Secret Service On the Anti-Govt Crowd on the Internet

Posted on July 23, 2015July 23, 2015 by Denise Simon

A team tasked with protecting the president of the United States is constantly sifting through hateful online comments to find would-be assassins or terrorists.

When President Obama launched his Twitter account in May, people noticed his rapid accumulation of followers, a silly back-and-forth with President Clinton, but also something more serious: the number of hostile and threatening messages directed at the president.

Sifting through those messages to determine which, if any, need to be taken seriously is the responsibility of the Secret Service Internet Threat Desk, a group of agents tasked with identifying and assessing online threats to the president and his family. The first part of this mission—finding threats—is in many ways made easier by the Internet: all you have to do is search! Pulling up every tweet which uses the words “Obama” and “assassinate” takes mere seconds, and the Secret Service has tried to make it easier for people to draw threats to its attention by setting up its own Twitter handle, @secretservice, for users to report threatening messages to.

But if the Internet makes it easier to find threats directed at the president, it can also make it harder to figure out which ones should be taken seriously. The sheer volume of threatening messages online, the lack of context, and the ease with which users can shield their identities all contribute to the challenges of assessing online threats. One series of tweets addressed to @POTUS that caught the Secret Service’s attention—at least enough to warrant an in-person visit from an agent—came from a user with the handle @jeffgully49 and included a picture showing a doctored version of the president’s campaign posters with his head in a noose and the word “HOPE” changed to “ROPE.” The messages were apparently posted by Jeff Gullickson of Plymouth, Minnesota, who was later visited at his home by a Secret Service agent. “The agent from the secret service was cordial,” Gullickson wrote in an email to MPR News, adding that the agent just wanted to be sure his tweets were not serious threats.

Making sure that Gullickson was not a threat required more than just an analysis of his online comments—it called for offline contact, an in-person visit, an assessment of who he was and what he was like face-to-face, not just on the Internet. Context is crucial for evaluating the seriousness of threats—both digital and analog—but online threats offer a slightly different set of contextual clues than their offline counterparts. And while much of the hate-filled commentary on the Internet is routinely written off as hyperbole and ranting, threats directed at the president are not so easily dismissed. So, every day, the Secret Service Internet Threat Desk is faced with the unenviable task of taking seriously some of the most extreme online rhetoric and trying to identify potential assassins or terrorists in the deluge of venomous messages directed at the president and his family.

Though most of the public cases involving the Internet threat desk have to do with threats made via Twitter or Facebook, the desk actually predates both platforms. Founded in 2000, the desk was reportedly expanded in 2009 around the same time that threats against President Obama spiked in the early months of his first term. Ronald Kessler, author of In the President’s Secret Service, said that when he visited the Internet threat desk several years ago it was “just a small room with a few people,” but added, “I’m sure it’s much bigger now.” Secret Service spokesman Robert Hoback declined to comment.

Since the Internet threat desk’s founding, Kessler said, more of the threats the Secret Service assesses have originated online, but the overall number of threats directed at the first family that require investigation has stayed relatively steady at about 10 per day—except for the period when Obama was first elected, when the Secret Service had to follow up on roughly 50 threats per day. “That includes threats on Twitter,” Kessler said. “It makes no difference to [the Secret Service] how a threat is communicated,” he added. “They can’t take that chance of assuming that because it’s on Twitter it’s less serious.”

The Secret Service categorizes all threats, online and offline alike, into one of three categories, according to Kessler. Class 3 threats are considered the most serious, and require agents to interview the individual who issued the threat and any acquaintances to determine whether that person really has the capability to carry out the threat. Class 2 threats are considered to be serious but issued by people incapable of actually follow up on their intentions, either because they are in jail or located at a great distance from the president. And Class 1 threats are those that may seem serious at first, but are determined not to be.

Classifying threats into these categories is partly a matter of wording and specificity—whether the speaker has developed a detailed plan, whether they state that they will kill the president or just that someone should kill the president—but also depends largely on the background of the people who issue them. “The Secret Service looks at whether this person has expressed similar plans previously, whether this person has a criminal record, or is mentally ill,” Kessler said. Presumably, that’s why an agent showed up at Gullickson’s house—to assess the person who issued the Twitter threat, not just the threat itself.

At a 2011 hearing before the House Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, then-Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan emphasized the importance of identifying the people who threaten the president for Secret Service investigations. “When I was a new agent, a lot of times if you got a threat, it would come in the mail, and if the person who was making the threat was very courteous, they would put their return address on there. You would know who to go out and talk to,” Sullivan said. “But regardless of whether it is by mail or over the internet, our people are extremely aggressive with [figuring out who issued threats] … when we do identify that individual who has made that threat or that inappropriate interest that they are displaying, whether it is 2 o’clock in the morning or 2 o’clock in the afternoon, our people are out there looking for that individual to interview them.”

But the Secret Service can’t very well interview everyone who directs hostile comments at the president online—there are just too many of them—especially as the government’s embrace of social media platforms creates an increasing number of channels for lashing out at the president. “What you’ve done with the POTUS Twitter account is created a one-stop shopping for people who don’t like the president to blow off steam and convey their view that they don’t like the president,” said University of Maryland law professor Danielle Citron. “That could perfectly well be political protest: ‘I hate you and I want to throw you in the river’ could mean ‘I hate your ideas and want to throw them in the river,’ or it could mean ‘I’m a neo-Nazi and I want to kill you because you’re a black president.’ For the president, [the Secret Service] is going to err on the side of over-inclusion and more false positives.”

Paring down those false positives may be even more of a challenge online than off. The Internet threat desk “comb[s] the internet” and has people “working 24 hours a day just going through the Internet looking for any type of buzzwords or any type of threatening or inappropriate activity out there that we may see that involves any of our protectees,” Sullivan said at the 2011 hearing.

In other words, the Secret Service is actively seeking out threats made online, rather than waiting for others to report them, or for the people issuing threats to contact the White House directly. “Online threats are much more findable—I can set up some structured queries and find out who’s making threats in real time,” said Andy Sellars, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “You can essentially have a column on TweetDeck for every time someone says ‘president’ and ‘kill’ in the same tweet. A lot of tools being sold to law enforcement are basically just glorified versions of TweetDeck.”

Finding the threats is the easy part, though. “It’s a lot easier to figure out the context of speech in the physical world than in the online world,” said Hanni Fakhoury, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “You need that context in order to see what that speech really means.”

The cases that the Secret Service has pursued in recent years offer some clues as to which types of threats they seem to take most seriously. Repeat offenders, unsurprisingly, seem to come in for particular attention. For instance, Jarvis Britton of Birmingham, Alabama, was arrested and sentenced to a year in prison in 2013 after posting a series of tweets over the course of several months. In a 2012 affidavit, Secret Service Special Agent Phillip Holly described the series of events that led up to Britton’s arrest, beginning with two tweets on June 28, 2012, that read: “Free speech? Really? Let’s test this! Let’s kill the president!” and “I’m going to finish this, if they get me, they get me! #ohwell. I think we could get the president with cyanide. #MakeItSlow.” The next day, Britton tweeted “Barack Obama, I wish you were DEAD!”

Following the June tweets, the Secret Service spoke with Britton and advised him of “the seriousness of the matter,” according to Holly, but “no further action was taken” until Britton resumed tweeting threats several months later. On September 14, 2012, he posted the message “Let’s kill the president. F.E.A.R.” After learning of the September threats from the Internet Threat Desk, Holly concludes: “Based upon the foregoing, I have probable cause to believe that Jarvis M. Britton did knowingly and willfully threaten to take the life of, kidnap, or inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States.”

Donte Jamar Sims of Charlotte, North Carolina, was also sentenced in 2013 to serve jail time for a series of threatening tweets directed at the president. Sims’ tweets, posted during the 2012 Democratic National Convention, included the messages: “Ima Assassinate president Obama this evening!” and “The Secret Service is gonna be defenseless once I aim the Assault Rifle at Barack’s Forehead.”

The Internet Threat Desk’s investigations are not limited to Twitter. One 2012 investigation centered on a Facebook photo of several young men from Arizona posing with guns and a T-shirt with the president’s face on it riddled with bullet holes. A 2008 case focused on a series of pseudonymous comments made by the user californiaradial on the Yahoo Finance website, including “Shoot the nig. Country fkd for another 4 years+, what nig has done ANYTHING right???? Long term???? Never in history, except sambos.” And “Fk the niggar, he will have a 50 cal in the head soon.” In court documents, Special Agent Gregory Becker identified californiaradial as Walter Edward Bagdasarian after the Internet Threat Desk “obtained the IP address from which the messages had been sent, as well as the subscriber information for that account.”

When people who issue online threats are identified, they sometimes try to provide context for those threats that might excuse their behavior. Sims, for instance, claimed he was high on marijuana when he threatened the president. Britton’s lawyer similarly insisted his client had no intentions to actually harm the president. Other times, the real world context of online threats makes them seems more concerning—when the Secret Service searched Bagdasarian’s house, they found a .50 caliber rifle among his possessions, which appeared to lend credence to the prediction “he will have a 50 cal in the head soon.”

Ultimately, however, it is the content of the threat itself—not the context—that seems to matter most in court. Sims, Britton, and Bagdasarian all allegedly issued multiple violent threats at the president in online forums. But Sims and Britton were sent to jail, regardless of the claims both made about their respective mental states when they issued the threats—while Bagdasarian’s conviction was ultimately reversed by a federal appeals court in California because he had not specifically said that he himself would kill the president but, rather, suggested more generally that someone should do so.

Making these distinctions between the people who really intended harm—the people who, in legal language, issued threats that they should have reasonably foreseen would be interpreted as “serious expressions of intent to inflict bodily harm upon that person”—and the people who were merely venting political frustrations or indulging in some hyperbolic anger is a very murky area of law, particularly when it comes to online threats. “It is harder to separate the wheat from the chaff online,” said Fakhoury, the Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer, of distinguishing “true threats” from speech that is protected by the First Amendment. “Part of that is the speed with which people can communicate online, part of it is that people are somewhat removed from what they say online, part of it is the breadth of the audience that exists online,” he explained.

The ease with which anyone can fire off a threat to the president’s Twitter account does not necessarily make such threats less concerning, Citron noted. “Sometimes people say online threats are never to be taken seriously because we’re behind a screen and we tend to just kind of mouth off without thinking, but on the other hand when someone writes something down then there’s the perception that its thoughtful—someone took the time to write this down,” she said.

“The anonymous part doesn’t make it less threatening, but it makes it harder for us to gauge whether it’s a joke or not.”

Many online threats are not even anonymous, Sellars pointed out. “People are making a shocking number of these threats posting on Facebook using their real names,” he said, calling to mind Sullivan’s comment about the letter writers who included their return addresses.

In a recent decision for the case Elonis v. United States, about a man accused of threatening his wife on Facebook, the Supreme Court avoided establishing any clear test for how to identify true threats online. Their decision to dodge the issue leaves not just the Secret Service but everyone who is the victim of online harassment to figure out how to draw the line between true threats and free speech on the Internet.

When it comes to protecting the president, however, that distinction may not be so vital, either online or offline. Kessler noted, “Actual assassinations are usually not preceded by threats.”

The Gifts from WH and John Kerry to Iran and IRGC

Posted on July 23, 2015July 23, 2015 by Denise Simon

Jack Lew, John Kerry and Ernest Moniz appeared before the Senate to defend the Iran deal and it was a hard hearing to sit through when the responses from the panel where anything but clear and succinct to questions asked by the Senate panel.

The panel of witnesses and Barack Obama follow this exact line of points and all those points in future selling jobs will be found here so save yourself the energy and time.

Given that, it is important to know the inner workings of Iran as well as what the money infusion from the lifted sanctions will cause in the realm of probable consequences.

The Iran File from 2007, where nothing appears to be different today except more danger today.

Center for Strategic and International Studies
Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy

IRAN’S REVOLUTIONARY GUARDS, THE AL QUDS FORCE AND OTHER INTELLIGENCE AND PARAMILITARY FORCES

I. The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (Pasdaran, or Vezarat-e Sepah Pasdaran-e Enqelab-e Islamic)
The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) is a product of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini established the force to protect the Islamic order of the new Iranian government. The IRGC has since evolved to be a major political, military, and economic force in Iran. It is believed to have close ties to the Supreme Leader, but has its own factions– some of which have loyalties to President Mahmud Ahmadi-Nejad who is a veteran of the IRGC. It is far more political and ideological than the regular armed forces. A number of senior officers in the IRGC have relatives or close ties to leading members of Iran’s leading clerics.
The IRGC (Pasdaran) has contributed some 125,000 men to Iran’s forces in recent years and has substantial capabilities for asymmetric warfare and covert operations. This includes the Al Quds Force and other elements that operate covertly or openly overseas, working with Hezbollah of Lebanon, Shi’ite militias in Iraq, and Shi’ites in Afghanistan. It was members of the IRGC that seized 15 British sailors and Marines, who seem to still have been in Iraqi waters, in March 2007.

The IRGC operates most of Iran’s surface-to-surface missiles and is believed to have custody over potentially deployed nuclear weapons, most or all other chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) weapons, and to operate Iran’s nuclear-armed missile forces if they are deployed.
The links between the IRGC and Iran’s nuclear program are so close that its leaders were singled out under the UN Security Council Resolutions passed on December 23, 2006, and March 24, 2007, and had their assets frozen. The commander, Major General Yahya Rahim Safavi, deputy commander, Brigadier General Morteza Rezaie, and the heads of the IRGC ground forces, naval branch, Al Quds Force, and Basij (Mobilization of the Oppressed Force) were all involved.
UN Security Council Resolution 1747, passed on March 24, 2007, included a wide range of Iranian officials involved in nuclear or ballistic missile activities, including the following members of the IRGC command structure:3
•
Ministry of Defense and Other Officials
o Fereidoun Abbasi-Davani [Senior Ministry of Defence and Armed Forces Logistics (MODAFL) scientist with links to the Institute of Applied Physics, working closely with Mohsen Fakhrizadeh- Mahabadi, designated below]
o Mohsen Fakhrizadeh-Mahabadi [Senior MODAFL scientist and former head of the Physics Research Centre (PHRC). The International Atomic Energy Agency has asked to interview him about the activities of the PHRC over the period he was head, but Iran has refused]
o Seyed Jaber Safdari (Manager of the Natanz Enrichment Facilities)
o Amir Rahimi (Head of Esfahan Nuclear Fuel Research and Production Center, which is part of the Atomic Energy Agency of Iran’s (AEOI’s) Nuclear Fuel Production and Procurement Company, which is involved in enrichment-related activities)

•
o Mohsen Hojati (Head of Fajr Industrial Group, which is designated under Resolution 1737 (2006) for its role in the ballistic missile programme)
o Mehrdada Akhlaghi Ketabachi (Head of Shahid Bagheri Industrial Group (SBIG), which is designated under Resolution 1737 (2006) for its role in the ballistic missile programme)
o Naser Maleki (Head of SHIG, which is designated under Resolution 1737 (2006) for its role in Iran’s ballistic missile programme. Naser Maleki is also a MODAFL official overseeing work on the Shahab-3 ballistic missile programme. The Shahab-3 is Iran’s long-range ballistic missile currently in service)
o Ahmad Derakhshandeh [Chairman and Managing Director of Bank Sepah, which provides support for the AIO and subordinates, including Shahid Hemmat Industrial Group (SHIG) and SBIG, both of which were designated under Resolution 1737 (2006)]
Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps key persons o Brigadier General Morteza Rezaie (Deputy Commander of IRGC) o Vice Admiral Ali Akbar Ahmadian (Chief of IRGC Joint Staff) o Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi (Commander of IRGC Ground Forces)
o Rear Admiral Morteza Safari (Commander of IRGC Navy) o Brigadier General Mohammad Hejazi (Commander of Bassij resistance force) o Brigadier General Qasem Soleimani (Commander of Qods force)
o General Mohammad Baqer Zolqadr (IRGC officer, Deputy Interior Minister for Security Affairs)

***

IRGC Land Forces
The IRGC has small elements equipped with armor and has the equivalent of conventional army units, and some units are trained for covert missions and asymmetric warfare, but most if its forces are lightly equipped infantry trained and equipped for internal security missions. These forces are reported to have between 120,000 and 130,000 men, but such totals are uncertain. They also include conscripts recruited from the same pool as regular army conscripts, and training and retention levels are low. The IRGC land forces do, however, control the Basij (Mobilization of the Oppressed) and other paramilitary forces if they are mobilized for war.
Some sources, like the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), report a force structure with 20 “divisions,” but most IRGC units seem to be battalion-sized elements. According to a Jane’s report, estimates of the IRGC’s organization differ sharply. Some sources claim that there are two armored, five mechanized, ten infantry, one Special Forces division, and about 15-20 independent brigades. The report concludes that many alleged divisions are equivalent to large brigades and the personnel numbers of the IRGC could support only three to five divisions.4 The total manpower pool of the IRGC could support only about five to six light infantry divisions. There is also supposed to be one airborne brigade.
The IRGC often claims to conduct very large exercises, sometimes with 100,000 men or more. The exact size of such exercises is unclear, but they are often a small fraction of IRGC claims. With the exception of a limited number of more elite elements, training is limited and largely suitable for internal security purposes. Most forces would require substantial refresher training to
act in any mission other that static infantry defense and using asymmetric warfare tactics like hit- and-run operations or swarming elements of forces when an invader appears vulnerable.
The IRGC is, however, the center of much of Iran’s effort to develop asymmetric warfare tactics to counter a U.S. invasion. Work by Michael Connell of the Center for Naval Analysis notes that the IRGC has been systematically equipping, organizing, and retraining its forces to fight decentralized partisan and guerrilla warfare. It has strengthened the anti-tank and anti-helicopter weaponry of IRGC battalions and stressed independent battalion-sized operations that can fight with considerable independence even if Iran loses much of the coherence in its command, control, communications, and intelligence capabilities.5 Its exercises have included simulated attacks on U.S. AH-64 attack helicopters with Iran’s more modern man-portable surface-to-air missiles, using mines and using improvised explosive device (IED)-like systems to attack advancing armored forces.

The IRGC, like the army and Basij, have attempted to develop and practice deception, concealment, and camouflage methods to reduce the effectiveness of U.S. and other modern imagery coverage, including dispersing into small teams and avoiding the use of uniformed personnel and military vehicles. While the credibility and effectiveness of such tactics are uncertain, the IRGC claims to be adopting tactics to avoid enemy radars and satellites. Both the IRGC and the army have also attempted to deal with U.S. signals and communications intelligence collection capabilities by making extensive use of buried fiber optics and secure communications and developing more secure ways to use the Internet and commercial landlines. Iran claims to be creating relatively advance secure communications systems, but its success is uncertain.
Connell notes that the IRGC is developing such tactics in ways that could form a layered or “mosaic” defense with the army and air forces, where the IRGC kept up constant pressure on any advancing U.S. forces. He indicates that the IRGC has developed special stay behind units or “cells” that would include some 1,800 to 3,000 teams of three to four soldiers whose main mission would be to attack U.S. lines of supply and communication, strike at elements in rear areas, and conduct ambushes of combat troops. This could include sending units forward into countries like Iraq and Afghanistan to attack U.S. forces there. or encourage local forces to do so, and sending teams to raid or infiltrate the southern Gulf States friendly to the United States.
At the same time, Connell notes that if the Iranian Army was defeated and an attacker like the United States moved into Iran’s major cities, the IRGC, the Iranian Army, and Basij are now organized and trained to fight a much more dispersed war of attrition in which force elements would disperse and scatter, carrying out a constant series of attacks on U.S. forces wherever they deployed as well as against U.S. lines of communication and supply. Such elements would have great independence of action rather than relying on centralized command.

The IRGC and the Iranian Army have clearly paid close attention to both the limited successes that Saddam’s Fedayeen had against the U.S. advance on Baghdad, and the far more successful efforts of Iraqi insurgents and militias in attacking U.S. and other Coalition forces following the fall of Baghdad.
One technique such forces organize and practice is using cities and built-up areas as defensive areas that provide concealment and opportunities for ambushes and for the use of swarming tactics, which forces an attacker to disperse large numbers of forces to try to clear and secure given neighborhoods. Connell indicates that some 2,500 Basij staged such an exercise in the
Western suburbs of Tehran in February 2007. Once again, Iran can draw on the lessons of the fighting in Iraq. It also, however, employed such tactics with great success against Iraqi forces during the Iran-Iraq War, and it has closely studied the lessons of urban and built-up area fighting in Somalia and Lebanon.
The IRGC remains the center of Iran’s hard-line security forces, but has become steadily more bureaucratic and less effective as a conventional fighting force since the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988. Corruption and careerism are growing problems, and the IRGC’s role in the defense industry has led to financial abuses. At this point in time, it is the elite elements of the IRGC that give it real meaning beyond serving the regime’s need to control its population.
One source identifies a trend that will eventually render the regular army more technologically advanced and more modern in general. According to this report, the IRGC, in contrast, is to focus on “less traditional defense duties,” such as enforcing border security, commanding the country’s ballistic missile and potential weapons of mass destruction forces, and preparing for a closing of the Strait of Hormuz with military means.

***

The IRGC Air Force
The air force of the IRGC is believed to operate Iran’s three Shahab-3 intermediate-range ballistic missiles units (whose true operational status remains uncertain) and may have had custody of its chemical weapons and any biological weapons. While the actual operational status of the Shahab-3 remains uncertain, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, announced in 2003 that Shahab-3 missiles had been delivered to the IRGC. In addition, six Shahab-3s were displayed in Tehran during a military parade in September 2003.9
It is not clear what combat formations exist within the IRGC, but the IRGC may operate Iran’s ten EMB-312 Tucanos.10 It also seems to operate many of Iran’s 45 PC-7 training aircraft, as well as some Pakistani-made trainers at a training school near Mushshak, but this school may be run by the regular air force. It has also claimed to manufacture gliders for use in unconventional warfare. These are unsuitable delivery platforms, but could at least carry a small number of weapons.
The IRGC Naval Forces
The IRGC has a naval branch with some 20,000 men, including marine units of some 5,000 men. Such a force could deliver conventional weapons, bombs, mines, and CBRN weapons into ports and oil and desalination facilities. It is operational in the Gulf and the Gulf of Oman and could operate elsewhere if given suitable sealift or facilities.
The naval branch has bases in the Gulf, many near key shipping channels and some near the Strait of Hormuz. These include facilities at Al-Farsiyah, Halul (an oil platform), Sirri, Abu Musa, Bandaer-e Abbas, Khorramshahr, and Larak. It also controls Iran’s coastal defense forces, including naval guns and an HY-2 Seersucker land-based anti-ship missile unit deployed in five to seven sites along the Gulf coast.
Its forces can carry out extensive raids against Gulf shipping, carry out regular amphibious exercises with the land branch of the IRGC against objectives like the islands in the Gulf, and could conduct raids against Saudi Arabia or other countries on the southern Gulf coast. They give Iran a major capability for asymmetric warfare. The Guards also seem to work closely with
Iranian intelligence and appear to be represented unofficially in some embassies, Iranian businesses and purchasing offices, and other foreign fronts.
The IRGC naval forces have at least 40 light patrol boats, 10 Houdong guided missile patrol boats armed with C-802 anti-ship missiles, and a battery of HY-2 Seersucker land-based anti- ship missiles. Some of these systems could be modified to carry a small CBRN weapon, but hardly are optimal delivery platforms because of their limited-range payload and sensor/guidance platforms unsuited for the mission.
Proxy and Covert CBRN Operations
The IRGC has a complex structure that includes both political and military units. It has separate organizational elements for its land, naval, and air units, which include both military and paramilitary units. The Basij and the tribal units of the Pasdaran are subordinated to its land unit command, although the commander of the Basij often seems to report directly to the Commander-in-Chief and Minister of the Pasdaran and through him to the Leader of the Islamic Revolution.
The IRGC has close ties to the foreign operations branch of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), particularly through the IRGC’s Qods force. The Ministry of Intelligence and Security was established in 1983 and has an extensive network of offices in Iranian embassies. It is often difficult to separate the activities of the IRGC, the Vezarat-e Ettela’at va Amniat-e Keshvar, and the Foreign Ministry, and many seem to be integrated operations managed by a ministerial committee called the “Special Operations Council” that includes the Leader of the Islamic Revolution, President, Minister of Intelligence and Security, and other members of the Supreme Council for National Defense.
Other elements of the IRGC can support proxy or covert use of CBRN weapons.

They run some training camps inside Iran for outside “volunteers.” Some IRGC still seem to be deployed in Lebanon and actively involved in training and arming Hezbollah, other anti-Israeli groups, and other elements. The IRGC has been responsible for major arms shipments to Hezbollah, including large numbers of AT-3 anti-tank guided missiles, long-range rockets, and some Iranian-made Mohajer unmanned aerial vehicles.
Iran exported thousands of 122-mm rockets and Fajr-4 and Fajr-5 long-range rockets to Hezbollah in Lebanon, including the Arash with a range of 21–29 kilometers. These reports give the Fajr-5 a range of 75 kilometers with a payload of 200 kilograms. Iran seems to have sent such arms to Hezbollah and some various Palestinian movements, including some shiploads of arms to the Palestinian Authority.
It has provided arms, training, and military technology to Shi’ite militias in Iraq and may have provided such support to Sunni Islamist extremists as well, which led to attacks on U.S. and Coalition forces. These transfers have included relatively advanced shaped charge and triggering components, which have sharply increased the lethality of militia and insugent attacks using IEDs on U.S. and Coalition armor. There were also growing indicators that similar training, weapons, and other aid were being provide to Shi’ite forces and Taliban elements in Afghanistan in 2007.

***

The Quds (Qods, or Jerusalem) Forces

The IRGC has a large intelligence operation and unconventional warfare component. Roughly 5,000 of the men in the IRGC are assigned to the unconventional warfare mission. The IRGC has the equivalent of one Special Forces division, plus additional smaller formations, and these forces are given special priority in terms of training and equipment. In addition, the IRGC has a special Quds force that plays a major role in giving Iran the ability to conduct unconventional warfare overseas using various foreign movements as proxies.16
In January, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) decided to place all Iranian operations in Iraq under the command of the Quds forces. At the same time, the SNSC decided to increase the personnel strength of the Quds to 15,000.

Current force strength data for the Quds are not available.
The al Quds forces are under the command of Brigadier General Qassem Soleimani and have supported nonstate actors in many foreign countries. These include Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, the Shi’ite militias in Iraq, and Shi’ites in Afghanistan. Links to Sunni extremist groups like Al Qa’ida have been reported, but never convincingly confirmed.
Many U.S. experts believe that the Quds forces have provided significant transfers of weapons to Shi’ite (and perhaps some Sunni) elements in Iraq. These may include the shaped charge components used in some IEDs in Iraq and the more advanced components used in explosively formed projectiles, including the weapon assembly, copper slugs, radio links used to activate such devices, and the infrared triggering mechanisms. These devices are very similar to those used in Lebanon, and some seem to operate on the same radio frequencies. Shaped charge
weapons first began to appear in Iraq in August 2003, but became a serious threat in 2005.
On January 11, 2007, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency stated in a testimony before the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that the Quds force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has the lead for its transnational terrorist activities, in conjunction with Lebanese Hezbollah and Iran’s MOIS.19 Other sources believe that the primary mission of the Quds has been to support Shi’ite movements and militias, and such aid and weapons transfers seem to have increased significantly in the spring of 2007.
The Quds are also believed to play a continuing role in training, arming, and funding Hezbollah in Lebanon and to have begun to support Shi’ite militia and Taliban activities in Afghanistan. Experts disagree on the scale of such activity, how much it has provided support to Sunni Islamist extremist groups rather than Shi’ite groups, and over the level of cooperation in rebuilding Hezbollah forces in Lebanon since the cease-fire in the Israel-Hezbollah War of 2006.

The debates focus on the scale of such activity and the extent to which it has been formally controlled and authorized by the Supreme Leader and the President, however, and not over whether some level of activity has been authorized.
The exact relationship between the Quds, Hamas, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad is even more speculative. Some Iranian arms shipments have clearly been directed at aiding anti-peace and anti-Israeli elements in the Gaza Strip. There is some evidence of aid in training, weapons, and funding to hostile Palestinian elements in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Open sources do not, however, provide a clear picture of the scale of such activity.
Some reports indicate that the budget for the Qud is a classified budget directly controlled by the Supreme Leader Khamenei and is not reflected in the Iranian general budget. The active elements of the Quds service operate primarily outside Iran’s borders, although it has bases inside and outside of Iran. The Quds troops are divided into specific groups or “corps” for each country or area in which they operate. There are Directorates for Iraq; Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan; Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India; Turkey and the Arabian Peninsula; Asian countries of the former Soviet Union, Western nations (Europe and North America), and North Africa (Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Sudan, and Morocco).
The Quds has offices or “sections” in many Iranian embassies, which are closed to most embassy staff. It is not clear whether these are integrated with Iranian intelligence operations or if the ambassador in each embassy has control of, or detailed knowledge of, operations by the Quds staff. However, there are indications that most operations are coordinated between the IRGC and offices within the Iranian Foreign Ministry and MOIS. There are separate operational organizations in Lebanon, Turkey, Pakistan, and several North African countries. There are also indications that such elements may have participated in the bombings of the Israeli Embassy in Argentina in 1992 and the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires in 1994–although Iran has strongly denied any involvement.
The Quds seems to control many of Iran’s training camps for unconventional warfare, extremists, and terrorists in Iran and countries like the Sudan and Lebanon. In Sudan, the Quds are believed to run a training camp of unspecified nature in Sudan. It has at least four major training facilities in Iran. The Al Quds have a main training center at Imam Ali University that is based in the Sa’dabad Palace in Northern Tehran. Troops are trained to carry out military and terrorist operations and are indoctrinated in ideology.
There are other training camps in the Qom, Tabriz, and Mashhad governorates and in Lebanon and the Sudan. These include the Al Nasr camp for training Iraqi Shi’ites and Iraqi and Turkish Kurds in northwest Iran and a camp near Mashhad for training Afghan and Tajik revolutionaries. The Quds seems to help operate the Manzariyah training center near Qom, which recruits from foreign students in the religious seminary and which seems to have trained some Bahraini extremists. Some foreigners are reported to have received training in demolition and sabotage at an IRGC facility near Isfahan, in airport infiltration at a facility near Mashad and Shiraz, and in underwater warfare at an IRGC facility at?Bandar Abbas.
On January 11, 2007, the U.S. military in Iraq detained five men accused of providing funds and equipment to Iraqi insurgents. According to U.S. military sources, these men had connections to the Quds.22 On January 20, 2007, gunmen dressed as U.S. soldiers entered the Provincial Joint Coordination Center in Karbala and killed and wounded several U.S. servicemen. According to some sources, including U.S. military intelligence, the gunmen were members of the Quds. The sophisticated planning and execution of this attack made it unlikely that any Iraqi group was involved in it.
General David H. Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, stressed the growing role of the Quds force and IRGC in testimony to Congress in April 2007. He noted that the United States had found Quds operatives in Iraq and seized computers with hard drives that included a 22-page document that had details on the planning, approval process, and conduct of an attack that killed five U.S. soldiers in Karbala. Petraeus noted.
They were provided substantial funding, training on Iranian soil, advanced explosive munitions and technologies as well as run-of-the-mill arms and ammunition…in some cases advice and in some cases even a degree of direction…Our sense is that these records were kept so that they could be handed in to whoever it is that is financing them…And again, there’s no question…that Iranian financing is taking place through the Quds force of the Iranian Republican Guards Corps.”
Israeli defense experts state that they believe the IRGC and Quds force not only played a major role in training and equipping Hezbollah, but may have assisted it during the Israeli-Hezbollah War in 2006. Israeli intelligence officers claim to have found command and control centers, and a missile and rocket fire-control center, in Lebanon that was of Iranian design. They feel the Quds force played a major role in the Hezbollah anti-ship missile attack on an Israeli Navy Sa’ar-class missile patrol boat and that Iranians and Syrians supported Hezbollah with intelligence from facilities in Syria during the fighting.

The Basij (Niruyeh Moghavemat Basij, Baseej-e Mostazafan, Mobilisation of the Oppressed, or Mobilisation Resistance Force)
Like the IRGC, the Basij force grew out of the Revolution of 1979 by direct intervention of Ayatollah Khomeini. On January 1, 1981, the Basij was put under command of the IRGC. The Basij is a popular reserve force of about 90,000 men, with an active and reserve strength of up to 300,000 and a mobilization capacity of nearly 1,000,000 men. It has up to 740 regionally commanded battalions, which consist of about 300-350 personnel each. It is controlled by the IRGC and consists largely of youths, men who have completed military service, and the elderly.
Apparently, the Basij began to place emphasis on riot control and internal security missions in the mid-1990s. Therefore, it has created a formal military-style command system and set up special battalions for internal security missions (Ashura).
Its mission has, however, increasingly been broadened to providing reserves and small combat elements for the IRGC in defending against a U.S. invasion. It would serve as a mobilization base for the IRGC, as well as provide cadres and small units for independent action against invading forces. It would also serve as a “stay behind” force and attack isolated U.S. units and rear areas. According to Connell, the IRGC has formed a wartime mobilization plan for the IRGC called the “Mo’in Plan,” where Basij battalions would be integrated into the IRGC in wartime as part of the IRGC regional defense structure.
It is far from clear how effective the Basij would really be in such missions. Similar forces have been created in a number of countries, including Iraq. In many cases, they have not materialized as a meaningful resistance force. Iran does, however, have extensive experience in creating and using such forces dating back to the Iran-Iraq War, and the fighting in Iraq since 2003 has shown that small cadres of activists using IEDs, car bombs, and suicide bombs can have a major political and military impact.
Role in Iran’s Industries
The IRGC plays a major role in Iran’s military industries. Its lead role in Iran’s efforts to acquire surface-to-surface missiles and weapons of mass destruction gives it growing experience with advanced military technology. As a result, the IRGC is believed to be the branch of Iran’s forces that plays the largest role in Iran’s military industries.27 It also operates all of Iran’s Scuds, controls most of its chemical and biological weapons, and provides the military leadership for missile production and the production of all weapons of mass destruction.

The IRGC is a powerful economic force, controlling key elements of Iraq’s defense industry. It seems to operate part of Iran’s covert trading network, a system established after the fall of the Shah to buy arms and military parts through various cover and false flag organizations. It is not clear, however, how much of this network is controlled by the IRGC versus the Ministry of Defense. For example, the same UN resolution dealing with Iran’s nuclear proliferation listed a wide range of entities where the role of the IRGC is often unclear:28
• Ammunition and Metallurgy Industries Group (AMIG) (aka Ammunition Industries Group) (AMIG controls 7th of Tir, which is designated under resolution 1737 (2006) for its role in Iran’s centrifuge programme. AMIG is in turn owned and controlled by the Defence Industries Organisation (DIO), which is designated under resolution 1737 (2006))
• Esfahan Nuclear Fuel Research and Production Centre (NFRPC) and Esfahan Nuclear Technology Centre (ENTC) (Parts of the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran’s (AEOI) Nuclear Fuel Production and Procurement Company, which is involved in enrichment-related activities. AEOI is designated under resolution 1737 (2006))
• Kavoshyar Company (Subsidiary company of AEOI, which has sought glass fibres, vacuum chamber furnaces and laboratory equipment for Iran’s nuclear programme)
• Parchin Chemical Industries (Branch of DIO, which produces ammunition, explosives, as well as solid propellants for rockets and missiles)
• Karaj Nuclear Research Centre (Part of AEOI’s research division) • Novin Energy Company (aka Pars Novin) (Operates within AEOI and has transferred funds on behalf of
AEOI to entities associated with Iran’s nuclear programme) • Cruise Missile Industry Group (aka Naval Defence Missile Industry Group) • (Production and development of cruise missiles. Responsible for naval missiles including cruise missiles)
• Bank Sepah and Bank Sepah International (Bank Sepah provides support for the Aerospace Industries Organisation (AIO) and subordinates, including Shahid Hemmat Industrial Group (SHIG) and Shahid Bagheri Industrial Group (SBIG), both of which were designated under resolution 1737 (2006)
• Sanam Industrial Group (subordinate to AIO, which has purchased equipment on AIO’s behalf for the missile programme)
• Ya Mahdi Industries Group (subordinate to AIO, which is involved in international purchases of missile equipment) Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps entities
It is clear that the IRGC has become a leading contracting organization, bidding for other contracts including at least some oil and gas projects. Like most Iranian entities associated with government projects, it is reported to get many contracts out of favoritism and/or without competitive bidding. It is believed to now be as corrupt as civil entities and religious foundations like the Bunyods.

Other Paramilitary Forces
Iran also has 45,000–60,000 men in the Ministry of Interior serving as police and border guards, with light utility vehicles, light patrol aircraft (Cessna 185/310s and AB-205s and AB-206s), 90 coastal patrol craft, and 40 harbor patrol craft. The rest of Iran’s paramilitary and internal security forces seem to have relatively little capability in any form of warfighting mission.

II. Paramilitary, Internal Security, and Intelligence
Forces
Iran has not faced a meaningful threat from terrorism. Its internal security forces are focused on countering political opposition. Figure 2.1 shows the force structure of Iran’s paramilitary and internal security services. Since 1990, Iran has maintained the same force structure, and its key agencies have not changed since the early years of the Revolution.
The U.S. Department of State described the role of Iran’s internal security apparatus as follows:
Several agencies share responsibility for law enforcement and maintaining order, including the ministry of intelligence and security, the law enforcement forces under the interior ministry, and the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps]. A paramilitary volunteer force known as the Basij and various informal groups known as the Ansar-e Hezbollah (Helpers of the Party of God) aligned with extreme conservative members of the leadership and acted as vigilantes. The size of the Basij is disputed, with officials citing anywhere from 11 to 20 million, and a recent Western study claiming there were 90 thousand active members and up to 300 thousand reservists. Civilian authorities did not maintain fully effective control of the security forces. The regular and paramilitary security forces both committed numerous, serious human rights abuses. According to HRW [Human Rights Watch] since 2000 the government’s use of plainclothes security agents to intimidate political critics became more institutionalized. They were increasingly armed, violent, and well equipped, and they engaged in assault, theft, and illegal seizures and detentions.
Iran maintains an extensive network of internal security and intelligence services. The main parts of the domestic security apparatus are made up of the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, the Basij Resistance Force, the intelligence unit of the IRGC, and the law enforcement forces within the Ministry of Interior that largely are responsible for providing police and border control. The leadership of each of these organizations appears to be fragmented and dispersed among several, often competing, political factions. Public information on all Iranian security and intelligence forces is extremely limited and subject to political manipulation.
Key to most paramilitary and intelligence forces in Iran is the IRGC, as it holds control over several other organizations or parts thereof. All security organizations without exception report to the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), as the highest body in the political chain of command. The phenomenon of the fragmented leadership of the security organizations is reflected in their relationship to the SNSC as different security organizations maintain special ties to certain elements of the SNSC. The Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, installed an advisory panel called Strategic Council on Foreign Policy in May 2006. This body is supposed to advise the Supreme Leader in a broad range of foreign policy matters. It can only be speculated what the implications of this body are, but its creation send a caveat to observers that there may be some significant tension among the security components in Iran.
In addition, it has to be assumed that other state organizations, most notably the police services, exert varying control over internal security. As with virtually all other organizations, the IRGC is believed to have considerable leverage over these services.30 The effectiveness of the internal security organizations is unclear and the political will to use them is hard to predict. After local unrest in the Iranian province of Baluchistan in May 2006, police were unable to seize control of the situation against regional tribal forces

The Ministry of Intelligence and Security
The Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), or Vezarat-e Ettela’ at va Aminat-e Keshvar (VEVAK), was installed following the Revolution to replace the now-disbanded National Organization for Intelligence and Security (SAVAK), which in return was created under the leadership of U.S. and Israeli officers in 1957. SAVAK fell victim to political leadership struggles with the intelligence service of the IRGC during the Iran-Iraq War. A compromise solution resulted in the creation of MOIS in 1984.
In 2006, the MOIS employed about 15,000 civilian staff. Its major tasks included intelligence about the Middle East and Central Asia and domestic intelligence and monitoring of clerical and government officials32 as well as work on preventing conspiracies against the Islamic republic.33 It can therefore be assumed that the Ministry maintains an elaborate domestic service network.
The MOIS staff is believed to maintain a professional service loyalty and therefore is not subject to easy mobilization by military, clergy, or other political forces. Some, however, believe that during former President Mohammad Khatami’s rule the MOIS actively sought to rid the organization of hard-line officials.34 Within Iran’s political system there is constant argument about limiting parliamentary control over MOIS, indicating that the control over MOIS can be used as a powerful political instrument. Recently, there were efforts in Iran to extract the counterintelligence unit of MOIS and make it a separate entity. This proposal seems to be favored by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and some hard-line legislators.
Until recently, the organization has remained under very limited public disclosure. In the 1990s, Ministry personnel were accused of killing political dissidents in Iran. Ensuing investigations have been covered up systematically. Apparently, MOIS has a comparatively large budget at its disposal and operates under the broader guidance of Ali Khamenei.36 And it seems likely that the details about the Ministry’s resources are partly undisclosed even to Iranian political officials.
The IRGC Intelligence Branch
As part of the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps, the roughly 2,000 staff members of its intelligence force are a largely politicized force with a political mission. According to Jane’s, their conformity and loyalty to the regime are unquestionable.
The main task of the IRGC Intelligence Branch is to gather intelligence in the Muslim world. As far as domestic security is concerned, the organization targets the enemies of the Islamic Revolution and also participates in their prosecution and trials. In addition, it works closely with the IRGC’s Qods Corps, which also operates covertly outside Iran.
The Basij Resistance Force
The Basij has already been mentioned briefly in the chapter on the IRGC (Chapter 5), but it performs broader functions than simply serving as a reserve for the IRGC. The IRGC oversaw the creation of a people’s militia, a volunteer group it named the Basij Resistance Force (which means Mobilization of the Oppressed), in 1980. The Basij derives its legitimization from Article 151 of the Iranian Constitution, which calls upon the government to fulfill its duty according to the Quran to provide all citizens with the means to defend themselves. Numbering over 1,000,00039 members, the Basij is a paramilitary force, mostly manned by elderly men, youth, and volunteers who have completed their military service.
This force is organized in a regional and decentralized command structure. It has up to 740 regional “battalions,” each organized into three to four subunits. Each battalion has 300–350 men. According to one source, about 20,000 Basij forces were organized in four brigades during an exercise in November 2006.40 It maintains a relatively small active-duty staff of 90,000 and relies on mobilization in the case of any contingency.
According to an IRGC general, a military exercise (Great Prophet II) conducted in the first two weeks of November 2006 employed 172 battalions of the Basij Resistance Force. According to the same source, the main mission of these troops was to guard “public alleyways and other urban areas.”
The Basij has a history of martyr-style suicide attacks dating back to the Iran-Iraq War, 1980– 1988. Today, its main tasks are thought to assist locally against conventional military defense as well as quell civil uprisings. In addition, one of the Force’s key roles has been to maintain internal security, including monitoring internal threats from Iranian citizens and acting as “a static militia force.” The state of training and equipment readiness for the Basij is believed to be low. No major weapon systems have been reported for the inventory of the Basij.
The IRGC maintains tight control over the leadership of the Basij and imposes strict Islamic rules on it members. Recent comments by Iranian leaders indicate that the mission of the Basij is shifting away from traditional territorial defense to “defending against Iranian security threats.” Furthermore, there are reports of an increased interest in improving the Basij under the leadership of President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad.43 At the same time, the IRGC leadership questions the effectiveness of the Basij and might loosen its ties to the organization.44
In 1993, the Ashura Brigades were created from IRGC and Basij militia units as a response to anti-government riots. This unit is composed of roughly 17,000 men and women, and its primary purpose is to keep down civil unrest, although there has been some discontent expressed by senior leaders about using IRGC units for domestic contingencies.

The Uncertain Role of the Ministry of Interior
The police forces, which comprise about 40,000 police under the Ministry of Interior (MoI), participate in internal security as well as border protection. The Police-110 unit specializes in rapid-response activities in urban areas to disperse potentially dangerous public gatherings. The maritime police have 90 inshore patrol and 40 harbor boats. In 2003, some 400 women became the first female members of the police force since the 1978–1979 Revolution.
The role of Iran’s MoI is unclear, and open-source information regarding its structure and forces is limited. The same is true of other organizations in Iran’s internal security apparatus. The Ansar-e Hezbollah is a paramilitary force that has gained questionable notoriety. It remains unclear to what extent it is attached to government bodies. Reportedly, the political Right in government has repeatedly made use of it to fight and intimidate liberal forces in society. According to reports, the Ansar-e Hezbollah’s military level of training appears to be very poor

The whole document is here with full citations.

IRS Against You, They Redact, Encrypt, Lose or Destroy

Posted on July 23, 2015July 23, 2015 by Denise Simon

It is broken, you know that most transparent administration in history. Barack Obama, the ‘not a smidgeon of corruption’ line he used, now blames the Republicans for the corruption within the IRS when he appeared on the Jon Stewart show.

Let us take a look at one incident when the IRS responded to a Freedom of Information Act request.

IRS Encrypts An Entire CD Of Redacted Documents In Response To FOIA Request

from the how-nice-of-them dept

Muckrock has a story of Alex Richardson, seeking information on the IRS’s Whistleblower Office, which has been receiving some scrutiny lately. Richardson filed a bunch of FOIA requests and discovered that the IRS apparently would like to make his life as difficult as possible. First he got an infamous GLOMAR “neither confirm nor deny” response — which was supposed to be limited to national security issues. However, with at least one request, a package with a CD just arrived… and Richardson was dismayed to find the contents of the CD encrypted.

That seems a bit strange for a response to a FOIA request, since whatever is being delivered is supposed to be public, but whatever. The letter accompanying the CD explains, for reasons unknown, that while the IRS was only returning 6 of the 23 pages that had been located, it was doing so with encryption, and it would send the key separately.

Again, this seems like weird operational security for public documents. Now, also, in the response letter, it noted that the reason only 6 pages are included is because the rest were withheld under FOIA exemptions:

So you had to imagine that in those 6 pages, there should at least be some relevant information. Nope. It appears that the IRS went through all that to give a final middle finger to Richardson, because when he finally decrypted the documents… they’re all redacted too. Six pages, entirely blacked out. Which makes you wonder why the other 17 were “withheld” in the first place. What difference could it have made? Original Document (PDF) »

Judicial Watch: New Documents Show IRS Used Donor Lists to Target Audits

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it has obtained documents from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that confirm that the IRS used donor lists to tax-exempt organizations to target those donors for audits. The documents also show IRS officials specifically highlighted how the U.S. Chamber of Commerce may come under “high scrutiny” from the IRS. The IRS produced the records in a Freedom of Information lawsuit seeking documents about selection of individuals for audit-based application information on donor lists submitted by Tea Party and other 501(c)(4) tax-exempt organizations (Judicial Watch v. Internal Revenue Service (No. 1:15-cv-00220)).

A letter dated September 28, 2010, then-Democrat Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) informs then-IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman: “ I request that you and your agency survey major 501(c)(4), (c)(5) and (c)(6) organizations …” In reply, in a letter dated February 17, 2011, Shulman writes: “In the work plan of the Exempt Organizations Division, we announced that beginning in FY2011, we are increasing our focus on section 501(c)(4), (5) and (6) organizations.”

In 2010, after receiving Baucus’s letter, the IRS considered the issue of auditing donors to 501(c)(4) organizations, alleging that a 35 percent gift tax would be due on donations in excess of $13,000. The documents show that the IRS wanted to cross-check donor lists from 501(c)(4) organizations against gift tax filings and commence audits against taxpayers based on this information.

A gift tax on contributions to 501(c)(4)’s was considered by most to be a dead letter since the IRS had never enforced the rule after the Supreme Court ruled that such taxes violated the First Amendment. The documents show that the IRS had not enforced the gift tax since 1982.

But then, in February 2011, at least five donors of an unnamed organization were audited.

The documents show that Crossroads GPS, associated with Republican Karl Rove, was specifically referenced by IRS officials in the context of applying the gift tax. Seemingly in response to the Crossroads focus, on April 20, IRS attorney Lorraine Gardner emails a 501(c)(4) donor list to former Branch Chief in the IRS’ Office of the Chief Counsel James Hogan. Later, this information is apparently shared with IRS Estate Gift and Policy Manager Lisa Piehl while Gardner seeks “information about any of the donors.”

Emails to and from Lorraine Gardner also suggested bias against the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. An IRS official (whose name is redacted) emails Gardner on May 13, 2011, a blog post responding to the IRS targeting of political and other activities of 501(c)(4), (5) and (6) organizations:

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is a 501(c)(6) organization and may find itself under high scrutiny. One can only hope.

The subject line of the email highlights this anti-Chamber of Commerce comment: “we are making headlines notice the end regarding 501(c)(6) applicability enjoy.” This critical comment is forwarded to other IRS officials and shows up attached to another Gardner IRS email chain with the subject line “re: 501(c)(4)” that discusses a pending decision about a tax-exempt entity.

In early May, once the media began reporting on the IRS audits of donors, IRS officials reacted quickly. One official acknowledges the issue “is a biggy” when a reporter from The New York Times contacts the IRS on May 9.

On May 13, 2011, former IRS Director of Legislative Affairs Floyd Williams discusses compliance with “interest” from Capitol Hill: “Not surprisingly, interest on the hill is picking up on this issue … with Majority Leader Reid’s office, has suggested the possibility of a briefing for the Senate Finance Committee staff on general issues related to section 501(c)(4) organizations I think we should do it as interest is likely to grow as we get closer to elections.”

Later that day, then-Director of the Exempt Organizations Lois Lerner weighs in with an email that confirms that she supported the gift tax audits. Lerner acknowledges that “the courts have said specifically that contributions to 527 political organizations are not subject to the gift tax–nothing that I’m aware of that about contributions to organizations that are not political organizations.” Section 501(c)(4) organizations are not “political organizations.” [Emphasis in original]

Lerner’s involvement and support for the new gift tax contradicts the IRS statement to the media at the time that audits were not part of a “broader effort looking at donations 501(c)(4)’s.” In July 2011, the IRS retreated and soon-to-be Acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller directed that “examination resources should not be expended on this issue” and that all audits of taxpayers “relating to the application of gift taxes” to 501(c)(4) organizations “should be closed.”

“These documents that we had to force out of the IRS prove that the agency used donor lists to audit supporters of organizations engaged in First Amendment-protected lawful political speech,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “And the snarky comments about the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the obsession with Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS show that the IRS was targeting critics of the Obama administration. President Obama may want to continue to lie about his IRS scandal. These documents tell the truth – his IRS hated conservatives and was willing to illegally tax and audit citizens to shut down opposition to Barack Obama’s policies and reelection.”

Judicial Watch had filed a separate lawsuit for records about targeting of individuals for audit in November 2013. In that litigation, the IRS had refused to search any email systems, including Lerner’s records. A federal court ruled the IRS’ search was sufficient and dismissed the lawsuit earlier this month.

In September 2014, another Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuit forced the release of documents detailing that the IRS sought, obtained and maintained the names of donors to Tea Party and other conservative groups. IRS officials acknowledged in these documents that “such information was not needed.” The documents also show that the donor names were being used for a “secret research project.”

The House Ways and Means Committee announced at a May 7, 2014, hearing that, after scores of conservative groups provided donor information “to the IRS, nearly one in ten donors were subject to audit.” In 2011, as many as five donors to the conservative 501(c)(4) organization Freedom’s Watch were audited, according to the Wall Street Journal. Bradley Blakeman, Freedom’s Watch’s former president, also alleges he was “personally targeted” by the IRS.

In February 2014, then-Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee Dave Camp (R-MI) detailed improper IRS targeting of existing conservative groups:

Additionally, we now know that the IRS targeted not only right-leaning applicants, but also right-leaning groups that were already operating as 501(c)(4)s. At Washington, DC’s direction, dozens of groups operating as 501(c)(4)s were flagged for IRS surveillance, including monitoring of the groups’ activities, websites and any other publicly available information. Of these groups, 83 percent were right-leaning. And of the groups the IRS selected for audit, 100 percent were right-leaning.

The Rest of the Terror Story on Domestic Mosques

Posted on July 22, 2015July 22, 2015 by Denise Simon

America does have a mosque problem and some moderate Muslims are assisting with law enforcement and FBI officials. Not so much however in Boston or maybe Portland, Oregon.

Oregon Live: The FBI acknowledged Monday that a joint investigation by its agents and those of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement prompted the government’s move on Monday to revoke the citizenship of the imam of Portland’s biggest mosque.

“The U.S. Department of Justice is pursuing Mr. (Mohamed Sheikh Abdirahman) Kariye’s denaturalization based on his illegal procurement of naturalization; specifically, Mr. Kariye obtained his U.S. citizenship by providing false information and willful misrepresentation and concealment of material facts including his criminal history and failed to establish that he was a person of good moral character during the requisite statutory period,” the FBI wrote in a news statement. “Due to the ongoing legal proceedings, no further information is available at this time.”
Court papers filed Monday in Portland show that Justice Department officials hope to win denaturalization of the Somali-born imam’s citizenship because he allegedly tried to conceal past associations with Islamic groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The Associated Press broke the story, based on a 34-page civil petition, which accuses Kariye of failing to tell immigration officials that he raised money, recruited fighters and provided training for insurgents battling the Soviet military in its 1980s war in Afghanistan.

The U.S. backed those mujahideen fighters in a proxy war against the Soviet Union, helping to topple the financially crippled superpower and end the Cold War.

Monday’s petition suggests that Kariye for a time had direct dealings with Osama bin Laden, who later came to head al-Qaida, along with a precursor terrorist organization known as Maktab Al-Khidamat. The government alleges that Kariye did not list those affiliations in his application for citizenship.

***

In 2014, the beginning of the ISIS beheading propaganda videos hit the internet resulting in shock and horror. Intelligence officials pointed to at least one man suspected to be at the core of the Islamic State media campaign, Ahmad Abousamra, from Boston.

It comes down to the deeper investigation details and the dots in connections and relationships. Now so real facts are known.

The case against Aafia Siddiqui currently in prison in Texas. The FBI 2010 summary.

Lady al Qaeda

Moderate imam reveals how radicals won battle for soul of Boston mosques

FNC: A moderate imam who raised alarms more than a decade ago about a radical shift at two controversial Boston mosques he led for decades says he was ousted for his efforts by a local doctor whose son joined ISIS and replaced by a man now with the infamous Pakistani terrorist group behind the 2008 Mumbai bombings.

Imam Talal Eid told FoxNews.com that creeping radicalism put him increasingly at odds in the late 1990s with the board of directors of the Islamic Center of New England, where he served from 1982 until 2005. But when Eid, nominally in charge of the religious teaching at the center’s mosques in Sharon and Quincy, resisted, he was left in fear for his safety and eventually driven out by Dr. Abdul-badi Abousamra, at the time a prominent endocrinologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and president of the 1,500-member Center.

“At times, I was fearful for my safety,” said Eid, a former member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom who now runs a mosque in Toledo, Ohio. “When I would stand up for what I believed in, and there was a clash, you see how I could be scared.”

“I was pushing for one thing, and the board was pushing for something else, and I was alone facing them.”

– Imam Talal Eid

Abousamra, who has since moved to Doha and could not be reached for comment, was one of the Boston Muslim community’s most powerful and prominent figures in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In addition to being the center’s president, he was vice president of the Muslim American Society of Boston, which ran the Islamic Society of Boston, a Cambridge mosque that shared many members with those run by the Islamic Center of New England.

All three mosques have ties to a host of known and suspected terrorists, including Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the brothers behind the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing; Aafia Siddiqui, aka “Lady Al Qaeda,” the Pakistani woman and Usama bin Laden associate now serving an 86-year federal sentence; and, more recently, Usaama Rahim, the 26-year-old man killed by police last month after brandishing a knife and allegedly plotting to behead Boston cops.

Even as Abousamra was exerting a radical influence on the leadership of mosques he helped run, law enforcement authorities say his son, a Northeastern University graduate raised in the Boston suburb of Stoughton, was training in Middle Eastern terror camps, aiding Al Qaeda and plotting attacks on U.S. soil. Ahamad Abousamra left Boston for Syria in 2006 while under investigation for terror-related charges that would later lead to an indictment, and is now believed to be running ISIS’ social media operation.

While mosques around the nation have disavowed terrorism, with many leaders working with law enforcement authorities to report suspicious activity, the infighting at the Boston mosque described by Eid shows that behind the scenes, mosque leaders are not always on the same page.

When Eid was ousted from the center, it soon became clear which direction leaders wanted to go. He was replaced by Muhammad Hafiz Masood, an assistant imam who had been forced on him in 1998 by Abousamra and who was known for fiery sermons easily interpreted as promoting violence.

“This is when I started to fear for my safety,” Eid said. “I was pushing for one thing, and the board was pushing for something else, and I was alone facing them.”

A year after Eid left, Masood fled the U.S. after being arrested for visa fraud. He resurfaced in Pakistan, where he is now spokesman for the Pakistani terrorist organization Jamaat-ud-Dawah, a group founded by his brother, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed. Saeed also founded Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani terrorist group behind the 2008 coordinated bombings in Mumbai that killed 164 and wounded hundreds more. Law enforcement sources say the two groups are one and the same.

Eid said he was not aware at the time of the radicalization of the younger Abousamra, which included a 2002 trip to Yemen where he trained at a terrorist camp with Massachusetts pal Tarek Mehanna. Abousamra fled to Syria in 2006, but in 2009 he and Mehanna were indicted on federal terrorism charges, including providing material support to Al Qaeda in Iraq – the precursor of ISIS – and an aborted plot to attack a suburban Massachusetts mall. Mehanna is serving a 17-year federal prison sentence.

Abousamra, a graduate of Northeastern University who grew up in the affluent suburb of Stoughton, is said to be a computer whiz who has risen to the top of ISIS’ media operation. He is rumored to have been killed in a recent airstrike in Syria, but the FBI, which has a $50,000 bounty on him, could not confirm that.

“Although aware of the reports, the United States government has not yet confirmed any change in the status of Ahmad Abousamra,” the FBI said in a statement to FoxNews.com. “He will remain on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists List until the time a confirmation in change of status is made.”

No one from the center’s current administration returned repeated requests for comment from FoxNews.com. While it is unclear whether the radicalizing impact of Masood and the senior Abousamra on the three Boston-area mosques lingers today, the non-profit organization Americans for Peace and Tolerance believes many of Masood’s supporters remain in leadership roles in the Boston Muslim community.

“There are many dots connecting Masood and his associates to terrorist activity in the city, past and present,” Americans for Peace and Tolerance Director of Research Ilya Feoktistov said. “With two ISIS-inspired terrorist plots thwarted in the Boston area in the past two months, the threat of radical Islamic terrorism to the city continues to grow.”

Eid stressed that the vast majority of Muslims at the Center’s mosques and at houses of worship throughout the nation attend for any other reason than to pray and reflect on the message of the Koran. It is up to leaders to ensure that moderate voices like his are not drowned out by the shrill calls to radicalism, he said.

“Do we need to wait for a tragedy to happen?” Eid said. “We need to allow more moderate Muslim voices so that life can go smoothly in our society.”

Europe Spooling up Military Activities vs. Russia

Posted on July 22, 2015July 22, 2015 by Denise Simon

When Putin took over Crimea and as he continues to do the same with Ukraine. it is important to know it shocked much of the world leaders but never should have if anyone is a student of history. Even the U.S. intelligence community declared it was a probability.

Operation Atlantic Resolve; Operation Hedgehog

Marines with Black Sea Rotational Force and service members from Bulgaria, Romania, the United Kingdom and Albania kicked- off Exercise Platinum Lion 15-3, July 6, 2015 at the Novo Selo Training Area. The two-week training exercise is designed to strengthen the partnerships between the NATO nations and share knowledge to help improve their military skill sets.

Ukraine/Crimea important to Putin and Russia

Sevastopol was the foundation of the Cold War headquarters for the Soviet Union. It was home to the Black Sea Fleet and was the base of the Soviet military with batteries built as layered levels deep into the earth. Sevastopol held back the German invasion during World War II due to the heavy fortifications.

Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, Moscow refused to recognise Ukrainian sovereignty over Sevastopol as well as over the surrounding Crimean Oblast, using the argument that the city was never practically integrated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic because of its military status.

Today, Europe and the Baltics vs. Russia

Europe Puts Its Finger on the Trigger

Hedgehog. Seemingly innocent, this word takes on extraordinary significance in a tiny Northern European country, reminding their population of barely 1 million of the constant threat of invasion by their former conquerers. You see, Hedgehog is the code name of Estonia’s largest-ever military exercise, which took place in early May, where tanks and aircraft from around the world joined with some 13,000 Estonians to practice avoiding the same fate that has befallen Ukraine. Government video shows everyday volunteers, who make up about half of the Estonian Defense Forces, firing automatic weapons from wooded hideouts and tossing smoke grenades before calling out, “The battle is over, all are friends!” But the message to Russia is clear and backed by unprecedented force: We are not friends.

U.S. military photo essay here with Europe.

While Putin’s brazen land grab in Ukraine, perceived threats from the Islamic State group to the south and an influx of immigration understandably put European nations on high alert, it’s surprising that all of this is happening on the coattails of a crippling economic crisis that has made millions cringe at the mention of “debt” and “austerity.” With social services being slashed while unemployment skyrockets, some are far from thrilled that their governments are beefing up infantry units and spy networks.

Naturally, it’s in the countries nestled snug against Mother Russia’s borders, mostly the Baltic and Scandinavian states, where the biggest increases in defense are happening. In Lithuania, the government overwhelmingly voted to reinstate conscription in March, which will see some 3,500 citizens recruited to serve in the military each year. It also just approved a 30 percent increase in military spending and has plans for further increases in coming years. And just in case citizens weren’t convinced of the code-red threat, the national defense minister released a booklet titled “Things to know about readiness for emergency situations and warfare.”

Then there’s Poland, which is quickly becoming one of the continent’s most prominent military and economic powers. Its approximately $37 billion budget increase from 2012 to 2022 will include 70 drones, 70 helicopters, tanks and heavy artillery in a bid to become one of the region’s military powerhouses — meaning it wants a greater say on NATO policy and to build a homegrown industry that can export goods to other countries.

What is a bit more surprising than countries at Russia’s doorstep arming themselves is the fact that Western Europeans, like the war-averse Germans and economically strapped French, are doing the same. In March, Germany passed an $8.5 billion increase through 2019 on military spending. Over the same period, France will up its budget by about $3.5 billion. It could be seen as sending a message to the Kremlin that the NATO agreement holds weight, but remember: If Russia invades a NATO-member nation, other members must go to war.

In March, both European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen threw their weight behind a proposal for a European Union army, which would be in addition to existing NATO forces. The EU army would be a direct counter to the threat of Russia. But the proposal was called “fantasy” by a number of critics, particularly in the U.K.

So tanks and missiles on the border regions are sure to make Putin think twice about marching soldiers into European countries. But the big, bad shirtless horseman to the east isn’t the only thing making Europeans get defensive. From the south, the rise of the Islamic State group has sparked fears of extremism breeding on European soil, particularly from fighters who have traveled to Syria and Iraq, only to return radicalized, says Anthony Glees, director of the Center for Security and Intelligence Studies at the University of Buckingham.

Some of this funding is much more under the radar. Then there’s France, which has just passed an ambitious surveillance bill — the “French Patriot Act” — that allows for sweeping intelligence gathering in the wake of extremist attacks in Paris in January, much like the Patriot Act did after the U.S. passed it following 9/11. In many ways, countries see intelligence as a cheaper and more effective way to safeguard from threats than conventional tanks and missiles, says Glees. But it does come at the cost of skeptical and often outraged members of civil society who doesn’t see the security benefits as outweighing their privacy rights.

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Europe Spooling up Military Activities vs. Russia