Homeland Security, Border, sabotage of energy, transportation, environment

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2017/06/21/dhs_s_biometric_exit_program_is_starting_to_scan_americans_faces_before.html

[Crafty_Dog]

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
 

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[G M]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.sfexaminer.com/man-receive-190000-sf-sanctuary-city-violation/

[ccp]

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-> 

[DougMacG]

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/

[G M]

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.

[ccp]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[G M]

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?

[G M]

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.”

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.inquisitr.com/4326878/these-nine-states-will-require-passports-for-all-domestic-air-travel-starting-in-2018/

[G M]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

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.

[G M]

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.

[ccp]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.investigativeproject.org/6449/sophisticated-australian-airplane-bombing-plot

[Crafty_Dog]

http://michellemalkin.com/

[Crafty_Dog]

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.

[DougMacG]

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?

[G M]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

IIRC this forum discussed this at the time.

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[Crafty_Dog]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

Actually, I suspect this to be true:

http://crazynews7.com/trumps-border-wall-would-be-3/

[G M]

Actually, I suspect this to be true:

http://crazynews7.com/trumps-border-wall-would-be-3/

Crazynews7 ?

[G M]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.steynonline.com/8229/jihad-on-the-bike-path

Jihad on the Bike Path
by Mark Steyn
Steyn on America
October 31, 2017

[Crafty_Dog]

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.

[G M]

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/

[ccp]

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.

[G M]

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!

[G M]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

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

   

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/nov/22/trump-calls-ice-union-chief-complaints-betrayal/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiT1RCa09URmlZalptTldZeiIsInQiOiJpZE9rRmxqeTVUcHJnXC9cL21McVBDZ1p0ekc4bFdvUVBxSGgrY3RtVWhMak1pMWtMR0J6T1BpT2dBMEVzRWltNDgzRnRFNW5Ha3pVVTVBdFAydHNlRnFlSmpIcFhyK28xWXhGc2N2dFU3NzRSbEh1ZitnK29sYTIxQmxEYjhScmRyIn0%3D

[Crafty_Dog]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[Crafty_Dog]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.dropbox.com/s/1cjgsc64vhjvaq2/BorderWall.mov?dl=0

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[Crafty_Dog]

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.”

[Crafty_Dog]

http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2018/01/19/border-wall-models-thwart-military-tests/

[Crafty_Dog]

    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.

[Crafty_Dog]

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
Share:   

, , ,

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://clarionproject.org/fbi-arresting-2-terror-suspects-a-week/

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[ccp]

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........

[DougMacG]

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?