.
At the time, one police officer was charged with getting in touch with the girls, but they were “uncooperative” and did not return his calls and messages. He asked the school to set up meetings with them and four other friends. Two meetings took place, one in the presence of the deputy principal and one with a teacher. But even then, Ms. Khanom said, neither the school nor the police told the families exactly what was going on.
Asked about failing to spot the signs of the girls’ radicalization, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Police maintained that there had been no indication during the interviews that any of the girls “were in any way vulnerable or indeed radicalized.”
“There was no indication that any of the girls were at risk of traveling to Syria,” the spokesman said.
On Feb. 5, officers gave letters to the girls, seeking their parents’ permission to take formal statements from them about Sharmeena’s disappearance. But the girls never passed the letters on. Khadiza’s was discovered by her sister hidden in textbooks in her bedroom after they had left.
Ms. Khanom was furious. “I saw the guy who gave her the letter. He said the 15-year-olds were giving him a runaround. And I’m like, ‘You’re supposed to be someone who’s trained in counterterrorism, you know. We don’t understand about 15-year-olds giving you a runaround. How does that work?’”
Eventually, the police issued an apology. The commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Bernard Hogan-Howe, said he was sorry that the letters had never reached the parents. A spokesman added: “With the benefit of hindsight, we acknowledge that the letters could have been delivered direct to the parents.”
As the police and the school were keeping Sharmeena’s suspected travel to Syria quiet, Khadiza and her friends began planning to follow in her footsteps.
A Girls’ Pact and Missed Signs
In messy handwriting on a page ripped out of a calendar, the girls made a detailed checklist for their trip: bras, a cellphone, an epilator, makeup and warm clothes, among other things. Next to each item, they noted cost, including just over 1,000 pounds for tickets to Turkey.
Discovered at the bottom of one of the girls’ closets after their departure, the list also appears to contain the handwriting of a fourth girl who had apparently planned to travel but dropped out when her father suffered a stroke. Since then, a judge has confiscated the passports belonging to her, three other students at Bethnal Green Academy and a fifth girl from the neighborhood.
Like other teenagers, the girls were sensitive to peer pressure. They were what Shiraz Maher, a senior fellow at the International Center for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence, called a textbook “cluster,” making the multiple oversights by the school and the police even more surprising.
If one member of a group of friends has gone to Syria, Mr. Maher said, that is a far more reliable predictor of the friends being at risk of going than variables like class or ethnicity. In clusters like the Bethnal Green group, doubts are drowned out and views quickly reinforced.
Mr. Akunjee, the lawyer, said, “From December it is pretty clear that there is a pact between the girls.”
Planning their trip appears to have occupied much of their time. Their homework, diligently completed before Sharmeena’s departure, came back incomplete in the weeks after.
“I’m amazed that the teachers and police missed that,” said Mr. Akunjee, who reviewed the homework. “These are bright girls. Well above average clever. This was a year with exams coming up. Shouldn’t the school have informed the parents?” It is a question the police are asking the school, too.
Khadiza and her friend Amira exchanged many messages on social media. In one post, Amira described the two of them as “twins.” In a Twitter message dated Dec. 20, she posted a hadith on being in a group of three friends: “If you are three (in number), then let not two engage in private, excluding the third.”
Was Amira worried about her two friends speaking without her and questioning their pact to go to Syria? She was perhaps the most active of the three friends on social media, providing glimpses of the gradual radicalization the group underwent.
In her posts, under the name Umm Uthman Britaniya, typical teenage commentary about fashion, school and her favorite soccer club (Chelsea) increasingly mixed with posts inquiring about how to learn Arabic quickly and what behavior is Islamic and what is not.
“Are nose piercings Haram or not?” one of her posts asked on Dec. 30, meaning were they forbidden under Islam. “Connnfuuuusseedddd.” Two weeks later she wrote: “The Prophet (PBUH) cursed those who pluck their eyebrows.”
But far from portraying an increasingly submissive girl, Amira’s Twitter messages featured punchy fist emoticons and empowered language: “Our abaya game” she wrote under a photo of four girls proudly clad in Muslim garb, is “strong.” In January, she wrote about rape: “Hearing these stories of sisters being raped makes me so close to being allergic to men, Wallah.”
Around the same time, Khadiza’s family noticed that she became “more quiet.”
“She spent a lot of time on her iPod,” her sister, Ms. Khanom, recalled. The iPod had been the subject of a dispute between Khadiza and her mother a year earlier. Khadiza had asked for one, but her mother had said no. It took Ms. Khanom to lobby on her behalf.
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On her iPod she received a steady stream of images depicting atrocities against Muslim children, from Syria to Myanmar. Her friend Amira posted and reposted several. One of her posts, a photo of a 3-year-old boy, had the caption: “This always gets to me.”
“Almost every day, I go on Facebook and I’m shown a horrible post somewhere,” Khadiza’s brother, Mr. Alom, said. “Online you have whole pages and groups and accounts dedicated to these sort of things, where they post pictures, they post videos.”
A lot of young Muslims, he said, feel that “Islamophobia is a very prevalent thing.”
“And then a group comes to them and says, like, ‘This is where you come,’ this is where they will be complete. ‘It’s a home for you.’ That appeals to them.”
“Yeah, that’s the main thing,” he continued, “because a lot of people feel that they are out of place to where they are.”
Bethnal Green is only one subway stop from the moneyed towers of the City of London and stretches into the capital’s trendy start-up district. Bearded hipsters are a common sight among the bustling market stalls selling everything from saris to spices.
But four in 10 residents, including Khadiza’s and Shamima’s families, have roots in Bangladesh. (Amira was born in Ethiopia and spent her early childhood in Germany before moving here when she was 11.) A literalist interpretation of Islam promoted by Saudi Arabia has become more mainstream and has combined with a widely shared sense that Muslims across the world suffer injustices in which the West is complicit.
After the girls vanished, it emerged that Amira’s father, Hussen Abase, had been filmed attending an Islamist rally in 2012 organized by a notorious hate preacher, Anjem Choudary, and also attended by Michael Adebowale, one of the two men who hacked a British soldier to death on a London Street in 2013. In the video Mr. Abase, who in March appeared on British television sobbing and cradling his daughter’s teddy bear and begging her to come home, can be seen chanting “Allahu akbar” (“God is great”) as an American flag was burned nearby.
He occasionally took Amira to marches, too. Among the people she followed on Twitter was Mohammed Mizanur Rahman, who has close links to Mr. Choudary. Both men were charged this month with supporting the Islamic State. Mr. Abase did not respond to an interview request.
“Some parents create the atmosphere for their children,” said Haras Rafiq, the managing director of the Quilliam Foundation, an anti-extremism research center.
As Amira became more vocal on Twitter, Khadiza became more argumentative at home, on occasion scolding her older siblings for acting “un-Islamic” or pressing her niece to disobey her mother.
The last time Ms. Khanom saw her sister was five days before she left. Her cousin Fahmida Abdul Aziz had come over, too. “We were fighting over a bag of Bombay mix,” Ms. Khanom said, referring to a traditional Indian snack. “She loves that. I guess she gets that off my dad, because my dad used to love it, too.”
They were sitting on the living room sofa. “She was in her PJs, you know like a T-shirt and a pajama bottom, and she just literally came, sat herself between the two of us and put her arms around us,” the cousin, Ms. Aziz said, smiling at the memory. “You know, just looked at me and just gave me a cuddle.”
The next day, Khadiza asked that her niece come to stay, but Ms. Khanom, the niece’s mother, said no because it was a school night. Uncharacteristically, she said, Khadiza texted her niece, urging her to disobey: “Just jump on the bus and come.”
That same week, Amira implored her Twitter followers in capital letters: “PRAY ALLAH GRANTS ME THE HIGHEST RANKS IN JANNAH, MAKES ME SINCERE IN MY WORSHIP AND KEEPS ME STEADFAST.” She posted a photo of three girls in black head scarves and abayas in a local park with their backs to the camera, presumably her and her two friends. “Sisters,” the caption reads.
Call Home, Girls
On Feb. 15, just two days before the three girls left, Shamima sent a Twitter message to a prominent Islamic State recruiter from Glasgow, Aqsa Mahmood. The youngest of the three, Shamima is also the most elusive. Little is known about her apart from the fact that she loved to watch “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” and traveled to Turkey on the passport of her 17-year-old sister, Aklima.
Ms. Mahmood, who goes by the name of Umm Layth (meaning Mother of the Lion) and provides advice on social media to would-be female migrants, has denied recruiting the girls. But her parents’ lawyer expressed surprise that the security services, believed to be monitoring Ms. Mahmood’s social media accounts, had not reacted to Shamima’s approach.
Khadiza’s family members say it is unlikely that the girls could have raised an estimated 3,000 pounds, or about $4,700, to cover the cost of their trip on their own. The plane tickets alone, police confirmed, cost more than 1,000 pounds and were paid for in cash at a local travel agency.
Unlike their friend who left earlier, Sharmeena, who had an inheritance from her mother, the three girls had no known source of money, raising questions about whether they were recruited and had outside help.
A suggestion by the counterterrorism chief of the Metropolitan Police, Mark Rowley, that the girls might have stolen from the families did not go down well: “I felt like punching them; that was a blatant lie,” Khadiza’s sister said.
“Khadiza took some of her jewelry but nothing expensive,” Ms. Khanom said. She left behind the most precious item she owned, a Swarovski necklace she had gotten for her most recent birthday. She did not touch the money in her sister’s bag in the hallway that morning and took nothing from her mother’s kitty.
“Nothing was missing,” Ms. Khanom said.
The police are still trying to establish whether the girls had help online or from a local recruiter. The trouble, investigators say, is that traveling to a conflict zone is not a crime in Britain, and neither is encouraging or facilitating travel to a conflict zone, unless a terrorist purpose can be proven.
“If a local facilitator is identified, a likelier ground for prosecution might be child abduction,” a senior officer said.
The families’ lawyer is convinced the girls tapped into a shadowy recruitment network embedded in and protected by the community in East London and were then handled “point to point.”
In shaky footage, apparently filmed on a hidden camera near the Syrian border and broadcast on A Haber, a Turkish television network, the girls are seen alongside a man in a maroon hooded sweatshirt. Another man, bearded and bespectacled, is taking bags out of the trunk of one car and helping to load them into another.
“This car,” he seems to tell them in heavily accented English, then apparently directs them to take passports allowing them into Syria.
The girls, who arrived in Turkey on a Tuesday night and were reported missing by early Wednesday, waited 18 hours at a bus station in an Istanbul suburb and crossed into Syria only on Friday. Both the British and the Turkish police have faced accusations of reacting too slowly.
Eventually, the Turkish police arrested a man on allegations that he had helped the teenagers cross the border. The Turkish news agency Dogan said the man had helped several other Britons cross into Syria for a fee between $800 and $1,500.
“This is not a package holiday,” Mr. Akunjee said. “It is a complicated journey.”
He knows this firsthand. One of the first things he did after the families hired him was to travel with relatives of all three girls to Turkey and make a public appeal to the girls to get in touch. The campaign, publicized with the hashtag #callhomegirls, was widely covered in the British press.
“Even I needed fixers to help me set it all up,” said Mr. Akunjee, who knows Turkey well. (He recently negotiated the release of a British girl held hostage by the Nusra Front.) “There is no way the girls did this on their own.”
Khadiza’s sister, Ms. Khanom, was among those who traveled to Turkey. “It was like we were retracing their steps,” she said. When the appeal went out, the families learned that 53 other women and girls were believed to have left Britain for Syria.
“Fifty-three,” Ms. Khanom said. “Where are all these girls?”
First Contact
The morning after the families returned to London, a message popped up on Ms. Khanom’s Instagram account. Her request to follow her sister, blocked since Khadiza had left for Syria, had been accepted.
Ms. Khanom said she sent Khadiza a private message, asking to let her know that she was safe. Her sister replied and later messaged again, asking about their mother.
“She is on her prayer mat asking Allah to help her find you,” Ms. Khanom wrote.
“I’ll call soon okay,” Khadiza replied.
“She has not been sleeping or eating since you left,” her sister wrote.
“Tell her to eat.”
“She is asking do you not want to see her?”
“Of course I do.”
But Khadiza also seemed suspicious of the families’ trip to Turkey, making Ms. Khanom wonder if it was really her sister messaging her. “It’s just the way of asking questions about what happened in Turkey: Why did I go? Those kind of things. It just felt like, why would she be asking me these questions, you know.”
At one point, Ms. Khanom tested her: “Who is Big Toe?” she asked. Khadiza sent back a “lol” and replied: “Our cousin.”
For a moment it was as if they were back in the same city. “I kind of forgot she’s not here,” Ms. Khanom said.
She asked her sister to keep in touch. Khadiza promised she would, but insisted that it would always be her to initiate contact. “I don’t think she has full freedom,” Ms. Khanom said.
The next day, Khadiza messaged again.
“I asked her, ‘Are you married?’ She goes, ‘You know me too well. I’m not here just to get married to someone,’” Ms. Khanom recalled. Khadiza said she was “considering.”
“What do you mean by considering?” Ms. Khanom recalled asking.
“Looking into getting married,” the reply came.
“When?”
“Soon.”
From these early conversations, and descriptions of the food they were eating — fried chicken, French fries and pizza — the families and authorities concluded that the three girls were in Raqqa, the de facto capital of the Islamic State, housed in one of several hostels for single women. Khadiza said she was living in a nice house “with chandeliers.”
Ms. Khanom pleaded with her to come home, telling her that the police had assured the families that the girls would not face prosecution.
Khadiza did not believe it. “They’re lying,” she told her sister.
No Way Back?
At Bethnal Green Academy, a school with a fine academic record but now notorious for having four of its students join the Islamic State, the departure of the girls is gingerly referred to as “the incident.”
In the week after they ran away, the principal, Mark Keary, called an assembly. Students were upset, and some teachers cried. But it quickly became clear that this was not a place where the issue of the girls’ departure would be openly discussed. As Mr. Keary put it that same week, it was “business as usual” for the school.
“He brushed over it,” said one girl who had attended the assembly. Teachers have been threatened with dismissal if they speak out publicly, people inside the school said. Mr. Keary declined to comment.
Two weeks after the girls disappeared, the phone rang at the help line of the Active Change Foundation, the organization working on deradicalization and prevention.
It was the father of a student at Bethnal Green Academy. His daughter had overheard a group of girls at lunchtime talking about going to Syria. He said it appeared they were in contact with the girls already there and were planning to join them over the Easter holiday. Hanif Qadir, who runs the charity, informed the local council. On March 20, a judge took away the girls’ passports.
It was an early indication that Khadiza, Amira and Shamima seemed to be settling into life in Raqqa.
Since then, all three girls have married, their families’ lawyer confirmed. They were given a choice between a number of Western men. One chose a Canadian, another a European. Amira married Abdullah Elmir, a former butcher from Australia, who has appeared in several ISIS recruitment videos and has been named “ginger jihadi” for his reddish hair.
All three have moved out of the hostel and live with their husbands. They have sporadic contact with home. The conversations give the impression that the girls have few regrets about leaving their lives in London. But they also hint at hardships like frequent electricity cuts and shortages of Western goods. One recent chat came to an abrupt end because airstrikes were starting.
Khadiza told her sister that she still wanted to become a doctor. There is a medical school in Raqqa, she said. The logo for the Islamic State Health Service mimics the blue-and-white logo of Britain’s treasured National Health Service.
In a recent online exchange on Twitter and Kik with a British tabloid reporter posing as a schoolgirl interested in going to Syria, Amira gave instructions that appeared to track her own experience: She advised the “girl” to tell her parents that she was going for review classes to escape the house, then fly to Turkey and take a bus to Gaziantep, where she could be smuggled across the border. She recommended a travel agent in Brick Lane, a short walk from Bethnal Green Academy, which would accept cash and ask no questions, and suggested taking along bras because “they have the worst bras here.”
She also asked if the would-be recruit would consider becoming a second wife to a Lebanese-Australian, a description fitting her own husband, and appeared to mock a minute of silence for the mostly British victims of a recent shooting in Tunisia for which the Islamic State claimed responsibility, with “Looooool,” shorthand for “laugh out loud.”
It is getting harder to know whether it is the girls who are communicating. Increasingly their conversations are interspersed with stock propagandistic phrases.
“Have they adapted that language, or is there someone standing next to them?” Mr. Akunjee asked. “We don’t know. But they’re not the people their families recognize. They’re not them anymore. And how could they be?”
Standing in her sister’s bedroom one recent afternoon Ms. Khanom recalled the girl who had watched “The Princess Diaries” at least four times and loved dancing Zumba in the living room.
Her room is unchanged; perfumes and teenage accessories remain on a small chest. Her exam schedule is still taped to the inside of her closet door: math, statistics, history, English. A checkered scarf, which Khadiza had dropped on the morning of her departure in the hallway outside, is neatly folded on a shelf. It still carries her scent.
There are frames filled with photographs of her sisters and her nephew, as well as her niece, who has taken her departure particularly badly.
“She’s very affected by it, she misses her terribly, Khalummy — that’s what she calls her, Khalummy,” Ms. Khanom said, referring to a Bengali term of endearment for aunt. “You know, sometimes she shows anger, sometimes she thinks that, you know, she could have stopped her that morning. She saw her get ready.”
“I don’t want to say they’re memories because ...,” Ms Khanom said, her eyes traveling across her sister’s things. “They’re memories, but not as if, like ...,” her voice trailing off again. “I hope and I feel she’s going to come back and things are going to go back to normal.”
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http://journal.ijreview.com/2015/08/246635-here-are-five-serious-truths-about-illegal-immigration-that-gop-candidates-have-to-accept/
Truth.
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/08/31/for-the-record-a-nuclear-iran-would-immediately-become-a-threat-to-americans/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Firewire%20-%20HORIZON%208-31-15%20FINAL&utm_term=Firewire
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http://theblacksphere.net/2013/04/devout-muslims-in-key-positions-in-the-white-house/
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http://theblacksphere.net/2013/04/devout-muslims-in-key-positions-in-the-white-house/
http://www.investigativeproject.org/3777/a-red-carpet-for-radicals-at-the-white-house
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http://pamelageller.com/2015/09/syrian-woman-seeking-asylum-and-american-relative-arrested-at-texas-border.html/
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http://tacticsandpreparedness.com/syrian-refugeesconnecting-dots-england-south-africa-america/
What could go wrong?
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:-o :-o :-o
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http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/09/obama-administration-admitted-1519-foreigners-with-terrorist-ties-into-the-u-s.php
I am sure the highly credentialed in the faculty lounge applaud this ruling.
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Importing Terrorists
By Arnold Ahlert
Apparently, the Obama administration’s determination to promote amnesty, maintain open borders and sanctuary cities, release thousands of criminal immigrants onto American streets, and enhance the Islamic State's recruiting ability by letting them run wild in the Middle East were insufficient efforts to undermine national security.
In a move best described as unconscionable, the administration granted asylum in the U.S. to 1,519 previously inadmissible foreigners involved in terrorism — because their crimes were ostensibly committed “while under duress.”
Even worse, the administration had to “tweak” the law to do so. In February 2014, an “Exercise of Authority” enacted by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the State Department amended the parts of the Immigration and Nationality Act that had taken a zero-tolerance approach towards asylum seekers involved in any material support for terrorism. DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson and Secretary of State John Kerry provided exemptions for "an alien who provided limited material support” to terrorist entities.
“These exemptions cover five kinds of limited material support that have adversely and unfairly affected refugees and asylum seekers with no tangible connection to terrorism: material support that was insignificant in amount or provided incidentally in the course of everyday social, commercial, family or humanitarian interactions, or under significant pressure,” a DHS official explained to The Daily Caller at the time. “In addition to rigorous background vetting, including checks coordinated across several government agencies, these exemptions will only be applied on a case-by-case basis after careful review and all security checks have cleared,” the official added. “This exemption process is vital to advancing the U.S. government’s twin goal of protecting the world’s most vulnerable persons while ensuring U.S. national security and public safety.”
Who determines those criteria? Judicial Watch obtained the breakdown from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services' (USCIS) annual report to Congress. Of the 1,519 admitted, 627 were processed despite an applicant’s provision of material support to an undesignated terrorist organization, nine despite an applicant’s receipt of military-type training from a terrorist organization, 28 despite providing voluntary medical care to members of a terrorist organization in the course of their professional responsibilities without assisting in the violent activities of an organization or individual, and 37 despite providing material support to, soliciting funds for, soliciting individuals for membership in or receiving military-type training from certain qualified Tier III terrorist organizations.
All of these applicants were determined to be “under duress” when they supported terror, along with an additional 189 processed simply for being under duress with no other criteria mentioned. And finally, another 628 were processed because their activities or affiliations with specific groups were simply “approved for consideration of an exemption” by the secretary of homeland security, in consultation with the secretary of state and the attorney general.
What about the idea that all of these people would be carefully vetted? During the border surge that also occurred in 2014, during which the Obama administration admitted thousands of illegal aliens and deliberately dispersed them throughout the nation, Centers for Disease Control (CDC) guidelines preventing the admission of unvaccinated people and those with other inadmissible criteria were conspicuously ignored.
In other words, Rule of Law applies only when it aligns with Obama administration agendas.
Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) director Jessica Vaughan addressed that specific issue. “[T]here is a very legitimate question as to whether the administration actually has the authority to change the law in this way,” Vaughan wrote in an email to the Caller while the asylum modifications were being made. “It seems to me that they are announcing that they will be disregarding yet another law written by Congress that they don’t like and are replacing it with their own guidelines, which in this case appear to be extremely broad and vague, and which are sure to be exploited by those seeking to game our generous refugee admissions program.”
And no one is helping them game the system more than the Obama administration itself, with the president recently announcing America would absorb an additional 10,000 Syrian “refugees” next year, with a target of accepting 100,000 worldwide refugees per year by 2017, according to John Kerry, who declared last month, “This step ... is in keeping with the best tradition of America as a land of second chances and a beacon of hope.”
A beacon of progressive stupidity is more like it, and one that stands in stark contrast to the 100,000 empty, air-conditioned tents in Saudi Arabia capable of housing as many as three million refugees — were it not for the reality the Saudis have refused to take any asylum-seekers.
Judicial Watch reaches an inexorable conclusion: "The administration seems to have a soft spot for terrorists.”
It’s worse than that. Fifteen of 27 Christian refugees from Iraq who have been held at a detention center in Otay Mesa, California, for approximately six months will be deported, despite having support that includes U.S. citizen family members vouching for them in a San Diego-based Iraqi Christian community. The same administration that plays fast and loose with the law whenever it chooses has determined that only people “persecuted by their government” qualify as refugees. By that “logic,” Christians fleeing the Islamic State killing fields in Iraq are ineligible for asylum, while Muslims from Syria and other aliens who have provided limited material support to terrorist thugs gain entry.
At a congressional hearing last Thursday, Barbara Strack, who serves as the chief of the Refugee Affairs Division at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service of the Department of Homeland Security — making her the top refugee official in the Obama administration — did not know Boston Marathon bombers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev had entered this nation as asylum-seeking refugees. “I would need to check with my colleagues, sir,” Strack deferred after the subcommittee’s chairman, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), asked the question.
Strack's stunning incompetence is emblematic. Suffused with a deadly combination of ideologically inspired arrogance and ignorance, this administration has allowed the Islamic State to remain a viable entity, relinquished Iraq to a Russian/Iranian sphere with the ability to dominate the Middle East and protect Syrian butcher Bashar al-Assad, and turned Libya into a jihadist playground. All of it has precipitated the largest refugee crisis since World War II, and thus the American public is expected to countenance thousands of “refugees” vetted by this same group of incompetents who have already decided a certain level of support for terror “under duress” is no big deal.
If you wrote this up as a Hollywood movie script, you couldn’t sell it because no one would believe it. Americans are getting it for free — whether we like it or not.
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:-o :-o :-o
http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2015/10/top-law-enforcement-official-terrorists-have-infiltrated-u-s-through-mexico/?utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Judicial%20Watch%20Tipsheet%20%2822%29&utm_content=
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https://www.facebook.com/tim.galvin.148/videos/1717485721809343/
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http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2015/10/migrants-from-terrorist-nations-in-texas-ice-center-seeking-asylum/?utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Judicial%20Watch%20Tipsheet%20%2824%29&utm_content=
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http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2015/10/migrants-from-terrorist-nations-in-texas-ice-center-seeking-asylum/?utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Judicial%20Watch%20Tipsheet%20%2824%29&utm_content=
Wait? We still have a border? Who knew?
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http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2015/10/28/homeland-security-fbi-cant-get-story-straight-on-screening-syrian-refugees/#undefined
Qualified! Not a partisan hack!
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http://10news.dk/?p=760
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3322649/The-enemy-Nearly-SEVENTY-arrested-America-ISIS-plots-include-refugees-given-safe-haven-turned-terror.html
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http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2015/11/fbi-has-nearly-1000-active-isis-probes-inside-u-s/?utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Judicial%20Watch%20Tipsheet%20%2828%29&utm_content=
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http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2015/11/fbi-has-nearly-1000-active-isis-probes-inside-u-s/?utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Judicial%20Watch%20Tipsheet%20%2828%29&utm_content=
The phony Syrian passport reminds me to wonder how many terrorists already have valid EU passports making them legal to enter the US, and under current non-enforcement can stay forever (in addition to those already here). France has 5 million Muslims; UK has 3 million. Good luck 'vetting' them, especially when we are not allowed to vet differently based on religion.
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http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2015/11/isis-terrorist-released-in-plea-deal-months-ago-in-illinois/?utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Judicial%20Watch%20Tipsheet%20%2828%29&utm_content=
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So what was the bargain?
A promise that he and every relative he has in the US or can bring in will vote Democrat?
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http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/18/us-france-shooting-honduras-idUSKCN0T72UE20151118#BsIZLZk2vliyoAIz.97
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http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/18/us-france-shooting-honduras-idUSKCN0T72UE20151118#BsIZLZk2vliyoAIz.97
Took a wrong turn at Alburquerque?
So, passed up the sweet, sweet free sh*t in europe to struggle towards the US? I wonder why.
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I'm not necessarily endorsing this theory. Brandon Smith obviously considers it to be fact, not speculation - but I tend to think there are some rather large holes in his argument. Nevertheless, I'm interested in the opinion of the folks here on the forum about this. It's a rather long piece, with some good suggestions for self-protection, but my primary interest is in his thesis that ISIS has been created by globalists to provide an opportunity for imposing martial law:
ISIS Is Being Aimed At The West By Globalists - Here’s What We Can Do About It
Wednesday, 18 November 2015 Brandon Smith
Over the past year and a half, I have been writing on the engineered nature of ISIS, delving deeply into its history and its backing by Western intelligence agencies in articles such as “Is Martial Law Justified If ISIS Attacks?” as well as “What Will You Do When Tyranny And Terrorism Work Hand In Hand?” and “The Time Is Ripe For A False Flag Attack On American Soil.”
Specifically, I compared the ISIS phenomenon to another establishment-backed terrorist program that began at the onset of the Cold War in Europe and was publicly exposed in the 1990s. That program was called Operation Gladio.
Gladio involved the manipulation of existing extremist groups as well as the complete fabrication of terrorist cells within Europe claiming to be “left-wing.” The reality was that these terrorist cells were made up of intelligence agency operatives (including CIA operatives) acting as handlers often for duped scapegoats and patsies. These proxy terrorists initiated decades of attacks in Europe, which focused on shootings and bombings in public areas with full media saturation. Gladio-influenced cells, such as Action Directe, carried out at least 50 different violent attacks in France in the 1970s and 1980s, along with groups like Red Army Faction, Black September and the PLFP.
Governments across Europe began using the attacks as a rallying cry for a centralized one-European nation; that cry culminated in the formation of the EU.
Operation Gladio began in France in 1947, when French Interior Minister Edouard Depreux revealed the existence of a secret stay-behind army codenamed “Plan Bleu.”
In France in 1948, the Western Union Clandestine Committee (WUCC) was created to coordinate secret unorthodox warfare. After the creation of NATO a year later, the WUCC was integrated into the military alliance under the name Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC).
The former director of the French intelligence service DGSE, Adm. Pierre Lacoste, said in a 1992 interview with The Nation, that France’s “secret army” was involved in terrorist activities against Charles de Gaulle, whom the CIA wanted to assassinate.
De Gaulle was apparently not entirely innocent in the Gladio affair, either. De Gaulle was very familiar with a secret organization called Service d’ Action Civique. It ended up being exposed as a training ground for Gladio Agents under Jaques Foccart, a government “adviser” who would go on to mastermind multiple military coups in Africa. Whether de Gaulle was fully aware of this problem is not known. It was discovered, though, that SAC had infiltrated communist student groups in the late 1960s through the 1970s and attempted to provoke violent actions.
De Gaulle was eventually driven out of office after the 1969 failure of the Referendum of Regionalisation. He was replaced by Georges Pompidou, who (what a surprise) was an avid promoter of European unification (centralization). Pompidou founded the French arm of the Pan-European Union Movement. And immediately after he took de Gaulle’s position, he helped initiate the European Communities Summit, which led directly to the formation of the European Union structure.
Gladio was not fully exposed to the wider public until 1990 when Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti came forward to the senate with detailed information. After the information hit the mainstream, the European Parliament was forced to write a resolution against any future false flag projects. Clearly, they have since ignored these promises.
For more information on Gladio, I highly recommend the intensively researched book “NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe” by Daniele Ganser, as well as the 1992 BBC documentary “Operation Gladio.”
As I have stated time and time again, government engineered crisis is designed to do one thing: drive the fearful public toward more centralization and less freedom. Although Operation Gladio was later exposed, it was too late; Gladio (along with other clandestine economic measures) had achieved the goal of a malleable citizenry desperate for more centralized governance; a social attitude which led to a transnational union in Europe with a single currency mechanism.
What does this have to do with ISIS? In order to defeat an enemy, you have to know where he comes from, what his motivations are, and who pulls his strings if he has any. As I predicted in the pieces linked at the beginning of this article, ISIS has now been exposed as being supported if not entirely funded and managed by Western covert intelligence through documents obtained from the Department of Defense by Judicial Watch, making ISIS very similar to Gladio in its origins and tactics.
This DoD paper should not have been at all surprising to most of us in the liberty movement. The West had been shifting militants from Libya into Syria just before protests suddenly erupted into all-out war. Instructors from the U.K. and France, under U.S. advisement, had been training militants in Jordan specifically for the purpose of invading and disrupting Syria and overthrowing president Bashar Assad. This training continued well after it became clear that the same militants had formed under the banner of ISIS.
Establishment elites have openly applauded the radicalization of insurgents in Syria. The Council on Foreign Relations argued that the inclusion of what they called “extremist al-Qaida elements” in the Syrian insurgency “improved the moral” of the movement, stating that the “Free Syrian Army needs al-Qaida now.” The CFR acknowledges that the goal of al-Qaida operatives in Syria is not necessarily to overthrow Assad, but to establish an Islamic state. Despite this, the CFR continued to support the same strategy of militant training to overthrow Assad.
The facts are this:
- ISIS was created by covert intelligence and continues to be trained and supplied by Western governments.
- The tactics ISIS uses, including monstrous acts of genocide, were clearly taught to them by covert intelligence interests (look into the School of the Americas for similar programs), considering ISIS insurgents continue to receive aid from Western intelligence despite their behavior.
- Western governments are well aware that ISIS agents have been inserted into refugee camps and are being imported into Europe and the U.S.
- ISIS smugglers have openly admitted to this infiltration plan, yet the U.S. and EU governments continued the immigration surge.
- Lower echelon ISIS fighters that have actually been captured and interviewed apparently have wide-ranging views on Islam and are not the staunchly unified theocratic zealots the Western public has been led to believe. This is a considerable departure from groups like al-Qaida (also Western funded and trained), which required complete theological conformity.
In truth, the only unifying drive of many captured ISIS fighters has been a concerted hatred of the West and the U.S. in particular due to our government’s complete destabilization of the Middle East. Meaning, the establishment (globalists) brought chaos to the Middle East, then conjured the rise of ISIS out of that despair, then used ISIS to recruit young men with a hatred for the West, and has now led those fighters right to our doorstep.
The escalation of force in Syria by both Russia and the West is likely now useless, as thousands of ISIS insurgents have been removed from the combat zone and transported exactly where they prefer to be — right next door to us. But defeating ISIS has never been the goal.
One must conclude given these facts that the plan by the establishment to force public acceptance of Syrian mass immigration was a Trojan horse strategy to plant ISIS extremists within deadly proximity to western civilians. But why?
Again, this is yet another Gladio-style program designed to strike terror in the hearts of the public and condition them into accepting even greater centralization and less freedom. A European superstate with common border security and a single government authority will certainly be on the table soon. Not to mention, martial law is essentially in place in France today and will be expanded to other EU members as the attacks continue. As with Gladio, Europeans should expect many more events like the Paris attacks in the months to come.
The U.S. is set to receive over 10,000 Syrian refugees in the next couple months. Unlike in Europe, where numerous activist groups have been able to partially track numbers and types of people within refugee groups, Americans have little access to information surrounding Syrian immigration to the U.S. I suspect that, as in Europe, the claims that the refugees are only “single mothers, children and religious minorities” is mostly false, and many of them are actually single military-age males.
In the U.S., the federal government has been legally positioning for martial law for years, from the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and its indefinite-detention-without-trial provisions that apply to citizens, to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and mass surveillance measures without warrant, to resource confiscation provisions through executive order that apply during any event the White House labels an “emergency,” to elitist insiders like Wesley Clark planting the concept on national television of World War II-style internment camps for citizens deemed hostile to the status quo.
I would also point out that the U.S., and the global economy in general, is currently witnessing a massive slowdown rivaling the credit collapse of 2008. Widespread terrorist attacks are a perfect rationalization for a complete lockdown of Western peoples, as well as a perfect distraction from the banker-generated economic implosion that is progressing in exponentially harsher stages as we head into 2016.
Another major advantage to consider to the Paris attacks is that now, with a Syrian passport being conveniently found on one of the terrorists (possibly fake), the war in Syria is given greater rationale while the immigration plan continues unabated. NATO countries are gearing up for a large-scale assault in the region, while Russia is already entrenched. Imagine the potential for an “accidental” trigger event between the East and West as Russian troops and planes come within spitting distance of NATO troops and planes.
Americans should see a Paris-level attack as inevitable in the near term. They should expect similar events in unusual areas of the country, including more suburban and rural areas to ensure that no one feels safe anywhere. They should expect that said attacks will be high frequency and that they will occur in a coordinated manner. This is how Gladio operated, and this is undoubtedly how ISIS will operate.
The question is: What can be done about it?
We must first recognize that ISIS is only a surface problem; the deeper problem is corrupt governments across the globe creating dangerous terrorist groups out of thin air. That said, ISIS is still a threat, and must be dealt with along with globalists.
If the government insists upon financing and training dangerous militant groups and directly immigrating them along with Syrian refugees without any vetting whatsoever, if they insist on wide open borders, then there is not much we can do to prevent ISIS from slipping into the U.S. We also cannot go the fascist route and round up every Muslim in the name of security as some neocons are suggesting; this is exactly what the elites want, public support for liberty destroying measures against one group that can then be applied to ALL groups.
We can, though, take some measures that we should have been instituting all along.
Higher pressure on prime immigration centers: Legal immigration should not be an issue normally, but it has been made an issue due to deliberately lax security measures by the federal government. If the government is not going to take action, then the American people must. There are a limited number of these relocation centers in the U.S.; and activist pressure could be applied, along with pressure on local and state officials. Michigan, Texas and Alabama among other states have publicly announced that they will not be taking any more refugees until the government revises its vetting standards. That is a perfectly rational approach. Although I suspect the hour may be too late to disrupt the flow of ISIS sleeper cells into our country, we should do what we can to end the current insane immigration policies.
Locally managed border security: The federal border patrol simply is not getting the job done right now. And the great threat is that once an attack does occur within the U.S., the federal government will suggest a militarization of the border (or the entire nation) rather than taking simple measures they should have taken long ago. You see, the goal of false-flag terror is to motivate the public to demand more government power. This is why followers of the neoconservative mindset are idiotic. The establishment CREATED the problem of ISIS and potential ISIS immigration. And when it all goes sour, neocons cry out that the same government needs expanded militarized authority to do its job. I say, “No more.”
Border security should be handled at the local level rather than the federal level, meaning the people of the vulnerable states should be organizing their own security measure, patrols, alarms, response teams, etc. I am so tired of hearing that we should “let the professionals do the job.” Frankly, there are no “professionals” in the area of border security seeing as we now have wide-open borders. The locals have every right to secure their own states and will probably do a better job that the federal government ever has.
Your tactical response kit: Build an active-shooter kit for your vehicle and ALWAYS carry a sidearm, either open carry or concealed if you have a CCW. I open carry at all times as a matter of principle and have never been asked to leave an establishment as a result. But if you are worried about confrontation with people or businesses, then simply carry concealed. Open-carry citizens could dissuade attackers from striking a particular place altogether through blatant show of force, while CCW holders are less visible. There are advantages to both.
An active-shooter kit would require a lightweight folding-stock rifle or a short-barrel AR-style pistol with an arm brace, a lightweight tactical vest with mags and ammo, ballistic plates, smoke, a rifle light (for dark indoor spaces in particular; night vision with limited depth perception is far less effective than a simple light), a trauma kit with pressure bandages, celox gauze, tourniquets, chest seals, decompression needles, etc., as well as a radio communications kit. All gear should be tailored to the individual's expertise and needs. This kit should be placed in a nondescript backpack or carrying case for easy transport. Obviously, train with all of your gear extensively before using it in the field.
Personal and team training for active shooters: The only way Americans can guarantee any measure of safety from a Paris-style attack is for as many citizens as possible to be armed and trained. This means mentally training to go TOWARD the sound of the shooting, rather than to run away from it, as well as tactical methods to marginalize a shooter’s ability to move and project violence. Team training is a must, and you should already be working within a group to learn how to function in combat without danger of friendly fire or misdirected fire that might put innocent bystanders at risk.
The common argument against citizens defending themselves is that they are untrained and are “likely to do more harm than good.” This is nonsense. One armed person in Paris could have made all the difference, as this man armed with a .38 revolver did when his church in South Africa came under attack by terrorists. Another argument is that when armed citizens respond aggressively to an attack, they risk being mistaken as terrorists by authorities. I have to point out that the authorities rarely arrive in time to accomplish anything, let alone mistake you on the scene as a terrorist while defending yourself.
Military-grade training far superior to the training mandated by law enforcement is widely available to U.S. citizens. It is time to accept that this is the world we live in now. Are you going to put blind faith in a corrupt government system that has deliberately put you in harm’s way, or are you going to take proactive measures to protect yourself and those around you? Make no mistake; your safety is in your hands whether you like it or not.
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Objectivist, I agree with you; there are large holes in this theory. Still it is good to question what we see, what we think of it and how we react.
Our operatives need to be infiltrating organizations like this; I hope they are. And if they are, it is so secret that we the public perhaps can never know the details. When partial details become public, things are easily misinterpreted. We also don't know about attacks thwarted.
Seems to me that it keeps coming back to the fact that they don't mind dying and even killing themselves. Bin Laden was a coward in sending others but had to give up power, go into hiding, live in isolation and finally get killed. The successful premise of the cold war was mutually assured destruction. Evil rulers of the Soviet empire and also PRC were willing to kill in the hundreds of millions but not willing to die or lose power.
They are smart enough to know what our reaction to bombings will be, and they don't seem to mind, and yes, we really are dumb enough to keep letting them in here, and to let them re-establish their own power bases.
Attacks on our homeland are unacceptable. Same for the homeland of friends and allies, Madrid, London, Paris and so on. Also unacceptable is ISIS holding territory anywhere, conducting training camps anywhere. The sex slave situation, the forced raising of another generation of terrorists is happening under our watch and must be stopped. Urgently! That this is happening within territory we already gave 3000 lives and a billion dollars to secure and gave up freely - is mind boggling.
While we debate and plot a they are increasing their power and increasing their reach.
The tragedy of the moment is that we have 14 more months of nothing right happening before a new American President can start to establish new respect and new leadership. In the meantime, France and Putin lead and the US is the JV.
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While John Kerry struggles to explain what "legitimizes" terror attacks, we can look back to Holocaust story of blaming the Jews and the bicyclists:
The Hannah Arendt Center describes a mordant joke “told during the Holocaust, especially amongst Jews in concentration camps”:
“The Jews caused the Great War,” an anti-Semite tells his friend.
“Yes, the Jews and the bicyclists,” says the friend.
“Why the bicyclists?” asks the anti-Semite.
To which the friend replies: “Why the Jews?”
[Hat tip James Taranto, WSJ]
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http://www.cleveland19.com/story/30551799/5-foreign-nationals-arrested-on-ohio-turnpike-passports-taken
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http://www.cleveland19.com/story/30551799/5-foreign-nationals-arrested-on-ohio-turnpike-passports-taken
The officers involved will soon face a DOJ civil rights investigation, most likely.
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https://www.facebook.com/FoxBusiness/videos/10153710969020238/
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https://www.facebook.com/FoxBusiness/videos/10153710969020238/
Just here to contribute to Texas' growing homemade clock industry.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/11/19/the-viral-claim-that-not-one-refugee-resettled-since-911-has-been-arrested-on-domestic-terrorism-charges/
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/11/19/the-viral-claim-that-not-one-refugee-resettled-since-911-has-been-arrested-on-domestic-terrorism-charges/
I'd score it a total fcuking lie made to be a propaganda talking point for leftist morons.
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http://monsterhunternation.com/2015/11/16/thoughts-on-paris/
Thoughts on Paris
November 16, 2015 correia45 331
I’ve not blogged much since getting back from tour. I’m still playing catch up. There has been a ton of things to comment on, so in brief:
Paris. Coming soon to a location near you. Mumbai, Beslan, and a thousand others, we’ve seen this before, and we’ll see it again.
On the personal, local level, this is another example of why you should carry a gun. No, we don’t expect every permit holder to be a Navy SEAL, just a speed bump. The best way to stop a mass shooter is an immediate violent response. At best, you drop them before they can hurt too many people. At worst, congratulations you were a distraction, but even distractions can save lives or derail plans.
Running is great. I’ll never fault somebody who chooses to run or hide when bad things happen. Every one of us has a different level of training, knowledge, and commitment, and what is the right answer for you, isn’t the right answer for your grandma. If you are the kind of person to get involved, you need to have a clue. However, since the only constant of gunfights is that they suck for somebody, you can do everything right and still die. On the bright side you at least bought everybody else some time.
For the pacifistic anti-gun dumb asses on the internet who always crop up in the aftermath of any violent event, bitching about imaginary crossfires, or how fighting back would just make things worse. Just shut up already. You’re children, with a child’s grasp of the subject. When people are being mass butchered, barring tossing hand grenades at the bad guy, it is pretty damned hard to make it worse.
Then I see the idiots claiming that they’re only worried about the quality of the regular people with guns… Liars. But okay, thought experiment time. Say there was a proposed law for a federal “super permit”, where if a regular person could pass a rigorous background check and, oh say, the same firearms qualification as an FBI agent, that individual would then be allowed to carry a gun anywhere in the fifty states a federal agent could, and ignore things like idiotic gun free zones, or could carry a gun in states where concealed carry is banned.
This doesn’t replace state laws. Heck, make the federal super permit really hard to get. Have it require a really high level of proficiency, a big knowledge of use of force laws, and one hell of a tough qualification. Make the applicant foot the bill for everything. And you know what? I bet you within a week we could still provide a million of my people as defense in depth, worst case scenario interrupters, spread all over America, for when bad things happen.
Would these people so worried about our level of training be in favor of this? Of course they wouldn’t. They’d find some other reason to bleat. And murderous assholes will continue to target disarmed populations. Besides, this is just wishful thinking, because any federal program which would empower the general populace would be designed to suck and fail from the get go. Ask any pilot who went through the armed pilot training post 9-11 how easy the feds made that simple,obvious, no brainer program.
Other than learning to shoot, learn first aid. The main things to remember about gunshot wounds is direct pressure. For most of them there’s not much else you can do. Learn how to apply a tourniquet.
That’s all personal stuff that could actually help. You want to argue about putting a French flag over your profile pic, I don’t care if you do or not. Whatever makes you feel better. I’ve seen some people saying that if you want to actually make a difference you need to join the military. That’s great, but missing the point. We don’t have a lack of warriors problem, we have a lack of leadership problem.
Now, big picture. Militant Islamist Wahhibi douchebags want to kill you. Period. Don’t make excuses for them. Don’t try to explain them away. They literally want you to submit or die. This isn’t rocket science. Just ask them. They’ll tell you.
In our current stupid society, you can’t talk about this topic without being accused of racism. That’s just idiotic, since a religious philosophy isn’t a race. But these same idiots like to bitch about Christians being awful and look under every rock for an imagined slight to rail against. Only Christians aren’t blowing people up. But libs love to throw out the racism card to automatically shut down all dissent, because most cons are nice people, who don’t like being accused of being vile, repugnant things. So they shut up.
Like if you say, hey, maybe taking in tens of thousands of completely unvetted refugees from a war torn third world nation that is a hotbed of the philosophy that wants to saw our heads off is a bad idea… They scream racist.
For the people saying the refugees are vetted… How? The Syrian Bureau of Criminal Identification? I’ve seen some people quoting the plaque from the Statue of Liberty. Really? Did you miss the point of what Ellis Island was for?
Do I feel bad for the actual refugees? Yep. The decent people are running from the same scumbags we’re worried about. However, that doesn’t mean the western world has to commit suicide in order to save everybody. It sucks. There’s evil in the world. Not having it on your doorstep makes it easier to treat it elsewhere. When you’ve got a disease you quarantine it. You don’t purposefully spread it everywhere. We’re in the position to help other countries only because ours isn’t currently on fire.
Some of you are under the mistaken impression that there is a good answer.
Another thing that I keep seeing are two opposing, equally idiotic schools of thought. The immediate knee jerk reaction of liberals flipping out about potential retaliatory hate crimes that almost never happen, but will eventually. Because push someone far enough, and they will inevitably lose their shit. Europeans are good at that.
And the other is the they’re all guilty, kill 1/6th of the world’s population, let God sort them out rage posters. Not getting into morality at all, that’s dumb just from a logistical and target selection stand point. That’s just good business. You’ve got a particular problem, focus on that specific rather than the overwhelming whole. Of course we aren’t fighting all Muslims. If we were fighting a billion people, you would know it. However, we are fighting millions. This isn’t some tiny, violent splinter group. This is a fairly wide spread, violent, jihadist, idealized imaginary history, philosophical movement, and they are motivated and think they can win.
The problem is that this murderous faction has taken over large swaths of everything, all over the world, and it has been going on for a long time. I’m not talking physically taking over either, but they’re in the mosques, in the leadership, and in the money. Yes, there are plenty of moderate Muslims who fight these people. That’s why the nut jobs spend most of their energy blowing up people who are supposedly of the same religion. There are bombings and shootings daily across the third world that barely make a blip in our media because they’re business as usual.
For the vast majority of the moderates however, what do we expect them to do? You can ally with the west, where you can fight against the death cultists, but the minute a progressive gets elected, you are going to get sold out and left to die. So why ally with us? Because the death cultists aren’t going anywhere. Those fuckers are committed.
Look at what happened to Iraq and Afghanistan. Why would any leader side with us now? America will come in, kick ass with the greatest fighting force ever… Oh, wait. MSNBC is upset. Buh bye. We’re out. Everybody who helped us get massacred. A year later, if they’re lucky they might get a hashtag on twitter, because that’s how America shows it cares.
Boko Haram, ISIS, and Hamas are all different groups, but they all share that idealistic, death cult, militant, asshole philosophy.
Barack Obama has two signature achievements. No seriously, check google. That’s all they can come up with. Two. Obamacare and pulling out of Iraq. Obamacare is an expensive train wreck, that didn’t solve the problems it was supposed to, which raised everybody else’s costs, and now for the handful of the population it did help, all of the exchanges are imploding like everybody who can do math said they would. Brilliant. But back to Muslim extremists, we pulled out of Iraq, and Daesh rolled right in. Yay.
Meanwhile, the rest of the middle east fell apart. Hillary Clinton and John Kerry showed us the brilliance we’ve come to expect from democrat presidential candidates and did… shit. I can’t tell. Our administration totally sucked it up to the point that the western world was literally cheering Putin getting involved. How badly do you have to fuck up that your allies are happy the Russians moved in instead?
Mostly it looks like our State Department yelled at the one little country in the region who isn’t trying to blow us up, for being too mean to the philosophical allies of the people trying to blow us up, or for trying to stop the biggest country that wants to blow them up from getting a nuke, even though they get the population adjusted equivalent of a Paris attack all the freaking time.
Liberalism is a suicidal political philosophy that focuses on non-problems and ignores real problems. We’ve got an actual death cult massacring people? Well, we’d better crack down on regular Americans civil liberties. Hey, there’s a conservative organization in rural Nebraska that has absolutely nothing to do with militant Islam, better tap their phones and sick the IRS on them. We do security theater at the airports, while having a foreign policy that makes zero sense and no border. Bad guys are massacring people with machine guns they smuggled into a country with incredibly strict gun control? Well, we’d better double down on gun free zones to minimize the number of people who could effectively fight back. DHS leadership is issuing warnings about American veterans, while the actual guys fighting terrorists are stymied with rules that make absolutely no sense.
I’ve got a ton of fans who are feds. Oh, the horror stories I hear from these guys. So many plots have been foiled, so many bad guys have been caught, and the stuff they are worried that is coming next is frankly terrifying… I mean, we’ve not seen anything yet. There are some nightmare scenarios out there that I won’t talk about on the internet. But don’t worry, our administration’s greatest concern is climate change. They’re all over that.
Seriously, this bunch of fuck ups will go down in history as the most clueless administration we’ve had. ISIS is the JV team! They’re contained. We spent like half a billion dollars on a training program that produced, what? A squad? But even if we’d turned out an actual Syrian fighting force, because of stupid campaign promises to Code Pink, heaven forbid we let our SF guys do their freaking job, and actual lead or help, because that would be “boots on the ground”, and that is so much worse than having hundreds of thousands of refugees overwhelming the western world a year later.
The other day on book tour I was stuck in an airport watching CNN. I swear airports are the only place that play CNN anymore (and before anybody bitches at me about bias, I’m not a FOX news guy either. I cancelled cable years ago). I caught Obama’s speech about the Keystone Pipeline, and it was just asinine. The whole thing was bullshit. He talked about the lowered energy costs, as if that was his doing, and not because of North Dakota, and Saudi Arabia going all bargain basement to try and stop them. Hang on… Isn’t this the same administration that is always bitching about the evils of fracking. Yeah, heaven forbid we be energy independent. Because if you think things suck now, just wait until the house of Saud collapses, and the same militant asshole extremist JV team that we’ve contained so well rolls in there. But don’t worry, before that we’ve got a nuclear deal with Iran that will surely result in Peace in Our Time.
But that’s us. Europe has been following the liberal, progressive, pseudo-socialist path a lot longer than we have. Instead of doing little things that make sense all along, they’ll let the problem get really big and stupid, and then it is guillotines, gulags, and cattle cars. There’s a lot of really pissed off Europeans right now, and over the centuries we’ve got plenty of examples of what masses of pissed off Europeans do when pushed.
The death cultists are totally cool with that, because they truly believe they’re going to win the apocalypse. The only long term problems liberals can fixate on are imaginary ones that allow them to make the government more intrusive for regular law abiding citizens. So I expect everything to get far stupider from here on out.
For the super isolationist types of the Perhaps if We’re Nice They’ll Go Away school of foreign diplomacy, too late now. We’re dealing with a group of people who literally think they’re helping bring about the apocalypse, and that’s a good thing. Our leadership is made up of petulant children more worried about poop swastikas that may or may not have existed, than actual killers who believe in real oppression.
Solution? Beats the hell out of me. It certainly isn’t whatever it is we’ve been doing. The ball is now in Europe’s court. America’s bipolar leadership has abdicated responsibility. Europe can either decide it is in it to win it, and fight like their survival is at stake, or keep doing their thing. The extremists are happy to die, and they consider everybody on their side expendable.
My guess? Retaliation. Our warriors will do what they’re awesome at, and kill a whole bunch of assholes. Depending on how hard and fast we, or in this case the French, do it, that will stop a whole bunch of other attacks. However, innocent people will die as has happened in every war in human history, which will cause liberals to flip out, which will cause the west to go all half-hearted and stupidly forward. So nothing will get fixed. The west will go back to the next imaginary issue that allows liberals to be control freaks. The security apparatus will then go back to being an ever tightening ratchet against the wrong people. We’ll repeat this cycle until the west collapses, or one particular brand of religious philosophy is utterly annihilated forever.
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http://www.newsweek.com/tsa-investigation-finds-73-workers-uss-terrorist-watc-341696?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mattkibbe
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http://www.newsweek.com/tsa-investigation-finds-73-workers-uss-terrorist-watc-341696?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mattkibbe
Lucky for us, DHS is administered by the qualified Jeh Johnson! Right bigdog?
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/09/10/terrorist-go-back-to-your-country-attacker-yelled-in-alleged-assault-of-sikh-man/
I'm wondering if there is a fund for this man?
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Bringing GM's post over to here-- this is some very interesting stuff!
http://www.wired.com/2015/11/isis-opsec-encryption-manuals-reveal-terrorist-group-security-protocols/
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2007/08/world-of-jihadcraft
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Pasting Doug's post from the Immigration thread here as well:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/24/syrian-refugees-central-america-routes-cuban-migrants
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http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2015/11/imam-who-issued-fatwa-against-islam-critic-got-doj-contract-holds-peace-prayer-for-paris/?utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Judicial%20Watch%20Tipsheet%20%2830%29&utm_content=
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http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2015/11/imam-who-issued-fatwa-against-islam-critic-got-doj-contract-holds-peace-prayer-for-paris/?utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Judicial%20Watch%20Tipsheet%20%2830%29&utm_content=
Well, if we are going to exclude every imam from employment for issuing a death fatwa, how can we hire any imam ?
Obvious islamophobia
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I've trained with Greg 4 or 5 times now and find him to be one of the best at presenting and integrating a good, basic skill set, including ground, knife, in close gunfighting, first aid, survival skills, et al. He is also quite well read and does an outstanding job of condensing his understanding for the lay reader, as witnessed in this piece here:
http://www.activeresponsetraining.net/counterinsurgency#sthash.zbcWUrfl.gbpl&st_refDomain=www.facebook.com&st_refQuery=/?sk=h_chr&sfx_switch=true
His Active Response Training site is well worth bookmarking.
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http://www.clarionproject.org/news/fbi-tracking-48-islamic-state-suspects-247-america
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http://www.clarionproject.org/news/fbi-tracking-48-islamic-state-suspects-247-america
Obviously,we need more unvettable aliens from the Middle East!!
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Sen Tom Cotton strongly defended the value of the NSA metadata program that is ending. I am trying to get a transcript of his remarks yesterday.
From his website:
http://www.cotton.senate.gov/?p=blog&id=204
Patriot Act, FISA keep us safe. Congress must act now to reauthorize vital counterterrorism tools
FoxNews.com
By: Senator Tom Cotton and Congressman Mike Pompeo
“The system was blinking red ? it could not get any worse.” That’s how then-CIA Director George Tenet described the threats against the United States during the summer of 2001. But it did get worse: Al Qaeda struck on 9/11, killing almost 3,000 Americans. Today, the terrorist threats are more dangerous than ever, as Director of National Intelligence James Clapper recently testified to Congress.
Across Africa and the Middle East, Al Qaeda affiliates have metastasized following America’s retreat. Iran continues its unrelenting support for terrorism. And of course there’s the Islamic State. Far from “the JV team” as President Obama called them, the Islamic State is rampaging across Iraq and Syria, while inspiring attacks and plots in the U.S. and Western Europe.
These groups are now larger and more sophisticated?for example, developing new non-metallic bombs to evade detection, recruiting westerners to conduct homegrown attacks, and attracting adherents through social media. Just last week, the Islamic State inspired the attack in Garland, Texas, and our military bases had to go on heightened alert.
After 9/11, America finally went on offense against terrorists, and not just with our military. Congress acted to close the intelligence gaps that had allowed Al Qaeda to strike us. With large bipartisan majorities, the Congress provided the executive branch and the judiciary with critical new tools to keep America safe, while also protecting civil liberties.
Unless Congress acts this month, three of these critical tools will expire, reopening pre-9/11 intelligence gaps.
First, the “lone wolf” provision helps officials find and stop homegrown attackers who may not be directly linked yet to an overseas terrorist group.
Second, the roving-wiretap provision allows for warrants against a targeted person, not just a specific device. Law-enforcement officials have had this power in criminal cases for decades, and it makes no sense to deprive them of it in national-security cases.
Finally, section 215 of the Patriot Act authorizes the collection of business records needed to thwart terrorist attacks. While this section is used most often by the FBI in investigations of specific threats, it’s more widely known after Edward Snowden’s treasonous disclosures as the authority for the NSA’s telephone metadata program.
As members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, we have carefully studied this program and are convinced that it’s an integral tool in our fight against terrorism. Congress should
Contrary to irresponsible rumors, the program is lawful, carefully monitored, and protects personal privacy. The program does not conduct mass surveillance of American citizens?or any surveillance at all.
The NSA isn’t “listening to your calls” and it’s not even getting personally identifiable information. Rather, it simply collects metadata: the time and duration of a call and the phone numbers involved.
The Supreme Court has long held there’s no a reasonable expectation of privacy in this information; after all, the phone company already has it. Further, 15 federal judges have approved the program on 40 different occasions. And the program was known or knowable to every member of Congress in 2011 when section 215 was last reauthorized.
Also, the NSA follows rigorous procedures to query the data. The agency must go through a 6-step process that includes multiple layers of review from attorneys and independent federal judges. Even then, only a couple dozen people can access the data.
We have personally met these upstanding men and women?many from a military background?and can attest their professionalism. Plus, they all undergo regular background checks, drug tests, and polygraphs.
Moreover, all queries of the data are automatically recorded and regularly audited by the Inspector General, Department of Justice, and congressional Intelligence Committees. These extensive safeguards are why the program has a sterling record with no verified incidents of intentional abuse?not a single one.
Given its limited scope and these safeguards, this program poses a much lower risk to personal privacy than does, say, a typical grocery-store rewards program. But you don’t have to take our word for it. President Obama’s own actions demonstrate the need for this program. He could’ve easily ended the program after Snowden’s sensational disclosures?but he didn’t and hasn’t, because he knows it protects Americans.
One example is the 2009 case of Najibullah Zazi?a Colorado-based Al Qaeda operative plotting to bomb the New York subway system. This program allowed the NSA to identify a previously unknown phone number for a co-conspirator. The plot so advanced that they had already procured the bomb-making materials needed to carry out the attack at the time of their arrest.
Similarly, many intelligence experts have testified that, had this program existed in 2001, it may have prevented the 9/11 attacks. One of the hijackers, Khalid al Mihdhar, made seven calls to an Al Qaeda safe house in Yemen before the attack. Though the NSA intercepted these calls using other overseas methods, they believed al-Mihdhar wasn’t in the U.S. because they couldn’t obtain the phone number from which he called. We know now that al Mihdhar was in San Diego, preparing for the attacks.
These examples?and others we can’t share?demonstrate that this program is a national security imperative, as are the lone wolf and roving-wiretap authorities. Congress must act to reauthorize all three provisions. The alternative is too dangerous.
Tom Cotton represents Arkansas in the U.S. Senate. Mike Pompeo represents Kansas's 4th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives.
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More recently:
http://www.cotton.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=258
Cotton Introduces Legislation to Postpone Impending Termination of Essential NSA Counterterrorism Program
November 17, 2015
Contact: Caroline Rabbitt (202) 224-2353
Washington, D.C.- Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) will today introduce the Liberty Through Strength Act, which would delay the USA FREEDOM Act's termination of the terrorist metadata collection program until the President can certify that the new NSA collection system is as effective as the current system.
"The terrorist attacks in Paris last week are a terrible reminder of the threats we face every day. And it made clear that the President's empty policy of tough talk and little action isn't working against ISIS. Regrettably, these policy follies also extend to the Intelligence Community, whose hands were tied by the passage of the USA FREEDOM ACT. This legislation, along with President Obama's unilateral actions to restrict the Intelligence Community's ability to track terrorist communications, takes us from a constitutional, legal, and proven NSA collection architecture to an untested, hypothetical one that will be less effective. And this transition will occur less than two weeks from today, at a time when our threat level is incredibly high.
"If we take anything from the Paris attacks, it should be that vigilance and safety go hand-in-hand. Now is not the time to sacrifice our national security for political talking points. We should allow the Intelligence Community to do their job and provide them with the tools they need to keep us safe. Passing the Liberty Through Strength Act will empower the NSA to uncover threats against the United States and our allies, help keep terrorists out of the United States, and track down those responsible in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks."
Background: In June, the Senate passed the USA FREEDOM ACT, which dramatically altered the NSA metadata collection system. The changes are effective December 1, 2015. The Liberty Through Strength Act would:
- Extend the transition timeline in the USA FREEDOM Act until after January 31, 2017, and upon certification from the President that the new architecture will have no operational impacts;
- Makes permanent the USA PATRIOT Act's "lone wolf" and roving wiretap provisions.
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Nearly 5 dozen ISIS arrests in US this year. - NYT
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/02/us/politics/56-arrests-in-us-this-year-related-to-isis-study-says.html?_r=1
https://cchs.gwu.edu/sites/cchs.gwu.edu/files/downloads/ISIS%20in%20America%20-%20Full%20Report.pdf
"JV Team". "Contained'. What threat?
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By Scott Stewart
In the wake of the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris and the Nov. 20 attack against the Radisson Blu Hotel in Bamako, Mali, I have been fielding a lot of press queries about countering the armed assault tactics used in both attacks. Since there seems to be so much interest in the topic, it seemed worthwhile to discuss both government and personal responses to armed assaults in this week's Security Weekly.
A Long History
First, it is important to realize that armed assaults employing small arms and grenades have long been a staple of modern terrorism. Such assaults have been employed in many famous terrorist attacks conducted by a wide array of groups, such as the Black September operation against Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics; the December 1975 seizure of OPEC headquarters in Vienna, Austria, led by Carlos the Jackal; the December 1985 simultaneous attacks against the airports in Rome and Vienna by the Abu Nidal Organization; and even the December 2001 attack against the Indian parliament building in New Delhi led by Kashmiri militants.
In a particularly brutal assault, Chechen militants stormed a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, in September 2004, taking more than 1,000 hostages and booby-trapping the school with mines and improvised explosive devices. The attack, standoff and eventual storming of the school by Russian authorities after a three-day siege resulted in the deaths of more than 320 people, half of them children.
More recently, we saw armed assaults used in the November 2008 Mumbai attacks; the October 2014 attack against the Canadian National War Memorial and Parliament in Ottawa, Canada; the January 2015 Paris attacks against Charlie Hebdo and a kosher deli; and the July 2015 attack against an armed forces recruitment center and a Navy reserve center in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
In some instances, such as the December 1996 seizure of the Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima, Peru, by the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, the objective of the armed assault is to take and intentionally hold hostages for a long period. In other instances, such as the May 1972 assault on Lod Airport by members of the Japanese Red Army, the armed assault is a suicide attack designed to kill as many victims as possible before the assailants themselves are killed or incapacitated.
Many recent jihadist attacks have been the latter, and as such they more closely resemble domestic active shooter situations than a barricade or traditional hostage situation. Because of this, they must be responded to differently.
Dealing With Armed Assaults
The long history of armed assaults in modern terrorism has compelled many countries to develop specialized and highly trained forces to combat heavily armed terrorists. For example, it was the failed rescue attempt of the Israeli athletes in Munich that motivated the German government to create the elite Grenzschutzgruppe 9 (GSG 9), which would become one of the best counterterrorism forces in the world. The activities of the Provisional Irish Republican Army likewise helped shape the British Special Air Service into its role as an elite counterterrorism force. Beyond national-level assets, the threat of heavily armed criminals and terrorists has also contributed to the development and widespread adoption of highly trained police, SWAT and counterassault teams by many cities, states and other subnational governments across the globe.
In traditional barricade or hostage situations, the most common tactical response is for the first officers responding to the scene to establish a perimeter to contain the incident. They then wait for hostage negotiators and SWAT or other hostage rescue teams to arrive to handle the crisis. This response is effective for a prolonged hostage situation. However, in the second type of armed assault, it permits the attackers free rein to find and kill many more victims inside the established perimeter. Many times, the attackers are also suicidal and are not planning on surviving the incident.
In the United States, the April 1999 attack at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, was a watershed event that changed the way authorities responded to the second type of armed assault. In the aftermath of Columbine, officials learned that while the police established the perimeter and waited, the two attackers continued to kill students inside the school. Clearly while a shooter was actively killing people, the police could not just sit back and wait for specialty forces to respond to the scene. Moreover, since it often takes time for the specialized units to mobilize and respond, such a delay can prove deadly.
Consequently, so-called active shooter protocols, which called for first responding officers to quickly form a team and then engage and neutralize the shooter as quickly as possible to save lives, were developed and adopted. Active shooter protocols have required police officers to undergo additional training and many police departments are now issuing officers rifles or shotguns so that they do not have to face an active shooter situation with a firepower disadvantage.
Stratfor has long said that ordinary police on patrol are an often overlooked but critical facet of national counterterrorism defenses. While spotting unusual behavior and conducting traffic stops are important, nowhere is the role of regular police officers more important than in responding to active shooter situations. Not only are street cops the most likely force to make first contact with attackers, but in many cases they are also the primary force called upon to stop them.
Officers employing active shooter protocols stopped attackers in the Chattanooga shootings, and in the October 2015 Umpqua Community College shooting in Roseburg, Oregon. In the Ottawa attack as well as the May 2015 attack against a provocative event in Garland, Texas, security personnel protecting the facility stopped the assailants. The police in Colorado Springs, Colorado, also employed active shooter protocol in the Nov. 27 shooting incident at a Planned Parenthood office. While one police officer was killed and four others were wounded, their rapid response undoubtedly saved lives.
Active shooter protocols rapidly spread to other First World countries through training literature and conferences. However, as evidenced by the 2008 Mumbai attacks and the September 2013 attack against the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya, in which security forces did not take active shooter counter actions and attackers were permitted to continue killing, it has taken a bit longer to get to security forces elsewhere. That said, the Malian and French special operations forces' actions during the Bamako attack and the Afghan government's response to several armed assaults in Kabul highlight that the concept is being spread to other governments through training programs such as the U.S. State Department's Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program and its Department of Defense equivalent, as well as through training provided by European and Australian forces.
In the United States, armed off-duty cops and civilians can also make a difference in countering armed assaults. In February 2007, for example, a heavily armed gunman who had killed five people in the Trolley Square Mall in Salt Lake City, Utah, was confronted by an off-duty police officer, who cornered the shooter and kept him pinned down until other officers could arrive and kill the shooter. The off-duty officer's actions plainly saved many lives that evening.
Individual Responses
But it is not just the authorities that need to respond to armed assaults. Ordinary citizens also need to learn to quickly respond to danger. Properly responding to danger actually begins well before the first shot is fired when people adopt a mindset that recognizes the world is a dangerous place and that they are ultimately responsible for their own safety.
Once a person understands the possibility of being targeted and decides to adopt an appropriate level of situational awareness, he or she will be mentally prepared to quickly realize that an attack is happening, something security professionals refer to as attack recognition.
The earlier a person recognizes that an attack is developing, the better chance he has to avoid it. But even once the attack has begun, a person can still keep it from being a successful one by quickly recognizing what is happening and getting away from the attack site by running or hiding — or fighting back if they cannot run or hide.
However, once a person has recognized that an attack is taking place, a critical step must be taken before he can decide to run, hide or fight: He must determine where the gunfire or threat is coming from. Without doing so, the victim could run blindly from a position of relative safety into danger. I certainly encourage anyone under attack to leave the attack site and run away from the danger, but one must first ascertain if he is in the attack site before taking action. Many times, the source of the threat will be evident and will not take much time to locate. But sometimes, depending on the location — whether in a building or on the street — the sounds of gunfire can echo, and it may take a few seconds to determine the direction it is coming from. In such a scenario, it is prudent to quickly take cover until the direction of the threat can be located. In some instances, there may even be more than one gunman, which can complicate escape plans.
Fortunately, most active shooters are not well trained. They tend to be poor marksmen who lack experience with their weapons. During the July 2012 shooting in Aurora, Colorado, James Holmes managed to kill only 12 people — despite achieving almost total tactical surprise in a fully packed movie theater — because of a combination of poor marksmanship and his inability to clear a jam in his rifle.
This typical lack of marksmanship implies that most people killed in active shooter situations are shot at close range. Thus, it behooves potential victims to move quickly to put as much distance between themselves and the threat. Even the act of moving, especially if moving away at an angle, makes one a much harder target for a poorly trained marksman to hit.
It is also important to think about and distinguish between concealment and cover. Items that conceal, such as a bush, can hide you from the shooter's line of vision but will not protect you from bullets the way a substantial tree trunk will. Likewise, in an office setting, a typical drywall construction interior wall can provide concealment but not cover, meaning a shooter will still be able to fire through the walls and door. Still, if the shooter cannot see his or her target, they will be firing blindly rather than aiming their weapon, reducing the probability of hitting a target.
In any case, those hiding inside a room should attempt to find some sort of additional cover, such as a filing cabinet or heavy desk. It is always better to find cover than concealment, but even partial cover — something that will only deflect or fragment the projectiles — is preferable to no cover at all.
There are many examples from the recent Paris and Bamako armed assaults of people who ran away from the scene of the attacks and survived. In the Bamako attack there were also many people who barricaded themselves inside their hotel rooms and hid until the authorities could rescue them. The August 2015 incident aboard a Paris-bound train provided a good example of potential victims who were trapped aboard a train car and fought back to end an armed assault.
Some people have mocked the simplicity of run, hide, fight. But as these cases demonstrate, all three elements of this mantra can and do save lives.
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Pictures of Farook and his Jihadi babe with background music of Bruce Springsteen singing "Born in the USA" (at least for Farook so far as we know) might be a apra pro (sp?) youtube video.
I am sure the liberal Springsteen would feint outrage.
Huff compost did not mention the words Muslim and on page two that it "might be terrorism".
I disagree. Obviously if they were at a Christmas party then it must really have been work place violence.
Or how about "Musals who went Postal".
Not a peep so far from the Narcissist in chief except that we need more gun control. Same for the other planning to be liar in chief - Hillary.
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Over 35 yrs ago a member of the Secret Service told me that a well planned "professional" assassination attempt of the PTUS could succeed. He gave me one example. Put dog in the WH grounds to set off cameras and distract while murderers would move elsewhere. His opinion was that a government o even mafia wanted to get the Prez they could. I am otherwise in no position to judge than or now. He added the SS (sounds Nazi! :-o)
stops the "crazies" who announce their plans ahead of time or are so mickey mouse anyone could see it coming and stop it. He told me about the SS agent whose rapid brilliant thinking prevented a complete loser like Squeaky From from shooting Ford. When he saw the hand with the revolver extend out from the crowd just a few feet from Ford he immediately put the web between his thumb an index finger between the hammer and firing pin to prevent the gun from going off. He was also able to grab the gun away from her:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/new-breaches-revealed-in-report-that-says-secret-service-is-in-crisis/2015/12/02/f99869ba-9905-11e5-8917-653b65c809eb_story.html
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Obama said this morning that it might be work place violence in San Bernardino.
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Obama said this morning that it might be work place violence in San Bernardino.
Of course. What else could it be?
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"Obama said this morning that it might be work place violence in San Bernardino."
Using Doug's once used perfect response to this:
Quoting the great Gomer Pyle:
"surprise, surprise, surprise".
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Muslims shooting up San Bernardino... 3 of them as a matter of fact - hard to blame work place violence with three shooters...
DDF's post was the first notice I found that they were Muslim. Is the media afraid we will draw the wrong conclusion? Or the right one??
Would they avoid leading us to the wrong conclusion if he considered himself a tea party member instead of a 'Sunni Muslim'?
Shooters also had an interest in planting bombs. Would tighter gun control, disarming the victims, prevent that?
The President immediately says we need more gun control. But there is no correlation between gun control laws and homicide rate:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/10/06/zero-correlation-between-state-homicide-rate-and-state-gun-laws/
These shooting investigations keep turning in one of two directions, shooters who are psychologically deranged and shooters that are inspired by Islam, (assuming those are separate categories). Rather than disarm the victims, why don't we talk about how to disarm (or when justified, deport or institutionalize) the shooters, before they shoot. If going after the real problem is not politically correct, we could just ignore this and hide the videos. After all, 14 murdered (so far) is a typical autumn week in gun-controlled Chicago.
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I blame the lax gun laws in California and France.
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http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/03/us/san-bernardino-shooting/index.html
Obviously, the confederate flag continues to kill.
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Did everyone miss the video?
The shooter was upset having been discriminated against because he was Muslim. They had no Ramadan celebration for him. Even worse, he was "mocked" by the people he worked with inviting him to a Christmas Party. It was a direct insult to him and Islam.
Therefore, the shooter was mentally deranged into committing work place violence.................
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Did everyone miss the video?
The shooter was upset having been discriminated against because he was Muslim. They had no Ramadan celebration for him. Even worse, he was "mocked" by the people he worked with inviting him to a Christmas Party. It was a direct insult to him and Islam.
Therefore, the shooter was mentally deranged into committing work place violence.................
Exactly!
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The shooter was upset having been discriminated against because he was Muslim. They had no Ramadan celebration for him. Even worse, he was "mocked" by the people he worked with inviting him to a Christmas Party. It was a direct insult to him and Islam.
Right, but he also massively pre-planned it down to the choosing of his 'partner'. Hard to believe the county government isn't Ramadan-friendly. But Islam friendly to people like him means having no living, breathing infidels - anywhere.
Now we have to stomp out Christian celebrations for public safety reasons.
Also we will need to find a radical Islam-friendly home for the placement of the infant.
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The shooter was upset having been discriminated against because he was Muslim. They had no Ramadan celebration for him. Even worse, he was "mocked" by the people he worked with inviting him to a Christmas Party. It was a direct insult to him and Islam.
Also we will need to find a radical Islam-friendly home for the placement of the infant.
Syria has several available currently. It shouldn't be a problem. I'll even donate to the airfare.
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San Bernardino Shooter May Have Acquired Guns Illegally
http://www.mrctv.org/blog/san-bernardino-shooter-may-have-acquired-guns-illegally#.ta363u7:xcUb
Nothing is more laughable than gun laws, even for felons.
There is no one that has the right to tell you to what degree you may defend yourself. That comes from one's creator.
Which... is what makes "gun laws" laughable to begin with.
Nature is not a nice place... not by humans, individuals nor governments...and there is always is someone that will want YOU to be disarmed...which is why everyone must be.
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Gun control? Better add pipe bomb control to that.
Maybe I am over-reacting, but what if we passed a law prohibiting all types of mass murder and eliminated the whole problem all at once!
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https://www.facebook.com/theblaze/videos/1018983194805687/
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/427990/san-bernardino-shooting-refugee-crisis-ted-cruz-jeff-sessions
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Second post
San Bernardino Shooter Passed DHS Counterterrorism Background Check
Heck of a job, Department of Homeland Security:
Federal investigators believe there is a “very serious” possibility that Tashfeen Malik, one of two shooters who murdered 14 people and wounded 21 others in San Bernardino, Calif. Wednesday, radicalized her husband and co-assailant, county restaurant inspector Syed Farook, Fox News has learned.
Investigators also believe that the couple had planned a second attack after the shooting at a social service center for the disabled when they were killed in a shootout with local authorities approximately two miles away.
Officials said Thursday that Malik underwent and passed a Department of Homeland Security counterterrorism screening as part of the process of getting the K-1 visa. The visa would have been effective for 90 days, after which Malik would have had to apply for green card status through the Department of Homeland Security as the wife of an American. It was not immediately clear whether she did so.
Hey, where else have we heard about the Department of Homeland Security counterterrorism screening lately? Oh, that’s right, when the White House was assuring us about how great DHS would be at weeding out any terrorists or criminals from the Syrian refugees:
U.S. security agencies screen the candidate, including:
-National Counterterrorism Center/Intelligence Community
-FBI
-Department of Homeland Security
-State Department
The screening looks for indicators, like:
-Information that the individual is a security risk
-Connections to known bad actors
-Outstanding warrants/immigration or criminal violations
DHS conducts an enhanced review of Syrian cases, which may be referred to USCIS Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate for review. Research that is used by the interviewing officer informs lines of question related to the applicant’s eligibility and credibility.
Oh, and when the White House was assuring us about the visa-waiver program.
Every prospective VWP traveler undergoes counterterrorism screening and must receive approval through DHS’ Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA). Through ESTA, DHS evaluates whether individuals are eligible to travel to the United States under the VWP before they are allowed to board a carrier bound for the United States.
The counterterrorism screening draws on information from U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies. DHS uses this information to decide if the travel poses any law enforcement or security risks. Without DHS approval through ESTA, VWP travelers cannot travel to the United States and must appear in person for a visa interview before they can be authorized to travel to the United States.
If you’re wondering where they learned to make pipe bombs . . .
Law enforcement sources tell CBS News senior investigative producer Pat Milton the suspects’ explosive devices owned by California shooters Syed Rizwan, and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, are nearly a carbon copy of bomb constructing instructions provided for in one of the very first issues of al Qaeda’s online magazine, INSPIRE, entitled “How To Build A Bomb In the Kitchen of Your Mom.”
At their home, they had 12 pipe bombs, tools for making more such explosives, and over 3,000 more rounds of ammunition, Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said.
The bombs in their various stages were made of the ingredients provided for in terrorists’ groups INSPIRE magazine, including Christmas tree lights to serve as a fuse, radio controlled toys to be used as a triggering mechanism and smokeless gun powder, according to the source.
They left no manifesto. The hard drive was gone from their computer. And their new cell phones were apparently smashed.
Go Figure, the Terrorists’ Guns Were Illegal
It was bound to happen; we would get hit by terrorists, and the leadership of the Democratic party would respond with a call for gun control. It’s as if George W. Bush responded to 9/11 with calls for box-cutter control.
My friend Liz Sheld points out:
While we hear more grandstanding about the need for more gun control, keep in mind all the current laws that were broken to execute this violent massacre:
-The shooters used weapons they did not purchase, sounds like a straw purchase or illegal transfer.
-The shooters modified guns to accept high capacity magazines.
-The shooter modified guns for automatic fire.
Can anyone think of a law we could put in place that these homicidal maniacs, or any criminal or homicidal maniac, would follow? I can’t.
And because the media is so stupid about guns, they don’t know that the firearm laws pertain not just to purchases but also to the way a gun is used. That is an inconvenient pill to swallow for the gun grabbers because if they consider the way firearms are used, the focus turns to the person using the gun and not the gun itself. Their propaganda is designed to demonize the gun, not to look at the people who are misusing firearms. They don’t want you to ask questions like “What’s going on in the inner cities of Chicago?”
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Are you fg kidding me?
https://pjmedia.com/trending/2015/12/3/obama-names-hamas-sympathizer-as-new-isis-czar
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Yet 80% of Jews still bend over backwards to support the Jew hater.
The enemy once again is all Republicans.
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Or is it forwards? :x :x :x
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This group is 'Jewish Republicans' (a contradiction?), they are the 20%, not the 80.
A strong Republican candidate should be able to drive that up to maybe 21-22%...
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AMERICA’S PATHOLOGICAL DENIAL OF REALITY
In America of 2015, natural conclusions about the San Bernardino jihadists are considered irresponsible, at best.
December 4, 2015 Caroline Glick
Originally published by the Jerusalem Post.
How much lower will America sink before it regains its senses? Wednesday, two Muslims walked into a Christmas party at a community service center in San Bernardino, California where one worked. They were wearing body armor and video cameras and carrying automatic rifles, pipe bombs and pistols. They opened fire, killed 14, and wounded 17.
The murderers, Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik were killed by police.
Speaking to the Daily News, Farook’s father said his son, “was very religious. He would go to work, come back, go to pray, come back. He’s Muslim.”
Farook’s neighbor told the paper that over the past two years, Farook exchanged his Western dress for Islamic gowns and grew a beard.
These data points lead naturally to the conclusion that Farook and his wife were jihadists who killed in order to kill in the name of Islam.
But in America of December 2015, natural conclusions are considered irresponsible, at best.
In an interview with CNN following the shooting, US President Barack Obama said the massacre demonstrates that the US needs stricter gun laws. As for the motives of the shooters, Obama shrugged. “We don’t yet know the motives of the shooters,” he insisted.
In other words, while ignoring what in all likelihood drove Farooq and his wife to murder innocent people, Obama laid responsibility for the carnage at the feet of his political opponents who reject his demands for stricter limitations on gun ownership.
Here is the place to note that California has some of the most stringent gun control laws in the US.
According to the victims, Farook and his partners were able to reload their weapons and shoot without interruption for several minutes until the police arrived because there was no one to stop them.
Obama wasn’t alone in deflecting attention away from the likely motivations of the murderers.
Wednesday evening, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), held a press conference at the Islamic Center of Orange County. Farook’s brother in law, Farhan Khan was carted out before the cameras to tell the world that he for one had no idea why his brother in law opened fire.
Two other speakers at the event were Hussam Auyloush, CAIR’s regional executive director and Muzammil Siddiqi, the director of the Islamic Society of Orange County.
Auyloush insisted that he had no idea would could have possibly prompted Farook and his wife to murder those gathered at the center. Auyloush raised the prospect that they could have been mentally ill, or perhaps they just didn’t like the victims, or maybe they were garden-variety extremists.
For his part, Siddiqi insisted that Islam had nothing to do with the shooters’ decision to murder innocent people, (how he could be so certain, is unknown).
Siddiqi added that he hopes law enforcement bodies will conduct a full investigation into the “people and motives,” behind the attack.
To a degree, the very fact that Siddiqi had no compunction about stepping in front of the cameras just hours after the attack is proof that the US has lost its way.
If American elites were even semi-competent, Siddiqi would have faded into the shadows, never to emerge again 15 years ago.
Siddiqi is a known jihadist sympathizer. His close ties to jihadists have been a matter of public record since 2000.
In October 2000, Siddiqi spoke at an anti-Israel rally in Lafayette Park in Washington, DC. There he warned the American people that they must abandon their support for Israel lest “the wrath of God” be unleashed against them.
According to a profile of Siddiqi compiled by the Investigative Project on Terrorism, (IPT) in the late 1990s Siddiqi gave a speech extolling jihad and foreseeing Israel’s replacement with an Islamic state.
Among other things, Siddiqi said, “In order to gain the honor, jihad is the path, jihad is the way to receive the honor.”
Siddiqi converted Osama bin Laden’s senior aide, American jihadist Adam Gadahn. Gadahn converted to Islam at the Islamic Center of Orange County in 1995. According to a 2007 New Yorker profile, Siddiqi employed Gadahn at the Center in the years following his conversion. It was during this period that Gadahn was radicalized. He then went to Pakistan and joined al Qaida.
In 1992 Siddiqi hosted a blind sheikh named Omar Abdel Rahman at the Islamic Center. He stood beside Rahman and simultaneously translated his lecture about jihad to the audience of worshipers.
The next year, Rahman masterminded the first jihadist attack on the World Trade Center.
During the 1990s, Siddiqi served as the president of the Islamic Society of North America, a known Muslim Brotherhood front group. In 2007, ISNA was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holyland terror financing trial.
Despite all of his connections to jihadists, US authorities insist that Siddiqi is a legitimate voice. In 2007 Stephen Tidwell, then assistant director of the FBI division in Los Angeles upheld Siddiqi as a moderate.
Speaking to the IPT, Tidwell said, “We have a very strong relationship with Dr. Siddiqi.”
Hours before Obama responded to the San Bernadino massacre by lashing out at gun control opponents, Col. Steve Warren, spokesman for US Operation Inherent Resolve – the US campaign against Islamic State – rejected Russian claims that the Turkish government is collaborating with the terror state.
Warren praised the Turks as “great partners to us.”
“We flatly reject any notion that the Turks are somehow working with Islamic State. That is preposterous,” he insisted, adding, “Any thought” the Turkish government would deal or collaborate with Islamic State is “completely untrue.”
Unfortunately, a wealth of evidence indicates that it is Warren’s statement that is preposterous and completely untrue.
For nearly five years, it has been an open secret that Turkey serves as Islamic State’s logistical base. Almost all the foreigners traveling to Syria to join IS transit through Turkey.
For nearly two years, we have known that Turkey is Islamic State’s major arms supplier. And for six months we have known that they are their partners in oil exports.
In an article published this past summer in Middle East Quarterly, Burak Bekdil reported in January 2014, Turkish prosecutors acting independently from the government, dispatched forces to a border province with Syria to intercept a convoy of trucks laden with missiles, rockets and ammunition making its way to Syria. One of the truck drivers testified at the time that he and his colleagues had “carried similar loads several times before.”
The forces charged with seizing the cargo were shocked to discover the trucks were being escorted by Turkish intelligence officers.
According to Bekdil, “all hell broke loose,” after the prosecutors ordered the men arrested and the cargo seized.
The provincial governor swooped in and insisted that the convoy was traveling on direct orders from Turkish leader Recep Tayip Erdogan. Months later, the military took over the case. And today, the men who executed the arrests and cargo seizure are on trial for “international espionage.”
Bekdil reported that two months after the cargo was intercepted, a meeting took place between then foreign minister and current Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, his deputy, Feridun Sinirlioglu, the head of Turkish intelligence, Hakan Fidan and deputy chief of the Turkish general staff, Gen. Yasar Guler.
A recording of the meeting was leaked to social media. In the recording, Fidan is heard saying that “he had successfully sent two thousand trucks into Syria before.”
As to Islamic State oil sales to Turkey, this past May, US special forces executed their first known raid inside Syria. The commandos descended on the home of Islamic State’s financial chief Abu Sayyaf. US forces killed Sayyaf and seized his computers and hard drives.
Sayyaf directed Islamic State’s oil, gas and financial operations.
Last July the Guardian reported that the computer data revealed close, direct dealings between Turkish officials and Islamic State members. According to one senior Western official familiar with the contents of the documents, just from what had been uncovered in the initial study of the material, “the links [between Islamic State and the Turkish government] are already so clear that they could end up having profound policy implications for the relationship between us and Ankara.”
Yet Wednesday, in the face of an overwhelming mountain of evidence, the Americans rejected out-of-hand Russians allegations that Turkey is the main consumer of oil exports from Islamic State.
This past July, two senior Defense Intelligence Agency analysts assigned to US Central Command submitted a formal complaint to the Defense Department’s inspector general. The two claimed that their intelligence reports on Islamic State were doctored and distorted as they made their way up the feeding chain to Obama. Fifty intelligence analysts have stated their agreement with the allegations in the complaint.
The doctored reports systematically rendered portraits of the US campaign against Islamic State as successful and Islamic State as a nearly spent force, along the lines of the narrative presented by Obama and his advisors. According to the analysts, the picture painted by the doctored reports bore little resemblance to their far more negative conclusions.
According to the Daily Beast’s report, intelligence analysts began complaining to their superiors about the distortion of their reports in October 2014. Some of those analysts were urged to retire early, and some did.
According to the publication, “one person who knows the contents of the written complaint… said it used the word ‘Stalinist’ to describe the tone set by officials overseeing CENTCOM analysis.”
Following the jihadist attacks on Paris on November 13, Obama maintained his insistence that climate change is a graver threat to US national security than terrorism. It could be that this prioritization of concerns is playing a role in the administration’s apparent determination not to seriously fight Islamic State.
In an interview with Charlie Rose last month, former CIA director Michael Morell explained that the administration decided not to bomb Islamic State’s oil infrastructure “because we didn’t want to do environmental damage.”
According to the Guardian, Islamic State makes between one to four million dollars per day from oil sales.
Perhaps the shooters in San Bernadino were just mad at their boss. Maybe Farooq suffered from clinical depression or ADD, or PTSD, or something.
And maybe Islamic State, with its new colony Sirte in “liberated” Libya, just 400 miles from Italy, is on the run. Maybe as well, Turkey is just a patsy and Russia is really Islamic State’s largest trading partner, or maybe Israel is, or Ireland.
But if facts are to be taken seriously, then the fact is that in December 2015, the US is acting with pathological devotion to ideological narratives that bear no relationship to reality.
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It hurts when she equates Obama and the msm with America.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2015/12/04/oh-by-the-way-the-san-bernardino-jihadi-got-a-visa-to-enter-the-u-s-by-providing-a-fake-address/comment-page-1/#comments
No worries.
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Following along from that link:
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/12/04/surreal-media-pushes-into-farooks-apartment-rifles-through-everything-there/
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This was just on Mexican news this morning.
One of the victims was "friends" with the attacker. He was a native of Sonora.
The victim's wife was interviewed.
Ask her what she thinks about Islam now.
Here's a link with his name for those interested.
http://intoleranciadiario.com/detalle_noticia/139380/nacional/sre-confirma-la-muerte-de-un-mexicano-en-san-bernardino
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http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/12/vet-this.php
Qualified!
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I don't understand why the US govt continues to give pakiland a pass. The wife was a paki, her husbands parents were paki. The husband went to pak as well as Saudi barbaria. Wife was associated with the Red Mosque in Pak (so called kendo stix gals)...see picture. They shot up 14 people another 14 died and we are still asking what was the motive ?.
Every terrorist attack can either be traced to ISIL or to Pak. Muslims constitute a few percent of the US population, yet every terror attack by them has been religiously motivated, Allah-ho-Akbar is the main script. Yes whites also shoot, but don't recall them ever muttering Jesus-ho-Akbar, ie the whites have had mental issues, the muslims are mostly religious nuts interested to expand their caliphate....YA
(http://i.imgur.com/AyHkQls.gif)
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Looks like the paki govt is cracking down on negative articles...so no link.
TERROR COCKTAIL, SHAKEN IN PAKISTAN, SERVED IN US
Sunday, 06 December 2015 | Kanchan Gupta | in Coffee Break
Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had spoken of “snakes in Pakistan's backyard”. With the San Bernardino attack, one of them has sunk its poison fangs into the hand that so lovingly feeds Pakistan
For all the vaunted homeland security measures, including Orwellian intrusion into private spaces and legally sanctioned eves-dropping into electronic communications, initiated after 26/11, America and Americans may claim greater safety but are in no manner entirely immune from terrorism fuelled by jihadi hate ideology. The ghastly Boston bombings have been surpassed by the grisly massacre of December 2 at San Bernardino, California, when Syed Rizwan Farook, a born-in-US American citizen of Pakistani origin, and his wife Tashfeen Malik, a Pakistani who grew up in Saudi Arabia, shot dead 14 people and injured 21 others.
The death toll would have been manifold had the jihadi couple got to use the deadly arsenal, including assault rifles, 4,500 bullets and improvised explosive devices attached to children’s toys (much like the remote-controlled ‘doll bombs’ that are the latest fetish of Islamic State barbarians) they had put together. Ironically, the guns and bullets they used to kill Americans in cold blood were acquired in America, legally. Regular mass killings, including the slaughter of children in schools, racially motivated attacks and targeting of Jews, have done nothing to change stupid laws that allow Americans to buy weapons of assault and run amok.
If that’s the downside, the admirable bit is about the remarkable speed and accuracy with which the first respondents, the police, in acts of terrorism react in the US. Farook and Tashfeen fled the scene of the massacre but were tracked to their home. They tried to escape in their SUV. A gunfight follfoll. They were shot dead. But that’s only one part, possibly the most inconsequential part, of the story. Jihadis are conditioned to kill mercilessly; they are prepared to die a ruthless dead. No tears need to be shed for them.
Treacly stories have appeared of how Farook and Tashfeen left their six-month-old child with her grandmother, how a bleak future lies ahead for her. There is no denying that the child shall grow up parentless and carry the burden of her parents’ crimes. She is as much a victim as those who died or suffered injuries, a testimony to the veracity of what Golda Mier said in a not-so-different context: “Peace will come when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us.” We could well adapt that wisdom to our terrible and terrifying times: “Peace will come when Islamists love their children more than they hate the rest of the world.”
There were two initial responses to the San Bernardino killings. The first was organised by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. It was the usual hackneyed stuff about how “shocked we are”. Farook’s brother-in-law was trotted out to inform the world that he was not aware of what was being planned. This is now a perfectly honed standard operating procedure for CAIR which is also in the forefront of branding critics of Islamic fanaticism as Islamophobes and hounding them with the help of Left-liberals in academia, politics and people at large. There is no shortage of them in America. But even CAIR’s crocodile tears are inconsequential and must not distract us.
The second response came from investigators who suggested the killers were driven by the impulse of “sudden jihad”. That’s a new inclusion to the ever-expanding lexicon of terrorism as well as counter-terrorism. Beyond that it means nothing. Subsequent revelations bear out this point. Also demolished once again are bleeding heart notions of denial, deprivation, lack of education, joblessness, discrimination, in brief, imagined victimhood, fuel the jihadi impulse. Farook was educated, had a reasonably good job with San Bernardino County, while Tashfeen came from a well-off family and had studied pharmacology. Workplace colleagues do not appear to have been non-inclusive. They lived in a home and neighbourhood far more decent than they would have in Pakistan.
So what do we know now that should worry America and make us feel concerned? Three revelations by the FBI, which has designated the killings as ‘terrorism’, are of import. First, Farook visited Saudi Arabia where he met and married Tashfeen. He may also have met his jihadi mentors there. Farook is likely to have been in touch with one or more terrorist organisations. It is unlikely his conversion from chasing the American dream to chasing the jihadi dream was of recent vintage. Like the beard he grew, the jihadi impulse must have taken time to overwhelm his critical thinking after being planted in his mind.
Second, before they embarked upon their shoot-to-kill mission, Tashfeen is believed to have declared her allegiance to the Islamic State. Her crossing the line and entering the zone of no return would have followed contemplation and reasonable exposure to jihad’s dark ideology and acceptance as well as internalisation of the Islamic State’s message of recreating the caliphate on the foundation of hate. Nobody crosses over just like that. The years she spent in Saudi Arabia, imbibing Wahaabi fanaticism, would have prepared her for the final step.
Third, Tashfeen, who grew up in Saudi Arabia after moving there at the age of two with her parents, returned to Pakistan to study pharmacology. Investigators say she came in contact with Maulana Abdul Aziz who is the chief cleric at Islamabad’s infamous Lal Masjid with which she was subsequently associated. Lal Masjid became a terror den during Gen Pervez Musharraf’s time, taunting the military and mocking him. Matters came to a pass when Lal Masjid thugs went after Chinese workers. To pacify an enraged Beijing, Musharraf ordered a raid on Lal Majid and its fortified madarsas for men and women. Aziz tried to escape in a burqa but was caught.
That was in 2007. Two years later Aziz was back in business after being set free by Pakistan’s sainted judges occupying seats in its hallowed courts of justice. All he had to do was plead “Not guilty”. The state, as always, did not press for prosecution. Aziz has since named the library at Lal Masjid after Osama bin Laden, set up a network of madarsas that are cradles of future terrorists, declared allegiance to the Islamic State and refused to condemn the 2014 Peshawar School carnage in which 148 children aged eight to 15 were killed by the Pakistani Taliban. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s alleged civilian Government and the Pakistani Army mollycoddle him.
So it’s a deadly cocktail of Army, Allah and America, shaken in Saudi Arabia, stirred in Pakistan and served in America. Hillary Clinton spoke of “snakes in Pakistan’s backyard”. One of them has sunk its poison fangs into the hand that so lovingly feeds Pakistan. Deceit and duplicity, when used as instruments of dollar-funded ‘strategic diplomacy’, can never fetch anything that is even remotely good. A second lesson: Both Paris and San Bernardino suggest we will increasingly witness female jihadis playing a prominent role in terrorist attacks. Paris was a repeat of 26/11 in both tactics and strategy. San Bernardino was more a ‘lone wolf’ attack. Paris proved, at a grievous cost to human lives, that our cities remain vulnerable in the face of unrelenting Islamism, especially of the vicious Islamic State variety. San Bernardino has shown what we are up next.
(The author is a current affairs journalist based in NCR)
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Interesting article YA, thank you (and good to see you with us again!).
For the record
"Ironically, the guns and bullets they used to kill Americans in cold blood were acquired in America, legally. Regular mass killings, including the slaughter of children in schools, racially motivated attacks and targeting of Jews, have done nothing to change stupid laws that allow Americans to buy weapons of assault and run amok"
is NOT quite right. If I have this right, (and I do think I have the gist of it) the main guns were acquired via straw purchase, the magazines were illegal, and if reports of modification to full auto are accurate, then that too was illegal.
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Free people own weapons, slaves do not.
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OBAMA’S ISIS COVER-UP GETS ITS OWN SPEECH
Instead of fighting ISIS, Obama wants to fight the Bill of Rights.
December 7, 2015 Daniel Greenfield
Obama began his speech with a cover-up, suggesting that Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik’s bloody San Bernardino massacre was not the work of ISIS.
Whatever dignity his Oval Office speech was meant to convey was lost in his opening sentences as his speech became yet another effort to claim that he hadn’t made a mistake by assuring Americans they had nothing to worry about from ISIS right before its latest terror attack.
Farook and Malik were “self-radicalized”. Their attack was not part of a “broader conspiracy”. But ISIS and Al Qaeda have both embraced a strategy of empowering local supporters to carry out their own attacks by giving them the tools and strategies to do so. Malik pledged allegiance to ISIS. Farook, according to his father, was a supporter of the Islamic State. The worst terror attacks in America in recent years were carried out by these independent Islamic terror cells in support of the Jihad.
These so-called “lone wolf” attacks are part of the broader ISIS and Al Qaeda conspiracy.
Instead of leading the fight against ISIS, Obama is making excuses for his latest failures while trying to once again minimize the threat of the global terror group that he had once described as a JV team.
Back in September, Obama’s strategy for defeating ISIS was, and I quote, "We don't have a strategy yet."
For months we have been hearing that the dog had eaten Obama’s ISIS strategy. It was coming. It was in the mail. It was going to be here soon. It was going to arrive one of these days.
Now, after the latest ISIS terror attack, Obama has finally unveiled his strategy. It consists of doing the same things he’s been doing all along while claiming that he was right all along.
For Obama, success means doubling down on failure.
His plan for defeating ISIS is more fake air strikes, more weapons for terrorists, more empty talk of coalitions and a plea for Putin to bail him out. That last part is somewhat new. That’s about it.
American soldiers will go on fighting ISIS on the ground, but according to Obama it’s not a violation of his pledge that there will be no “boots on the ground” unless it’s a brigade. Weapons will go on being passed out to terrorists even though they’ve found their way to Al Qaeda and ISIS before.
At home, he’ll be relying on the same old Muslim Brotherhood community policing policies that have crippled law enforcement’s ability to intercept plots by Islamic terrorists using informants.
Obama concedes that, “an extremist ideology has spread within some Muslim communities”, but claims that Farook and Malik were only “embracing a perverted interpretation of Islam that calls for war against America and the West.” As opposed to the regular form of Islam which calls for the same thing.
ISIS, he tells Americans, is a “cult of death” that does not speak for Islam and “millions of patriotic Muslim-Americans… reject their hateful ideology”. Would these be the Muslims who allow Muslim Brotherhood front groups like CAIR and ISNA with terrorist ties, to speak for them?
But did anyone really expect anything different from Obama?
The media was hoping for an inspirational speech, but Obama ran out of inspiration about the same time that Americans ran out of jobs and hope for the future. All that’s left is narcissistic preening.
We’ve been getting variations of this passive aggressive speech for years now in which Obama condescendingly informs the nation that he knows what he’s doing and isn’t about to change a thing, and then issues some random demands to Congress to try and pass the responsibility to someone else.
All the tired old clichés are here. Anyone who wants to take on ISIS is just “giving it what it wants”. Because apparently what the Islamic State really, really wants is for us to crack down on terrorists.
Anyone who disagrees with Obama is “giving into fear” or “abandoning our values”. And yet it’s Obama who demands that we give in to fear by compromising the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights.
Obama insists that any profiling of Muslims would be “abandoning our values”, but that rolling back the Second Amendment for the entire country somehow isn’t a fearful abandonment of our values.
He claims that a crackdown on terrorists would be “giving into fear”, but creating a class of people who are denied their Second Amendment rights because their names appear on a no-fly list wouldn’t be.
Obama’s solution to ISIS terror at home isn’t to target Islamic terrorists, but to roll back the Bill of Rights for the entire country or select sections of it who, like Ted Kennedy, wind up on the no-fly list.
But would Obama be open to deporting non-citizens who appear on the no-fly list? Don’t bet on it. The people on it are too dangerous to be allowed to buy guns, but not too dangerous to stay in America.
The former isn’t “giving into fear” or “abandoning our values”. Only the latter is.
Instead of fighting ISIS, Obama wants to fight the Bill of Rights. Instead of targeting Islamic terrorists, he’s still going after Americans who cling to their guns and bibles. When he says, “freedom is more powerful than fear”, his own words and actions show that he does not mean it. He’s just selling fear of the NRA, instead of fear of Islamic terrorists.
Obama triples down on bringing tens of thousands of Syrian Muslim migrants, 13% of whom poll as supporting ISIS, to America. He insists once again, falsely, that “It is our responsibility to reject religious tests on who we admit into this country.” We actually have religious tests to determine who is being persecuted and who isn’t a genuine refugee. In Syria, that’s Christians and Yazidis.
But Obama instead took in 98% Sunni Muslims, 53 Christians and 1 single Yazidi. That’s a “religious test” too. He just refuses to admit it.
Obama continues to troll Congress with demands for a new AUMF against ISIS. Secretary of State Kerry had already told the Senate, “The President already has statuary authority to act against ISIL.” The original 9/11 authorization for the use of military force still holds. Obama doesn’t need a new AUMF. For that matter he fought a war in Libya without the faintest shred of Congressional authorization.
So why does he keep mentioning a new AUMF? To shift responsibility for his inaction to Congress.
Obama is so “confident” in his ISIS strategy that he keeps trying to blame it on Congress. Even when Congress has nothing to do with it.
There is no plan here for beating ISIS. No plan for stopping the next ISIS terror attack.
Instead all Obama has to offer are false claims of success, a strategy that is more of the same, attempts to shift the blame for his “successful” strategy and a carefully curated selection of the same old lies.
ISIS has new tactics on tap. Obama doesn’t. All he has is the same old claim that he is on the “right side of history.” What is the “right side of history”? It’s the side that refuses to learn anything from history because it is convinced that the past is irrelevant and its success is inevitable.
ISIS thinks the same way.
The tragedy is that both the Islamic State and the United States are led by narrow-minded fanatics who are leading their peoples to disaster in an attempt to create a utopia through abuse of power and lies.
If Obama ever wants to figure out how to really defeat ISIS, he can start by trying to figure out how he would defeat himself.
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http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/12/07/house-security-chairman-isis-tried-use-refugee-program-get-u-s/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social
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http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2015/12/middle-eastern-men-arrested-near-mexican-border-with-steel-cylinders/
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(percentages source CIA: The World Fact Book 2007):
► As long as the Muslim population remains around 1% of any given country they will be regarded as a peace-loving minority and not as a threat to anyone. In fact, they may be featured in articles and films, stereotyped for their colorful uniqueness:
United States — Muslim 1.0%
Canada — Muslim 1.9%
Norway — Muslim 1.8%
► At 2% and 3% they begin to proselytize other ethnic minorities and disaffected groups with major recruiting from the jails and among street gangs:
Denmark — Muslim 2%
Germany — Muslim 3.7%
United Kingdom — Muslim 2.7%
► From 5% on they exercise an inordinate influence in proportion to their percentage of the population. They will push for the introduction of halal (clean by Islamic standards) food, thereby securing food preparation jobs for Muslims. They will increase pressure on supermarket chains to feature it on their shelves — along with threats for failure to comply (United States ). At this point, they will work to get the ruling government to allow them to rule themselves under Sharia, the Islamic Law. The ultimate goal of Islam is not to convert the world but to establish Sharia law over the entire world:
France — Muslim 8%
Philippines — Muslim 5%
► When Muslims reach 10% of the population, they will increase lawlessness as a means of complaint about their conditions ( Paris –car-burnings) . Any non-Muslim action that offends Islam will result in uprisings and threats ( Amsterdam – Mohammed cartoons):
India — Muslim 13.4%
Israel — Muslim 16%
Russia — Muslim 10-15%
► After reaching 20% expect hair-trigger rioting, jihad militia formations, sporadic killings and church and synagogue burning:
Ethiopia — Muslim 32.8%
► At 40% you will find widespread massacres, chronic terror attacks and ongoing militia warfare:
Bosnia — Muslim 40%
Lebanon — Muslim 59.7%
► From 60% you may expect unfettered persecution of non-believers and other religions, sporadic ethnic cleansing (genocide), use of Sharia Law as a weapon and Jizya, the tax placed on infidels:
Malaysia — Muslim 60.4%
Qatar — Muslim 77.5%
Sudan — Muslim 70%
► After 80% expect State run ethnic cleansing and genocide:
Egypt — Muslim 90%
Indonesia — Muslim 86.1%
Iran — Muslim 98%
Iraq — Muslim 97%
Pakistan — Muslim 97%
Syria — Muslim 90%
► 100% will usher in the peace of ‘Dar-es-Salaam’, the 'Islamic House of Peace.' There is supposed to be peace because everybody is a Muslim:
Afghanistan — Muslim 100%
Saudi Arabia — Muslim 100%
Somalia — Muslim 100%
Yemen — Muslim 99.9%
Of course, that’s not the case. To satisfy their blood lust, Muslims then start killing each other for a variety of reasons.
"Before I was nine I had learned the basic canon of Arab life. It was me against my brother; me and my brother against our father; my family against my cousins and the clan; the clan against the tribe; and the tribe against the world and all of us against the infidel." –- Leon Uris, ‘The Haj’
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Trump just gave everyone "explody heads". He just called to stop all Muslims coming into the US until everything gets sorted out. Expect another 4% bump in the polls.
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DDF:
I'm thinking a lot of those numbers from 2007 may be out of date.
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DDF:
I'm thinking a lot of those numbers from 2007 may be out of date.
Obviously. The trend they show though, and what happens with certain percentages is interesting, isn't it?
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Bank records show $28,500 deposit to Syed Farook's account two weeks before the shooting, source says
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/12/08/bank-records-show-28500-deposit-to-syed-farooks-account-two-weeks-before-shooting-source-says.html?intcmp=hpbt1
Still under investigation, maybe he won the lottery... Still, this didn't happen without help.
Also of note was the body armor they allegedly wore and additional bombs not used. Bombs set on delay or remote? Rented car, left after 5 minutes, tried to get away? This was not the typical suicide mission. I haven't followed it closely but it looks to me like they tried to survive and intended to do more of these.
Not 'workplace violence', not lone wolves, not a suicide mission, our enemy is evolving faster the we are!
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1) I have read that witnesses mistook gun belt/ammo vests for body armor.
2) In a curious coincidence apparently the money was deposited on the day of the raids in Paris.
3) "Not 'workplace violence', not lone wolves, not a suicide mission, our enemy is evolving faster the we are!" Exactly so.
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It might be a good idea to try to cut off their supply of domestic jihadis. Just saying...
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1) I have read that witnesses mistook gun belt/ammo vests for body armor.
- Thank you. That piece of the puzzle made no sense to me and is an example why I don't like to follow these stories (tragedies) as they are breaking. They mostly tell you nothing and a good part of what they do tell you is wrong.
2) In a curious coincidence apparently the money was deposited on the day of the raids in Paris.
- Coincidence, yes. That doesn't mean unrelated. They may have worried that certain types of bank wires could get increased scrutiny or shut down in the aftermath.
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1) I have read that witnesses mistook gun belt/ammo vests for body armor.
- Thank you. That piece of the puzzle made no sense to me and is an example why I don't like to follow these stories (tragedies) as they are breaking. They mostly tell you nothing and a good part of what they do tell you is wrong.
2) In a curious coincidence apparently the money was deposited on the day of the raids in Paris.
- Coincidence, yes. That doesn't mean unrelated. They may have worried that certain types of bank wires could get increased scrutiny or shut down in the aftermath.
It also could have happened with a brief, planned time lapse to the Paris attacks like I have in my defeat-ISIS proposal that calls for us to knock out N.K nukes first, then Iran nukes, then the head of ISIS all on news cycle intervals, for distraction, impression, and to put a vision of defeat in their mortal head. We could conceivably take out all three before the UN could pass the first condemnation resolution- if we took action like we meant it.
You can't win.... other than protecting oneself....
I've learned some interesting things in the past few years....
If one were so inclined, the best place to get weapons, is directly from the sheepdogs. You just have to go take them from them. It isn't all that hard. Not saying that I would condone that, because I don't.
I'm merely stating that arming oneself isn't difficult and certainly will never be regulated by law when someone wants to arm themselves.
It's kind of comical.... laws, disarming the lawful.
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Then again, anyone really wishing harm to a country would never choose firearms or explosives as their weapons.
One night after a gunfight.... I was standing there with 210 rounds, and it occurred to me.... "you have 210 rounds....that's pretty powerful." A moment later it dawned on me, that even if you used every single one of those rounds, the dead would be replaced less than a day later...
It made me think.... firearms and bombs don't work.... in several of the many ways one might take that.
Personal safety matters.... "sheepdogs" cannot protect you, nor even themselves.... everyone is a wolf.... and offensive actions have nothing to do with CQC.
They can reject all of the Muslims (and they should), but the fact is, the US is still in big trouble because it thinks multiculturalism can exist in the same place and that race equals culture.... That will be the downfall of the States. You just don't know it yet.
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The author asks a good question...........what happened to the third shooter? I listened to the police feeds as SB was going on and there were continuous reports of a third shooter, eye witness, etc.
Well? Would the government "hide" this information?
http://spectator.org/articles/64891/odd-man-out-what-happened-third-shooter (http://spectator.org/articles/64891/odd-man-out-what-happened-third-shooter)
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/428227/national-security-profiling--start-now
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The author asks a good question...........what happened to the third shooter? I listened to the police feeds as SB was going on and there were continuous reports of a third shooter, eye witness, etc.
Well? Would the government "hide" this information?
http://spectator.org/articles/64891/odd-man-out-what-happened-third-shooter (http://spectator.org/articles/64891/odd-man-out-what-happened-third-shooter)
The abandonment of the crime scene was deliberate, but I doubt there was a third shooter.
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There were credible reports of a third person. I heard the same reports coming in on my scanner. Even a video showed what appeared to be three people involved.
But I guess the government would not lie about this....,.
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Now why would a couple of "foreign speaking" men go into a rural Walmart and buy 60 cell phones? Must be after the family plan.
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2015/12/large-quantity-of-cellphones-bought-by-immigrants-at-rural-missouri-walmart-sets-off-alarms/ (http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2015/12/large-quantity-of-cellphones-bought-by-immigrants-at-rural-missouri-walmart-sets-off-alarms/)
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"Now why would a couple of "foreign speaking" men go into a rural Walmart and buy 60 cell phones? Must be after the family plan."
What are you some sort of xenophobe? Racist? Bigot?
How dare you!
We are going to watch YOU (not the guys buying huge numbers of cell phones from other lands).
We will plaster your picture and your home address and send it to everywhere around the world and shame you and your family and send you back to the cave you came from with your tail between your legs.
You white privileged *hateful* (Republican)
What do you say to that? Apologize, beg for forgiveness, admit the error of your words or we will destroy you and your reputation. Keep you from travelling anywhere that is above your hate speech (England, San Francisco), picket outside your house, force your employer to fire you, make sure your children are ashamed of you and wish to God you were anything but a white male.
Comprende?
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Comprende.
BTW,
There must be a huge family with these guys. It has happened a third time.
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2015/12/update-fbi-alerted-after-bulk-cell-phone-purchase-at-third-mid-missouri-walmart-video/ (http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2015/12/update-fbi-alerted-after-bulk-cell-phone-purchase-at-third-mid-missouri-walmart-video/)
Is any Missouri inbreeding going on?
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=139&v=JNRHsibHlbk
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=139&v=JNRHsibHlbk[/youtube]
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=139&v=JNRHsibHlbk
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=139&v=JNRHsibHlbk[/youtube]
http://dailycaller.com/2015/12/11/whistleblower-feds-shut-down-terror-investigation-that-could-have-prevented-san-bernardino-attack/
Strange, I can't imagine that the QUALIFIED Jeh Johnson would allow that to happen on his watch.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=139&v=JNRHsibHlbk
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=139&v=JNRHsibHlbk[/youtube]
http://dailycaller.com/2015/12/11/whistleblower-feds-shut-down-terror-investigation-that-could-have-prevented-san-bernardino-attack/
Strange, I can't imagine that the QUALIFIED Jeh Johnson would allow that to happen on his watch.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/secret-us-policy-blocks-agents-social-media-visa/story?id=35749325
Fearing a civil liberties backlash and "bad public relations" for the Obama administration, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson refused in early 2014 to end the secret U.S. policy that prohibited immigration officials from reviewing the social media messages of all foreign citizens applying for U.S. visas, according to a former senior department official.
"During that time period immigration officials were not allowed to use or review social media as part of the screening process," John Cohen, a former acting under-secretary at DHS for intelligence and analysis. Cohen is now a national security consultant for ABC News.
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http://dailycaller.com/2015/12/14/dhs-monitors-americans-social-media-accounts-but-not-visa-applicants/
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http://dailycaller.com/2015/12/14/dhs-monitors-americans-social-media-accounts-but-not-visa-applicants/
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/428540/tashfeen-malik-social-media-ignored-dhs
Tashfeen Malik’s Jihadist Social-Media Posts Were Deliberately Ignored by the Feds
by ANDREW C. MCCARTHY December 15, 2015 12:00 PM @ANDREWCMCCARTHY
San Bernardino mass-murderer Tashfeen Malik wrote social-media posts that endorsed jihad and expressed disdain for America. Yet, that did not cause U.S. immigration agents to question her admission into our country, much less deny it. In fact, our government consciously avoided learning about Malik’s Islamist rants. Commentators stunned by this dereliction are attributing it to “secret” guidance issued by the Department of Homeland Security. In truth, there is nothing secret about it. The instruction to refrain from scrutinizing social-media commentary, a precious source of intelligence, is a straightforward application of what passes for the official Obama administration “anti”-terrorism strategy, known as “Countering Violent Extremism.” Malik, a native Pakistani, who immigrated to the United States in July after living for a time in Saudi Arabia, joined her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, in slaying 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., earlier this month. The jihad’s Bonnie and Clyde were finally killed in a gun battle with police. Government officials now concede that Malik was inadequately screened before being permitted to relocate to the United States on a K-1 visa, issued because she was the fiancée of Farook, an American citizen. The couple married soon after her immigration. Malik’s visa approval was already the stuff of scandal even before the latest revelations — especially in light of President Obama’s plan to admit thousands of immigrants from Syria and other bastions of Islamic supremacism, which inevitably breeds violent jihadism. Right after the massacre, it emerged that Malik had provided government screeners with a fake Pakistani address. She may also have been educated in a notoriously anti-Western madrassa. Neither fact was discovered during the vetting process.
RELATED: Our Immigration Laws Should Screen Out Islamists, Not All Muslims ADVERTISING But as we now learn, that’s not the half of it. It turns out Malik was an active user of social media. Government investigators made this discovery only after the San Bernardino massacre. Malik’s actual posts were not published in the initial media reports (leaving us to wonder just how inflammatory they must be). But sources close to the investigation acknowledge that she championed jihad and condemned the United States. It is not enough to say that these signs of the Islamist mindset were missed by security and intelligence agencies. Our government chose to miss them. As a matter of policy, the Department of Homeland Security — the bureaucratic behemoth created after 9/11 to enhance protection of our country — avoids looking at, much less scrutinizing, the publicly available social-media commentary of aliens who seek visas to enter the United States, including from Islamic countries that are jihadist strongholds. You read that correctly.
RELATED: It’s Time to Start Profiling for Terrorists, without Apology Now that the story of shocking recklessness is out, the administration is scrambling for cover. The policy, officials stammer, was not really written down and was, in any event more like a loose guideline than a real rule. That is simply false. The guidance was mandatory, and it even ignited a furious intramural clash at DHS. In the end, Secretary Jeh Johnson personally refused to countermand the guidance, siding with DHS’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (the radicalism of which is on a par with the Justice Department’s infamous Civil Rights Division) over Homeland Security agents who were worried about, you know, security. Press reports suggest that the guidance was “secret”: adopted out of concerns about antagonizing civil-rights activists in the wake of the hysteria over surveillance provoked by Edward Snowden. Alternatively, the Obama administration floats the suggestion that scrutinizing the social-media commentary of visa applicants would be (a) too difficult because people like Malik use pseudonyms and privacy protocols, and (b) too time-consuming because there are millions of applications. Visa applicants are aliens. They have no right to enter the U.S. and no civil rights under the U.S. Constitution. Each of these rationalizations is bogus. The surveillance controversy, to the extent it was not entirely overblown, sprang from concerns over spying on Americans. Visa applicants, by contrast, are aliens. They have no right to enter the U.S. and no civil rights under the U.S. Constitution. In addition, even if we pretend they have privacy rights, we are talking in this case about speech that aliens voluntarily share with others, not personal property in which they might be said to have an expectation of privacy. Moreover, if social-media commentary is sometimes difficult to uncover, that is mainly because government examiners purposely refrain from asking about it. If visa applicants were routinely questioned about aliases and social-media practices, much would be revealed. The fact that some aliens might lie to examiners is no excuse not to ask questions. Many would tell the truth. As for those who would not, it must be remembered that entering the U.S. is a privilege, not a right. The burden is on the alien to demonstrate fitness, not on the government to prove dishonesty. Examiners are good at detecting duplicity, and the visa should be denied if they suspect it. Finally, the claim about there being far too many visas to allow for competent background checks is frivolous. The number of visas issued is supposed to be a function of our national interest and the resources available to process applications. Plainly, if investigative resources are sparse, the government should issue fewer visas, not skimp on background checks.
But let’s put all of the Obama administration’s panicked excuse-making aside. The fact of the matter is that Tashfeen Malik was issued a visa not because of an insane “secret” visa policy, but because of the Obama administration’s criminally irresponsible but quite public national “security” strategy — “Countering Violent Extremism.” I wrote about CVE when the new strategy was rolled out during Obama’s first term. In essence, CVE holds that terrorism has nothing to do with Islam, or even with Islamist ideology that reviles the United States. According to President Obama, “Muslim American communities have categorically condemned terrorism” — as if that were an incontestable proposition or one that told the whole story. Thus, as I elaborated at the time, The real threat to our security, [the CVE guidance instructs], is not Muslim terrorist plots against us but our provocation of Muslims by conveying the misimpression that America is at war with Islam. Therefore, the key to security is “partnering” with the leadership in Muslim communities [much of which just happens to be tied to or heavily influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood]. Let them train the police, let them be our eyes and ears, and surely they’ll let us know if there is any cause for concern. If it is possible, the practice of CVE is even more of a national-security disaster than the theory. That is a central theme of an essential new book by Stephen Coughlin, Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad. CVE holds that terrorism has nothing to do with Islam, or even with Islamist ideology that reviles the United States. Apart from being an exceptional lawyer, Steve is a trained military-intelligence officer who has studied our enemies’ threat doctrine, Islamic supremacism — the classic sharia-based Islam that is mainstream in the Middle East. The book is about how the United States government has systematically stifled the study of this doctrine since before 9/11. CVE is the paragon illustration of how the Obama administration has exacerbated this catastrophic failure. As Coughlin demonstrates, CVE is no secret. For example, DHS’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties has worked with the National Counterterrorism Center (another bureaucracy created after 9/11 to improve security) to develop government-agency training programs that “bring together best [CVE] practices.” One product of this effort is a handy two-page instruction document of CVE “Do’s and Don’ts” [sic]. The “Don’ts” tell agents to avoid, among other things, “ventur[ing] too deep into the weeds of religious doctrine and history,” or examining the “role of Islam in majority Muslim nations.” The guidance further admonishes: Don’t use training that equates radical thought, religious expression, freedom to protest, or other constitutionally protected activity, with criminal activity. One can have radical thoughts/ideas, including disliking the U.S. government, without being violent; for example, trainers who equate the desire for Sharia law with criminal activity violate basic tenets of the First Amendment. This allusion to the First Amendment is patent nonsense. Free-expression principles protect Americans against laws that subject speech to penalty or prosecution (a protection, by the way, that the Obama administration seeks to deny to speech unflattering to Islam). But there is no free-speech protection against having one’s words examined for intelligence or investigative purposes. That is why, for example, speech is routinely used in court to prove crimes. And, to repeat: Aliens outside the United States do not have First Amendment rights at all. In sum, Obama’s CVE strategy expressly instructs our investigators to consider only violent or criminal conduct. They are told to ignore radical ideology, particularly if it has the veneer of “religious expression.” They are directed to turn a deaf ear to anti-Americanism and the desire to impose sharia, which just happens to be the principal objective of all violent jihadists and of the Obama administration’s oft-time consultants, the Muslim Brotherhood.
Our agents, furthermore, are cautioned to avoid doing anything that smacks of subjecting particular groups or people from select regions to heightened scrutiny. After all, that might imply that terrorism committed by Muslims has some connection to Islam — specifically, to the undeniable, unambiguous commands to violent jihad found throughout Muslim scripture. Obviously, this CVE guidance is exactly what DHS follows when it willfully blinds itself to social-media postings by visa applicants from Muslim-majority countries where anti-Americanism and jihadist sympathies run rampant. There is nothing secret about it. It is right there in black-and-white. Willful blindness is, furthermore, a guiding principle of Obama’s governance. It is, for example, the same rationale used to justify purging instruction about the Islamic doctrinal roots of violent jihadism from materials used to train our law-enforcement, military, and intelligence agents. The mulish determination not to “know thine enemy” is the intentional design of the Obama strategy. What happened in the case of Tashfeen Malik was not a glitch. It was foreseeable and inevitable. And now, 14 innocent people are dead. —
Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute. His latest book is Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/428540/tashfeen-malik-social-media-ignored-dhs
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I've been sympathetic to Ryan, but this is pretty awful.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/12/16/paul-ryan-betrays-america-1-1-trillion-2000-plus-page-omnibus-bill-funds-fundamental-transformation-america/
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https://www.facebook.com/FoxNews/videos/10153919352831336/
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I've been sympathetic to Ryan, but this is pretty awful.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/12/16/paul-ryan-betrays-america-1-1-trillion-2000-plus-page-omnibus-bill-funds-fundamental-transformation-america/
Total fcuking betrayal!
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http://dcwhispers.com/obama-snarls-against-fbis-immigration-suggestion-you-sound-like-trump/
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If I understood correctly, Rand Paul says Marco Rubio is opposing his bill to tighten visa waiver requirements.
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https://reason.com/blog/2015/12/29/tsa-says-it-will-stop-accepting-drivers
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http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/30/us/unarmed-aviation-officers/index.html
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Security theater, citing fear of terror attacks as a reason to abrogate second amendment protections, institutionalized eavesdropping, et al, play in to the hands of terrorists:
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/we-are-terrorized-why-us-counterterrorism-policy-failing-why-it-cant-be
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http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2016/01/judicial-watch-uncovers-2004-state-department-records-confirming-arab-smuggling-cells-al-qaeda-leader-in-mexico/
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http://dailycaller.com/2016/01/16/defending-our-homeland-how-neighbors-can-protect-their-community/
Homegrown.
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http://www.nypdshield.org/public/SiteFiles/documents/NYPD_Report-Radicalization_in_the_West.pdf
Thanks ACLU!
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http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2016/01/judicial-watch-uncovers-2004-state-department-records-confirming-arab-smuggling-cells-al-qaeda-leader-in-mexico/
I keep seeing accusations of this sort from the chumps at Judicial Watch and Stratfor; yet, not one of the two can quote a hard source (general, politician, etc,) or provide any proof of this.
Why is that? Are they that hard up for evidence?
Bonus Question - Who has ever vetted the people behind Stratfor and Judicial Watch?
Stratfor - two military vets, neither of whom have any contacts here in Mexico, slinging accusations to sell page hits.
"Strategic Forecasting, Inc. — known as Stratfor — is an American publisher and global intelligence company founded in 1996 in Austin, Texas, by George Friedman, who was the company's chairman. Shea Morenz is president and chief executive officer. Fred Burton is Stratfor's vice president of intelligence.
Other executives include Chief Operating Officer Mark Ozdarski, a retired Navy SEAL officer who also has worked as an investment portfolio manager;[2] former U.S. Special Operations Command officer Bret Boyd, vice president of custom intelligence services;[3] and Editor-in-Chief David Judson.[4]"
Judicial Watch - "Thomas J. "Tom" Fitton is an American activist. He is the President of Judicial Watch, a conservative educational foundation. He has worked for America's Voice and National Empowerment Television, the International Policy Forum, the Leadership Institute, and Accuracy in Media. He also used to be a talk radio and television host.[1]"
I'm failing to see how any of them would have the slightest idea what goes on in Mexico.
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You have PM.
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http://patriotpost.us/posts/40116
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You have PM.
Excellent point sir. I stand corrected.
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And thus our Search for Truth takes a step forward!
TAC!
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And thus our Search for Truth takes a step forward!
TAC!
Indeed. They should make it clearer however, that their source is an unidentified, "confidential" informant. We all know how trustworthy those are.
I was just hoping they had something more than that.
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http://www.dickmorris.com/10000-from-terror-countries-overstay-visas-in-u-s-dick-morris-tv-lunch-alert/?utm_source=dmreports&utm_medium=dmreports&utm_campaign=dmreports
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http://www.texastribune.org/2016/02/01/abbott-and-cuellar-question-dhs-over-cuts-border-s/
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I think it is better said that Obama cuts surveillance. We know the directives are coming down from the top.
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Good thing DHS has the qualified Jeh Johnson and not some dem machine hack running it.
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/homeland-security/268282-dhs-ordered-me-to-scrub-records-of-muslims-with-terror
DHS ordered me to scrub records of Muslims with terror ties
By Philip Haney
Amid the chaos of the 2009 holiday travel season, jihadists planned to slaughter 290 innocent travelers on a Christmas Day flight from the Netherlands to Detroit, Michigan. Twenty-three-year old Nigerian Muslim Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab intended to detonate Northwest Airlines Flight 253, but the explosives in his underwear malfunctioned and brave passengers subdued him until he could be arrested. The graphic and traumatic defeat they planned for the United States failed, that time.
Following the attempted attack, President Obama threw the intelligence community under the bus for its failure to “connect the dots.” He said, “this was not a failure to collect intelligence, it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.”
Most Americans were unaware of the enormous damage to morale at the Department of Homeland Security, where I worked, his condemnation caused. His words infuriated many of us because we knew his administration had been engaged in a bureaucratic effort to destroy the raw material—the actual intelligence we had collected for years, and erase those dots. The dots constitute the intelligence needed to keep Americans safe, and the Obama administration was ordering they be wiped away.
After leaving my 15 year career at DHS, I can no longer be silent about the dangerous state of America’s counter-terror strategy, our leaders’ willingness to compromise the security of citizens for the ideological rigidity of political correctness—and, consequently, our vulnerability to devastating, mass-casualty attack.
Just before that Christmas Day attack, in early November 2009, I was ordered by my superiors at the Department of Homeland Security to delete or modify several hundred records of individuals tied to designated Islamist terror groups like Hamas from the important federal database, the Treasury Enforcement Communications System (TECS). These types of records are the basis for any ability to “connect dots.” Every day, DHS Customs and Border Protection officers watch entering and exiting many individuals associated with known terrorist affiliations, then look for patterns. Enforcing a political scrubbing of records of Muslims greatly affected our ability to do that. Even worse, going forward, my colleagues and I were prohibited from entering pertinent information into the database.
A few weeks later, in my office at the Port of Atlanta, the television hummed with the inevitable Congressional hearings that follow any terrorist attack. While members of Congress grilled Obama administration officials, demanding why their subordinates were still failing to understand the intelligence they had gathered, I was being forced to delete and scrub the records. And I was well aware that, as a result, it was going to be vastly more difficult to “connect the dots” in the future—especially beforean attack occurs.
As the number of successful and attempted Islamic terrorist attacks on America increased, the type of information that the Obama administration ordered removed from travel and national security databases was the kind of information that, if properly assessed, could have prevented subsequent domestic Islamist attacks like the ones committed by Faisal Shahzad (May 2010), Detroit “honor killing” perpetrator Rahim A. Alfetlawi (2011); Amine El Khalifi, who plotted to blow up the U.S. Capitol (2012); Dzhokhar or Tamerlan Tsarnaev who conducted the Boston Marathon bombing (2013); Oklahoma beheading suspect Alton Nolen (2014); or Muhammed Yusuf Abdulazeez, who opened fire on two military installations in Chattanooga, Tennessee (2015).
It is very plausible that one or more of the subsequent terror attacks on the homeland could have been prevented if more subject matter experts in the Department of Homeland Security had been allowed to do our jobs back in late 2009. It is demoralizing—and infuriating—that today, those elusive dots are even harder to find, and harder to connect, than they were during the winter of 2009.
Haney worked at the Department of Homeland Security for 15 years.
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http://www.tucsonnewsnow.com/story/31154548/drug-cartel-scouts-living-in-mountain-ranges-south-of-phoenix
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http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/11/04/ted-cruz-introduces-bill-designate-muslim-brotherhood-terrorist-organization/
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http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/11/04/ted-cruz-introduces-bill-designate-muslim-brotherhood-terrorist-organization/
Balls. Leadership.
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http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2015/07/mexican-cartels-smuggle-terrorists-into-u-s-through-rural-texas-border-region/
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http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2015/07/mexican-cartels-smuggle-terrorists-into-u-s-through-rural-texas-border-region/
Dreamers!
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http://pamelageller.com/2016/02/litigation-jihad-sting-cair-gunrange.html/
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http://pamelageller.com/2016/02/fbi-says-third-shooter-in-san-bernardino-jihad-slaughter.html/
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http://pamelageller.com/2016/02/fbi-says-third-shooter-in-san-bernardino-jihad-slaughter.html/
Good thing they secured and totally processed the shooter's home. Oh, never mind.
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http://pamelageller.com/2016/02/fbi-says-third-shooter-in-san-bernardino-jihad-slaughter.html/
Good thing they secured and totally processed the shooter's home. Oh, never mind.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jHnuQxh_-tQ
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Some people tend to favor strong powers to the State as a means of stopping Islamic Fascism, but worth keeping in mind are the implications of things like this:
http://www.clarionproject.org/analysis/new-fbi-counter-extremism-site-fails-mention-islamism
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Basically, we ain't ready if folks make a habit of using 'em:
http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/the-improvised-explosive-device-threat-to-the-homeland-americans-are-not-prepared
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:-o :-o :-o
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Basically, we ain't ready if folks make a habit of using 'em:
http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/the-improvised-explosive-device-threat-to-the-homeland-americans-are-not-prepared
Strange, I thought the libertarian answer to all criminal activity was to legalize it.
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This would appear to be a real BFD. :| :x :x
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2016/03/10/surprise-nsa-data-will-soon-routinely-be-used-for-domestic-policing-that-has-nothing-to-do-with-terrorism/
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http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/11/10/time-close-tsa/Y7RHFtY3UKnu2vTOoi6JnO/story.html?event=event25
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http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/11/10/time-close-tsa/Y7RHFtY3UKnu2vTOoi6JnO/story.html?event=event25
The airlines were in charge of aviation security 9/11/01.
Security firm plans overhaul after failures
By New York Times,
published November 10, 2001
ATLANTA -- Under fire for a lengthy series of lapses at airport checkpoints, Argenbright Security, the nation's largest airport security company, appointed a new chief executive Friday to replace its founder. It also announced an overhaul of its policies to improve training and weed out employees with criminal records.
David Beaton, an executive at Securicor, Argenbright's British owner, was named to replace Frank A. Argenbright Jr., who built the company from a small polygraph operation in Atlanta in 1979. Beaton said Argenbright was retiring as planned and declined to say whether the departure was related to the company's problems.
The company also plans to increase the wages of its 7,000 checkpoint screeners -- in some cases, to more than twice the minimum wage that many of them are now paid -- and will hire a second screener to work at every X-ray machine that examines carryon luggage. All screeners will have their backgrounds rechecked for criminal convictions, Beaton said, and new employees will receive 40 hours of classroom training instead of the 12 required by the Federal Aviation Administration.
Argenbright handles security at Airside D at Tampa International Airport.
Friday's moves were clearly an effort to salvage the company's reputation -- and stave off a federal takeover of the industry -- at a time when Argenbright is being attacked almost daily by officials in Washington as the most prominent example of the country's porous aviation security system.
Company officials have acknowledged that supervisors in Philadelphia forged documents to allow people with criminal records to work as checkpoint screeners, and frequently allowed workers to skip the federally required training and tests. Two Argenbright employees were fired in Chicago this week, accused of stealing knives carried by a passenger who was almost able to take them onto a plane. The Sept. 11 hijackers smuggled their box cutters past two company checkpoints.
Attorney General John Ashcroft has accused the company of committing "an astonishing pattern of crimes," and this week Gov. Parris N. Glendening of Maryland criticized Southwest Airlines for hiring Argenbright to check passengers at Baltimore/Washington International Airport.
While not commenting on past problems, Beaton said it was time to bring Argenbright -- which has 40 percent of the nation's airport security business -- up to the higher standards of European airports.
Some of the proposed changes could involve significant costs to the airlines, which pay companies like Argenbright for their security, and inconvenience to passengers. For example, the company plans to hand-search any bag that contains an item opaque to X-rays and will automatically hand-search the luggage of any passenger carrying a suspicious item caught by a metal detector.
Beaton said he knew the policies could increase waiting time at checkpoints but considered them important to achieve the government's zero-tolerance policy for airport threats.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/serbia-us-bound-combat-missiles-found-on-passenger-flight/2016/03/13/75a0a83e-e937-11e5-a9ce-681055c7a05f_story.html?tid=ss_fb-bottom
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Last week, Palestinian activist Bassem Tamimi published a letter on his Facebook page showing that his visa to come to the United States was revoked on March 1.
In a story published Wednesday, the Palestine News Network (PNN) continued to push his claim that the U.S. action somehow was in retaliation for a civil lawsuit he and others filed against dozens of Israeli supporters and companies doing business there. "To stop our effort against the Israeli occupation, the American consulate revoked my Visa," Tamimi wrote March 8.
The whole story is a lie. Tamimi would have us believe that American bureaucracy is so efficient, so nimble, that it processed a visa revocation overnight. The lawsuit was filed March 7 in Washington, D.C. district court, the day before Tamimi published it. In addition, the visa revocation letter is dated March 1.
In order for it to be payback for the lawsuit, the Zionist Occupiers must have perfected time travel.
In addition, I know Tamimi is spreading a lie because I helped secure the documents which proved he lied to U.S. officials.
This is a standard question asked of all applicants.
In fact, he has been arrested repeatedly, including a 2010 arrest for incitement after Tamimi provoked demonstrators to repeatedly throw rocks at Israeli soldiers in the West Bank. According to Israeli court records, Tamimi planned the confrontations, first by gathering young men from a nearby village, encouraging them to throw stones and organizing their stone throwing . When soldiers approached, he provided reconnaissance to ensure they would not get caught. He also arranged for ambulances to be immediately available to the stone throwers in case any of them were injured. He was convicted on all the charges and sentenced to 30 months in jail.
When Tamimi was in the United States last September on a cross country bash-Israel tour that was co-sponsored by Amnesty International, an Israeli source informed me of Tamimi's conviction. I relayed the information to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). U.S. government agents obtained Tamimi's arrest and conviction records from Israel.
ICE agents reviewed Tamimi's visa application and discovered that he lied by not checking a box indicating he had been arrested before. As a result, an administrative investigation was immediately initiated into Tamimi's false statements.
The review process took months to complete and resulted in a determination that Tamimi had lied on his visa application. As is standard for those who do not disclose their arrest records on their visa or immigration forms, Tamimi's right to a visa to the United States was permanently revoked. It culminated in the letter that Tamimi saw fit to share with the world.
The PNN story dismisses the arrests as "arbitrary" and cited Tamimi saying the detentions are "ways of Israeli occupation to silence the Palestinian voice." Tamimi could have been forthcoming with the U.S. Consulate office and in his visa application, argued the arrests were improper and let the State Department make an informed decision.
Instead, he lied. Now he's complaining that he got caught in that lie.
It's an odd lie to tell, given that the U.S. has prosecuted Palestinians, among many others, for similar lies on immigration applications.
But it is not necessarily out of character. In convicting Tamimi of incitement in 2012, the Israeli judge determined that he "lied to the court, did not express regret for what he had done and did not take responsibility for his actions."
During a Sept. 26 appearance in Atlanta, Tamimi's arrest record was not something to hide, but a means of establishing his bona fides.
"I have been in jail nine times in my life," he said.
He spent five weeks in the United States during September and October, pushing the campaign to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel. Among his stops was a third grade class in Ithaca, N.Y. where he reportedly spoke about the suffering of Palestinian children.
As the website Legal Insurrection reported in October, Tamimi used his Facebook page to promote an anti-Semitic blood libel that Israel arrests Palestinian children "To STEAL THEIR ORGANS." The claim Tamimi reposted included a picture of a person's torso with a long wound stitched up along the side.
Tamimi uses children as tools to instigate confrontations with Israelis, including having his daughter, dubbed "Shirley Temper," scream at soldiers in hopes of provoking images that portray them as cruel or brutal.
"When we are able to get a video like this, we can use it to great effect," he said during the U.S. speaking tour. "When enough people here see these videos and hear our stories, it can start a kind of intifada against Israel in the United States."
Tamimi's visa has been revoked permanently. In order to enter the United States again, he will have to obtain a waiver, which is a benefit rarely given.
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How the US ends up in a real Civil War this Fall
Posted: 20 Mar 2016 11:11 AM PDT
The US election could get worse. It could be a prelude to a civil war.
How so? Here's a simple scenario.
It's November 8th and the choice is between Trump and Hillary.
Both candidates have negatives approaching 70% (Hillary is currently at 56% and Trump is at 60%). The campaign has been vicious. A rematch of Hitler vs. Stalin in US politics.
For months, there has been violent protest in every US state. Protesters vs police vs. each other. Voters are edgy when they head to the booths on November 4th. Everyone is ready to put this campaign behind them.
However, things are about to change for the worse.
Early in the afternoon (EST) a small group of global guerrillas spring an N-1 trap (N-1 is a last moment action or betrayal) on the US:
A dozen faux bombs in suspicious packages are placed at heavily (Rep or Dem) polling locations resulting in evacuation and widespread concern.
Robocalls pour in to police departments and polling places in heavily (Rep or Dem) polling locations with bomb/terrorist threats. Widespread poll closures occur. Calls continue until late.
Election results are skewed. Electoral college swings to the candidate helped by the threats.
One candidate declares victory. The other cries foul. Protests go national. Violence, looting and active engagement with police.
Calls for calm ignored. Martial law is declared in different areas. Internet is turned off in different areas.
Violence grows. The global economy collapses due to uncertainty over US economy (ill conceived financial derivatives ensure that virulent US contagion spreads to every nook and cranny of the global financial and economic system).
The US, suddenly impoverished, extremely angry, and mortally betrayed stumbles into civil war.
Have fun,
John Robb
PS: The most interesting thing about this scenario is that it can be pulled off with only five people.
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Thoughts on Brussels
Originally published at the Washington Times
Hours after the horrific terror attacks in Brussels on Tuesday, a correspondent on one of the American cable networks remarked that ordinary Belgians were predicting grimly that security would be very tight that day--and that the next day, it would return to the same casual mediocrity that had failed to stop the attack in the first place.
The Belgians were speaking from experience--from an awful familiarity with how their security services respond to the terror threats that are so frequent in European cities.
But they might just as well have been describing the reaction of Western civilization itself--its response to a virulent ideology that is determined to destroy it by any means necessary.
Again and again, we are attacked by people who have warned us of exactly what they intend to do, who have explained exactly what motivates them, and who have proved beyond doubt that they are sincere. Again and again, we respond to the violence with shock, psychoanalysis, and a brief surge of force before going back to life--and business, and security--as usual.
That’s what happened after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and other targets in France last winter. It’s what happened after the shootings on Thalys train from Amsterdam to Paris last summer. And what happened after the stabbings at the University of California at Merced last fall. And after the Paris attacks the same month. And after the San Bernardino attack a few weeks later.
When will the Western world decide to be serious about confronting this threat? After there is a biological or chemical attack in one of these cities--or worse?
Tuesday’s events in Belgium came days after the police arrested Salah Abdeslam, the final surviving terrorist behind the most recent Paris attacks. He was residing in the Molenbeek neighborhood of Brussels. He had been there, and eluded capture, for more than four months.
When Abdeslam was arrested, the neighborhood rioted. The people threw garbage and bottles at the police. Belgian media reported that the community had known the fugitive was hiding there the whole time.
How can we have neighborhoods in European cities that shelter terrorists and then riot when we catch someone responsible for the murder of 130 innocent people (and the injury of hundreds more)?
The challenge, of course, is much greater than a single neighborhood. Claude Moniquet, a former French intelligence officer, told CBS News that he could “agree to say that Molenbeek is a hotbed of terrorism if we agree at the same time to say that is not the only hotbed of terrorism in Europe.”
“You could find the same in London,” he continued. “You could find the same in the north of France.”
These are countries whose residents travel freely throughout western Europe and even to the United States and Canada, with little or no scrutiny.
In other words, the Brussels attacks should be a reminder that meeting the threat is going to require real changes and force us to reassess decades of assumptions. Swapping out our Facebook profile pictures and lightening up landmarks in solidarity will not be enough to address the danger we have allowed to grow up within Western countries.
Which brings us to the President’s trip to Cuba this week. President Obama has long aimed to sew closer ties with the Cuban regime, inspired by an idealistic internationalism that has clashed with the reality of events throughout his presidency--up through and including the attacks today.
As part of his effort to woo the Cuban dictatorship and signal his righteousness to the nations of the world, the President has been determined to close our terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay.
Yet here too he has been frustrated by reality. It seems no other members of the “international community” will agree to take their fair share of the terrorists. Perhaps it’s because, whether in Europe or the Middle East or South Asia, they are all too familiar with the type.
For the President, the juxtaposition of the Brussels attack with his tour of our hemisphere’s last communist dictatorship must have been at least a little chilling. Let’s hope it produces an epiphany in this final year of his presidency: to preserve the delicate balance between freedom and security that the Western democracies have uniquely maintained, we will certainly need Guantanamo, or places like it.
Your Friend,
Newt
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http://patriotpost.us/articles/41618
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http://www.rawstory.com/2016/04/armed-hate-group-backs-out-of-texas-mosque-protest-when-faced-with-gun-toting-worshipers/#.VwBMzcvSC5Q.facebook
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Awareness Can Short-Circuit a Bomb Attack
Security Weekly
March 31, 2016 | 08:00 GMT Print
Text Size
Some missed opportunities to avert the bombing attacks that struck the Zaventem airport in Brussels included chemical odors outside the bombmakers' apartment and suspicious behavior on the part of the suicide attackers. (YORICK JANSENS/AFP/Getty Images)
By Scott Stewart
Bombs used in the March 22 attacks in Brussels displayed a degree of tradecraft not before shown by the Islamic State outside its core areas of operation. The bombings at the Zaventem airport and at a metro station in Brussels killed 35 and wounded more than 300, making them the deadliest jihadist bombing attack in the West in more than a decade.
The Brussels attacks broke the recent trend of moving toward armed assaults from bombings. The Brussels cell was able to conduct such a large bombing operation because one of its key members, identified by Belgian authorities as Najim Laachraoui, possessed advanced bombmaking tradecraft acquired from Islamic State trainers while he was in Syria. Laachraoui is also thought to have constructed the bombs used in the November 2015 Paris attacks.
Strangely, Laachraoui has been identified as one of the suicide bombers who attacked the airport in Brussels. It is rare for an organization's bombmaker to participate in a suicide attack — they are simply too valuable to waste — but it appears as if Laachraoui, under heavy police pressure, chose to go out intentionally rather than to risk being captured like his fellow conspirator, Saleh Abdesalam, who was arrested March 18. No matter Laachraoui's motive, it is good news that a well-trained bombmaker is out of the picture. However, the threat of jihadist bomb attacks against targets in Europe and elsewhere in the West did not die with Laachraoui, and authorities and citizens alike are left to wonder: How many other trained Islamic State bombmakers remain at large?
I've recently seen a reputable company write that if a terrorist plot gets to the bombmaking stage, it is too late to avert an attack. However, I strongly disagree with this claim. Even in the weapons acquisition or bombmaking stage of the terrorist attack cycle, terrorist operatives remain vulnerable, and plots can be thwarted if bombmaking activity is noticed and reported to authorities.
Indeed, unusual activity was noticed in the Brussels case, according to a March 26 story in The New York Times. The story noted that an overpowering chemical odor coming from Laachraoui's sixth floor apartment made the building's owner gag — and odd happenings at the apartment prompted another neighbor to call the police, but those reports were not investigated. The taxi driver who drove three of the attackers to the airport also noticed that his passengers acted strangely and refused to let him touch their suitcases, which reeked strongly of chemicals, but he did not take action until after the attacks.
These were all indications that very well could have resulted in the attacks being disrupted, but unfortunately, they did not. However, that does not mean that the next bombing cannot be thwarted by the telltale signs of bombmaking activity. Let's examine some of those indicators in more detail.
Beyond a Bleach Blonde
As al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's Inspire magazine so famously stated, you can indeed "make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom." It truly is not difficult for a knowledgeable individual to mix up improvised explosives using a wide range of common household chemicals, including peroxide, acetone, chlorine and brake fluid.
It is important to recognize that when we say an explosive mixture or an explosive device is "improvised," that does not automatically mean the end product is going to be ineffective or amateurish. Like an improvised John Coltrane saxophone solo, some improvised explosive devices can be highly crafted, albeit deadly, works of art. That said, certain activities necessary to make bombs leave even proficient bombmakers open to detection by outside observers — and amateur bombmakers are even easier to spot if one knows what to look for.
To obscure bombmaking activity, explosive mixtures and device components are often manufactured in rented houses, apartments or hotel rooms. We have seen this in past cases, such as the December 1999 "millennium bomb" plot in which Ahmed Ressam and an accomplice set up a crude bombmaking factory in a hotel room in Vancouver, British Columbia. More recently, Najibullah Zazi was arrested in September 2009 and charged with attempting to manufacture the improvised explosive mixture triacetone triperoxide (TATP) in a Denver hotel room. In September 2010, a suspected lone assailant in Copenhagen accidentally detonated an explosive device he was constructing in a hotel.
Similar to clandestine methamphetamine labs, which are also frequently set up in rental properties or hotel rooms, makeshift bombmaking operations frequently use everyday volatile substances. Chemicals such as acetone, a common nail-polish remover, and peroxide, commonly used to bleach hair, can easily be found in stores. Fertilizers, the main component of the bombs used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the 1993 World Trade Center attack, are present in large volumes on farms or in farm-supply stores in rural communities. Hardware and paint stores sell acids and powdered metals.
However, the quantities of chemicals required to manufacture explosives far exceeds those required for most legitimate purposes. Because of this, hotel staff, landlords and neighbors can fairly easily notice signs that someone in their midst is operating a makeshift bombmaking laboratory. Obvious suspicions should be raised if, for example, a new tenant moves several bags of fertilizer into an apartment in the middle of a city, or if a person brings in gallons of acetone, peroxide or sulfuric or nitric acid. Furthermore, bombmakers use laboratory implements, such as beakers, scales, protective gloves and masks, not normally found in a hotel room or residence.
Additionally, although electronic devices like cellphones or wristwatches may not seem unusual in the context of a hotel room or apartment, signs that such devices have been disassembled or modified to have wires protruding should raise a red flag, as these altered devices are commonly used as initiators for improvised explosive devices.
Certain items that are less commonly used in household applications but that are frequently used in bombmaking include nitric or sulfuric acid; metal powders such as aluminum, magnesium and ferric oxide; and large quantities of sodium carbonate, commonly sold in 25-pound bags. Large containers of methyl alcohol, which can be used to stabilize nitroglycerine, are another indicator that a bombmaker may be present.
Fumes from chemical reactions are another sign of bombmaking activity. Depending on the size of the batch being concocted, the noxious fumes from an improvised explosive mixture can bleach walls and curtains and, as was the case for the July 2005 London attackers, even the bombmakers' hair. The fumes can even waft outside of the lab and be detected by neighbors, as they were in the Brussels case. Spatters from the mixing of ingredients such as nitric acid leave distinctive marks, which are another way for hotel staff or landlords to recognize that something is amiss. Additionally, rented properties used for bombmaking activity rarely look occupied. They frequently lack furniture and have makeshift window coverings instead of drapes. Properties where bomb laboratories are found also usually have no mail delivery, sit vacant for long periods and are occupied by people who come and go at odd hours and who are often seen carrying strange things — such as containers of chemicals or large quantities of ice, which is used to keep chemical reactions such as those used to synthesize TATP under control.
The components for the truck bomb used in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing were manufactured in a rented apartment in Jersey City. The process of cooking the nitroglycerine used in the booster charges and the urea nitrate used in the main explosive charge created strong chemical fumes that changed the wall paint color and corroded metal doorknobs and hinges. The bombmakers also spilled chemicals on the floor, the walls, their clothing and other places, leaving plenty of trace evidence for investigators to find after the attack.
More Clues to Spot Bombmakers
Given the caustic nature of the ingredients used to make homemade explosive mixtures and the volatile chemical reactions required to make things like nitroglycerin and TATP, creating the explosive can be one of the most dangerous aspects of planning a bombing attack. Indeed, Hamas militants refer to TATP as "the mother of Satan" because of its volatility and propensity to severely burn or kill bombmakers if they lose control of the chemical reaction required to synthesize it.
Because of this, it is important for medical personnel to pay attention to emergency room walk-ins with thermal or chemical burns who smell of chemicals and to report them to authorities in much the same way they do patients who appear to have been injured in meth lab accidents.
In January 1995, an apartment in Manila, Philippines, caught fire when the bombmaker in the 1993 World Trade Center attack, Abdel Basit (aka Ramzi Yousef), lost control of the reaction in a batch of TATP he was brewing for his planned attack against a number of U.S. airliners flying over the Pacific Ocean — an operation he had nicknamed Bojinka. Because of the fire, authorities were able to arrest two of Basit's co-conspirators and to unravel Bojinka and other plots against targets including Pope John Paul II and U.S. President Bill Clinton. Basit fled to Pakistan, where he was apprehended a short time later. This case serves to highlight the dangers presented by these labs to people in the vicinity — especially in a hotel or apartment building.
Another behavior that provides an opportunity to spot a bombmaker is testing. A professional bombmaker will try out improvised mixtures and components, like improvised blasting caps, to ensure that they are functioning properly and that the completed device will therefore be viable. Such testing may involve burning or detonating small quantities of the explosive mixture, or actually exploding the blasting cap or booster charge. The testing of small components may happen in a backyard, but the testing of larger quantities will often be done at a more remote place. In his diary, Norway bomber Anders Breivik noted how he had taken his bomb components to a remote location a good distance from the rented farmhouse where he built his bomb to test them. Therefore, any signs of explosions in remote places like parks and national forests should be immediately reported to authorities.
Obviously, not every container of nitric acid spotted or small explosion heard will be absolute confirmation of bombmaking activity, but reporting such incidents to the authorities will give them an opportunity to investigate. In an era when the threat of attack comes from increasingly diffuse sources, a good defense requires more eyes and ears than the authorities possess.
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Quote: Crafty's Post:
Awareness Can Short-Circuit a Bomb Attack
Security Weekly
March 31, 2016
Some missed opportunities to avert the bombing attacks that struck the Zaventem airport in Brussels included chemical odors outside the bombmakers' apartment and suspicious behavior on the part of the suicide attackers....
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This post is quite informative. This knowledge needs to be more widely known if that is one of ISIS' current modes of attack. Not mentioned is what the taxi driver could have done, had he known. Refuse to drive terrorist looking Muslims in Brussels-Molenbeek to where they request? I own small quantities of strong cleaners and solvents among those mentioned, but as the articles, it would be odd and suspicious for a household to be buy chemicals like those in bulk or to have that smell coming out of a residence.
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Posting this here by request, adding a link for the Syrian refugees coming to our northern border and the Montana border protection 'gap'!
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Canada Prime Minister Justin Trudeau plans to welcome at least 100,000 Syrian Muslims, refugees, into his country. 25,000 already admitted. http://thenationalsun.com/justin-trudeau-to-bring-in-another-100000-syrian-refugees-into-canada/#
13% 'support' ISIS, 33% 'sypathize' with ISIS.
http://www.clarionproject.org/analysis/13-percent-syrian-refugees-support-isis-poll
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2015/11/shock-poll-third-of-syrian-refugees-isis-sympathizers-13-percent-support/
Mr. Trump, it looks like we may need a couple more walls.
The Canada–United States border is the longest international border in the world, 5500 miles, 4000 across the lower 48 + 1500 going up Alaska. I wonder if Canada will pay for it...
In Montana, Reuters reported earlier this year, our federal enforcement force is still so understaffed that the Border Patrol depends on 100 private citizen ranchers along the northern border to police the U.S.-Canada boundaries. Of 21,000 total Border Patrol agents, only 2,100 are assigned to the northern border. There are only about 300 agents guarding the entire northern border at any one time. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-shooting-usa-canada-idUSKBN0TD0BL20151125
I have never driven or flown into Canada but have been over the border many times on foot, boat and snowmobile.
As an aside, Crafty (and others), may I recommend you take your son or family on a trip into the Boundary Waters before the border is closed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_Waters_Canoe_Area_Wilderness
That portion of the wall will be most difficult to build, a million acres along the border non-motorized, bringing in workers and cement blocks by paddle and portage. (3 million acres of lakes and forests counting the Canadian side, Quetico Park.)
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http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2016/04/cdc-official-warned-staff-of-health-safety-risks-during-influx-of-illegal-alien-minors-plan-on-many-of-the-kids-having-tb-be-wary-of-personal-safety/
CDC Official Warned Staff of Health, Safety Risks During Influx of Illegal Alien Minors: “Plan on Many of the Kids Having TB,” “Be Wary of Personal Safety.”
APRIL 21, 2016
A government official warned employees deploying for the influx of illegal immigrant minors about health and safety risks because the new arrivals would have tuberculosis and some were young adults—not children—like the Obama administration proclaimed, according to records obtained by Judicial Watch. “We might as well plan on many of the kids having TB,” states a June 26, 2014 guidance e-mail from a Centers for Disease Control (CDC) environmental health scientist, Alaric C. Denton, as the agency prepared to handle the crisis. “Most of these kids are not immunized, so we need to make sure all our staff are immunized.” Denton, who is stationed at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, predicts in the directive that the agency will be overwhelmed pretty quickly and that screening requirements will be hard to keep up with.
Judicial Watch had to sue the CDC’s umbrella agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, (HHS) for the records. Though chunks have been redacted, the documents contradict the Obama administration’s public statements dismissing possible health and safety risks created by the tens of thousands of Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) fleeing violence in Central America. The CDC official reveals in the documents obtained by JW as a result of the lawsuit that “some of these kids are not really kids they are young adults, and we should be wary of personal safety.” JW reported this early on, when the first group of UACs arrived through the Mexican border in the summer of 2014. Homeland Security sources directly involved with the mess told JW that holding centers were jam-packed, rampant with diseases and sexually active teenagers. A veteran Border Patrol officer who heads the agency’s Tucson sector quickly established that many of the UACs were not little kids but rather 17-year-olds with possible ties to gang members in the U.S.
Weeks later JW reported that the nation’s most violent street gangs—including Mara Salvatrucha or MS-13—were actively recruiting new members at U.S. shelters housing illegal immigrant minors. A high-level Homeland Security source told JW the gangs used Red Cross phones at the shelters to communicate with the new recruits. Last fall the Texas Department of Public Safety confirmed that the MS-13 has been fortified and able to remain a top tier gang thanks to the influx of illegal alien gang members that recently crossed into the state. The MS-13 is a feared street gang of mostly Central American illegal immigrants that’s spread throughout the U.S. and is renowned for drug distribution, murder, rape, robbery, home invasions, kidnappings, vandalism and other violent crimes. The Justice Department’s National Gang Intelligence Center (NGIC) says criminal street gangs like the MS-13 are responsible for the majority of violent crimes in the U.S. and are the primary distributors of most illicit drugs.
This new batch of government records, part of an ongoing JW investigation into the UAC disaster, indicate the administration was well aware of the danger in allowing hordes of illegal immigrant youths to enter and stay in the U.S. At the very least it flies in the face of the administration’s false narrative involving the key issues of health and safety surrounding the new arrivals which have been relocated throughout the nation. Denton, the CDC environmental health scientist who warned colleagues prior to deployment, works at the agency’s Environmental, Safety and Health Compliance Office (ESHCO). Officials from other federal agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), were also involved in the exchanges. JW will continue receiving records from the government involving this issue as part of an agreement, supervised by a federal judge, stemming from our lawsuit.
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http://conservativetribune.com/muslim-plane-dirty-secret/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=ConservativeHeadlinesEmail&utm_campaign=AM1&utm_content=2016-04-23
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/us/an-amateur-vs-isis-a-car-salesman-investigates-and-ends-up-in-prison.html?emc=edit_th_20160424&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193&_r=0
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/434469/9-11-victims-saudi-arabia-iran-cornyn-schumer-bill
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https://www.clarionproject.org/news/fbi-informs-3600-new-yorkers-they-are-isis-watch-list
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/may/2/arpaio-defeats-immigrant-groups-court-arizona-id-t/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTTJNMU16ZzBZMlUwTTJWaiIsInQiOiJDTHowYkdzVlFlSmU1TnRIb3pDdnF6K1ZPZmR3T0FveVhDNFo3U1BwaGdWTWxtVVVxTUFMc2kzaHA4b2pFMzBLTWl2a3lISHF3NEFXNkVzTGRoS25Id3pWNXdKZWh4T1ltOEI2Mm56RTE5Yz0ifQ%3D%3D
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http://www.clarionproject.org/news/%E2%80%98obama-plans-reduce-screening-refugees-3-months%E2%80%99
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http://www.clarionproject.org/news/%E2%80%98obama-plans-reduce-screening-refugees-3-months%E2%80%99
Is anyone here a member of ISIS? No? Welcome to America!
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http://dailysignal.com/2016/05/05/central-americans-are-crossing-the-border-illegally-at-2014-crisis-levels/?utm_source=TDS_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MorningBell&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWVRkaFpEZGpNMlUzTm1VMSIsInQiOiJsTjV4SlZWVUlcL2pRVm9TWnBsME0zYW1LRURkOGloSVZDTU1jOWhcL3ZlU2o2ZHZPMjIwYVpJVCtvbW5mbTVpMUdXYm1iSzNpdlFuUjljZ3VnMWVmdGRxbXl1eUFhY0VkVm4xaU5MU0FLd1drPSJ9
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Why Vincente Fox has said he knows more Mexicans are going back to Mexico than are coming. O'Reilly did not question him on it.
However Fox also says he has no idea how many Mexicans are in the United States.
So how can he know more are returning.
Here in Jersey one of the biggest immigrant states I haven't noticed people taking buses south with suit cases.
How is the traffic heading south out of California?
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"...Vincente Fox has said he knows more Mexicans are going back to Mexico than are coming. O'Reilly did not question him on it. However Fox also says he has no idea how many Mexicans are in the United States. So how can he know more are returning."
Packed suitcases headed south or not, they are all admitting it is still a porous border.
I thought we passed a law to fix that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Fence_Act_of_2006
Republicans and Democrats ignored the law, should arrest themselves. Now we have Trump.
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http://www.abc15.com/news/region-central-southern-az/florence/hikers-campers-warned-about-assassins-in-parts-of-pinal-county
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http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2015/04/isis-camp-a-few-miles-from-texas-mexican-authorities-confirm/
http://dailycaller.com/2016/05/23/gen-boykin-obama-is-letting-terrorists-cross-the-border-and-gop-is-too-weak-to-stop-it/
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http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2016/05/pakistani-fake-ecuadorean-passport-enters-u-s-via-mexico-multiple-times/?utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Judicial%20Watch%20Tipsheet%2005-25-16%20%281%29&utm_content=
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I have been on this reservation. It is a VERY low population density place with no signs of man at all most of the time as one drives along , , , though I did see a drunken Indian (please forgive the stereotype, but it is the fact here) hit and run by a car. I saw an owl, several coyotes, eagles, and tons of prairie dogs.
Anyway, an IDEAL place for smuggling and given the narcos credo of "Plata o plomo?" (Meaning "silver or lead" i.e. Take the money or we kill you) I can't picture anyone giving the slightest of resistance.
https://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2016/05/border-patrol-locked-indian-reservation-known-mexican-drug-trafficking/
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I have been on this reservation. It is a VERY low population density place with no signs of man at all most of the time as one drives along , , , though I did see a drunken Indian (please forgive the stereotype, but it is the fact here) hit and run by a car. I saw an owl, several coyotes, eagles, and tons of prairie dogs.
Anyway, an IDEAL place for smuggling and given the narcos credo of "Plata o plomo?" (Meaning "silver or lead" i.e. Take the money or we kill you) I can't picture anyone giving the slightest of resistance.
https://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2016/05/border-patrol-locked-indian-reservation-known-mexican-drug-trafficking/
Trust me, there is a reason the stereotype exists. See it on a constant basis.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QOwAJ2ez6U&app=desktop
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"I did see a drunken Indian (please forgive the stereotype, but it is the fact here) hit and run by a car. "
Was he killed?
That is a terrible sight.
Did the driver ever get caught?
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http://pamelageller.com/2016/06/cnn-finds-muslim-war-criminal-working-security-at-dc-area-airport.html/
:-o :-o :-o
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http://pamelageller.com/2016/06/cnn-finds-muslim-war-criminal-working-security-at-dc-area-airport.html/
:-o :-o :-o
What could possibly go wrong?
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jun/2/smuggling-network-guided-illegal-immigrants-from-m/
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jun/2/smuggling-network-guided-illegal-immigrants-from-m/
Since Buraq Hussein is busy importing jihadist refugees, at this point, what difference does it make?
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http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2016/06/dhs-quietly-moving-releasing-vanloads-illegal-aliens-away-border/
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second post
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3623231/Illegal-immigrants-including-Afghan-embroiled-terror-plot-caught-15-miles-north-border-crawling-fence-help-smuggling-network.html
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https://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2016/06/cartels-corruption-terrorism-an-investigation/
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http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2016/06/dhs-quietly-moving-releasing-vanloads-illegal-aliens-away-border/?utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tipsheet%206-7-16%20%281%29&utm_content=
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http://www.newsday.com/news/nation/james-wesley-howell-arrested-at-calif-gay-pride-parade-was-on-probation-in-ind-1.11907256
"The page's most recent public post, from June 3, shows a photo comparing an Adolf Hitler quote to one from Hillary Clinton. An anti-Clinton, pro-Bernie Sanders photo was posted in February."
This would be on top of Huffington Post if he appeared to be Trump supporter. Unless the above is wrong and he is a Trump supporter. :?
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http://www.floridatoday.com/story/news/crime/2016/06/12/who-omar-mateen/85791280/
A former Fort Pierce police officer who once worked with 29-year-old Omar Mateen, the assailant in an Orlando nightclub shooting that left at least 50 dead, said he was "unhinged and unstable."
Daniel Gilroy said he worked the 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. shift with G4S Security at the south gate at PGA Village for several months in 2014-15. Mateen took over from him for a 3 to 11 p.m. shift.
Gilroy, a former Fort Pierce police officer, said Mateen frequently made homophobic and racial comments. Gilroy said he complained to his employer several times but it did nothing because he was Muslim. Gilroy quit after he said Mateen began stalking him via multiple text messages — 20 or 30 a day. He also sent Gilroy 13 to 15 phone messages a day, he said.
FLORIDA TODAY
Orlando shooting is deadliest in U.S. history
"I quit because everything he said was toxic," Gilroy said Sunday, "and the company wouldn't do anything. This guy was unhinged and unstable. He talked of killing people."
Gilroy said this shooting didn't come as a surprise to him.
(https://westernrifleshooters.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/tumblr_o8o7rlyxck1r7p8tto1_1280.jpg?w=500&h=334)
https://westernrifleshooters.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/tumblr_o8o7rlyxck1r7p8tto1_1280.jpg?w=500&h=334
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http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/283290-orlando-shooter-was-on-then-off-watch-list
FBI: Orlando shooter was on, then off watch list
Getty Images
By Julian Hattem - 06/13/16 02:17 PM EDT
The man who police say killed 49 people in a brutal rampage in Orlando, Fla., early on Sunday morning was on a federal watch list for roughly 10 months in 2013 and 2014, while he was the subject of an FBI probe.
But then Omar Mateen was taken off the list soon after the investigation ended in March of 2014, FBI Director James Comey said on Monday
“He was watch-listed with the opening of the preliminary investigation and he was taken off the watch list when the investigation was closed,” Comey told reporters.
That preliminary investigation was launched after coworkers complained that Mateen, who at the time was the guard at a Florida courthouse, reported that he had boasted about having connections to al Qaeda and other extremist groups. As part of the investigation, the FBI followed Mateen and had confidential sources meet with him, but the results were not enough to press forward, Comey said.
Had Mateen remained on the list, federal officials would have received a flag when he purchased two guns earlier this month, but he would not have been banned from making the purchase.
Democrats in Congress have fought to change the rules for purchases firearms and enact restrictions against people on various government databases from buying the weapons. Those calls have returned in the wake of the shooting in Orlando, the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
Sally Quillan Yates, the Justice Department’s deputy attorney general, appeared open to the idea but declined to explicitly endorse it.
“Certainly we always want to have more information rather than less, but you also want to factor in what it is you can do with that information,” Yates said. “And currently, there is no prohibition for someone who is under active investigation to be able to purchase a firearm.”
It is unclear whether Mateen was on the Terrorist Screening Database, which is commonly referred to as the terrorist watch list, the narrower no-fly list or a broader classified system shared across the government. Comey declined to clarify the point on Monday.
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https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/2016/06/13/law-enforcement-never-guessed-gay-club-would-be-targeted-by-jihad/?singlepage=true
HOMELAND SECURITY
Law Enforcement 'Never Guessed' Gay Club Would Be Targeted by Jihad
BY ROBERT SPENCER JUNE 13, 2016 CHAT 281 COMMENTS
While Omar Mateen was casing other gay clubs to determine where he wanted to commit jihad mass murder, law enforcement officials had no idea a jihadi might ever consider such targets.
On Sunday, the East Orlando Post reported startling words from James Copenhaver, whom it described as a “veteran investigator and former Orlando law enforcement officer.” Said Copenhaver:
I have been in this business for 30 years, and we all in law enforcement have talked about one of the theme parks getting hit by these terrorist killers. Never in all my years of training, and being involved in several investigative units, to include the FBI Task Force, would we have ever guessed a LGBT club be a target of an terrorist attack.
Why would they never have guessed?
Because the FBI and other law enforcement agencies don’t study Islam, and this is a direct result of Muslim groups demanding the removal of such material. Those who are committed to protecting us are taught to downplay and deny the motivating ideology behind jihad terror attacks.
They have no idea that the following sayings exist or what their significance is:
If two men among you are guilty of lewdness, punish them both. If they repent and amend, leave them alone; for Allah is Oft-returning, Most Merciful. (Qur’an 4:16)
That seems mild, but keep reading. The Qur’an depicts Allah raining down stones upon people for engaging in homosexual activity:
We also sent Lot. He said to his people: “Do you commit lewdness such as no people in creation committed before you? For you practice your lusts on men in preference to women: you are indeed a people transgressing beyond bounds. … And we rained down on them a shower of brimstone: Then see what was the end of those who indulged in sin and crime!" (Qur’an 7:80)
Muhammad himself makes clear that Muslims should be the executors of the wrath of Allah by killing gays. A hadith depicts Muhammad saying:
If you find anyone doing as Lot’s people did, kill the one who does it, and the one to whom it is done. (Abu Dawud 38:4447)
Stone the upper and the lower, stone them both. (Ibn Majah 3:20:2562)
James Copenhaver, in his 30 years in the business, never encountered that material nor was given any idea of how it might one day relate to a jihad mass murder attack.
While Copenhaver is right that this denial and willful ignorance has been going on for decades, one more recent and notorious manifestation of how it has become national policy came on October 19, 2011. That day, Farhana Khera of Muslim Advocates delivered a letter to John Brennan, who was then the assistant to the president on National Security for Homeland Security and Counter Terrorism.
The letter was signed by the leaders of virtually all significant Islamic groups in the United States: 57 Muslim, Arab, and South Asian organizations, many with ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Muslim American Society (MAS), the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), Islamic Relief USA, and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC).
The letter denounced what it characterized as U.S. government agencies’ “use of biased, false and highly offensive training materials about Muslims and Islam.” It emphasized that this was an issue of the utmost importance:
The seriousness of this issue cannot be overstated, and we request that the White House immediately create an interagency task force to address this problem, with a fair and transparent mechanism for input from the Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities, including civil rights lawyers, religious leaders, and law enforcement experts.
The task force was needed because:
[W]hile recent news reports have highlighted the FBI’s use of biased experts and training materials, we have learned that this problem extends far beyond the FBI and has infected other government agencies, including the U.S. Attorney’s Anti-Terrorism Advisory Councils, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Army. Furthermore, by the FBI’s own admission, the use of bigoted and distorted materials in its trainings has not been an isolated occurrence. Since last year, reports have surfaced that the FBI, and other federal agencies, are using or supporting the use of biased trainers and materials in presentations to law enforcement officials.
Khera also complained about my work: that my books could be found in “the FBI’s library at the FBI training academy in Quantico, Virginia”; that a reading list accompanying a slide presentation by the FBI’s Law Enforcement Communications Unit recommended my book The Truth About Muhammad; that in July 2010 I “presented a two-hour seminar on ‘the belief system of Islamic jihadists’ to the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) in Tidewater, Virginia”; and that I also “presented a similar lecture to the U.S. Attorney’s Anti-Terrorism Advisory Council, which is co-hosted by the FBI’s Norfolk Field Office.”
These were supposed to be terrible materials because I was supposedly bigoted and hateful. However, many of the examples Khera adduced of “bigoted and distorted materials” involved statements that were simply accurate. The only distortion was Khera’s representation of them.
For instance, Khera stated:
A 2006 FBI intelligence report stating that individuals who convert to Islam are on the path to becoming “Homegrown Islamic Extremists,” if they exhibit any of the following behavior:
“Wearing traditional Muslim attire”
“Growing facial hair”
“Frequent attendance at a mosque or a prayer group”
“Travel to a Muslim country”
“Increased activity in a pro-Muslim social group or political cause”
Well, the FBI intelligence report Khera purported to be describing didn’t actually say that. Rather, it included these behaviors among a list of fourteen indicators that could “identify an individual going through the radicalization process.” Other indicators included:
“Travel without obvious source of funds"
“Suspicious purchases of bomb making paraphernalia or weapons”
“Large transfer of funds, from or to overseas”
“Formation of operational cells”
Khera had selectively quoted the list to give the impression that the FBI was teaching that devout observance of Islam led inevitably and in every case to “extremism.”
Despite the factual accuracy of the material about which they were complaining, the Muslim groups signing the letter demanded that the task force, among other actions:
“Purge all federal government training materials of biased materials.”
“Implement a mandatory re-training program for FBI agents, U.S. Army officers, and all federal, state and local law enforcement who have been subjected to biased training.”
They wished to ensure that all law enforcement officials ever learn about Islam and jihad would be what the signatories wanted them to learn -- and Brennan was amenable to that. He took Khera’s complaints as his marching orders.
In a November 3, 2011, letter to Khera that -- significantly -- was written on White House stationery, Brennan made no attempt to defend counter-terror materials and procedures. He instead accepted Khera’s criticisms without a murmur of protest and assured her of his readiness to comply:
Please allow me to share with you the specific steps we are taking to ensure that federal officials and state, local and tribal partners receive accurate, evidence-based information in these crucial areas.
Brennan assured Khera that all her demands would be met:
Your letter requests that "the White House immediately create an interagency task force to address this problem," and we agree that this is necessary.
He then detailed other specific actions being undertaken, including “collecting all training materials that contain cultural or religious content, including information related to Islam or Muslims.” In reality, this material wouldn’t just be “collected”; it would be purged of anything that Farhana Khera and others like her found offensive. Honest, accurate discussion of how Islamic jihadists use Islamic teachings to justify violence would no longer be allowed.
The alacrity with which Brennan complied was unfortunate on many levels. Numerous books and presentations that gave a perfectly accurate view of Islam and jihad were purged. Brennan was complying with demands from quarters that could hardly be considered authentically moderate.
Four-and-a-half years later, this entrenched policy of the U.S. government ensured that people such as Omar Mateen simply cannot be identified as risks. The administration is bound, as a matter of policy, to ignore what in saner times would be taken as warning signs.
And so there will be many, many more jihad massacres like the one he perpetrated in Orlando Saturday night.
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Good thing DHS has the qualified Jeh Johnson and not some dem machine hack running it.
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/homeland-security/268282-dhs-ordered-me-to-scrub-records-of-muslims-with-terror
DHS ordered me to scrub records of Muslims with terror ties
By Philip Haney
Amid the chaos of the 2009 holiday travel season, jihadists planned to slaughter 290 innocent travelers on a Christmas Day flight from the Netherlands to Detroit, Michigan. Twenty-three-year old Nigerian Muslim Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab intended to detonate Northwest Airlines Flight 253, but the explosives in his underwear malfunctioned and brave passengers subdued him until he could be arrested. The graphic and traumatic defeat they planned for the United States failed, that time.
Following the attempted attack, President Obama threw the intelligence community under the bus for its failure to “connect the dots.” He said, “this was not a failure to collect intelligence, it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.”
Most Americans were unaware of the enormous damage to morale at the Department of Homeland Security, where I worked, his condemnation caused. His words infuriated many of us because we knew his administration had been engaged in a bureaucratic effort to destroy the raw material—the actual intelligence we had collected for years, and erase those dots. The dots constitute the intelligence needed to keep Americans safe, and the Obama administration was ordering they be wiped away.
After leaving my 15 year career at DHS, I can no longer be silent about the dangerous state of America’s counter-terror strategy, our leaders’ willingness to compromise the security of citizens for the ideological rigidity of political correctness—and, consequently, our vulnerability to devastating, mass-casualty attack.
Just before that Christmas Day attack, in early November 2009, I was ordered by my superiors at the Department of Homeland Security to delete or modify several hundred records of individuals tied to designated Islamist terror groups like Hamas from the important federal database, the Treasury Enforcement Communications System (TECS). These types of records are the basis for any ability to “connect dots.” Every day, DHS Customs and Border Protection officers watch entering and exiting many individuals associated with known terrorist affiliations, then look for patterns. Enforcing a political scrubbing of records of Muslims greatly affected our ability to do that. Even worse, going forward, my colleagues and I were prohibited from entering pertinent information into the database.
A few weeks later, in my office at the Port of Atlanta, the television hummed with the inevitable Congressional hearings that follow any terrorist attack. While members of Congress grilled Obama administration officials, demanding why their subordinates were still failing to understand the intelligence they had gathered, I was being forced to delete and scrub the records. And I was well aware that, as a result, it was going to be vastly more difficult to “connect the dots” in the future—especially beforean attack occurs.
As the number of successful and attempted Islamic terrorist attacks on America increased, the type of information that the Obama administration ordered removed from travel and national security databases was the kind of information that, if properly assessed, could have prevented subsequent domestic Islamist attacks like the ones committed by Faisal Shahzad (May 2010), Detroit “honor killing” perpetrator Rahim A. Alfetlawi (2011); Amine El Khalifi, who plotted to blow up the U.S. Capitol (2012); Dzhokhar or Tamerlan Tsarnaev who conducted the Boston Marathon bombing (2013); Oklahoma beheading suspect Alton Nolen (2014); or Muhammed Yusuf Abdulazeez, who opened fire on two military installations in Chattanooga, Tennessee (2015).
It is very plausible that one or more of the subsequent terror attacks on the homeland could have been prevented if more subject matter experts in the Department of Homeland Security had been allowed to do our jobs back in late 2009. It is demoralizing—and infuriating—that today, those elusive dots are even harder to find, and harder to connect, than they were during the winter of 2009.
Haney worked at the Department of Homeland Security for 15 years.
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2016/06/14/ironic-jeh-johnson-says-gun-control-now-a-homeland-security-issueorlando-terrorist-worked-for-dhs-n2178248
Irony: Jeh Johnson Says Gun Control Now a Matter of Homeland Security...Orlando Terrorist Worked For DHS
Katie Pavlich Katie Pavlich |Posted: Jun 14, 2016 12:15 PM Share (977) Tweet
Irony: Jeh Johnson Says Gun Control Now a Matter of Homeland Security...Orlando Terrorist Worked For DHS
The Islamic terrorist who carried out the horrific, atrocious attack on Pulse nightclub in Orlando Sunday morning was employed by G4S security company as a licensed, professional security guard with the ability to carry a firearm on duty. He worked at the company for years.
G4S is contracted by the Department of Homeland Security to protect federal buildings, including nuclear facilities, and is responsible for providing security protocol for major transportation hubs around the country.
Further, the terrorist (an American citizen) purchased the firearms he used Sunday legally and passed a background check to do so.
Despite these facts, during an interview with CBS this morning Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson declared gun control as a "matter of national security."
"Meaningful, responsible gun control has to be part of national security," Johnson said.
The Orlando terrorist was interviewed by the FBI three times and was under investigation for 10 months in 2013. At no point were his security credentials revoked. Maybe instead of focusing on gun control, Johnson should be focused on not allowing DHS contracted companies to employ those under FBI investigation for terrorism.
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http://10news.dk/?p=760
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http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2016/06/islamic-refugee-gas-pipeline-plans-arrested-new-mexico-border-county/
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https://20committee.com/2016/06/15/unraveling-the-orlando-horror/
Unraveling the Orlando Horror
June 15, 2016
At 2 a.m. last Sunday, the worst terrorist attack on the United States since 9/11 unfolded in Orlando, Florida. The target was a popular gay dance club packed with guests for Latin Night. By the time the horrific ordeal was over, three hours later, 49 party-goers plus the gunman were dead while 53 more were injured, many of them gravely.
The attack on Pulse nightclub has left America in shock, horrified by the reappearance of mass-casualty terrorism perpetrated in the name of Islam. President Obama had been lucky before last weekend. His two terms witnessed several Islamist terror attacks inside the USA, but nothing like Orlando. The Fort Hood, Texas shooting in 2009, by a U.S. Army major, killed 13 soldiers. The Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 killed only three but injured more than 250 others. Most recently, the San Bernardino, California attack last December killed 14 Americans. While all these incidents were traumatic, they pale in comparison to the Orlando horror.
The killer, responsible for the bloodiest mass murder in American history, was himself killed by police. Armed with an assault rifle and a pistol, Omar Mateen embarked on the one-way jihadist mission he must have long fantasized about. Just before commencing his slaughter of the homosexuals he hated, Mateen pledged allegiance to the Islamic State.
Mateen was born in New York City in 1986 to parents who immigrated from Afghanistan. To all appearances, the 29 year-old had a normal American upbringing without excessive religiosity. He had a brief marriage that failed. His ex-wife noted he was not especially religious but he did beat her frequently. After they divorced, Mateen embraced a more fervent version of Islam, including attending a mosque in Fort Pierce, Florida, several times per week. That same mosque produced a young radical, Moner Abu Salha, who died as a suicide bomber in Syria in 2014.
There had been previous warning signs about Omer Mateen. He is reported to have greeted news of the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon with unconcealed glee, something that disturbed fellow students at his high school.
Then there is the strange matter of his family. Seddique Mateen, his father, has pronounced that his son’s horrible crimes have nothing do with Islam, and he professes to have no idea what inspired his mass murder spree. However, the father has stated that homosexuals deserve divine punishment, and he has also praised the Taliban. The elder Mateen is active in Afghan diaspora politics, including hosting a satellite TV show aimed at his homeland. Bizarrely, he has sometimes claimed to be the real president of Afghanistan.
There is nothing amusing about his son, however, who developed a penchant for angry statements against gays, minorities, and others he didn’t like. He made repeated threats of violence and co-workers noticed. He was employed beginning in mid-2007 for G4S, a British multinational security company that does lots of work in the USA, including some for the U.S. Government. As a security guard, Mateen had reason to be armed and he stayed with that firm until his death, although his tenure was rocky. Complaints mounted about his troubling ways, but G4S did nothing about them.
One co-worker, who later became a police officer, repeatedly complained about violent anti-gay statements by Mateen, whom he considered “unhinged and unstable.” Mateen then began stalking that co-worker, yet G4S kept him on the job. In disgust, the co-worker resigned, believing that their employer did nothing about Mateen’s troubling behavior because it was afraid to take action due to Mateen’s religion.
It’s apparent that Mateen was able to get away with years of violent statements and threats due to a pervasive fear of Islamophobia. It even derailed the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mateen’s bizarre statements to co-workers, including claims that he belonged to an international terrorist group, got the FBI’s attention, and in 2013 the Bureau opened a formal investigation into him.
That investigation lasted ten months and included the employment of confidential informants and wiretaps on Mateen, as well as two interviews with the security guard, but ultimately closed without adding Omar Mateen to any permanent list of suspected terrorists in the United States.
The FBI ultimately concluded that Mateen was a fantasist more than a terrorist. Although he claimed to have joined multiple terrorist groups, there was no evidence to back any of that up. To top it off, the FBI concluded that Mateen was engaging in bizarre behavior due to “co-workers discriminating against him and teasing him because he was Muslim.” In 2014, the FBI opened a second investigation into Mateen and reached the same conclusion: he was a fantasist not a jihadist.
Since Mateen had no criminal record and was not under FBI investigation any longer, he had no trouble buying an AR-15 assault rifle just days before the Orlando attack. Florida has permissive gun laws even by American standards. That semi-automatic weapon did most of the killing last Sunday. Americans should be asking how anybody who had been twice investigated on terrorism suspicions was able to buy an assault rifle so easily.
But Americans must also ask why we tolerate such angry, violent behavior in the first place. A security firm where he carried a gun was hardly the place an unbalanced hater like Mateen should have been working. Fear of Islamophobia seems to have trumped fear of murder.
Although it appears unlikely that the Islamic State had anything directly to do with Mateen, they were happy to claim responsibility for his atrocity. After all, the group has encouraged followers worldwide to wage individual jihad against the “infidel” West. And they hate no one more than gays, whom they butcher at every opportunity.
The FBI has confirmed that Mateen was yet another case of online radicalization, which is commonplace in the West now. He watched ISIS videos that propagate the group’s violent, hate-filled ideology. In 2016, this is sufficient for some would-be jihadists: actual trips to the Middle East are optional.
Reports proliferate of more than one shooter at Pulse but they remain unconfirmed. Yet it is remarkable that Mateen, who had no combat experience, managed to kill 49 people all by himself, while the Islamic State attack on Paris last November that killed 130 involved nine terrorists, several of whom were veteran killers from the Syrian war.
Many questions remain unanswered. The FBI is now doing the investigation they should have done years before, including raids on Mateen’s friends and family, looking for any network that may have helped the killer. Although “lone wolves” exist they are rare in reality. Most terrorists have help from someone. We need to know the full story here.
In the meantime, President Obama has talked about hate and guns causing Orlando, omitting any discussion of Islamism or jihad. Hillary Clinton has done much the same, calling for a ban on assault weapons not jihadism (though Ms. Clinton is willing to admit radical Islam is a problem).
For his part, Donald Trump has stated he was right all along about the jihadist threat, reiterating his call for a ban on immigration from countries where terrorism is common. In effect, this means banning Muslims. This position, unpopular with American elites, may prove popular with average voters who are disgusted by what has just happened.
America’s presidential election is still almost five months away but the Orlando horror seems certain to feature prominently in the race. Although President Obama’s war on terrorism has taken place mostly in Afghanistan and Iraq, plus drone strikes in several more countries, last weekend showed that there is a home front too in the fight against the Islamic State. That is a fight no president can afford to lose.
(This article appeared in the German newspaper BILD, you can read that here.)
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amazing
FBI followed Mateen
DHS did not notice he was contractor with them and someone working within the company kept complaining about him
Gun shop owner reported his suspicious behavior
and Obamster gets no blame from the media for a culture that obviously is worried about micro aggression against Muslims.
Instead the Bamster is running around shooting his big yap about guns , hate crimes, and America and Christians might be to blame.
We have to get rid of him and Clinton - both to pasture.
Though we know he will go for some international post - UN - or something or other - since like Clinton he will never be able to leave us alone.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/12/15/one-woman-s-case-proves-it-s-basically-impossible-to-get-off-the-no-fly-list.html
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http://dailysignal.com/2016/06/14/the-terrorist-watchlist-explained/?utm_source=TDS_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Top5&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTmpFNU16VTNabU14TURVMiIsInQiOiIrWEg4YUVnZWlHMk5DdXhXdTVmNzZMQVhhMzRrdEszXC9BdkZ0Z3pOTFpBR1FxXC9BXC9rd0tJdUJvVW5aYWJza2grdEE5QzJyejhOWUoxZFZkcWVxWDhmWk40RFZrMVp1ZWg5OEtsXC9mYkN4elU9In0%3D
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http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/06/13/481889329/orlando-gunman-had-been-taken-off-watch-list-fbi-director-comey-says
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http://www.investigativeproject.org/5447/document-reveals-omar-mateen-father-tied-to
OTOH
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/06/20/i-reported-omar-mateen-to-the-fbi-trump-is-wrong-that-muslims-dont-do-our-part/?campaign_id=A100&campaign_type=Email
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Do we have more Muslims waging jihad or helping law enforcement? I will will bet it's the former.
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Do we have more Muslims waging jihad or helping law enforcement? I will will bet it's the former.
The peaceful majority need to go from staying out of it to helping law enforcement.
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Agreed AND our part of it is acknowledging and welcoming those who do.
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Agreed AND our part of it is acknowledging and welcoming those who do.
Very few are going to want to go public, as they face from very real threats from their co-religionists. By helping non-muslims, they are violating norms rooted in islamic theology.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
http://www.meforum.org/1754/peace-or-jihad-abrogation-in-islam
The issue of abrogation in Islam is critical to understanding both jihad and da'wa, the propagation of Islam. Some Muslims may preach tolerance and argue that jihad refers only to an internal, peaceful struggle to better oneself. Western commentators can convince themselves that such teachings are correct. However, for learned Muslim scholars and populist leaders, such notions are or should be risible. They recognize that, in practice, there is compulsion in Islam. They take seriously the notion that the Qur'an teaches not just tolerance among religions, but tolerance among religions on the terms of Islam. To understand the challenge of the current Islamist revival, it is crucial for non-Muslims and moderate Muslims alike to recognize that interpretation of Islamic doctrine can have two faces, and that the Medinan face may very well continue to overshadow the Meccan face for a major portion, if not the majority, of contemporary Muslims.
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http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2016/06/fealty-and-modern-terrorism-1.html
Fealty and Modern Terrorism
During his deadly attack on a packed Orlando nightclub where he killed 50 people and wounded many more, Omar Mateen called 911.
On the recorded call, he pledge his loyalty to ISIS.
A day later, a terrorist outside of Paris, used Facebook livestreaming to pledge his loyalty to ISIS while stabbing a police chief and his wife to death.
What's going on?
The answer is that these pledges aren't simply expressions of loyalty, they are expressions of fealty, a much more powerful means of connection.
Fealty is something we haven't seen since the middle ages. ISIS became capable of employing fealty once it rebuilt a barebones Caliphate and it is using it to transform modern terrorism.
To understand this, let's dig into fealty a bit.
Fealty is a strict, lifelong pledge of loyalty from a vassal to a lord. It's public and irreversible. (If you watch Game of Thrones, it's why everyone hates the Kingslayer, even if he was justified in his actions)
Fealty obligates the vassal to act in the service of the lord, without any need for specific direction. It also gives the protection of the lord to the vassal (in a religious context, salvation and redemption).
Fealty made it possible to build large, geographically segmented networks in a world without instant communications and rapid travel.
Fealty allows ISIS to get around some of problems of modern open source insurgency. For example:
A potential terrorist shouldn't express fealty until the attack. Benefit: This prevents discovery during the grooming process.
A public expression of fealty (FB, Twitter..) provides them with instant acceptance by the "lord" Benefit: this provides them spiritual protection for the attack and maximizes the publicity for ISIS
A Jihadi, or their local network, shouldn't ask for permission, planning, or support. They should act on their own. The attack itself is a demonstration of loyalty. Benefit: this reduces chances of discovery and maximizes the innovative potential of the global network.
The more I think about it, fealty is an extremely useful way of harnessing and directing the power of an open source insurgency (aka, herding cats).
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http://www.theguardian.com/global/2015/may/17/losing-their-religion-british-ex-muslims-non-believers-hidden-crisis-faith
The guardian is hardly a right wing periodical.
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http://www.theguardian.com/global/2015/may/17/losing-their-religion-british-ex-muslims-non-believers-hidden-crisis-faith
The guardian is hardly a right wing periodical.
This is the conundrum. We can't solve this (ever) without peace seeking Muslims coming forward and we can't provide a full witness protection program for 2 billion people. 10-15% can control 85-90% with terror. (The IRS has been doing it for years.) The latest Islamist example was a 4 year old girl beheaded in front of her mom. I wonder what either of them did wrong.
Articulating this better is Trump's ticket to getting elected. We know that not all Muslims are attacking us. We know peaceful Muslims face huge risks when they come forward to help. But Muslims and Muslim immigrants is a group that includes nearly all the terrorists and the rest can't join us in rooting out this problem, so it is suicidal for our society to be take in more numbers of that group until that changes. And if we aren't going to take more in legally, we certainly shouldn't take them in illegally. One candidate is pledged to control the border. One just the opposite, not evn pretending she will secure it. The argument of which one will make us more secure isn't that hard. Instead of being inflammatory, how about making the definitive case?
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https://www.youtube.com/embed/6PzT8vEvYPg
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http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2016/06/avert-us-versus-dhs-told-ban-religiously-charged-terms-jihad-sharia-anti-terror-programs/
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http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/marshals-innocent-people-placed-on-watch-list-to-meet-quota
Marshals: Innocent People Placed On 'Watch List' To Meet Quota
Marshals Say They Must File One Surveillance Detection Report, Or SDR, Per Month
10:56 AM, Jul 21, 2006
Autoplay:X
Air Marshals Say SDR Quota Puts Pressure To Label People As 'Suspicious'
You could be on a secret government database or watch list for simply taking a picture on an airplane. Some federal air marshals say they're reporting your actions to meet a quota, even though some top officials deny it.
The air marshals, whose identities are being concealed, told 7NEWS that they're required to submit at least one report a month. If they don't, there's no raise, no bonus, no awards and no special assignments.
"Innocent passengers are being entered into an international intelligence database as suspicious persons, acting in a suspicious manner on an aircraft ... and they did nothing wrong," said one federal air marshal.
These unknowing passengers who are doing nothing wrong are landing in a secret government document called a Surveillance Detection Report, or SDR. Air marshals told 7NEWS that managers in Las Vegas created and continue to maintain this potentially dangerous quota system.
"Do these reports have real life impacts on the people who are identified as potential terrorists?" 7NEWS Investigator Tony Kovaleski asked.
"Absolutely," a federal air marshal replied.
7NEWS obtained an internal Homeland Security document defining an SDR as a report designed to identify terrorist surveillance activity.
"When you see a decision like this, for these reports, who loses here?" Kovaleski asked.
"The people we're supposed to protect -- the American public," an air marshal said.
What kind of impact would it have for a flying individual to be named in an SDR?
"That could have serious impact ... They could be placed on a watch list. They could wind up on databases that identify them as potential terrorists or a threat to an aircraft. It could be very serious," said Don Strange, a former agent in charge of air marshals in Atlanta. He lost his job attempting to change policies inside the agency.
That's why several air marshals object to a July 2004 memo from top management in the Las Vegas office, a memo that reminded air marshals of the SDR requirement.
The body of the memo said, "Each federal air marshal is now expected to generate at least one SDR per month."
"Does that memo read to you that Federal Air Marshal headquarters has set a quota on these reports?" Kovaleski asked.
"Absolutely, no doubt," an air marshal replied.
A second management memo, also dated July 2004, said, "There may come an occasion when you just don't see anything out of the ordinary for a month at a time, but I'm sure that if you are looking for it, you'll see something."
Another federal air marshal said that not only is there a quota in Las Vegas for SDRs, but that "it directly reflects on (their) performance evaluations" and on how much money they make.
The director of the Air Marshal Service, Dana Brown, declined 7NEWS' request for an interview on the quota system. But the agency points to a memo from August 2004 that said there is not a quota for submitting SDRs and which goes on to say, "I do not expect reports that are inaccurate or frivolous."
But, Las Vegas-based air marshals say the quota system remains in force, now more than two years after managers sent the original memos, and that it's a mandate from management that impacts annual raises, bonuses, awards and special assignments.
"To meet this quota, to get their raises, do you think federal air marshals in Las Vegas are making some of this stuff up?" Kovaleski asked.
"I know they are. It's a joke," an air marshal replied.
"Have marshals in the Las Vegas office, I don't want to say fabricated, but 'created' reports?" Kovaleski asked.
"Creative writing -- stretching a long ways the truth, yes," an air marshal replied.
One example, according to air marshals, occurred on one flight leaving Las Vegas, when an unknowing passenger, most likely a tourist, was identified in an SDR for doing nothing more than taking a photo of the Las Vegas skyline as his plane rolled down the runway.
"You're saying that was not an accurate portrayal of a potential terrorist activity?" Kovaleski asked.
"No, it was not," an air marshal said.
"It was a marshal trying to meet a quota ..." Kovaleski said.
"Yes, he was," the air marshal replied.
Strange said he didn't have a quota in the Atlanta office when he was in charge.
"I would never have done that ... You are going to have people reporting every suspicious looking activity they come across, whether they in their heart feel like it's a threat, just to meet the quota," Strange said.
Strange and other air marshals said the quota allows the government to fill a database with bad information.
A Las Vegas air marshal said he didn't write an SDR every month for exactly that reason.
"Well, it's intelligence information, and like any system, if you put garbage in, you get garbage out," the air marshal said.
"I would like to see an investigation -- a real investigation conducted into the ways things are done here," the air marshal in Las Vegas said.
Although the agency strongly denies any presence of a quota system, Las Vegas-based air marshals have produced documents that show their performance review is directly linked to producing SDRs.
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http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/marshals-innocent-people-placed-on-watch-list-to-meet-quota
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2016/06/23/it-took-this-innocent-woman-eight-years-to-get-off-the-nofly-list-n2182845
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http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/marshals-innocent-people-placed-on-watch-list-to-meet-quota
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2016/06/23/it-took-this-innocent-woman-eight-years-to-get-off-the-nofly-list-n2182845
I don't know how anyone would suffer such a thing that is obviously not legal, depriving their right from the creator, adn still consider themselves a "man," granted that the one case in particular was a woman.
I for one will never be told how to live my life so long as I'm not actively harming others.... not going to happen.
Ps.... New York just passed a law allowing for a Terrorist Registry that you don't have to break the law to get on.... it's right on the NY Senate Website.
https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2015/s3464/amendment/original
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But Americans must also ask why we tolerate such angry, violent behavior in the first place.
Seriously? To that point, he hadn't been violent.... and we're concerned with anger now?
I'm angry.... I'm angry at being called racist every time I disagree with something, even though I'm not racist. I loathe liberals, but from a cultural perspective... I don't think (personally) that we belong under the same flag. I'm angry that there is a person in the Whitehouse and tons of nonhackers telling me that I have to buy insurance. Freedom? Whatever happened to that?
"Tolerate" an "angry" guy?
I can't wait until this fluff society gets sorted out.....that or buy a house in the swamp and hang t"respassers will not survive" sign on it and grow old with my wife.
Angry.... oh man.
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https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/06/cruz-destroys-jeh-johnson-after-catching-him-in-a-lie
BigDog unavailable for comment.
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http://pamelageller.com/2016/07/u-s-accepts-record-number-of-syrian-refugees-in-june-despite-terrorist-screening-worries.html/
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http://pamelageller.com/2016/07/boston-police-captains-son-indicted-in-isis-inspired-plot.html/
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http://counterjihad.com/hammadi-alwan-poster-boys-refugee-terrorism-kerry-says-doesnt-exist
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http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/07/14/clinton-resettle-one-million-muslim-migrants-first-term-alone/
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http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/07/14/clinton-resettle-one-million-muslim-migrants-first-term-alone/
She reads that to mean a million new Democratic voters...
Hillary took an issue where her opponent has been seen as extreme and now gone extreme herself in a more dangerous, less popular direction. Do even the illegal Hispanics want open borders for the Islamists? Do blacks? Do gays want more Muslims here? Do Rabbis? Do blue collar working people? Do soccer mom's want more terrorists in the neighborhoods? I'm not being facetious; Eden Prairie schools, a rich suburb here, had to re-draw the Elementary school lines to uncluster the influx of Somalis moving in. What means busing the white kid to a school further from their home. Guess what? Moms don't like that.
If your opponent has gone extreme right on a crucial issue, why not lock in the center? Take in new immigrants with due diligence and caution, even a pause while we figure out what is going on. But the left is not led by the center. Current leftist leaders including Obama, Hillary, BLM, SEIU, AFSCME, the Planned Parenthood organ chop shop and all the rest risk splitting up the coalition they worked so hard to build.
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https://www.clarionproject.org/analysis/declassified-pages-link-muslim-brotherhood-911-network
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http://www.michaelyon-online.com/crucial-declassified-document.htm
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http://www.michaelyon-online.com/crucial-declassified-document.htm
What do you take from this? The document is new and perhaps provide new details but it seems the relationships were already known. Does contact with a hijacker mean a family member knew the mission? Michael Yon is suggested we should have overthrown Saudi or still should? Saudi is an enemy of ISIS and Iran. We could depose the royal family and it would be the ISIS Caliphate's dream come true.
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http://www.michaelyon-online.com/crucial-declassified-document.htm
What do you take from this? The document is new and perhaps provide new details but it seems the relationships were already known. Does contact with a hijacker mean a family member knew the mission? Michael Yon is suggested we should have overthrown Saudi or still should? Saudi is an enemy of ISIS and Iran. We could depose the royal family and it would be the ISIS Caliphate's dream come true.
If ISIS or Iran or another enemy gets control of the "land of the two holy mosques" that would be seriously bad kimchee.
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http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2016/08/dhs-gives-somali-muslims-special-airport-security-tours-harassment-profiling-complaints/
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As always this forked tongue President always makes US the enemy. Yet he stands there at the convention praising the US @ the DNC after he has done everything to undermine it.
:x
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http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/08/02/border-patrols-website-offers-advice-on-eluding-border-patrol.html
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http://counterjihad.com/good-news-homeland-security-bill-will-target-muslim-brotherhood-name
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/a-secret-group-bought-the-ingredients-for-a-dirty-bomb--here-in-the-us/2016/08/03/46901c6e-58ae-11e6-9767-f6c947fd0cb8_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_dirtybomb-7am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory
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http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2016/08/isis-terrorist-tells-feds-jihadist-brothers-mexico-confirming-jw-reports/
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http://www.thefederalistpapers.org/us/biden-does-the-unthinkable-with-nuke-codes-at-hillary-rally
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http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2016/08/military-intel-confirms-jw-reporting-muslim-terrorists-entering-u-s-via-mexico/
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http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2016/08/26/exclusive-ret-lt-gen-flynn-warns-terror-linked-nations-cutting-deals-mexican-drug-cartels-passage-u-s/
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This public reactiveness may become the new normal both here and in Europe. If so, we can expect people take advantage of it.
Here's how.
All it takes is a single audio clip. Like this or this either near a public space or done remotely on a timed playback device is all it would take to ignite the FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) that leads to a large scale evacuation. In fact, people are so reactive now, I suspect it wouldn't even take a sound that is explicit, only something that sounds similar.
Think about this for a moment. The ability to shut down a public space for hours:
anytime (just walk in and play the sounds),
remotely (low cost playback device on timer/remote activation), or
on a large scale (thousands of people playing the sounds on their smart phones in public spaces simultaneously)
is a substantial capability.
How so? Take this fall's election for example.
It is a far easier to close a voting location with a sound than hack a voting machine.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439582/mexico-southern-border-illegal-aliens-other-than-mexicans-terrorism?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Trending%20Email%20Reoccurring-%20Monday%20to%20Thursday%202016-09-01&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
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https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/2016/09/06/dhs-secretary-jeh-johnson-speaks-at-convention-of-hamas-linked-group/
Qualified to speak at HAMAS/Muslim Brotherhood front group.
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http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a22778/hybrid-warfare/
When the Little Green Men Invade Arizona
Could Russian-style "hybrid warfare" happen on American soil?
By Joe Pappalardo
Sep 9, 2016
The biggest military victories of the 21st century didn't look like people expected. Consider Russia's seizure of Crimea from Ukraine, which relied upon not fighter jets or advanced warships but crafty public relations, Special Forces, and a proxy army.
How did Russian President Vladimir Putin do it? He started with outreach to aggrieved Russian-speaking people in Crimea, posing them as victims of the crooked Ukrainian government. Russian state media and social media flooded the region and the world with propaganda. Putin then encouraged militias to form. They seized an airport, military bases, and government buildings. A parliamentary vote declared Crimea would secede from Ukraine. A referendum, days later, voted the region to become part of Russia.
It was a new kind of invasion, and it worked.
"Once the green men are there, a revolution happens quickly."
Russian armored personnel carriers reported to be heading to Simferopol of Crimea, Ukraine on February 28, 2014.
Bulent Doruk/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Experts have begun to call these tactics "non-linear," "unconventional," or "information warfare." But the catchphrase getting the most traction is "hybrid war." We've seen Russia use it to grab land in Crimea, but make no mistake, this is not just an eastern European phenomenon. It could happen anywhere, including the United States.
To understand the confusing modern "hybrid" battlefield, it's helpful to place these new tactics on familiar territory. A great example of fiction informing fact is 1984's Red Dawn, in which writer/director John Milius made viewers understand the nature of guerrilla warfare via an alternate history in which Cuban and Soviet forces invaded the USA. The hypothetical scenario I'm laying out below should be considered with the same amount of skepticism—it's an extreme hypothetical, but it serves to explain the concept. All the details here are fictional, but the shadowy strategies of 21st century hybrid warfare are very real.
1) Find a Proxy
Let's say a Mexican cartel wanted to ensure its routes through a tightened U.S. border remain open. The cartel is well armed but can't out-muscle the United States military, so a direct invasion is out of the question. There is no political recourse since we're talking about an outlaw cartel and not a nation-state. But the cartel could wage a campaign using elements of hybrid warfare to gain an advantage.
It doesn't require a nation to wage a hybrid war, and criminal organizations will be drawn to hybrid warfare because it preserves anonymity. That means the first step is to find a sympathetic group on the ground to serve as a proxy. Without one, a group waging hybrid war can't take and seize terrain. (Turf isn't always the objective, but in our scenario it is.)
A member of Ukraine's disbanded elite Berkut riot police force aims his Klashnikov rifle at a checkpoint under a Russian national (L) and Russian naval (R) flags on a highway that connect Black Sea Crimea peninsula to mainland Ukraine near the city of Arm
Viktor Drachev/AFP/Getty Images
In Crimea, Ukrainians who spoke Russian served as the rallying point for an annexation. The United States has its own groups of people who feel trapped in the middle. Border tensions have been fueling discontent between the U.S. government and the Tohono O'odham nation, a Native American group whose land straddles the Mexican border. On one side, contraband smugglers make the area unstable and tempt locals to become outlaws. On the other side, fences, checkpoints, and other law enforcement efforts have disrupted the tribe's sovereignty and ability to do business.
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Earlier this year, a European researcher named Anton Shekhovtsov outlined some of the conditions needed for a hybrid war to work. One condition was introducing forces that are culturally transparent, so they "so they do not stand out as 'aliens' and, thus, compromise the operation." In Crimea that meant ethnic Russians, but in the multicultural stewpot of the United States, language and culture mean less. What matters more is the ability to infiltrate the levers of control over, and that means owning property, sponsoring local candidates and tools of communication, which the cartel can do with its ample money and legitimate business connections.
Each of these elements could be used when it comes time to drive a wedge between the tribe and the United States government.
2) Win Phase Zero
Propaganda was around long before Sun Tzu wrote about the need to sap an enemy's morale to win wars. But modern media—fast moving, fractured, and pervasive—has made the home front a primary target in hybrid war.
After finishing the referendum in Crimea, Pro-Russian people make celebrations at Lenin Square in Simferepol, Ukraine.
Getty
In the real world, the Tohono O'odham nation is already abuzz over plenty of real, legitimate concerns. Local blogs drive passions with reports of fences cutting through sacred lands, of businesses losing money because they can't freely move goods, of religious artifacts taken during Border Patrol arrests. In our fictional scenario, some creative rumor-mongering amplifies the anger.
Here's where the concept of cyberwar comes into sharp focus. Mexican cartels can hire freelance hackers to conduct industrial espionage operations that benefit cartel-friendly businesses by stealing details on bids or digging up trade secrets. Mercenary hackers from anywhere in the world can dig up dirt and blackmail moderate political voices. Websites with opposing views can be hacked and disrupted. Doctored videos and photos can spread discontent, with compromised local media eager to tout them. Politicians not used to hardball are quickly marginalized as the cartel threatens to kill them or their families.
The powder keg is ready for a spark.
This is the digital equivalent of using an artillery barrage to soften up the defender's ability to resist. "Weakening the enemy's will through nonmilitary measures will pay large dividends in the long-run," writes Nicholas Fedyk, project associate at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs in the Small War Journal.
Let's take this scenario full Crimea. Stoked by this propaganda, the tribe's confrontations and protests against the Border Patrol escalate as moderate politicians lose influence. Cartel-controlled media begin talk of a referendum on self-governance—a divorce from both the United States and Mexico.
The powder keg is ready for a spark. And that's when the little green men show up.
3) Introduce the Little Green Men
When the Russian special operations forces entered Crimea, they hid among local militia groups. They wore no insignia, but offered weapons, training, and secure communications equipment. These paramilitary units were dubbed "little green men." They were swift, effective and most of all, deniable—since they were not official Russian forces, Putin could have denied knowledge of their activities if necessary. As NATO General Philip Breedlove told a German publication in 2014: "Once the green men are there, a revolution happens quickly."
Little green men put real teeth behind the movement. In our scenario, the cartel backs Native American radical groups with experienced gunmen and former Mexican military officers who can backstop these proxies with sophisticated communication gear and heavy weapons. Some of the weapons are aimed at dissenters inside the tribe, while others threaten the Border Patrol and National Guard.
Squads of cartel killers assassinate some border patrol agents and claim credit on behalf of the tribe, putting both sides on edge and bringing U.S. military attention in the form of the National Guard. This stokes emotions on the eve of the referendum, perhaps swinging the vote toward independence. If not, the cartels rig it. The outcome is preordained either way.
4) Spark a Crisis and Take Control
When the vote of separation from the U.S. and Mexican governments succeeds, armed squads take over the highways and bridges. Border Patrol, local police, and National Guardsmen find their radios jammed, websites knocked out by DDoS attacks, and vital highways blocked by abandoned, booby-trapped trucks.
In a hybrid war, threats are even better than actions.
The cartel has invested and smuggled military grade equipment to its forces, and they wield shoulder-fired missiles that can shoot down helicopters. A traditional general, interested in causing enemy casualties, would keep this hardware a secret until it was time to surprise an enemy. But in a hybrid war, threats are even better than actions. This is the power of information—a single Youtube video can ground a fleet of the world's most advanced reconnaissance and attack helicopters.
The independent nation can now declare its right to self-defense in attacking any other government troops violating its turf. The Russian and Chinese, delighted with this knock to American hegemony, backs the claim at the United Nations.
People celebrate the first anniversary of the signing of the decree on the annexation of the Crimea by the Russian Federation, on March 18, 2015 in Sevastopol, Crimea.
Getty Alexander Aksakov
The cartel's revolution has succeeded. Like ISIS, it now owns territory and can impose governmental means of control, like laws, taxes, and jail sentences. It has transformed from a transnational crime syndicate to something like a nation. Smugglers now operate with impunity, weakly monitored by the cartel-beholden government. The puppet ruling party soon enacts a zero-extradition policy and few legal controls over its permissive banking system. It's like a little Cayman Islands right along the border. The Tohono O'odham—very of few of whom had to be complicit in this movement for it to succeed—finds themselves in a nation run by a criminal organization.
21st Century Total War
The tactics and techniques outlined in this hypothetical scenario may seem far-fetched, sure. But people in Crimea and Ukraine just watched more outlandish power grabs succeed even as NATO, Europe, and the United States looked on.
It was a new kind of invasion, and it worked.
The reality of hybrid warfare is a stark reminder to anyone who thinks the idea of total war has vanished in the glare of the information age. Instead of carpet bombing cities and launching land-grab invasions, the 21st century's version of total war is more subtle, effective, and exportable.
Don't believe it could happen here? Take a look at what's happening with claims of Russian hacking and its impact on the U.S. election. Consider the targets of Anna Chapman and other Russian spy rings in America. Ponder the industrial espionage aimed at defense firms and federal agencies. For all we know, the hybrid war against the United States may have already begun.
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http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/man-sliced-cleaver-boot-car-article-1.2794834
Cop attacked by meat cleaver madman released from hospital
NY Daily News
BY
Rocco Parascandola
Dale W. Eisinger
Larry Mcshane
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Updated: Friday, September 16, 2016, 8:27 PM
Meat cleaver madman, a Palestinian, was in Midtown to appeal deportation order before he sliced cop
The meat cleaver maniac who hacked an off-duty cop is a Palestinian busted two months ago while screaming in Arabic outside a Brooklyn synagogue.
Suspect Akram Joudeh was only in New York for Thursday’s Midtown rampage because he was appealing a deportation notice — with a hearing set for Oct. 14, a high-ranking NYPD source told the Daily News.
Cops found two knives inside Joudeh’s car after answering the July report of an erratic man on Shore Parkway in Brooklyn shout “Allahu Akbar!” — or “God is great” in Arabic.
But the source said investigations by the NYPD and FBI showed Joudeh, 32, was emotionally disturbed and not a terrorist threat.
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http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/09/15/nydp-officers-attacked-by-man-with-meat-cleaver/
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/man-sliced-cleaver-boot-car-article-1.2794834
Cop attacked by meat cleaver madman released from hospital
NY Daily News
BY
Rocco Parascandola
Dale W. Eisinger
Larry Mcshane
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Updated: Friday, September 16, 2016, 8:27 PM
Meat cleaver madman, a Palestinian, was in Midtown to appeal deportation order before he sliced cop
The meat cleaver maniac who hacked an off-duty cop is a Palestinian busted two months ago while screaming in Arabic outside a Brooklyn synagogue.
Suspect Akram Joudeh was only in New York for Thursday’s Midtown rampage because he was appealing a deportation notice — with a hearing set for Oct. 14, a high-ranking NYPD source told the Daily News.
Cops found two knives inside Joudeh’s car after answering the July report of an erratic man on Shore Parkway in Brooklyn shout “Allahu Akbar!” — or “God is great” in Arabic.
But the source said investigations by the NYPD and FBI showed Joudeh, 32, was emotionally disturbed and not a terrorist threat.
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http://wtvr.com/2016/09/18/crossroads-mall-stabbing-suspect-yelled-allah/
Will we ever know the motive?
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http://wtvr.com/2016/09/18/crossroads-mall-stabbing-suspect-yelled-allah/
Will we ever know the motive?
Motive unknown.
http://m.startribune.com/off-duty-officer-kills-man-who-stabbed-8-at-crossroads-mall-in-st-cloud/393850931/
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I had to look this up. Now I am clear on the source of this phrase:
"Allahu Akbar" (Arabic: الله أكبر) is an Islamic phrase, called Takbir in Arabic, meaning "God is greater" or "God is [the] greatest". Allahu Akbar or Allahu Ekber and similar variants may also refer to: Allahu Akbar (anthem), the national anthem of Libya from 1969 to 2011.
I thought this was Yiddish. Maybe Chinese.
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TERRORIST KNIFE ATTACK IN MINNESOTA
In a scene from what the current administration would want us to think is the "new normal", we have this:
"A man dressed in a private security uniform and making reference to Allah, entered a St. Cloud Minnesota mall Saturday night and stabbed eight people before being shot dead by an off duty police officer."
...and this:
"A man who was killed after stabbing eight people Saturday night inside a Minnesota mall was “a soldier of the Islamic State,” an ISIS-linked news agency said Sunday morning."
And this happens almost simultaneously with bombs in New York that are reminiscent of the Boston Marathon bombings that so many Americans seem to have already forgotten about. We live in a time of war and it would be foolish of us to forget that for a moment, or to forget who the unannounced enemy happens to be. The terrorists all have a common thread, a cultural, political, and religious ideology that connects them regardless of where they were born, what passport they hold or what language they speak. I am still astounded at law enforcement's reluctance to even speak of the common thread. Its like the Vikings in The Thirteenth Warrior refusing to speak the name of the "Wendol", as if the name remains unspoken, the monster will not exist.
In short order, the identity of the Islamic Terrorist named by ISIS will be known, as well as who planted the bombs in New York...and you will all be able to name the monster for yourselves. In the meantime - lessons to learn.
1). The Crossroads Mall I am told is posted as a Gun Free Zone. from their website, it mentions - "No firearms or illegal weapons". Well that is all very nice, but that didn't seem to stop the terrorist, so since the other side refuses to obey the rules, so shall we refuse to obey such silly rules. Carry your weapons everywhere...well concealed but ready at hand. Ignore the sign. The sign will not protect you...that much is clear.
2). Profile everyone that comes near you, regardless of where you are and what uniform they are wearing. The terrorist was a security guard. And I have been to Minnesota. I will bet that the security guard/terrorist was a Somali immigrant. I am not certain of this, but I am making an educated guess based on prior training and collective national experience. We will see.
3). Along with visual profiling, look at what they have in their hands...and why. I cannot imagine that nobody saw the Somali security guard loping around the mall with a knife in his hand. If you are in a Minnesota Mall and a man that fits the national collective profile of the insurgency culture walks up to you with a knife in his hand and asks what religion you are, I think that you are justified in being suspicious without considering yourself as a deplorable racist.
4). Learn how to fight the knife. A hint...the best answer is not a martial arts technique. More to follow as we get information.
UPDATE:
He was Dahir Adan, 22, born in Africa and brought here 15 years ago. The head of Minnesota CAIR expressed fears of a "potential for backlash," and Democrat Gov. Mark Dayton called for "religious and racial tolerance."
What do you know about that?!!
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/sep/19/ahmad-khan-rahami-sought-questioning-about-nyc-bla/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiT1RWbU9EVTJaRFZqWWpBNCIsInQiOiJ6Szgyald3XC9RekR2ZXJ4UGRudXVcLzNaUVY3TDhDaFN2S0J3a0x6eTNqc3VQS1FIeGR5cVwvTmJaRGtUY1hoQkludnJuZ095RG1GaUl0Sk04NTQ0ZUw0SWFnV2FzRncya1VTRnJkV1V0dlc0Zz0ifQ%3D%3D
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I know exactly where in Elizabeth this is just from this small photo. It is called the "arch" and is just under the railroad tracks. I used to walk under it every day going home from high school.
There used to be a great record store on that block. Remember those? I think the pizza store is still there. A lot of homeless hang out (or at least used to) just across the street along the alley way like street next to tracks.
http://twitchy.com/gregp-3534/2016/09/19/terror-in-nj-bomb-explodes-as-robot-attempts-to-disarm-it-at-train-station-in-elizabeth-video-photos/
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I was going to post it on my facebook account, but thought better of it due to the fact that I have friends and coworkers from Africa and Mexico on my page and didn't want to hurt their feelings or give them the wrong idea. I also have to say, that at work, I have often seen agents from the National Institution of Migration working at several checkpoints throughout the country and they are VERY proactive. Still, this is happening.
Having said that, it cannot be ignored, that here in Mexico, there have been 7000 African immigrants admitted legally, the majority of which, went DIRECTLY to the border, attempting to enter the United States.
Mexico is now in a quandary as to what to do with them. Why they were admitted, I have no idea, and bear in mind, that doesn't count the Syrian immigrants allowed refuge here as well.
I'm citing the Universal (the most important newspaper in Mexico) as a source for this. I apologize that it is in Spanish, and if need be, I'll translate it. The article is from two weeks ago.
http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/articulo/nacion/sociedad/2016/09/1/la-ruta-de-la-migracion-africana-congo-brasil-mexico
Basically, Mexico is granting the transit visas to cross Mexico and enter the States because the Africans are claiming that they have a job or relatives awaiting them in the States. Still others, are crossing into Mexico illegally, some of whom are detained.
http://www.univision.com/noticias/inmigrantes-indocumentados/piden-declarar-crisis-humanitaria-por-llegada-a-mexico-de-miles-de-africanos-y-asiaticos-que-buscan-asilo-en-eeuu
It needs to be mentioned that, you can walk right into the United States from Mexico, but... that you'll have to pay your coyote guide (about 20-30 thousand pesos), and nowadays you have to pay the Zetas another 10,000 pesos at certain points they have set up, or they'll kill you? If you know how to avoid their checkpoints, you can get in for free, but if you try to avoid them and are caught, it's the last thing you will ever do. (All of this is a separate subject, but it bears mentioning due to the fact, that people are entering Mexico, and if refused entry legally *which the Africans have been,* they can still enter one of two ways - guided or taking their chances on foot).
Here is an article in English on it, citing Breitbart as well:
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2016/09/mexico-helping-unvetted-african-migrants-to-u-s-border-many-from-al-shabaab-jihadi-hotbed
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The terrorist knife attack in MN is disturbing, small town America. St. Cloud is a town of 66k, about half the size of Peoria. The Crossroads Mall is well known. You can see Lake Wobegon from there.
From the article:
"The Crossroads Mall I am told is posted as a Gun Free Zone."
- This is a key talking and learning point. Verified at:
https://www.crossroadscenter.com/en/code-of-conduct.html
http://www.ammoland.com/2016/09/mass-stabbing-crossroads-mall-gun-free-weapons-free-zone/#axzz4Ki1SNvCe
"Examples of specific activities that are prohibited include but are not limited to: ...
No firearms or illegal weapons"
[The policy does not make any exceptions for off duty police officers.]
Why do they want to attack where people are defenseless, can't fight back? ... oh, skip it. Better question, Why do we want to be defenseless?
Back to the article:
"Learn how to fight the knife. A hint...the best answer is not a martial arts technique."
- I'll take a 'stab' at this even though I'm the beginner here and have a lousy record (0-1) against Jihadis with knives,
a) Be aware of everything around you all the time,
b) Carry a gun ready to use, and
c) Shoot the guy after he has threatened deathly harm and before he gets within blade reach.
Thank God for preparedness, decisiveness, proximityand actions of this off-duty officer with a gun who shot him.
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"Carry a gun ready to use"
or be very sure Hillary's body guards are near by.
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"Carry a gun ready to use"
or be very sure Hillary's body guards are near by.
They are too busy dragging her unconscious body around to be of much help.
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I was going to post it on my facebook account, but thought better of it due to the fact that I have friends and coworkers from Africa and Mexico on my page and didn't want to hurt their feelings or give them the wrong idea. I also have to say, that at work, I have often seen agents from the National Institution of Migration working at several checkpoints throughout the country and they are VERY proactive. Still, this is happening.
Having said that, it cannot be ignored, that here in Mexico, there have been 7000 African immigrants admitted legally, the majority of which, went DIRECTLY to the border, attempting to enter the United States.
Mexico is now in a quandary as to what to do with them. Why they were admitted, I have no idea, and bear in mind, that doesn't count the Syrian immigrants allowed refuge here as well.
I'm citing the Universal (the most important newspaper in Mexico) as a source for this. I apologize that it is in Spanish, and if need be, I'll translate it. The article is from two weeks ago.
http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/articulo/nacion/sociedad/2016/09/1/la-ruta-de-la-migracion-africana-congo-brasil-mexico
Basically, Mexico is granting the transit visas to cross Mexico and enter the States because the Africans are claiming that they have a job or relatives awaiting them in the States. Still others, are crossing into Mexico illegally, some of whom are detained.
http://www.univision.com/noticias/inmigrantes-indocumentados/piden-declarar-crisis-humanitaria-por-llegada-a-mexico-de-miles-de-africanos-y-asiaticos-que-buscan-asilo-en-eeuu
It needs to be mentioned that, you can walk right into the United States from Mexico, but... that you'll have to pay your coyote guide (about 20-30 thousand pesos), and nowadays you have to pay the Zetas another 10,000 pesos at certain points they have set up, or they'll kill you? If you know how to avoid their checkpoints, you can get in for free, but if you try to avoid them and are caught, it's the last thing you will ever do. (All of this is a separate subject, but it bears mentioning due to the fact, that people are entering Mexico, and if refused entry legally *which the Africans have been,* they can still enter one of two ways - guided or taking their chances on foot).
Her is an article in English on it, citing Breitbart as well:
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2016/09/mexico-helping-unvetted-african-migrants-to-u-s-border-many-from-al-shabaab-jihadi-hotbed
This is a great post, important point. There is an age-old, political economic disagreement about the value of new immigrants, needed for labor and age demographics, but pushing down wages for low income workers. The WSJ view against Buchanan, Perot, Trump, etc. This may be irreconcilable, but the idea that we need to control our borders and entries in a time of international terrorism is not.
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No worries, the qualified Jeh Johnson is on the job!
I was going to post it on my facebook account, but thought better of it due to the fact that I have friends and coworkers from Africa and Mexico on my page and didn't want to hurt their feelings or give them the wrong idea. I also have to say, that at work, I have often seen agents from the National Institution of Migration working at several checkpoints throughout the country and they are VERY proactive. Still, this is happening.
Having said that, it cannot be ignored, that here in Mexico, there have been 7000 African immigrants admitted legally, the majority of which, went DIRECTLY to the border, attempting to enter the United States.
Mexico is now in a quandary as to what to do with them. Why they were admitted, I have no idea, and bear in mind, that doesn't count the Syrian immigrants allowed refuge here as well.
I'm citing the Universal (the most important newspaper in Mexico) as a source for this. I apologize that it is in Spanish, and if need be, I'll translate it. The article is from two weeks ago.
http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/articulo/nacion/sociedad/2016/09/1/la-ruta-de-la-migracion-africana-congo-brasil-mexico
Basically, Mexico is granting the transit visas to cross Mexico and enter the States because the Africans are claiming that they have a job or relatives awaiting them in the States. Still others, are crossing into Mexico illegally, some of whom are detained.
http://www.univision.com/noticias/inmigrantes-indocumentados/piden-declarar-crisis-humanitaria-por-llegada-a-mexico-de-miles-de-africanos-y-asiaticos-que-buscan-asilo-en-eeuu
It needs to be mentioned that, you can walk right into the United States from Mexico, but... that you'll have to pay your coyote guide (about 20-30 thousand pesos), and nowadays you have to pay the Zetas another 10,000 pesos at certain points they have set up, or they'll kill you? If you know how to avoid their checkpoints, you can get in for free, but if you try to avoid them and are caught, it's the last thing you will ever do. (All of this is a separate subject, but it bears mentioning due to the fact, that people are entering Mexico, and if refused entry legally *which the Africans have been,* they can still enter one of two ways - guided or taking their chances on foot).
Her is an article in English on it, citing Breitbart as well:
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2016/09/mexico-helping-unvetted-african-migrants-to-u-s-border-many-from-al-shabaab-jihadi-hotbed
This is a great post, important point. There is an age-old, political economic disagreement about the value of new immigrants, needed for labor and age demographics, but pushing down wages for low income workers. The WSJ view against Buchanan, Perot, Trump, etc. This may be irreconcilable, but the idea that we need to control our borders and entries in a time of international terrorism is not.
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"Mexico helping unvetted African migrants to U.S. border, many from Al-Shabaab jihadi hotbed"
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2016/09/mexico-helping-unvetted-african-migrants-to-u-s-border-many-from-al-shabaab-jihadi-hotbed
Al Shabaab is al Qaeda's affiliate in Somalia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Shabaab_(militant_group)
A large number of the Somali immigrants settled in Minnesota, which harbored the largest population of Somalis in North America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somali_Americans
The Somali community’s increasing economic and geographic mobility—and has plans to expand to Rochester and St. Cloud.
http://www.thetower.org/article/why-are-there-jihadists-in-minnesota/
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I'm not saying this terrorist came through Mexico, just saying we know more are coming and we know what they are capable of.
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I know that there have been stories of ISIS operating in Mexico, that come from an unconfirmed "confidential informant" from either the DEA or ATF.
I have allegiances to Mexico for a couple reasons, but also am interested in the well being of my native country.
What I can say without reserve, is that Mexico is not a kind country to outsiders. Is it possible that agents of ISIS could operate here by paying off cartels? It is. It's more likely though, that the cartels don't want anything interrupting their established business and from a government perspective, we are very aggressive with anyone that breaks laws.
ISIS cells operating here in Mexico? I haven't seen a single substantiated instance of it, not even one, nor have I heard of any, other than the one mentioned by the confidential informant.
I've been here six years.
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http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/09/security-guards-minnesota-style.php
See no evil.
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http://brokelyn.com/honor-among-thieves/
One tweet that perfectly sums up being a New Yorker during a terror scare
by Tim Donnelly
1 Comment
Screen Shot 2016-09-19 at 1.07.14 PMVia, referencing this news story from DNAinfo about how the NY/NJ bombers were thwarted by thieves who pounced on the unattended bags. This piece of news will leave you with a very “well, huh!” feeling about living in New York while the rest of the country panics that we’re under attack from ISIS. This city may at times be a cesspool of thieves, con artists and villainy. But it’s our cesspool. Crime isn’t good, but no real New Yorker would leave their bag unattended anywhere, for exactly this reason.
As a law enforcement source told DNAinfo: “Who in this world finds a pressure cooker with a phone and just takes the bag?”
Be careful out there and be good to each other, however you process your feelings of safety and vigilance. Life goes on in New York, for now.
Bobby Big Wheel @BobbyBigWheel
New York fears ranked
1. Pushed into subway tracks
2. Seamless outage
3. Have to go to Times Square
4. Fav dive bar gentrified
1,563: ISIS
9:00 AM - 19 Sep 2016
11,846 11,846 Retweets
21,792
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/21/nyregion/ahmad-khan-rahami-suspect.html?emc=edit_na_20160920&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0
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See wires where they should not be you are either a
1) f...g hero or a
2) f...g bigot
flip a coin or take your pick get sued or blown to smithereens :
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner
Thanks cLocKbOy
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/sep/22/dhs-memo-admits-refugee-fraud-easy-commit/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTUdWbU5EQTFNelV5TkRRMCIsInQiOiJyOGpnVmJqdkRrT0dpTU9SQ3MyblFHRUxzdzlZdlc2VDFMaTVvdUhOcVdIUE95MENkcjlRZVpVVHllTExxYlZ1aTdBMXNiWlVoWlViNmtrM0huXC9kYmkwY00xWHArcHM1MzZxTGp1d1J6MUk9In0%3D
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http://q13fox.com/2016/09/24/cascade-mall-shooting-person-of-interest-in-custody/
So motivation forever unknown, or mental illness. Take your pick.
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http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2016/09/dhs-agency-enforces-immigration-law-honors-open-borders-activist-helps-illegal-aliens/
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https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/2016/10/04/isis-calls-for-random-knife-attacks-in-alleys-forests-beaches/
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clarionproject.us6.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=6f33facd52316b5c258168da6&id=33ea3dfd62&e=d7eaaa3130
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http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/11/az-indian-tribe-controls-75-miles-border-wont-allow-trump-wall-land-video/
I've driven through this reservation. Very untouched by modern hands-- one does not see even telephone wires,no light pollution at night. VERY low population density. Prairie dogs, coyotes, hawks, eagles, etc abound.
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http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/11/az-indian-tribe-controls-75-miles-border-wont-allow-trump-wall-land-video/
I've driven through this reservation. Very untouched by modern hands-- one does not see even telephone wires,no light pollution at night. VERY low population density. Prairie dogs, coyotes, hawks, eagles, etc abound.
Tribal sovereignty doesn't allow for preventing the international border from being secured.
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Wasn't suggesting otherwise-- just filling in a personal experience touch. I would also note that nor does the law allow for the picturesque blockage we now see in the Dakotas , , ,
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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-muslim-registry-immigrants-policy-kris-bobach-reinstate-wall-a7420296.html
Only the source vouches for the source. We shall see.
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http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/16/13649764/trump-muslim-register-database
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Bill Would Delay Expanded Digital Search Powers for FBI
(November 17, 2016)
US Senators have introduced a bill that would delay an update to Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure that grants the FBI extended powers to search computers in multiple US jurisdictions. The change is scheduled to go into effect on December 1, 2016. The legislation would freeze the impending rule change until July 1, 2017.
Read more in:
- http://www.nextgov.com: Senators Introduce Bill to Delay Expansion of FBI Hacking Powers
- http://www.nextgov.com: Text of Proposed Legislation
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http://www.westernjournalism.com/reports-suspect-in-ohio-state-attack-believed-to-be-university-student-and-somali-refugee/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=PostUp&utm_campaign=WJBreaking&utm_content=2016-11-28
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Addressing the elephant in the room:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/442565/muslim-immigration-ohio-state-stabbing-shows-dangers-lets-be-honest?utm_source=nr&utm_medium=satemail&utm_content=french&utm_campaign=immigration&utm_term=VDHM
A historical point which I have referenced more than once around here:
". . .During the Cold War, American law denied entry to the United States to any alien who wrote, published, or advocated “the economic, international, and governmental doctrines of world communism or the establishment in the United States of a totalitarian dictatorship.” We continue to maintain an escalating series of ideological litmus tests for visa recipients and green-card holders. We can and should expand those tests to deny entry to any visitor or immigrant who advocates the doctrines or ideas of ISIS, al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, and any other recognized terrorist organization — including by expressing support on social media for the goals, theology, politics, or leadership of those organizations. Indeed, the list should expand beyond known terrorists so that we’d exclude those who support the doctrines or ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood or the Iranian Revolution. Beyond this basic test, it is simply not in America’s national interest to admit refugees, visitors, or other immigrants from zones of jihadist activity unless they have a demonstrable record of loyalty to or cooperation with the United States or its allies. When we know that our enemy is seeking to infiltrate and indoctrinate these specific populations (and has greatest access to these populations), the burden of proof for immigration or entry should be squarely placed on the immigrant. If refugees need our aid, we should aid them in the Middle East. , , ,"
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/442565/muslim-immigration-ohio-state-stabbing-shows-dangers-lets-be-honest?utm_source=nr&utm_medium=satemail&utm_content=french&utm_campaign=immigration&utm_term=VDHM
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y44aS7k3MOU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzKIPaGyxiw (The judge seems more than a little too jovial given the subject matter )
http://www.fuqrafiles.com/ several entries of interest e.g. http://www.fuqrafiles.com/knowledgebase/california-2/
:-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o
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http://weaponsman.com/?p=37177
The OSU Attacker Gets Reinforcements
2,500 more of these are on the way. And that's just the beginning.
2,500 more of these are on the way. And that’s just the beginning.
While the eyes of most interested in national security are on the excellent appointment of USMC Gen. James Mattis — and it’s worth it just to see the egg on hack reporter Colin Clark’s face for a bullshit report based on an “anonymous source” who probably didn’t exist, or whom he misrepresented — a more serious national security event just happened.
The lame duck “security” establishment is rushing “refugees” from jihad exporting nations to the United States — and the State Department is treating their names, points of origin, and destinations as classified information.
You know, like they didn’t do with their actual classified information, which is why a mountain of it is on Wikileaks, and whatever isn’t there is on servers in the Lubyanka. Fox:
In an unprecedented move, the U.S. State Department has classified details on refugees to be resettled in America via a secret deal made with Australia. The bi-lateral agreement, which Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull called a “one-off,” involves 2,465 people currently being held in Papua New Guinea and Nauru who will now be transferred onto U.S. soil.
“This is a backroom deal, wheeling and dealing with another country’s refugee problem,” Center for Immigration Studies fellow Don Barnett told FoxNews.com. “I don’t believe for a moment it’s a one-time deal. That’s for public consumption.”
Congress has asked Jeh Johnson (nominally Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security) about the jihadi influx, and his response has been to stonewall. The security of jihadis is a greater concern of his than the security of this nation.
The 2,465 mohammed-worshippers were vetted by Australia and deemed (1) not admissible as refugees and (2) not admissible at any rate due to terrorism ties or histories, or complete absence of any documented history, suggesting that some of them are ringers using cover names.
Officials, however, did confirm countries of origin to be Iran, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq and Sudan, as well as some deemed “stateless.”
Every single one of those nations is a net producer and exporter of terrorists, although Sri Lanka terrorism seems to be in remission at the moment. Still, the principal reason a refugee would free Sri Lanka is due to connection to the crushed Tamil separatist movement, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
The stateless are people who have been expelled from their home nations, primarily because their loyalty is elsewhere, for example, to a transnational pseudo-religious terrorist movement.
While this is hitting the mainstream media (well, some of the mainstream media) cold, Refugee Resettlement Watch was on it last month, before it actually happened. (She’s also got pictures of those fine “refugees” burning their camp down in a fit of inchoate anger in 2013).
In two related stories at the New York Times, one revels in the collapse of the immigration courts under lawyers’ obstruction and over a half-million backed-up deportation cases, and another tries to tell the story of the OSU jihadi, but can’t figure out why he did it.
It’s the Islam, stupid. We don’t need, and we can’t afford, even one more Somali. The Times says the attack was no big deal because the 11 people slashed by the attacker (and the one hit by police friendly fire) are not going to die. If the rest of these people did what the “assimilated, happy” “refugee” did in Columbus, then 27,115 people will be hospitalized with serious wounds. It’s not like we have any shortage of murderous refugees, violent immigrants and criminal alien mayhem already.
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DHS: Hamas-Tied NJ Imam Must Prove Why He Shouldn't Be Deported
by John Rossomando • Dec 7, 2016 at 11:09 am
http://www.investigativeproject.org/5723/dhs-hamas-tied-nj-imam-must-prove-why-he-shouldnt
Evidence being used against him in the Department of Homeland Security's effort to deport him is the product of torture and is not credible, a Hamas-connected imam testified Tuesday in a Newark, N.J. immigration court.
Mohammad Qatanani is imam at the Islamic Center of Passaic County. Immigration officials have been fighting to deport him since 2006, alleging he failed to disclose connections with Hamas when he applied for permanent residency. When he came to the United States 10 years earlier, he claimed he had never been arrested or belonged to any terrorist groups. That history makes Qatanani subject to deportation, DHS says.
Tuesday's hearing centered on Qatanani's October 1993 arrest and conviction by an Israeli military court on charges he provided support to Hamas. He claims Israeli authorities detained him and never charged him.
"No lawyer prior to 2008 ever told me that I had a conviction," Qatanani said.
U.S. Immigration Judge Judge Alberto Reifkohl ruled in 2008 that the bulk of the evidence and testimony introduced by the Department of Homeland Security was not credible and granted Qatanani permanent residency, better known as a "green card."
The Justice Department's Board of Immigration Appeals sent the case back to Reifkohl in October 2009, finding that he erred rejecting the credibility of evidence and government testimony. In addition, DHS attorneys bolstered some of the evidence obtained from Israeli officials, including two confessions which include statements Qatanani made about his Hamas connection. Three additional witness statements came from people who told Israeli officials that Qatanani recruited them to join Hamas. Qatanani claims he never was given translations of the Hebrew-language Israeli court records and never knew what they alleged. "There is no confession to my understanding" Qatanani said Tuesday.
He also disputed that the signatures on the documents were his, saying instead they were "similar" to his signature. DHS evidence was able to match the fingerprints on the documents to Qatanani.
He claims he was mistreated in Israeli custody, but never signed any documents he thought were confessions, describing them as "finishing papers."
The legal standard in immigration court is less stringent than a criminal conviction. This means DHS only needs to show that Qatanani had associations with Hamas that he hid on his visa application. Under immigration law, the Qatanani has the burden of proof to show he is not a terrorist, said Department of Homeland Security Deputy Chief Counsel Chris Brundage.
It's impossible for Qatanani to get around the fact he lied when he said he never had been arrested, Brundage said.
No ruling was issued before the hearing recessed. It is scheduled to resume next month.
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It Will Take More Than a Wall to Solve Border Crime
Security Weekly
December 1, 2016 | 08:05 GMT Print
Text Size
A view of Nogales from the American side of the U.S.-Mexico border. If walls were an effective way to halt the cross-border movement of contraband, cartels would not bother to expend so much blood and treasure to capture cities like Nogales. (FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images)
By Scott Stewart
Nearly a month has passed since U.S. voters chose their next president, and over the past few weeks it has become a little clearer how the policies of President Donald Trump will differ from the promises of candidate Trump. As we have seen since January 2009, when newly elected President Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize for his campaign pledges of change and hope, reality has a way of constraining a leader's ability to effect real change. More often than not, the policies that presidents put into practice look very different from the ideas they put forth on the campaign trail.
The same will probably be true of Trump's vow to seal the U.S.-Mexico border by building a wall. One of the biggest problems with this proposal is that the flow of illegal immigrants and contraband between the two countries is not a simple matter of physical security, international relations, or customs and immigration law. Rather, the cross-border movement of goods and people is driven by formidable economic forces that are powerful enough to overwhelm any barrier — just as they have with walls built for the same purpose in the past.
Digging Into the Economics
Anyone who knows me or has read my columns is aware that I love to analyze criminal and terrorist tactics. As a former special agent who spent years investigating bombings, crime and fraud, those subjects get my blood pumping much faster than talk of politics and economics. (Needless to say, I wasn't at all excited when I was forced to take economics in high school and college.) That said, the more I study criminal trends, the more I see the principles of economics at work.
No matter what kind of barrier the U.S. government tries to build along its border with Mexico, it will be impossible to stop the flow of drugs and people north (or the flow of guns and money south) so long as there is money to be made in the process. A kilo of methamphetamine, for example, might cost $300-$500 to synthesize in Mexico but sell for $20,000 in the United States. By the same token, guns purchased legally in the United States can be sold for three to five times that in Mexico. Those are profit margins any businessman would envy.
As we've seen over the past few decades, border barriers can redirect the illicit flow of people or goods, but they cannot stop it. Driven by the prospect of striking it rich, smugglers have come up with any number of creative means to go over, under or through walls. They are constantly coming up with new ways to hide contraband in commercial cargo shipments, personal vehicles or people's bodies. In fact, far more drugs cross the U.S.-Mexico border through official checkpoints than are smuggled through the empty expanses of desert on either side — especially when it comes to high-value drugs such as methamphetamine, cocaine and heroin.
This is why Mexican drug cartels spend so much effort fighting for control of walled border-crossing cities (referred to as "plazas" in Spanish). Massive amounts of illegal trade pass through these towns, and the organizations that control them can collect a tax (or "piso") on the smuggling activities taking place there. If walls were truly an effective way to halt the movement of contraband at the border, cartels would never bother to expend the blood and treasure needed to capture and hold cities such as Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa, Juarez and Tijuana — all of which have had walls running through them for decades.
One of the biggest gaps smugglers have discovered in border security is people. The U.S.-Mexico border is the most heavily trafficked land border in the world: Some 6 million cars, 440,000 trucks and 3.3 million pedestrians move northward across it every month. These volumes skyrocket when you add in the goods and people traveling between the two countries by train, bus, air and sea. And all of these individuals present transit opportunities for smugglers.
Nevertheless, barriers have become more effective (and screening equipment more sophisticated) in recent years, making it more difficult to illegally sneak people or goods through checkpoints. As a result, the number of corruption cases involving border inspection and law enforcement officials has spiked, and corruption has seeped through every layer of local, state and federal government. In some places, it is simply cheaper and easier for smugglers to pay an inspector to look the other way as a shipment of drugs passes through an inspection lane than it is to dig a tunnel or find some other means of bypassing it. Similarly, as it has become harder to legally cross the border, the level of interest in obtaining legitimate border crossing cards, visas and passports from corrupt authorities has risen.
Another Brick in the Wall
Fences have existed along some parts of the U.S.-Mexico border for decades. In the early 1990s, Washington began to construct more substantial barriers in urban areas, many of which were made with surplus metal runway mats (known as perforated steel planking) from the Vietnam War. More sophisticated fencing techniques did not appear until 1995, when Sandia National Laboratories created a barrier three layers deep that was designed to slow intruders until border patrol agents could respond to the breach. In this scheme, the layer closest to the foreign country is a thick metal wall, separated from the middle layer — a metal mesh fence — by a well-lit open area blanketed with technological surveillance, including cameras, thermal imaging and an array of sensors.
Then, in areas most prone to heavy traffic, a low fence forms the third and innermost layer.
In 2006, the Secure Fence Act sought to extend existing fences along the border. Yet even with the additions, there are still gaps that are hundreds of kilometers long in the nearly 3,200-kilometer (2,000-mile) border. Lawmakers have repeatedly proposed measures that would fund fence-building in these areas, but none have been approved because of the serious doubts that remain on fences' effectiveness in deterring illegal border crossings. According to The Washington Post, the Department of Homeland Security spent $3.4 billion and completed 1,030 of the 1,050 kilometers of fencing and vehicle barriers called for by the Secure Border Initiative before it was shuttered. Filling in the rest of the border (with the exception of a 322-kilometer stretch of land in southwest Texas) is estimated to cost somewhere between $7 billion and $10 billion. But despite the money spent on the Secure Border Initiative, there has been no discernable drop in the flow of narcotics into the United States, based on their steady prices on the street.
The Buck Stops Here
The bottom line is that until Americans stop paying premium dollars for drugs being transported through or manufactured in Mexico, it simply won't be possible to keep them from entering the country. When I talk to U.S. or Mexican politicians and law enforcement agents, they are well aware of this fact and understand that they are fighting an unwinnable war. Nevertheless, they feel compelled to keep trying to stem the drug trade as best they can.
If government authorities could quash the demand for drugs, Mexican cartels would implode. They would continue to be groups of criminals, but they would be criminals with far fewer resources. Smuggling plazas would no longer be worth fighting bloody battles for, and they would not need to worry about getting cash across the border in bulk. Moreover, cartels would not have the money to pay top dollar for U.S. guns, or to buy off government officials on both sides of the border.
Unfortunately, reducing demand for narcotics is easier said than done. Drug addiction is a serious social, moral, public health and mental health issue to which there is no simple solution. We cannot just arrest our way out of the problem, either: People will continue to spend exorbitant amounts of money on illegal drugs, regardless of the risk of imprisonment. And as long as the demand for drugs exists, the lure of massive profits will continue to push smugglers to find new ways to circumvent border security.
The same is largely true for illegal immigration. It is clear that the improving health of the Mexican economy has done more to reduce the flood of job seekers heading to the United States than stricter border controls have. That said, Venezuela and Central America's northern triangle are still suffering from steep crime and bleak economies. If Americans are willing to hire workers who are here without documentation, laborers will find ways to come to the United States.
Clamping down on demand for illegal labor is a little easier than eliminating the need for drugs. In fact, all it takes is the strict enforcement of laws prohibiting the employment of undocumented workers. So, if the U.S. government is serious about halting illegal immigration, it could put more effort into arresting and fining the U.S. citizens who hire illegal immigrants rather than the immigrants themselves, drying up the demand that is drawing job-seekers in droves. The fines collected from these cases could even be used to build the rest of the border wall. This approach, however, would be deeply unpopular with construction and landscaping firms, poultry processors and other powerful agriculture groups, which is why these laws are not tightly enforced now. That U.S. companies in these sectors employ undocumented workers is a poorly kept secret, and immigration authorities know which ones are guilty of doing so. But any attempt to slap these firms and their leaders with fines or criminal charges would probably amount to political suicide, as would fining people who hire illegal immigrants as gardeners, nannies or maids. Cracking down on these practices could also damage certain U.S. industries, making it a strategy unlikely to be implemented anytime soon.
Of course, even if demand for illegal labor were significantly slashed, criminal aliens — those who migrate to the United States to commit crimes instead of finding work — would not be directly affected. Even so, if the total number of undocumented aliens greatly declines, more law enforcement resources could be funneled toward countering criminal aliens and more sinister threats such as terrorist operatives, rather than be spent chasing day laborers.
With no surefire way to decrease demand for drugs and no politically feasible method of reducing demand for undocumented labor, border security will continue to be punted from one administration to the next.
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At the Southern Border, a
Do-It-Yourself Tack on Security
By FERNANDA SANTOSDEC. 21, 2016
Photo
Members of the Arizona Border Recon, on the move in Arizona in November. The group is a paramilitary organization performing reconnaissance operations along the border with Mexico. Credit Johnny Milano
His radio crackled. “Can you hear it?” a veteran Army soldier named Tim Foley asked one weekend afternoon while traversing the remote trails off the remote community of Sasabe, a dot along a busy drug-smuggling corridor in southern Arizona.
“They’re pushing something through,” he said. “And they’re not too far.”
When the housing market collapsed and Mr. Foley, 57, lost his construction job and then his home, he moved to Sasabe, on the United States-Mexico border, to start his own citizens’ border patrol. Mr. Foley prefers to call his group, Arizona Border Recon, a nongovernmental organization, but others label it a militia and scoff at the notion of private individuals, many of them armed, patrolling the border.
Photo
The border fence in Nogales, Ariz., patrolled and monitored by United States Customs and Border Inspection. Credit Johnny Milano
That Sunday, Mr. Foley was out trying to decipher the traffickers’ scrambled communications his portable radio had intercepted. He held a .40-caliber pistol in hand and his dog, a Pitbull named Rocko, by its leash. Those were his two weapons.
Photo
A Border Patrol agent patting down a migrant who wandered into the Arizona Border Recon camp in November. Credit Johnny Milano
Mr. Foley argues that there is a war going on at the southern border, even though the number of apprehensions has declined precipitously — to about 409,000 in the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30 from 1.2 million in the 2005 fiscal year. He served in the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division before he went to work in construction, where he came away believing that the rules of employment and immigration were broken.
Photo
Jeremy Wood, a veteran and Arizona Border Recon member, resting in March after spending most of the previous 24 hours on watch for scouts, migrants and cartel groups. Credit Johnny Milano
“The illegals,” he said, “had fake IDs, fake Social Security cards.” One week, they would be gone after being flagged in the federal electronic system that employers use to check employees’ legal status. “The next week, the same guys would show up with another fake ID, another fake Social Security card.”
Photo
Chris Maloof, a member of the Arizona Border Recon, hiked along mountain trails in August, intent on cutting off paths used by migrants and drug couriers. Credit Johnny Milano
The Border Patrol operates according to a “shift mentality,” their responsibilities limited by time and distance, he said. Many agents are assigned to the station in Tucson, more than an hour away. “When they’re coming down,” Mr. Foley said, “they’re being reactive” to an image on a video camera or a ground sensor set off by someone where no one should be.
“They’re already behind,” he said. “What we do is try to be proactive.”
He lives in Sasabe; many of the members of Arizona Border Recon live there or nearby. “Because we live out here, we do this 24/7,” he said.
Mr. Foley runs background checks on volunteers and verifies their military records, but there is no government or public oversight over who joins this group or any of the militia organizations operating on America’s southern border. Most of the group’s members are either veterans or retired law enforcement officers. They are volunteers who have been trained to read the signs that migrants leave in the wild — a snapped twig, for instance, or the characteristic print of a piece of carpet glued to the bottom of a migrant’s shoe to complicate tracking efforts.
Border Patrol agents “actually like us,” Mr. Foley said. “We have so much intel of what’s happening and where it’s happening.”
The group’s mission, as explained on its website, “is not to overthrow any government, or take the law into our own hands.” It is to serve as another set of eyes and ears where eyes and ears are so few.
Photo
Blaine Cooper, a figure in the militia standoff in Oregon early in 2016, seen here lacing up his boots at the Arizona Border Recon’s forward operating base in October 2014. Credit Johnny Milano
Mr. Foley said he and the other volunteers had given water, food and blankets to thirsty, hungry and cold migrants whom they have found lost and disoriented in the desert, abandoned by the smugglers who brought them across. Then they turn the migrants over to the Border Patrol.
Photo
Members of the Arizona Border Recon scanning the terrain for migrant activity in November. Credit Johnny Milano
“We stay on the mountains seven to 10 days,” Mr. Foley said. “We sleep where we can, when we can, and we stay focused.”
Mr. Foley is known to others in his group as “Nailer,” a nod to his former life as a carpenter.
“Because people think we’re militia, they think we’re running around pointing weapons at people, shooting at people,” he said. “Six years and we’ve never fired a shot.”
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http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/12/22/obama-administration-scraps-entry-exit-tracking-system-for-migrants-from-muslim-countries/
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http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/12/22/obama-administration-scraps-entry-exit-tracking-system-for-migrants-from-muslim-countries/
Pretty clear who's side he is on, isn't it?
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http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/dec/26/isis-arrests-in-northern-virginia-reveal-jihadi-th/
Islamic State arrests reveal jihadi threat near seat of U.S. government
By Rowan Scarborough - The Washington Times
Monday, December 26, 2016
Law enforcement agencies have arrested nine Northern Virginia residents on charges of aiding the Islamic State since the terrorist group rose to power in Syria and Iraq in 2014 and launched social media propaganda to attract followers, a government message to police states.
The Northern Virginia Regional Intelligence Center issued profiles of the nine in a Dec. 21 report labeled “law enforcement sensitive.”
Such reports are designed to help state and federal agents recognize trends in the types of individuals who are influenced by the Islamic State’s message and how they communicate across terrorist networks.
A defense attorney in one of the cases accused police of anti-Muslim bias; his client later pleaded guilty.
Somalis living in Minnesota appear to receive the most press attention in the U.S. for wanting to help or join the Islamic State. The FBI arrested six residents of Somali origin in April after they made arrangements to leave Minnesota for Syria. Last December, a 20-year-old man of Somali origin was arrested on accusations of leading a group of ethnic Somalis attempting to fight for the Islamic State.
The Northern Virginia report shows that Muslims seeking to become mass killers live near the seat of American government.
Of the nine Northern Virginians who were arrested, all but one were in their teens and early 20s. They included a police officer, a Starbucks barista, Army soldiers, bankers and a cabdriver. Four of the nine graduated from Northern Virginia high schools, one with honors. Two attended Northern Virginia Community College.
In other words, all of them appeared to have opportunities via public education to become successful Americans but instead were charged with what amounted to a devotion to violent jihad.
They are suspected of conducting terrorism planning through Twitter, Facebook, Skype, WhatsApp and other platforms and apps, as well as on prepaid phones.
“Local police are in a particularly difficult situation,” said Robert Maginnis, a retired Army officer and researcher on Islamism who lives in Northern Virginia. “They face a severe challenge by Islamists operating in the shadows of our open society. These mostly young male Muslims become radicalized either by Islamist imams at some of the thousands of mosques across America, at school, or over the ever-present internet sites that spew anti-West, anti-Christian hatred.”
These are the nine profiles, according to the intelligence report obtained by The Washington Times:
• Ali Shukir Amin. He pleaded guilty to providing support to the Islamic State (also known as ISIS, ISIL and Daesh) and was sentenced to 136 months in prison. An honors student at Osbourn Park High School, Amin wrote a pro-Islamic State blog, had a Twitter account with 7,000 tweets and instructed people on how to use bitcoin to hide money transfers and on how to travel to Syria.
• Reza Niknejad. Also an Osbourn Park student who was attending Northern Virginia Community College, Niknejad, aided by Amin, traveled to Syria in 2015. He was charged in absentia.
• Heather Coffman. She pleaded guilty to making a false statement concerning involvement in international terrorism and was sentenced to 54 months in prison. She joined the Army but was discharged after four months, and later worked as a sales clerk. She operated multiple Facebook accounts to promote the Islamic State and shared terrorism contacts with possible recruits.
• Joseph Hassan Farrokh. He pleaded guilty this year to attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State and received 102 months in prison. He provided $600 to a friend to travel to Syria and attempted to be a foreign fighter.
• Mahmound Amin Mohamed Elhassan. He pleaded guilty in October to aiding Farrokh and lying about his involvement in international terrorism. He spoke openly of supporting the Islamic State and its violence. He had attended Northern Virginia Community College and worked for Starbucks.
• Mohamad Jamal Khweis. He was arrested in Turkey on charges of conspiring to help the Islamic State. His trial begins in April. He graduated from Edison High School and worked for two banks and Highgate Hotels. He traveled to Syria in 2015 to become a foreign fighter before having second thoughts and escaping.
• Mohammad Bilor Jalloh. He pleaded guilty in October to trying to help the Islamic State. He had served as a combat engineer in the Virginia National Guard and worked for consulting firms. He met with Islamic State members in Africa and tried to buy firearms to carry out a Fort Hood-style massacre.
• Haris Qatar. He also pleaded guilty to charges of helping the Islamic State. He attended Northern Virginia Community College and worked for Wells Fargo. He created 60 Twitter handles for Islamic State propaganda and stalked residences in Northern Virginia that were on the group’s “kill lists.” He was preparing to make a video encouraging people to carry out “lone wolf” attacks around Washington.
• Nicholas Young. The oldest of the nine at 36, he has been charged with helping the Islamic State but has not faced trial. He graduated from West Potomac High School and worked as a Metro police officer. He is accused of stockpiling weapons at his home. According to authorities, he traveled to Libya and gave advice to Islamic State followers on how to avoid law enforcement monitoring.
Mr. Maginnis, who stays in contact with local police in Virginia, said the wave of social media rhetoric against law enforcement has made their counterterrorism role more difficult.
“Given our open society, detached parents and politically correct schools, local police in Northern Virginia understandably hesitate to rigorously pursue young Islamist wannabes,” Mr. Maginnis said.
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:-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o
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Headline is deceptive by content is disconcerting.
http://pamelageller.com/2017/01/us-immigration-office-fake-syrian-passports-ok.html/
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http://www.hannity.com/articles/hanpr-election-493995/secret-service-agent-i-wont-take-15499848/
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http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2017/0115/Are-terrorists-crossing-the-US-Mexico-border-Excerpts-from-the-case-file
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http://www.wsj.com/articles/ban-on-u-s-entry-met-with-alarm-in-mideast-africa-1485365466
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/444370/donald-trump-refugee-executive-order-no-muslim-ban-separating-fact-hysteria
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https://westernrifleshooters.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/16265445_1405593456126757_4700181938390028164_n.jpg
(https://westernrifleshooters.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/16265445_1405593456126757_4700181938390028164_n.jpg)
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http://hotair.com/archives/2017/01/17/driver-who-shot-and-beat-arizona-trooper-was-in-the-country-illegally/
Former Mexican law enforcement officer.
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This is Breitbart, so double check:
http://www.breitbart.com/jerusalem/2017/01/29/flashback-obama-2011-suspended-iraq-refugee-program-six-months-terrorism-fears/
This is not
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/al-qaeda-kentucky-us-dozens-terrorists-country-refugees/story?id=20931131
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President Trump seems determined to conduct a shock and awe campaign to fulfill his campaign promises as quickly as possible, while dealing with the consequences later. This may work for a pipeline approval, but the bonfire over his executive order on refugees shows that government by deliberate disruption can blow up in damaging ways.
Mr. Trump campaigned on a promise of “extreme vetting” for refugees from countries with a history of terrorism, and his focus on protecting Americans has popular support. But his refugee ban is so blunderbuss and broad, and so poorly explained and prepared for, that it has produced confusion and fear at airports, an immediate legal defeat, and political fury at home and abroad. Governing is more complicated than a campaign rally.
Start with the rollout late Friday with barely an explanation for the public, or apparently even for border agents or customs officials. The order immediately suspended entry for nationals from seven countries for 90 days, except for exceptions authorized by the secretaries of State or Homeland Security. It also banned refugee entries from Syria indefinitely.
The airwaves were suddenly full of stories of scientists, business travelers and even approved visa holders detained at the airport and denied entry to the U.S. Tech companies immediately recalled employees for fear that they may not be able to return.
Even some green-card holders—who have permanent legal residence in the U.S.—were swept up in the border confusion. The White House scrambled Sunday to say green-card holders are exempt from the order, but that should have been made clear from the start.
The White House legal review was also slipshod. The President has wide discretion over refugee policies, and the overall Trump order is no doubt legal. But surely someone in the executive branch knew that anyone who touches down on U.S. soil is entitled to some due process before summary removal.
Opponents of the policy pounced to sue in several jurisdictions, and no fewer than four judges have rebuked the order in some way. One government lawyer who had to defend the White House position couldn’t explain why those detained were a security threat or why they weren’t at risk if they were sent back to their native countries.
The larger problem with the order is its breadth. Contrary to much bad media coverage, the order is not a “Muslim ban.” But by suspending all entries from seven Muslim-majority nations, it lets the jihadists portray the order as applying to all Muslims even though it does not. The smarter play would have been simply to order more diligent screening without a blanket ban. (MARC: Oh barf!)
The order does say the government should “prioritize refugee claims made by individuals on the basis of religious-based persecution, provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion” in that country.
That could apply to Christians, whom the Obama Administration neglected in its refugee admissions despite their persecution in much of the Middle East. But it could also apply to minority Sunni Muslims in Iraq who have fought with the U.S. Yet that wasn’t explained, and in an interview with a Christian broadcast network Mr. Trump stressed a preference for Christian refugees.
The order also fails to make explicit exceptions for Iraqis, Afghans and others who have fought side by side with Americans. These include translators and others who helped save American lives and whose own lives may now be at risk for assisting GIs. The U.S. will fight wars in foreign lands in the future, and we will need local allies who will be watching how we treat Iraqis, Kurds and other battle comrades now.
The U.S. is in a long war with jihadists that is as much ideological as military. The U.S. needs Muslim allies, while the jihadists want to portray America as the enemy of all Muslims. Overly broad orders send the wrong signal to millions of Muslims who aren’t jihadists but who might be vulnerable to recruitment if they conclude the U.S. is at war with Islam, rather than with Islamist radicals.
The reaction to the refugee order is also a warning that controversial policy changes can’t merely be dropped on the public like a stun grenade. They need their own extreme internal vetting to make sure everyone knows what’s going on. They need to be sold and explained to the public—again and again.
Mr. Trump is right that the government needs shaking up, but the danger of moving too fast without careful preparation and competent execution is that he is building up formidable political forces in opposition. The danger isn’t so much that any single change could be swept away by bipartisan opposition, but that he will alienate the friends and allies at home and abroad he needs to succeed. Political disruption has its uses but not if it consumes your Presidency in the process.
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https://www.jihadwatch.org/2017/01/dubais-head-of-security-we-completely-support-trump-in-ban-on-entry-to-those-who-may-cause-breach-in-americas-security
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http://www.meforum.org/6505/smoking-out-islamists-via-extreme-vetting
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http://dailycaller.com/2017/01/30/dem-congresswoman-forced-to-face-her-own-voting-history-after-calling-trumps-travel-ban-horrifying/
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http://www.dps.texas.gov/director_staff/media_and_communications/2017/threatOverview20170115.pdf#page=21
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dailycaller.com/2017/01/31/jordanian-prince-on-syrian-refugees-we-cant-vet-these-people/
What could possibly go wrong?
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U.S. Ill Prepared for Convicted Jihadis Ending Their Prison Sentences
by Patrick Dunleavy
IPT News
February 8, 2017
http://www.investigativeproject.org/5778/us-ill-prepared-for-convicted-jihadis-ending
"O Allah, Free the Muslim Prisoners."
Inspire Magazine 2010
The old adage, "Out of sight, out of mind" does not apply to dealing effectively with the threat of Islamism especially in the case of terrorists who have been captured or incarcerated.
Radical Islamic organizations such as al-Qaida and ISIS never forget their members. To them, going to prison is part of the pathway to paradise. Both groups' leaders, Ayman al-Zawahri and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, spent considerable periods of time locked up. It did nothing to diminish their zeal, but rather, fueled their fervor. Often, as in their cases, what comes out of prison is worse than what went in.
This is further illustrated by the increased number of terrorists released from Guantanamo who rejoin the fight against U.S. military personnel. Almost one in three released prisoners return to the jihadists' fold. This recidivism can be attributed in part to the admonitions terrorists receive to assist those who are captured or imprisoned. That support may include financial help for their families and for legal fees.
These instructions were found in a training manual discovered in 2000 by law enforcement officers in Manchester, England.
"I take this opportunity to address our prisoners. We have not forgotten you," al-Zawahiri said in an interview with Al Shabab commemorating the fourth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. "We are still committed to the debt of your salvation . . . until we shatter your shackles."
AQAP's Inspire magazine went so far as to list the names of incarcerated members for all to remember.
They do this because jihadis firmly believe that sooner or later they'll be reunited with those members.
If that isn't ominous enough, consider the fact that as many as 100 people convicted of terror-related offenses in U.S. prisons will be set free in less than four years.
And yet, while Islamic terrorist organizations have rapidly changed in their recruitment and tactical methodologies overall, the U.S. has not adapted to countering the evolving threat.
In the United States, the number of terror-related incidents increased exponentially since 9-11. As they did, authorities adapted new ways to investigate. State of the art technologies help collect and analyze data. Fusion centers were created to get the information into the hands of investigators in real time. Counter terrorism, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies joined together to share.
Legislation has changed how the judicial system prosecutes terrorists. "Our criminal law was unprepared for international terrorism. We simply did not have statutes and penalties that fit what terrorists do," said former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, who led the prosecution against the first World Trade Center bombers and blind sheik Omar Abdel Rahman.
A vigorous debate continues whether to treat terrorists as criminals or as enemy combatants. A reasonable consensus among the military and the judicial branches is building for the use of both designations.
Two significant changes, in policy and practice, toward radical Islamic terrorists remain to be addressed.
Terrorists go into prison much the same way as the burglar, the drug dealer, or the pedophile. They are housed and fed in existing correctional facilities with common criminals. No mandatory rehabilitation or de-radicalization programs exist for convicted Islamic terrorists. And when they are released, there is no specialized supervisory program applied to monitor their employment or whereabouts.
This situation has to change if we are to deal effectively with terrorism. We should establish a registration list for convicted terrorists. This would provide local authorities with the identity of those recently released to their communities. It has been successfully used with sex offenders. It can work if properly applied.
With as many as 500 terrorists now in custody and more to come, the custodial system must also evolve in how it handles jihadists. Security classification must not be downgraded simply because the terrorist has become "jail wise" (exhibited good behavior) like "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, who will be released from prison in two years.
Special administrative measures – conditions of confinement – which restrict visits, correspondence and other prison privileges assigned to terrorists must continue.
Uniform security standards for imprisoned terrorists should be established in the federal, state, and local correctional facilities. Jose Padilla, the alleged "dirty bomber" who first learned of a radical form of Islam while in a Florida county jail and was originally sentenced to life in prison, is scheduled to be released in eight years. Who will be the parole officers assigned to supervise him and will those officers be afforded any specialized training before that happens?
In some cases, specialized facilities like Guantanamo are necessary in dealing with enemy combatants and other committed jihadists. They are effective. No anecdotal evidence has been presented showing them to be a recruitment tool for ISIS or al Qaida. That is like saying that Alcatraz was responsible for the increase in violent crime.
The number of people arrested in the U.S. for terrorism-related crimes nearly tripled in 2015. That year, FBI Director James Comey testified that more than 200 people traveled overseas from the United States in an attempt to fight alongside ISIS or al-Qaida related groups in the Middle East and North Africa.
In 2016, Comey said his agents still had 1,000 open cases related to ISIS. Within the next few years, he said, there may be a "terrorist diaspora" of ISIS fighters leaving the battlefield of Syria and returning to their home countries, committed to carrying out more terrorist attacks.
We can only hope that the vast majority will be apprehended before they can carry out attacks here in the United States. And when they are, we had better be prepared to effectively deal with them throughout their entire time in the system. Anything less is unacceptable to the citizens of this great country.
IPT Senior Fellow Patrick Dunleavy is the former Deputy Inspector General for New York State Department of Corrections and author of The Fertile Soil of Jihad. He currently teaches a class on terrorism for the United States Military Special Operations School.
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Re: Trained professionals!
« Reply #1170 on: Today at 02:34:12 PM »
Quote from: G M on Today at 10:56:27 AM
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/2016/04/20/author-u-s-official-who-issued-visas-to-911-hijackers-still-works-for-state-department/2/
How dare Trump keep these professionals out of the loop!
https://www.google.com.fj/amp/amp.dailycaller.com/2015/10/01/u-s-refugee-chief-didnt-know-boston-bombers-were-refugees/?client=safari
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Bet it's much more than dozens
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/al-qaeda-kentucky-us-dozens-terrorists-country-refugees/story?id=20931131
Exclusive: US May Have Let 'Dozens' of Terrorists Into Country As Refugees
By James Gordon Meek
Cindy Galli
Brian Ross
Nov. 20, 2013
QUANTICO, Virginia
Several dozen suspected terrorist bombmakers, including some believed to have targeted American troops, may have mistakenly been allowed to move to the United States as war refugees, according to FBI agents investigating the remnants of roadside bombs recovered from Iraq and Afghanistan.
The discovery in 2009 of two al Qaeda-Iraq terrorists living as refugees in Bowling Green, Kentucky -- who later admitted in court that they'd attacked U.S. soldiers in Iraq -- prompted the bureau to assign hundreds of specialists to an around-the-clock effort aimed at checking its archive of 100,000 improvised explosive devices collected in the war zones, known as IEDs, for other suspected terrorists' fingerprints.
"We are currently supporting dozens of current counter-terrorism investigations like that," FBI Agent Gregory Carl, director of the Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center (TEDAC), said in an ABC News interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC News' "World News with Diane Sawyer" and "Nightline".
"I wouldn't be surprised if there were many more than that," said House Committee on Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul. "And these are trained terrorists in the art of bombmaking that are inside the United States; and quite frankly, from a homeland security perspective, that really concerns me."
As a result of the Kentucky case, the State Department stopped processing Iraq refugees for six months in 2011, federal officials told ABC News – even for many who had heroically helped U.S. forces as interpreters and intelligence assets. One Iraqi who had aided American troops was assassinated before his refugee application could be processed, because of the immigration delays, two U.S. officials said. In 2011, fewer than 10,000 Iraqis were resettled as refugees in the U.S., half the number from the year before, State Department statistics show.
Suspect in Kentucky Discovered to Have Insurgent Past
An intelligence tip initially led the FBI to Waad Ramadan Alwan, 32, in 2009. The Iraqi had claimed to be a refugee who faced persecution back home -- a story that shattered when the FBI found his fingerprints on a cordless phone base that U.S. soldiers dug up in a gravel pile south of Bayji, Iraq on Sept. 1, 2005. The phone base had been wired to unexploded bombs buried in a nearby road.
An ABC News investigation of the flawed U.S. refugee screening system, which was overhauled two years ago, showed that Alwan was mistakenly allowed into the U.S. and resettled in the leafy southern town of Bowling Green, Kentucky, a city of 60,000 which is home to Western Kentucky University and near the Army's Fort Knox and Fort Campbell. Alwan and another Iraqi refugee, Mohanad Shareef Hammadi, 26, were resettled in Bowling Green even though both had been detained during the war by Iraqi authorities, according to federal prosecutors.
Most of the more than 70,000 Iraqi war refugees in the U.S. are law-abiding immigrants eager to start a new life in America, state and federal officials say.
But the FBI discovered that Alwan had been arrested in Kirkuk, Iraq, in 2006 and confessed on video made of his interrogation then that he was an insurgent, according to the U.S. military and FBI, which obtained the tape a year into their Kentucky probe. In 2007, Alwan went through a border crossing to Syria and his fingerprints were entered into a biometric database maintained by U.S. military intelligence in Iraq, a Directorate of National Intelligence official said. Another U.S. official insisted that fingerprints of Iraqis were routinely collected and that Alwan's fingerprint file was not associated with the insurgency.
"How do they get into our community?"
In 2009 Alwan applied as a refugee and was allowed to move to Bowling Green, where he quit a job he briefly held and moved into public housing on Gordon Ave., across the street from a school bus stop, and collected public assistance payouts, federal officials told ABC News.
"How do you have somebody that we now know was a known actor in terrorism overseas, how does that person get into the United States? How do they get into our community?" wondered Bowling Green Police Chief Doug Hawkins, whose department assisted the FBI.
Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Peter Boogaard said in a statement that the U.S. government "continually improves and expands its procedures for vetting immigrants, refugees and visa applicants, and today [the] vetting process considers a far broader range of information than it did in past years."
"Our procedures continue to check applicants' names and fingerprints against records of individuals known to be security threats, including the terrorist watchlist, or of law enforcement concern... These checks are vital to advancing the U.S. government's twin goal of protecting the world's most vulnerable persons while ensuring U.S. national security and public safety," the statement said.
Last year, a Department of Homeland Security senior intelligence official testified in a House hearing that Alwan and Hammadi's names and fingerprints were checked by the FBI, DHS and the Defense Department during the vetting process in 2009 and "came in clean."
After the FBI received the intelligence tip later that year, a sting operation in Kentucky was mounted to bait Alwan with a scheme hatched by an undercover operative recruited by the FBI, who offered Alwan the opportunity to ship heavy arms to al Qaeda in Iraq. The FBI wanted to know if Alwan was part of a local terror cell -- a fear that grew when he tapped a relative also living in Bowling Green, Hammadi, to help out.
The FBI secretly taped Alwan bragging to the informant that he'd built a dozen or more bombs in Iraq and used a sniper rifle to kill American soldiers in the Bayji area north of Baghdad.
"He said that he had them 'for lunch and dinner,'" recalled FBI Louisville Supervisory Special Agent Tim Beam, "meaning that he had killed them."
Alwan even sketched out IED designs, which the FBI provided to ABC News, that U.S. bomb experts had quickly determined clearly demonstrated his expertise.
'Needle in a Haystack' Fingerprint Match Found on Iraq Bomb Parts, White House Briefed
The case drew attention at the highest levels of government, FBI officials told ABC News, when TEDAC forensic investigators tasked with finding IEDs from Bayji dating back to 2005 pulled 170 case boxes and, incredibly, found several of Alwan's fingerprints on a Senao-brand remote cordless base station. A U.S. military Significant Action report on Sept. 1, 2005 said the remote-controlled trigger had been attached to "three homemade-explosive artillery rounds concealed by gravel with protruding wires."
"There were two fingerprints, developed on the top of the base station," Katie Suchma, an FBI supervisory physical scientist at TEDAC who helped locate the evidence, told ABC News at the center's IED examination lab. "The whole team was ecstatic because it was like finding a needle in a haystack."
"This was the type of bomb he's talking about when he drew those pictures," added FBI electronics expert Stephen Mallow.
Word was sent back to the FBI in Louisville.
"It was a surreal moment, it was a real game changer, so to speak, for the case," FBI agent Beam told ABC News. "Now you have solidified proof that he was involved in actual attacks against U.S. soldiers."
Worse, prosecutors later revealed at Hammadi's sentencing hearing that he and Alwan had been caught on an FBI surveillance tape talking about using a bomb to assassinate an Army captain they'd known in Bayji, who was now back home – and to possibly attack other homeland targets.
"Many things should take place and it should be huge," Hammadi told Alwan in an FBI-recorded conversation, which a prosecutor read at Hammadi's sentencing last year.
Then-FBI Director Robert Mueller briefed President Obama in early 2011 as agents and Louisville federal prosecutors weighed whether to arrest Alwan and Hammadi or continue arranging phony arms shipments to Iraq that the pair could assist with, consisting of machine guns, explosives and even Stinger missiles the FBI had secretly rendered inoperable and which never left the U.S.
But agents soon determined there were no other co-conspirators. An FBI SWAT team collared the terrorists in a truck south of Bowling Green in late May 2011, only weeks after al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan and Obama had visited nearby Fort Campbell to thank the SEALs and Army Nightstalker pilots for their successful mission. The Kentucky al Qaeda case drew little attention as the nation celebrated Bin Laden's death.
Suspects Linked to Attack That Killed 4 US Soldiers
Pennsylvania National Guard soldiers who had served in Bayji in 2005 saw news reports about the two arrests, and Army Staff Sgt. Joshua Hedetniemi called the FBI to alert them to an Aug. 9, 2005, IED attack that killed four of their troopers in a humvee patrolling south of the town. The U.S. attorney's office in Louisville eventually placed the surviving soldiers in its victim notification system for the case, even though it couldn't be conclusively proven that Alwan and Hammadi had killed the Guardsmen.
The four Pennsylvania soldiers killed that day were Pfc. Nathaniel DeTample, 19, Spec. Gennaro Pellegrini, 31, Spec. Francis J. Straub Jr., 24, and Spec. John Kulick, 35.
"It was a somber moment for the platoon, we had a great deal of love and respect for those guys and it hit us pretty hard," Hedetniemi said in an interview in the Guard's armory near Philadelphia. "I think that these two individuals are innately evil to be able to act as a terrorist and attack and kill American soldiers, then have the balls to come over to the United States and try to do the same exact thing here in our homeland."
Confronted with all the evidence against them, Alwan and Hammadi agreed to plead guilty to supporting terrorism and admitted their al Qaeda-Iraq past. Alwan cooperated and received 40 years, while Hammadi received a life term which he is appealing. A hearing for Hammadi's appeal took place Tuesday in the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Ohio.
"We need to take this as a case study and draw the right lessons from it, and not just high-five over this," said retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Barbero, who headed the military's Joint IED Defeat Organization until last May. "How did a person who we detained in Iraq -- linked to an IED attack, we had his fingerprints in our government system -- how did he walk into America in 2009?"
Barbero is credited with leveraging the Kentucky case to help the FBI get funding to create a new state of the art fingerprint lab focused solely on its IED repository in a huge warehouse outside Washington. The new FBI lab assists counterterrorism investigations of suspected bombmakers and IED emplacers and looks for latent prints on 100,000 IED remnants collected over the past decade by the military and stored in the vast TEDAC warehouse.
The only man in the Humvee to survive the 2005 IED bombing in Bayji, Daniel South, who is now an Army Black Hawk helicopter pilot in Texas, said he was stunned to learn al Qaeda-Iraq insurgents were living in Kentucky -- but he's glad they were finally brought to justice for attacking U.S. troops in Iraq.
"I kind of wish that we had smoked [Alwan] when it happened, but we didn't have that opportunity so I guess this is second best," South told ABC News.
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http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2614043?platform=hootsuite
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-syrias-assad-tells-yahoo-news-some-refugees-are-definitely-terrorists-182401926.html
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http://pamelageller.com/2017/02/77-refugees-allowed-come-from-terror-list.html/
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/feb/12/terror-convicts-came-from-countries-targeted-for-e/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTlRZNU1Ua3pZVGMxWTJWaSIsInQiOiJxU2RxUlg3bGhvaGVKV3A2MVV2aVhza2lOMUhDXC9pU0ZtRkR1YVU1TUtzaFpaazFQK21ReGxTRE1VNnJ6SWxYaHprdlNOeDJsdUkyRDA0eHhkdWdxMDE1XC9QQm9GVlAyWk92T2Q0Tk5PRUtueEJ4NU9NOFFrN05XbFJkUmpGbDdFIn0%3D
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http://www.meforum.org/6524/taxpayer-dollars-help-american-and-palestinian-terrorists-meet?utm_source=Middle+East+Forum&utm_campaign=ad6a2eb7ef-smith_stillwell_2017_02_13&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_086cfd423c-ad6a2eb7ef-33691909&goal=0_086cfd423c-ad6a2eb7ef-33691909
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http://pamelageller.com/2017/03/iran-boasts-guerilla-movement-united-states.html/
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http://pamelageller.com/2017/03/iran-boasts-guerilla-movement-united-states.html/
This has been known for many years.
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a) http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-39310793; and http://thefederalistpapers.org/us/laptop-with-hillary-email-investigation-info-trump-tower-floor-plans-stolen-from-secret-service?utm_source=FBLC&utm_medium=FB&utm_campaign=LC
b) heard this morning that the last White House fence jumper was wandering around for 45 minutes before detected.
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a) http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-39310793; and http://thefederalistpapers.org/us/laptop-with-hillary-email-investigation-info-trump-tower-floor-plans-stolen-from-secret-service?utm_source=FBLC&utm_medium=FB&utm_campaign=LC
b) heard this morning that the last White House fence jumper was wandering around for 45 minutes before detected.
And the leftdemedia complex bitched about Trump using his private security detail.
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http://dailycaller.com/2017/03/18/30-countries-are-refusing-to-take-back-illegal-immigrants-convicted-of-serious-crimes/?utm_campaign=thedcmainpage&utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social#ixzz4bhe6R1ZD
which is an example of why signing this petition is a real good idea:
http://www.immigrationpause.org/
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second post
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/mar/16/trump-budget-goes-big-border-wall-short-agents/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiT1RZd05qSXlPV1kzWVdGaiIsInQiOiJ4QzlqXC9YMGNKaFFtXC9cL3ZFRklZTjVCUGRkd0pqRGN4YjJaSlwvRXU1dXBrOXhLUVJkXC9NXC8xclczZ0UwRXEydFhzZU5yMGpUUjJKK0JrZlFsT1cxMDkwcUI3VDFjRHFCdmpGQnArWFZ1bHJUN2JYcjJuXC9CNXQ2dEVDMm1tNEE1QkQifQ%3D%3D
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/03/21/trump-wont-allow-you-to-use-ipads-or-laptops-on-certain-airlines-heres-the-underlying-story/?utm_term=.d56be5183de4&wpisrc=nl_&wpmm=1
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/03/21/trump-wont-allow-you-to-use-ipads-or-laptops-on-certain-airlines-heres-the-underlying-story/?utm_term=.d56be5183de4&wpisrc=nl_&wpmm=1
Waiting for the 9th circus to rule this unconstitutional as well.
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I heard the Brits are doing the same thing , , ,
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I heard the Brits are doing the same thing , , ,
From years ago, I can tell you any electronic device is 3/4 of an IED.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/23/us/politics/visa-extreme-vetting-rex-tillerson.html?emc=edit_na_20170323&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445973/donald-trump-border-wall-coming-big-bend-national-park?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Trending%20Email%20Reoccurring-%20Monday%20to%20Thursday%202017-03-22&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445973/donald-trump-border-wall-coming-big-bend-national-park?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Trending%20Email%20Reoccurring-%20Monday%20to%20Thursday%202017-03-22&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
Planting landmines instead will suffice. We couldn't possibly building a wall obstructing a view almost no one goes to see.
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http://www.anonews.co/secretive-spy-us/
:-o :-o :-o
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQ3cBhIB3hg&feature=share
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http://wethealliance.com/articles/u-s-mexico-border-wall-needed-only-in-strategic-locations-says-border-patrol-union-head
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https://www.facebook.com/CongressmanClayHiggins/videos/429997500682449/?pnref=story
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/chief-border-patrol-agents-among-most-assaulted-7542-2006
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http://dailysignal.com/2017/04/12/hefty-drop-in-border-arrests-a-credit-to-trumps-enforcement-of-us-law/?utm_source=TDS_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MorningBell&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWkRoa1lqVXhPVGczTmpZMiIsInQiOiJcLzJET0J3eHpCa2d0cTQyK3lwUnZPbndRWTlXUG5NSnQ1eHQ4T1R2VVVMT1hDWWhrbnMxcEtNSzZHR1prZzRSNXVZWXM4MkgwSEs0Nkk1YTdEWUlNM0JRdWpSVzNHRGZQdmRpSTRjOWQ3WDlOdEdnZ1NlZTdNYjhmZDF1ZmJEVUIifQ%3D%3D
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/12/us/trump-immigration-border-hiring.html?emc=edit_th_20170413&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193&_r=0
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http://pamelageller.com/2017/04/senate-fbi-garland.html/
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second post
http://pamelageller.com/2017/04/washington-dc-judge-revokes-jihadis-citizenship.html/
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http://kstp.com/news/minneapolis-police-uncover-bomb-making-materials-weapons-in-suv-/4489973/?cat=1
So many threads this could go in, Islam in America, Urban issues, the way forward.
Sure they had guns, ammunition, hand grenade, and bomb-making materials. What pisses me off as a North Minneapolis landlord is that they just dump their fast food wrappers into the street. And that's how they got caught. Not because police enforce that law but because someone cared enough to confront them.
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State Dept. Redacts Big Chunks of $22.8 Mil Contract to Resettle Muslim Refugees
MAY 24, 2017
The U.S. government spends billions of dollars to “resettle” foreign nationals and transparency on how the money is spent depends on the agency involved. Judicial Watch has been investigating it for years, specifically the huge amount of taxpayer dollars that go to “voluntary agencies”, known as VOLAGs, to provide a wide range of services for the new arrivals. Throughout the ongoing probe Judicial Watch has found a striking difference on how government lawyers use an exemption, officially known as (b)(4), to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to withhold records. All the cases involve public funds being used to resettle foreigners on U.S. soil and Americans should be entitled to the records.
The (b)(4) exemption permits agencies to withhold trade secrets and commercial or financial information obtained from a person which is privileged or confidential. Depending on the government agency and the mood of the taxpayer-funded lawyers handling public records requests, that information is exempt from disclosure. In these cases, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) disclosed a VOLAG contract to resettle tens of thousands of Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) that entered the U.S. through Mexico under the Obama administration while the State Department withheld large portions of a one-year, $22.8 million deal to resettle refugees from Muslim countries. Most of the UACs came from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala and the Obama administration blamed the sudden surge on violence in the three central American nations. The agency responsible for resettling the minors and issuing contracts for the costly services is HHS.
As a result of Judicial Watch’s work HHS furnished records with virtually nothing redacted. Disclosed were employee salaries of VOLAGs contracted by the agency to provide services for the illegal immigrant minors, the cost of laptops, big screen TVs, food, pregnancy tests, “multicultural crayons” and shower stalls for the new arrivals. The general contract was to provide “basic shelter care” for 2,400 minors for a period of four months in 2014. This cost American taxpayers an astounding $182,129,786 and the VOLAG contracted to do it was government regular called Baptist Children and Family Services (BCFS). The breakdown includes charges of $104,215,608 for UACs at Fort Sill, Oklahoma and an additional $77,914,178 for UACs at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.
HHS rightfully provided all sorts of details in the records, including the cost of emergency surge beds ($104,215,608) for just four months; food for the illegal alien minors and staff ($18,198,000); medical supplies such as first aid kits, latex gloves, lice shampoo and pregnancy tests ($1,120,400); recreation items such as board games, soccer balls and jump ropes ($180,000); educational items like art paper and multicultural crayons ($180,000); laptops ($200,000) and cellphones ($160,000). Hotel accommodations for the BCFS staff was $6,765,000, the records show, and the salary for a 30-member “Incident Management Team” was $2,648,800, which breaks down to $88,293 per IMT member for the four-month period. It was outrageous that the Obama administration spent nearly $200 million of taxpayer funds to provide illegal alien children with the types of extravagant high-tech equipment and lavish benefits many American families cannot even afford for their own children.
This has become a heated issue for the government which may explain why other agencies aren’t as forthcoming in providing specific figures, thus abusing the (b)(4) exemption. The State Department, for instance, redacted huge portions of records involving contracts with VOLAGs to resettle refugees from mostly Muslim countries. The files illustrate the disparate redaction treatment given by different government agencies to the same types of records. The State Department paid a VOLAG called United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) a ghastly $22,838,173 in one year to resettle refugees that came mostly from Muslim countries. Unlike HHS, the agency redacted information related to what the USCCB charged the government for things like furniture, personnel, equipment and other costs associated with contracts to resettle refugees. Why did one government agency hand over the same types of records that another agency claims are trade secrets? Judicial Watch is challenging the State Department’s (b)(4) exemption and will provide updates as they become available.
HHS and the State Department work with nine VOLAGs to resettle refugees and the voluntary agencies have hundreds of contractors they like to call “affiliates.” It’s a huge racket that costs American taxpayers monstrous sums and Judicial Watch is working to pinpoint the exact amount. Besides BCFS and USCCB, other VOLAGs with lucrative government gigs to resettle refugees are: Church World Service, Ethiopian Community Development Council, Episcopal Migration Ministries, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, International Rescue Committee, U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, Lutheran Immigration Refugee Services and World Relief Corporation.
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Bringing third world savages to wage war on your citizens isn't cheap or easy. But diversity!
State Dept. Redacts Big Chunks of $22.8 Mil Contract to Resettle Muslim Refugees
MAY 24, 2017
The U.S. government spends billions of dollars to “resettle” foreign nationals and transparency on how the money is spent depends on the agency involved. Judicial Watch has been investigating it for years, specifically the huge amount of taxpayer dollars that go to “voluntary agencies”, known as VOLAGs, to provide a wide range of services for the new arrivals. Throughout the ongoing probe Judicial Watch has found a striking difference on how government lawyers use an exemption, officially known as (b)(4), to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to withhold records. All the cases involve public funds being used to resettle foreigners on U.S. soil and Americans should be entitled to the records.
The (b)(4) exemption permits agencies to withhold trade secrets and commercial or financial information obtained from a person which is privileged or confidential. Depending on the government agency and the mood of the taxpayer-funded lawyers handling public records requests, that information is exempt from disclosure. In these cases, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) disclosed a VOLAG contract to resettle tens of thousands of Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) that entered the U.S. through Mexico under the Obama administration while the State Department withheld large portions of a one-year, $22.8 million deal to resettle refugees from Muslim countries. Most of the UACs came from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala and the Obama administration blamed the sudden surge on violence in the three central American nations. The agency responsible for resettling the minors and issuing contracts for the costly services is HHS.
As a result of Judicial Watch’s work HHS furnished records with virtually nothing redacted. Disclosed were employee salaries of VOLAGs contracted by the agency to provide services for the illegal immigrant minors, the cost of laptops, big screen TVs, food, pregnancy tests, “multicultural crayons” and shower stalls for the new arrivals. The general contract was to provide “basic shelter care” for 2,400 minors for a period of four months in 2014. This cost American taxpayers an astounding $182,129,786 and the VOLAG contracted to do it was government regular called Baptist Children and Family Services (BCFS). The breakdown includes charges of $104,215,608 for UACs at Fort Sill, Oklahoma and an additional $77,914,178 for UACs at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.
HHS rightfully provided all sorts of details in the records, including the cost of emergency surge beds ($104,215,608) for just four months; food for the illegal alien minors and staff ($18,198,000); medical supplies such as first aid kits, latex gloves, lice shampoo and pregnancy tests ($1,120,400); recreation items such as board games, soccer balls and jump ropes ($180,000); educational items like art paper and multicultural crayons ($180,000); laptops ($200,000) and cellphones ($160,000). Hotel accommodations for the BCFS staff was $6,765,000, the records show, and the salary for a 30-member “Incident Management Team” was $2,648,800, which breaks down to $88,293 per IMT member for the four-month period. It was outrageous that the Obama administration spent nearly $200 million of taxpayer funds to provide illegal alien children with the types of extravagant high-tech equipment and lavish benefits many American families cannot even afford for their own children.
This has become a heated issue for the government which may explain why other agencies aren’t as forthcoming in providing specific figures, thus abusing the (b)(4) exemption. The State Department, for instance, redacted huge portions of records involving contracts with VOLAGs to resettle refugees from mostly Muslim countries. The files illustrate the disparate redaction treatment given by different government agencies to the same types of records. The State Department paid a VOLAG called United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) a ghastly $22,838,173 in one year to resettle refugees that came mostly from Muslim countries. Unlike HHS, the agency redacted information related to what the USCCB charged the government for things like furniture, personnel, equipment and other costs associated with contracts to resettle refugees. Why did one government agency hand over the same types of records that another agency claims are trade secrets? Judicial Watch is challenging the State Department’s (b)(4) exemption and will provide updates as they become available.
HHS and the State Department work with nine VOLAGs to resettle refugees and the voluntary agencies have hundreds of contractors they like to call “affiliates.” It’s a huge racket that costs American taxpayers monstrous sums and Judicial Watch is working to pinpoint the exact amount. Besides BCFS and USCCB, other VOLAGs with lucrative government gigs to resettle refugees are: Church World Service, Ethiopian Community Development Council, Episcopal Migration Ministries, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, International Rescue Committee, U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, Lutheran Immigration Refugee Services and World Relief Corporation.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/25/us/politics/trump-travel-ban-blocked.html?emc=edit_na_20170525&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49641193&ref=cta
King Abdullah of Jordan begs to differ:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0y3jpv4_Uw
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/25/us/politics/trump-travel-ban-blocked.html?emc=edit_na_20170525&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49641193&ref=cta
King Abdullah of Jordan begs to differ:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0y3jpv4_Uw
King Abdullah comes off better than 99% of US politicians. Intelligent and well spoken.
Wolf Blitzer is a douche.
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/369928.php
May 25, 2017
British Security Services Were Warned Five Times About Salman Abedi Talking Up Suicide Bombing
Maybe it's time we focused less on "Muslims need to report their misbehaving members" and more on "Security services need to actually do something when citizens report likely terrorists."
I don't know that all of the people reporting Abedi were Muslim, but given that they were "friends" and I can't see Abedi trying too hard to integrate into broader British society, I imagine at least some were.
The Manchester suicide bomber was repeatedly flagged to the authorities over his extremist views, but was not stopped by officers, it emerged Wednesday night.
Counter Terrorism agencies were facing questions after it emerged Salman Abedi told friends that "being a suicide bomber was okay", prompting them to call the Government's anti-terrorism hotline.
Sources suggest that authorities were informed of the danger posed by Abedi on at least five separate occasions in the five years prior to the attack on Monday night.
...
Two friends of Abedi also became so worried they separately telephoned the police counter-terrorism hotline five years ago and again last year.
“They had been worried that ‘he was supporting terrorism’ and had expressed the view that ‘being a suicide bomber was ok’,” a source told the BBC.
Akram Ramadan, 49, part of the close-knit Libyan community in south Manchester, said Abedi had been banned from Didsbury Mosque after he had confronted the Imam who was delivering an anti-extremist sermon.
...
Mr Ramadan said he understood that Abedi had been placed on a "watch list" because the mosque reported him to the authorities for his extremist views.
A well-placed source at Didsbury Mosque confirmed it had contacted the Home Office's Prevent anti-radicalisation programme as a result.
A US official also briefed that members of Abedi's own family had contacted British police saying that he was "dangerous", but again the information does not appear to have been acted upon.
I'm not sure all of these claims are true -- it could be pro-Islamist agitators making claims to exonerate the Libyan community in Manchester.
But I gotta tell you, based on the past record, with so many "Known Wolves" being at perfect liberty to murder and maim, and the FBI seemingly intentionally permitting the Garland shooter to begin his attempt to assassinate people for putting on Free Speech demonstration, I am seriously beginning to wonder if our security services are actually in the business of protecting us rather than "community feelings."
And meanwhile, the feds allowed known MS-13 members to enter the United States as "unaccompanied minor" border crossers, and they're now lost in the country.
A number of Central American youths who were positively identified by border agents as MS-13 and Sureno 18 gang members were allowed to enter the country in July 2014 under Obama administration border surge policies, according to documents released today by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.). Johnson is seeking information from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on the status of these cases and, most importantly, whether they were released from the HHS facilities to communities in the United States. The youths were initially held by the Border Patrol in Nogales, Ariz., and were later transferred to HHS-run facilities in Virginia, Washington, Texas, New York, and Oklahoma.
The gang members were identified on July 5, 2014, after staff members at the Border Patrol facility saw MS-13 graffiti in the bathrooms. Officers documented 16 juveniles who admitted to gang membership...
Despite the positive identification as gang members, the youths were transferred to low-security facilities around the country....
A week later, on July 11, Border Patrol agents apprehended two more UACs who were heard in their cells boasting about their gang affiliation and crimes to each other...
These two were separated from the general population in the Border Patrol holding facility until "being placed". There is no further information available about the disposition of their cases, whether they were eventually placed in an HHS contract facility somewhere, whether they were released, whether they have completed their deportation proceedings, or what has happened to them.
One thing to keep in mind about security services leaving known wolves to kill:
I spoke to a source with close knowledge of terrorist surveillance practices, and she told me that even serious terrorist threats -- serious, like they know this guy is definitely a terrorist -- are followed something like three 8-hour shifts a week.
When I heard this, I tried to clarify: "No, I don't mean the low-level threats, I mean the high level threats."
"I mean the high level threats too," she said. "The low-level threats get much less surveillance."
The problem, which surprised me, is just that there are so many high-level terrorist threats that there just aren't enough counter-terrorism surveillance personnel to follow them any more than a fraction of the time.
So part of the problem is simple: We just have too many high-level terrorism threats living in America. (And Britain, of course.) They overwhelm security services with their sheer numbers.
Maybe it's time to focus on that, the real problem, rather than lying to the public that we can "manage" terrorist threats in-country.
We can't. I was flat-out told how thinly spread surveillance personnel are and how they have to do triage surveillance even on the highest level threats.
Like, just an idea, maybe we could not admit known MS-13 gang members into our country when they illegally cross the border.
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http://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2017/05/24/mpls-brothers-arsenal-arrest/
Growing Concern Over Brothers Arrested With Guns, Bomb-Making Materials
May 24, 2017 7:10 PM By Esme Murphy
Filed Under: Abdullah Alrifahe, Esme Murphy, Majid Alrifahe, Minneapolis
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) — There are growing concerns about the arrest of two brothers with ties to the Middle East who authorities say had an arsenal with bomb-making materials, guns and ammunition in their car.
Twenty-seven-year-old Abdullah Alrifahe and 26-year-old Majid Alrifahe were arrested on May 11 in north Minneapolis.
Abdullah is being held in the Hennepin County Jail. His brother, Majid, has been released and is facing minor charges.
WCCO-TV has confirmed that both Homeland Security and the FBI are involved in the investigation, which started outside a federally-subsidized senior housing project. A good Samaritan confronted the men about littering from their car.
abdullah alrifahe and majid alrifahe Growing Concern Over Brothers Arrested With Guns, Bomb Making Materials
Abdullah Alrifahe and Majid Alrifahe (credit: Hennepin Co. Jail)
The man, who asked that his name not be used for fear of his safety, said the brothers jumped out of their car, moved aggressively toward him and used the N-word. He then called police.
Inside the brothers’ car, police found a loaded AK-47, another rifle, a handgun, a grenade, large amounts of ammunition, and what would later be identified as bomb-making materials, including a drone.
Abdullah Alrifahe had recently been released from jail after serving time for a weapons conviction. He is now facing a single felony weapons charge.
His brother, Majid, has been released from jail and is facing a low-level misdemeanor charges, including disorderly conduct.
The good Samaritan is outraged the charges aren’t more serious.
“For what they found in their car, that is way too light,” he said.
However, criminal defense attorney Joe Tamburino, who is not affiliated with the case, says prosecutors are doing what they can.
“These people have been charged with what the prosecutors can do right now,” he said, adding that more charges could come down later.
The Minneapolis Police Department says the investigation remains an open. Meanwhile, Abdullah Alrifahe is being held on $200,000 bail, which is an extremely high amount for the charges he faces.
His brother, who is out of jail, did not immediately return phone calls.
WCCO-TV also reached out to the FBI and Homeland Security. The FBI responded that it has no comment on the case.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/447973/nsa-illegal-surveillance-americans-obama-administration-abuse-fisa-court-response?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Trending%20Email%20Reoccurring-%20Monday%20to%20Thursday%202017-05-25&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/447973/nsa-illegal-surveillance-americans-obama-administration-abuse-fisa-court-response?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Trending%20Email%20Reoccurring-%20Monday%20to%20Thursday%202017-05-25&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
Investigation and prosecution are the only acceptable response from Trump. If he doesn't act, it's all on him.
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http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/national-security/article152947909.html
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maIKuMUyn5c&feature=youtu.be&utm_source=deployer&utm_campaign=JWTV_5-25-17&cmp=1&utm_medium=email
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http://nypost.com/2017/06/11/bratton-thinks-europe-like-terror-attacks-are-headed-for-the-us/
Bratton thinks Europe-like terror attacks are headed for the US
By David K. Li June 11, 2017 | 7:00pm | Updated
Recent acts of terror in Europe are the “new normal” — and surely coming soon to the United States, former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton ominously warned Sunday.
Evildoers have stepped up attacks on soft targets — such as London Bridge, Manchester Arena and Bastille Day in Nice — in the past 12 months, making a similar terrorist strike on American soil inevitable, Bratton told “The Cats Roundtable.”
“(European-style terror attacks are) going to be the new normal in our world,” Bratton told interviewer John Catsimatidis on AM 970. “The pace of terrorist attacks, certainly in Europe, has been increasing.” Bratton warned: “That type of attack is quite likely to occur in the United States at some point in time.”
Even as US-backed forces close in on ISIS in Raqqa, Syria, the terror group will only spread from a setback in a conventional war, according to Bratton — analogizing it to a particularly gross medical procedure.
“As the issue in Syria comes to closure as ISIS loses its last city in the caliphate, unfortunately, it is like lancing a boil,” he said.
“What is inside will spread around the world even more.”
Bratton blamed porous European borders for exacerbating the problem.
“The open-border situation in Europe is compounding the problem,” said Bratton, who served as NYPD commish in two stints, 1994-96 and 2014-16. “It [hinders the effort] of trying to keep track of people who identify as terrorists or having terrorist leanings.”
________________________________________________________________________________________
In a totally unrelated article:
http://buffalonews.com/2017/06/10/refugees-including-many-muslims-arrive-buffalo-despite-trumps-promise/
Refugees – including 149 from Trump's travel ban nations – arrive in Buffalo
While Congress may decide to admit a larger number of refugees, Trump’s budget said the number should be kept as low as possible for financial reasons. (Derek Gee/News file photo)
By Jerry Zremski
Published Sat, Jun 10, 2017
WASHINGTON – President Trump's promise to cut in half the number of refugees coming to America – and therefore Buffalo – has turned into a dream unfulfilled.
Buffalo offers proof of it. State Department figures show the city welcomed 376 new refugees between Trump's Jan. 20 inauguration and last Wednesday. That's a 32 percent reduction from the 554 who arrived a year before, but nothing close to a 50 percent reduction.
What's more, 149 of those new arrivals come from Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan or Syria – nations subject to Trump's travel ban before the federal courts ruled it was unconstitutional.
And now, the city's refugee resettlement agencies are gearing up for a growing wave of refugees under a new State Department announcement that further undercuts Trump's promise.
"We had a very busy May, and we will have a very busy June," said Karen Andolina Scott, executive director of Journey's End Refugee Services, one of Buffalo's four refugee resettlement agencies.
Church World Service, the national refugee agency affiliated with Journey's End, "was able to send us more people than we thought," Scott added.
That's exactly the opposite of what appeared likely after Trump's Jan. 27 executive order banning travel from seven Muslim-majority countries and suspending refugee resettlement for four months.
That executive order also cut the number of refugees admitted to America during the 2017 fiscal year to 50,000, less than half the 110,000 that former President Barack Obama had promised.
In light of Trump's order, resettlement agencies in Buffalo expected relatively few new refugees to arrive between the end of January and the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30. And they reacted accordingly, either reassigning staff to tasks other than refugee resettlement or laying off caseworkers.
But then the federal courts blocked Trump's efforts to shut off immigration from those Muslim-majority countries, as well as the four-month refugee moratorium. That meant that refugees who already had been vetted and prepared for a move to America could come only a little later than planned.
"They were already in the resettlement pipeline," said Marlene A. Schillinger, president of Jewish Family Service of Buffalo and Erie County, which has been bringing refugees to Buffalo for many years. "They were already scheduled to come here."
Refugees endure a grueling two-year process, including multiple interviews and background checks, before being allowed to move to America. Still, the new arrivals from those Muslim-majority countries – especially those from war-torn Syria – arrived in a country whose new president warned they could be terror threats.
Refugees are a subset of legal immigrants, and are welcomed to the United States for humanitarian reasons after fleeing their troubled homelands.
Legal immigrants are people who resettle in the United States, nearly two-thirds do so because family members – who already are U.S. citizens – sponsor them. Other immigrants come on work visas, including those who come for temporary, low-skill work as well as professionals who move here permanently.
Among the local organizations resettling the refugees is the International Institute of Buffalo, which has made special efforts to connect new arrivals with others from their home countries to help them adjust to their new home, said Eva Hassett, the agency's executive director.
Asked how those new arrivals are settling in, Hassett said: "As well as you can expect. Buffalo is a welcoming community."
Now Buffalo stands poised to welcome a growing number of refugees in the next few months. That's because the State Department last month quietly abandoned the weekly refugee admission quotas that had been in place earlier in the year.
Budgetary constraints previously limited the number of refugees coming to America in the current fiscal year. But a State Department spokesman said the temporary budget bill that Trump signed on May 5, which funds the government through Sept. 30, includes full funding for the nation's refugee resettlement program.
That returns the annual cap for refugees coming to America the same as the one Obama set: 110,000 for the year ending Sept. 30.
Refugee resettlement advocates doubt the nation will receive that number. They said it appears the Department of Homeland Security, which vets prospective refugees, slowed down that process in several countries in wake of Trump's earlier actions, which in turn could slow refugee arrivals in the United States.
Still, local resettlement agencies expect the pace of new refugee arrivals to grow in the coming months.
"We're just watching it from day to day," Schillinger said. "I'm hopeful more than optimistic."
That hope may not last long. Trump's proposed fiscal 2018 budget cuts the number of refugee admissions back down to 50,000, the minimum allowed under the federal law governing the resettlement program.
While Congress may decide to admit a larger number of refugees, Trump's budget said the number should be kept as low as possible for financial reasons.
"A large proportion of entrants arriving as refugees have minimal levels of education, presenting particular fiscal costs," Trump's budget summary stated.
The Trump budget cited a federal study that showed that of refugees who arrived nationwide in the previous five years, nearly half were on Medicaid in 2015, while 45 percent received welfare payments and 75 percent were on food stamps.
A Buffalo News study last year showed that refugee arrivals boosted social service costs locally, too – but that that was just one side of the equation. The study found that in the two West Side ZIP codes where many refugees had settled, job growth and business starts exceeded the county-wide average while property values boomed.
Besides, refugee advocates noted, America never before viewed refugee resettlement as a pure dollars-and-cents matter. Instead, politicians of both parties have long viewed it as a moral necessity for America to welcome people who had been driven from their homes overseas.
"No matter what, every refugee arrival is a life saved, and we all hope that arrivals will continue," Hassett said.
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http://www.speroforum.com/a/NUUSXJZRTC51/81055-ICE-raid-in-Detroit-yields-300-Iraqi-Christians-to-be-deported?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WPXVFOEVCJ1&utm_content=NUUSXJZRTC51&utm_source=news&utm_term=ICE+raid+in+Detroit+yields+300+Iraqi+Christians+to+be+deported#.WUFtx3okSGA
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http://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/337867-supreme-court-weighs-fate-of-trump-travel-ban-order
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http://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/337867-supreme-court-weighs-fate-of-trump-travel-ban-order
Does the president have the powers of the president if the court doesn't like him?
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http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2017/06/21/dhs_s_biometric_exit_program_is_starting_to_scan_americans_faces_before.html
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This is a victory for the Administration. The Court should have gone further (see the dissenting folks), but it’s good.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/16pdf/16-1436_l6hc.pdf
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Maybe less good than we thought.
McCarthy is a true heavyweight in these things and his analysis deserves serious consideration"
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/448989/supreme-court-travel-ban-order-trump-victory-limited
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Maybe less good than we thought.
McCarthy is a true heavyweight in these things and his analysis deserves serious consideration"
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/448989/supreme-court-travel-ban-order-trump-victory-limited
This does not bode well for what is left of this country.
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http://www.sfexaminer.com/man-receive-190000-sf-sanctuary-city-violation/
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So which takes precedence?
local law , state law, or federal law here?
To think tax payers are on the hook to pay this illegal because local law enforcement turned him over to ICE which is what they should be doing-> :-(
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So which takes precedence?
local law , state law, or federal law here?
To think tax payers are on the hook to pay this illegal because local law enforcement turned him over to ICE which is what they should be doing-> :-(
It's kind of fun to see liberals discover states' rights.
Others have asked this same question and come up with different answers:
http://tenthamendmentcenter.com/2017/02/17/thomas-jefferson-on-the-constitution-and-immigration/
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So which takes precedence?
local law , state law, or federal law here?
To think tax payers are on the hook to pay this illegal because local law enforcement turned him over to ICE which is what they should be doing-> :-(
Not much sympathy here for SF taxpayers. They built this.
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Doug posts:
"Others have asked this same question and come up with different answers:
http://tenthamendmentcenter.com/2017/02/17/thomas-jefferson-on-the-constitution-and-immigration/"
It sounds like one could argue this illegal person is not "dangerous" or from a country at "war" with the US.
I would think based on this the state, local law have the upper hand.
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This will play poorly
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/07/02/afghanistans-all-girl-robotics-team-wont-be-allowed-to-come-the-u-s/?utm_term=.555d6fe0e978&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1
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This will play poorly
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/07/02/afghanistans-all-girl-robotics-team-wont-be-allowed-to-come-the-u-s/?utm_term=.555d6fe0e978&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1
With whom? The endlessly weeping lefties? The pearl clutching fredo-cons?
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/11/nyregion/mohammed-wali-zazi-sentenced-for-lying-about-subway-bomb-plot.html
Prison for Father Who Lied About Terror Plot
By MOSI SECRETFEB. 10, 2012
The father of a man who plotted to set off homemade bombs in Manhattan subway cars was sentenced on Friday to four and a half years in prison for trying to block a federal investigation of his son.
The father, Mohammed Wali Zazi, 56, was convicted in July of obstructing justice and conspiring to obstruct justice. Prosecutors said he had lied to agents, encouraged others to lie, and formed and carried out a plan to destroy evidence that his son had left behind in a relative’s garage.
In sentencing Mr. Zazi, Judge John Gleeson of Federal District Court in Brooklyn said, “As obstruction offenses go, they don’t get much more offensive than this.” He added: “When someone is going to bomb the New York City subway system, every lie matters. That could have made the difference between the life and death for thousands of people.”
But Judge Gleeson rejected arguments from the prosecution that Mr. Zazi’s lies were themselves crimes of terrorism that merited a 30-year sentence under sentencing guidelines.
Judge Gleeson said of Mr. Zazi, “He was trying to do one thing: Get his kid out of a jam.”
Mr. Zazi’s son, Najibullah Zazi, who like his father was born in Afghanistan, was a 24-year-old airport shuttle bus driver living near Denver when he showed up on the government’s radar in summer 2009. Counterterrorism analysts received information that linked the younger Mr. Zazi to terrorist activities.
When Najibullah Zazi drove a rental car from Colorado to New York City, he set off a frenzied government investigation involving hundreds of F.B.I. agents, federal prosecutors and detectives.
Officials later learned that the younger Mr. Zazi had received training in weapons and explosives in Pakistan from Qaeda operatives. In July and August 2009, he visited several beauty supply stores in the Denver area, buying gallons of hydrogen peroxide and acetone, which he and co-conspirators planned to use to build their own bombs.
In February 2010, Najibullah Zazi pleaded guilty to charges that included conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction and to provide material support for a terrorist organization. He admitted that he came to New York to kill himself and others using a homemade bomb.
In court on Friday, the elder Mr. Zazi remained defiant in defending his son. “My son was pressured,” Mr. Zazi said, referring to his son’s decision to plead guilty. “I don’t think he was involved in any wrongdoing.” He said the ordeal had caused great suffering for his family.
Referring to the elder Mr. Zazi, Judge Gleeson said he was “surprised at the complete absence of remorse on behalf of the defendant.”
“You have a delusion about your son,” the judge said. “He and his co-conspirators were going to commit horrific crimes.”
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http://www.inquisitr.com/4326878/these-nine-states-will-require-passports-for-all-domestic-air-travel-starting-in-2018/
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http://www.inquisitr.com/4326878/these-nine-states-will-require-passports-for-all-domestic-air-travel-starting-in-2018/
That is actually a good thing. A US Passport is a must have if you are interested in protecting your privacy.
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Last week while attending a conference where I was a speaker, I had the opportunity to listen to a U.S. government representative give a presentation on terrorism. One of the topics he discussed was the trend in recent years toward what he called "homegrown violent extremists" — individuals we at Stratfor refer to as grassroots jihadists.
The official noted how the vast majority of jihadist terrorist attacks in the United States in the post-9/11 era — and indeed all successful attacks — have been conducted by grassroots jihadists. As he discussed the challenges for authorities that grassroots jihadists operating under the leaderless resistance operational model present, the speaker showed a slide depicting the terrorist attack cycle on which, as he clicked, most of the steps in the cycle were marked off by red X's indicating that they didn't apply in cases involving grassroots jihadists conducting simple attacks.
As red X's filled the slide, I thought to myself, "Has the terrorist attack cycle really become obsolete?" I have pondered this question over the past week, and I believe the answer is more a matter of the attack cycle being misunderstood when applied in a leaderless resistance context than it is a matter of the cycle itself no longer being a useful frame of reference for examining terrorist attacks.
The Terrorist Attack Cycle
On the drive back to Austin after the conference I discussed this topic with one of my colleagues, who asked, "Who invented the terrorist attack cycle?" That's a good question. I told him I didn't know, but that the concept was something I had always been taught. My first exposure to it came during the terrorism block of instruction at my U.S. Army Military Intelligence Officer Basic Course. The concept was repeated when I took the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center's Criminal Investigator Training Program and the Diplomatic Security Service's Basic Special Agent Course.
Later, after I transferred to the Diplomatic Security Service's counterterrorism investigation office, the terrorist attack cycle proved a useful guide when investigating attacks, especially since we weren't tasked just with finding the perpetrator, but were expected to conduct a more holistic investigation that provided guidance on how lessons learned from an attack could be used to prevent or thwart future attacks. To do this we needed to look at both the security of the target as well as the way terrorists applied their tradecraft to attack the target. Breaking the attack into the steps of the attack cycle was a useful way to identify and examine the tactics and tradecraft required to complete each step.
This is an approach Fred Burton and I brought to Stratfor in 2004. We have found that the attack cycle continues to be a useful reference for examining terrorist attacks. Indeed, we even have seen parallels to other types of crime and have borrowed the concept to create a frame of reference for examining the criminal planning cycle.
The terrorist attack cycle is best viewed as a guideline, elastic rather than static.
An Elastic Guideline
One of the lessons I've learned over the past 30 years of investigating and analyzing terrorist attacks is that it is important not to interpret the concept of the attack cycle too rigidly. It is a guideline, and an elastic one at that. For one, each terrorist is different, and the level of tradecraft a terrorist possesses affects the manner in which that terrorist approaches planning and executing an attack. For another, different types of attacks require different degrees of planning and preparation. Some complex attacks, such as the August 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya or the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India, take years to plan and carry out. On the other end of the scale, a simple attack against a large, static target, such as the December 1989 rifle grenade attack against the U.S. Embassy Seafront Compound in Manila, the Philippines, may have taken only hours to plan and execute if the attackers already had the rifles and grenades in hand.
In a long, deliberate attack cycle, the target identification and selection stage can be quite complex. The attack planner may compile a list of potential targets and then conduct surveillance on each of them to determine their vulnerability. In a simple attack, the target identification may consist of an attacker deciding to conduct a vehicular assault against pedestrians where the attacker knows they congregate. While this step of the attack cycle is condensed, it is nonetheless necessary to select a target for attack, even if the attack is a simple one.
Likewise, the planning and preparation phase of the cycle can vary considerably in its complexity. The 9/11 attacks required significant transnational travel and coordination as well as the transfer of funds. They required the hijacker pilots to attend flight school while the muscle hijackers received intensive training in hand-to-hand combat. Even in terms of weapons acquisition during the planning phase, there can be a great deal of difference depending on the attack being planned. It takes far more time and effort to acquire and prepare the materials for a vehicle bombing that it does a simple pipe bomb attack.
Nevertheless, in all the grassroots attacks we've seen, there is still a planning stage, even if it is much shorter than the planning required for a more complex attack. Omar Mateen conducted several rounds of surveillance while planning the Pulse nightclub attack in Orlando, Florida; Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik purchased guns, tactical gear and assembled bombs while planning their attack in San Bernardino, California. Even Esteban Santiago's seemingly random attack in the baggage claim area of the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in Florida was the result of a planning process that required several steps.
The escape step in the attack cycle can be disregarded when it comes to the operatives in suicide attacks, such as 9/11 or the November 2015 Paris attacks, but it can be applied to planners of the attacks — figures such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or Abdelhamid Abaaoud — who hope to survive to equip and deploy future suicide operatives. And we've seen several non-suicide attacks by grassroots jihadists, such as the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the San Bernardino shooting and the June 2009 shooting of an armed forces recruitment center in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Although grassroots operatives who conduct suicide operations are not in a position to conduct the exploitation phase of the attack cycle, the larger jihadist movement is. Internet and social media applications have made it easy for the media wings of jihadist groups to receive video wills or statements from attackers before they conduct their attack. Preparing and transferring such recordings to jihadist group media wings before an attack is a distinguishable action that grassroots jihadists frequently take during the planning phase of the attack cycle.
There have been times when jihadists have reacted with violence when approached by police seeking to arrest them. For example, when police and agents tried to arrest Usaamah Rahim on a Boston street in June 2015, he lunged at them with a knife and was shot dead. But incidents that occur as a result of police-initiated action need to be distinguished from an intentional attack launched by a grassroots jihadist. At the very least, such incidents should not be used to support the idea that the terrorist attack cycle is no longer a relevant framework for understanding attacks.
When we view the terrorist attack cycle as elastic rather than static, it becomes clear that even grassroots jihadists operating as lone attackers or in small cells are still bound to follow the steps in the cycle, no matter how abbreviated the steps are. Any attacker wishing to conduct an attack must select a target, plan the attack, acquire the weapon(s) to be used, conduct some degree of surveillance and then deploy to conduct their attack. Indeed, in many ways, lone attackers are even more vulnerable to the constraints of the attack cycle because they must conduct each step by themselves. In this manner they expose themselves to detection at more points throughout the cycle than does a group that can assign different tasks to different individuals.
The concept of the attack cycle is alive and well. It continues to give investigators, analysts and citizens a framework for understanding how terrorist attacks are executed so plots can be spotted and stopped.
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/370922.php
uly 31, 2017
Accused Oregon Rapist Has Been Deported 13 Times; He Was Subject to an ICE Detainer But the County Released Him; He Attacked Two More Women Since Then
We're all now fugitives in our own country.
Sergio Jose Martinez, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, had been deported at least 13 times since 2008, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spokesperson Virginia Kice confirmed to Portland’s KATU2. Martinez, 31, was also the subject of an ICE detainer request placed Dec. 7, 2016 with the Multnomah County Jail, where he was being held on local charges.
Because Oregon law prohibits police from using agency resources to enforce immigration law, jail officials released Martinez the following day without notifying ICE.
...
Martinez is accused of two separate attacks against women in Portland on Monday, reports local CBS affiliate KOIN. Police say Martinez first broke into the apartment of a 65-year-old woman, bound her hands and feet with scarves, and proceeded to sexually assault her.
He also threatened to kill a woman with a knife; cops suspect he wanted to abduct her, and you can imagine his plans following that.
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http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix/2017/07/31/maricopa-county-sheriff-joe-arpaio-found-guilty-criminal-contempt-court/486278001/
For targeting latinos - for goodness sakes why would anyone think that Latinos are the great dominant groups of people coming here illegally into Arizona? How dare him target them! outrageous etc etc so the libs go.
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https://www.investigativeproject.org/6449/sophisticated-australian-airplane-bombing-plot
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http://michellemalkin.com/
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An Aussie Terror Warning
Islamic State came close to taking down a passenger plane.
By The Editorial Board
Aug. 10, 2017 7:13 p.m. ET
WSJ
The international media paid little attention when Australian police rolled up a terrorist plot in the Sydney suburbs last month, the 13th time in three years the country has dodged a mass-casualty attack. But it has since become clear that Islamic State nearly brought down a large plane without authorities having a clue. That should ring alarm bells across the world.
On July 15, brothers Khaled and Mahmoud Khayat placed a bomb inside a meat grinder and gave it to a third, unwitting brother to carry in his luggage on an Etihad Airways flight to Abu Dhabi. At the last moment the bag wasn’t checked in, apparently because it was too heavy. An Australian antiterrorism task force began to watch the Khayat family only after a tipoff 11 days later from British intelligence. They arrested the brothers on July 29 and found evidence that the bomb could have brought down the plane.
Tests with a dummy version suggest that it would have been caught by the luggage-screening system at Sydney’s airport. But the fact that the plot progressed to such an advanced stage is proof of a major intelligence failure. Luck was on the side of the authorities this time, but it easily could have favored the terrorists.
The would-be attackers gave little indication that they had been radicalized. Khaled Khayat, a 49-year-old butcher of Lebanese descent, briefly appeared on the intelligence radar because a fourth brother is an Islamic State commander in Syria. But he and Mahmoud appeared to be well-integrated members of the community.
Aussie authorities say that, unlike typical distant recruits, the brothers received direction from an Islamic State controller in the Middle East. Components for making the bomb, including a military-grade explosive, were shipped to them on a cargo flight from Turkey. Since 2001 no terrorist plot on Western soil has used such sophisticated material.
Western authorities will be hard pressed to stop attacks if Islamic State can put high-powered bombs in the hands of Islamic radicals not on a watchlist. Terrorism expert Paul Cruickshank has dubbed this the IKEA model of terror for its ability to replicate cheaply.
The terrorists will be encouraged by their near success to try again. The West must examine how the Khayats slipped through the net and the role that Turkey is playing as a global Grand Central station for terrorists.
Appeared in the August 11, 2017, print edition.
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You can't make this stuff up. This came out of the local newspaper coverage of the Minnesota trial of a Somali ISIS recruiting operation in the Twin Cities.
"...behind-the-scenes security tour with about 50 imams and other members of the Muslim community at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. "
http://m.startribune.com/prosecutors-say-member-of-alleged-isil-recruit-s-defense-team-preached-jihad/373733531/
Content redacted on a Freedom of Information Act disclosure.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/08/dhs-magical-mystery-tour-doing-the-work-the-star-tribune-wont-do-3.php
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/02/dhs-magical-mystery-tour-and-why-i-need-a-lawyer.php
Who brought these Jihadis here in the first place?! Who else gets back room TSA tours? Do you folks want a blueprint to take with you?
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You can't make this stuff up. This came out of the local newspaper coverage of the Minnesota trial of a Somali ISIS recruiting operation in the Twin Cities.
"...behind-the-scenes security tour with about 50 imams and other members of the Muslim community at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. "
http://m.startribune.com/prosecutors-say-member-of-alleged-isil-recruit-s-defense-team-preached-jihad/373733531/
Content redacted on a Freedom of Information Act disclosure.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/08/dhs-magical-mystery-tour-doing-the-work-the-star-tribune-wont-do-3.php
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/02/dhs-magical-mystery-tour-and-why-i-need-a-lawyer.php
Who brought these Jihadis here in the first place?! Who else gets back room TSA tours? Do you folks want a blueprint to take with you?
Makes you wonder who's side they are on.
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IIRC this forum discussed this at the time.
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http://dailysignal.com/2017/09/07/foiled-virginia-attack-brings-total-us-terror-plots-97-since-911/?utm_source=TDS_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MorningBell&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTmpFMU9XSmpOakV3WmpjeSIsInQiOiJsMW1KUmFHSlRTdnQ0NEl4Z3Q3OExKa0tlRFJYcjZMdjZ0eGJtMkVnK0llRFB5OVM5OHpsQmt4amVxVEt5OFwvdUFQb1BmMWZWV21cL1JUdDZTOW8rZ2VFdGJZbnZjRzQ4WElmVktBeTRHTVJVSWtxcm9MdWd5d2VZemtyNDlaMlliIn0%3D
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http://www.worldtribune.com/report-isis-in-possession-of-more-than-11000-blank-syrian-passports/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newslink&utm_term=members&utm_content=20170919231313
Islamic State (ISIS) holds some 11,100 blank Syrian passports which German authorities fear could be used to bring potential terrorists into Europe, a report said.
The passports, stolen from Syrian government sites, are genuine identity papers that have not yet been filled out with an individual’s details, making them a valuable tool for forgers, German security services said according to a report by the Bild am Sonntag newspaper.
Investigators have assembled a list of serial numbers of the blank passports and the authorities that issued them, the newspaper reported, citing confidential documents from federal police and the interior ministry.
“Developments in connection with the refugee situation have shown that terrorist organizations are using the opportunity to infiltrate potential attackers or supporters into Europe and Germany undetected,” a spokeswoman for the BKA federal criminal police told Bild am Sonntag.
A number of the ISIS jihadists behind the Paris attacks that claimed 130 lives in November 2015 were found to have used fake or altered Syrian passports.
Some 8,625 passports checked by German migration authorities in 2016 turned out to be fake according to documents seen by Bild am Sonntag
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An undercover FBI agent posing as a jihadist on social media received a message from Abdulrahman El Bahnasawy in April 2016. El Bahnasawy, a Canadian citizen who was then 18 years old, claimed to support the Islamic State, said he wanted to conduct an attack in New York City and solicited the agent's help in planning one. Over the next month, he discussed possible targets and methods with the agent, sending maps of the New York subway system and photos of Times Square. He also introduced the agent to two other men: Talha Haroon, an 18-year-old U.S. citizen living in Pakistan who wanted to participate in the attack, and Russell Salic, a 36-year-old doctor in the Philippines who would help finance it.
El Bahnasawy was arrested on May 21, 2016, after traveling from Canada to Cranford, New Jersey, with the stated intent of joining the undercover agent at a rural cabin to make bombs. Five months later, he pleaded guilty to a seven-count indictment; Haroon and Salic were also arrested and are pending extradition from Pakistan and the Philippines. The U.S. Department of Justice recently unsealed documents related to the case, including criminal complaints against the three conspirators who had planned attacks throughout New York during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan in 2016. El Bahnasawy's quick plea and the fact that the government kept the case sealed for so long suggest that he was working with U.S. officials to identify other jihadists with whom he had been in contact. Now that the Justice Department has gotten what it wanted from El Bahnasawy and unsealed the case, we have access to a wealth of information that can help put the jihadist threat in context.
Going by the Book
A look at the documents reveals a classic grassroots plot. Several aspects of the averted attack not only track with current jihadist trends but also recall past terrorist incidents. Even the plan to use a remote cabin to build bombs and practice shooting harkens back to previous attacks. Anders Breivik, for example, rented a remote farm in Norway to build his truck bomb, and the groups behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 2007 Fort Dix armed assault plot traveled to rural Pennsylvania to work on their shooting skills.
The main conspirators behind the plot fit a familiar profile as two young operatives who met over social media and then used the technology to hatch their plan. Social media is an invaluable tool for aspiring jihadists. For one thing, it gives isolated and geographically distant jihadists a sense of community that encourages their radicalization. For another, it puts them in touch with people with the experience, expertise and resources they need to plan and execute an attack. Social media sites are also useful for organizing small cells, which can conduct larger, more ambitious strikes than a single person could. Like the would-be perpetrators behind many other thwarted terrorism cases, El Bahnasawy and Haroon maintained multiple accounts on a variety of social media applications. And like many other foiled jihadists, El Bahnasawy made a critical misstep while looking for assistance to plan his attack and inadvertently reached out to a government informant instead of a like-minded collaborator.
The young plotters in this case may well have failed even without the FBI's intervention. Among the many attacks El Bahnasawy and Haroon discussed with the agent was a spectacular car bombing in Times Square. Whether they had the capabilities to construct the bombs required for such a feat may be another story, though. Triacetone triperoxide (TATP) is a powerful explosive that grassroots jihadists can manufacture quickly from everyday materials. But the substance is notoriously volatile and can be a dangerous choice for first-time bombmakers — especially if they're trying to synthesize large quantities. In fact, three jihadists died in an explosion in August while trying to make a big batch of TATP in a house in Alcanar, Spain. El Bahnasawy and Haroon seem to have realized the car bomb plot might be a lofty goal for their level of experience. The unsealed documents reveal that they eventually settled on a more modest plan for an armed assault using guns and suicide vests.
Beyond the perils of TATP, the recently unsealed case also offers a reminder of the dangers lurking across the United States' northern border. El Bahnasawy, as a Canadian citizen, could easily travel to the United States to conduct an attack — he didn't even need a visa. For all the attention the southern U.S. border receives, the northern border still poses a far more serious threat where terrorism is concerned, as El Bahnasawy's case demonstrates. His use of e-commerce sites to purchase hydrogen peroxide and other bombmaking necessities, moreover, sheds light on the hazards that come along with the convenience of online shopping.
Some Help From Overseas
El Bahnasawy's co-conspirators, likewise, provide valuable insight into the world of grassroots jihadists. Haroon claimed to have ties to the Islamic State's Wilayat Khorasan in Pakistan. He said he had wanted to join the group but that the Khorasan chapter's leaders thought it better for him to travel to the United States to conduct the attack. According to Haroon, the Wilayat Khorasan even blessed the plot he and El Bahnasawy were cooking up, though the group apparently declined to buy him an airline ticket to the United States to carry it out.
That Haroon couldn't get Wilayat Khorasan to arrange his travel is just one of several indications that his claims of contact with the group were overblown, if not altogether false. Pakistani militant groups, after all, have helped Western jihadists conduct past attacks, including the bombings in London on July 7, 2005, and Faisal Shahzad's botched Times Square attack. The cost of a one-way ticket from Pakistan to the United States would be a small price for a terrorist group to pay to help an operative presumably unknown to U.S. law enforcement officials stage an attack in New York. Militant groups in Pakistan also previously have provided hands-on bombmaking training to operatives. Yet Haroon demurred when he was asked to run the bombmaking instructions El Bahnasawy had found online past the explosives expert he purported to know, saying the Islamic State didn't want too many people involved in the plot. He also said the bombmaker had told him they needed detonating cord, which is difficult to procure in the United States. All things considered, Haroon probably was a keyboard jihadist who had not yet made the leap from online radicalism to real-life terrorism.
Salic is another interesting figure. According to the criminal complaint against him, the Filipino doctor and small-time terrorism financier sent hundreds of dollars not only to the undercover FBI agent involved with El Bahnasawy but also to jihadists in Malaysia, Lebanon, Bosnia, Syria, Australia and Palestine. Salic had a prominent social media presence, which is presumably how he came in contact with El Bahnasawy and the other jihadists he backed. Unlike other jihadist sympathizers, such as former Maj. Nidal Hasan, the U.S. military psychiatrist who attacked Fort Hood in 2009, Salic appears to have used social media to contribute small amounts of money to fund grassroots operations, rather than donate large sums to charities that support jihadist causes. Salic's criminal complaint includes allegations that he sent $426.30 on June 24, 2016, to a person in Malaysia named Jasanizam Rosni. Rosni picked up the money June 26, two days before a grenade attack on a bar in Kuala Lumpur, which the Islamic State claimed. In August 2016, Malaysian authorities arrested and charged Rosni in connection with the attack, perhaps thanks to the investigation into the foiled plot in New York.
Setting the Scene
In addition to details on the attackers, the recently unsealed documents reveal useful information about the locations they considered. El Bahnasawy and Haroon, for example, floated the idea of attacking New York's subway system, a perennial target for jihadists (though it has so far escaped the kinds of attacks that have rocked transit lines in cities such as London, Madrid, Brussels and Moscow).
The aspiring jihadists also considered attacking a concert venue. Their discussions took place a full year before the deadly bombing outside an Ariana Grande performance in Manchester — and well before the mass shooting at a music festival in Las Vegas on Oct. 1. The plotters said the high death toll that assailants achieved at Paris' Bataclan theater in November 2015 had inspired them. Based on their statements, we can expect the more recent attacks on concerts, which also inflicted large numbers of casualties, to draw jihadists and other attackers to concert halls and festivals in the future.
The timing of the prospective attacks is no less notable. In 2016, an unprecedented number of attacks answered the Islamic State's calls for violence during Ramadan, which lasted from June 6 to July 5. El Bahnasawy and Haroon's assault is one of several thwarted attacks that could have added to the mayhem during the holy month. Similarly, attacks spiked during Ramadan this year, and we can expect the trend to continue next year, when Ramadan will take place from May 15 to June 14.
El Bahnasawy and Haroon's plot never came to fruition, considering that it involved an undercover agent from its very inception. Nevertheless, the documents released in the case offer us a rare window into the transnational world of grassroots jihadists organizing and raising support for their attacks — as well as a window into the efforts to stop them.
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Actually, I suspect this to be true:
http://crazynews7.com/trumps-border-wall-would-be-3/
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Actually, I suspect this to be true:
http://crazynews7.com/trumps-border-wall-would-be-3/
Crazynews7 ?
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/oct/24/terror-skies-mexican-cartel-attaches-bomb-drone/
Terror from skies as Mexican cartel attaches bomb to drone
By Stephen Dinan - The Washington Times - Tuesday, October 24, 2017
Mexican police discovered four men carting a kamikaze drone equipped with an IED and a remote detonator last week, in what analysts say is an example of cartels figuring out how to weaponizing UAVs. The disturbing development is a manifestation of something top American security chiefs warned Congress about earlier this year, when they said they feared terrorists would begin to use drones to attack targets within the U.S.
Drug cartels had already been turning to drones to smuggle their product into the U.S., and had begun using IEDs in their turf struggles — but now at least cartel appears to have put the two technologies together, according to Mexican reports analyzed by Small Wars Journal.
“A weaponized drone/unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)/unmanned aerial system (UAS) with a remotely detonated IED allows for a precision strike to take place against an intended target,” Robert Bunker and John P. Sullivan, the authors of the new analysis, wrote.
The drone-IED combination was found in central Mexico, by federal police who did a traffic stop on a stolen pickup truck with four men in it.
Police found an AK-47, ammunition, phones and what the Small Wars Journal authors said appears to be a 3DR Solo Quadcopter, which retails for about $250 online. Taped to the drone was an IED, which could be trigger by remote detonator. Mr. Bunker and Mr. Sullivan said the “dron bomba,” as they labeled it, was the next step for cartels that have been using papas bombas, or potato bombs — a roughly shaped sphere with a core of explosives and nails and other shrapnel packed inside for the most lethal reach.
The analysts said several examples of potato bombs have been detected in Mexico this year.
Drug smugglers have long waged a technological war with authorities on the U.S.-Mexico border, with the cartels often boasting better night vision gear and tactics such as ultralights to carry drug loads over the border.
More recently, drones have become a tactic for smuggling hard drugs such as heroin and methamphetamine, which are light enough and lucrative enough to be carried by the expensive technology.
In August, U.S. Border Patrol agents nabbed a $5,000 drone and seized a $46,000 meth load in southern California, after one agent detected it flying overhead. Agents also apprehended the man assigned to pick up the load, who said he had made a number of such pickups and was paid $1,000 each time.
Meanwhile, the chiefs of the FBI and National Counterterrorism Center told Congress last month that they are worried Islamic State terrorists who have pioneered weaponized drones in the Middle East will use the tactic inside the U.S. to spread a toxin or drop a grenade.
“Two years ago this was not a problem. A year ago this was an emerging problem. Now it’s a real problem,” Nicholas J. Rasmussen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, told the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
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https://www.steynonline.com/8229/jihad-on-the-bike-path
Jihad on the Bike Path
by Mark Steyn
Steyn on America
October 31, 2017
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The threat posed by foreign fighters returning from Syria and Iraq has been the subject of a lot of discussion lately. Indeed, my news feed has been full of media reports about the danger to country X, country Y or the world in general. Some good studies have been produced on the topic, such as the one recently released by Richard Barrett of the Soufan Group.
But the concern about foreign fighters is not new. Indeed, in April 2014 I wrote a piece assessing the danger, and it has aged pretty well. Like then, I believe that returning foreign fighters pose a real threat, but it is being mitigated by several factors — the most significant of which is the fact that the world has become aware of them. But other elements can also help lessen the threat.
Building Blocks of Security
As we've noted previously, several building blocks contribute to solid personal security. These same principles are also applicable on a wider scale to national security. The first block is mindset, which has three aspects: recognizing that there is a threat, accepting responsibility for one's security and using the available tools to protect oneself. It is not difficult to see how these tenents can be readily translated into a national security context and used to respond to the threat of returning jihadists.
Clearly, the fact that we are discussing this topic demonstrates widespread recognition of the risk, and there is little indication that governments are in denial or ignorant of it. Being aware of the threat from returning jihadists is vastly different from what I experienced after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989. First, there was little discussion about the threat from fighters returning from Afghanistan. Some people even foolishly predicted the end of terrorism after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, because the Soviets had been one of the major sponsors of political violence around the globe. But sadly, terrorism was not just a tool of Marxist revolutionaries, and it was picked up and wielded by believers of other ideologies.
When I traveled with an FBI colleague to Yemen to investigate the attacks on U.S. Marines in Aden in December 1992 and a rocket assault on the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa in January 1993, we suspected that Libyans were behind them. They had a history of striking U.S. military and diplomatic targets in the region, and they had made previous attacks in Yemen. However, our investigation determined that jihadists, who had been trained by the CIA's Office of Technical Service in Afghanistan and had returned to Yemen, had done the bombings.
Shortly after I got back from Yemen, I was sent to New York to help investigate the World Trade Center bombing of February 1993. Excellent forensic work quickly determined that the truck had been rented by a group of jihadists who had traveled to Afghanistan. The FBI had previously investigated the group, but unfortunately it was determined that they did not pose a threat despite the fact that one member had assassinated ultranationalist Rabbi Meir Kahane at a midtown Manhattan hotel in November 1990. The World Trade Center bombing — along with the connected 1993 New York landmark bomb plot — combined with the Yemen attacks to help raise awareness that jihadists could be a transnational threat to the United States and its interests abroad. However, while awareness was rising, it would still be a couple of years before we knew these jihadists were part of an organized network called al Qaeda.
Perhaps the best illustration of the ignorance of the threat in the 1990s was the case of Sgt. Ali Mohamed. He is a former Egyptian special forces officer who moved to the United States in 1984 and received his citizenship after marrying an American. He enlisted in the U.S. Army and served as an instructor in Arabic culture at the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, N.C. While on active duty with the Army, and with the knowledge of his supervisors, Mohamed traveled to Afghanistan, where he reportedly fought the Soviets and trained al Qaeda jihadists. He pleaded guilty in October 2000 to helping plan the August 1998 attacks against the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Clearly, no military in the world would condone, or even ignore, this type of jihadist tourism today. Unlike the '90s, no government is ignorant of the threat these extremists pose.
Situational Awareness
Another building block that is closely related to recognizing the threat is situational awareness. In a personal security context this means using one's senses to scan the environment for dangers. In a national security context, it means using intelligence and law enforcement agencies to monitor for threats — in this case, returning jihadists. But beyond the government, the wider society needs to pay attention and be proactive in notifying the authorities when a threat is perceived.
Muslim communities have become an important component of society's situational awareness monitoring, in part because it is predominantly Muslim children who are being radicalized and used as cannon fodder by jihadists. In recent years many families have approached the authorities to report children who have left home without permission intending to fight or travel to a jihadist theater such as Syria and Iraq. Some of these children have been caught at the airport before departure or in a transit country. In some cases, investigators have been able to identify the jihadist recruiters. Some of these extremists have been arrested or killed in airstrikes.
In a threat environment in which jihadist groups are recruiting members in cyberspace and encouraging grassroots fighters to adopt the leaderless resistance form of terrorism, grassroots defenders must supplement the efforts of the security forces.
Environmental Baselines
To practice effective situational awareness — even collectively — one needs to have a good baseline understanding of the environment in which one is living or working. This is the next building block for personal and collective security.
In a personal context, an environmental baseline means understanding things such as the types of crimes being committed, the modus operandi of the criminals, and the most likely times and locations for crimes. The potential for natural disaster, terrorism and war should also be considered. Once this baseline has been established, one can then evaluate vulnerabilities based on the types of crimes and the tactics of the criminals.
In the context of national security when considering returning jihadists, a baseline means attempting to identify those who left and are returning, but also understanding the terrorist tradecraft that they might have learned overseas and how this will impact the way they approach the various steps in the terrorist attack cycle. Have individuals acquired advanced bombmaking or surveillance capabilities? Or were they front-line fighters, experienced with firearms and more likely to attempt an armed assault than a bombing?
The specific skills a fighter has learned overseas may well influence how they conduct jihad.
Indeed, looking at recent cases involving fighters returning from Iraq and Syria, they have tended to conduct attacks against soft targets instead of making more complex attacks against harder, more significant targets. Some examples include a Jewish museum and the soft side of the airport in Brussels; a concert in Manchester in the United Kingdom; and a cafe, concert venue and sports stadium in Paris. Understanding the capabilities of returning jihadists and their potential targets via a vulnerability assessment can help prevent such attacks.
Reacting to Attacks
The final piece in the building blocks of personal security series was an installment on reacting to danger, and this is also a critical element of collective security. In one sense this can refer to the quick realization that an attack is happening — attack recognition — and then suitably responding to armed assaults, knife attacks and vehicular assaults. Indeed, police departments all over the world are forming special units to quickly respond to, and end, such attacks. In the United Kingdom, an increasing number of police officers are now carrying firearms.
But beyond simply responding to an attack in progress, security forces are also studying past assaults and taking steps to prevent similar ones in the future. For example, after the rash of recent car and truck attacks, authorities in several countries and cities have placed vehicle barriers in high-profile locations that could be targets, More will likely follow suit in the wake of the Nov. 1 vehicular assault in New York.
The threat posed by returning jihadists will persist at a low level for the foreseeable future. It will also be augmented by grassroots jihadists who were unable or unwilling to travel abroad, and by those who will be released from prison after completing sentences for jihadist-related crimes. However, it does not take a great degree of skill to conduct a deadly, simple attack, and because of this, it is important to lessen the overall threat posed by grassroots jihadists.
-
The threat posed by foreign fighters returning from Syria and Iraq has been the subject of a lot of discussion lately. Indeed, my news feed has been full of media reports about the danger to country X, country Y or the world in general. Some good studies have been produced on the topic, such as the one recently released by Richard Barrett of the Soufan Group.
But the concern about foreign fighters is not new. Indeed, in April 2014 I wrote a piece assessing the danger, and it has aged pretty well. Like then, I believe that returning foreign fighters pose a real threat, but it is being mitigated by several factors — the most significant of which is the fact that the world has become aware of them. But other elements can also help lessen the threat.
Building Blocks of Security
As we've noted previously, several building blocks contribute to solid personal security. These same principles are also applicable on a wider scale to national security. The first block is mindset, which has three aspects: recognizing that there is a threat, accepting responsibility for one's security and using the available tools to protect oneself. It is not difficult to see how these tenents can be readily translated into a national security context and used to respond to the threat of returning jihadists.
Clearly, the fact that we are discussing this topic demonstrates widespread recognition of the risk, and there is little indication that governments are in denial or ignorant of it. Being aware of the threat from returning jihadists is vastly different from what I experienced after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989. First, there was little discussion about the threat from fighters returning from Afghanistan. Some people even foolishly predicted the end of terrorism after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, because the Soviets had been one of the major sponsors of political violence around the globe. But sadly, terrorism was not just a tool of Marxist revolutionaries, and it was picked up and wielded by believers of other ideologies.
When I traveled with an FBI colleague to Yemen to investigate the attacks on U.S. Marines in Aden in December 1992 and a rocket assault on the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa in January 1993, we suspected that Libyans were behind them. They had a history of striking U.S. military and diplomatic targets in the region, and they had made previous attacks in Yemen. However, our investigation determined that jihadists, who had been trained by the CIA's Office of Technical Service in Afghanistan and had returned to Yemen, had done the bombings.
Shortly after I got back from Yemen, I was sent to New York to help investigate the World Trade Center bombing of February 1993. Excellent forensic work quickly determined that the truck had been rented by a group of jihadists who had traveled to Afghanistan. The FBI had previously investigated the group, but unfortunately it was determined that they did not pose a threat despite the fact that one member had assassinated ultranationalist Rabbi Meir Kahane at a midtown Manhattan hotel in November 1990. The World Trade Center bombing — along with the connected 1993 New York landmark bomb plot — combined with the Yemen attacks to help raise awareness that jihadists could be a transnational threat to the United States and its interests abroad. However, while awareness was rising, it would still be a couple of years before we knew these jihadists were part of an organized network called al Qaeda.
Perhaps the best illustration of the ignorance of the threat in the 1990s was the case of Sgt. Ali Mohamed. He is a former Egyptian special forces officer who moved to the United States in 1984 and received his citizenship after marrying an American. He enlisted in the U.S. Army and served as an instructor in Arabic culture at the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, N.C. While on active duty with the Army, and with the knowledge of his supervisors, Mohamed traveled to Afghanistan, where he reportedly fought the Soviets and trained al Qaeda jihadists. He pleaded guilty in October 2000 to helping plan the August 1998 attacks against the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Clearly, no military in the world would condone, or even ignore, this type of jihadist tourism today. Unlike the '90s, no government is ignorant of the threat these extremists pose.
Situational Awareness
Another building block that is closely related to recognizing the threat is situational awareness. In a personal security context this means using one's senses to scan the environment for dangers. In a national security context, it means using intelligence and law enforcement agencies to monitor for threats — in this case, returning jihadists. But beyond the government, the wider society needs to pay attention and be proactive in notifying the authorities when a threat is perceived.
Muslim communities have become an important component of society's situational awareness monitoring, in part because it is predominantly Muslim children who are being radicalized and used as cannon fodder by jihadists. In recent years many families have approached the authorities to report children who have left home without permission intending to fight or travel to a jihadist theater such as Syria and Iraq. Some of these children have been caught at the airport before departure or in a transit country. In some cases, investigators have been able to identify the jihadist recruiters. Some of these extremists have been arrested or killed in airstrikes.
In a threat environment in which jihadist groups are recruiting members in cyberspace and encouraging grassroots fighters to adopt the leaderless resistance form of terrorism, grassroots defenders must supplement the efforts of the security forces.
Environmental Baselines
To practice effective situational awareness — even collectively — one needs to have a good baseline understanding of the environment in which one is living or working. This is the next building block for personal and collective security.
In a personal context, an environmental baseline means understanding things such as the types of crimes being committed, the modus operandi of the criminals, and the most likely times and locations for crimes. The potential for natural disaster, terrorism and war should also be considered. Once this baseline has been established, one can then evaluate vulnerabilities based on the types of crimes and the tactics of the criminals.
In the context of national security when considering returning jihadists, a baseline means attempting to identify those who left and are returning, but also understanding the terrorist tradecraft that they might have learned overseas and how this will impact the way they approach the various steps in the terrorist attack cycle. Have individuals acquired advanced bombmaking or surveillance capabilities? Or were they front-line fighters, experienced with firearms and more likely to attempt an armed assault than a bombing?
The specific skills a fighter has learned overseas may well influence how they conduct jihad.
Indeed, looking at recent cases involving fighters returning from Iraq and Syria, they have tended to conduct attacks against soft targets instead of making more complex attacks against harder, more significant targets. Some examples include a Jewish museum and the soft side of the airport in Brussels; a concert in Manchester in the United Kingdom; and a cafe, concert venue and sports stadium in Paris. Understanding the capabilities of returning jihadists and their potential targets via a vulnerability assessment can help prevent such attacks.
Reacting to Attacks
The final piece in the building blocks of personal security series was an installment on reacting to danger, and this is also a critical element of collective security. In one sense this can refer to the quick realization that an attack is happening — attack recognition — and then suitably responding to armed assaults, knife attacks and vehicular assaults. Indeed, police departments all over the world are forming special units to quickly respond to, and end, such attacks. In the United Kingdom, an increasing number of police officers are now carrying firearms.
But beyond simply responding to an attack in progress, security forces are also studying past assaults and taking steps to prevent similar ones in the future. For example, after the rash of recent car and truck attacks, authorities in several countries and cities have placed vehicle barriers in high-profile locations that could be targets, More will likely follow suit in the wake of the Nov. 1 vehicular assault in New York.
The threat posed by returning jihadists will persist at a low level for the foreseeable future. It will also be augmented by grassroots jihadists who were unable or unwilling to travel abroad, and by those who will be released from prison after completing sentences for jihadist-related crimes. However, it does not take a great degree of skill to conduct a deadly, simple attack, and because of this, it is important to lessen the overall threat posed by grassroots jihadists.
Perhaps foreign fighters should just suffer accidents while in transit. And perhaps we should consider stopping all muslim travel and immigration.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/09/14/federal-data-u-s-annually-admits-quarter-of-a-million-muslim-migrants/
(https://westernrifleshooters.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/muslimbikepath.jpg)
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And as always the wife and rest of the family had NO CLUE. Just came totally out of no where with not even one iota of a hint of any plans. And as usual lived in NJ or (Michigan):
http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/01/us/sayfullo-saipov-new-york-attack/index.html
he was just a Muslim menche who needed a better job then Uber who needs to pay the drivers more I guess.
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And as always the wife and rest of the family had NO CLUE. Just came totally out of no where with not even one iota of a hint of any plans. And as usual lived in NJ or (Michigan):
http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/01/us/sayfullo-saipov-new-york-attack/index.html
he was just a Muslim menche who needed a better job then Uber who needs to pay the drivers more I guess.
Ah! It's Uber's fault! I knew it!
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And as always the wife and rest of the family had NO CLUE. Just came totally out of no where with not even one iota of a hint of any plans. And as usual lived in NJ or (Michigan):
http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/01/us/sayfullo-saipov-new-york-attack/index.html
he was just a Muslim menche who needed a better job then Uber who needs to pay the drivers more I guess.
Ah! It's Uber's fault! I knew it!
'
It should be pointed out that they named him "Sword of Allah", not "Home Depot rental truck of Allah", so they have some plausible deniability in this case.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/11/19/after-border-agent-is-killed-and-partner-injured-in-texas-trump-renews-call-for-wall/?undefined=&utm_term=.259bcfc6023a&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1
:cry: :cry: :cry: :x :x :x
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/nov/22/trump-calls-ice-union-chief-complaints-betrayal/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiT1RCa09URmlZalptTldZeiIsInQiOiJpZE9rRmxqeTVUcHJnXC9cL21McVBDZ1p0ekc4bFdvUVBxSGgrY3RtVWhMak1pMWtMR0J6T1BpT2dBMEVzRWltNDgzRnRFNW5Ha3pVVTVBdFAydHNlRnFlSmpIcFhyK28xWXhGc2N2dFU3NzRSbEh1ZitnK29sYTIxQmxEYjhScmRyIn0%3D
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Professional Terrorists Are Still the Greater Threat
By Scott Stewart
VP of Tactical Analysis, Stratfor
The damage that professionally trained terrorists can inflict makes them a far more dangerous threat than grassroots attackers who have no training.
Writing in Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper on Nov. 1, Colin Clarke of RAND Corp. reflected on the Oct. 31 vehicular assault in New York that killed eight people and injured 11 others. He wrote:
"But in the United States, the greater threat emanates from people who are already in the country, sometimes referred to as homegrown violent extremists. Tuesday's attack in New York underscores this point."
At Stratfor, I have long argued that grassroots jihadists (which Clarke refers to as homegrown violent extremists) pose a persistent and deadly threat. Indeed, I have warned for many years of the vulnerability of soft targets to these terrorists armed with simple weapons. In the following excerpt from a Stratfor security column dated Nov. 4, 2009, I again raised the alarm after Nasir al-Wahayshi, leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), called for jihadists in the West to conduct attacks using readily available weapons:
"The most concerning aspect of al-Wahayshi's statement is that it is largely true. Improvised explosive mixtures are in fact relatively easy to make from readily available chemicals — if a person has the proper training — and attacks using small IEDs or other readily attainable weapons such as knives or clubs (or firearms in the United States) are indeed quite simple to conduct. As STRATFOR has noted for several years now, with al Qaeda's structure under continual attack and no regional al Qaeda franchise groups in the Western Hemisphere, the most pressing jihadist threat to the U.S. homeland at present stems from grassroots jihadists, not the al Qaeda core. This trend has been borne out by the large number of plots and arrests over the past several years, to include several so far in 2009."
However, while I agree that attacks by grassroots jihadists using simple weapons are the ones most likely to occur, I disagree that those attacks present the "greater" threat to the United States — or the rest of the world for that matter.
Defining the Greater Threat
It is important to place the danger posed by grassroots jihadists in the proper perspective. Overstating the risk is counterproductive, but so is downplaying it. Labeling grassroots jihadists as the deadliest threat to the United States falls into the former category.
By their very definition, grassroots jihadists are people who have become radicalized and have decided to heed the call to attack. They think globally but act locally, to borrow a phrase, but tend to lack the skills generally associated with professional operatives. In the paradox associated with grassroots radicals, they are generally more difficult to identify than people associated with a terrorist organization, but they are also generally less capable of conducting a spectacular attack.
But in the grand scheme of things, eight deaths are not a huge toll, and occasional attacks of this sort do not pose an existential threat to society.
It is difficult for me to associate the term "greater threat" with an attack such as the Oct. 31 truck assault in New York. I do not want to ignore the personal tragedies that such an attack causes for the families of the victims; on the individual scale, the attacks are devastating. But in the grand scheme of things, eight deaths are not a huge toll, and occasional attacks of this sort do not pose an existential threat to society. Nearly anyone could drive a vehicle into a crowd of people. Efforts certainly must be made to prevent such attacks, but there are simply too many soft targets and too many possible weapons to be able to protect everything against every possible form of attack. It is frankly quite easy to kill people if one wishes — especially if one is willing to die in the process.
While grassroots assailants have been responsible for all fatal jihadist attacks inside the United States since 9/11, all those deaths combined — our count is 114, not including attackers — pale in comparison to the 2,977 victims of the 9/11 hijackings. But even if we throw out 9/11 as an aberration, the threat from professional terrorists, or attackers equipped by professionals, outstrips that from grassroots jihadists. For example, Richard Reid, who had been given a shoe bomb by an al Qaeda facilitator, nearly brought down American Airlines Flight 63 with 197 passengers and crew on Dec. 22, 2001, and on Christmas Day 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab nearly destroyed Northwest Airlines Flight 253, which was carrying 290 passengers and crew. He was trying to use a bomb concealed in his underwear that AQAP had given him. Had either been successful, it likely would have eclipsed the death toll of all the grassroots attacks inside the United States since September 2001.
The same factors are at play in Europe, where in Paris on Nov. 13, 2015, a cell of operatives dispatched by the Islamic State killed 130 people, a toll far higher than any from attacks by grassroots terrorists in France. Members of the same cell killed 32 more in the Brussels bombings of March 22, 2016, before they were all finally rounded up. While the Bastille Day assault in 2016 by a grassroots attacker in a cargo truck led to 86 deaths in Nice, France, that is still far fewer than the 162 people killed by the professional terrorists of the Paris-Brussels cell. Quite simply, professional terrorists are a more severe threat than grassroots operatives, and we must not lose sight of that danger. Even though they have not been able to launch a successful attack against the United States in the post-9/11 era, it is not for lack of trying.
Despite a few close calls such as the would-be airliner bombers, security forces have proved capable at identifying operatives tied to terrorist groups and stopping their plots. Indeed, this is the very reason that jihadist groups such as al Qaeda and the Islamic State have embraced the leaderless form of terrorism that encourages grassroots jihadists to attack. The two organizations have been frustrated by their inability to get operatives into the United States.
Security Ramifications
This reality has implications for security forces. First, they must maintain their relentless focus on the acute and significant threat that the professional terrorist cadre from the Islamic State and al Qaeda pose to the United States (and the rest of the world). These operatives who possess sophisticated terrorist tradecraft will continue their attempts to commit spectacular attacks, and the likelihood of success will increase if resources are reassigned from countering them to focus on the less-capable grassroots operatives.
Again, I am not arguing that resources should not be assigned to counter the grassroots threat; I'm arguing that the more capable and dangerous extremists should remain the primary focus of counterterrorism efforts. The potentially devastating cost of easing the pressure they have been under is simply too great.
Second, people need to understand that the government can't protect every soft target from every possible type of attack and that they must take measures to protect themselves and their families from these homegrown radicals.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/454545/port-authority-jihadist-attack-civilian-court?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202017-12-11&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
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Governors Pardon Immigrants Convicted of Serious Crimes to Halt Deportation
JANUARY 03, 2018
While the nation was preoccupied celebrating the holidays, the While the nation was preoccupied celebrating the holidays, the governors of two major states pardoned immigrants convicted of serious crimes to shield them from deportation. First, California Governor Jerry Brown pardoned two men on the verge of being deported for committing crimes in the U.S., according to a Sacramento news report. Days later, New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo pardoned 18 immigrants convicted of serious crimes so they could remain in the country. The foreigners had obtained legal immigration status in the United States but committed such abhorrent crimes that they faced removal after the completion of their criminal sentence. An official statement issued by the governor’s office refers to the pardoned as “contributing members of society” who face the “threat of deportation and other immigration-related challenges” as a result of their crimes.
Cuomo said the foreign criminals he pardoned had been rehabilitated but the “stigma of convictions” prevented them from gaining legal status or fully reentering society. "While the federal government continues to target immigrants and threatens to tear families apart with deportation, these actions take a critical step toward a more just, more fair and more compassionate New York," Cuomo said in a statement. The state press release also quotes several representatives from open borders groups praising the governor’s pardons. Among them is the president of a group dedicated to eradicating racial disparities in the criminal justice system, who commended Cuomo’s strong display of leadership. “Too many immigrants with prior criminal convictions are subjected to the gratuitous punishment of deportation, despite being longstanding contributing members of our community,” said the president of the Vera Institute of Justice. The director of the Center on Race, Inequality and the Law also applauded Cuomo, saying “deportation is an out-size punishment for prior criminal convictions when people serve their sentences and go on to become longstanding, law abiding, contributing members of society.”
Let’s look at a few of the newly pardoned immigrants. The Californians are two Cambodian men, Mony Neth of Modesto and Rottanak Kong of Davis, arrested in immigration sweeps a few months ago. The men, ages 42 and 39, came to the U.S. as children and were convicted of felonies as adults. The crimes include a weapons charge and association to a gang. Neth and Rottanak were scheduled to be deported in December along with dozens of other Cambodians convicted of crimes but a federal judge in southern California issued a temporary restraining order after their pro bono attorneys from a civil rights group filed an emergency motion. Nearly 2,000 Cambodians in the U.S. are subject to deportation, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) figures cited in a northern California newspaper. More than half of them have criminal convictions that stripped them of legal status.
The New York pardons include a 57-year-old Mexican transgender woman convicted of criminal facilitation, a 35-year-old man from Estonia convicted of larceny and a 53-year-old Dominican man convicted of criminal sale of a controlled substance. The Mexican national, Lorena Borjas, deserves to stay in the U.S. because she is a strong advocate for transgender and immigrant communities and runs HIV testing programs for transgender sex workers and a syringe exchange for transwomen taking hormone injections. The Estonian, Alexander Shilov, became a nurse and frequently gives talks on overcoming addiction. The Dominican, Freddy Perez, works as an electrician and takes care of his autistic younger brother. For these reasons, they deserve to remain in the U.S. despite their criminal histories, according to Cuomo.
This appears to be part of a broader effort by local governments to protect criminal immigrants from deportation. Months ago, Judicial Watch reported that prosecutors in two major U.S. cities ordered staff not to charge illegal immigrants with minor, non-violent crimes because it could get the offenders deported. Brooklyn, New York District Attorney Eric Gonzalez was the first to issue the order creating two sets of rules involving local crimes. The goal, according to a statement issued by the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office, is “minimizing collateral immigration consequences of criminal convictions.” Taxpayers in the busy New York City borough are also paying for two immigration attorneys to train all staff on immigration issues and advise prosecutors when making plea offers and sentencing recommendations. The idea is to avoid “disproportionate collateral consequences, such as deportation, while maintaining public safety.” Gonzalez, the Brooklyn District Attorney, says he’s committed to equal and fair justice for all Brooklyn residents—citizens, lawful residents and undocumented immigrants alike.
A few weeks after Brooklyn proudly disclosed its policy, prosecutors in Maryland’s largest city joined the bandwagon, albeit more quietly. There was no public announcement or celebratory press conference but a local newspaper got ahold of an internal memo sent by Baltimore’s Chief Deputy State’s Attorney instructing prosecutors to think twice before charging illegal immigrants with minor, non-violent crimes. The chief deputy, Michael Schatzow, used similar language in the memo, writing that the Trump administration’s deportation efforts “have increased the potential collateral consequences to certain immigrants of minor, non-violent criminal conduct.” Schatzow is second-in-command to Baltimore’s top prosecutor, Marilyn Mosby, and oversees major crimes at the state agency. “In considering the appropriate disposition of a minor, non-violent criminal case, please be certain to consider those potential consequences to the victim, witnesses, and the defendant,” Schatzow wrote to his staff.
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https://www.dropbox.com/s/1cjgsc64vhjvaq2/BorderWall.mov?dl=0
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On Saturday, Hawaiians were startled and frightened by a civil defense warning that missiles were on the way and that it was not a drill but the real thing.
After 38 minutes of frantically trying to find safe cover (some families on Oahu drove to the opposite side of the island to seek shelter in caves in order to try to survive the expected nuclear blast), Hawaiians were told the whole thing was a mistake, and there was no imminent missile attack.
Of course, Hawaiians were furious at their state government for this frightening accident.
Much attention was paid to the one state employee who mistakenly selected the wrong computer option during a routine drill following a shift change. Washington was glad that Hawaiian Governor David Ige took responsibility at the state level.
However, all this blame casting and acceptance misses the real warning inherent in this accidental event: Imagine that the warning had been real. Imagine that there had been one or more missiles equipped with nuclear warheads on the way.
Are we confident we could defend Oahu, the U.S. Pacific Command, and all the people on the Hawaiian Islands?
Current ballistic missile defense involves launching ship- or land-based interceptor missiles to shoot down a ballistic missile in flight. This has been likened to shooting a bullet with a bullet.
I fear that our defense system could handle no more than two or three missiles before becoming saturated.
In fact, we would need three or four defensive anti-missile launches per each incoming offensive to have reasonable confidence that Honolulu would be safe. To make this defensive challenge even more complex, the North Koreans, like the Chinese and the Russians, are working to develop a submarine-launched missile.
So while the fact that Hawaiians were frightened by a false alarm is upsetting, our real concern should be ensuring we can keep American cities from being hit by nuclear missiles. Today, our anti-ballistic missile systems are much too weak, and our anti-cruise missile systems are virtually non-existent.
We have been trapped by political timidity, the liberal fantasy that space can be kept free of weapons, and a defense bureaucracy-large corporation-lobbyist complex that wants to focus spending on obsolete programs, using outmoded technologies.
I am extremely worried that we are going to lose one or more American cities in the next decade or two, if we do not improve our defensive capabilities. The loss of life will be almost unendurable. The loss of our freedoms in a very dangerous world will be horrifying.
The requirement that we retaliate forcefully and with comparable nuclear weapons will compound the loss of lives horrendously.
Having an effective defense against any attack has become one of the highest national priorities; however, we have neither a visionary proposal, a practical implementation system, nor a communications program to get the public and the Congress to support such an enormous undertaking. Yet, the failure to act boldly and decisively could eventually lead to the loss of millions of American lives.
We have a precedent for thinking boldly about missile defense. President Ronald Reagan proposed a comprehensive missile defense system, which included a space-based missile defense system, in his 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative. At the time, our current ballistic missile defense system was in the developmental phase.
Today, we have the potential to build a substantial missile defense system that would dramatically increase the safety of the American people.
In the three and a half decades since President Reagan offered a bold, visionary way to break out of the nuclear nightmare, the technologies have improved dramatically.
The Cray-2, which was released two years after Reagan’s proposal and was believed to be the fastest machine in at the time, had the processing power of an iPhone 4.
With this exponential increase in computing power and the emergence of reusable launch vehicles for space, the potential to field a space-based system is real and eminently rational. However, the military procurement system and current missile defense bureaucracy are incapable of rapid development and innovation at the speed we need to offset threats from North Korea, Iran, and other dangerous regimes.
President Trump should propose a Space Defense Implementation Command with lean procurement rules and entrepreneurial hiring and firing capability. It should operate like Silicon Valley, rather than K Street. The President should make an Oval Office address describing the genuine threat and the horror of what would have occurred if the Hawaiian alert had been real.
He should challenge members of Congress to fully fund a multiyear space combat missile defense system precisely as they would a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.
To save American cities, we need stability in funding, reliability in management, and consistent political support built around saving millions of American lives. Additionally, the Air Force should establish a Space Combat Command designed to wage and win wars in space.
It is abundantly clear that our potential adversaries know how much we rely on space-based assets for communications and intelligence. It is also clear that if we entered a war with any of these regimes, they would intend to kill or cripple our systems while protecting and – if necessary – renewing their own.
It took only 15 years to go from the Wright Brothers’ first airplane flight to massive military use of air power in World War I.
For the last 61 years (dating from the Soviet launch of Sputnik), we have avoided confronting the reality that space is a domain which will inevitably become an arena for conflict fully as much as land, sea, air, or cyber. We need to bring security-focused thinking, doctrines, war games, and technologies to bear to defend American interests in space and Americans wherever they are.
Millions of lives could be at stake.
The loss of 2,996 lives on September 11, 2001 launched a series of wars which have left 6,948 Americans dead and more than 52,000 wounded over 16 years. At the same time, the United States has spent $7.6 trillion. If fewer than 3,000 casualties galvanized this explosion of effort, what should we be prepared to do to save Oahu’s more than 953,000 residents, the U.S. military personnel assigned there, and the thousands of visiting tourists?
This is what would have been at risk if the Hawaiian alert had been real. Next time it may be.
The time to act is now – before a disaster.
Your Friend,
Newt
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second post
3 Out of 4 Convicted Terrorists Came to U.S. Legally Via Current Immigration System
JANUARY 17, 2018
Illustrating the national security threats created by the nation’s immigration system, the overwhelming majority of individuals convicted of terrorism are foreigners who entered the United States legally through various federal programs. Three out of every four convicted terrorists between September 11, 2001 and December 31, 2016 are foreign born and came to the United States through our immigration system, according to a new report issued jointly by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ).
At least 549 individuals were convicted of terrorism-related charges in American federal courts since 2001 and 402 of them—approximately 73%–were foreign-born, the report says. Here’s the breakdown by citizenship at the time of their convictions; 254 were not U.S. citizens, 148 were naturalized and received American citizenship and 147 were U.S. born. Additionally, 1,716 foreigners with national security concerns were removed from the United States. The Trump administration stresses that figures include only those aliens who were convicted or removed and therefore do not represent the total measure of foreign terrorist infiltration of the United States. Statistics on individuals facing terrorism charges who have not yet been convicted will be provided in follow-up reports that will be made available to the public.
This DHS/DOJ report, issued this month, is disturbing enough and reveals that a significant number of terrorists entered the country through immigration programs that use family ties and extended-family chain migration as a basis for entry. Among them is Mufid Elfgeeh, a national of Yemen who benefitted from chain migration in 1997 and was sentenced to more than 22 years in prison for attempting to recruit fighters for ISIS. Sudanese Mahmoud Amin Mohamed Elhassan came to the U.S. in 2012 as a relative of a lawful permanent resident and eventually pleaded guilty to attempting to provide material support to ISIS. Pakistani Uzair Paracha was admitted to the U.S. in 1980 as a family member of a lawful permanent resident and in 2006 was sentenced to more than three decades in prison for providing material support to Al Qaeda. Khaleel Ahmed, a national of India, was admitted to the United States in 1998 as a family member of a naturalized United States citizen. Ahmed eventually became an American citizen and in 2010 was sentenced to more than eight years in prison for conspiring to provide material support to terrorists.
Other convicted terrorists came to the U.S. through the controversial visa lottery program, the multi-agency probe found. Among them is Abdurasaul Hasanovich Juraboev, a national of Uzbekistan who was admitted into the country as a diversity visa lottery recipient in 2011. In 2015, he pleaded guilty to conspiring to support ISIS and in 2017 Juraboev was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Sudanese Ali Shukri Amin was admitted to the U.S. in 1999 as the child of a diversity visa lottery recipient and subsequently obtained American citizenship through naturalization. In 2015, he was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison for conspiring to provide material support and resources to ISIS. Amin admitted to using social media to provide advice and encouragement to ISIS and its supporters and facilitated ISIS supporters seeking to travel to Syria to join the terrorist group. Amin also helped a Virginia teen named Reza Niknejad get to Syria to join ISIS in 2015.
“The United States faces a serious and persistent terror threat, and individuals with ties to terror can and will use any pathway to enter our country,” the new DHS/DOJ report states. “Accordingly, DHS has taken significant steps to improve the security of all potential routes used by known or suspected terrorists (KST) to travel to the United States to ensure that individuals who would do harm to Americans are identified and detected, and their plots are disrupted. These figures reflect the challenges faced by the United States and demonstrate the necessity to remain vigilant and proactive in our counterterrorism posture.”
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http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2018/01/19/border-wall-models-thwart-military-tests/
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U.S. President Donald Trump's administration will press for more aggressive action from Central American governments against criminal gangs, drug trafficking and illegal migration.
Institutional inertia, competing priorities and the decentralized nature of criminal gangs are going to limit the White House's ability to come down hard on security threats from Central America.
The administration will probably press Central American governments to pursue individual criminal groups more, but the way Washington deals with crime from Central America overall is unlikely to change.
As U.S. President Donald Trump's administration moves to take a harder line against crime in Central America, it will likely run into the same problems that have vexed many previous presidents. On the campaign trail, Trump emphasized domestic security and indicated that illegal immigrants and criminal gangs from Central America would get more attention from law enforcement. As president, he has already followed through on some of these campaign promises domestically. Now, the White House appears to be shifting its attention abroad. But as Washington turns up the heat on Central America, it is likely to find its goals thwarted by poverty, corruption and the amorphous nature of gangs.
Forecast Update
The United States has for decades focused on stemming violent crime and illicit migration from Central America. U.S. President Donald Trump's administration has made countering criminal activity from this region a central part of its foreign and domestic security policies, and it will press forward in the coming years to craft a more aggressive stance toward violent crime and illegal migration in the region.
See 2018 Annual Forecast
Spotlight on Central America
Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador — where many illegal migrants and criminal gang members in the United States are from — are in the spotlight as the Trump administration turns up the pressure. And the president has pointed to violent criminal gangs, particularly MS-13 (ethnically Salvadoran but born in Los Angeles--MARC not just ethnically, in citizenship too), in its drive to tighten immigration. Over the next few years, U.S. institutions such as the State Department, the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security will try to turn Trump's campaign rhetoric into actions that hit criminal groups or weaken the flow of drugs to the United States. Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez recently met with a U.S. State Department official in what was likely an attempt to find an actionable policy. And the United States can be expected to pressure the governments in Tegucigalpa, Guatemala City and San Salvador to target and arrest key criminals, as well as to enact more substantial programs to detect and slow migrants trying to cross into Mexico.
However, pressing for change and achieving it are two very different things. For decades, these Central American nations haven't been able to effectively move against these problems, which also vex the United States. The countries are poor, with small and extremely corrupt armies and police forces. The local institutions that the United States has to work with are limited and are not going to improve quickly. Training enough capable and trustworthy soldiers and police officers to challenge the cartels and gangs and to stem migrant flows will take years — and the Trump administration simply may not have enough time to fund these improvements.
Additionally, criminal activity in Central America is of relatively low importance for Washington compared with other pressing global problems, a fact that may delay further action. Criminal gangs are but one of many forms of violent crime within the United States, and illegal migration is far lower than it was a few decades ago. Furthermore, while drug trafficking to the United States is a public health issue, it isn't an existential crisis. A solution to the North Korean nuclear crisis is far more consequential for the United States than reining in MS-13, the 18th Street gang and similar criminals.
Decentralization is also likely to frustrate Washington's moves against threats south of the border, since there is no single group it can target to end the criminal threat from Central America. Gangs tend to be decentralized, so while authorities can round up their members, other factions will take their place. The same can be said of Mexican and Central American drug trafficking cartels, which have fragmented into smaller, more violent units as their leaders have been arrested or killed.
Turning to Mexico
While Washington faces formidable regional obstacles, not all of its goals are out of sight. Its successes will be small, and the United States will continue to rely primarily on Mexico to stem the flow of drugs and migrants northward. Mexico has an institutional capability that all Central American states lack, and that isn't going to change in the next few years. The administration can press for its Central American neighbors to take more aggressive action against criminal gangs, migration and drug traffickers — and that is likely where the U.S. push in Central America is going to go.
The security concerns the Trump administration is emphasizing are perennial, intractable issues that Washington's institutional bureaucracy cannot deal with conclusively. Their rather low importance, accompanied by institutional inertia, is going to limit the White House's ability to devote more time and resources to them.
In the end, the administration is probably going to respond to criminality from Central America with tactics reminiscent of measures that have already been tried. Mexico will shoulder most of the burden of helping the United States deal with security problems in its backyard. Though the administration will try to craft a response different from those of its predecessors, it will most likely resort to more of the same.
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Iran, Russia, and China's Central Role in the Venezuela Crisis
by Joseph M. Humire
Gatestone Institute
February 14, 2018
http://www.meforum.org/7206/iran-russia-and-china-central-role-in
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Strong evidence suggests that Venezuela used its immigration agency (SAIME) to provide Venezuelan identities and documents to several hundred, if not thousands, of Middle Easterners. Unless our regional allies have proper vetting and verification measures in place, as well as a high degree of counterintelligence support, they will not know if the Venezuelan refugees spilling across their borders are legitimate refugees or members of a transregional clandestine network between Latin America and the Middle East.
As Secretary Tillerson calls upon regional allies to increase support to resolve Venezuela's humanitarian crisis and apply more pressure to the Maduro regime, it would also make sense for the Trump administration to help U.S. allies by enhancing their counterintelligence and counterterrorism capabilities against Iran and Hezbollah in the Western Hemisphere. It appears that some of this cooperation is already beginning to take place, as evidenced by a new agreement between the U.S. and Argentina to tackle Hezbollah's illicit financing in the Southern Cone.
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https://clarionproject.org/fbi-arresting-2-terror-suspects-a-week/
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Not really sure where to post this one:
http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2018/03/26/father-pulse-nightclub-killer-omar-mateen-fbi-informant/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=daily&utm_content=links&utm_campaign=20180326
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/latest-pulse-jury-reaches-verdict-widows-trial-135039967.html
This sets a precedent
Just claim you had no idea , or were too stupid to know to report your family member is planning to murder as many people as possible
I know it was a jury of our peers who objectively just heard all the evidence........
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/latest-pulse-jury-reaches-verdict-widows-trial-135039967.html
This sets a precedent
Just claim you had no idea , or were too stupid to know to report your family member is planning to murder as many people as possible
I know it was a jury of our peers who objectively just heard all the evidence........
Yes, leave the details of this one to the jury but it raises questions. Is there a legal obligation to speak up? Should there be?
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Did the jury know about her father-in-law being an FBI informant?
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second post
https://www.buzzfeed.com/adolfoflores/a-huge-caravan-of-central-americans-is-headed-for-the-us?utm_term=.etzy4WV5qe#.op9JXZY81x
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" Did the jury know about her father-in-law being an FBI informant? "
apparently , no :
https://www.conservativereview.com/articles/withheld-information-help-acquit-noor-salman/
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https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/244655
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https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1182
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second post
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/apr/26/ms-13-gang-members-claim-theyre-underage-gain-acce/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=manual&utm_campaign=20171227&utm_term=newsletter&utm_content=morning
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third post
Syrian Imam Who Endorsed Suicide Bombing Tours U.S. Mosques
by John Rossomando • Apr 25, 2018 at 9:22 am
https://www.investigativeproject.org/7419/syrian-imam-who-endorsed-suicide-bombing-tours-us
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/may/2/doj-35-lawyers-18-judges-border-stop-caravan/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=manual&utm_campaign=20171227&utm_term=newsletter&utm_content=morning
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Maybe these Americans have need of at least an AR-15 with a 30 shot magazine:
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Arizona Border Ranchers Live in Fear as Illegal Immigration Crisis Worsens
Our southern border is an abstraction for most people, a topic for talking heads on TV. But for those who call it home, life on the border is a gritty and dangerous reality. And the reality is, despite dramatic change in approach to border issues the Trump administration, our Southern border remains largely open to illegal aliens.
Our Corruption Chronicles blog provides an unsettling and astonish first-hand look.
More than half a million illegal immigrants of several dozen nationalities have been apprehended on John Ladd’s sprawling cattle ranch in southeastern Arizona. Ladd has also found 14 dead bodies on his 16,500-acre farm, which has been in his family for well over a century and sits between the Mexican border and historic State Route 92. The property shares a 10 ½-mile border with Mexico, making it a popular route for human and drug smugglers evading a meager force of Border Patrol agents in the mountainous region. “As big as that number sounds, many more got away,” said National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd of the hundreds of thousands arrested on Ladd’s parcel. Judd spent a chunk of his decades-long career with the agency patrolling the area and he knows it well. “It’s gotten more violent. It’s gotten worse.”
As part of an ongoing investigation into the critical security issues created by the famously porous southern border, Judicial Watch visited frustrated ranchers and residents in Sierra Vista, a Cochise County town located 75 miles southeast of Tucson with a population of around 44,000. The town sits in the picturesque Sonoran Desert and is surrounded by the scenic Huachuca Mountains. Illegal immigrants and drug smugglers are devastating the area and many longtime residents live in fear. Some are too scared to enjoy a simple pastime—horseback riding on their own land. “I can’t guarantee there’s not a dead body somewhere in my ranch right now,” said Ladd pointing to his property as he stood in front of the U.S. government’s border fence, an area known as the “shit ditch” because illegal immigrants use it as a toilet and trash. Sporting a thick, gray mustache and a dapper cowboy hat, Ladd said 200 to 300 illegal aliens are caught daily passing through his property. “We don’t have any control of the border,” he said. “I see it every day.”
A 60-foot wide dirt road, known as a federal easement, separates Ladd’s ranch from Mexico. Some portions have an 18-foot iron fence along the border that Ladd says illegal immigrants “easily climb with a pack of dope.” Other sections have a laughable wire fence that has been repeatedly penetrated with vehicles speeding through from Mexico. Some areas have been visibly patched where holes were carved out for passage. The fence is such a joke that the Border Patrol installed concrete barriers along a busy two-mile stretch across the 60-foot dirt road, right in front of the barbwire barrier on Ladd’s property line to stop smugglers. “Smugglers even put a hydraulic ramp, so a car or truck could blow through,” Ladd said. He estimates that around 70% of the traffic that comes through his ranch is human smuggling and 30% is drug smuggling. In the last three years most of the illegal border crossers have been Central American, Ladd said. The veteran rancher first became concerned with the unprotected border decades ago because sick Mexican cows threatened his herd. The problem became more serious over the years. “First it was Mexican cows, then people then dope,” Ladd said. “Now it’s really bad.” Ladd has traveled to the nation’s capital seven times to bring attention to the crisis in Sierra Vista, but Washington bureaucrats have failed to take any action.
Instead, the federal government has placed ineffective or faulty surveillance equipment in the region that smugglers easily evade. “The smugglers know the radio range and avoid it,” Judd said, adding that cameras are installed in the wrong spot and don’t have great resolution. On a hill adjacent to Ladd’s ranch stands an imposing camera tower that could never capture illegal border crossers because its view is completely blocked by a sea of lush trees below. The government spent $1.3 million on the useless equipment and never bothered to study the terrain’s impact on the technology. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) simply installed the equipment based on a predetermined formula that separates the cameras by a fixed number of miles without considering the landscape, according to Judd. “They didn’t do any research on the topography,” he said. These kinds of failures frustrate local ranchers, who feel increasingly threatened by the barrage of illegal crossers rampaging through their property. With both thumbs resting on his thick, bronze belt buckle, Ladd looked up at the pointless camera tower smiling and quipped: “Now that’s a big boondoggle right there, a total waste of taxpayer dollars.”
Another troubled property owner, John Guerrero, took Judicial Watch on a nighttime tour of a nearby smuggling route that is inexplicably unprotected. The dirt road runs through the Coronado National Forest and Guerrero, a retired U.S. Army Ranger and intelligence officer who served in Iraq and Somalia, has felt the impact of the government’s failure to adequately guard it. Five strands of barbwire serve as the physical boundary between the U.S. and Mexico in a remote portion of the park, which is closed to the public at night and is heavily transited by drug and human smugglers. Illegal immigration has had such a devastating impact on the area that Guerrero wrote a book offering detailed anecdotes of what he and his family endure because they live near the Mexican border. This includes drugs and illegal immigrants piling into vehicles on the road adjacent to his four-acre property and ultralight aircraft flying near his rooftop, just above the trees, en route to make a drug drop. “Local residents are increasingly fearful,” Guerrero said.
The event that has most impacted Guerrero occurred when smugglers burned down a beloved chapel, Our Lady of the Sierras, situated on a hill across the road from his home. A 75-foot Celtic cross outside the chapel remains lit through the night and serves as a navigational tool for smugglers and the grounds are regularly used to transfer drugs. In 2011, illegal immigrant smugglers started the fire along the border to escape the Border Patrol during a pursuit. Besides the chapel, which has since been rebuilt, the fire destroyed nearly 30,000 acres and dozens of homes. Guerrero and his family were forced to evacuate. Widespread media coverage omitted that illegal immigrants were responsible for the fire, but a local news station finally reported that the Cochise County Sheriff confirmed the fire started 200 yards north of the Mexican border in an area known as Smuggler’s Gulch. “There was absolutely no mention by the federal government as to the true origin of the fire,” Guerrero said.
Judd, who heads the union that represents some 16,000 Border Patrol agents nationwide, says the border can be secured. “There has to be political will to secure the border,” he said. The frontline agency had tremendous faith that the Trump administration would finally get the job done, but the stats tell a different story. Shortly after Trump became president there was a dip in the number of illegal immigrants entering the U.S. through Mexico, Judd said. However, “by April 2018 we were back to the Obama high of illegal border crossers,” Judd confirmed. Sierra Vista residents like Ladd and Guerrero continue to suffer the consequences of anemic border control and worry about the crime that has infested their once-idyllic town. The problem is so rampant that Ladd often sees smuggling spotters from his property on the nearby mountains in the Mexican side. “They’re right there every day,” he said. “They live in camps and have solar generators. Their job is to look out.” Residents in Sierra Vista feel no one is looking out for them.
Thanks to our Judicial Watch team who traveled to the Southwest border to compile this report. We will follow up with more investigations and, I’m sure, lawsuits as part of JW’s efforts to secure our borders through the rule of law!
Until next week …
Tom Fitton
President
Judicial Watch
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http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-border-patrol-national-guard-2018-story.html#nws=mcnewsletter
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Assessing the Threat of Jihadists Returning From Syria
By Scott Stewart
VP of Tactical Analysis, Stratfor
Scott Stewart
VP of Tactical Analysis, Stratfor
A picture showing the Aleppo headquarters of the Islamic State after being seized by fighters from several Syrian rebel brigades, Jan. 8, 2014.
(MOHAMMED WESAM/AFP/Getty Images)
Connections
This column was originally published in April 2014. In light of recent attacks in Indonesia committed by returning fighters from Syria affiliated with the Islamic State, we are sharing this article once more.
We have been closely following the events in Syria since the demonstrations in spring 2011 that led to the civil war. Over the years, we've discussed the beginnings of foreign intervention in 2011 to its becoming a widespread phenomenon. We've also tracked the spread of jihadist groups in Syria over the past three years to the present point where the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant has rebelled against al Qaeda and formed a second pole of jihadism.
All this is to say that we watch Syria carefully and we read a lot of reporting from various sources about the many facets of the civil war raging there and the implications for the region. One of the narratives regarding the fighting in Syria that has become very pronounced in recent weeks is the threat foreign jihadists currently fighting in Syria will pose when they return home. There has been some very good, detailed reporting and analysis on this topic, but there has also been quite a bit of hype accompanying it. By some accounts, the foreign fighters in Syria pose a threat akin to the fictional zombie apocalypse.
Certainly, foreign fighters in Syria who survive the conflict and either stay in the country or return to their countries of origin will pose a lingering threat. But I believe several factors exist that will mitigate that threat, helping ensure it remains modest.
History of Foreign Jihadists
First, it is important to remember that the return of foreign fighters from war zones is not a new phenomenon. Thousands of Muslim men received training at camps in Pakistan following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and thousands more received training at camps in Afghanistan between the Soviet withdrawal and the U.S. invasion in 2001. While nobody, including the groups employing the fighters, has accurate numbers, it is believed that at least 20,000 foreign fighters cycled through Afghanistan between 1979 and 2001, although it is unlikely that there were more than 3,000 to 4,000 in the theater at a given time. Al Qaeda emerged from among these fighters, and the current al Qaeda leadership, including Ayman al-Zawahiri and Nasir al-Wahayshi, had their roots in the jihadist struggle in Afghanistan. Many foreign jihadists remained in Afghanistan until they were either killed or driven out by U.S. and Afghan national forces in 2001.
Other foreign jihadists migrated to the Afghanistan-Pakistan region to fight following the U.S. invasion, although this flow was reduced dramatically following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Iraq, the ancient seat of the Abbasid Caliphate, was seen as being at the heart of the Islamic world, rather than a backwater like Afghanistan. It was also easier to get to Iraq than Afghanistan. Because of these factors, Iraq supplanted Afghanistan as the most popular destination for foreign fighters, and thousands of jihadists flocked to Iraq. Most of these fighters were from the Middle East, but there were also a number of jihadists from Europe and the United States. The U.S. Army reported that more than 1,000 foreign fighters were captured or killed in Iraq in 2006 alone.
There were also significant numbers of foreign jihadists involved in the first Chechen War (1994-1996) and in Bosnia (1992-1995) but these numbers were far lower than those in Afghanistan or Iraq. Like Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, Muslim fighters traveled to Chechnya and Bosnia to fight a defensive jihad to protect fellow Muslims rather than traveling there to attempt to establish (or re-establish) an Islamic state like we saw in post-U.S. invasion Afghanistan and Iraq. Smaller numbers of foreign jihadists have also fought in Somalia, Libya, Mali and elsewhere.
Yet despite the tens of thousands of jihadists who have fought in these various conflicts since the 1970s, only a very small percentage have returned to their countries of origin to conduct terrorist attacks. One important reason for this is ideology. While many Muslims feel compelled to travel to places like Syria to fight, many of those who do so are not jihadists. Furthermore, there are also differences among those who hold jihadist beliefs. For example, even among the jihadists there are many who believe it is religiously permissible to travel to a place such as Syria or Iraq to fight for Muslims who are being oppressed or attacked (defensive jihad), or who they see as being locked in an internal sectarian fight in Syria, but who do not believe it is permissible to conduct terrorist attacks against civilians outside of such theaters of war. Such people have no qualms about killing armed combatants in a war zone, but they believe that Islam clearly prohibits attacks against noncombatants.
Jihadist infighting in Syria has also proved to be a significant ideological arrestor. First, the more divided the jihadists are, the less attention they have to give to areas beyond Syria and to pool their resources for strikes farther abroad. Second, some foreigners who have traveled to Syria have left after becoming disillusioned by internal ideological squabbling and backbiting. The bloody infighting has also increased the number of jihadist deaths, since foreign fighters are often fighting against the regime, Syrian jihadists, Kurds and other non-jihadist Syrian rebels. Many Syrian rebel groups have come to view foreign fighters as a potential threat, and the days of the "five-star jihad" are now over.
Training and Capability
While many foreign jihadists who have traveled to various theaters to fight are provided with some rudimentary training, it is very important to remember that the training they receive is normally restricted to the skills needed by a guerrilla fighter in a war zone. These include things such as physical fitness, some hand-to-hand combat and the use of small arms, such as assault rifles, hand grenades and pistols. Very few of these jihadists are ever provided advanced training in the types of skills required to successfully conduct a major terrorist attack in a hostile environment, or what we refer to as terrorism tradecraft. These skills include such things as obtaining fraudulent travel documents, clandestine communications, weapons procurement, bombmaking, surveillance, etc.
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and even the al Qaeda core have encouraged would-be grassroots jihadist terrorists to conduct simple attacks that are within their capabilities: In other words, to fight like they have trained and to conduct attacks that do not require advanced terrorism tradecraft. But despite this encouragement, very few grassroots jihadists follow this advice. Even among the very few who have undertaken such attacks, most have sought to conduct spectacular attacks that are beyond their capability, and are frequently caught in sting operations as they seek outside assistance with weapons procurement or bombmaking.
I anticipated back in 2010 that we were going to see a shift in jihadist tactics away from sophisticated bomb plots and toward simple armed assaults that most jihadists are capable of conducting without outside assistance. I based this assessment on the widely hyped success of the Fort Hood shootings, the ease of conducting such attacks and the exhortations of jihadist groups to emulate Maj. Nidal Hassan. But I was wrong. The shift has never materialized. For every successful simple attack such as Fort Hood, or last year's Boston Marathon bombing, there are many complex plots that are either botched by those planning them or thwarted by the authorities when the wannabe terrorists stumble into law enforcement stings. This could still change, but to date, the desire to conduct spectacular attacks has served to blunt the threat posed by simple attacks.
Awareness
Perhaps the most powerful of the factors that will help mitigate the impact of the threat posed by jihadists returning from Syria is awareness. The fact that I am writing this is proof of that awareness, and this awareness is greater than ever before. When I traveled to Yemen with a colleague from the FBI to investigate the December 1992 attack against U.S. Air Force personnel in Aden and the January 1993 rocket attack against the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa, our initial working theory was that Libyan operatives or surrogates had conducted the attacks. It was only after we investigated the attacks that we determined the perpetrators were jihadists who had been trained in Afghanistan and who had returned to Yemen. That is when we first began to realize that returning jihadists posed a threat outside Afghanistan.
Shortly after I returned from Yemen, I was sent to New York to assist with the investigation of the February 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Within days of that bombing, the outstanding investigative efforts of my forensic colleagues determined that the truck had been rented by a group of jihadists with links to Afghanistan. Sadly, the core group behind the bombing had been investigated by the FBI, which determined it did not pose a threat despite the fact that a member of the group had assassinated Meir Kahane in midtown Manhattan in November 1990. But that case, along with the related 1993 New York landmark bomb plot case, helped raise awareness of jihadists as a transnational threat to the West.
That threat became acutely obvious on 9/11, and was re-emphasized by the attacks in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005. Today, there is not one security or intelligence service in the world that is not intensely aware of the potential threat posed by jihadists returning home from fighting in Syria.
Things have changed dramatically since the 1980s and early 90s, and massive international efforts are underway to identify and monitor foreign fighters in Syria due to the potential threat they pose.
In the 1980s and 1990s, when returning jihadists were largely ignored, Sgt. Ali Mohamed — who was convicted for being involved in the 1998 East Africa embassy bombing plot — told his U.S. Army supervisors that he went to Afghanistan to fight while on vacation. Incredibly, Mohamed was still permitted to retain his job. Things have changed dramatically since that time, and massive international efforts are currently underway to identify and monitor foreign fighters in Syria due to the potential threat they pose.
In some countries, these returning fighters are questioned and released. In others, they are monitored. And in some countries, like Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Jordan — where it is now illegal to fight in Syria — returning jihadists face jail time. It is far easier to travel to Syria from those three countries than it is to return to them from Syria. Other jihadists who train with organizations that have been designated international terrorist groups can also face prosecution in their home countries on charges of providing material support for a terrorist group. Some countries, such as the United Kingdom, have begun to revoke the citizenship of their citizens who travel to Syria to fight.
And the awareness of the potential threat is not just confined to the government. Muslim communities have also become very aware of this potential threat over the past few decades. In many cases, we have seen families approaching governments to tell them of children who have left home without permission to fight in jihadist theaters. In other cases, family calls to law enforcement agencies have resulted in young men being arrested before they could leave the country to travel to Syria and to the identification and arrest of people recruiting fighters. This community awareness can also place ideological pressure on returning jihadists to help prevent them from conducting attacks against innocent people in the countries where they reside.
Jihadists returning from Syria will pose a threat for the foreseeable future, but due to the factors we've discussed, that threat will remain chronic and low-level. It is something that should be of concern, but not a cause for panic.
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Upgrade America’s 19th-Century Electric Grid
The U.S. relies on regional networks vulnerable to terrorism and blackouts.
Upgrade America’s 19th-Century Electric Grid
Photo: iStock/Getty Images
By Charles Bayless and
Thomas Petri
June 4, 2018 6:52 p.m. ET
60 COMMENTS
The U.S. electrical system is inefficient and vulnerable to natural and man-made threats—from severe weather and solar storms to cyber and electromagnetic attacks. To stay competitive in the 21st century, the U.S. should upgrade its system before it’s too late.
What is commonly known as “the grid”—consisting mostly of aboveground transmission wires—is actually a patchwork of three regional networks that share few interconnections. Periods of high demand, such as a prolonged heat wave, can trigger regional imbalances in electricity supply and demand, leaving consumers to contend with price spikes and blackouts or brownouts. Insufficient transmission capacity also means that during periods of low local demand, surplus electricity is wasted rather than sold to other regions.
The U.S. grid relies on alternating-current technology, a legacy of its 19th-century creation. But a direct-current system would be far superior. Thanks to technological breakthroughs, direct-current technology can now transmit electricity over longer distances with less power loss than existing alternating-current networks.
The Climate Institute has proposed constructing a new overlay network that balances the generation and consumption of electrical power. The North American Supergrid is a concept for a multinodal, high-voltage direct-current transmission network that would extend across the lower 48 states, eventually linking with Canada and Mexico. The new grid would work as a resilient backbone to the existing electrical grid. Built largely underground alongside highways or railway rights of way, it would also be less vulnerable to attack.
By creating a level, nationwide market, the supergrid would allow energy generators throughout the country to compete directly. Because transmission distance would no longer be a constraint, the grid would promote the easy transfer and trade of energy—from renewable and traditional sources—between power-abundant and power-hungry regions. The increased transmission capacity would turn America’s enormous size into an advantage. It would permit, for example, the transmission of inexpensive energy produced by Mojave Desert solar farms or Great Plains wind farms to East Coast urban centers, supplanting more expensive power derived from fossil fuels. A 2016 study from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory estimated that a similar supergrid could achieve roughly an 80% reduction in power-sector carbon emissions, relative to 1990 levels.
Upfront private investment could reduce costs for consumers and taxpayers. The projected cost of as much $500 billion over 30 years to construct the North American Supergrid would be outweighed by eventual savings to U.S. electricity consumers, according to the NOAA study. And construction of the new grid would create between 650,000 and 930,000 jobs yearly across the entire energy sector over the estimated three decades needed to build and maintain its necessary infrastructure, according to a 2017 Climate Institute study. Many of these jobs would come to economically depressed rural areas.
Other nations are embracing advanced direct current transmission. China is moving aggressively to build nationwide high-voltage direct-current lines, investing $88 billion between 2009 and 2020. As a part of its energy-transition strategy, the European Union plans to invest some $1 billion toward 17 new supergrid projects on the Continent.
The Trump administration can propel the U.S. into the supergrid era by expanding upon the president’s infrastructure permitting executive order to cut still more red tape. It should push Congress to streamline the grid-permitting process to promote far-reaching infrastructure proposals. The White House also should direct the Energy Department and other executive agencies to develop plans for interregional transmission, then work with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to implement such plans. Congress should allocate federal funds to study the future of U.S. electricity transmission.
The North American Supergrid could transform the country, much like creation of the interstate highway system did in the 1960s and ’70s. In contrast to the localized economic payoffs received from new roads and bridges, it would benefit the entire U.S. economy and produce significant environmental and security improvements. Constructing it will require leadership from the highest levels. It would be fitting if the real-estate developer president paved the way for the U.S. to enter the supergrid era.
Mr. Bayless is a former CEO of Tucson Electric Power. Mr. Petri, a Republican, is a former U.S. representative from Wisconsin. They are board members of the Climate Institute
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Big deal. TSA did a quick pat down on a 96 yo.
Now the Left will turn this into a "me2" thing and Gloria Allred probably has one of you goons calling now:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tsa-agents-search-96-year-old-woman-wheelchair-dulles-airport-outside-washington/
People are so naive to think a 96 couldn't be used as a mule ?
:-P
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Public Middle School Terrorized by MS-13
is a “Ticking Time Bomb”
A violent street gang energized by the steady flow of illegal immigrant minors is terrorizing a public middle school less than 10 miles from the nation’s capital while administrators cover up the problem and the feds ignore the crisis.
Teachers are afraid, drugs are sold, gang graffiti litters the area surrounding the campus and gang-related fights are a daily occurrence, according to a lengthy mainstream newspaper report published this week. Most of the dozens of teachers, parents and students interviewed for the story refused to be identified for fear of losing their jobs or being targeted by the gangbangers that have taken over at William Wirt Middle School in Riverdale, Maryland.
Wirt is part of the Prince George’s County Public School system, which has more than 130,000 students. “The school is a ticking time bomb,” according to one educator quoted in the article.
The culprits belong to the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), a feared street gang of mostly Central American illegal immigrants that has spread throughout the U.S. and is renowned for drug distribution, murder, rape, robbery, home invasions, kidnappings, vandalism and other violent crimes.
The Justice Department’s National Gang Intelligence Center (NGIC) says criminal street gangs like the MS-13 are responsible for the majority of violent crimes in the U.S. and are the primary distributors of most illicit drugs. Judicial Watch has reported extensively on how Barack Obama’s open border policies helped criminal enterprises like the MS-13.
When the barrage of Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) began four years ago, Homeland Security sources told Judicial Watch that the nation’s most violent street gangs—including MS-13 and the 18th Street gang—were actively recruiting new members at U.S. shelters housing the minors.
A year later the Texas Department of Public Safety confirmed that the MS-13 is a top tier gang thanks to the influx of illegal alien gang members that crossed into the state under Obama’s disastrous program, which saw over 60,000 illegal immigrants—many with criminal histories—storm into the U.S. in a matter of months.
At last count, more than 200,000 UACs have entered the U.S. through Mexico. The Texas Department of Public Safety disclosed in a report that the number of MS-13 members encountered by U.S. Border Patrol in the Rio Grande Valley sector increased each year, accelerating in 2014 and coinciding with increased illegal immigration from Central America during the same period.
When dozens of MS-13 members were indicted in Boston a few years ago for murder, conspiracy to commit murder, drug trafficking, firearm violations, federal racketeering and immigration offenses, federal prosecutors revealed that the gang actively recruited prospective members in high schools situated in communities with “significant immigrant populations from Central America.” The recruits are known as “paros” and they are typically 14 or 15 years old, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ). During a tryout period, they must engage in violent criminal activity before becoming a full-fledged MS-13 member.
At the Maryland school a short drive from the White House MS-13 aggressively recruits students recently arrived from Central America, sources say in the news story. One eighth-grader said the gang “dominates the school.” Teachers are so scared they refuse to be alone with students and many said they repeatedly reported gang activity to administrators who simply ignored them.
“Teachers feel threatened but aren’t backed up,” an educator says in the news article. “Students feel threatened but aren’t protected.” Wirt’s principal declined reporters’ repeated requests for an interview, which is very revealing. The school’s resource officer, from the Prince George’s Police Department, declined to comment about gang activity on the campus.
Records obtained by the newspaper reveal that as of May 1, police were called to the school 74 times. One parent predicts that “there’s going to be a tragedy at that school.” A teacher said the administration’s attitude about gangs is “don’t ask, don’t talk about it.”
It’s important to note that Prince George’s County, where the Riverdale middle school is located, provides sanctuary for illegal immigrants and defies federal requests to hold illegal aliens arrested for state crimes until immigration agents pick them up.
Besides Prince George’s County, three other large Maryland jurisdictions shields illegal aliens from the feds and deportation—Montgomery and Baltimore counties as well as the city of Baltimore. Maryland’s Attorney General, the state’s chief law enforcement official, issued a legal memo last year defending the practice.
Complying with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainers for criminal illegal aliens is voluntary, the Attorney General writes in the document, and state and local law enforcement officials are potentially exposed to liability if they hold someone beyond the release date determined by state law.
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https://www.oathkeepers.org/wall-wall-troops-stewart-rhodes/?mc_cid=7573286c79&mc_eid=161fe6af53
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https://www.oathkeepers.org/wall-wall-troops-stewart-rhodes/?mc_cid=7573286c79&mc_eid=161fe6af53
Yes, this is a war requiring military level involvement as crucial as any other US deployment in the world. Everyone seems to know that brutal Mexican gangs control the border in our absence. Fewer troops will be needed after the wall and fencing systems are designed and built.
With DACA and "comprehensive" immigration reform, Democrats enjoyed keeping illegal immigration a permanent issue for their political benefit. Now the mandate is to secure the border and with the failure to build a wall after a decisive election it is (mostly) Democrats keeping it a permanent issue to their detriment. Ironically it is Democrats who should want the 'Secure the Border' issue that swept Trump into power to be solved and off the table.
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https://www.dailywire.com/news/32202/mexican-prez-candidate-calls-mass-exodus-us-paul-bois?utm_medium=email&utm_content=062318-news&utm_campaign=position1
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https://mic.com/articles/189983/democratic-congressman-will-introduce-the-first-bill-to-abolish-ice#.WBtfn0rZH
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https://mic.com/articles/189983/democratic-congressman-will-introduce-the-first-bill-to-abolish-ice#.WBtfn0rZH
I hope they push that really hard.
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https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2018/06/24/pico-rivera-arcadia-sideshows-burnouts/
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https://canadafreepress.com/article/did-we-just-dodge-9-11-2.0
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http://dailycaller.com/2018/07/31/confused-senator-ice-illegal-immigration/
‘I’M CONFUSED’ — ICE OFFICIAL TAKES DEMOCRATIC SENATOR TO SCHOOL
6:30 PM 07/31/2018
Christopher Smith | Contributor
Democratic Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono received a quick lesson on U.S. immigration law from ICE official Matthew Albence during a hearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday.
WATCH:
“Would you send your child to [the Family Residential Center]?” Hirono asked.
Albence appeared to be losing his patience with the senator’s line of questioning and perceived lack of understanding of the issue, saying, “Again, I think we’re missing the point. These individuals are there because they have broken a law. There has to be a process.”
The senator, not liking where Albence’s answer was leading, interjected: “They have broken a law only as deemed so by the president,” she said.
“No, ma’am. They’re there for violation of Title 8 of the immigration of the U.S. and Nationality Act. OK? They’re 8 USC 1325 — that’s illegal entry — is both a criminal and civil violation,” Albence retorted. “They are in those FRCs pending the outcome of that civil immigration process. They have broken the law,” he concluded.
Hirono, now visibly both flustered and frustrated, tried to draw a distinction between civil and criminal proceedings, but was again quickly shot down by the ICE representative.
“There were criminal proceedings when the border patrol prosecuted them, but at the conclusion of that process, once the individual came into ICE custody, they would go through administrative proceedings,” Albence told the Senator.
Albence’s answer appeared to be too much for the Senator to handle, as she responded by simply saying, “I’m confused.”
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https://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2018/08/arab-living-in-mexico-smuggles-6-yemenis-into-u-s-via-southern-border/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tipsheet&utm_term=members&utm_content=20180807050257
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/376493.php
Really, really peaceful!
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https://israelunwired.com/illegal-immigrants-storm-beach-in-spain-as-beachgoers-look-on/
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apparently not
We no longer have that policy since obama wants only future Democrats to enter the country:
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/florida-keys/article215222015.html
as for the Africans running on the beach , I don't know how long their journey is but I assume they are looking for toilets
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No? How awesome!!!
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https://townhall.com/columnists//kurtschlichter/2018/08/23/november-must-be-the-mollie-tibbetts-election-n2511999
The November Election Is About Illegal Alien Crime
Kurt Schlichter |Posted: Aug 23, 2018 12:01 AM
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not represent the views of Townhall.com.
If you’re cool with Americans being butchered by illegal aliens, this November you should vote Democrat. They’re certainly cool with Americans being butchered by illegal aliens. Oh, in theory they would probably prefer that the foreigners sneaking into our country in defiance of the laws we American citizens made through our elected representatives would stop butchering Americans. They don’t particularly want your kids to be butchered. They just want uncontrolled illegal immigration more than your kids’ safety. So, they’ve made a choice to be the party of illegal immigration. And the resulting body count is a price Democrats are willing to pay to replace an electorate of Normal Americans who refuse to obey.
The Democrats are the party of No Borders, of Abolish ICE, and of murdered Americans. You cannot howl and shriek in support of X yet deny that you accept the foreseeable, demonstrated consequences of X.
Now we know Mollie Tibbetts was murdered by an illegal alien. Add her name to the butcher’s bill. And who was shocked? Who said, “Gosh, that’s surprising!” Who said, “Whoa, I don’t believe it!”
No one. Because it happens all the time. Her life, like the lives of so many others, was snuffed out because our elite made a conscious choice to risk our lives to satisfy its own interests. She was just more collateral damage. We better decide in November where we stand, because a Democrat majority means this bloodbath continues.
Your daughter, shot dead in front of you on a wharf. Your son, knifed by gang members. Your daughter, murdered and dumped in an Iowa cornfield. That’s what you get if you elect Democrats, because that’s what their open borders policies enable.
But our elite can live with that. They will live with that behind their communities’ gates, where their only experience with illegal immigration is their friendly, cheap nanny and industrious, cut-rate gardener. A few lives of people the elite will never meet is a small price to pay for a massive new Democrat constituency. And they’ll happily pay it.
Am I being unfair?
Is saying this outrageous?
Go to hell.
We’re sick of American citizens paying checks written in blood by a Democrat Party that absolutely refuses to allow our government to do the two most basic jobs of any government – securing our country’s borders and protecting our citizenry.
Our citizenry, not foreigners. They have no right to be here. None. Those that are here stay here by our grace and at our pleasure. We are American citizens – and that includes my legal immigrant wife. This is our country. We rule, not an unaccountable elite that wants to import a more pliable electorate and a more pliable serf class to do the jobs Americans don’t want to do because the Chamber of Commerce types don’t want to pay them fairly.
No more Americans should die because of our worthless elite’s greed.
Not one more Jamiel Shaw.
Not one more Kate Steinle.
Not one more Mollie Tibbetts.
How about our cities be sanctuaries for our children, not alien thugs? No more slaughtered victims sacrificed on the altar of political correctness.
This fall, we need to stand up and demand to be heard. The Democrats will never listen, but the Republicans will. Some will listen because they get it, because they understand that this can’t go on. And others, the weak and the bought off and the feckless Fredocons of Conservative, Inc., will listen because if they don’t we’ll crush them at the ballot box.
Recommended
Sen. Warren On Mollie Tibbetts: Yeah, It Sucks She's Dead, But Illegals At The Border Are More Important
Matt Vespa
Here’s the platform.
No amnesty. None. Go home.
Abolish ICE? Quadruple ICE.
Build the wall. A real wall, the kind that keep people out – and that keeps out the opioids and meth that wreck so many American lives.
What are your questions, Republicans?
Democrats, why are you willing to let even one more Mollie Tibbetts die?
That’s what our platform must be, because these midterm elections are about our children’s lives. And maybe our kids don’t matter much to our useless elite, but they matter to us.
Donald Trump tapped into the anger of Normal people at this outrage, this utter betrayal of American citizens, when he dared break the taboo and tell the truth about illegal immigration. It destroys American communities, it destroys American livelihoods, and it destroys American lives. As my upcoming book Militant Normals: How Regular Americans Are Rebelling Against the Elite to Reclaim Our Democracy explains, we Normals see what’s happening, and we’re fighting mad at an elite that does not care.
To the elite, our protests are an annoyance. Another wonderful life gets snuffed out at the hands of someone they tolerated coming here illegally and being here illegally, and their first thought is how this is probably going to help Trump.
Well, it better help him. You better vote like your life or your kid’s life depends on it, because it does.
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https://israelunwired.com/iranian-spies-arrested-in-the-u-s-planning-a-terror-attack/
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/sep/12/illegal-immigration-soars-families-spot-holes/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=manual&utm_campaign=20171227&utm_term=newsletter&utm_content=morning&bt_ee=8b%2BOKKkcreihh9zxcJZohcg1jT3mbLg0iv4Qk6LUo89lYkio2pZWUhx6%2BVLJRIeM&bt_ts=1536835587290
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House Acknowledges the Need for a National Terrorist Registry
by Patrick Dunleavy • Sep 17, 2018 at 11:46 am
https://www.investigativeproject.org/7622/house-acknowledges-the-need-for-a-national
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https://www.breitbart.com/economics/2018/09/19/largest-u-s-public-pension-fund-looks-to-hand-control-over-to-chinese-official/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=daily&utm_content=links&utm_campaign=20180919
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House Acknowledges the Need for a National Terrorist Registry
by Patrick Dunleavy • Sep 17, 2018 at 11:46 am
https://www.investigativeproject.org/7622/house-acknowledges-the-need-for-a-national
https://www.wnd.com/2017/06/no-refugees-no-terror-for-poland-hungary/
Funny how that works. I again thank Bigdog for pointing out the disproportionate number of terrorists muslim immigration brings here.
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(https://westernrifleshooters.files.wordpress.com/2018/09/dnippxouyaa9y8u.jpg)
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http://click1.email.thehill.com/ViewMessage.do?m=ldgmqjqm&r=rwrcwwkjn&s=okqmscfgqttpcptkwqqmmqfntftvvlqgcrn&q=1539696179&a=view
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" President Trump threatens Honduras over Caravan "
The exact right response, but apparently symbolic :
Compared to private investment in Honduras government aid is less then ~ 1.5 million .
https://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/1922.htm
Wonder if the caravan obviously designed with help from the Democrats will get to the Texas border just in time for the election .
Drag all their kids with them , some maybe pregnant , and holler my life is at risk and I seek asylum.
With English translation cards provided by DNC and CNN and ACLU and immigration lawyers swarming at the border reception (Nov 4 or 5 ?).
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If I read that source correctly, (btw outstanding work in finding and posting it!) that $1.5M is but one program.
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https://www.speroforum.com/a/KIOBUXTAOX11/84156-Hondruas-responds-to-Trump-as-massive-migrant-caravan-heads-to-US?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=JQFQKZVCLU8&utm_content=KIOBUXTAOX11&utm_source=news&utm_term=Hondruas+responds+to+Trump+as+massive+migrant+caravan+heads+to+US#.W8a6vfZRfcs
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CD's post above - sounds good
Hopefully another Trump "victory"
we will see if it works or just temporary
Last night on Ingraham the total aid to Honduras is noted to be 65 million - not a small sum
She had guest on who thinks the caravan was organized by the cartels
when she asked , like me, who is funding and organizing this.
some how I think it is somehow more then just cartels and related to activists her in US possibly with funding by the Left.
just a hunch .
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CD's post above - sounds good
Hopefully another Trump "victory"
we will see if it works or just temporary
Last night on Ingraham the total aid to Honduras is noted to be 65 million - not a small sum
She had guest on who thinks the caravan was organized by the cartels
when she asked , like me, who is funding and organizing this.
some how I think it is somehow more then just cartels and related to activists her in US possibly with funding by the Left.
just a hunch .
Look for Soron and Hoyer money.
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President Trump has added Guatemala and El Salvador to the list.
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https://thehill.com/latino/411990-trump-threatens-military-action-at-border-if-mexico-doesnt-stop-immigration-onslaught?userid=188403
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So we have been hearing how Russia tried to influence our election in '16
So what do you call 4K or more Hondurans making a planned spectacle to show up at our border just before an election ?
Leftist media suddenly finds foreign influence into an election to be used as a weapon to use against one party .
I pray it backfires
It may be already too late ; Trump can't seem to stem the tide ....
The distance fromo Honduras to Texas is roughly 1441 miles
Thus it would be impossible that they are walking 70 miles per day to get here
The Dems are financing their food their transportation
and will have an DNC army waiting for them at the border
And the Ryan Repubs did nothing for 2 yrs
squat
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So we have been hearing how Russia tried to influence our election in '16
So what do you call 4K or more Hondurans making a planned spectacle to show up at our border just before an election ?
Leftist media suddenly finds foreign influence into an election to be used as a weapon to use against one party .
...
The Dems are financing their food their transportation
and will have an DNC army waiting for them at the border
...
Political analysis home run for ccp there. Projecting is what Leftists do. What they accuse is what they are doing and hiding or denying. "Influencing elections" is something akin to treason they imply yet they are constantly doing it.
Obama people tried to defeat Netanyahu in Israel and Tories in the UK, both allies. Then they scream, how can Trump even talk to someone, Putin, who allegedly did that here?
It turns out Trump did not collude with Russia in 2016, but Clinton via Ohr and Steele did. Lucky for them 100% of the news coverage cut in their favor on that for some unknown reason.
Look at the whole immigration debate. Leftists motives don't even try to hide in plain sight. They want more Democrat voters and will do anything to get them. Add felons to that list, shamelessly. Illegals vote, perhaps millions, and Democrats oppose all Voter ID measures, they oppose all efforts to identify fraud, and then they initiate government efforts to target them for voter registration as documented in the Immigration issues thread, motor voter and tenant voter initiatives.
Trump the extremist candidate's most extreme issues was immigration. Instead of calling him out on that in the debates, Hillary took an even more extreme position, her far left party line's position of no border enforcement whatsoever and voting rights to anyone who successfully crosses.
That isn't about trying to influence elections? That's exactly what it is and both sides know it. Somehow they get away with framing it in reverse, that Republicans don't want an invasion because they will bring their third world voting habits with them. On that I plea guilty as charged. It's not because they are Mexican, Honduran, Somali or terrorist, I don't want anyone to come here FROM ANYWHERE en masse with the intention of disrupting our political system and turning us into a third world country.
Regarding the money, let's track it. If this is the same George Soros backed groups that are putting something like a half billion into the midterms, let's stop just alleging it and prove it and call them out on it.
https://moneymorning.com/2017/08/31/liberal-billionaire-george-soros-will-spend-more-on-the-2018-midterm-race-than-ever-before/
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https://gellerreport.com/2018/10/isis-caravan-guatemala.html/
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A high ranking friend in Border Patrol tells me that this is accurate.
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https://www.speroforum.com/a/HFDVCKGUPW4/84196-Doubts-emerge-about-bombs-sent-to-Obama-and-Hillary?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=INDFTUZYZB30&utm_content=HFDVCKGUPW4&utm_source=news&utm_term=Doubts+emerge+about+bombs+sent+to+Obama+and+Hillary#.W9FmN_ZRfcs
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second post
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/cnn-pipe-bomb-white-powder-harmless-law-enforcement-report/
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/cnn-pipe-bomb-white-powder-harmless-law-enforcement-report/
What we know for sure is that whoever sent these wanted to create a media and public attention circus at this particular time which happens to be just before the midterm elections.
There was zero chance that some kind of an obvious or fake explosive was going to make it through Secret Service who protects two ex-Presidents. In the case of Hillary Clinton, the sender didn't even try hard enough to track her public appearance travel schedule before sending to her. She was in Florida, but took the time to make a public statement on the matter.
We will know more when the facts come in. Hopefully they solve this faster and better than anthrax scare of a number of years ago.
http://thefederalist.com/2018/02/08/robert-mueller-botching-investigations-since-anthrax-attacks/
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/cnn-pipe-bomb-white-powder-harmless-law-enforcement-report/
What we know for sure is that whoever sent these wanted to create a media and public attention circus at this particular time which happens to be just before the midterm elections.
There was zero chance that some kind of an obvious or fake explosive was going to make it through Secret Service who protects two ex-Presidents. In the case of Hillary Clinton, the sender didn't even try hard enough to track her public appearance travel schedule before sending to her. She was in Florida, but took the time to make a public statement on the matter.
We will know more when the facts come in. Hopefully they solve this faster and better than anthrax scare of a number of years ago.
http://thefederalist.com/2018/02/08/robert-mueller-botching-investigations-since-anthrax-attacks/
https://nypost.com/2018/10/24/bomb-sent-to-cnn-came-with-envelope-of-white-powder/
This is the pipe bomb sent to CNN
By Larry Celona, Aaron Feis and Bruce Golding October 24, 2018 | 1:44pm | Updated
Modal Trigger
This is the pipe bomb sent to CNN
Twitter
They all arrived in identical packaging.
The five apparent pipe bombs sent to former President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, CNN’s New York City headquarters and others were each placed in a nondescript manila envelope lined with bubble wrap, the FBI said Wednesday.
The mailers all bore six American-flag “Forever” stamps and computer-printed address labels.
SEE ALSO
CNN building evacuated as anchors cover bombs sent to Clinton, Obama
CNN building evacuated as anchors cover bombs sent to Clinton, Obama
“All packages had a return address of ‘DEBBIE WASSERMAN SHULTZ’ [sic] in Florida,” the FBI said in a statement
The envelope sent to former CIA Director John Brennan at CNN offices in Manhattan also had his name misspelled, as was Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s home state, according to photos released by CNN.
That envelope didn’t bear a postmark, and law-enforcement sources told CNN it was delivered by a courier.
Photos of the device show a cylindrical object, about six inches long, wrapped in black electrical tape and with wires emerging from either end.
The wires — one red and one black — lead to a digital clock or timer taped to the middle of the tube.
A senior law-enforcement official told The New York Times that it resembled the others, saying, “Same package. Same device.”
The FBI described the devices as “potentially destructive,” and law-enforcement sources told The Post that the first one discovered — in a mailbox outside the Katonah home of billionaire George Soros Monday — had black powder on it.
But a source briefed on that device and the one sent to CNN told The Post on Wednesday that they couldn’t actually have blown up because neither was equipped with a blasting cap or other means of detonating explosive material.
“There was nothing to ignite it,” the source said. “There was nothing there.”
The source also said an envelope of unidentified powder contained in the CNN package was too small to create a radiological or biological “dirty bomb.”
The fact that none of the bombs blew up suggests they were built by an amateur, former FBI Agent Steve Gomez told ABC News.
The NYPD used its rarely seen Total Containment Vessel to move the CNN device from the network’s bureau at the Time Warner Center in Columbus Circle to the Rodman’s Neck police facility in The Bronx.
Members of the department’s elite Bomb Squad carefully loaded the device into the back of the TCV, placing it onto a suspended net inside the chamber designed to minimize jostling, police sources said.
The TCV, which is mounted on the back of a NYPD Emergency Service Unit truck, is engineered to withstand a blast from within should the device trigger during the trip, minimizing damage to those outside.
In the early afternoon, police blocked off a route to Rodman’s Neck, providing the TCV with quick access to the facility with minimal risk to motorists.
Escorted by a convoy of emergency vehicles, the TCV wound its way to the remote firing range and training facility.
Now, technicians from both the NYPD and FBI are figuring out how to safely transport the device to federal labs for further examination, NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence and Counterterrorism John Miller said in a press briefing.
The process is being hampered by the envelope of powder included in the package with the bomb, Miller said.
Ideally, investigators would like to disarm the bomb without detonating it, allowing them to comb over it for any clues to the maker’s identity, including fingerprints and DNA, sources said.
A TCV was also used to transport one of Chelsea bomber Ahmad Khan Rahimi’s undetonated pressure-cooker explosives to the facility in 2016.
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I'm guessing its the Russians
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I'm guessing its the Russians
Of course!
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Ohio Man Allegedly Wanted ISIS Training, Hoped to Trigger U.S. Conflict
by Abha Shankar • Oct 25, 2018 at 5:21 pm
https://www.investigativeproject.org/7673/ohio-man-allegedly-wanted-isis-training-hoped-to
An Ohio man was charged Wednesday with attempting to provide material support to the ISIS Wilayat Khorasan, the Islamic State's branch in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Naser Almadaoji, a 19-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen from Iraq, was arrested at John Glenn International Airport in Columbus, Ohio. He planned to travel to Astana, Kazakhstan, hoping then to be smuggled into Afghanistan to be trained by the ISIS affiliate.
Almadaoji was questioned by Customs and Border Protection agents last February after a trip to Egypt and Jordan, an FBI affidavit attached to his criminal complaint said. He said he wanted to join the Peshmergan military in northern Iraq "to stop ISIS" and criticized the terrorist group for killing Muslims. But he also said American airstrikes had killed Muslims and the U.S. forces needed to leave the Middle East.
It isn't clear what triggered it, but the FBI had a confidential source posing as an ISIS supporter contact Almadaoji in August via a messaging app. Almadaoji later told the informant he wanted to trigger a civil conflict between the U.S. government and anti-government militias: "...I imagined a scenario of the collapse of the US as a nation.... They have alot [sic] of weak spots 2 really weak spots that would ignite the deadliest civil war on earth if the right spots are poked."
To trigger this conflict, he imagined planting child pornography on militia leaders' computers, then tipping off the FBI to their presence. He also spoke of assassinating militia leaders.
Federal buildings were "more sensitive for the militias to hit than police stations and military bases," he said. "With a coordinated attack such as car bombings parked next to fed buildings with all the previous build we talked about.... And there you have the US on its knees."
Almadaoji, who allegedly pledged bayat, or allegiance, to ISIS, put together "a list of do's and don'ts" for prospective ISIS recruits based on his travel experience to Egypt and Jordan. It included suggestions to "dress like a western guy," buy a roundtrip ticket to avoid suspicion by authorities, "delete anything suspicious in your phone" and if asked "who financed the trip, tell them you did."
"Don't freak out," he wrote. "Remember Allah, put your trust in Him Subhanahu wa Ta'ala stick to your cover. Be nice to the officer questioning you, have a smile, keep direct eye contact, and of course be cooperative."
Almadaoji translated ISIS propaganda into a digital file that he titled, "In The Name of Allah.docx." He also said he was a follower of now-deceased al-Qaida cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who has been responsible for the online radicalization of thousands of youth.
While he talked about domestic attacks, Almadaoji never stopped planning to travel abroad for ISIS training. He said he wanted to be trained in weapons, kidnapping, hit and run attacks and more. The affidavit makes it sound like most of September and October were spent arranging financing for the trip.
He was arrested at an airport ticket counter after he received his boarding pass. He faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.
Related Topics: Prosecutions | Abha Shankar, ISIS, Naser Almadaoji, ISIS Wilayat Khorasan, informants, terror plots, Anwar al-Awlaki, bayat
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second post
A series of crudely-made improvised explosive devices have been delivered to prominent political, business and entertainment figures in the United States, from Oct. 22 onward. The letter bomb packages are likely assembled and distributed by the same — as yet unknown — individual or group. To date, none of the timer-initiated pipe bomb-type devices has successfully detonated.
Who Was Targeted?
A pipe bomb, probably hand-delivered, was removed from the mailbox of investor George Soros' home in Bedford, New York, on the afternoon of Oct. 22.
A device addressed to the home of Bill and Hillary Clinton in Chappaqua, New York, was intercepted at a mail-screening facility late on Oct. 23.
A device intended for the Washington, D.C., residence of former U.S. President Barack Obama was intercepted before it could be delivered early on Oct. 24.
Later that day, a package containing a pipe bomb and suspicious white powder was discovered in the mailroom of CNN's New York offices, addressed to former CIA Director John Brennan.
Again on Oct. 24, a bomb squad was called to the Florida offices of Democratic U.S. House Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz after a suspicious package arrived. (The package was originally intended for Eric Holder Jr., Obama's first attorney general, but had Wasserman Schultz's office listed as a return address.)
On Oct. 25, another suspicious package was delivered to actor Robert De Niro at his film and television production company in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York City.
Two further packages were intercepted, addressed to former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden. One was found at a mail facility in New Castle, Delaware, the other was reportedly found in Wilmington, Delaware.
The FBI confirmed that two additional packages had been sent to California state representative Maxine Waters, one of which was discovered at a mail facility in Los Angeles.
What We Know About the Packages So Far
The packages share many common characteristics. Publicly released images show tape-sealed manila envelopes with at least six first-class postage stamps emblazoned with the flag of the United States. Address labels are computer printed and taped to the front of the package. Errors in some of the addresses led to certain packages being returned to the attached "sender" address, in most cases Wasserman Schultz's Florida office.
Contained within the discovered packages were rudimentary pipe bombs. The casing type used was reportedly 1 inch by 6 inch (2.53 centimeter by 15.24 centimeter) PVC pipe, wrapped in black tape. The explosive type has been reported as pyrotechnic powder — the first recovered device was apparently packed with black powder. Reports indicate that a relatively small amount of explosive was contained within each device. Broken glass was reportedly used to fill out the packages as the shrapnel component. In terms of initiation, at least one of the recovered devices employed a timer powered by a small button battery, similar to the kind used in digital clocks. The timer was connected to a hot bridgewire initiator. The gauge of the wire used in the device was fairly heavy and it is unclear whether such a small battery would have enough power to overcome the resistance of the wires and produce enough heat in the bridgewire to detonate the device. Authorities have reported that the envelope mailed to CNN contained white powder of an undetermined nature.
What Next?
Unless the culprit is found, it is likely that the pattern of incidents will continue to evolve. Because some devices were sent through the mail, similar devices could be theoretically dispatched to any location and may not be uncovered immediately. As seen in the Austin bombings in early 2018 and a number of anarchist letter bombings, these individual incidents tend to be part of larger campaigns. Though all individuals targeted have been criticized by U.S. President Donald Trump, authorities have not released information about the motivations — political or otherwise — of the sender. The interception of the devices by the Secret Service once again demonstrates the value of the mail-screening process.
The use of a digital clock timer is odd for an explosive device sent by mail. Previous lethal parcel bombs have used a trigger set to detonate when the package is opened, calling into question the intended lethality of the current devices. NBC reported that the device sent to the CNN offices in New York had an image on it parodying the flag of the Prophet Mohammed (commonly employed by the Islamic State and al Qaeda) with the phrase "Get 'Er Done," a motif created for a right-wing parody news site in 2014, which has been frequently shared in right-wing forums. There is also a photo of an unidentified person next to this sticker.
More packages are likely to show up because these incidents typically come in waves, though the timing could be staggered as the bomber attempts to elude authorities. Devices mailed to individuals who do not have the protection of organizations like the U.S. Secret Service or Capitol Police are far more likely to reach their target — or at least their home or office — as demonstrated by the devices delivered to George Soros, John Brennan and Robert De Niro.
Since the parcels used so far have received so much attention and now are highly recognizable, the bomber may change up the packaging and delivery methods to avoid detection. The intense scrutiny may also lead to a higher likelihood that other devices will be ensured to detonate. The bomber could also begin sending parcels to random targets to shift the target set in an attempt to throw off authorities and to get through to less secure targets. Using basic mail-screening practices, individuals can recognize potentially threatening packages that are unexpected, misshapen or rigid, contain typos, have too much postage or are excessively taped. Parcel bombs can come in many shapes and sizes, and stopping them means knowing what to look for.
Attaching white powder and an image which evokes those associated with jihadist groups most likely means that the author of the attack didn't intend for the devices to detonate, so the additional material could be found intact and spread fear. None of the devices has detonated, and the explosive material actually contained within the devices appears limited. Furthermore, the use of a timer as a detonator does not make much tactical sense in an operation intended to kill. The devices were all mailed to high-profile individuals, meaning that most of the packages were intercepted in mail-screening facilities and the threat contained.
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ok so Chuck Todd reads the forum!
https://ntknetwork.com/chuck-todd-i-fear-the-russians-could-be-behind-the-mail-bomb-scare/
(how do we know it was not Wasserman Schultz afterall?
she has motive knock off every one else then she has clear field to run for '20.
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/bombing-suspect-identified/
Any relation to the Sayocs of Sayoc Kali?
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One annoying thing about this is CNn will not take one iota of introspection for their insulting half the country every single minute of every single day
and will of course blame Trump.
I admit the guy could not have chosen a better cast of Dem party hacks though....
It is a whos who of the most obnoxious ones .
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/bombing-suspect-identified/
Any relation to the Sayocs of Sayoc Kali?
I smell a deep state Patsy here. Think a propaganda operation is what we are looking at.
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/bombing-suspect-identified/
Any relation to the Sayocs of Sayoc Kali?
My quick reading of the accused, he doesn't vote with us. If he votes at all it is because Democrats keep trying to give voting rights back to convicted felons.
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For the record Sayoc Kali has said he is not one of theirs and they strongly condemn his action.
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C:\Users\Marc Denny\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\INetCache\Content.Outlook\PVIXRQXE\email (003).mht
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C:\Users\Marc Denny\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\INetCache\Content.Outlook\PVIXRQXE\email (003).mht
Yeah, you might want to delete that and try again.
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Migrants seeking asylum must accept it nearest country/where first offered
https://www.apnews.com/4489c5ef0f224930aba2ddd55f906732
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/bombing-suspect-identified/
Any relation to the Sayocs of Sayoc Kali?
I smell a deep state Patsy here. Think a propaganda operation is what we are looking at.
https://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2018/10/inspector-columbo-just-couple-of-more.html?m=1
Saturday, October 27, 2018
Inspector Columbo: "Just a couple of more questions..."
And getting back to Lunabomber for one last minute this morning...
Comments here and elsewhere have riffed on the old Freudian "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" line.
I.E., this @$$clown could just be that stupid, and is exactly what the MSM is portraying: A rabid right-wing bomb-mailing wannabe murderer, like all the Deplorables are.
I could see one or two things lining up.
But this is the crime scene in Jack Reacher:
Guy leaves one latent print.
They walk right up to his homeless guy molester van in a metropolis of several million people, and arrest him the next day, like he had a fucking address that said “Trump MAGA sticker-covered van, third row, fourth palm tree from the middle, at 3765 W 207th St” on his vehicle registration, and was wearing a GPS ankle bracelet.
Makes the bombs look cartoonish, yet impossible to detonate, ensuring the FBI has fucktons of surviving evidence.
Does everything but write “Please Open: Bomb Inside” on envelopes.
They get to 12 locations without ever being mailed, but he’s supposed to have sent them via courier. With postage. Like you do.
None of them go to people who open their own mail.
None of them go off, nor could go off.
The media gets invited in by way of getting a couple of their own examples.
Supposedly Republican, waits until we’re liable to have a red wave, then sends devices two weeks before elections, because reasons.
Lights every light on the “not a Republican” list:
Minority
felon
living in his van
pedo/perv
Lives in such Republican hotbed states as NY, NJ, MN.
Looks like the exact mouth-breathing goober DiFi and Pelosi would hire for the role.
The press conference and talking points are ready to be rolled out in 0.2 seconds after the first one is found.
Brennan calls “GOP”, gets his own bomb the next day.
Soros-spawn gets NYTimes knee-jerk editorial while the final bombs are still en route.
Now come on, anybody could get one or two, but eleventy-nineteen and counting, and this is looking like powerball odds of him being the Democrat Wet Dream Fantasy Football Republican Whacktard Pick Of The Year.
This is like someone panhandling and asking for a sandwich when you’re hungry, and instantly an entire 11-course Thanksgiving Dinner is catered to you on the spot, in 5 seconds, including whipped cream on the pumpkin pie, a personal waiter pouring champagne, and a guy playing violin music while bikini-clad models hand feed you peeled grapes as the appetizer.
While carrying the rifle that’s a ballistic match to the JFK bullets on his shoulder, and holding a postcard of himself on the Grassy Knoll in 1963, holding a rifle.
So yeah, FTR, this could have “just happened”.
And been wrapped up and solved faster than cases on TV on CSI.
Exactly two weeks before the election.
IF YOU'RE FUCKING HIGH AS HELL ON TWENTY POUNDS OF CRACK, METH, AND PCP.
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https://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2018/10/life-imitates-art.html?m=1
Saturday, October 27, 2018
Life Imitates Art
So now that the thumbprint on James Barr's quarter allowed the FBI to track down serial hoax-bomber Cesar Sayoc in time for the credits on CSI:Miami, let's note a couple more details.
1) Tom Marvolo Riddle = I am Lord Voldemort
Cesar Sayoc = accessory
2) Guy identifies online with two opposing political parties.
Only is a Republican now, when he's mailing bombs.
3) Trump meme stickers are unfaded in FL sunlight. After 10 months.
Conspicuous Trump-van isn't torched, despite being in (D)-majority county.
4) Guy lives in a van, because he can't afford an apartment.
But he's got the money to make 10 faux prop-bombs.
And pay for courier delivery.
Then blows more money on unnecessary postage.
Like you do when you're so poor you're living in your van in a parking lot.
And has internet access and a cellphone.
Like you do when you're so poor you're living in a van in a parking lot.
5) But can find obscure non-published addresses for his targets.
5a) Which are recockulously stupid choices.
5b) Who never open their own mail, since ever.
6) Guy can't spell Florida - where he lives - right on the return address label.
7) Is Filipino, but "identifies" as Seminole.
Pop quiz: One of these things is not like the other. Spot the outlier:
Elizabeth Warren (D) - MA identifies as Cherokee
Rachel Dolezal (D) - WA identifies as black
Bob O'Rourke (D) - TX identifies as Hispanic
Cesar Sayoc ("R?") - FL identifies as Seminole
Which one doesn't fit the profile?
Sudoku Bonus: Solve the puzzle above, and make it fit.
Elizabeth Warren (D) - MA white, identifies as Cherokee
Rachel Dolezal (D) - WA white, identifies as black
Bob O'Rourke (D) - TX white, identifies as hispanic
Cesar Sayoc (D) - FL Asian, identifies as Seminole
8) Sending out bombs that you know won't explode, ever, does what, and for which party, two weeks before election day?
Hint:
Rich old Arab sheik is dying, calls his two princely heirs to his bedside, and tells them, "You must race each other around the boundaries of my lands. The one whose horse crosses the finish line last shall inherit my lands and fortune."
They stand there, immobile.
The sheik's wise old advisor whispers two words to them, and suddenly they both jump on their horses, and tear like hell across the desert.
What were the two words whispered?
"Trade horses."
9) Left wing bomb throwers include, literally, everyone. Sacco & Vanzetti, the L.A. Times bombers, the IRA, the PLO, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the SDS, and on and on.
Name five right wing bombers, since ever.
10) I'm still waiting.
11) Why go batshit nuts now? Not two years ago, not a year ago, not even last month amidst the Kavanaugh Kaos. But right now, two weeks ahead of elections.
Cui bono?
12) How long after this narrative of "Batcrap crazy right-wing Trump Supporter mailing bombs to Democrats" went right into the shitter, because no one was buying it, before we suddenly had the obligatory pre-election mass shooting, of a Dem interest group, in a gun-free zone?
"Don't mind us burning codebooks in the Japanese embassy on Sunday morning, President Roosevelt. We're doing it on a Sunday morning so we don't bother the staff on a work day."
So yeah, looking at all that, it's perfectly logical to assume that all this just happened.
Because Patsy Sayoc is a clueless misguided moron. Which explains everything.
Who totally coincidentally decided to pull a massive PR stunt hoax-bomb campaign, right after the serial failures of the Mueller investigation, Kavanaugh sliming, the collapse of the Blue Wave myth, the exposure and backfiring of the Democratic Mob Rule tactics, and the meltdown of the criminal/terrorist caravan from Shitholia, and feeds the narrative that Republicans are the real terrorists, right before the elections.
Like we always pull when three formerly Democrat slam-dunk senatorial campaigns are now either dead heats, or favor the Republican, in a massive shift in the last two weeks.
After the President has held yuuuuuuuuuuge rallies, promising unbelievable turnout of a fed-up conservative electorate, and kicking the imaginary Blue Wave right in the crotch.
Pull the other leg; it's got bells on it.
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https://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2018/10/elaborately-planned-caravan-brings-human-traffickers-violent-gangbangers-to-guatemala/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tipsheet&utm_term=members&utm_content=20181029191745
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=49&v=enXvVPU3Dyo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=638&v=ohmrGnPjIvw
https://www.speroforum.com/a/ADDRAFBRYX1/84215-Mexico-shocked-by-masked-US-border-patrol?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYPKLSZNPH37&utm_content=ADDRAFBRYX1&utm_source=news&utm_term=Mexico+shocked+by+masked+US+border+patrol#.W9fpk_ZRfcs
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=49&v=enXvVPU3Dyo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=638&v=ohmrGnPjIvw
https://www.speroforum.com/a/ADDRAFBRYX1/84215-Mexico-shocked-by-masked-US-border-patrol?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYPKLSZNPH37&utm_content=ADDRAFBRYX1&utm_source=news&utm_term=Mexico+shocked+by+masked+US+border+patrol#.W9fpk_ZRfcs
Long overdue. Glad to see it!
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https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/doj-and-dhs-issue-new-asylum-rule?fbclid=IwAR0VGOPQbOlhtnpcoY8MF-7PfwERtpLB_L2SKfwblsCoKk7J9PT_IH_UXMI
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=13&v=LLJtznxJ1-g
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20 million dollars per mile ?
This seems crazy:
https://www.westernjournal.com/us-government-awards-contract-another-chunk-border-wall-built/
The new line for illegals - many are "LGBT " and are fleeing persecution at home........ :roll:
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=5&v=1BHHd2bT0_E
Just a hardworking guy seeking a better life!
So I wonder what Mexican law enforcement and/or military unit trained him...
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https://noticieros.televisa.com/ultimas-noticias/integrantes-caravana-migrante-tambien-llegan-mexicali/
https://noticieros.televisa.com/ultimas-noticias/motiva-segunda-caravana-migrante-esperanza-mejor-futuro/
Private sector offers 7-10,000 jobs!
https://noticieros.televisa.com/ultimas-noticias/caravana-migrante-sector-empresarial-de-mexico-ofrece-empleo-migrantes-centroamericanos/
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Crossing shut down to block caravan. I bet locals, who use the crossing to go work, are pist!
https://noticieros.televisa.com/ultimas-noticias/cierran-garita-san-ysidro-por-presencia-de-caravana-migrante/
https://noticieros.televisa.com/ultimas-noticias/integrantes-caravana-migrante-tambien-llegan-mexicali/
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/nov/21/border-troops-authorized-use-force/?bt_ee=8DBJyOJ5yQYNjcZ%2F3YYyYuliiq%2BsezM249r%2FN%2B2Ve%2F49YFxpwl5jyhDLCjmXHuDb&bt_ts=1542829043488
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=lfP2UJP0hJE
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https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/mexico-sides-trump-looks-completely-shut-illegal-immigration-us/?utm_source=push&utm_medium=conservativetribune&utm_content=2018-11-25&utm_campaign=manualpost
https://noticieros.televisa.com/ultimas-noticias/trump-recomienda-a-mexico-ser-inteligente-y-frenar-las-caravanas-migrantes/
https://noticieros.televisa.com/ultimas-noticias/trump-insiste-migrantes-esperen-mexico-mientras-tramitan-asilo/
https://noticieros.televisa.com/ultimas-noticias/inm-otorga-retorno-asistido-mil-migrantes-centroamericanos/?utm_medium=ONESIGNAL&utm_source=SITE&utm_campaign=PUSHNOTIFICATION
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https://defensemaven.io/bluelivesmatter/news/breaking-migrants-breach-wall-throw-rocks-get-gassed-back-to-mexico-videos-RnCuAZYykk6HdLIKI6KBqQ/?fbclid=IwAR1ggK78DJMZjo1ghac_NgLQwjFS8gy0QfezaxLiwob6zZ9xlQRxbmLTFQA
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https://defensemaven.io/bluelivesmatter/news/breaking-migrants-breach-wall-throw-rocks-get-gassed-back-to-mexico-videos-RnCuAZYykk6HdLIKI6KBqQ/?fbclid=IwAR1ggK78DJMZjo1ghac_NgLQwjFS8gy0QfezaxLiwob6zZ9xlQRxbmLTFQA
Thank you for posting this.
Liberal Media: Stop calling it an invasion.
Answer: Have you seen the video? It's an invasion unless we stop it.
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https://defensemaven.io/bluelivesmatter/news/breaking-migrants-breach-wall-throw-rocks-get-gassed-back-to-mexico-videos-RnCuAZYykk6HdLIKI6KBqQ/?fbclid=IwAR1ggK78DJMZjo1ghac_NgLQwjFS8gy0QfezaxLiwob6zZ9xlQRxbmLTFQA
Thank you for posting this.
Liberal Media: Stop calling it an invasion.
Answer: Have you seen the video? It's an invasion unless we stop it.
For the left, it's an affirmation to them that there shouldn't be a border at all.
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It would be an invasion if they and the legions of family members the bring in were future Republicans
To the crats this is not an invasion but future Democrat party recruitment drives .
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"For the left, it's an affirmation to them that there shouldn't be a border at all."
That was an amazing moment in the 2016 debate. Trump accused Hillary of supporting open borders; it was in her emails released by Wikileaks. Chris Wallace asked her about it and she went on for 90 seconds about energy and Russia never denying it.
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/full-transcript-third-2016-presidential-debate-230063
"A Republic, if you can keep it."
https://www.bartleby.com/73/1593.html
It's definitional. How do you have a republic without borders.
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ccp, Yes, imagine the dynamics if the intruders were Republican and wanted amnesty and voting rights.
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https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-border-patrol-rock-throwing-san-ysidro-2013nov25-story.html?fbclid=IwAR1ZIlD_uTNPL3w5h7wq7Ho97o2wGqwCtBeFHv1R_KJi-5ejJj34dJPqsrA
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https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-border-patrol-rock-throwing-san-ysidro-2013nov25-story.html?fbclid=IwAR1ZIlD_uTNPL3w5h7wq7Ho97o2wGqwCtBeFHv1R_KJi-5ejJj34dJPqsrA
Ah, that was different because shut up, said the left.
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"That was different because shut up."
Right except it's worse than that. In Orwell's 1984 and the Left's 2018, the past never happened shut up.
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https://www.dailysignal.com/2018/11/26/3-times-previous-presidents-closed-the-southern-border/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiT1RreFl6Qm1aVFUwTWpNNCIsInQiOiJDUXdcL1dwbGtJWEVIQlg1SFA2TlAwdHRCR05HQXc4K29oaGNEQ0ZoOHpiNW8weGxIVFpUVWtyeTNKckluanFoYWdlRVUyVFJlMGorZThQZEorcTBqc1N5eEFxUTZPRXF5TzByWWdcL0k5WlB0dDJEVEdId3FRek5Hc0c1a2F3MStrIn0%3D
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https://www.speroforum.com/a/IUIQPW...s+who+cross+the+southwest+border#.W_43W-JRfcs
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Its Breitbart, so caveat lector
https://www.breitbart.com/border/2018/11/28/ms-13-member-says-he-traveled-with-migrant-caravan-to-california/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newslink&utm_term=members&utm_content=20181129013300
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https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/caravanners-get-bad-news-tijuana-govt-rain-coming-not-paying-keep-dry/?utm_source=push&utm_medium=conservativetribune&utm_content=2018-11-29&utm_campaign=manualpost
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https://www.theblaze.com/news/alleged-ms-13-gang-members-child-sex-abuses-arrested-by-us-border-patrol-agents?utm_content=bufferbaa20&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=theblaze
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http://www.iamawake.co/the-eu-funded-wall-that-nobody-wants-to-talk-about-turkey-syria/?fbclid=IwAR3r3euuhjWeMJ9vcOeclED153r7jBwFsLd3PGOwQYNCaWrZ_CC3hzFsFYo
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***The EU-funded wall that nobody wants to talk about***
ssssshhhhhh.
before the libs remove this from the internet.
must be to prevent deer from harming themselves in a war zone
or to keep the Turkish frog safe.
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https://www.westernjournal.com/99-ms-13-gang-members-arrested-all-entered-us-as-unaccompanied-minors/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=westernjournalism&utm_content=2018-12-25&utm_campaign=manualpost&fbclid=IwAR1aQ3zMD3j8KNnaslSjxcXyrq6NRDVu8sPqZ2bBMGP3zxpeejLxC5Is9q4
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/sheriff-border-fence-helped-cut-crime-in-yuma-by-91-percent_2749236.html?fbclid=IwAR0vADT2MnJE_DQ63Jhrco4UGENqjGqa_qtZkc-T4gegkJmNoAl2Dm-ZtF4
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https://www.westernjournal.com/bigger-caravan-honduras/?utm_source=push&utm_medium=westernjournalism&utm_content=2018-12-28&utm_campaign=manualpost
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https://www.dailysignal.com/2019/01/02/trumps-new-asylum-policy-will-help-block-illegal-immigration/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTVRJNVlqTXlaVEU0TkRkaSIsInQiOiJTQ0swcUkxaEpcL2E0N0VYMitRODB4cW1ibzMwSEt3Y2hmOStKK0crZmJwaVlKTnBIelwvQU5BN3FmSGY2bTY1VjljWWRkYzVEaWtZcDJEVzhUWTlyS1BqR3pDWmxJZFdzQmtvNDNKdGc0cUJMWHQzNVwvemlBajRGYTYzcGJVUW5SZCJ9
https://www.uscis.gov/ilink/docView/SLB/HTML/SLB/0-0-0-1/0-0-0-29/0-0-0-5389.html#0-0-0-238
President Trump finally gets going in the bully pulpit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15h8DecnOJk
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http://opencda.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/396705631-SIA-Report-2018.pdf?fbclid=IwAR2atcjJwP-nhO-oQOX7j_Wuzm5rRrGzRRNuzV-JZZPEw5KZ6sgjzM0vTi4
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Started and built with the support of President Obama:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egypt%E2%80%93Gaza_barrier
Support
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas declared support for the barrier, adding: "It is the Egyptians’ sovereign right in their own country. Legitimate supplies should be brought through the legal crossings."[6] The United States announced its support for the barrier saying it would help to prevent weapons smuggling.[7] Cairo's main Al-Azhar University officially backed the government's decision saying that it was the "state's right to build along its walls facilities and obstacles that will enhance its security."[8]
Opposition
Militant Islamist group Hamas, the de facto governing authority of the Gaza Strip, opposes the barrier and has called it a "wall of death".[8]
Hassan Nasrallah, chief of Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, called on Egypt to halt construction.[9]
The Islamic Action Front, a Jordanian Islamist group, criticized Egypt for the barrier and accused it of "collaborating" with Israel and the United States. "The Egyptian authorities are ...increasing the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza by building the steel wall and closing the border crossings with Gaza," said Hamzah Mansour, a member of the Shura Council of the Islamic Action Front.[10]
=================================================
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Gaza_barrier
From the Israeli perspective, the Israel–Gaza Strip barrier is a security barrier intended by Israel to control the movement of people between the Gaza Strip and Israel, to stop the entry of arms into the territory. It has significantly improved security in Israel.[citation needed]
The Israel-Gaza Strip barrier has met with opposition and protests from some Palestinians.[5]
The barrier was largely torn down by Palestinians at the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Intifada in September 2000, followed by many terror attacks.[6] The barrier was rebuilt between December 2000 and June 2001. A one-kilometer buffer zone was added, in addition to new high technology observation posts. Soldiers were also given new rules of engagement,[6] which, according to Ha'aretz, allow soldiers to fire at anyone seen crawling there at night illegally into Israeli territory.[7] Palestinians attempting to cross the barrier into Israel by stealth have been shot and killed.[8]
The barrier's effectiveness prompted a shift in the tactics of Palestinian militants who commenced firing Qassam rockets and mortars over the barrier.[6][9]
The barrier has been effective in preventing terrorists and suicide bombers from entering Israel from Gaza. Since 1996, virtually all suicide bombers trying to leave Gaza have detonated their charges at the barrier's crossing points and were stopped while trying to cross the barrier elsewhere.[10][11]
================================================
https://www.breitbart.com/immigration/2018/03/22/gop-democrats-fully-fund-border-wall-jordanians/?fbclid=IwAR3F_hXbVyS-StEKpdbcTzCpyq4ymll4QGw0hRL51Arr3P5zua2fxcX2kMU
=============================================
Update: Thanks to the comments of Jonathan Seidman below, I'm now aware of information about the Jordan Border Security Program. There seems to be US Army contracts to build a fence (it's not referred to as a "wall" in references) with surveillance towers and communications equipment along the border between Jordan and Syria. See Jordan Border Security:
On 02 April 2008 DRS Technologies, Inc. announced that it received an order from the U.S. Army's Communications and Electronics Command (CECOM), Fort Monmouth, N.J., for the initial phase of the Jordan Border Security Program. In conjunction with the U.S. Army, DRS will provide the Jordan Armed Forces with an end-to-end border security system for a section of Jordan's border. On September 9, 2008 the Defense Security Cooperation Agency notified Congress of a possible Foreign Military Sale to Jordan of Increment 2 Requirements for Border Security Program as well as associated equipment and services. The total value, if all options are exercised, could be as high as $390 million.
The Government of Jordan requested a possible sale to extend the Jordan Border Security Program (JBSP) to cover Increment 2 requirements. The proposed sale will include exportable Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) hardware and exportable U.S. military Command and Control application software and hardware, spare and repair parts, support equipment, publications and technical documentation, U.S. Government and contractor technical support, and other related elements of program support. The estimated cost is $390 million.
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Started and built with the support of President Obama:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egypt%E2%80%93Gaza_barrier
Support
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas declared support for the barrier, adding: "It is the Egyptians’ sovereign right in their own country. Legitimate supplies should be brought through the legal crossings."[6] The United States announced its support for the barrier saying it would help to prevent weapons smuggling.[7] Cairo's main Al-Azhar University officially backed the government's decision saying that it was the "state's right to build along its walls facilities and obstacles that will enhance its security."[8]
Opposition
Militant Islamist group Hamas, the de facto governing authority of the Gaza Strip, opposes the barrier and has called it a "wall of death".[8]
Hassan Nasrallah, chief of Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, called on Egypt to halt construction.[9]
The Islamic Action Front, a Jordanian Islamist group, criticized Egypt for the barrier and accused it of "collaborating" with Israel and the United States. "The Egyptian authorities are ...increasing the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza by building the steel wall and closing the border crossings with Gaza," said Hamzah Mansour, a member of the Shura Council of the Islamic Action Front.[10]
=================================================
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Gaza_barrier
From the Israeli perspective, the Israel–Gaza Strip barrier is a security barrier intended by Israel to control the movement of people between the Gaza Strip and Israel, to stop the entry of arms into the territory. It has significantly improved security in Israel.[citation needed]
The Israel-Gaza Strip barrier has met with opposition and protests from some Palestinians.[5]
The barrier was largely torn down by Palestinians at the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Intifada in September 2000, followed by many terror attacks.[6] The barrier was rebuilt between December 2000 and June 2001. A one-kilometer buffer zone was added, in addition to new high technology observation posts. Soldiers were also given new rules of engagement,[6] which, according to Ha'aretz, allow soldiers to fire at anyone seen crawling there at night illegally into Israeli territory.[7] Palestinians attempting to cross the barrier into Israel by stealth have been shot and killed.[8]
The barrier's effectiveness prompted a shift in the tactics of Palestinian militants who commenced firing Qassam rockets and mortars over the barrier.[6][9]
The barrier has been effective in preventing terrorists and suicide bombers from entering Israel from Gaza. Since 1996, virtually all suicide bombers trying to leave Gaza have detonated their charges at the barrier's crossing points and were stopped while trying to cross the barrier elsewhere.[10][11]
================================================
https://www.breitbart.com/immigration/2018/03/22/gop-democrats-fully-fund-border-wall-jordanians/?fbclid=IwAR3F_hXbVyS-StEKpdbcTzCpyq4ymll4QGw0hRL51Arr3P5zua2fxcX2kMU
=============================================
Update: Thanks to the comments of Jonathan Seidman below, I'm now aware of information about the Jordan Border Security Program. There seems to be US Army contracts to build a fence (it's not referred to as a "wall" in references) with surveillance towers and communications equipment along the border between Jordan and Syria. See Jordan Border Security:
On 02 April 2008 DRS Technologies, Inc. announced that it received an order from the U.S. Army's Communications and Electronics Command (CECOM), Fort Monmouth, N.J., for the initial phase of the Jordan Border Security Program. In conjunction with the U.S. Army, DRS will provide the Jordan Armed Forces with an end-to-end border security system for a section of Jordan's border. On September 9, 2008 the Defense Security Cooperation Agency notified Congress of a possible Foreign Military Sale to Jordan of Increment 2 Requirements for Border Security Program as well as associated equipment and services. The total value, if all options are exercised, could be as high as $390 million.
The Government of Jordan requested a possible sale to extend the Jordan Border Security Program (JBSP) to cover Increment 2 requirements. The proposed sale will include exportable Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) hardware and exportable U.S. military Command and Control application software and hardware, spare and repair parts, support equipment, publications and technical documentation, U.S. Government and contractor technical support, and other related elements of program support. The estimated cost is $390 million.
https://www.westernjournal.com/liberal-hypocrites-build-walls-around-houses/
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https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/mother-son-killed-illegal-looks-directly-camera-border-wall-message-dems/?utm_source=push&utm_medium=conservativetribune&utm_content=2019-01-06&utm_campaign=manualpost
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Interesting term turned back on our friends on the Left on this issue: "Border Deniers"
https://twitchy.com/samj-3930/2019/01/06/beating-them-at-their-own-game-rep-dan-crenshaws-new-term-for-dems-claiming-a-border-wall-wont-work-is-perfect/
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"Border Deniers"
In the words of Donald Trump Jr. :
"love it!" :))
Also can be said of "immigration crisis deniers"
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"Border Deniers"-- heh heh, I like that.
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Relevant today as President Trump promises to talk about this to the nation. I thought this was already posted but could not find it in searches.
It Was Always about the Wall
By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
December 20, 2018
U.S Border Patrol officers stand near the border fence between Mexico and the United States in Tijuana, Mexico, November 25, 2018. (Hannah McKay/Reuters)
A high wall would end the border patrol's reliance on dogs and tear gas when rushed by would-be border crossers throwing stones.
There was likely never going to be “comprehensive immigration reform” or any deal amnestying the DACA recipients in exchange for building the wall. Democrats in the present political landscape will not consent to a wall. For them, a successful border wall is now considered bad politics in almost every manner imaginable.
Yet 12 years ago, Congress, with broad bipartisan support, passed the Secure Fence of Act of 2006. The bill was signed into law by then-President George W. Bush to overwhelming public applause. The stopgap legislation led to some 650 miles of a mostly inexpensive steel fence while still leaving about two-thirds of the 1,950-mile border unfenced.
In those days there were not, as now, nearly 50 million foreign-born immigrants living in the United States, perhaps nearly 15 million of them illegally.
Sheer numbers have radically changed electoral politics. Take California. One out of every four residents in California is foreign-born. Not since 2006 has any California Republican been elected to statewide office.
The solidly blue states of the American Southwest, including Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico, voted red as recently as 2004 for George W. Bush. Progressives understandably conclude that de facto open borders are good long-term politics.
Once upon a time, Democrats such as Hillary and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama talked tough about illegal immigration. They even ruled out amnesty while talking up a new border wall.
In those days, progressives saw illegal immigration as illiberal — or at least not as a winning proposition among union households and the working poor.
Democratic constituencies opposed importing inexpensive foreign labor for corporate bosses. Welfare rights groups believed that massive illegal immigration would swamp social services and curtail government help to American poor of the barrios and the inner city.
So, what happened? Again, numbers.
Hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants have flocked into the United States over the last decade. In addition, the Obama administration discouraged the melting-pot assimilationist model of integrating only legal immigrants.
Salad-bowl multiculturalism, growing tribalism and large numbers of unassimilated immigrants added up to politically advantageous demography for Democrats in the long run.
In contrast, a wall would likely reduce illegal immigration dramatically and with it future Democratic constituents. Legal, meritocratic, measured and diverse immigration in its place would likely end up being politically neutral. And without fresh waves of undocumented immigrants from south of the border, identity politics would wane.
A wall also would radically change the optics of illegal immigration. Currently, in unsecured border areas, armed border patrol guards sometimes stand behind barbed wire. Without a wall, they are forced to rely on dogs and tear gas when rushed by would-be border crossers. They are easy targets for stone-throwers on the Mexican side of the border.
A high wall would end that. Border guards would be mostly invisible from the Mexican side of the wall. Barbed wire, dogs and tear gas astride the border — the ingredients for media sensationalism — would be unnecessary. Instead, footage of would-be border crossers trying to climb 30-foot walls would emphasize the degree to which some are callously breaking the law.
Such imagery would remind the world that undocumented immigrants are not always noble victims but often selfish young adult males who have little regard for the millions of aspiring immigrants who wait patiently in line and follow the rules to enter the United State lawfully.
More importantly, thousands of undocumented immigrants cross miles of dangerous, unguarded borderlands each year to walk for days in the desert. Often, they fall prey to dangers ranging from cartel gangs to dehydration.
Usually, the United States is somehow blamed for their plight, even though a few years ago the Mexican government issued a comic book with instructions on how citizens could most effectively break U.S. law and cross the border.
The wall would make illegal crossings almost impossible, saving lives.
Latin American governments and Democratic operatives assume that lax border enforcement facilitates the outflow of billions of dollars in remittances sent south of the border and helps flip red states blue.
All prior efforts to ensure border security — sanctions against employers, threats to cut off foreign aid to Mexico and Central America, and talk of tamper-proof identity cards — have failed.
Instead, amnesties, expanded entitlements and hundreds of sanctuary jurisdictions offer incentives for waves of undocumented immigrants.
The reason a secure border wall has not been — and may not be — built is not apprehension that it would not work, but rather real fear that it would work only too well.
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/trump-border-wall-construction-pentagon/
For a political appearing win it is sound
From a practical point of view less so because of eminent domain .
The Democrat Lawyer mob will find every property owner on the border they can and offer free services to block implementation .
( with promises of even being able to get on CNN)
Suddenly the Dems are big supporters of eminent domain protections from Federal policy makers just the opposite it was with the greatest human who ever walked the Earth.
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already out in force even before the speech.
and of course the msm will have multiple Dem politicians giving their crises denying and immoral compassionate etc propaganda speeches ready to fire immediately after Trump closes his mouth at the end of his speech:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/9-things-know-trump-starts-090003864.html
If the Republican party has Any hope we need to stop this madness now
though probably already too late.
Ryan's weakness on this issue probably cemented the end of the Can Party as we know it.
I feel our only hope is Trump to win in 20 and for us to win back the House. But I cannot fathom how that can happen now the u to 1.4 million felons can vote in Florida
Of course Mitt thinks he will win their hearts and minds over with his integrity .
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Mollie Hemmingway fact checking the fact checkers (media issue also)
http://thefederalist.com/2019/01/09/medias-angry-response-to-president-trumps-oval-office-speech-comes-up-short/
When they can't call it false, they call it misleading. Why do they insert their opinions in "fact" checking?
Washington Post: 266,000 illegal aliens arrested in the last two years for committing crimes is true but misleading because it includes all crimes.
Politico rated Trump's claim there is a crisis at the border as - Not True.
Politico rated Not True that Schumer “has repeatedly supported a physical barrier in the past” even though that’s absolutely true. He voted for a barrier in 2005 and gave a speech on it in 2009.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijLJSTGA3hs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdAyn89hFIo
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Daily Signal documents and eleborates on each of these true claims: https://www.dailysignal.com/2019/01/09/fact-checking-5-of-trumps-claims-in-border-speech/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTVdReFpEVmxZV1ZoWldRMSIsInQiOiJJM294VzVwVGJMSDI2bUVzQ3NaXC9DQjdHVG9tYURpSktYZXJyQmNFd2xlVXhGY0EwQjJxZjY4QmZjWEk5eER1eCtTUlVnaFBPck5FUVZFK3F0UzM4TkVPe
1. “All Americans are hurt by uncontrolled illegal migration. It strains public resources and drives down jobs and wages. Among those hardest hit are African-Americans and Hispanic Americans.” - True
2. “Sen. Chuck Schumer–who you will be hearing from later tonight–has repeatedly supported a physical barrier in the past, along with many other Democrats. They changed their mind only after I was elected president.”
3. “Every week 300 of our citizens are killed by heroin alone, 90 percent of which floods across from our southern border.” - True
4. “One in three women are sexually assaulted on the dangerous trek up through Mexico.” - 80% in some reports.
5. “In the last two years, ICE officers made 266,000 arrests of aliens with criminal records, including those charged or convicted of 100,000 assaults, 30,000 sex crimes, and 4,000 violent killings.” - True
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One voice of sanity and balance in the Bezos Bulletin:
Trump won the night. Schumer and Pelosi lost.
Marc Thiessen
President Trump did something Tuesday night (Wednesday AEST) that he has rarely done since taking office: He used the presidential bully pulpit to reach beyond his hardcore base of supporters to make his case to the American people as a whole.
Speaking from the Oval Office for the first time during his presidency, Trump embraced our country’s tradition as a nation of immigrants, declaring “America proudly welcomes millions of lawful immigrants who enrich our society and contribute to our nation.” He then offered a cogent explanation why he believes we face what he called “a humanitarian crisis — a crisis of the heart and a crisis of the soul” along our southern border.
He pointed out the human cost of our broken system to illegal migrants themselves, expressing compassion for the “children [who] are used as human pawns by vicious coyotes and ruthless gangs” and the “women [who] are sexually assaulted on the dangerous trek up through Mexico.” He shared heartbreaking stories of Americans killed by criminal aliens who had no right to be here — including a police officer in California who was murdered, a 16-year-old girl who was brutally stabbed in Maryland, and an Air Force veteran who was raped and beaten to death.
“I’ve held the hands of the weeping mothers and embraced the grief-stricken fathers,” Trump declared. “I will never forget the pain in their eyes, the tremble in their voices, or the sadness gripping their souls.”
And he laid out his solution, which he explained was “developed by law enforcement professionals and border agents” and includes funds for cutting-edge technology, more border agents, more immigration judges, more bed space and medical support — and $5.7 billion for a “physical barrier” that he called “just common sense.” Without naming her, Trump responded to the absurd charge from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) that a wall is “immoral.” Democrats voted repeatedly for physical barriers until he was elected president, he noted. If a wall is immoral, Trump asked, “why do wealthy politicians build walls, fences and gates around their homes? They don’t build walls because they hate the people on the outside, but because they love the people on the inside.”
US President Donald Trump delivers a televised address to the nation from his desk in the Oval Office.© REUTERS/Joshua Roberts US President Donald Trump delivers a televised address to the nation from his desk in the Oval Office.
The president did not unilaterally declare a national emergency. Instead, he called for compromise and said, “To those who refuse to compromise in the name of border security, I would ask: imagine if it was your child, your husband, or your wife, whose life was so cruelly shattered and totally broken?”
He was, in short, presidential.
Democrats insisted on equal time, which is highly unusual for presidential addresses other than the State of the Union. It was a mistake. In contrast to Trump, Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) came across as small and intransigent.
While Trump spoke calmly and rationally from behind the Resolute Desk, the Democratic leaders accused him of “pounding the table” and having a “temper tantrum.” While Trump told human stories, they complained about process. They accused him of arguing that the women and children at the border were “a security threat” when he had just explained to the American people that they were victims, too. They charged him with using the “backdrop of the Oval Office to manufacture a crisis, stoke fear and divert attention from the turmoil in his administration.” They were partisan and petty, while Trump came across as reasonable and even compassionate.
To normal Americans watching in the heartland, and who are not steeped in Trump hatred, the president must have seemed like the adult in the room.
And, most important, Pelosi and Schumer failed to use the one word that millions of Americans were longing to hear — compromise. But Trump did. That is why the president won the night. Schumer and Pelosi appealed to their base, while Trump made an effective appeal to persuadable Americans.
Until now, Trump has owned the 18-day government shutdown that prompted this address, because he’s the one who started it. But if Democrats continue to attack him, and won’t entertain any compromise, soon the shutdown will be all theirs — because they’re the ones who have refused to end it.
https://www.msn.com/en-nz/news/world/opinions-trump-won-the-night-schumer-and-pelosi-lost/ar-BBRZLKt
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The "Elites" like Nanzi and Scummer live behind walls and are protected by guns. We are not worthy of the same in their eyes.
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I thought the speech was overall good.
Glad he listened to our advice and gave it . Certainly this is the way he should be making his cases instead of emotional tweets.
Another disgusting talking point of the Dems is "most illegals are not crossing our sudden borders , they are overstaying their visas " Then after they say that is dead silence.
Even if that were true then why are we not addressing this too?
These people should be arrested and deported. Even if they are while they are here having anchor babies.
Yet the Dems while I have seen recently trying to divert attention away from the border wall , leave themselves wide open with the neglect of this form of immigration abuse.
Time to start calling them on it as well as these visa law breakers.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=8aESr_eIfcU
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second post
PorkyPricklyPants
PorkyPricklyPants
1 day ago
10 U.S. Code § 2808 - Construction authority in the event of a declaration of war or national emergency
US Code...(a) In the event of a declaration of war or the declaration by the President of a national emergency in accordance with the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.) that requires use of the armed forces, the Secretary of Defense, without regard to any other provision of law, may undertake military construction projects, and may authorize the Secretaries of the military departments to undertake military construction projects, not otherwise authorized by law that are necessary to support such use of the armed forces. Such projects may be undertaken only within the total amount of funds that have been appropriated for military construction, including funds appropriated for family housing, that have not been obligated.
(b) When a decision is made to undertake military construction projects authorized by this section, the Secretary of Defense shall notify, in an electronic medium pursuant to section 480 of this title, the appropriate committees of Congress of the decision and of the estimated cost of the construction projects, including the cost of any real estate action pertaining to those construction projects.
(c) The authority described in subsection (a) shall terminate with respect to any war or national emergency at the end of the war or national emergency.
What constitutes a national emergency is open to interpretation, but generally, it is seen as an event that threatens the security of the people of the United States.
According to the Congressional Review Service, a 1934 Supreme Court majority opinion characterized an emergency in terms of “urgency and relative infrequency of occurrence as well as equivalence to a public calamity resulting from fire, flood, or like disaster not reasonably subject to anticipation.” Through federal law, when an emergency is declared, a variety of powers are available to the president to use. Some of those powers require very little qualification from the president for their use.
The Brennan Center for Justice lists 136 special provisions that become available to a president when he declares a national emergency.
A CRS report states, "Under the powers delegated by such statutes, the president may seize property, organize and control the means of production, seize commodities, assign military forces abroad, institute martial law, seize and control all transportation and communication, regulate the operation of private enterprise, restrict travel, and, in a variety of ways, control the lives of United States citizens.”
However, under the National Emergencies Act, the president must name the specific emergency power he is invoking. According to U.S. law, a president can divert funds to a federal construction project during a declared national emergency.
In the case of the border wall, the money could come from the budget for the Department of Defense under something called “un-obligated” money. Under federal law, un-obligated money in the Department of Defense's budget may be used by the military to fund construction projects during war or emergencies.
Department of Defense spokesman Jamie Davis said in a statement that, “To date, there is no plan to build sections of the wall. However, Congress has provided options under Title 10 U.S. Code that could permit the Department of Defense to fund border barrier projects, such as in support of counter drug operations or national emergencies.” Congress can end a president’s call of a national emergency with a joint resolution. A joint resolution is a legislative measure that requires the approval of both the House and the Senate. The resolution is submitted, just as a bill is, to the president or his or her signature, making it a law. A joint resolution is usually used for continuing or emergency funding.
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https://mwi.usma.edu/effective-weapon-modern-battlefield-concrete/?fbclid=IwAR3sQNLdCKliZrfJdGoTLldE3BQyyjCx2Ebh1LyqyIZsCMXWnMwA9oTU7xc
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Fourth post
“Crisis” of Seriously Ill Migrants Slams Border Patrol — TB, Pneumonia, Influenza, Parasites
Weeks after mainstream media outlets reported that illegal immigrants don’t bring disease into the United States, the Border Patrol reveals that it is getting slammed daily with dozens of illegal immigrants carrying “serious illnesses.” This includes tuberculosis, influenza and pneumonia. In fact, a Guatemalan migrant who died in U.S. custody on Christmas Eve had Influenza B, a virus that causes respiratory infections.
Federal agents are referring 50 illegal immigrants a day for urgent medical care, according to figures obtained by Washington D.C.’s conservative newspaper. Authorities say “it’s unlike anything they’ve ever seen before.” Many of the migrants have tuberculosis, parasites or the flue, the feds confirm.
There are also lots of pregnant women about to give birth. The article quotes Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Kevin McAleenan saying that most of the illegal immigrants were sick when they arrived at the U.S. border. “Many were ill before they departed their homes,” McAleenan said. “We’re talking about cases of pneumonia, tuberculosis, parasites. These are not things that developed urgently in a matter of days.”
A separate story published by a mainstream newspaper on New Year’s Eve discloses that in the last few weeks of 2018 more than 450 illegal immigrants required medical attention for illnesses. More than half were children. In the piece CBP Commissioner McAleenan refers to the situation as a “crisis.”
Here’s an excerpt from the article: “The ill migrants have been arriving with all kinds of ailments, many with flu or pneumonia that can be particularly pervasive and dangerous this time of year.” It proceeds to reveal that 17 illegal immigrants have been hospitalized and that the Coast Guard has been deployed to help, sending medical teams to Border Patrol sectors getting bombarded with sick migrants. They include Yuma and Tucson, Arizona as well as the Rio Grande Valley.
It’s unbelievable that a “news” narrative can change so quickly in just a few weeks. Right before Christmas the mainstream media proclaimed illegal immigrants don’t bring disease into the United States. In various articles reporters took it a step further by claiming that migrants actually help fight disease.
One story, published by NBC news and reiterated by various other outlets, focused on a study commissioned by a medical journal. One of the researchers received lots of print for declaring that migrants spreading disease is a “false argument” used to keep them out. The editor of the medical journal that conducted the study was quoted saying this: “In too many countries, the issue of migration is used to divide societies and advance a populist agenda.” The biased coverage marked a great example of the mainstream media distorting information to promote a liberal agenda.
Judicial Watch has interviewed medical experts that confirm illegal immigrants do indeed pose a serious public health threat to the U.S. by bringing dangerous diseases into the country. This includes tuberculosis, dengue and Chikungunya.
After returning from covering the Central American caravan along the Guatemala-Honduras border, Judicial Watch spoke with a prominent physician in a border state who warned that the migrants will undoubtedly bring infectious diseases into the U.S. Among them are extremely drug resistant strands of tuberculosis and mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue and chikungunya that are widespread in the region.
The same week Judicial Watch published the story about the caravan health threat a major newspaper reported on the health crisis created by the influx of Venezuelans fleeing to neighboring countries. The migrants are spreading malaria, yellow fever, diphtheria, dengue, tuberculosis and AIDS throughout South America. Many of the diseases had been considered eradicated in the neighboring Latin American countries, according to government officials cited in the article, which states that “contagion from Venezuela’s economic meltdown is starting to spread to neighboring countries—not financially, but literally, in the form of potentially deadly diseases carried among millions of refugees.”
As an example, the story reveals that “measles reappeared with a vengeance” in a Brazilian city near the Venezuelan border that had declared the highly contagious airborne disease “vanquished” nearly two decades ago. “Measles is already spreading beyond the Brazilian Amazon to other Brazilian states, as well as Colombia, Peru and as far south as Argentina, according to recent Pan American Health Organization reports,” the article states. “Other diseases racing through communities in Venezuela are now crossing borders and raising concerns among health authorities as far away as the U.S.”
Years ago, when Barack Obama let tens of thousands of illegal immigrant minors into the country, health experts warned about the serious hazards to the American public. Most of the Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) came from Central America, like the current caravan, and they crossed into the U.S. through Mexico, in the same way that the caravan expects to. Swine flu, dengue fever and Ebola were among the diseases that the hordes of UACs brought with them, according to lawmakers and medical experts interviewed by Judicial Watch during the influx. At the time, a U.S. Congressman, who is also a medical doctor, told Judicial Watch about the danger to the American public as well as the Border Patrol agents forced to care for the UACs.
The former lawmaker, Phil Gingrey, referred to it as a “severe and dangerous” crisis because the Central American youths were importing infectious diseases considered to be largely eradicated in this country. Many migrants lack basic vaccinations such as those to prevent chicken pox or measles, leaving America’s young children and the elderly particularly susceptible, Gingrey pointed out then. To handle the escalating health crisis the CDC activated an Emergency Operations Center (EOC) that largely operated in secrecy.
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Sasha and Malia aren’t going to be sitting in a class next to an illegal with drug resistant TB. So it’s not a problem.
Fourth post
“Crisis” of Seriously Ill Migrants Slams Border Patrol — TB, Pneumonia, Influenza, Parasites
Weeks after mainstream media outlets reported that illegal immigrants don’t bring disease into the United States, the Border Patrol reveals that it is getting slammed daily with dozens of illegal immigrants carrying “serious illnesses.” This includes tuberculosis, influenza and pneumonia. In fact, a Guatemalan migrant who died in U.S. custody on Christmas Eve had Influenza B, a virus that causes respiratory infections.
Federal agents are referring 50 illegal immigrants a day for urgent medical care, according to figures obtained by Washington D.C.’s conservative newspaper. Authorities say “it’s unlike anything they’ve ever seen before.” Many of the migrants have tuberculosis, parasites or the flue, the feds confirm.
There are also lots of pregnant women about to give birth. The article quotes Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Kevin McAleenan saying that most of the illegal immigrants were sick when they arrived at the U.S. border. “Many were ill before they departed their homes,” McAleenan said. “We’re talking about cases of pneumonia, tuberculosis, parasites. These are not things that developed urgently in a matter of days.”
A separate story published by a mainstream newspaper on New Year’s Eve discloses that in the last few weeks of 2018 more than 450 illegal immigrants required medical attention for illnesses. More than half were children. In the piece CBP Commissioner McAleenan refers to the situation as a “crisis.”
Here’s an excerpt from the article: “The ill migrants have been arriving with all kinds of ailments, many with flu or pneumonia that can be particularly pervasive and dangerous this time of year.” It proceeds to reveal that 17 illegal immigrants have been hospitalized and that the Coast Guard has been deployed to help, sending medical teams to Border Patrol sectors getting bombarded with sick migrants. They include Yuma and Tucson, Arizona as well as the Rio Grande Valley.
It’s unbelievable that a “news” narrative can change so quickly in just a few weeks. Right before Christmas the mainstream media proclaimed illegal immigrants don’t bring disease into the United States. In various articles reporters took it a step further by claiming that migrants actually help fight disease.
One story, published by NBC news and reiterated by various other outlets, focused on a study commissioned by a medical journal. One of the researchers received lots of print for declaring that migrants spreading disease is a “false argument” used to keep them out. The editor of the medical journal that conducted the study was quoted saying this: “In too many countries, the issue of migration is used to divide societies and advance a populist agenda.” The biased coverage marked a great example of the mainstream media distorting information to promote a liberal agenda.
Judicial Watch has interviewed medical experts that confirm illegal immigrants do indeed pose a serious public health threat to the U.S. by bringing dangerous diseases into the country. This includes tuberculosis, dengue and Chikungunya.
After returning from covering the Central American caravan along the Guatemala-Honduras border, Judicial Watch spoke with a prominent physician in a border state who warned that the migrants will undoubtedly bring infectious diseases into the U.S. Among them are extremely drug resistant strands of tuberculosis and mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue and chikungunya that are widespread in the region.
The same week Judicial Watch published the story about the caravan health threat a major newspaper reported on the health crisis created by the influx of Venezuelans fleeing to neighboring countries. The migrants are spreading malaria, yellow fever, diphtheria, dengue, tuberculosis and AIDS throughout South America. Many of the diseases had been considered eradicated in the neighboring Latin American countries, according to government officials cited in the article, which states that “contagion from Venezuela’s economic meltdown is starting to spread to neighboring countries—not financially, but literally, in the form of potentially deadly diseases carried among millions of refugees.”
As an example, the story reveals that “measles reappeared with a vengeance” in a Brazilian city near the Venezuelan border that had declared the highly contagious airborne disease “vanquished” nearly two decades ago. “Measles is already spreading beyond the Brazilian Amazon to other Brazilian states, as well as Colombia, Peru and as far south as Argentina, according to recent Pan American Health Organization reports,” the article states. “Other diseases racing through communities in Venezuela are now crossing borders and raising concerns among health authorities as far away as the U.S.”
Years ago, when Barack Obama let tens of thousands of illegal immigrant minors into the country, health experts warned about the serious hazards to the American public. Most of the Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) came from Central America, like the current caravan, and they crossed into the U.S. through Mexico, in the same way that the caravan expects to. Swine flu, dengue fever and Ebola were among the diseases that the hordes of UACs brought with them, according to lawmakers and medical experts interviewed by Judicial Watch during the influx. At the time, a U.S. Congressman, who is also a medical doctor, told Judicial Watch about the danger to the American public as well as the Border Patrol agents forced to care for the UACs.
The former lawmaker, Phil Gingrey, referred to it as a “severe and dangerous” crisis because the Central American youths were importing infectious diseases considered to be largely eradicated in this country. Many migrants lack basic vaccinations such as those to prevent chicken pox or measles, leaving America’s young children and the elderly particularly susceptible, Gingrey pointed out then. To handle the escalating health crisis the CDC activated an Emergency Operations Center (EOC) that largely operated in secrecy.
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http://opencda.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/396705631-SIA-Report-2018.pdf?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=corruption+chronicles&utm_term=members&utm_content=20190112021255
Also
https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/OFAC-Enforcement/Pages/20180227.aspx?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=corruption+chronicles&utm_term=members&utm_content=20190112022807
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https://www.dailysignal.com/2019/01/09/fact-checking-5-of-trumps-claims-in-border-speech/?utm_source=TDS_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Top5&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTnpnNFlqSmpZV1EzWTJSaCIsInQiOiIrbUh6RVk5ZUo0RFAxd1F6ZVJaUnU2dTRiN3lPRisreHdnUktmM0wweEJLVzBHZ1pDR0RpaEx1V1VCb3duQkxMYmhmOVFtb044TGNTUytMdGhhcmdqY25GTldcL1FVMFh1M3Aya1BOcEZQb2pFaHZNc2U2UXBoaUNBb3I3d0RMVWsifQ%3D%3D
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http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/dr20190109-u-s-counterterror-officials-see-no-signs-of-is-alqaeda-on-southern-border?page=0,0
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:roll:
http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/dr20190109-u-s-counterterror-officials-see-no-signs-of-is-alqaeda-on-southern-border?page=0,0
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BD:
What did you make of my two citations in my Post #2065?
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I need citations on the effort a year or two ago to make a wall/DACA deal. The way I remember it, Trump made a far too generous offer but the Dems turned it down. I need a citation or two of this to shut someone up.
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Second post:
https://www.dailysabah.com/war-on-terror/2018/06/09/turkey-finishes-construction-of-764-km-security-wall-on-syria-border?fbclid=iwar1_0ykoeo_ohaav0wcihl0jglv259vumic4sncjpzmghewiqxa7rm2gb7i
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I need citations on the effort a year or two ago to make a wall/DACA deal. The way I remember it, Trump made a far too generous offer but the Dems turned it down. I need a citation or two of this to shut someone up.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/26/trump-daca-deal-is-a-dream-come-true-for-democrats-commentary.html
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He is right . The workers do not have to come to work and they get paid anyway so in that regard they ARE better off
so to heck with your Huffcompost:
https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/trump-adviser-suggests-unpaid-government-032510246.html
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https://www.dailywire.com/news/42171/watch-laura-loomer-brings-illegal-immigrants-nancy-amanda-prestigiacomo?utm_medium=email&utm_content=011519-news&utm_campaign=position1
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as for photo above
that will work!
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https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44502949?SThisFB&fbclid=IwAR3nKXffIG9483-sTdokZ7GcbGoCxDhSPjG5J97GC6Bycdcj7LlRmoCDUrs
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https://dailycaller.com/2019/01/13/walls-across-america-george-soros/
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https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44502949?SThisFB&fbclid=IwAR3nKXffIG9483-sTdokZ7GcbGoCxDhSPjG5J97GC6Bycdcj7LlRmoCDUrs
Too bad to need that. Walls work. Vehicle barricades need that. The wall should be around France; just let the people in who don't blow up monuments.
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https://dailycaller.com/2019/01/13/walls-across-america-george-soros/
Unbelievable. Hard to hide hypocriy.
General Secretary Soros, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity, if you seek open borders: Come here to this gate! Mr. Soros, open this gate! Mr. Soros, TEAR.DOWN.THIS.WALL!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=u3YfjPe9JH0 [Youtube link from post above.]
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/379211.php
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http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2019/01/17/oha-offices-lockdown-after-members-sovereignty-group-storm-building/
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https://www.dailywire.com/news/42672/watch-sen-lindsey-graham-perfectly-articulates-frank-camp?utm_source=shapironewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=012619-news&utm_campaign=position2
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Mark Morgan has been making something of a splash on The Wall as Obama's former head of BP yet supporting Trump. Here's some inside scoop on his background.
"The important takeaway from this video (in my opinion) is that Mark Morgan was the Border Patrol Chief during the Obama Administration. He came over to the Patrol from the FBI and replaced a Chief who had gotten himself in something of an administrative jam and was forced into early retirement. Morgan was a smart guy and very willing to listen to the boots in the dirt opinion from the frontlines. But unfortunately he was the first BP Chief who was never a Patrol Agent (and that never sat well with the Patrol). Additionally he ran contrary to the BP Union on occasion. All in all, he was a pretty decent Chief, but was put in the position by an unpopular administration (by BP standards). He was removed/replaced as Chief by the Trump Administration (...assumed as a favor to the BP Union President). Morgan’s picture still sits a little lower than the other Chiefs on the wall at HQ. All that being said, Morgan has absolutely nothing to gain by lending his support to Trump’s Border proposal. It is a testament to Morgan’s character as someone who does the right thing because it is the right thing to do."
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second post
https://www.meforum.org/57569/trump-and-the-gop-were-hardly-the-first?fbclid=IwAR2r6PDMs_lGHMazitEsXg2Uj-1PyOHFdXPAmRVhW8nVTTiUbeB6rNOu2tE
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Moving CCP's post to here
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bethbaumann/2019/02/11/preventing-a-shutdown-congress-comes-to-an-agreement-on-border-security-n2541202
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https://www.factcheck.org/2019/01/trump-wrong-about-wall-effect-in-el-paso/
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https://www.factcheck.org/2019/01/trump-wrong-about-wall-effect-in-el-paso/
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/fact_check_review/
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Not seeing anything there about this , , ,
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Trump’s Wall Crumbles Under the Law of Diminishing Returns
The president needs to avoid the sunk-cost fallacy and take what he can get on border security.
By Jason L. Riley
Feb. 12, 2019 6:45 p.m. ET
In economics, the law of diminishing returns describes the shrinking benefits associated with additional capital expenditures. Beyond some point, the disadvantages of increasing your investment start to outweigh the advantages. Alas, there is a political corollary to this concept that the White House has been ignoring but maybe shouldn’t.
We all agree that illegal immigration was the defining issue of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. At rally after rally, he promised his supporters that he would construct a “beautiful” wall along the southern border and make Mexico pay for it. Mr. Trump is convinced that his hard-line stance is a big reason he won, and there’s a case to be made that immigration played a larger role in 2016 than in any presidential race in recent memory.
For decades, conventional wisdom held that immigration restrictionism was a political loser. People might like to complain about the undocumented population, but exit polling showed that they ultimately voted on other issues. This included Republicans, who repeatedly rewarded pro-immigration candidates in national elections. Ronald Reagan spoke dismissively of “the illegal alien fuss” and wanted to “make the border something other than a locale for a 9-foot fence.” He quipped that Hispanics are “Republicans who don’t know it yet.”
George W. Bush—first as governor of Texas and later as president—channeled Reagan’s big-tent Republicanism and worked to portray the GOP as racially and ethnically inclusive. In 2004 he won more than 40% of the Hispanic vote en route to a second term. Even GOP presidential hopefuls since who were nominated but lost, such as John McCain and Mitt Romney, were well to the left of Mr. Trump on how to handle immigration and border security.
Mr. Trump, by contrast, has attempted to make illegal immigration a wedge issue on par with abortion and guns. Some of his supporters care about little else, and the president has gone to great lengths to ensure that their concerns are heard. Putting aside the merits of placing additional physical barricades on the border, the question now facing the administration as another government shutdown looms is whether the political capital being invested in this issue is still producing positive returns for the president. Or has his wall rhetoric become counterproductive?
The first signs of trouble for the White House were the midterm elections. Mr. Trump made border security a dominant theme, yet Republicans lost 40 seats and control of the House. Last November, public opposition to a new border wall stood at 59%, according to a CBS News poll. Today, it’s 60%, according to a Gallup survey released earlier this month. Given how hard the president has worked over the past two months to make the case for a wall, it’s remarkable how few minds he has changed.
In December Mr. Trump shut down the government to stress the importance of border security. During negotiations, he gave a national address from the Oval Office that graphically detailed violent crimes committed by people in the country unlawfully. The State of the Union speech was another attempt by Mr. Trump to sell the country on a wall. Yet and still, the Washington Examiner reported last week that “the nation is getting in line behind Democrats in their fight with President Trump over a border wall and amnesty.” Citing the recent Gallup poll, the paper said “the bottom line is that Democrats, and not the president, have the edge in the immigration debate.” Either voters have tuned out the president on border security or they find his arguments unpersuasive. In any case, an issue that helped elect the president may now be helping his opponents.
If the president cuts a deal with Democrats for less than he’s asking, his mainstream media antagonists will mock him while his supporters on talk radio and cable news will carp. But he’ll be doing his party a favor and his base will stand by him, no matter what Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter say.
Mr. Trump promised to be a deal-maker, not a conviction politician. What matters most to his core supporters is what he symbolizes—what he represents—not the purity of his policy accomplishments. Trump loyalists understand that Congress is a coequal branch of government and that the votes to fund a big, beautiful wall simply aren’t there. They may understand this better than the president himself does.
Congressional leaders struck a tentative deal this week that would provide $1.38 billion for more physical barriers on the border, far less than the $5.7 billion the president has been seeking. Mr. Trump must decide whether to declare a minor victory and move on for now or double-down on a strategy that by all appearances is producing diminishing political returns for him and his party.
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I think Trump should say no deal :
https://www.conservativereview.com/news/house-freedom-caucus-tries-buy-time-trump-border-deal-worse-thought/
moved from immigration thread
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https://www.westernjournal.com/trump-predicts-will-sued-border-security-case-will-make-scotus/
likely will go to SCOTUS .
i am NOT confident in Roberts.
we should have 5 -4 majority . Instead we have another Kennedy on the Court.
also the census question - are you a citizen - simple - but no. isn't this clearly in the Constitution ?
but again Roberts is not courageous in his decisions . Too worried about his legacy as being a centrist I guess
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https://www.westernjournal.com/trump-predicts-will-sued-border-security-case-will-make-scotus/
likely will go to SCOTUS .
i am NOT confident in Roberts.
we should have 5 -4 majority . Instead we have another Kennedy on the Court.
also the census question - are you a citizen - simple - but no. isn't this clearly in the Constitution ?
but again Roberts is not courageous in his decisions . Too worried about his legacy as being a centrist I guess
Or worried about what the deep state has to blackmail him with.
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https://www.westernjournal.com/ap-the-latest-trump-plans-to-spend-8b-on-border-barriers/
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I caught his press conference the other day where he announced all this.
What a bumbling incoherent presentation of the case for Emergency order!!! :x :x :x UGH.
Here is what the other side is saying:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/a-weak-and-rambling-president-declares-a-fake-national-emergency?utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_021619&utm_medium=email&bxid=5be9d3fa3f92a40469e2d85c&user_id=50142053&utm_term=NYR_DAILY_ACTIVE
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"It will be interesting to see what the courts make of Trump’s admission that, when it came time to declare a national emergency, he didn’t “need to do this.”
surely what he meant is that Congress should be enforcing immigration law.
he certainly didn't need to fuel the Left's speculation he gets his strategy from Limbaugh and Hannity.
OTOH Brock had no problem having celebrities coming to his WH to pay homage to him and surely give him strategic suggestions.
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https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-border-waiver-20190215-story.html#nws=mcnewsletter
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I caught his press conference the other day where he announced all this.
What a bumbling incoherent presentation of the case for Emergency order!!! :x :x :x UGH.
Agree. [Strange that it followed a 90+% very excellent state of the union address.]
Why wouldn't he try to make the case that an emergency exists when he is announcing an emergency order certain to end up in the courts?
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So, the president can have a drone fire a hellfire missile to kill anyone globally, but doesn’t have the power to block illegal aliens from streaming over our border.
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"So, the president can have a drone fire a hellfire missile to kill anyone globally, but doesn’t have the power to block illegal aliens from streaming over our border."
Maybe fire a few hellfire missiles near the border.
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So, the president can have a drone fire a hellfire missile to kill anyone globally, but doesn’t have the power to block illegal aliens from streaming over our border.
The entire war in Libya was done without Congress, just President Obama ordering funds around, '... but [this President] doesn’t have the power to block illegal aliens from streaming over our border?'
https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/430335-why-trump-will-win-the-wall-fight
How about the national emergency over uncut diamonds from Sierra Leone? Then there were the declarations over property owned by certain figures in Zimbabwe, the presidential election in Congo, and issues concerning Yemen, Burundi, Myanmar, Lebanon, Somalia, and South Sudan. All of these were “national emergencies.”
...
Congress has the authority to rescind the national emergency declaration of Trump with a vote of both chambers. The legislative branch should do so. If Congress cannot muster the votes, however, a federal judge is unlikely to do so.
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https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/430335-why-trump-will-win-the-wall-fight?fbclid=IwAR2WCq6NIs2-abypvs3PyApFScEHkTt73ahu_NgbYhxHHCVe5mMobln-W24
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Hey, Guys, We Might Not Need that National-Emergency Declaration Fight
Senator Marco Rubio with a much simpler and much more Constitutionally sound way to generate significant amounts of funding for more border fencing: Start with the $1.375 billion appropriated in the most recent spending bill, add $601 million from Treasury Forfeiture Fund and move $2.5 billion from Department of Defense’s Counterdrug fund. Neither of the latter moves require Congressional approval; “Section 8005 of the most recent Defense Appropriations bill allows up to $4 billion to be moved around in the defense operating budget.”
That would add up to something in the neighborhood of 200 miles of new fencing, which I suspect a lot of Trump fans would see as significant progress towards keeping his campaign promise.
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Hey, Guys, We Might Not Need that National-Emergency Declaration Fight
Senator Marco Rubio with a much simpler and much more Constitutionally sound way to generate significant amounts of funding for more border fencing: Start with the $1.375 billion appropriated in the most recent spending bill, add $601 million from Treasury Forfeiture Fund and move $2.5 billion from Department of Defense’s Counterdrug fund. Neither of the latter moves require Congressional approval; “Section 8005 of the most recent Defense Appropriations bill allows up to $4 billion to be moved around in the defense operating budget.”
That would add up to something in the neighborhood of 200 miles of new fencing, which I suspect a lot of Trump fans would see as significant progress towards keeping his campaign promise.
Yes. While they fight the emergency order, contradicting everything they said during Obama's 6 years of working outside of congress, Trump can go ahead and build the wall.
A temporary injunction would apply only to the emergency order, not to the proper use of these funds. Then Republicans have perhaps a 50/50 chance of taking back the House AND holding the Senate - if he wins reelection.
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https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/woman-tells-spanish-speaking-mexican-restaurant-employees-get-f-country-223659853.html
while I am against this verbal attack on people I submit that this is the result of our politicians not enforcing immigration laws.
If they did this would not be happening. Of course the MSM tries to pin this on Trump who is trying to fix the problem left him . He did not cause this.
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https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2019/02/21/of-course-cair-is-definding-isis-bride-who-called-for-the-murder-of-us-troops-innoncents-n2542002
I say lets let her come home - then arrest her and throw her in jail for life for treason terrorism
and conspiracy to commit murder.
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https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2019/02/21/of-course-cair-is-definding-isis-bride-who-called-for-the-murder-of-us-troops-innoncents-n2542002
I say lets let her come home - then arrest her and throw her in jail for life for treason terrorism and conspiracy to commit murder.
Guantanamo.
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https://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2019/02/watch-deadly-shootout-between-officer.html
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https://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2019/02/watch-deadly-shootout-between-officer.html
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https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2019/02/27/nypd-ms-13-planning-to-target-off-duty-cops-at-their-homes/?fbclid=IwAR1l_5tkM7DIYNKaVhSrCuVm56NL0R6JJcVXGcVyaCsZrt-IwgWCEeQNkg8
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https://clarionproject.org/isis-may-be-knocked-out-in-syria-but-alive-in-us/
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https://www.nraila.org/articles/20190301/hr-8-votes-reveal-dem-house-leadership-values-illegal-aliens-over-law-abiding-gun-owners?fbclid=IwAR1wRJyrpkcOmb3hq09wj7ZA5ITyxq-knsVHnhHzWYJHdvh59IH-2kj1N54
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https://www.nraila.org/articles/20190301/hr-8-votes-reveal-dem-house-leadership-values-illegal-aliens-over-law-abiding-gun-owners?fbclid=IwAR1wRJyrpkcOmb3hq09wj7ZA5ITyxq-knsVHnhHzWYJHdvh59IH-2kj1N54
Of course.
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https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/59310.html
China, Russia or the dems?
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https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/securing-the-southern-border-could-help-save-thousands-of-women-and/?fbclid=IwAR3WCUZQPdWsUZDZkQKyAJtc6OOIwCxJ4TAYcOfeoSZsQ0jb7rWyl7n9cDs
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Snowballs in hell-- POTH discovers a crisis at the border
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/us/border-crossing-increase.html?fbclid=IwAR1TgcWMl5dGvCgAv-TgiIckXDscw-EjEF2sxtZfpHa2rytKJDuBAxaMhQw
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https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/a-new-study-uncovers-troubling-information-about-immigrant-only-prisons?utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_031319&utm_medium=email&bxid=5be9d3fa3f92a40469e2d85c&user_id=50142053&esrc=&utm_term=TNY_Daily
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=LlShQj4c8YI
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https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/2808?fbclid=IwAR0zYX87lLQ---y1uubGgeeiLbTChB52ATSXhg0UGlsBsvxk50Z-FbplH7o
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Another Ninth Circuit Reversal
The Supreme Court sides with Congress on criminal alien detention.
By The Editorial Board
March 19, 2019 7:03 p.m. ET
The Supreme Court in Washington, Friday, March 15, 2019.
The Supreme Court in Washington, Friday, March 15, 2019. Photo: Susan Walsh/Associated Press
The Supreme Court reversed the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals again Tuesday in an immigration case that turned on a clear-cut question of statutory interpretation. While the 5-4 conservative majority read the law as it was written, the Court’s liberals would have overruled Congress.
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Assessing the Democratic candidates in the 2020 race.
Another Ninth Circuit Reversal
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Federal immigration law generally authorizes the Secretary of Homeland Security to detain “deportable” immigrants with the discretion to release them on bond or parole if they don’t endanger the public. Congress in 1996 limited executive discretion and required the government to detain immigrants who have committed certain crimes or have links to terrorism “when [they are] released” from prison or jail.
In Nielsen v. Preap, plaintiffs argued that if the government does not detain the criminal immigrants immediately upon their release—that is, the day they leave jail—they are entitled to a bond or parole hearing. Immigration officials didn’t detain the lead plaintiff until 2013, seven years after being released from criminal custody. The case is especially ripe since sanctuary cities often don’t inform federal authorities when they release criminal immigrants.
Siding with the plaintiffs, the Ninth Circuit twisted itself into knots to rule against the Trump Administration. But as Justice Samuel Alito observed in the majority decision, the Ninth Circuit’s ruling “misreads the structure” of the law and would result in all kinds of legal absurdities.
“It would be ridiculous to read paragraph (1) as saying: ‘The Secretary must arrest, upon their release from jail, a particular subset of criminal aliens. Which ones? Only those who are arrested upon their release from jail,’” Justice Alito noted, adding that “The mandatory-detention scheme [favored by the Ninth Circuit] would be gentler on terrorists than it is on garden-variety offenders.”
Or as Justice Brett Kavanaugh explained in his pithy concurrence: “It would be odd, in my view, if the Act (1) mandated detention of particular noncitizens because the noncitizens posed such a serious risk of danger or flight that they must be detained during their removal proceedings, but (2) nonetheless allowed the noncitizens to remain free during their removal proceedings if the Executive Branch failed to immediately detain them upon their release from criminal custody.”
Although the case involved a narrow statutory question, the Court’s four liberals quibbled about the law’s policy implications on the nation’s “values.” For instance, what if immigrants were detained years after being released from police custody and have “established families and put down roots in a community”? The Court’s job isn’t to substitute its policy judgments for those of Congress.
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/mar/27/border-patrol-forced-restart-catch-and-release/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=manual&utm_campaign=20171227&utm_term=newsletter&utm_content=morning&bt_ee=U035aOeSnkXBFwGymE9mb2xkH38AdStwT195itEkkzUtcUU0ybL%2FemtlVf2DOZMg&bt_ts=1553774833565
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/mar/27/border-patrol-forced-restart-catch-and-release/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=manual&utm_campaign=20171227&utm_term=newsletter&utm_content=morning&bt_ee=U035aOeSnkXBFwGymE9mb2xkH38AdStwT195itEkkzUtcUU0ybL%2FemtlVf2DOZMg&bt_ts=1553774833565
There is no crisis on the border. A fence is immoral.
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"There is no crisis on the border."
According to Mario's VERY annoying kid there is a crises
but of sick and frail and scared - children.
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If you are an American smuggling two illegals in you are in Fed custody
if you are the illegals coming in then you get released........
https://www.breitbart.com/border/2019/03/28/aryan-brotherhood-of-texas-member-pleads-guilty-to-migrant-smuggling/
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/mar/28/92-percent-illegal-immigrant-families-ignore-depor/?fbclid=IwAR26BnIs-OwbeTINYD6VB1GpzH6QmTPJelgO9B7CoVch_JXFEovgBJAdJmY
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https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/mexican-drug-soldier-found-us-city-full-auto-gun-armor-night-vision/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=westernjournalism&utm_content=2019-03-29&utm_campaign=manualpost&fbclid=IwAR1VSVIRBmwML77Kv8d9Q0x_R4XuE6nGuLll-VX5urHCtZF3aleCSWh0q7U
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The Border Asylum Crisis
A broken asylum system all but guarantees entry if you bring children.
By The Editorial Board
March 31, 2019 3:54 p.m. ET
In this photo provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, migrants are seen inside an enclosure in El Paso after crossing the border between Mexico and the United States illegally and turning themselves in to request asylum.
Immigration politics is so polarized that right and left have a veto over any constructive policy. Yet a genuine crisis is building at the southern border as the perverse incentives of U.S. asylum law invite a surge of migrants that is overwhelming border security.
Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan said last week that the border has hit “a breaking point” amid a rush of families from Central America. More than a strong U.S. economy is driving this influx. Between 2000 and 2017, apprehensions dropped 80% as Mexico’s economy improved and border security tightened. But immigration has picked up over the last year as word has spread that parents with children who claim asylum can stay for years and perhaps forever.
More than 76,000 immigrants illegally crossed the border in February and about half came with families, a 10-fold increase over the past two years. Border apprehensions in March probably exceeded 100,000, the highest monthly total in a decade. At the current rate, border apprehensions will exceed one million this year—the most since 2006—as human smugglers become more ambitious and reduce prices to entice more migrants.
***
Mr. Trump’s solution is to build a wall along the 1,900-mile border, and on Friday he said he may even close the legal points of entry with Mexico. He has also ordered U.S. aid cut to the Central American countries that are the source of the migrant waves. None of this will deter migrants increasingly drawn by the porous U.S. asylum system. Congress needs to build stronger legal barriers that migrants and judges can’t evade or bulldoze.
One problem is that asylum claimants may avoid immediate deportation simply by convincing an immigration officer that they have a “credible fear” that they will be persecuted if they return to their home country. The Immigration and Nationality Act conditions asylum on a “well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” But immigrants complaining about abusive spouses and economic hardship have been waved through.
Due to a shortage of detention beds, they are usually released and allowed to work in the U.S. while awaiting another hearing to determine if they qualify for asylum. The average hearing wait time is two years. Many disappear and don’t report for their hearing.
The Trump Administration last year tried to make it harder to pass the credible-fear test by barring those fleeing social and economic unrest. Immigration law allows the President to “establish additional limitations and conditions, consistent with this section, under which an alien shall be ineligible for asylum” and temporarily “impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem” are in the national interest.
But federal Judge Emmet Sullivan last year blocked the Administration from imposing asylum conditions. Last month the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals extended habeas corpus to asylum claimants, which means even those who fail the initial screening will have recourse in federal court. Almost anyone who claims asylum will now be able to avoid immediate deportation.
The Ninth Circuit in 2016 created other opportunities for asylum arbitrage by extending to families the 1997 Flores settlement, which limits the time unaccompanied children may be detained to 20 days. This has encouraged parents to bring their children on a perilous journey in hopes of expediting their release into the U.S. A father of an eight-year-old boy who died in government custody last December while waiting to be processed had heard rumors that children are a fast-track entry ticket to the U.S. Border agents have identified 2,400 “false families” over the last year as smugglers pair adults with unrelated children.
To relieve overburdened detention facilities and nonprofits, the Trump Administration has tried to steer more immigrants to ports of entry where they can wait in Mexico while their claims are processed. The Administration last year tried to limit asylum eligibility to immigrants who present themselves at ports of entry, but the Ninth Circuit blocked that too.
Thus, the border chaos. Most migrants don’t want to wait years in Mexico so they pay smugglers thousands of dollars to bus them to the border. Some have been ambushed by gunmen. Many cross the border and surrender to government agents because they know they will be quickly released into the U.S.
All of this promotes the perception that the border is out of control and increases support for more restrictionist immigration policies, which should give Democrats a political incentive to fix the asylum loopholes. Start by clarifying that migrants who aren’t being persecuted aren’t eligible for asylum.
Lawmakers should also overrule unfounded court rulings including the Ninth Circuit’s expansion of Flores. More immigration judges are needed to reduce the backlog. Ditto detention beds to house immigrants while claims are processed. Democrats don’t want to make any concessions to Mr. Trump on immigration, but if they refuse to act they will be more to blame for the growing humanitarian and security crisis than the Administration.
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https://www.theblaze.com/news/illegal-immigrant-stabs-california-woman-to-death-after-sanctuary-laws-protected-suspect-from-ice-9-times?utm_content=buffer892c9&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=theblaze&fbclid=IwAR0rUstof7532WPBnjMrs25aPe1FMBnJxUJA8b5K-O-6Ssa3BIEYh8_YbPs
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/border-patrol-union-president-warns-current-migrant-influx-is-the-worst-crisis-in-agencys-history/
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https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/practical-thoughts-on-immigration/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=stripes&utm_content=04042019&fbclid=IwAR3vGD-jBDYA6VyEkox8awQFoucRiod0k92qx270bMa3tWhb8NhbNtfcj4c
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https://patriotpost.us/articles/62253-dhs-reset-to-battle-border-crisis?mailing_id=4184&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4184&utm_campaign=digest&utm_content=body
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/380765.php
"Maryland Man" Accused of Stealing a U-Haul In Order to Drive It Through Crowds at National Harbor (Just Outside of DC)
White Supremacy Watch.
This plan is of course borrowed from ISIS -- renting (or stealing) a large heavy vehicle and then just plowing through civilians has been a staple of ISIS attacks in Europe.
And in New York City, of course.
A Maryland man inspired by the Islamic State terror network allegedly planned to ram a truck into "disbelievers" at a popular tourist spot and keep "driving and driving and driving" nonstop, U.S. officials said Monday.
...
Henry has had "hatred" toward those who don't practice Islam for two years, officials said Monday, adding that he was allegedly inspired from videos of foreign terrorists. He allegedly planned to conduct a similar attack to the truck attack in Nice, France in 2016. Authorities say Henry admitted that he wanted to create "panic and chaos"
"After stealing the van, Henry drove around, arriving at Dulles International Airport in Virginia at approximately 5:00 a.m. on Wednesday, March 27, 2019," officials said. "The government’s motion for detention alleges that Henry exited his U-Haul and entered the terminal, trying to find a way through security, allegedly to harm 'disbelievers' in a way designed for maximum publicity. After more than two hours of failing to breach Dulles’s security perimeter, Henry allegedly returned to the U-Haul."
Strangely, we're not getting the sort of coverage we got after Christchurch, with leftwing/jihad-friendly media types searching to figure out what kind of political messaging, from which set of political actors, could have contributed to this terrorists' mindset.
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/04/09/nolte-univision-anchor-tells-border-agents-dodge-rocks-rather-than-ask-wall/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=daily&utm_content=links&utm_campaign=20190409
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https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-release/cbp-awards-contract-duty-handguns?fbclid=IwAR1h9IVv9994vlS0uYzbc28YZ65cFCrbJGD0f8KLLthZpravwaQNAXumdfs
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https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-release/cbp-awards-contract-duty-handguns?fbclid=IwAR1h9IVv9994vlS0uYzbc28YZ65cFCrbJGD0f8KLLthZpravwaQNAXumdfs
Good call!
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Incoherent on Immigration
Firing his own deputies won’t help the border or move Congress.
By The Editorial Board
April 9, 2019 7:54 p.m. ET
President Donald Trump greets former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen in El Centro, Calif., April 5. Photo: Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press
Frustrated with Congress and the courts on border security, President Trump has responded by firing his own immigration-enforcement deputies. This political incoherence won’t produce better results at the border or break the stalemate in Congress over immigration.
Mr. Trump was good enough to finally show Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen the door on Sunday after taunting her for months on Twitter and via White House leaks to the press. Her forced resignation comes a week after he yanked the nomination of Ron Vitiello to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement to “go in a tougher direction.” Restrictionists want him to clean house, but what do they hope to accomplish?
After defenestrating the department’s top brass, Mr. Trump will be left with a dozen or so vacancies including the deputy secretary at Homeland Security, the general counsel and Citizenship and Immigration Services director. The Senate could take months to confirm replacements—assuming the President can find masochists who’ll take the jobs—and the lack of permanent leadership won’t ease the mess at the southern border.
The President has good reason to be frustrated with liberal judges who have issued nationwide injunctions against his border-control policies that are well grounded in the law. Last summer a federal judge expanded asylum eligibility to immigrants fleeing gang or domestic violence, which has encouraged tens of thousands of migrants to surge to the border on the expectation of being able to stay in the U.S. indefinitely even if they enter illegally.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has extended habeas corpus protections to migrants whose asylum claims are rejected, and it blocked Ms. Nielsen’s order limiting asylum eligibility to immigrants who present themselves at ports of entry. The Supreme Court last year let the latter injunction stand, essentially encouraging judges to take charge of U.S. border control.
Ms. Nielsen’s last-ditch effort was to keep some asylum claimants in Mexico until their cases are heard. The Immigration and Nationality Act provides that an immigrant “who is arriving on land (whether or not at a designated port of arrival) from a foreign territory contiguous to the United States, the Attorney General may return the alien to that territory pending a proceeding.” But a federal judge on Monday enjoined this policy too.
It makes no sense to hang Ms. Nielsen or others because judges—most appointed by Barack Obama—have erected legal barriers to implementing a rational border policy. The dismissals send the message to the public that the problems at the border can be fixed with better administrative policies or execution.
Some advisers want Mr. Trump to take “tougher” actions that strain the legal limits of his executive authority such as ending birthright citizenship. Other bad ideas include reviving family separations at the border, though Mr. Trump backed off that on Tuesday.
Perhaps he was reminded that a federal judge had also ruled against that policy or that images of children in cages don’t sit well with the public. This is why the Administration stopped the separations last spring and asked Congress to fix asylum laws and let families be detained as units.
***
Mr. Trump has cause to be exasperated that Congress has ignored him. Yet some of his advisers, especially immigration Svengali Stephen Miller, have also repeatedly scuttled attempts to forge a compromise with Democrats that could provide more legal immigration including work permits for young adults who came to the country as children.
Last weekend the President channelled Mr. Miller by declaring “we can’t handle any more” immigrants and “our country’s full.” Yet this contradicts Mr. Trump’s avowals that the U.S. needs more foreign workers amid a stretched labor force. The Departments of Labor and Homeland Security acknowledged this reality Monday by making available an additional 30,000 H-2B visas for seasonal workers.
Mr. Trump needs to offer an immigration policy that gets beyond the political dead end of Mr. Miller’s close-the-border restrictionism. Democrats have no incentive to cooperate as long as Mr. Trump is raging against his own deputies as if they’re the problem.
The President needs to offer a larger immigration vision that combines border security while welcoming legal immigrants and offering Democrats something they want. If they still refuse to cooperate, then he can offer that better vision to voters in 2020. Until he does he’ll be frustrated by his own policy incoherence that sounds tough but accomplishes nothing.
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"The President needs to offer a larger immigration vision that combines border security while welcoming legal immigrants and offering Democrats something they want. If they still refuse to cooperate, then he can offer that better vision to voters in 2020. Until he does he’ll be frustrated by his own policy incoherence that sounds tough but accomplishes nothing."
***offering crats what they want! sure , great idea.*** . Is the WSJ kidding? they have to my knowledge never been serious about this issue
bottom line
we are screwed (unless DJT takes drastic action but) even then Obamster judges will block him .
Screwed till 2020 if Republicans can win back the House and maintain Senate and WH.
Till then illegal numbers will swell to 25 million .
and if the Repubs lose House and or WH then that is the ball game folks
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The WSJ has always been pro-legal immigration and soft on illegal immigration. I posted the article not as a matter of shared POV, but as a matter of seeing what an important player is saying.
Edited to add:
That said, the editorial I think fairly makes not of some of the specifics of the judicial dismantlement of defense of our border in a way makes good talking points in reasoning with our fellow Americans.
This too I think a point worth noting:
"It makes no sense to hang Ms. Nielsen or others because judges—most appointed by Barack Obama—have erected legal barriers to implementing a rational border policy. The dismissals send the message to the public that the problems at the border can be fixed with better administrative policies or execution."
Though I think the better analysis is that they lacked the testosterone to move the bureaucracy, I do hope President Trump communicates better to the American people that it in Congress that the true solution lies.
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I also like the WSJ opinion writers though I don't fully agree with them on this. I heard their discussion of this on their podcast, subscription not required.
https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/opinion-potomac-watch
Crafty: "I think the better analysis is that they lacked the testosterone to move the bureaucracy"
Yes. That is Trump's perception of it and it is his right within limits to choose his team. The problems are not kirstjen Nielsen's fault, but the game has changed and the skill set required going forward is different.
Crafty: "I do hope President Trump communicates better to the American people that it in Congress that the true solution lies."
Exactly. The story of the problem at the border is getting out, but the story about the solution and the blocking of it is not.
On Democrats and Obama judges blocking of the solution, the WSJ is right. Left wing judges are acting as Commander in Chief, anti-constitutionally, and Democrats in Congress blocking the reform of laws to allow border security to do its job.
Regarding the need for action from Congress, it seems that Trump needs an Oval Office address to the nation. But that method is not his strength and most certainly will be written off as political. The decision to do it depends on whether it will work and with Pelosi-Omar-Ocasio running the House it will not work, so on we go with Trump communicating in the way that he does and fighting this with all tools available to him.
I agree the strategy now depends on 'testosterone' or testicles (of any gender) for an aggressive legal fight. Without support from Democrats, Trump unfortunately needs to use emergency powers to address this emergency, and to take this fight strategically all the way up the Court system. I'm surprised WSJ panel doesn't see the need for the President to choose his own team to do this, even though the fault is not with the outgoing officials.
Bernie Sanders admitted the other day that we do need borders and we do need enforcement, a breakthrough for the Left. Trump needs to somehow lock in some crossover support on major issues like this one, especially as Democrats lose even Hispanics with their refusal to address the crisis at the border.
I don't think Republicans alone can defend our country.
Regarding legal immigration, from the article:
"Last weekend the President channeled Mr. Miller by declaring “we can’t handle any more” immigrants and “our country’s full.” "
This looks to me like another case of journalists making the mistake of taking Trump word for word literally - and drop the Stephen Miller thing already. They know better and acknowledge it in the next sentences:
"Yet this contradicts Mr. Trump’s avowals that the U.S. needs more foreign workers amid a stretched labor force. The Departments of Labor and Homeland Security acknowledged this reality Monday by making available an additional 30,000 H-2B visas for seasonal workers."
The need for skilled workers is a different question than the current crisis of children and families at the border. Perhaps Trump is setting out a negotiating position for legislation to address both situations. If so, he is a step ahead of those who judge him.
Why are these undersecretary positions not getting filled?
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/04/after-500-days-dozens-of-white-house-jobs-remain-unfilled.html
If we loosen the rules that give power to minority in the Senate, will we be screwed later by that decision? [Yes.] Where there are vacancies in the departments, does that give the White House more power to run the department?
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https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/honduras-caravan-now-3000-strong/?utm_source=Mexico+News+Today&utm_campaign=3eb46ec59a-MNT+apr12-2019&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f1536a3787-3eb46ec59a-349632321
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Dunno about this , , ,
Trump's Latest Proposal to Deter Migrants Risks Doing the Opposite
Migrants wait in a detention area on March 31, 2019, in El Paso, Texas.
(JUSTIN SULLIVAN/Getty Images)
Highlights
In an effort to curb rising illegal immigration from Central America, U.S. President Donald Trump is considering limiting transfers of money from migrants working in the United States to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.
But even relatively mild measures — such as denying or delaying more transfers through increased scrutiny by the U.S. Treasury Department — threaten the already tenuous economic and political situations in these Central American countries.
Reducing remittances would also likely accelerate Central American efforts to seek additional foreign aid and trade links with China, though the United States wields significant economic influence to hamper this trend.
In the end, the Trump administration's efforts could actually drive more migrants to the border by exacerbating the factors they often seek to escape, such as high crime, poverty and food shortages.
The U.S.-Mexico border has seen an influx of asylum seekers from Central America in recent years. The number of migrants apprehended or turned away at the border increased from about 17,000 in March 2017 to 100,000 this March. And while this figure is still well below where illegal immigration on the southern U.S. border was nearly two decades ago, it nonetheless presents a challenge to U.S. President Donald Trump by undermining the staunch immigration enforcement message that helped fuel his electoral victory in 2016.
The Big Picture
Quelling illegal immigration was the core of Donald Trump's political platform in 2016, and it remains a key issue for his administration and supporters. But the growing number of Central Americans who are now reaching the U.S.-Mexico border risks undercutting this political message ahead of the 2020 presidential election. In response, the Trump administration is mulling unprecedented measures to quickly deter illegal border crossings, such as blocking migrant workers from sending money back home.
See Crossing Borders
In an attempt to shore up support ahead of the 2020 presidential election, the Trump administration is now seeking to turn its campaign promises into policy — even if it means pursuing drastic measures. Currently, the most consequential proposal on the table is a move to stem the flow of remittances to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, or money migrant workers send back to their families. But announcing a crackdown on this money is no idle threat. Remittances to these countries (the vast majority is from citizens in the United States) are a leading source of revenue in Central America — making up about 20 percent of Honduras' and El Salvador's GDP and about 12 percent of the Guatemalan economy.
If the White House makes good on its threat, reducing remittances risks spawning considerable political and economic ripple effects in Central America, which could eventually make their way back to Washington in the form of even more migrants on its doorstep.
A Perfect Storm for Populism
The proposal to slow remittances is particularly risky for the economies in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras because of the high number of citizens in these countries who earn their living through informal jobs. In Guatemala and Honduras, more than 70 percent of the population is estimated to work in what's known as the informal labor force, while in El Salvador, the figure exceeds 60 percent. These jobs offer few, if any, benefits and are often tenuous and low-paying. Those who work in the informal sector can also go for weeks or months without pay. As a result, these citizens often make ends meet through the remittances they receive from family members working abroad.
Targeting remittances would thus severely strain many households' income. And the resulting economic slowdown, worsened by global economic headwinds over the next several years, could threaten the region's already fragile political stability and give rise to brewing populist movements.
A graphic showing an increase in the number of apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Central American governments would face hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of constituents with delayed or nonexistent income from remittances. And with limited pools of domestic capital and small budgets, they would have little to offer in the way of alleviating citizens' financial woes. As a result, voters could start turning their anger against incumbent governments, leading to violent unrest and increased support for leftist populists who promise to address their social and financial grievances.
In Honduras, the government of President Juan Orlando Hernandez is already facing a growing threat from the country's main leftist coalition after the president narrowly defeated its candidate in 2017. There is, of course, little that the Honduran government can do to avoid attracting the Trump administration's ire concerning illegal migration. But that wouldn't stop its leftist opponents from using the issue of remittances to garner support and possibly eke out a win in the next presidential election in 2021.
Tied Hands on Trade
Beyond the direct economic and political implications for the region, cutting off remittances would also likely force Central American governments to consider options for expanding trade links and sources of foreign assistance outside of the United States. In doing so, these countries could start accelerating their efforts to court Chinese assistance and export opportunities, which will prove risky due to the region's exposure to the U.S. economy.
As part of the Central American-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR), Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador are particularly vulnerable to U.S. retaliation in the form of trade benefits. El Salvador, for example, was quickly met with Washington's wrath after toying with the idea of recognizing China over Taiwan to diversify its exports in 2018. The United States considered revoking some of El Salvador's trade benefits under CAFTA-DR in retaliation. While the decision to revoke CAFTA-DR benefits would ultimately fall into the hands of an arbitration panel, it is nonetheless a powerful tool the United States can wield to dissuade Central American countries from strengthening their ties with its chief rival in the East.
Even if the United States moves to penalize Central American countries for illegal immigration, these countries will find it very difficult to pursue a path away from the United States. Their historical reliance on their northern neighbor for trade and foreign assistance will cause governments to walk a fine line between satisfying Washington and planning for the future. But there will be little they can do to prevent the domestic fallout from challenging the United States.
Laying Out Trump's Options
With that said, the extent of these economic and political implications in Central America largely depends on the effectiveness of the measures enacted by the Trump administration. As president, Trump technically has the power to target remittances by cutting off all financial transfers to these countries. However, such a move would be highly unpalatable because of the collateral economic damage. It also would be challenged in the U.S. courts and face potential reversal in Congress.
Complicating Central Americans' ability to send money home risks slowing Central American economies, which would have economic and political consequences for the United States.
Instead, the administration is more likely to target remittances by alleging that some of the money migrants are sending back home is being used to facilitate money laundering or fund criminal activities, such as drug trafficking. In doing so, Trump could, for example, have the Treasury Department order financial entities to start heavily scrutinizing remittances sent to Central American countries. Under such a policy, the Treasury Department could start blocking even small amounts of money wired abroad, if the entities transferring the funds can't easily verify the sender's identity or legal status.
In the long term, Central American migrant workers in the United States stymied by more stringent controls on money transfers may start to look for alternative methods, such as cryptocurrency, to continue sending remittances. However, complicating Central Americans' ability to send money home — even if it's temporary — risks slowing Central American economies, which would have economic and political consequences for the United States.
Beware the Backfire
The importance of Central American economies to the United States is relatively minor, accounting for less than $16 billion of U.S. exports. However, certain U.S. companies that operate in Central America, such as those in the retail sector, could be hit especially hard by consumers' shrinking pocketbooks.
But perhaps of most concern to the United States, and to the Trump administration in particular, is the potentially adverse effect targeting remittances could have on Central American migration. The economic fallout risks exacerbating the existing factors — such as violent crime and food insecurity — that already push Hondurans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans to seek asylum in the United States. And drought conditions in rural areas — which are particularly dependent on remittances from abroad — will propel even more of the poorest Central Americans to head north. Though the administration is considering targeting remittances to deter migration, the secondary effects of such a decision could thus end up driving to the U.S. border more desperate Central Americans, who have few other destinations to improve their economic prospects.
Whether the White House will try to make it more complicated for Central Americans to repatriate their earnings remains an open question. A proposal to limit remittances from Mexico was nestled in Trump's 2016 platform on immigration, but the idea only now seems to be under serious consideration. The temptation to make the proposal a reality ahead of the 2020 election will be great. As a result, the United States could come away with even more Central American migrants at its border, and fewer friendly relationships at its disposal in the region to preemptively curb migration flows.
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Gee, if we only had some sort of ...barrier protecting us...
Dunno about this , , ,
Trump's Latest Proposal to Deter Migrants Risks Doing the Opposite
Migrants wait in a detention area on March 31, 2019, in El Paso, Texas.
(JUSTIN SULLIVAN/Getty Images)
Highlights
In an effort to curb rising illegal immigration from Central America, U.S. President Donald Trump is considering limiting transfers of money from migrants working in the United States to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.
But even relatively mild measures — such as denying or delaying more transfers through increased scrutiny by the U.S. Treasury Department — threaten the already tenuous economic and political situations in these Central American countries.
Reducing remittances would also likely accelerate Central American efforts to seek additional foreign aid and trade links with China, though the United States wields significant economic influence to hamper this trend.
In the end, the Trump administration's efforts could actually drive more migrants to the border by exacerbating the factors they often seek to escape, such as high crime, poverty and food shortages.
The U.S.-Mexico border has seen an influx of asylum seekers from Central America in recent years. The number of migrants apprehended or turned away at the border increased from about 17,000 in March 2017 to 100,000 this March. And while this figure is still well below where illegal immigration on the southern U.S. border was nearly two decades ago, it nonetheless presents a challenge to U.S. President Donald Trump by undermining the staunch immigration enforcement message that helped fuel his electoral victory in 2016.
The Big Picture
Quelling illegal immigration was the core of Donald Trump's political platform in 2016, and it remains a key issue for his administration and supporters. But the growing number of Central Americans who are now reaching the U.S.-Mexico border risks undercutting this political message ahead of the 2020 presidential election. In response, the Trump administration is mulling unprecedented measures to quickly deter illegal border crossings, such as blocking migrant workers from sending money back home.
See Crossing Borders
In an attempt to shore up support ahead of the 2020 presidential election, the Trump administration is now seeking to turn its campaign promises into policy — even if it means pursuing drastic measures. Currently, the most consequential proposal on the table is a move to stem the flow of remittances to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, or money migrant workers send back to their families. But announcing a crackdown on this money is no idle threat. Remittances to these countries (the vast majority is from citizens in the United States) are a leading source of revenue in Central America — making up about 20 percent of Honduras' and El Salvador's GDP and about 12 percent of the Guatemalan economy.
If the White House makes good on its threat, reducing remittances risks spawning considerable political and economic ripple effects in Central America, which could eventually make their way back to Washington in the form of even more migrants on its doorstep.
A Perfect Storm for Populism
The proposal to slow remittances is particularly risky for the economies in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras because of the high number of citizens in these countries who earn their living through informal jobs. In Guatemala and Honduras, more than 70 percent of the population is estimated to work in what's known as the informal labor force, while in El Salvador, the figure exceeds 60 percent. These jobs offer few, if any, benefits and are often tenuous and low-paying. Those who work in the informal sector can also go for weeks or months without pay. As a result, these citizens often make ends meet through the remittances they receive from family members working abroad.
Targeting remittances would thus severely strain many households' income. And the resulting economic slowdown, worsened by global economic headwinds over the next several years, could threaten the region's already fragile political stability and give rise to brewing populist movements.
A graphic showing an increase in the number of apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Central American governments would face hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of constituents with delayed or nonexistent income from remittances. And with limited pools of domestic capital and small budgets, they would have little to offer in the way of alleviating citizens' financial woes. As a result, voters could start turning their anger against incumbent governments, leading to violent unrest and increased support for leftist populists who promise to address their social and financial grievances.
In Honduras, the government of President Juan Orlando Hernandez is already facing a growing threat from the country's main leftist coalition after the president narrowly defeated its candidate in 2017. There is, of course, little that the Honduran government can do to avoid attracting the Trump administration's ire concerning illegal migration. But that wouldn't stop its leftist opponents from using the issue of remittances to garner support and possibly eke out a win in the next presidential election in 2021.
Tied Hands on Trade
Beyond the direct economic and political implications for the region, cutting off remittances would also likely force Central American governments to consider options for expanding trade links and sources of foreign assistance outside of the United States. In doing so, these countries could start accelerating their efforts to court Chinese assistance and export opportunities, which will prove risky due to the region's exposure to the U.S. economy.
As part of the Central American-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR), Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador are particularly vulnerable to U.S. retaliation in the form of trade benefits. El Salvador, for example, was quickly met with Washington's wrath after toying with the idea of recognizing China over Taiwan to diversify its exports in 2018. The United States considered revoking some of El Salvador's trade benefits under CAFTA-DR in retaliation. While the decision to revoke CAFTA-DR benefits would ultimately fall into the hands of an arbitration panel, it is nonetheless a powerful tool the United States can wield to dissuade Central American countries from strengthening their ties with its chief rival in the East.
Even if the United States moves to penalize Central American countries for illegal immigration, these countries will find it very difficult to pursue a path away from the United States. Their historical reliance on their northern neighbor for trade and foreign assistance will cause governments to walk a fine line between satisfying Washington and planning for the future. But there will be little they can do to prevent the domestic fallout from challenging the United States.
Laying Out Trump's Options
With that said, the extent of these economic and political implications in Central America largely depends on the effectiveness of the measures enacted by the Trump administration. As president, Trump technically has the power to target remittances by cutting off all financial transfers to these countries. However, such a move would be highly unpalatable because of the collateral economic damage. It also would be challenged in the U.S. courts and face potential reversal in Congress.
Complicating Central Americans' ability to send money home risks slowing Central American economies, which would have economic and political consequences for the United States.
Instead, the administration is more likely to target remittances by alleging that some of the money migrants are sending back home is being used to facilitate money laundering or fund criminal activities, such as drug trafficking. In doing so, Trump could, for example, have the Treasury Department order financial entities to start heavily scrutinizing remittances sent to Central American countries. Under such a policy, the Treasury Department could start blocking even small amounts of money wired abroad, if the entities transferring the funds can't easily verify the sender's identity or legal status.
In the long term, Central American migrant workers in the United States stymied by more stringent controls on money transfers may start to look for alternative methods, such as cryptocurrency, to continue sending remittances. However, complicating Central Americans' ability to send money home — even if it's temporary — risks slowing Central American economies, which would have economic and political consequences for the United States.
Beware the Backfire
The importance of Central American economies to the United States is relatively minor, accounting for less than $16 billion of U.S. exports. However, certain U.S. companies that operate in Central America, such as those in the retail sector, could be hit especially hard by consumers' shrinking pocketbooks.
But perhaps of most concern to the United States, and to the Trump administration in particular, is the potentially adverse effect targeting remittances could have on Central American migration. The economic fallout risks exacerbating the existing factors — such as violent crime and food insecurity — that already push Hondurans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans to seek asylum in the United States. And drought conditions in rural areas — which are particularly dependent on remittances from abroad — will propel even more of the poorest Central Americans to head north. Though the administration is considering targeting remittances to deter migration, the secondary effects of such a decision could thus end up driving to the U.S. border more desperate Central Americans, who have few other destinations to improve their economic prospects.
Whether the White House will try to make it more complicated for Central Americans to repatriate their earnings remains an open question. A proposal to limit remittances from Mexico was nestled in Trump's 2016 platform on immigration, but the idea only now seems to be under serious consideration. The temptation to make the proposal a reality ahead of the 2020 election will be great. As a result, the United States could come away with even more Central American migrants at its border, and fewer friendly relationships at its disposal in the region to preemptively curb migration flows.
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“One of the main lessons our elites seemed to derive from 9/11 is that the best way to fight Islamic terror is to welcome huge numbers of immigrants from places known for Islamic extremism.” Tucker Carlson
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Next caravan under way in Chiapas , , ,
https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/ca...il&utm_term=0_f1536a3787-9ee523849d-349632321
Irregular Cubans
https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/im...il&utm_term=0_f1536a3787-9ee523849d-349632321
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Credibility of this source unknown, but the concept is worth noting:
http://theblacksphere.net/2019/04/citizens-arrest-migrants-new-mexico/
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Prediction:
Sometime soon we may see some action by America on the Guatemalan border , , ,
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second post
https://www.kusi.com/new-mexico-county-declares-state-of-emergency-regarding-immigration/?fbclid=IwAR3G7JMat0i9NZvE3M4bJjg8huvy1HLFOIXDfFIW498EY1DdWYoVDbodO7M
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https://nypost.com/2019/04/20/this-is-a-war-meet-the-texas-ranchers-forming-their-own-border-militia/?utm_source=facebook_sitebuttons&utm_medium=site%20buttons&utm_campaign=site%20buttons&fbclid=IwAR3Tj607W8XvkKckjwwbZfq4rwkcvfG0rCr5gC8ib4eAMGL268JP3hWZAp4
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second post
Why Migrant Caravans Are not Behind the Recent U.S.-Mexico Border Crossing Slowdowns
A Central American migrant caravan on Nov. 11, 2018, passes through the Mexican state of Guanajuato on its way to the United States.
Highlights
Much has been made of so-called migrant caravans heading toward the U.S.-Mexico border, but they are a relatively small part of a broader problem increasing processing times for legal land border crossings into the United States.
These slowdowns affect the operations of businesses reliant on cross-border trade.
While current record levels of immigration will eventually drop off, seemingly intractable staffing challenges at U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the national political fight over the border will continue.
Editor's Note: This security-focused assessment is one of many such analyses found at Stratfor Threat Lens, a unique protective intelligence product designed with corporate security leaders in mind. Threat Lens enables industry professionals and organizations to anticipate, identify, measure and mitigate emerging threats to people, assets and intellectual property the world over. Threat Lens is the only unified solution that analyzes and forecasts security risk from a holistic perspective, bringing all the most relevant global insights into a single, interactive threat dashboard.
About 3,000 migrants from Central America crossed into Mexico from Guatemala via the Rodolfo Robles International Bridge on April 12, joining about 4,000 others already in Mexico's southern state of Chiapas hoping to make it to the United States. Based on the patterns of previous caravans from Central America, the migrants will take an additional three to four weeks to make their way north to the U.S. border, arriving sometime in early May. This timeline could be delayed, however, by an apparent crackdown by the Mexican government: Reuters reported on April 17 that Mexico City has sought to slow the caravans by closing visa offices in southern Mexico and stopping the processing of visas, stranding migrants in camps.
The Big Picture
Staffing shortages, a highly charged atmosphere over immigration and border security, and record-high numbers of would-be illegal border crossers — many of whom are children — have overwhelmed U.S. officials, with so-called migrant caravans a relatively small contributor to the slowdown in border crossings. Consequent delays at official crossing points where U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents process thousands of commercial and personal vehicles every day have caused major problems for legitimate businesses. While current record levels of immigration will eventually drop off, the perennial challenge of securing the border and the national political fight over the issue will persist.
See Crossing Borders
But while some migrants will turn back and some will seek shelter in Mexico, the majority will eventually push on to the U.S. border and will even be joined by others — swelling the size of the caravan. Nongovernmental organizations will help by arranging bus rides, providing meals and leading the group on foot at times. As the caravan moves north, it is likely to break up as groups head toward major crossing points into the United States at Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez and Piedras Negras.
The caravans are contributing to a surge in illegal border crossings into the United States, which has experienced more illegal crossings from Mexico than it has in 12 years. To boost patrols in overwhelmed sectors, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has reassigned hundreds of agents from high-traffic ports of entry, such as San Diego, and Laredo and El Paso in Texas. This in turn has slowed down the processing of legitimate border traffic.
The recent slowdown in processing times threatens the operations of businesses reliant on trade with Mexico. In El Paso, for example, wait times increased to two to three hours in early April 2019 compared with an average of about one hour in April 2015. At Otay Mesa, California, crossing was taking close to 4.5 hours in early April versus minimal wait times in November 2018. And California's San Ysidro crossing, just a few miles west of Otay Mesa, was shut down by protests and immigrants trying to force their way across. Laredo is also experiencing unusually high wait times of about four hours. No caravans, however, will arrive at the border in April. Moreover, the last time a caravan arrived on the border — when about 1,800 Central Americans reached Piedras Negras in early February — its arrival didn't cause a significant jump in legal border crossing times.
Migrant Caravans, a Small Part of the Overall Problem
While caravans have been drawing a great deal of attention in the national debate over immigration and border security, they are just one of a number of factors that have contributed to the crisis unfolding along the border with Mexico. Immigrants attempting to reach the United States by caravan make up a small percentage of total immigration from Mexico and Central America. The February Piedras Negras caravan, for example, accounted for little more than 2 percent of the 76,535 individuals that CBP agents apprehended that month trying to cross into the United States.
March 2019 in turn saw the highest levels of monthly reported apprehensions (103,492) at the border since April 2007, a 105 percent increase over March 2018. In March 2019, apprehensions were up 516 percent from March 2017, when migration along the border with Mexico was at record lows. From January to March 2019, CBP apprehended more Honduran and Guatemalan family units than in all of 2018 combined. So it is actually the overall increase in illegal immigration that is overwhelming the border, not the caravans themselves.
Seasonal Surges and CBP Staffing Woes
Immigration to the United States from Latin America is currently in the middle of its annual increase as seasonal workers attempt to make their way in. In a historical trend, border apprehensions — an indicator of overall illegal immigration patterns — tend to increase from February through May before dropping in June and July. So with or without caravans, the seasonal pressure on immigration authorities along the border should continue for the next one to two months.
Making it harder for the government to cope with the surge, and thus increasing legal crossing wait times, CBP has simultaneously been struggling with staffing shortages. In late March, CBP ordered the redeployment of 750 agents from El Paso and Laredo; Tucson, Arizona; and San Diego to address the surge along less-patrolled sections of the border. That number could go up to 2,000 agents during April, and CBP could request even more if it deems it necessary — further straining resources at busy ports of entry.
Less personnel means fewer open lanes, delays in processing vehicles and backlogs that compound the wait time — ultimately raising shipping costs for companies and individuals that rely on products from Mexico.
During 2018, similar but smaller redeployments saw shorter delays. CBP moved 100 agents from El Paso to the Arizona and California sectors in November, causing wait times to double to about an hour in El Paso. This reallocation of resources has closely corresponded to the increase in wait times during early April. The agents' absence is forcing ports of entry to limit their operations. For example, Laredo was operating only 10 of 12 commercial lanes on April 12, while Otay Mesa was using only eight of 10. Less personnel means fewer open lanes, delays in processing vehicles and backlogs that increase wait times — ultimately raising shipping costs for companies and individuals that rely on products from Mexico.
The apparent shortage of CBP agents is nothing new. According to a 2017 report from the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General, CBP hasn't hit its hiring goals since 2014. It is also trying to fill 7,000 to 8,000 positions for new agents and officers to secure the border and ensure commerce continues without unreasonable delays. But nothing so far indicates the CBP will overcome its personnel shortages any time soon.
Faced with an influx of immigrants and a shortage of personnel to deal with them, U.S. President Donald Trump's administration has chosen border security over the swift processing of commercial and private traffic from Mexico. While the president didn't go so far as to shut down the border as he threatened in early April, the redeploying of limited human resources away from entry points has still hampered trade.
The importance of border security to Trump, as evidenced by his insistence on a border wall, means the subject will remain a politically intractable issue. And while current record levels of immigration will eventually drop off, relieving some pressure on border security forces, the perennial challenges of an understaffed CBP and the national political fight over the border will continue at least through the next round of U.S. elections in 2020.
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/04/22/armed-militia-group-kicked-out-new-mexico-camp/3545014002/
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/feb/11/appeals-court-rules-trump-can-build-border-wall/?fbclid=IwAR03Pcxg5CVDgSkxNAoJfGB9Wni2tDZ_WSzXDWiGRV_eXk8HgClndOeRLTw
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second post
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/heavily-armed-men-escort-migrants-across-us-border-surveillance-video-shows/ar-BBWdAxf?ocid=spartanntp&fbclid=IwAR0mjUYTyQgnMjp7KBiuba_0zirsGXtqDvoNAeu0_UJEMkjxhB_sXV-II1U
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https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-warns-mexico-after-guns-drawn-on-us-troops-better-not-happen-again?fbclid=IwAR2sWvehO087fBbbZACzimiHFn7Sr5kthoIDE-SNMpuWTxremPc7iRC20X4
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https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-warns-mexico-after-guns-drawn-on-us-troops-better-not-happen-again?fbclid=IwAR2sWvehO087fBbbZACzimiHFn7Sr5kthoIDE-SNMpuWTxremPc7iRC20X4
https://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2019/04/this-is-going-to-end-well.html
(https://i.imgur.com/vvj9kI9.jpg)
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Failed Immigration Policy Sustains a Lawless Cartel Empire
Human traffickers profit off the humanitarian crisis at the border. Congress needs to act now.
By Ron Johnson
April 25, 2019 6:49 p.m. ET
A scene from El Paso and Juarez at the U.S.-Mexico border, April 21. Photo: David Peinado/Zuma Press
In a 2018 Gallup poll, 158 million adults world-wide, including 42 million from Latin America, named the U.S. as their desired future residence. That’s almost half our current population of 325 million. We simply cannot accommodate all those would-be immigrants.
Whether it’s called an emergency, a crisis or something else, the surge of families and children entering illegally through our southern border is out of control. Since 2012, some 900,000 unaccompanied children and people traveling in families have entered illegally or without proper documentation. In March alone, the number was 66,000.
Americans naturally have great sympathy for anyone fleeing violence or economic hardship for the hope and promise that the U.S. offers. That we’re a nation of immigrants—natural risk-takers—has made us the envy of the world. But immigration has to be a legal and controlled process.
The generally accepted best estimate of the undocumented population in the U.S. is somewhere between 11 million and 12 million. Using a different method, Yale researchers estimated somewhere between 16 million and 29 million. No one really knows.
Having that many people living in the shadows is not good for anyone. Illegal immigrants can be exploited by unscrupulous employers, depressing wages and working conditions for the legal population. Children born to illegal aliens are U.S. citizens, creating another impossible enforcement issue. Human traffickers—some of the most evil people on the planet—extort their “clients” into forms of involuntary servitude, including sex trafficking.
Among the many reasons the border remains unsecured, America’s insatiable demand for drugs stands out. Cartels have established sophisticated trafficking operations and routes across the U.S.-Mexico border. Fortunes have flowed into cartels’ coffers, weakening the rule of law south of our border.
Because our immigration laws are easy to exploit, cartels have expanded into human trafficking and discovered that it is not only very profitable but entails less risk and less work. They deliver their “cargo” to the border near a Border Patrol station. The immigrants cross on their own, increasingly in larger groups, and the U.S. government and nongovernmental organizations do the rest.
It’s important to understand that the southern border is secure—on the Mexican side. It’s controlled by cartels with the acquiescence, if not outright help and support, of some Mexican officials. No one crosses the border without paying their fees.
Cartels are pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more, for their transportation system through Mexico. America’s broken immigration system—our laws and legal loopholes—sustains this wicked business model. Our laws must change.
Congress should focus on solving a specific problem: the increasing number of unaccompanied minors and people traveling in families who flow in without a valid asylum claim. In fiscal 2018 only 13.5% of asylum claims made by those from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras—the substantial majority of people crossing our southern border—were granted once fully adjudicated. Yet we allow 75% of those claiming credible fear to enter the U.S. and avail themselves of the full, multiyear judicial process. Because ill-conceived laws and a lack of personnel and facilities prevent the government from detaining unaccompanied minors and families, most of the 900,000 who have arrived since 2012 have dispersed all over the U.S. There is no central database tracking them.
As a result, only 7% of those who aren’t detained but whose claims have been denied are actually sent home. The reality since 2012 is that if you come into the U.S. as an unaccompanied minor or member of a family and you claim asylum, you will probably be able to stay indefinitely. This creates a huge incentive for more people to come—hence the growing crisis.
The achievable goal of legislation should be to reduce the flow of people entering illegally without a valid asylum claim. In 2005, 31,000 Brazilians were apprehended entering the U.S. illegally through Mexico. The Bush administration used a process of expedited removal for those without a valid asylum claim and worked with Mexican authorities to prevent further entries. Within two months, the number of migrants fell by 90%. Only 1,400 Brazilians were apprehended in 2006.
In 2014 President Obama declared it a humanitarian crisis when 120,000 unaccompanied minors and people traveling in families entered illegally. Without separating families, his administration began detaining and removing those without valid asylum claims. The number dropped to 68,000 in 2015.
As these examples show, the solution is to determine quickly and more accurately who clearly does not have a valid asylum claim and safely return them home. Once illegal immigrants realize we will not allow our laws to be exploited, fewer will risk paying human traffickers, and the flow will be reduced.
Mr. Johnson, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Wisconsin.
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Judicial Watch
Thousands of Illegals from Terrorist Nations Here after Being ‘Deported’
If terrorists want to infiltrate our country, how hard do you think it would be? The chilling answer is: not very. Our Corruption Chronicles blog explains why.
Months after Judicial Watch reported that migrants from terrorist nations are trying to enter the U.S. via Mexico at record rates, government figures show that more than 10,000 illegal aliens from countries that sponsor terrorism currently live here. It’s not clear how they entered the country but federal authorities know about them because they have either been deported or have final removal orders pending. Nevertheless, they are not in custody and roam freely in unsuspecting communities throughout America.
The distressing statistics were obtained from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) by a public interest group that favors secure borders and exposes the harms of mass migration. The Washington D.C. nonprofit filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and made the figures public this month. They show 10,340 non-detained illegal immigrants from Iran, Syria, Sudan and North Korea on ICE’s national docket as of June 2018. Iran tops the list with 6,331, followed by Syria (2,128), Sudan (1,860) and North Korea (21). All four countries have been designated as sponsors of terrorism by the State Department.
The U.S. government has determined that Iran is the “foremost state sponsor of terrorism” because it provides a range of support, including financial, training and equipment, to groups worldwide, particularly Hezbollah. Syria is also a hotbed of Hezbollah militants and al Qaeda-linked jihadists. A recent RAND Corporation study concluded that the most significant threat to the United States comes from terrorist groups operating in a handful of Middle Eastern countries that include Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The State Department also classifies Syria as a dangerous country plagued by terrorism. “There is a terrorist threat from violent extremist groups including the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, (ISIL), formerly known as al-Qa’ida in Iraq (AQ), the al-Nusrah Front, and others,” according to the State Department assessment. “Tactics for these groups include the use of suicide bombers, kidnapping, use of small and heavy arms, and improvised explosive devices in major city centers, including Damascus, Aleppo, Hamah, Dara, Homs, Idlib, and Dayr al-Zawr.”
During the Syrian refugee crisis, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) admitted that dozens of Syrian nationals suspected of having terrorist ties slipped into the U.S. The agency tried to downplay the travesty, claiming that federal agents missed “possible derogatory information” about the immigrants due to “a lapse in vetting.” Among those who slipped through the cracks is a man who failed a polygraph test after applying to work at a U.S. military installation and another who communicated with an Islamic State leader. Regardless, President Obama let thousands of Syrians settle in the U.S. even as his own intelligence and immigration officials warned that individuals with ties to terrorist groups used the program to infiltrate the country and that there was no way to properly screen refugees.
Along the southern border federal agents routinely encounter individuals from terrorist nations and DHS considers them one of the top threats to the United States. The government classifies them as Special Interest Aliens (SIA) and they are flowing north via Latin America in huge numbers thanks to established Transitional Criminal Organizations (TCO) that facilitate travel along drug and migrant smuggling routes. An investigation completed by Congress earlier this year found that tens of thousands of SIAs—from the Middle East, Asia and Africa—entered Panama and Colombia in the past few years. Nearly all the SIA migrants were headed to the United States and most came from Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Bangladesh and India. Encounters with the special interest individuals resulted in the seizure of tens of thousands of fraudulent documents—including passports and visas—that facilitated travel from their countries of origin through the Americas, according to a report released earlier this year by the congressional committee that conducted the probe.
The famously porous Mexican border is an easy pathway into the U.S. for many SIAs. In Laredo, Texas alone authorities report an astounding 300% increase in immigrants from Bangladesh, a south Asian Islamic country well known as a recruiting ground for terrorist groups such as ISIS and al-Qaeda Indian Subcontinent (AQIS).
All this serves as a dramatic reminder that the core issue on the border needs to be the safety and security of the American people.
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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/dhs-tells-army-corps-to-skirt-land-regs-begin-1b-project-to-replace-53-miles-of-border-fence?fbclid=IwAR1OO9tRGXQ6TI3RHYN6yFm0pi2_VjbFzuyEMg8UrlCxGF7p-iVVXmPfEpk
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second post
http://www.newswest9.com/2019/04/27/investigators-raid-texas-properties-belonging-palestinian-with-ties-terror-group/?fbclid=IwAR1vLWVij3gbJ11AzJK-fB_23AT3FevBQK_nnQ4x8Tulukrfxz7xUHXimOM
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Third post
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4Khgvjdc78&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR1gRQxa1o9BY5sy1d_eJ8v_RzYA9BbbxD14hI8vfI3kKl3S_7U2jGLAI4I
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https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/homeland-security/268282-dhs-ordered-me-to-scrub-records-of-muslims-with-terror?fbclid=IwAR27SmAnUTRUOyrqCZ20QWDwWdEj4EBLex7LOu_DPRnurSeGrWAGikpghBM#.XL_oIdatkJ8.facebook
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https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/homeland-security/268282-dhs-ordered-me-to-scrub-records-of-muslims-with-terror?fbclid=IwAR27SmAnUTRUOyrqCZ20QWDwWdEj4EBLex7LOu_DPRnurSeGrWAGikpghBM#.XL_oIdatkJ8.facebook
I wonder what the statute of limitations is or Obama administration treason.
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https://patriotpost.us/articles/62651-florida-legislature-votes-to-end-sanctuary-cities?fbclid=IwAR3xnuJcr9si6cdWI_FytPmyTUBSjV9JKHEr0YSy58F1QTK-skSHkw8bXw0
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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/new-mexico-county-to-block-democratic-governor-from-releasing-migrants-in-its-backyard?fbclid=IwAR1nhhHC9F32_DjJNAnJZ0KNPfDu_-3tDZqDj-cbQD7rywhHZ-6B446VrBw
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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/new-mexico-county-to-block-democratic-governor-from-releasing-migrants-in-its-backyard?fbclid=IwAR1nhhHC9F32_DjJNAnJZ0KNPfDu_-3tDZqDj-cbQD7rywhHZ-6B446VrBw
I can say I see a serious fracturing of the authority of the western states. It's between the leftist dominated urban areas and their intended rule over the rural areas that are growing increasing tired of their SH*T. I note that when it comes to gun laws, they only really apply to the front range.
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https://www.foxnews.com/us/border-patrol-illegal-immigrants-new-mexico-largest-group-apprehended?fbclid=IwAR037mbEaMh5wS-QRItmZlkl2eOEIcdN_TctI-ktkUJKwJdTn-UfSuj2clQ
Follow the money!!! The 654 people apprehended in this article are , , , let's see , , ,
$7,000 X 544= $457,800 in gross revenues in one day, apparently for one group.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/trish-illegal-border-crossing-is-big-business-for-criminal-cartels?fbclid=IwAR2icFlTHVyOA8FHdqwLKNK9BMtB0Tl7om1u52qD0itAYnkjFixCcHrpE34
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Second post
Thousands of Illegal Aliens from Terrorist Nations Live in U.S. after Being “Deported”
Months after Judicial Watch reported that migrants from terrorist nations try to enter the U.S. via Mexico at record rates, government figures show that more than 10,000 illegal aliens from countries that sponsor terrorism currently live here. It’s not clear how they entered the country but federal authorities know about them because they have either been deported or have final removal orders pending. Nevertheless, they are not in custody and roam freely in unsuspecting communities throughout America.
The distressing statistics were obtained from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) by a public interest group that favors secure borders and exposes the harms of mass migration. The Washington D.C. nonprofit filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and made the figures public this month. They show 10,340 non-detained illegal immigrants from Iran, Syria, Sudan and North Korea on ICE’s national docket as of June 2018. Iran tops the list with 6,331, followed by Syria (2,128), Sudan (1,860) and North Korea (21). All four countries have been designated as sponsors of terrorism by the State Department.
The U.S. government has determined that Iran is the “foremost state sponsor of terrorism” because it provides a range of support, including financial, training and equipment, to groups worldwide, particularly Hezbollah. Syria is also a hotbed of Hezbollah militants and Al Qaeda-linked jihadists. A recent RAND Corporation study concluded that the most significant threat to the United States comes from terrorist groups operating in a handful of Middle Eastern countries that include Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The State Department also classifies Syria as a dangerous country plagued by terrorism. “There is a terrorist threat from violent extremist groups including the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, (ISIL), formerly known as al-Qa’ida in Iraq (AQ), the al-Nusrah Front, and others,” according to the State Department assessment. “Tactics for these groups include the use of suicide bombers, kidnapping, use of small and heavy arms, and improvised explosive devices in major city centers, including Damascus, Aleppo, Hamah, Dara, Homs, Idlib, and Dayr al-Zawr.”
During the Syrian refugee crisis, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) admitted that dozens of Syrian nationals suspected of having terrorist ties slipped into the U.S. The agency tried to downplay the travesty, claiming that federal agents missed “possible derogatory information” about the immigrants due to “a lapse in vetting.” Among those who slipped through the cracks is a man who failed a polygraph test after applying to work at a U.S. military installation and another who communicated with an Islamic State leader. Regardless, President Obama let thousands of Syrians settle in the U.S. even as his own intelligence and immigration officials warned that individuals with ties to terrorist groups used the program to infiltrate the country and that there was no way to properly screen refugees.
Along the southern border federal agents routinely encounter individuals from terrorist nations and DHS considers them one of the top threats to the United States. The government classifies them as Special Interest Aliens (SIA) and they are flowing north via Latin America in huge numbers thanks to established Transitional Criminal Organizations (TCO) that facilitate travel along drug and migrant smuggling routes. An investigation completed by Congress earlier this year found that tens of thousands of SIAs—from the Middle East, Asia and Africa—entered Panama and Colombia in the past few years. Nearly all the SIA migrants were headed to the United States and most came from Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Bangladesh and India. Encounters with the special interest individuals resulted in the seizure of tens of thousands of fraudulent documents—including passports and visas—that facilitated travel from their countries of origin through the Americas, according to a report released earlier this year by the congressional committee that conducted the probe.
The famously porous Mexican border is an easy pathway into the U.S. for many SIAs. In Laredo, Texas alone authorities report an astounding 300% increase in immigrants from Bangladesh, a south Asian Islamic country well known as a recruiting ground for terrorist groups such as ISIS and Al-Qaeda Indian Subcontinent (AQIS).
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So, the libertarian answer would be to dissolve the border, correct?
https://www.foxnews.com/us/border-patrol-illegal-immigrants-new-mexico-largest-group-apprehended?fbclid=IwAR037mbEaMh5wS-QRItmZlkl2eOEIcdN_TctI-ktkUJKwJdTn-UfSuj2clQ
Follow the money!!! The 654 people apprehended in this article are , , , let's see , , ,
$7,000 X 544= $457,800 in gross revenues in one day, apparently for one group.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/trish-illegal-border-crossing-is-big-business-for-criminal-cartels?fbclid=IwAR2icFlTHVyOA8FHdqwLKNK9BMtB0Tl7om1u52qD0itAYnkjFixCcHrpE34
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https://arizonadailyindependent.com/2019/03/02/a-petition-from-southern-arizona-ranchers/?fbclid=IwAR3oWaWwSA804Z3lgvD7MMTsncdGx0Oy6aJw8p-S6kjx26nXDq2anuLQWvY
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https://arizonadailyindependent.com/2019/03/02/a-petition-from-southern-arizona-ranchers/?fbclid=IwAR3oWaWwSA804Z3lgvD7MMTsncdGx0Oy6aJw8p-S6kjx26nXDq2anuLQWvY
Section 4.
The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government, and shall protect each of them against invasion; and on application of the legislature, or of the executive (when the legislature cannot be convened) against domestic violence.
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https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/04/24/politics/us-border-patrol-fingerprinting-children-new-policy/index.html?fbclid=IwAR1tRaJEFFLzl_AnLyx_n2S0EEfp2Yia7_Q8Et-KuWpKkAMmrolpYZk5O30
https://nypost.com/2019/04/26/man-accused-of-killing-infant-over-paternity-had-been-deported-5-times-ice/?fbclid=IwAR16_5X_qRpIQRevfNhoQ7KRS0AQbMSdbVNotSlucPWbidkGTKPKzTUgFVg
https://educationblogit.blogspot.com/2019/03/brett-kavanaugh-casts-deciding-vote.html?fbclid=IwAR2dwlgydt7ynSQkpdoDk-UWQpOE30Ok0d0gwxyTVWINRqYd0ldAcfIa4uY
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https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/border-issues/2019/04/26/border-patrol-now-releasing-migrant-families-directly-tucson/3593532002/?fbclid=IwAR1oNwigXmtw4FevJ6F1So6rjY_KFL3RrqMwgOw3uKXHX07TQwJRh_5t1fI
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https://www.npr.org/2019/05/03/719927985/inside-texas-new-migrant-tent-facility?fbclid=IwAR23keLgirQ41IbcrZhbvwpC9Adr03jap3mF79WZGHwzlYNbFJQD2Xpg_cU
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https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/let-immigrant-families-pay-us-cartels-come?utm_campaign=Cato+Today&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=72297603&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8AE2FpMPgIyOWUW3wLDEF_Fhqgml8dOZVj7nTD2MAXaCkI-o5MOX9pHj41BFhGCbgniQGu9rNYLGiFdgLIpuLjnRo1oQ&_hsmi=72297603&fbclid=IwAR0gdPLBeOF7RuKwsIoPse4l22OoEY1CLVl5V8XJ8qFoUa7K7gzcZqg59gM
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Yes. For one thing, they come illegally via doing business with organized crime, two strikes against them before they start.
With businesses booming, 0% unemployment and everyone wanting to come here, why are we running our immigration system at a loss?
At a minimum, each family coming here should sign a binding contract to pay $200,000, roughly their share of the debt, with say 20% down, if they want to come enjoy our nation's assets that were not free to build. Picking crops by hand or going on welfare doesn't get you there. Present a plan to pay your share. No matter where you go with that idea, you have to take away the free and criminal options first.
Also where is our pressure on these countries to stop being ****holes that people need to flee. If thousands, millions come here claiming danger and persecution, call them out on that. The world index of economic freedom provides a simple roadmap. They could pass our constitution. Instead their people come here wanting our freedom but continue voting for forced redistribution and oppression.
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https://nypost.com/2019/05/05/cartels-thrive-in-new-mexico-county-after-feds-shut-down-checkpoints/?fbclid=IwAR2NzwLfqmX6qA42shxo_pWzDw39B7OxyyPEkpC2xrbCxbAsen1Qg4CIg00
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/05/04/donald-trump-revives-national-program-to-exclude-illegals-from-jobs/?fbclid=IwAR2P9LPUX4qdLcbABVbjPoHGVA8rk72i0vhAq3KhxA6geEFHR2lExkjdIy4
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https://www.baynews9.com/fl/tampa/news/2019/05/06/florida-law-enforcement-working-with-ice-under-new-program?fbclid=IwAR2Q_VpUPXSZgLw0pJH5oIcN-rYuTI8aTi9EYY-33S5eUhcxbMdSuDJ43D8
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/05/opinion/trump-border-crisis-funding.html?fbclid=IwAR132trRfToZnbmBke1M3RClf4TlwNTFJJi9bW7dVseuxgbo4bp4vlSOCic
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Just forget it . We lost
illegals are all over the country
and our elected officials are not going to do anything
any so called compromise means more immigrants, everyone here stays here
more families being imported
no enforcement of those who overstay their visas
endless achor babies
and more dilution of our political system to lean toward democrats
Trump is the only one who is trying to take on the problem but he alone obviously will not be able to achieve anything
the legal in this country have been taken for granted and ignored and simply screwed over for both votes and campaign contributions
game OVER and I am sick of hearing about it.
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Don't let a crisis go to waste. Maybe the problem becoming a crisis was needed to fix this. Losing the House to Comey, Mueller, Pelosi was catastrophic, but a way of cleaning house. Republicans weren't going to solve it on their own or get to 60 in the Senate when they couldn't get all of their own. Maybe the felon vote movement finally exposes the motives of the Left. The solution needs to be bipartisan and it requires the border solution side to win one more election.
The one big puzzler, how do left-run places, like San Francisco with feces in the street and Seattle with their homeless problem, stay far Left?
There is a split coming on the left that will be exposed in the primaries, I predict.
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"The solution needs to be bipartisan"
The Left has succeeded in millions coming and staying
here
"bipartisan" means the Left wins
politicians will never send these people back
there will never be ev every or enforcement of it.
we can't even verify who is voting.
bipartisan means we conciliate or compromise always to our disadvantage .
we needed 60 or we were never gong to win. Doug, that is why we have already lost.
What has changed in the last 20 yrs.
The Rubio compromise was more of a win for the Left than for legal Americans
is was all about helping people from other countries come and stay here - nothing to protect or promote us.
Just disgusted beyond reproach in NJ.
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https://www.wbrz.com/news/illegal-immigrant-wanted-for-homicide-in-honduras-captured-in-livingston-parish/?fbclid=IwAR3u_sJc_yDu7NM78moaRly_EzvS2Kzth1ryVHRnAgkn6t8tNo5TzTqLZZ8
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https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/al-qaeda-kentucky-us-dozens-terrorists-country-refugees/story?id=20931131
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https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/al-qaeda-kentucky-us-dozens-terrorists-country-refugees/story?id=20931131
If they had gone to Minnesota, they might be serving in Congress right now.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-CF2ueU6OU&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR1uGk5beUspzhlHHv2-Qf-SyqkbZsv7p-j5LvbNh90myVIjbI7871eIPqQ
https://kvoa.com/news/local-news/2019/05/07/yuma-cbp-apprehends-more-than-1500-migrants-in-3-days/?fbclid=IwAR3lrl1z9safEpxxAtg2dIYOxvj61sUaVJM7IqwZ6lDsZoowlPqQQrO_WrY
https://www.foxnews.com/us/13-illegal-immigrants-arrested-in-california-wearing-u-s-marine-uniforms?fbclid=IwAR1H3yoWlR93QcrDOVYDfcb5TPmMbtJFAlG7o7aM2v7KANpRGoQvUzFvM2U
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https://abcnews.go.com/US/portland-man-bribe-ice-officer-deport-wife-sour/story?id=62890980
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https://dailycaller.com/2019/05/11/fbi-homegrown-terror-alabama/?fbclid=IwAR1KDTFJFIItlA414lS6_fpNPbDHNWYhsH7ygJO2sPHEFCixwIaUdWk0FvI
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https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2019/05/12/shanahan-says-military-wont-leave-until-border-is-secure/?fbclid=IwAR0FvQtfWwKDu0lmf0G1ykPHU7WONh9gf4MHFbrsCA0eX4LWoA2eXrP_FJw
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https://www.conservativereview.com/news/cartels-kicking-butts-new-mexico-state-left-without-checkpoints/?fbclid=IwAR3GgKRmB5NWdpRssaAMB8f_RVmNS3X9B8WEP9JbpMUHIq-8qU93sKWi-U8
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https://abc3340.com/news/lara-logan-investigates/this-sheriff-is-not-waiting-for-congress-to-come-up-with-solutions-for-the-southern-border?fbclid=IwAR1fyP-LOWYP2NSk2ZNdc2EQyacITtLEjRMewmTGEvDDYxYcLfrNOTAXRGo
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second post
https://americanmilitarynews.com/2019/05/us-military-will-build-6-illegal-immigrant-tent-cities-at-border/?utm_campaign=DailyEmails&utm_source=AM_Email&utm_medium=email
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https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-release/cbp-awards-contract-duty-handguns
https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2019/04/luis-valdes/us-customs-and-border-protection-adopts-the-brand-new-glock-g47-9mm/
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https://www.facebook.com/AZPatriotsUnited/videos/678481912607051/
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second post
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7045351/Rapid-DNA-testing-reveals-migrants-faked-family-relationship-kids.html?fbclid=IwAR3y5ZdIJbYvG2hqJ9DBRw1tLaXmlQIHQoXbp1Tc7YIXKtJLHXJ8aJiGNyo
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second post
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7045351/Rapid-DNA-testing-reveals-migrants-faked-family-relationship-kids.html?fbclid=IwAR3y5ZdIJbYvG2hqJ9DBRw1tLaXmlQIHQoXbp1Tc7YIXKtJLHXJ8aJiGNyo
Unpossible! I have been told that illegal aliens are the best people in America.
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Haven't read this yet, but it looks to go into the weeds with specifics
https://www.conservativereview.com/news/trumps-new-border-directives-may-stop-fanning-flames-time-douse/?fbclid=IwAR3-H65qDIFYkyJc2kVvnLopU3BOAbZvTUeAvH7mHJOCaqUsV5pSIjsXq7A
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https://www.breitbart.com/border/2019/05/23/gulf-cartel-kidnapping-crew-caught-operating-in-texas/?fbclid=IwAR1PuTob0FruSDmnouq4QaqRmrWsIJ187blVR7vyzfJAKzMuBmtgp2IRe1s
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Tomorrow?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_Act
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/can-trump-use-insurrection-act-stop-immigration/589690/
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Tomorrow?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_Act
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/can-trump-use-insurrection-act-stop-immigration/589690/
Governors and Mayors of sanctuary states/cities should be arrested to start with.
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https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/immigration/2019/05/30/we-build-the-wall-gofundme-sunland-park-new-mexico-completed-soon/1271081001/?fbclid=IwAR3ThhV-_RxXQJfsJGBTMlts7VlfVt0xGvue9tC_My9qxoyRTp-mlekThq4
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Pasting CCP's post on Immigration here as well
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2019/06/04/judge-tosses-dems-lawsuit-trying-to-block-trumps-use-of-military-funds-for-border-wall-n2547384
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Second post:
Pasting this from the Ebola thread:
https://www.conservativereview.com/news/large-numbers-coming-border-ebola-ridden-african-countries/
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/former-chief-if-ice-hits-capacity-weve-lost-the-border_2950731.html?ref=brief_News
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second post
https://amp.usatoday.com/amp/1319996001?fbclid=IwAR2nKVRgyoWkNM1vli34IHe29aLssa9BUKglGFQkg7tr9Ua8Pg2Bd5EWqoE
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/former-chief-if-ice-hits-capacity-weve-lost-the-border_2950731.html?ref=brief_News
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/381672.php
The House passed a vote Tuesday that would grant protection from deportation to illegal immigrants and give millions a path to permanent citizenship status.
**But Latvia!**
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrXvH2xBm6w&fbclid=IwAR3Aiclr0oG0zs-Vv5OsN4FCKF54Xl0qbu19vyTcS92yjVYNpae3t6FvZQ0
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second post
https://video.foxnews.com/v/6044222222001/?fbclid=IwAR0MNm4ZzK5AbLDl1imf_KQCn4zkzq-RMOezHuHFP2Mgh2egy6Z2ZjESaXI#sp=show-clips
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Third post
https://www.militarytimes.com/pay-benefits/2019/06/05/these-three-military-bases-may-soon-house-unaccompanied-immigrant-children/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Army%20DNR%2006-05-19&utm_term=Editorial%20-%20Army%20-%20Daily%20News%20Roundup
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fourth post
https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/cartel-led-assault-on-soldiers-taken-captive/?utm_source=Mexico+News+Today&utm_campaign=7c9acb49f8-MNT+june05-2019&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f1536a3787-7c9acb49f8-349632321
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Fifth post
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgersnIc5Cc&fbclid=IwAR3msWivfic-49sfz33WsTsKKurZbiLz41zX90IfEHJrOwtXY6wXFNEIqpU
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**Taxpaying Americans are at the bottom of the multi-tier system.**
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bethbaumann/2019/06/08/hello-irony-tsa-allows-illegal-aliens-without-papers-to-fly-n2547808
TSA: Americans Need Papers To Fly, But Not Illegal Aliens
Beth Baumann | @eb454 |Posted: Jun 08, 2019 5:25 PM
When you head to the airport to board a commercial flight you're expected to have a government-issued ID or passport, something that shows you're who you say you are. Apparently that rule only applies to Americans and not to illegal aliens.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is allowing illegal aliens to fly on commercial flights once they're released Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and/or Border Patrol. The illegal aliens are being flown to various parts of the country for processing, seeing as how Border Patrol stations along the southern border are overwhelmed.
Illegal aliens are allowed to board flights despite not having one of the 15 approved forms of identification.
Acceptable forms of ID include (from the TSA website):
• Driver's licenses or other state photo identity cards issued by Department of Motor Vehicles (or equivalent)
• U.S. passport
• U.S. passport card
• DHS trusted traveler cards (Global Entry, NEXUS, SENTRI, FAST)
• U.S. Department of Defense ID, including IDs issued to dependents
• Permanent resident card
• Border crossing card
• DHS-designated enhanced driver's license
• Federally recognized, tribal-issued photo ID
• HSPD-12 PIV card
• Foreign government-issued passport
* Canadian provincial driver's license or Indian and Northern Affairs Canada card
• Transportation worker identification credential
• U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Employment Authorization Card (I-766)
• U.S. Merchant Mariner Credential
According to the Washington Examiner, TSA has yet to change their policies or introduce a permanent solution for addressing this issue, especially as border apprehensions reach record highs.
Here's where the issue comes in.
Catch-and-release has been a colossal failure. Illegal aliens cross the border, find a Border Patrol agent, ask to see an immigration judge, are processed and then dumped in our communities. ICE often drops them off at bus stations and malls, at which point nongovernmental organizations, like Catholic Charities, provide rides and arrange transportation for the illegals to join their family in other cities. Once ICE drops those people off they wipe their hands and move to the next people.
From the Examiner (emphasis mine):
A TSA spokesperson initially told the Washington Examiner migrants were allowed to board flights if they could present the document they are given when they apply for asylum. The Notice To Appear, known by DHS as Form I-862, is a paper that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services will give to a person who has passed a credible fear screening and will have his or her asylum case decided by a federal judge as many as five years down the road.
TSA said the court order served as the individual’s identification because that person had already gone through a background check while in custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, ICE, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
However, a USCIS official said TSA’s knowledge of protocol was wrong and that the latter agency would not provide any type of travel authorization document to a person who has passed a credible fear screening. The official said the NTA has one purpose and that was to tell recipients when to show up for court.
With the pushback from USCIS, TSA said another possible document that might be used would be the USCIS employment card.
However, asylum seekers who have been released from custody cannot attain that paper until 180 days after a credible fear claim has been approved.
In its initial statement to the Washington Examiner on its own policy violation, the agency said “TSA accepts identification documentation issued by other government agencies, which is validated through the issuing agency. All passengers are then subject to appropriate screening measures.”
TSA then referred the Washington Examiner to a webpage, which still states, “You will not be allowed to enter the security checkpoint if your identity cannot be confirmed, you chose to not provide proper identification or you decline to cooperate with the identity verification process.”
TSA issued an additional statement after publication.
“All travelers are required to provide proper documentation prior to flying. CBP, ICE and TSA have been working together for years, ensuring that those who are leaving detention facilities are provided with the proper documentation, or given additional information about proper documentation at that time," a TSA spokesperson said in an email. "TSA has always had protocols in place for those that are unable to produce documentation and need to travel. However, we expect the vast majority of travelers to appear with one of the documents listed on our website."
Multiple Border Patrol agents have told me that they have trust what the illegal alien is telling them. Most of them have no documentation on them. They tell the agents their name, and for all an agent knows, it's an alias the person made up on their way to being processed. There is absolutely no way of knowing who these people are, why they're here or if they have a criminal past if their fingerprints aren't in the system and they have no valid form of ID.
Allowing anyone on an airplane is dangerous. We already know that "exotic" illegal aliens – those from places like Somalia and Africa – are using our southern border to enter the United States. It's only a matter of time before one of these people use our various modes of transportation to cause harm. We don't need a repeat of September 11th. If Americans have to have proper documentation and identification to get on an aircraft than illegal aliens need to have the same restrictions placed on them.
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https://patriotpost.us/articles/63840-deportation-raids-delayed-at-the-request-of-democrats?mailing_id=4355&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4355&utm_campaign=digest&utm_content=body
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http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/01/hhs-handed-child-migrants-to-human-traffickers.html?fbclid=IwAR2LUHf0XzAuO31PBPvnTBPSgZm9PyQ0NUriCnrVKzSTOLgcDXkr9lAph_E>m=top
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https://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2019/06/isis-fighter-affirms-what-jw-exposed-years-ago-terrorists-enter-u-s-via-mexico/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=corruption_chronicles
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https://www.meforum.org/58778/isis-plans-to-breach-the-us-mexico-border?utm_source=Middle+East+Forum&utm_campaign=82ad8b08e0-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_06_25_02_32&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_086cfd423c-82ad8b08e0-33691909&mc_cid=82ad8b08e0&mc_eid=9627475d7f
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second post
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/ice-agents-are-losing-patience-with-trumps-chaotic-immigration-policy?utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_062519&utm_medium=email&bxid=5be9d3fa3f92a40469e2d85c&cndid=50142053&esrc=&utm_term=TNY_Daily
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https://www.newsmax.com
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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/byron-york-what-now-for-those-who-denied-a-crisis-at-the-border
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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/byron-york-what-now-for-those-who-denied-a-crisis-at-the-border
It's not a crisis, it's part of their plan. Just like all the stacks of Spanish language voter registration documents and "Voto Aqui" signs printed up with taxpayer money.
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(https://i.imgur.com/dmhJBOh.jpg)
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https://www.theblaze.com/news/kevin-mcaleenan-democratic-donor?utm_content=buffer327ae&utm_medium=Referral&utm_source=Facebook&utm_campaign=TheBlazeFB&fbclid=IwAR2ztjUXn1cq4HC-vgilzTfGLuydsFD_yp_Moi3pJjrlJ8aD8lJh-eXcHro
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https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/450987-judge-permanently-blocks-trump-from-using-billions-in-military-funds
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https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/450987-judge-permanently-blocks-trump-from-using-billions-in-military-funds
Ignore the judge and build the wall.
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Defense of the Homeland seems to me a valid basis for a Consitutional crisis , , ,
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https://www.meforum.org/58832/isis-operatives-disguised-as-migrants-caught-in-nicaragua?utm_source=Middle+East+Forum&utm_campaign=b9997b7db1-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_07_02_06_30&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_086cfd423c-b9997b7db1-33691909&mc_cid=b9997b7db1&mc_eid=9627475d7f
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second post:
https://www.foxla.com/news/cbp-condemns-disturbing-private-facebook-group-with-reported-graphic-posts-by-employees?fbclid=IwAR1STd2NBZyNxbmERGgnL2Yk9ISyn0xTynp6hR_5xnIq-fbAFPfk8EsfrGI
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cortez slandering BP agents:
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2019/07/02/the-liberal-media-fell-for-another-ocasiocortez-theater-production-with-detained-illegals-drinking-from-toilets-lie-n2549361
I don't understand what the hell "private" FB group means.
If it is private why is it all over the news?
since I won't in the remaining yrs of my life ever go to FB can someone explain
And if this was a private group, so what.
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second post:
https://www.foxla.com/news/cbp-condemns-disturbing-private-facebook-group-with-reported-graphic-posts-by-employees?fbclid=IwAR1STd2NBZyNxbmERGgnL2Yk9ISyn0xTynp6hR_5xnIq-fbAFPfk8EsfrGI
They were sitting on this story until they needed a shiny object.
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https://dailycaller.com/2019/07/03/omar-obama-trump-immigration/?utm_medium=email
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Legally dubious, but a fine piece of trollery , , ,
https://jonathantgilliam.com/republicans-introduce-bill-to-allow-victims-to-sue-sanctuary-cities/?fbclid=IwAR2vFmay76LHuqCYfoYwOCWF3trwCa_xHAJLr7IABmqFyLSvSeD_pyPCdLE
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jul/10/house-democrats-delete-tweets-showing-obama-era-ph/?fbclid=IwAR1Wbz5sYyyhfMGW_PqXYPqXi094EQNwx4fbCfUVyYleQmSXZUunyOCk-IQ
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/pelosi-advises-illegal-immigrants-on-how-to-avoid-ice/
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https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/watch-pelosi-video-found-showing-massively-racist-todays-democrats-standards-says-doesnt-want-illegals/?utm_source=push&utm_medium=westernjournalism&utm_content=2019-07-22&utm_campaign=pushtraffic
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https://www.dailywire.com/news/49734/border-patrol-weve-now-arrested-over-1000-african-james-barrett?utm_source=cnemail&utm_medium=email&utm_content=072319-news&utm_campaign=position1
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https://americanmilitarynews.com/2019/07/16-marines-arrested-at-camp-pendleton-on-charges-of-human-smuggling-and-drug-related-offenses/?utm_campaign=DailyEmails&utm_source=AM_Email&utm_medium=email
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https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2019/07/facial-recognition-changing-cbp-operations/158736/?oref=defenseone_today_nl
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Connor Betts
for socialism and Liz Pocohantus
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/dayton-shooter-reportedly-supported-gun-control-elizabeth-warren-and-socialism
won't hear this on CNN
how about liz's hate speech
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https://www.theblaze.com/news/hold-cal-state-san-bernardino-apologizes-offers-counseling-to-students-after-promoting-job-opportunities-with-us-border-patrol?utm_content=bufferd6601&utm_medium=organic&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=fb-theblaze&fbclid=IwAR0QQl7cvltgKhjgYpjUFdirdwzCyLzrAkSjaCXAoiYRRTLYKBGR09g4A08
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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/democrats-reject-oversight-of-migrant-detention-centers-because-they-dont-want-to-stop-illegal-immigration
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https://www.meforum.org/59251/scores-smuggled-from-africa-mideast?utm_source=Middle+East+Forum&utm_campaign=8586fe30d4-MEF_Bensman_2019_09_03_02_31&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_086cfd423c-8586fe30d4-33691909&goal=0_086cfd423c-8586fe30d4-33691909&mc_cid=8586fe30d4&mc_eid=9627475d7f
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https://www.meforum.org/59310/ecuador-battleground-to-secure-us-border?utm_source=Middle+East+Forum&utm_campaign=4156872046-MEF_bensman_2019_09_06_03_20&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_086cfd423c-4156872046-33691909&goal=0_086cfd423c-4156872046-33691909&mc_cid=4156872046&mc_eid=9627475d7f
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https://www.judicialwatch.org/corruption-chronicles/north-carolina-jails-free-hundreds-of-illegal-immigrant-criminals-wanted-by-feds/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tipsheet&utm_term=members&utm_content=20190916230759
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https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2019/09/17/the-pentagon-is-canceling-three-border-wall-projects-because-the-costs-went-up/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Army%20DNR%2009-17-19&utm_term=Editorial%20-%20Army%20-%20Daily%20News%20Roundup
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https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2019/09/us-deploy-anti-drone-defenses-along-us-mexico-border/160247/?oref=defenseone_today_nl
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https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ice-nabs-dozens-of-illegal-immigrants-with-child-sex-offenses-after-release-by-sanctuary-cities?fbclid=IwAR0KYb0hhxE7zGhFvW4JII9WP1Xnnp9M95eaOatXvrXimoUJzAsO1ySuyAo
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https://defensemaven.io/bluelivesmatter/news/court-rules-all-florida-cities-must-cooperate-with-ice-4pBWfx-pdUC83F-201k-UQ/?fbclid=IwAR37SgnvFscRe8gMB-6ED8IwGOn054c533SWSHfrEkC8YZXPu3MBR6pnWkU
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/fbi-campaign-alerts-us-universities-to-counter-china-theft-threat_3107584.html?utm_source=Epoch+Times+Newsletters&utm_campaign=fefae501dc-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_10_06_09_06&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4fba358ecf-fefae501dc-239065853
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FBI warns Universities
how can Universities really protect themselves we have 10 s of thousands here is our systems?
but 25 yr late better than never I suppose.
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https://www.meforum.org/59598/mexico-struggles-with-extra-continental-migrants?utm_source=Middle+East+Forum&utm_campaign=ddff1500ad-MEF_Bensman_2019_10_17_10_00&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_086cfd423c-ddff1500ad-33691909&goal=0_086cfd423c-ddff1500ad-33691909&mc_cid=ddff1500ad&mc_eid=9627475d7f
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/trump-administration-asks-supreme-court-to-review-californias-sanctuary-law_3128576.html?ref=brief_News&utm_source=Epoch+Times+Newsletters&utm_campaign=e02a4551ad-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_10_30_02_28&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4fba358ecf-e02a4551ad-239065853
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https://kutv.com/news/local/cartels-in-utah-same-group-behind-deadly-mexico-attack-has-an-operation-here?fbclid=IwAR0CLM9p2ZC6qQO3DilE0FV4XISz5iZC5iMINOBtz8ylbgUfuc4EmqX6tu8
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https://clarionproject.org/iran-hezbollah-use-mexican-drug-cartels-to-inflitrate-us/?utm_source=Clarion+Project+Newsletter&utm_campaign=ab7cc46a2b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_11_05_12_43&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_60abb35148-ab7cc46a2b-6358189&mc_cid=ab7cc46a2b&mc_eid=d7eaaa3130
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https://americanmilitarynews.com/2019/11/new-video-15-marines-arrested-in-formation-for-human-smuggling-ring/?utm_campaign=DailyEmails&utm_source=AM_Email&utm_medium=email
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https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/smugglers-cut-hole-in-border-wall-big-enough-for-a-truck/
I inquired of a BP friend if this was old wall.
His answer:
"Correct. This was an area of the old Vietnam era landing mat and illustrates exactly why we need a more resilient barrier. This happens all the time....not uncommon at all. The landing mat is falling apart in a lot of areas....easily cut or pushed down. We actually had a situation in San Diego where a large number of the illegals in the Caravan pushed the wall down on top of members of their own group, pinning them under the mat fence, and trampled them. Our Agents actually had to use CS gas to keep them from trampling them to death. The old fence was a joke...not remotely a deterrent. I have literally seen a semi-cripple toss his crutches over and climb over it...pick up his crutches and hobble to the smuggling vehicle that was waiting for him.......can’t do that when the drop is 30 feet."
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N GEOPOLITICS
The Geopolitics of Immigration
EDITOR'S NOTE:
Pilgrim and Puritan settlers who arrived in New England in the early 17th century brought with them the tradition of Thanksgiving that was adopted by waves of immigrants who followed. This analysis first published Jan. 15, 2004, examines the role immigration has played — and continues to play — in the evolution of the United States.
The United States came into being through mass movements of populations. The movements came in waves from all over the world and, depending upon the historical moment, they served differing purposes, but there were two constants. First, each wave served an indispensable economic, political, military or social function. The United States — as a nation and regime — would not have evolved as it did without them. Second, each wave of immigrants was viewed ambiguously by those who were already in-country. Depending upon the time or place, some saw the new immigrants as an indispensable boon; others saw them as a catastrophe. The debate currently under way in the United States is probably the oldest in the United States: Are new immigrants a blessing or catastrophe? So much for the obvious.
What is interesting about the discussion of immigration is the extent to which it is dominated by confusion, particularly about the nature of immigrants. When the term "immigrant" is used, it is frequently intended to mean one of two things: Sometimes it means non-U.S. citizens who have come to reside in the United States legally. Alternatively, it can mean a socially or linguistically distinct group that lives in the United States regardless of legal status. When you put these together in their various permutations, the discourse on immigration can become chaotic. It is necessary to simplify and clarify the concept of "immigrant."
Initial U.S. immigration took two basic forms. There were the voluntary migrants, ranging from the Europeans in the 17th century to Asians today. There were the involuntary migrants — primarily Africans — who were forced to come to the continent against their will. This is one of the critical fault lines running through U.S. history. An immigrant who came from China in 1995 has much more in common with the Puritans who arrived in New England more than 300 years ago than either has with the Africans. The former came by choice, seeking solutions to their personal or political problems. The latter came by force, brought here to solve the personal or political problems of others. This is one fault line.
The second fault line is between those who came to the United States and those to whom the United States came. The Native American tribes, for example, were conquered and subjugated by the immigrants who came to the United States before and after its founding. It should be noted that this is a process that has taken place many times in human history. Indeed, many Native American tribes that occupied the United States prior to the foreign invasion had supplanted other tribes — many of which were obliterated in the process. Nevertheless, in a strictly social sense, Native American tribes were militarily defeated and subjugated, their legal status in the United States was sometimes ambiguous and their social status was frequently that of outsiders. They became immigrants because the occupants of the new United States moved and dislocated them.
There was a second group of people in this class: Mexicans. A substantial portion of the United States, running from California to Texas, was conquered territory, taken from Mexico in the first half of the 19th century. Mexico existed on terrain that Spain had seized from the Aztecs, who conquered it from prior inhabitants. Again, this should not be framed in moral terms. It should be framed in geopolitical terms.
When the United States conquered the southwest, the Mexican population that continued to inhabit the region was not an immigrant population, but a conquered one. As with the Native Americans, this was less a case of them moving to the United States than the United States moving to them.
The response of the Mexicans varied, as is always the case, and they developed a complex identity. Over time, they accepted the political dominance of the United States and became, for a host of reasons, U.S. citizens. Many assimilated into the dominant culture. Others accepted the legal status of U.S. citizens while maintaining a distinct cultural identity. Still others accepted legal status while maintaining intense cultural and economic relations across the border with Mexico. Others continued to regard themselves primarily as Mexican.
The U.S.-Mexican border is in some fundamental ways arbitrary. The line of demarcation defines political and military relationships, but does not define economic or cultural relationships. The borderlands — and they run hundreds of miles deep into the United States at some points — have extremely close cultural and economic links with Mexico. Where there are economic links, there always are movements of population. It is inherent.
The persistence of cross-border relations is inevitable in borderlands that have been politically and militarily subjugated, but in which the prior population has been neither annihilated nor expelled.
Where the group on the conquered side of the border is sufficiently large, self-contained and self-aware, this condition can exist for generations. A glance at the Balkans offers an extreme example. In the case of the United States and its Mexican population, it also has continued to exist.
This never has developed into a secessionist movement, for a number of reasons. First, the preponderance of U.S. power when compared to Mexico made this a meaningless goal. Second, the strength of the U.S. economy compared to the Mexican economy did not make rejoining Mexico attractive. Finally, the culture in the occupied territories evolved over the past 150 years, yielding a complex culture that ranged from wholly assimilated to complex hybrids to predominantly Mexican. Secessionism has not been a viable consideration since the end of the U.S. Civil War. Nor will it become an issue unless a remarkable change in the balance between the United States and Mexico takes place.
It would be a mistake, however, to think of the cross-border movements along the Mexican-U.S. border in the same way we think of the migration of people to the United States from other places such as India or China, which are an entirely different phenomenon — part of the long process of migrations to the United States that has taken place since before its founding. In these, individuals made decisions — even if they were part of a mass movement from their countries — to move to the United States and, in moving to the United States, to adopt the dominant American culture to facilitate assimilation. The Mexican migrations are the result of movements in a borderland that has been created through military conquest and the resulting political process.
The movement from Mexico is, from a legal standpoint, a cross-border migration. In reality, it is simply an internal migration within a territory whose boundaries were superimposed by history. Put differently, if the United States had lost the Mexican-American war, these migrations would be no more noteworthy than the mass migration to California from the rest of the United States in the middle of the 20th century. But the United States did not lose the war — and the migration is across international borders.
It should be noted that this also distinguishes Mexican population movements from immigration from other Hispanic countries. The closest you can come to an equivalent is in Puerto Rico, whose inhabitants are U.S. citizens due to prior conquest. They neither pose the legal problems of Mexicans nor can they simply slip across the border.
The Mexican case is one-of-a-kind, and the difficulty of sealing the border is indicative of the real issue. There are those who call for sealing the border and, technically, it could be done although the cost would be formidable. More important, turning the politico-military frontier into an effective barrier to movement would generate social havoc. It would be a barrier running down the middle of an integrated social and economic reality. The costs for the region would be enormous, piled on top of the cost of walling off the frontier from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific.
If the U.S. goal is to create an orderly migration process from Mexico, which fits into a broader immigration policy that includes the rest of the world, that probably cannot be done. Controlling immigration in general is difficult, but controlling the movement of an indigenous population in a borderland whose frontiers do not cohere to social or economic reality is impossible.
This is not intended to be a guide to social policy. Our general view is that social policies dealing with complex issues usually have such wildly unexpected consequences that it is more like rolling the dice than crafting strategy. We nevertheless understand that there will be a social policy, hotly debated by all sides that will wind up not doing what anyone expects, but actually will do something very different.
The point we are trying to make is simpler. First, the question of Mexican population movements has to be treated completely separately from other immigrations. These are apples and oranges. Second, placing controls along the U.S.-Mexican frontier is probably impossible. Unless we are prepared to hermetically seal the frontier, populations will flow endlessly around barriers, driven by economic and social factors. Mexico simply does not end at the Mexican border, and it hasn't since the United States defeated Mexico. Neither the United States nor Mexico can do anything about the situation.
The issue, from our point of view, cuts to the heart of geopolitics as a theory. Geopolitics argues that geographic reality creates political, social, economic and military realities. These can be shaped by policies and perhaps even controlled to some extent, but the driving realities of geopolitics can never simply be obliterated, except by overwhelming effort and difficulty. The United States is not prepared to do any of these things and, therefore, the things the United States is prepared to do are doomed to ineffectiveness.
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/us-customs-seizes-thousands-of-fake-ids-from-china_3160840.html?utm_source=Epoch+Times+Newsletters&utm_campaign=c5ecc18118-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_12_02_12_19&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4fba358ecf-c5ecc18118-239065853
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https://israelunwired.com/muslims-rally-in-times-square-calling-for-an-intifada-in-america/
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https://israelunwired.com/muslims-rally-in-times-square-calling-for-an-intifada-in-america/
https://gatesofvienna.net/2019/12/courage-what-would-we-do/#more-49372
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https://www.breitbart.com/2nd-amendment/2019/12/06/report-6-saudis-detained-after-pensacola-shooting-including-3-who-filmed-attack/
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https://www.breitbart.com/2nd-amendment/2019/12/06/report-6-saudis-detained-after-pensacola-shooting-including-3-who-filmed-attack/
Tell me again how we are winning.
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https://americanmilitarynews.com/2019/12/navy-suspends-flight-training-for-300-saudi-military-personnel-in-the-us/?utm_source=foramerica&utm_campaign=alt&utm_medium=facebook&fbclid=IwAR2yEUJVwh8_cvPbu7MHf48EaA5f52CIIOwQACmLuzZ-_9zPbNt6Y7dG8hA
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https://clarionproject.org/saudi-student-in-nm-arrested-with-handgun-hit-list/?utm_source=Clarion+Project+Newsletter&utm_campaign=773cf6324f-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_12_17_01_55&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_60abb35148-773cf6324f-6358189&mc_cid=773cf6324f
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Can someone post this article please? I've used up my freebies with this site.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/dec/17/catch-and-release-ended-95-migrants/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=manual&utm_campaign=20171227&utm_term=newsletter&utm_content=morning&bt_ee=KTEaGZJHClYgT%2FKWNgJhj3FiJTRqaZjmETyn5TNcJKNxPkpBQXJkp%2BMrHplH0IbZ&bt_ts=1576665452624
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Can someone post this article please? I've used up my freebies with this site.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/dec/17/catch-and-release-ended-95-migrants/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=manual&utm_campaign=20171227&utm_term=newsletter&utm_content=morning&bt_ee=KTEaGZJHClYgT%2FKWNgJhj3FiJTRqaZjmETyn5TNcJKNxPkpBQXJkp%2BMrHplH0IbZ&bt_ts=1576665452624
Catch-and-release ended for 95% of migrants; cartels already adjusting
In this Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2019, photo, Border Patrol agents stop two men thought to have entered the country illegally, near McAllen, Texas, along the U.S.-Mexico border. In the Rio Grande Valley, the southernmost point of Texas and historically the busiest section for border crossings, the U.S. Border Patrol is apprehending around 300 people daily, down from as many as 2,000 people a day in May. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
In this Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2019, photo, Border Patrol agents stop two men thought to have entered the country illegally, near McAllen, Texas, along the U.S.-Mexico border. In the Rio Grande Valley, the southernmost point of Texas and historically the ... more >
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By Stephen Dinan - The Washington Times - Tuesday, December 17, 2019
Homeland Security has solved the Central American migrant surge from earlier this year, ending 95% of catch-and-release at the border, a top official said Tuesday — but he warned the cartels are already shifting their tactics to entice other migrants to make the journey.
And acting Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark A. Morgan also warned the government may not meet its own goal for construction of miles of President Trump’s border wall by the end of next year.
“Our goal at the end of 2020 is 450 miles. It’s hard right now to say whether we’re still gong to be able to meet that goal, but I’m confident we’re going to be close,” Mr. Morgan told reporters.
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So far, just 93 miles has been built — all of it replacing old, outdated fencing. No new miles of the border have been fenced in on Mr. Trump’s watch, though officials say that’s coming soon.
Mr. Morgan was delivering an update on progress made six months after Central American children and families set new records for illegal immigration into the U.S.
Mr. Morgan also delivered new evidence of the callousness of the cartels that control the smuggling routes to the U.S., pointing to a truck stopped at a Border Patrol checkpoint this week.
He said they found immigrants who were living in the country illegally inside wearing shirts with letters branded on their clothing with spray-paint, which he said appeared to be a cartel system for identifying and moving the people “literally like a piece of cattle.”
“When you see these pictures, I hope that you have the same level of disturbance,” Mr. Morgan told reporters as he discussed the tactics.
The flow of people from Central America has dried up as federal officials have found ways to combat the loopholes migrants had been using to gain a foothold in the United States.
Cooperation with Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, as well as stiffer standards for claims here in the U.S., have created consequences for 95% of people who enter the country illegally, Mr. Morgan said.
Some are returned to Mexico to wait for immigration hearings under the Migrant Protection Protocol, while others can now be more quickly sent back to Central America.
Word has gotten back to that region that the old loopholes are no longer working, and the number of Central American families is down 85% compared to the nearly 90,000 migrant families — by far a record — who jumped the border in May.
It’s made a major dent in the cartels’ bottom line, Mr. Morgan said.
“We have probably removed a couple billion dollars from their illicit criminal scheme,” he said.
But they’re already finding replacement clients, he said.
They’ve begun to advertise in Mexico, seeking to entice more people there to make the trip. And they are looking “extracontinental,” he said, recruiting migrants from across the globe.
The change in tactics shows up in the numbers.
Southeastern Arizona, which had been relatively unscathed by the migrant surge compared to parts of Texas and western Arizona, saw its arrest numbers more than double from October to November as migrants thought they could take advantage of loopholes there.
Human rights groups say the better border numbers overall are not without a cost.
The Washington Office on Latin America released a report Tuesday looking at Mexico’s stepped-up efforts, under threat of punishment by Mr. Trump, to police its own borders.
Mexico deployed 12,000 members of its new national guard to its own southern border, and set records for its own apprehensions of immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. That’s left its own detention facilities at the breaking point, WOLA said, with some at 300% capacity.
“Thousands of migrants are stranded in Mexico’s southern border zone, where many have fallen victim to crime and abuse,” WOLA said in its report.
While Mexico’s facilities are bursting at the seams, U.S. border facilities are in much better shape now, compared to the peak of the crisis.
In early June, Homeland Security said it had nearly 20,000 people in custody in facilities that were designed for quick processing — similar to a police station’s holding cells.
Immigrant-rights groups and Democrats in Congress had complained that migrants were being maltreated during the overcrowding, including one report from Democrats who said a migrant had told them she was ordered to get drinking water from a toilet.
CBP never substantiated that claim.
Mr. Morgan did acknowledge the overcrowding, but says things have improved greatly. Now, about 4,000 migrants are in CBP custody on the average day. Mr. Morgan said that’s right at capacity.
The acting commissioner also made a pitch for Mr. Trump’s border wall, saying it not only fends off migrants but can help stop the flow of illegal drugs, which he said is getting worse.
CBP says its goal is to have 450 miles built by the end of 2020, with another 59 miles in construction.
Of that, only 165 miles will fence off parts of the border currently without any barrier. Another 57 miles will add a new secondary line of fencing where none exists.
The rest — about 287 miles — will replace existing barriers.
The Trump administration is battling in federal courts to keep construction on track. Judges in El Paso and California have ruled in recent weeks against Mr. Trump’s move to shift billions of dollars in Pentagon money into wall building.
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https://www.kens5.com/article/news/special-reports/at-the-border/border-patrol-agents-assaulted-on-new-years-eve-in-laredo/273-62391a96-5616-4851-82de-3d8f5f636c06
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https://clarionproject.org/us-expel-saudi-military-trainees/?utm_source=Clarion+Project+Newsletter&utm_campaign=c8d535d346-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_01_12_03_10&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_60abb35148-c8d535d346-6358189&mc_cid=c8d535d346
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second post
https://clarionproject.org/6-prominent-us-universities-failed-to-disclose-1-3-billion-in-foreign-funding/?utm_source=Clarion+Project+Newsletter&utm_campaign=c8d535d346-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_01_12_03_10&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_60abb35148-c8d535d346-6358189&mc_cid=c8d535d346
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/trump-planning-to-divert-additional-7-2-billion-in-pentagon-funds-for-border-wall/ar-BBYVkbJ
Just like they build around rich leftist estates.
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https://www.judicialwatch.org/corruption-chronicles/mexican-police-chief-unfazed-by-u-s-alert-arrival-of-middle-easterners-going-north-is-normal/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=corruption+chronicles&utm_term=members&utm_content=20200115192616
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second post
https://nypost.com/2020/01/14/feds-blame-de-blasio-for-murder-sex-assault-of-92-year-old-woman/?utm_source=maropost&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nypdaily&utm_content=20200115&tpcc=morning_report&mpweb=755-8533267-719779164
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Look, you can't build the left's new multicultural favela without breaking some eggs.
second post
https://nypost.com/2020/01/14/feds-blame-de-blasio-for-murder-sex-assault-of-92-year-old-woman/?utm_source=maropost&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nypdaily&utm_content=20200115&tpcc=morning_report&mpweb=755-8533267-719779164
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https://www.meforum.org/60297/saudi-critics-should-revisit-sue-myrick-wake-up?utm_source=Middle+East+Forum&utm_campaign=b501e4bdca-MEF_Caschetta_2020_01_17_08_18&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_086cfd423c-b501e4bdca-33691909&goal=0_086cfd423c-b501e4bdca-33691909&mc_cid=b501e4bdca
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https://apnews.com/fa038b1a40bfc1192dc960fd25a1c8f8
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https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/11/huge_illicit_drivers_license_haul_in_kentucky_suggests_a_very_established_cartel_operation.html#.XiPk2i1DyU0.facebook
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https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/11/huge_illicit_drivers_license_haul_in_kentucky_suggests_a_very_established_cartel_operation.html#.XiPk2i1DyU0.facebook
Delete This:
#.XiPk2i1DyU0.facebook
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One of the themes of this thread is the threat to our Freedom in the name of protecting us. With that in mind , , ,
https://i-d.vice.com/en_uk/article/jge5jg/dazzle-club-surveillance-activists-makeup-marches-london-interview?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&Echobox=1580324410#fbclid=Echobox
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One of the themes of this thread is the threat to our Freedom in the name of protecting us. With that in mind , , ,
https://i-d.vice.com/en_uk/article/jge5jg/dazzle-club-surveillance-activists-makeup-marches-london-interview?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&Echobox=1580324410#fbclid=Echobox
At least London is safe!
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/8104412/london-stabbings-2019-knife-crime-statistics/
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https://www.judicialwatch.org/corruption-chronicles/thousands-of-illegal-aliens-from-terrorist-nations-live-in-u-s-after-being-deported/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newslink&utm_term=members&utm_content=20200211142903
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https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-the-trump-administration-uses-the-hidden-weapons-of-immigration-law?source=EDT_NYR_EDIT_NEWSLETTER_0_imagenewsletter_Daily_ZZ&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_021320&utm_medium=email&bxid=5be9d3fa3f92a40469e2d85c&cndid=50142053&esrc=&mbid=&utm_term=TNY_Daily
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Signs of a Thwarted Russian Hit in Miami
Scott Stewart
Scott Stewart
VP of Tactical Analysis, Stratfor
9 MINS READ
Feb 25, 2020 | 10:00 GMT
The Miami skyline, photographed on April 29, 2019.
The Miami skyline, photographed on April 29, 2019. Russian intelligence agencies have gotten away with killing the Kremlin's enemies abroad, which may have emboldened them to give assassination a try in the United States.
(DANIEL SLIM/AFP via Getty Images)
HIGHLIGHTS
Russian intelligence agencies have gotten away with killing the Kremlin's enemies abroad, which may have emboldened them to give assassination a try in the United States....
The U.S. Department of Justice on Feb. 18 announced the arrest in Miami of a man being charged with acting on behalf of a foreign government without registering with the U.S. attorney general's office, and conspiracy to do the same. According to the criminal complaint, the accused, Hector Alejandro Cabrera Fuentes, is a Mexican citizen who resides in Singapore where he works at the National Heart Institute.
According to Cabrera's LinkedIn profile, he reportedly attended Kazan State University in Russia, where he studied microbiology and molecular biology. He also claims to be a postdoctoral research associate at Justus-Liebig University in Germany and listed himself as president of an organization called the Mexican Global Network in Singapore. Cabrera reportedly is married to a Russian woman, although he also appears to be legally married to the Mexican woman who was with him at the time of his arrest.
The Big Picture
Since former KGB officer and FSB director Vladimir Putin became Russia's president, the country's intelligence agencies have regained much of their Cold War power. As Putin's power has grown, his intelligence services have grown commensurately bolder. Though the Kremlin invariably will try to deny any role in or knowledge of assassinations and other skulduggery, for the most part, the operations are overt or only very thinly veiled.
See Echoes of the Cold War
According to the criminal complaint, in February 2019, Cabrera's Russian wife, who had been residing in Germany, traveled back to Russia to handle some administrative tasks regarding her identification documents. After completing this transaction, she was not permitted to leave Russia. Cabrera traveled to Russia in May 2019 to see his family. Upon his arrival, he was contacted by a man he had met previously in group settings at conferences and meetings and who he knew was a Russian government official. The officer asked Cabrera to travel to Moscow to meet with him. During this meeting, the Russian intelligence officer reportedly offered to help Cabrera get his Russian wife and her daughters out of Russia if Cabrera "helped" him by performing some tasks for him.
From this sequence of events, as described in the complaint, it is clear that the Russian intelligence officer had previously spotted Cabrera and assessed him to be a viable potential agent. Detaining Cabrera's Russian wife inside Russia provided the Russian intelligence officer with significant leverage over Cabrera that he was then able to use in his recruitment pitch.
An American Recruited Overseas
Recruiting an agent from another country who can accomplish basic tasks, such as renting an apartment or obtaining a license plate number, while providing the recruiting agency with plausible deniability, is standard espionage tradecraft. What is interesting in this case is that the Russians used an agent they had recruited overseas to conduct such functions rather than task a previously recruited American agent or foreign agent residing in the United States. On one hand, this could indicate they didn't deem this case significant enough to risk burning an American agent. Conversely, however, given the time, expense and effort involved in this case, it may demonstrate that the Russians were concerned the FBI may have surveillance coverage on their current agents inside the United States so they decided to use a "clean" outsider in an attempt to evade detection.
It is not clear which Russian agency the intelligence officer who allegedly recruited Cabrera was working for, but given the context of this case, it was most likely either the Russian military's Main Intelligence Directorate (known as the GRU by its Russian acronym) or Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB).
A chart illustrating the human intelligence recruitment process.
Cabrera's first tasking from his handler, according to the complaint, was to rent a specific apartment in a condo complex in Miami that a U.S. government "confidential human source who previously provided information on Russian Intelligence Service activities implicating national security interests of the United States" was living in. This description indicates that the person is likely a Russian defector or agent who had been resettled to the United States.
The Russian intelligence officer said he knew that Cabrera had previously looked at purchasing a property in South Florida and showed him a printed version of a 2015 email exchange Cabrera had with a real estate agent in Florida. The coverage of Cabrera's email was obtained as part of the Russian's efforts to assess Cabrera and explain why he was selected for this specific tasking in Miami.
Cabrera was instructed not to tell anyone he was renting the property and to avoid renting it in his own name, the complaint alleges. He was able to have a contact rent the apartment in their name and wired the contact $20,000 in December 2019 to pay for the rent. Cabrera was allegedly told that the apartment was intended to be used to conduct surveillance against the target, but given Russia's aggressive campaign against defectors in recent years, it is also possible it was being considered as a location from which to launch an assassination attempt.
Amateur Hour
When Cabrera returned to Russia in February 2020, he was reportedly again contacted by the intelligence officer, who provided him with a description of the target's vehicle, and who then instructed Cabrera to travel to Miami again to locate the target's car, obtain its license plate number and note where it was being parked. On Feb. 13, Cabrera traveled to Miami with his Mexican wife. On Feb. 14, the couple drove a rented car to the condo complex where the target lived. They reportedly "tailgated" behind another vehicle to gain entrance to the complex. This reportedly drew the attention of an alert security guard who approached the couple. They provided the name of a person they were allegedly attempting to visit, but no person with that name resided in the complex, and the security guard asked the couple to leave. As the security guard was talking to Cabrera, his Mexican wife reportedly left the car, went over and took a photo of the target's vehicle with her cellphone.
When Cabrera and his wife attempted to leave Miami on a flight to Mexico City on Feb. 16, they were pulled in for an interview by Customs and Border Protection (CPB). The CPB inspectors reportedly found a photo of the target's vehicle and its license plate on Cabrera's wife's cellphone and also found she had sent the photo to Cabrera using WhatsApp. Cabrera reportedly admitted to investigators what he had been doing, and activity on his phone showed that he had been in contact with the Russian intelligence officer. The complaint also notes that the communications between Cabrera and the Russian intelligence officer clearly indicated that it was the intelligence officer who initiated and directed the meetings with the suspect.
The alleged tradecraft exhibited by Cabrera in this case was amateurish. He did not have a well thought out cover for action and cover for status to explain why he tailgated to get into the condo complex. A more sophisticated and better-trained agent could have easily constructed a plausible reason for the visit. The wife's provocative action of taking the photo of the vehicle's license plate while the security guard was talking to them was likewise very reckless and foolish. (The complaint noted that the Russian intelligence officer instructed Cabrera not to take a photo of the vehicle.) From these alleged events it would appear that Cabrera had received little to no training in clandestine tradecraft. It is also interesting that Cabrera appears to have communicated with his phone via SMS or WhatsApp instead of some sort of sophisticated messaging app. It might be an indication that they were attempting to hide in plain sight by using normal apps, but on the other hand, it is sloppy that the handler used his Moscow cellphone and number to communicate with Cabrera rather than some foreign phone number to provide more security.
Russia's 'Wet' Activities
Poor tradecraft in and of itself is not unusual in cases involving Russian "wet" activities to assassinate defectors and other regime opponents, in which poor tradecraft has become the rule rather than the exception. In addition to the highly publicized tradecraft errors made by the attempted assassins of Sergei Skripal, other operations, such as the assassination of Chechen separatist Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in Berlin in August 2019 and efforts to hack into the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), were likewise ham-fisted affairs.
The fact that the Russian intelligence officer was interested in the target's car could harken back to a failed 2015 attack against Bulgarian arms manufacturer Emilian Gebrev, his son and one of their plant managers in Sofia, Bulgaria. Some reports suggest that in that case, the unidentified poison was administered to the victims by smearing it on the handles of their vehicles while they were parked in a hotel parking garage. The poisoning resulted in all three slipping into comas and nearly dying, similar to the Skripal case. It is believed that Khangoshvili was killed by an FSB operative, while the men arrested in connection with the OPCW hacking attempt were allegedly from the GRU, as were the Skripal and Gebrev attackers.
Given the aggression demonstrated by Russian intelligence agencies in these past cases, it is likely that U.S. authorities were on guard for attempts to target defectors living in the United States, and it is likely the person targeted in Miami was under government protection. This sensitivity, along with the shoddy tradecraft in this case, may have helped the Miami incident come to the notice of U.S. authorities and allowed them to catch Cabrera before he was able to leave the country. This case will also undoubtedly result in additional security being afforded to Russian defectors living in the United States — and elsewhere. If this was indeed some sort of assassination plot on U.S. soil, it underscores the brutal nature of Russian intelligence and their lack of concern for the blowback such an operation would bring. They've literally gotten away with murder and attempted murder in London, Berlin and other places while facing very little in the way of consequences. This may have emboldened them to extend those efforts to the United States.
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/federal-appeals-court-blocks-trumps-remain-in-mexico-policy/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=19575650
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Haney didn't kill himself.
https://datechguyblog.com/2020/02/29/they-tell-no-tales/
Good thing DHS has the qualified Jeh Johnson and not some dem machine hack running it.
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/homeland-security/268282-dhs-ordered-me-to-scrub-records-of-muslims-with-terror
DHS ordered me to scrub records of Muslims with terror ties
By Philip Haney
Amid the chaos of the 2009 holiday travel season, jihadists planned to slaughter 290 innocent travelers on a Christmas Day flight from the Netherlands to Detroit, Michigan. Twenty-three-year old Nigerian Muslim Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab intended to detonate Northwest Airlines Flight 253, but the explosives in his underwear malfunctioned and brave passengers subdued him until he could be arrested. The graphic and traumatic defeat they planned for the United States failed, that time.
Following the attempted attack, President Obama threw the intelligence community under the bus for its failure to “connect the dots.” He said, “this was not a failure to collect intelligence, it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.”
Most Americans were unaware of the enormous damage to morale at the Department of Homeland Security, where I worked, his condemnation caused. His words infuriated many of us because we knew his administration had been engaged in a bureaucratic effort to destroy the raw material—the actual intelligence we had collected for years, and erase those dots. The dots constitute the intelligence needed to keep Americans safe, and the Obama administration was ordering they be wiped away.
After leaving my 15 year career at DHS, I can no longer be silent about the dangerous state of America’s counter-terror strategy, our leaders’ willingness to compromise the security of citizens for the ideological rigidity of political correctness—and, consequently, our vulnerability to devastating, mass-casualty attack.
Just before that Christmas Day attack, in early November 2009, I was ordered by my superiors at the Department of Homeland Security to delete or modify several hundred records of individuals tied to designated Islamist terror groups like Hamas from the important federal database, the Treasury Enforcement Communications System (TECS). These types of records are the basis for any ability to “connect dots.” Every day, DHS Customs and Border Protection officers watch entering and exiting many individuals associated with known terrorist affiliations, then look for patterns. Enforcing a political scrubbing of records of Muslims greatly affected our ability to do that. Even worse, going forward, my colleagues and I were prohibited from entering pertinent information into the database.
A few weeks later, in my office at the Port of Atlanta, the television hummed with the inevitable Congressional hearings that follow any terrorist attack. While members of Congress grilled Obama administration officials, demanding why their subordinates were still failing to understand the intelligence they had gathered, I was being forced to delete and scrub the records. And I was well aware that, as a result, it was going to be vastly more difficult to “connect the dots” in the future—especially beforean attack occurs.
As the number of successful and attempted Islamic terrorist attacks on America increased, the type of information that the Obama administration ordered removed from travel and national security databases was the kind of information that, if properly assessed, could have prevented subsequent domestic Islamist attacks like the ones committed by Faisal Shahzad (May 2010), Detroit “honor killing” perpetrator Rahim A. Alfetlawi (2011); Amine El Khalifi, who plotted to blow up the U.S. Capitol (2012); Dzhokhar or Tamerlan Tsarnaev who conducted the Boston Marathon bombing (2013); Oklahoma beheading suspect Alton Nolen (2014); or Muhammed Yusuf Abdulazeez, who opened fire on two military installations in Chattanooga, Tennessee (2015).
It is very plausible that one or more of the subsequent terror attacks on the homeland could have been prevented if more subject matter experts in the Department of Homeland Security had been allowed to do our jobs back in late 2009. It is demoralizing—and infuriating—that today, those elusive dots are even harder to find, and harder to connect, than they were during the winter of 2009.
Haney worked at the Department of Homeland Security for 15 years.
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2016/06/14/ironic-jeh-johnson-says-gun-control-now-a-homeland-security-issueorlando-terrorist-worked-for-dhs-n2178248
Irony: Jeh Johnson Says Gun Control Now a Matter of Homeland Security...Orlando Terrorist Worked For DHS
Katie Pavlich Katie Pavlich |Posted: Jun 14, 2016 12:15 PM Share (977) Tweet
Irony: Jeh Johnson Says Gun Control Now a Matter of Homeland Security...Orlando Terrorist Worked For DHS
The Islamic terrorist who carried out the horrific, atrocious attack on Pulse nightclub in Orlando Sunday morning was employed by G4S security company as a licensed, professional security guard with the ability to carry a firearm on duty. He worked at the company for years.
G4S is contracted by the Department of Homeland Security to protect federal buildings, including nuclear facilities, and is responsible for providing security protocol for major transportation hubs around the country.
Further, the terrorist (an American citizen) purchased the firearms he used Sunday legally and passed a background check to do so.
Despite these facts, during an interview with CBS this morning Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson declared gun control as a "matter of national security."
"Meaningful, responsible gun control has to be part of national security," Johnson said.
The Orlando terrorist was interviewed by the FBI three times and was under investigation for 10 months in 2013. At no point were his security credentials revoked. Maybe instead of focusing on gun control, Johnson should be focused on not allowing DHS contracted companies to employ those under FBI investigation for terrorism.
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Please post in the Skullduggery and Conspiracy thread(s) as well
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Psst . . . I Want You to Illegally Immigrate
Solicitation or free speech? The Supreme Court takes up the case.
By The Editorial Board
Feb. 27, 2020 7:17 pm ET
Hundreds of people overflow onto the sidewalk in a line outside a U.S. immigration office with numerous courtrooms in San Francisco, Jan. 31, 2019.
PHOTO: ERIC RISBERG/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Acting to “encourage” illegal immigration is itself against the law. Is this a sensible ban on solicitation? Or a First Amendment violation that could make a criminal of “a loving grandmother who urges her grandson to overstay his visa”? That theoretical was cited in 2018 when the law was struck down by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
The Supreme Court took up the case Tuesday in U.S. v. Sineneng-Smith. A California consultant, Evelyn Sineneng-Smith, billed illegal immigrants $6,800 to file paperwork for an expired pathway to legal residence. While allegedly dangling unreachable green cards, she collected $3.3 million. Two of the immigrants said they would have left the U.S. otherwise.
A jury found Ms. Sineneng-Smith guilty of mail fraud, as well as inducing illegal immigration. Two years ago the Ninth Circuit threw out the latter conviction, ruling that the law “is unconstitutionally overbroad in violation of the First Amendment.”
The federal government argues that the California judges overstepped. The words “induce” and “encourage” are legal terms of art, the feds say. The law doesn’t apply to vague consoling from grandmas, just as a teen doesn’t solicit drug possession “merely by saying to a friend, ‘I encourage you to try smoking pot.’” The Ninth Circuit “did not identify any realistic danger of chilling protected speech,” but instead reacted to “hypothetical scenarios.”
Ms. Sineneng-Smith emphasizes the statute’s plain meaning. Whatever else a ban on encouragement might implicate, “at the very least it covers telling an undocumented noncitizen ‘I encourage you to reside in the United States.’” That could hit lawyers, teachers or ministers. As for reading the law as a ban on solicitation, staying in the U.S. without documents is a civil violation, so there need not be any underlying crime.
During oral arguments this week, the High Court seemed to grope for a way to be assured of free speech without throwing out the statute. If mere words of encouragement aren’t illegal, Justice Samuel Alito wondered, how about a defendant who “says it 10 times in a forceful voice”? Justice Elena Kagan asked if the risk of abuse was so dire, given “the absence of actual prosecutions that you can point to and say, ah, that went wrong.”
Justice Stephen Breyer noodled the idea of narrowing the law so “it is limited to solicitation of a crime.” A counter came in questioning from Justice Alito, who suggested that urging a friend to kill himself isn’t protected speech, even if suicide is legal. Chief Justice John Roberts also was apparently unpersuaded. After a Justice Breyer colloquy, he joked: “Would we have to get that passed by the Senate and House?”
Alas, Congress is a source of dysfunction in immigration. Nobody should be prosecuted for giving illegal aliens kind words or good-faith advice. But what if a consultant offers directions to a gap in the border wall? In a sane world, lawmakers might clarify this statute. Instead they use immigration as an opportunity to polarize, leaving the difficult task to the courts.
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The Right-Wing Extremist Threat in Context: External Extremist Actors
Scott Stewart
Scott Stewart
VP of Tactical Analysis, Stratfor
10 MINS READ
Mar 3, 2020 | 15:54 GMT
HIGHLIGHTS
Due to a long history of law enforcement penetration and disruption, right-wing extremist groups in the United States and Europe adopted the leaderless resistance model of terrorism in the 1980s.
In recent years we have seen right-wing extremists adopt social media strategies pioneered by jihadist groups, particularly the Islamic State.
Right-wing extremists remain constrained by the attack cycle and are vulnerable to detection as they progress through that cycle.
Focusing on behaviors associated with the attack cycle can help prevent attacks by right-wing extremists.
Editor's Note: This is part one in a two-part series. The first part will discuss outside right-wing extremist actors, while the second will focus on insider extremists.
Last week I had the opportunity to speak with someone in the process of setting up a protective intelligence program at a large corporation. During our conversation about various concerns and threats, the topic of the current wave of right-wing extremist attacks arose. We discussed how that threat manifested itself differently when the actor was an outsider versus an insider, as well as steps the company could take to protect itself against these threats. After thinking about that conversation for some days, it occurred to me that there might be broader interest in the topic, and that it might be worth writing on it to place the threat posed by right-wing extremism into context. With that in mind, I have decided to address external right-wing extremist actors and insider extremists.
The Big Picture
Terrorism remains a persistent and deadly threat, but it can be prevented. Studying terrorism trends and tactics to develop an understanding of the attack cycle and its associated behaviors can help people and organizations adopt measures to mitigate the impact of an attack — or better yet, to recognize attack planning as it's occurring to thwart it.
A History of Right-Wing Violence
As I've discussed elsewhere, the threat of violence from white supremacists, white nationalists and other right-wing extremists is not new. Indeed, as evidenced by the sacking of Lawrence, Kansas, in 1856 and the birth of the Ku Klux Klan in 1865, the threat predates the advent of modern terrorism in the Victorian era. Since then, there have been a number of waves of right-wing extremism in the United States and Europe, including the second rise of the KKK in the United States and the rise of Nazism in Germany and Fascism in Italy in the 1920s, and the rise of George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party and the third rise of the KKK in the 1960s.
Because of this long history, law enforcement in the United States — and in the West in general — has a great deal of experience investigating and disrupting right-wing extremist groups. For demographic and linguistic reasons, police forces in the West have had a far easier time infiltrating such groups than they've had infiltrating jihadist groups. A watershed event for the movement in the United States was a 1988 federal trial in Fort Smith, Arkansas, in which 14 white supremacist leaders were charged with seditious conspiracy. Those charged included members of domestic terrorist groups The Order and the Covenant Sword and Arm of the Lord, along with KKK Leader Louis Beam, National Alliance leader William Pierce and Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler.
Although the white supremacist leaders were ultimately acquitted, testimony in the Fort Smith trial revealed how thoroughly the white supremacist movement had been penetrated by law enforcement officers and informants. As a result, leaders like Beam, Pierce and Richard Kelly Hoskins began to widely promote the leaderless resistance model of terrorism for right-wing extremists.
This change was perhaps most visible in the fiction written by Pierce under the pen name Andrew Macdonald. In 1978, he wrote a book called The Turner Diaries, with the intent of providing a blueprint for conducting terrorist operations as an underground organization. Not coincidentally, the organization in The Turner Diaries was named "The Order," a name later adopted by a real-world domestic terrorist group. But in 1989, following the Fort Smith trial, Pierce put forth a different operational blueprint in a book called Hunter that promoted the leaderless resistance model. Pierce dedicated Hunter to Joseph Paul Franklin, a lone terrorist who conducted a yearslong series of killings, robberies and arsons spanning several states in an attempt to spark a race war.
While there have been a number of membership groups dedicated to right-wing extremism, including skinhead, Klan and neo-Nazi groups, overall, the movement has become extremely fragmented. None of these groups is very large, and the leaders of groups normally encourage members who want to commit acts of violence to leave the group to avoid legal and law enforcement consequences. Even the newer crop of extremist groups that openly advocate violence, such as Atomwaffen or The Base, urge their followers to adopt the leaderless resistance model. There are some exceptions to the leaderless resistance model. For example, in Ukraine groups like the Azov Battalion provide white supremacists with a structured organization. They also provide a place where right-wing extremists from other countries can travel to receive military training and combat experience in much the same way jihadist foreign fighters have done over the past few decades.
In general, however, the threat from right-wing extremists in the United States and elsewhere in the West (including Australia and New Zealand) stems from practitioners of this leaderless resistance model who operate as lone attackers or in small cells. They are generally radicalized and operationalized via the internet, and there are in fact many similarities between them and grassroots jihadists in the West. While jihadists borrowed the concept of leaderless resistance from right-wing extremists who embraced it decades earlier, we have conversely seen right-wing groups copying social media strategies from jihadists. For example, edgy and aggressive calls for violence used by the Islamic State were later copied by groups such as Atomwaffen, while "The Base'' is the literal English translation of al Qaeda. Additionally, jihadist attackers such as those responsible for the 2012 attacks in Toulouse, France, and the 2014 attack on a Jewish museum in Belgium wore video cameras to document their attacks. We saw this tactic later aped by right-wing attackers in 2019 in New Zealand and California.
Pros and Cons of Leaderless Resistance
The leaderless resistance model of terrorism provides increased operational security, and makes it tougher for law enforcement and security services to identify lone attackers or small cells than a hierarchical group model of terrorism. Indeed, heavy and relentless law enforcement pressure is precisely why the model has been adopted. However, the model also comes with significant disadvantages. For this reason, I have long argued that the adoption of leaderless resistance is a sign of weakness rather than of strength.
Perhaps the greatest weakness of the leaderless resistance model is its reliance on untrained grassroots operatives to conduct attacks rather than trained, professional terrorist cadres. These grassroots operatives often possess very little in the way of terrorist tradecraft. This places serious constraints upon their ability to plan and conduct attacks. As a result, they will often attempt to reach out to others to obtain the capability to conduct a sophisticated attack, which can often land them in a law enforcement sting. This happened in January 2020 when law enforcement took down a cell of The Base in Georgia as it planned an assassination.
A flowchart showing the anatomy of a sting operation
If would-be attackers don't seek outside assistance, they will normally be limited to very simple attacks, but as we saw in the armed assault attack against the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in October 2018 in which a white supremacist killed 11 people, even simple attacks can prove deadly.
Protecting Your Company or Organization
As noted above, the terrorist tradecraft possessed by lone attackers and members of small cells is often quite limited. This means that they are often vulnerable to detection as they progress through the terrorist attack cycle. And make no mistake, grassroots attackers are constrained by the demands of the attack cycle. They still need to select a target, surveil their target, acquire their weapons, and plan and launch the attack. While sophisticated terrorist organizations will be able to use different cells or individuals to accomplish these steps, a lone attacker must accomplish them all himself, increasing his chances of being detected. A small cell provides a bit more manpower and maybe expertise, but the cell will still be bound to the steps in the attack cycle, as evidenced by a January 2020 case involving members of The Base working together in a cell.
A flowchart showing the terrorist attack cycle
I believe that detecting the surveillance conducted during different phases of the attack cycle provides the best chance for a company or organization being targeted to interrupt the attack cycle and prevent an attack. Make no mistake, even professional terrorists have struggled with surveillance tradecraft, and amateur grassroots operatives possess even less in the way of surveillance capability. They are ordinarily not difficult to detect — but only if someone is looking for them.
From interviews of right-wing extremists involved in past attacks, from their writings, and from CCTV footage and sting operations, we know that they conduct extensive surveillance of their potential targets. These sources have also provided many examples of attackers directing their attack plans away from potential targets with good security toward those deemed easier to attack. For example, the 1999 Los Angeles Jewish Community Center shooter surveilled a number of Jewish institutions before deciding to attack the one he deemed easiest to attack. More recently, the killer who attacked a synagogue in Halle, Germany, in October 2019 surveilled a number of targets, including a mosque and a cultural center associated with the antifa movement, before deciding to attack the synagogue.
Detecting the attack cycle in process and preventing an attack is always better than reacting to an attack. Prevention is the first part of my strategy for protecting companies and organizations against mass public attacks: prevent, deny, defend.
The Halle attack also provides a good example of how adequate access control can help defend against such attacks by denying access to the facility and the people inside it. In this case, the murderer was unable to gain entrance to the worshippers sheltered inside the building, and in frustration, killed a woman on the street and then a man in a kebob shop. The March 2018 shooting at YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, California, is another good example of how access control can prevent a shooter from gaining access to vulnerable victims, the deny element of prevent, deny, defend.
As seen in an incident at a church in White Settlement, Texas, in December 2019, armed security can often be very effective in the defend portion of this strategy. But it is not always legal or possible to have armed security, or armed responders simply may not be close by at the time of an attack. Because of this, potential victims must be prepared to go on the offensive to defend themselves if necessary. In August 2015, a number of passengers, including three American tourists, disarmed an attacker aboard a French train, and in April 2018 a patron took a rifle away from a gunman in an attack on a Waffle House in Antioch, Tennessee. In June 2017, patrons at pub in London forced an attacker armed with a knife to leave after pelting him with pint glasses, beer bottles and barstools, and in February 2016, a jihadist with a machete attacking customers at a Mediterranean restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, stopped his assault after an employee wielding a baseball bat and a patron throwing chairs pursued him.
For more on how a robust protective intelligence program can help equip and empower company and organization employees to spot and report potential threats and respond to actual threats, please read this.
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Just quibbling about words here. Funny definition they have for "right-wing extremism" "including skinhead, Klan and neo-Nazi groups".
I see right wing as the opposite of that. Tea party, freedom loving, color blind, live and let live.
Klan was started by Democrats. Nazi means government control and skinhead is all about identity politics. Sounds far Left to me. These are not extreme in liberty or national patriotism in a nation where all men are created equal.
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Agree, and I should have said so when posting.
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The KKK was the original armed wing of the dems (Before Antifa and the FBI of today). The NAZIS were/are socialists. How is this right wing?
The Right-Wing Extremist Threat in Context: External Extremist Actors
Scott Stewart
Scott Stewart
VP of Tactical Analysis, Stratfor
10 MINS READ
Mar 3, 2020 | 15:54 GMT
HIGHLIGHTS
Due to a long history of law enforcement penetration and disruption, right-wing extremist groups in the United States and Europe adopted the leaderless resistance model of terrorism in the 1980s.
In recent years we have seen right-wing extremists adopt social media strategies pioneered by jihadist groups, particularly the Islamic State.
Right-wing extremists remain constrained by the attack cycle and are vulnerable to detection as they progress through that cycle.
Focusing on behaviors associated with the attack cycle can help prevent attacks by right-wing extremists.
Editor's Note: This is part one in a two-part series. The first part will discuss outside right-wing extremist actors, while the second will focus on insider extremists.
Last week I had the opportunity to speak with someone in the process of setting up a protective intelligence program at a large corporation. During our conversation about various concerns and threats, the topic of the current wave of right-wing extremist attacks arose. We discussed how that threat manifested itself differently when the actor was an outsider versus an insider, as well as steps the company could take to protect itself against these threats. After thinking about that conversation for some days, it occurred to me that there might be broader interest in the topic, and that it might be worth writing on it to place the threat posed by right-wing extremism into context. With that in mind, I have decided to address external right-wing extremist actors and insider extremists.
The Big Picture
Terrorism remains a persistent and deadly threat, but it can be prevented. Studying terrorism trends and tactics to develop an understanding of the attack cycle and its associated behaviors can help people and organizations adopt measures to mitigate the impact of an attack — or better yet, to recognize attack planning as it's occurring to thwart it.
A History of Right-Wing Violence
As I've discussed elsewhere, the threat of violence from white supremacists, white nationalists and other right-wing extremists is not new. Indeed, as evidenced by the sacking of Lawrence, Kansas, in 1856 and the birth of the Ku Klux Klan in 1865, the threat predates the advent of modern terrorism in the Victorian era. Since then, there have been a number of waves of right-wing extremism in the United States and Europe, including the second rise of the KKK in the United States and the rise of Nazism in Germany and Fascism in Italy in the 1920s, and the rise of George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party and the third rise of the KKK in the 1960s.
Because of this long history, law enforcement in the United States — and in the West in general — has a great deal of experience investigating and disrupting right-wing extremist groups. For demographic and linguistic reasons, police forces in the West have had a far easier time infiltrating such groups than they've had infiltrating jihadist groups. A watershed event for the movement in the United States was a 1988 federal trial in Fort Smith, Arkansas, in which 14 white supremacist leaders were charged with seditious conspiracy. Those charged included members of domestic terrorist groups The Order and the Covenant Sword and Arm of the Lord, along with KKK Leader Louis Beam, National Alliance leader William Pierce and Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler.
Although the white supremacist leaders were ultimately acquitted, testimony in the Fort Smith trial revealed how thoroughly the white supremacist movement had been penetrated by law enforcement officers and informants. As a result, leaders like Beam, Pierce and Richard Kelly Hoskins began to widely promote the leaderless resistance model of terrorism for right-wing extremists.
This change was perhaps most visible in the fiction written by Pierce under the pen name Andrew Macdonald. In 1978, he wrote a book called The Turner Diaries, with the intent of providing a blueprint for conducting terrorist operations as an underground organization. Not coincidentally, the organization in The Turner Diaries was named "The Order," a name later adopted by a real-world domestic terrorist group. But in 1989, following the Fort Smith trial, Pierce put forth a different operational blueprint in a book called Hunter that promoted the leaderless resistance model. Pierce dedicated Hunter to Joseph Paul Franklin, a lone terrorist who conducted a yearslong series of killings, robberies and arsons spanning several states in an attempt to spark a race war.
While there have been a number of membership groups dedicated to right-wing extremism, including skinhead, Klan and neo-Nazi groups, overall, the movement has become extremely fragmented. None of these groups is very large, and the leaders of groups normally encourage members who want to commit acts of violence to leave the group to avoid legal and law enforcement consequences. Even the newer crop of extremist groups that openly advocate violence, such as Atomwaffen or The Base, urge their followers to adopt the leaderless resistance model. There are some exceptions to the leaderless resistance model. For example, in Ukraine groups like the Azov Battalion provide white supremacists with a structured organization. They also provide a place where right-wing extremists from other countries can travel to receive military training and combat experience in much the same way jihadist foreign fighters have done over the past few decades.
In general, however, the threat from right-wing extremists in the United States and elsewhere in the West (including Australia and New Zealand) stems from practitioners of this leaderless resistance model who operate as lone attackers or in small cells. They are generally radicalized and operationalized via the internet, and there are in fact many similarities between them and grassroots jihadists in the West. While jihadists borrowed the concept of leaderless resistance from right-wing extremists who embraced it decades earlier, we have conversely seen right-wing groups copying social media strategies from jihadists. For example, edgy and aggressive calls for violence used by the Islamic State were later copied by groups such as Atomwaffen, while "The Base'' is the literal English translation of al Qaeda. Additionally, jihadist attackers such as those responsible for the 2012 attacks in Toulouse, France, and the 2014 attack on a Jewish museum in Belgium wore video cameras to document their attacks. We saw this tactic later aped by right-wing attackers in 2019 in New Zealand and California.
Pros and Cons of Leaderless Resistance
The leaderless resistance model of terrorism provides increased operational security, and makes it tougher for law enforcement and security services to identify lone attackers or small cells than a hierarchical group model of terrorism. Indeed, heavy and relentless law enforcement pressure is precisely why the model has been adopted. However, the model also comes with significant disadvantages. For this reason, I have long argued that the adoption of leaderless resistance is a sign of weakness rather than of strength.
Perhaps the greatest weakness of the leaderless resistance model is its reliance on untrained grassroots operatives to conduct attacks rather than trained, professional terrorist cadres. These grassroots operatives often possess very little in the way of terrorist tradecraft. This places serious constraints upon their ability to plan and conduct attacks. As a result, they will often attempt to reach out to others to obtain the capability to conduct a sophisticated attack, which can often land them in a law enforcement sting. This happened in January 2020 when law enforcement took down a cell of The Base in Georgia as it planned an assassination.
A flowchart showing the anatomy of a sting operation
If would-be attackers don't seek outside assistance, they will normally be limited to very simple attacks, but as we saw in the armed assault attack against the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in October 2018 in which a white supremacist killed 11 people, even simple attacks can prove deadly.
Protecting Your Company or Organization
As noted above, the terrorist tradecraft possessed by lone attackers and members of small cells is often quite limited. This means that they are often vulnerable to detection as they progress through the terrorist attack cycle. And make no mistake, grassroots attackers are constrained by the demands of the attack cycle. They still need to select a target, surveil their target, acquire their weapons, and plan and launch the attack. While sophisticated terrorist organizations will be able to use different cells or individuals to accomplish these steps, a lone attacker must accomplish them all himself, increasing his chances of being detected. A small cell provides a bit more manpower and maybe expertise, but the cell will still be bound to the steps in the attack cycle, as evidenced by a January 2020 case involving members of The Base working together in a cell.
A flowchart showing the terrorist attack cycle
I believe that detecting the surveillance conducted during different phases of the attack cycle provides the best chance for a company or organization being targeted to interrupt the attack cycle and prevent an attack. Make no mistake, even professional terrorists have struggled with surveillance tradecraft, and amateur grassroots operatives possess even less in the way of surveillance capability. They are ordinarily not difficult to detect — but only if someone is looking for them.
From interviews of right-wing extremists involved in past attacks, from their writings, and from CCTV footage and sting operations, we know that they conduct extensive surveillance of their potential targets. These sources have also provided many examples of attackers directing their attack plans away from potential targets with good security toward those deemed easier to attack. For example, the 1999 Los Angeles Jewish Community Center shooter surveilled a number of Jewish institutions before deciding to attack the one he deemed easiest to attack. More recently, the killer who attacked a synagogue in Halle, Germany, in October 2019 surveilled a number of targets, including a mosque and a cultural center associated with the antifa movement, before deciding to attack the synagogue.
Detecting the attack cycle in process and preventing an attack is always better than reacting to an attack. Prevention is the first part of my strategy for protecting companies and organizations against mass public attacks: prevent, deny, defend.
The Halle attack also provides a good example of how adequate access control can help defend against such attacks by denying access to the facility and the people inside it. In this case, the murderer was unable to gain entrance to the worshippers sheltered inside the building, and in frustration, killed a woman on the street and then a man in a kebob shop. The March 2018 shooting at YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, California, is another good example of how access control can prevent a shooter from gaining access to vulnerable victims, the deny element of prevent, deny, defend.
As seen in an incident at a church in White Settlement, Texas, in December 2019, armed security can often be very effective in the defend portion of this strategy. But it is not always legal or possible to have armed security, or armed responders simply may not be close by at the time of an attack. Because of this, potential victims must be prepared to go on the offensive to defend themselves if necessary. In August 2015, a number of passengers, including three American tourists, disarmed an attacker aboard a French train, and in April 2018 a patron took a rifle away from a gunman in an attack on a Waffle House in Antioch, Tennessee. In June 2017, patrons at pub in London forced an attacker armed with a knife to leave after pelting him with pint glasses, beer bottles and barstools, and in February 2016, a jihadist with a machete attacking customers at a Mediterranean restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, stopped his assault after an employee wielding a baseball bat and a patron throwing chairs pursued him.
For more on how a robust protective intelligence program can help equip and empower company and organization employees to spot and report potential threats and respond to actual threats, please read this.
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The article fails by falling into common parlance, but what about the rest of it?
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The article fails by falling into common parlance, but what about the rest of it?
Scott Stewart is a smart guy.
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U.S. Lays Out Welcome Mat for Middle Eastern and Other "Extra-Continental" Migrants
by Todd Bensman
Creative Destruction Media
February 5, 2020
https://www.meforum.org/60501/us-welcomes-extra-continental-migrants
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https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/03/05/arizona-lawmaker-outlines-steps-to-secure-the-border/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=arizona-lawmaker-outlines-steps-to-secure-the-border?utm_source=TDS_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MorningBell&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWlRnNE9EVTNPR1k0WVRjeCIsInQiOiJKV2VOU3h3Y2hHSXJSMFI4N2lHMHFUSjVwR2ZkTk1ZZ2pZOTNcL2drUGRXYXgrQzN0YXZ2U1daVFc3WDlcL0NFeXFkN3BwdkZyeXdMWjIxblwvXC9VK2ZZVzMrNjhlYUhXb2NnTXBETzM0V0Q4N3pBbjJPMkVYSVI3ckFBaWVVSnpjTmoifQ%3D%3D
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/coronavirus-outbreak-highlights-us-dependence-on-china-for-medical-supplies_3269631.html?ref=brief_News&utm_source=Epoch+Times+Newsletters&utm_campaign=b67a1c91d8-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_03_12_03_54&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4fba358ecf-b67a1c91d8-239065853
=================
https://dailycaller.com/2020/03/11/white-house-executive-order-buy-american-coronavirus-medical-supply-chain-china/
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I would be less "Well, you haven't shown that ICE isn't doing a good job" and more along the lines of "Well then, send them home"
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/03/21/coronavirus-federal-judge-rules-migrants-must-stay-in-detention-center/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=todays_hottest_stories&utm_campaign=20200321
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNFpM9AxGBg&feature=youtu.be
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https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2020-03-20/us-mexico-border-to-close-amid-coronavirus-spread?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newslink&utm_term=members&utm_content=20200324133615
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https://www.meforum.org/60608/bangladeshi-migrants-pose-a-national-security-risk?utm_source=Middle+East+Forum&utm_campaign=d0d760dc0f-MEF_Bensman_2020_03_27_12_50&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_086cfd423c-d0d760dc0f-33691909&goal=0_086cfd423c-d0d760dc0f-33691909&mc_cid=d0d760dc0f
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BOP Audit Finds Security Lapses in Handling of Terrorists
by Patrick Dunleavy
IPT News
March 31, 2020
https://www.investigativeproject.org/8357/bop-audit-finds-security-lapses-in-handling
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BOP Audit Finds Security Lapses in Handling of Terrorists
by Patrick Dunleavy
IPT News
March 31, 2020
https://www.investigativeproject.org/8357/bop-audit-finds-security-lapses-in-handling
And Epstein...
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https://www.militarytimes.com/news/coronavirus/2020/04/01/540-additional-troops-to-deploy-to-us-mexico-border-over-covid-19-concerns/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=New%20Campaign&utm_term=Editorial%20-%20Army%20-%20Daily%20News%20Roundup
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Lets use this thread for the Enforcement issues related to the Chi Com Cooties Quarantine:
https://www.foxnews.com/us/florida-inmate-freed-over-coronavirus-concerns-linked-to-murder-1-day-after-release-authorities
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Presidential Power Is Limited but Vast
Trump can’t fully reopen the economy on his own authority. But he can go a long way in that direction.
By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey
April 15, 2020 6:06 pm ET
President Trump has come under attack this week for saying he has “absolute authority” to reopen the economy. He doesn’t—his authority is limited. But while the president can’t simply order the entire economy to reopen on his own signature, neither is the matter entirely up to states and their governors. The two sides of this debate are mostly talking past each other.
The federal government’s powers are limited and enumerated and don’t include a “general police power” to regulate community health and welfare. That authority rests principally with the states and includes the power to impose coercive measures such as mandatory vaccination, as the Supreme Court held in Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905). Nor may the federal government commandeer state personnel and resources to achieve its ends or otherwise coerce the states into a particular course of conduct. There is no dispute about these respective state and federal powers.
In most federal-state disputes, the question is what happens when authorities at both levels exercise their legitimate constitutional powers at cross-purposes. Here, the president has the edge. The Constitution’s Supremacy Clause requires that when the federal government acts within its proper sphere of constitutional authority, state law and state officials must give way to the extent that federal requirements conflict with their own. Federal power encompasses a broad power to regulate the national economy. Thus although the president lacks plenary power to “restart” the economy, he has formidable authority to eliminate restraints states have imposed on certain types of critical commercial activity.
Much of this authority was established by Congress in the Defense Production Act of 1950, which Mr. Trump has invoked on a limited basis to require American manufacturers to make personal protective equipment and ventilators. Most of his current critics lauded these actions and urged him to do more.
The DPA was enacted principally to assure U.S. military preparedness. But it defines “national defense” broadly to include “emergency preparedness” and “critical infrastructure protection and restoration.” The law “provides the President with an array of authorities to shape national defense preparedness programs and to take appropriate steps to maintain and enhance the domestic industrial base.” It authorizes him to prioritize the production of certain products and to “allocate materials, services, and facilities in such a manner, upon such conditions, and to such extent as he shall deem necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense.”
The DPA isn’t a blank check. The president cannot, for example, impose wage and price controls without additional congressional action, and he is often required to use carrots rather than sticks to achieve the law’s purposes. Nevertheless, because he is acting under an express congressional grant of authority, he is operating, as Justice Robert Jackson explained in his iconic concurring opinion in the “steel seizure” case Youngstown v. Sawyer (1952), at the apex of his legal and constitutional power.
Any state restrictions on commerce or personal behavior would have to yield to the federal imperative. “The states have no power, by taxation or otherwise, to retard, impede, burden, or in any manner control, the operations of the constitutional laws enacted by congress to carry into execution the powers vested in the general government,” the Supreme Court explained in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819). States, whether acting alone or in coordination, would be barred, for example, from forbidding their residents to return to work in critical industries, or from restraining industrial, agricultural or transportation facilities in ways that impede the federal mandate.
That said, even the most expansive interpretation of the DPA, and other federal statutes regulating interstate commerce, wouldn’t permit President Trump to reopen all aspects of the American economy on his own authority. The reopening of many local businesses, such as restaurants and nonessential retailers, would be up to the states.
Thus state governors and lawmakers are as vital a part of this effort as the president and Congress. Federal and state officials have to work together, however much they may dislike each other politically or personally, to get America back on its feet.
The truly difficult legal issues coming out of the Covid-19 crisis are whether government at all levels has sufficiently protected individual rights. All exercises of federal and state power, emergency or not, are subject to the overriding limitations of the Bill of Rights. The courts have traditionally taken the nature and extent of national emergencies into account in construing and applying these rights, but they cannot be ignored entirely.
So far the American people have largely accepted temporary restrictions on their liberty—especially freedom of assembly and religion—that may not stand up to court challenges. It would serve the president and governors well to make a priority of easing these restrictions and others as soon as possible after the worst of the danger has passed.
Messrs. Rivkin and Casey practice appellate and constitutional law in Washington. They served in the White House Counsel’s Office and Justice Department under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush and have litigated separation-of-powers cases, representing states in challenges to ObamaCare and the federal Clean Power Plan
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https://www.justsecurity.org/69538/how-much-liberty-should-we-give-up-the-constitution-and-coronavirus-lockdown-proposals/
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War-Gaming The Next Pandemic
What I learned from the Dark Winter simulation and the 1995 Oklahoma City terrorist bombing.
By Frank Keating
April 19, 2020 11:32 am ET
I have experience—though not in real life—in dealing with a public emergency caused by an infectious virus. In June 2001, as governor of Oklahoma, I participated in Dark Winter, a simulation of the release of the smallpox virus at an Oklahoma City shopping center. The simulated virus spread to 25 other states and 15 countries.
Fourteen participants played the roles of federal and state leaders, including former Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn, former Central Intelligence Agency Director Jim Woolsey, former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Bill Sessions and political analyst David Gergen. Johns Hopkins University and the Center for Strategic and International Studies organized the event at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland.
Dark Winter was spontaneous and unrehearsed. It quickly punctured the myth that every level of government would work together because each knew its role and that state and local officials would salute smartly when the feds walked into the room.
Instantly, debate focused on the public-health response, the inexplicable lack of an adequate supply of smallpox vaccine, the roles and missions of federal and state governments, and the civil liberties associated with isolation and quarantine.
The scenario was different from the real crisis we faced in Oklahoma on April 19, 1995—3½ months after I took office—but the fundamental principles were the same.
The massive terror bomb that detonated in front of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City 25 years ago killed 168 and injured hundreds. The response overnight joined more separate agencies from local, state and federal government than had ever worked cooperatively on a single task. The outcome could have been chaotic but wasn’t. Later, observers coined the label “The Oklahoma Standard” to describe the way everyone worked together to respond to what was then the largest criminal investigation in the history of the FBI.
The after-action analyses from Oklahoma City are remarkably similar to those that followed the Dark Winter simulation. For one, first responders will be local. The federal government doesn’t maintain rapid-response teams; the Federal Emergency Management Agency arrived the night after the 1995 bombing. Local private physicians and public health officials were the first to detect cases of smallpox in Dark Winter, and local government and law-enforcement agencies imposed quarantines, curfews and martial law. The locals collected epidemiological data to forward to federal agencies and handled relations with the press.
Another lesson is the local knowledge advantage. Locals know the geography, infrastructure and resources that shape the immediate response.
Dark Winter featured repeated disagreement between federal and local authorities over what the public would be told. We Oklahomans argued that leaving the public uninformed would result in angst, suspicion, mistrust, fear and panic. The feds (particularly the military) seemed to focus more on gathering intelligence than saving lives immediately. Fortunately, the state won the debate. Government won’t earn the trust of those it serves if it is overly secretive.
Perhaps the strongest lesson from Oklahoma City, and the most worrisome outcome from Dark Winter, was the federal government’s instinctive urge to open the federal umbrella over any and all functions and activities. It acted like a 2,000-pound gorilla. Instantly, the feds sought to commandeer the National Guard. Fortunately, Mr. Nunn, who played the president, overruled them and we continued to work together as equals. Still, the states can’t know what horror is about to attack the country. Only the national government knows that. That means early warnings and constant contact are essential.
The Oklahoma City bombing and Dark Winter exercise pulled light out of darkness. Leadership, training, equipment and a hound’s nose for facts were essential to a satisfactory outcome. Teamwork is the principal ingredient, especially in America. Federalism requires it. Federalism works.
Mr. Keating served as governor of Oklahoma, 1995-2003.
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/apr/20/kim-pagan-new-jersey-woman-charged-for-organizing-/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=manual&utm_campaign=evening&utm_term=evening&utm_content=evening&bt_ee=Fv6iGwr2V5QCrsUGyPCmkMvEC%2FmnaXT7Wc19Pu%2FKKmPxhOSLnm83lCja2xPbhqWw&bt_ts=1587413565668
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third post
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/493812-trump-says-he-will-sign-executive-order-temporarily-suspending
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https://www.judicialwatch.org/corruption-chronicles/mexican-drug-tunnel-exits-in-u-s-warehouse-run-by-illegal-aliens-near-cbp-crossing/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tipsheet&utm_term=members&utm_content=20200420154350
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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-21/barr-says-doj-may-act-against-governors-with-strict-virus-limits
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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-21/barr-says-doj-may-act-against-governors-with-strict-virus-limits
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/1983
https://www.constitution.org/brief/forsythe_42-1983.htm
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https://www.heritage.org/the-constitution/commentary/constitutional-guide-emergency-powers
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https://patriotpost.us/articles/70263-barr-sets-doj-upon-states-infringing-on-civil-rights?mailing_id=5019&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.5019&utm_campaign=digest&utm_content=body
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https://patriotpost.us/articles/70263-barr-sets-doj-upon-states-infringing-on-civil-rights?mailing_id=5019&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.5019&utm_campaign=digest&utm_content=body
Still waiting on action for the violation of Gen. Flynn's rights....
:roll:
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I'd say Barr's hand can be seen in recent developments , , ,
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I'd say Barr's hand can be seen in recent developments , , ,
Let me know when we actually see people in handcuffs. Don't hold your breath.
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Tricky legal issues when it comes to undrawing a guilty plea , , , the Judge has ultimate say if I am not mistaken.
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Tricky legal issues when it comes to undrawing a guilty plea , , , the Judge has ultimate say if I am not mistaken.
A separate issue from the many federal charges that could be filed against many deep state operatives and aren't. It's called running out the clock.
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Or it could be a matter of letting Flynn make his play to reverse his guilty plea AND allowing ongoing investigations to complete so that all ducks are in a row.
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Or it could be a matter of letting Flynn make his play to reverse his guilty plea AND allowing ongoing investigations to complete so that all ducks are in a row.
How easy would it be to charge Comey for any number of felonies and let the other players cut plea deals in exchange for testimony?
How's that investigation into Epstein's death going?
More failure theater. "Gosh, we really wanted to do something, but the Trump administration ended/the statute of limitations ran out".
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Those are fair points.
How about this one?
It would cost Trump the election.
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https://link.govexec.com/view/5c36805c95a7a15a6011543bc0lbq.aln/56443b71
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https://www.judicialwatch.org/corruption-chronicles/dreamers-arrested-in-protests-helped-those-who-were-there-to-commit-crime-and-damage/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=corruption+chronicles&utm_term=members&utm_content=20200610183910
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iit1fUXRk58
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https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2020/06/dhs-predicted-summer-violence-radicalization-and-conspiracies/166441/?oref=defense_one_breaking_nl
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Court Closes Asylum Loophole
The Justices deliver another defeat for the Ninth Circuit.
By The Editorial Board
June 25, 2020 7:19 pm ET
Immigration opponents like to point to disorder at the border, and too often liberal judges have helped them by undermining the law. On Thursday a 7-2 Supreme Court majority restored some sanity to asylum law by ruling that illegal immigrants who step foot on American soil can’t seek a writ of habeas corpus to stay lawfully in the United States.
Habeas corpus is the common-law principle that protects individuals from unlawful detention. The Court has held that the Constitution’s Suspension Clause “protects the writ as it existed in 1789.” But living constitutionalists have been trying to expand its edges, most notably in Boumediene v. Bush(2008) when Anthony Kennedy joined with the four liberal Justices to extend the right to enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay.
In DHS v. Thuraissigiam, a Sri Lankan man caught within 25 yards of the Mexican border without documentation claimed that the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA)’s expedited removal process violated the Suspension Clause.
Mr. Thuraissigiam at first tried to exploit U.S. asylum law to avoid immediate deportation. Illegal immigrants caught at the border merely need to convince asylum officers that they have a “credible fear” of prosecution in their homeland to be allowed to stay in the U.S. Over the last five years more than three-quarters of asylum claimants have passed this “credible fear” test.
But two asylum officers and an immigration judge found Mr. Thuraissigiam’s claim wasn’t credible. So he sought a habeas writ to get his deportation order reviewed by a federal judge. Immigration law specifically limits federal review of asylum decisions to three factual challenges—none of which Mr. Thuraissigiam made.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals last year ruled that the IIRIRA violated the Suspension Clause. But no appellate court before had extended habeas to individuals apprehended at the border. Even the Obama Administration had argued the contrary.
As Justice Samuel Alito writes in the majority opinion, the Court has in the past noted that “‘[h]abeas is at its core a remedy for unlawful executive detention’ and that what these individuals wanted was not ‘simple release’ but an order requiring them to be brought to this country. Claims so far outside the ‘core’ of habeas may not be pursued through habeas.”
In a concurring opinion, Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg write that extending habeas corpus might be warranted in other immigration cases. “Habeas corpus, as we have said, is an ‘adaptable remedy,’ and the ‘precise application and scope’ of the review it guarantees may change ‘depending upon the circumstances,” they write, poking Chief Justice John Roberts by citing his Boumediene dissent. They and the dissent by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan wink at liberal groups to tee up another habeas challenge.
America has long offered asylum to the truly endangered, but public support falls when it is exploited by those who aren’t. By refusing to open an illegal loophole, the Court did a service to lawful asylum seekers.
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https://www.judicialwatch.org/corruption-chronicles/illegal-immigrant-child-rapist-released-from-jail-by-maryland-sanctuary-county-remains-at-large/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=corruption+chronicles&utm_term=members&utm_content=20200708172900
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https://www.judicialwatch.org/corruption-chronicles/illegal-immigrant-child-rapist-released-from-jail-by-maryland-sanctuary-county-remains-at-large/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=corruption+chronicles&utm_term=members&utm_content=20200708172900
Remember, as a non-elite, Traditional American, you are at the bottom of the current caste system the left has instituted.
Illegal Alien child rapists rank higher than you.
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then we have no united nation.
we have a location where everyone comes and leaves here at their will
as though they are entitled
let me be clear - I don't pay taxes so everyone can walk over here and get stuff:
https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2020/07/10/25000-academics-say-americans-citizenship-is-an-artificial-distinction/#
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https://www.newsweek.com/ice-launching-citizens-academy-course-how-agency-arrests-immigrants-1516656
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White House Says 40 U.S. Code 1315 Gives Trump, DHS Jurisdiction To Act In Portland (VIDEO)
“They can be deputized for the duty, in connection to the protection of property owned or occupied by the federal government and persons on that property,” she continued. “When a federal courthouse is being lit on fire and commercial fireworks being shot at it, being shot at the officers I think that falls pretty well within the limits of 40 U.S. Code 1315.”
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https://theintercept.com/2020/07/23/air-force-surveillance-plane-portland-protests/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=The%20Intercept%20Newsletter
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/27/trump-border-patrol-troops-portland-bortac
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=2AJJsnmtM9k&feature=emb_logo
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https://americanmilitarynews.com/2020/08/20000-fake-licenses-mostly-from-china-seized-at-chicago-ohare-airport-in-2020/?utm_campaign=DailyEmails&utm_source=AM_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Master+List&utm_campaign=613f648204-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_08_10_08_08&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_9c4ef113e0-613f648204-61658629&mc_cid=613f648204
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https://americanmilitarynews.com/2020/09/ice-arrests-2000-illegal-immigrants-in-sweep-85-with-criminal-convictions-or-charges/?utm_source=breaking_email&utm_campaign=breaking_mailchimp&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Master+List&utm_campaign=da47766cef-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_09_01_04_54&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_9c4ef113e0-da47766cef-61658629&mc_cid=da47766cef
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https://www.breitbart.com/border/2020/09/22/border-patrol-agent-stabbed-assailant-shot-killed/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=daily&utm_campaign=20200922
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https://www.judicialwatch.org/corruption-chronicles/surge-in-illegal-immigrants-smuggled-into-u-s-packed-in-commercial-tractor-trailers/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=corruption+chronicles&utm_term=members&utm_content=20200930165900
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/china-ties-to-us-riots-exposed-by-trevor-loudon-2_3531626.html?utm_source=news&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking
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https://www.judicialwatch.org/corruption-chronicles/ability-to-control-territory-co-opt-governments-makes-mexican-cartels-greatest-threat-to-u-s/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tipsheet&utm_term=members&utm_content=20201116151348&fbclid=IwAR0rMU6z3sIIKf_YKUZWFKdFoSaJaAo4YlNFOZsiLQ9yRkKkm1WU7glYuFQ
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https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/11/21/illegal-alien-crossings-surging-in-anticipation-of-biden-presidency-n1166094?fbclid=IwAR20mTe5A3jvBZJ4ogXEMQrauX5prTBRKAHjr6CpBHw5JbcgbE7onXDKxvc
https://www.cnsnews.com/index.php/article/washington/terence-p-jeffrey/biden-says-he-will-admit-and-grant-permanent-status-immigrants?fbclid=IwAR2PijJscGFDfxxG9BqIf0heKSpscsxF0owNU9CwqN2rgdg75V3JrtxWPfo
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All part of the plan.
Benjamin Franklin: "A Republic, if you can keep it".
2020: NOPE.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/11/21/illegal-alien-crossings-surging-in-anticipation-of-biden-presidency-n1166094?fbclid=IwAR20mTe5A3jvBZJ4ogXEMQrauX5prTBRKAHjr6CpBHw5JbcgbE7onXDKxvc
https://www.cnsnews.com/index.php/article/washington/terence-p-jeffrey/biden-says-he-will-admit-and-grant-permanent-status-immigrants?fbclid=IwAR2PijJscGFDfxxG9BqIf0heKSpscsxF0owNU9CwqN2rgdg75V3JrtxWPfo
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16795/biden-administration-border-security
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"The coming disaster"
for American citizens
but for the Democrat Party it will be a. huge achievement
with more Democrats , more undocumented ballots , and the last vestiges of red in the US wiped out for good.
what could put a bigger grin on their faces
Rino's and Wall Street couldn't give a shit either .
Thanks to them we have God knows how many in this country illegally
etc etc
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Ending Trump Travel Ban Portends Return to Immigration Security Challenges
by Todd Bensman
November 23, 2020
https://www.investigativeproject.org/8645/ending-trump-travel-ban-portends-return-to
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ON SECURITY
U.S.-Mexico Border Crossings Are Poised to Grow in 2021
10 MINS READ
Dec 8, 2020 | 10:00 GMT
Cars line up on the Mexican side of the San Ysidro crossing port at the U.S.-Mexico border in Tijuana, Mexico, on March 12, 2020.
Cars line up on the Mexican side of the San Ysidro crossing port at the U.S.-Mexico border in Tijuana, Mexico, on March 12, 2020.
(GUILLERMO ARIAS/AFP via Getty Images)
HIGHLIGHTS
The compounding crises of 2020 will likely contribute to a new wave of immigrants from hard-hit Central American countries. While previous surges of migrants in 2018 and 2019 contributed to significant disruptions along the U.S.-Mexico border, a repeat of those episodes in 2021 is unlikely. But addressing the many security challenges that still plague the United States’ southern border will require working more deeply with Mexico on a long-term solution....
The compounding crises of 2020 will likely contribute to a new wave of immigrants from hard-hit Central American countries. While previous surges of migrants in 2018 and 2019 contributed to significant disruptions along the U.S.-Mexico border, a repeat of those episodes in 2021 is unlikely. But addressing the many security challenges that still plague the United States’ southern border will require working more deeply with Mexico on a long-term solution.
Immigration and the status of the U.S.-Mexico border will be among the policies to see the most dramatic shifts in approach once U.S. President-elect Joe Biden takes office in January 2021. The distinction between Biden and outgoing U.S. President Donald Trump’s rhetoric on immigration is as stark as it is relevant, with the latter campaigning on his signature border wall and used a flurry of executive orders to block, slow down and deter immigration. Biden, by contrast, has promised to defund the ongoing construction of the border wall, as well as reform the U.S. immigration system to make it more efficient and create pathways to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants currently in the United States. But as immigration constraints related to both the COVID-19 pandemic and Trump’s aggressive policies weaken, Biden could soon find himself facing another surge of Central American migrants at his country’s southern border.
Changes to Immigration Patterns
The U.S.-Mexico border is one of the longest and busiest in the world. In 2018, 500,000 people and $1.7 billion worth of goods crossed the nearly 2,000-mile border every day, according to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Mexico is the United States’ third-biggest trading partner behind Canada and China; U.S. consumers and manufacturers are also heavily reliant upon the dozens of road and rail networks that connect the two countries along the border. Consumers and manufacturers were thus concerned when surges of migrants from Central America caused disruptions to the movement of people and goods across the U.S.-Mexico border in 2018 and 2019. Trump also threatened to place tariffs on Mexican goods if migrant flows through Mexico didn’t decline.
Immigration along the southern U.S. border has changed dramatically over the course of the 21st century. In 2000, Mexican nationals accounted for 98% of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) apprehensions along the U.S.-Mexico border (while imperfect, apprehensions are an approximate indicator of how many people are attempting to cross the border illegally). Since 2000, CBP apprehensions of Mexican nationals have been declining, while apprehensions of nationals from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador (the three Central American countries that make up what’s known as the Northern Triangle) have been increasing.
The Push and Pull
These changes have made Central America much more relevant to future waves of migration. Poverty, crime and corruption already provided Guatemalans, Hondurans and Salvadorans plenty of incentives to emigrate before 2020, as evidenced by the years-long upward trend in apprehensions of Northern Triangle nationals along the U.S.-Mexico border. But the economic fallout from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, combined with back-to-back major hurricanes in November, has further worsened living conditions in the Northern Triangle, especially for the poorer, marginalized segments of society that were already more likely to attempt the arduous journey north to the United States. The World Bank is projecting negative GDP growth of 8.7%, 7.1% and 3% for El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, respectively, for 2020.
The factors pulling migrants to the United States are also set to strengthen in 2021. First and foremost, those considering immigrating to the United States will feel they have a better chance of entering and staying in the country once Biden takes office compared with the past four years under Trump. Second, the U.S. economy has always been a strong pull for migrants from all over the world. But the expected fast timeline for the U.S. economic recovery in 2021 will make the United States that much more appealing to those seeking work. Part of that economic success is also based on the anticipation of widespread access to COVID-19 vaccines by the second half of 2021. Marginalized, impoverished populations in Central America may assess that their chances of receiving a COVID-19 vaccine are higher in the United States than in their own hometown — an incentive that could convince them to overcome fears of exposure to the virus during the risky journey north.
Constraints on Migration
Trump’s campaign pledge to build a wall between the United States and Mexico was his highest-profile policy aimed at addressing unauthorized immigration. But his deal with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in 2019 to reinforce Mexico’s southern border, along with the unexpected COVID-19 pandemic, have so far had a much more dramatic impact on reducing illegal immigration. Between May and October 2019, the Mexican government deployed thousands of newly minted National Guard forces to its southern and northern borders to reinforce existing military efforts aimed after Trump threatened to impose tariffs on Mexican exports to the United States. Over that same time period, CBP apprehensions at the US.-Mexico border declined by two-thirds, suggesting that attempted unauthorized border crossings returned to more normal levels. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 has since further reduced border apprehensions to record lows. A combination of public concern, stay-at-home orders and a freeze on nonessential personal border crossings similarly impacted authorized travel, with border crossings plummeting from 24 million in December 2019 to just 97,000 in March 2020.
But these forces that contributed to an overall decline in border activity are not permanent. First, Biden will likely upend Trump’s efforts to shift the migration burden onto Mexico via threats and personalized deals. And second, COVID-19 vaccines are likely to be widely available by the second half of 2021 in the United States and other developed nations. As greater immunity alleviates fears of infection and death, local officials will lift restrictions on the movement of people, prompting the United States, Canada and Mexico to eventually reopen their borders. The subsidence of concerns over contracting the virus and return to normal levels of traffic will create more opportunities for smugglers and human traffickers to bring unauthorized individuals into the United States.
Mexico’s Role
As the constraints to immigration along the U.S.-Mexico border weaken, 2021 could see a repeat of the border crises seen between 2018 and 2019, depending on how heavily Mexico and the United States respond to the expected surge in migrants from Northern Triangle countries. Once the primary source of migrants at the U.S. southern border, Mexico is now largely a transit country for Central Americans seeking entry to the United States. Between 2016 and 2019, Northern Triangle nationals outnumbered Mexican nationals in apprehensions. Mexico also fell from first to third (behind Guatemala and Honduras) as a source of nationals attempting to immigrate illegally. This has, in turn, made Mexico’s southern border with Belize and, more importantly, Guatemala, a focal point when it comes to U.S. immigration from Mexico.
The 124-mile wide Isthmus of Tehuantepec, which spans the Mexican states of Oaxaca and Veracruz, is a far more strategic chokepoint for stopping migrants from the Northern Triangle than the borders Mexico shares with both the United States and Guatemala. Since 2014, Mexico has deployed military units and established thousands of checkpoints between Guatemala and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in an effort to apprehend and deport migrants from Northern Triangle countries. This effort will continue regardless of who is in the White House, meaning there will be basic infrastructure in place to limit migration from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — especially as the COVID-19 pandemic remains a top priority for the Mexican government.
But without U.S. threats or incentives to stem a flow of migrants moving through Mexico to the United States, Mexico cannot be guaranteed to defend its southern border in 2021 and beyond with the same vigor that contributed to the rapid decline in attempted migrations in 2019. The incoming Biden administration will likely remove some of its predecessor’s executive orders that slowed down the asylum application process and enhanced border security efforts. This will prompt more Central Americans to migrate to the United States, increasing pressure on Mexican security forces trying to stop them from moving north.
The Mexican government, meanwhile, will have less incentive to block these Northern Triangle migrants from reaching the United States as Biden’s more lenient policies reduce the threat of U.S. retaliation, while the distribution of vaccines reduce the threat of migrants spreading COVID-19 in Mexico. Mexico also has plenty of other security threats requiring its finite federal security resources, including a record-high murder rate, rampant fuel theft from its national energy company, and powerful criminal organizations competing with the state over territorial control.
A New Approach Under Biden
But even if renewed migration incentives spark another surge of unauthorized crossings along the U.S.-Mexico border, the widespread disruptions to border activity seen in 2018 and 2019 are unlikely under the Biden administration. While Trump administration policies appear to have deterred immigration, they also contributed to increased tensions. In November 2018, for example, thousands of Central American nationals seeking asylum in the United States protested along the California border in the Mexican city of Tijuana, resulting in U.S. border security forces firing tear gas in an attempt to disperse the crowds. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) closed the nearby San Ysidro port of entry (one of the busiest along the border) to enhance security measures and prevent protesters from rushing the border. As apprehensions of unauthorized immigrants along the U.S.-Mexico border climbed dramatically, Trump then threatened to close the entire border in 2018. While that threat never materialized, CBP did deploy agents away from border checkpoints to border patrols, slowing down commercial and passenger traffic and causing days-long delays that threatened those strategic supply chains.
The 2019 threats to shut down the border and delays at border crossings were the product of the Trump administration’s efforts to force Congress to approve funding for his border wall project. But President-elect Biden has criticized these more aggressive tactics and has promised to reverse Trump’s executive actions on asylum. Compared with Trump, Biden is also more likely to seek a comprehensive strategic deal that addresses the underlying issues compelling people to flee the Northern Triangle countries, rather than rely on threats to motivate Mexico’s actions along its own southern border. An agreement between the United States, Mexico and Central American countries on humanitarian aid, technical assistance and infrastructure development in the Northern Triangle that incorporates Mexico’s proximity to the region would be a more sustainable solution to addressing migration issues. Such an agreement is unlikely to come quickly, but if there are early signs of progress and prioritization of such a deal during the initial months of the Biden administration, it would likely sustain Mexico’s efforts to stem migration along the southern border, thus alleviating pressure on the U.S.-Mexico border.
But the strategic significance and political contentiousness of the U.S.-Mexico border means that other types of crises are still possible. Unmitigated surges in migrants could overwhelm an already understaffed U.S. Border Patrol, potentially disrupting personal and commercial traffic at certain ports of entry. Conservative opposition in the United States could thwart the Biden administration’s ability to either pass comprehensive immigration reform or pursue a more holistic strategy that addresses the source of migration flows from Central America. While Biden is expected to bring a different policy approach and style of governance to the U.S.-Mexico border, the historical and compounding challenges introduced in 2020 make a comprehensive solution very unlikely in 2021.
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16853/espionage-china-spying-us
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/12/boiling-the-frog-slowly-on-immigration/
I am paywall blocked. Would someone paste the article please?
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/12/boiling-the-frog-slowly-on-immigration/
I am paywall blocked. Would someone paste the article please?
Paywall tip, open in a different browser, Brave, Chrome, Duckduckgo etc. or with a different device.
Boiling the Frog Slowly on Immigration
By MARK KRIKORIAN
December 15, 2020
Biden’s unraveling of border rules will be gradual but inexorable.
President-elect Joe Biden has pledged to reverse the immigration policies implemented by the Trump administration. His campaign site’s immigration page says he will “take urgent action to undo Trump’s damage and reclaim America’s values.” As Rich Lowry has written, “Biden will move on all fronts to loosen immigration controls.”
Despite what anti-borders groups say, this will be relatively easy to do. Because virtually all the changes to immigration policy made by the Trump administration have been executive actions of one sort or another, the incoming administration will simply rescind them in the same manner. That’s what Trump’s people thought they’d be able to do to Obama’s policies, of course, but lawless members of the “Resistance” judiciary have prevented him from discontinuing DACA, or from implementing a new rule on welfare use by prospective legal immigrants, or even from not renewing the ostensibly time-limited Temporary Protected Status work-permit program for certain illegal aliens. Biden will not face that hurdle, and so will be able to undo most everything Trump has done; in some cases immediately, in others over a period of several months.
As this won’t be done all at once, Biden will do his best to try to hide the politically explosive consequences from public view. The new administration will likely fail to mask the fallout of Biden’s immigration pledges, but he has the Top Men in the anti-borders brain trust working on the problem.
The Biden team and its allies are aware of the political danger inherent in its immigration promises. The Migration Policy Institute, for instance, a Biden-friendly think tank in Washington, wrote concerning one such border-related promise: “Even though the Biden administration could immediately lift the public-health order, doing so without having a considered new policy in place could quickly stoke major new flows at the border. Chaotic scenes of arrivals, as occurred in 2019 under the Trump administration, could narrow Biden’s political maneuvering room on immigration.”
I’ll say.
So how will a Biden administration try to finesse this? Firstly, it won’t make the changes as quickly as possible, preferring instead to boil the frog slowly. The public-health authority referred to above, for instance, allows immediate expulsion of border-jumpers without any court process because of the pandemic. Biden allies have said this might remain in place for a while, however much activists dislike it. It will be whittled down with exemptions until it’s a nullity, but will technically remain for some time.
On the other hand, the Migration Protection Protocols, more commonly known as “Remain in Mexico,” whereby border-jumping illegal immigrants who apply for asylum are returned across the border to await their hearings, will be discontinued immediately. But there are tens of thousands of Central Americans waiting in Mexico, and the Biden people will not want to hand the 2022 Republican campaigns the footage for ads of thousands of people being waved into the country. They will all be admitted and released into the U.S., of course, never to be removed even after their asylum claims are rejected. But their admission will be spread out over days and weeks, in different ports of entry, perhaps even under the cover of darkness (taking a page from alien smugglers, who before 9/11 would often fly their newly crossed clients out of airports in the Southwest to the interior on late-night or early-morning flights).
What about the various amnesties Biden has promised? Restoring the supposedly temporary DACA program will be easy enough and is unlikely to create too much political blowback, allowing the Biden administration to expand eligibility to double or triple the number of illegal immigrants already given work permits under the cover of simply renewing an existing program.
The broad amnesty for all illegal aliens that Biden promised to propose to Congress is unlikely to go anywhere. And the administration will not want to tempt fate by summarily issuing work permits to the entire illegal population, as some supporters have suggested. Instead, the administration will probably use a gimmick called “parole in place“ to grant “temporary” work permits and Social Security numbers (i.e., amnesty) piecemeal, half a million here, a million there, until most of the illegal population is no longer really illegal — without Congress having lifted a finger. “Essential workers” might be first, with anti-borders pressure groups pushing for as broad a definition as possible — there’s a pandemic and we’re helpless without them! Then maybe illegal-alien caregivers of disabled children or adults. And so on. It will add up, but not so fast (they hope) that the frog will jump out of the pot.
The strategy of increasing immigration gradually, and hiding the increase, will be pursued south of the border as well. For instance, one of the most effective policies keeping non-Mexican illegal immigrants from swarming the border has been Mexico’s deployment of its National Guard on its own southern border with Guatemala. This has succeeded in bottling up a significant number of “asylum-seekers” from Central America, the Caribbean, and farther afield, preventing them from passing through Mexico on their way north. The deployment came in response to threats of trade sanctions from President Trump. Mexico and the Biden administration have a shared interest in waiting a while before sending the troops back to their barracks. Mexico will want to show that it did not, in fact, bend to threats from Trump, while the Biden administration will want to blunt the border surge the roll-back of Trump’s policies will inevitably cause. So the bottleneck will be opened up again, but not right after inauguration.
As camouflage, the Biden administration is likely to revive and radically expand an Obama-era scheme called the Central American Minors (CAM) program. Under that arrangement, certain left-behind children whose illegal-immigrant parents had benefited from a work-permit amnesty (such as Temporary Protected Status) were flown directly to the United States at taxpayer expense, saving the parents the cost and trouble of hiring smugglers. Obama’s relative timidity about subverting the rule of law meant this remained a limited program, and it was discontinued by the Trump administration. The appeal for the Biden crowd of a restored and radically expanded program like this (encompassing a wider array of relatives, and not only of those with some kind of legal status in the U.S., and lowering the bar of “persecution” that must be demonstrated) is that it would avoid uncomfortable news coverage of caravans and massed border-jumpers, since people would simply be flown in, a few hundred a day, to different airports, often at night, allowing a Biden-compliant media to ignore the story.
None of this may ending up working in the end. The Biden Effect at the border — the surge of illegal immigrants expecting to be let in by Democrats — has already begun, with increasing apprehensions of minors and families. This is no surprise; my colleague Todd Bensman visited southern Mexico early this year and spoke with dozens of Central Americans biding their time in Mexico in hopes that Trump would lose and the Democrats would let them in. “I want Trump out!” one told Bensman. “I’ll wait for that because it would make things easier to get in.”
But it’s important not to create the expectation that the floodgates will open on Day One — because they won’t, not entirely anyway, prompting the administration and its media poodles to say that conservative fears were overblown.
None of this changes the Biden administration’s goal: unlimited immigration. To this end, refugee numbers will be dramatically increased, interior enforcement ended, asylum standards lowered, “temporary” worker programs expanded. The result will be millions of additional foreign workers, many admitted unlawfully, but all with work permits, Social Security numbers, and driver’s licenses. Because of this, it is unlikely they’ll ever be made to leave. But Biden’s people will work to hide this until it’s too late to reverse.
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My inchoate fears reified!!!
:x :x :x :x :x :x :x :x :x
"Paywall tip, open in a different browser, Brave, Chrome, Duckduckgo etc. or with a different device.
This is brilliant!
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https://patriotpost.us/articles/76584-the-coming-biden-border-surge-2020-12-18?mailing_id=5537&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.5537&utm_campaign=digest&utm_content=body
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https://www.nationalreview.com/photos/central-american-migrant-caravan/#slide-1
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/federal-judge-blocks-biden-order-halting-deportations/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=22763931
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/doj-rescinds-zero-tolerance-border-policy/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MJ_20210127&utm_term=Jolt-Smart
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/feb/5/memo-details-dhs-strategy-cancel-cooperation-deals/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=manual&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=tL5JbPlrIvlf3w0Bpw9MqoPfdVPcUZwnEco0jKjXeMBsX1hvcoigwbrTu8pDVrVZ&bt_ts=1612538554803
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second post
https://www.algemeiner.com/2021/02/04/us-border-patrol-arrests-group-of-eleven-iranian-citizens-crossing-illegally-from-mexico/
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-to-end-trump-asylum-deals-with-three-central-american-countries/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=22876690
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I could have swore I posted this previously but Search did not turn it up and so I Ducked it to find it and here it is:
https://thehill.com/latino/407848-yale-mit-study-22-million-not-11-million-undocumented-immigrants-in-us
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I could have swore I posted this previously but Search did not turn it up and so I Ducked it to find it and here it is:
https://thehill.com/latino/407848-yale-mit-study-22-million-not-11-million-undocumented-immigrants-in-us
I still think that's a lowball number.
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https://dailycaller.com/2021/02/08/tragesser-a-little-known-emergency-health-order-has-secured-our-border-it-is-now-dismantled/
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/feb/14/sierra-club-aclu-calls-biden-tear-down-border-wall/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=manual&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=jv2IzivfPcTaSXS%2BJL%2BpUGhWG0TuKiYB11nIMzhvEssJhVI5P01AISm8Z3zRTOlj&bt_ts=1613408866455
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/feb/18/joe-biden-immigration-plan-speeds-legalization-lag/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=manual&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=qj47Rw6UwPo93hwNdkT3IhXV%2Fz3uJujVSzxiNWek4vsfcLKagCFctm0W4a6ssHjF&bt_ts=1613643034023
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/23/report-dhs-secretary-alejandro-mayorkas-plans-to-gut-ice-immigration-enforcement/
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/feb/24/court-slaps-down-joe-bidens-100-day-deportation-pa/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=manual&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=XWIeknZlaHl3NsDr6RuD6wj%2FPYh5ySbUcX94FKMoz%2FLmfMutxcIjqJS7UqKwNXSI&bt_ts=1614167941378
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https://www.foxnews.com/politics/garland-illegal-border-crossings-crime
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4th post of the day
https://api-esp.piano.io/story/estored/vib-ckljhj0r15ic306s308fbqn65/579023439/-1?sig=e8b431f87952b5034bb4e89e57e77a7ec064f8e5a6ab82216fdd68caf51e2ceb
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https://dailycaller.com/2021/02/24/tucker-carlson-democrats-claims-11-million-illegals-lie/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2906&pnespid=iux3rqFcFFSNmIJPipTfaT71lnjgJP3BCHyqd94k
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second
https://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-21-356
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https://patriotpost.us/articles/78051-bidens-most-extreme-immigration-agenda-2021-02-26?mailing_id=5662&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.5662&utm_campaign=digest&utm_content=body
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/feb/28/biden-catch-and-release-strategy-threatens-communi/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=manual&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=rZ4XUkkkmT1h9nIE0p0wQLgaCF0%2FaU5QYMuOf4Pkuzg9U3TV3FrnQQTZXnlqzSZh&bt_ts=1614611355424
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/mar/2/ice-locks-twitter-account-alerted-public-sanctuary/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=manual&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=qml0td1iKOyyqbgrbK9FpFlG%2FwNqsE9Ec7TAyuDTPQYrbTvwyEXY4dQg8NKFErLX&bt_ts=1614715135289
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https://twitchy.com/gregp-3534/2021/03/02/d-c-is-not-removing-the-fence-around-the-capitol-its-being-improved/
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https://dailycaller.com/2021/03/02/poll-americans-believe-antifa-domestic-terrorist-organization/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=getemails&pnespid=2bh8o.1BCVCNY0IcW3issxtOP1IkX.NcKu6DpPlj
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/mar/3/pentagon-extremism-definition-could-roll-conservat/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=manual&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=hEuo0rN0sl62R3GqeW7qGxuSUDlsgoCnyF%2BaucC5bD2lL3%2BYDy1rq6c%2B0bAEzuTD&bt_ts=1614870419865
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https://api-esp.piano.io/story/estored/vib-ckmev5z4v446u06sf9osb0b8f/579023439/-1?sig=3a703e4b51a6cd7374ef0240c8248b0b029f263b7d3279eefc72aff859ffed18
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/24/gao-launches-investigation-into-bidens-decision-to-halt-construction-on-border-wall/
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/30/if-cesar-chavezs-bust-could-talk/
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https://dailycaller.com/2021/04/01/john-katko-henry-cuellar-southern-border-department-of-homeland-security/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=getemails&pnespid=0bdguPFIHFeNcfmwLf1DTzTEKSqydJDCxpF3DqFf
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/more-than-a-million-illegal-immigrants-expected-to-cross-border-in-2021-official_3758925.html?utm_source=morningbrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2021-04-02&mktids=1f427e2459d3cb32c0793c1634d1c407
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LxSoexBzGE
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/apr/5/dhs-may-restart-border-wall-construction-plug-gaps/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=manual&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=II4XGW3ldUrNLtjcXm1zxKnu3zpI8oyZbgNNPpdxB%2B9a2nmrHWPfUpLNah3s7Xtd&bt_user_id&bt_ts=1617669467851
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https://dailycaller.com/2021/04/06/cbp-press-release-yemeni-terrorists-border-access-denied/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=getemails&pnespid=h_cwp_NaBhaNh5guWiQmgXBOXXXEx4oypjGOQb6M
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https://www.patreon.com/posts/49751407
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/texas-ranchers-dealing-with-armed-smugglers-on-land_3776011.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2021-04-16&mktids=a9d130b4af19889144796b8abf1af982&est=MwZdBtEzSX21ZygQmJ5ROSY9I2hV3a1SpIGAOjgYPS%2B%2F2LPDqYgAVA2n12s57BJnYHQF&fbclid=IwAR1EWTaAvP7WTfxKGVdokMMqwFZRxqkkC5zrrpzXSPSMprcku3ACffrg3Bw
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Hat tip GM
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2021/04/are-increasing-numbers-of-military.html
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17319/biden-border
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https://nypost.com/2021/04/29/us-investigating-possible-energy-attack-near-white-house/
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/may/1/migrant-dies-after-being-run-over-by-border-patrol/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=B6gxElAA1yNpQpAietWqt7t5qGXwzdGW6AQ%2FccFuZsTd2yayXgZts%2B2w7rVDbaSh&bt_ts=1619894840583
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17343/sonic-attacks
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/increasing-number-of-illegal-aliens-evading-border-patrol-42000-in-april_3804250.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2021-05-06&mktids=298122041f8b30616bad9674d4e5c461&est=6jwIvEGAelE%2BbLnK4wzV7%2FG7ttIrGscrqbouD4Dr%2BntQjw0UTE3zWET%2B3og7cKceoSnC
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second
On Wednesday, the Webb County Sheriff’s Office received information of suspicious activity at a residence located on the 3400 block of Barcelona Avenue.
Sheriff’s Office Investigators conducted surveillance throughout the day and approached the residence at approximately 4:45 p.m.
During the approach, investigators discovered 76 undocumented immigrants inside the residence. The immigrants immediately asked the investigators for food and water. Investigators began opening windows when they discovered the temperature inside the residence was extremely hot. The rescued were found in very poor conditions.
U.S. Border Patrol arrived at the scene and took custody of the 76 undocumented immigrants.
The investigation is still ongoing.
“I congratulate our Investigators for a job well done and saving lives.
Unfortunately, this is a very common scenario where many times, these undocumented immigrants can be victims of being held against their will. We have seen other cases where, due to the heat and cramped areas, situations like this one have led to death. I remind the public to report any suspicious activities by calling 956-415-BUST (2878). You can be eligible for a cash reward,” said Sheriff Martin Cuellar.
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https://www.judicialwatch.org/corruption-chronicles/illegal-aliens-released-by-bp-commit-home-invasion-robberies-store-burglaries-in-u-s-town/?fbclid=IwAR0YQ-eR1vfYsJfWZ90FW2tVNMQJvxfgdf8IlQdlRgV66SRnKx6okkKY-8w
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https://www.toddbensman.com/congressman-journalists-historic-surge-of-extra-continental-immigrants-now-pouring-through-panama-to-us-border/
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https://news.yahoo.com/fbi-director-wray-likens-white-135616701.html
Me:
DUH :roll:
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/smugglers-openly-advertise-illegal-border-crossings-on-facebook_3844888.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2021-06-05&mktids=7fed606d021d3f8d1c8724cf617eba3c&est=r%2BJvaOKXfwKe55GTIEyp47tpBefff0RkF%2FZHFXTRx6EI1SECkZ8gHZPW1sjcCZaceyI6
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/10864-venezuelans-pour-into-texas-border-region-up-from-135-last-year_3847132.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2021-06-07&mktids=18009e3a86255707f0a38816cd82b1a8&est=a21piwMhm9o3D%2F1N5OGaaURIXYmL%2FqkDHjy6LWxUwgXWs1RqLtrLCUy4VqE0g1dNRnOV
“In just the last 7 days, our agents have encountered over 5,800 migrants from 29 different countries,” Del Rio Sector Border Patrol Chief Austin Skero wrote on Twitter on June 4. “During this same time, 63 smuggling attempts were caught on our highways.”
More than 119,000 illegal aliens from 70 countries have been apprehended in the sector so far this fiscal year (starting Oct. 1, 2020). Del Rio is a city of just over 35,000 people, while nearby Eagle Pass has about 30,000. The region is mostly ranch land.
The number of Venezuelans coming is immense. In this sector alone, with four months to go in the fiscal year, 10,864 Venezuelans have been apprehended by Border Patrol, according to Customs and Border Protection.
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/jun/8/border-surge-sends-prices-soaring-smugglers-can-ea/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=evening&utm_term=evening&utm_content=evening&bt_ee=0X3DK0qo7OkWy6E0BuIBbm%2ByGMWvdBm76hVoBJC%2FRfO0jz1otvv1Udaf4XjdAChW&bt_ts=1623183943973
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/jun/8/border-surge-sends-prices-soaring-smugglers-can-ea/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=evening&utm_term=evening&utm_content=evening&bt_ee=0X3DK0qo7OkWy6E0BuIBbm%2ByGMWvdBm76hVoBJC%2FRfO0jz1otvv1Udaf4XjdAChW&bt_ts=1623183943973
Our top Libertarian thinkers tell us that we should then legalize Human Trafficking!
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https://www.judicialwatch.org/corruption-chronicles/planeloads-of-illegal-immigrant-minors-relocated-around-u-s-in-middle-of-the-night/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=corruption_chronicles
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/11/texas-governor-greg-abbott-announces-statewide-plan-to-build-border-wall-and-arrest-illegals/
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https://rumble.com/vibu51-the-border-crisis-pipeline-from-south-america-through-mexico-with-rep.-tom-.html
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https://dailycaller.com/2021/06/14/ray-kamala-harris-giggled-southern-border-illegal-immigration/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2360&tpcc%3D=newsletter&pnespid=kbBhrvpXHB2NQS.eDhkTU6mD5tNjoNh_wINiEW2R
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/illegal-immigrants-intentionally-damaging-property-says-texas-sheriff_3859628.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2021-06-16&mktids=9c40eec5ae565e091e76fb95ae00c2dd&est=MhRtK%2F%2BmFlvJt7XYa9d1ruPoRNW6O1TgqpD4WjAbww%2FItuFkYaERkPHJU%2BUc9IpX3MsA
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second
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/jun/16/smartphone-smugglers-how-social-media-is-reshaping/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=7bLE5aXmnIpXwFg0wrhJpjxI6Q1ZDKcHgnfIZnH21UNLYIZ562L1uUBi%2BQ5P3QQq&bt_ts=1623846994583
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/29/judicial-watch-sues-biden-administration-over-cover-up-of-illegal-aliens-covid-information/
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Defending against illegal migration at the Greek-Turkish border. Quelle surprise, a wall figures prominently:
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/820858/turkey-weaponizes-migrants-my-interview-wirh-john-batchelor
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A Ridiculous Effort to Blame Trump for ‘Border Security Theater’
On the menu today: A Democratic governor agrees to send 125 National Guard soldiers from his state to help with border security, in accordance with the request that the Biden-appointed secretary of homeland security made to the Biden-appointed secretary of defense, and an MSNBC commentator looks at it all and sees a sinister Republican plot. Meanwhile, the Washington media start to notice that President Ice-Cream-Connoisseur doesn’t actually do all that much, and a well-traveled columnist declares it is now time to restrict unnecessary travel.
Why Would Democratic Officials Carry Out GOP ‘Border Security Theater’?
Over at the NBC News website, Hayes Brown fumes that “Trump’s border security theater hasn’t ended — it’s gotten worse. Now GOP governors are sending National Guard members to Texas and Arizona as political props.”
First, it’s amazing that former president Donald Trump is managing to “worsen” “border security theater” almost six months after leaving office. Trump no longer holds any authority over any portion of the military, U.S. National Guard, or Border Patrol officers or policies. If he did, things would be quite different.
Nine paragraphs into his argument, Brown gets around to mentioning the fact that on May 12, the Department of Homeland Security requested that the Defense Department “extend DoD support to Customs and Border Protection into fiscal year 2022.” The Department of Homeland Security, headed by Biden’s appointed secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, doesn’t see the mission as using those troops as political props. Nor does defense secretary Lloyd Austin; a few days ago, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said that Austin had approved extending the use of up to 3,000 DOD personnel to support the Southwest-border mission into the next fiscal year.
And as for the notion that it is GOP governors who are sending National Guard members to Texas and Arizona as political props,” this morning brings word that “approximately 125 soldiers from the Wisconsin Army National Guard will mobilize this fall for a year-long deployment to the southwest U.S. border. The 229th Engineer Company from Prairie du Chien and Richland Center is going there as part of a federal deployment. They’re assisting with what Guard officials are calling ‘non-law enforcement activities’ assisting U.S. Customs and Border Protection.” There is little reason to think that Democratic Wisconsin governor Tony Evers would be interested in having his state’s National Guard troops assist in “border security theater” and be used as “political props.”
Brown charges that the National Guard deployments just represent governors maneuvering for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination: “Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem are likely to be campaigning for the GOP nomination for president in 2024, you can bet these token deployments will play a big part in campaign ads and stump speeches.”
Except . . . Ohio governor Mike DeWine, nobody’s idea of a frothing-at-the-mouth xenophobe and a guy with no indication of any interest in running for president in 2024, announced that 185 members of the Ohio Army National Guard will be deployed to help Customs and Border Protection. North Dakota’s GOP governor Doug Burgham is sending 125 soldiers from a Bismarck-based National Guard unit. Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson is sending 40 members of his state’s National Guard. Clearly, it isn’t just presidential ambition that is spurring governors to send their National Guard troops to assist in border-patrol efforts.
Despite the insistence of Brown and other progressives, there’s a bipartisan recognition that the waves of migrants coming across the border represent a security problem, and the U.S. National Guard can play a role in mitigating the serious challenges there. This is not “militarizing” our southern border, this is not combat, and this is not a posse comitatus situation. The National Guard units are mostly watching monitors and scopes, as Texas Public Radio detailed:
In a darkened room inside the McAllen border patrol station, a couple of National Guard troops are bathed in violet glare. Ahead of them is a wall of screens, each displaying camera feeds from different parts of the border.
Machines beep intermittently and fuzzy radio transmissions echo throughout the room.
Using motion sensors and control towers, the Guard can see vehicles, terrain and occasionally people. Every so often, they spot something suspicious, like someone hauling drug bundles or trying to cross the border illegally. Then they’ll report it to the border patrol.
. . . Along the border itself, National Guard personnel also operate scope trucks — pickups with raised cameras in their beds — used to monitor border activity. Aside from manning those trucks in high-traffic areas, they also clear roads for the border patrol, help fix their equipment and perform administrative tasks.
Of course, information such as this doesn’t fit the narrative of big, bad, scary Republican governors sending the military to the border in a frenzy of xenophobic rage.
In a few days, we will get the numbers for how many migrants CBP caught at the Southwest border in June. It may not be as high as May’s 180,000, but it will be high. Yesterday, CBP announced that:
Sunday morning, McAllen Border Patrol Station (MCS) agents encountered 90 migrants after they illegally entered the United States through Hidalgo, Texas. Within minutes, 28 more subjects entered behind them. The group of 118 migrants consisted of 75 family members, 15 unaccompanied children, and 28 single adults. The migrants are from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua.
Yesterday evening, MCS agents working near Mission, Texas, observed a large group of migrants illegally enter the United States. Agents apprehended 115 migrants and identified 68 as family members, 40 as unaccompanied children, and 7 as single adults. The migrants are citizens of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Ecuador.
And elsewhere on the border:
Hours later, Rio Grande City Border Patrol Station agents were processing a Salvadoran national when they discovered he is a Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang member. He was apprehended shortly after illegally entering the United States in Roma, Texas. A short while later, MCS agents working in Hidalgo, Texas, apprehended a group of 89 migrants, mainly composed of families. Agents processing the migrants, identified a male Salvadoran national as a Mara Salvatrucha gang member.
And elsewhere on the border:
Coast Guard riverine units patrolling near Mission, Texas, encountered a raft with nine subjects, including a 9-month-old infant and two unaccompanied children, being pushed off the Mexican riverbank by smugglers. The raft was partially deflated and immediately began to submerge under water. Having no life jackets or oars, the migrants began yelling for help. The Coast Guard crewmen were able to safely pull them onto their vessel. The migrants were turned over to the McAllen Border Patrol Station agents. The migrants were assessed and did not require any medical treatment.
Yesterday evening, a female migrant ran towards McAllen Border Patrol Station agents and claimed she just escaped from her attacker. The female Honduran national entered the country illegally with her husband and young child. The brush guide separated the woman from her family and told them to hide in a different area. When alone with the female, the brush guide forced her to the ground and tore her pants and shirt. The woman began yelling and fighting back and was able to escape and find her husband. The female was medically assessed and taken into Border Patrol custody. An investigation with local law enforcement officials was initiated. The suspect was not located.
Additionally, 70 subjects were discovered inside a commercial tractor trailer at the Falfurrias Border Patrol Checkpoint.
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/member/MichaelYon
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Border authorities encountered 190,000 people illegally crossing border in June, highest in 21 years
- Washington Examiner
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/border-authorities-190000-people-illegally-crossing-border-june-highest-21-years
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".Border authorities encountered 190,000 people illegally crossing border in June, highest in 21 years
- Washington Examiner"
The US Chamber of Commerce and the Democrat Party run the largest human trafficking
ring in the history of the US
maybe the world !
dirtballs....
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Iranian Terror Comes to America
There will be dangerous consequences if Biden doesn’t respond strongly to the kidnapping plot.
By Navid Mohebbi and Cameron Khansarinia
July 20, 2021 6:24 pm ET
\
The foiled kidnapping plot against activist and journalist Masih Alinejad, an Iranian-born U.S. citizen living in New York City, has sparked a wave of outrage. The Justice Department’s indictment and detailed court documents indicate the Islamic Republic’s significant investment in the plot. The most troublesome part of this case, however, has been the Biden administration’s weak public response, which invites more malign behavior from Tehran.
Hundreds of dissidents have been threatened, kidnapped or assassinated since 1979, when the current regime rose to power in Iran. Since 2018, however, the Islamic Republic has carried out its campaign of terror with a new fervor. In 2019, Tehran lured, kidnapped and killed Ruhollah Zam, an Iranian dissident journalist residing in France. In July 2020, the Islamic Republic abducted Jamshid Sharmahd in Dubai and brought him to Iran, where he has been detained ever since. Mr. Sharmad is a lawful permanent resident of the U.S. The regime also abducted Habib Chaab, an Iranian-Swedish political activist, in October 2020.
Like other Iranian activists, the Brooklyn-based Ms. Alinejad has long faced threats for her opposition to the clerical regime. But attacking a U.S. citizen on American soil is something the Islamic Republic hasn’t attempted in more than four decades. Why now?
Iran, pressed to show its strength by the tide of discontent rising among its restive population, is likely taking these actions to send two messages. The first is to the Iranian people: No matter where you flee to, if you speak up, we will find you. This is at a time when antiregime protests are erupting in the country. The second and more important is meant for the U.S.: We will come after your people on your soil, spreading terror and brutality in the belief that, as the regime’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, put it, “America can’t do a damn thing against us.”
So far, President Biden has proved Khomeini prescient. His cowed stance is dangerous not only for those residing within the U.S. but for liberty’s advocates all around the world. The plot to kidnap an American citizen from New York has thus far gone unrecognized and uncondemned by Mr. Biden. The one tweet that did come from Secretary of State Antony Blinken didn’t even name Iran as the perpetrator or mention that an American citizen had been threatened on U.S. soil.
Ignoring this threat will have three lasting consequences. First, for dissidents of all types, it sets a horrifying precedent. Those who left their homelands for the promise of safety and freedom are realizing the current administration doesn’t care. If Tehran can be caught trying to kidnap a U.S. citizen in Brooklyn and receive billions of dollars in sanctions relief on the same day the U.S. government announces the foiled plot, what stops the Chinese or Russian government from attempting the same? The Biden administration is putting not only Iranian-Americans but also Cubans, Venezuelans, Hong Kongers and other dissident communities who sought refuge in America in physical danger.
Second, the message to the Iranian negotiating team in Vienna couldn’t be clearer: Washington wants a deal at any cost. Word is already emerging that the Biden administration has made massive concessions to the world’s leading state sponsor of terror in negotiations to return to the now defunct Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. By letting the Islamic Republic get away with the plot against Ms. Alinejad and other dissidents, the U.S. shows there’s nothing it isn’t willing to give away for a deal.
The third, and perhaps most lasting, consequence of ignoring the threat against Ms. Alinejad, is that the world now knows Mr. Biden’s promise to give human rights priority in U.S. foreign policy was nothing more than a slogan. Dictators and tyrants will feel emboldened, realizing there will be no price to pay for abusing their citizens.
The president can avert this. All he needs to do is put serious pressure on Tehran. At the very least, Mr. Biden should halt negotiations in Vienna, expel the remaining diplomats at the Iranian regime’s Interests Section in Washington—the country’s de facto embassy—and open a substantial dialogue with activists, dissidents, and the secular democratic opposition.
The president has a choice to make. He can show that while his administration values diplomacy, it values the lives of Americans more. Or he can shirk his most basic responsibility to keep American citizens safe and let dictators’ sovereignty extend into places like Brooklyn.
Mr. Mohebbi, a former political prisoner in Iran, is policy fellow at the Washington-based National Union for Democracy in Iran, where Mr. Khansarinia is policy director.
Modify message
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https://washingtontimes-dc.newsmemory.com/?token=71e2fc320cf4c121eee4fd2c29b86e2b_60f81d84_6d25b5f&selDate=20210721
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https://freeworldnews.tv/watch?id=61043dc4398a151dc18f95a5
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9jX4J4OdCU
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https://patriotpost.us/articles/81705-americans-pay-high-cost-for-bidens-border-crisis-2021-08-04?mailing_id=6019&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.6019&utm_campaign=digest&utm_content=body
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https://www.oann.com/biden-blames-texas-fla-for-covid-surge-after-flooding-u-s-with-over-100k-untested-unquarantined-illegal-aliens/
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https://www.oann.com/biden-blames-texas-fla-for-covid-surge-after-flooding-u-s-with-over-100k-untested-unquarantined-illegal-aliens/
Joey Rapefingers can go FCUK himself.
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/938534/biden-policy-killing-children-here-in-darien-panama
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https://myrgv.com/featured/2021/08/05/migrant-camp-moved-anzalduas-park-new-site-of-emergency-shelter/?fbclid=IwAR3CsPKbShHcijIcg3s4MGYDOWXwLrcP_WHEoh_9vXwzID3FkKzftJ-v1ds
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https://americanmilitarynews.com/2021/08/18-20-of-illegal-immigrant-coming-into-us-have-covid-19-report-says/?fbclid=IwAR2VvN1YxPotUb_JrSZhHqDdF4LjcQx56XuqO6jIZ9j6Fe1QYiQUoMGo2Og
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https://americanmilitarynews.com/2021/08/18-20-of-illegal-immigrant-coming-into-us-have-covid-19-report-says/?fbclid=IwAR2VvN1YxPotUb_JrSZhHqDdF4LjcQx56XuqO6jIZ9j6Fe1QYiQUoMGo2Og
So?
As long as they can still vote, dead or alive...
-
If I have this right, the syllogism runs something like this:
Because of climate change our troops will be busy fighting forest fires.
and
Because of civil disorder our fighting readiness will be diminished because we willl be using our military to put down Trump supporters.
https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2021/08/climate-change-already-disrupting-military-it-will-get-worse-officials-say/184416/
-
https://nation.foxnews.com/watch/1e31b6887ee8c9bfbec5524b4bb00251/
-
https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/13/biden-to-unleash-a-wave-of-jussie-smolletts-on-america/
-
More than a million people have illegally come in since Biden took office. 220,00 last month alone. That only counts the one that come up to border patrol. They're being shipped all over across the country - at our expense. It's not a border issue. Hard to believe this really is happening and no one is stopping them - the Biden Administration, that is, from doing this. I know Crafty was starting FB posts with Impeach Biden. Is this part of what you have in mind? Biden administration is undermining our country and destroying our sovereignty. There are a thousand reasons not do to do this. 20% have Covid for starters, delta and all the next variants. Some are terrorists from Yemen; some are gangs and thugs. Biden and Dems are willing to destroy our country, but can't remember this is what brought Trump to power in the first place.
-
If COVID was that serious of a threat, would they allow this while dining at exclusive restaurants and getting their hair done?
-
Biden is Fifth Column, leading an invasion of our country. Treason.
Impeach is mild.
-
Biden is Fifth Column, leading an invasion of our country. Treason.
Impeach is mild.
Time permitting, maybe the forum (CD) could publish the first Biden Harris Articles of Impeachment.
-
"Time permitting, maybe the forum (CD) could publish the first Biden Harris Articles of Impeachment.
Larry Lib Tribe is already drafting the defense of why that would not be Constitutional
(because Democrats cannot be impeached)
-
SUPER DUPER BUSY right now. Prepping the Constitutional Law course, other things not posted here for security reasons, etc.
Maybe in two weeks the pressure will lift.
-
https://www.cnsnews.com/article/international/patrick-goodenough/cbp-encountered-703-russians-illegally-us-july
-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniela_Bianchi
well if they ALL look like this then open all borders !! :))
8-)
-
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/964894/all-the-kings-horses
-
BY STEPHEN DINAN THE WASHINGTON TIMES
The Biden administration is rushing to build an immigration system that will decide who gets to stay in the U.S. after promising to airlift tens of thousands of Afghan citizens out of their home country.
But there were more questions than answers Tuesday. Officials were unable to say how many Afghans they thought would qualify for evacuation, how many they could airlift out of the country over the two weeks before the full withdrawal of U.S. troops and what would happen to the Afghans upon arrival to America.
Neither the Department of Homeland Security nor the State Department would say whether the Afghans would be held in custody until their cases are decided or released into communities, and neither department would say whether those who lose their cases for special visas will be deported.
It’s a serious risk.
According to the latest data from the two departments, the government denied 84% of Afghan applications for the Special Immigrant Visa that were decided during the first three months of the year. The visa is designed to help translators, guides and others who assisted the U.S. war and nation-building efforts.
“The SIV program is in
chaos, just like the rest of the Biden administration’s handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal,” said Jessica Vaughan, policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies. “Their plan to just bring people into the United States, plop them onto active military bases and sort it all out later is a terrible one. Anyone can see that.”
She said the visa program was already rife with fraud when it was being run normally, with applications filed from Afghanistan and a full embassy staff in the country that was able to check applicants’ stories. Trying to do that from the U.S., with no embassy staff in Afghanistan and without a cooperative government in place, becomes almost impossible, experts said.
Yet the effort is underway.
The Biden administration said it has carved out space at three military bases to house and process about 22,000 people. It is also pleading with other countries to take in fleeing Afghans, at least temporarily.
In addition to the Special Immigrant Visa for those who directly assisted the U.S., the State Department has designated other Afghans as priorities for refugee resettlement.
The State Department wouldn’t talk numbers Tuesday. It rebuffed inquiries about how many people deserve evacuation or how many the U.S. government can process and evacuate. But the department signaled optimism about what it can do.
“We are going to do and we are doing as much as we can for as long as we can,” said department spokesman Ned Price.
Mr. Price said the U.S. is expanding its aperture for people it wants to fly out to include not just Afghans who assisted America’s war and nation-building efforts but also those who helped media outlets or worked with nongovernmental organizations to build their country’s civil society.
He was asked repeatedly whether being a woman or girl was enough to qualify for evacuation, given the Taliban’s record. Mr. Price did not give a direct answer.
The State Department takes the lead on Special Immigrant Visas and refugee processing, though the Department of Homeland Security plays a role from its legal immigration agency, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
USCIS sent out pleas this week for employees to volunteer to deploy to the military bases where Afghans will be arriving so they can help process and judge applications.
Deployments begin Wednesday and can last up to 60 days, according to one email request reviewed by The Washington Times. Tasks include performing background checks, collecting and ruling on applications, checking fingerprints and issuing work permits.
Homeland Security said it also has dedicated some employees from Customs and Border Protection to help process applications.
USCIS is already strained with a massive backlog of cases, and CBP is dealing with the unprecedented surge of illegal immigration at the border. Experts said taking staff away from those missions will hurt the agencies down the road.
Ms. Vaughan also said state and local governments will end up bearing the costs of support services, education and health care.
“Though the numbers seem small relative to illegal immigration and other legal admissions programs, the security risks, processing logistics and population needs are large and will be a big headache for everyone involved for years to come,” she said.
RJ Hauman, head of government relations at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said he expects immigrant rights groups to argue strenuously that Afghans should be released when they arrive and await the outcomes of their cases while living in American communities.
“This is a national security disaster waiting to happen,” he said.
Even more troubling, he said, is the push to expand the scope of those the U.S. will evacuate. What started as a call to get America’s allies, those who assisted the U.S. war and nation-building efforts, has quickly become a demand to airlift Afghan journalists, human rights activists, academics and in some cases any woman or girl who faces a rougher life under the Taliban.
Mr. Hauman said that would be a “colossal mistake,” particularly given how the Biden administration has handled immigration issues during the first seven months of its tenure.
“Refugee flows are best handled in countries closer to the conflict,” he said. “We need to create workable regional solutions and only resettle some Afghans as a last resort within reasonable numerical limits and in adherence to current law.”
The government is tightlipped about what screening of Special Immigrant Visa applicants looks like, but officials insist it is robust.
The track record is less convincing.
Analysts said the risk of a terrorist slipping through the system is not hypothetical. Refugees from Middle Eastern countries have been charged with terrorism offenses over the past decade, including the 2019 arrest of a Syrian refugee accused of plotting to bomb a Pittsburgh church.
State Department officials have acknowledged the national security concerns with the Special Immigrant Visa program but say they are taking steps to minimize the risks.
Among Iraqi refugees, including people who assisted the U.S. war effort, authorities suspected at least 4,000 filed bogus applications, Reuters reported this year. Officials were reexamining more than 104,000 other cases.
The Biden administration suspended the Iraqi preference program after federal investigators announced they had broken up a fraud ring that had stolen hundreds of applicants’ files.
Two of the people implicated were foreigners who worked for USCIS. They were apparently culling the files to see what sorts of applications were approved and which ones were rejected and then used that information to help others craft their applications.
Special Immigrant Visa denial rates shot up for Afghans in the wake of that investigation.
From January through March, the U.S. government issued 137 visas to principal applicants. It denied 728 principal applications, amounting to an 84% rejection rate.
Those who are denied because their service isn’t deemed to meet the bar for a Special Immigrant Visa can appeal. The State Department said 713 appeals were filed during those three months, and 601 were denied.
A State Department spokesperson said Tuesday that those who lose their appeals can reapply. Still, the rejection rate suggests the vast majority of people applying for the Special Immigrant Visa don’t qualify.
Ms. Vaughan said she expects a “get to yes” mentality will prevail and most applications will be rubber-stamped. Some will be delayed, she said, but those will end up in court battles and it will be diffi cult to find places to send those who lose their cases.
“This is going to be a festering problem for years,” she said.
Copyright (c) 2021 Washington Times , Edition 8/18/2021
-
Expect the usual gratitude we get from muslims.
Funny enough, reading a really good book on the Boston Bombers.
https://www.wbur.org/news/2020/04/14/michele-mcphee-mayhem-boston-marathon-bombing
BY STEPHEN DINAN THE WASHINGTON TIMES
The Biden administration is rushing to build an immigration system that will decide who gets to stay in the U.S. after promising to airlift tens of thousands of Afghan citizens out of their home country.
But there were more questions than answers Tuesday. Officials were unable to say how many Afghans they thought would qualify for evacuation, how many they could airlift out of the country over the two weeks before the full withdrawal of U.S. troops and what would happen to the Afghans upon arrival to America.
Neither the Department of Homeland Security nor the State Department would say whether the Afghans would be held in custody until their cases are decided or released into communities, and neither department would say whether those who lose their cases for special visas will be deported.
It’s a serious risk.
According to the latest data from the two departments, the government denied 84% of Afghan applications for the Special Immigrant Visa that were decided during the first three months of the year. The visa is designed to help translators, guides and others who assisted the U.S. war and nation-building efforts.
“The SIV program is in
chaos, just like the rest of the Biden administration’s handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal,” said Jessica Vaughan, policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies. “Their plan to just bring people into the United States, plop them onto active military bases and sort it all out later is a terrible one. Anyone can see that.”
She said the visa program was already rife with fraud when it was being run normally, with applications filed from Afghanistan and a full embassy staff in the country that was able to check applicants’ stories. Trying to do that from the U.S., with no embassy staff in Afghanistan and without a cooperative government in place, becomes almost impossible, experts said.
Yet the effort is underway.
The Biden administration said it has carved out space at three military bases to house and process about 22,000 people. It is also pleading with other countries to take in fleeing Afghans, at least temporarily.
In addition to the Special Immigrant Visa for those who directly assisted the U.S., the State Department has designated other Afghans as priorities for refugee resettlement.
The State Department wouldn’t talk numbers Tuesday. It rebuffed inquiries about how many people deserve evacuation or how many the U.S. government can process and evacuate. But the department signaled optimism about what it can do.
“We are going to do and we are doing as much as we can for as long as we can,” said department spokesman Ned Price.
Mr. Price said the U.S. is expanding its aperture for people it wants to fly out to include not just Afghans who assisted America’s war and nation-building efforts but also those who helped media outlets or worked with nongovernmental organizations to build their country’s civil society.
He was asked repeatedly whether being a woman or girl was enough to qualify for evacuation, given the Taliban’s record. Mr. Price did not give a direct answer.
The State Department takes the lead on Special Immigrant Visas and refugee processing, though the Department of Homeland Security plays a role from its legal immigration agency, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
USCIS sent out pleas this week for employees to volunteer to deploy to the military bases where Afghans will be arriving so they can help process and judge applications.
Deployments begin Wednesday and can last up to 60 days, according to one email request reviewed by The Washington Times. Tasks include performing background checks, collecting and ruling on applications, checking fingerprints and issuing work permits.
Homeland Security said it also has dedicated some employees from Customs and Border Protection to help process applications.
USCIS is already strained with a massive backlog of cases, and CBP is dealing with the unprecedented surge of illegal immigration at the border. Experts said taking staff away from those missions will hurt the agencies down the road.
Ms. Vaughan also said state and local governments will end up bearing the costs of support services, education and health care.
“Though the numbers seem small relative to illegal immigration and other legal admissions programs, the security risks, processing logistics and population needs are large and will be a big headache for everyone involved for years to come,” she said.
RJ Hauman, head of government relations at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said he expects immigrant rights groups to argue strenuously that Afghans should be released when they arrive and await the outcomes of their cases while living in American communities.
“This is a national security disaster waiting to happen,” he said.
Even more troubling, he said, is the push to expand the scope of those the U.S. will evacuate. What started as a call to get America’s allies, those who assisted the U.S. war and nation-building efforts, has quickly become a demand to airlift Afghan journalists, human rights activists, academics and in some cases any woman or girl who faces a rougher life under the Taliban.
Mr. Hauman said that would be a “colossal mistake,” particularly given how the Biden administration has handled immigration issues during the first seven months of its tenure.
“Refugee flows are best handled in countries closer to the conflict,” he said. “We need to create workable regional solutions and only resettle some Afghans as a last resort within reasonable numerical limits and in adherence to current law.”
The government is tightlipped about what screening of Special Immigrant Visa applicants looks like, but officials insist it is robust.
The track record is less convincing.
Analysts said the risk of a terrorist slipping through the system is not hypothetical. Refugees from Middle Eastern countries have been charged with terrorism offenses over the past decade, including the 2019 arrest of a Syrian refugee accused of plotting to bomb a Pittsburgh church.
State Department officials have acknowledged the national security concerns with the Special Immigrant Visa program but say they are taking steps to minimize the risks.
Among Iraqi refugees, including people who assisted the U.S. war effort, authorities suspected at least 4,000 filed bogus applications, Reuters reported this year. Officials were reexamining more than 104,000 other cases.
The Biden administration suspended the Iraqi preference program after federal investigators announced they had broken up a fraud ring that had stolen hundreds of applicants’ files.
Two of the people implicated were foreigners who worked for USCIS. They were apparently culling the files to see what sorts of applications were approved and which ones were rejected and then used that information to help others craft their applications.
Special Immigrant Visa denial rates shot up for Afghans in the wake of that investigation.
From January through March, the U.S. government issued 137 visas to principal applicants. It denied 728 principal applications, amounting to an 84% rejection rate.
Those who are denied because their service isn’t deemed to meet the bar for a Special Immigrant Visa can appeal. The State Department said 713 appeals were filed during those three months, and 601 were denied.
A State Department spokesperson said Tuesday that those who lose their appeals can reapply. Still, the rejection rate suggests the vast majority of people applying for the Special Immigrant Visa don’t qualify.
Ms. Vaughan said she expects a “get to yes” mentality will prevail and most applications will be rubber-stamped. Some will be delayed, she said, but those will end up in court battles and it will be diffi cult to find places to send those who lose their cases.
“This is going to be a festering problem for years,” she said.
Copyright (c) 2021 Washington Times , Edition 8/18/2021
-
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/967361/sean-parnell-recounts-terp-spy
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https://en-volve.com/2021/08/20/shocking-the-dhss-secret-terror-watchlist-with-nearly-2-million-americans-on-it-exposed-online-with-no-password/
-
What do we know about this site?
Why have we not heard of this elsewhere?
-
What do we know about this site?
Why have we not heard of this elsewhere?
Why is this not in the MSM? Really?
https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/16/22627630/terrorist-watchlist-no-fly-list-dhs-fbi-research-cybersecurity
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/secret-terrorist-watchlist-with-2-million-records-exposed-online/
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/2-million-government-records-exposed-online-in-no-fly-watchlist-researcher-says/
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GM:
Scurrilous bullshit is not unknown on the fringes of our side. For OUR credibility here, when sites unknown to us are cited for the content they contain, it is fair to ask about them.
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/978126/massive-error-to-haul-tons-of-taliban-to-united-states
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https://freebeacon.com/national-security/dhs-braces-for-terror-threat-on-southern-border/
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9927283/DHS-software-hosted-Amazon-scans-immigrants-records-potentially-citizenship-REVOKED.html
-
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9927283/DHS-software-hosted-Amazon-scans-immigrants-records-potentially-citizenship-REVOKED.html
https://nypost.com/2021/08/15/fbi-dodged-ilhan-omar-bro-wed-probe-devine/
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https://coffeeordie.com/china-mexican-cartel-alliance/?fbclid=IwAR1lgQxNCxc0Cniy5kBC1vJma0RiXUJRf45FiIitMGDOumMSBv9OQfZ9Xqg
-
second
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/al-qaeda-isis-members-could-surface-southern-border-experts?fbclid=IwAR0ZFNYlux_7NeWpg9WgxrnGNq8oSIkWL2iOHSMq8EAE3pq51zvGPJf-sVk
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/exclusive-border-patrol-asking-agents-process-afghan-refugees
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I recall telling some Libertarians about how the Chinese would love to pay the west back for the opium wars. Here we are.
https://coffeeordie.com/china-mexican-cartel-alliance/?fbclid=IwAR1lgQxNCxc0Cniy5kBC1vJma0RiXUJRf45FiIitMGDOumMSBv9OQfZ9Xqg
-
https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/security-forces-hunt-down-migrants/?utm_source=The+Whole+Enchilada&utm_campaign=b26be156ec-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN+The+Whole+Enchilada&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f17425060f-b26be156ec-350211146
-
https://nypost.com/2021/09/07/more-migrants-sent-back-to-mexico-after-trump-policy-reinstated/?utm_source=facebook_sitebuttons&utm_medium=site%20buttons&utm_campaign=site%20buttons&fbclid=IwAR1D5z2xjHzZvoBruhT4OX2CVTyVWx9an_i8u-I1gOmAv_RphJWecw6f8Jc
-
https://washingtontimes-dc.newsmemory.com/?token=2edc004d88747c50f446b862f39f1b71_61488849_6d25b5f&selDate=20210920 (https://washingtontimes-dc.newsmemory.com/?token=2edc004d88747c50f446b862f39f1b71_61488849_6d25b5f&selDate=20210920)
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Article III
Section 4.
The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government, and shall protect each of them against invasion; and on application of the legislature, or of the executive (when the legislature cannot be convened) against domestic violence.
-
Article III
Section 4.
The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government, and shall protect each of them against invasion; and on application of the legislature, or of the executive (when the legislature cannot be convened) against domestic violence.
Seems clear to me. What do your students say? Are you able to bring up current issues like this?
-
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/085/317/325/original/8b844dbb68d6cd67.png
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/085/317/325/original/8b844dbb68d6cd67.png)
Article III
Section 4.
The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government, and shall protect each of them against invasion; and on application of the legislature, or of the executive (when the legislature cannot be convened) against domestic violence.
Seems clear to me. What do your students say? Are you able to bring up current issues like this?
-
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/why-trump-didnt-have-a-haitian-migrant-crisis/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202021-09-22&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-lashes-out-at-mounted-del-rio-border-patrol-agents-those-people-will-pay/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=25135141
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hey CD
at first I though *BP* meant black people
but I realize you must mean Border Patrol
Cock Roach states BP Haitians are being stabbed in back
I read somewhere this am
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/retired-mounted-border-patrol-supervisor-debunks-dems-whipping-narrative/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=25137331
-
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-lashes-out-at-mounted-del-rio-border-patrol-agents-those-people-will-pay/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=25135141
Guy who droned seven kids mistakenly really mad at mean men on horses!
-
today the scum are showing us drone shots of same place with no one there.
amazing how fast things get done when it is for the Dem Party .
funny
"2,000" returned to Haiti
(small print -> round tickets provided )
and 20 ,000 disappear from border as of today
just like ballots
show up and then disappear just like that
whenever needed
Cock roach Al got to border just in time to scream RACISM SLAVERY
and arrest those white boys on horseback for doing their job and trying to protect our country when elites do not.
-
so Del Rio looks a some land by a river - no mass crowds today
make bad visuals go away
and thus no media blitz with images of refugee camps
just move them to secret bunkers or food water health care stations that cannot be seen or ship them around the country to seed more future democrats around (and covid infections)
what disgusting lying democrat operatives
only dopes are being fooled
however there are enough of them
first on my mind known as - W
-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvAcR3Tws9A
-
https://dailycaller.com/2021/09/26/tapper-challenges-mayorkas-on-cbp-horse-patrol/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2360&tpcc%3D=newsletter&pnespid=u6BlAS9DJLwWxPTFoDS.DI2Nox2.BYl3KrKum7I19B9mSGQmjhG_vtazXAK9xvmlJozc2rjV
https://dailycaller.com/2021/09/26/chris-wallace-confronts-mayorkas-on-flood-migrants-border/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2360&tpcc%3D=newsletter&pnespid=6bluCyMeZKoWyqifvmi7A5zTvAL_SIR5cOK_n_d0tkZmfXO3a.p3CsFiwj99SK23UoE6SjTa
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/395781.php
Being destroyed in front of us.
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/27/report-mexican-drug-cartels-to-provoke-more-clashes-between-migrants-and-border-patrol-so-biden-will-force-more-agents-off-the-line/
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/media-corrections-come-too-late-for-publicly-shamed-border-patrol-agents/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202021-09-27&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
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I have taken the time to assemble some serious reading below.
Note the dates of the three McCarthy articles.
The US v. AZ case is long, I post it here for Scalia's Dissent & Concurrence discussed by McCarthy in his 2012 article.
In my unhumble opinion, McCarthy is a fine legal mind and on the top of his game here about a matter of our national survival as America.
==========================
Article IV Section 4 The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.
=========================================
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/bidens-immigration-treachery-threatens-the-nation-not-just-national-security/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202021-09-29&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart&fbclid=IwAR0x0tt0EdVmaYdwA53w1qnEC5E3Y5AesrtjqCnm_1Aa0loz5vyywBXC2bI
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/08/why-the-border-crisis-is-here-to-stay/?fbclid=IwAR3-XTTuYiG1I5dO5bLadJQL4hR-QeP0LP_g9gCbld3Ch2dP1JmQEsL14EA
https://www.nationalreview.com/2012/07/sovereignty-preempted-andrew-c-mccarthy/?fbclid=IwAR0USveF_QtcTt8_KgWwsYOXampQpcIyzdiDuQdn-2zb8tpclPkOcpFrWeE
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/11-182
-
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/nearly-300-covid-positive-illegal-immigrants-quarantined-in-el-paso-motels/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=25208836
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second
https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2021/10/01/nbc-news-biden-administration-gearing-up-for-400000-migrants-in-october-n419710?fbclid=IwAR35BlQJK38mh0SSUicS2Ui2txw9RF3PyhioFcAS6INGwXEgNveFdHv6ykc
-
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/09/23/sen_graham_biden_has_surrendered_the_border_to_cartels_coyotes_and_human_smugglers.html
Good to see a GOP moderate pissed off at what is happening. Any Dem moderates want to speak up?
-
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/09/23/sen_graham_biden_has_surrendered_the_border_to_cartels_coyotes_and_human_smugglers.html
Good to see a GOP moderate pissed off at what is happening. Any Dem moderates want to speak up?
It's the usual scam from Miss Lindsey. Talk tough to the press while voting along with the open borders uniparty.
-
https://www.theblaze.com/news/biden-paying-to-not-build-border-wall
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https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/10/bidens-border-crisis-pops-off-cartel-fires-machine-gun-border-patrol-tower-days-threats-agents-armed-gangs-tac-vests-just-shoot-soldiers-video/
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Fk.
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https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/10/illegal-immigrant-trafficker-warns-americans-leaving-tapachula-ready-war-video/
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https://andmagazine.com/talk/2021/10/12/welcome-to-bidenland-where-the-cartels-are-not-in-control-of-our-southern-border/
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/18/dhs-insider-blows-the-whistle-on-biden-regime-policies-that-allow-sex-traffickers-and-drug-cartels-to-operate-in-u-s/
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/1195344/excellent-texas-governor-to-use-national-guard-to-arrest-invaders
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second post
https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/militia-moves-into-texas-border-county-to-deter-illegal-immigration_4057460.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2021-10-20&mktids=b903d54d906d6f525130667153f1cea6&est=X%2FSosC1WItZZ2OjVMEbdSfje5ns6jhu7V6k9XdTUeo%2B6fkW7a4bKKmiGLlzpjQPkQ9v0
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https://www.c-span.org/video/?515454-1/republican-senators-discuss-border-security
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https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/security-forces-fail-to-prevent-2000-strong-migrant-caravan/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=jeeng
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lPVE2YcBVs&t=2s !!!
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/oct/29/dhs-issues-memo-cancel-remain-mexico-border-policy/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=evening&utm_term=evening&utm_content=evening&bt_ee=tcSg2mTnLcvM0X1lHCVRH8XNYgGJ93UHrQJlEKcNwOIaPYW2qm0qAqKr7%2F2f5vMS&bt_ts=1635539153811
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/google-reveals-exponential-growth-of-new-surveillance-method_3990038.html
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/1251431/roma-texas-now
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https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2021/11/belaruss-weaponized-migrants-offer-primer-gray-zone-warfare/186590/
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https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2021/11/belaruss-weaponized-migrants-offer-primer-gray-zone-warfare/186590/
"Consider the consequences for the United States should a Latin American government decide to weaponize migration."
Or that the dems already have.
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/06/bidens-borderline-madness/
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https://nypost.com/2021/11/12/texas-authorities-claim-mexican-cartels-murdering-people-on-us-soil/?utm_source=facebook_sitebuttons&utm_medium=site%20buttons&utm_campaign=site%20buttons&fbclid=IwAR2KpgvAakEZxB9qA4fuoHHg4JKxtehCS5I_pV2QDKdMcMTbQAh7aGhqQbg
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https://nypost.com/2021/11/12/texas-authorities-claim-mexican-cartels-murdering-people-on-us-soil/?utm_source=facebook_sitebuttons&utm_medium=site%20buttons&utm_campaign=site%20buttons&fbclid=IwAR2KpgvAakEZxB9qA4fuoHHg4JKxtehCS5I_pV2QDKdMcMTbQAh7aGhqQbg
The only thing new is it’s being admitted to by government authorities.
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Why the situation on America’s southern border has become unmanageable
Democrats have not realised how serious the problem is
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/11/13/why-the-situation-on-americas-southern-border-has-become-unmanageable
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The "problem" is intentional. The political fallout is not.
It could cost Beto his rightful place in the Governor Office.
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From the article:
"The site has an air of abandonment, like a half-finished apartment building whose developer ran out of money. Thirty-foot (nine-metre) steel rods rise from the desert sand. The area has been electrified and prepared for floodlights, but only half a dozen have been installed, so most of the structure is bathed in darkness at night. Thanks to Donald Trump the border wall, of which this is part, has become a charged symbol of nativism and exclusion. But the design of this stretch, with slats spaced four inches apart to let people see through, is similar to the 128 miles of wall built during Barack Obama’s presidency, just taller. It was built hastily during the final months of Mr Trump’s term. Strewn nearby are steel piles of the old, shorter wall, which have yet to be hauled away.
President Joe Biden, who has not visited the southern border since 2008 [and won't be going there anytime soon], put a halt to all wall-construction on his first day in office. The wall here ends abruptly, in the middle of a mountain peak. Close by are several long gaps, where floodgates were planned to allow water to flow through during heavy rains. Time ran out, and they were never added. Instead, a few low boulders and a thin string of wire serve as hurdles. At one break, a dozen water bottles are littered on the sandy ground, a sign of migrants’ passage. “See, this is concerning for us,” says Jesus Vasavilbaso, who works for Customs and Border Patrol (cbp). [The rest is paywall; don't bother click.]
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All they can hope for is that no one in narrative media covers it.
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https://notthebee.com/article/bidens-first-9-months-23-illegal-aliens-previously-convicted-of-homicide-later-charged-with-illegal-reentry-in-arizona?utm_source=jeeng
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17947/supply-chain-border-security
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/nov/25/ice-arrests-plummeted-under-biden-guidance-officer/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=evening&utm_term=evening&utm_content=evening&bt_ee=OCyGsxENNed%2B%2FX4vVxx9eaPo%2BIEjbCfQO6Iqat66Ln%2BwmaMzvQ7GetbPPCiCs%2Bft&bt_ts=1637875531026
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https://video.foxnews.com/v/6284103311001?fbclid=IwAR3_ihdFIKna9oYC6jxqOIdbKXWOLlGJrF4IwpZzhwL-tzhlKSngfsKKXYM#sp=show-clips
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/exclusive-texas-law-enforcement-reports-reveal-scope-of-the-border-crisis_4133656.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2021-12-02&mktids=68df2bb5af10e2af577ae8cd1995877b&est=0oO6rl5TPadCA%2FsVaNzqOLZCpZ%2Bq2eIbMdWtfdq%2FIMcmZbFJ0qxibvyHGM8vcFfAWDj1
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second
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/dec/2/dhs-says-its-waiting-mexico-restart-border-turn-ba/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=evening&utm_term=evening&utm_content=evening&bt_ee=5SfNEzla1iX0lMoCNxI3Vx4QIGgLM%2BgRYXz9dgSECAI1Vtsxurxgl2DqdrIWqdJ%2F&bt_ts=1638480325795
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Biden revives ‘Remain in Mexico’ rule
Reluctant move, even if temporary, angers immigrant advocates
BY STEPHEN DINAN THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Mexico said Thursday that it will allow the restart of a Trump-era border policy that immediately sends illegal immigrants back across the boundary after the Department of Homeland Security announced it would speed up court hearings, offer vaccinations and help improve conditions for the migrants.
The Biden administration made clear it wasn’t happy about the move and was acting only under a court order to revive the program, officially known as the Migrant Protection Protocols but commonly called the “Remain in Mexico” policy.
The U.S. will begin returning migrants early next week, Homeland Security said.
Instituted by the Trump administration, MPP helped resolve the 2019 border surge by discouraging bogus asylum claims. The Biden administration, calling the program cruel to migrants, halted it on Inauguration Day.
In separate statements Thursday, the two countries outlined the agreement to revive MPP.
Homeland Security said it is making “humanitarian” improvements to the program at Mexico’s request. It promised to try to finish court cases for those in MPP within six months and to ensure better access to legal assistance from Mexico.
New MPP enrollees will be offered COVID-19 vaccines. Homeland Security said it will pressure Mexico to improve safety at the shelters where MPP enrollees are encouraged to wait.
Given those promises, “for humanitarian reasons and on a temporary basis, the Government of Mexico has decided that it will not return to their
home countries certain migrants who have an appointment to appear before an immigration judge in the United States to request asylum there,” the Mexican Foreign Ministry said.
The move angered immigrant rights advocates.
The New York Immigration Coalition said restarting MPP “fundamentally betrays” President Biden’s promises to asylum seekers.
“This president decried the awful human cost of our border policies not long ago. But now, President Biden is doing little to reform and rebuild our current immigration system,” said Murad Awawdeh, the coalition’s executive director.
The American Immigration Council said the administration “has broken its promise” by restoring the MPP and said the program cannot be administered humanely.
“Today is a dark day for the United States and for the rule of law,” said Jorge Loweree, the council’s policy director.
Under MPP, illegal immigrants from beyond Mexico who jumped the border and attempted to make a claim in the U.S. were given notices of court dates and sent back to Mexico to wait.
The goal was to discourage bogus asylum applications that flooded the system when it became clear to migrants in Central America that they could arrive, make a claim and be released into the U.S. They could wait years, and sometimes legally hold jobs, before their cases would be heard.
Immigrant rights advocates said returning people to Mexico blocked some deserving applicants, left them vulnerable to abuse and in some cases denied them the chance to communicate with a lawyer or gain other assistance.
Activists compiled lists of thousands of cases of migrants enrolled in MPP who said they were robbed, beaten, raped or faced other struggles after they were sent back.
The Biden administration halted MPP in its early days, and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas tried to revoke the program altogether in early June. But a federal judge ruled that Mr. Mayorkas cut too many corners in his decisionmaking and ordered him to make a “good-faith” effort to revive the program.
Mr. Mayorkas said he intends to cancel MPP and has issued a more detailed memo justifying that decision. The court’s injunction remains, so he is being forced to take steps to revive it.
About 68,000 people were put through the MPP from its 2019 start to its suspension by the Biden administration in January.
Though the number was small relative to the overall border traffi c, Trump officials said it sent a message to would-be migrants, and the flow of people slowed.
Mexico agreed to expand the MPP in 2019 under threat of crippling sanctions by President Trump. It deployed tens of thousands of national guard troops along routes used by Central American migrants to choke off the flow farther south.
With other steps to curtail asylum claims, those moves helped resolve the 2019 border surge.
The Biden administration has erased Trump policies, though a pandemic border shutdown known as Title 42 remains in place.
Under Title 42, Mexico generally allows the return of Spanishspeaking single adults and families without children younger than 7.
FLOODING THE SYSTEM: Migrants swarmed to the U.S. with the belief that they would be allowed to stay by claiming asylum, but the Homeland Security Department will begin returning them to Mexico. ASSOCIATED PRESS
U.S. asylum seekers will be blocked next week by the Migrant Protection Protocols. Immigration rights advocates say restarting the Trump-era policy “fundamentally betrays” President Biden’s promises. ASSOCIATED PRESS
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https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/migrants-remain-in-mexico/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=jeeng
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/dec/6/alejandro-mayorkas-dhs-misrepresent-involvement-of/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=evening&utm_term=evening&utm_content=evening&bt_ee=DFzsL%2BHqtTWtidejaFEUAl1fuIEqJsGHLcagzc3%2Byk0l%2FPkLVHfBEugGliEeDYpo&bt_ts=1638825937556
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More Americans support building wall on southern border
Poll finds more believe it will solve illegal immigration issues
BY STEPHEN DINAN THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Americans believe a border wall is part of the solution to illegal immigration and oppose the Biden administration’s plans to pay settlements to illegal immigrants whose families were separated after they jumped the border in the Trump era, according to a new poll taken for The Washington Times.
By better than 2-to-1 — 60% to 29% — voters disagreed with President Biden’s justification that the families suffered trauma and deserve taxpayers’ money as compensation. A stunning 47% “strongly” disagreed with the idea, swamping the 13% who strongly agreed.
And 53% said a border wall is “an effective way” to stop illegal immigration, compared to just 40% who disagreed.
But Americans signaled a generosity of spirit when it comes to immigrants who have been in the country a decade or more illegally without any serious legal entanglements. They “deserve a path to citizenship,” according to 59% of the voters polled.
The Times’ survey, conducted by OnMessage Inc. from Nov. 19 to Dec. 3, tested a wide range of hot-button issues, with a particular emphasis on immigration-related questions.
Support for the border wall was particularly striking.
It had been a winning position during the Bush and Obama years, but when thencandidate Donald Trump pushed the idea in 2015, support plummeted. When Gallup tested the issue in 2018, it found 57% opposed construction, and that deepened to 60% in 2019.
Now, though, with President Biden at the helm and halting wall construction, and with illegal immigration across the southern border hitting unprecedented levels, the barrier enjoys 13-point net positive support, at 53-40.
Republicans are strongly in favor, but so are nearly a third of Democrats.
Even among Hispanics — a community whose political leadership tilts Democratic and is vociferously opposed to the wall — about half said a wall would help control illegal immigration. About a third of Black voters supported the idea, too.
Nathan Klein, the pollster at OnMessage, said as the border numbers grew worse earlier this year under Mr. Biden, support for the wall rose.
That’s borne out by the 70% of voters in the survey who said the border situation is a “crisis,” including 60% of self-identified Democrats.
Mr. Biden and his team have rejected that term, suggesting this spring that what was going on at the border was “seasonal” and nothing out of the ordinary. As the numbers worsened over the summer, the administration pleaded for patience, saying it had a plan but it would take time to see results.
One plan Mr. Biden is already working on is paying thousands of illegal immigrant adults who were arrested and prosecuted for jumping the border under the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance border policy, then saw their children taken.
Because federal prisons don’t have family facilities, adults who arrived with children were separated, with the children put into shelters run by the federal Health and Human Services Department. But the administration lacked the capacity to reunite most of the families, and many parents were deported without their children.
Mr. Biden has said they deserve to be compensated for their trauma.
“If, in fact, because of the outrageous behavior of the last administration, you coming across the border, whether it was legally or illegally, and you lost your child — you lost your child. It’s gone — you deserve some kind of compensation, no matter what the circumstance,” the president said. “What that will be I have no idea. I have no idea.”
Three-fifths of voters disagreed, according to The Times’ poll.
The president’s plans for legalizing illegal immigrants fared better.
Nearly 3 in 5 voters said they would back citizenship rights for long-term illegal immigrants — those who have been in the country a decade — without running seriously afoul of the law. They have “earned a place here,” according to 59% of voters.
Even 42% of Republicans agreed with that idea.
Still, Americans are skeptical of allowing more people to come legally. By a 49-40 split, voters said the country “admits too many people, hurting Americans already looking for jobs.”
image
About 53% of people surveyed in a poll taken for The Washington Times said that a border wall is “an effective way” to stop illegal immigration, compared to 40% who disagreed. The findings mark a shift in attitudes about the controversial policy. ASSOCIATED PRESS
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"53% said a border wall is “an effective way” to stop illegal immigration, compared to just 40% who disagreed."
The other 40% also know the border wall is effective at stopping illegal immigration and drugs and human trafficking and covid and terrorists coming across the border but don't want to. There is something (everything) dishonest about that.
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https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2021/12/08/death-drugs-and-a-disbanded-unit-how-the-guards-mexico-border-mission-fell-apart/
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/1420857/texas-national-guard-aiding-invasion-into-america
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/dec/14/illegal-immigrant-russians-nabbed-making-run-us-bo/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=evening&utm_term=evening&utm_content=evening&bt_ee=Em1ySTGH%2BshK6XJQVW2RukV%2Bb4XORGTFc4p5jmet6Wno9QAkKNKxERifAAa%2Fm5sR&bt_ts=1639517136641
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https://www.epnewsleader.com/post/eppd-detective-charged-with-harboring-conspiracy?fbclid=IwAR0uinITdGag5w8oFFZveWt5RW-GKP5u56Jca8Nzsgx6aosxslepLOaTkMk
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/dec/9/justice-department-upgrading-curbs-foreign-influen/
seems like good thing
I hope this applies to illegals and maybe all non citizens ?
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You mean like these illegals?
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/12/15/joe-biden-flying-illegal-aliens-deported-by-trump-back-to-u-s/
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/dec/20/dhs-plug-gaps-biden-left-trumps-border-wall/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=4ZTJpCt%2FT9zhLB%2FjCsbbk8LF7qO2wSi5xjZtO3BEPUJwwYQ1BKO7q8DvsEeHEIl%2B&bt_ts=1640033562223
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https://nypost.com/2021/12/28/border-patrol-officials-tweet-about-potential-terrorist-arrest-deleted/?utm_campaign=iphone_nyp&utm_source=com.facebook.Messenger.ShareExtension&fbclid=IwAR0cP7gZfLWrht0GNcmJ5WezBLopEcCqg5K5oaMafRx9j7po5SEeatFy_XU
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Courts wrestle with Hispanic disparity in cases
Most actions involve ousted migrants attempting U.S. return
BY STEPHEN DINAN THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Forget drugs or fraud. The most common type of case federal prosecutors bring is against illegal immigrants who try to reenter the country after having been ousted — and almost all of those charged are Hispanic.
Now federal courts are grappling with whether that imbalance means the law itself is racist.
One court in Nevada has already ruled that it does. Judge Miranda Du, a President Obama appointee, said the section of law that makes it a felony for someone previously ousted to sneak back into the U.S. has racist antecedents dating to the 1920s.
Though the law has been updated since then, Congress has never “confronted the racist, nativist roots” of the law, the judge ruled. She said that, coupled with the overwhelmingly Hispanic targets for prosecution, makes the law unconstitutional.
She tossed the government’s case against Gustavo Carrillo-Lopez.
The Biden administration has appealed and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is hearing the case, which has reverberated across the legal world and is shaping up as a significant test of the critical race theory’s approach to criminal law.
“If we are trying to uproot systemic racism, that means we have
to consciously understand what motivated a law’s original enactment, and then make the conscious decision whether we want to change it or whether we want to continue it,” Ahilan Arulanantham, codirector of the Immigration Law and Policy Center at UCLA School of Law and one of the leading scholars on the history of the illegal-reentry law, told The Washington Times in an interview earlier this year.
The illegal reentry law, section 1326 of Title VIII of the U.S. Code, governs “reentry of removed aliens.”
Those guilty of the basic offense can be sentenced to two years in prison. If they had a drug record or a basic felony on their criminal record they could earn 10 years, and if they had an aggravated felony record they could get up to 20 years.
Usually, sentences are much shorter, but the law has serious teeth — and a lot of targets.
According to a report last month by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there were 30,636 prosecutions in fiscal year 2018 under Section 1326. That’s more than 36% of all federal prosecutions. Drug trafficking, the second most common, only accounted for half that many.
The BJS study doesn’t give an exact racial breakdown for Section 1326 prosecutions, but it does say 98% of all illegal immigrants prosecuted in 2018 were Hispanic, so it’s a good bet almost all Section 1326 cases were Hispanic.
The study was published after Judge Du’s ruling, but she pointed to the overwhelmingly Hispanic demographics of those arrested jumping the border as evidence that “Mexican and Latinx individuals” are disproportionately affected by the illegal reentry law.
She said that, coupled with the fact that illegal reentry was first criminalized by Congress in 1929, by lawmakers who were influenced by the Jim Crow era of racial segregation and were looking to tamp down on Mexican migration.
Section 1326 itself was written in 1952 — again with arguably discriminatory intent, Judge Du concluded — and its penalties were stiffened in 1988, 1990, 1994 and 1996.
The judge said those Congresses never explicitly came to terms with the racist antecedents.
Kris Kobach, former secretary of state in Kansas and a prominent legal figure among groups who want stricter immigration, was stunned by the ruling.
“The judge’s conclusions are ridiculous,” he said. “The law is neutral on its face, and it is justified by a multitude of legitimate reasons having nothing to do with race. It is nonsense to declare that the statute must be ‘cleansed’ in some way because an unknown number of legislators who supported a predecessor statute a century ago might have been racially biased,” he said.
The Justice Department, in its appeal briefs, said Judge Du’s math equating the high number of Latinos to racial discrimination ignored “the obvious alternative explanation that those numbers are attributable to geography and the high percentage of such individuals among the population of noncitizens unlawfully in the United States.”
Or, as Christopher J. Hajec at the Immigration Reform Law Institute put it to The Times earlier this year, when you border Mexico, and just south of that is Central America, you’re going to see a lot more illegal immigrants from those places trying to sneak back in.
“When you’re doing disparate impact you have to compare things with the right things. In the universe of illegal aliens a very large proportion are from Latin America, and that’s due to geography and economics,” Mr. Hajec said. “It follows that a large proportion of illegal entrants who’ve already been deported are going to be from Latin America, are going to be Hispanic.”
IRLI said the point of the law is to deter deported migrants from trying to come back, no matter where they’re from.
The case has forged odd alliances, with IRLI finding itself on the same side as the Biden administration.
Indeed, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas earlier this year told employees at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that he thought there should be more prosecutions under Section 1326.
“I see cases now where we apprehend and remove individuals that I think need to be prosecuted criminally,” he told employees during a virtual town hall this spring. He said he would work with the Justice Department to try to bring more cases.
But Mr. Arulanantham says there must be some reckoning of the law’s history, and pointed to his own experience serving for two years as an assistant federal public defender in El Paso.
He figures he handled maybe 150 illegal reentry cases, yet he didn’t know the law’s origins at the time.
“That’s how systemic racism works, it’s nobody’s fault, but we live in a system and unless you’re very consciously able to examine it, you just go along with it,” he said.
Carrillo-Lopez, the man at the heart of the Nevada case, was already deported twice, with the most recent expulsion coming in 2012. He snuck back in at an “unknown time,” and was living secretly in the U.S. — Nevada lists a dozen different aliases he’s used — until he was caught on state drug-trafficking charges in 2019.
He also has a prior felony conviction for drugs and a misdemeanor domestic-violence conviction.
Even if he beats the federal illegal reentry charges, he’s not going to be out on the streets soon. He’s serving a life sentence on the drug trafficking charge, with no possibility of parole until 2029.
So far, this appears to be the only case where a judge has tossed the charges over questions about Section 1326. But if Judge Du’s ruling stands, he wouldn’t be the last.
That would leave a couple options. Congress could go back and repass the illegal reentry law, or something like it, this time grappling with the history and concluding that whatever the motives of the past, there’s a good reason today to have a criminal bar on deported people sneaking back into the country.
But it’s not clear that Congress would pass such a law again at this time, which opponents say is part of the whole point of performing a systemic racism analysis on the legal code.
“Forcing Congress to reenact this statute would be a significant legislative undertaking, particularly when it played a huge role in family separation,” Mr. Arulanantham said.
The other option is to live without a criminal penalty, and rely on the civil code and its penalty — another deportation.
Even those who are convicted under Section 1326 and serve time — about six months, according to the new Justice Department report — will usually be deported at the end of it anyway, which raises questions about whether the criminal law is needed as a deterrent.
But there are other implications to a world where laws like Section 1326 are ruled unconstitutional because of racist intentions by Congress at the time.
One target could be gun control laws, such as the Gun Control Act of 1968, which imposed a ban on sale of firearms to felons and created the first federal bar on explosives.
Scholars have argued that law was part of a push to keep firearms out of the hands of the country’s Black residents.
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https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/01/shocking-exclusive-america-slept-thursday-night-flight-world-atlantic-flight-695-transported-full-load-illegal-immigrants-el-paso-allentown-pa/
While America slept, your president was flying illegal immigrants around the country at our expense.
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/01/05/biden-accused-of-using-coronavirus-funds-to-bankroll-secret-flights-of-border-crossers-into-u-s/
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second
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/jan/5/new-dhs-data-reveals-border-no-longer-mexican-prob/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=morning&utm_term=newsletter&utm_content=morning&bt_ee=aMitgOt0PPPqcWVQ%2BgfbxGH53v4rdINc3tg35KU5CEBAhTu%2FwRx3A9PkajJ8%2F3XG&bt_ts=1641465923110
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https://www.westernjournal.com/kari-lake-pledges-defy-biden-new-interstate-border-patrol-solve-border-crisis/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=westernjournalism&utm_content=2022-01-07&utm_campaign=manualpost&fbclid=IwAR0IfSzj532yUthAG-Oj08dzOSIHbCM4BOiH7ahv5v8f2MTuJr4SVSxroLc
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https://www.westernjournal.com/kari-lake-pledges-defy-biden-new-interstate-border-patrol-solve-border-crisis/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=westernjournalism&utm_content=2022-01-07&utm_campaign=manualpost&fbclid=IwAR0IfSzj532yUthAG-Oj08dzOSIHbCM4BOiH7ahv5v8f2MTuJr4SVSxroLc
Fcuk. Yes.
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https://www.zerohedge.com/political/weve-got-gun-every-door-house-border-rancher-sees-2400-percent-increase-illegal-aliens
Meanwhile, we are provoking a potential war in Eastern Europe.
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https://cis.org/Bensman/Mexicos-Duplicitous-Ant-Operation-Moved-Tens-Thousands-US-Border-Sight-Unseen-and-Will
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https://cis.org/Bensman/Mexicos-Duplicitous-Ant-Operation-Moved-Tens-Thousands-US-Border-Sight-Unseen-and-Will
Shocking news to exactly no one.
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Recommended by Michael Yon:
https://americasvoice.news/video/u2rw7Y05aqoT33Y/
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https://arizonadailyindependent.com/2022/01/26/border-patrol-agent-attacked-in-remote-area-of-cochise-county/?fbclid=IwAR08twUzMXcoHFYskc4HPLQ7y-a1n7fZHqrk3w5S5225H3htJmcWe2EnW9c
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https://www.foxnews.com/politics/five-syrian-men-encountered-southern-border-migrant-surge?fbclid=IwAR2I0v2pKiqWv8IA6lNXcvpjBrzCn-xELPZQHeHMwsJqXawLaTk8xZpzPw4
https://amp.azcentral.com/amp/9242479002?fbclid=IwAR3ys8R0S0OI7kuiEwOeNuGQ1orcoyD7tY82ACimB0kaquRUeIUVXZ4giTw
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https://rumble.com/vto1bv-biden-drops-off-hundreds-of-illegal-aliens-at-florida-hotel.html?fbclid=IwAR00eaDjDOk3fvXL9vVZvQcaGr9m5s0H89BIPjzgy6D9ROeZPX5JKe3rcIA
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/jan/30/dhs-cancels-deportation-request-hit-and-run-killer/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=0vzGhpm4ybaFmZJPLOVrV%2FNesgH95tx2iJootF56mu4Psbg2AKdP6V3ySqpLhQqL&bt_ts=1643627567981
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https://rumble.com/vto1bv-biden-drops-off-hundreds-of-illegal-aliens-at-florida-hotel.html?fbclid=IwAR00eaDjDOk3fvXL9vVZvQcaGr9m5s0H89BIPjzgy6D9ROeZPX5JKe3rcIA
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/jan/30/dhs-cancels-deportation-request-hit-and-run-killer/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=0vzGhpm4ybaFmZJPLOVrV%2FNesgH95tx2iJootF56mu4Psbg2AKdP6V3ySqpLhQqL&bt_ts=1643627567981
How is this not Treason?
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https://www.foxnews.com/us/border-patrol-agents-fired-upon-from-mexico-return-fire?fbclid=IwAR0LkchWwzO4szlUhmimp3sY-_CgqjRlbYbO-Oyud5xTSvzuldyU2iP0tpo
An additional option:
https://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/pershings-mexican-expedition
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Arizona AG rules border surge is an ‘invasion,’ state can defend itself
By Stephen Dinan - The Washington Times - Updated: 8:46 p.m. on Monday, February 7, 2022
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich issued an official opinion Monday saying the surge of illegal immigrants coming across the border meets the legal definition of an “invasion” under the U.S. Constitution.
Mr. Brnovich‘s ruling is only on the legal situation. He said it’s up to Gov. Doug Ducey to make the actual determination, which would allow the state to “defend itself” under Article I, Section 10 of the founding document.
“The on-the-ground violence and lawlessness at Arizona’s border caused by cartels and gangs is extensive, well-documented, and persistent. It can satisfy the definition of ‘actually invaded’ and ‘invasion’ under the U.S. Constitution,” the Republican attorney general wrote in his opinion.
The ruling was requested by a member of the state assembly.
Mr. Brnovich‘s opinion is the latest salvo in a war of rhetoric over how bad the border has gotten under President Biden.
Jonah Goldberg picked up by CNN after resigning from Fox News over Tucker Carlson
The president and most of his team have refused to label the record surge of people and drugs a “crisis,” much less an invasion.
But sheriffs on the border, and elected officials of both parties, say “crisis” undersells what they’re seeing, and some cities on the border have declared states of emergency over having to handle the massive numbers.
Mr. Brnovich‘s opinion elevates the matter to one of constitutional proportions.
He said the key sections are Article IV, Section 4, which requires the government to guarantee each state a republican form of government and to “protect each of them against invasion,” and Article I, Section 10, which bars states from raising armies or engaging in war “unless actually invaded.”
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10500779/Senators-CIA-secret-program-collects-American-data.html
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But not protecting our borders
instead
used as a military ops against the US citizens :
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/dhs-super-bowl-canada-truckers/2022/02/11/id/1056549/
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/feb/20/last-afghan-evacuees-leave-us-military-bases-amid-/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=yKTXitHZJ3nL4uJlDI2MpvYnKo%2B6xcZwBSiJ2K47afDMwMv%2FyLqlXy1rhZA2XNHW&bt_ts=1645442310754
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/02/20/tom-cotton-biden-bringing-suspected-bomb-makers-terrorists-to-u-s/
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https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/fbi-still-silent-murder-dhs-whistleblower-phillip-lloyd-billingsley/
Haney didn't kill himself.
https://datechguyblog.com/2020/02/29/they-tell-no-tales/
Good thing DHS has the qualified Jeh Johnson and not some dem machine hack running it.
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/homeland-security/268282-dhs-ordered-me-to-scrub-records-of-muslims-with-terror
DHS ordered me to scrub records of Muslims with terror ties
By Philip Haney
Amid the chaos of the 2009 holiday travel season, jihadists planned to slaughter 290 innocent travelers on a Christmas Day flight from the Netherlands to Detroit, Michigan. Twenty-three-year old Nigerian Muslim Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab intended to detonate Northwest Airlines Flight 253, but the explosives in his underwear malfunctioned and brave passengers subdued him until he could be arrested. The graphic and traumatic defeat they planned for the United States failed, that time.
Following the attempted attack, President Obama threw the intelligence community under the bus for its failure to “connect the dots.” He said, “this was not a failure to collect intelligence, it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.”
Most Americans were unaware of the enormous damage to morale at the Department of Homeland Security, where I worked, his condemnation caused. His words infuriated many of us because we knew his administration had been engaged in a bureaucratic effort to destroy the raw material—the actual intelligence we had collected for years, and erase those dots. The dots constitute the intelligence needed to keep Americans safe, and the Obama administration was ordering they be wiped away.
After leaving my 15 year career at DHS, I can no longer be silent about the dangerous state of America’s counter-terror strategy, our leaders’ willingness to compromise the security of citizens for the ideological rigidity of political correctness—and, consequently, our vulnerability to devastating, mass-casualty attack.
Just before that Christmas Day attack, in early November 2009, I was ordered by my superiors at the Department of Homeland Security to delete or modify several hundred records of individuals tied to designated Islamist terror groups like Hamas from the important federal database, the Treasury Enforcement Communications System (TECS). These types of records are the basis for any ability to “connect dots.” Every day, DHS Customs and Border Protection officers watch entering and exiting many individuals associated with known terrorist affiliations, then look for patterns. Enforcing a political scrubbing of records of Muslims greatly affected our ability to do that. Even worse, going forward, my colleagues and I were prohibited from entering pertinent information into the database.
A few weeks later, in my office at the Port of Atlanta, the television hummed with the inevitable Congressional hearings that follow any terrorist attack. While members of Congress grilled Obama administration officials, demanding why their subordinates were still failing to understand the intelligence they had gathered, I was being forced to delete and scrub the records. And I was well aware that, as a result, it was going to be vastly more difficult to “connect the dots” in the future—especially beforean attack occurs.
As the number of successful and attempted Islamic terrorist attacks on America increased, the type of information that the Obama administration ordered removed from travel and national security databases was the kind of information that, if properly assessed, could have prevented subsequent domestic Islamist attacks like the ones committed by Faisal Shahzad (May 2010), Detroit “honor killing” perpetrator Rahim A. Alfetlawi (2011); Amine El Khalifi, who plotted to blow up the U.S. Capitol (2012); Dzhokhar or Tamerlan Tsarnaev who conducted the Boston Marathon bombing (2013); Oklahoma beheading suspect Alton Nolen (2014); or Muhammed Yusuf Abdulazeez, who opened fire on two military installations in Chattanooga, Tennessee (2015).
It is very plausible that one or more of the subsequent terror attacks on the homeland could have been prevented if more subject matter experts in the Department of Homeland Security had been allowed to do our jobs back in late 2009. It is demoralizing—and infuriating—that today, those elusive dots are even harder to find, and harder to connect, than they were during the winter of 2009.
Haney worked at the Department of Homeland Security for 15 years.
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2016/06/14/ironic-jeh-johnson-says-gun-control-now-a-homeland-security-issueorlando-terrorist-worked-for-dhs-n2178248
Irony: Jeh Johnson Says Gun Control Now a Matter of Homeland Security...Orlando Terrorist Worked For DHS
Katie Pavlich Katie Pavlich |Posted: Jun 14, 2016 12:15 PM Share (977) Tweet
Irony: Jeh Johnson Says Gun Control Now a Matter of Homeland Security...Orlando Terrorist Worked For DHS
The Islamic terrorist who carried out the horrific, atrocious attack on Pulse nightclub in Orlando Sunday morning was employed by G4S security company as a licensed, professional security guard with the ability to carry a firearm on duty. He worked at the company for years.
G4S is contracted by the Department of Homeland Security to protect federal buildings, including nuclear facilities, and is responsible for providing security protocol for major transportation hubs around the country.
Further, the terrorist (an American citizen) purchased the firearms he used Sunday legally and passed a background check to do so.
Despite these facts, during an interview with CBS this morning Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson declared gun control as a "matter of national security."
"Meaningful, responsible gun control has to be part of national security," Johnson said.
The Orlando terrorist was interviewed by the FBI three times and was under investigation for 10 months in 2013. At no point were his security credentials revoked. Maybe instead of focusing on gun control, Johnson should be focused on not allowing DHS contracted companies to employ those under FBI investigation for terrorism.
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Please post all that on the Deep State thread as well.
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IMMIGRATION
Biden administration restarts troubled Iraqi refugee program
BY STEPHEN DINAN THE WASHINGTON TIMES
The State Department said it is reviving an Iraqi refugee program that was abruptly shut down early last year after investigators discovered government employees had been pilfering files to help people file bogus applications.
Department officials insisted the vulnerabilities that led to the massive fraud that tainted thousands of applications have been fixed, though they were cagey on the details and wouldn’t say whether anyone has lost status because of the breach.
“During our review of the Iraqi P-2 Program, we identified and resolved the issues that led to our suspension of the program in January of 2021. We are committed to ensuring that only bona fide and qualified Iraqis who supported U.S. efforts in Iraq are considered for this important humanitarian program,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said Tuesday in announcing the restart.
The P-2 program is a special refugee category that’s supposed to reward Iraqis who assisted the U.S. in the lengthy war effort.
It was abruptly shut down just after President Biden took office last year, when authorities revealed a major breach in the P-2 program’s files. They found that two Homeland Security contractors had gotten access to hundreds of applicants’ files and were shipping the information to their ringleader, Aws Abduljabbar, who was using it to help other Iraqis file bogus applications.
Abduljabbar pleaded guilty to his role in the scam this year.
Robert Law, a former senior official at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said he’s wary of the State Department’s assurances that they’ve fixed things.
“Those claims deserve proper scrutiny before any additional Iraqis are allowed into the country,” said Mr. Law, who is now director of regulatory affairs and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies.
He pointed to an inspector general’s report late last month that found significant security lapses in vetting Afghan evacuees who were brought to the U.S. under a justification similar to that of the Iraqis.
“The Biden administration continues to double down on its desire to get as many aliens into the country as possible without regard to proper vetting,” Mr. Law said.
The Iraqi program restart comes as Mr. Biden finds himself in need of an immigration win after the botched Afghanistan airlift, which evacuated tens of thousands of average Afghan nationals but left behind tens of thousands of allies who assisted the U.S. war effort.
The State Department has offered few answers for those left behind in Afghanistan, but said it will try to help those in Iraq.
“After an extensive review, we have resumed case processing for a select number of Iraqi P-2 cases that had been previously suspended during our review of the program,” Mr. Price said. “In coordination with the Department of Homeland Security, we will continue to review and process all other existing Iraqi P-2 cases that can move forward as well as accept new applications to the program.”
The program was suspended Jan. 22, just two days after Mr. Biden took office. Originally, it was supposed to be a 90-day pause while authorities figured out the extent of the breach, but it stretched to more than a year.
According to Abduljabbar’s plea deal, he said he was paying a Jordanian man who worked for USCIS at the U.S. Embassy in Amman to pore over files in the agency’s refugee system and pull out details of cases dealing with Iraqis. That Jordanian’s time at USCIS ended in 2016, but he managed to get into the computer system remotely, and illegally, for months afterward.
By then, the Jordanian had recruited another henchman for Abduljabbar — a Russian woman who worked at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and could pull files. From 2016 to 2019, the Russian woman stole access into at least 591 cases involving Iraqis applying for the P-2 program. She sent hundreds of screenshots and documents to Abduljabbar so he could keep tabs on those cases.
That knowledge helped him coach Iraqis on how to craft their applications. He provided inside information on what questions might be asked in interviews and what stories worked and what didn’t.
“As a result, the State Department, DHS and other agencies will spend millions of dollars to investigate and mitigate the damage,” prosecutors and Abduljabbar said in the statement of facts supporting his plea deal. “Among other tasks, this continuing effort involves the identification of [refugee] cases affected by the scheme, review of all cases to identify fraud and/or previously unidentified security risks, and an array of subsequent remedial steps.”
Reuters reported last summer that authorities suspect the fraud scheme tainted about 4,000 refugee cases. More than 500 of those had already been approved and admitted to the U.S.
Reuters said investigators found no connections to terrorism in the cases. Still, the Justice Department, in announcing the guilty plea, said the fraud ring was a risk “to public safety and national security” and potentially blocked legitimate refugees whose lives were in danger.
The State Department said this week it upgraded its databases last year and “addressed the vulnerabilities exposed by this case.” It also said it has reverified the employment documents of applicants.
But the department declined to say anything more on changes, and said it couldn’t comment on whether anyone has had refugee status revoked, citing the ongoing case against the fraudsters.
The P-2 program is supposed to reward people in danger because they assisted with American efforts in the war in Iraq.
Refugees accepted by the U.S. generally have fled their home countries, fear returning and are referred to the U.S. by the United Nations Refugee Agency. But the P-2 program, also known as “direct access,” allows people to apply from their home countries without undergoing U.N. vetting.
“All refugees undergo the highest level of security screening and vetting, including extensive interviews and the vetting of biographic and biometric information,” Mr. Price said Tuesday. “Only after an applicant has cleared all security vetting can they be deemed eligible for admission to the United States. In the admission of refugees to the United States, the safety and security of the American people is our highest priority.
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What could possibly go wrong?
IMMIGRATION
Biden administration restarts troubled Iraqi refugee program
BY STEPHEN DINAN THE WASHINGTON TIMES
The State Department said it is reviving an Iraqi refugee program that was abruptly shut down early last year after investigators discovered government employees had been pilfering files to help people file bogus applications.
Department officials insisted the vulnerabilities that led to the massive fraud that tainted thousands of applications have been fixed, though they were cagey on the details and wouldn’t say whether anyone has lost status because of the breach.
“During our review of the Iraqi P-2 Program, we identified and resolved the issues that led to our suspension of the program in January of 2021. We are committed to ensuring that only bona fide and qualified Iraqis who supported U.S. efforts in Iraq are considered for this important humanitarian program,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said Tuesday in announcing the restart.
The P-2 program is a special refugee category that’s supposed to reward Iraqis who assisted the U.S. in the lengthy war effort.
It was abruptly shut down just after President Biden took office last year, when authorities revealed a major breach in the P-2 program’s files. They found that two Homeland Security contractors had gotten access to hundreds of applicants’ files and were shipping the information to their ringleader, Aws Abduljabbar, who was using it to help other Iraqis file bogus applications.
Abduljabbar pleaded guilty to his role in the scam this year.
Robert Law, a former senior official at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said he’s wary of the State Department’s assurances that they’ve fixed things.
“Those claims deserve proper scrutiny before any additional Iraqis are allowed into the country,” said Mr. Law, who is now director of regulatory affairs and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies.
He pointed to an inspector general’s report late last month that found significant security lapses in vetting Afghan evacuees who were brought to the U.S. under a justification similar to that of the Iraqis.
“The Biden administration continues to double down on its desire to get as many aliens into the country as possible without regard to proper vetting,” Mr. Law said.
The Iraqi program restart comes as Mr. Biden finds himself in need of an immigration win after the botched Afghanistan airlift, which evacuated tens of thousands of average Afghan nationals but left behind tens of thousands of allies who assisted the U.S. war effort.
The State Department has offered few answers for those left behind in Afghanistan, but said it will try to help those in Iraq.
“After an extensive review, we have resumed case processing for a select number of Iraqi P-2 cases that had been previously suspended during our review of the program,” Mr. Price said. “In coordination with the Department of Homeland Security, we will continue to review and process all other existing Iraqi P-2 cases that can move forward as well as accept new applications to the program.”
The program was suspended Jan. 22, just two days after Mr. Biden took office. Originally, it was supposed to be a 90-day pause while authorities figured out the extent of the breach, but it stretched to more than a year.
According to Abduljabbar’s plea deal, he said he was paying a Jordanian man who worked for USCIS at the U.S. Embassy in Amman to pore over files in the agency’s refugee system and pull out details of cases dealing with Iraqis. That Jordanian’s time at USCIS ended in 2016, but he managed to get into the computer system remotely, and illegally, for months afterward.
By then, the Jordanian had recruited another henchman for Abduljabbar — a Russian woman who worked at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and could pull files. From 2016 to 2019, the Russian woman stole access into at least 591 cases involving Iraqis applying for the P-2 program. She sent hundreds of screenshots and documents to Abduljabbar so he could keep tabs on those cases.
That knowledge helped him coach Iraqis on how to craft their applications. He provided inside information on what questions might be asked in interviews and what stories worked and what didn’t.
“As a result, the State Department, DHS and other agencies will spend millions of dollars to investigate and mitigate the damage,” prosecutors and Abduljabbar said in the statement of facts supporting his plea deal. “Among other tasks, this continuing effort involves the identification of [refugee] cases affected by the scheme, review of all cases to identify fraud and/or previously unidentified security risks, and an array of subsequent remedial steps.”
Reuters reported last summer that authorities suspect the fraud scheme tainted about 4,000 refugee cases. More than 500 of those had already been approved and admitted to the U.S.
Reuters said investigators found no connections to terrorism in the cases. Still, the Justice Department, in announcing the guilty plea, said the fraud ring was a risk “to public safety and national security” and potentially blocked legitimate refugees whose lives were in danger.
The State Department said this week it upgraded its databases last year and “addressed the vulnerabilities exposed by this case.” It also said it has reverified the employment documents of applicants.
But the department declined to say anything more on changes, and said it couldn’t comment on whether anyone has had refugee status revoked, citing the ongoing case against the fraudsters.
The P-2 program is supposed to reward people in danger because they assisted with American efforts in the war in Iraq.
Refugees accepted by the U.S. generally have fled their home countries, fear returning and are referred to the U.S. by the United Nations Refugee Agency. But the P-2 program, also known as “direct access,” allows people to apply from their home countries without undergoing U.N. vetting.
“All refugees undergo the highest level of security screening and vetting, including extensive interviews and the vetting of biographic and biometric information,” Mr. Price said Tuesday. “Only after an applicant has cleared all security vetting can they be deemed eligible for admission to the United States. In the admission of refugees to the United States, the safety and security of the American people is our highest priority.
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/1872582/tidal-wave-invasion-into-united-states
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https://www.zerohedge.com/political/criminal-tourists-target-wealthy-american-neighborhoods
Vibrant diversity! Kicking in your door at 3 AM!
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Ukrainian Refugees Find Easier Path to Enter U.S. at the Mexican Border
Meanwhile, Russians fleeing sanctions and their government have a harder time getting into U.S.
A Ukrainian family waiting to seek asylum in the U.S. on Sunday at the border crossing in Tijuana, Mexico.
PHOTO: CESAR RODRIGUEZ/BLOOMBERG NEWS
By Alicia A. CaldwellFollow
Updated Mar. 25, 2022 7:24 am ET
TIJUANA, Mexico—Vladymyr Ostapchuk and his family walked up to the U.S. border with Mexico on Sunday afternoon to ask for asylum, the final border they would cross after a multicountry trip over 20 days that started as Russian military forces invaded their native Ukraine last month.
Mr. Ostapchuk, a 33-year-old construction worker from Vinnytsia, fled Ukraine by land through Moldova with his two children, his wife, and her brother’s family of four. They traveled through several countries before making their way to Germany, then on to Cancún, Mexico, and later Tijuana, just over the border from San Diego. Once in the U.S., they planned on heading to Vancouver, Wash., to reunite with relatives living there.
“I feel safe, better,” Mr. Ostapchuk said through a translator after he and his family arrived at the border crossing. A few hours later, they were allowed to enter the U.S.
Mr. Ostapchuk and his family are among thousands of Ukrainians and Russians fleeing war and sanctions, who are increasingly using Mexico as a transit point as they try to migrate to the U.S. Most choose this route because they don’t need a visa to fly directly to Mexico, unlike the U.S. Once they make it to a U.S. land border, they can ask for asylum and often begin the legal process, which sometimes takes years, inside the U.S. instead of in a faraway country.
Arrivals of migrants from Russia and Ukraine have increased in Mexico in recent months. In January and February alone some 30,111 Russians arrived in Mexico, compared with a full-year average of 12,380 during each of the past five years, according to Mexican immigration data.
Residents in Ukraine’s second largest city tried to extinguish fires after strikes by Russian forces. Following meetings with Western leaders, President Biden travels to Poland to visit a town that’s become a major arms resupply artery for Ukraine. Photo: Felipe Dana/Associated Press
The number of Ukrainians visiting Mexico has also surged during the same period to 10,031 during January and February, compared with a full-year average of 4,078. While entering as tourists, most are likely heading to the U.S., Mexican immigration officials say.
The U.S.-Mexico border remains officially closed to asylum seekers under a public-health rule meant to help curb the spread of Covid-19, but immigration officers working at border crossings were told last week that because of the war in Ukraine, they were free to offer exemptions to Ukrainian migrants.
“The Department of Homeland Security recognizes that the unjustified Russian war of aggression has created a humanitarian crisis,” the memo outlining the exemption process for Ukrainians said.
For most newly arriving Ukrainians, this means they would be allowed to stay for at least a year under a provision called “humanitarian parole” and wouldn’t have to apply for asylum or other protections during that time. On Thursday, in Poland, President Biden announced plans to accept up to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees. It is unclear when they might start arriving in the U.S.
Things are less clear for Russians. In recent months, thousands of Russians seem to have been allowed to ask for asylum and given court dates to begin asylum proceedings. But in recent days, growing numbers have been turned back and told to wait in Mexico, according to immigration advocates, migrants and others.
On Sunday afternoon, several Ukrainian families, all toting just a few suitcases, were allowed to enter the U.S. after each had waited a few hours on the Mexican side of the San Ysidro border crossing into San Diego.
A Russian group said they were turned away and referred to a Mexican government-operated shelter in Tijuana. The family declined to be identified, but one man in the group said it was confusing that Russians were being treated differently, despite also fleeing the Putin regime.
Earlier in March, groups of Russian and Belarusian families who had slept on the street near the border crossing, hoping to be allowed in, were taken by Mexican authorities to local hotels, immigration advocates said. A Mexican police officer, who declined to be identified, told reporters on Sunday that only Ukrainians were allowed to cross.
Since October, the start of the U.S. government’s budget year, about 1,300 Ukrainians have been taken into custody by immigration officials at the U.S.-Mexican border, more than double the number of such migrants during all of last year, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Separately, 7,100 Russian migrants have been taken into custody, nearly double the figure from a year ago.
Those migrants were usually quickly released into the U.S. and given a court date to appear to begin asylum proceedings.
The numbers for both Ukrainian and Russian would-be migrants are expected to grow in coming weeks, as the war devastates Ukraine and economic sanctions and growing authoritarianism make life in Russia more difficult.
Ukrainian migrants crossing the border on Sunday waited two-to-three hours outside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility. Their children sat atop suitcases and snacked on Carl’s Jr. hamburgers and fries brought by a local volunteer. Once inside, the Ukrainians spent less than 30 minutes being processed and received a stamp in their passports, giving them permission to stay in the U.S. for up to a year.
The Ostapchuks and members of their extended family after crossing the border and being released into San Diego on Sunday.
PHOTO: ALICIA A. CALDWELL/THE WALL STREET
“We get to stay…for one year,” a smiling Ilona Martyniuk said, showing off a photo of her stamped passport. She said the family was making arrangements to fly to Washington state and were looking forward to hugging other relatives, including her mother-in-law.
From early on in the pandemic, the Trump and then Biden administrations have used the public-health law known as Title 42 to disregard asylum requests and turn back hundreds of thousands of would-be migrants at the border, most of them from Latin America.
Some immigration advocates want the Title 42 restrictions lifted. The continued use of Title 42, along with reported delays for Russians and other nationalities, harm vulnerable migrants, said Margaret Cargioli, directing attorney at the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, a legal-aid group working with asylum seekers in Tijuana.
The Homeland Security Department has said that every nationality is eligible for an exemption from Title 42 and they are granted on a case-by-case basis.
The Biden administration has temporarily halted deportations to Russia, Ukraine and several other Eastern European countries, all but ensuring that Russian migrants who are already in the U.S. or make it into the country will be allowed to stay for now.
Anastasiia Davidson, a 19-year-old hookah-bar barista from Kharkiv whose husband is an American, said she and her family debated where she should go in the lead-up to the war, choosing between Canada and Mexico. They settled on Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, a beach resort she had visited in early February. She decided to meet up with her husband at the border in Tijuana on Sunday, after the memo authorizing exemptions for Ukrainians was issued.
Ben Davidson, her husband, said the plan was always for Anastasiia to join him in San Francisco—they have already applied for a visa—but the war sped up the process.
“She was going to wait out the U.S. immigration system in Ukraine, but now she has no home to go back to,” Mr. Davidson said. “We were planning on her going to Canada, but it looks like she’s going to be able to come in.”
Ms. Davidson said the rest of her family has stayed in Ukraine. “My house already was bombed. My grandmother’s house was already bombed,” she said, adding that her uncle was killed on the second day of the war. “Every day it’s like a nightmare.”
Ms. Davidson and her husband flew home to San Francisco Sunday afternoon.
Juan Montes in Mexico City contributed to this article.
Write to Alicia A. Caldwell at Alicia.Caldwell@wsj.com
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IMMIGRATION
Homeland Security finalizes plan to take over asylum cases
BY STEPHEN DINAN THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Homeland Security released a final regulation Thursday taking control of decisions in border asylum cases, in a move analysts said is likely to lead to faster — and more — approvals.
The cases had been handled by immigration judges at the Justice Department, but under the new policy, they will shift to asylum officers at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Immigrant-rights advocates have complained that the judges were too strict, and they hope for more leniency from USCIS.
“The current system for handling asylum claims at our borders has long needed repair,” said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
The new policy, announced in a 512-page interim final rule, also erases some of the limits on asylum claims put in place by the Trump administration from 2018 to 2020 but had gotten snared in court challenges.
The new rule is a critical part of the Biden administration’s plans to revamp how illegal immigrants’ claims at the border are handled.
Biden officials had said they want those overhauls in place to prepare for an expected surge of illegal immigrants once pandemic- era border restrictions are fully ended.
Rosemary Jenks, vice president of NumbersUSA, which calls for stricter immigration policies, said the asylum changes are ripe for a legal challenge if someone has the standing to bring it.
Those covered by the policy have jumped the border and are in deportation proceedings. Under the law, Ms. Jenks said, their cases are supposed to be handled by immigration judges.
“This is yet another example of this administration essentially rewriting the law to suit their own needs,” she said.
Mr. Mayorkas said he hopes the new process will deliver faster decisions so that those who qualify for asylum get status faster and those whose claims fail can be deported faster.
Currently, cases can drag on for years, and the ability of illegal immigrants to jump the border, make an asylum claim and then gain a foothold in the U.S. while waiting for a decision on their case has become an incentive for people to stream in, filing what turn out to be bogus claims.
In 2020, more than 70% of asylum claims were rejected, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. In 2021, the rejection rate was 63%.
Mr. Mayorkas and Attorney General Merrick Garland, who oversees the immigration courts at the Justice Department, said they hope the changes help ease the backlog of cases that has built up before the immigration judges.
USCIS began hiring officers to hear the expected crush of asylum cases last summer, just as it announced the initial proposal.
Asylum officers are recruited heavily from ranks of refugee resettlement agencies and are likely to bring a markedly proasylum perspective, compared to more neutral immigration judges, Ms. Jenks said.
“It’s basically putting the U.N. in charge of our asylum decisions,” she said. Asylum claims are similar to refugee claims, though refugees apply from outside the U.S. while asylum seekers are already on American soil.
Protections are supposed to be granted to those who claim fear of persecution back home because of their membership in a particular social class, such as their race, religion or political beliefs. In recent years, the definition has expanded to include some claims of spousal abuse and generalized violent crime.
Under the old system, an illegal immigrant who jumps the border and is caught can lodge a claim of “credible fear” of being sent back to those conditions at home. That determination is made by USCIS and is a lower standard than an actual asylum claim.
Those granted credible fear are then allowed to stay and pursue full claims of asylum, or other humanitarian protections.
Migrants approved for credible fear could be detained, but in reality, most are released with the hope they return for their hearings at some point before an immigration judge. Many do not.
Under the new system finalized Thursday, USCIS officers will still make the initial credible fear determination and then will get the first crack at the asylum decision, too.
If USCIS rejects an asylum claim, the migrant then gets another crack at making a case before an immigration judge. The Biden administration says those cases will have new controls to prevent them from dragging on.
The new system will be phased in, with only a limited number of cases at first, in order to give USCIS a chance to staff up
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"So apparently FEMA has been quietly activated to set up a command center at the border to start dealing with the surge. Haven’t seen anything on the press. Inside info from Chief Scott. Technically FEMA cannot be activated unless there is a declared Federal emergency…..and this is done while this Administration claims there is no problem."
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I strongly suspect they are planning on war with Russia.
"So apparently FEMA has been quietly activated to set up a command center at the border to start dealing with the surge. Haven’t seen anything on the press. Inside info from Chief Scott. Technically FEMA cannot be activated unless there is a declared Federal emergency…..and this is done while this Administration claims there is no problem."
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ICE to scour communities searching for border scofflaws
Officers voice doubts, say effort likely to be ineffective
BY STEPHEN DINAN THE WASHINGTON TIMES
The Department of Homeland Security will deploy teams of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers into communities to track down illegal immigrants the Biden administration caught and released at the border last year and who have since gone AWOL, The Washington Times has learned.
Some fugitive operations teams at ICE, who had been used to go after serious criminals, will be sent after the border jumpers, according to a memo detailing the new policy, known as “Operation Notice to Report Plus.”
But ICE officers doubt the chances of success, saying they have little hope of tracking down people who gave bad addresses to the government and haven’t built enough of a digital footprint to be found otherwise.
“We’re literally looking for ghosts,” one ICE source said. “This whole thing’s crazy.”
The assignment is particularly aggravating for ICE officers who feel they’re being tasked to play clean-up for the administration’s bungling.
The targets of the operation were caught by the Border Patrol last year and were in custody. But they were released without being given an immigration court summons and have ignored followup efforts to reach them.
“Part of me wonders whether this is meant to be effective, or if it’s largely a messaging exercise meant to persuade the public and the courts that this administration takes the laws seriously. I guess time will tell,” said Jon Feere, former chief of staff at ICE in the Trump administration.
ICE, in a statement to The Times, wouldn’t comment on the operation, calling it a “law enforcement sensitive” matter that conforms to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ priorities of “national security, public safety and border security” cases.
The new operation comes even as the administration prepares for another surge of migrants this spring that could obliterate last year’s record-shattering numbers.
During the worst of the 2021 surge, Border Patrol agents were so overwhelmed that they didn’t have time to process and issue a Notice to Appear (NTA), the official immigration court summons, to all of the people they were
Exclusive
catching and releasing. Instead, they issued a Notice to Report (NTR), which took about 10 minutes, or far less than the hour it takes to issue an NTA.
The difference is more than just the name of the form.
An NTA enters a migrant into deportation proceedings, and they can be ordered removed by an immigration judge if they don’t show up for their hearings.
Those given NTRs are not officially in deportation court proceedings. Instead, an NTR asks them to check in with an ICE office within 60 days and, in some cases, to collect an NTA.
Tens of thousands have failed to do so. ICE wouldn’t talk numbers with The Times, but in communications to Congress, Mr. Mayorkas revealed that from late March to the end of July, 104,171 illegal immigrants were caught and released with NTRs. Of those, 97,564 were beyond the 60-day window and 47,705 had failed to check in.
That works out to 49% who hadn’t checked in after 60 days, or substantially worse than the 25% refusal rate Mr. Mayorkas had claimed in testimony to the Senate in September.
Faced with the grim numbers, ICE late last year launched Operation Horizon, which fired off warning letters to the resisters begging them to come in and get their NTAs. The letters promised migrants they wouldn’t be detained, barring major criminal issues with their records.
Thousands of those summonses didn’t produce results, prompting the latest operation.
“It’s clear that the Notice to Report and Parole/Alternatives to Detention processes have failed. This is nothing more than catch-and-release by another name,” said Sen. James Lankford, an Oklahoma Republican who has been closely tracking the border situation.
“The only real solution to address border security is to enforce the law, which Biden’s team is clearly unwilling to do,” the senator told The Times.
NTRs unite both sides of the immigration debate. Immigrant-rights advocates say they create all sorts of problems for the migrants, who have to go through extra hoops to figure out the immigration process they face.
“People who are given NTRs at a moment of what is crisis in their own lives are frankly set up for failure,” said Jorge Loweree, policy director at the American Immigration Council.
He said it’s incumbent on Homeland Security to get NTAs into the hands of everyone who was released on an NTR to give them an opportunity to present their case.
“If the government’s going to force you or me to go through a legal process with potentially serious legal consequences for us, the government needs to meet its burden and make sure we received the proper paperwork,” he said. “If the government can’t do that for a specific reason the government needs to figure out a way to make that right.”
According to the memo laying out the new operation, migrants with “criminal histories” will take top priority as officers decide who to target.
Officers were instructed to keep the operation “low profile in nature” because many of the targets will be families. They were told to wear plain clothes rather than uniforms, to keep body armor under their clothes, and to use unmarked vehicles.
Officers were given permission to arrest and detain migrants they thought were security or safety risks, and were also told they could bring some criminal cases to federal prosecutors.
But officers were specifically told they should not arrest other illegal immigrants they happen to come across as they’re tracking down the border fugitives.
“The approval to carry out an enforcement action against targeted noncitizens will not authorize enforcement actions against other noncitizens encountered during the operation,” the memo said.
The operation was scheduled to start April 1 and run through June 30.
One source said there are more than 3,600 initial targets, but officers are expecting more people to be added to the list during the 90 days.
ICE’s National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center has been tasked with trying to develop leads to track down targets for the operation. Officers say they’re not expecting much.
The targets generally have no footprint beyond the addresses they gave, and those have already proved to be invalid. They haven’t been in the country long enough to generate other data, such as utility bills or car registration data, that could help the targeting center track them down.
“It’s a complete waste of time and resources that Mayorkas claims we already don’t have enough of,” said a second ICE source.
That source said even if the targets can be tracked down and pressured to go through their court proceedings, the administration might still just close their cases, giving them a free pass.
“That or they become the next protected class like the DACA aliens,” the source said, referring to the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which for a decade has offered a deportation amnesty to “Dreamers,” immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally as children.
Also complicating plans is Mr. Mayorkas’ rules limiting places where ICE officers can operate. He has generally barred enforcement actions near what he has deemed “protected” locations — schools, day cares, parks, clinics, bus stops and organizations that provide social services.
That places many urban areas offlimits, leaving officers wondering how they’re supposed to track down and serve NTAs to people who live near one of the protected areas.
Mr. Feere said if Mr. Mayorkas is serious about wanting the operation to succeed, he should waive his rules.
“And then the question becomes what happens if they do locate some of these individuals,” he said. “Are they actually going to be deported? Are they going to be detained?
He said the issue of absconders will outlast the Biden administration.
“It’s important for the GOP to really think about the resources ICE is going to need in the coming years to clean up the mess created by this administration,” said Mr. Feere, who is now director of investigations at the Center for Immigration Studies.
“It’s clear that the Notice to Report and Parole/Alternatives to Detention processes have failed. This is nothing more than catch-andrelease by another name,” Sen. James Lankford, Oklahoma Republican, said about the issue. ASSOCIATED PRESS
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Wank-wank!
ICE to scour communities searching for border scofflaws
Officers voice doubts, say effort likely to be ineffective
BY STEPHEN DINAN THE WASHINGTON TIMES
The Department of Homeland Security will deploy teams of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers into communities to track down illegal immigrants the Biden administration caught and released at the border last year and who have since gone AWOL, The Washington Times has learned.
Some fugitive operations teams at ICE, who had been used to go after serious criminals, will be sent after the border jumpers, according to a memo detailing the new policy, known as “Operation Notice to Report Plus.”
But ICE officers doubt the chances of success, saying they have little hope of tracking down people who gave bad addresses to the government and haven’t built enough of a digital footprint to be found otherwise.
“We’re literally looking for ghosts,” one ICE source said. “This whole thing’s crazy.”
The assignment is particularly aggravating for ICE officers who feel they’re being tasked to play clean-up for the administration’s bungling.
The targets of the operation were caught by the Border Patrol last year and were in custody. But they were released without being given an immigration court summons and have ignored followup efforts to reach them.
“Part of me wonders whether this is meant to be effective, or if it’s largely a messaging exercise meant to persuade the public and the courts that this administration takes the laws seriously. I guess time will tell,” said Jon Feere, former chief of staff at ICE in the Trump administration.
ICE, in a statement to The Times, wouldn’t comment on the operation, calling it a “law enforcement sensitive” matter that conforms to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ priorities of “national security, public safety and border security” cases.
The new operation comes even as the administration prepares for another surge of migrants this spring that could obliterate last year’s record-shattering numbers.
During the worst of the 2021 surge, Border Patrol agents were so overwhelmed that they didn’t have time to process and issue a Notice to Appear (NTA), the official immigration court summons, to all of the people they were
Exclusive
catching and releasing. Instead, they issued a Notice to Report (NTR), which took about 10 minutes, or far less than the hour it takes to issue an NTA.
The difference is more than just the name of the form.
An NTA enters a migrant into deportation proceedings, and they can be ordered removed by an immigration judge if they don’t show up for their hearings.
Those given NTRs are not officially in deportation court proceedings. Instead, an NTR asks them to check in with an ICE office within 60 days and, in some cases, to collect an NTA.
Tens of thousands have failed to do so. ICE wouldn’t talk numbers with The Times, but in communications to Congress, Mr. Mayorkas revealed that from late March to the end of July, 104,171 illegal immigrants were caught and released with NTRs. Of those, 97,564 were beyond the 60-day window and 47,705 had failed to check in.
That works out to 49% who hadn’t checked in after 60 days, or substantially worse than the 25% refusal rate Mr. Mayorkas had claimed in testimony to the Senate in September.
Faced with the grim numbers, ICE late last year launched Operation Horizon, which fired off warning letters to the resisters begging them to come in and get their NTAs. The letters promised migrants they wouldn’t be detained, barring major criminal issues with their records.
Thousands of those summonses didn’t produce results, prompting the latest operation.
“It’s clear that the Notice to Report and Parole/Alternatives to Detention processes have failed. This is nothing more than catch-and-release by another name,” said Sen. James Lankford, an Oklahoma Republican who has been closely tracking the border situation.
“The only real solution to address border security is to enforce the law, which Biden’s team is clearly unwilling to do,” the senator told The Times.
NTRs unite both sides of the immigration debate. Immigrant-rights advocates say they create all sorts of problems for the migrants, who have to go through extra hoops to figure out the immigration process they face.
“People who are given NTRs at a moment of what is crisis in their own lives are frankly set up for failure,” said Jorge Loweree, policy director at the American Immigration Council.
He said it’s incumbent on Homeland Security to get NTAs into the hands of everyone who was released on an NTR to give them an opportunity to present their case.
“If the government’s going to force you or me to go through a legal process with potentially serious legal consequences for us, the government needs to meet its burden and make sure we received the proper paperwork,” he said. “If the government can’t do that for a specific reason the government needs to figure out a way to make that right.”
According to the memo laying out the new operation, migrants with “criminal histories” will take top priority as officers decide who to target.
Officers were instructed to keep the operation “low profile in nature” because many of the targets will be families. They were told to wear plain clothes rather than uniforms, to keep body armor under their clothes, and to use unmarked vehicles.
Officers were given permission to arrest and detain migrants they thought were security or safety risks, and were also told they could bring some criminal cases to federal prosecutors.
But officers were specifically told they should not arrest other illegal immigrants they happen to come across as they’re tracking down the border fugitives.
“The approval to carry out an enforcement action against targeted noncitizens will not authorize enforcement actions against other noncitizens encountered during the operation,” the memo said.
The operation was scheduled to start April 1 and run through June 30.
One source said there are more than 3,600 initial targets, but officers are expecting more people to be added to the list during the 90 days.
ICE’s National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center has been tasked with trying to develop leads to track down targets for the operation. Officers say they’re not expecting much.
The targets generally have no footprint beyond the addresses they gave, and those have already proved to be invalid. They haven’t been in the country long enough to generate other data, such as utility bills or car registration data, that could help the targeting center track them down.
“It’s a complete waste of time and resources that Mayorkas claims we already don’t have enough of,” said a second ICE source.
That source said even if the targets can be tracked down and pressured to go through their court proceedings, the administration might still just close their cases, giving them a free pass.
“That or they become the next protected class like the DACA aliens,” the source said, referring to the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which for a decade has offered a deportation amnesty to “Dreamers,” immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally as children.
Also complicating plans is Mr. Mayorkas’ rules limiting places where ICE officers can operate. He has generally barred enforcement actions near what he has deemed “protected” locations — schools, day cares, parks, clinics, bus stops and organizations that provide social services.
That places many urban areas offlimits, leaving officers wondering how they’re supposed to track down and serve NTAs to people who live near one of the protected areas.
Mr. Feere said if Mr. Mayorkas is serious about wanting the operation to succeed, he should waive his rules.
“And then the question becomes what happens if they do locate some of these individuals,” he said. “Are they actually going to be deported? Are they going to be detained?
He said the issue of absconders will outlast the Biden administration.
“It’s important for the GOP to really think about the resources ICE is going to need in the coming years to clean up the mess created by this administration,” said Mr. Feere, who is now director of investigations at the Center for Immigration Studies.
“It’s clear that the Notice to Report and Parole/Alternatives to Detention processes have failed. This is nothing more than catch-andrelease by another name,” Sen. James Lankford, Oklahoma Republican, said about the issue. ASSOCIATED PRESS
-
IMMIGRATION
Congressman pushes DHS to shoot down cartel drones
Bishop tells committee 200 crafts detected daily
BY STEPHEN DINAN THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Rep. Dan Bishop was incredulous when Homeland Security officials told a House committee last week that they see about 200 suspicious drone flights a day at the southern border — and that’s just what they are able to detect.
“I don’t understand the reason that we would allow drones to come into the United States,” the North Carolina Republican said. “Why don’t we shoot them down?”
It’s a question that’s been percolating among border experts and Homeland Security officials for years, and one that still confounds policymakers.
The threat from drones is massive and growing, officials told the House Homeland Security Committee.
During one five-month period, Customs and Border Protection detected 30,000 flights.
Dennis Michelini, acting head of CBP’s Air and Marine Operations division, described for lawmakers what happened when a dronescanning system was turned on for the first time in one part of the border.
CBP immediately spotted flight signatures for 40 to 45 drones that they had no idea were in the skies over the border.
Some were Mexican government counter-drones, but others were flying back and forth across the border. They may have been hobbyists knowingly or unknowingly breaking the law, but some were likely to have been cartelcontrolled drones carrying drugs or observing Border Patrol movements in order to spot gaps in coverage.
“The amount out there was really staggering,” Mr. Michelini said.
He told Mr. Bishop that Homeland Security’s current approach is to disrupt drones’ flight operations. Essentially, that means breaking the connection between the remote pilot and the unit, which usually forces the drone to the ground, often returning back to where it took off.
CBP has two “covered areas” where it can deploy that capability. Few drones are actually interdicted, he said, but at least they are brought out of the sky for that time.
Mr. Michelini said Homeland Security doesn’t use “kinetic” force.
Mr. Bishop, in a follow-up interview with The Washington Times, said he wasn’t satisfied with the answers.
“It’s another sign of chaos, It’s another sign that every bit of U.S. policy under this administration is content with chaos at the border, including drone flights,” he said.
He said he will try to become chair of the Homeland Security Committee if Republicans take control of Congress next year, and he will demand better answers from the government.
It’s not just the border where authorities are struggling for answers on drones.
The Transportation Security Administration, the lead agency on drone threats at airports, said it considers disruption the best answer right now — but it has holes in its own capability to bring drones down.
“We’re focused on detect, track and identify,” said Austin Gould, TSA’s assistant administrator for requirements and capabilities analysis.
Rep. Diana Titus, Nevada Democrat, seemed horrified by the idea of shooting a drone out of the sky.
“I don’t think it’s quite that simple. I don’t think you start firing off rockets to shoot down drones in neighborhoods or along the border or along the river, where people live,” she said.
She said in Las Vegas, people illegally fly drones near the airport — formerly known as McCarran, and now as Harry Reid International Airport — to get pictures of the city’s skyline.
Mr. Bishop said she was conflating things by comparing solutions at airports to those at the border.
“I certainly don’t think we should be firing missiles at drones in Las Vegas,” he said. “I see a very different picture in terms of crossborder flights.“ He also said it wouldn’t take long to get a message across.
“If you blew up a bunch of Mexican cartel drones, especially the heavy ones you keep talking about, I don’t think they’d keep doing it,” the congressman said.
Rep. Carlos Gimenez, Florida Republican, said the U.S. needs to invest in more research to get an offensive capability to bring down drones.
“I really do believe it’s a matter of when, not if, some major event is going to be happening either at the border or it’s going to be happening in one of our airports or one of our transportation hubs through the use of these unmanned systems,” he said.
He worried about the looming danger of autonomous drones, flying on programming and preset GPS points rather than controlled by a pilot. Without pilot-to-drone communication, forcing them down is a far tougher task, experts said.
Mr. Gould said British authorities think that’s exactly the type of drone that was used in a 2018 incident at Gatwick Airport, when more than a thousand flights were canceled over three days as drone sightings halted operations.
Some security experts have also worried about the ability to arm drones. In 2017, federal police in central Mexico discovered four men suspected of cartel ties who were carrying a drone equipped with a bomb and a remote detonator.
Mr. Michelini said drones also pose a threat to his own people flying helicopters along the U.S.Mexico border.
He said there have been five “near-misses” with small drones and CBP aircraft in the last year and a half.
Mr. Gould said from the air traffic standpoint, drones over the last year forced 49 flights to have to take “evasive action” to avoid a midair collision
-
We can spend trillions on defense, it just can't be used to actually defend the US or it's citizens.
Those are just hardworking Mexican drones crossing the border in hopes of a better life! It's an act of love!
IMMIGRATION
Congressman pushes DHS to shoot down cartel drones
Bishop tells committee 200 crafts detected daily
BY STEPHEN DINAN THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Rep. Dan Bishop was incredulous when Homeland Security officials told a House committee last week that they see about 200 suspicious drone flights a day at the southern border — and that’s just what they are able to detect.
“I don’t understand the reason that we would allow drones to come into the United States,” the North Carolina Republican said. “Why don’t we shoot them down?”
It’s a question that’s been percolating among border experts and Homeland Security officials for years, and one that still confounds policymakers.
The threat from drones is massive and growing, officials told the House Homeland Security Committee.
During one five-month period, Customs and Border Protection detected 30,000 flights.
Dennis Michelini, acting head of CBP’s Air and Marine Operations division, described for lawmakers what happened when a dronescanning system was turned on for the first time in one part of the border.
CBP immediately spotted flight signatures for 40 to 45 drones that they had no idea were in the skies over the border.
Some were Mexican government counter-drones, but others were flying back and forth across the border. They may have been hobbyists knowingly or unknowingly breaking the law, but some were likely to have been cartelcontrolled drones carrying drugs or observing Border Patrol movements in order to spot gaps in coverage.
“The amount out there was really staggering,” Mr. Michelini said.
He told Mr. Bishop that Homeland Security’s current approach is to disrupt drones’ flight operations. Essentially, that means breaking the connection between the remote pilot and the unit, which usually forces the drone to the ground, often returning back to where it took off.
CBP has two “covered areas” where it can deploy that capability. Few drones are actually interdicted, he said, but at least they are brought out of the sky for that time.
Mr. Michelini said Homeland Security doesn’t use “kinetic” force.
Mr. Bishop, in a follow-up interview with The Washington Times, said he wasn’t satisfied with the answers.
“It’s another sign of chaos, It’s another sign that every bit of U.S. policy under this administration is content with chaos at the border, including drone flights,” he said.
He said he will try to become chair of the Homeland Security Committee if Republicans take control of Congress next year, and he will demand better answers from the government.
It’s not just the border where authorities are struggling for answers on drones.
The Transportation Security Administration, the lead agency on drone threats at airports, said it considers disruption the best answer right now — but it has holes in its own capability to bring drones down.
“We’re focused on detect, track and identify,” said Austin Gould, TSA’s assistant administrator for requirements and capabilities analysis.
Rep. Diana Titus, Nevada Democrat, seemed horrified by the idea of shooting a drone out of the sky.
“I don’t think it’s quite that simple. I don’t think you start firing off rockets to shoot down drones in neighborhoods or along the border or along the river, where people live,” she said.
She said in Las Vegas, people illegally fly drones near the airport — formerly known as McCarran, and now as Harry Reid International Airport — to get pictures of the city’s skyline.
Mr. Bishop said she was conflating things by comparing solutions at airports to those at the border.
“I certainly don’t think we should be firing missiles at drones in Las Vegas,” he said. “I see a very different picture in terms of crossborder flights.“ He also said it wouldn’t take long to get a message across.
“If you blew up a bunch of Mexican cartel drones, especially the heavy ones you keep talking about, I don’t think they’d keep doing it,” the congressman said.
Rep. Carlos Gimenez, Florida Republican, said the U.S. needs to invest in more research to get an offensive capability to bring down drones.
“I really do believe it’s a matter of when, not if, some major event is going to be happening either at the border or it’s going to be happening in one of our airports or one of our transportation hubs through the use of these unmanned systems,” he said.
He worried about the looming danger of autonomous drones, flying on programming and preset GPS points rather than controlled by a pilot. Without pilot-to-drone communication, forcing them down is a far tougher task, experts said.
Mr. Gould said British authorities think that’s exactly the type of drone that was used in a 2018 incident at Gatwick Airport, when more than a thousand flights were canceled over three days as drone sightings halted operations.
Some security experts have also worried about the ability to arm drones. In 2017, federal police in central Mexico discovered four men suspected of cartel ties who were carrying a drone equipped with a bomb and a remote detonator.
Mr. Michelini said drones also pose a threat to his own people flying helicopters along the U.S.Mexico border.
He said there have been five “near-misses” with small drones and CBP aircraft in the last year and a half.
Mr. Gould said from the air traffic standpoint, drones over the last year forced 49 flights to have to take “evasive action” to avoid a midair collision
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https://cis.org/Bensman/Texas-Governors-Ideas-May-Impact-Mexican-Enforcement-Mass-Migration
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10696133/How-fake-DHS-agents-spent-18-MONTHS-trying-infiltrate-Secret-Service-Jill-Bidens-detail.html
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Note date of article
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-border-vigilantes-taught-us-right-wing-armed-groups/?preview_id=1428042
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Note date of article
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-border-vigilantes-taught-us-right-wing-armed-groups/?preview_id=1428042
How dare Americans defend America? The horror!
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Good for Sen. Marco Rubio for drawing attention to this right now.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/southern-border-crisis-biden-catastrophe-sen-marco-rubio
What is sovereignty? Without borders we aren't a governable nation. If not Biden, Harris and handlers, we need the people, a majority in the House and 67 Senators to agree.
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https://www.instagram.com/p/CcRBCANv0-F/?igshid=MDJmNzVkMjY%3D&fbclid=IwAR3FdufHwwABJC3o0kYPCuVFdQOTlzHgkgkzmFAyf60dOaQ41Cghew7K9oQ
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https://www.instagram.com/p/CcRBCANv0-F/?igshid=MDJmNzVkMjY%3D&fbclid=IwAR3FdufHwwABJC3o0kYPCuVFdQOTlzHgkgkzmFAyf60dOaQ41Cghew7K9oQ
Hardworking drones just wanting a better life. An act of love!
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MtFJwE9wxA
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FOX NEWS: Border Patrol stopped 23 people on terrorist database at southern border in 2021: CBP data
Border Patrol apprehended at least 23 people coming across the southern border whose names are on the terror watchlist in 2021, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data obtained by Fox News.
Between Jan. 20 and Dec. 27, 2021, there were 23 encounters with individuals whose names matched on the Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB).
Four were in the Rio Grande Valley Sector, 4 in Del Rio Sector, 3 in El Paso Sector, 2 in Tucson Sector, 2 in Yuma Sector, 4 in El Centro Sector and 4 in San Diego Sector. The information was provided to Fox News in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request submitted in December.
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https://www.state.gov/the-united-states-and-panama-advance-migration-cooperation/
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Republican calls for military to contain cartels on border
Migrants from ‘all over the world’ entering U.S.
BY STEPHEN DINAN THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Rep. James Comer, the House Republicans’ lead investigator, says it’s time to send active-duty military troops to the U.S. border with Mexico to shut down drug routes and curtail the reach of smuggling cartels, which control the boundary with startling effectiveness.
The lawmaker from Kentucky led a delegation from the House Oversight and Reform Committee to the border in California and Arizona last week. He said the level of chaos was noticeably higher than a similar trip to the border in Texas and New Mexico last year.
He said cartels dictate border operations, sending groups of migrants to tie up Border Patrol agents and then sneaking drugs into the U.S. The cartels have eyes on everything, and the brazenness of their defiance is stunning, he said.
“We were seeing buses and Ubers pull up and letting people out. They were waiting until we left, and they were going to walk across,” Mr. Comer said.
The lawmakers watched one group of 45 people from Cuba and Uzbekistan make their way into the U.S., Mr. Comer recounted. Agents said they are
also getting Syrians and Afghans and even nabbed some people from Poland.
“I don’t think that’s something the average person knows: These people are coming from all over the world,” Mr. Comer said.
Department of Homeland Security numbers released this week bear that out.
Of the 221,303 unauthorized border crossers nabbed at the U.S.-Mexico line in March, nearly 90,000 came from beyond the traditional sending countries of Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.
Border Patrol agents reported apprehending more than 15,000 Colombians, 16,000 Nicaraguans and 32,000 Cubans.
Cubans are particularly prevalent in border arrests in Arizona. Mr. Comer said they are claiming to be members of the LGBTQ community and demanding asylum.
Other countries such as Turkey and India accounted for fewer people, but each has shown a massive increase in numbers over the past year.
The 1,353 Indians whom agents nabbed in March was up fivefold from March 2021, and the 1,962 people from Turkey marked a 55-fold increase from the 35 whom agents arrested a year ago.
Mexico also represented a resurgence of numbers in the March data, with nearly 90,000 caught by Border Patrol agents. That was the highest monthly total in years.
Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Chris Magnus said the situation will get even worse when the Biden administration ends the Title 42 pandemic border shutdown next month.
Still, he said Homeland Security is ready to deliver a fair and welcoming hand to the flood of illegal immigrants.
“CBP is surging personnel and resources to the border, increasing processing capacity, securing more ground and air transportation, and increasing medical supplies, food, water, and other resources to ensure a humane environment for those being processed,” he said.
The department expects up to 18,000 illegal immigrants a day to be caught at the southern border. In March, about 7,000 were nabbed each day, which was itself a near-record pace.
During the early days of the Trump administration, there were times when the Border Patrol caught fewer than 15,000 migrants in an entire month.
Mr. Comer said agents already are overwhelmed. They told him they spend more than half their time performing administrative duties, such as writing reports on apprehensions or providing caretaking for the migrants in custody.
That leaves fewer people to guard the border.
“Under President Biden, he has turned the Border Patrol into the welcoming committee for anybody who wants to come to the United States, for any reason,” Mr. Comer said.
The border chaos has been a major boon for smuggling cartels, which most migrants are compelled to pay for the right to cross into the U.S.
The typical payment for a Mexican migrant in March was $10,000, according to The Washington Times’ database of border smuggling cases. Central Americans were paying $10,000 to $15,000. Those from farther afield can pay even more.
Cartels’ control of the border is so overwhelming that when Mr. Comer was there, he said, agents pointed out a house on the Mexican side where cartel operatives were keeping watch on the congressional delegation. Agents also pointed to a hilltop on the U.S. side where cartel scouts were thought to be messaging Border Patrol movements back to the Mexican side.
“This is an issue of national security, these spotters that are over here, they’re a national security threat,” Mr. Comer said. “Not only are they complicit in allowing the illegal drugs to cross the border … they’re also involved in crime, just horrific crimes.”
That demands the presence of U.S. troops, the lawmaker said.
“There’s no fear of the United States government,” he said.
National Guard troops have been deployed before, and some are still on the border as part of state details, but Mr. Comer said it’s time to send activeduty troops.
“It’s the fact that the United States isn’t putting up a fight,” he said. “We need to have a military presence on the border. There’s clear paths across from Mexico to the United States where these drug smugglers are walking every day.”
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/apr/21/democratic-senator-calls-border-wall-construction-/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=evening&utm_term=evening&utm_content=evening&bt_ee=YW14%2BsNT4Ofbwa%2FXEcCvJq%2BLxtrKiJ22S7V8KDzmDGfh%2FxBcMtiwsfKWN%2BJNgvJF&bt_ts=1650572740783
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https://twitter.com/realamvoice/status/1518697604133097481?s=21&t=Hufpe_IUMbuhXcGxWKxZZQ
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https://twitter.com/realamvoice/status/1518697604133097481?s=21&t=Hufpe_IUMbuhXcGxWKxZZQ
So they can get here and vote for free sh*t!
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https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/05/03/all_the_biden_border_policies_that_have_migrants_heading_north_830219.html
"Since Joe Biden’s first day in office, when he signed seven executive orders on immigration that, among other things, suspended deportations and ended the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” program that had eased the crush of those awaiting asylum hearings, the president has in word and deed sent signals that migrants have interpreted as welcoming. The initiatives include reviving the Obama-era policy known as “catch and release,” “paroling” illegal border crossers so they can enter the country, resettling migrants through secret flights around the country, and ending the “no match” policy that had helped the government identify people who were using fraudulent credentials to find work."
...
“We’re stopping nobody coming into our country,” said Clint McDonald, the executive director of the Texas/Southwestern Texas Border Sheriffs’ Coalition, “and we have no idea who is in our country.”
...
Within hours of taking office Biden began to make good on his signals, moving aggressively against the existing infrastructure that dealt with illegal immigration at the southern border. In addition to temporarily suspending deportations and ending the “Remain in Mexico” program, he issued an executive order stopping work on Trump’s border wall. Policy memos from the Homeland Security also gave Customs and Border Protection and ICE agents more latitude in how they handle people encountered crossing the southern border without papers. These policy directives effectively ended ICE’s usual practice of taking custody of immigrants released from local or state jails, and placed more restrictions on the ability of federal authorities to arrest illegal immigrants.
...
In yet another policy change that facilitates illegal immigration, the Social Security Administration quietly announced on its website last May that it would cease to issue what are known as “no-match” letters, which informed employers of discrepancies between its records and information provided by employees. Critics of the system said it targeted immigrants and claimed the letters were often sent in error. The SSA reportedly sent 791,000 no-match letters in 2020.
...
Most recently, the Biden administration insisted on ending Title 42, a clause from a 1944 public health law the Trump administration had used to limit illegal immigration during the COVID pandemic. Experts predicted its removal would lead to a tsunami of more illegal immigrants, and at least 10 congressional Democrats, including those up for reelection this year such as Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, have voiced reservations about lifting it.
Much more at the link.
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/garland-allows-immigration-judges-to-consider-mental-health-of-convicted-criminals/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=27667545
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Explanations for detention bed vacancies don’t add up
Plea to end Mexico policy gets muddled
BY STEPHEN DINAN THE WASHINGTON TIMES
President Biden’s attorney, defending the government’s immigration policies to the Supreme Court late last month, painted a picture of an administration eager to detain illegal immigrants to the full extent of the law but stymied by a stingy Congress that won’t provide any more beds.
The numbers don’t back that up. From Dec. 1 to March 31, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Homeland Security Department agency tasked with detaining illegal immigrants, left an average of more than 7,600 beds empty on any given day, or about 27% of its total capacity.
Now, as the Biden administration pleads with the justices for permission to end the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy, those empty beds could come back to haunt officials.
“If you are complying with the law, you are going to use as close as possible to the total number of ICE beds you are authorized for,” said Gene Hamilton, a former top official at the Justice and Homeland
Security departments who has tracked the Supreme Court case for America First Legal. “It’s another example of just being very disingenuous with what their capabilities are as compared to what the law requires.”
The beds are at the core of immigration policy. Under the law, Congress laid out three options for handling illegal immigrants caught jumping the border. They can be detained while they fight deportation, they can be “paroled” into the country in limited circumstances where there is a compelling public interest, or they can be pushed back into Mexico to wait for their deportation cases to be processed.
That latter option was the basis for Remain in Mexico, officially known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, or MPP, which the Trump administration used to resolve the border surge in 2019.
Now facing a worse surge, the Biden administration says MPP is cruel and doesn’t want to use it.
The administration also is reluctant to use all the detention space it has been given and instead is paroling record numbers of people, sometimes nearly 100,000 a month, into the U.S.
“Historically, the detention beds have not been used effectively. We are emphasizing use of alternatives to detention,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told Congress in hearings late last month.
Mr. Mayorkas said he wants to use detention only when it is “a public safety imperative” or it’s critical that someone show up for their deportation proceedings in court.
The problem is that just a day before Mr. Mayorkas’ testimony, the Biden administration’s solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar, was painting a different picture for the justices. She suggested that Mr. Mayorkas is using every bed Congress has given him.
“Congress expected us to use the detention capacity that we have, and that’s what we’re doing,” she told the court.
She said Homeland Security was at full capacity in March.
“At that point in time, DHS was appropriated for a little under 32,000 detention beds,” she said. “And the average daily amount of detention over that same month was also at about 32,000 individuals. That’s ICE being a little under its capacity and CBP being over capacity.”
Andrew “Art” Arthur, a resident fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, said equating ICE and CBP beds doesn’t work.
CBP space is for short-term custody while fingerprinting, checking records and figuring out what happens next for an illegal immigrant. By contrast, ICE uses jail cells meant for longer-term detention. Indeed, in many instances, ICE is renting jail space from local communities.
“She could have clarified the facts of this a whole lot better than she did,” Mr. Arthur told The Washington Times.
Experts said ICE’s capacity matters when it comes to ending the cycle of catch-and-release of border jumpers. If they can be detained while awaiting their court hearings, they can be deported in a matter of weeks. Those who are released can linger in the system for six to eight years — if they bother to show up for court dates at all.
Digging into the numbers only makes things murkier.
The Justice Department, in filings with a lower court judge in the case, said CBP’s holding capacity is about 6,000 spaces. Mr. Mayorkas said CBP can hold at least 13,000 people under his new border plan and will have the capacity for 18,000 by later this month.
The Times reached out to CBP last week to clarify which figure is correct, but the agency did not provide a response in time for this article.
The fuzziness of CBP’s numbers underscores the difference between its capacity and the capacity for ICE, where Congress has set a hard cap of funding for 34,000 beds.
ICE said that meant bed space for 31,500 adults as of March 15, but because of COVID-19 restrictions and court orders, its actual operating capacity was 25,780 beds.
On any given day, ICE left more than 5,000 of those beds empty, with an average daily capacity of 20,045 people. The low point was March 4, when it counted 17,988 detainees. The high point was March 21, when it tallied 21,287 people, 4,000 beds shy of capacity.
Looking back from Dec. 1 to March 31, the agency averaged more than 7,600 empty beds a day, according to data ICE has submitted to the court.
The justices homed in on detention capacity in exchanges with Ms. Prelogar.
“You’re sort of making it even harder for you to do anything other than release the people encountered at the border into the United States,” Chief Justice John G. Robert Jr. told her — though he quickly acknowledged that there are “not nearly enough beds to take care of the problem.”
“Did you ask for more?” Justice Stephen G. Breyer prodded Ms. Prelogar.
She ignored the question the first time he asked it, but he came back to it minutes later: “Has the administration asked Congress for more money for detention?”
Ms. Prelogar didn’t answer directly. She said only that funding decisions are up to Congress. She did say Mr. Biden’s new budget asks for more immigration judges to expedite cases and more ways to monitor migrants who are caught and released.
She did not mention that Mr. Biden has asked for fewer beds. His budget would slash 9,000 beds from ICE’s inventory by cutting the spending from $2.9 billion to $2.4 billion.
The Justice Department declined to comment on the record for this article.
Immigrant rights legal advocates contacted by The Times didn’t respond to inquiries.
Neither did Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the lead challenger to the Biden administration in the case.
Mr. Hamilton said the Biden administration’s bed cuts undermine the argument that the administration is making a good-faith effort to comply with the law.
“You’re admitting you don’t have the ability to detain everybody, and you’re also admitting you don’t want to use MPP, and you’re also admitting you have a record flood of people at the border — hundreds of thousands a month — and yet you’re asking for fewer beds from Congress?” he said.
The Trump administration took the opposite approach. It asked for more detention space. When Congress lowballed the number, the Trump administration used flexibility in the law to reprogram money and add more beds.
Biden officials treat detention as an option only for worst cases.
“In a world where we don’t have sufficient beds, as everyone acknowledges, there is an imperative public interest in ensuring that we are detaining the people who might be criminals or who might abscond or who threaten our national security, and not simply filling those beds on a first-come basis with no accounting for the limited detention capacity,” Ms. Prelogar told the high court.
She also said MPP relies on cooperation from Mexico.
The Trump administration won that cooperation through threats of economic sanctions. The Biden administration has been reluctant to use similar pressure tactics, and Mexico’s cooperation on taking back migrants has deteriorated.
During the April 26 oral argument, Ms. Prelogar said Mr. Mayorkas has made a carefully crafted decision that the public interest is better served by releasing illegal immigrants rather than pushing them back to Mexico.
She said the high court doesn’t need to evaluate detention beds at this point.
The only question before the justices right now, she said, is whether Mr. Mayorkas has the freedom to end MPP.
“I think that the secretary is well justified in thinking that in light of the tremendous costs that he identified with the program and in light of his determination that it actually detracted from other strategies and programs he thought would be more effective in stemming the tide of irregular migration, that he was well justified in making that policy determination,” Ms. Prelogar said.
Immigration and Custom Enforcement had thousands of empty beds at its detention facilities in March even with a flood of border jumpers and the Biden administration’s reluctance to return them to Mexico. ASSOCIATED PRESS
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/guilty-verdict-in-first-illegal-alien-trespass-trial-in-texas_4458408.html?utm_source=Morningbrief-ai&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2022-05-12-ai&est=kZoyL3k%2FOekLxIfCbsoE7NuQ8EwEr5AklXsVYngcZsxWLTDvz4%2BFL5YDN5NDl6mFAzeZ
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Arizona follows Texas’ lead, buses migrants to Washington
BY STEPHEN DINAN THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Arizona has started its own busing campaign to deliver newly arrived illegal immigrants straight to Washington, following in the footsteps of Texas, which pioneered the policy last month.
Gov. Doug Ducey announced the move as part of a broader border security crackdown that includes deploying more National Guard troops and working with ranchers and other landowners to try to secure their property from the onslaught of migrants.
Mr. Ducey’s office confirmed to local news outlets that the first bus arrived Wednesday, carrying 20 people.
The governor said he turned to busing because Arizona’s communities are overwhelmed by the number of illegal immigrants being caught and released, and they aren’t getting much help from the feds.
Migrants who are being shipped to Washington volunteered for the trip, meaning it’s likely they were already headed to the East Coast anyway. Mr. Ducey’s office said they will be fed and will have access to “support” services while on the road.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott pioneered the busing strategy, with the first shipment of illegal immigrants from his state reaching Washington a month ago.
Texas has averaged more than a bus a day, with 32 loads so far, totaling 835 migrants, according to the governor’s office. All of the migrants volunteered to come. They are being dropped off near the U.S. Capitol.
The federal government has sent mixed signals on busing operations.
The White House initially mocked Mr. Abbott, saying he was helping migrants reach their final destinations and at Texas taxpayers’ expense.
But Homeland Security offi cials said the busing operation was interfering with its efforts to keep track of the migrants.
“As individuals await the outcome of their immigration proceedings, they are legally obligated to report in for the next steps in their immigration process and permitted to travel elsewhere. CBP’s close partnerships with other government and non-governmental stakeholders are essential to this effort, and to ensuring fairness, order, and humanity in the process,” Chris Magnus, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, said last month.
The Border Patrol’s Tucson and Yuma sectors, which cover all of Arizona and a sliver of eastern California, tallied nearly 57,000 illegal entry attempts in March, the latest month for which data has been released. That’s the highest rate in years.
Less than half of those caught were turned back under the Title 42 pandemic border shutdown. Given rates of recidivism and “gotaways” — those who made it in while avoiding capture — it means a majority of illegal crossers were successful.
Communities have been so overwhelmed that one city mayor took to piling illegal immigrants into his vehicle and driving them to the airport in Phoenix so they could disperse throughout the country
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/2184351/possible-dic-to-bush-strike-attempt
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/2184351/possible-dic-to-bush-strike-attempt
Easy for anyone globally to send hitters anywhere in the US over our wide open border.
No prints on file, no DNA database to connect them to a US crime scene.
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/2198091/border-being-overrun
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iETOgF_ZEuo
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/2282843/tonight-on-the-texas-border-free-rein-horses-in-rio-grande
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for administrative reasons whatever that means
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/dhs-punish-border-patrol-agents-haitian-whipping-incident
:x
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for administrative reasons whatever that means
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/dhs-punish-border-patrol-agents-haitian-whipping-incident
:x
It's like we live in a post-constitutional banana republic.
Be sure to voter harder!
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A profound outrage!
https://dailycaller.com/2022/06/15/border-migrants-immigration-haiti-biden/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2680&pnespid=6L9nDHgbM7JC3KfE_DKwGpeFsUq0V5V3IvDixrd58BpmgHSkD6nUXldZekI4AWiPPAe8D7V1
And yes, one more reason to vote harder.
If a fix of the vote changes the outcome, then it will be time to re-examine.
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You've been voting for how long?
And here we are.
A profound outrage!
https://dailycaller.com/2022/06/15/border-migrants-immigration-haiti-biden/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2680&pnespid=6L9nDHgbM7JC3KfE_DKwGpeFsUq0V5V3IvDixrd58BpmgHSkD6nUXldZekI4AWiPPAe8D7V1
And yes, one more reason to vote harder.
If a fix of the vote changes the outcome, then it will be time to re-examine.
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Let's take this to the Electoral thread.
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/2305086/war-plan-unfolding-across-europe-and-america
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Tricky legal issues when it comes to undrawing a guilty plea , , , the Judge has ultimate say if I am not mistaken.
A separate issue from the many federal charges that could be filed against many deep state operatives and aren't. It's called running out the clock.
https://emeralddb3.substack.com/p/durham-played-you-for-a-fool?utm_source=email
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Dammit man! You are relentless!
Meanwhile here is this:
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/2324583/american-d-day
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Dammit man! You are relentless!
Meanwhile here is this:
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/2324583/american-d-day
https://warroom.org/2022/06/22/the-worst-mass-migration-crisis-in-history/
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JUDICIARY
Biden Administration Cannot Ignore Federal Law, Must Remove Illegal Alien Criminals: Court
By Zachary Stieber July 8, 2022 Updated: July 8, 2022biggersmaller Print
President Joe Biden’s administration cannot ignore federal law that says authorities must arrest, detain, and remove illegal aliens convicted of certain crimes and/or aliens who are ordered deported, an appeals court has ruled.
Federal law says the attorney general “shall take into custody,” “shall detain,” and “shall remove” illegal aliens convicted of certain crimes and aliens who are ordered deported. But the Biden administration has attempted to prevent the holding and removal of some illegal immigrants convicted of those crimes.
“The fact an individual is a removable noncitizen therefore should not alone be the basis of an enforcement action against them,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, a Biden appointee, said in a memorandum in September 2021 outlining new guidance that narrowed immigration enforcement priorities.
Mayorkas also said that immigration agents should not “rely on the fact of conviction … alone” when deciding to take action against an alien.
That has led to a sharp drop in criminal aliens detained by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), a panel of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals said. The memo and others like it has led to a spike in the rescinding of criminal detainers, or orders to local authorities to detain aliens, court documents show. One hundred and seventy aliens had detainers rescinded in Texas between Jan. 20, 2021, and Feb. 15, 2022, with at least 17 failing to comply with their parole conditions and four committing fresh crimes.
“The data show that the Final Memo ‘increases the number of aliens with criminal convictions and aliens with final orders of removal released into the United States,’ and Texas has shown by a preponderance of the evidence that the cost of that reality has fallen on it and will continue to do so,'” the panel said in a ruling dated July 6.
DHS is trying “to claim it acts within the bounds of federal law while practically disregarding that law,” it added.
The panel upheld an earlier ruling from U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton, a Trump appointee who said the policy had resulted in criminal aliens “roam[ing] free” and ordered the department not to follow the memo.
The Biden administration had appealed, arguing that the lower court order should be overturned because the states lack standing, because they have not suffered any injury, and because any injury that the speculative injury was not traceable to the Mayorkas memo. The appeals court panel disagreed.
Response
Biden “tried to throw out immigration law, saying DHS didn’t have to detain criminal illegals. The court now says he must,” Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, one of the plaintiffs, said in a statement.
“Had the administration won its stay, it would have gone on releasing criminal aliens while its appeal of the district court’s ruling wound through the courts,” added Dale Wilcox, executive director of the Immigration Reform Law Institute, which filed a brief in the case. “We are pleased that didn’t happen, and applaud the Fifth Circuit for denying the administration the extra time it sought to violate the law and endanger Americans.”
The administration is expected to appeal, which could send the case to the full Fifth Circuit or to the Supreme Court, which recently ruled the administration can end the Trump era “Remain in Mexico” policy while explicitly avoiding weighing in on whether the detention requirement outlined in federal law is “subject to principles of law enforcement discretion” and whether the administration’s current approach to immigration enforcement violates the provision.
The panel consisted of Judges Edith Jones, a Reagan appointee; Edith Clement, a George W. Bush appointee; and Kurt Engelhardt, a Trump appointee.
Its ruling diverged from an opinion from the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in a similar case brought by the states of Arizona, Montana, and Ohio that in April overturned (pdf) a lower court’s nationwide preliminary injunction that blocked the same guidance.
The Fifth Circuit panel said its divergence is explainable by the benefit of bench trial and precedent in other cases brought before the court. “Until there is a contrary ruling from the Supreme Court, we adhere to our precedent and the facts found by the district court,” it said.
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"President Joe Biden’s administration cannot ignore federal law that says authorities must arrest, detain, and remove illegal aliens convicted of certain crimes and/or aliens who are ordered deported, an appeals court has ruled."
which is exactly what they have been doing for 18 months
the only remedy would be impeachment - which will not happen
and
then we get Harris anyway
we are stuck till '24.
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Both Biden and Harris can legitimately be impeached for dereliction of duty under Article 4 Section 4. If Reps take House, Speaker of the House will be Rep.
Just sayin' , , ,
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Did the dems promise not to cheat this time?
Both Biden and Harris can legitimately be impeached for dereliction of duty under Article 4 Section 4. If Reps take House, Speaker of the House will be Rep.
Just sayin' , , ,
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https://www.foxnews.com/politics/dhs-provide-info-terror-plots-congress-waivers-accused-non-citizens-republicans-say?fbclid=IwAR1jQ7vCPF1n2qvVj7f2ozenH8GkcoyC6LFXvZqh-rIlCnSlY7JgsGs70Ow
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https://www.foxnews.com/politics/dhs-provide-info-terror-plots-congress-waivers-accused-non-citizens-republicans-say?fbclid=IwAR1jQ7vCPF1n2qvVj7f2ozenH8GkcoyC6LFXvZqh-rIlCnSlY7JgsGs70Ow
It's almost like the feral government is controlled by enemies of the American people, isn't it?
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"It's almost like the feral government is controlled by enemies of the American people, isn't it?"
everything this administration does is to hurt US citizens
and make things worse
=YES it does seem this way -
In my lifetime there was never an administration or party that went to such great lengths
to screw its own citizens
Jimmy Carter , was bad but nothing like this.
Obama however, was terrible too, just a bit more subdued in efforts to screw us over.
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Build the damn wall. 108,000 reasons (per year) to do it. Secure the border.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/11/health/drug-overdose-deaths-record-high-2021/index.html
According to the DEA, Los Angeles is a major transport and shipment hub for illegal drugs coming from the U.S.-Mexico border and are often stored in warehouses, storage units and residential properties in the region.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/1-million-fentanyl-pills-linked-to-sinaloa-cartel-seized-in-record-breaking-drug-bust/ar-AAZBJXv?cvid=526e5d0507fa4044a14f5d11fad78c24
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over 100K people dying of fentanyl
drugs
but they can't blame it on doctors over prescribing anymore
don't expect politicians or Democrats to take any responsibility
this will only get air time if Republicans get control back
till then we are only to worry that politically incorrect speech may cause trans to kill themselves
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IMMIGRATION & BORDER SECURITY
Biden Administration Makes Two Big Changes to Help Illegal Immigrants
By Zachary Stieber July 16, 2022 Updated: July 16, 2022biggersmaller Print
President Joe Biden’s administration has made two major changes to immigration policies by re-interpreting federal law.
Immigrants, many illegal, from certain countries are shielded from deportation and allowed to be legally employed if the secretary of homeland security decides their home country meets certain conditions.
The designation is known as Temporary Protected Status (TPS).
Fifteen countries are currently designated, including Afghanistan, El Salvador, Somalia, Ukraine, and Venezuela. Hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of immigrants from those countries are protected.
Up until July, those protected by TPS had to remain in the country unless they received approval to travel.
If TPS beneficiaries did leave the country and returned, they’d have the same status—illegal or legal—when they returned, based on language from Miscellaneous and Technical Immigration and Naturalization Amendments, even though they could remain temporarily protected by TPS.
But U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which handles the nation’s legal immigration system, has changed that policy.
Now, all beneficiaries that return will be “inspected and admitted,” a bureaucratic term that means one has entered the country legally. “This is true even if the TPS beneficiary was present without admission or parole when initially granted TPS,” USCIS said in an alert (pdf).
“That basically launders the fact that they came here illegally and that will put them on the path to a green card,” Jessica Vaughan, policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies, told The Epoch Times.
“This is an end run on U.S. immigration law, and Congress,” added Emilio Gonzalez, who directed USCIS during the George W. Bush administration. “It really is a left-handed way of legalizing people.”
USCIS said in its alert that the change stemmed from a court decision, guidance from the lawyers at its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, and an evaluation of current and past policy. The agency did not respond to requests for comment.
Supreme Court
The Supreme Court in 2021 ruled that immigrants who receive TPS are not admitted for purposes of obtaining legal permanent residency.
“A grant of TPS does not cure a foreign national’s entry without inspection or constitute an inspection and admission of the foreign national,’” Justice Elena Kagan, an Obama appointee, wrote in the 9–0 decision.
But USCIS seized on a footnote in the ruling, in which the court said it was not expressing a view on whether a parole enables a TPS recipient to become a legal permanent resident. The secretary of homeland security can parole an illegal immigrant, which allows them to enter or remain in the country legally.
The USCIS also cited a decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which said that the law mandates TPS beneficiaries who travel outside the country be inspected and admitted upon returning, and be treated as entering the United States legally, even if they originally entered illegally.
The DHS Office of General Counsel, on the request of USCIS, reviewed the rulings and the law and concluded that USCIS was “well within its authority” to rescind Trump era guidance and allow illegal immigrants to use leaving the country and coming back to become legal.
“This is just a transparent workaround that I believe is illegal, and almost certainly is going to be challenged,” Vaughan said.
Epoch Times Photo
Activists and with Temporary Protected Status (TPS) march in Washington on Feb. 23, 2021. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Another Big Change
The Immigration and Nationality Act, says that immigrants who were illegally in the United States and left cannot re-enter for a certain period of time. Illegal immigrants who were in the country for less than one year have to wait three years to be able to re-enter the country; those who were present for one year or more would be inadmissible unless he or she waits 10 years to re-enter.
The immigrants were expected to wait outside the United States, to comply with the law.
USCIS, though, is now saying that an immigrant can be inside the United States, and that will not reset the clock.
“The statutory 3-year or 10-year period begins to run on the day of departure or removal (whichever applies) after accrual of the period of unlawful presence. This statutory period continues to run, without interruption, regardless of whether or how the noncitizen returned to the United States during the 3-year or 10-year period. Thus, it is immaterial whether the noncitizen has spent the applicable statutory 3-year or 10-year period in or out of the United States,” USCIS says in its policy manual.
The change was made on June 24 to be consistent with two recent court rulings and an unpublished Department of Justice Board of Appeals decision, the agency said in an alert on the alteration.
“This is basically an invitation for any deported alien to pay the cartels to smuggle them back into the U.S. while they let the clock run out,” Rob Law, who headed the USCIS policy office during the Trump administration and directs the America First Policy Institute’s Center for Homeland Security and Immigration, told the Washington Times, which first reported on the update.
Court Decisions
The move stemmed from two 2020 rulings.
In the first, a Japanese woman overstayed her nonimmigrant status by five years. She left voluntarily in 2003 but returned just two years later, well before the 10-year period mandated in the law.
While she didn’t follow U.S. immigration law, her lawyer argued she shouldn’t have been denied permanent residency when she applied for it in 2019 because she was married to a United States citizen and because over 10 years had elapsed.
Government lawyers said that aliens to whom the law applies “must remain outside of the country for the entire duration of the inadmissibility period” and, if they do not, they cannot be admitted.
U.S. District Judge Consuelo Marshall, a Carter appointee, ruled for the plaintiff, agreeing on the argument that over 10 years had gone by before Yayomi Kanai asked for residency.
“This policy change would be great for our client. That means she could have been granted adjustment of status by the USCIS and she wouldn’t have had to go through all these problems,” Michael Piston, who represented Kanai, told The Epoch Times.
“It feels very, very good that they’re doing the right thing,” Mario Urizar, a lawyer who represented the man in the other case, told The Epoch Times.
In that case, a Brazilian national overstayed a tourist visa and was ordered deported in 1994. He left the United States in 2000.
Two years later, the man re-entered, even though the 10 years had not elapsed. When he went to adjust his status later, in 2016, authorities noted he violated the law and thus remained inadmissible.
U.S. District Judge Kevin McNulty, an Obama appointee, ruled that the law “is silent” on the time after 10 years elapses. He said imposing what amounted to a lifetime ban from the United States was wrong.
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IMMIGRATION
ICE officers pulled off security duty to go on wild ‘ghost’ chase
Illegal border crossers evade notices for court
BY STEPHEN DINAN THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Exclusive
The Biden administration’s attempt to track down catch-and-release illegal immigrants and serve them with court summonses turned into a “complete waste of time,” according to officers who say they were pulled off higher priority cases to chase down “ghosts.”
Out of a universe of more than 30,000 potential targets, officers were able to locate and serve only about 600, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement sources.
That means tens of thousands of illegal border crossers remain at large in the country without an official Notice to Appear for their immigration proceedings — and there are no good prospects for tracking them down.
Officers who spoke to The Washington Times said the agency should have known the operation was doomed because the migrants had given bogus addresses to authorities when they were caught at the border.
Also, themigrants haven’t been in the U.S. long enough to generate phone or utility records that would allow them to be tracked down.
“I haven’t went on one where there was a person at the house where they said they would be,” one West Coast offi cer said. “It seems like this administration is trying to find busy work to keep us from actually arresting people.”
“I’ve got child molesters, I’ve got aggravated felons, I’ve got more important people to go after,” said an officer who works the southern part of the country.
“There were plenty of good cases that we’ve had to push to the side because, on a weekly basis, we had to go out and try to do something with these cases,” said an officer who works on the East Coast. “It was basically three months of at least going out weekly when there were plenty of cases that were definitely more of a public safety consideration that we couldn’t work.”
The Washington Times contacted ICE multiple times for this article, but the agency did not comment.
The Times revealed the atlarge operation in April. At that time, ICE called it a “law enforcement sensitive” matter but said the migrants targeted counted as enforcement priorities under Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ framework.
Officers counter that the operation was a distraction, leaving them chasing “ghosts” instead of going after the big cases Mr. Mayorkas said he wanted.
“They say they have us focusing on the worst of the worst, but they took us off of these quality cases to do this, which never should have happened in the first place,” the East Coast officer said.
That “never should have happened” remark referred to the way the migrants were handled at the border.
When illegal immigrants are caught and released, they are usually served with court summonses, known in the field as a Notice to Appear.
But during the initial wave of the Biden border surge last year, the number of migrants caught and released was so overwhelming that Border Patrol agents were instructed not to do the full processing of an NTA and instead issue a Notice to Report.
Issuing an NTA can take 90 minutes to fill out the forms, while issuing an NTR can take just a small fraction of that time. That meant agents could move migrants through the processing more quickly.
Rodney Scott, who was chief of the Border Patrol at the time, said it was a calculated decision designed to get agents back into the field quickly so they could try to detect other illegal crossings.
“We carved out the groups of individuals that the Biden administration had already said were going to be released, and only after we did records checks,” he told The Times.
Mr. Scott said they knew the chance that the migrants would ever be removed from the U.S., whether they were issued NTAs or not, was close to zero, so the balance of risks made it more important to speed through them to get agents back on the line.
“We decided to prioritize national security and having agents on the border,” he said.
An NTA enters a migrant into deportation proceedings. Migrants can be ordered removed by immigration judges if they don’t show up for their hearings.
Those given NTRs are not officially in deportation court proceedings. Instead, an NTR asks them to check in with an ICE office within 60 days and, usually, to collect an NTA.
Tens of thousands have failed to do so.
In communications to Congress, Mr. Mayorkas revealed that from late March to the end of July last year, 104,171 illegal immigrants were caught and released with NTRs. About half had failed to check in.
ICE was then assigned cleanup duty.
The agency tried to send NTAs to the addresses that the migrants reported to border authorities, but in many cases, the addresses were bad. ICE decided to pull its fugitive operations teams off their normal duties and try to clean up the mess by tracking down the absconders in communities.
ICE’s Law Enforcement Support Center, based in Vermont, was roped in to come up with addresses to give to the fugitive teams. The problem, officers said, is that they had little to work with and the migrants haven’t been in the U.S. long enough to develop the kind of electronic trail that would help track them down.
Even when the right street address was included, the apartment number might have been wrong. That left officers with the choice of giving up or knocking on all the doors in a building — which could feed into fears of ICE “raids.”
Of the 600 or so migrants tracked down, some were issued NTAs on the spot. Others were issued ICE’s Form G-56 instructing them to check in at an ICE office.
That meant even more processing time, which meant less time out looking for high-value targets, officers said.
The officers were particularly frustrated at having to play cleanup. If the Department of Homeland Security had been on top of the situation, they said, the migrants would have been served NTAs in the usual way at the border and ICE’s fugitive operations teams never would have been dragged into the matter.
It was particularly galling to officers because, even if they did track down one of the border migrants, they weren’t arresting or detaining them, merely issuing new paperwork, officers said.
“If I wasn’t going after that guy, I could be going after another guy I could potentially be taking into custody or removing,” the West Coast officer told The Times.
It’s not clear what Homeland Security’s next steps are for the tens of thousands of migrants who couldn’t be found. One of the ICE officers said the fugitive teams have been told to expect ongoing operations to try to track down the absconders.
OVERWHELMING: So many people were crossing into the U.S. illegally that Border Patrol officers didn’t have time to process official documents for hearings. ASSOCIATED PRESS
Rodney Scott, as chief of the Border Patrol, said he wanted to get agents into the field instead of doing paperwork. He acknowledged he knew that many illegal immigrants would never be removed. ASSOCIATED PRESS
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second
Homeland Security defends new border wall construction
Says it will save migrants’ lives
BY STEPHEN DINAN THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Homeland Security announced plans Thursday to complete sections of President Trump’s border wall in Yuma, Arizona, defending the new construction as a way to save illegal immigrants’ lives.
The four gaps were left in the wall when President Biden took office and shut down wall construction, looking to make good on his campaign promise not to build “another foot” of his predecessor’s marquee project.
But Homeland Security says it has concluded some of the halted projects were too essential to forgo — including the ones in Yuma.
The department, in a statement, cast the new construction as a way to protect illegal immigrants themselves from running risks by trying to run through the gaps.
“Due to the proximity to the Morelos Dam and the swift-moving Colorado River, this area presents safety and life hazard risks for migrants attempting to cross into the United States where there is a risk of drownings and injuries from falls,” the department said. “This area also poses a life and safety risk to first responders and agents responding to incidents in this area.”
The dam spans the Colorado River and has become a key crossing point for illegal immigrants, who then walk through one of the gaps in the wall on the U.S. side. Customs and Border Protection has released a video of migrants doing just that.
In June, a 5-year-old migrant child drowned at that point in the river. The child’s mother told agents she had last seen her child near the dam.
Homeland Security said funding for the construction will come out of $2 billion or so in border wall money Congress allocated during the Trump administration, but which has sat idle since Mr. Biden took office.
The department didn’t give a timeline for construction and said environmental concerns will still have to be addressed.
Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly told local news that the first contracts will be done by the end of September.
Mr. Kelly, a Democrat, portrayed the new wall construction as critical to gaining control of the border.
“I’m glad that the Department of Homeland Security has listened to Arizona and is going to close these gaps,” he said.
Mr. Kelly, who is facing a tough reelection battle this year, said he raised the gaps with Mr. Biden last year and had “numerous calls” with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over the issue
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https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/07/lara-logan-giving-social-security-numbers-illegal-aliens-us-border-video/
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IMMIGRATION
Study: 17% of new cases tossed due to filing errors
BY STEPHEN DINAN THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Immigration judges are tossing one out of every six new immigration cases because Homeland Security failed to file a basic form — the original court summons — according to a new study.
When illegal border jumpers are nabbed, Customs and Border Protection is supposed to issue the migrant a Notice to Appear, which is a summons for immigration court. CBP is then supposed to file the NTA with the immigration court itself.
But CBP failed to file the form in nearly 17% of cases so far this fiscal year, according to data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University and released Friday.
Analysts said it was a shocking bungle.
“DHS needs to get its priorities in order to ensure cases are properly filed, that aliens are properly served and that the ICE attorney is ready to go forward in court on the hearing date,” said Andrew “Art” Arthur, a former immigration judge and now a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies. “This is indicative of a lack of interest on the part of the Biden administration in actually enforcing immigration laws.”
The Washington Times has reached out to CBP for comment.
The new TRAC report adds to a growing pile of evidence for how badly the Biden team has mishandled the record surge of illegal immigrants at the border.
The Times reported last week on tens of thousands of illegal immigrants who were caught and released without even an NTA being issued. Officers at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement were tasked this spring with tracking down some of them and serving them with the paperwork.
Out of more than 30,000 potential targets, roughly 600 were able to be served .
Officials have blamed the record numbers at the border for upsetting CBP’s processing. Issuing an NTA can take 90 minutes per person.
Once an NTA is issued, a migrant is entered into deportation proceedings and has an immigration court date scheduled. TRAC said CBP is required to upload the NTA into the court’s computer system before the first hearing.
That final step isn’t happening, TRAC said.
TRAC said it was previously exceedingly rare for an NTA not to be filed. In 2016, for example, just 11 cases out of 178,052 were dismissed because an NTA wasn’t filed.
That rose to about 1 in 40 cases in 2020. But the rate soared under the Biden administration, reaching more than 1 in 10 cases last year and now reaching 1 in 6 so far this fiscal year.
“This is exceedingly wasteful of the Court’s time. It is also problematic for the immigrant (and possibly their attorney) if they show up at hearings only to have the case dismissed by the Immigration Judge because the case hasn’t actually been filed with the Court,” TRAC said.
Mr. Arthur said if a case is dismissed for lack of an NTA, Homeland Security needs to reserve the migrant with new paperwork with a new court date.
That requires the willingness — and ability — to locate and serve tens of thousands of people. TRAC identified more than 47,000 cases in the first nine months of the current fiscal year alone.
Mr. Arthur said he expects Congress and the Government Accountability Office to take an interest in the lapse.
“The only question that remains is whether this is nonfeasance or malfeasance,” he said.
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/2533647/democrat-sponsored-invader-accused-of-murder-kidnapping-torture
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Trump-era ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy axed
BY STEPHEN DINAN THE WASHINGTON TIMES
The Homeland Security Department announced it will end the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy and welcome ousted illegal immigrants back into the U.S. after a federal court dissolved the last remaining hurdle.
Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk lifted his permanent injunction Monday after the Supreme Court ruled in late June that Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas did have power under the law to end the border security program, officially known as the Migrant Protection Protocols.
The department said it will immediately stop ousting people under MPP, and said the several thousands who had been ousted under the policy in recent months will be welcomed back when they show up for their next appointments — though they remain under threat of deportation.
“As Secretary Mayorkas has said, MPP has endemic flaws, imposes unjustifiable human costs, and pulls resources and personnel away from other priority efforts to secure our border,” the department said in a statement announcing the move.
Under MPP, some migrants caught jumping the southern border illegally who then requested asylum were pushed back into Mexico to wait for their immigration court hearings.
The policy’s goal was to deny them the foothold that has served as an enticement for an unprecedented flow of immigrants, and it proved strikingly successful for the Trump team.
But the Biden administration called the policy cruel and has pushed from its early days to end the program, along with most of the rest of the Trump administration’s get-tough immigration policies.
Judge Kacsmaryk, in his initial ruling, had said Congress laid out a framework that calls for illegal immigrants to be detained or released under rare circumstances. In cases in which neither of those was possible, he said the law required they be returned to Mexico.
An appeals court backed Judge Kacsmaryk, but the Supreme Court disagreed in a 5-4 ruling led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.
He said Congress made return of the immigrants to Mexico optional, and the Biden administration has more leeway to decide how to treat those jumping the border.
Since Judge Kacsmaryk’s original ruling last year, the Biden administration has put about 5,000 immigrants into MPP, according to the latest numbers through June 30.
Nearly 70,000 people were put into MPP during the Trump years.
Denied quick entry, many of those gave up their interest in reaching the U.S. and returned home or remained in Mexico. Others tried to sneak back into the U.S. again.
Few actually won their claims, with the American Immigration Council saying the success rate was about 1%.
The Trump administration saw the low rate of success as an indicator that most of the people had bogus claims to begin with.
Immigrant-rights activists, though, blamed lack of lawyers, bureaucratic complications and unsafe conditions in Mexico for making it tough for migrants to show up for their hearings and to make their arguments.
After Homeland Security’s announcement, activists urged the Biden administration to move quickly to bring the ousted migrants back.
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Biden team ends ICE workers’ union protection
Council whistleblowers at risk of losing jobs
BY STEPHEN DINAN THE WASHINGTON TIMES
The Biden administration delivered a death sentence Thursday to the labor organization that represents thousands of employees at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The Federal Labor Relations Authority’s decision erases the National ICE Council and leaves its 7,600 members, mostly deportation officers, without a collective bargaining agreement or union representation, members said.
The move also dents a prominent critic of both the administration and the American Federation of Government Employees, the umbrella union that included the ICE Council.
AFGE moved to “disclaim” the ICE employees this summer after the council filed a complaint claiming gross mismanagement and hostile intentions at AFGE. AFGE President Everett Kelley said the ICE Council wasn’t a good partner in the labor movement.
FLRA Regional Director Jessica S. Bartlett agreed to AFGE’s request in a decision Thursday, saying that ICE also sided with AFGE in its battle to ax the council.
“Based on AFGE’s disclaimer of interest, I find that it is appropriate to revoke the certification for the unit of non-professional employees,” Ms. Bartlett wrote in her decision.
Chris Crane, president of the council, said the government colluded with AFGE to silence the organization and its members.
“There is no doubt that ICE and DHS leadership worked in unison with corrupt union bosses to make
this happen,” he said. “DHS and AFGE leadership both wanted desperately to silence ICE Council whistleblowers. Without a union, it’s doubtful those whistleblowers will have jobs much longer.”
He also called the FLRA’s decision “the largest single act of whistleblower retaliation in United States history” by depriving union members of their representation.
“We did what we were supposed to do. We reported to the Department of Labor that union bosses at AFGE were allegedly spending dues money on prostitutes and strippers, sexually assaulting their own employees, engaging in payoffs and coverups, and other unlawful and egregious acts. It was supposed to be investigated. We were supposed to be protected,” he said.
He added: “Federal employees must be alerted immediately that they have no protection from corrupt unions when reporting allegations to the Department of Labor. This can’t happen again.”
Neither AFGE nor ICE responded to requests for comment Thursday.
When it filed to oust the ICE employees’ union last month, AFGE blamed the employees for the bad blood and characterized the disclaimer as acceding to the council’s wishes.
“It is clear that the AFGE Council 118 remains steadfast in their desire to no longer be a part of AFGE or the broader labor movement,” Mr. Kelley said. “As a result, we have made the difficult decision to disclaim interest in this unit. While we had hoped to avoid this outcome, today’s action begins the process of granting Council 118’s request.”
The council had sought independence. Instead, AFGE’s disclaimer abolishes the council and leaves its members back at the starting point.
They must now go through a new organization drive and renegotiate a collective bargaining agreement.
The council has long been critical of the direction of activities at ICE, including playing a key role in sinking nominees to lead the agency in both the Trump and Biden administrations.
ICE officers also have battled Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over his attempts to refashion the agency and its mission. Just before the end of the Trump administration, the ICE Council signed a controversial agreement with the Department of Homeland Security giving the union chapter a say in policy changes that the Biden team wanted to make. The new administration “disapproved” of the agreement.
The ICE Council has battled AFGE. It argues that the 700,000-member union doesn’t deliver good service to its members and takes stances that are hostile to the members. That includes backing politicians who have called for abolishing ICE, which could effectively end the members’ jobs.
Beyond those service complaints, the ICE Council has claimed serious management issues at AFGE, including in a complaint filed with the Labor Department asking for an investigation.
The complaint, first reported by The Washington Times in June, cited accusations that AFGE leaders used union money to hush up claims of racial discrimination and sexual harassment and used union dues to pay for “strip clubs” and “pursuing prostitutes.”
In filing their complaint, ICE Council officials sought whistleblower protections, fearing retaliation. Weeks later, AFGE filed its notice of disclaimer asking that the council be dissolved.
Rep. Michael Cloud, Texas Republican, said that appeared to be just the sort of retaliation that worried the council.
He sent a letter late last month asking the Labor Department to investigate AFGE.
Mr. Cloud also asked AFGE to defend itself against the council’s accusations of mismanagement.
The FLRA didn’t give the ICE council a say in its fate. The authority said the two parties involved were AFGE and the Homeland Security Department — specifically ICE.
Mr. Crane said the agency’s decision allowed AFGE to get away with retaliation.
“The FLRA absolutely knew this was whistleblower retaliation, but purposely prohibited the evidence from being introduced. They need to be investigated immediately. This investigation is a complete sham,” he said.
The FLRA did not respond to a request for comment on the process.
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/aug/15/pompeo-us-must-act-stop-iranian-hit-squads-america/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=morning&utm_term=newsletter&utm_content=morning&bt_ee=1nANBKqu0AhzdEBkLrZXV6O7dlBoqU8T%2FDg%2BNfkEUP2HCbiu0Jc5NRME%2BgNAAvEI&bt_ts=1660643134507
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5 million untested, mostly unvaccinated, came across our southern border since Biden took office, but world no. 1 and Wimbledon champion Novak Djokavic cannot play the US Open because of his vaccination status? What a (bad) joke.
https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/sports/djokovic-missing-us-open-over-covid-vaccine-status-would-be-a-joke-mcenroe-2022-08-24/
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/us-mexico-border/2022/08/21/id/1083970/
Banana Republic.
A banana republic is a country with an economy of state capitalism, whereby the country is operated as a private commercial enterprise for the exclusive profit of the ruling class. Such exploitation is enabled by collusion between the state and favored economic monopolies, in which the profit, derived from the private exploitation of public lands, is private property, while the debts incurred thereby are the financial responsibility of the public treasury.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic
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IMMIGRATION
Bill would punish China for refusing to take back deportees
Republican’s bill cuts off ability to travel to U.S.
BY STEPHEN DINAN THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Fed up with countries refusing to take back their own citizens the U.S. is trying to deport, a Republican congressman on Thursday announced new legislation that could cut off those countries’ ability to travel to the U.S.
Rep. Tom Tiffany, Wisconsin Republican, said he was spurred by China’s recent announcement that it would refuse to cooperate with deportations as retaliation for American engagement with Taiwan.
“For years, Beijing has impeded our ability to send their criminal aliens home — effectively treating our country as a dumping ground for their nationals who break American laws,” Mr. Tiffany said. “It makes no sense to continue granting visas to citizens of Communist China knowing that we may never be able to remove them should they overstay or commit crimes in our communities.”
U.S. law already gives the administration discretion to cut off visas, but presidents have been reluctant to flex the power.
Mr. Tiffany’s bill would remove some of the discretion by requiring that when the administration does impose visa sanctions, it go after both nonimmigrant visitor visas and full immigrant visas.
While China is a chief target, it is not the only offender.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement keeps a list of countries it seems “recalcitrant” in cooperating on deportations. As of June 2020, there were a dozen countries on it, according to the Congressional Research Service: Cuba, Russia, Iraq, Iran, Burundi, Eritrea, Pakistan, India, Cambodia, Laos, Bhutan and China.
ICE has not answered repeated inquiries from The Washington Times over the last year seeking an updated list.
Under Section 243(d) of immigration law, the Homeland Security secretary has the power to trigger visa sanctions on recalcitrant countries. If the secretary sends a notice to the State Department, the secretary of state is required to impose sanctions.
But since it is a discretionary power, not all countries deemed recalcitrant are under sanctions.
The administration also can choose what sort of sanctions to level.
They can range from a full ban on all visas to restrictions on particular categories and people. One common sanction is a ban on short-term “nonimmigrant” tourism or business visas for members of a government and their families.
Mr. Tiffany’s bill would mandate the suspension of both immigrant and nonimmigrant visas.
Homeland Security officials have said that labeling a country “recalcitrant” is a bit of an art.
China, however, removed all doubt about its status earlier this summer when it announced it would no longer cooperate on deportations. That was one of the retaliatory steps Beijing announced after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, defying China’s wishes.
ICE’s website currently lists eight countries under visa sanctions: Cambodia, Eritrea, Sierra Leone, Burma, Laos, Cuba, Pakistan and China.
ICE does not detail the level of sanctions imposed on each, but notes that the sanctions on Sierra Leone and Laos used to be stiffer but have been trimmed.
When countries refuse to cooperate on deportations it can mean the U.S. government has to release illegal immigrants with serious criminal records out onto the streets.
In 2015, ICE provided statistics to Congress showing that in the previous year it had released nearly 2,500 migrants with criminal records because it was unable to get cooperation on deporting them.
Cuba, Vietnam and China were the biggest offenders in that data.
The George W. Bush administration used Section 243(d) sanctions only once, against Guyana, in 2001. The Obama administration used them against The Gambia in 2016. The Trump administration was more willing to use the power, deploying it against Cambodia, Eritrea, Guinea and Sierra Leone in 2017; against Burma and Laos in 2018; against Cuba, Ghana and Pakistan in 2019; and against Burundi, China and Ethiopia in 2020.
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/08/27/exclusive-bombshell-emails-reveal-bidens-dhs-still-knowingly-releasing-covid-positive-border-crossers-into-u-s/
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Border Patrol chief admits under oath Biden's no-consequence border policies caused immigration crisis
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/border-patrol-chief-admits-under-oath-bidens-no-consequence-border-policies-caused-immigration-crisis
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https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/border-patrol-migrants-found-dead-rio-grande-texas-89267125
My question:
How can the river current in Texas be swift and dangerous when Lakes Mead and Powell are dry due to global climate change?
Also, former President Trump offered to build a big, beautiful gate. Nobody has drowned coming in legally.
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Texas rivers are racist!
Expecting people to obey the law is racist as well.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/border-patrol-migrants-found-dead-rio-grande-texas-89267125
My question:
How can the river current in Texas be swift and dangerous when Lakes Mead and Powell are dry due to global climate change?
Also, former President Trump offered to build a big, beautiful gate. Nobody has drowned coming in legally.
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"Nobody has drowned coming in legally."
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11200859/Chicago-Mayor-Lori-Lightfoot-sparks-fury-moving-64-migrants-bus-Texas-GOP-suburb.html
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Let's use this thread for this issue:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/illinois-governor-issues-emergency-disaster-over-illegal-immigrants-bused-from-texas_4732746.html?utm_source=Goodevening&utm_campaign=gv-2022-09-15&utm_medium=email&est=6QVbAXBr%2BJfU4SZ7sMhwcq3fs3fciX4uUDaHdpo91r%2BOJDaPaH25rDNxRLCNK23R9mBm
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Migrant Busing Brings the Border Crisis to Sanctuary Cities
Not all are dispatched by Gov. Abbott. The federal government is sending them too.
By Carine Hajjar
Sept. 16, 2022 2:06 pm ET
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New York Immigrant Affairs Commissioner Manuel Castro high-fives a child as a group of migrants arrive in New York City, Aug. 25.
PHOTO: YUKI IWAMURA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
New York
It was 6 a.m., and the buses from Texas had yet to arrive. But a handful of ambulances and policemen already waited on the street. An hour later, empty buses from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority would line up to transport migrants across New York City. Volunteers unloaded boxes into the makeshift “triage center” inside the lobby of the Port Authority bus terminal. Manuel Castro, Mayor Eric Adams’s commissioner for immigrant affairs, and Rep. Adriano Espaillat, whose district spans Upper Manhattan and part of the Bronx, arrived before 7. At around 8, 80 asylum-seeking migrants filed out of the two buses arriving from the Lone Star State, one sent by Mr. Abbott from the border and another by the city of El Paso. Messrs. Castro and Espaillat shook everyone’s hand, saying: “Bienvenidos a Nueva York.”
Since early August, Gov. Greg Abbott has been sending bus loads of asylum-seekers from the Texas border to sanctuary cities—New York, Chicago, Washington and other places that have policies discouraging local law enforcement from cooperating with federal authorities in enforcing immigration law. This week Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis one-upped Mr. Abbott by sending a small plane full of Venezuelan migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.
New York is struggling to provide medical care and shelter for migrants in keeping with its sanctuary policies and right-to-shelter mandate. Some New York hospitals have seen unexpected arrivals of migrants throughout the summer, challenging already burdened staff. “Everyone is on board with wanting to help, but we don’t have the staff,” one doctor from a New York public hospital says. “The buses are coming unexpectedly, so there could be a wave of patients in the emergency room with complex medical and social needs that need to be triaged on top of the patients that are already there.”
Housing the migrants is even more complicated, despite the city’s best efforts. Shelter vacancy rates in June were under 1%, far below the city’s 5% target. On Aug. 1, Mr. Adams made an emergency procurement declaration to provide housing for asylum seekers. It included a “conservative estimate” that some 4,000 migrants had entered the shelter system since May, noting that the city doesn’t track their immigration status. Today, the city reckons that number is closer to 9,800, of which 7,300 are still housed in New York City shelters. Mr. Adams has opened 20 more emergency shelters, some in hotels, amid the surge of asylum seekers. Washington, another sanctuary city, faces similar challenges. Its mayor, Muriel Bowser, and Mr. Adams have both asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency for help.
The objective of Mr. Abbott’s stunt is to push sanctuary-city Democrats into demanding action from the White House on the border crisis. They’re resisting. Mr. Adams has called Mr. Abbott’s actions “horrific.” At the Port Authority, Messrs. Espaillat’s and Castro’s words of welcome soon turned to denunciations of Mr. Abbott for causing a “circus,” as Mr. Espaillat put it. “This is about a governor . . . that wants all of you to cover [for] him,” he said.
When I asked if the Biden administration is doing enough to create a safe and orderly border, Mr. Espaillat conceded that “much needs to be done at the border” but was quick to add that “this is complicated by the arbitrary behavior of Gov. Abbott.” Mr. Castro’s staff reported getting less than 24 hours’ notice before now-daily bus arrivals.
Yet not all the arriving vehicles are “Abbott buses.” The White House calls Mr. Abbott’s busing “shameful,” but the Biden administration appears to be doing the same thing. Mr. Adams has said that buses are sent by the federal government as well as the state. The city of El Paso, which has a Democratic mayor, is chartering buses separate from Mr. Abbott’s operations and soliciting reimbursements from FEMA, according to the Texas Tribune.
Claims of Mr. Abbott’s “human trafficking,” as Mr. Espaillat describes it, are overblown. New York City has more social services than El Paso or Del Rio. It offers better chances for asylum, too. In fiscal 2021, the New York immigration court granted 3 of every 4 asylum claims. Houston’s granted less than 1 in 20.
The true culprits are in Washington, not Austin. Congress hasn’t enacted meaningful reform to accommodate more legal immigration or stabilize the border, and the federal executive branch has fallen down on the job of administering existing law at the border and elsewhere.
From the humanitarian to the economic, welcoming migrants is beneficial, but our current immigration system isn’t built to accommodate the present number of asylum claims. Since the start of fiscal 2022 last Oct. 1, there have been more than 1.9 million migrant encounters at the southern border, already exceeding the number of encounters for all of fiscal 2021 by more than 200,000. Of these, 47.5% were expelled under Title 42, a Trump-era anti-Covid policy, though many try again. The rest are likely to apply for asylum.
The consequences of disorderly policy reach bottom to top. As Customs and Border Protection agents process increasing numbers of asylum seekers, they’re diverted from the field, leaving the border porous to smugglers and cartels and decreasing security for local communities. The system is especially dangerous for migrants. Nearly 750 have died at the border, many drowning or otherwise succumbing to the elements, in fiscal 2022, up 200 from last year.
The dysfunction is also evident in immigration-court backlogs. According to Syracuse University, asylum seekers across the country wait an average of 810 days for an initial hearing. The average tops 900 days in New York state and 1,100 in New York City.
That means New York’s obligations will multiply. After Messrs. Castro and Espaillat concluded their remarks, volunteers told me that three more buses were expected to arrive at noon, breaking a daily record for arrivals. This will be the norm until Washington can manage the crisis at the border. Forcing the issue is in Mr. Adams’s interests, even if he doesn’t like the way Mr. Abbott is doing it.
Ms. Hajjar is the Journal’s Joseph Rago Memorial Fellow.
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:https://justthenews.com/government/congress/rep-nehls-says-homeland-security-confirmed-venezuela-sends-violent-criminals-us?utm_source=sf&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=twjs
Hard to title this anything other than, Trump was right.
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https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/kevindowneyjr/2022/09/19/confirmed-venezuela-sending-violent-prisoners-across-our-southern-border-n1630460
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Venezuelan "Scarfaces"!
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Venezuelan "Scarfaces"!
Yes.
Good thing we have magic soil!
It would be tragic if they found their way to Martha's Vinyard or Aspen, Colorado!
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The Port Mariel exodus was of particular interest to me-- not only because of my interest in Latin America, but also because I had been in Cuba a few months before. A friend I made there was among the escapees and looked me up in NYC. We hung together for a few months, often going to Salsa Clubs.
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https://thefederalist.com/2022/09/23/the-border-crisis-is-just-the-tip-of-the-iceberg-in-mexico-a-cartel-crisis-looms/
The Border Crisis Is Just The Tip Of The Iceberg. In Mexico, A Cartel Crisis Looms
BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON
SEPTEMBER 23, 2022
6 MIN READ
This week, U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced that apprehensions of illegal immigrants surpassed 2.1 million for the fiscal year in August, with more than 203,000 apprehensions last month alone, marking six straight months of southwest border arrests exceeding 200,000.
Nothing like this has ever happened before. The 2.1 million figure represents an all-time high, surpassing the previous record of 1.7 million, set in fiscal year 2021. That is to say, every year President Joe Biden has been in office has been a record-breaking year of illegal immigration. Biden’s policies are directly responsible for the ongoing border crisis, which will continue unabated until those policies change. Whatever the number ends up being for 2022, the number for 2023 will almost certainly be higher.
But the shocking volume of arrests at the border, and the dramatic footage of illegal immigrants crossing the Rio Grande or lining up by the hundreds along stretches of the border wall (or scaling it), can blind us to another, less obvious crisis unfolding on the Mexican side of the border that we need to understand if we hope to craft policies that will put an end to mass illegal immigration.
That crisis, put simply, is the gradual takeover of the Mexican state by cartels. I hesitate to call them “drug cartels,” because what these criminal organizations do goes far beyond the manufacture and trafficking of narcotics. In addition to drugs, Mexican cartels are now involved in industrial agriculture, port operations, migrant smuggling, human trafficking, and even the control and distribution of water in drought-stricken parts of the country.
These twin crises are connected. Although the border crisis is a direct result of Biden’s policies, the cartels are exploiting those policies for profit. One estimate from Homeland Security Investigations puts the figure at $13 billion annually, up from just $500 million in 2018. That is to say, illegal immigration has been industrialized by these cartels and their smuggling networks. It is not too much to say they have turned the southwest border into a vast black market, not just for deadly drugs such as fentanyl, but also for illegal immigration.
A new report from the Texas Public Policy Foundation (where, full disclosure, I once worked and am today a senior fellow) sheds some much-needed light on how the cartels have accomplished this. Their involvement in migrant smuggling — a vast enterprise that involves transportation, surveillance, logistics, accounting, and stash houses on both sides of the border — is a natural extension of their increasing involvement in nearly every facet of Mexico’s economic and political life.
The report, whose author has remained anonymous for safety reasons, chronicles the recent history of deep collusion between the Mexican state and the country’s most powerful drug cartels: “The unfortunate reality is that criminal cartels have burrowed their way into the government — and vice versa. Well-meaning public servants, of whom Mexico has many, are powerless against a nexus of senior officeholders, societal elites, and criminal cartels.”
The rot in the Mexican state, the report makes clear, goes to the very top. In 2018, just before President Enrique Peña Nieto left office, Ivan Reyes Arzate, a high-ranking member in the Mexican Federal Police, was found guilty in U.S. federal court on charges of obstructing a Drug Enforcement Administration investigation of international drug trafficking and money laundering. The case “represented the first time a high-level foreign law enforcement officer was held criminally accountable in a U.S. courtroom for interfering with a transnational organized crime investigation,” according to the TPPF report.
But if Peña Nieto’s time in office was marked by a curtailment of U.S.-Mexico law enforcement cooperation, Mexico’s current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has sought to shut down such cooperation almost entirely. Thanks to a new law pushed by López Obrador’s administration aimed at curbing the operations of foreign agents (clearly aimed at the DEA), decades of U.S.-Mexico bilateral cooperation has been effectively ended. In addition to this new law, López Obrador in April shut down an elite anti-narcotic unit that had worked with the DEA for 25 years.
Since taking office, López Obrador has pursued a posture of passivity toward the cartels, especially the Sinaloa Cartel, the country’s most powerful. In so doing, Mexico’s president has transformed his naïve campaign slogan, abrazos no balazos (“hugs not bullets”), into a policy framework that can only be understood as a rebuke of the United States in favor of the cartels.
What is also different now than in the past, the TPPF report explains, is that the cartels “increasingly supplant the legitimate sovereignty of the Mexican state with their own — often in cooperation with major elements of that state. The qualitative difference since 2018 has been the near-open role of the current Mexican president in allowing, and perhaps even participating in, that cooperation.” Indeed, by some estimates cartels now control up to 40 percent of Mexican territory.
If that sounds outlandish, it is not because the facts don’t support such a conclusion but because corporate media in the U.S. are for the most part unwilling or unable to cover the issue in depth or accurately convey its implications for America.
The implications are this: As the Mexican state succumbs to the cartels, Mexico’s problems will become America’s problems. That doesn’t just mean a worsening border crisis but a breakdown of law and order all up and down the border, on both sides of the Rio Grande, and a worsening drug crisis in American cities far from the border. It means the corruption of Mexican officialdom will gradually spread to American officialdom, just as the operations of Mexican cartels have spread to every corner of the United States.
What to do about all this? The first step is for the United States to stop treating Mexico like a partner or a peer with whom we can work together to address common challenges. Our entire posture has to shift. We have to begin treating Mexico less like an ally and more like a hostile neighbor. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, to his credit, this week took the extraordinary step of issuing an executive order designating Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations. While that might not do much on its own, it at least sends a signal to Washington that it is time for the federal government to do the same.
There is of course a historical precedent for this, and indeed the relatively peaceful interregnum of the past 80 years is a departure from the historical norm of U.S.-Mexico relations. We are now returning to the norm, whether policymakers in Washington realize it or not.
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It would be nice if the general public read the forum and Federalist in addition to the news pushed through on facebook and msm. Having cartels that are terrorist organizations PAID to run our border instead of real US law enforcement is a threat larger than we can imagine.
In numbers, the population of Ireland has come in unchecked, illegally, since Biden was (not really) elected.
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"These twin crises are connected. Although the border crisis is a direct result of Biden’s policies, the cartels are exploiting those policies for profit. One estimate from Homeland Security Investigations puts the figure at $13 billion annually, up from just $500 million in 2018. That is to say, illegal immigration has been industrialized by these cartels and their smuggling networks. It is not too much to say they have turned the southwest border into a vast black market, not just for deadly drugs such as fentanyl, but also for illegal immigration. "
absolutely appalling as is Biden ignoring
LEFT wind logic would twist this into a good thing - cartels are simply helping poor desperate
victims into the chance for a good future in the US !!!
Agree with Doug.
WILLFULL Lack of MSM coverage is just as bad as the crimes themselves
Lib jurnolisters who pride themselves with such stories in the 20th century simply ignore it now because they are protecting the favorite politicians.
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Federal Court Rules DACA Unlawful but Preserves Policy for Current Recipients
DACA supporters outside the White House, September 2017.(Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
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By CAROLINE DOWNEY
October 5, 2022 9:01 PM
A federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy is unlawful but agreed to preserve the program for existing recipients.
A three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a July 2021 decision from Texas federal judge Andrew Hanen, who said the Obama administration had no authority to impose DACA, according to a court filing obtained by Axios. The court blocked the Biden administration from enrolling new illegal immigrants, which would provide them with work permits and shield them from deportation, but said current beneficiaries could stay and that immigration officials could process DACA renewals.
“In our view, the defendants have not shown that there is a likelihood that they will succeed on the merits,” Chief Judge Priscilla Richman wrote Wednesday. “We also recognize that DACA has had profound significance to recipients and many others in the ten years since its adoption.”
Richman returned the case challenging the legality of the policy back to a lower court in Texas to examine a recent rule the Biden administration implemented in a maneuver to protect the program from litigation. The Biden administration, which appealed the 2021 ruling, codified DACA into regulatory law this August and revoked the 2012 memo drafted by former Department of Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano that formed the original program. Given Wednesday’s ruling, the Biden administration is expected to file a formal appeal that could eventually send the case to the Supreme Court to make a final judgment on DACA’s constitutionality.
DACA applies to nearly 600,000 illegal immigrants residing in the U.S., often called “Dreamers” by proponents of the program, who had to prove that they arrived in the country by age 16 and before June 2007. They must attend or have graduated from high school and cannot have a serious criminal record. Recipients are also not entitled under the program to be given permanent legal status or citizenship.
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ALL illegals should be deported!
ALL!
Federal Court Rules DACA Unlawful but Preserves Policy for Current Recipients
DACA supporters outside the White House, September 2017.(Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
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By CAROLINE DOWNEY
October 5, 2022 9:01 PM
A federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy is unlawful but agreed to preserve the program for existing recipients.
A three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a July 2021 decision from Texas federal judge Andrew Hanen, who said the Obama administration had no authority to impose DACA, according to a court filing obtained by Axios. The court blocked the Biden administration from enrolling new illegal immigrants, which would provide them with work permits and shield them from deportation, but said current beneficiaries could stay and that immigration officials could process DACA renewals.
“In our view, the defendants have not shown that there is a likelihood that they will succeed on the merits,” Chief Judge Priscilla Richman wrote Wednesday. “We also recognize that DACA has had profound significance to recipients and many others in the ten years since its adoption.”
Richman returned the case challenging the legality of the policy back to a lower court in Texas to examine a recent rule the Biden administration implemented in a maneuver to protect the program from litigation. The Biden administration, which appealed the 2021 ruling, codified DACA into regulatory law this August and revoked the 2012 memo drafted by former Department of Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano that formed the original program. Given Wednesday’s ruling, the Biden administration is expected to file a formal appeal that could eventually send the case to the Supreme Court to make a final judgment on DACA’s constitutionality.
DACA applies to nearly 600,000 illegal immigrants residing in the U.S., often called “Dreamers” by proponents of the program, who had to prove that they arrived in the country by age 16 and before June 2007. They must attend or have graduated from high school and cannot have a serious criminal record. Recipients are also not entitled under the program to be given permanent legal status or citizenship.
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1) As the saying goes, "The first rule of holes is when you find yourself in one-- stop digging!" Seems to me that this decision is quite important-- if blocks Biden, his handlers, and the Progs from continuing to dig us deeper. In that they have finagled five million illegals into our country, this is a really good thing!
2) Saying "ALL illegals" is politically suicidal. There are plenty of cases wherein someone was brought here illegally as a child and grew up as an American and genuinely thinks of themselves as such. To say that a twenty two year old person who was brought here at two should be heaved out just is not going to fly-- and correctly so!
OF COURSE the Progs will be trying to use such cases to block deportation of an MS 13 who came in three years ago at 20 while claiming to be 15 but we need to be politically astute enough to distinguish between the two types of cases.
EDITED TO ADD:
Clarifying remarks in the following WT piece:
========================
Appeals court rules DACA was illegally created
Program created in 2012 to remain intact — for now
BY STEPHEN DINAN THE WASHINGTON TIMES
A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that the DACA program to protect immigrant “Dreamers” was created illegally by the Obama administration a decade ago, upholding a lower court’s decision to erase the program.
But the three-judge panel said its ruling doesn’t apply to the new version the Biden administration announced this year.
The judges sent the entire matter back to the lower-court judge to evaluate.
And the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals kept in place a partial stay, meaning the current DACA program will remain running while the case works through the court system.
The appeals court did signal a tough road ahead for the Biden plans, saying it does not appear that Congress anticipated such a broad grant of executive authority in immigration law.
“There is no ‘clear congressional authorization’ for the power that DHS claims,” wrote Chief Judge Priscilla Richman, who was nominated to the court by President George W. Bush.
But for now, she said, that merely means that the 2012 program created by the Department of Homeland Security in the Obama years was established in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said he was “deeply disappointed” in the ruling and said the administration is working on “an appropriate legal response.”
All sides agree that Congress could grant the Dreamers protections, and President Trump and congressional Democrats reached for a deal in 2018. But the president’s price of building a border wall, and potentially making other changes, was too steep for Democrats.
Wednesday’s ruling will fuel the political fight, with immigrant- rights advocates arguing voters have a chance to send a message in November by backing candidates who support granting citizenship rights to Dreamers and other immigrants who are in the country illegally.
Republicans, meanwhile, have made the border chaos under President Biden a top issue.
In sending the case back to the lower court, the 5th Circuit is continuing a line of cases that dates back nearly a decade, to the creation of the original DACA program.
Advocates called the ruling a “punt” that leaves 1.2million people in the lurch.
“To continuously shuttle DACA through different courts, keeping it in limbo, is to devalue and ignore the contributions this policy has made to our state and country,” said Murad Awawdeh, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition.
DACA grants a stay of deportation to immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally as children before the middle of 2007, who had been here at least five years, who had worked toward an education and who had kept a relatively clean criminal record.
The program, officially known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, also grants work permits, which allow the recipients to settle more deeply into communities and to obtain some taxpayer benefits such as tax credits, Social Security and Medicare.
President Obama had repeatedly said he didn’t have power to create such a program, before reversing himself in the months ahead of Election Day in 2012.
The Trump administration sought to phase out the program, drawing an avalanche of lawsuits that ended at the Supreme Court.
The justices ruled that Mr. Trump cut too many corners in trying to end the program, even though some of the justices pointed out that he had used the same methods as the Obama administration did in creating it.
Republican-led states, led by Texas, sued to force a decision on the original DACA program, leading to Wednesday’s ruling
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https://www.alaskasnewssource.com/2022/10/07/2-russians-who-landed-st-lawrence-island-now-seeking-asylum-us/?fbclid=IwAR3RFLfMRrb3scWLTpWhHTka48rz_Mzqiwy-eCZ9P8LfVGK5jkqEpViiwfE
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/ice-issues-smartphones-to-255602-illegal-border-crossers-cost-is-89-5-million-a-year_4787293.html?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=TheLibertyDaily&src_src=partner&src_cmp=TheLibertyDaily
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https://thefederalist.com/2022/10/11/thanks-to-bidens-border-crisis-the-million-dollar-migrant-smuggling-industry-is-now-worth-billions/
Excerpts:
"“500% increase in human smuggling..."
"In May of 2018, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that human smuggling operations are making “$500 million a year, or more.”
“To be clear, human smuggling operations are lining the pockets of transnational criminal organizations (TCOs). They are not humanitarian endeavors. Smugglers’ priorities have profits over people, and when aliens pay them to get here, they are contributing $500 million a year, or more, to groups that are fueling greater violence and instability in America and the region,” she warned.
More than four years later,
the criminal enterprises responsible for scoping out border weaknesses and using those to funnel more than 2 million illegal border crossers into the U.S. in just 12 short months are now raking in an estimated $13 billion per year."
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This just keeps getting worse with terrorists and gangs discovered along with human trafficking and fatal fentanyl.. The lack of outrage is reprehensible. The party in power that did this needs to be permanently, electorally crushed.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/10/border-disaster-by-the-numbers.php
https://nypost.com/2022/10/07/the-chilling-numbers-that-reveal-the-scale-of-joe-bidens-border-disaster/
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This just keeps getting worse with terrorists and gangs discovered along with human trafficking and fatal fentanyl.. The lack of outrage is reprehensible. The party in power that did this needs to be permanently, electorally crushed.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/10/border-disaster-by-the-numbers.php
https://nypost.com/2022/10/07/the-chilling-numbers-that-reveal-the-scale-of-joe-bidens-border-disaster/
The party in power will cheat even harder to maintain it's power.
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This just keeps getting worse with terrorists and gangs discovered along with human trafficking and fatal fentanyl.. The lack of outrage is reprehensible. The party in power that did this needs to be permanently, electorally crushed.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/10/border-disaster-by-the-numbers.php
https://nypost.com/2022/10/07/the-chilling-numbers-that-reveal-the-scale-of-joe-bidens-border-disaster/
The party in power will cheat even harder to maintain it's power.
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/117/721/274/original/c5e26598a50730f0.png
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/117/721/274/original/c5e26598a50730f0.png)
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Under the category of deplorable lack of curiosity, I have not seen the Chinese fentanyl coming across the border killing our youth tied to the Mexican gangs who provide our border security. Maybe this story connects some of that.
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John Ellis
Oct 13
A revolutionary money laundering system involving Chinese organized crime, Latin American drug cartels and Chinese officials – In 2017, Drug Enforcement Administration agents following the money from cocaine deals in Memphis, Tennessee, identified a mysterious figure in Mexico entrusted by drug lords with their millions: a Chinese American gangster named Xizhi Li. As the agents tracked Li’s activity across the Americas and Asia, they realized he wasn’t just another money launderer. He was a pioneer. Operating with the acumen of a financier and the tradecraft of a spy, he had helped devise an innovative system that revolutionized the drug underworld and fortified the cartels. As they investigated Li’s tangled financial dealings, U.S. agents came across evidence indicating that his money laundering schemes involved Chinese government officials and the Communist Party elite. China’s omnipresent security forces tightly control and monitor its state-run economy. Yet Li and others moved tens of millions of dollars among Chinese banks and companies with seeming impunity, according to court documents and national security officials. Some U.S. officials believe that Chinese authorities permit criminals like Li to operate because dark money benefits the elite, strengthens China’s economy and weakens the West. Beijing rejects such accusations. Read the rest. (Source: propublica.org via sinocism.com.
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Sorry but what does Ukraine have to do with our unenforced border?
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Sorry but what does Ukraine have to do with our unenforced border?
Everything.
The Mafiya-ocracy of Ukraine isn't my problem. The destruction of the US is.
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https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2022/10/intelligence-community-doesnt-warn-about-all-attacks-against-us-homeland-why-not/378703/
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/oct/22/joe-biden-sets-new-record-terrorism-suspects-borde/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=R3CgGP%2FOLlw0tVeoSfbc0bNAyOFg3q8YM7ErXvMU9HEa7AW0%2BhzU%2FdvVtNE7P%2FPD&bt_ts=1666443601776
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https://www.frontpagemag.com/bidens-open-door-to-jihad-terrorists/?fbclid=IwAR2Zu4hw7p-0yOEcRKFzWfWDQ53X7WQdq55QlWfb8k7tp8MetwgmoaKwhNM
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https://www.judicialwatch.org/afghans-on-terror-watchlist/?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=corruption%20chronicle&fbclid=IwAR0JRBU2LtIwQb7D91Mgza4ZnFYkZpHLnEXQyD672XH-CSvATKof8ootyNM
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https://www.foxnews.com/politics/tens-thousands-migrants-cases-thrown-immigration-court-docs-filed?fbclid=IwAR3Qhe3_P1FVM2RbX_33vGoF2MRYPoCJ7kzyOihMXJ909R6p_0ShN5wNfT8
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https://dailycaller.com/2022/10/30/exclusive-facilitators-of-traffickers-guatemalan-president-says-us-needs-to-pressure-countries-illegal-migrants/?utm_medium=email&pnespid=rL5.EX9XaaQXivvduDvoCYyHoBvxS4BmdbS2keA38RdmZNlHAscUwKd_s8evXpiBpizdjlj9
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BREAKING FROM OPHQ:
There was a shooting in US Border Patrol Yuma Sector! One bandit 10-7’d yesterday by Yuma Sector BORTAC!
An armed smuggler was shot and killed. The suspect was part of a rip crew robbing and kidnapping aliens near County 23rd in Yuma on the Colorad Riverbed
There were two subjects; one brandished a handgun. The other subject ran back to Mexico.
Yuma Border Patrol was watching them for a couple days. When Camera Operators spotted them sometime last week, there were three subjects. Two armed with pistols and one with a rifle. All wearing body armor at that time.
They robbed/kidnapped some give ups, and they were able to provide more INTEL on the bandits.
OPR came out along with local PD, Sheriff. Excellent job BORTACers! That’s how it’s done. Enforcement in the finest tradition of our beloved Patrol.
God help the other side when we finally get leadership with the balls to shut down and secure the Border.
Nobody does it better than the United States Border Patrol. Honor first, honor always!
#BidenBorderCrisis #usbp #cbp #dhs #oldpatrolHQ
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10-7’d is “out of service”.
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second post
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/illegal-migrants-wave-venezuelan-flag-crossing-us-southern-border-attack-border-patrol-agents?fbclid=IwAR2yAzE9STPm1wywTykZnpVoQ24CcaYirpfZufKucP9QcniXR2J7LuOp-QY
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/nov/3/fact-checkers-were-wrong-once-mocked-gop-gets-last/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=OjfcdPpxbFU2US31tv1UbNjp%2FkjYq%2FrU5f0HpJkEIR2YyeLF7xOX4oc0RtUyummw&bt_ts=1667499788531
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https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/11/abbott-calls-out-the-guard.php
POSTED ON NOVEMBER 15, 2022 BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN CONSTITUTION, ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION, TEXAS
ABBOTT CALLS OUT THE GUARD [UPDATED]
This could be huge news: Texas Governor Greg Abbott has summoned the National Guard and the Texas Department of Public Safety to repel the invasion of Texas from its southern border. Abbott invokes the Invasion Clauses of the U.S. and Texas Constitutions:
Some notable points:
* Texas will build its own border wall.
* I love the reference to gun boats.
* Abbott contemplates entering into one or more compacts with other states to deal with the invasion.
* He also intends to “enter into agreements with foreign powers to enhance border security.”
I believe by the “Invasion Clause” of the U.S. Constitution, Abbott means Section 4 of Article IV, which provides:
The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.
Article IV of the Texas Constitution bestows powers on the governor of that state. Article IV, Section 7 provides:
GOVERNOR AS COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF OF MILITARY FORCES. He shall be commander-in-chief of the military forces of the State, except when they are called into actual service of the United States. He shall have power to call forth the militia to execute the laws of the State, to suppress insurrections, and to repel invasions.
At first look, I think Abbott is on solid ground under the Texas Constitution. I assume the relevance of the U.S. Constitution is that the federal government has breached its duty to protect Texas against invasion.
I think Abbott’s long-overdue move has the potential to generate a crisis of federalism. Immigration is constitutionally regulated by the federal government, but the federal government has not only failed to enforce its own laws, it has deliberately encouraged the violation of those laws on a massive scale. States like Texas have been left holding the bag. When the federal government abdicates its constitutional duties, and actively tries to undermine the constitutional framework, does a state have the right to step in? One would think so, but the Biden administration no doubt disagrees.
Can a state enter into an agreement with a foreign government? I don’t know. The concept seems extraordinary. No doubt legal scholars will enlighten us.
We have been on a collision course between ever-expanding but incompetently applied federal power on one hand, and the interests and powers of sovereign states like Texas and Florida on the other hand, for a while now. Fundamental issues of federalism like those posed by Abbott’s orders need to be resolved. I hope they are resolved in favor of the states. As I have written before, given the bitterly divided condition of our populace, the alternative to a renewed commitment to federalism may be disunion.
Perhaps Governor Abbott’s declaration will turn out to be a historic step toward restoring the Founders’ constitutional vision.
[Update] A friend whom I won’t identify but who may be known to you as the In___ Pun__ answers my question:
States are forbidden from making treaties with other nations (or each other) by Article I Section 10.
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It could be truly awesome if Abbot lives up to the potential here!
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https://twitter.com/RealSaavedra/status/1078496926058700800
https://twitter.com/greg_price11/status/1592928904112922625
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KImirpG2Fk
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BIDEN ADMIN NOW DRIVING FOREIGN NATIONALS ACROSS THE BORDER… CENTER FOR IMMIGRATION STUDIES: Legalizing Border Crossing for All: The Next Stage of Biden’s Migration Crisis
MEXICALI, Mexico – This northern Mexican city across from California is one of the latest to go live with an unreported, legally questionable new immigration strategy that President Joe Biden’s administration has discretely unfurled for months all along the U.S. southern border.
Twice a day, seven days a week since September, Mexicali city officials working closely with Biden’s U.S. Customs and Border Protection, on a secure shared “CBP-ONE” online platform, select hundreds of people a month for their escorted government-to-government handoffs through the land port of entry to Calexico, Calif. Once the Americans check their paperwork, they legally admit intending illegal border crossers like Nicaraguan Maria Esperanza Diaz Ruiz, 42, into the U.S. interior under a questionable authority known as “humanitarian or significant public benefit parole.”
They are free to start new lives under the benefit, with work authorization and the right to apply for asylum part of the package.
EL PASO RESIDENTS BLAME BIDEN FOR INVASION… NY POST: El Paso neighborhood overrun with migrants as border crisis rages: ‘We don’t know if they have guns’
As El Paso becomes the number one location for immigrants to cross into the US, residents of the Texas city tell The Post illegal immigrants are overwhelming their neighborhoods, prowling through their yards and may be carrying weapons.
“It’s real bad because sometimes there’s up to 10, 15 of them running all over,” Luis Lujan, who lives near El Paso’s Ascarate Park, less than two miles from the border, told The Post. […]
“Ever since Biden said, ‘Come on over,’ they’re coming over,” Lujan said. “This was like a freeway to them.”
Lujan’s neighbors are mostly elderly residents with modest incomes. He explained they report the illegals to US Border Patrol.
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https://dailycaller.com/2022/11/21/we-lost-our-purpose-border-patrol-sees-surge-in-suicides-as-morale-plummets/?utm_medium=email&pnespid=rbt6VjtAM7ob1qmZrDqtCYKGuAzzVptpJrGl2.s5pBxmCuXR5G_Bh4qJolsWK90VUWcdVtkb
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Designating The Cartels As Terrorists Could Worsen Illegal Immigration, Experts Say
MEXICO-VIOLENCE-CARTELS-RELIGION
(Photo by ENRIQUE CASTRO / AFP) (Photo by ENRIQUE CASTRO/AFP via Getty Images)
Daily Caller News Foundation logo
JENNIE TAER
INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER
November 23, 2022
4:48 PM ET
FONT SIZE:
Designating the drug cartels as terrorist organizations would likely complicate illegal immigration, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The topic has been mulled on both the federal and state levels, during former President Donald Trump’s administration and most recently by Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
“The immigration crisis could be exacerbated with asylum claims for fleeing violence from terrorist organizations,” former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Special Agent in Charge of the El Paso division Kyle Williamson told the DCNF.
Designating the drug cartels as foreign terrorists would likely complicate the illegal immigration crisis, several experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
More migrants would attempt to use threats from the cartels as their ticket into the country, former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Special Agent in Charge for El Paso Kyle Williamson and former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott told the DCNF. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) encountered a record of over 2.3 million migrants at the southern border in fiscal year 2022 and a surge of over 230,000 in the start of fiscal year 2023.
Scott and Williamson both believe that the designation is still needed due to the cartels’ threats on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Over 100,000 people died in the U.S. in 2021 largely due to fentanyl, which comes from cartels in Mexico, according to the DEA. (RELATED: ‘Even Worse’: Illegal Migrants Will Flood The US Border When One Major Trump-Era Policy Ends)
“The immigration crisis could be exacerbated with asylum claims for fleeing violence from terrorist organizations,” Williamson told the DCNF.
“There are implications to designating drug cartels as terrorist organizations that could be negative. … It’s not that people would flee more, it’s that they would have a better argument in asylum hearings,” Scott told the DCNF, adding, “We have over 200,000 a month right now. The Border Patrol is completely overwhelmed. This administration has ignored all that anyway, so I don’t really see that per se as a threat.”
The decision carries a lot of weight, but it should be taken seriously due to the current drug crisis, Williamson said.
“An FTO designation should not be taken lightly because it could exacerbate our current immigration crisis and impact foreign trade. However, with the continued threat of Fentanyl and the the resulting overdose deaths in our communities, we must start to weigh benefits and costs. I believe that we have arrived at a point where designating the cartels as foreign terrorists organizations would be an effective strategy in the fight against Fentanyl and in the best interest of US national security,” Williamson said.
However, David Bier, associate director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, says that being a victim of a terrorist organization won’t qualify illegal migrants “for anything under immigration law.” In Bier’s eyes, the designation is “almost purely symbolic.”
“It is almost purely symbolic, and it would change nothing about migration. I don’t think the sale of fentanyl meets the legal definition either since the cartels aren’t ‘using’ fentanyl. They are selling it. The users are the ones using it, but this question is pretty much irrelevant since drug trafficking is already by itself a permanent bar to legal admission. It would just create confusion between these two types of inadmissibility categories for no foreseeable benefit,” Bier told the DCNF.
When former President Donald Trump was in office, he indicated he was inching toward making the designation at the federal level, but never actually did. But the Biden administration isn’t likely to seriously consider the move, Scott said, adding that he has little faith the current president would do it.
“If the administration was going to be serious about it, and make decisions about OK, this is how far we’re gonna go. And we’re literally willing to hold corporate America or government officials accountable if we can prove that they’re associated in any way, shape or form with these individuals,” Scott said.
“I think it would have a lot of value, and I haven’t always said that. Traditionally, I don’t like changing definitions just to meet the need of the day. I like looking and the definition and then if it meets the definition of a terrorist organization, fine. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. Traditionally, I’ve not believed that the cartels met that definition because they’re just criminal enterprises. There hasn’t been like a political agenda, but we’ve seen dramatic shift in the last few years,” he added.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott [Screenshot/Fox News]
[Screenshot/Fox News]
Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott recently indicated he would make the designation at the state level after declaring an “invasion” at his state’s border with Mexico due to the surge in illegal immigration. But the question remains as to how Abbott will press charges against individuals and groups tied to the cartels under the designation at the state level.
Neither Abbott nor Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office responded to requests for comment about the designation and the penalties it could impose.
At the federal level, designating the cartels as terrorists would mean that any person in the U.S. found to be providing “any material support or resources whatsoever” would face prosecution, according to Scott.
“Anybody that provides any kind of assistance to that organization is then subject to criminal prosecution at the federal level, a lot on immigration. So if any alien does it, then they’ll submit inadmissible or deportable. But again, the state doesn’t have immigration authority,” Scott said.
The state, however, wouldn’t be able to step in and take such actions, Kinney County Attorney Brent Smith, who presides over an area of the Texas border, told the DCNF, adding that Abbott’s designation would be more of a “[PR] thing.”
“Federally, it does have a huge impact if they were labeled terrorists or categorized as terrorists because it opens up certain military action that can be taken, I believe. With Abbott doing it, I don’t believe it does really anything more or opens up any other avenues of authority. I think he did that in anticipation of declaring an invasion because he has to name a party that is facilitating the invasion, which is the cartels,” Smith said.
“So I think that was more of a setup on him declaring an invasion more than anything, because legally, the state declaring them as terrorists doesn’t profoundly impact the current authority that law enforcement has before versus after, if that makes sense,” Smith said.
The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment from the DCNF.
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https://www.oann.com/newsroom/air-marshall-union-expresses-concerns-after-marshals-reassigned-to-southern-border/
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3147699/broken-arrow-our-border-is-overrun
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By BRITTANY BERNSTEIN
December 15, 2022 8:49 AM
The U.S. Justice Department filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against the state of Arizona and Governor Doug Ducey over the state’s temporary border wall made of hundreds of double-stacked shipping containers.
The government argues the makeshift wall is illegal, dangerous, and interferes with federal duties, and has asked a judge to order the removal of the containers from U.S. land.
The suit requests damages for the state’s “unlawful trespasses” and asks for “a declaration that Arizona’s use and occupancy of lands owned by the United States without the required permits or other authorization constitutes unlawful trespasses.”
The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for Arizona on Wednesday on behalf of the U.S. departments of Agriculture and Interior.
Work on the container wall had paused in recent days in response to protests from environmental activists and objections by the federal government, according to the Associated Press.
Federal agencies, including the Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Forest Service, previously told Arizona the construction on federal land is unlawful and it must stop. In response, Ducey sued federal officials on October 21. The outgoing governor has argued the state holds sole or shared jurisdiction over the 60-foot-wide strip along the state’s remote eastern border with Mexico. He said the state has a constitutional right to protect residents from “imminent danger of criminal and humanitarian crises.”
“Arizona is going to do the job that Joe Biden refuses to do — secure the border in any way we can.” Ducey said in announcing the lawsuit last month. “We’re not backing down.”
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The Justice Department Office of Legislative Affairs said that “the state’s actions have substantially curtailed federal law enforcement personnel from freely accessing the border area, and Arizona’s placement of armed guards on federal land risks putting federal law enforcement officials in danger,” according to an email obtained by the Arizona Republic.
“Arizona’s actions have also stymied federal efforts to complete construction of border infrastructure projects in certain locations,” the email adds.
Environmentalists have warned the containers could harm natural water systems and endanger species, while Governor-elect Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, called the containers a waste of resources and has suggested the containers could possibly be repurposed as affordable housing.
Ducey’s border wall project began this summer in Yuma, a popular crossing point where containers filled gaps in former president Donald Trump’s border wall. Now, crews have begun focusing on San Rafael Valley, an area of the border that does not see many border crossings, according to the Associated Press.
The initial project in Yuma cost about $6 million and required eleven days of work to erect 130 containers to secure some 3,800 feet.
The new work, which will use up to 3,000 containers to secure ten miles in Cochise County, is costing the state $95 million. The new wall has gaps of several hundred yards in some areas due to steep terrain.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection is set to fill gaps on the border near Yuma with temporary mesh fencing and vehicle gates beginning in January, according to the Arizona Republic.
A spokesman for the governor celebrated the news.
“The shipping containers were always a temporary solution to an ongoing problem,” spokesman C.J. Karamargin said. “From our perspective, the shipping container mission is a success. Not only have we plugged gaps in the border barrier, but we got the federal government to do their job.”
Send a tip to the news team at NR.
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/12/19/chief-justice-john-roberts-puts-brakes-on-bidens-ending-title-42-at-border/
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https://www.newsnationnow.com/cuomo-show/manchin-immigration-deal-not-even-on-the-table/
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I put this under border thread but my real point is Manchin should switch parties and is giving plenty of signs.
Adding this:
“And I think that basically, I will make my decision (about switching parties) whenever I make the decision, or if I do make a decision, I will do it, and I’m not in any hurry to do that,” Manchin continued. On CNN with Jake Tapper
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video came up
with Cuomo (Newsnation). (channel 82 at my location)
interviewing Joe
not tapper (though he is equally an obnoxious liberal Democrat operative)
https://www.yahoo.com/news/senators-confident-bill-to-block-election-subversion-will-become-law-212158562.html
I also saw O"Reilly on Cuomo last night
watching Bill state how he never saw a President so derelict in his duty in enforcing the laws of the US (refusing to control border and immigration law on the books)
Cuomo of course defends Biden of course
as do all Dems
since they want more votes to wipe out Republicans once and for all in elections.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlCJAS5cydk
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/texas-national-guard-border-force-blocking-illegal-crossings_4937218.html?utm_source=Goodevening&src_src=Goodevening&utm_campaign=gv-2022-12-21&src_cmp=gv-2022-12-21&utm_medium=email&est=%2BgRZDnsa1rdqNpJ7df68hW8dWoxC9ydX5jIJWD52EahrNRSlIw9cnejWNrYbDi1rU2eF
Texas National Guard ‘Border Force’ Blocking Illegal Crossings
By Tom Ozimek December 21, 2022 Updated: December 21, 2022biggersmaller Print
Texas National Guard troops deployed to El Paso have constructed a razor-wire barrier along the Rio Grande and have been blocking people from making unauthorized crossings into the United States amid a migrant surge and legal back-and-forth about ending Title 42, a Trump-era rule that helped stem the tide of illegal immigration.
Acting under orders from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, several hundred soldiers that are part of a “contingency border force” have set up along the river channel separating El Paso from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, with the aim of preventing people from crossing the border illegally.
“This morning, service members deployed to El Paso, Texas constructed a triple-strand concertina barrier near the border to secure the area from illegal crossings,” the Texas Military Department, which oversees the state’s National Guard, said in a Dec. 20 statement.
The Texas National Guard told media outlets that its service members are trying to funnel asylum-seekers to designated ports of entry while their “primary goal” is to prevent “illegal crossings into Texas.”
A group of around 75 people seeking to enter the United States through an unauthorized crossing faced off against National Guard members and state troopers on Tuesday, according to the Texas Tribune, which reported that a National Guard service member told them through a bullhorn that they would be unable to enter.
Abbott ordered more than 400 Texas National Guard personnel to El Paso on Monday as part of a “contingency border force” being deployed in response to high levels of illegal border crossings in recent times and the pending expiration of Title 42 restrictions.
Title 42 is the Trump-era rule that has been used around 2.5 million times to block people from making asylum claims in the United States and that has been widely credited as helping reduce the influx.
“The end of Title 42 is expected to lead to a massive influx of illegal immigrants allowing criminals to further exploit gaps while federal authorities are inundated with migrant processing,” the Texas Military Department said in a statement.
Abbott’s “enhanced border security effort” will include the deployment of a Security Response Force that includes elements from the 606th Military Police Battalion, which the Texas Military Department said is “trained in civil disturbance operations and mass migration response.”
Tens of thousands of would-be border crossers have assembled near the border amid expectations that the Title 42 restrictions would be lifted.
Title 42 Back-and-Forth
Texas was among the 19 Republican-led states that asked the U.S. Supreme Court to extend Title 42 restrictions beyond its scheduled Dec. 21 end date.
Chief Justice John Roberts granted the request, prompting the Biden administration to ask the high court to lift Title 42 but give it some time to prepare for an influx in illegal border crossings.
The Biden administration wants the restrictions in place until the end of Dec. 27 if the Supreme Court were to act before Dec. 23. If the court acts on Friday or later, the government wants the limits to remain until the second business day following such an order.
“The government recognizes that the end of the Title 42 orders will likely lead to disruption and a temporary increase in unlawful border crossings. The government in no way seeks to minimize the seriousness of that problem,” a Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyer said in a Supreme Court filing.
The lawyer added that “the solution to that immigration problem cannot be to extend indefinitely a public-health measure that all now acknowledge has outlived its public-health justification.”
Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, who sued along with other organizations to end Title 42, said Abbott has no legal right to stop migrants from seeking asylum anywhere on the border. “What Texas is doing by preventing people from seeking asylum is patently unlawful and should stop immediately,” he said in an interview.
Before troops deployed to El Paso on Monday, hundreds of people had crossed the border and waited in line to be processed by Border Patrol agents, with many later released into the city.
El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser, a Democrat, warned that shelters across the border in Ciudad Juárez were filled to capacity, with an estimated 20,000 people looking to cross into the United States.
Leeser on Sunday declared a state of emergency in El Paso amid a surge in unauthorized crossings that has left people sleeping in the streets.
He said the emergency measures will allow the city to access more resources and authority to shelter people, adding that the measures would be even more necessary after Title 42 ends, when he predicted that the rise in the number of illegal border crossings would be “incredible.”
Over the past week, border agents have encountered an average of around 1,500 illegal aliens a day in a 268-mile stretch of the border known as the El Paso Sector, according to figures published by the city.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said in a statement on Tuesday that over the past week, agents have moved more than 3,400 illegal aliens by expelling them to Mexico under Title 42 or flying them back to their home countries via ICE expedited removal flights.
In a bid to ease pressure on El Paso, agents have also moved 6,000 aliens from the area to other sectors for processing.
“Average daily encounters have also dropped 40 percent—from roughly 2,500 a day to roughly 1,500 a day—over the last three days as we continue to work with partners in Mexico to discourage disorderly migration and disrupt criminal smuggling operations,” DHS said in the statement.
With cold temperatures gripping Texas, Abbott asked President Joe Biden on Tuesday to deploy federal assets immediately “to address the dire border crisis, particularly in the City of El Paso, as a dangerously cold polar vortex moves into Texas this week.”
In a letter to Biden, the Texas governor blamed “federal inaction” for putting the lives of migrants at risk, warning that the numbers of people crossing the border illegally would rise if Title 42 expulsions end
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/arizona-agrees-to-dismantle-shipping-container-border-wall-after-federal-lawsuit/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=30055648
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3245382/texas-governor-abbott-is-an-invasion-force-commander
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WITH CONTROL OF THE BORDER, CARTELS HAVE BECOME COMPLETELY BRAZEN… NOW TAKING TRAFFICKING MONEY ON AMERICAN SIDE… With Title 42 In Limbo, Cartels Illegally Smuggle In Hundreds Of Migrants Across The Southern Border (VIDEO)
Cartels smuggled in hundreds of illegal migrants Wednesday after the Supreme Court temporarily halted the expiration of Title 42.
A pool of migrants crossed the border into Yuma, Arizona, around 3:00 a.m. after cartels transported and dropped them off, Daily Caller field reporter Jorge Ventura reported. Footage captured migrants paying a cartel member to smuggle them to the U.S. The smuggler then returned to Mexico. The majority of migrants appeared to be from Cuba and Peru.
A long line of migrants waited for several hours to be apprehended as the record-high number of migrants reaching the border overwhelms border officials. Migrants are currently waiting longer hours for processing after the Supreme Court imposed a temporary stay Monday on the expiration of Title 42, a Trump-era policy allowing migrants to be quickly expelled in order to mitigate the spread of COVID-19.
ARIZONA SURRENDERS IN BORDER WALL FIGHT… FOX: Arizona agrees to take down shipping container border wall to settle Biden lawsuit
Under pressure from the Biden administration, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey is halting construction of a wall fashioned from shipping containers at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The Republican governor reached a settlement with the Department of Justice in which Arizona agreed to stop construction of the border wall on national forest lands, according to court documents filed Thursday with the U.S. District Court in Phoenix.
The agreement stipulates that Arizona will remove all previously installed shipping containers and associated equipment, materials, vehicles and other objects in the U.S. Border Patrol Yuma Sector, without damaging U.S. natural resources. To do so, Arizona will work in conjunction with officials from the U.S. Forest Service and Customs and Border Protection.
The agreement was reached one week after the Biden administration filed a lawsuit against Ducey on behalf of the Bureau of Reclamation, the Department of Agriculture and the Forest Service.
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By RICH LOWRY
December 23, 2022 6:30 AM
It’s incredible that two years into the Biden administration, officials still point the finger at Donald Trump.
The U.S. teeters on the brink of a complete meltdown at the border, and yet the Biden administration is still consumed with blame-shifting and evasions.
Whatever happens at the border must be the fault of the prior administration, Joe Biden’s critics, or circumstances beyond anyone’s control. And no matter how bad things get, it is definitely not in any way a “crisis at the border” — a phrase as taboo at the Biden White House as “black sheep” or “ladies and gentlemen” at Stanford University.
Pancho Villa could ride again and detach a portion of the United States to serve as a safe haven for millions of migrants drawn from throughout the hemisphere and Biden officials would call it a “challenge,” not a “crisis.”
If the famous Mexican revolutionary isn’t going to reappear, when Title 42 — the pandemic-era edict that has become a pillar of border enforcement — inevitably expires, the historic influx of migrants is now only going to swell. Current daily apprehensions are running at an off-the-charts 7,000 a day and could go as high as 18,000.
It’s incredible, but true, that two years into the Biden administration, with Donald Trump 800 miles south of the White House hawking trading cards, Biden officials still point the finger at him.
The other day, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said her boss has been saddled with the “system that was set” by his predecessor. Biden, too, has claimed that he was stuck with “one god-awful mess at the border,” and Department of Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas likes to complain about “inheriting a broken and dismantled immigration system.”
It’s passing strange, though, that the failure of Trump’s approach didn’t become apparent until he left office and his policies were largely dismantled.
PHOTOS: Border Crisis at El Paso
It’d be one thing if Biden had positioned himself as an inheritor of Trump’s border policies, and assiduously kept them in place; then, if crossings skyrocketed anyway, he might have had legitimate cause to argue that the Trump measures had failed.
Instead, he declared himself a sworn enemy of all Trump had wrought, tore as much of it up as possible, and, when a border that had been brought under control by 2020 unraveled month by month, still blamed it on Trump. This is a rhetorical move so audacious that most wouldn’t dare attempt it.
Equally bold is the assertion that harsh criticisms of Biden’s border policies are responsible for migrants’ coming. Jean-Pierre recently said that if Title 42 is lifted, it “does not mean the border is open. Anyone who suggests otherwise is simply doing the work of these smugglers.”
The idea is that if border hawks say we have a de facto open border, migrants will think, erroneously, that they can come to the border and gain entry illegally. Of course, it is the reality that migrants can come to the border and gain entry illegally that is driving the continued flow, rather than anyone pointing this out.
Then, there is the communism excuse. “What’s on my watch now,” Biden has said, “is Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua.” Jean-Pierre puts a finer point on it. “Failing authoritarian regimes in Venezuela, as well as Nicaragua and Cuba, are causing a new migration challenge across the Western Hemisphere,” she averred. “So, what we’re seeing is a new pattern.”
It is certainly true that the number of migrants from these countries has increased, but if the border is largely open, they are going to feel the same incentive to come as migrants from other countries. Migrants from these three places still accounted for only 35 percent of the total as of August 2021. Sadly, Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua have been miserably misgoverned for a long time. What’s changed is that desperate people living in these countries have a better chance of getting into, and staying in, the United States than ever before.
When Title 42 goes away, it’s hard to predict exactly what will happen — except that Biden and his team will resist taking any responsibility
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/dec/25/busloads-migrants-arrive-near-kamala-harris-home-c/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=6vu4ydxactcxaded0DIf9wK5jqnmzJZvZj8nD4Zf4W%2BF5sEa%2Fmt9Vwt%2FNYaAGECy&bt_ts=1672000187326
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https://www.yahoo.com/gma/2-power-substations-attacked-washington-203500942.html
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3266529/armed-invasion-of-united-states
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https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/whos-attacking-our-power-grid/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MJ_20221227&utm_term=Jolt-Smart
Who’s Attacking Our Power Grid?
By JIM GERAGHTY
December 27, 2022 10:15 AM
On the menu today: I hope you had a wonderful Christmas. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it appears someone is attacking the electrical power grid of the Seattle area, which comes after a series of similar incidents elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest as well as in Florida. And the FBI never caught the guy who attacked the electrical grid down in North Carolina earlier this month. Shooting up a power substation is apparently the latest fad.
Electric Boogaloo
Picture it: It’s Christmas, you’re about to prepare a big meal for the whole family, and the power goes out — all the lights, the refrigerator, your computer and cellphone charger, the works. That happened this year for a lot of families in the Seattle area, but it wasn’t wind, snow, or bad weather; someone shot up their local power substation.
The initial Pierce County Sheriff’s Department public statement was . . . curious:
Today at 05:26 am we received a call of a burglary to the Tacoma Public Utilities Substation at 22312 46th Ave E.
Deputies arrived on scene and saw there was forced entry into the fenced area. Nothing had been taken from the substation, but the suspect vandalized the equipment causing a power outage in the area.
Deputies were notified of a second burglary to the TPU substation at 8820 224th St E which also had forced entry with damage to the equipment. Nothing was taken from this site either.
At 11:25 we were notified by Puget Sound Energy that they too had a power outage this morning at 02:39 am. Deputies are currently on scene at this facility where the fenced area was broken into and the equipment vandalized.
At this time deputies are conducting the initial investigation. We do not have any suspects in custody. It is unknown if there are any motives or if this was a coordinated attack on the power systems.
In total, three sites were vandalized, two TPU and one PSE, with more than 14,000 customers effected.
Really? They weren’t sure if three separate site invasions where equipment was vandalized and broken in a matter of hours might be a coordinated attack? It’s Christmas morning: Most other people have places to be and things to do at that time!
That night, the department issued a second police report:
At 7:21 pm, on December 25th, 2022, dispatchers received a call of a fire at the Puget Sound Energy substation at 14320 Kapowsin Hwy E. Deputies, Firefighters and Puget Sound Energy employees responded to the scene. The fire was extinguished and the substation secured. Power was knocked out for homes in Kapowsin and Graham. The suspect(s) gained access to the fenced area and vandalized the equipment which caused the fire. There are no suspects in custody at this time.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because earlier this month, someone still at large attacked power stations in North Carolina, knocking out power for tens of thousands of people. This, dear readers, is not-so-accurately labeled “vandalism” and is more accurately labeled “terrorism,” and the FBI is investigating.
Because we live in a politically charged era, the FBI is investigating two potential motives, according to CNN.
Investigators — who have found nearly two dozen shell casings from a high-powered rifle — are zeroing in on two threads of possible motives centered on extremist behavior for the weekend assault on two North Carolina electric substations, according to law-enforcement sources briefed on the investigation.
One thread involves the writings by extremists on online forums encouraging attacks on critical infrastructure. The second thread looks at a series of recent disruptions of LGBTQ+ events across the nation by domestic extremists.
The FBI and the NC State Bureau are assisting in the investigation. Investigators have no evidence connecting the North Carolina attacks to a drag event at the theater in the same county, but the timing of two events are being considered in context with the growing tensions and armed confrontations around similar LBGTQ+ events across the country, the sources told CNN.
Sheriff Ronnie Fields has said that whoever fired at the substations “knew exactly what they were doing.” No group “has stepped up to acknowledge or accept they’re the ones who [did] it,” the sheriff said on Sunday.
But what really ought to make us sit up and take notice is how Seattle and North Carolina are just two of the most high-profile incidents of this kind of attack, which appears to be growing more frequent. Before the North Carolina attacks garnered national attention, someone launched a series of attacks elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest:
The electrical grid has been physically attacked at least six times in Oregon and Western Washington since mid-November, causing growing alarm for law enforcement as well as utilities responsible for parts of the region’s critical infrastructure.
According to information obtained by Oregon Public Broadcasting and KUOW Public Radio, at least two of the incidents bear similarities to the attacks on substations in North Carolina on Saturday that left thousands of people without electricity for days.
Portland General Electric, the Bonneville Power Administration, Cowlitz County Public Utility District and Puget Sound Energy have confirmed a total of six separate attacks on electrical substations they manage in Oregon and Washington. Attackers used firearms in at least some of the incidents in both states, and some power customers in Oregon and Washington experienced at least brief service disruption as a result of the attacks.
. . .
Two people cut through the fence surrounding a high-voltage substation, then “used firearms to shoot up and disable numerous pieces of equipment and cause significant damage,” the security specialist wrote.
The memo also referenced “several attacks on various substations,” recently, in Western Washington, “including setting the control houses on fire, forced entry and sabotage of intricate electrical control systems, causing short circuits by tossing chains across the overhead buswork, and ballistic attack with small caliber firearms.”
(“Buswork” is a term for the maze of wires and switches that hum overhead at a substation.)
Earlier this fall, an individual or groups started forcing their way into power substations in Florida and attempting to cut the power:
On Sept. 21, an intruder “forced entry” into the Zephyrhills North substation in Pasco County, manually tripping equipment that caused an outage lasting nine minutes, according to a report filed with the U.S. Department of Energy.
One day later, someone “forced entry” at Duke’s East Clearwater substation in Pinellas County, again manually tripping equipment that caused an outage lasting two minutes.
The two substations are about 50 miles apart and both incidents took place in the early morning hours between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m.
Experts say the threats to infrastructure are nothing new but appear to have become more common recently.
“It’s definitely not a new type of threat but I think we’re seeing a level of intent to cause damage that is higher than we’ve probably seen in the past,” said Todd Keil, an associate managing director for security risk management at Kroll, who previously worked with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Power substations are particularly hard to protect, as they’re often isolated in the middle of nowhere and usually unmanned.
Politico examined the federal records on attacks on power stations, substations, and related equipment and determined assaults “are at their highest level since at least 2012, including 101 reported this year through the end of August. . . . The previous peak was the 97 incidents recorded for all of 2021.”
(You may also recall the power going out in parts of Tennessee on Christmas 2020, after a bomber blew himself up, because he was concerned about lizard people. His bomb detonated in front of an AT&T hub, and crippled cellular, internet, and cable service across several states.)
Reacting to the attacks on power substations in Washington, Steve Hayward at the, er, ironically named blog Power Line concludes, “This starts to sound like possible eco-terrorism. After all, throwing paint at artworks in museums, and gluing yourself to the wall, doesn’t stop greenhouse gas emissions. Blowing of the electricity grid just might.”
These attacks could be the work of eco-terrorists, but it’s fair to wonder if the average green extremist would know which systems to shoot up in order to disrupt the power transmission. Then again, I suppose you can learn just about anything from the internet these days.
It’s worth keeping in mind that in February, three men in Ohio pleaded guilty to conspiring to provide material support to terrorists, as part of a plot to attack the U.S. power grid in furtherance of white-supremacist ideology. According to the Department of Justice, “as part of the conspiracy, each defendant was assigned a substation in a different region of the United States. The plan was to attack the substations, or power grids, with powerful rifles. The defendants believed their plan would cost the government millions of dollars and cause unrest for Americans in the region. They had conversations about how the possibility of the power being out for many months could cause war, even a race war, and induce the next Great Depression.”
Just because it may seem like the Justice Department reflexively blames white nationalists and violent anti-government extremists for acts of terrorism doesn’t mean that white nationalists and violent anti-government extremists don’t exist, or that they don’t aim to harm as many people as possible.
Attribute it to whatever you like — the Die Hard obsession, the need for inspiration for the novels — but I’ve always liked looking at unsolved mysteries, particularly terrorist attacks with no plausible claims of responsibility and no named suspects, that often fade from the public’s collective memory. One of the odder ones occurred in April 2013 at a Pacific Gas and Electric’s substation in Metcalf, Calif. The perpetrator began by slipping into an underground vault not far from a busy freeway and cutting telephone cables. Then, “within half an hour, snipers opened fire on a nearby electrical substation. Shooting for 19 minutes, they surgically knocked out 17 giant transformers that funnel power to Silicon Valley. A minute before a police car arrived, the shooters disappeared into the night.”
“This wasn’t an incident where Billy-Bob and Joe decided, after a few brewskis, to come in and shoot up a substation,” Mark Johnson, retired vice president of transmission for PG&E, told a utility-security conference, according to a video of his presentation, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. “This was an event that was well thought out, well planned and they targeted certain components.”
Nearly two years later, Caitlin Durkovich, assistant secretary for infrastructure protection at the Department of Homeland Security, said at an energy conference, “While we have not yet identified the shooter, there’s some indication it was an insider.” I notice the early accounts of the attack by the authorities used the pronoun “they,” and references to “snipers,” indicating they believed more than one person was involved in the attack.
I suppose the energy industry has disgruntled employees as much as the next industry, but this seems like a particularly elaborate and ambitious plan for revenge. It’s also worth remembering that the exact same substation in California was robbed a year later, which shouldn’t fill us with confidence about the physical security around these sites.
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https://dailycaller.com/2022/12/28/immigration-and-customs-enforcement-illegal-immigration/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking&pnespid=uat2CXQfJbIe06Gd.m6wSp2VuUmrCcd2Pemx2PN5rAdmrmfYN2FOELTiWTW0gqb_2igOR7rm
INVESTIGATIVE GROUP
ICE Admits It Has ‘No Records’ For Hundreds Of Thousands Of Illegal Immigrants Released With Electronic Monitors
ICE Agents Detain Suspected Undocumented Immigrants In Raids
John Moore/Getty Images
Daily Caller News Foundation logo
JENNIE TAER
INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER
December 28, 2022
1:23 PM ET
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) admitted to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) that it has “no records” of 377,980 illegal immigrants enrolled in its “Alternatives to Detention” program.
TRAC sent a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for data on the program, which used to electronically monitor illegal immigrants into the country.
“ICE’s response that they could no longer find records on immigrants in Alternatives to Detention (ATD) that they had previously released came as a shock, particularly after they informed us recently that they had been misleading the public for several months by releasing extremely inaccurate ATD data. The agency really needs to come clean. The American public deserves to have accurate data about the ATD program,” TRAC assistant Professor Austin Kocher told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) admitted it has “no records” of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants released into the country with electronic tracking devices, the agency said in a Dec. 22 letter to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).
ICE informed TRAC that it had “no records” of the 377,980 individuals monitored by the agency’s “Alternatives to Detention” (ATD) program used to electronically track illegal immigrants released into the country. TRAC had asked for data via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on those in ATD custody from the start of fiscal year 2019 to August 2022. (RELATED: ‘Didn’t Have To Happen’: This Wyoming Sheriff Wants An Illegal Alien Who Raped An 8-Year-Old Imprisoned, Not Deported)
“ICE’s response that they could no longer find records on immigrants in Alternatives to Detention (ATD) that they had previously released came as a shock, particularly after they informed us recently that they had been misleading the public for several months by releasing extremely inaccurate ATD data. The agency really needs to come clean. The American public deserves to have accurate data about the ATD program,” TRAC assistant Professor Austin Kocher told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
ICE started the ATD program in 2004 to monitor illegal migrants released into the country using ankle monitors, GPS tracking and cellphones. With limited detention space, ICE relies on the program to hold those awaiting the years-long backlogs in immigration courts.
The agency has previously provided TRAC with data on individuals enrolled in ATD, disclosing which technology was used, dates of entry into the program among other key details.
TRAC’s latest issue with ICE isn’t the first time the data on the ATD program has faced scrutiny.
The DCNF recently reported on errors and miscalculations in the ATD data on illegal immigrants not tracked with any technology and others tracked using GPS monitoring. At the time, ICE had privately disclosed different data to participants of a private event that showed an over 18,000% discrepancy in public data on those not tracked with any technology and another roughly 600% difference in publicly disclosed GPS tracking data.
ICE later apologized for the issue and updated the data.
“Upon further inspection of what participants were provided against what was publicly available online, it became clear there was a data miscalculation. Teams worked quickly to address and reconcile the issue, now updated on ICE.gov. We regret ICE provided erroneous ATD enrollment data and worked to resolve the miscalculation going forward,” an ICE spokesperson told the DCNF at the time.
TRAC is concerned over ICE’s consistent errors.
“When Congress ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to publish data on immigrant detention, perhaps it should have been clearer that it expected ICE to produce accurate data—not inconsistent, error-ridden, and misleading data that the agency currently provides to the public on a regular basis. These sloppy, uncorrected errors—more of the norm rather than the exception—demand immediate attention from both the public and from Congress,” TRAC wrote on Sept. 20 after ICE incorrectly released data from May 2021 instead of September 2022.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeLQRLzo_-c
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https://dailycaller.com/2022/12/28/immigration-and-customs-enforcement-illegal-immigration/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking&pnespid=uat2CXQfJbIe06Gd.m6wSp2VuUmrCcd2Pemx2PN5rAdmrmfYN2FOELTiWTW0gqb_2igOR7rm&fbclid=IwAR32SjYT3sK-kOvO7OIefGv-TCBNR4KMQNF6qCPdtW5u_a26AyI6MEj_XVs
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https://dailycaller.com/2022/12/28/southern-border-illegal-immigration-wyoming-crime/?utm_medium=email&pnespid=6bU8BSVEP.0civ.N_mvpEpjSv0izVpJzI.Sl07tj8wxmTl0SamkUhJo4NPToE8BQGRDH9vNV
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https://dailycaller.com/2022/12/27/joe-biden-asylum-illegal-immigration/?utm_medium=email&pnespid=rOV_DyBAP6Uf36PZrzvsA5fSoBjxT54oKvXjyPt2oANm.uIhF0BS5GlEtTsXAlhi27FCtRbR
There are a record number of asylum cases backlogging U.S. immigration courts under President Joe Biden, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).
There are roughly 1.6 million asylum cases, a record number, backlogging the system, according to TRAC, which analyzes and compiles government data. The wait times for court appearances have increased to an average of 4.3 years nationwide, TRAC reported.
Those waiting the longest for their court proceedings are in Omaha, Nebraska, where the average wait time is 2,168 days.
The new high for the Biden administration comes following a record year for migrant encounters at the southern border.U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) encountered more than 2.3 million migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in fiscal year 2022. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: ‘Unacceptable’: Texas GOP Rep Demands Mayorkas Answer To Data ‘Miscalculations’ After DCNF Reports)
“Asylum backlogs are not new (as TRAC has shown many times), since the number of people requesting the type of protection that asylum provides has typically exceeded the capacity of government agencies to process applications quickly and fairly. Yet in recent years, with political, economic, and environmental instability in places like Mexico, Venezuela, Haiti, Central America, Ukraine, and elsewhere, the United States has seen a growth in migrants’ needs that outpace even the growing number of Immigration Judges and asylum officers added by both Democratic and Republican administrations,” TRAC noted.
(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
In fiscal year 2012, there were over 10,000 asylum cases, according to TRAC. That number increased to 750,000 in fiscal year 2022.
Those seeking asylum come from 219 different countries, according to TRAC. But nearly 60% of applicants come from only five countries that include Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico and Venezuela.
Roughly 30% of those seeking asylum are children, according to TRAC. There have been large increases in the number of asylum cases in Florida and Massachusetts recently, TRAC reported.
“The shifting composition of nationalities reflects not just the volume of individuals arriving at our borders seeking asylum, but the country’s policies and practices of which nationalities are being allowed to actually enter the U.S. and seek asylum. Asylum seekers from the Northern Triangle countries and Mexico were usually immediately turned away under Title 42 and not allowed to enter and seek asylum. The Biden administration has created some exceptions to this policy, exceptions that have been structured by nationality,” TRAC noted.
In March, the Biden administration implemented a rule to hire asylum officers to vet claims before illegal immigrants went to court to address the backlog. Additionally, it added Venezuelans to the list of several nationalities that can be expelled under Title 42, a Trump-era public health order used to expel certain illegal immigrants to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, in October.
Asylum officers can approve or deny claims. If a case is denied, an immigration judge can overrule the denial, according to TRAC. Some asylum seekers are brought first to an immigration judge if they were previously apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) or processed for expedited removal.
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
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https://mexiconewsdaily.com/travel/san-diego-and-tijuana-a-vanishing-border/?utm_source=MND%20mail&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MNT&pnespid=s6B9GnpZbaVD2PKbpSuqHc7Qoku0DJorPOynxexstgZmrOSsu3MDi5WKM4c1nhkwoXIfmEcY
San Diego and Tijuana: a vanishing border?
Marko Ayling
Marko Ayling
December 29, 2022
0
Aerial view of the San Diego-Tijuana metropolitan region. (Wikimedia Commons)
Whenever I travel from Mexico City to my hometown of San Diego, I always fly through the Tijuana International Airport. I take advantage of something that few travelers know: it extends to the U.S. side of the border.
It is built right against the border wall and a sealed bridge travels up and over the physical fence, allowing quick and affordable travel between San Diego and Mexico.
I’m sharing this for a few reasons.
First, it’s a massive travel hack.
If you’re traveling between Southern California and Mexico, it almost always saves you money (it’s a domestic flight within Mexico) and time, thanks to highly expedited customs and immigration cooperation. And with the surging cost of air travel, the savings add up.
Cross-border X-press in Tijuana International Airport
The Cross-Border X-press that connects Tijuana International Airport with San Diego, California is a testament to how many people move back and forth between the Mexico-U.S. border daily and how the two cities are slowly becoming one entity. (Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacífico)
Secondly, the Tijuana airport connects to 39 destinations within Mexico, making it easy to fly direct to many airports not serviced by LAX or San Diego. It also has direct flights to China and Japan, a byproduct of the city’s many maquiladoras (export-focused factories for foreign companies, many of which are Asian).
But more importantly, it’s a bright star in the often rocky relationship between my countries of birth and residence, an area of cooperation that has advanced despite (and during) surging nationalism and an example of how San Diego and Tijuana are increasingly becoming a single city separated by a shared border.
In fact, San Diego-Tijuana is one of the world’s largest binational metropolitan areas, with a combined population of 5 million people. And as I witness the ties deepen between Mexico City and other North American cities, my hometown is an example of cutting-edge bilateral collaboration.
Many of the following facts are pulled from the excellent book, “Vanishing Frontiers: The Forces Driving Mexico and the United States Together” by journalist Andrew Selee. The first chapter is dedicated to SD/TJ, which warmed my heart and inspired this article.
The cross-border airport (called Cross Border Express, or CBX) came about when San Diego city planners were looking to expand our airport, which is wedged between downtown and the harbor and constrained to a single runway. This has limited the city’s economic expansion, as larger planes can’t land here. But Tijuana International Airport has much more runway space and capacity for planes large enough to cross the Pacific.
So instead of expanding or relocating San Diego’s airport, they simply built a bridge over the border straight into the Tijuana Airport. Now San Diegans can check into their flight on the U.S. side, breeze through customs and be eating Ensenada-style tacos in Tijuana 20 minutes later.
For Mexicans, the American terminal has car rental agencies; shuttles taking you as far as Disneyland, Los Angeles, Arizona, and Las Vegas; and a relatively smooth immigration experience. It’s also right next door to the Otay Mesa outlet malls for bargain shopping.
CBX was funded by private investors, who took a gamble on the concept. But it’s been a huge hit.
Groundbreaking of SR11/Otay Mesa East Port of Entry project in Aug. 2022
The SR11/Otay Mesa East Port of Entry project, which broke ground on Aug. 22 and will be a new border crossing between San Diego and Tijuana, is just one of many binational projects collaborated on between the two cities. (Photo: SANDAG/Twitter)
I used it shortly after its opening in 2015 on my first trip to Mexico City. Since moving here, it’s become the only way I travel to California. And from what I have witnessed, it’s a common way for Mexican immigrants to visit family back home.
During my recent trip, I was surprised to enter a completely remodeled terminal that was even faster and easier than the previous one. The upgraded terminal cost 2 billion pesos (US $102.5 million) and is 83% bigger, has 75% more capacity and 25% more immigration processing lines.
And with plans to expand service in Asia and Latin America, it’s an example of how the cities are fusing into a major economic region.
After a couple of years of shuttling between Mexico City and San Diego, I’ve come to appreciate these connections even more. It’s no surprise that both San Diego and Tijuana have some of the best craft beer in their respective countries — brewers frequently cross the border to swap recipes. And while Americans fly to CDMX to eat at award-winning restaurants like Pujol or Contramar, the city’s top chefs are building outposts in New York and Los Angeles.
Some other examples include how maquiladoras increasingly send goods back and forth across the border during different stages of production, how the La Rumorosa wind farm east of Tijuana produces green energy for San Diego Gas and Electric, and how the entire state of Baja California is connected to the U.S. power grid — not Mexico’s.
More importantly, the percentage of San Diegans who say their city’s future is closely tied to that of Tijuana has gone up from 9% in 2012 to over 70% now.
But clearly, challenges remain. For too many, the border is still an all-too-real barrier. There are many Mexicans (and other nationals) who are unable to cross the border in pursuit of the American dream. And while these stymied immigrants often settle in Tijuana and enrich the local culture (especially the food), it’s impossible to ignore how much easier it is to travel south than north.
And despite Mexico City’s explosive popularity with millennials, many Americans continue to view the country as a source of violence and unwanted problems, even as Aeroméxico trolls such bigotry in this viral ad from 2018:
Nevertheless, in an era when so many call for more walls, it’s refreshing to see bridges being built between cultures.
This article was originally published on The Missive on Substack. Minor editorial changes have been made to the original.
Marko Ayling is a life-long traveler and the creator and host of Vagabrothers, one of the most trusted and popular travel shows on YouTube, with 1M+ subscribers worldwide. He now writes “The Missive” on Substack, a weekly dispatch of travel tales, reading recommendations, and curated cultural recommendation
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3283460/disassembling-us-border-defense
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https://www.foxnews.com/media/air-marshals-outraged-biden-admin-border-deployments-despite-terror-threat-absolutely-madness?fbclid=IwAR30lFGeqdKkybYMPi6JUtC0DsAzBpT3N_KjaREHuGVgOGhRr5TFH6JlSc4
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https://www.judicialwatch.org/al-qaeda-plans-plane-attacks-using-new-techniques/?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=corruption%20chronicle
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11596107/Two-men-charged-power-substation-attacks-left-thousands-Washington-state-without-power.html
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11596107/Two-men-charged-power-substation-attacks-left-thousands-Washington-state-without-power.html
'they were trying to rob a local cash register'??
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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/crime/el-paso-clears-downtown-migrant-camps-biden-visit?fbclid=IwAR0THRx0o42N9bbJpVqLiqcwcu32u3_wh9xpTxzTYqvTQyKA9qTm_UiHa_o
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https://www.youtube.com/shorts/owm6-drFs2Q
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Biden’s Immigration ‘Parole’ Scam
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
January 7, 2023 6:30 AM
Biden is willfully failing to execute the laws faithfully when it comes to illegal immigration.
We must have a “safe, orderly, and humane processing” of “migrants” seeking to enter the United States. Prepare to hear that a lot, particularly on Sunday at President Biden’s drive-by in El Paso. It’s the new Biden administration mantra. If you hear it often enough, Biden hopes you’ll pass into just the right detached, transcendental state — the state that seems to befall him now and again (and again . . . and again . . .). That way, you might not notice that Congress has already enacted into federal law the “safe, orderly, and humane process” for aliens who enter our country in violation of our laws.
It’s called detention.
Last weekend, I urged that the House impeach Biden over the security catastrophe he has willfully created at the southern border. In just the last two months, for example, over 600,000 illegal aliens — oh, sorry, migrants — have been apprehended. And mind you, that doesn’t count another 200,000-plus “got aways,” who’ve snuck in without being captured because Biden won’t provide adequate enforcement resources. As anger over his non-enforcement policy mounts, Biden is now trying to hoodwink the country into believing that he is getting tough on illegal-alien entries, despite two years of aiding and abetting millions of them. That is what tomorrow’s theater in El Paso is about. It’s why on Thursday, Biden announced a new policy, dramatically warning Latin America that aliens who show up at the border without legal authorization to enter will be denied the opportunity to apply for asylum.
On cue, the media-Democrat complex shrieked and blubbered about how very distressing it all is to “human-rights organizations.” But it’s a scam, and they’re in on it. The monitory tone of the coverage is misdirection. Buried deeper in the reporting is an alternative illegal-entry route the administration is pedaling — softly and disingenuously when addressing the American people, but loud and clear south of the border.
Biden and his factotum, Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, are telling aliens the world over who want to come to the United States that they just need to let us know they’re coming ahead of time. For this, they just need to use an app or avail themselves of various hubs in Mexico (and elsewhere, to be sure). The idea is that Biden will then purport to grant them parole before they get to the border. The fiction is that this way, when the alien hordes later show up at the border, they won’t be “without legal authorization” anymore. The parole decreed by the chief executive will be treated as if it were a visa granted under legitimate American law.
“Wait a second,” you’re thinking, “hasn’t Biden already been paroling hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens?” Yes, he has. But see, the parole has been happening after the aliens get “encountered” at the border. (Encounter is a euphemism that the government employs because it doesn’t want to say arrest — that, after all, would imply detention, which the government is not doing, though the law requires it.)
Biden’s Useless Border Posturing
The Biden administration doesn’t want to do the parole post-encounter anymore. Is that because of our national-security problem? Don’t be silly: It’s because of Biden’s embarrassing political problem.
If the parole happens after the encounter, then the alien gets counted as a “migrant” who has been captured trying to enter illegally. With these illegal-alien arrest numbers now racing past 300,000 a month, Biden is on pace to exceed, by leaps and bounds, the 2.3 million “encountered” in fiscal year 2022 (which ended last September and thus doesn’t count the nearly 1 million more since then). As if this were not a bad enough look, Biden then presumes to parole a goodly chunk of these “migrants” into the country. Government reports must thus reflect the dreaded “capture and release” of illegal aliens by the million.
To address this political embarrassment, Biden has concocted a form of what we might call “migrant laundering.” The illegal aliens will now apply for parole before they get here, so that when they arrive at the border — voila! — they are no longer illegal; they’ll have their Biden parole codes. Border agents (the Welcoming Committee) will find the code right there on the app, perhaps loaded onto one of those cellphones illegal aliens are given gratis, courtesy of Uncle Sam (a.k.a the American taxpayer). That means there will no longer be reason to count these aliens in government stats as illegals caught at the border and then released onto our streets. You’re to conclude that the aliens are no longer illegal because they have Biden administration parole authorization, as if that were the same thing as authorization under the laws of the United States.
The result: The administration will tell us that there has been a dramatic decline in the number of “migrants” “encountered” each month while trying to cross the border “without authorization.” Sure, the exact same thing that was happening before will still be happening: Wave after wave of illegal aliens will arrive at the border and be ushered into the country. But we’ll be told that because “encounters” are down, the president has “solved” the border crisis — even as it further metastasizes when Title 42 is rescinded.
Needless to say, this is illegal. It is both a gross violation of the narrow, statutory parole authority Congress has granted the executive branch for decades, and an unconstitutional usurpation by the president of Congress’s power to set the conditions for lawful entry into the United States. In impeachment parlance, Biden is willfully failing to execute the laws faithfully, and rather than preserving the Constitution as his oath requires, he is shredding it.
As we’ve repeatedly observed, Congress has been crystal clear that aliens who enter the country illegally, or are arrested trying to, “shall be detained” until any legal proceedings are concluded. And, since the vast majority of illegal aliens have no viable claims of a right to enter and remain in our country if they have not gone through our generous legal-immigration process, Congress has provided for deportation forthwith. As Biden officials bang on about the need for “safe, orderly, and humane processing” of “migrants,” understand: It’s not like Congress never considered due process for illegal aliens. To the contrary, lawmakers considered it very carefully. Quite rationally, they decided that the processes of detention and rapid deportation were not merely safe, orderly, and humane but also the best way to discourage aliens from making the often-perilous journey to the United States. There is nothing humane about a policy, such as Biden’s, that encourages the unspeakable horrors of human trafficking.
Naturally, emergency situations do arise. An alien at the border may have a heart attack or other health exigency that requires emergency medical treatment. The Justice Department may need the testimony of an alien in a terrorism or organized-crime prosecution. Or there could be an earthquake or a war as a result of which, for humanitarian and diplomatic reasons, it is in the national interest to temporarily admit some aliens until the crisis eases. For such reasons, Congress gave the executive narrow parole authority, only to be invoked in cases of true emergency, and only on a case-by-case basis — i.e., not as a pretext to grant admission and de facto amnesty to broad categories of aliens whose entry and presence in the country has not been authorized by Congress.
The Obama-Biden administration blew out the parole limitations in 2009. The consequences have been disastrous. Before then, it was the rare alien who asserted a fear of persecution because such claims were so routinely denied. But now, aliens and smuggling networks know that “migrants” who say those magic words will be paroled into the United States and, in all probability, never kicked out. That’s why they’re coming in droves now. And of course, transnational progressives believe, regardless of what our law says, that our obligation is to roll out the red carpet and ensure that “migrants” have a “safe, orderly, humane process” for positing whatever bogus claim they can conjure up — even as aliens who try to play by the rules of our legal immigration system wait in line.
For a change, I will end this weekend rant with a silver lining. For all the hullaballoo about Biden’s finally deigning to eyeball the catastrophe he has wrought this weekend, the most significant development in the next few days will be the start, on Monday, of a federal trial in Pensacola.
Florida, in a lawsuit brought by state attorney general Ashley Moody, a key ally of Governor Ron DeSantis, has challenged Biden’s mass-paroling of illegal aliens as a violation of the Constitution and federal statutory law. The presiding judge is Thomas Kent Wetherell II, formerly a state appellate judge and deputy solicitor general, who was appointed to the federal bench in 2019 by then-president Donald Trump — whose border-security measures Biden has recklessly dismantled. In May, Judge Wetherell denied the motion of the defendants — the Biden administration — to dismiss Florida’s lawsuit, writing:
Suffice it to say the court is wholly unpersuaded by defendants’ position that they have unfettered discretion to determine how (or if) to comply with the immigration statutes and that there is nothing that Florida or this court can do about their policies even if they contravene the immigration statutes.
Sounds like this trial could be more consistent with what most Americans think of as a safe, orderly, and humane process.
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**On cue, the media-Democrat complex shrieked and blubbered about how very distressing it all is to “human-rights organizations.”**
And on cue the NYT WP MSNBC PBS NPR CNN ABC NBC CBS LSD PCP will all report that Biden is clamping down on immigration
but he can't fix it entirely till Republicans agree to reform (amnesty for 30 million)
and easier for another 30 million to come in later.
3 card monte bullshit
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"3 card monte bullshit"
Exactly so.
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This time they took out a solar site.
(Need new thread?)
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2023/01/08/las-vegas-solar-plant-suffers-terror-attack-but-what-kind-n1659800
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I have added Energy Grid to the thread's name.
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Biden's Plan to El Paso the Buck
A three-hour photo op at the border doesn't change the president's deceptive plan to "fix" the border crisis.
Nate Jackson
Joe Biden and his DHS sidekick Alejandro Mayorkas traveled to El Paso over the weekend to pretend to care about border security for three whole hours. That was fresh after giving a speech last Thursday in which he claimed he's going to fix the crisis by ... offering a plan to make it worse. He begins a summit in Mexico City with other North American leaders today on the topic of migrants.
"Biden Visits Southern Border Amid Fresh Crackdown on Migrants," reads The New York Times headline. What "crackdown" would that be? Perhaps the scribes at the Times read a different speech or plan than we did. What Biden actually promised is that he'd drastically increase the number of asylum slots — all migrants from four particular countries have to do is let the U.S. know they're coming — so as to put a patina of legitimacy on the current surge at the border.
The Times is complicit in the left-wing propaganda, reporting that "Democrats and human rights activists condemned his new enforcement plan as a 'humanitarian disgrace.'" The Times wants you to think that means some sort of crackdown. In reality, leftist complaints are all part of the show. Biden needs them to cover for the fact that he is proposing what Andrew McCarthy calls "migrant laundering."
What's Biden's plan to address the record 2.2 million arrests at the border last fiscal year? Or the minimum five million who've crossed illegally since he took office? He'll simply reduce the number of Border Patrol "encounters" with illegal aliens by making those aliens "legal" before they ever arrive. It's duplicitous and deceptive, and it'll yield even more flouting of U.S. immigration law than the millions of illegals over the past two years have done.
Mayorkas gave the game away by saying the president's policies will "incentivize a safe and orderly way and cut out the smuggling organizations." Key word: incentivize.
Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, for one, is having none of it. "This [visit] is all for show," Abbott argued. Indeed it is. Adding that it's a "sanitized" itinerary, Abbott noted that Biden specifically "avoids the sites where mass illegal immigration occurs and sidesteps the thousands of angry Texas property owners whose lives have been destroyed by your border policies." Illegal border crossings are up 260% in the El Paso Sector over the last fiscal year, but it sees only a tiny fraction of the problem.
Given that Biden caused the crisis, Abbott said the visit is "two years and about $20 billion too late." Nevertheless, he met Biden as the president disembarked Air Force One and handed him a blistering letter.
"All of this is happening because you have violated your constitutional obligation to defend the States against invasion through faithful execution of federal laws," Abbott wrote Biden. "You must," he added, "comply" with the law regarding detention and paroling aliens, "stop sandbagging" enforcement provisions like Remain in Mexico and other expulsions, "aggressively prosecute illegal entry between ports of entry," follow the law and congressional appropriations and "immediately resume construction of the border wall" in Texas, and, finally, "designate the Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations."
Abbott and other governors along the Mexican border represent the American citizens on the front lines of Biden's intentional invasion. They have every right to be outraged by Biden's dereliction of duty, and no three-hour photo op at the border is going to fix that. Neither is slapping the "legal" label on every border crosser and announcing "problem solved."
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Biden Bows to Blackmail on Migrants
The administration rewards Venezuelan trafficking with 30,000 new visas.
Mary Anastasia O’Grady hedcutBy Mary Anastasia O’GradyFollow
Jan. 8, 2023 5:19 pm ET
The Cuban military dictatorship has unleashed three destabilizing rafter crises since taking power in 1959. They occurred in 1965, 1980 and 1994-95, all years when a Democrat was in the White House. During the Obama administration, more than 120,000 Cuban migrants found their way to U.S. ports of entry from 2014-16, mainly via Central America.
There was no attempt by Fidel Castro to flood American shores with desperate balseros during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush or George W. Bush despite their hard-line policies against Cuba. Donald Trump faced caravans arriving at the southern border starting in 2018 but by the end of 2019, the numbers of migrant “encounters” by U.S. Customs and Border Protection had dropped precipitously.
This partisan dichotomy is worth noting in light of the human train-wreck at the southern U.S. border since President Biden took office. Is the migrant crisis merely a spontaneous flood of huddled masses yearning to breathe free, or is it an organized assault on U.S. law and order similar to Castro pranks of old?
Flight data from Venezuela to Mexico collected by the nongovernmental organization Center for a Secure Free Society, or SFS, and interviews the center has done with migrants at the U.S. border suggest the latter. In a paper due out in March, SFS director Joseph Humire presents research to show that Caracas has played a key role in facilitating the migrant spike since 2021.
Using migrants as weapons is essentially an act of war. Yet on Thursday the U.S. announced that it will grant an additional 30,000 visas a month to Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Cubans and Haitians if they apply from their home countries. Mr. Biden sets a bad precedent in bowing to blackmail as so many of his Democratic predecessors did.
Enemies of Western liberal democracies have a long tradition of sparking migration crises to extract geopolitical concessions from governments that appear vulnerable to extortion. In a 2016 essay in the journal Military Review titled “Migration as a Weapon in Theory and in Practice,” Tufts University political science professor Kelly Greenhill defined the strategy as “coercive engineered migration.”
Weak nations, Ms. Greenhill explained, can capitalize on the desperation of their populations “to achieve political goals that would be utterly unattainable through military means.” Clearly “the idea that states such as Cuba, Haiti, and Mexico could successfully coerce their neighbor, the United States, with the threat of military force is absurd,” Ms. Greenhill wrote. But “the tacit or explicit threat of demographic bombs” to force the U.S. to negotiations, is not. Cuba was successful in this strategy during the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
Ms. Greenhill’s essay doesn’t mention Venezuela but in recent years it may have become the most aggressive practitioner of the geopolitical coercion that she described.
Venezuela wants desperately to get out from under U.S. sanctions imposed by the Trump administration and restore its legitimacy. It made progress last year by forcing U.S. talks with dictator Nicolás Maduro to free American hostages and feigning interest in negotiating a return to democracy. But the large numbers of people desperate to leave the country also scream opportunity.
Many migrants are opponents of the regime, and exile is a way of purging dissidents. But it isn’t enough that they leave. Caracas delights in the destabilizing effects of large numbers of migrants on Uncle Sam’s doorstep. Those eventually employed in the U.S. will send back dollar remittances, which will prop up Venezuela’s economy.
Some seven million people have fled Venezuela since 2014, when the economy hit the skids. But in most of those years, migrants went largely to neighboring countries in South America. When Mr. Biden arrived in the White House, things changed.
Mr. Humire told me last week that “immigration agents encountered nearly 190,000 Venezuelans along the U.S.-Mexico border in the latest fiscal year ending September 30, a 375% increase over the previous fiscal year.” Organized crime trafficked many of those people on land but the evidence collected by SFS suggests that it wasn’t without help from Caracas.
According to SFS, in 2021 and 2022 the majority of the direct flights to Mexico from Venezuela were operated by Conviasa, which is subject to U.S. sanctions, or other, smaller state-owned or state-controlled airlines. SFS found that Venezuelans it interviewed at the border, who had arrived in Mexico by air, had purchased packages from Venezuelan travel agents. The packages included the necessary government-issue travel documents to enter Mexico and contacts with human smugglers who facilitated the ground journey to the U.S. border.
Mr. Biden could clamp down on Mr. Maduro’s trafficking network by imposing sanctions on fuel and service providers to the Venezuelan airlines. Instead, he has opted to reward the exploitation of the refugees. Problem not solved.
Write to O’Grady@wsj.com.
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3329234/texas-governor-gregg-abbott-has-opened-our-border
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3329234/texas-governor-gregg-abbott-has-opened-our-border
Not one of MY's better posts IMHO.
If I'm reading him right and if I watched the right video...
He is putting responsibility for the border on the state instead of the Feds. He is putting blame on Republicans instead of Democrats. He attacks ad hominem and attacks for trade trips and for nere attendance at world economic forum. Shouldn't our side infiltrate these events? If not, no wonder they've become so one sided against us. His title of lying/liar fails to call out a specific lie.
Someone can point out to me how tearing down more Republican leaders helps secure the border.
It fits a pattern of ripping the only people doing something for not doing enough. Maybe he's the one not doing enough. Writing from Panama instead of exposing election fraud at home. We lost our border to the 2020 election, and 2022. Why didn't he travel to Phoenix, Atlanta or Phillie and put some hard evidence behind the failed court cases? None of his links work unless you send him money. What is he selling, discord within the conservative / Republican side?
If he ran his attacks earlier maybe we could have Beto as Governor, working with Biden as President, with Democrat Hobbs taking charge of Arizona and a Dem Governor of New Mexico. How small does he want our movement and influence to be?
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Working from memory, he feels Abbot should be using the Texas National Guard, the Texas Rangers et al to DEFEND THE BORDER whether the Feds approve or not and anything less is deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic stuff because we REALLY are being invaded and that when we begin to assert ourselves, we will be violently taught just how penetrated we are.
Witness the battle in Culiacan a few days ago between the Army and the Sinaloa Cartel-- he is not without evidence.
That said, I agree he can be sloppy and appearing "over the top" in some of his, , , I forget his phrase , , , "unedited blasts" posts. He is a lone voice in the wilderness on a extraordinary range of issues. I worry too that he has put on a massive amount of weight and all the massive time zone changes he puts his body through are a heavy load on his health.
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Second
https://www.realclearwire.com/articles/2023/01/07/the_invasion_equation_874351.html
The Invasion Equation
By Clarence HendersonJanuary 07, 2023
Click To Republish
The Invasion EquationI took this photo myself and release all rights. JamesReyes at e
The Army National Guard vs. The Invading Cartel Armies
Rape trees, river floaters, skeletal remains, and fentanyl candy. The new vernacular of illegal immigration is an indictment of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) loss of operational control along the U.S.-Southern border. A consequence of this is the transformation of cartel insurgencies into well-formed armies that recruit and employ uniformed soldiers, have supporting intelligence operations, and control terrain. The challenge now confronting state and federal law enforcement is no longer how to deter an insurgency; it’s how to defeat an army.
Modern armies are resourced by nation-states who provide moral leadership in times of war. But the accountable governments of nation-states can falter and fail. Mexico in particular has a compromised central government that is not protecting its own homeland from subversive actors. When this happens, a conglomerate of paid professionals, mercenaries, conscripts, and criminals fills the void to either protect or exploit the resources of a community. It was true within the first communities of Mesopotamia, and it is happening now in communities across Mexico. This is how armies begin. A state is incapable of securing its communities, accountable governments lose legitimacy, and subversive actors start vying for control of terrain to exploit resources.
The hallmark of any effective army is its ability to control terrain. The cartel armies have done that by co-opting the gangs of the U.S. and operate the world’s largest crime syndicate complete with narco distribution hubs throughout the U.S.. In Mexico they cordon cities and run roadblocks to collect information and extort residents. To date, as much as 20 percent of Mexico has come under control of the cartels as previously reported by CIA analysts. Their center of gravity is the illicit drug and human trafficking revenues from which they derive their strength. The illegal aliens that they infiltrate, the drugs that they smuggle, and the terrorist that they give safe passage each infiltrate the Southern border under their control and further empower their control of terrain.
The Invasion Word
Armies deter aggression and win the nation’s wars by dominating the land. So, the maxim goes… But this is a description that prescribes to a classical definition of state-on-state aggression initiated by an invasion of one state’s sponsored military against another’s. Article 4, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution even guarantees that the U.S. shall protect its states against invasion. And if not, Article 1, Section 10 permits states the right to protect themselves from an invasion. These “invasion clauses” are the genesis of the debate that is occurring between the federal government and border states. The federal government clings to the classic definition of an invasion and does not believe the humanitarian disaster occurring under the control of cartel armies constitutes an invasion. Whereas border state Governors believe in a 21st century asymmetric style of invasion pointing to the infiltration of bad actors causing economic and criminal harm to their states. Regardless, the federal dogma continues along the line that an invasion is an “armed hostility from another political entity.”
To date, America’s next great leader has yet to emerge and articulate a coherent unified response to the 21st century cartel invasion. Instead, a range of state-based strategies and stunts have been developed. Governor Gregg Abbott of Texas has passed an executive order empowering his state to apprehend illegal immigrants in certain circumstances as well as designating Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey was seeking court affirmation for his state’s right to defend itself, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is focusing on trafficking operations. And each of the aforementioned Governors has since adopted the political stunt of giving illegal aliens safe passage to sanctuary cities in northern states via bussing. As a result, cartel armies continue to consolidate power and gain control of territories while states bear the brunt of economic and criminal impacts.
Deploying the National Guard
The loss of operational control along the U.S.-Southern border by DHS has forced border state Governors into a constitutional dilemma. To date, no Governor has challenged the federal government to enforce federal immigration law and turn back persons seeking illegal entry. Instead, states such as Texas are relying on their own state constitutional authority to use the National Guard to arrest illegal aliens committing crimes. In fact, the National Guard has had a continuous presence on the Southern border since 2014 when former Texas Governor Perry deployed 1,000 troops to interdict Cartel del Golfo (Gulf Cartel). Deploying the National Guard to interdict cartel armies remains a desirable option due to the federal government’s abandonment of the border. But when opting for this option the Governor’s and their military commanders must maintain strategic symmetry throughout all facets of the operation. On-going challenges the National Guard is confronting on the border has generated the following principles that should be addressed when conducting border operations.
A Task Force is not a Strategy
Don’t Surge Your Troops to Failure
You Can’t Go to War with a Border
Build Consensus Between the Diplomats, the Bureaucrats, and the Generals
A Task Force is Not a Strategy
Governors love a good Task Force. And they exist for virtually every political, economic, and social purpose. As far as the border is concerned, Current task forces include Arizona’s Task Force Badge to support local law enforcement in border towns; New Mexico’s Human Trafficking Task Force; and Texas’ Task Force on Border and Homeland Security. These task forces sometimes strain due to the broad scope of concerns they attempt to address. Governor’s fall into a ‘my task force is bigger than yours” mentality and end up creating over representative committees. For instance, Texas’ Task Force on Border and Homeland Security has representatives from eight state agencies, the Border Sheriffs’ Coalition, county judges, mayors, property rights organizations, concerned citizens, and border community prosecutors. Good luck with that task force developing a specific focus.
A bloated think-tank style “task force” creates ambiguity at the operational level that lacks strategic context. What often results are large task forces that try to cover all conceivable scenarios due to the absence of a unified strategy. Inevitably, the Governor responds to think-tank style task forces and their recommendations and begins to implement what is confused as a strategy. Whereas the General tries to facilitate force structure and build a strategy within their joint staff. Thus, the two begin to react to separate problem sets.
Don’t Surge Your Troops to Failure
The National Guard is an operational force that provides strategic depth to our nation’s Army and Air Force. Over the past two decades the National Guard became quite adept as a resource provider to the Middle Eastern wars. In this federal role the National Guard followed a deliberate mobilization process lasting up to a year that culminated with properly trained, equipped, and missioned Soldiers. State led missions on the other hand are led by the Governor and TAG who controls the state’s National Guard. These National Guard soldiers and airmen are activated on state active duty and remain under the command and control of the Governor while costs are incurred by the taxpayers of the state. In this capacity the state’s TAG is responsible for training, readiness, and oversight of soldiers and airmen.
Governors don’t understand this concept and instead believe that the military exists within a perpetual state of readiness. And because of this belief they are quick to surge troops to the border when political pressure builds. Doing this wrong had disastrous results in Texas. Just this past summer a “no notice surge” of up to 10,000 troops to the Texas-Mexico border was attempted by the Governor. What resulted was a logistical nightmare of delayed pay, substandard living conditions, and equipment shortages. Most egregious were a number of suicides attributed to forced mobilizations because of no warning, and a tragic drowning due to limited training. In the wake of this disaster the TAG, Major General Tracy Norris, was replaced due to her inability to plan an operation, other senior officers were reassigned, and the number of troops on the border was reduced.
You Can’t Go to War with a Border
The Prussian Soldier and writer Carl von Clausewitz wrote over two hundred years ago that war is not exerted on inanimate or passive human material. The U.S.-Mexico border is an inanimate terrain feature. It does not think or fight. The thinkers and fighters are “Cartel Americana” that have saturated the Americas in depth throughout the northern and Southern hemispheres. Defeating the illicit activities of the cartel armies requires a defense in depth strategy extending to within the cities and towns of the U.S. away from the border. What is required is a higher order of operational strategy consisting of what military theorist Liddell Hart refers to as the “concentration of strengths against weaknesses”.
The strength of the National Guard is its array of specialized units and human capital that do not exist within the active component of the U.S. military. Units such as homeland response forces, counter drug programs, cyber defense teams, and information operations; amongst other specialized capabilities could be the focus beyond the border. The primary intent should be to reclaim the physical and digital terrain that the cartel armies have seized. Augmenting the special agents within the Criminal Investigation Divisions of each state’s County Sheriff’s Offices, Attorney General’s Office, and Departments of Public Safety would provide a real threat to the cartel army’s self-preservation. Physical interdictions do not cease but instead become enhanced on the border.
Build Consensus Between the Diplomats, the Bureaucrats, and the Generals
A Governor that decides to deploy the National Guard takes on the role of a diplomat to convince both the citizenry and state legislature for the need of civil self-protection. The messaging that the Governor delivers must be persuasive enough to receive popular support, pass legislation, and forge a budget. In Arizona Governor Doug Ducey influenced state legislators to create a border security fund consisting of $55 million; Florida Governor Ron DeSantis created a consortium of state law enforcement agencies expending $1.6 million to provide border security support to Texas; and Texas Governor Greg Abbott influenced his state legislature to provide $3 billion to finance the Operation Lone Star mission. Building consensus for a budget proposal is a core competency of Governorship. However, building funding consensus is not synonymous with strategic consensus.
Governors, as the Commander in Chief of state military forces, are responsible for providing a strategic context to their National Guard troops. They should be able to rely on their existing agencies to craft that strategic context. The strategic aptitudes of a state exist within the Department of Emergency Management, Department of Public Safety, and Military Department (National Guard) who possess competent strategic planners. It is within these departments and agencies that a strategic framework is developed to visualize the operation in time, space, and purpose. From that, operations at the tactical level are developed, and resources applied through existing state bureaucracies. Doing this right requires strategic patience which is antithetical to a Governor who may have just negotiated a “border package” and needs a surge to commence. Thus consensus on a strategy often is strained from the very first press conference.
Conclusion
Current border state Governors have been forced into a situation non dissimilar to Reagan’s dilemma of 1984 when he responded to the Soviet Union’s influence in our hemisphere. During that time Reagan stated, “the United States has a legal right and a moral duty to help resist the subversive activities of the Soviet Union.” The dilemma of our hemisphere today is how to defend the United States from cartel armies. It’s not good practice to commit large military formations to long term criminal enforcement. It’s simply not within the DNA of America’s founding principles. However, the U.S. is being invaded by cartel armies as they continue to infiltrate the U.S.. How our Governors decide to leverage Constitutional authorities will determine if this war can be won.
Colonel Clarence Henderson (U.S. Army, ret.) is a former Infantry Brigade Combat Team Commander and U.S. Army War College graduate with over 20 years of active service and multiple worldwide deployments. He was the former commander of all troops on the border under Governors Rick Perry and Greg Abbott of Texas.
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not sure I agree with the entirety of the premises
but nonetheless another viewpoint long on what will not work and short on anything that will:
https://warontherocks.com/2020/02/mexican-drug-cartels-are-violent-but-theyre-not-terrorists/
leniency on drug users in the US
from a criminal perspective and being warm and cuddly with them and their "disease "
is not helping either in MHO
I guess there is no answer
if there was we would be doing it.
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I might be mistaken, but my understanding is that the cartels now make more from human smuggling than drugs, so a real good start would be to shut down taking in illegals.
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AMLO Mexican President says 40 Million Mexicans live in US
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Double that number I suppose if you include all of Central and Latin America and other countries.
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https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/01/10/remarks-by-president-biden-prime-minister-trudeau-and-president-lopez-obrador-in-joint-press-conference/
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Montezuma's revenge
SANTA ANA'S REVENGE
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https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/flights-across-us-affected-after-faa-computer-system-failed?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=1176
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3346760/invasion-force
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Third
DHS slaps new limits on when Border Patrol can chase fleeing smugglers
By Stephen Dinan - The Washington Times - Wednesday, January 11, 2023
The Department of Homeland Security announced a new vehicle-pursuit policy Wednesday that will severely limit when Border Patrol agents can pursue migrant smugglers, saying the cat-and-mouse game has become too dangerous for everyone involved.
The policy, released by Customs and Border Protection’s acting commissioner, bans agents from trying to box in a fleeing car or from using a pursuit immobilization technique in which a car is intentionally nudged to get it to stop.
The policy also discourages pursuits when a suspect is fleeing above the speed limit, is overloaded with illegal immigrants or is headed toward a more populated area. All are frequent occurrences in Border Patrol chases.
CBP said the new rules do not ban pursuits but are needed to reduce the danger and force agents to evaluate whether the suspected crime is serious enough to deserve a chase.
“The safety of officers, agents and the public are paramount as we carry out our mission,” said Troy Miller, the agency’s acting head.
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/faa-pilot-alert-system-breakdown-followed-years-of-warnings-11673547026?mod=hp_lead_pos3
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3389666/war-invasion-through-darien-gap-and-through-kinney-county-texas
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https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/cbp-enforcement-statistics
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https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/catherinesalgado/2023/01/24/new-biden-admin-program-will-hide-numbers-of-illegal-immigrants-entering-the-country-n1664523?fbclid=IwAR3X1lDHJAwIcpUrPttAz0L_WLqH5GJbhfzzzYgiaefy5-JZEFZifnn1oik
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3417046/darien-gap-update
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https://www.epbusinessjournal.com/2023/01/woman-grazed-by-gunshot-fired-at-federal-agents-residence-in-eagle-pass-texas/?fbclid=IwAR1SBx1-d-iMQjtYwGL4F4BTMissP09IN42xY-NPLI5pmuPxdLkscy1N9Pc
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3422507/darien-gap-today
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What Does 'Security' Mean in 2023?
undefined and Director of Analysis at RANE
Sam Lichtenstein
Director of Analysis at RANE, Stratfor
9 MIN READJan 30, 2023 | 19:01 GMT
A man monitors computer screens.
A man monitors computer screens.
(Shutterstock)
''What security issues should we be aware of?'' This well-intentioned client inquiry regarding operations in a foreign country recently gave me pause as I struggled to understand exactly what the client wanted. Was the client looking for an on-the-ground review of major violent risks, like crime and terrorism? If so, did that mean the client was not interested in the more strategic geopolitical risk of interstate war? What about environmental and health concerns — did the client care about infectious diseases, natural disasters and other threats? Or could it be that the client really cared about cybersecurity in terms of protecting IP and other sensitive data?
Of course, we could answer all of those questions, but running through that checklist in my head made me realize a more foundational question: what exactly does ''security'' mean today? As analysts, we must always consider situations from various points of view and, especially when considering client questions, properly scope our responses. But the truth about ''security,'' no matter how straightforward it may seem, is that it may be just as difficult to define as it is to truly achieve complete safety.
A Shifting Paradigm
As students of international relations theory will be quick to highlight, in its traditional sense, ''security'' is a realist concept that refers to a state's ability to protect itself from foreign attack. For realists, the global environment is a dangerous place and, as the most important actors in the international system, states at their most fundamental level must survive. In this conception, security is defined in opposition to external attack and there is no need to consider what happens within states themselves.
While a neatly-organized concept, over time many other theories have chipped away at realism's dominance. For instance, it is obvious that security within states can matter just as much as security between them, as evidenced by the violent toll of civil war, insurgency and other internal conflicts. Even this external versus internal distinction is an incomplete picture amid the rise of a wholly new environment like cyberspace as a zone of not just competition but outright conflict.
Moreover, as recently highlighted by our analysts, it is clear that ''security'' does not affect everyone equally, but rather some groups (such as women) often suffer disproportionately. Similarly, this focus on the individual illustrates that states are far from the only relevant actors: witness the lethal violence conducted by terrorist groups, criminal syndicates and other non-state actors. Even some private companies could find themselves listed here.
Perhaps most structurally: is ''security'' only about safety from physical violence? Following the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, I do not think anyone would deny that ''health security'' needs to be a bigger priority. Meanwhile, in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the concepts of ''economic security'' and, especially, ''energy security'' are back in vogue. And if you ask many companies, you would probably hear that ''data security'' or ''supply chain security'' are at the forefront of their concerns. Amid these different interpretations, what gets labeled as ''security'' (in some cases, now synonymous with ''self-sufficiency'') has thus become much broader over time — a process known (and at times critiqued) as ''securitization''.
What Is Old Is New Again
Despite the expanding concept of ''security,'' realists have always argued that their fundamental contention about a state needing to prevent external attack has stood the test of time. In this respect, Russia's invasion of Ukraine seemed to be tragic vindication and has duly inspired a flurry of headlines arguing various versions of ''realism is back.'' There is no debating that the return of land war to Europe (and growing concerns over Chinese predations on Taiwan) shows that territorial integrity, the basis of the traditional realist idea of ''security,'' cannot be taken for granted in the 21st century. But while realists are right to point out that a state's most basic duty remains to protect itself, there is no reason to think that interpretations of ''security'' will not continue to expand in its environments, key actors and basic conceptions.
First, a future shift in what counts as a security environment is already coming into focus. Outer space — once a merely theoretical area of competition and, in turn, potential conflict — is coming closer to reality every year. This will add to yet another domain to monitor beyond the already contested land, air and sea realms here on Earth, and more recently the rise of cyberspace (which still has a long way to develop before it is as well-defined as those other three).
Meanwhile, for all the powers that states have, it is also clear that they are far from the only key players. The recent past has seen the introduction of new non-state actors with disproportionate impact. In addition to the rise of cybercriminals, there has also been a re-emergence of mercenary groups — a relic some had thought was left behind centuries ago, illustrating the dynamism in what actors matter for security. Looking ahead, new threats can be sure to arise from other actors, such as individual hacktivists (whose capabilities seem to be only growing) and multinational companies (the largest of which have arguably supplanted many states in their power).
Finally, the future broadening of ''security'' beyond just physical violence is also easy to conceive. Once seen as relevant only to poorer countries, ''food security'' is another example of ''security'' as ''self-sufficiency'' that has become more widely resonant over the past year amid the Ukraine-related shocks to global food supplies and prices; and it is a focus that will likely endure long after the fighting in Ukraine ceases as governments seek to mitigate future crises, including those brought on by climate change. Relatedly, ''environmental security'' will also only grow in tandem with the impacts of climate change. And from a corporate perspective, something akin to ''reputational security'' may in fact be the greatest threat many firms face.
All or Nothing
As the concept of ''security'' comes to mean ever more things, it consequently becomes much harder to achieve. After all, in trying to do everything at once, we often risk doing nothing particularly well. This will create obvious challenges for governments that must decide how to prioritize resources, particularly as there will be inevitable tradeoffs. For instance, as seen over the past year, a clear tension is playing out in real time between short-term ''energy security'' and long-term ''environmental security.'' There will also be inevitable debates over whether to invest in defenses against future threats that may not emerge for many years compared with more immediate ones. Indeed, despite the staggering toll of COVID-19, most governments are loath to make major new investments in fundamental ''health security'' now that the most acute period of the crisis is over. Finally, investing in some forms of security, such as that regarding the emerging domain of outer space, will simply be out of reach for many poorer states, which will cede their ability to control events there. Magnifying all of these challenges is that what may be strategically wise could also be politically unpopular or divisive; after all, partisan politics often lurks amid many security threats.
If leaders within states struggle to agree on priorities, global coordination will be even more challenging. For instance, what some states see as a truly existential threat (like climate change) may benefit others; low-lying island nations are seeing their territory erode amid rising sea levels at the same time northern nations like Canada and Russia are seeing theirs expand amid the thawing ice in the Arctic. Similarly, what some states see as a security threat (such as cyberattacks) may also be a deliberate part of other states' strategies that they seek to amplify, not contain. Moreover, even if states desire to work together to prevent conflict, fundamentally differing interests (such as those over outer space) may still inhibit cooperation. And of course, all of these challenges are magnified in an emerging multipolar world in which the mechanisms for global collaboration are quickly fraying, if not already decisively split.
If the challenges for governments loom large, those for businesses may loom even larger. After all, the public sector is expected to deal with weighty security matters every day, whereas such matters are generally (at best) a secondary concern in the private sector compared with the business of business, so to speak. But companies are increasingly being pressured to do far more than their basic business functions, from taking a stand on high-profile political issues to being leaders in reducing carbon emissions and, in some cases, even being the primary defenders against certain security threats (such as those in cyberspace).
Looking ahead, organizations should only expect more of these responsibilities to pile on. As the post-World War II liberal international order continues to erode and the global system becomes more chaotic and uncertain, companies will increasingly be asked to do more as competing states struggle to coordinate. This will raise uncomfortable questions in boardrooms and challenge corporate leaders to rethink the scope of their activities. They may no longer be just an industrial firm or a services provider, but also an ostensible provider of security (whether it be cyber, health, environmental or another form of security). And what happens inside those boardrooms will increasingly have impacts elsewhere — in some cases life or death ones.
Corporate Security Is Everyone's Business
To return to the original client question, then, asking what security considerations companies need to know may require a much more expansive answer than originally intended. Businesses no longer can only consider common threats like crime, but must also remember that every employee is an ambassador for their corporate reputation, the first line of defense for their cyber networks and a potential vector for disease (on top of the many other security-linked responsibilities that are unlikely to be part of their formal job requirements).
This reality will make the jobs of corporate security officers that much harder as they become responsible for preventing an ever-growing list of threats for the sake of not only their companies but, in some cases, their countries. In this new, more complex security environment, merely taking a business trip may have much weigher implications that require we, as analysts, to adjust our focus accordingly to ensure our clients are as prepared as possible.
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3451705/mandarin-practice-in-darien-gap
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and just for those , like me , who had no idea where in the world is the Darien gap :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dari%C3%A9n_Gap
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Good thing that balloon was not an EMP , , ,
==========================
From our Electricity EMP thread in 2021
MILITARY
U.S. vulnerable to electromagnetic pulse attack from foreign nations
BY BEN WOLFGANG THE WASHINGTON TIMES
America’s electric grid and other key infrastructure remain vulnerable to an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack from China, North Korea or other adversary, and the U.S. is at a pivotal moment if it wants to avoid a potential doomsday scenario, a panel of experts warned Tuesday.
At a major virtual forum hosted by the Universal Peace Federation, specialists warned of the growing threat of an EMP attack that could knockout communications, water and sewer services, transportation systems, retail and other central components of American society.
The dangers of EMP attacks have long been understood, but China’s shocking test of a new hypersonic glide vehicle last summer has some analysts fearing it could give the nation’s Communist leaders the perfect avenue to deploy a high-altitude EMP, offering the chance to defeat the U.S. by sparking a long-lasting blackout, shutting down food and water delivery systems, and crushing military communications and contact with far-flung posts.
China already possesses so-called “super EMPs,” or weapons designed to create bursts of energy
much stronger than past versions, according to an analysis by the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, a congressional advisory board.
Combining EMP attacks with other modern unconventional military tactics could be even more devastating.
“That poses a real threat of possibly being able to win a war with a single blow by means of an EMP attack. Moreover ... they don’t envision employing an EMP by itself. It would be used in conjunction with cyberattacks and physical sabotage, and nonnuclear EMP,” Peter Vincent Pry, the task force’s executive director, said at Tuesday’s event, which was moderated by Washington Times Foundation President Michael Jenkins.
“This is regarded by Russia, China, North Korea and Iran as potentially the most decisive military revolution in history,” Mr. Pry said. “By attacking the technological Achilles heel of a nation like the United States, you could bring us to our knees and not even have to do battle with the Marines or the Navy or the Air Force, and win a war in 24 hours with a single blow — a combined EMP cyberattack.”
American scholars and lawmakers have warned for decades that U.S. infrastructure — especially the electric grid system — is highly vulnerable to EMPs. Huge swaths of infrastructure aren’t adequately protected against such an attack, specialists warned, despite widespread agreement on the importance of the problem and the existence of technology to solve it.
President Trump in 2019 signed an executive order directing a new level of governmentwide coordination on combating a potential EMP attack. Recent federal spending bills also have included measures to ramp up EMP defenses.
But many specific steps have yet to be implemented, such as bringing all pieces of the electric grid up to the military’s “hardening” standard so they are able to withstand a major electromagnetic pulse.
“We do know how to protect against it. It’s not a technological problem. It’s a political problem,” Mr. Pry said, citing federal bureaucracy and other factors that make the issue especially complex and difficult.
Other specialists said the Biden administrationshould keep the nation’s EMP vulnerability firmly in mind as it doles out billions of dollars in infrastructure money.
“There are active protection measures that will ground the pulse as it strikes the electric system of a vehicle, for example. The good news is those technologies are out there, they exist,” said David Winks, managing director at AcquSight, a leading cyber, physical and electromagnetic resilience firm. “I think it would be a good use of some of this infrastructure money to start investing in this.”
One of the largest hurdles is the vast number of state agencies and utility companies involved with the nation’s electric grid, making it difficult to install a single set of hardening standards across the entire country.
Meanwhile, China has invested heavily in its offensive EMP programs, and those investments are bearing fruit. In August, for example, the South China Morning Post and other regional media outlets reported that China very likely conducted its first test of an EMP weapon, successfully using the pulse to knock drones out of the sky. The Post cited papers published by Chinese technology journals that reported the test but offered little detail.
The Pentagon warns that electronic warfare is an increasingly important piece of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) arsenal and its preparations for a potential clash with the U.S.
China’s electronic warfare strategy “emphasizes suppressing, degrading, disrupting, or deceiving enemy electronic equipment throughout the continuum of a conflict while protecting its ability to use the cyber and electromagnetic spectrum,” reads a recent Pentagon report on Chinese military capabilities. “The PLA is likely to use electronic warfare early in a conflict as a signaling mechanism to warn and deter adversary offensive action. Potential EW targets include adversary systems operating in radio, radar, microwave, infrared and optical frequency ranges, as well as adversary computer and information systems.”
Even nations without China’s cutting-edge military capabilities could be able to infl ict serious damage using EMP technology.
“There is no need for precision. North Korea doesn’t need to have a very good ballistic missile in order to precisely deploy and detonate the weapon,” said Plamen Doynov, a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and chief technology officer at the company EMP Shield.
Mr. Doynov also warned that unlike a nuclear strike, traditional bombing campaign or ground invasion, an EMP attack doesn’t directly cause any casualties, potentially allowing an enemy to more easily justify the move and make retaliation a more difficult political decision for the state that is targeted.
“It’s bloodless, at least initially,” he said. But over time, hundreds of millions of lives could be lost. Mr. Pry has estimated that a yearlong blackout caused by an EMP could kill 90% of Americans.
Such a catastrophic situation at home, of course, would allow American adversaries to essentially do as they pleased around the globe.
“Imagine the president in the situation where the dispute is over Taiwan, or the dispute is with Russia over the Baltic states,” Mr. Pry said at Tuesday’s event. “And they do an EMP [attack] on the United States. What’s the president going to do? Try to go into World War III, which he will surely lose? ... Or is he going to use the residual capabilities that we have, especially the military capabilities, to try to recover those critical civilian infrastructures because the clock is ticking toward the deaths of millions of Americans?”
===================
A second Chinese spy balloon is currently traversing Latin America, Pentagon confirmed late on Feb. 3 amid rising concern about a Chinese surveillance balloon hovering eastward across the continental United States.
“We are seeing reports of a balloon transiting Latin America. We now assess it is another Chinese surveillance balloon,” Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder said in a statement to media outlets.
The comment came hours after Ryder was pressed at a briefing with reporters about a Canadian defense ministry statement on Friday that they were monitoring a “potential second incident,” and whether the United States is doing the same. Ryder in response referred the question back to the Canadian authorities.
The first Chinese balloon, which military officials described to be a “high altitude surveillance balloon,” appeared earlier this week above the state of Montana, home to one of the country’s three nuclear missile silo fields.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday postponed a trip to Beijing that would have marked the highest profile U.S. visit to China over the balloon, calling the balloon “irresponsible” and “a clear violation of U.S. sovereignty and international law.”
“[China’s] decision to take this action on the eve of my planned visit is detrimental to the substantive discussions that we were prepared to have,” he told reporters.
The Department of Defense wouldn’t confirm the balloon’s exact location, its size, and other details on Friday other than saying that the balloon is maneuverable, has changed course at some point, and that it is currently flying at 60,000 ft eastward across the country.
President Joe Biden was first briefed on the matter on Tuesday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Jan. 3, and was given the “strong recommendation” by military leaders not to shoot it down due to the risk that falling debris may harm civilians.
A senior defense official said the U.S. has taken unspecified mitigation measures against the balloon, adding that it was assessed that the device had “limited additive value from an intelligence collection perspective over and above what [China] can do through other means.”
The Chinese regime has claimed that the balloon over the United States is a civilian meteorological balloon from China that was blown off course. In response, Ryder said, “The fact is we know it’s a surveillance balloon.”
Costa Rica Reports
Ryder didn’t specify which country the balloon is currently hovering over, but local reports have cited sightings of a white balloon of mysterious origin over Costa Rica, which the country’s civil aviation authorities said doesn’t have a fly authorization.
“My big concern with the Chinese balloon flight is if this is a test to see how fast we react and what we do,” Art Thompson, CEO of California-based company Sage Cheshire Aerospace which provides stratospheric balloon launching and research services, told The Epoch Times.
The two balloons appear to have been launched from different locations, he said. The photos Thomson examined of the two balloons, over the United States and Costa Rica, show that they are very similar in style.
“When I look at the trajectory, the question is, where did they launch it from? And it could have been launched from mainland China, and then just drifted over and would have done a little oscillation in its flight,” he said.
Thompson has advocated for the United States to shoot down the balloon currently moving eastward over the nation with laser weapons. He believes that U.S. authorities still have several days to take action before the balloon reaches international waters, but the one over Costa Rica would have a much shorter timeline.
“It’s going to be out of touch fairly quickly because in Costa Rica, they’re going to be across into the gulf pretty fast,” he said.
“The Chinese are definitely testing us and preparing for something.”
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The United States could bring down the Chinese surveillance balloon currently flying eastward across the country by shooting it with a laser, which would cause it to gradually descend without inflicting serious damage to civilians on the ground, according to an aerospace specialist.
The Defense Department previously ruled out shooting down the balloon, which was first spotted earlier this week in Montana, saying that its size could cause a debris field large enough to harm Americans.
But Art Thompson, CEO of California-based company Sage Cheshire Aerospace which provides stratospheric balloon launching and research services, believes that a “semi-controlled descent” could be a solution. He was previously the technical director of the Red Bull Stratos program, which in 2012 smashed records for the highest-ever skydive, an endeavor that included the world’s largest manned balloon.
By firing a munition or laser weapon, one can put holes in the balloon and force it to vent air.
“Knowing what the weather patterns are, you could probably predict how fast you can get it to vent, in which case it’s semi-controlled. [Then] you can get it to touch down relatively softly, recover the equipment, and try to figure out exactly what this is,” he told The Epoch Times.
“The trick is that it has to be big enough to get the balloon to vent down and start dropping in altitude. But it has to be small enough that it’s not going to just come tumbling down or tear a giant hole out,” causing it to crash, he said.
This action, Thompson believes, would be in the United States’ best interests. “Because once it gets out of our control, you know, we’re never going to know exactly what it was used for.”
The Chinese balloon was first sighted above Montana, a state that houses intercontinental ballistic missile silos, earlier this week. A top Pentagon official said on Friday that the balloon is flying at 60,000 feet (18,300 meters), has the ability to maneuver, and has changed course at some point during its flight, although he wouldn’t specify when.
The Associated Press, citing anonymous officials, reported that the balloon has the size of about three school buses.
Defense Department spokesperson Brigadier General Pat Ryder said the balloon has a “large payload underneath the surveillance component” and could stay in the United States for several more days as it moves eastward.
Radio Signals Intelligence
Thompson suspects the balloon’s role has more to do with intercepting radio signals than collecting visual information—such as radio frequencies relating to communication systems or evaluating electromagnetic energy that can allow Beijing to interfere with U.S. communication systems if something were to happen. Satellite footage from Google Earth already provides the Chinese regime with plenty of photographic images of U.S. terrain with high accuracy, he noted.
That said, “they aren’t being very stealthy about it,” because the balloon uses a white shell that reflects a lot of light, making it conspicuous when compared to those made with StratoFilm, which is sheer and less reflective, like “a dry cleaner bag,” he said.
The balloon has most recently been sighted near Kansas City and several other parts of Missouri. A local news report cited a pilot seeing the balloon at an estimated 50,000 feet altitude, but suddenly dropped by 20,000 feet in seconds—a description that surprised Thompson and made him wonder if there’s already a hole in the balloon. Although he later noted that the pilot’s estimate could be inaccurate, as such a dive would mean the balloon is in a freefall, in which case it would have been on the ground by this point.
The National Weather Service (NWS) in Kansas City, Missouri, at 12:30 p.m. local time posted photos of the balloon, saying it was visible from their office in Pleasant Hill and the Kansas City metropolitan area.
“We have confirmed that it is not an NWS weather balloon,” it said on Twitter.
The U.S. Air Force received its first high-energy laser weapon that can fit on a tactical fighter jet last June. The U.S. Navy also has ground-based laser systems that can attack targets on air, although Thompson noted that they might not be immediately available to deploy in the area needed for use.
The United States has missed its best opportunity to bring it down, Thompson said. That’d be earlier in the week when it was flying over sparsely-populated areas.
But an alternative, he said, is to wait until the balloon leaves the coast but is still within U.S. territorial waters before shooting it down, and then getting the Coast Guard to retrieve it, which would pose the most minimal amount of civilian damage.
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all I can say is the *apparent* indecisiveness
over a God darn balloon
is far more alarming than the balloon itself.
If our military commander in chief cannot make a decision on something this seemingly straight forward
we are in as Ross Perot used to say very "deep doo doo"
* Definition of Indecisiveness. Indecisiveness is defined as a dysfunctional personality trait characterized by a generalized difficulty to make decisions (Lauderdale et al., 2019). Being a stable individual difference independent of a particular decision content, it is not to be confused with indecision.*
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wrong about China for 30 yrs
wrong about Afghanistan
wrong about Russia actually invading Russia
wrong about the Russian overwhelming Ukraine
wrong about the wokism in the military
and for GM - I will throw this in wrong about the clotshot in the military :wink:
does not give me confidence
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Maybe the indecisiveness is them being thrown under the bus to cover for President Magoo?
Nonetheless, the larger point you are making remains.
As the old joke goes, "military intelligence" is an oxymoron, but
a) IIRC they did predict the invasion of Ukraine and the Ukes pooh poohed it;
b) not sure of your meaning when you say mil-intel was wrong about wokism
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Imagine the blackmail material the Chinese Ministry for State Security has on the Biden crime family…
Maybe the indecisiveness is them being thrown under the bus to cover for President Magoo?
Nonetheless, the larger point you are making remains.
As the old joke goes, "military intelligence" is an oxymoron, but
a) IIRC they did predict the invasion of Ukraine and the Ukes pooh poohed it;
b) not sure of your meaning when you say mil-intel was wrong about wokism
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https://dailycaller.com/2023/02/03/immigration-and-customs-enforcement-biden-administration/?utm_medium=email&pnespid=sLp2VygWbqRLhebC_DXsFcKK4Uv_D5ouMbOszPQ0tUFm6cQXpcWZqAyHj1EdQzHJkyFG.GQO
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/feb/4/biden-officials-kept-quiet-about-suspected-chinese/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=FswAPLQ%2BLAR4ZzSIIOfkp9tfemoCQNhipyEZ7cvX7EhYOW9Sm1gBi8Q2PTiHWXbL&bt_ts=1675534674539
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Biden's approval plunges after balloon gate
https://twitter.com/i/status/1621982213288992769 (https://twitter.com/i/status/1621982213288992769)
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https://news.yahoo.com/pentagon-reveals-details-chinese-spy-220701366.html
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https://video.foxbusiness.com/v/6319716386112?fbclid=IwAR3J4A3nkZGRKqW8fvZsP_6A_OXelKsmddYkgl7cpR8I58FXqAkmPMIXG3A#sp=show-clips
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/02/05/angel-mom-illegal-alien-ms-13-gang-member-was-freed-into-u-s-at-border-before-murdering-raping-my-daughter/
We should totally vote against this!
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trump-officials-cast-doubt-on-white-house-claim-that-chinese-balloons-hovered-over-u-s-during-last-administration/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=30468654
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/feb/6/balloons-spying-countering-drones-and-psychologica/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=morning&utm_term=newsletter&utm_content=morning&bt_ee=GvCYUR7kkO6EOrBqIJTsXW%2BlBhakyN32KPlGTPd0zLMHHY1pkIgxwO46K32%2FNr6u&bt_ts=1675780236538
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https://sheenarodriguez.substack.com/p/exploiting-ols-shortfalls-cartels?r=164o1e&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post&fbclid=IwAR38uIJS7SRRfxvLN6iRLuLdApKgpjS8euEfIoZP0Q5Yi_YdECqeQzNW4SA
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trump-officials-cast-doubt-on-white-house-claim-that-chinese-balloons-hovered-over-u-s-during-last-administration/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=30468654
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/403061.php
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Breaks down the true issues with the balloons. A must see. Can someone locate the clip? It was the opening segment.
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https://redstate.com/streiff/2023/02/07/us-navy-sailors-recover-remains-of-chinese-spy-balloon-but-we-still-have-a-lot-of-question-and-no-plausible-answers-n699936?fbclid=IwAR2l_kaE-JmXtfbBnqZg-RH4C0cThbLPRAEdeAaK1-ZDS9-pNKw5r9Psgd8
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https://www.foxnews.com/video/6320117645112?fbclid=IwAR3j-9O7B0dVw2z03Z1Br3QJ_X3WpVv4XJTA-oCpthwIi6pYqZqFdiI3E3I
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/u-s-military-shoots-down-unidentified-airborne-object-over-michigan/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=30531869
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https://dailycaller.com/2023/02/13/the-biden-admin-is-making-it-easier-for-illegal-immigrants-to-roam-the-us-without-tracking-them/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking&pnespid=sLQ4Uy9WKLNFh6GRqDa0FJCJvQKpVZwrfOKlzOVitxBmlQFtvkESu5meVryi4WQTjVsKlBtQ
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/feb/13/northern-border-shaping-next-challenge-homeland-se/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=morning&utm_term=newsletter&utm_content=morning&bt_ee=9n4o4x%2BBxyq0p3Z1izzIO3HBlIHk2R%2BVyZvW0OWTqXVCOJrW17U%2Be9pZ43t%2Fk1Xb&bt_ts=1676383237677
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second
No specificity as to the basis for the description of their political beliefs, but similar to a neo-nazi attack on the grid that I posted about here previously.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/maryland-woman-and-florida-man-charged-federally-conspiring-destroy-energy-facilities?utm_source=sendinblue&utm_campaign=Extremism_Roundup_2023-02-09_RESEND_02-14&utm_medium=email
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second
No specificity as to the basis for the description of their political beliefs, but similar to a neo-nazi attack on the grid that I posted about here previously.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/maryland-woman-and-florida-man-charged-federally-conspiring-destroy-energy-facilities?utm_source=sendinblue&utm_campaign=Extremism_Roundup_2023-02-09_RESEND_02-14&utm_medium=email
:roll:
Most likely more Faking Bogus Investigations BS.
"Oh, let's destroy Baltimore!" As if they could do a better job than the residents of Baltimurder.
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See my entry of Jan 18, 2023: https://firehydrantoffreedom.com/index.php?topic=2771.msg154276;topicseen#msg154276
See my entry of Dec 22, 2022
https://firehydrantoffreedom.com/index.php?topic=2771.50
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See my entry of Jan 18, 2023: https://firehydrantoffreedom.com/index.php?topic=2771.msg154276;topicseen#msg154276
See my entry of Dec 22, 2022
https://firehydrantoffreedom.com/index.php?topic=2771.50
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQMrM-mHP0_oVvLMpcww1BaPUbtUhLkH4OkIA&usqp=CAU
(https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQMrM-mHP0_oVvLMpcww1BaPUbtUhLkH4OkIA&usqp=CAU)
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3524503/snakeheads-through-darien-gap
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3524503/snakeheads-through-darien-gap
Good thing the PRC won’t insert intel or spec ops assets into the US this way, that wouldn’t be fair!
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Biden’s SOTU Boasts about Decreasing Illegal Immigration Were Fraudulent, Too
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
February 14, 2023 2:24 PM
The president hasn’t fixed the problem; he has covered it up through a legally baseless sleight of hand.
Right before I read Jim Geraghty’s excellent Corner post on how President Biden’s State of the Union boasts about inflation were, well, inflated, I happened to read a report by Andrew R. Arthur, the stellar analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies, on how Biden’s SOTU boasts about dramatic improvement in the crisis of illegal immigration at the southern border are also absurdly overblown.
In his speech, Biden brayed, “Since we launched our new border plan last month, unlawful migration from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela has come down 97 percent.” I will come momentarily to the administration’s new border plan, which, as I observed when Biden rolled it out, is both illegal and a political fraud. For now, though, let’s stick with what the president said. Even at face value, it was exaggeration. As Arthur runs the numbers, there was a decrease in unlawful migration from the four countries in question between December 2022 and January 2023, but it was a decrease of just 76 percent — and even that statistic makes the Biden administration’s immigration policies sound a lot more successful than they’ve actually been.
Because of Biden’s policies, illegal immigration is at astronomical, previously unseen levels, so any decrease, no matter how noticeable, is going to be a fall from unprecedented heights. And when you widen the time frame, comparing January 2023 with January 2021 (when Biden took office, and thus before his policies took hold) and January 2020 (before Covid shut down even most illicit travel), the picture starts to look a lot different from the one Biden painted. As Arthur shows, apprehensions from the four countries Biden mentioned were up 400 percent in January 2023 compared to January 2021, and an astonishing 1,275 percent compared with January 2020.
Now, let’s look at the numbers for all countries, rather than just the four that Biden cherry-picked. In total, there were about 156,000 illegal aliens “encountered” by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) personnel in January — 128,000 detained at the border, and 28,000 stopped at ports of entry. In the 15 years between May 2006 and May 2021, monthly apprehensions exceeded the January 2023 total of 128,000 only once — in May 2019, when slightly fewer than 133,000 encounters were recorded. That is, the January 2023 numbers Biden bragged about are historically horrible.
And how could they not be? In fiscal year 2022 (which ended last September), CPB agents apprehended over 2.2 million illegal aliens. As Arthur has previously shown, that is about 300,000 more illegal aliens in just a single year than were detained by CPB agents during the combined five-year period between the start of fiscal year 2014 and the end of fiscal year 2018. (See this New York Post chart, which makes the point graphically.)
Now, about Biden’s new border plan: It is not reducing the number of illegal aliens detained at the border; it is concealing the number of illegal aliens released into the country through a “parole” scam.
The scam works this way: Rather than trying to cross illegally at the border, aliens are now encouraged to arrange entry into the U.S. at CBP ports set up in northern Mexico. There, even if they do not have a valid asylum claim (which the vast majority do not, because a valid claim must meet a high evidentiary burden), they will be given “parole” so long as they can show a potential claim of credible fear of persecution in their home country (a very low standard).
As we shall see, the administration has no legal authority to grant such “parole.” Nevertheless, compliant and uninformed media are reporting on the plan as if it were legitimate and the “paroled” aliens were entering our country lawfully. The “parole” purports to authorize illegal aliens to work in the U.S. and lasts for two years, plenty of time to establish other ties (marriage, children) that will make it practically impossible to expel them — assuming that they show up for legal proceedings, and that the overrun system even schedules those proceedings in the foreseeable future. That is, Biden has presumed the unilateral power to amend statutory immigration law, in effect granting asylum to illegal aliens who do not meet the qualifications Congress has prescribed — aliens who are merely economic migrants, who could have applied for asylum in countries they passed through before arriving at a U.S. port of entry, and who do not have a cognizable fear of persecution in their native countries.
Biden’s parole program is lawless, which is why it is now being challenged in a Texas federal court by 20 states (including Florida, which has also brought a lawsuit in a Florida federal court). As I’ve explained a number of times, federal immigration law mandates that illegal aliens “shall be detained” from the time they are first encountered by federal authorities until their cases are disposed of (i.e., until they are either deported or granted asylum or some other statutorily authorized right to remain).
The law only provides two exceptions to this detention mandate.
The first exception enables the government to return aliens encountered at the border to a foreign country contiguous to the United States while their immigration proceedings are pending. This is the exception that led to former President Trump’s successful “Remain in Mexico” policy, which Biden willfully dismantled.
The second exception (codified in Section 1182(d)(5)(A) of Title 8, U.S. Code) authorizes the government to parole aliens temporarily into the country, “on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit” (emphasis added). It is on this second exception that Biden purports to rely for his parole authority, but this claim is laughable. The administration does not even pretend that it is doing anything but mass parole; this is not case-by-case analysis of each alien, but release into the U.S. of thousands of illegal aliens each day. There is no “urgent humanitarian reason” to open the border: Again, these are economic migrants, and Congress has mandated that even aliens with potentially legitimate persecution claims must be detained. Finally, far from “significant public benefit,” the entry of so many illegal aliens is a public catastrophe for the states whose public-health, welfare, education, and law-enforcement resources are left to deal with them.
Biden is not reducing illegal immigration. He is pretending that illegal immigrants are legal because he has granted them “parole” — notwithstanding the fact that Congress has never and will never give him the power to grant it. He is not ameliorating the disaster he has created; he is merely moving the locus of the disaster from the border to the ports of entry. Consider, for example, the president’s false claim of a 97 percent drop in illegal immigration from the four aforementioned countries. As Arthur points out, there were about 22,000 such aliens encountered in January 2023. Of these, fewer than 12,000 were detained at the border; the rest were stopped at ports of entry. And that was actually a 42 percent increase over December 2022.
Biden’s shift of the crisis from the border to the ports is causing significant problems for the Mexican government (from which we need cooperation) as aliens from various countries overwhelm the ports in Mexican territory. The shift also continues the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe because it persists in encouraging aliens to make the perilous trip northward, notorious for violence, rape, child trafficking, kidnapping, and other abuses.
And here is the most perverse part: The president and his radical progressive base have turned things on their head. The point of having ports of entry is to provide for orderly management of our country’s generous legal immigration process. Congress’s objective in enacting immigration law is to discourage illegal immigration and expedite the removal of aliens who attempt to enter unlawfully. Now, however, Biden is converting the ports of entry into gateways through which tens of thousands of illegal immigrants can enter the country, squeezing out legal immigration and faithlessly undermining the execution of federal law.
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https://centerforsecuritypolicy.org/comrade-barbara-lee/?fbclid=IwAR21DhjdgxFJ8McMY7S2LhuWaYEA26HQeMlh6jgz53jOyGjJb-m8FA7aIPQ
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Pasting two URLs from our GM in this thread here.
https://twitter.com/DC_Draino/status/1627093225579360258
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/02/massive-5-acre-fire-breaks-kissimmee-florida-warehouse-storing-plastic-plant-pots-flames-two-stories-high-residents-breathing-issues-told-stay-inside/
As we have been discussing, letting in six million essentially unvetted illegal aliens from around the world is a deep thread to homeland security.
In recent days it has been reported that this includes 25-30 Chinese every day and that they are paying something like $35,000 each to the Cartels. Why wouldn't the ChiComs be sending fifth column agents? Why wouldn't the Iranians or ISIS or Al Qaeda, etc etc?
Th problem is particularly insidious-- sabotage of this sort does not require very much training and essentially is impossible to distinguish from the stupidities of every day life. Beyond a sense of "Boy there seems to be an increase in stupidity!" how are we to realize and activate against the threat?
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Controlling the Border Starts with Fixing Our Dysfunctional Asylum System
Migrants, among them Nicaraguans who were kidnapped by organized crime in the state of Durango and released days later by the Mexican Army, line up near the border wall after crossing the Rio Bravo River to turn themselves in to U.S. Border Patrol agents to request asylum in El Paso, Texas, seen from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico December 12, 2022. (Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters)
By SAM PEAK
February 16, 2023 6:30 AM
Instead of pretending he has a plan to solve the border crisis, President Biden should consider the proposals lawmakers have already put forth.
After overseeing an unprecedented two-year border crisis, President Biden implied during his State of the Union address that he finally had a plan to resolve this disaster. But when pressed for further details, Biden’s own officials stressed that “no proposal is under serious consideration.”
Instead of pretending to have a plan in place, Biden should pay attention to the solutions that lawmakers have already rolled out. Last Congress, a group of border-state lawmakers introduced the Border Solutions Act. If passed, this bill would address one of the border crisis’s major driving forces: the perverse incentives in our asylum system. Because merely receiving an asylum hearing often takes over four years, people can file claims that lack merit and work indefinitely in the U.S. while their case is pending.
The Border Solutions Act would fix this problem by moving the most recent asylum cases to the front of the line during periods when migration surges are most extreme. This “last in, first out” policy would reject and remove applicants with weaker asylum claims more quickly, preventing them from using the typically prolonged adjudication times as a means of staying in the U.S. over an extended period.
By deterring people with otherwise weak claims from applying, a last-in, first-out policy could eventually reduce backlogs for applicants with stronger claims. Research from the Migration Policy Institute found that roughly 90 percent of Salvadorans, Hondurans, and Guatemalans cited “economics” as their reason for wanting to migrate, while fewer than 10 percent cited “insecurity and violence.” Although Northern Triangle countries no longer represent as large a proportion of new border-crossers, these findings suggest that economic migrants are slowing the process of receiving asylum for people with legitimate claims.
Many of these weak asylum cases come from people who were given false information about their eligibility to enter the U.S. Some of this can be attributed to local gossip, but it’s also true that smugglers have weaponized the Biden administration’s incoherent messaging and policies in order to sell their services to people who don’t know better. This was an especially prominent driver of the September 2021 migrant crisis, in which numerous Haitian arrivals were deceived by smugglers’ marketing campaigns.
Biden should counter smuggler propaganda by supporting the Border Response Resilience Act, which would require routine government reports about the tactics and propaganda deployed by human smugglers and the perception of American immigration policy among potential migrants. The bill also requires the U.S. government to devise an interagency plan to rapidly expand detention capacity by dispatching facilities and personnel from other agencies during migration surges. Such a plan would keep the government from purchasing detention space on an ad hoc basis at unreasonably exorbitant prices.
As our asylum process collapses under the weight of unresolved claims, our U.S. Customs and Border Protection personnel are being diverted from their routine law-enforcement duties in a vain attempt to hold our system together. During the 2019 asylum-seeker surge, anywhere from 40 percent to 60 percent of our Border Patrol agents were redirected so they could process applicants. This trend has certainly grown worse in recent years, as more parts of our border have become unmanned.
Our sprawling asylum system may also be contributing to today’s fentanyl crisis, given that hundreds of the CBP officers who guard our legal ports of entry are periodically diverted to help handle large flows of families. The thousands of American lives lost from drug overdoses — not to mention the hundreds of thousands of workers who have left the labor force due to synthetic-opioid addiction — are reason enough to get this crisis under control.
Most of CBP’s staffing problems can be ameliorated by regaining control over our asylum system, but Congress must also act immediately to attract CBP personnel. According to an exchange between Representative Nancy Mace and Tucson Border Patrol chief John Modlin during a recent oversight hearing, the process of hiring a Border Patrol agent takes well over a year, and CBP may be facing a staffing shortage of roughly 2,700 agents. Modlin recommended shortening these hiring times by eliminating redundant security clearances for Border Patrol applicants who have already been federally cleared due to their prior service in a different federal agency.
All these solutions are critical for addressing America’s immediate security needs. But over the long term, policy-makers must revamp America’s asylum system so that it’s capable of rapidly adjudicating cases no matter how circumstances change at the border. One idea for achieving this goal is to equip asylum adjudicators with artificial-intelligence technology to help them decide cases at a faster pace. Such technology could in theory streamline the simpler elements of an asylum case while providing adjudicators with additional bandwidth to evaluate the more complex aspects. Figuring out the extent to which automation can assist personnel in reaching asylum decisions will require elaborate risk assessment. But continuing to rely solely on human judgment to decide asylum cases inevitably results in glaringly disparate outcomes in addition to keeping applicants in limbo.
The status quo of our asylum system is untenable. What we need instead is a humanitarian system that resists exploitation while better serving those for whom it was designed. If President Biden actually wants to fix the border crisis, that’s a good place to start.
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Edited
Police sources: 18-inch pipe bomb found behind Holmesburg church, near railroad tracks
https://www.fox29.com/news/police-sources-18-pipe-bomb-found-behind-holmesburg-church-near-railroad-tracks
This moron gets a C- for effort.
There are 20 ways to derail a train that require nothing more than 5-10 bucks spent at a home depot. With no noise and no signature.
I don’t want to be specific, but our enemies, both internal and imported (intentionally, via our open borders) know them all very well. They are trained. (I could do the “training” in 2 or 3 paragraphs here, but I won’t.)
RR tracks, pipelines, power lines, fiber optic cables: they can only exist and function as we expect them to function in a high-trust society.
As soon as you add a few 100 to 1,000 saboteurs, with 3 paragraphs of information and 10 bucks spent at Home Depot, it all begins to crash.
Metcalf was just a high-level warning shot, ignored.
(Metcalf probably cost $100. The next 10 East Palestines can be done for $5-$10 each. And our enemies, internal and imported, know all this very well.)
Even if 99% of Americans are literally asleep at the switch.
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https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/127/809/766/original/574a3a2fb9569ff0.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/127/809/766/original/574a3a2fb9569ff0.jpg)
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"Even if 99% of Americans are literally asleep at the switch."
I don't think this works until that number improves.
This meaning American Greed, resistance to Marxism fascism, erosion of freedoms, putting forward our side of it, and winning.
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The analogy doesn't work for me.
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11773411/Mass-Casualty-Incident-reported-following-explosion-metal-manufacturing-plant-Bedford-Ohio.html
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Remember this the next time we read about some mysterious explosion or derailment or fire.
https://audioboom.com/.../8250485-panama-dariengap-report...
IMPEACH BIDEN HARRIS!!!
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Remember this the next time we read about some mysterious explosion or derailment or fire.
https://audioboom.com/.../8250485-panama-dariengap-report...
IMPEACH BIDEN HARRIS!!!
Getting "page not found".
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https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/south-africas-households-wihtout-electricity-nine-hours-day-amid-ginormous-blackouts
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I got the URL from a MY missive. It worked when I posted it.
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/feb/23/yumas-hospital-migrants-are-taking-beds-local-resi/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=evening&utm_term=evening&utm_content=evening&bt_ee=BYzq7wAUGTCq8mDQ8hM3OmFViRvieugfVR1SlZuaYEZOND3afv5Oy4OZnNVvcGu0&bt_ts=1677199822470
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https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/02/illegal-alien-shot-dead-by-arizona-rancher-was-cartel-drug-smuggler-or-scout/
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defense attorney for Arizona Rancher
suggest the cartels bribe those who arrested him
and will routinely produce "witnesses" who will testify against him
(or anyone who stands up to them)
VERY DISTURBING
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defense attorney for Arizona Rancher
suggest the cartels bribe those who arrested him
and will routinely produce "witnesses" who will testify against him
(or anyone who stands up to them)
VERY DISTURBING
If only he were a Ukrainian...
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Quite plausible!
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Quite plausible!
https://www.thecentersquare.com/arizona/lake-says-arizona-will-show-texas-how-to-declare-an-invasion/article_9cf26af2-5e1b-11ed-9b52-e793cab53aff.html
This is why they had to keep her out at all costs.
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A most lucid argument for the giving her accusations serious consideration.
That said, the Trump wing in AZ seems to have a rather shitty record backing up its claims , , ,
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how to track if cartel money is going to US politicians and law enforcement , lawyers judges, and others
locally and more generally.
it is almost certainly happening
we are simply blind and naive as usual
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/feb/7/10000-cartel-drones-detected-crossing-us-border-la/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=HTsUWFjsEIQMn1qWs8aJJfAMogS0lkBeQLy1rNvN8m5gIlt92J0uIe9drU%2B8%2B2dR&bt_ts=1675790627867
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https://www.zerohedge.com/political/power-grid-attacks-71-and-biden-acolytes-tell-us-its-all-those-white-supremacists
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https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/south-africas-households-wihtout-electricity-nine-hours-day-amid-ginormous-blackouts
https://businesstech.co.za/news/business/668257/businesses-prepare-for-grid-collapse-in-south-africa/
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Though interesting, that has nothing to do with the Homeland Security of America. A thread dedicated to energy, to Africa, or supply chain disruptions would be more suitable.
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Though interesting, that has nothing to do with the Homeland Security of America. A thread dedicated to energy, to Africa, or supply chain disruptions would be more suitable.
A formerly first world nation collapsing from within. Can't happen here!
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https://cis.org/Report/Walls-Another-Border
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Does the average moderate Dem or so-called independent voter care about this? Where do they think the poison is coming from? This is just the killing with drugs, what about the human trafficking, no problemo?
https://www.newsweek.com/chinese-chemicals-mexican-cartel-hands-feed-deadly-us-fentanyl-crisis-1588948
https://asiamedia.lmu.edu/2021/11/03/china-fentanyl-trafficking-is-devastating-u-s-citizens/
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/china-mexico-fentanyl/2022/08/23/id/1084324/
https://asiatimes.com/2022/12/the-fentanyl-wars-china-mexico-and-the-us/
https://nypost.com/2023/01/03/fentanyl-is-now-integrated-into-our-lives-thanks-to-our-open-southern-border-progressive-fads/
https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/china-working-with-mexican-drug-cartels-fueling-fentanyl-crisis-in-the-u-s/
https://adnamerica.com/en/mexico/china-and-mexican-cartels-consolidate-fentanyl-distribution-throughout-americas
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second
No specificity as to the basis for the description of their political beliefs, but similar to a neo-nazi attack on the grid that I posted about here previously.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/maryland-woman-and-florida-man-charged-federally-conspiring-destroy-energy-facilities?utm_source=sendinblue&utm_campaign=Extremism_Roundup_2023-02-09_RESEND_02-14&utm_medium=email
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/03/horror-man-in-stolen-vehicle-causes-entire-building-to-collapse-after-crashing-into-it-pedestrian-also-killed-shocking-video/
:roll:
Most likely more Faking Bogus Investigations BS.
"Oh, let's destroy Baltimore!" As if they could do a better job than the residents of Baltimurder.
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Quite plausible!
https://www.thecentersquare.com/arizona/lake-says-arizona-will-show-texas-how-to-declare-an-invasion/article_9cf26af2-5e1b-11ed-9b52-e793cab53aff.html
This is why they had to keep her out at all costs.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/03/report-illegal-border-crossings-already-increasing-since-governor-katie-hobbs-took-office-30-more-gotaways-in-hobbs-second-month/
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Just had a deeply interesting conversation with someone highly qualified in these things:
Understand this about immigration law:
It distinguishes "political refugees" and "economic refugees" with the former having rights to seek asylum.
OTOH were we to accept economic refugees we would be inundated, and so the law makes that distinction. Biden and the forces of Progery (ha!) want to blur this line so that all limits on them are removed.
If the Cartels are declared "terrorist organizations" then, anyone in Mexico will be able to claim being a political refugee.
THINK WELL UPON THIS.
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second
"What is your path to victory?"
As best as I can tell we face full spectrum war.
First order of business is to reclaim control of our border and within our borders. This will include deporting many millions (and yes the Dreamer principle needs to apply too-- number unknown, but could be in the millions).
Worth noting well is that the need to deport is not yet part of socially acceptable conversation, even among those clear on the need to assert our border.
How many millions? The Yale-MIT study (during the Obama years or the Trump years?) is the best of which I am aware and it put the number at 22-24 million. How many of these are Deamers? Depends on the criteria of course, but without going down the rabbit hole I'll say I'd put the number at 2 million, but political compromise of up to 5-7 million is acceptable to me. Add in the 6-7+ million under Biden so far.
IMHO 30 million is a reasonable working number.
In the context of the full spectrum war already under way, it needs to be clearly noted that large groups of military age males from various countries and cultures hostile to America have entered our country. The working assumption needs to be that some/many of them are under direction from not only the Cartels, but also China, Russia, Iran, Islamofascistsan, etc.
Look at what 19 Saudis, under the direction of certain elements within the Saudi government, accomplished after taking the time to get well integrated!!!
Our supply chains are already diminished and their fragility revealed.
We are a people divided between Americans and AmINOS-- Americans In Name Only. In the thralls of collective militant enthusiasm lemming-like they follow the nudges of the forces of the Prog-Goolag-Infowar-Surveillance-Globalist State.
What do we think will happen here in America if/when conflagrations elsewhere in the world kick off and the fifth columns among us put match to the "objective conditions" of Michael Yon all around us?
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"First order of business is to reclaim control of our border and within..."
1. I like the plan and I like that we're discussing victory instead of failure and collapse.
2. Assuming none of that will happen with Biden, Harris, Buttigieg, Newsom et al as chief executive or with Warnock, Fetterman et al in the majority in the Senate, (or Omar, AOC et al in the majority in the House which they almost are), and assuming more of the same won't flip those, what is the path to political victory that makes the path to policy victory possible?
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DeSantis.
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what is the path to political victory that makes the path to policy victory possible?
I'll take a stab at that
let's see
I am thinking
still thinking
I have to guess
promote candidates and vote harder ! :-D
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what is the path to political victory that makes the path to policy victory possible?
I'll take a stab at that
let's see
I am thinking
still thinking
I have to guess
promote candidates and vote harder ! :-D
Yes, Live in blue hives and vote harder!
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Regarding the mass deportations:
Frankie McR says require employers to use E-Verify and make failure to do so a felony leading to no jobs for the illegals and self-deportation by them.
Could be!
This could lead to serious supply chain problems though!
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/on-northern-us-border-a-surging-crisis-aided-by-americans_5159153.html?utm_source=Goodevening&src_src=Goodevening&utm_campaign=gv-2023-03-30&src_cmp=gv-2023-03-30&utm_medium=email&est=UQzru2r%2BqcS82ZMp5JT8LENg%2BsXMUp4Y3v65HQ2aOB%2BUC7IIeW1%2B2%2FjubxqmiLSi%2B5G7
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/chinese-spy-balloon-collected-intel-from-military-sites-after-biden-admin-delayed-take-down/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=31045370
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The "credible fear" standard-- note well:
"However, the DHS memo instructed federal border authorities to allow illegal migrants that could face expulsion under the new agreement to still have their cases heard by an asylum officer to vet for “credible fear” if one fears persecution or torture, according to the memo.
https://dailycaller.com/2023/04/10/canada-justin-trudeau-joe-biden-border-patrol/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking&pnespid=6OluCXQcJP0cwqbSpCblSsKGuhjyS5B1NLGk07p4rEdmdYnYdBzYqCHyXJLXA8YJFW8piANk
With a "Terrorist Designation", the door swings wide open for letting pretty much everyone in.
The people who write these things are some seriously devious people!!!
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3828404/now-darien-panama
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3828404/now-darien-panama
Vibrant diversity + our vibrant economy = domestic tranquility!
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not to worry
nikki haley will find them jobs........
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not to worry
nikki haley will find them jobs........
I have no doubt that will be her biggest concern.
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3830948/us-delegation-expanding-us-invasion-camps-has-landed-in-darien-panama-in-front-of-us-now-secret
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https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-admin-hold-migrants-credible-fear-screenings-cbp-facilities-border-prepares-surge
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3836573/must-see-from-darien-gap
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3839668/beyond-midnight-in-darien-gap-panama
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3847548/must-see-and-share-chinese-using-anchor-babies
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second
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3849639/how-many-military-aged-chinese-males-do-you-see-here
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3849569/chinese-baby-in-jungle-without-milk
https://twitter.com/michael_yon/status/1647067746318921734?s=61&t=p8MRaatq9pVVjBrMnwK2iA
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3851232/anti-invasion-sympathy-growing
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second
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3851350/china-preparing-for-war
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second
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3851350/china-preparing-for-war
I would bet on it.
Things are going to get spicy CONUS.
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/apr/18/alejandro-mayorkas-predicts-new-illegal-immigrant-/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=SER0z1X5blO%2BADc%2F0XZzb95U6XlVtuIwcrk7fvmwzQbMkG%2Flcz7Ha0GnNyG%2FQ6gL&bt_ts=1681834129221
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/apr/18/alejandro-mayorkas-predicts-new-illegal-immigrant-/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=SER0z1X5blO%2BADc%2F0XZzb95U6XlVtuIwcrk7fvmwzQbMkG%2Flcz7Ha0GnNyG%2FQ6gL&bt_ts=1681834129221
Who is the satanic jew Mayorkas loyal to?
Imagine if a goy were in a position of power in Israel, letting Israel be flooded with aliens…
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3867428/aliens-in-your-living-room-this-is-no-drill-and-no-joke
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3869525/my-interview-today-on-fox-and-friends-i-was-getting-a-little-out-of-control
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3867428/aliens-in-your-living-room-this-is-no-drill-and-no-joke
https://andmagazine.substack.com/p/wonder-where-all-these-illegal-immigrants
I am just so glad we gave Blinken's family shelter!
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right
the immigrants of today are not the immigrants of 120 yrs ago
with regards to how they are/were treated.
plus the immigrants of 120 yrs ago were legal
not that that should mean anything :roll:
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right
the immigrants of today are not the immigrants of 120 yrs ago
with regards to how they are/were treated.
plus the immigrants of 120 yrs ago were legal
not that that should mean anything :roll:
Legal/illegal is just a cultural construct created by white people to oppress people of color!
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And yet you imitate the bigotry of the Progs , , ,
Moving along:
=========================================
At a public hearing on Capitol Hill yesterday, Homeland Invasion and Slave Trafficking Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas acknowledged the obvious: that the conditions along the southern border will get even worse next month when the Biden administration rescinds the Trump administration's highly effective Title 42 pandemic authority to immediately expel illegals.
But never fear: Mayorkas said he and his team are working to adapt to the changed conditions. Uh-huh.
What might those adaptations entail? Well, given that DHS is far short on detention space, the nation's deportation czar, acting ICE Director Tae Johnson, told the House Appropriations Committee that they'd have to release illegals currently in custody in order to handle the coming surge.
Johnson said he'd requested "thousands more detention beds in the agency's new budget, but higher-ups in the Biden administration rejected that idea."
We can't make this stuff up. We're $32,000,000,000,000 in debt, and Team Biden is pinching pennies on our southern border.
For those of you who haven't yet gotten sick of counting, we're now at more than 6.3 million illegal crossings.
"Mayorkas," reports The Washington Times, "did not offer specific numbers on border traffic, but a projection last year, ahead of a previous deadline for ending Title 42, said that as many as 18,000 illegal immigrants could cross per day."
As the Times notes, "That would be nearly triple the amount that arrived each day in March." And here we thought illegal border crossings were supposed to decrease as the temperatures increased.
As our Nate Jackson warned earlier this week: "Now that Biden reluctantly signed legislation officially ending the COVID emergency, Title 42 soon won't even be a pretense in his way. Indeed, perhaps 40,000 migrants have gathered at the border ready to surge across once Title 42 is gone, and even the administration predicts that CBP encounters could reach 400,000 a month."
Let's see: an open border, easy admission, and free healthcare and other social services. What's not to love if you're an illegal immigrant? Well, except for the enslavement of children and the sex trafficking. But other than that?
"It's like a concierge service for illegal immigrants," said Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley last month. Clearly, these people don't give a damn about illegal immigrants, except when it comes to converting them into wards of the state and reliable votes for Democrat-run Big Government.
Yesterday, Hawley picked up where he left off, and then some, roasting the smirking Mayorkas for his role in this pre-planned border disaster:
"A moment ago," said Hawley, "you were crowing about the fact that you treated children so well, and yet we find tens of thousands of children who are forced to work as slaves because of your policies. And you turn around and blame the prior administration. I am sick and tired of it, and thousands of children are in physical danger, danger because of what you're doing. You should have resigned long ago, and if you cannot change course, you should be removed from office."
"Secretary Mayorkas' failed border policies," Hawley tweeted, "have led to the indentured servitude of migrant children on a scale never seen in American history. Kids treated like slaves in factories. Smugglers collecting the profit. Mayorkas should be removed."
Indeed, Mayorkas should be removed. We've been beating the drum about this disgraceful liar from the beginning, and we called for his impeachment just days after Republicans took control of the House, but with each passing week of inaction it appears more doubtful. Indeed, it appears that Mayorkas will be allowed to escape real accountability — unless and until House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his fellow House Republicans come to their senses.
Arguing that Republicans don't have the votes to remove Mayorkas is correct on its face but utterly beside the point. Impeachment is a political act, and publicly shaming a terrible cabinet official is a worthwhile political endeavor, especially if it spurs voters to hold this administration accountable.
Think about it: Has there ever been a cabinet secretary more deserving of impeachment than this consistently willful abdicator of his sworn duties?
Of course, the dollar cost of this administration's intentional catastrophe is incalculable. But so are the non-monetary costs. As we've written before: What price can be affixed to the change that the American fabric undergoes — over weeks and months and years and generations — when an influx of people unlike any in American history is forcibly distributed across the land by the Biden administration? Does our patriotism and our sense of Americanness grow stronger or weaker? Do we become more inclined to fight for our country or less so? More inclined to obey our nation's laws or less so? More inclined to pay taxes or less so? More inclined to work or less so? More inclined to vote or less so?
Sadly, these questions answer themselves.
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3871449/chinese-ccp-invading-usa
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3871449/chinese-ccp-invading-usa
Such sinophobic bigotry! You are making young black men shove Asian women in front of subway trains with this hate speech!
Right?
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3883768/invasion-maps-to-aliens-to-invade-our-homes
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https://www.ntd.com/investigator-claims-chinese-spies-migrating-to-us-citing-physical-build-military-trained-accents-unusually-deep-pockets_915130.html
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Bill O"Reilly rates Joe Biden as the second worst president behind James Buchanan
Personally, I would rate him worse than James Buchanan......
Why, because of his *purposeful * adoption of policies that hurt and diminish our nation .
Liberal Presidential historians try to tell us he is one of the greatest. :x
here is one rank - Biden #19 best !!!
Just one behind Ronald Reagan !!! :roll:
of course .....
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Bill O"Reilly rates Joe Biden as the second worst president behind James Buchanan
Personally, I would rate him worse than James Buchanan......
Why, because of his *purposeful * adoption of policies that hurt and diminish our nation .
Liberal Presidential historians try to tell us he is one of the greatest. :x
here is one rank - Biden #19 best !!!
Just one behind Ronald Reagan !!! :roll:
of course .....
The alleged president forced his daughter to shower late at night so he wouldn't join her.
We can't ignore that.
Even if he was a legitimately elected president and actually running things well, which he obviously isn't.
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In my haste this am
I forgot to post this historian (partisan) rank of presidents:
https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/presidents-ranked-worst-best/2/
even Jimmy Carter is mid pack :roll:
I just noticed Biden is ahead of GH Bush LOL
woodrow wilson ahead of reagan
bill clinton also
brock of course even higher at 11. :roll:
I would like true nonpartisan historians ... to rank
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3915072/must-see-advertisement-for-chinese-invasion-of-america?fbclid=IwAR1Ox5kWkQPEPqw-kL1rfyCQL-J4_qG6w-Tx5DzjI10bpUEGJAvV6xnulCE
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second
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3916743/flying-invaders-directly-into-communities
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3917405/cast-out-demons-from-office
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second
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3916743/flying-invaders-directly-into-communities
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3917405/cast-out-demons-from-office
Sick invaders, who might just happen to bring the next bioweapon to us. Imagine Ebola or another hemorrhagic fever virus rapidly spreading CONUS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJhgEMKLuHI
Four Horsemen.
Plan accordingly.
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3933762/malarial-red-zone-you-ll-be-happy-to-know
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3933586/now-in-darien-panama
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absolutely
and TOTALLY IGNORED BY THE WOKE HEALTH INDUSTRY AND CDC, HHS, MEDICAL ASSOCIATIONS, ETC !!!!
:x :x :x :x :x
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https://andmagazine.substack.com/p/biological-warfare-waged-on-america?publication_id=746580&isFreemail=false
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second
Agency tells hundreds to help in border surge
Employees fight order to leave duties
BY STEPHEN DINAN THE WASHINGTON TIMES
The Department of Homeland Security’s legal immigration agency is ordering hundreds of employees to drop their regular duties and shift to border detail, where they will assist in the catch-andrelease of the wave of illegal immigrants expected to come into the U.S. this month.
People performing anti-terrorism work or helping reunite separated families have been conscripted, as have officers who process regular applications from legal immigrants. They were ordered to begin a seven-day training course this week and be ready for a 60-day deployment to help with the migrant surge.
Employees were angry and unleashed their fury on U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials Friday in a briefing that The Washington Times monitored.
Exclusive
John Lafferty, the head of USCIS’s asylum division who led the briefing, acknowledged that the agency doesn’t have the staff to handle the border surge and do all its other work.
“We’re going to have to take a hit on other priorities in order to do this, but the department has made very clear that this is a priority,” Mr. Lafferty said. “The administration, the White House, has made clear this is a priority.”
Mr. Lafferty said he can send 600 to 700 asylum officers to border duty but it will take 1,100 to 1,200 to be ready for the department’s anticipated surge.
Hundreds of USCIS employees have been ordered to train to help starting this week.
Recruits say they come from other high-priority jobs, including anti-terrorism duties and working on President Biden’s task force to reunite children separated from their families during the last administration.
Mr. Lafferty said USCIS’s other work will have to slow down.
“Some other things that we all consider very high profile or priority are going to have to be done perhaps at a slower rate,” he said. “Fewer cases being done, taking a little longer, to meet the ask that has come to us.”
Mr. Lafferty originally asked for volunteers, but too few people came forward. Border duty was then made mandatory — or, as one employee put it, they were “voluntold.”
Several employees challenged the agency’s authority to make the shift.
“Where is the authority for the agency to conscript us found? I’d like to read it with my own two eyes,” one said in a message posted to the virtual briefing’s chat function.
Another expressed moral qualms. “I strongly believe that credible fear applicants are being trafficked into the United States to work off their debt to their smugglers. Some of them are being trafficked as sex slaves,” that employee said. “There is a reason why I left Asylum, and that is one of the reasons. That is, I don’t want to work as a middleman for drug cartels and sex traffickers.”
That refers to smugglers who charge migrants $10,000 or more to be shepherded to the border. Those who can’t pay upfront must work off their debts, sometimes by selling sex.
The officer continued: “I honestly believe the credible fear program is doing more harm than good to the applicants. Can I please not participate if I chose to?”
Homeland Security didn’t respond to multiple inquiries for this report. USCIS said it is still trying to assess the impact of diverting the workers.
“Nearly 480 USCIS employees with relevant experience have been selected to enroll in a credible fear interview training exercise this week to better prepare for increased staffing and resource requirements, strengthen the agency’s operational readiness, and support upcoming processing efforts at the southern border,” the agency said in a statement to The Washington Times.
The agency said employees are being taken “from across the agency” and not just from the ranks of officers.
Rosemary Jenks, vice president at NumbersUSA, a group that argues for stricter immigration controls, said the agency’s scrambles belie Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ claim that he has had a plan in place for months to deal with the end of Title 42. The pandemic-era law allowed migrants to be returned for public health reasons.
“The clown show demonstrated by this briefing is an abuse of USCIS employees,” she said. “DHS has known for months when Title 42 would end, so this last-minute, panicked scramble is unconscionable and merits serious investigation by Congress.”
Roughly 6,000 unauthorized migrants poured across the southern border each day in March — the latest month for which Homeland Security has released data. Officials think that number could double in two weeks when the Title 42 power expires.
Rather than derail the flow, the Biden administration has put its effort into trying to manage it.
The USCIS employees will be ordered to undergo an initial screening of new arrivals who claim to fear being sent back home. That is the first step on the path to claiming asylum.
The initial screening is known as a “credible fear interview.”
Those who pass are generally released into the U.S. to wait for their asylum cases to be heard. That process can take many years, and most end up losing their cases. By then, however, they will have put down roots in the U.S. and become all but impossible to send home.
That foothold is the incentive analysts point to as the driving force behind the record border chaos under the Biden administration.
Friday’s call revealed startling details about how the administration plans to handle the surge.
For one thing, the USCIS employees won’t be conducting the “credible fear” interviews face-to-face.
Mr. Lafferty said migrants will be placed in phone booths in a border facility where they will be interviewed via phone.
USCIS employees told The Washington Times that a face-to-face interview is critical for judging an applicant’s credibility.
Mr. Lafferty said the phone-booth approach was an accommodation to the urgency of the situation.
If the asylum office faced a normal crunch, it would borrow officers from the refugee section, which is also part of the Refugee, Asylum and International Operations Directorate. Refugee and asylum petitions are similar but for the location of the application. Refugees apply for protection from outside the U.S., while asylum-seekers are already on U.S. soil.
Mr. Lafferty said the Biden administration plans to expand refugee openings for would-be border migrants, so the refugee division also will be swamped.
That leaves Mr. Lafferty with 600 to 700 asylum officers he can send to border duty on a given day. USCIS thinks he will need as many as 1,200, so the additional people must be conscripted from other divisions within the agency.
“There’s a chance that we would on any given day be putting up to 1,100 to 1,200 people on phones conducting credible fear screenings in order to meet the numbers that are being asked of us,” he told employees.
USCIS counts roughly 19,000 employees.
One person in the Q& A said a credible fear screening takes roughly two hours, so four could be completed in a normal workday. With 1,200 people doing the screenings, that works out to nearly 5,000 screenings a day.
Mr. Lafferty said employees may be ordered to work overtime, including on weekends.
He said the projections were based on Homeland Security’s anticipated numbers. He said USCIS wants to be prepared for a worst-case scenario, but the numbers may not be so bad and fewer people will be needed.
Employees in Friday’s briefing objected to being forced to serve.
“I was abused, threatened, harassed and humiliated by the RAIO component I worked for, in addition to being told I was a poor officer. I was continually told to work off the clock without pay. I have no desire to being subject to further abuse. Why am I being selected for this?” one employee demanded.
Another said: “Are you planning disciplinary action against those who refuse to participate?”
Mr. Lafferty told the employees that they didn’t have a choice and were at the mercy of the decisions made by the agency’s human capital and training office.
“The main point here is HCT does have the authority to assign work to the staff,” he said.
Michael Knowles, a USCIS employee who leads the labor union representing USCIS officers, was part of Friday’s briefing and posted repeated messages asking employees with concerns to contact him.
He told The Washington Times that the union has registered its concerns about the diversion of employees to handle border cases.
As for employees who object to the work on moral grounds, Mr. Knowles said they could face discipline if they refuse to be reassigned.
“At the end of the day, however, each employee must make choices that best reflect their individual consciences and interests,” he said. “We remain concerned that many employees may simply elect to quietly leave the program and seek employment elsewhere within USCIS or other federal agencies.”
Mr. Lafferty didn’t respond to email inquiries for this report.
He has had several tumultuous years at USCIS, having been ousted as head of the asylum office by the Trump administration in 2019 after sending an email criticizing policy changes.
“We are once again being asked to adapt and to do so with very little time to train and prepare,” he said in the 2019 email, reported by BuzzFeed.
The Biden administration put him back into the asylum job, and now he finds himself overseeing a last-minute upheaval.
Several employees at Friday’s briefing complained about the short notice. They were told only on April 25 that they were being ordered to clear their schedules for the seven days of training starting May 1.
Then came Friday’s call. USICS says it will have final decisions on who gets conscripted for the 60-day border duty by May 12. That’s a day after the Title 42 power expires.
Mr. Lafferty said the announcements had to wait on Mr. Mayorkas and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who revealed the administration’s plans for handling the surge on Thursday.
“I wish we’d been able to do this earlier,” Mr. Lafferty said in the Friday briefing. “It really felt like the announcement yesterday was something that had to happen.”
The last-minute upheaval will be hard, employees said. One said they are a single parent of two children and wondered how they could afford child care to cover the overtime they may be ordered to work.
Another said she worked a flexible schedule and wondered whether that would be respected.
“If not, what options are available to us for backup family care?” she prodded.
USCIS originally sought volunteers for border duty but didn’t get enough willing workers, so it ordered others to be prepared.
Mr. Lafferty said the agency has selected people who have gone through asylum or refugee training in the past. That’s a requirement under the law for anyone to be able to conduct a credible fear screening.
Yet they seem to have cast the net too wide.
“I cannot and do not want to participate in the detail. I declined to volunteer on purpose. How can I be sure that this is respected by USCIS?” one employee asked.
Another said they used to work in the asylum and refugee office but hated it and took a pay cut to leave. They asked whether the agency will pay them more to return to the job.
Mr. Lafferty downplayed those hopes. He said even relatively lower-level employees can do credible fear screenings, so the work itself is not necessarily highly paid.
USCIS is funded mostly by fees paid by immigrants or businesses seeking to bring in foreign workers.
Asylum applications are fee-free. That means the cost of the massive new workload will either have to be covered by taxpayers or else absorbed by the agency’s other applicants — generally legal immigrants, whose cases will be delayed by the shift in workers.
“The fact that legal immigrants’ fees will be used to pay for catch-and-release of illegal aliens is offensive,” Ms. Jenks said.
ATTENTION: Migrants claiming asylum must undergo credible fear screenings. Hundreds of employees at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services have been ordered to train on the screenings starting this week. ASSOCIATED PRESS
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https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/2nd-train-derailment-russia-suggests-stepped-covert-sabotage-campaign
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I just used that in a FB post to make that point.
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3947898/life-downrange-severe-treachery-is-destroying-america?fbclid=IwAR305IGnCuLqeBtbpruwPHqzfy1ILLne9pESsHJpTLHbRULx5Uefe2UYWfY
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3956639/death-camps
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"CCP has weaponized Dengue and drones to dispense mosquitos. Panamanians here are now overrun with Malaria at levels they never saw until the invasion through Darien."
:x
but we have Biden Myorkas and Harris and the Silicon shit hole.
so nothing is done of course
the border wide open
and not stating 10,000 per day will flood the US very soon
as title 42 ends May 11
yet all we hear about is Clarence Thomas
and racial themes and gay themes all day and night on MSM
:x
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"CCP has weaponized Dengue and drones to dispense mosquitos. Panamanians here are now overrun with Malaria at levels they never saw until the invasion through Darien."
:x
but we have Biden Myorkas and Harris and the Silicon shit hole.
so nothing is done of course
the border wide open
and not stating 10,000 per day will flood the US very soon
as title 42 ends May 11
yet all we hear about is Clarence Thomas
and racial themes and gay themes all day and night on MSM
:x
If you don't want drug resistant TB, it's because you are racist!
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https://www.zerohedge.com/political/new-footage-shows-el-paso-engulfed-mass-migration-dumpster-fire-state-emergency-declared?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=1462
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https://www.zerohedge.com/political/new-footage-shows-el-paso-engulfed-mass-migration-dumpster-fire-state-emergency-declared?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=1462
What is left of America is about to be shattered.
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RASHES
Mysterious Jet Fighter Crashes Near Mertzon and No One is Talking
BY JOE HYDE, MAY 3, 2023
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MERTZON, TX — A Czechoslovakian-made fighter jet crashed on a ranch just northwest of Mertzon. According to a witness who saw it happen as well as the air traffic control flight track, the jet was flying unusual raster patterns around San Angelo and had just departed the San Angelo airspace headed towards Midland, climbing to 10,000 feet
At 4:08 p.m. Tuesday, the flight path ends over the Rocker B Ranch north of Barnhart when the L-39 Albatross recorded a high rate of descent of over 2,100 feet per minute.
According to witnesses, the jet had cameras mounted at several places. Those cameras were fetched and taken away from San Angelo quickly after the crash, we were told.
People with knowledge of the crash landing are tight-lipped. The Irion County Sheriff would not talk to us. Reports from the field are that workers who arrived at the crash site were concerned about the “Russian” markings and words on the plane.
Usually, when an incident like this happens, the National Transportation Safety Board dispatches a team of crash investigators. Concurrently with the start of the investigation, usually within hours, the NTSB Newsroom on Twitter announces the crash. This incident happened over 24 hours ago and there has been no official statement from any government agency.
A call to the NTSB Response Operations Center transferred to NTSB Media Relations in Washington, DC. The NTSB confirmed that there was no investigation initiated into the incident.
Between Irion County Sheriff W.A. Estes not talking to the news media, an absence of an NTSB investigation, and no one wanting to go on the record about the crash, our eyebrows are raised. The NTSB said that depending upon the circumstances of the incident, the local FAA office may conduct the investigation. It appears from the flight track that the jet was operating under Visual Flight Rules, or VFR, so the local FAA may not even be aware of the crash.
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The L-39 Albatros that crashed on the Rocker B Ranch
The L-39 Albatros that crashed on the Rocker B Ranch
The L-39 Albatros crashed on the Rocker B Ranch
The L-39 Albatros crashed on the Rocker B Ranch
An earlier photo of the L-39 N343WT that crashed on the Rocker B ranch on May 2, 2023. (UGC from FlightAware.com)
An earlier photo of the L-39 N343WT that crashed on the Rocker B ranch on May 2, 2023. (UGC from FlightAware.com)
The flight path of the troubled L-39 that crash landed on the Rocker B Ranch near Mertzon on May 2, 2023.
The flight path of the troubled L-39 that crash landed on the Rocker B Ranch near Mertzon on May 2, 2023. (FlightAware.com)
FlightAware.com
The last location ADSB records the L-39 on Tuesday, May 2, 2023, before it crash landed on the Rocker B Ranch.
The last location ADSB records the L-39 on Tuesday, May 2, 2023, before it crash landed on the Rocker B Ranch (screen grab from Google Maps)
Google Maps
One anonymous source told us that the fighter experienced a compressor stall, flaming out the engine. Unable to relight the engine, the pilot aimed the jet at a ranch road located north of Barnhart and hoped for the best. Some L-39s in civilian use are equipped with ejection seats, some are not. We do not know if the pilot had the option to eject. According to the best data we have, the L-39 touched down at a very high rate of descent of 2,116 feet per minute.
After touchdown, the jet went out of control. Either it was too fast or it veered off the ranch road — or both. It ended up crashing through Mesquite brush before coming to a stop with its landing gear relatively undamaged, according to the photos we saw. We were told the pilot walked away from the crash landing.
This L-39 is registered to a U.S. owner in Pearland near Houston called Phantom Phlyers, LLC. The L-39 is considered to be a high performance "warbird" operating under an Experimental Exhibition Special Airworthiness Certificate from the Federal Aviation Administration. Warbirds have been highlighted by the FAA since the tragic crash of the WWII era B-17 Flying Fortress called the Texas Raiders that crashed at Dallas Executive Airport during the annual CAF “Airsho 22” last November. In mid-April, there were reports that the remaining B-17s that are still flying may be grounded by the FAA due to wing spar issues.
The L-39 is a two-seat high performance jet trainer used in the Warsaw Pact. In the 1990s, after the Berlin Wall fell, the L-39 was sold all over the world and is the most widely used military jet trainer in the world.
The airplane will likely be loaded onto a flatbed trailer and removed from the crash site soon, we were told.
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3961627/incoming-disease-serious-diseases
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3961627/incoming-disease-serious-diseases
So I'm planning a big road trip this summer. I was going through El Paso....
Never mind.
My wife and I have a procedure for staying at ANY hotel. We use Clorox wipes for door knobs, light switches, TV remotes, TV buttons, basically any hard surfaces.
I will post later on the importance of a basic forensic level exam of the beds.
Pro tip: Don't use a UV light if you need to sleep there. Sometimes ignorance really is bliss.
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/may/9/ice-released-hundreds-criminals-clear-space-border/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=pZrsTuPcsbuIY3sbJafEqkdVyBFIp4MlXVsrdRQz8%2Ff2408sqiMIYZ4UxATzkui7&bt_ts=1683713257800
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3977998/my-mind-is-only-on-this
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3979949/security-warning-spacex
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-administration-introduces-sweeping-asylum-overhaul-as-title-42-expires/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=31447048
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https://cis.org/Bensman/Biden-DHS-Coordinating-Illegal-Immigration-InFlows-Mexico
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https://www.uscis.gov/laws-and-policy/legislation/immigration-and-nationality-act
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3891989/darien-gap-pathogen-highway-to-american
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https://finance.yahoo.com/news/heavy-gunfire-casualties-reported-near-214613377.html
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https://www.facebook.com/reel/5938575012894513?fs=e&s=m
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https://www.oann.com/video/oan-contribution/title-42s-expiration-sees-influx-of-chinese-migrants-posing-national-security-threats/
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https://www.oann.com/video/oan-contribution/title-42s-expiration-sees-influx-of-chinese-migrants-posing-national-security-threats/
Unlike WWI and WWII, WWIII will be fought in part on US Soil.
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Should it come, it could very well be.
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Should it come, it could very well be.
It is coming.
It is unfolding right in front of us.
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Which is why IN ADDITION TO WORKING TO RESTORE ELECTORAL INTEGRITY, PERSUADE OUR FELLOW AMERICANS, AND BY SO DOING WIN THE ELECTIONS, we should also be preparing to protect ourselves from other developments.
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Which is why IN ADDITION TO WORKING TO RESTORE ELECTORAL INTEGRITY, PERSUADE OUR FELLOW AMERICANS, AND BY SO DOING WIN THE ELECTIONS, we should also be preparing to protect ourselves from other developments.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/05/bidens-open-borders-invasion-illegal-alien-tracking-map-shows-movement-of-the-masses-of-illegals-across-the-us-71-end-up-in-republican-districts/
Just a coincidence!
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https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/social-media-monitoring
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https://im1776.com/2023/05/16/highway-to-hell/
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https://andmagazine.substack.com/p/biological-warfare-waged-on-america?isFreemail=false&fbclid=IwAR0QPkLX9FyCVdJg32j77-KqDvo8L0-atLb3TF1E2aS_mVSMdIYKb7j5cQU
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12112399/60-000-pounds-ammonium-nitrate-shipped-rail-Wyoming-California-missing.html?fbclid=IwAR2SkTiIMG78CdH92dqGfXpnB_3uB_6WHQPeUY_athod6lqhrfgKHrRt0Vg
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12112399/60-000-pounds-ammonium-nitrate-shipped-rail-Wyoming-California-missing.html?fbclid=IwAR2SkTiIMG78CdH92dqGfXpnB_3uB_6WHQPeUY_athod6lqhrfgKHrRt0Vg
https://firehydrantoffreedom.com/index.php?topic=1903.1850
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/4062601/important-talk-this-morning-before-we-hit-the-wall-webinar-kinetic-war-on-the-u-s-home-front
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/4062601/important-talk-this-morning-before-we-hit-the-wall-webinar-kinetic-war-on-the-u-s-home-front
5,000 Special Operations Troops waging irregular warfare CONUS would cause this country to grind to a halt.
It would be devastating.
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Hell, look at what the DC Sniper and sidekick accomplished all by themselves.
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Hell, look at what the DC Sniper and sidekick accomplished all by themselves.
Exactly.
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/tribe-demanding-answers-justice-for-member-shot-38-times-by-us-border-patrol-agents_5297058.html?utm_source=News&src_src=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2023-05-29-2&src_cmp=breaking-2023-05-29-2&utm_medium=email&est=ueCTozBBcqWfr9qzYyITdSmi%2BUIXab8e4%2BnA%2BWhZT2uWHsMghjuR9REz1k1yys9Hbgpi
Tribe Demanding Answers, Justice for Member Shot 38 Times by US Border Patrol Agents
Conflicting narratives paint different pictures of Tohono O'odham Nation member's death in Arizona
Mattias family spokeswoman Ofelia Rivas stands while propping a sign with a picture of Ray Mattia, who was shot and killed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents on May 18, 2023. The photo was taken during a protest in front of the Ajo Border Patrol Station in Why, Ariz., on May 27, 2023. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)
Mattias family spokeswoman Ofelia Rivas stands while propping a sign with a picture of Ray Mattia, who was shot and killed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents on May 18, 2023. The photo was taken during a protest in front of the Ajo Border Patrol Station in Why, Ariz., on May 27, 2023. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)
Allan Stein
By Allan Stein
May 29, 2023Updated: May 29, 2023
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WHY, Ariz.—Yvonne Nevarez remembers her late uncle Raymond Mattia as a proud Tohono O’odham Nation member who always took a stand against injustice.
He was a kind, respectful, peace-loving man, she said, making his shooting death by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents even harder to accept.
“I’m angry. I can’t believe it. I don’t want to believe it. Our lives will never be the same,” Nevarez said, struggling through tears.
“He was like a dad to me. And now, he’s gone.”
Family members say that on May 18, Mattia contacted tribal police to report illegal migrants trespassing on his property in Meneger’s Dam Village, a remote southern border community of the Tohono O’odham Nation reservation about 52 miles from Ajo by car.
During a brief encounter with CBP agents, family members say Mattia was shot approximately 38 times for reasons as yet unknown.
“It was literally at his doorstep,” Nevarez told The Epoch Times at a protest gathering near the Ajo Border Patrol Station in Why, Arizona, on May 27.
Epoch Times Photo
Protesters at a rally for Raymond Mattia flash placards at a passing Border Patrol vehicle in Why, Ariz., on May 27, 2023. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)
Tribal members and supporters held another demonstration in Tucson on the same day.
“We feel that how they took his life was unjust. There’s no justification for it,” Nevarez said.
The family released a statement calling the shooting a “grievous” incident as “it is apparent what happened.”
“Raymond called for help and, in turn, was shot down on his doorstep. Raymond’s rights were violated by the authorities whom we trust to protect our Nation. Improper and unprofessional actions of the agencies involved were witnessed by family members present near the crime scene.
“Loved ones sat in agony, not knowing of Raymond’s condition until they were told that he had passed away hours later. Raymond lay in front of his home for seven hours before a coroner from Tucson arrived.
The statement added, “In our eyes and hearts, we believe Raymond was approached with excessive and deadly force that took his life. He was a father, brother, uncle, friend, and an involved community member. Raymond always fought for what was right, and he will continue to fight even after his death. This is not an isolated incident, but it should bring awareness of the oppression our people live through.”
Epoch Times Photo
A nephew of Raymond Mattia holds a sign during a protest in Why, Ariz., on May 27, 2023. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)
The family has launched a GoFundMe page to raise $10,000 in legal defense fees.
So far, the effort has garnered $2,954.
CBP Responds
On May 22, CBP issued a statement detailing the events leading to Mattia’s death.
The statement said that at 9:04 p.m., the U.S. Border Patrol Tuscon Sector Tactical Operations Center notified the Ajo station that the Tohono O’odham Nation Police Department had requested assistance responding to a report of shots fired near Mattia’s property.
At least 10 CBP agents met with tribal police at the local recreation center to coordinate a joint response.
At 9:32 p.m., a tribal police officer and several CBP agents arrived near Mattia’s residence and “spread out while searching for the man.”
“The officer and agents encountered an individual approximately 103 meters (about 337 feet) northwest of their parked vehicles, outside a residence, at approximately 9:03 p.m.”
At that point, Mattia allegedly “threw an object” at the police officer as they approached.
The object landed “a few feet” from the officer.
“Shortly after the individual threw the object, he abruptly extended his right arm away from his body, and three agents fired their service weapons, striking the individual several times.”
“The individual fell to the ground, and the officer and agents slowly approached the man,” according to the statement.
The statement made no mention of whether Mattia was armed or whether warnings were given before he was shot down.
Epoch Times Photo
An unattended sign with the image of Raymond Mattia in Why, Ariz., on May 27, 2023. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)
Resuscitation Efforts Fail
Agents began administering CPR after they could not detect a pulse and requested emergency medical services.
However, there was no air life evacuation available due to bad weather. The agents continued administering CPR without success.
Mattia was pronounced dead at a Pima County hospital at 10:06 p.m. The medical examiner’s office took custody of the body pending an autopsy on May 19, the statement added.
The agents involved in the shooting will remain on administrative leave according to standard practice while authorities investigate the “use of deadly force.”
“All three agents who discharged their weapons and seven additional agents activated their body-worn cameras during the incident.”
The statement added the CBP is “committed to the expeditious release of the body-worn camera footage of this incident as soon as is appropriate to do so without impacting the ongoing law enforcement investigation.”
The Tohono O’odham Police Department and FBI are currently investigating. CBP said the agency’s National Use of Force Review Board would review the incident following the investigation.
Tohono O’odham police referred the matter to the department’s public information officer Matt Smith, who did not return a phone call or text requesting comment from The Epoch Times.
At the May 27 protest in Why, family spokeswoman Ofelia Rivas said tribal members have reported many negative encounters with an “aggressive” Border Patrol in the past.
“This has been going on for quite a while,” Rivas told The Epoch Times. “The Border Patrol claims to have supreme authority on the reservation.”
Epoch Times Photo
A man wears a “Justice For Ray Mattia” camouflage shirt during a rally outside of the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol station in Why, Ariz., on May 27, 2023. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)
On her blog site, Bren Norrell, a journalist with Censored News, wrote that Mattia had voiced concerns about alleged Border Patrol collusion with Mexican drug cartels during an interview about a decade ago.
“Raymond told me that he had evidence that U.S. Border Patrol agents in the area were working with the cartels and were involved in drug running,” Norrell wrote.
“Mattia had video evidence that disappeared after he made an official report.”
Rivas corroborated Norrell’s statement anecdotally, saying tribal community members reported observing many interactions between Border Patrol agents and cartel members on Tohono O’odham land.
“Border Patrol would escort the cartel vehicles through the village to wherever they were going through the reservation. Everybody witnessed that. Everybody in the community witnessed that,” she said.
CBP spokesman Robert Daniel did not respond to an email requesting comment from The Epoch Times.
Untold Story
Rivas said she believes “absolutely” that much about Mattia’s fatal encounter with Border Patrol has yet to be explained.
Like his family, she’s awaiting the investigation results, including the body camera footage.
“He’s been a victim for everything he tried to advocate for the community because he is a ceremony person. There’s retaliation—absolute retaliation from the Border Patrol, especially in the border area where you don’t have any help.”
Michelle, a Tohono O’odham Nation member who works in Ajo, spoke of strained relations between the Tohono O’odham Nation and Border Patrol.
“There’s a lot of stuff that happens out there that’s fishy with Border Patrol,” Michelle told The Epoch Times.
“I’m angered and saddened by [Mattia’s death]. I mean, come on—38 shots at one person?”
“From what I’ve seen with the Border Patrol, they’re strict with our tribal members. Excuse my language; they’re kind of [expletives] with us. Some of them are OK. They treat us with respect. Others, they don’t.”
Michelle said illegal migrants trespassing on tribal land happens “all the time” and often goes unchallenged.
“They have illegals coming into yards, trying to steal vehicles. They come and knock on doors asking for water, or they’ll open the door and help themselves in.”
Michelle told The Epoch Times she knows some tribal members who receive money from the cartels helping usher illegals across the reservation.
“It is a big problem,” she said. “I would say tribal members—the young kids—get into it. They get paid [by drug cartels] to cross them over. They get pulled into that. They see the money—fast money. Even the older people are getting into it.
“The cartels pay money. Some of them get pulled deep into it. If they make a mistake … not good.”
Epoch Times Photo
The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Ajo Border Patrol Station on May 27, 2023. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)
Michelle said she couldn’t see why Border Patrol agents had to shoot Mattia 38 times to subdue him.
“For throwing a rock, it doesn’t make sense,” she said. “I can see 38 shots if he had an Uzi or something. From what I’ve heard, he was very well-respected in the community. He helped people.”
‘Frustrating and Sad’
“It’s just like anything else in the world with police officers pulling their guns,” said Wanda, a restaurant server in Ajo. “Out of the seven [agents], not one of them saw he did not have anything in his hand? It’s frustrating—and it’s sad.”
“Do we have a lot of that stuff happening here? No. Am I nervous about it? No. Everybody in Ajo knows the residents and the people who come and visit. It’s almost like we watch out for each other.
“It’s upsetting. How much is a rock going to do? They’re supposed to de-escalate situations, not escalate them,” said another tribal member who did not want to be identified.
Epoch Times Photo
A protester makes a sign in support of shooting victim Raymond Mattia during a protest in Why, Ariz., on May 27, 2023. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)
According to CBP data, there have been two fatal shootings and a total of 157 use-of-force incidents in the Tucson Sector in fiscal 2023 to date.
In fiscal 2022, there were three use-of-force incidents involving firearms and 196 total incidents.
Ariella Walker, a humanitarian advocate from Why, said her reason for attending the May 27 protest was to to show her support for the Mattias family.
“It’s just the [CBP] response we’re focusing on,” said Walker, who believes that CBP agents are “trained to dehumanize.”
“I don’t think the [body camera] footage needs to be released for people to be outraged. Just the fact that it happened is enough,” Walker told The Epoch Times.
“We know we’ve seen cases with Border Patrol who have colluded with cartel members assisting in drug running.”
Walker said she fears the shooting incident will disappear in the news cycle.
“We’ve already seen the pattern where something atrocious happens, there’s an outrage. The family is hurt. The country sparks up in arms. Eventually, it’s co-opted and dies slowly in the political system.”
Epoch Times Photo
Raymond Mattia’s first cousin, Tina, raises a fist during a protest outside the Ajo Border Patrol Station in Why, Ariz., on May 27, 2023. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)
“Hurt. Disgusted,” is how Tina described her reaction to her first cousin Ray Mattia’s death. “He was just an all-around great guy. He was a peaceful person,” Tina said.
“I believe a story is out there—I don’t know what it is. The truth is out there.”
Niece Nevarez said Mattia’s death has all the outward appearances of an “execution.”
“I feel like it could have turned out differently, but because it was Border Patrol … none of it makes any sense,” she said.
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https://odysee.com/@MichaelYon1776:a/Invasion-Border-Video:7?r=BgU3ShDqueUvx8zjSvnaCqVxUPjtLG8C
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/4094338/must-read-this-linked-article-you-can-be-arrested-after-contracting-an-invasion-disease-such-as
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https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/unlawful-southern-border-entries-70-record-highs-end/story?id=99868336
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/4129314/foreign-dhs-expanded-invasion-camp
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/4129331/milking-the-cow
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/4129343/replacement-invasion-fully-underway
Regarding the last one: A high level BP friend with whom I shared it replied with one word "Truth."
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https://www.theburningplatform.com/2023/06/11/somebody-call-mayor-pete/
As Michael Yon said previously that he was taught in SF training to always use fire rather explosives whenever possible when destroying enemy infrastructure.
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https://www.theburningplatform.com/2023/06/11/somebody-call-mayor-pete/
As Michael Yon said previously that he was taught in SF training to always use fire rather explosives whenever possible when destroying enemy infrastructure.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/roadway-gone-tanker-explosion-destroys-bridge-i-95-bridge-philadelphia
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On top of 250 forest fires in Canada without lightning storms? Nah , , ,
Meanwhile , , ,
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/jun/11/illegal-immigrants-stream-airports-biden-plans-kic/?fbclid=IwAR0NAqvCzLh_BSc3y4wtRnAlqkvhlVq1IMN6Mu_H0h8ccIcrnbBnmM7XrKM
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https://www.theburningplatform.com/2023/06/11/somebody-call-mayor-pete/
As Michael Yon said previously that he was taught in SF training to always use fire rather explosives whenever possible when destroying enemy infrastructure.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/roadway-gone-tanker-explosion-destroys-bridge-i-95-bridge-philadelphia
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/11/us/philadelphia-i-95-collapse-fire/index.html
See if they report a decedent found in the cab. Who reported the fire? How did the fire start? Who did the truck belong to? Any camera footage? Why did the truck stop?
https://www.fireengineering.com/hazmat/firefighter-training-gasoline-tanker-close-call/
(https://www.inquirer.com/resizer/ggidv9p0Mz_oG52UliwiD_fpC1s=/800x715/smart/filters:format(webp)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/pmn/DGU6Z7VFOVBMBHBAQURZROJVE4.png)
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/repairs-of-collapsed-i-95-in-philadelphia-could-take-months_5326845.html?utm_source=News&deep_link_sub1=article&source_caller=api&shortlink=8eac1v2s&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking-2023-06-12-2&src_src=News&deep_link_value=5326845&src_cmp=breaking-2023-06-12-2&est=HjIWJqlm3pf6FMYwkksRVM1B409L+vb6B3O9bdNbfa0lJ66AkI+sJmDPS1ylWliM7HIb
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How to Rebuild Fast After the Interstate 95 Collapse
Incentives for speed are the key. California showed the way after the 1994 Northridge earthquake.
By John FundFollow
June 12, 2023 6:23 pm ET
67
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(4 min)
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The aftermath of the collapse of a part of I-95 highway in Philadelphia, June 11. PHOTO: BILLY KYLE/BILLY KYLE VIA REUTERS
Frustrated by your commute? Unless you’re in the Philadelphia area, it could be worse. A Sunday tanker-truck fire in the city’s northeast caused an Interstate 95 overpass to collapse, closing a stretch of the heavily traveled road and subjecting some drivers to 43-mile detours. Gov. Josh Shapiro says reopening the freeway will take “some matter of months.”
When an illegal Philly tire dump caught fire on a stretch of I-95 in 1996, it merely buckled the payment and melted guardrails. The road was partially closed for six months. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In 2007 a connector on the MacArthur interchange in Oakland, Calif., where three freeways meet, melted from an exploding tanker fire similar to the one in Philadelphia. It was fully rebuilt in 26 days.
A big reason was the selection of the now-defunct contractor C.C. Myers Inc. The company’s bid of $867,000 was estimated to cover only a third of the actual cost, but C.C. Myers counted on making up the difference, since it would be paid an incentive of $200,000 a day if the work was completed in less than two months. The firm earned a $5 million bonus.
C.C. Myers was hired in part because of its legendary record of repairing fallen freeway overpasses in Los Angeles after the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Gov. Pete Wilson was told it would take 26 months to repair the bridges and reopen I-10. Mr. Wilson issued emergency orders to cut red tape, but his moves went far beyond the usual changes to government rules and enabled the freeway to open to its normal heavy traffic in only 84 days.
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Protracted public hearings, environmental-impact reports and other procedural hurdles were suspended. President Bill Clinton refused—under union pressure—to suspend David-Bacon wage rules (as President George Bush had done in 1992 after Hurricane Andrew). But Mr. Wilson did what he could and suspended union-backed limits on overtime in the private sector, among other rules.
Most important, Mr. Wilson used incentives. He told contractors their bids had to specify when work would be finished, and that they would incur a daily penalty of $200,000 if they were late. C.C. Myers won the bid and put on three shifts that worked 24/7. It hired its own locomotive and crew to haul surplus steel from Texas, and Mr. Wilson agreed government inspectors would be on site around the clock to approve the work.
Pennsylvania officials are doing what they can to reroute motorists. Brad Rudolph, the spokesman for the state’s Transportation Department, says his agency will consider “a fill-in situation or a temporary structure” near the collapsed freeway to improve access. But Pennsylvania should seize the initiative and adapt some lessons from other states. The need for speed is urgent. Traffic on I-95 peaks in August as vacation-goers and college students join commuters and truckers on the road.
No doubt the White House will send federal cash, but no one expects it to come up with imaginative solutions or suspend Davis-Bacon union wage rules. State and local officials in Pennsylvania can still follow the example of the 1994 “Northridge miracle” and get I-95 repaired faster than the experts are now predicting.
Mr. Fund is a columnist for National Review and a co-author of “Our Broken Elections: How the Left Changed the Way You Vote.”
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An extreme environmental event struck New York last week. The city experienced some of the worst air quality in the world—and the worst to hit the city in at least a half-century—as dense wildfire smoke surged south from the province of Quebec. Headlines suggested that the primary culprit was climate change, but these claims are inconsistent with peer-reviewed science, the observational record and our growing understanding of the meteorology associated with wildfire events.
I have published extensively on the meteorology of major wildfires, studied the effects of climate change on atmospheric circulation, and received funding from the National Science Foundation and U.S. Forest Service for research dealing with wildfire meteorology.
An unusual atmospheric circulation resulted in wildfire ignition and rapid growth, with an intense low-pressure area pushing undiluted smoke into the New York area. Global warming was only a minor player in this event.
The recent wildfires occurred in the boreal forests of northern Quebec. Fire isn’t rare in that region. The ecology of these forests relies on fire for the release of seeds and forest health. Many of the major boreal fires occur during a narrow temporal window from mid-April through early June, just after the winter snow has melted and before grasses and other small plants grow, reducing flammability. During this short window, the dead vegetation from the previous year can dry out sufficiently to burn if there is an ignition source such as lightning or errant human activity.
Many of the great Quebec fires have occurred during the spring, such as the May 2010 fire that spread massive amounts of smoke into New England and the May 1870 Saguenay fire, which spread smoke as far as the British Isles. Large boreal forest fires during the spring in Canada are neither unusual nor a sign of climate change.
The fires this month began on June 2, as hundreds of lightning strikes ignited vegetation dried by nearly a week of unusually warm weather. The weather prior to the warm spell wasn’t unusually dry, with the Canadian drought monitor showing normal moisture conditions and temperatures near or below normal.
Starting on May 27, an area of high pressure built over south-central Canada, warming and drying the area for several days into early June. With the light surface fuels, such as grasses ready to burn, all that was needed to start a fire was an ignition source, which occurred in early June with a lightning storm associated with low pressure.
The lightning ignited numerous fires and the low-pressure center’s circulation produced high winds that stoked the fires, resulting in rapid uncontrolled growth. Even worse, as the low center pushed south and intensified east of New York, it produced persistent strong winds from the northwest, moving the Quebec smoke into the New York metropolitan area.
It was the perfect storm for smoke in New York, with several independent elements occurring in exactly the right sequence. It’s difficult to find any plausible evidence for a significant climate-change connection to the recent New York smoke event. The preceding weather conditions over Quebec for the months prior to the wildfire event were near normal. There is no evidence that the strong high pressure over southern Canada that produced the warming was associated with climate change, as some media headlines claim. In fact, there is a deep literature in the peer-reviewed research that demonstrates no amplification of high- and low-pressure areas with a warming planet.
The long-term trend in Quebec has been for both precipitation and temperature to increase. Temperatures have warmed about 2 degrees Fahrenheit over the past half-century. Even assuming that this warming is entirely human-induced, it represents only a small proportion of the excessive heat during the event, in which Quebec temperatures climbed to 20 to 25 degrees above normal. The number of wildfires in Quebec is decreasing; there is no upward trend in area burned, which would be expected if global warming was dominant.
The recent intense New York smoke event is a good illustration of the underlying origins of many extreme environmental and weather events. The atmosphere is a chaotic system, dominated by random natural variability. Such variability is like a game of cards—rarely, by the luck of the draw, one is dealt a full house or a straight flush. Climate change’s effects on weather are relatively small compared to random variations inherent in a hugely complex system.
Mr. Mass is a professor of atmosphere sciences at the University of Washington.
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third
https://washingtontimes-dc.newsmemory.com/?token=1bbc291ec07c58e48febbdb68812e89f_64886f11_6d25b5f&selDate=20230613
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fourth
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-suspends-asylum-appointments-texas-border-city-after-extortion-reports-2023-06-12/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_campaign=Daily-Briefing&utm_term=061323
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third
https://washingtontimes-dc.newsmemory.com/?token=1bbc291ec07c58e48febbdb68812e89f_64886f11_6d25b5f&selDate=20230613
What page?
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https://www.congress.gov/116/meeting/house/110243/witnesses/HHRG-116-SY18-Bio-MassC-20191120.pdf
hope professor Maas still has his job beyond today .
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GM:
Officials: Driver lost control of tanker before bridge collapse
Both elevated sections of Interstate 95 to be demolished
BY RON TODT, MIKE C ATALINI AND MARC LEVY ASSOCIATED PRESS PHILADELPHIA | The driver of a tractor-trailer hauling gasoline lost control on an off-ramp and flipped the tanker truck on its side in a wreck that set it afire and destroyed a section of the East Coast’s main north-south highway, Pennsylvania’s top transportation official said Monday.
In the first official accounting of a wreck that threw hundreds of thousands of morning commutes into chaos and disrupted untold numbers of businesses, state Transportation Secretary Mike Carroll said the driver was northbound “trying to navigate the curve, lost control of the vehicle, landed on its side and ruptured the tank.”
The driver was feared dead, and a relative of a New Jersey truck driver who has not been heard from since Sunday told the Philadelphia Inquirer that investigators had contacted the family in an effort to identify human remains found in the wreckage.
Pennsylvania State Police said a body was turned over to the Philadelphia medical examiner and coroner, but did not identify the remains or respond when asked if they belonged to the driver.
Interstate 95 will be closed in both directions for weeks at the start of summer travel season. The elevated southbound portion of I-95 will have to be demolished, as well as the northbound side, Mr. Carroll said. Motorists should avoid the northeast corner of the sixth-largest city in the country, transportation officials said.
The accident also disrupted the automotive route from Canada to Florida through the Boston, New York and Washington metropolitan areas, increasing Americans’ dependence on air travel and the interstate rail network.
Videos shared on social media showed a number of close calls around the accident, with people driving through the area as flames licked upward from the fire below. The National Transportation Safety Board said it was sending a team to investigate the accident.
Mr. Carroll said the damaged I-95 segment carries about 160,000 vehicles daily. State police don’t know if the driver was speeding and no other vehicle has been found. Officials said they had been in contact with the trucking company, but they did not identify it.
Mr. Carroll said the highway span was 10 to 12 years old, had appeared sound and they blamed the damage on the heat of the fire, which took an hour to control.
Gov. Josh Shapiro signed a disaster declaration Monday, saying it gives state agencies the ability to skip normal biddingand- contracting requirements so the span can be repaired faster.
High heat from the fire or the impact of an explosion could have weakened the steel beams supporting the overpass, according to Drexel University structural engineering Professor Abi Aghayere. Bridges like the one that collapsed don’t typically have fire protection, like concrete casing, he added. It could have been coated in a fire-retarding paint, but even then the beams could have been weakened.
“It just gives you time,” Mr. Aghayere said.
Among many transportation changes across the region, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority said it was operating three extra morning and late afternoon trains on its Trenton, New Jersey, line, and adding capacity to regularly scheduled lines during peak hours.
This section of I-95 was part of a $212 million reconstruction project that wrapped up four years ago, state Transportation Department spokesman Brad Rudolph said. PennDOT rated the 104-foot span as in “good” condition earlier this year.
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In the first official accounting of a wreck that threw hundreds of thousands of morning commutes into chaos and disrupted untold numbers of businesses, state Transportation Secretary Mike Carroll said the driver was northbound “trying to navigate the curve, lost control of the vehicle, landed on its side and ruptured the tank.”
(https://www.inquirer.com/resizer/ggidv9p0Mz_oG52UliwiD_fpC1s=/800x715/smart/filters:format(webp)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/pmn/DGU6Z7VFOVBMBHBAQURZROJVE4.png)
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https://www.facebook.com/reel/784052293425765
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/4134060/china-openly-invading-usa-this-is-published-today-by-la-consulate-general-it-called-chinese-peopl
=================================================
http://losangeles.china-consulate.gov.cn/lbyj/202306/t20230610_11094695.htm
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https://michaelyon.substack.com/p/illegal-aliens-welcomed-to-texas
MY with Steve Bannon:
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/4157732/invasion-communities-while-dhs-pumps-hundreds-of-millions-into-open-hands-across-america-https
==========================================
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/4157703/migrant-base-camp
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https://michaelyon.substack.com/p/facts?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email#media-ec1d720b-fcff-40f9-9922-e2c7b2dd4415
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Illegal aliens in the U.S.: Recent analysis of the number of illegal aliens living in the U.S. estimates that the population sat at roughly 17 million as of 2021. The analysis was conducted by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and it comes in at a higher number than other immigration tracking groups that estimate 11 million illegal aliens. FAIR's report states, "This estimate is also a 2.3 million increase from our end-of-2020 estimate, meaning the illegal alien population increased 16 percent nationwide during just the first two years of Joe Biden's presidency." The report does acknowledge that no one knows "exactly how many people cross the border illegally and evade immigration authorities, nor can anyone accurately quantify overstays or gotaways." However, due to Joe Biden's de facto open-border policy, it's a good bet that FAIR's higher estimate of illegal aliens is closer to reality than the lower numbers being claimed by the Biden administration.
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/dnc-continues-to-cite-2005-number-on-illegal-immigration-studies-indicate-real-figure-likely-3-times-higher_4879007.html?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=BonginoReport
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There was a Yale and or MIT and or Princeton study a few years back asserting 22-24M.
Can we (hint, that means you GM haha) find it?
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Reminder
Madison Warned About ‘Sanctuary’ States
He foretold their interest in ‘exaggerating their inhabitants’ to ‘swell’ their numbers in Congress.
By David B. Rivkin Jr. and John S. Baker Jr.
Aug. 2, 2020 3:32 pm ET
President Trump met wide derision last month when he issued an executive order excluding illegal aliens from the census numbers used for apportioning House seats. “Persons means persons,” Thomas Wolf of the Brennan Center for Justice told a reporter. “Everyone must be counted.” But counting is different from allocating political power, and Mr. Trump has the better constitutional argument.
Section 2 of the 14th Amendment provides: “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.” This revises a provision in Article I that uses similar language but also includes the infamous Three Fifths Clause.
When voting on the latter provision, the Constitutional Convention used the term “number of inhabitants.” The Committee on Style shortened that to “numbers,” but that linguistic change was of no import. As Chief Justice Earl Warren noted in Powell v. McCormack (1969), the committee wasn’t authorized to make substantive changes to previously voted provisions. In Wesberry v. Sanders (1964), Justice Hugo Black wrote for the court that “the debates at the Convention make at least one fact abundantly clear: that . . . in allocating Congressmen, the number assigned to each State should be determined solely by the number of the State’s inhabitants.”
The administration argues that illegal aliens don’t qualify as inhabitants, and it’s right. The definition of “inhabitant” at the time of the Founding had an important political and economic context because of the legal responsibility of localities to care for the destitute under the 1601 Act for the Relief of the Poor. An inhabitant was a person who rightfully resided in a jurisdiction, contributing to and qualifying for available benefits. Like illegal aliens today, those whose presence was unlawful were not considered inhabitants and were subject to removal.
According to the 2018 Yale study, there are at least 16.7 million, and more likely around 22.1 million, illegal aliens in the U.S. The apportionment following the 2010 census yielded congressional districts containing roughly 710,000 people each. That means the illegal-alien population is the equivalent of around 30 districts, more than any state except California (53) or Texas (36).
States inflating census numbers has been a ever-present danger to the proper functioning of America’s federalist system. In Federalist No. 54, James Madison addressed what he called states’ “interest in exaggerating their inhabitants” to bolster their representation in Congress: “It is of great importance that the States should feel as little bias as possible, to swell or to reduce the amount of their numbers.”
Millions of illegal aliens are distributed disproportionately throughout the U.S., more than enough to cause shifts in apportionment of congressional seats, which also affect the Electoral College. In an example of the kind of swelling Madison warned about, some states and localities entice illegal aliens with “sanctuary” laws promising to shield them from federal law enforcement and provide them free health care and other benefits. In the years ahead, that could make the illegal alien population become larger and more concentrated in these states.
Yet this is not simply a blue vs. red state conflict over political power. Sanctuary state California will lose representatives if illegal aliens are excluded from apportionment, but so will Texas and Florida. It is also a Sun Belt vs. Rust Belt conflict. States like Indiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio are the ones that stand to gain (or at least not lose) in apportionment under the president’s plan.
Since only a few states lose representation after each decennial census, this gradual erosion of political power has rarely been challenged. The Supreme Court has never addressed the constitutionality of including illegal aliens in congressional apportionment and has only occasionally been asked to do so (including in a 2011 case in which we represented Louisiana). When the court rejected Mr. Trump’s proposed citizenship question on the census, it was on technical administrative procedure ground, not the merits.
That leaves it to the political branches to carry out the constitutional mandate of counting only inhabitants for reapportionment. Congress has done so, by enacting statutes giving the president wide discretion on reapportionment decisions. Mr. Trump is right to take the next step.
Mr. Rivkin practices appellate and constitutional law in Washington. He served in the White House Counsel’s Office and Justice Department under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Mr. Baker is a visiting professor at Georgetown’s Center for the Constitution and a professor emeritus at Louisiana State University Law Center.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwjWHnv4sF8
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https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/06/video-biden-border-patrol-cuts-razor-wire-fence/
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https://www.theburningplatform.com/2023/07/01/florida-issues-statewide-emergency-malaria-alert/
I wonder how that happened...
"CCP has weaponized Dengue and drones to dispense mosquitos. Panamanians here are now overrun with Malaria at levels they never saw until the invasion through Darien."
:x
but we have Biden Myorkas and Harris and the Silicon shit hole.
so nothing is done of course
the border wide open
and not stating 10,000 per day will flood the US very soon
as title 42 ends May 11
yet all we hear about is Clarence Thomas
and racial themes and gay themes all day and night on MSM
:x
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/jun/30/joe-biden-forced-build-donald-trumps-border-wall/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=lk9YsbYO4gKWLc9A%2BIzRuBkilXfKulmeX2PdQVMCnt1ewvrfljqV5j3%2FTmErMYJH&bt_ts=1688310987504
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second
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/4236167/latest-1-day-invasion-numbers-through-darien-gap-panama-share-share-share-informaci-n-del
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Third
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/4234578/something-is-not-right-in-panama-i-keep-getting-messages-like-this-i-have-talked-to-a-couple-o
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/4240878/remember-when-what-those-ignorant-liberals-said-in-2016-when-some-of-us-protested-they-cal
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/4240866/gigacide-inbound?fbclid=IwAR0262-4zLJj-5M2PZujSRhy3b4JrC2T8GiMatTTxPL08U7e7pUXIkFF4lw
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Such Sinophobic racism! Shame!
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/4240866/gigacide-inbound?fbclid=IwAR0262-4zLJj-5M2PZujSRhy3b4JrC2T8GiMatTTxPL08U7e7pUXIkFF4lw
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I notice no, tats, piercings, lipstick on the CCP party members
all men it seems too
straight male haircuts too
In China - >. WOKE does not die. It was never born.
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China wants to rule, so they crush the pedo-groomers and foster masculinity.
I notice no, tats, piercings, lipstick on the CCP party members
all men it seems too
straight male haircuts too
In China - >. WOKE does not die. It was never born.
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https://dailycaller.com/2023/07/05/exclusive-house-homeland-security-committee-spotlight-cartel-violence-next-phase-mayorkas-probe/?pnespid=tbRpVXRMZKYG0PKcrDLlSp_A7xmhXZEvdfbjnOQztRtm15qspFGyvvewfrBCHSfCRGxVpalA
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https://www.statista.com/statistics/611020/total-number-of-properties-purchased-by-chinese-buyers-in-the-us/
Roughly 322 thousand U.S. homes/properties are owned by Chinese nationalists. Entire apartment blocks, shopping areas etc. Safe houses, depots and black sites for interrogation/snatching problem people. All bought legally and protected from search by our Constitution. Infinite time after the first few raids start and everyone is warning each other to move the goods.
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DHS admits that 40% of catch-and-release migrants disappeared.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/jul/18/vanishing-act-dhs-admits-40-catch-and-release-migr/
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https://washingtontimes-dc.newsmemory.com/?token=9dbbb592e8cbe1e557916581fc93030f_64be7a63_6d25b5f&selDate=20230724
https://twitter.com/OldPatrolHQ/status/1683131080034103296
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https://townhall.com/tipsheet/juliorosas/2023/07/23/dont-expect-the-media-to-cover-the-gunman-who-ambushed-fargo-police-n2626050
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https://apnews.com/article/fargo-north-dakota-police-officer-shooting-d289e29344a93f623620acef9912dfda?_se=bXV0aGVuQGludG5ldC5tdQ%3D%3D&utm_campaign=Extremism+Roundup+2023-07-27&utm_medium=email&utm_source=brevo
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/.../ice-revives.../...
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement rekindled its policy limiting the illegal immigrants whom officers are allowed to arrest and deport after the Supreme Court shot down a legal challenge to the policy.
The new rules, which lay out President Biden’s priorities for immigration law enforcement, say that being in the country illegally is no longer a sufficient reason for arrest or deportation.
The rules require agents and officers to justify each arrest and deportation target as either a threat to national security, a risk to public safety or a recent border crosser.
=================================
Rhetorical question: Why is it that we the American people have less fight in us to defend our country than the Ukranians do to defend theirs?
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/jul/30/smuggling-cartels-still-raking-cash-despite-lower-/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=65mneUaTkyQZAwKCeur2lDViIBX9TyKZvOqAD%2BJEUADLfh60dZMLhwW7NmIzkhpU&bt_ts=1690807269193
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/4373830/this-number-will-explode-am-frequently-down-in-darien-studying-this-the-intentional-invasion-is
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second
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&fbclid=IwAR2_3VggCfbZZyM6iC2wxkMBNmt7qLm98jHUTZ84DdFGQkCrjUoR50vgy9U&v=9Qtb184J4dY&feature=youtu.be#bottom-sheet
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19858/prestige-biotech-china
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https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/08/armed-suspected-cartel-members-seen-entering-texas-mexico/?fbclid=IwAR2bjleFtGGLJQ5kfL1YFeSL-LWGgjExSH-2c3Z618VQMtbUdCUrhw7ajK0
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/4410865/operationburningedge-day-9-update-with-annvandersteel-https-rumble-com-v362540-august-9-2023
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/4418466/on-fire-at-the-burningedge-from-annvandersteel-the-abbott-border-is-wide-open-https-rumble-c
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/aug/10/dhs-eyes-more-generous-work-permits-unauthorized-m/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=morning&utm_term=newsletter&utm_content=morning&bt_ee=7sdnC47C5jOIfUgS9Iiih%2BIpdzwdM%2FO%2FEAvSwQBYqoRYTYqlGcP66NadQk19AjJ%2B&bt_ts=1691763636330
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/aug/26/gunshots-border-smugglers-take-aim-agents/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=YC6qSSEU9FAZN2bRHsajPHSv5IlG0buecLg5GSQ3rjzkbyIWKnlTL%2FGIdQHNcdNW&bt_ts=1693077110440
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second
https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cwa-_jLJNXW/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA%3D%3D&fbclid=IwAR2hxnGUagf80pwxdNQJOSqOzuqOGYBNk_X5c14ZxhZyO2HKoCOt61MROOs
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https://americanmind.org/salvo/between-suicide-and-murder-part-one/?utm_campaign=American%20Mind%20Email%20Warm%20Up&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=273415312&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--g7EQ3Sr3oSZbLL-ZtJ5lLFaOy8jc-FCqINHFJ8YeKoyzUcf3WvPT2fdc1uxCPvc5G5kCznmS06PbIicli-JFvwz7QwA&utm_content=273415312&utm_source=hs_email
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/sep/12/un-pronounces-us-mexico-border-worlds-deadliest-mi/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=nhWu%2FkN6PcaQyTzlzdhx4rssySbCxSR3J%2FFB7TXdiDL46zRKl6O15%2FZ9LNSAtmzj&bt_ts=1694599929484
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Invasion USA
MICHAEL YON
SEP 15
READ IN APP
PANAMA: the #CCP Economy Collapsing…#Chinese and other children pushed through deadly Darien Gap to come and destroy America. Venezuelan gangsters in the invasion column next to them. The very professional Panamanian Senafront rescue people daily. Senafront is now deep in the jungle now with courageous Oscar Blue, Ben Bergquam, and a Mexican journalist named Manuel. The rains are coming down hard now. Senafront well-trained, highly professional, strong. I hear one of their helicopters right now. (UH-1).
Ben messaged via satcom text: “The scene is truly apocalyptic. Bajo Chiquito is completely overrun (thousands!), possibly as many as Lajas Blancas and more arriving every second! And the amount of feces and trash is staggering. My guess is we passed about 8000 people today between boats, the camp and the jungle. It’s getting dark and they’re still coming.- Ben Bergquam”
Another person mentioned just now 59 busses took about 3080 “migrante” from Darien yesterday.
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https://nypost.com/2023/09/17/dems-migrant-policies-to-blame-in-bronx-daycare-fentanyl-death/
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/4625019/tuberculosis-is-one-of-the-worst-diseases-known-to-mankind-killed-more-people-even-than-communism
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https://www.foxnews.com/politics/whistleblower-tells-congress-that-govt-delivering-migrant-children-human-traffickers
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https://www.foxnews.com/politics/whistleblower-tells-congress-that-govt-delivering-migrant-children-human-traffickers
As right wing as I may be, I've never heard of anyone being Q'anon except through left-wing rhetoric. But I looked it up and the weirdest part was belief in something to do with child sex pedophilia and trafficking involving people of power.
That's crazy.
But now we have a president whose own son calls him pedo Pete, whose daughter recounts inappropriate naked, underage behavior with her, and then we have stories like these. (above)
How did government ever get so big and powerful that that kind of abuse is even possible?
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At around minute 04:00 this guy asks a particularly challenging question:
In the event of conflict between us and the Axis of Evil (China-Russia-Iran-NoKo-et al) what is to stop the Chinese from arming the Cartels the way we have armed the Ukes?
As chronicled my MY and noted here on this forum, the Chinese already have well established beach heads in Latin America.
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Second
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=990907405510230&extid=CL-UNK-UNK-UNK-AN_GK0T-GK1C&ref=sharing&mibextid=ZbWKwL
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https://www.judicialwatch.org/criminal-organizations/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_content=&utm_campaign=tipsheet&utm_term=members
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second
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVIfZzzKlVM
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Yes, military incursions sounds good but I agree it would be tricky and would certainly lead to screwups that involve innocents and piss off our neighbor.
OTOH , as noted the cartels face no consequence if we don't do more.
If the root cause is the CCP as the person in the video suggests , we are also screwed . We don't need more talking the CCP we need to make this more painful to them as talk does just leads "to more talks".
I wonder what precursors are sent from China to Mexico who then produce the fentanyl.
How the China - Mexican cartel money laundering works:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/18/china-mexico-opioid-traficking-us-sanctions
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Relevant to this thread, note the part about proxy war support of the Ukes being used to justify proxy war by the Russkis , , , and more:
https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/28/the-ukrainian-gordian-knot/?utm_campaign=Cultivation&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=276739390&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_VHtnHj3vuTD1AaMjeFBR-TZ6OH6ia4PZ2AQzdxaCnlHF3gqSwbu8BkeNTs58MaXW_2CVJUWX8LurXGS6J-5XKt_Itwg&utm_content=276739390&utm_source=hs_email&fbclid=IwAR0n--nzO8B8ojvr5x8Do-0w63aBvgzgbhsxZWPe2hA2oUAqdHAaDmiGW3g
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/10/03/minnesta-police-illegal-aliens-men-involved-gang-rape-young-girls/
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https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2023/10/04/us-russia-emergency-tests-n2629332
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Third
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/oct/4/mayorkas-declares-immediate-need-border-wall-texas/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=DduVDtsRobh8ChGtfgV9g2OAZ58d7eTIVPsaJ1X2392u1btHq5YT3L3Ku3XqvCHF&bt_ts=1696446216358
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hopefully we will hear the truth about this over the next couple of days.
never trust a Democrat
probably all window dressing
perhaps finally some pressure from Northern Dem strongholds and the usual support in urban area FINALLY showing even Dems pissed off so he needs to put on show for the MSM to shout over the airwaves = Dems are doing something.
yada yada
never trust a Dem
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https://cis.org/Bensman/Rarely-Quoted-Sheriffs-Mexican-Cartels-Do-Operate-and-Around-Controversial-Texas-Illegal?fbclid=IwAR0tEx3w3KGJP1tC9VtwB-lyIOQku6aXG6osM--nkgCCa8jB4i8klH6LXcw
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Second
The Democrats’ Phony Border War
Leaders say they’re tired of the crisis, but they’re afraid of the solution.
By The Editorial Board
Oct. 5, 2023 6:33 pm ET
Democrats are taking matters into their own hands at the border, or so they say. The wild bunch of mayors heading toward the Rio Grande are still afraid of the one action that might help slow the flow of migrants: Putting pressure on President Biden.
Leaders from far north of the border are heading south as thousands of migrants continue to fill up their shelters. Mayor Eric Adams arrived in Mexico Wednesday to tell migrants that New York City has no vacancies, and he’ll spread the same word in Colombia and Ecuador over the weekend. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson says he’ll visit Texas’ southern border soon to see the migrant issue firsthand.
Both men are feeling the pressure to do something as housing for migrants puts more and more strain on city budgets. Yet both avoid the topic of asylum law, which currently makes it easy for migrants to gain temporary legal status in the U.S. and remain in the country for years without a hearing.
Mr. Johnson denies that he wants to slow migration at all, and says he’s traveling merely to “assess the full situation.” Mr. Adams is tougher but leaves the harshest talk to his surrogates. “We need the federal government, the Congress members, the Senate, and the president to do its job: Close the borders,” said his chief adviser Ingrid Lewis-Martin on Sunday, with a clarity that still evades the mayor.
Democrats know that even modest asylum restrictions would draw fire from the left, so they stop short of asking President Biden to do it. Ask New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who ran for cover after daring to point out the asylum problem.
“We want them to have a limit on who can come across the border,” she said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “People coming from all over the world are finding their way through, simply saying they need asylum.”
That’s true, but saying so out loud drew progressive rebukes, and by Monday Ms. Hochul was backtracking. “With respect to what was said about the border, I have called for a more thoughtful, balanced national immigration—federal immigration—policy.” Watering down her call to reform asylum law to a “thoughtful, balanced” policy is ducking the issue.
With no federal reform on the way, their recourse is to blame Republicans. Hence the Governor’s swipe on Sunday at the GOP Representatives from her state, whom she says “refuse to work with President Biden and come up with a sensible border strategy.” And like Mayors Adams and Johnson, Ms. Hochul blames her migrant woes on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. He’s a convenient target, though the Lone Star State has sent about a third of the migrants who have turned up in Chicago and less a sixth of those in New York.
Each of these Democrats knows, or at least should, that the main obstacle to reforming asylum policy now is in their own party. Republicans would happily reform the asylum law but can’t without Democratic support—and that means leadership from the White House.
Border enforcement is the duty of the federal government, and Mr. Biden has considered nearly every solution except the asylum changes that might actually work. Migrants will keep filling the big cities until other Democrats start telling the truth about the real cause of today’s mass border crossings.
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Third
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12589871/mexico-cartel-texas-invasion-border-war-todd-bensman.html
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fourth
https://gunreviewspro.com/videos/5-most-deadly-guns-of-mexican-drug-cartels/
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/10/biden-is-lying-about-the-border-wall/?bypass_key=NUZwN2pScWpLR0VWcWlxenFkNldwZz09OjpUQzlKWW1vdlZYcHpXSGh4V2tSS1NtSllkbGxSWnowOQ%3D%3D
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at 02:10
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=241922448497254&extid=CL-UNK-UNK-UNK-AN_GK0T-GK1C&ref=sharing&mibextid=1hfH0m
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Hamas Raping and Killing Women — Darien Gap is WIDE OPEN FOR BUSINESS
Meanwhile uncategorized Arabs flow through Darien every hour. Including “Palestinians” I personally encounter. Jews and others have nowhere to run because not tossing out vaxxing-and other self-destructive governments.
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As of today, illegal aliens are able to pass straight through Colombia, Panama, Costal Rica, with very little human-made delay and a great deal of human facilitation, especially so by United States and UN. UN has massive presence in Panama. US funds and facilitates UN. After crossing Darien Gap from Colombia into Panama, unidentified aliens load buses (now right in from of me) and can as of today drive completely through Panama into Costa Rica to Nicaraguan border. Price now per head for bus ride from Darien is $60 per person over five years-old. People who do not have the $60 can work for five days around camp to pay for ticket.
Presidents of Costa Rica and Panama came to Lajas Blancas camp on 06 October 2023. We were there again yesterday, on 07Oct23, aliens had been held back in the jungle reducing the numbers the press-cameras saw. Lajas Blancas camp had been cleaned of trash before arrival. A source currently in Bajo Chiquito village (3 hours upriver from Lajas Blancas by piragua) told me two minutes ago that 1500 illegal aliens boarded 100 piraguas in past 2 hours en route to Lajas Blancas Camp. Piraguas are dugout canoes — 15 to 20 per aliens per piragua. This reconciles with what I am seeing right now coming in from Bajo Chiquito. With new agreement between Panama and Costa Rica to open border between Panama and Costa Rica, these aliens can now immediately proceed through Panama and Costa Rica in roughly 1 day.
In summary, this means the Chinese route through South America to United States, the route typically starting in Quito, Ecuador, can facilitate Chinese landing in South America and then entering United States within roughly 2 weeks. Some Chinese can do within 10 days depending on the breaks. In other words, a Chinese spy/soldier can leave China and take the Southern route and be anywhere in America within about 2 weeks without any trace of entering America. Currently roughly 60 buses per day are making the journey from Darien.
A source told me yesterday the next phase starting soon will bring this to 200 buses. Two brand new camps are being built in the Darien. This accurate and direct information and more is the source of my estimate that at least 10,000 aliens per day will be successfully crossing through Panama to United States. The new bridge building and other infrastructure being built along the route will easily create conditions for 3-4 million per year through Panama. I know this route very well.
A few more tweaks can pave way for a million per month coming through here.
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second
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/4698177/chinese-arabs-and-many-more-flooding-into-usa-increasing-https-audioboom-com-posts-8381143-d
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third
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/4698155/kiss-of-death-open-borders-https-audioboom-com-posts-8381142-texas-texas-legislature-investi
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Lying under oath to Congress
https://issuesinsights.com/2023/10/11/did-mayorkas-just-confess-to-multiple-felonies/
Is there no consequence for this?
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iden Has Abandoned Border Towns
New York and Chicago get federal help. Eagle Pass, Texas, and Yuma, Ariz., don’t.
By Karl Rove
Oct. 11, 2023 6:01 pm ET
Journal Editorial Report: A liberal group forms to stop a No Labels candidate. Images: AP/Reuters Composite: Mark Kelly
Tom Perez and Kathy Hochul have each other on speed dial. He directs the White House Office of Intergovernmental Relations and is a former Democratic National Committee chairman; she is New York’s governor.
Politico reports they were brought together while “coordinating responses” to the influx of migrants New York has received since spring 2022. Mr. Perez said that Ms. Hochul is “working her tail off.” In response, she said “frequent conversations and his engagement” have “made a huge difference.”
Good for them. Yet far to the southwest, GOP Rep. Tony Gonzales is still waiting for the White House to phone local officials in Texas’ 23rd Congressional District. The epicenter of the border crisis, it runs 823 miles along the Rio Grande, two-thirds of the Texas-Mexico border.
Bigger than Pennsylvania, the district contains most of the El Paso Border Patrol sector, all of the Big Bend and Del Rio sectors, and part of the Laredo sector. Of fiscal 2023’s 1,827,133 encounters—detentions of migrants for crossing the border illegally—so far, 790,734 occurred in those four sectors. That doesn’t yet count September’s encounters, and the total is on pace to be the largest in history.
Mr. Gonzales sees the financial and human cost in the communities along the border. Mayors and county officials complain about migrant housing, food and transportation needs. Law-enforcement officers talk about crimes committed by “getaways”—migrants who elude the Border Patrol. Community groups have exhausted their resources trying to meet ever-increasing demands for social services. Local hospitals are stuck with bills for care they’ve provided migrants dumped in emergency rooms. In Eagle Pass, Texas, there’s one small hospital with 101 beds. It gets hit with $100,000 a month in uncompensated migrant care that the federal government won’t reimburse.
Intrigued by reports of Mr. Perez’s New York outreach, Mr. Gonzales checked to see if the White House was calling mayors, sheriffs or county judges (the top executives in Texas counties) in his district. Most are Democrats. “They haven’t heard a word from Perez,” Mr. Golzales told me, “though they’re on the border and local resources have been depleted while cities thousands of miles away from the frontline of the crisis are getting attention from the White House.” It feels to Mr. Gonzales as if “Texas is being punished for this administration’s policy failures.”
Douglas Nicholls, mayor of Yuma, Ariz., once received calls from Mr. Perez’s predecessor as White House director of intergovernmental affairs, Julie Chávez Rodríguez. A granddaughter of Cesar Chávez and a native of Yuma, she at least paid attention to that part of the border. But since she left to run President Biden’s re-election, crickets. Yuma, population 99,246, had 168,269 encounters between Oct. 1, 2022, and Aug. 31, 2023, and its resources are stretched. Its only hospital had $26 million in uncompensated migrant services between November 2021 and December 2022, and the burden is growing.
Compare the challenges faced by big Northern cities with those of Southwestern border towns. Since spring 2022, New York City, with a population of 8.3 million, has received 118,000 migrants. Chicago, population 2.6 million, accepted around 15,000. The mayors of both cities and their states’ governors have complained bitterly about the burden this imposes.
Eagle Pass and Del Rio, Texas, combined population 63,433, saw 347,572 migrant encounters in the first 11 months of fiscal 2023, and no White House officials are working them like Mr. Perez is working New York and Illinois.
But Mr. Biden and his party are paying a political price for their indifference and ineptitude. A June 11 Pew Research poll found only 23% of Americans say the government deals with the border well while 47% believe illegal immigration is a very big problem. A Sept. 19 NBC News poll found voters believe the GOP handles immigration better than Democrats by 45% to 27%.
Mr. Gonzales argues that securing the border and restoring confidence starts with asylum reform. Those seeking asylum should have to prove they’re eligible and didn’t come through a safe third country, or else face swift deportation.
Sen. John Cornyn (R., Texas) would also end “catch and release.” In December 2020, the Border Patrol released into the U.S. 17 migrants who didn’t make asylum claims. Last December, it released 140,355. Detaining and quickly removing illegal aliens would discourage others from coming.
This is a serious political problem for Mr. Biden that a few more miles of border wall won’t solve. The president needs to ignore his party’s open-border wing and negotiate in good faith with Republicans on reforms in this year’s Homeland Security budget if he wants a chance at regaining voters’ trust on immigration—let alone helping those Southwestern border towns bearing the brunt of the crisis. Local leaders there are increasingly angry about the administration’s indifference to their plight. They want action.
Mr. Rove helped organize the political-action committee American Crossroads and is author of “The Triumph of William McKinley” (Simon & Schuster, 2015).
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https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1713248981772279943
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https://www.foxnews.com/us/us-customs-confirms-iranian-special-interest-alien-apprehended-month-eagle-pass-texas
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https://twitter.com/Michael_Yon/status/1713961036552745318
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Huge mess, numerous shell companies, non-English speaking employees, no licenses. What could possibly go wrong?
https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/behind-a-secret-chinese-biolab-in-california-a-global-web-of-connections-5498112?utm_source=ref_share&utm_campaign=facebook&rs=SHRNCMMW&fbclid=IwAR3xoDQ_uCQiJXCH0ljuLWISPkk5ukvxa7mn0rIakfP0wy8wvSu2tQJv66o
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New Hampshire doubles up on border security after Biden admin ignores their border needs:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/10/new-hampshire-governor-will-tackle-northern-border-after-silence-from-biden-admin/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=new-hampshire-governor-will-tackle-northern-border-after-silence-from-biden-admin
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https://brushbeater.org/2015/12/01/echoes-of-chechnya/
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Some things to think about.
https://greyenigma.wordpress.com/your-on-your-own/when-the-music-stops/
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/texas/article-12663663/Venezuelas-worst-gangsters-criminals-cross-border-carrying-orders-dictator-Maduro.html
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DR. ETIQUETTE 🤦♂️
@DrEtiquette
The Government of Venezuela provides Hezbollah operatives with full packages of false identity documents. Hundreds of thousands of middle aged men from Venezuela have already entered the U.S. border. How many of them are Hezbollah operatives?
https://x.com/DrEtiquette/status/1719142397576200632?s=20
This would be hard to catch if we were trying to secure our border. Impossible to catch when it's left wide open.
What happened to the idea of impeaching the officials who ordered the border unsecured?
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Impeachment and conviction has been pursued here at least , , ,
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More evidence of terrorists coming in:
https://www.newsnationnow.com/us-news/immigration/border-apprehensions-terror-list/
"new figures show that apprehensions of people at the border who happen to be on the FBI’s terror watch list continue to tick up.
During fiscal year 2023, 169 people were flagged, with 98 in 2022 and 15 in 2021."
(Doug) Don't we think those "terror watch list" numbers are tip of the iceberg? Real numbers of people coming who pose real danger are likely what, 10 times that?
The point is, the people in charge either don't care or support the undermining of our security, and this gets covered in outlets mainstream voters don't see.
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https://thefederalnewswire.com/stories/650372780-are-hamas-and-other-middle-east-terrorist-groups-collaborating-with-mexico-s-sinaloa-cartel?fbclid=IwAR1Ucwvj0LRZ7dN3d883zfFgO15MZ2XYSZ9yhEyXSSmzDFbZ_mpYF-ZzFN8
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Border agents pulled off child trafficking, fentanyl cases to make meals for illegals:
https://x.com/heritage/status/1719408970350076346?s=61&t=L5uifCqWy8R8rhj_J8HNJw
ETA: Senator Kennedy asks some obvious questions of border officials with no answers forthcoming:
https://x.com/bennyjohnson/status/1719407040655696250?s=20
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2nd post:
Here’s some cheery thoughts. Keep your powder dry, folks:
@TonySeruga
This post will be attacked by the left, the marxists, the trolls, antifa, blm, even the intelligence community.
I'm a 39 year intelligence analyst, I and my team’s clients include the United States Government, British Government, Israeli Government, Saudi Arabia Government, NEOM, Microsoft, Dell Computers, GE, IBM, General Motors Corporation, The Scott Fetzer Corporation, Managing Dutch East India Company Archives for UNESCO , Procter & Gamble, Raytheon, Mastercard, Walmart, Northrop Grumman, Berkshire Hathaway, General Dynamics, BAE Systems, Standard Oil aka ExxonMobil, Saudi Aramco, et al.
Intelligence is NEVER perfect. It's a messy, messy business.
Rarely can I 'guarantee' the intelligence. Many times just releasing it in the wild can stop a false flag or genuine attack. But with as close to 100% confidence as possible, there WILL be multiple terrorist attacks in the U.S.
The attacks will come in waves for the next 14 months. Hundreds of thousands of CCP saboteurs trained to attack our electrical grid, poison our water supply, destroy our railways and main highway arteries, additionally at least a million, possibly two million terrorists are already here from Palestine, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Qatar, Lebanon, Iran, Somalia, etc., etc., and they are extremely well funded and get this, the Biden Administration working with the UN has given them debit cards that are reloaded every month.
Below are links to 3 articles on Hezbollah Unit 910, a sleeper cell already in the U.S. awaiting the green light from Persia to launch attacks. This is just one group of hundreds here to destroy America.
Todd Bensman led counterterrorism intelligence for the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division and its multi-agency fusion center, read his reports:
Part I of III Hezbollah’s ‘Unit 910’ in America: Recruitment, Targeting Jews, and a Building with a Doorman
toddbensman.com/part-i-of-iii-…
Part II of III Hezbollah’s ‘Unit 910’ in America: A Treasure Hunt for Fake Docs, Weapons, Explosives
toddbensman.com/part-ii-of-iii…
Part III: Hezbollah’s Clandestine Terror Wing in America: the Michigan Mystery
toddbensman.com/part-iii-hezbo…
https://x.com/tonyseruga/status/1719372334354850087?s=61&t=L5uifCqWy8R8rhj_J8HNJw
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/4813254/this-all-is-kayfabe-the-border-no-longer-exists-greg-abbott-texas-biden
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/4814731/invasion-underway-from-embera-indian-friend-just-now-in-darien-gap-panama-yesterday-we-have-6
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https://nypost.com/2023/10/30/opinion/biden-admin-secretly-let-in-thousands-of-unvetted-migrants-from-countries-of-national-security-concern/?fbclid=IwAR1uiibCR525slOF3rl3yyXyGEH8UHLHQ9fuCh0O_SCiLZ4YNPdSa23XLDQ
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/republicans-raise-terror-alarm-after-illegal-immigrants-caught-with-explosive-devices-5520541?utm_source=epochHG&utm_campaign=CFP&src_src=epochHG&src_cmp=CFP&fbclid=IwAR3lxot8FPoSIrYhJB5xCbbdKsk835tsnSI0v174tdu7EP5ztMZFdEWTJwo
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https://www.oann.com/newsroom/u-s-military-members-data-is-easy-to-purchase-online-study-finds/
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/4837799/in-arizona-border-is-completely-open-over-a-surface-area-the-size-of-connecticut-tribal-land-with
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/11/08/report-democrats-circulate-plan-to-open-floodgates-for-palestinians/
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https://twitter.com/RGVTRUTH1/status/1722664172004012520
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Keep your powder dry, folks:
https://pjmedia.com/catherinesalgado/2023/11/13/gang-members-disguised-as-migrants-enter-open-us-border-n4923861
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To hell with “who will watch the watchers,” how bout who will watch the unwatched on the watch list? Some criminal intentional oblivious actions strongly implied here.
https://nypost.com/2023/11/15/news/gunman-who-killed-swat-cop-was-on-terror-watchlist-report/
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" To hell with “who will watch the watchers,” how bout who will watch the unwatched on the watch list?"
the only ones being watched are conservatives
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https://babylonbee.com/news/idiot-terrorist-tries-to-enter-via-canadian-border-when-southern-border-is-wide-open?utm_source=The%20Babylon%20Bee%20Newsletter&utm_medium=email
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but the government is assuring this was NOT a terrorist attack
Are terrorists Kiss fans - ?
I never liked Kiss, their music is not good and they look ridiculous. Yet seem to have made fortune
One is an Israeli, I forget which one Stanley?
strike that question.
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Hamas: Made in the U.S.A.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/11/hamas-made-in-the-u-s-a/?bypass_key=S2YxRFQ0K2dtOTFGWGRzczZkRWphUT09OjpNVE53V2xGTlRHbHBMMWh1YW5GelNHMUVMMjk1WnowOQ%3D%3D
Left: Mousa Abu Marzook in 1999. Right: Pro-Palestinian students take part in a protest at Columbia University in New York City, October 12, 2023. (Khaled Al Hariri, Jeenah Moon/Reuters)
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
November 25, 2023 6:30 AM
Antisemitic terror has deep, surprising roots in American soil.
After the jihadist barbarities of October 7, Israel responded with aerial bombardments of Hamas havens in Gaza, in preparation for the now-ongoing ground invasion. As the bombs fell, Hamas heavyweight Mousa Abu Marzook was asked about the elaborate network of tunnels that the organization has built under the territory it has governed since being popularly elected in 2006. It is a virtual underground city stretching over 300 miles, constructed with untold billions of dollars in foreign-aid money diverted for the purpose (not to be confused with the aid money diverted to make billionaires out of Marzook and his fellow Hamas emirs).
Since Hamas has built tunnels instead of bomb shelters, the friendly Russia Today TV reporter wondered, why doesn’t it just let Gazans use the tunnels to shelter from Israeli attacks?
Marzook’s answer was chillingly matter-of-fact. The tunnels were not built for so-called civilians; they were built for the jihadists:
We have built the tunnels because we have no other way of protecting ourselves from being targeted and killed. These tunnels are meant to protect us from the airplanes. We are fighting from inside the tunnels.
Of course Marzook (sometimes spelled “Mazouk” or “Marzuq”) is not fighting from inside a tunnel. He was speaking from his posh offices in Qatar. There, he and the rest of Hamas’s “politburo” are harbored and abetted by the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Doha that President Biden — building on the Obama–Biden administration’s empowerment of Qatar, despite its record of material support to jihadists — has formally denominated a “major non-NATO ally” of the United States. Hamas has been formally designated as a terrorist organization under U.S. law since 1994, yet the Obama–Biden administration greenlit the establishment of a Hamas headquarters in Doha in 2012 — just as it similarly greenlit the establishment of a Taliban headquarters that Qatar, of course, was delighted to host.
Remember, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”? Twenty-two years ago seems like an alternative universe now.
The notion that Hamas has a strictly political operation siloed from its jihadist operations has always been as absurd as the conceit, similarly popular among transnational progressives, that anti-Zionism is just a political stance, unconnected to hateful antisemitism. Marzook has been at the center of both fictions since the 1987 establishment of Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.
In Doha, the native of Gaza has landed softly, as ever, after bouncing from Amman to Damascus to Cairo. Following his faraway treks these last three decades, one almost forgets that it was in the United States that he helped forge Hamas — and even ran it for a time.
The Brotherhood’s Lifeblood Is the Campus
I recounted Marzook’s exploits in The Grand Jihad, my 2010 book about the partnership between the political Left and the Brotherhood — the most successful global sharia-supremacist movement in modern history. (The Brotherhood, which has numerous satellite organizations, is frequently referred to as the Ikhwan — shorthand for Jamā’at al-Ikhwān al-Mulismūn, the Society of the Muslim Brothers. It was established in Egypt after the collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924.) While I’d love to take credit for as perfect a description of the Brotherhood’s sharia-supremacist project as “the grand jihad,” it is perfect because it comes directly from the Brotherhood itself. The phrase appears in an internal Brotherhood memorandum, which was central to the Justice Department’s eventual terrorism-financing prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development — the “charity” that served as Hamas’s American piggy bank.
In the memo, expounding on its mission in the United States, Marzook’s confederate, Mohamed Akram, wrote:
The Ikwhan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands [i.e., the Westerners’ own hands] and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.
Those words were written in 1991. By then, Marzook had been at this civilizational jihad in America for a decade.
The Brotherhood is a movement that sprang from universities and has always catalyzed campus radicalism. Its two most formative figures, founder Hassan al-Banna and his successor Sayyid Qutb, were academics. The Brotherhood’s guiding jurisprudent in the modern era, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, was a scholar at al-Azar University, the center of Sunni Islamic scholarship for over a millennium. So was another Brotherhood eminence, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (dubbed “the Emir of Jihad”), whom I prosecuted in the early-to-mid-Nineties, and whose students’ movement (Gama’at al Islamiyya, the Islamic Group) was principally responsible for murdering Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981 over the peace he’d made with Israel.
Like most members, Marzook found the Brotherhood on campus, becoming active as an engineering student in Abu Dhabi during the Seventies. Ostensibly, it was to pursue an industrial-engineering doctorate at Columbia State University in Louisiana that he came to the United States in the late 1970s. That was over a decade after the Brotherhood stood up the first chapters of its most consequential building block in the West, the Muslim Students Association (MSA).
You’ve been aghast at the Dionysian exhibitions of Jew hatred on American campuses for the past seven weeks? You shouldn’t be so shocked. It’s been happening unimpeded right before our eyes for, now, 60 years.
MSA chapters indoctrinate young Muslims — and those they, in turn, influence — in sharia-supremacism, particularly the writings of Banna, Qutb, and Qaradawi. Needless to say, until his death last year, Qaradawi was harbored in Qatar, also — of course — home to the Islamist propaganda outlet Al Jazeera, which for years broadcast the sheikh’s weekly Sharia and Life program to audiences in the tens of millions. Antisemitism is a leitmotif of this oeuvre, seamlessly interwoven with progressive academia’s anti-Western, anti-Zionist, anti-white polemics against “colonialism,” “oppression,” and “systemic racism.”
Starting with just a few chapters in the Midwest (the first at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1963), the MSA now boasts chapters (often more than one) at hundreds of universities across the United States and Canada — such that it’s really not that tough to rustle up over 30 organizations at Harvard to blame Israel for the atrocities perpetrated on Israelis by Hamas. And if you’re wondering how you end up with 300,000 pro-Hamas demonstrators on the streets of London on the very day England reserves for the honoring of its war dead, the answer is the Brotherhood’s American model. In 1984, the Muslim Students Association of Europe was founded in Madrid. In short order, it became the plinth for the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe, a hive for Brotherhood groups throughout the continent.
That’s exactly what had previously happened in the United States.
Marzook Builds the Brotherhood’s American Empire
Back in the Seventies, the Saudi government was playing the role now largely assumed by Qatar, bankrolling the Brotherhood’s proselytism. (This was four decades before the Brotherhood’s so-called Arab Spring revolts and the brutal war in Syria ruptured the Saudi–Brotherhood alliance.) In 1973, the Saudis and their Brotherhood partners at the MSA created the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), which set about investing in (i.e., assuming control of) the lion’s share of American mosques and associated Islamic centers — the centers that Qutb envisioned as the “axis” of the movement to spread sharia’s dominion.
By 1981, the consolidation of influence in the mosques and on campus had proved so successful, the Brotherhood conceived of a new organization, which would serve simultaneously as an MSA graduate program and an umbrella structure “to advance the cause of Islam and service Muslims in North America so [as] to enable them to adopt Islam as a complete way of life.” Thus was born the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA).
ISNA is now the largest Muslim organization in the United States, and thus efforts to airbrush its history — including, to my chagrin, in National Review — are legion. But facts are facts. ISNA emerged from the MSA like Athena from the head of Zeus. It was incorporated at the same address as the MSA and NAIT. On its website, ISNA has frequently claimed to have been created in 1963 (the year of the MSA’s establishment, 18 years before ISNA’s). And an internal Brotherhood memo relates that the MSA “was developed into the Islamic Society of North America to include all Muslim congregations of immigrants and citizens, and to be a nucleus for the Islamic movement in North America.” For its part, NAIT acknowledged that it provided “protection and safeguarding for the assets of ISNA/MSA.”
ISNA chafes at this history because it resulted in the organization’s being identified, along with NAIT and other Brotherhood satellites, as an unindicted coconspirator in the notorious scheme to back Hamas’s anti-Israeli intifada with millions of dollars. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
In 1981, the same year ISNA also debuted in the Midwest, Chicago was the locus for the Brotherhood’s establishment of the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP). The trailblazer for IAP was Marzook, then 30, in collaboration with another STEM student, Sami al-Arian. A budding computer engineer born in Kuwait to Palestinian refugees, al-Arian would ultimately become a top leader in Palestinian Islamic Jihad while holding down a professorship in computer engineering at the University of South Florida (having earned his doctorate at North Carolina State University). According to the Turkish-American scholar Zeyno Baran, Marzook and al-Arian worked in consultation with Khaled Mashal, a prodigy who joined the Brotherhood at 15 while (naturally) a student in Kuwait — and who, years later, would succeed Marzook as Hamas’s leader because Marzook was stuck in U.S. federal prison.
Coddled by Marzook’s American Brotherhood Network, Hamas Is Born
The IAP was an unabashed Brotherhood organ, declaring its purpose to be communicating the Ikhwan point of view and championing “Palestine” in the arenas of politics and public opinion. It also became the essential support platform for the jihad against Israel when the Brotherhood created Hamas — whose name is an acronym roughly derived from Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Isamiyya, the Islamic Resistance Movement.
For decades, even prior to Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, jihadists had savagely resisted the presence of Jews in the ancestral Jewish homeland (as Sol Stern relates in an essential Commentary essay). But by the Eighties, “the resistance” was dominated by Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Its tactical nods to radical Islam notwithstanding, the PLO had a Marxist bent (to say nothing of its notorious corruption), and thus coexisted uneasily with the Brotherhood and its sharia supremacism. Hamas would be the vehicle by which the Brotherhood would seize control — very lucrative control — of the “struggle against occupation.”
In late December 1987, fighting broke out in Gaza when a tragic car accident, in which four Palestinians lost their lives, was distorted by agitators, who portrayed it as an intentional killing to avenge the recent murder of an Israeli. In the resulting revolt, Hamas was formally established by two longtime Brotherhood activists: Ahmed Yassin, a blind paraplegic bestowed the honorific “Sheikh” although he had not completed his studies, and Abdel Azziz al-Rantisi, a medical doctor who — need I say it? — joined the Brotherhood while at university in Alexandria, Egypt. By 1988, as the first intifada raged, Hamas had issued its infamous charter, which pledges it to Israel’s destruction by violent jihad, assertedly as an Islamic duty.
Once Hamas was established, its support became the preeminent mission of the Brotherhood globally, and especially of Marzook in America. He sprang his U.S.-based network into action, forming the “Palestine Committee” under the auspices of the IAP, as both a fundraising arm and a vehicle for imposing order and direction on the surge of pro-Hamas initiatives from various Brotherhood components.
These exertions included Marzook’s provision of $200,000 in seed money for the creation of the “Occupied Land Fund,” which in time morphed into the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. The HLF operated from within ISNA and NAIT, which kept an HLF account into which were deposited checks payable to “the Palestinian Mujahideen” — a reference to Hamas’s military wing. Years later, when it became the subject of the Justice Department’s most significant federal terrorism-financing prosecution, the HLF was proved to have raised over $12 million for Hamas.
There was a vital piece missing from the Brotherhood’s U.S. infrastructure, however: a public champion wily in the ways of American law and media.
As the first intifada raged from 1987 through 1993, and Hamas emerged as the jihad’s hard edge, a new Democratic administration made its bed with Arafat in the quest for the holy grail: the “two-state solution” that Palestinians have never wanted, and the prospect of which they are reared from birth to regard as a betrayal of Allah. As “peace partner,” Arafat paid lip-service to the “renunciation of terrorism” and “Israel’s right to exist,” but never backed up his words with much meaningful action. It was enough, though, to persuade President Clinton to strengthen Arafat’s hand against his Hamas rival. New federal laws were enacted, under which Hamas was formally designated as a terrorist organization, such that material support to it was criminalized and its fundraising channels could be dammed.
Hamas’s principal supporters, under the auspices of Marzook’s IAP, were thus imperiled. They were known abettors of the jihad, and their labors could now land them in federal prison. “We are marked,” one fretted at a 1993 Brotherhood confab in Philadelphia, secretly recorded by the FBI.
The solution, they decided, was to establish a less “conspicuous” cheerleader with a clean slate, one that would combine what HLF leader Shukri Abu-Bakr called “a media twinkle” with an emotive commitment to civil rights — the better to obscure its jihadist sympathies in vaporous odes to “social justice,” “due process,” and “resistance.” Because “war is deception,” the Philadelphia conferees agreed, the organization would need to speak with a forked tongue — offering a message that would seem benign to the “American . . . who doesn’t know anything” while resonating with “the Palestinian who has a martyr brother,” as Nihad Awad, the IAP’s then-public-relations director, explained.
Thus did Marzook’s Brotherhood network birth the Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR, which made its first official appearance in 1994. It has since become the American media’s go-to source for sharia-supremacist apologetics. Awad, a Palestinian from Jordan, was placed in charge and is to this day CAIR’s executive director. Seed money was poured in by Marzook and HLF. CAIR would return the favor many times over, not only serving as Hamas’s “civil rights” advocate but also helping HLF raise funds.
Running Hamas . . . from Virginia
It is not enough, though, to say Hamas was bankrolled from the United States in its early days, as it sought to destroy Israel by force. Hamas was also run from the United States.
In 1989, Sheikh Yassin was arrested by Israeli authorities. At that point, Marzook was named head of the Hamas political bureau. For three years during the First Intifada, Marzook ran Hamas from his Virginia home. From that perch, he not only oversaw fundraising but coordinated forcible attacks as well as the recruitment and training of Hamas operatives on American soil. In 1992, Marzook moved closer to the action, relocating to Jordan where he remained until the Clinton administration induced King Hussein to expel him despite the resulting Palestinian unrest.
It should go without saying in this sordid story that Marzook had earned U.S. lawful-permanent-resident-alien status in the years during which he built the Brotherhood’s American network and led Hamas. With that seeming ace in the hole, Marzook calculated that the Americans could not prevent him from returning to his family in Virginia. But for once, he guessed wrong: He was arrested at Kennedy Airport in New York City in July 1995, his name flagged on a terrorism watch-list. Israel pressed its American ally to detain Marzook while it sought his extradition to face trial for a slew of terrorist atrocities. He was thus held in federal prison for 22 months.
The Peace Process Helps the Jihadist Slip the Noose
In a 1996 opinion rejecting one of Marzook’s many challenges to detention and extradition, the late judge Kevin Thomas Duffy — who had earlier tried the first World Trade Center bombing case in Manhattan federal court — summarized some of Marzook’s alleged trail of carnage:
(1) the bombing at a beach in Tel Aviv on July 28, 1990, which killed a Canadian tourist; (2) the stabbing deaths of three civilians working in a factory in Jaffa on December 14, 1990; (3) the January 1, 1992, shooting death of a civilian as he drove his car in Kfar Darom in Gaza; (4) the shooting death of a civilian as he drove his car in the Beit La’hiah region of Gaza on May 17, 1992; (5) the stabbing deaths of two civilians working at a packing plant in Sajaeya on June 25, 1992; (6) the gun-fire attack by three persons of a passenger bus in Jerusalem on July 1, 1993, in which two civilians were killed and others were injured; (7) the bombing of a passenger bus in Afula on April 6, 1994, which killed eight civilians and injured forty-six; (8) the bombing of a passenger bus in Hadera on April 13, 1994, which killed four civilians and injured twelve; (9) the machinegun attack in a pedestrian mall in Jerusalem on October 9, 1994, which killed one civilian and injured eighteen; and (10) the bombing of a bus in Tel Aviv on October 19, 1994, which killed twenty-two civilians and injured forty-six.
Marzook laughably contended both that the Hamas political bureau he led was walled off from the organization’s forcible operations, and that the latter operations were nevertheless “political” rather than criminal — a claim Judge Duffy curtly rebuffed, pointing out that terrorist crimes against humanity cannot be immunized as mere political acts.
Marzook’s legal arguments were meritless, but he has always had an exquisite sense of timing.
In autumn 1996, after an outbreak of deadly fighting and under pressure from the Clinton administration to revive the flagging Oslo “peace process,” the newly elected Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, agreed to restart negotiations, mediated by Jordan’s King Hussein in conjunction with Clinton’s emissaries. Recognizing this as a sensitive moment — when, if he actually were tried for Hamas’s rampages in Israel, it could stir Palestinian outrage and disrupt the negotiations — Marzook suddenly dropped his objection to extradition. Flummoxed, Israel announced that it no longer sought to try him, despite having for a year and a half pressured the Clinton Justice Department to detain him in the teeth of protest by the Brotherhood’s array of American satellite organizations.
It is not enough to say that, at that point, there were abundant grounds for a U.S. prosecution that could, then and there, have put an end to Marzook’s jihadist career. Marzook was eventually indicted by the Bush Justice Department in 2002 — i.e., only after the 9/11 attacks had roused Americans into dull awareness that our country had for decades been fueling the jihad even as it turned its fire on us.
Alas, by then Marzook was long gone. Once Israel declined prosecution of its nemesis, Clinton washed his hands of Marzook, now pressuring Jordan to take him back less than two years after demanding that Jordan expel him. In the dead of night in May 1997, Marzook was flown from New York to Amman. He had agreed not to contest the terrorism allegations, which effectively forfeited his green-card status. While American and Israeli officials tried to spin this as a win, the Hamas emir was welcomed back to the region as a victor.
Though Hamas’s leaders have become multi-billionaires skimming off the jihad, it’s an uncertain life. But Marzook has a remarkable way of landing on his feet. Sprung from American imprisonment, safely out of U.S. jurisdiction, he evaded prosecution in the above-mentioned 2002 Texas case and, later, in the 2008 HLF prosecution — in which ISNA, NAIT, and CAIR were all named as unindicted coconspirators. They stayed unindicted. Despite convictions of several defendants and a mountain of evidence, by the next year the new, Brotherhood-friendly Obama–Biden administration was in power — with President Obama’s top adviser, Valerie Jarrett, keynoting the annual ISNA convention.
Meanwhile, Marzook was booted from Jordan to Syria when the vaunted “peace process” inevitably imploded. He subsequently made his way to Cairo, but the Arab Spring proved exceptionally hot when Egyptians ousted the new Brotherhood government upon just a small taste of what it would actually be like.
So now Marzook has found safe haven in the Brotherhood’s alter ego, the sharia-supremacist regime of Qatar. There, while Doha barters savagely abducted Israeli hostages — including toddlers — for concessions to Hamas, Marzook snidely explains that the tunnels in Gaza, built by diverting billions in foreign aid, are for jihadist warfare, not civilian shelter.
Many wonder at how, after funding and harboring Hamas for years, Qatar could be rewarded by the Biden administration with “Major Non-NATO Ally” status and all its attendant perks. Mousa Abu Marzook does not wonder. Having built the Muslim Brotherhood’s American empire, which has flooded urban centers and campus quads with unabashed Hamas supporters; having launched Hamas in gusts of American fundraising; and having run the Brotherhood’s Palestinian jihad for years from his Virginia home, Marzook can only smirk.
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The Department of Homeland Security announced that it will shut down or reduce some lanes of traffic at border crossings in Arizona and Texas. It wants to redeploy staff to handle an increase in migrants. ASSOCIATED PRESS
HOMELAND SECURITY
DHS shutting down, reducing traffic at border crossings amid new surge
BY STEPHEN DINAN THE WASHINGTON TIMES
The Department of Homeland Security said Monday that it will reduce or shut down some lanes of traffic at border crossings in Arizona and Texas to redeploy staff to handle a renewed surge of migrants entering illegally.
Customs and Border Protection, which oversees the ports of entry, blamed “smugglers peddling disinformation” for the surge of people.
The affected border crossings are Lukeville, Arizona, where CBP said it will throttle down vehicle processing, and International Bridge 1 in Eagle Pass, Texas, where all processing is being halted.
The agency, in an unsigned statement, said it needed to shift the officers who usually staff those posts to help Border Patrol agents, who patrol the miles in between the crossings and who have been overwhelmed by the crush of people coming over the last few years.
“The U.S. is continuing to see increased levels of migrant encounters at the Southwest Border, fueled by smugglers peddling disinformation to prey on vulnerable individuals and encourage migration,” CBP said. “As we respond with additional resources and apply consequences for unlawful entry, the migration trends shift as well.”
The agency did not say what the current level of illegal crossings was.
The shutdowns mean more pain for those looking to cross legally, as Homeland Security seeks to handle those coming illegally.
Homeland Security has been playing whack-a-mole with the border since the start of the Biden administration, which erased Trump-era get-tough policies and quickly saw a relatively calm border explode into chaos.
It’s been up and down since then, though even the best month under President Biden since spring 2021 would count as one of the worst months for any previous president.
Every time the administration says it’s made changes to solve the situation, a new crisis emerges at the border.
After a catastrophically bad September, CBP celebrated an improvement in October, arguing it had cut Border Patrol arrests along the southern boundary by 13%, with particularly big drops in key demographics near the end of the month.
But Monday’s announcement suggests things may be dipping into catastrophic territory again.
The news comes as Mr. Biden has asked Congress for $14 billion in emergency money for the border mess. He’s requesting money to hire more Border Patrol agents and expand deportations, though most of the money appears aimed at speeding up processing of the migrants rather than deterring their arrival.
Republicans have said they will not approve the money unless it includes major changes to the administration’s policies, such as tighter restrictions on seeking and proving asylum claims.
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https://americanwirenews.com/mass-influx-at-border-pre-planned-with-mysterious-hands-providing-gps-coordinates-report/?utm_campaign=james&utm_content=11-27-23%20Daily%20PM&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=Get%20response&utm_term=email
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12826181/Checking-Huge-group-dressed-CHINESE-migrants-smart-luggage-wait-processed-illegally-crossing-border-Mexico-California.html
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https://twitter.com/Matt_Bracken48/status/1733141981973373033
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" wireless security systems that depend on WiFi to operate "
yup , you can't use wireless against sophisticated criminals.
how about a wireless camera in your home.
well scumbag drives up to your house and sits in his car picks up the wireless signal and now watches you in your house smirking and laughing at his own brilliance the whole time.
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Not in accord with the tone of this piece, but a highly relevant piece of history:
https://www.history.com/news/operation-wetback-eisenhower-1954-deportation?fbclid=IwAR0PuAB-vsCpgwecZGjYG9PPlZEpwRHNPHmbDsHBMXTTwpx-JjOawg2UvcQ
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-considering-expelling-migrants-without-asylum-screening-and-expanding-detention-and-deportations-in-new-hardline-immigration-plan/ar-AA1lpJQx?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=db5b4966d84541b08a76371bd3f301e9&ei=69
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/4964645/millions-of-young-americans-do-not-see-what-is-coming-many-are-fighting-in-favor-of-the-invasion
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anyone with eyesight can see more and more illegals are coming to NJ monthly.
everywhere one looks
any time you speak on the phone with someone from a business
it gets worse monthly
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https://twitter.com/BensmanTodd/status/1734565397784129719
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Even the Democrats know Democrat policies are wrong:
On inflation, on energy policy and at the border:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/arizona-governor-democrat-orders-national-guard-border-2023-12-16/
Arizona governor, a Democrat, orders National Guard to the border
They can't deny it anymore. How many million have come in, under false pretenses, and they get free transportation inward instead of escorted out and sent home.
Republicans should read (and follow) Crafty's impeachment advice. If the shoe were on the other foot Democrats would most certainly exploit governing malfeasance for political gain.
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The number that came under Biden alone is greater than 7 million.
https://www.cornyn.senate.gov/biden-border-crisis/
These actual count is higher, obviously does not count those who came in unnoticed, uncounted.
According to the 2020 census state populations (last before Joe took office),
https://state.1keydata.com/state-population.php
Arizona and Massachusetts had populations of roughly 7 million.
Only 13 states had populations pre-Biden greater than that.
Replacement isn't a theory or an allegation. These many millions are diluting, replacing, canceling our votes.
Illegals can't vote? Like saying felons can't vote? First, no one checks, and then we legalize it anyway. Why else are they bringing them in? Because we had excess free healthcare capacity??
https://nypost.com/2023/12/19/opinion/biden-is-breaking-the-border-on-purpose-he-wants-mass-amnesty/
The Democrats in power are willing to give up Israel and Ukraine over border amnesty. Amnesty for illegals is the only immigration issue. We've (almost) always had generous legal immigration.
What does 7 million people (plus all that came before them) look like if you could get them all in one picture?
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yes and this is on top of low estimates of 13 mill already here but I recall we all discussed yrs ago it is almost surely several millions more possible over 20 million or more to start with.
So ~ 30 million in our country ?
no one knows which is the plan
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Remember too the Congressional districts are apportioned by the number of people in them, not the number of CITIZENS.
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59% of illegals households are on welfare:
https://cis.org/
Center for Immigration Studies (CIS)
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is this nuts or what?
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59%?!? Fk!!!
=================
The Border: Worst Story of the Year
The numbers are mind-boggling, the costs are incalculable, and the Democrats are to blame.
Douglas Andrews
Try to imagine every single person in Alaska.
Now add everyone in Delaware. And in Hawaii. And in Maine. And in Montana. Now add New Hampshire, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Add together every single person in each of those states. Now you have a sense of how many illegal immigrants our demented Democrat president, Joseph Robinette Biden, has allowed to invade our country by refusing to secure our southern border.
We cease to be a country when we cease to control our border. And anyone who doubts that this "browning" of America is a key component of Barack Obama's third term in office and the Democrats' long-held plan for permanent political power hasn't been paying attention.
This isn't the sexiest story of the year. Let's face it: We're all sick of hearing about the border. Not a week goes by here in our humble shop when we aren't struggling for a way to put a novel spin on a broken record of a disaster. But Joe Biden's refusal — as opposed to "failure," which implies effort — to abide by his constitutional duty to secure our southern border is without a doubt the most consequential story of the year.
It's also an impeachable offense, and it speaks to Republican myopia that they fixate on the Biden Crime Family's influence peddling rather than having charged the president with this inarguably high crime long ago. We can't absorb a Pennsylvania of low-skilled and unskilled, non-English-speaking immigrants and not have it permanently change our national fabric. As we wrote earlier this year, the costs are incalculable.
Customs and Border Protection says we recently saw a record 14,509 illegals in a single day, Tuesday. In addition, as Fox News's Bill Melugin reports, we've already had more than 200,000 border encounters in December alone. That's the equivalent of a Birmingham, Alabama, crossing our border in just 20 days.
They're coming from everywhere — from Guinea, Senegal, Liberia, Oman, Lebanon, Bangladesh, India, and elsewhere. They're flying from Africa into Central America, then heading north. As our Emmy Griffin challenged earlier this week, "Tell us again how it's not an invasion."
But don't worry. A Colombian woman was given her confirmed appointment with Immigration and Customs Enforcement for — we kid you not — Thursday, January 23, 2031. This is called back-door amnesty, and this is what Democrat governance gets you.
"It's deliberate," says Newt Gingrich, stating the obvious before adding something less obvious: that the Democrats' next phase is to grant illegals the right to vote.
Estimates vary when it comes to the scale of this calamity. And why wouldn't they? How can we keep track of a nearly 2,000-mile border when our president isn't interested in doing so? As the Washington Examiner's Paul Bedard reports, "A new estimate this week put the growing population of 'gotaways' at a sky-high 13 million, more than the population of every state except four: California, Texas, New York, and Florida."
That shockingly large number comes from an expert: Steven Camarota, the research director for the Center for Immigration Studies. "He provided the new estimate at a conference held this week," Bedard continues, "during which he released a new census-based report showing that there are almost 50 million foreign-born citizens in the country, far more than previously expected by the government and likely driven by the spike in Biden administration-approved immigrants flooding into the country."
Camerota's paper also studied the ruinous economic impact of such a massive migration, noting that 54% of immigrant households — including naturalized citizens, legal residents, and illegal immigrants — used at least one major welfare program. The rate is even higher, 59%, for noncitizen households, which include green-card holders and illegal immigrants. As for U.S.-born households, "only" 39% are on the government dole.
Any suggestion that the Democrats have been powerless to stop this invasion — and this depletion of our treasury — is a lie, and that was made clear this week when news began to trickle out that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and a band of establishment Republicans have been working in secret to tamp down the flow of illegals in exchange for $61 billion in aid for Ukraine. North Carolina moderate Thom Tillis and his fellow Republicans proposed a trigger of 3,000 illegal crossings per day for closing the border, which was down from the Democrats' opening offer of 5,000 per day.
Huh? How about zero? Does zero work for these people? And why are we bartering on behalf of Ukraine to secure our border? As the New York Post editorial board puts it:
If Washington can tell border agents to stop waving in illegals when the total hits some arbitrary threshold, then it can tell them to do it from the get-go. In other words, by dickering over just how many illegal migrants can come through in a day before the door slams shut, the Biden administration has at long last said the quiet part out loud: The law doesn't actually require treating the word "asylum" as a magic "Open sesame."
Wisconsin's Ron Johnson, who wasn't invited to the private powwow, spoke for many of us: "Conducting rushed and secret backroom negotiations is not the way to address the unprecedented border crisis. That's the kind of business-as-usual process that Washington leadership has relied upon to mortgage our children's future and weaken our country."
Thanks to Joe Biden, every state is now a border state. That's because this administration has long been packing up and sending illegals all over the country, to every congressional district in the 50 states.
Texas Governor Gregg Abbott has been returning the favor. Abbott, who followed the lead of Ron DeSantis but recently endorsed Donald Trump for president, is flying illegals to sanctuary cities like Chicago while noting that every sanctuary city is fair game. "Until Biden steps up to secure the border," he said, "we will continue to provide overwhelmed Texas border towns with much-needed relief."
Chicago's sanctuary mayor, Brandon Johnson, is squealing like a stuck pig: "We have a governor ... that is placing families on buses without shoes, cold, wet, tired, hungry, afraid, traumatized. And then they come to the city of Chicago. ... The governor of Texas needs to take a look in the mirror of the chaos that he is causing for this country. This is not just a Chicago dynamic. He is attacking our country."
Republicans haven't been as strong on securing our border as they should be, largely because they've been cowed by a phony political calculus: They mistakenly believe that Hispanics will hold it against them at the polls. But Hispanics, as it turns out, are sick of this situation too. Judy Gutierrez, a lifelong resident of the border town of El Paso and the daughter of Mexican immigrants, calls the situation "unsustainable" and says that the normally solidly Democrat city will reflect its displeasure at the polls. "They're really frustrated. ... They just feel nothing is being done and their voices aren't being heard."
If you like what's been happening at our southern border under Joe Biden, then the Democrats are your party. If you deplore it, if you want your voice to be heard, then it's your duty to vote for the party that believes national borders are not optional, not a bargaining chip, not a "nice to have."
As for that national fabric we mentioned earlier, what are the effects — over weeks and months and years and generations — of an influx of people unlike any in American history that is forcibly distributed across the land by the Biden administration? Does our patriotism and our sense of Americanness grow stronger or weaker? Do we become more inclined to fight for our country or less so? More inclined to obey our nation's laws or less so? More inclined to pay taxes or less so? More inclined to work or less so? More inclined to vote or less so?
If recent polling is any indication, the American people are finally waking up. According to a recent Fox News poll, the percentage of voters who see illegal immigration as the most important issue facing the country has nearly doubled since August.
As for what ought to be done by the first post-Biden administration, 89% of Republicans favor deporting illegal immigrants, while Democrats are divided, with 48% in favor and 44% in opposition.
The 2024 presidential election will have consequences, and none will be more profound or long-lasting than our nation's border security.
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"The Border: Worst Story of the Year
The numbers are mind-boggling, the costs are incalculable, and the Democrats are to blame."
- Douglas Andrews (Patriot Post)
----------
This guy says all the right things, or you could say he agrees with us or reads the forum.
He is also on to crafty's idea of impeachment for not enforcing the Border and securing the country.
I wonder how you do that, an impeachment on those grounds right now. Like democrats, let three years go by and then suddenly do it? Put Biden on notice? Enforce it now or this is what's coming? Impeach both of them but I don't think there's any precedent for impeaching the vice president since the vice president has (almost) no responsibilities. Drop the corruption charges (that are taking forever) or add this to them. But if it's urgent then act like it's urgent. Oh well, skip that, Congress adjourned for the holidays. And 12,000 a day more come in or is it 14,000? With 59% on some form of welfare, and virtually none of them top 1%, the ones who pay the taxes, We aren't ever going to balance a budget. We couldn't get our fiscal act together before and now it's not possible.
Is a Republican president really going to send 7 million home? 13 million? 30 million? How? Where? Do they really have homes waiting for them back home? Is that going to look better than children in cages? Republicans chicken out when the cameras are on, and they don't get elected when they're successfully painted as extremists. What a mess.
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" and the Democrats are to blame "
drove somewhere Saturday, I think it was, and radio was turned on and I hear THAT voice of Anthony Weiner doing his radio show.
I listened for perhaps 2 minutes and he made the claim Republicans are to blame for immigration "reform" by holding it up in Congress.
I got sick with rage and turned it off.
Lying bastards.
All of them.
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I recognize the feeling , , ,
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https://washingtontimes-dc.newsmemory.com/?token=fa0b1df5a98444eee5677945f4b93f7e_659577e1_6d25b5f&selDate=20240103
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https://www.breitbart.com/border/2022/09/18/exclusive-venezuela-empties-prisons-sends-violent-criminals-to-u-s-says-dhs-report/?fbclid=IwAR2MGEeWMa1XwDZGr8Prn4Iv8Il-YHhUe76vQuex1I0u1XAyF12u12-u7_8
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https://dailycaller.com/2024/01/02/biden-admin-cbp-chinese-illegal-migrants/
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Today's episode in this very interesting development.
@BPUnion statement:
“Governor Abbott is not harming Border Patrol operations, he is enhancing them. His seizing control of Shelby Park allows our agents to deploy to troubled spots that experience high numbers of gotaways. Governor Abbott’s actions should be seen as a force multiplier.”
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https://twitter.com/watchtenetnow/status/1746637592752255362?s=12&fbclid=IwAR1hmE3YdtO4zuECyh2porD0Pi0_p_98N3kUCHGYnBVmeMRjekIk5VEc90E
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https://www.bizpacreview.com/2024/01/12/border-patrol-agents-quietly-support-texas-move-to-seize-area-of-border-1427114/?utm_campaign=bizpac&utm_content=Newsletter&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_source=Get%20Response&utm_term=EMAIL
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/eagle-pass-shelby-park-biden-cease-and-desist-texas/?ftag=CNM-00-10aab7e&linkId=264106902
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for propaganda purposes.
I never dreamed growing up I would see Soviet style tactics :
https://www.dailywire.com/news/how-the-biden-administration-used-a-counter-terrorism-grant-to-fund-anti-conservative-propaganda#:~:text=entity%20known%20as%20%E2%80%9C-,Courageous%20RI,-%2C%E2%80%9D%20helmed%20by%20U
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https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/17/combating-the-federal-governments-determination-to-allow-a-border-invasion/?fbclid=IwAR2nJY2Lltp_W1DZr4KiY5m-wzZ31F95k8h58KVPH33CnLv9A3twi0UYVlU
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With Texas vs. the Feds in Eagle Pass going on this will be coming up a lot:
https://legaldictionary.net/arizona-v-united-states/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arizona_v._United_States
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second post
https://www.oann.com/newsroom/illegal-immigrant-charged-with-raping-disabled-person-is-released-after-9-days-initial-ice-request-ignored/
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https://nypost.com/2024/01/18/opinion/has-biden-bribed-mexico-to-control-border-and-help-him-win-election/?fbclid=IwAR37PiY6beAd1pPKaFGvi-nQHNh82q2uo8EI3UO6sVkW3r9qbO35isipT4s
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https://nypost.com/2024/01/22/news/supreme-court-allows-federal-agents-to-cut-razor-wire-texas-installed-on-us-mexico-border/
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https://www.scdailypress.com/2024/01/23/bomb-blast-rattles-deming-corrections-office/
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFwU8KcUm5o&t=2s
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In his statement today, Gov. Abbot uncorked this highly significant citation:
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-10/clause-3/
THIS answers the SCOTUS case of US v. Arizona!
Here is the entire statement:
https://gov.texas.gov/uploads/files/press/Border_Statement_1.24.2024.pdf
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https://nypost.com/2024/01/21/opinion/how-biden-gave-up-on-ridding-us-of-criminal-aliens-putting-us-in-danger/?fbclid=IwAR14tKYUkVHjzZlxXcd1ixwStV8oIhASfMY-sdJVvU3qbJhBF7XEUJxScjw
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And hey, there is an adjacent LEGAL point of entry:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/01/biden-demands-abbott-give-border-patrol-access-to-shelby-park-to-cut-wire/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=biden-demands-abbott-give-border-patrol-access-to-shelby-park-to-cut-wire
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https://redstate.com/bonchie/2024/01/26/huge-border-patrol-turns-on-joe-biden-proclaim-support-for-texas-national-guard-n2169256#google_vignette
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https://dailycaller.com/2024/01/26/turley-biden-texas-showdown-invasion/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=29912&pnespid=trthGHhcbbEIhunB.GrtH5iJp0._RYd8KPeh3vE0oEBmldcVOfmS0VXYvY8at7vMj3_qQgpn
What will the litigation look like? How long will it take?
I remember a SCOTUS phrase: "The C. is not a suicide pact."
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The piece takes a while to get to it, but quotes letter stating large number of military age males from countries hostile to the US with unknown intentions are entering the US illegally:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/01/former-national-security-officials-warn-of-multi-division-army-of-young-single-adult-males-crossing-border/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=former-national-security-officials-warn-of-multi-division-army-of-young-single-adult-males-crossing-border
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eE-Gwul950
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https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=3729038670702346&set=p.3729038670702346&type=3
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbr_pz0pzeI
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The points made about LNG futures our allies own and now have to come up with a plan B for are worth mulling:
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/01/biden_the_border_and_tik_tok_too.html?fbclid=IwAR1UcWRjwFEIWPBBrdEMQ2E_uByMLbpZkcO7rGwue0PigvfDo_1LLhi0Bn8
I've communicated with the author a couple times and think she is well worth following.
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https://justthenews.com/government/security/fbi-luminaries-starkly-warn-congress-us-being-invaded-border-alarming-and
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It’s been far too long since I checked in with Wm Briggs:
The Border Happening & The Weakness Of The Regime
BY BRIGGS ON JANUARY 29, 2024 • ( 12 COMMENTS )
Simple math: 5,000 x 365 = 1,825,000. Check me. Is it right?
That 5,000 is the number of “migrants” the Regime Senate would allow in each day—each and every day of the year, in perpetuity. Five thousand a day is just under 2 million a year. Every year.
This daily number, instead of annual, is well calculated to assist propagandists. You will hear idiotic things like, “They’re only letting 5,000 in.” Listen for this.
Special addition! No sooner did I write this article, then I heard on the radio news: “The new Senate deal would allow President Biden to shut the border down if migrants reached 5,000 or more”. With not a word about this being daily. And notice who it allows the power. This was Fox News radio.
Those 5,000 are just the legal ones. How many daily illegal “migrants”? Who knows. Not zero. One guy says there are now nearly 7,000 “migrant encounters” at the border daily.
Migrant encounters. Lord help us.
That 5,000 a day is the “deal” the Senate is “offering” to fix the wholly manufactured “crisis” at the border. English demands an outcome cannot be a crisis if it was desired, aided, and abetted. Yet English has already been sacrificed to the woke, who have lunatics strutting around announcing “their” pronouns.
Now some of this is surely also due to incompetence. If there is anything we learned these last three years is how incompetent our elite are. But it is a directed incompetence, especially with its emphasis on DIEing.
The only real solution, therefore, is replacing that elite.
At any rate, you will have heard the news. Last week, Governor Abbott declared an “invasion” and Texas forbade the Feds from monkeying with its border razor wire. This incensed, quietly, those same Feds. Biden issued an ultimatum: back down or else! Abbott did not back down. Then a slew of other governors announced “support” of Abbott. As of this writing, nobody really knows what this “support” means in practice.
Yet what was hilarious was Biden’s “or else.” After Abbott held, Biden issued some penny-ante decree pausing approval of natural gas terminals, which will sting Texas (and other states) in some small way. Biden blamed “the devastating toll of climate change” for the pause, and not Abbott.
Not only this, but then the White House starting touting the Senate deal as the “solution”, which we might call Open Borders Lite, the math of which we saw above. And then Biden backed down again!
He had somebody issue a hilarious tweet declaring the border is “broken” and saying that “It’s long past time to fix it”. And he said if he got Open Borders Lite, he would act.
Gorgeous propaganda! It will certainly fool every NPR listener and suchlike folk who are eager to find an excuse, any excuse, to continue to support the Regime. None of them will even pause to consider Abbott has already acted after Biden refused to. Consistently refused to, and, of course, abetting the invasion.
On the other hand—and here comes our main point—those NPR types might not ever hear of any of this. A quick scan at the time of writing (Sunday evening), and I don’t see word one on the New York Times on-line site. Last relevant article about Abbott or Texas was from the 22nd about another SCOTUS ruling issued before Abbott’s declaration.
Regime propaganda outlets are doing their absolute best to remain as quiet as they can about this genuine crisis, even though the Governors of half the States have issued declarations of support and against the Regime. Which one would assume is both shocking and newsworthy.
The reason for the hush is that the Regime is pathetically weak, and know it, and they look it. They tried muscle and blew it. Which weakens them. Abbott, so far anyway, has refused to budge, and he got Biden to surrender twice.
Yes, it’s all small stuff. So far. But the Regime could have done much more, if they really had the strength. For instance, many on-line lefties (none of whom are in any power) have called for the Regime to nationalize the Texas National Guards, which they have the authority to do.
Can you imagine them doing that in an election year, though? This would be the equivalent to the campaign slogan Vote for Biden and Open Borders — Or Else!
Probably the Regime is preparing some sort of “devastating” legal move, which might even work. Don’t forget, “conservatives” pride themselves on following the law, even when the law is insane. (The left has no such compunction.) Abbott may back down.
Yet now is the time to push them. Any use of force on the Regime’s part is the beginning of their end
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"For instance, many on-line lefties (none of whom are in any power) have called for the Regime to nationalize the Texas National Guards, which they have the authority to do."
I may have this a bit muddled but note that DeSantis has done something to make the FL NG a FL State thing and as such not subject to this. Yet another example of why he would make a great president.
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second
https://nypost.com/2024/01/27/news/convoy-claiming-to-be-gods-army-heading-to-texas-to-protest-border-crisis/?utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=nypost&utm_medium=social
https://twitchy.com/amy-curtis/2024/01/29/gods-army-tx-border-n2392276
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Much of the current border debate, at least from the "Progressive" side of the aisle, appears predicated on the opinion that some sort of bipartisan agreement (with some already proposed as shown above) is required to address the issues there, issues that all sorts of very nothing-behind-the-curtain-here maybe possibly is perhaps inspired by the damage being done to Biden's presidential bid due to his administration's handling of the border. Well for the sake of the Memory Hole let's paste what currently appears on the White Houses website re Biden's executive actions on immigration taken on the first days of his administration:
FEBRUARY 02, 2021
Executive Order on Restoring Faith in Our Legal Immigration Systems and Strengthening Integration and Inclusion Efforts for New Americans
HOME
BRIEFING ROOM
PRESIDENTIAL ACTIONS
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows:
Section 1. Policy. Over 40 million foreign-born individuals live in the United States today. Millions more Americans have immigrants in their families or ancestry. New Americans and their children fuel our economy, working in every industry, including healthcare, construction, caregiving, manufacturing, service, and agriculture. They open and successfully run businesses at high rates, creating jobs for millions, and they contribute to our arts, culture, and government, providing new traditions, customs, and viewpoints. They are essential workers helping to keep our economy afloat and providing important services to Americans during a global pandemic. They have helped the United States lead the world in science, technology, and innovation. And they are on the frontlines of research to develop coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccines and treatments for those afflicted with the deadly disease.
Consistent with our character as a Nation of opportunity and of welcome, it is essential to ensure that our laws and policies encourage full participation by immigrants, including refugees, in our civic life; that immigration processes and other benefits are delivered effectively and efficiently; and that the Federal Government eliminates sources of fear and other barriers that prevent immigrants from accessing government services available to them. Our Nation is enriched socially and economically by the presence of immigrants, and we celebrate with them as they take the important step of becoming United States citizens. The Federal Government should develop welcoming strategies that promote integration, inclusion, and citizenship, and it should embrace the full participation of the newest Americans in our democracy.
Sec. 2. Role of the Domestic Policy Council. The role of the White House Domestic Policy Council (DPC) is to convene executive departments and agencies (agencies) to coordinate the formulation and implementation of my Administration’s domestic policy objectives. Consistent with that role, the DPC shall coordinate the Federal Government’s efforts to welcome and support immigrants, including refugees, and to catalyze State and local integration and inclusion efforts. In furtherance of these goals, the DPC shall convene a Task Force on New Americans, which shall include members of agencies that implement policies that impact immigrant communities.
Sec. 3. Restoring Trust in our Legal Immigration System. The Secretary of State, the Attorney General, and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall review existing regulations, orders, guidance documents, policies, and any other similar agency actions (collectively, agency actions) that may be inconsistent with the policy set forth in section 1 of this order.
(a) In conducting this review, the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall:
(i) identify barriers that impede access to immigration benefits and fair, efficient adjudications of these benefits and make recommendations on how to remove these barriers, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law; and
(ii) identify any agency actions that fail to promote access to the legal immigration system — such as the final rule entitled, “U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Fee Schedule and Changes to Certain Other Immigration Benefit Request Requirements,” 85 Fed. Reg. 46788 (Aug. 3, 2020), in light of the Emergency Stopgap USCIS Stabilization Act (title I of division D of Public Law 116-159) — and recommend steps, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to revise or rescind those agency actions.
(b) Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall each submit a plan to the President describing the steps their respective agencies will take to advance the policy set forth in section 1 of this order.
(c) Within 180 days of submitting the plan described in subsection (b) of this section, the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall each submit a report to the President describing the progress of their respective agencies towards implementing the plan developed pursuant to subsection (b) of this section and recognizing any areas of concern or barriers to implementing the plan.
Sec. 4. Immediate Review of Agency Actions on Public Charge Inadmissibility. The Secretary of State, the Attorney General, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and the heads of other relevant agencies, as appropriate, shall review all agency actions related to implementation of the public charge ground of inadmissibility in section 212(a)(4) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), 8 U.S.C. 1182(a)(4), and the related ground of deportability in section 237(a)(5) of the INA, 8 U.S.C. 1227(a)(5). They shall, in considering the effects and implications of public charge policies, consult with the heads of relevant agencies, including the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
(a) This review should:
(i) consider and evaluate the current effects of these agency actions and the implications of their continued implementation in light of the policy set forth in section 1 of this order;
(ii) identify appropriate agency actions, if any, to address concerns about the current public charge policies’ effect on the integrity of the Nation’s immigration system and public health; and
(iii) recommend steps that relevant agencies should take to clearly communicate current public charge policies and proposed changes, if any, to reduce fear and confusion among impacted communities.
(b) Within 60 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall each submit a report to the President describing any agency actions identified pursuant to subsection (a)(ii) of this section and any steps their agencies intend to take or have taken, consistent with subsection (a)(iii) of this section.
Sec. 5. Promoting Naturalization. (a) Improving the naturalization process. The Secretary of State, the Attorney General, and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall, within 60 days of the date of this order, develop a plan describing any agency actions, in furtherance of the policy set forth in section 1 of this order, that they will take to:
(i) eliminate barriers in and otherwise improve the existing naturalization process, including by conducting a comprehensive review of that process with particular emphasis on the N-400 application, fingerprinting, background and security checks, interviews, civics and English language tests, and the oath of allegiance;
(ii) substantially reduce current naturalization processing times;
(iii) make the naturalization process more accessible to all eligible individuals, including through a potential reduction of the naturalization fee and restoration of the fee waiver process;
(iv) facilitate naturalization for eligible candidates born abroad and members of the military, in consultation with the Department of Defense; and
(v) review policies and practices regarding denaturalization and passport revocation to ensure that these authorities are not used excessively or inappropriately.
(b) Implementing improvements to the naturalization process. Within 180 days of the issuance of the plan developed pursuant to subsection (a) of this section, the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall each submit a report to the President describing the progress in implementing the plan, any barriers to implementing the plan, and any additional areas of concern that should be addressed to ensure that eligible individuals are able to apply for naturalization in a fair and efficient manner.
(c) Strategy to promote naturalization. There is established an Interagency Working Group on Promoting Naturalization (Naturalization Working Group) to develop a national strategy to promote naturalization. The Naturalization Working Group shall be chaired by the Secretary of Homeland Security, or the Secretary’s designee, and it shall include the heads of the following agencies, or senior-level officials designated by the head of each agency:
(i) the Secretary of Labor;
(ii) the Secretary of Health and Human Services;
(iii) the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development;
(iv) the Secretary of Education;
(v) the Secretary of Homeland Security;
(vi) the Commissioner of Social Security; and
(vii) the heads of other agencies invited to participate by the Working Group chair.
(d) Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Naturalization Working Group shall submit a strategy to the President outlining steps the Federal Government should take to promote naturalization, including the potential development of a public awareness campaign.
Sec. 6. Revocation. The Presidential Memorandum of May 23, 2019 (Enforcing the Legal Responsibilities of Sponsors of Aliens), is revoked. The heads of relevant agencies shall review any investigations or compliance actions initiated pursuant to that memorandum and shall determine whether to suspend, as appropriate, any investigations or compliance actions inconsistent with the policy set forth in section 1 of this order. The heads of relevant agencies shall review any agency actions developed pursuant to that memorandum and, as appropriate, issue revised guidance consistent with the policy set forth in section 1 of this order.
Sec. 7. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:
(i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or
(ii) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.
(b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.
(c) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.
JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR.
Next Post: Executive Order on Creating a Comprehensive Regional Framework to Address the Causes of Migration, to Manage Migration Throughout North and Central America, and to Provide Safe and Orderly Processing of Asylum Seekers at the United States Border
Executive Order on Creating a Comprehensive Regional Framework to Address the Causes of Migration, to Manage Migration Throughout North and Central America, and to Provide Safe and Orderly Processing of Asylum Seekers at the United States Border
FEBRUARY 02, 2021
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW
Washington, DC 20500
WH.gov
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/02/02/executive-order-restoring-faith-in-our-legal-immigration-systems-and-strengthening-integration-and-inclusion-efforts-for-new-americans/
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"Strengthening Integration and Inclusion Efforts for New Americans"
. - Illegals are not "New Americans" any more than home burglars are new family members.
The head fake of the Biden administration wanting to do something in an election year is disgraceful. And the bargain, we won't 'secure' the border unless you vote for amnesty, encouraging even more of it, is worse.
The people who believe our sovereignty as a nation is a political bargaining chip need to be soundly defeated.
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what ever that means.
I've read this is not Constitutional and he does not have the power to do this:
https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2023/07/06/court-ruling-could-overturn-federal-control-of-the-national-guard/
of course, shysters led by Larry the Harvard lib asshole are working hard dreaming up ways to subvert this
in the name of the "rule of law"
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I'm going to paste this in the Tenth Amendment thread.
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https://washingtontimes-dc.newsmemory.com/?token=56988ef2a35f158944f618fd528ebd1e_65ba60ea_6d25b5f&selDate=20240131
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So much for my preceding post?
https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/31/texas-lt-gov-dan-patrick-texas-wont-stop-putting-razor-wire-along-border/
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Third
https://www.stephenwbrowne.com/2007/01/if-i-were-a-terrorist-part-2/?fbclid=IwAR2CxV9i0nIdXhBAUSoLEPjqvxY0h9cVuZaRl_x0ibuwwdZNIAot7kJN9VI
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fourth
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/31/politics/china-hacking-infrascture-fbi-director-christopher-wray/index.html
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https://amgreatness.com/2024/02/01/when-the-invaders-outnumber-the-army/
When the Invaders Outnumber the Army
In the past three years, we’ve had upwards of eight million people slip into our country, both detected and undetected. We are being invaded, and our government is failing to do anything about it.
By Chuck Owen
February 1, 2024
According to the website Statista, the United States has the third largest standing “Army” in the world. The website says that we have 1.3 million soldiers under arms. By “soldiers,” they’re referring to all of our armed forces—Army, Marines, Navy, Air Force, and Space Force. Third largest in the world. Not bad, if you’re into measuring things. China and India are the only countries with larger militaries. Russia has one about the same size as us, as does North Korea.
In addition to our active force, Statista says we have over 760,000 reservists attached to our armed forces. For those unfamiliar, a reservist is also a soldier (generic term) who can theoretically be called into duty to do things the active forces do. They’re called reservists because they are the first line of replenishment for the active force. Reservists serve in various capacities in all of the branches of the US military. They train once a month with their unit and have a two-week annual training event where they go to an installation and ensure their skills are ready for wartime. Some call them weekend warriors. I call them heroes—many or most have other jobs and serve our great country because they want to serve. Of key importance is that all of these service members are federally authorized and work at the direction of the president.
We also have over 325,000 National Guardsmen in the United States of America. These people serve in all 50 states and hail from over 2,500 separate communities in our great republic. Their lives are very similar to those of reservists. The Guard is a dual-hat organization that works in peacetime primarily for the governor of each state and can be called into national service at the direction of the president. Our guardsmen are especially visible in times of crisis at home, most prominently during times of disaster. Their units are also frequently involved in overseas contingency operations in support of national commitments, like in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East right now. Once a guardsman goes on federal orders, he or she works for the president. When they’re in their home state, they generally work for their governor.
When you add these numbers up, we look pretty good on paper. We have about 2.3 million people serving in the armed forces in our country. Sounds like we’re set.
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As a rule, the mission of our armed forces is to defend our country and national interests. At the outset of our country’s founding, our Army protected us. That’s kind of changed, in that we use our military primarily as an overseas arm of American policies—to defend our values and to help our friends. So, two million people who have the capacity to defend really aren’t here for us in the real sense of defending our country. Our Guard is here for that, but the mission of the Guard is a bit obscure in this day and age. We ostensibly have the Border Patrol and Homeland Security to protect our sovereign land. The federal Border Patrol is part of Homeland Security and is a 22,000 agent-strong unit. The Department of Homeland Security has roughly 260,000 people on its payroll.
But, hey, we have 2.3 million people in uniform and about 260,000 Homeland Security personnel. We have our own state and local police forces who are here for public safety. We’re all good, right? Our minds should be at ease.
Until you realize that in the past three years, we’ve had upwards of eight million people slip into our country, both detected and undetected. The Biden administration’s Border Patrol has caught and released into America a reported 2.3 million foreign nationals since 2021. There are informed estimates that as many as six million others have filtered in illegally during the same period. The thought of so many unaccounted-for and unvetted people sneaking into our country is a great concern. In December 2023 alone, more than 300,000 people have shown up at our border trying to get into the United States.
What a person knows about this topic is a function of the news they watch—or don’t watch. Many who zero in on left-wing media barely know this problem exists. CNN and MSNBC barely talk about the subject. Why they ignore it is mystifying. Fox News covers it, as does Newsmax. The Big Three networks cover it, but only when they’re covering something in an attempt to make Republicans or conservatives look like ogres.
In truth, we don’t know where most of these estimated eight million people have gone. Many or most appear to be military-age men. We don’t know where these people are from. Some are stopped by curious media, and most of those tell where they’re from. Migrants from Latin America make sense. They can walk here. Belize and Bolivia are on this side of the world. It’s a long walk, but it’s a walk. But what on earth are migrants from Southwest Asia doing walking across our southern border? How did an indigent person from Bulgaria, Pakistan, or India get here? How did a supposedly poor person from Senegal, Albania, or China get here, and who carted them to the border of America and Mexico?
A recent in-person report by news outlet Muckraker chronicled the trip from South America to here. The reporter documented the aid stations created by the United Nations along the route. He documented supplies from American organizations. The reporter even documented Chinese aid facilities created for Chinese nationals who are making the trek into our country. It’s all on tape. The young reporter almost lost his life on this trip, but it’s now there for all to see.
While Congress and the White House wrestle over this, the invasion continues.
What appears to be the case is that the Biden administration is happy to try to make Texas absorb the entire cost of this influx. Every time Texas tries to do something to protect its citizenry, the Biden administration brings up ambiguous terms about things like “comprehensive immigration reform.” Team Biden and the blue states apparently expect all these people to just come and settle in Texas.
I don’t know what you call a three-year influx of millions of people, but it sure seems like an invasion to me. If the Biden administration cared about this country, they would close the border. And yes, they have the authority and means to do just that. Right now. The president simply has to direct the closure.
The sad truth is that if there was ever a time to protect this country with our purported third largest army in the world, it would be now. Before someone soils themselves over posse comitatus, I refer anyone reading this to the War of 1812. We are being invaded, and our government is failing to do a single thing about it. Article IV, Section 4, of the United States Constitution states, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion;..” The Biden Administration is not fulfilling this obligation to the States.
And for the record, I have every faith in our local and state law enforcement. Their jobs are already tough enough, dealing with the influx of people who have come here over decades and other festering criminal and social ills. Putting this on their backs is not fair. For the record, I am not anti-immigration. People ought to be able to come here—but under our terms. The people of the United States ought to be the ones deciding who comes here—via the laws we pass through our elected representatives. Waves of foreign invaders do not get to determine if they come into our country. What concerns me most is how we, as a country, can manage literal human waves coming from who knows where. This is going to strain every element of our society.
How this all ends is anyone’s guess. It is my hope that law and order prevail. It is my hope that Congress will hold the line and not give the federal government a single dime to do anything until this invasion is halted. Congress has the power of the purse. The good folks at Statista like to compile numbers; I hope they’re compiling the numbers of people who have illegally crossed here and then start compiling numbers on how this is managed. I also hope that if you have a family member who is unaware of these facts, you’ll share this article with them. Many are deeply concerned. I hope you are too.
Charles “Chuck” Owen is a retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, a Member of the Louisiana State House of Representatives and the Louisiana Freedom Caucus.
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I believe quite strongly that those seeking to understand an issue, and who seek to engage where that topic is concerned, owe it to themselves and those they engage to be at least acquainted with the arguments of the other side so they can frame any ensuing debate accurately, avoid straw arguments, and maybe perhaps alter their thinking when confronted by a good argument.
I also believe these days it’s easier for those leaning right to embrace this ethos than their peers on the other side as, let’s face it, the MSM et al tend to parrot the arguments of the left, which leaves those of us of another opinion basically unable to avoid the positions of the other side as they are so proliferate. Not so with with folks on the left side of the aisle, most of whom are essentially insulated from encountering any notions that aren’t sung from their hymnal.
And it shows. Having confronted little but caricatures of right leaning arguments few on the left are able to effectively address a cogent framing of a right leaning view that isn’t delivered in the imbecilic manner they’ve been assured is all the right is capable of. I think it leaves them at a significant disadvantage, much as person that has applied martial skills in context while sparring has an advantage over dojo ballerinas that have done little more than kick and punch air.
As that may be, this is from a source I’ve shared before called Just Security, a site that regularly promulgates lawfare tactics I follow in a “know your enemy” context. Well hell, this does a lovely job of demonstrating just how unhinged the left can become when the right wing folk like Abbot don’t play by the rules as the left would dictate them. The histrionic tone on full display here demonstrates full well just how effective someone embracing traditional American values can be when unapologetically smacking the “Progressive” left upside the head with them. The one trick pony “that’s racist” cognitive dissonance on full display is delicious. Enjoy:
The Biden Administration Must Use Civil Rights Enforcement to Push Back Against Texas’s Racist Invocation of Invasion
27 states support Texas border defense
•Just Security / by Kate Huddleston / February 01, 2024 at 09:07AM
In the last few weeks, Texas politicians have escalated confrontation with the Biden administration over its supposed failure to engage in immigration enforcement. In doing so, they have made extraordinary fact-free, conspiratorial assertions that the federal government is purportedly actively working to bring migrants to the United States, to increase votes for Democrats and in partnership with the cartels. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick claimed recently that the Biden administration’s “goal” is “to put millions of people into this country, one day turn them into citizens, and one day turn them into voters and take over the country”—and that the federal government doesn’t “care if people die” in the process. Attorney General Ken Paxton went even further, claiming with no evidence that the “federal government” is “actually participating with cartels and bringing people here as fast as they possibly can.”
Not coincidentally, in the last few weeks Texas has also asserted an extraordinary, previously fringe legal theory: that Texas is under invasion based on immigration and must assert a right to self-defense. This legal theory has its roots in the same racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory that has fueled Patrick and Paxton’s claims. Through civil rights enforcement, the Biden administration can and should counter the racist “invasion” narrative and years of Texas’s escalating border actions. Doing so will reassert at the Texas-Mexico border the rule of law, migrants’ humanity, and an essential role of the federal government—protecting civil rights from state law enforcement abuses.
Texas’s Border Extremism is Escalating
For three years, under Governor Greg Abbott’s “Operation Lone Star” program, Texas has sent thousands of state police and National Guard to border communities, where they have targeted migrants for arrest on state charges, conducted a disproportionate number of traffic stops, put up razor wire, and even reportedly pushed children back into the Rio Grande. Currently, the state is denying the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) access to a border park. Instead, Texas National Guard and law enforcement are building razor wire barriers, telling migrants to turn back, and arresting some for misdemeanor trespass. This comes days after the Supreme Court restored Border Patrol’s ability to remove Texas’s razor wire. In an inflammatory statement, Abbott asserted that Texas must “defend and protect itself” from an “invasion” of immigrants.
Abbott claims that Texas has a constitutional “right of self-defense”; that he has accordingly “declared an invasion under Article I, § 10, Clause 3” based on President Joe Biden’s purported “refusal” to enforce immigration law; and that Texas will continue to act in light of its purported power to repel invasion. Abbott’s argument is antithetical to governing Supreme Court precedent, which has long held that immigration policy—as to entry, exit, and status—and immigration enforcement are federal powers. The Court explained in 1915, “the authority to control immigration—to admit or exclude aliens—is vested solely in the federal government.” In the 2012 touchstone decision Arizona v. United States, the Court reaffirmed that “the federal power to determine immigration policy is well settled” and held several state statutory provisions, including one authorizing state and local arrests for offenses making a person potentially deportable, preempted under federal law. As numerous scholars have argued, the invasion argument is legally outrageous. Despite that, 25 Republican governors issued a joint statement saying they “stand in solidarity with” Texas and endorse the invasion legal theory.
“Invasion”: Roots in White Supremacist Conspiracy Theory
How did we get to this extraordinary moment? The white supremacist “great replacement” conspiracy theory has long fueled politicians’ “invasion” rhetoric—in a way, escalation from rhetoric to legal argument is a grimly logical next step.
In August 2019, a white supremacist drove hundreds of miles to El Paso, Texas, to target Latinos in a mass shooting, killing 23 people. In a written manifesto, the shooter claimed that his actions were to combat a “Hispanic invasion of Texas” and denounced Latino political power in the state. One day earlier, in a fundraising appeal, Abbott argued that Texans need to “DEFEND” the border because “[t]he national Democrat machine has made no secret of the fact that it hopes to ‘turn Texas blue.’” Abbott told his would-be supporters, “unless you and I want liberals to succeed in their plan to transform Texas—and our entire country—through illegal immigration, this is a message we MUST send.”
Both Abbott and the El Paso shooter were espousing the “great replacement” conspiracy theory—the fiction that liberal elites are working to bring nonwhite immigrants to the United States to “replace” white and conservative political power. (This idea rests on the predicate that immigrants will necessarily vote for liberals, which is not the case.) Following the shooting, amid intense backlash, Abbott recognized “the importance of making sure that rhetoric will not be used in any dangerous way.” But that was, obviously, short-lived.
Four years after the El Paso shooting, the language of “invasion” and other white supremacist rhetoric is common in Texas politics, as are conspiracy theories about the federal government’s involvement in attracting migrants to the country. For example, Kinney County is a border county that has played a leading role in Texas’s extreme anti-immigrant policies. A website run by the county asks for donations to “Defend Our Borders” from “this federally funded invasion.” And in 2021, when thousands of mostly Haitian migrants waited for federal processing in Del Rio, Texas, Patrick claimed that Biden and Democrats had started a “silent revolution” “trying to take over our country without firing a shot.” He argued, “in 18 years if every one of them has two or three children, you’re talking about millions and millions and millions of new voters and they will thank the Democrats and Biden for bringing them here. Who do you think they’re going to vote for?”
A fall 2023 conversation between a Texas state legislator and the then-executive director of Texans for Strong Borders —an organization with extensive white supremacist ties and extreme rhetoric that successfully pushed anti-immigrant legislation—provides another sign of the conspiracy theory’s reach. The advocate asserted that “the federal government” is “actively facilitating the invasion,” claiming “an orchestrated scheme” in which Democrats will extend voting rights to undocumented immigrants to flip Texas and permanently cement the Electoral College for Democrats. The legislator nodded along and emphasized in responding that “this is a fight between good and evil.”
These, and Patrick’s and Paxton’s recent public statements, are all variations of the racist great replacement conspiracy theory. Like a virus, the idea has made the jump from narrative to legal claim.
Invasion Legal Origins: White Supremacist Rhetoric, Anti-Immigrant Policies
The constitutional “invasion” theory appears to have originated not with Abbott but, years earlier, with local and national political figures who have espoused racist ideas and implemented anti-immigrant policies. Its apparent first expression was intertwined with great replacement rhetoric.
The first assertion of the legal “invasion” idea appears to have come from Kinney County Attorney Brent Smith, in an April 2021 letter to Texans. The letter claimed that Texas was being “invaded” by people who “originate from many different countries . . . including the Middle East.” It argued that under Article I, Section 10, Clause 3, Texas has “the concurrent authority” to engage in immigration enforcement “in times of ‘invasion or imminent harm.’”
The letter was consistent with racist views that Smith has espoused, such as claiming that with immigration “we will lose our country . . . it won’t look the same way.” Smith has been on the leading edge of Texas’s anti-immigrant policies: for example, he suggested in 2021 that Texas could unilaterally deport individuals and appears to have originated Texas’s scheme of arresting migrants on state trespass charges. Three years later, his letter’s detailed legal argument is consistent with Abbott’s current one.
Two months after Smith’s letter, three former Trump administration DHS officials floated the invasion theory. Former Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan, former senior official Ken Cuccinelli, and former DHS Office of General Counsel attorney Mike Howell cited the “invasion or imminent harm” language in Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 and argued, “Texas, as a sovereign state, has the inherent authority to protect its citizens and enforce its own borders.” Long before espousing this legal idea rooted in racism, both Morgan and Cuccinelli had made racist statements. In 2019, both publicly defended then-President Donald Trump’s claim that immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border was an “invasion.”
In October 2021, Cuccinelli published a blueprint for provoking a state confrontation with the federal government through the invasion clause. He argued that states should send National and State Guard to the border; instruct National Guard and law enforcement to unilaterally deport migrants; and bus migrants out of state, among other policy steps. Several months later, when Smith orchestrated declarations of invasion by Texas counties, Cuccinelli and Morgan attended the Kinney County press conference to pressure the state to do the same. Now, Abbott has declared an invasion and implemented many of Cuccinelli’s recommendations. This fringe legal theory with a racist predicate has broken through to the conservative mainstream.
Abbott’s Incrementalist Approach to Eroding Federal Control over Immigration
Great replacement rhetoric and its disguise in legal garb has partially led to the volatile current situation at the Texas border. Equally important, though, has been Abbott’s incrementalist approach to invoking the invasion theory and to provoking a confrontation with the federal government. Abbott has chipped away at federal control over immigration enforcement for years–and has not encountered significant opposition from the Biden administration.
From April 2021 through fall 2022, Abbott resisted declaring an invasion—despite entreaties from Kinney County and criticism from Cuccinelli. Instead, Abbott declared a state of disaster, comparable to a hurricane or flood. This was a norms-shattering step, and similar to Trump’s declaration of emergency to build the border wall. It also enabled Abbott to take three key steps starting in 2021: (1) saturating border communities with state law enforcement and National Guard; (2) creating a parallel immigration enforcement system predicated on state criminal trespass law, which targets migrants for often-questionable arrest and channels them into a separate detention and prosecution system rife with civil rights abuses; and (3) invoking an interstate emergency aid compact to successfully urge other states to send law enforcement to the border.
In the intervening years, Abbott has entrenched these aspects of Operation Lone Star. The Texas National Guard’s stringing of razor wire along border areas began initially to create physical fences, to provide constructive notice under state law of trespass. By spring 2023, Texas had begun characterizing the razor wire barriers as “essential impediments” to migration. Over 28 months, Texas has arrested almost 10,000 migrants on state misdemeanor trespass charges. Abbott has been clear about the trespass program’s goal to circumvent federal authorities: he’s explained that Texas is “employing state law, as opposed to federal law, because when we make an arrest under federal law we typically have to turn people over to the federal authorities, and they just release them.”
Perhaps most startlingly from a federalism perspective, Abbott has used the Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC) to circumvent the federal government. EMAC is an interstate agreement to share resources in disasters, such as a hurricane or flood. In 2021, Abbott and the then-Arizona governor sent a letter asking other states to “send all available law-enforcement resources to the border in defense of our sovereignty and territorial integrity.” In response, seven states sent National Guard and/or law enforcement. In spring 2023, Abbott again invoked EMAC, and 13 governors committed to sending 1,305 National Guard and 231 law enforcement to the Texas-Mexico border. They claimed they were “stepping up to protect Americans where Biden has failed.” While these deployments were typically short term and better viewed as political stunts, they have helped move the Overton window—placing within mainstream political thought the idea that states must band together to confront immigration at the border with armed force.
The Biden administration has not meaningfully pushed back on any of these efforts, either through actions or public statements. In July 2022, a Department of Justice review of Operation Lone Star for civil rights violations under Title VI came to light through public records requests. No formal investigation has ever been opened. There has been no public response to calls for investigations under other civil rights authority and for misappropriation of COVID relief funds. The administration has avoided most public comment on Abbott’s state immigration enforcement system. In a Texas Monthly interview, the then-Border Patrol chief briefly called for “coordination.”
Now, Abbott has combined the fruits of his incremental policy entrenchment under “emergency” authority with the bold assertion of the constitutional invasion theory. Texas’s occupation of a municipal park, denial of access to Border Patrol agents, and arrest of migrants on state criminal trespass charges are the culmination of years-long policies. State governors were primed to readily respond to a request for support by multiple requests, and positive responses, over years. And Texas leaders’ open assertion of inflammatory rhetoric about the Biden administration and a legal theory rooted in racism is possible due to a years-long narrative.
Time for the Biden Administration to Enforce Civil Rights Law at the Border
This showdown between Texas and the federal government has thus been building for years. The Biden administration’s failure to engage as Texas escalated, until its actions became extraordinarily egregious, was plainly misguided. To avert a crisis, the federal government now needs to shift the legal ground and narrative framing away from Texas’s racist, conspiracy-theory-based claim of immigration enforcement as tantamount to war.
To do so, the federal government should not only continue to assert federalism arguments but also enforce federal civil rights laws at the Texas-Mexico border. 34 U.S.C. § 12601 provides for DOJ pattern-or-practice investigations of and litigation against law enforcement agencies who violate civil rights, including through unlawful stops and arrests. The Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act similarly provides for legal action where state and local agencies subject detained individuals to a pattern or practice of rights violations. 18 U.S.C. §§ 241 and 242 provide for criminal prosecution where state and local officials deprive individuals of constitutional or statutory rights or conspire to do so.
There is ample evidence that, under Operation Lone Star, Texas law enforcement has engaged in racial profiling in traffic stops in border communities; arrested migrants for trespass without probable cause; held migrants long after they should have been released from custody; and held migrants in horrific conditions of confinement, among other civil rights violations—in a program created to punish migrants for coming to the United States.
Now is the time for DOJ to robustly enforce federal civil rights protections in Texas border communities, on behalf of residents and migrants. In doing so, DOJ should also publicly assert the need for law enforcement to treat all individuals with dignity and in accordance with the law. Undertaking this effort and combating rights violations by state law enforcement will help recast the situation at the border from a military crisis to a humanitarian emergency, and recenter the humanity of migrants. It will also shift the legal stakes from purely a constitutional federalism confrontation to highlight the federal government’s civil rights authority and duty.
The invasion theory is a white supremacist conspiracy theory wrapped in the Constitution. Continuing to ignore this underlying reality is dangerous and will only lead to further escalation, both governmental and by individuals fueled by hate. This is a civil rights as well as a federalism crisis, and the federal government should start treating it accordingly.
IMAGE: U.S. Border Patrol agents cut an opening through razor wire after immigrant families crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico on September 27, 2023 in Eagle Pass, Texas. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)
The post The Biden Administration Must Use Civil Rights Enforcement to Push Back Against Texas’s Racist Invocation of Invasion appeared first on Just Security.
https://www.justsecurity.org/91700/the-biden-administration-must-use-civil-rights-enforcement-to-push-back-against-texass-racist-invocation-of-invasion/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-biden-administration-must-use-civil-rights-enforcement-to-push-back-against-texass-racist-invocation-of-invasion
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Some where in here we have a citation of a serious quality study done by Yale? Princeton? MIT? (or maybe two of them) during the Trump years IIRC looking to come up with valid numbers regarding illegals in America. I've tried looking for it both here and through Qwant but have not beeing able to find it.
IIRC it put the number at 22-24 million-- and that is before the Biden Invasion.
Would love to get my hands on it-- given the prestige of those names in Dem/Prog circles, it should be a potent piece of propaganda for us.
Also recently I saw something to the effect that 15% of people in America now are illegals. Would love to get my hand on this too.
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Some where in here we have a citation of a serious quality study done by Yale? Princeton? MIT? (or maybe two of them) during the Trump years IIRC looking to come up with valid numbers regarding illegals in America. I've tried looking for it both here and through Qwant but have not beeing able to find it.
IIRC it put the number at 22-24 million-- and that is before the Biden Invasion.
Would love to get my hands on it-- given the prestige of those names in Dem/Prog circles, it should be a potent piece of propaganda for us.
Also recently I saw something to the effect that 15% of people in America now are illegals. Would love to get my hand on this too.
Not acquainted with either, but I’ll be looking for them.
ETA: is this the Yale study?
https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/yale-study-finds-twice-as-many-undocumented-immigrants-as-previous-estimates
Whups, another one:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6150478/
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HT to Doug
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/02/they-firebombed-my-office.php
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https://www.oann.com/newsroom/n-y-c-launches-53m-program-to-provide-migrant-families-with-pre-paid-credit-cards/
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https://www.oann.com/newsroom/n-y-c-launches-53m-program-to-provide-migrant-families-with-pre-paid-credit-cards/
Just saw that & was gonna post. $53 million IIRC in a city with all sorts of problems and underserved needs going to illegals instead. But hey, they gotta sign a piece of paper saying they will only use their free $1K/month on food and diapers. Right….
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How the Border Bill Would ‘Shut Down’ Illegal Crossings
Bipartisan measure would rein in asylum claims, try to decide cases more quickly
By Michelle Hackman
Feb. 5, 2024 5:00 am ET
Migrants were taken into custody by officials at the Texas-Mexico border in January. PHOTO: ERIC GAY/ASSOCIATED PRESS
The Senate released the long-awaited text of a compromise bill on Sunday aimed at curtailing historically high illegal border crossings.
The bill’s central aim is to end widespread use of a practice known as “catch and release,” in which migrants claiming asylum are released into the U.S. with immigration court dates years into the future.
It contains new measures that make it tougher to qualify for asylum, detain or track migrants as they move through the process and limit how many people can make asylum claims a day. In addition, it makes several minor changes to the legal immigration system, including ones to help children of work-visa holders avoid deportation when they become adults.
Here’s an explanation of what the bill would do if enacted.
Setting up a new process at the southern border
The bill would create a new system under which any migrant seeking asylum—whether they cross the border into the U.S. illegally or enter at a legal crossing point with an appointment—would be put through a rapid asylum-determination process meant to last about 90 days. Most adults would likely be detained for that new process, while most families with children under 18 would be released with a monitoring device, such as an ankle bracelet or a cellphone app.
Within that 90-day window, migrants would then undergo a new, toughened initial asylum screening, where they would be asked to show some evidence backing their claims and prove they couldn’t safely live somewhere else in their home countries. Migrants who fail that initial screening, miss their appointments or tamper with their monitoring devices could all be swiftly deported. Those who do pass should receive a final decision within another 90 days. Still, those windows are targets rather than hard deadlines, and migrants won’t be deported if the process drags on.
Unaccompanied migrant children are exempted from the new process, and a separate provision of the bill would ensure that all children under the age of 14 would be represented in their immigration hearings by a government or pro bono lawyer.
Creating a new expulsion authority
The bill sets up a temporary new authority modeled after Title 42, the Trump pandemic-era policy that allowed the government to turn away migrants without needing to consider their asylum claims. Under that new power, which is authorized for three years, the government can “shut down” the border to asylum seekers if crossings surpass a daily average of 4,000 a day for at least seven days—roughly half the daily crossings seen in recent months. The shutdown becomes mandatory at 5,000 a day. The idea is to ensure the government’s detention capacity doesn’t get overwhelmed when illegal crossings climb too high. The border then couldn’t reopen until crossings fall to under 75% of the trigger point.
Even when the border is “shut down,” 1,400 appointments a day would remain available to asylum seekers who make appointments and enter at legal ports of entry. Those applicants would still be put through the rapid asylum determination process.
The bill also authorizes the president to suspend the border emergency for up to 45 days “if it is in the national interest.”
(MARC: !!!)
Limiting humanitarian parole at the border
The bill also restricts the use of an immigration power known as humanitarian parole, a temporary legal status that the government has been using to allow migrants to enter the country legally and work, so it could no longer be used at the southern border. Humanitarian parole can still be granted to people landing at the U.S. airports, meaning the bill will allow a program for Americans to sponsor Ukrainian refugees to continue, along with a similar one for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans.
Expanding legal immigration
The bill would create an additional 50,000 Green Cards each year for five years, which allow noncitizens to live and work permanently in the U.S. Of those, 32,000 will become available to family members of U.S. citizens, while 18,000 will be allotted to immigrants sponsored by their employers. Nearly all Green Card categories are currently oversubscribed, and immigrants from countries with high demand—such as Mexico, India and the Philippines—routinely must wait years or even decades for their number to come up in line. Adding Green Cards to the existing totals would help alleviate some of those backlogs.
Creating a path to citizenship for Afghan refugees
The bill includes a measure, known as the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would allow Afghans evacuated to the U.S. during the military withdrawal in 2021 to become permanent residents and citizens. About 80,000 afghans were brought to the U.S. on humanitarian parole, and many of them have no permanent legal options, meaning they could become undocumented if their parole status expires.
Including a fix for ‘documented dreamers’
The “documented dreamers” are a group of primarily Indian immigrants who moved to the U.S. as children when their parents moved here legally for work opportunities. Because the backlog for Green Cards for Indian applicants is estimated to be several decades long, tens of thousands of these children have started turning 21 and losing their parents’ visa protections—along with their place in the Green Card line. Some have been forced to return to their home countries because they are unable to qualify for new work visas, which are also oversubscribed. The bill would fix that by ensuring these adult children are still treated as children in the immigration system, so they can remain and work on their visas and become permanent residents when their parents are eligible
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A lot of ""Includeds" there. No offense but actual reporting would also mention what isn't included, the billions it would take to build the wall 69% of Americans favor.
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I agree with Speaker Johnson that this bill is, and should be, DOA.
Though there are some tempting improvements mingled in (if meaningful, tightening the definition and standards for political asylum), the fundamentals remain.
First and foremost, Biden already can stop what is happening but quite deliberately does not. He/his handlers DESIRE what is happening. THE BILL SIMPLY IS NOT NECESSARY TO STOP OR DIMINISH WHAT IS HAPPENING.
Second, it authorizes something like 1.8 million illegals per year!!! WTF!!! And with the chicanery and kabuki theater sure to attend any efforts to enforce this ceiling, the number is meaningless.
Third, were the bill to pass, we have castrated our strongest issue against Biden. No doubt the Pravdas and he will protray rejecting the bill as politically motivated MAGA extremist obstructionism-- but that is a fight we need to accept and one which we should win.
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/texas-stripped-of-powers-in-border-security-bill/ar-BB1hNVZp?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=7aadd64064a14766833702d877556c07&ei=32
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Laura was fierce tonight on the Bill,, Stephen Miller on Hannity too.
Both were very specific, not just hyperventilating.
This may have been posted previously but having given it a careful listen, I am making sure by posting it here now.
THIS IS A MUST LISTEN.
https://t.co/mY8TlrLPnm" / X (twitter.com)
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Piece claims EPA knew of unsafe toxin levels, but didn't want to cause Biden and Buttigieg problems, particularly after their weak response to the derailment.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/did-the-epa-cover-up-east-palestine-toxins-to-help-biden/?fbclid=IwAR3KD_omplt2tVp06hOqPdvqc5knHYY3nKglwvBB_2MeKJalGUr7n5jqT_s
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Biden lays it out in 2015:
https://x.com/boatgirl3/status/1754919166690160655?s=61&t=L5uifCqWy8R8rhj_J8HNJw
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https://www.bizpacreview.com/2024/02/06/go-fck-themselves-rank-and-file-border-patrol-agents-slam-senate-funding-deal-1434481/?utm_campaign=bizpac&utm_content=Newsletter&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_source=Get%20Response&utm_term=EMAIL
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"Lawmakers proposed significant assistance to the agency for its efforts to quintuple that workforce, including by boosting base pay for General Schedule positions by 15%"
Typical Dems
when they want the votes they offer taxpayer money to bribe needed support.
obviously they thought this sell out would get BP agents on board to support the bill.
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"Lawmakers proposed significant assistance to the agency for its efforts to quintuple that workforce, including by boosting base pay for General Schedule positions by 15%"
I need the citation for this. Do you have it handy?
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https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2024/02/hiring-and-pay-reforms-accompany-staffing-surges-bipartisan-border-deal/393918/
" including by boosting base pay for General Schedule positions by 15%. "
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Thank you.
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Mike Gallagher is otherwise one of the good ones but here he is 1 of the 4 R's who voted No on Mayorkas impeachment.
In the WSJ he explains, subscription required, this will start the practice of impeaching each other's cabinet members.
Good point but with due respect, isn't that door already opened with 98% of Republican members on record voting for impeachment?
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https://dailycaller.com/2024/02/09/victor-davis-hanson-southern-border-security-bill-con-job/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=29912&pnespid=76ZiAiQbJa4HhvTC9m6tA8yc5gjyBIFrL_zswbIzshRmaKljOIYDq96_tmwhXhZxO1Zwxt7V
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"If the border can be shut down when more than 5,000 illegal immigrants cross per day, then why can’t it be shut down immediately, right now?"
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/02/12/the_one_border_question_dems_cant_answer_150479.html#2
Put another way, yes it can. They don't want to. And they left provisions in the bill to NOT shut the border down even when those targets, a million illegals a year, are surpassed.
70% of Americans want the border secured. Democrats in power in Washington don't. Too bad Americans don't control the White House and Senate, or even the Senate Republican leadership.
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https://dailycaller.com/2024/02/14/border-patrol-nabbed-terror-watchlisted-individuals-four-months-years-combined/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=rundown&pnespid=uqlqWX8XJbhF3eTMrCTkSI_XowD_SZF5KvHlwOU59gBmG4dlw_Dl.TaghQohTKDOIdsTqRqh
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https://americanwirenews.com/texas-plans-to-build-a-military-base-near-eagle-pass-in-response-to-bidens-border-crisis/?utm_campaign=bizpac&utm_content=Newsletter&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_source=Get%20Response&utm_term=EMAIL
https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1759278086816673986
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmBWk2--x6c&t=3s
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https://twitter.com/FinanceLancelot/status/1759998273941573970?fbclid=IwAR17he1M9MzynCDhSt-2C7Wl552DxOUwCZYR2da2kArZh_DK328H6QGxIas
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from above post by CD
ME:
so, our armed forces can become a hired army of foreign mercenaries.
as we say, "what could go wrong?"
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Just saw a memeD"
"Number of illegal alien military age males entered during Biden, now outnumber the our military 6-1."
Is this accurate?
Helluva a bulletpoint to toss into a conversation if so.
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https://www.oann.com/newsroom/military-monitoring-new-high-altitude-balloon-moving-across-western-u-s/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPDifMpcKRY&t=65s
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/russia-may-have-just-carried-out-its-first-direct-action-against-the-west/ar-BB1iYZ2J?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=f570127e71204647a5c35757836bc9f3&ei=22
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https://babylonbee.com/news/police-warn-women-not-to-jog-within-2000-miles-of-an-open-border
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https://www.instagram.com/reel/C36U_6vN5vo/?igsh=bGt4aHR5MTdnMGV2&fbclid=IwAR2EWqM0-6_8gRrXFhhSeXqzKePW8IvU9dWqcUknVHpcPxxk3ZAhps8EjMY
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https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2024/03/02/national-border-patrol-council-president-brandon-judd-n2170835
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https://www.bizpacreview.com/2024/03/04/more-national-guard-troops-deploy-to-southern-border-as-biden-admin-fails-to-act-1442235/?utm_campaign=bizpac&utm_content=Newsletter&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_source=Get%20Response&utm_term=EMAIL
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It's year 12 of Obama Biden, year 16 if you count their control of the deep state during the Trump first term, it's hard to surprise, shock or outrage anyone with news of a new scandal. We had Fast and Furious, IRS Targeting and the Deep State Targeting of all things Trump.
Now, right while they divert attention on border security with an unneeded Senate bill, we find out they are flying 'migrants' in illegally by the hundreds of thousands.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13155765/biden-illegal-migrant-flying-program-national-security-vulnerability.html
Talk about high crimes, I would call this Article One in the impeachment case of Biden Harris. Let the Biden family corruption case drop to Article Two.
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Can it get any more outrageous than this?
:x
This would should be all over the news today and going forward.
Congress needs to haul Myorkas ass right back into their chambers.
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https://michaelyon.substack.com/p/china-camp-is-a-terrorist-bus-station?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=459345&post_id=142318126&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=z2120&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
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https://washingtontimes-dc.newsmemory.com/?token=cfe34e1c283409407744cbd227e4cd0a_65e8854c_6d25b5f&selDate=20240306
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https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/11/federal-court-blocks-biden-administration-from-further-divestment-of-border-wall-funds/
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https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/an-immigration-crisis-beyond-imagining/
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https://justthenews.com/government/security/fbi-director-wray-warns-southern-border-smuggling-network-isis-ties?utm_medium=social_media&utm_source=facebook_social_icon&utm_campaign=social_icons&fbclid=IwAR0mLjjOa6ylmi92BmLgupydnFuu1wBPVhVgmUsqjtRTtoG1uPl2gfSErYs
Edited to paste in BBG's post on Immigration thread:
https://justthenews.com/government/security/fbi-director-wray-warns-southern-border-smuggling-network-isis-ties?utm_medium=social_media&utm_source=facebook_social_icon&utm_campaign=social_icons&fbclid=IwAR0mLjjOa6ylmi92BmLgupydnFuu1wBPVhVgmUsqjtRTtoG1uPl2gfSErYs
Modify message
Report to moderator 192.145.116.66 (?)
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https://cis.org/Testimony/Presidential-Power-Secure-Border
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A good point to make clearly: Congress sets the rules and the President must enforce them.
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I am trying to address the SNL skit point that Sen Britt bringing up a brutal rape out of the blue at her kitchen table is funny. Who would ever do that?
Dems say that point is moot because those rapes happened years ago (not under Biden).
But years ago the flow of illegals was small compared to now.
I want to do some math with this but the real question is true or false:
Is systematic rape and human trafficking, sex trafficking a significant part of this southern border flood?
Of course it is.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/central-america-migrants-rape_n_5806972
This study says 80% raped. Other studies say 60% raped. Repeatedly raped seems to be a better description from those interviewed.
If 10 million come in under Biden and half are female and half of those are getting raped say an average of twice, isn't that 5 million rapes? Change the assumptions any way you want and it is still MILLIONS OF RAPES.
Now back to Senator Britt. The symbolic point of kitchen table setting combined with national political speech is to bring up the national issues of the day. Border is number one for many, and otherwise certainly top 3 nationally. The human trafficking component of that is numbe one or at least top 3 reasons to address the flow across the border. Millions of rapes is an uncomfortable fact that liberals would be up in arms about if it was happennig in Sudan or Zimbabwe. But here it runs up against political forces, the issue could hurt our guy, and therefore must be kept silent.
Sen Britt put it back in their face. We know this is happening right now, millions of rapes under Bien's failed policies empowering cartels and luring the massive flow.
Hey liberals and Leftists, we on the right want to know why this is political, or humorous. Why are you not outraged? Why don't you want it stopped?
If we cannot come together on this we will defeat you over it because no amount of evasion, diversion or political spin makes what's happening acceptable.
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Secondly, fentanyl is killing millions. "nearly 100,000 Americans who die from fentanyl imported across open borders"
Thirdly, illegals are filling the low end jobs, removing the bottom rung of the economic ladder for the underclass we already have, making them permanent underclass.
If we can't come together on this, we share no common values at all.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLI2Wv49V80
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https://www.bizpacreview.com/2024/03/15/pentagon-warns-of-alarming-number-of-drone-attacks-coming-over-us-mexico-border-over-1k-per-month-1445405/?utm_campaign=bizpac&utm_content=Newsletter&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_source=Get%20Response&utm_term=EMAIL
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https://www.theguardian.com/law/2024/mar/19/us-supreme-court-texas-migrant-law
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https://twitter.com/laralogan/status/1772675651599770093?s=20
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I doubt it.
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Lara and Michael Yon definitely are at the conspiracy end of things (not to mention the anti-Israel thing), and here she gets it wrong when she says that harbor pilot was not used- but OTOH a rather large amount of conspiracy theories have been born out in recent years- including more than a few of theirs.
If her theory were right, would the powers that be
a) realize it? and
b) tell us if they did?
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(3) STATES COPY TEXAS’ SB 4 AFTER SCOTUS GIVES GREEN LIGHT: Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, and Louisiana are working to pass state laws that copy Texas’ Senate Bill (SB) 4, allowing state authorities to arrest illegal immigrants and punish them with jail time, fines, or deportation after the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) allowed Texas to begin enforcing SB 4.
Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds said, “States have stepped in to secure the border.” “Americans deserve nothing less. I look forward to signing SF 2340 into law.”
Why It Matters: The Biden administration and Democratic operatives will very likely file lawsuits against these state immigration laws. A circuit split would likely push SCOTUS to accelerate the timeline of the Biden administration or state appeals and will very likely decide against these state immigration laws. More Red State Coalition states adopting these laws will likely push illegal immigrants to blue states, increasing Democrat-held seats in the House and Electoral College votes after the 2030 census and redistricting. – R.C.
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(4) CISA RELEASES FIRST CRIT. INFRASTRUCTURE HACK REPORTING RULES: The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released a new proposed rule that would require critical infrastructure operators to send detailed reports on network breaches and ransomware attacks within 72 hours of detection.
CISA’s new rule will cover hacks that cause a critical loss of system availability, damage operational technology, disrupt business operations, or breach networks through third parties.
Why It Matters: The 18-month timeline before CISA enforces this new reporting rule will run right up to a potential 2027 conflict between the U.S. and China. Recent developments indicate the federal government is very concerned about domestic disruption due to cyber attacks during a period of crisis or conflict. – R.C.
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https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2024/03/26/the_many_ways_a_porous_border_means_crime_without_boundaries_1020358.html
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https://www.newsweek.com/chinese-migrant-suddenly-found-california-military-base-1885133
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/cartels-taking-over-us-land-threatening-authorities-5623776?utm_source=Goodevening&src_src=Goodevening&utm_campaign=gv-2024-04-08&src_cmp=gv-2024-04-08&utm_medium=email&est=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYvAqcwcVzc7PzLYPrHFRB710wA0AIj31kx5JTWZu9FddhEg4S8RP&utm_content=3
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(4) LOUISIANA MOVING ON TEXAS-STYLE IMMIGRATION LAW: The Louisiana State Senate passed Senate Bill 388 in a 28-11 vote, which will allow law enforcement to arrest, jail, and fine illegal immigrants in Louisiana.
“I think all of us know that we have a crisis at the border, and the federal government is not doing anything to help the states,” State Senator Valerie Hodges (R) said.
Why It Matters: Louisiana is the latest member of the Red State coalition to push a bill that mimics Texas’ SB 4 after Iowa announced a similar bill in March. More Red states are likely to follow. However, the states are waiting for the Biden administration’s challenge to SB 4 to make its way to the Supreme Court, where the Supreme Court will likely side with the Biden administration and strike down state immigration laws. – R.C.
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(4) SCRANTON ARMY AMMO PLANT CATCHES FIRE: Local authorities are investigating a fire at the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant in Scranton, PA, that broke out yesterday and said the extent of damage is unknown at this point.
The Scranton plant is the only manufacturer in the U.S. of 105mm and 155mm shell casings for the U.S. military.
Why It Matters: There is no information yet on the cause of the fire, and the base case is likely an accident. However, the Scranton plant presents a target of opportunity for foreign adversaries or domestic far left radicals who called for disrupting U.S. defense contractors and defense logistics. The contraction of the U.S. defense industrial base created choke points in the U.S. defense supply chain, allowing single points of failure to have a potentially outsized impact on U.S. national security. – R.C.
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(4) FEDERAL JUDGE TOSSES RED STATE ASYLUM RULE LAWSUIT: U.S. District Judge David Joseph ruled that Louisiana, Florida, and 17 other states lack standing to challenge a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Department of Justice (DOJ) interim final rule that ended the adversarial process for asylum claims and gave asylum officers the power rather than immigration judges to decide asylum claims.
Judge Joseph said Biden administration policies resulted in a breakdown of government control on the border and general lawlessness, but the states lacked standing to challenge the rule.
Why It Matters: The Biden administration has used new rules interpreting immigration law, and failed to enforce certain immigration laws, to exacerbate the immigration crisis. The Democratic Party long-term political strategy remains to bolster the Democratic voter base ahead of an eventual move on illegal immigrant asylum. – R.C.
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https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/04/josh-hawleys-master-class.php