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

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[Crafty_Dog]

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."

[Crafty_Dog]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[Crafty_Dog]

https://israelunwired.com/muslims-rally-in-times-square-calling-for-an-intifada-in-america/

[G M]

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

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.breitbart.com/2nd-amendment/2019/12/06/report-6-saudis-detained-after-pensacola-shooting-including-3-who-filmed-attack/

[G M]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[DougMacG]

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 >
 Print
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.

TOP STORIES
Russian spy ship operating in 'unsafe manner' near U.S. submarine base
Report: Teen's kidnapping a hoax, police say
Trump favorability up 6 percentage points since impeachment began, Gallup poll shows

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[DougMacG]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[G M]

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

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[Crafty_Dog]

https://apnews.com/fa038b1a40bfc1192dc960fd25a1c8f8

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/11/huge_illicit_drivers_license_haul_in_kentucky_suggests_a_very_established_cartel_operation.html#.XiPk2i1DyU0.facebook

[G M]

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

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[G M]

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/

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[Crafty_Dog]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[G M]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

Please post in the Skullduggery and Conspiracy thread(s) as well

[Crafty_Dog]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

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.

[DougMacG]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

Agree, and I should have said so when posting.

[G M]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

The article fails by falling into common parlance, but what about the rest of it?

[G M]

The article fails by falling into common parlance, but what about the rest of it?

Scott Stewart is a smart guy.

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[Crafty_Dog]

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/

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNFpM9AxGBg&feature=youtu.be

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[G M]

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...

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[Crafty_Dog]

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