FBI Director Comey: The Ferguson Effect

Posted on October 26, 2015October 26, 2015 by Denise Simon

FBI Director James Comey has visited several law enforcement agencies across the country to determine the ‘chill’ by law enforcement. The White House pushed back hard as did Amnesty International. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and former White House Chief of Staff even declared his police force in Chicago is in the fetal position.

The FBI keeps the statistics….

FBI chief again says Ferguson having chilling effect on law enforcement

WaPo: CHICAGO — Twice in recent days, FBI Director James B. Comey has stepped to a podium here and asserted that police across the nation are reluctant to aggressively enforce the law in the post-Ferguson era of smartphones and YouTube.

And twice his comments have drawn disagreement and derision from a host of sources, including civil rights activists, law enforcement officials and, on Monday, the White House.

“The available evidence at this point does not support the notion that law enforcement officers around the country are shying away from fulfilling their responsibilities,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Monday during a news briefing in Washington. “The evidence that we’ve seen so far doesn’t support the contention that law enforcement officials are somehow shirking their responsibility.”

Comey, nonetheless, stayed the course, telling thousands of police officials gathered here for a conference of the International Association of Chiefs of Police that a violent crime wave is gripping the nation’s major cities. And he suggested that police officers themselves are in part to blame, made gun shy by the prospect of getting caught on the next video of alleged police brutality.

The “age of viral videos” has fundamentally altered U.S. policing, Comey said Monday in a speech virtually identical to one he delivered last week at the University of Chicago Law School.

His comments have been interpreted as giving credence to the notion of a “Ferguson effect” — the theory that riots and racial unrest in places such as Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore, where police were accused of killing civilians, has prompted police officers to become more restrained. That, in turn, has theoretically resulted in an uptick in violent crime, as criminals become emboldened.

Comey acknowledged Monday that he has little evidence to support the theory.

“The question is, are these kinds of things changing police behavior around the country? The honest answer is: I don’t know for sure whether that’s the case,” he said, adding that “I do have a strong sense” that it’s true.

It’s “the one theory that to my mind and to my common sense, does explain” rising rates of urban violence in 2015.

Coming from the nation’s top law enforcement official, the remarks have landed like a bombshell in criminal justice circles, offending people across the political spectrum. Civil rights groups and activists have taken deep exception to the idea that crime rates might be linked to protests against police brutality.

Amnesty International USA executive director Steven Hawkins called Comey’s comments “outrageous” and “unsubstantiated.”

Policing groups, meanwhile, have been equally infuriated by the assertion that their officers have been somehow derelict in their duties, frightened by teenagers with cellphone cameras.

“Time and time again [Comey] generalizes about a segment of the population that he knows nothing about,” said James O. Pasco, executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police. “He has never been a police officer.”

Comey is “like the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz,” Pasco said. “He wanders around pretending to be smart and then at the end they give him a diploma and he thinks he’s a genius. They swear him in as the director of the FBI and all of a sudden he’s an expert on what police officers are thinking.”

The speeches have also put Comey at odds with the White House, as President Obama is eager to take credit for lowering the crime rate.

As Comey was preparing to deliver his address Friday, Obama was hosting a criminal-justice forum at the White House, where he celebrated “incredible, historic reductions in crime over the last 20 years.”

“I know that there’s been some talk in the press about spikes that are happening this year relative to last year. I’ve asked my team to look very carefully at it — Attorney General Lynch has pulled together a task force — and it does look like there are a handful of cities where we’re seeing higher-than-normal spikes,” Obama said at the time. However, he added, “across the 93 or 95 top cities, it’s very hard to distinguish anything statistically meaningful.”

In his speech Monday, Comey also urged law enforcement leaders to stop engaging in an us-vs.- them tug of war with protesters from Black Lives Matter, the group that sprung up in the wake of the August 2014 shooting of a black teenager by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo.

Instead, Comey said, police chiefs should use the budding protest movement as a window into the minds of those they are charged with protecting.

“There is a line of law enforcement and a line of communities we serve, especially communities of color,” Comey said. “Each time somebody interprets ‘hashtag Black Lives Matter’ as anti-law enforcement, one line moves away. And each time someone interprets ‘hashtag police lives matter’ as anti-black, the other line moves away.”

Comey’s comments come weeks after he held a closed-door session with 100 city leaders and law enforcement officials from across the nation. At that meeting, many — including Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) — reported that police morale was sinking in their towns amid ongoing scrutiny.

“We have allowed our police department to get fetal, and it is having a direct consequence,” Emanuel declared during the meeting. “They have pulled back from the ability to interdict . . . they don’t want to be a news story themselves, they don’t want their career ended early, and it’s having an impact.”

Comey said such feedback has served as inspiration for his recent speeches, in which he declared that violent crime rates are being inflated by a “a chill wind blowing through American law enforcement over the last year.”

“That wind is surely changing behavior,” Comey said, later adding: “We need to figure out what’s happening and deal with it now. I refuse to wait . . . these aren’t data points, these are lives.”

CEO of Hobby Lobby Back Under Federal Investigation

Posted on October 26, 2015October 26, 2015 by Denise Simon

Shameful, just shameful.

Exclusive: Feds Investigate Hobby Lobby Boss for Illicit Artifacts

DailyBeast: One of America’s most famously Christian businesses is amassing a vast collection of Biblical antiquities. The problem is some of them may have been looted from the Middle East.

In 2011, a shipment of somewhere between 200 to 300 small clay tablets on their way to Oklahoma City from Israel was seized by U.S. Customs agents in Memphis. The tablets were inscribed in cuneiform—the script of ancient Assyria and Babylonia, present-day Iraq—and were thousands of years old. Their destination was the compound of the Hobby Lobby corporation, which became famous last year for winning a landmark Supreme Court case on religious freedom and government mandates. A senior law enforcement source with extensive knowledge of antiquities smuggling confirmed that these ancient artifacts had been purchased and were being imported by the deeply-religious owners of the crafting giant, the Green family of Oklahoma City. For the last four years, law enforcement sources tell The Daily Beast, the Greens have been under federal investigation for the illicit importation of cultural heritage from Iraq.

These tablets, like the other 40,000 or so ancient artifacts owned by the Green family, were destined for the Museum of the Bible, the giant new museum funded by the Greens, slated to open in Washington, D.C., in 2017. Both the seizure of the cuneiform tablets and the subsequent federal investigation were confirmed to us by Cary Summers, the president of the Museum of the Bible.

From its founding in 1970, the Greens’ Hobby Lobby chain has been more than simply a suite of craft stores. The Greens have used it as a model of a business run on Christian values. Stores are closed on Sundays in order to give employees time to attend church. The company employs four chaplains, and offered a free health clinic to staff at its headquarters long before free health care came into political vogue. The Greens have also used the Hobby Lobby platform to spread their Christian message far and wide: the company annually places full-page ads celebrating—in their words— “the real meaning of Christmas, Easter, and Independence Day” in newspapers across the country.

But the Greens went from evangelical players to bona fide Christian celebrities in June of 2014 when they won a Supreme Court case, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. It granted them exemption from the Obamacare mandate to provide certain forms of contraception to their employees; forcing the company to do so, the Supreme Court ruled, would have violated the Greens’ deeply-held Christian beliefs.

If the investigation ends with a decision to prosecute, on either criminal or civil charges, the Greens may be forced to forfeit the tablets to the government. There may also be a fine involved. The Green family, who successfully forced the federal government to legally recognize their personal moral standards, now find themselves on the other side of the docket, under suspicion of having attempted to contravene U.S. laws.

When Summers spoke with us, he made it sound as if the ongoing federal investigation was simply the result of a logistical problem. “There was a shipment and it had improper paperwork—incomplete paperwork that was attached to it.” That innocuous phrase—“incomplete paperwork”—makes it sound as if some forms were simply missing a date or a signature. That is rarely the case with questionably-acquired ancient artifacts—and were the problem merely logistical, the chances are slim that it would take four years to resolve.

Summers suggested that the tablets were merely “held up in customs,” as if this was merely a case of bureaucratic delays. “Sometimes this stuff just sits, and nobody does anything with it.” But an individual close to the investigation told us that investigators have accumulated hundreds of hours of interviews, which doesn’t sound like bureaucratic delay—and which also suggests that there is more at stake here than merely a logistical oversight.

An attorney familiar with customs investigations explained that they often center around properly filled-out paperwork. There are two types of customs declarations: informal entry and formal entry. Informal entry is generally for shipments that have a collective monetary value of under $2,500; formal entry is for anything above that. In cases where people are trying to bring something into the country that they shouldn’t, one of the common ways to do so is to undervalue whatever the item is, often by misidentifying it, so that it goes through the expedited informal entry process rather than the more closely scrutinized formal entry.

If someone looking to bring antiquities into the U.S. knows that the artifacts should never have left their country of origin, or lack proper provenance, the only way to get them through customs is to lie: about the country of origin, about the country of export, about the value, about the identity. (This happened recently in the case of a Picasso worth $15 million, which was listed on the customs declaration as a “handicraft” worth $37.) One source familiar with the Hobby Lobby investigation told us that this is precisely what happened in this case: that the tablets were described on their FedEx shipping label as samples of “hand-crafted clay tiles.” This description may have been technically accurate, but the monetary value assigned to them—around $300, we’re told—vastly underestimates their true worth, and, just as important, obscures their identification as the cultural heritage of Iraq.

Steve Green, the CEO of Hobby Lobby, admitted that among his family’s extensive collection they might have some illegally-acquired antiquities, though he denied having ever knowingly done anything wrong. “Is it possible that we have some illicit [artifacts]? That’s possible,” he told us for a story slated to appear in a forthcoming issue of The Atlantic. It seems unlikely that this case, however, is one of simply misunderstanding the relevant laws. The paperwork misidentifying the antiquities as “tile samples” certainly suggests otherwise. What’s more, however, in the summer of 2010, Patty Gerstenblith, a well-respected law professor at DePaul University working in the area of cultural heritage, met privately with the Greens in order to explain to them precisely these issues: how to do due diligence with regard to provenance and how to watch out for legal complications with regard to antiquities sales. It cannot be said that the Greens were totally ignorant of the world they were engaging with. And a year later, the Greens imported the tablets that have now become the subject of the federal investigation.

The Greens are worth $4.5 billion or so. If they are indeed prosecuted, no fine could make a significant dent in their financial well-being. But for a company and a family that have built their reputation on a particular set of Christian values, this investigation may hurt more than any financial penalty could.

Skreemr vs. the Boneyard

Posted on October 26, 2015October 26, 2015 by Denise Simon

Courtesy of DailyMail: It’s 12 years since Concorde made its last supersonic flight at Mach 2.04, or 1,354 mph (2,179 km/h). For the full article go here.

But the future of flight could be much faster, with a transatlantic journey taking as little as half an hour.

A concept aircraft named Skreemr could reach speeds exceeding Mach 10 – that’s 10 times the speed of sound.

Designers Charles Bombardier and Ray Mattison envisage the craft could be launched using a magnetic railgun system to catapult it into the sky at high speed.

Using such a launch system, the craft would be positioned on a pair of conductive parallel rails and accelerated along them using a powerful electromagnetic field.

Liquid-oxygen or kerosene rockets would be fired to enable the plane to rapidly climb higher in the sky and reach Mach 4, which is around twice the speed of Concorde, The Globe and Mail reported.

The designers say scramjet engines could then be used to propel it to speeds of over 10 times the speed of sound, which is around 7,673mph (12,349km/h)

While scramjet engines are under development for drones and military planes, it could be years until they are used for consumer jets and there is no suggestion the designs for Skreemr will ever become reality.

Craft using scramjet propulsion systems are set to be smaller, lighter and faster, because oxygen needed for engine combustion would be taken from air passing through a vehicle, instead of from a tank on board, Nasa explains.

It’s predicted scramjets could reach 15 times the speed of sound.

Bombardier Skreemr’s sleek design, with four wings and two large rockets on the rear, is intended to be used as a commercial aircraft to carry 75 passengers in luxury.

While Bombardier came up with the idea, Mattison, from Design Eye-Q in Minnesota, created the renderings of the concept.

Earlier this month, illustrations emerged for ‘Concorde 2,’ based on a patent awarded to Airbus in July, which describes a craft that climbs vertically into the air before breaking the sound barrier as it travels horizontally across the sky.

It’s been dubbed Concorde 2 because it would be much faster and quieter than the retired supersonic jet, having been designed to have a top speed of Mach 4.5, meaning a journey from New York to London would take just one hour.

Airbus hopes its planned hypersonic jet, which would travel at 4.5 times the speed of sound, could take people between two major cities faster than most daily commutes.

Its proposed one-hour journey time between New York and London would be more than three times faster than the original Concorde, which made its final flight in 2003.

Standard airliners take around eight hours to complete the journey.

Airbus’ jet is described as ‘an air vehicle including a fuselage, a gothic delta wing distributed on either side of the fuselage, and a system of motors able to propel the air vehicle’.

The Boneyard:

Check Out This Awesome Aerial 360º Image Of The Department Of Defense's Boneyard

Check Out This Awesome Aerial 360º Image Of The Department Of Defense’s Boneyard

Aerial Sphere, a company that uses 360 degree photography in an aerial format, took this awesome image high over Davis Monthan Air Force Base and its sprawling boneyard ran by the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (AMARG). You can spin the image in every direction and zoom in wherever you like, it’s pretty awesome.

Check out AerialSphere here, as they already have the majority of Phoenix mapped with 360º images like these and they seem to be expanding. 360 photography and video has become increasingly popular in the aviation community, providing virtual tours of cockpits and even virtual ride-alongs in fighter aircraft. Once Virtual Reality headsets become just another fixture in most people’s homes, this technology should really, well, takeoff.

Those 2 Defense Contractors and Manpads in Benghazi

Posted on October 26, 2015October 26, 2015 by Denise Simon

In part from CBSNews: The U.S. has been unable to secure thousands of potentially dangerous shoulder-fired missiles known as “MANPADS” that were leftover from the Qaddafi regime in Libya, CBS News has learned.

MANPADS stands for “Man-portable air-defense systems.” According to a well-placed source, hundreds of the missiles have been tracked as having gone to Al Qaeda Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), an Algeria-based Sunni Muslim terrorist group fighting for control in Mali.

“I would imagine they’re trying to get their hands on as many weapons such as MANPADS as they can,” says CBS News national security consultant Juan Zarate. “It’s a danger both to the military conflict underway in Mali and a real threat to civilian aircraft if, in fact, terrorists have their hands on these MANPADS.”

Before his overthrow and death in the fall of 2011, Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi was believed to have purchased 15,000-20,000 Soviet MANPADS. Concern over the whereabouts of the missiles – and the possibility that terrorists could buy them on the black market and even use them to shoot down American passenger jets – drove a U.S. effort to recover as many as possible. But only about 2,000 were accounted for prior to the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attacks on Benghazi, Libya, according to the source. He describes those working to locate the missiles as “beside themselves” and “frustrated.”

The program to recover MANPADS in Libya was funded by the U.S. and said to have been run by South African contractors. The contractors attempted to appeal to Libyans, many of them ex-Gaddafi loyalists, to turn over or destroy the MANPADS as a matter of patriotism and pride.

“We told them that ‘if planes start dropping out of the sky, it will trace back to you and you’ll have the international reputation for terrorism,'” says the source. “We offered them money, we tried talking them out of it … The only successes they had were in western Libya, the Tripoli area. In the eastern half toward Benghazi, they were getting nowhere.”

The full emails are here from Judicial Watch regarding the 2 Defense contractors hired by the State Department to collect weapons in Benghazi, specifically manpads.

In part, 2 pages are below, the interaction between the State Dept. OpsCenter and Benghazi

Sent:

To:

Subject:

Classification:

SensitivityCode:

Tuesday, September 11, 2012 7:27 PM

DSCC_Watch Team; DSCC_Management_ Team

Benghazi Contractors

UNCLASSIFIED

Sensitive

Further regarding Contractors on the ground in Benghazi

SBU

This email is UNCLASSIFIED.

From: Operations Center

Sent: Tuesday. Seotember 11. 2012 7;26 P:

To:l.__ __________ _,j

Cc: SES-0

Subject: RE: proposed teleconference call – PM/WRA– Libya Thursday

‘c:!llo gentlemen,

~—–~ RELEASE IN PART

B7(C),B6

~-i (..• .. \ ‘”‘ ;1 J

B7(C)

rhe Operations Center spoke with! ~arlier this evening ~nd has noted that he and [ [are in the

hotel in Benghazi. Please let us know if there are any further updates, and do not hesitate to call the Operations Center

if you need anything at all.

Take care,

Esther

Esther Pan Sloane

From:I

Subject: proposed teleconference call – PM/WRA- Libya Thursday

Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2012 20:35 :06 +0000

Hello All,

PM/WRA, led by Jim Lawrence, would like to host a conference call to discuss our current and future work on the ground

in Easf and West Libya, as well as other relevant issues regarding the coordination with our Libyan and UN partners.

I liave scheduled the call for 1000 EST (Washington) on Thursday, September 13. I am waiting for details to ·pass on to

the participants to .call in. I should have those shortly. –

I just wanted to give you a heads up and we hope you can participate. For participants in our o~ce CC’d on this mail,

this call will be held in WRA’s Conference Room. ·

Thanks,

SBU

This email is UNCLASSIFIED.

*** Taken in part from page 7 of the journal marking the retirement of Jim Lawrence.

His quiet brand of leadership has been as effective in waging peace as his father’s efforts were in waging war; consequently, PM/WRA and the Department of State are prepared as never before to face the evolving challenges in the fields of humanitarian demining and the destruction/disposition of MANPADS [man-portable air-defense systems] and other conventional weapons.

Captagon, the Drug of Choice by Iran/Hezbollah

Posted on October 26, 2015October 26, 2015 by Denise Simon

Syria is now the number one exporter and producer of the stimulant drug Fenethylline, marketed under the brand name Captagon. Drug experts say the Middle Eastern country has overtaken production from regional players such as Lebanon – who has encountered a 90 per cent drop in production from 2011. The stimulant drug, created in the 1960s and once used to treat ADHD, is cheap to manufacture and has allegedly been used by government and anti-government forces to fund weapons for the civil war.

Lebanon busts 2 tons of amphetamine on Saudi private jet

BEIRUT (AP) — A Lebanese official says Beirut airport authorities have foiled one of the country’s largest drug smuggling attempts, seizing two tons of amphetamine Captagon pills before they were loaded onto the private plane of a Saudi prince.

The official said the prince and four others have been detained Monday. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was authorized to give official statements.

Captagon manufacturing thrives in Lebanon and war-torn Syria, which have become a gateway for the drug to the Middle East and particularly the Gulf.

The U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime said in a 2014 report that the amphetamine market is on the rise in the Middle East, with busts mostly in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria accounting for more than 55 percent of amphetamines seized worldwide.

*** In our 2013 study we revealed that Hezbollah operatives were trafficking in counterfeit medications, and in particular manufacturing and selling fake Captagon tablets, with Iranian assistance and guidance. It appears that sales of this counterfeit drug in the Middle East have only expanded since then, as Hezbollah has strengthened its cooperation with Syrian, Lebanese, Saudi and Palestinian drug dealers.

Hezbollah’s takeover of extensive territories in Lebanon, especially along the Syrian border in the Beka’a Valley region in the east of the country, has created pseudo-autonomous regions for the organization. The local population has effectively been subjugated to the terrorist group, with its norms and enforcement measures, and the Lebanese government kept away from these areas.

Hezbollah’s transformation into a major player in Lebanese politics, its participation in the coalition government and its control over key senior positions in the country’s government and apparatuses have only served to strengthen its freedom of action in the territories under its control.

Deeper dive:

Prior to the events in Syria, Hezbollah and al-Qaeda fighters had never met face to face. They clashed for the first time in the Syrian arena. For the Islamist fighters, Hezbollah is fighting under the influence of Captagon. Hezbollah fighters, on the other hand, believe their adversaries are “crazy, carrying spoons in their pockets in preparation for a meal with the prophet.”

“Hezbollah members are takfiris,” according to al-Qaeda fighters, and so are the members of the “international jihad” as perceived by their arch-enemy and many others. The two organizations had never fought each other before Syria. When the opportunity came, they clashed on several fronts in that country, in Ghouta, Aleppo, and Qalamoun. Both sides lost men and the upper hand went to Hezbollah. However, al-Qaeda’s fighters believe that “losing a battle does not mean losing the war…for we are the victorious sect.” The limited confrontation was a chance for both sides to create an image of the other.

Hezbollah’s fighters do not underestimate their opponents from al-Qaeda and vice versa. They both give their adversaries their dues, without ignoring the generally negative landscape. Speaking to Al-Akhbar, a Lebanese al-Nusra Front fighter, who used to be stationed at al-Sahl front and Rima Farms in Qalamoun said, “some Hezbollah fighters looked like they were possessed.”

“I was with a brother during the fighting,” he explained. “Hezbollah fighters were facing us within our line of fire. We would shoot at them but they would not back down. We hit three of them but they continued to descend. Only a crazy person would do that. Their courage is not normal. I admit that.” However, his companion interjected and said “it is certain that they are using drugs, Captagon.” But how about accusations of drug use by his side? “Pills are forbidden by our Sharia,” he declared. The reply came from the original interviewee: “Their side also forbids pills. Even if they were your enemies do not underestimate them. I saw them with my two eyes.”

News of the recent confrontations in Qalamoun is the talk of the town in a Bekaa village, which became a refuge for a good number of fighters fleeing the confrontations. What is constant, by everyone’s account, is that most fighters fled from the battles with the Syrian army and Hezbollah, with the exception of al-Nusra and the [Salafist] Green Brigade. Fighters from the two al-Qaeda related organizations lasted a few days, before withdrawing from one village to another. Despite this, there are many who boast about “individual heroism,” which did not impact the course of the battle.

A fighter who was injured in al-Sahl battle and transferred to a hospital in Ersal explained that Hezbollah used “heavy firepower, which made the sky rain fire. They also depended on traitors among us.”

“There are many differences between Hezbollah and al-Qaeda members,” explained a young man from West Bekaa who fought inside Syria. “They are also more numerous and their weapons are more modern and more powerful. They have warplanes, tanks, Burkan rockets, and other types of rockets, which we know nothing about. They also have their uniforms and meals, which cost thousands of [US] dollars. On the other hand, al-Qaeda fighters need to borrow money and pay for their weapons and ammunition from their own pockets.”

The Syrian army is also in possession of advanced weaponry. Why is the situation different with Hezbollah? “The party’s creed is corrupt, of course. But the blind faith of its soldiers makes them bolder during the battles,” he answered quickly. Does he know anything about the party? “The party is takfiri and will not hesitate to slaughter every one of us.” But you are the ones doing the butchering “to get closer to God.” He replied: “We butcher to terrorise our enemy and they also butcher.”

The picture does not look different in the other camp. “Al-Qaeda is a paper monster, magnified by the media,” a Hezbollah fighter told Al-Akhbar. The thirtysomething fighter, who participated in the battles of al-Qusayr and Qalamoun against the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and the Salafis, explained: “FSA members were amateurs. The Salafis were more vicious because of their ideology.” However, “they are unorganized and none of their fighters could withstand heavy fire, even if their hearts were made of stone.”

Another [Hezbollah] fighter in Qalamoun spoke about the “madness” of al-Qaeda fighters. “They attack by the dozens and get killed by the dozens, without interrupting their flow, until your finger gets tired from pulling the trigger,” he explained. But how did he recognize them as Islamists belonging to al-Qaeda? “From their long beards, shaved moustaches, and banner,” he replied. “They are only superior in their security operations, car bombs, and suicide bombers.”

A third member of Hezbollah spoke about “al-Qaeda’s mastery and its superiority in killing and brutality only in the areas they control. They have no chance in a direct confrontation with us.”

Some Hezbollah fighters do not see a difference between al-Nusra and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria/Levant (ISIS). They believe “they are all takfiris and our battle with them is existential.” One fighter described “the unprecedented courage of some al-Qaeda fighters. They refused to surrender in a clash inside a hospital in Deir Atiya after we surrounded them…They kept fighting until they were all killed after one of them blew himself up on one of the hospital floors.”

Other Hezbollah fighters spoke about “individual acts of heroism by Islamist fighters. But ultimately, they do not fight as one.” Another explained: “There is no distribution of tasks or plans of attack or defense…Fighting for them is ‘hit-and-miss,’ although many are excellent in individual combat, due to the fighting experience they accumulated from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Chechnya.”

The clash between Hezbollah and al-Qaeda is a war that both sides are certain is a necessary evil. Despite acknowledging the adversary’s qualities, negative and positive, this will not change the fact they are both fighting an existential war. Each side is doing what it can to eliminate the other, but it is certain that al-Qaeda and Hezbollah are opposites and will never join each other.