Category Archives: Citizens Duty

6 Americans Among Hostages in Mali al Qaeda Attack

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On Friday, a group of local terrorists stormed the Radisson Blu hotel in Bamako, Mali, taking 170 hostages and up to 3 are dead. Some hostages have been released if they could recite verses of the Koran. U.S. military personnel is assisting as they were already in the region doing training. The U.S. State Department has confirmed there are 6 Americans as part of the hostages. The UN was also holding an event at the hotel.

The group of attackers is known as the Macina Liberation Front, an operating wing of Boko Haram, another operating wing of al Qaeda. Some of the attackers spent the night at the hotel while others stormed the building with grenades and gunfire.

Meanwhile, when the world and especially looks to Barack Obama for answers, solutions, missions and strategies, only blank stares are the result. Obama has retreated completely from global conflicts and national security to focus on social justice agendas. He  attends only 40% of presidential daily briefings known as PDN’s. The Pentagon and the intelligence apparatus is disgusted with the commander in chief. The safety of America and other allied nations is damned to some doom over Obama’s lack of will, knowledge or involvement.

Breitbart:

A new Government Accountability Institute (GAI) report reveals that President Barack Obama has attended only 42.1% of his daily intelligence briefings (known officially as the Presidential Daily Brief, or PDB) in the 2,079 days of his presidency through September 29, 2014.
The GAI report also included a breakdown of Obama’s PDB attendance record between terms; he attended 42.4% of his PDBs in his first term and 41.3% in his second.

The GAI’s alarming findings come on the heels of Obama’s 60 Minutes comments on Sunday, wherein the president laid the blame for the Islamic State’s (ISIS) rapid rise squarely at the feet of his Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

“I think our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” said Obama.

According to Daily Beast reporter Eli Lake, members of the Defense establishment were “flabbergasted” by Obama’s attempt to shift blame.

“Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bullshitting,” a former senior Pentagon official “who worked closely on the threat posed by Sunni jihadists in Syria and Iraq” told the Daily Beast.

On Monday, others in the intelligence community similarly blasted Obama and said he’s shown longstanding disinterest in receiving live, in-person PDBs that allow the Commander-in-Chief the chance for critical followup, feedback, questions, and the challenging of flawed intelligence assumptions.

“It’s pretty well-known that the president hasn’t taken in-person intelligence briefings with any regularity since the early days of 2009,” an Obama national security staffer told the Daily Mail on Monday. “He gets them in writing.”

The Obama security staffer said the president’s PDBs have contained detailed threat warnings about the Islamic State dating back to before the 2012 presidential election.

“Unless someone very senior has been shredding the president’s daily briefings and telling him that the dog ate them, highly accurate predictions about ISIL have been showing up in the Oval Office since before the 2012 election,” the Obama security staffer told the Daily Mail.

This is not the first time questions have been raised about Obama’s lack of engagement and interest in receiving in-person daily intelligence briefings. On September 10, 2012, the GAI released a similar report showing that Obama had attended less than half (43.8%) of his daily intelligence briefings up to that point. When Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen mentioned the GAI’s findings in his column, then-White House Press Secretary Jay Carney dubbed the findings “hilarious.” The very next day, U.S. Libyan Ambassador Chris Stevens and three American staff members were murdered in Benghazi. As Breitbart News reported at the time, the White House’s very own presidential calendar revealed Obama had not received his daily intel briefing in the five consecutive days leading up to the Benghazi attacks.

Ultimately, as ABC News reported, the White House did not directly dispute the GAI’s numbers but instead said Obama prefers to read his PDB on his iPad instead of receiving the all-important live, in-person briefings.

Now, with ISIS controlling over 35,000 square miles of territory in its widening caliphate in Iraq and Syria, and with Obama pointing fingers at his own Director of National Intelligence James Clapper for the rise of ISIS, the question remains whether a 42% attendance record on daily intelligence briefings is good enough for most Americans.

What About Screening the TSA Employees for Terror?

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TSA Says 73 Employees Were on Terror Watch List

Spectator: A few months ago, top TSA officials were forced to hand over their plastic badges and report for bin-stacking duty after it was discovered that 95% of the time, fake, planted “bombs” and “firearms” were able to make it swiftly through security at a bunch of American airports (just don’t wrap your face powder up in your underwear or they’ll spill out the contents of your luggage across the “security screening area” with abandon, before testing you and your laptop for explosives, because obviously you’re a terrorist, boarding a flight to that high-impact target Cleveland at an ungodly morning hour…not that I’m bitter).

Anyway, the malfeasance inside the TSA extends throughout the agency, apparently, from line workers, to top brass and even to HR. According to a report released this week, the TSA had 73 “aviation workers” on its payroll who also happened to be on the terror watchlist, something the TSA, in its extensive screening process, failed to discover.

A recent U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) report found that 73 aviation workers, employed by airlines and vendors, had alleged links to terrorism.

The report, published by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of Inspector General on June 4, blamed bureaucratic mistakes. Though the TSA says it frequently cross-checks applications and employee lists with the DHS’s “Consolidated Terrorist Watchlist,” both are incomplete.

The TSA’s employee lists, which consist of thousands of records, “contained potentially incomplete or inaccurate data, such as an initial for a first name and missing social security numbers,” the report found. The DHS Consolidated Terrorist Watchlist was also incomplete because “[TSA] is not authorized to receive all terrorism-related categories under current interagency watchlisting policy.”

Well, that’s weird: the TSA, which is supposed to be the front line in protecting American travelers from terrorists, but has no access to the full terror watch list. Granted, the terror watch list is also overly inflated and has a bunch of names of ‘persons of interst’ who are relatives, close friends, roommates and other associates of actual people being watched for terror-related activities, but still. If you’re that close to someone with designs on blowing parts of America sky high, you probably shouldn’t be running the bodyscanner at your local airport. No offense, it’s just a thing.

The best part of Newsweek‘s coverage of the incident is the final paragraph of the story, where the writers of a major publication throw up their hands and claim that they have no idea if anything will even be done to correct the situations, whether people will be fired, or if anyone actually cares.

*** In 2010, the terror watch list gets upgrades.

Now a single tip about a terror link will be enough for inclusion in the watch list for U.S. security officials, who have also evolved a quicker system to share the database of potential terrorists among screening agencies; a senior U.S. counter-terrorism official said that officials have now “effectively in a broad stroke lowered the bar for inclusion” in the list; the new criteria have led to only modest growth in the list, which stands at 440,000 people, about 5 percent more than last year; also, instead of sending data once a night to the Terrorist Screening Center’s watch list, which can take hours, the new system should be able to update the watch list almost instantly as names are entered

An upgraded, more comprehensive system // Source: wired.com

Now a single tip about a terror link will be enough for inclusion in the watch list for U.S. security officials, who have also evolved a quicker system to share the database of potential terrorists among screening agencies.

The master watch list of individuals with suspected links to terrorism is used to screen people seeking to obtain a visa, cross a U.S. border, or board a plane in or destined for the United States. Officials say they have made it easier to add individuals’ names to the watch list and improved the government’s ability to thwart terrorist attacks, the Washington Post reported.

Timothy Healy, director of the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, which maintains the master list, said the new guidelines balance the protection of Americans from terrorist threats with the preservation of civil liberties.

He said the watch list today is “more accurate, more agile,” providing valuable intelligence to a growing number of partners that include state and local police and foreign governments.

Another senior counter-terrorism official told the Post that officials have now “effectively in a broad stroke lowered the bar for inclusion.” The measure comes a year after a Nigerian man allegedly tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner. The U.S. government faced criticism for its failure to put Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on the watch list despite his father warning U.S. officials of Abdulmutallab’s radicalisation in Yemen.

Sify news quotes senior counter-terrorism officials to say that since then, they have altered their criteria so that a single-source tip, as long as it is deemed credible, can lead to a name being placed on the watch list, the daily said.

Civil liberties groups argued that the government’s new criteria has made it even more likely that individuals who pose no threat will be swept up in the nation’s security apparatus, leading to potential violations of their privacy and making it difficult for them to travel.

Officials insist, however, that they have been vigilant about keeping law-abiding people off the master list. The new criteria have led to only modest growth in the list, which stands at 440,000 people, about 5 percent more than last year. A vast majority are non-U.S. citizens.

“Despite the challenges we face, we have made significant improvements,” Michael E. Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said in a speech this month at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “And the result of that is, in my view, that the threat of that most severe, most complicated attack is significantly lower today than it was in 2001.”

The names on the watch list are culled from a much larger catch-all database that is housed at the National Counterterrorism Center and that includes a huge variety of terrorism-related intelligence.

The database, the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), underwent a multimillion-dollar upgrade to streamline and automate the data so that only one record exists per person, no matter how many aliases that person might have.

Paris Terror Plotter Dead, Greece Abetting?

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When it comes to the insurgency of immigrants and illegals into the United States, Mexico is a failed partner. When it comes to the insurgency of immigrants and illegals into Europe, Greece is the failed partner.

CNN:  Greece has become an unwitting crossroads — both for jihadists trying to reach Iraq and Syria from Europe, and for fighters returning home from the Middle East.

Greece’s long land and maritime boundaries, its proximity to Turkey, the explosion of illegal migration from Syria and the country’s dire financial situation make it an inviting hub for jihadist groups, according to multiple counterterrorism sources.

One source close to the Greek intelligence services told CNN there may be some 200 people in the country with links to jihadist groups such as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or the al Nusra Front — the two groups that most Europeans join.
In 2011, Greek authorities detained nearly 50,000 illegal migrants from Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to police figures.

One analyst who has studied jihadist travel patterns says there are indications that militants are setting up logistical, recruitment and financial cells in Greece, in part to facilitate the travel of a growing number of would-be fighters traveling from Kosovo and Albania.

The suicide-vest-clad woman who killed herself during Wednesday’s raid in Saint-Denis has been identified by official sources in France as Hasna Ait Boulahcen.

Linking ISIS leadership and European jihadists

Intelligence agencies had identified him as a link between ISIS leadership in Syria and European terror cells, and he is believed to have moved between several European countries without being apprehended.

Abaaoud, in his late 20s, had been on the counterterrorism radar for some time and was targeted in French airstrikes on Syria last month, a French counterterrorism source told CNN.

He was believed to be close to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

French military forces carried out airstrikes in October targeting an ISIS training camp for foreign fighters in Raqqa, Syria, in an effort to kill Abaaoud, the French counterterrorism source said.

“He was the one training foreign fighters,” and he spent time at the camp, the source said, but it’s not clear if Abaaoud was there at the time of the airstrikes.

France’s former top counterterror judge, Jean-Louis Bruguiere, told CNN’s Jim Sciutto the Paris attacks were planned in Syria.

Bruguiere said Abaaoud would certainly have been in contact with Baghdadi about an attack like the one last week. In addition, Bruguiere said, this fits with Baghdadi’s vision of establishing the ISIS caliphate and then exporting the war to the West.

A personal connection also points to Abaaoud’s alleged involvement in planning the Paris attacks. Salah Abdeslam — the on-the-run suspected eighth attacker — is a longstanding associate of Abaaoud, with both men involved in gangs in Molenbeek, Belgium, that carried out robberies and other petty crimes.

AFP-Paris: Moroccan intelligence helped put French investigators on the trail of the Belgian jihadist suspected of orchestrating last week’s deadly attacks in Paris, police sources said Thursday.

A Moroccan tip-off, along with other information, helped police track Abdelhamid Abaaoud to an apartment block in a northern Paris suburb, where he was killed in a raid on Wednesday.

*** Islamic State is a tech savvy organization and quite advanced in protecting its military tactics and communications. This has proven difficult for counterterrorism professionals to trace and track their work, but it is clearly not impossible.

In part from TheHill: The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) uses a 34-page manual to instruct its followers on how to stay invisible on the Internet.

The Arabic document was translated and released this week by analysts at the Combating Terrorism Center.

Users are also directed to use Apple’s encrypted FaceTime and iMessage features over regular unencrypted text and chat features.

“This short guide ask God’s faithfulness in it, and we hope to be published and participation on a wider scale,” the document concludes.

House Refugee Measure, First of Many

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Per testimony before the Senate, certain details have been provided.

  1.  Only 1 in 5 refugee applicants are denied, 23,000 have currently been screened and approved and referred to the United States.
  2. It is much easier to get into the United States thru the visa waiver program or thru the student visa program than thru the resettlement program.
  3. Per the FBI, there is currently 51 cases of the 900+ that requires special 24 hour surveillance. This is very labor intensive, meaning it takes up to 60 man units per person for surveillance.
  4. The European screening process is weak at best and the Schengen Zone Agreement makes it almost impossible to share background and data with the United States on migrants or other questionable individuals.
  5. While people are focused on Syrians and Islamic State, there is a building risk that other terror groups will benefit from the lack of attention with regard to resettlement and terror plots including al Qaeda and al Shabaab.

The House of Representatives ignored Barack Obama’s veto threat on legislative measures regarding refugee resettlement and passed the first of many measures in the pipeline.

Republican Campaign Against Refugees Is Just Beginning

 

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Bloomberg: The House passed a bill Thursday to severely restrict the admission of refugees from Syria and Iraq. President Barack Obama has promised to veto it. Behind the scenes, Republicans are preparing several bills that are more drastic, aiming to close American borders to asylum seekers. These measures set up a much longer political battle.

The most severe of the Republican proposals would suspend all U.S. government support for resettling refugees in the U.S. and would aim to guard against certain refugees entering the U.S. through the southern border who are suspected of ties to terrorism, designating them “special interest aliens.”

The four sponsors said in a press release that all services in the Office of Refugee Resettlement should be suspended, including the health services, legal services and social services “that help refugees become self-sufficient as quickly as possible after their arrival in the United States.”

One senior Republican House aide told me that if lawmakers are concerned about radicalization in the U.S., then cutting off refugee resettlement is the most counterproductive step they could take.

Representative Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee said she and the other sponsors want to include their proposal in the omnibus spending bill that will be needed next month to fund the government. Democrats are urging their Republican colleagues not to risk a government shutdown by tying the funding bill to the refugee issue. The White House can easily veto standalone bills, but a government funding bill is too important to reject easily.

There are at least half a dozen other bills on their way that could be attached to the omnibus bill, all of which aim to restrict the flow of refugees.

Representative Steve Stivers, Republican of Ohio, has been circulating a letter this week that urges Obama to stop accepting any refugees from Iraq or Syria. As of Monday, the letter had dozens of lawmakers’ signatures.

Ted Poe, Republican of Texas, has introduced a separate piece of legislation that would change the law to allow governors to refuse admission to refugees the federal government wants to resettle in their states. Twenty-seven governors have come out publicly to say they would refuse new refugees from Syria, but in a conference call this week, top White House officials told governors they did not currently have that right.

“Given that more than half of the US states have already indicated their desire to opt out, it is imperative that Congress ensure that our states have this choice,” Poe’s office said in a letter to his colleagues.

Ted Yoho, Republican of Florida, introduced a bill similar to the Poe legislation, to give governors the right to refuse refugees and to require FBI background checks for refugees. His Florida colleague Dennis Ross introduced a bill to stop all federal funding to admit Syrian refugees. Florida Republicans Tom Rooney and Curt Clawson have anti-refugee bills of their own.

The House passed the main bill on Thursday afternoon with some Democratic support. The measure, to be vetoed by Obama if it passes the Senate, is sponsored by Michael McCaul, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson testified this week the bill’s requirement that he personally certify each Syrian and Iraqi refugee as safe was “hugely cumbersome” and not a good use of his time.

Not all Republicans want to put up roadblocks against refugees, but the leadership is on board and the presidential candidates are amplifying the anti-refugee message.

The administration has found some unlikely allies. Retired Gen. Jack Keane, a harsh critic of the Obama administration’s Middle East policy, implored Republicans to resist the rhetoric against Muslims and refugees.

“Come on, this is America. We can do this right,” he testified. “We are smart enough to bring thousands of people into this country and make sure they are not going to hurt us.”

Obama, speaking in the Philippines, said that the Republicans’ rhetoric was a “potent recruitment tool for ISIS.” But recent polls show that most Americans are leaning toward the Republican way of thinking. The administration will have to be more savvy, and more substantive, if it wants to continue to welcome Syrian refugees. The fight is just getting started.

Intel Community, POTUS Refuses Terror Reports

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Home Affairs Correspondent

SkyNews: The Paris attacks and last month’s bombing of a Russian airliner in Egypt herald a possible return to more ambitious mass casualty attacks, according to the two men responsible for safeguarding the nation at the time of the London bombings.

Former defence and home secretary Lord Reid and Lord Blair, in charge of Scotland Yard at the time of 7/7, have told Sky News they believe the capability of so-called IS has now caught up with their ambition to mount attacks on a global scale.

It has been more than a decade since four suicide bombers struck the London transport system, killing 52 innocent people and injuring almost a thousand more.

At the time of those attacks, terrorists tried to carry out other very ambitious multiple bombings.

Five would be suicide bombers were jailed for planning a second attack on London just two weeks after 7/7 and police and security services foiled plans for a large scale attack on transatlantic passenger planes, using liquid bombs.

The decade since has been largely defined by numerous lower intensity terror plots.

Former Met Commissioner Lord Blair says he firmly believes that era is over and the UK is entering a new and more dangerous phase.

“These last few weeks – with the bombs in Istanbul, the Sharm el Sheikh plane and now Paris – are showing this group ISIS to have some capabilities, a bit like they had in 2005 when it was al Qaeda inspired.”

Lord Blair said he feared police forces would find it much more difficult in the years ahead to gain proper ground level intelligence on people of concern because of Home Office budget cuts, which were forcing chief constables to reduce traditional neighbourhood policing.

Lord Reid was defence secretary at the time of the London bombings and then home secretary when police foiled the liquid bomb plot.

He believes the recent multi-pronged attacks in Turkey, Egypt, Beirut and France are a worrying illustration that the capability of IS is now catching up with its ambition.

Lord Reid, who now heads the Institute for Security and Resilience Studies, said: “Their ambition remains the same, but they’re adapting to circumstances, and in particular, the circumstances of young men going to Syria to be trained, and then coming back to this country.”

Around 750 British citizens are believed to have travelled to Syria and Iraq and about half are now back in the UK.

Chris Philips, former head of the National Counter Terrorism and Security Office said the concern for police and the security services is that many were now returning with specific training on how to use weapons and make bombs.

“We’ve got people now that have potentially killed people in Iraq and Syria coming back to our country.

“And quite frankly, we don’t know who they all are, where they all are and it’s impossible for the security services and the police – with the resources they’ve got – to keep an eye on these people and keep them under surveillance.”

UK authorities say the public should not be alarmed, but must certainly be vigilant.

An urgent review is now under way to ensure the UK can properly respond if a major attack hits British streets.

But authorities stress there is no specific intelligence beyond the general severe terror threat level.

*** From TheHill: Authorities in Honduras say they have arrested five Syrian nationals who were attempting to travel to the United States using stolen Greek passports, according to Reuters. Authorities said there was no apparent indication the Syrians were among suspects linked to last week’s attacks in Paris, the news outlet reported.

Debate has raged since the Friday attacks over whether terrorists may attempt to slip into the U.S. after reports that one Paris attacker may have come to Europe mixed in with Syrian refugees.
A French official said a passport found near a Paris suspect’s body and had passed through Greece border controls was probably stolen, The New York Times reported.