Stalking Iran and bin Ladin with a Drone

Posted on March 24, 2016March 24, 2016 by Denise Simon

We don’t have an intelligence problem, we don’t have a signit problem, not even a humint problem, we have a lack of will which translates to a lack of strategy and a mission objective. We did get Usama bin Ladin but what was the real gain?

At least for we weary Americans, we can take some confidence that we do have technology.

The Drone that Stalked Bin Laden

AirandSpace: In 2009, after two weeks of being embedded as an independent journalist with a small team of U.S. Marines in Afghanistan, I ended up at Combat Outpost Monti, a 14-acre camp of tents, plywood huts, a few concrete bunkers and makeshift guard towers, and a helicopter landing area, all ringed by collapsible barriers. At the outpost, one of hundreds built in Afghanistan during the 13 years of NATO combat operations, the Marines were training and fighting alongside Afghan National Army soldiers. COP Monti was less than 10 miles from the Pakistan border, near the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

RQ-170

My time with the team was just about up when they were ordered to move up the Kunar River valley on a large combat operation. I stayed behind with the Afghan soldiers and, before I managed to find a ride out, weathered a mortar and rocket attack from combatants who had undoubtedly planned the attack and stockpiled the weapons for it at a site across the border, in Pakistan. Even if the Marines had still been there, they could not have pursued the attackers. Al-Qaeda, Taliban, and other belligerents have hidden from the U.S. military in Pakistan’s tribal areas, with varying success, since Americans entered Afghanistan in 2001.

“Everybody knows that the Taliban and other groups train, raise money, plan operations, and even recruit in the tribal areas of Pakistan,” says a retired U.S. infantry officer who served two tours in Afghanistan as well as a rotation in Iraq. (All of the sources quoted in this article spoke to me on the condition that I would not name them because they do not have permission to speak on the record.) “The insurgent leadership move men and materials into Afghanistan and attack American and coalition forces and assets.” Then, he says, they scurry back to Pakistan, where U.S. forces can’t follow.

At least, not on the ground.

Since 2004, the United States has followed insurgents into Pakistan, and has spied on and sometimes killed them there. The CIA flies Predator and Reaper unpiloted aerial vehicles over the tribal districts, often with the approval of Pakistani leaders, who have enemies of their own among the militants inhabiting the country’s northwest. Some missions though are conducted without approval from Pakistan’s authorities. For those missions, the CIA needed a different aircraft.

In late 2007, reporters and observers at Afghanistan’s Kandahar Airfield discovered that a new spy had joined the team. Grainy photographs emerged of what appeared to be an unmanned flying wing. Aviation reporter Bill Sweetman (who writes a column for this magazine) nicknamed the aircraft “the Beast of Kandahar,” and the name has stuck, though the airplane doesn’t have the ferocity or power of a beast. It is an unarmed, stealthy observer designed to glide silently over its targets and transmit photos, video, and other intelligence to a worldwide network of users. The Air Force acknowledged it in 2009 and revealed its official name: the Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel.

The RQ-170 is operated by the U.S. Air Force 432nd Wing, which also operates Predators and Reapers. The 432nd, stationed at Creech Air Force Base, northwest of Las Vegas, declined to speak about the Sentinel, and a spokesperson for Lockheed Martin would state only that it is a “low-observable Unmanned Aerial System” and that its “primary mission is Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance.”

Trying to put together a picture of how the RQ-170 might have been used in the mysterious Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, I spoke to a U.S. military pilot who had flown in the 2003 Iraq war and who had later served in a senior position in an unmanned aerial vehicle unit. “At the start of [Operation Iraqi Freedom], one of our missions was to fly right up against the Iranian border, with our targeting pods slewed to the side to scan for border activity,” the pilot said. “We were right on the border, but we couldn’t cross it. Their radar had us. We were doing ISR work, trying to figure out just what, if any, activity was taking place on and as far inside their border as possible.” One type of activity the U.S. military was trying to follow and disrupt was the Iranian manufacture of devices called EFPs—explosively formed penetrators—and their distribution to enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Historically, insurgencies have required bases of support outside the contested country. “When discussing the RQ-170,” the pilot continued, “you have to understand that both Pakistan and Iran are outside of the ISR grasp of a targeting pod on an aircraft flying on the border, or of satellites. Sheer distance degrades certain aspects of a satellite’s ability to observe.”

The United States needed an intelligence-gathering platform that could avoid detection by Iranian and Pakistani radars. A retired military aviator who held a senior position at Kandahar Airfield during Sentinel operations pointed out that the UAV’s size and shape give it a low radar cross-section—the measure of the amount of energy a target reflects toward the radar that illuminated it. “It’s a large airfoil, roughly 65 to 70 feet in length,” he said. “Being a main wing only, with no fuselage and tail surfaces, drastically reduces both its radar signature and aerodynamic drag.” The Sentinel has the stealthy form of the 172-foot-span B-2 bomber, but is less than half its size.

Because the Sentinel is manufactured by the company that brought us the F-22 stealth fighter and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (and, before that, the F-117, SR-71, and U-2), we can assume that its skin uses radar-absorbent materials to further diminish radar return. Although its shape and materials keep it invisible to some radars, the aviator explained, others would be able to detect the aircraft but might not be able to track or target it.

At medium altitudes, the Sentinel’s light gray color enables it to blend in with the sky. It must also be quiet enough that it won’t be heard on the ground. An aviator who held a senior position at Kandahar Airfield during the Sentinel’s operation said its sound during takeoff wasn’t loud but distinctive—different from the propeller-driven UAVs and military jets that operated from the airfield.

Kandahar Airfield

An early image of the drone, at Kandahar Airfield before 2010. (Anonymous)

Engine noise or heat can never be eliminated but can be reduced. “[A stealth UAV] would use a high-efficiency turbofan engine, and its exhaust would be spread out as much as possible, masking both heat and noise,” the aviator said. A nozzle that spreads the exhaust eliminates concentrations of heat and helps mix hot exhaust with cooler ambient air.

An earlier, short-lived Lockheed Martin stealth UAV, the RQ-3 DarkStar, used a Williams-Rolls-Royce FJ44-1A turbofan, an engine favored for 1990s-era business jets, whose manufacturers claimed noise reductions. But those reductions were due partly to a change in the jets’ takeoff and landing profiles. Flight profile, according to an expert in unmanned aerial systems, is key to maintaining low observability. He explained that to fly low over a location of interest, an aircraft would most likely be put into a shallow descent, with its engine throttled back, so that it would essentially glide over the target. After one pass, “it will turn and gently increase power, but in a geometry such that nobody at or near the target could hear.” Once back at a higher altitude, the Sentinel would, if necessary, set up for another pass. This description suggests that maintaining continuous observation of a location would require two, possibly three, Sentinels flying overlapping patterns, not a sole craft orbiting.

**********

In December 2011, one or several of the Sentinel’s stealthy protections could have failed: An RQ-170 was taken prisoner in Iran. It had been on a reconnaissance mission and landed within the country, mainly intact, a few hundred miles from its home runway at Kandahar Airfield. The Iranians seized it, put it on display, and broadcast claims that they had spoofed its guidance system. Another possibility is that the UAV lost power or that its guidance system simply malfunctioned, an explanation that several Pentagon officials offered the press in the days after the incident.

“These systems have trip wires,” an aviator explained. “They’re meant to automatically return home, or at least to friendly airspace. But you have to consider: Was there a possibility of an oversight that the Iranians figured out they could exploit?” The guidance system, he noted, likely uses a combination of GPS and inertial navigation. With inertial navigation, highly sensitive accelerometers and gyros determine a craft’s route in three axes. Inertial systems cannot be fooled, though they can drift. GPS signals and guidance systems can be jammed or fooled; receivers can be sent signals making the onboard navigation system believe that the aircraft’s home airport is hundreds of miles from where the airport really is.

In 2008, at a Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics training exercise outside Yuma, Arizona, a GPS guidance unit was accidentally spoofed, with a near-disastrous result. The unit was attached to a Containerized Delivery System, a pallet with stuff to resupply ground troops—food, ammunition, water—that had been released from a C-130 transport, and was tracking a GPS signal so it would arrive at a certain point on the ground. In the exercise with the C-130 were a number of airplanes and helicopters, many of them using electronic jamming equipment or testing electronic warfare systems. In the signal-rich environment, the CDS, instead of landing at its programmed landing point, was heading straight for the Chevy Suburban that was waiting to return the pallet to base. Seeing the CDS headed for him, the Suburban driver stepped on it, but he wasn’t fast enough; the cargo crashed into the back of the van. The driver was uninjured.

Reporters have surmised that the Sentinel was in Iran to gather information about Iranian progress in developing nuclear weapons. Satellites can detect nuclear detonations, but to passively sniff for isotopic and other signs of uranium enrichment, analysts would need a platform much closer to the ground. Although reporters have also speculated that the Sentinel, to keep from being heard, flies upwards of 50,000 feet, it probably flies much lower—to be closer to its targets of observation. “Most aircraft are inaudible above 8,000 feet,” says a Department of Defense UAV expert. He explains that if a sensor is operated at a high altitude, it needs to be much larger and heavier to obtain the same degree of accuracy as smaller, lighter ones operating at low altitudes.

He also used intelligence from the MC-12 Liberty, another King Air, this one stuffed with a more exotic sensor suite than the Predator or Guardrail has, including a “complete collection, processing, analysis and dissemination system,” according to its U.S. Air Force fact sheet. The Liberty is brought to bear when commanders want to know what’s going on inside a building, whether people are “manufacturing explosives, packaging opium, or something else,” the officer said. The MC-12 “can sniff things out based on their chemical or metallurgical signatures. They’re incredibly accurate.”

But they aren’t stealthy and can fly only in airspace where the enemy has no radar. So is the purpose of the RQ-170 to carry any combination of the instruments deployed on the Predator, Guardrail, and Liberty into places where those three aircraft can’t go? A former unmanned aircraft systems commander answered: “Yes, definitely.”

The expert pointed out the two bumps on the top of the craft: “Not one antenna but two, so it can be serving multiple, distinct tasks, simultaneously, for users all over the world.”

**********

When I left Combat Outpost Monti—on a blue and white Bell B412 helicopter flown not by the U.S. military but by a Canadian contracting company working for the military (with the call sign “Molson Air,” for the Canadian beer)—we flew for roughly 15 minutes, then landed in a field next to a compound outside a small village. I checked my GPS; we were idling about a half-mile from Pakistan. Two U.S. military personnel, wearing camouflage and helmets unfamiliar to me, climbed aboard the helicopter. We then continued the journey to Asadabad.

A model of the RQ-170, which Iran claimed to have reverse-engineered, on display in Tehran (The Office of the Supreme Leader, Iran)

After returning home, I got an inkling of what those guys in unfamiliar camouflage might have been doing there near the Pakistan border and how they may have used the RQ-170. I learned about counter-terrorism units in a program called Omega, which combined special forces with CIA teams for missions into Pakistan to conduct raids on Taliban and other insurgent and terrorist targets. Putting this information together with what my sources had described, I had little doubt that intelligence about those targets was gathered in part by Sentinels.

The joint CIA–special operations forces mission that would best show off the RQ-170’s surveillance capabilities was conducted years later, in support of the SEAL team who, on the night of May 1, 2011, flew into Pakistan on two modified Black Hawk helicopters, entered a compound in Abbottabad, and killed Osama bin Laden. U.S. government officials told Washington Post reporter Greg Miller that stealth drones had flown dozens of missions to monitor the Abbottabad compound.

My own experience in Afghanistan suggests other missions the RQ-170 might have flown. I often heard intelligence officers or patrol commanders request “a pattern of movement” or a “pattern of life” for targets and enemy forces. To provide that information, analysts would draw data from a number of types of surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft. Learning about the capabilities of these aircraft helped me understand the kind of surveillance the Sentinel might perform.

One of the most important reconnaissance aircraft collecting data for the coalitions in Iraq and Afghanistan is also one of the least known: the Northrop Grumman RC-12 Guardrail. “The Guardrail is probably the most boring-looking airplane in the Department of Defense, but in my opinion, it brings some of the most important capabilities to ground forces,” said the retired infantry officer. The RC-12 is a Hawker Beechcraft Super King Air sprouting antennas to collect signals intelligence. “Looks like a flying porcupine, with all the antennas dangling off it,” the officer said. He regularly requested the Guardrail’s listening capabilities to identify, locate, and track insurgents and to help develop ground operations. The Guardrail does not process the data it collects; instead, it transmits it via a secure satellite link to locations in the United States or, according to a U.S. Army fact sheet, in Germany or Korea, where the data is processed and the results beamed back to the aircraft, which transmits it to the commanders who requested it. It happens fast. Within a second, the system can identify an individual’s or a group’s precise location. It takes a little longer to record and analyze their transmissions.

“I’ve tasked all sorts of assets, manned and unmanned, to look at ground targets and areas of interest,” said the infantry officer. For imagery intelligence, he said, “we used Predator a lot.”

“The beauty of how intelligence gets disseminated with the systems we have in place is that you just request an intelligence product, and you get it based on classification level and need-to-know,” says the aviator who served in a senior position at Kandahar Airfield. “You don’t ask for a platform, just a product. Much of the time intelligence users won’t know they are seeing something that was sourced from a Sentinel.”

The Sentinel is one platform in a complex intelligence system that collects information from every U.S. military command around the world. Analysts at various centers process 20 terabytes of data, of all intelligence types, every day. “Once each type is processed into a product, then it gets fused together with other intelligence products to give a multidimensional picture,” the aviator says.

“Think of a compound, say in Abbottabad, Pakistan, one with some walls that imagery shows to be 16 feet high. Combine that knowledge with signals collections of those in and around the structure, learn the pattern of life, maybe pick up a tall guy walking around, and maybe do some sniffing for weapons in the compound, soak up computer noise that can be analyzed, and then put that together with some human intelligence gathered on the ground about who that tall guy is.” He laughs. “There you go.”

Operation Hemorrhage

Posted on March 24, 2016March 24, 2016 by Denise Simon

It has been said often, either fight the enemy in a true war theater on the battlefield with real war tactics or fight them at home. Brussels and Paris and in the United States in Boston and San Bernardino to mention a few, the hybrid war gets real expensive. These costs are rarely measured or questioned. We are also not measuring the cost of freedoms are giving up. Add in the cost of the cyber war…..well….going back much earlier than 9-11-01 the costs cannot be calculated.

Operation Hemorrhage: The Terror Plans to Wreck the West’s Economy

The Western economy is a key underlying target in attacks like the one that the Islamic State perpetrated in Brussels.

DailyBeast: Every European who flies frequently knows the airport in Zaventem, has spent time in the ticketing area that was strewn with blood, limbs, broken glass, battered luggage and other wreckage.

It was another attack on aviation that pulled the United States into the conflict sometimes known as the “global war on terror” in the first place. Since then, airports and airplanes have remained a constant target for Islamic militants, with travelers being encumbered by new batches of security measures after each new attack or attempt.

After the ex-con Richard Reid managed to sneak a bomb aboard a transatlantic flight in December 2001, but failed to detonate the explosives, American passengers were forced to start removing their shoes on their way through security. After British authorities foiled a 2006 plot in which terrorists planned to bring liquid explosives hidden in sport drink bottles aboard multiple transatlantic flights, authorities strictly limited the quantity of liquids passengers were allowed to carry. When Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab snuck explosives hidden in his underwear onto a flight on Christmas Day 2009, he ushered in full-body scans and intrusive pat-downs.

Those are the misses. There have been hits, too. In August 2004, two female Chechen suicide bombers, so-called “black widows,” destroyed two domestic Russian flights. In January 2011, a suicide bomber struck Moscow’s Domodedovo airport in an attack that looked almost identical to the one that rocked the airport in Brussels: the bomber struck just outside the security cordon, where the airport is transformed from a “soft” target to a “hard” one. Just months ago, the self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS)—the perpetrator of the Brussels attacks—destroyed a Russian passenger jet flying out of Egypt’s Sinai, killing 224 people.

The targeting of airports and airplanes has been so frequent that in lighter times—back when the terrorists seemed so much worse at what they do—some pundits openly mocked their continuing return to airplanes and airports. In one representative discussion from early 2010, a well-known commentator described jihadists as having a “sort of schoolboy fixation” with aviation.

But the reason for this targeting, of course, is neither mysterious nor quixotic, and it’s one the jihadists have explained for themselves. Following the November Paris attacks, ISIS released an infographic boasting that its slaughter on the streets of Paris would force Belgium “to strengthen its security measures … which will cost them tens of millions of dollars.” Moreover, the group claimed, “the intensified security measures and the general state of unease will cost Europe in general and France in specific tends of billions of dollars due to the resulting decrease in tourism, delayed flights, and restrictions on freedom of movement and travel between European countries.”

And that was before the group successfully attacked the Brussels airport, despite those costly new security measures.

Even before 9/11, jihadists saw bleeding the American economy as the surest path to defeating their “far enemy.” When Osama bin Laden declared war against the “Jews and crusaders” in 1996, he emphasized that jihadist strikes should be coupled with an economic boycott by Saudi women. Otherwise, the Muslims would be sending their enemy money, “which is the foundation of wars and armies.”

Indeed, when bin Laden first had the opportunity to publicly explain what the 9/11 attacks had accomplished, in an October 2001 interview with Al Jazeera journalist Taysir Allouni, he emphasized the costs that the attacks imposed on the United States. “According to their own admissions, the share of the losses on the Wall Street market reached 16 percent,” he said. “The gross amount that is traded in that market reaches $4 trillion. So if we multiply 16 percent with $4 trillion to find out the loss that affected the stocks, it reaches $640 billion of losses.” He told Allouni that the economic effect was even greater due to building and construction losses and missed work, so that the damage inflicted was “no less than $1 trillion by the lowest estimate.”

In his October 2004 address to the American people, dramatically delivered just before that year’s elections, bin Laden noted that the 9/11 attacks cost Al Qaeda only a fraction of the damage inflicted upon the United States. “Al Qaeda spent $500,000 on the event,” he said, “while America in the incident and its aftermath lost—according to the lowest estimates—more than $500 billion, meaning that every dollar of Al Qaeda defeated a million dollars.”

Al Qaeda fit the wars the United States had become embroiled in after 9/11 into its economic schema. In that same video, bin Laden explained how his movement sought to suck the United States and its allies into draining wars in the Muslim world. The mujahedin “bled Russia for ten years, until it went bankrupt,” bin Laden said, and they would now do the same to the United States.

Just prior to 2011, there was a brief period when jihadism appeared to be in decline. Al Qaeda in Iraq, the group that later became ISIS, had all but met with defeat at the hands of the United States and local Sunni uprisings. Successful attacks were few and far between.

Valentin Bianchi/AP

Representative of those dark times for jihadists, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula released a special issue of its online magazine Inspire celebrating a terrorist attack that claimed no victims. In October 2010, jihadists were able to sneak bombs hidden in printer cartridges onto two cargo planes. Due to strong intelligence efforts, authorities disabled both bombs before they were set to explode, but the group drew satisfaction from merely getting them aboard the planes.

“Two Nokia phones, $150 each, two HP printers, $300 each, plus shipping, transportation and other miscellaneous expenses add up to a total bill of $4,200. That is all what Operation Hemorrhage cost us,” the lead article in that special issue of Inspire boasted. “On the other hand this supposedly ‘foiled plot’, as some of our enemies would like to call [it], will without a doubt cost America and other Western countries billions of dollars in new security measures.” The magazine warned that future attacks will be “smaller, but more frequent”—an approach that “some may refer to as the strategy of a thousand cuts.”

The radical cleric Anwar Al Awlaki, writing in Inspire, explained the dilemma that he saw gripping Al Qaeda’s foes. “You either spend billions of dollars to inspect each and every package in the world,” he wrote, “or you do nothing and we keep trying again.”

Even in those days when the terrorist threat loomed so much smaller, the point was not a bad one. Security is expensive, and driving up costs is one way jihadists aim to wear down Western economies.

Unfortunately, Al Qaeda’s envisioned world of smaller but more frequent attacks proved unnecessary for the jihadists. Less than two months after the special issue of Inspire appeared that celebrated an at best half-successful attack, the revolutionary events that we then knew as the “Arab Spring” sent shockwaves through the Middle East and North Africa.

This instability would help jihadism reach the current heights to which it has ascended, where the attacks are not only more frequent but larger. Unfortunately, the United States—blinded at the time by the misguided belief that revolutions in the Arab world would devastate the jihadist movement—pursued policies that hastened the region’s instability. The damages wrought by these policies are still not fully appreciated.

The silver lining to the jihadist economic strategy is that they, too, are economically vulnerable. The damage inflicted on ISIS’s “state” by coalition bombings and other pressures forced the group to slice its fighters’ salaries at the beginning of this year. But as Al Qaeda watches its flashier jihadist rival carry out gruesome attacks on Western targets and get bombarded in return, it discerns further proof of the wisdom of its strategy of attrition.

As it watches these two sets of foes exhaust each other, Al Qaeda believes that its comparative patience will pay off. It believes that its own time will come.

Hillary’s Blackberry Back in the News

Posted on March 24, 2016March 24, 2016 by Denise Simon

Questions remain unanswered that include, exactly how many email addresses were there for Hillary’s team, what are the timelines and who were they assigned to?

Not only did Hillary make an original statement about her use of emails…..her office published responses in written form and it took 9 pages to do it. That document from the office of Hillary Clinton is here.

Email Shows Clinton Engaged On Blackberry Issues

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it has obtained State Department documents from February 2009 containing emails that appear to contradict statements by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that, “as far as she knew,” all of her government emails were turned over to the State Department and that she did not use her clintonemail.com email system until March 2009. The emails also contain more evidence of the battle between security officials in the State Department, National Security Administration, Clinton and her staff over attempts to obtain secure Blackberrys.

The documents were obtained in response to a court order in an April 28, 2015, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:15-cv-00646), filed after the Department of State failed to comply with a March 10, 2015, FOIA request seeking:

Any and all records of requests by former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton or her staff to the State Department Office Security Technology seeking approval for the use of an iPad or iPhone for official government business; and

Any and all communications within or between the Office of the Secretary of State, the Executive Secretariat, and the Office of the Secretary and the Office of Security Technology concerning, regarding, or related to the use of unauthorized electronic devices for official government business.

On February 13, 2009, Cheryl Mills (Clinton’s then-chief of staff) sent Clinton an email describing efforts by the National Security Agency to address demands for a secure Blackberry:

In meeting with the NSA person today ([Redacted] NSA’s rep to DOS) – she indicated they could address our BB so that BB could work in the sciff [Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility] and be secure based upon some modifications that could be done to each BB (more below).

Mills attaches an email from an unnamed NSA official that reports:

Debbie Plunkett, D/Chief of our Information Assurance Directorate, is personally assembling a knowledgeable team to work with you and other members of your staff to move forward on your Blackberry requirement. She will engage State’s CIO and DS/comms security folks to ensure everyone is aware of the art of the possible … I am confident we can get to YES on this! [Emphasis in original]

That same day, on February 13 at 12:33 pm Hillary Clinton, using her unsecured [email protected] account responds, “That’s good news.”

As Judicial Watch reported last week, the National Security Agency personnel had denied Clinton’s requests, telling Clinton staff to “shut up and color.”

The new documents include another February 13, 2009, email, written after the Mills-Clinton exchange, that shows that State and NSA security officials were shocked and surprised by Clinton’s Blackberry demands.

For instance, responding to details of the Clinton Blackberry requirements, an unnamed NSA employee simply writes “Amazing…” in a February, 13, 2009, email to Patrick Donovan, then-Director, Diplomatic Security Service and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, and Greg Starr, then-Director of the Diplomatic Security Service. (The documents have many redactions under Exemption 7(c), which is for “information compiled for law enforcement purposes that would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”)

The new emails show that despite prior concerns about security and cost, the NSA and State Department officials came up with a plan to modify six Blackberry devices for Clinton and her staff. A February 20, 2009 State Department email states:

Pat Donovan [head of Bureau of Diplomatic Security] tasked us with a memo that he wanted by today and that we finished last night and that it outlines the vulnerabilities and risks of BB use inside and outside a SCIF (because they’re essentially the same) and concludes with our collaboration with NSA to seek an acceptable solution for their desired BB use.

Despite this warning about using Blackberry “outside a SCIF,” Mrs. Clinton and her staff continued to use unsecured Blackberrys. The documents suggest a continued push for secure Blackberrys in late March 2009 but the documents are heavily redacted.

Hillary Clinton has repeatedly stated that the 55,000 pages of documents she turned over to the State Department in December 2014 included all of her work-related emails. In response to a court order in other Judicial Watch litigation, she declared under penalty of perjury that she had “directed that all my emails on clintonemail.com in my custody that were or are potentially federal records be provided to the Department of State, and on information and belief, this has been done.” This new email find is also at odds with her official campaign statement:

On December 5, 2014, 30,490 copies of work or potentially work-related emails sent and received by Clinton from March 18, 2009, to February 1, 2013, were provided to the State Department. This totaled roughly 55,000 pages. More than 90% of her work or potentially work-related emails provided to the Department were already in the State Department’s record-keeping system because those e-mails were sent to or received by “state.gov” accounts.

Early in her term, Clinton continued using an att.blackberry.net account that she had used during her Senate service. Given her practice from the beginning of emailing State Department officials on their state.gov accounts, her work-related emails during these initial weeks would have been captured and preserved in the State Department’s record-keeping system. She, however, no longer had access to these emails once she transitioned from this account.

The Associated Press previously reported that the State Department was provided by the Department of Defense with emails between Clinton and General David Petraeus that also predate March 2009. Those emails have not been released to the public.

“So now we know that, contrary to her statement under oath suggesting otherwise, Hillary Clinton did not turn over all her government emails,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “We also know why Hillary Clinton falsely suggests she didn’t use clintonemail.com account prior to March, 18, 2009 – because she didn’t want Americans to know about her February 13, 2009, email that shows that she knew her Blackberry and email use was not secure.”

ISIS Stealth European Operations, on Display

Posted on March 24, 2016March 24, 2016 by Denise Simon

AtlanticCouncil: Even though Belgian authorities have been on high alert for several months, attackers were able to strike Brussels in three separate but seemingly coordinated attacks, killing at least 31 people on Tuesday.

Part of the challenge for security officials in Belgium, where home-grown radicalization is a major problem, is the lack of information-sharing between intelligence agencies and “numerous types of local law enforcement,” according to Jorge Benitez, an international security expert at the Atlantic Council.

Brussels is home to 19 different municipalities, two intelligence agencies, and six police zones in a city home to only around 1 million people.

“Even in the tightest-wound societies in terms of security services, you can still hide in nooks and crannies,” Tom Sanderson, a terrorism expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Mashable. “And in Belgium, the nooks and crannies are huge.”

*****

FC: Jake Wallis Simons writes on the March 23, 2016 Daily Mail Online, that “the seeds of the terror blasts that shook Europe, were planned by a brotherhood of childhood friends who grew up just a few doors away from each other in a part of Brussels dubbed “the crucible of terror.” “Police following the trail of the terrorists murderers behind the atrocities in France and Belgium have repeatedly arrived at a single block of housing in Molenbeek, a district of Brussels known as a hotbed of jihadism.”

“The center of the deadly network is the Abdelslam family home, a first floor apartment on Gemeenplaats, behind the police station — and just around the corner from the home of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the ‘brains’ behind the Paris attacks,” Mr. Simons wrote. “Questions remain,” he adds “about how a gang of young men, all of whom were Belgian citizens,” were “transformed into death-loving monsters, showing loyalty to each other; but, [demonstrating] a profound hatred of their country and fellow citizens.”

“Belgian authorities were so focused on Molenbeek, known as the hotbed of jihadism, that they were unaware that Europe’s most wanted man was forming a new terror network in Schaerbeek, another Muslim-dominated area just three miles down the road,” Mr. Simons wrote. “The local community there views police with contempt,” the locals told The Daily Mail Online, “and are unlikely to report terrorists to the authorities, even if they do not have jihadist sympathies themselves.” “Frankly, I wasn’t surprised,’ a policewoman who wished to remain anonymous told The Daily Mail Online. “Nobody takes what happens in the district seriously. Every day, we arrest well known criminals, and the next day they are back on the street. It is frustrating that we are doing our work; but, the justice system doesn’t back us up. These people aren’t being prosecuted, or fined, they are just being released. We arrest them,and nothing happens. One or two hours later they smile and mock us, believing they are on the winning side. The lack of respect for police and for Belgium in the local multicultural community meant that the terror cell could operate without fear of being reported. This made Schaerbeek — which has been ‘off the radar’ for terror police — the ideal place for the terror jihadi to hideout. We have been asking for the higher authorities to take this district more seriously; but, it hasn’t happened,” she said. The Daily Mail Online added that the policewoman’s commanding officer, who also wanted to remain anonymous, agreed with her observations. “We have not been blind to the fact that something serious has been going on here.”

**** What is there to be cultivated is real and handy:

SkyNews: Buried in the midst of thousands of Islamic State files passed to Sky News we discovered a spreadsheet different to the rest of the documents.

The names of Islamic fighters, their pseudonyms, their countries of origin and contact numbers for family members, we had seen before.

What marked this file out was its title: The Martyrs.

Previously unheard of, this was a totally secret brigade. A brigade made up of men who had joined Islamic State to die as suicide bombers.

The files revealed the names of 123.

They came from a variety of countries: France, German, Spain, Tunisia and Egypt.

What is interesting in the files is the number of times that Belgium or Belgian cities are mentioned.

We can reveal that 25 Belgians are identified.

There are 48 references to Belgian nationals within the registration papers.

There are 70 references to the country which include their sponsors who guaranteed their entry to the terror group, family members and telephone numbers.

Islamic State, like many previous jihadi groups, has used suicide attackers to overrun their enemies’ positions from Libya to Pakistan and Afghanistan. All in traditional war zones. What marks this brigade out as different is that it appears to have been made up, in the large part, by killers trained to carry out attacks in the peaceful cities of Europe and beyond.

Death squads sent out to attack away from Syria and Iraq, away from the battlefield.

The files we have published over the past week or so list all the fighters’ intended specialisms.

Fighter, infiltrator and Martyr were standard pieces of information requested. All these men ticked the Martyr box. In translation it is suicide attacker.

The registration form of Mohammed Belkaid, first reported by Sky News from our files after he opened fire on police in Brussels last week and was killed, showed that he too was part of the Martyrs’ Brigade.

In Syria he is likely to have joined one of the training camps and the Islamic State training programme in their stronghold of Raqqa.

Sky News has previously revealed the existence of these foreigners’ camps, which train fighters to carry out attacks outside Syria and Iraq.

Counter Terrorism expert Professor Andrew Silke said ISIS seeks out recruits for its martyrs’ brigade that have a series of qualification.

He said: “One of the things that the movements are interested in is ‘have we got a candidate who is willing and able to carry out a suicide attack? Because there’s a value in that.

“Another issue … is ‘could this person operate in the West? Have they got the language skills? Do they fit in with the culture? Do they come from that particular region, because if they do, their ability to go back and operate (there) … is much greater than sending somebody from the Middle East.”

Some of the Belgians we can easily identify.

Redwana Mohammed Hajaoui also known as Abu Khalid al Maghribi, crossed into Syria in February 2014. He later appeared in an Islamic State propaganda video.

Mesut Cankarturan also known as Abu Abdullah al Beljiki from Bruges, crossed into Syria in March 2014. He later died near Deir ez-Zor.

During our investigations Sky News has learned from former ISIS members that the recruits were trained not just to carry out attacks but to be trainers as well, raising the specter of further developing terror cells.

The analysis of these files will take a long time; certainly the security services are gearing up for a long fight against Islamic State and its terror gangs.

ISIS Crossing Southern Border From Mexico and Money?

Posted on March 24, 2016March 24, 2016 by Denise Simon

ISIS Crossing Southern Border From Mexico? More Smugglers Sending Money Transfers To Middle East, Arizona Official Claims

IBT: Arizona’s attorney general is raising the alarm about a potential connection between illegal immigration and Middle East terrorism. Attorney General Mark Brnovich said Arizona residents are worried about border security.
“We’ve seen a huge spike in money transfers coming from places like Nogales on the border, to Middle Eastern countries,” he said on Fox Business Network ahead of the Arizona primary on Tuesday. “Arizona is on the front line, and we have seen consequences of what has happened when we’ve had an unsecured, porous border. I mean, frankly, just six months ago there were six folks apprehended from Middle Eastern countries, from Pakistan and Afghanistan, at our border. I know when you talk to the ranchers down there, they’re concerned because they have found coins from Middle East.”

After waves of terror attacks in Europe and Africa in recent months, conservative lawmakers in the U.S. have increasingly warned about the threat of Islamic State group militants or other terrorists crossing the Mexico border. But immigration reform proponents have argued that making the dangerous border crossing into Arizona is an unlikely path for terrorists, and many of the Middle Eastern migrants who have crossed are more likely to be refugees fleeing war or looking to connect with family members already in the U.S, International Business Times found.

The Arizona Attorney General’s Office issued a report in early March that highlighted the growing money trail between the Middle East and Mexico. Officials launched the investigation in November after six Middle Eastern men were arrested south of Tucson for illegally crossing the border into Arizona.

The report found that people were sending money to the Middle East from Tapachula, a city in southern Mexico that is known for migrant smuggling, and Nogales, which is just across the Arizona border. In one case, a human smuggler received 69 money transfers from names that were reportedly of Middle Eastern origin, according to local media reports.

“The Southwest border is open despite a lot of claims that it’s more secure,”Neville Cramer, a retired immigration special agent who worked on counterterrorism efforts, told local media about the investigation.

The report did not make any links between the wire transfers and terrorism. But that hasn’t stopped some immigration critics from making that connection.

“I can assure you there are terrorist cells, operating in Central and South America. It is of concern and it’s been a concern of the United States Department of Homeland Security,” Cramer said.

Brnovich said in early March he was feared people with “ill intentions” might try to enter the United States through Arizona.

“Is it because they are being smuggled from the Middle East into the United States? Is it because maybe there are terrorism organizations that involved, either in funding or the human-trafficking trade?” he said.

Brnovich said his office was investigating why money is being sent from the Middle East to Mexico and who is sending money to whom and how often.

“For us to effectively be able to look at where money is coming from and being sent to is so important as a tool for law enforcement,” he said.

**** More reading: U.S. Confirms ISIL Planning Infiltration of U.S. Southern Border

In part from Pew Research, illustrating the World Bank is watching the money and transactions closely.

2013:

Despite global shifts in international migration, one constant remains: The U.S. has the world’s largest number of international migrants.

The number of immigrants in the U.S. doubled from 23 million people in 1990 to 46 million in 2013. During this time, no other country has come close to the number of foreign-born people living within its borders. For example, second-ranked Russia had about 11 million immigrants in both 1990 and 2013 (many of whom had moved within the former USSR prior to 1990). Consequently, the U.S. has bolstered its lead in the number of international migrants, doubling second-place Russia in 1990 and quadrupling it by 2013.

The U.S. has also become a major recipient of migrants from key countries with large numbers of emigrants. Although the U.S. was not a leading destination of migrants born in top origin countries in 1990, things have changed considerably in a quarter century. By 2013, nearly 1-in-6 (2.1 million) migrants born in India—the top country of birth for international migrants in 2013–lived in the U.S. Almost the entirety of the 13 million migrants born in Mexico–the second highest country of birth for international migrants in 2013—also lived in the U.S.

And the U.S. is the top recipient of migrants from about a quarter of the world’s countries. In 1990, the U.S. was the top destination of migrants born in 53 countries. In 2013, that number was about the same at 52 countries.

**** The report targets 2013, but in the last 2 years the trend is exploding due to Barack Obama’s policies.