Category Archives: Citizens Duty

SCOTUS on Obamacare, Facts

Posted on by

 

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court was sharply divided Wednesday in the latest challenge to President Barack Obama’s health overhaul, this time over the tax subsidies that make insurance affordable for millions of Americans.

The justices aggressively questioned lawyers on both sides of what Justice Elena Kagan called “this never-ending saga,” the latest politically charged fight over the Affordable Care Act.

Chief Justice John Roberts said almost nothing in nearly 90 minutes of back-and-forth, and Justice Anthony Kennedy’s questions did not make clear how he will come out. Roberts was the decisive vote to uphold the law in 2012.

Otherwise, the same liberal-conservative divide that characterized the earlier case was evident.

Opponents of the law say that only residents of states that set up their own insurance markets can get federal subsidies to help pay their premiums. The administration says the law provides for subsidies in all 50 states.

The liberal justices peppered lawyer Michael Carvin almost from the outset of his argument to limit the subsidies.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the law set up flexibility for states to either set up their own markets or rely on the federal healthcare.gov. Giving subsidies only to people in some states would be “disastrous,” Ginsburg said.

When Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. stepped to the lectern, the liberal justices fell silent, and Justices Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia took over.

“It may not be the statute Congress intended, but it may be the statute Congress wrote,” Scalia said of the provision in question. The case focuses on four words in the law, “established by the state.” The challengers say those words are clear and conclusive evidence that Congress wanted to limit subsidies to those consumers who get their insurance through a marketplace, or exchange, that was established by a state.

(AP) Members of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association rally…
Full Image

Verrilli argued that the law can only be read more broadly and noted that millions of people would lose health insurance if the court rules against the administration.

Alito wondered if the justices could delay the effect of such a ruling to allow states and perhaps the federal government to act. Scalia said he believes Congress would act.

“This Congress, Your Honor?” Verrilli said to widespread laughter in a packed courtroom that included leading congressional Democrats and Republicans.

Kennedy voted to strike down the health law in 2012, but on Wednesday he asked questions of both sides that made it hard to tell where he might come out this time.

He suggested that challenger Carvin’s argument raised a “serious” constitutional problem affecting the relationship between states and the federal government. On the other hand, he seemed less than convinced by Verrilli’s reading of the law to allow the subsidies nationwide.

Millions of people could be affected by the court’s decision. The justices are trying to determine whether the law makes people in all 50 states eligible for federal tax subsidies to cut the cost of insurance premiums. Or, does it limit tax credits to people who live in states that created their own health insurance marketplaces?

A ruling that limits where subsidies are available would have dramatic consequences because roughly three dozen states opted against their own marketplace, or exchange, and instead rely on the U.S. Health and Human Services Department’s healthcare.gov. Independent studies estimate that 8 million people could lose insurance coverage.

Activists on both sides were in place outside the marble courthouse by 5:30 a.m. Wednesday. Some held placards showing how many people in each state would lose insurance if the court ruled that the law does not allow subsidies everywhere.

Opponents of the Affordable Care Act failed to kill the law in an epic, election-year Supreme Court case in 2012. Chief Justice Roberts joined with the court’s liberal justices and provided the crucial vote to uphold the law in the midst of Obama’s re-election campaign.

The new case, part of a long-running political and legal fight to get rid of the law also known as Obamacare, focuses on the four words “established by the state” in a law that runs more than 900 pages.

The administration counters that the law was written to dramatically reduce the ranks of uninsured, and that it would make no sense to condition subsidies on where people live. The phrase “established by the state,” is what the administration calls a “term of art” that takes in both state- and federally run exchanges. The administration also says the term cannot be read in isolation, and that other parts of the law show that subsidies should be widely available.

Each side in the case argues that the law unambiguously supports only its position. One other option for the court is to declare the law is ambiguous when it comes to subsidies and defer to the Internal Revenue Service’s regulations making tax credits available nationwide.

Partisan and ideological divisions remain stark for a law that passed Congress in 2010 with no Republican votes. Of the judges who have ruled on lawsuits over the subsidies, Democratic appointees have sided with the administration and Republican appointees have been with the challengers.

Roberts was the only justice to essentially cross party lines with his vote in 2012. His fellow conservatives on the court voted to strike down Obamacare in its entirety.

A decision in King v. Burwell, 14-114, is expected by late June.

To understand the case that House has against the Department of Health and Human Services on Obamacare (ACA), in part this is from the lead lawyer, Jonathan Turley representing the House of Representatives:

The case could again put Chief Justice Roberts in the position of saving or dooming the ACA with a court that has been deeply divided over the Act. Roberts appeared to have switched sides soon before the issuance in the individual mandate case — a decision that saved the ACA but also produced a rather convoluted opinion. Now the Administration seems to be trying to influence Roberts with dire predictions about what would occur if he or his colleagues vote against the President. Obviously, the ramifications of a legal interpretation should not influence the Court but clearly some believe it may factor into the analysis.

Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the Health and Human Services secretary, told lawmakers in a letter on Tuesday that millions of Americans would lose their health insurance if the court rules against President Barack Obama’s administration in the case, which is expected to be decided by June. The timing of the letter is rather obvious and the question is whether such heavy-handed moves could backfire. It seems pretty obvious who the letter is really directed toward and Roberts may feel like he is being played as a chump.

Ironically, there is no need for the letter. As I have noted in the past, King and Halbig represent serious threats to the ACA, even though there could be legislative remedies. The problem is that the President has burned every bridge with Congress in continuing to take unilateral actions in violation of the the Separation of Powers (at least in the view of some of us).

In the end, this type of public campaign can irritate and alienate justices before an argument. Whether the President acted constitutionally (and I believe that he did not) should not be a question that turns on how you feel about health care or the ramification of enforcing what you believe is the constitutional mandate.

—

Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, ISNA/CAIR

Posted on by

Check EVERY lawmaker in Washington DC, no one is exempt when it comes to the funds they receive much less the events they attend. But let us take a deeper look at one, Congresswoman, Sheila Jackson-Lee. Jackson-Lee is in the court of the Muslim Brotherhood, a terror organization listed by Egypt, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Back as recently as in August of 2012, Congresswoman, Sheila Jackson Lee was a willing speaker at an ISNA event on the topic of ‘Forming a More Perfect Union’. ISNA has a motto: ‘One Nation Under God: Striving for the Common Good’. The Congresswoman was at this large event with 2 other significant Islamists, Nihad Awad, a Palestinian and has proven ties to Hamas, a terror organization listed by the U.S. Treasury Department. Awad is the Executive Director and Founder of Council on American-Islamic Relations.

The second Islamist joined by Congresswoman Jackson-Lee was Suhail Khan. Khan blocked the opposition to the Ground Zero mosque and he facilitated the meeting of the Bush White House and Sami al Arian, now deported for terrorism. Khan also delivered a speech in 1999 full of hostility toward Federal law enforcement and demonstrated sympathy to terror suspects. Khan is also the first born son of Mahboob Khan, a founding father of the Muslim Brotherhood in America.

Then in 2011, Sheila Jackson Lee went on a full blown rant at a hearing held by Congressman Pete King’s committee hearing on terrorism. Moving towards 2013, Congresswoman Jackson-Lee was campaigning to replace Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. Jackson-Lee gained the full support of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Jackson-Lee’s outrageous remarks over the years — including her comment that welfare entitlements are “earned,” and famously asking where she could find photos of our flag planted on Mars — have made her a laughingstock.

Still, the letter asserts, “Rep. Jackson-Lee would serve as an effective DHS secretary because she understands the importance of increasing border security and maintaining homeland security.”

Yes, Jackson-Lee currently serves on a homeland security subcommittee. But she’s never run any organization, certainly not one as big and critical as DHS.

And Jackson-Lee actually voted against the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which created the DHS.

More concerning is Jackson-Lee’s free association with people DHS is supposed to protect us from. She’s in the pocket of Islamist groups who support terrorism.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, she is among the top 10 recipients of Arab-Muslim cash and has helped unindicted terrorist co-conspirators raise cash.

At one annual fundraiser for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, she presented the terror-tied group with a congressional recognition award — even though the FBI has banned the group from outreach meetings.

“How proud I am to have been associated with CAIR’s legislative work,” she said at a 2007 CAIR event. “We need CAIR and we need all of you supporting CAIR.”

That same year, she placed at least one CAIR worker in her office, according to “Muslim Mafia.”

It does not end here, there is more. A Turkish cleric named Fethullah Gulen has been a force when it comes to schools in America, when several have actually been raided by the FBI. Sheila Jackson-Lee has bee up to her chin in the schools too as have many others including some Republicans.

Here in the United States, meanwhile, Gülen’s allies have been stepping up their involvement in U.S. politics, emerging as a force in districts from South Texas to South Brooklyn. Liberal Democrats like Yvette Clarke, Sheila Jackson Lee, and Al Green, and conservative Republicans like Ted Poe and Pete Olson have all benefitted from donors affiliated with Gülen in one way or another.
Leaders in the movement deny that there is any top-down organization of the donations (or, indeed, that the Gülen movement has any organization at all), but the patterns of giving suggest some level of coordination in a community beginning to flex its political muscle. Gülen himself reportedly told followers in 2010 that they could only visit him in the Poconos if they donated to their local congressman, according to the Wall Street Journal, though Gülen has denied the comment.
The donations, taken together, comprise significant totals for some U.S. House members in relatively safe seats. For instance, people connected to the Gülen-inspired charter schools donated $23,000 to Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee in October 2013 — a large sum considering Jackson Lee has raised just more than $130,000 this cycle in individual contributions, according to documents filed with the Federal Election Commission.

The state of Texas is home to Harmony Public Schools, the Gülen-inspired network of charter schools that have inspired some controversy; the Harmony schools, and other Gülen-related educational institutions around the country, have been accused of abusing foreign worker visas and of using taxpayer money to favor Turkish businesses over others. And Houston and its southwest suburbs are a hub for the movement in the U.S. Many Turkish immigrants who live there work for Harmony or for other organizations with ties to the Gülen movement, such as the Texas Gulf Foundation, the Raindrop Foundation, or North American University, a relatively new STEM-focused school that sits on the side of a desolate highway in north Houston. Other Houstonites affiliated with Gülen groups gave to Rep. Henry Cuellar, Rep. Pete Olson, Rep. Ted Poe, Oklahoma Rep. Jim Bridenstine, and others.

Though bundling political donations is common, Gülen-affiliated Houstonites said there was no top-down coordination of the donations.

For instance, Metin Ekren, a Harmony educator who gave $2,000 to Sheila Jackson Lee in 2012 and $1,500 to her in 2013, said that Harmony did not tell its employees to donate. Ekren said he and “friends in the office” discuss such things, but that “usually Sheila Jackson Lee has a kind of donation meeting” and that’s how he had donated. He said he gives to other Democrats as well, though records show he has mostly given to Republicans, including Poe, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, and Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker.

Erdal Caglar, Harmony’s chief financial officer, gave $1,500 to Jackson Lee in October 2013 at a fundraiser, he said.

“She has been always a supporter of our schools,” Caglar said. “She has attended all major events that Harmony organized. And she expressed — you know, Harmony’s STEM, and she’s supporting STEM education.”

Don’t go away yet, there is still more.

You see when it comes to events even in Washington DC….lil miss Sheila is there too, along with Congressman Elijah Cummings (D-MD) and Amy Goodman, who runs the operation titled Democracy Now. Democracy Now protested the 2008 Republican National Convention and were detained by police. Not to be omitted, Democracy Now was the recipient of $100 million from George Soros, the Ford Foundation and the Tides Foundation.

 

Leahy, a Baby and Prisoner Swaps

Posted on by

It was a shock that Barack Obama declared normalized relations with Cuba. Under his White House regime, Obama made yet another 5 for 1 swap of prisoners….but when it comes to humanitarian objectives, there is something else that is not told….it is about a baby, a little girl. Enter Senator Leahy.

Adriana Perez’s pregnancy has been the talk of Cuba since she appeared with Gerardo Hernandez at the island’s parliament this weekend. Perez beamed and held hands with Hernandez as he caressed her baby bump, clearly visible beneath a flowing blue dress.

A top adviser to U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy said Monday that the lawmaker helped arrange for Perez’s artificial insemination, one of the stranger chapters of 18 months of back-channel negotiations that culminated with Washington and Havana’s announcement they will resume diplomatic ties after more than 50 years of hostility.

Tim Rieser, foreign policy aide to Leahy, told The Associated Press that it all began with a February 2013 trip to Cuba by Leahy, who has visited the island multiple times since the early 1990s, met with both former and current presidents Fidel and Raul Castro and opposes the U.S. embargo.

Back home, Leahy’s office began working with U.S. government officials. Conjugal visits are not allowed in the federal prison system, but there is precedent to use artificial insemination for an inmate, CBS News’ Paula Reid reports.
Around the beginning of this year, a first attempt at artificial insemination was made, but it failed. A couple of months later, a second attempt worked. The procedure itself was carried out in Panama and everything was paid for by the Cuban government, according to Rieser.
U.S. officials had been trying to win better conditions for Alan Gross, an American man who was serving a 15-year sentence in Cuba after he was caught introducing restricted communications equipment as part of a U.S. government democracy program on the island.
Rieser lobbied for Perez to receive a U.S. visa and she was able to visit Hernandez twice in the last year and a half, after apparently only being allowed to see him once before. Rieser also helped another member of the “Cuban Five,” island agents who were serving long prison terms in the United States, access to medicine he needed. He said there was no quid pro quo, however.
That U.S. officials facilitated Perez’s pregnancy made a big impression on Cuban officials, for whom the agents’ return was one of the country’s most important international policy goals. And it helped set the tone for the secret negotiations that culminated with the deal announced last Wednesday, under which the last three of the “Cuban Five” returned home and Cuba freed a U.S. intelligence asset jailed for nearly 20 years on the island. Gross was also released as a humanitarian gesture.

 

 

In what is becoming more and more like a John le Carré novel, the shadowy world of espionage between the United States and Cuba is coming to light in the wake of the historic prisoner swap between the nations about two weeks ago.

At the center of the swap is the purported spy whom President Barack Obama labeled “one of the most important intelligence agents that the United States has ever had in Cuba.” While there has been a slew of speculation over who this super spook is, Washington and Havana have both been remained mum on any more details about who this person.

Evidence compiled from insiders from the scant information handed out by the White House, however, appears to point former Cuban Interior Ministry Lt. Rolando Sarraff – jailed since his arrest in 1995 – who has disappeared from the Havana prison where he was being held and his family members say they’ve neither heard from him nor been told about his whereabouts.

An alleged former U.S. intelligence asset, however, claims that the silence over Sarraff by the U.S. is because he was playing the CIA by feeding them false information as part of a Cuban scheme to disrupt U.S. intelligence.

“They were acting on behalf of Fidel Castro,” Bill Gaede, an Argentinian engineer who says he carried information to the CIA from Sarraff and other Cuban intelligence officers, told the Miami Herald. “They weren’t genuine. They were full of caca.”

Gaede goes on to claim that both the CIA and the FBI knew from the start that Sarraff was a fake – or a “dangle” in spy talk – and that labeling him now as a valuable agent is just a political ploy to make the prisoner swap with Cuba more easily digestible for conservative lawmakers in the U.S.

This argument by Gaede, however, has been contested by another member of the spy ring — José Cohen, also a former lieutenant in the Cuban Interior Ministry – who says that Gaede is in cahoots with the Cuban government and only looking to discredit the U.S. media.

“Bill Gaede is not a [credible] source. He was an enemy of the United States. He’s at Cuba’s service,” Cohen, now living in Miami-Dade County, told the Herald. “I think what Bill is looking for is publicity. … He’s mocking the press, he’s mocking the government.”

Gaede, who resides in Germany, was deported from the U.S. after serving three years in prison. He had been working for Cuban intelligence agents when he flipped and began working for the FBI and CIA, giving them secrets from his U.S. employer, the computer-chip manufacturer AMD. When his company found out, he was fired – so he fled to South America and sold secret information to Iran and China. When he returned to the U.S. he was charged and convicted.

Sarraff, Gaede and Cohen were all members of a group that passed secrets – true or not – to Washington during the mid-1990s before it dissolved after two years. What’s still uncertain is what those secrets were, if they actually provided any useful – or truthful – intelligence and if the CIA and FBI thought the information was real or just a ruse by the Castro government.

al Qaeda Founder Changes Sides

Posted on by

The spy who came in from al-Qaeda

Aimen Dean

Aimen Dean is a founder member of al-Qaeda, who changed tack in 1998 and became a spy for Britain’s security and intelligence services, MI5 and MI6. Interviewed by Peter Marshall, he describes his years working in Afghanistan and London as one of the West’s most valuable assets in the fight against militant Islam.

Bosnia

Dean was brought up in Saudi Arabia, where opposition to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s made military jihad a noble concept. He was a teenager when Yugoslavia splintered, and Bosnian Muslims found themselves in mortal danger from Serb nationalists. He and a friend, Khalid al-Hajj – later to become the leader of al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia – set off to become mujahideen.

I would say it was the most eye-opening experience I ever had. I was a bookish nerd from Saudi Arabia just weeks ago and then suddenly I find myself prancing up on the mountains of Bosnia holding an AK-47 feeling a sense of immense empowerment – and the feeling that I was participating in writing history rather than just watching history on the side.

And also at the same time, being in the military training camps, receiving knowledge that I never thought in a thousand years I would be receiving about warfare and war tactics and military manoeuvres, and to be receiving it alongside people from many different nationalities, with the one common factor among them that they were all Muslims. And they were all there in order to participate in the jihad in defence of the Bosnian population, was in itself also an overwhelming experience.

Q: You weren’t afraid?

A: Between you and me, I think at the beginning I was afraid of the unknown rather than afraid of the fact that I’m going into, embarking on a journey that might end up with all of us being killed actually.

Q: You didn’t fear death?

A: I would be lying if I say no I didn’t fear death but I started to come to peace with the idea that yes, I am entering Bosnia. Most likely I will never come out of it.

Q: Did you want martyrdom, did you want to die?

A: Yes.

Jihad school

By the end of the Bosnian conflict I started to notice something else within my comrades. Those who survived started to adopt a rather more anti-Western, anti-globalisation feeling that the global community were conspiring against the Muslims in Bosnia because they were turning the tide of the war in their favour – so they wanted to end the war there and then before they score any more victories.

At least that’s the perception. And with that perception, I think they started to feel that the West is fighting Islam as a religion… and that led to further radicalisation that made it easy for them to make the transformation from being mujahideen into being jihad operatives.

Bosnia was a school in which many talented leaders of al-Qaeda were born. Khalid Sheikh Mohamed [accused of being the architect of the 9/11 attacks] was one of those people who were in Bosnia.

The impression I had at that time, was that he was there in Bosnia in order to spot talent, let’s put it this way, in order to you know scout for talents who will be useful for the later struggle.

I remember that one of the things he said, and it was in a wedding where we were seated next to each other basically, and one of the things he said, he said, “Well, the Bosnian war seems to be ending here, that you know the end is in sight but what will happen after the war? The question is are we going to roam the globe from one hopeless battle to another trying to save a Muslim population until someone else, and then someone else come and reap the reward?”

In other words, there will be a government that is secular and doesn’t rule by the rules of Sharia. He says that this cycle need to end and that we have to think about another front where we can serve Islam and basically resurrect the spirit of jihad within the Muslim world. I think that little speech was the first indication that things are moving from jihad being an instrument to defend Muslim populations on the frontiers to an instrument to bring down regimes and to fight a terror war… against the US interests in the region.

Q: To become terrorists rather than soldiers?

A: Absolutely.

Joining al-Qaeda

I was invited to Kandahar to give the allegiance basically and as with everyone who give allegiance Osama bin Laden will give you know a one-to-one meeting basically with those who are joining and then he welcomed me into the fold. He basically said that there will be many, many years of difficulties and hardship, and that the cause of jihad is not going to start with him or end with him.

Q: You swore an oath?

A: Yes.

Q: What was the oath?

A: “I give you an allegiance to fight alongside you in good times and in bad times and to fight the jihad against the enemies of god and to obey my commanders.”

Q: What were you doing when you were swearing the oath? Do you stand, do you kneel?

A: You sit next to him on the floor basically and you know you have your hand on a copy of the Koran and you say it. Almost knees touching each other basically.

Q: And this is a moving moment presumably?

A: Yes, although like you know I have to say looking back at it basically, I felt you know the same dread of the unknown that I felt before I went to Bosnia.

Q: You knew it was a big leap you were taking?

A: Yes.

Afghanistan

At home in Saudi Arabia Aimen Dean had been a Muslim theological prodigy. In Afghanistan it was his responsibility to train al-Qaeda recruits – many from Yemen – in the basics of Islamic theology and history and the essentials of religious practice. This opened his eyes to the jihadists’ different motivations.

There is no single process of radicalisation. Some people, it took them years to be convinced of coming to the jihad and some people it took them minutes. Some people were studying in religious seminaries – they’re a minority by the way – and then decided to come and some people basically just came straight out of a night club you know while he was consuming alcohol basically to come and seek redemption there in the jihadist world.

So you know you see immediately that you know there isn’t one single classical journey there, that there are so many journeys.

Q: But they all want martyrdom?

A: They all want martyrdom and redemption and to various degrees. Some people will come to you and say you know I’m really tired, I want to be martyred as soon as possible. And some people will come to you and say I want to be martyred but not before I give the enemies of god hell on this earth. I want to live for as long as possible to give them as much hell as possible and then taken out by them.

Q: So some, some are basically suicidal to begin with, and others just have blood lust?

A: Yes.

Doubts

Dean was at a training camp in Afghanistan when the bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam took place in 1998. He was concerned to learn that as well as the 12 American casualties, 240 or more local people died, and 5,000 were wounded.

I think that is when the horror of it started to sink in. And this is when I realised that if this is the opening salvo of this war, where is the next target? Argentina, South Africa, Mozambique? Are we going to fight Americans in Africa in order to expel them from the Middle East, from the Arabian peninsula? It just didn’t make sense.

And as a theologian, that’s when I started to have doubts about the legality of the whole thing. So I started to ask questions. I went, I remember, to Abdullah al Mohaja, who was the de facto mufti of al- Qaeda… I said, “It’s not that I have doubts or anything but can you please enlighten me about the religious justifications for attacking an embassy belonging to the enemy, yes, but at the same time the fact that it’s surrounded by potentially huge collateral damage?”

And he said to me, “Well look, there is a fatwa issued in the 13th Century AD throughout the Muslim world, which legitimises attacking an enemy even if it means there are civilian deaths because the enemy is using them as a human shield.” And he said, “This fatwa is comprehensive, it gives us justification and there is no doubt about the legality of what we have done.”

So I decided to go and look for myself, and this is when I received a big shock. The fatwas were issued in response to questions sent by Muslim cities in Central Asia, Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara, asking this particular question: “Look, the Mongols are invading. Every time they sack a city, they take a segment of the population from that city, a thousand or two or three, and make them push the siege towers towards the walls of the next city. So do we shoot at our fellow Muslims, who are against their wills pushing the siege towers into the walls of our city, or not?”

And then the fatwa came: “Yes, this is a case where the Mongols are using civilian Muslims as human shields in order to achieve a military aim and if you don’t shoot at them, you will end up being killed yourself if the attacks succeed.”

Now when I learned of this, I was thinking: “OK, how do I reconcile this fatwa which applies to a life-and-death situation, regarding a vicious enemy using people as human shields to sack another place and to kill every man, woman and child in that city, with what happened really in Nairobi and Tanzania?” There is no resemblance here.

Q: And this fatwa based on siege towers from 800 years ago, that’s what’s used to justify all acts of jihadi terrorism?

A: That would result in civilian casualties, yes.

Q: So it’s important?

A: It is important but you know I’m not going to say it has shaky foundations. It has no foundations at all. It’s basically castle of sand in the air.

Q: It’s nonsense?

A: Absolutely, and two months down the line I decided that it’s no longer for me and that I wanted to leave.

Becoming a spy

Still barely out of his teens, and deeply troubled, Dean says he went to the Gulf for medical treatment, having privately decided not to return. Instead, he found himself in the hands of MI6. In 11 days, he says, he was turned. After four years and two months as a jihadi, he landed in London on 16 December 1998, and the debriefing began.

I think seven months of debriefings, that was more or less helping them put together a better picture of these organisations and the groups and who are the influential people within them.

Q: Because you knew Osama Bin Laden, Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, Abu Zubeida. You knew everybody.

A: Yes… Seven months into the debriefings, that’s when the suggestion [came]: “What about you going back to Afghanistan and doing some more work for us?” And my answer was unequivocally, “Yes.” I didn’t have any qualm with that at all.

Q: What did you do?

A: Passing back information, that’s what my primary objective was, to collect as much information as possible – and that wasn’t an easy task because you have to rely entirely on your memory. You can’t write anything. Everything has to be stored in the mind, nowhere else… Whatever moral misgivings I had, I have my ex-comrades to thank for driving those moral misgivings away because the more I see what they were planning – for example, I was there basically when al-Qaeda was constructing their first workable chemical device and talking about this with such glee and such deep psychopathic satisfaction… – that is when you say to yourself, “Why do I have any moral misgivings about spying on you guys?” Whatever they are doing is justifying whatever you are doing.

Q: You had to play along with them obviously?

A: Of course. I was still preaching, I was still stating how committed I am to the cause.

Q: That must be tricky, though, because in some ways because you’re there preaching, you’re again giving theological justification for some of the bad things that you know that they’re up to.

A: Yes, but at the end of the day if you want to catch rats, you have to go into the sewage system basically and get dirty yourself.

Q: So you were in Afghanistan and you were coming back and forth to the UK as well.

A: Yes.

Q: But al- Qaeda thought they were sending you back to the UK presumably?

A: Yes. I think that’s the beauty of it.

Q: So they think you’re working for them?

A: Yes.

Q: When you’re actually working for the West?

A: Absolutely.

Spying in London

While in the UK Dean would be watching and gathering information on people like Babar Ahmed, a British man who admitted providing material support to terrorists, and Abu Hamza, convicted in the US earlier this year of supporting terrorism, and Abu Qatada, who was cleared of terrorism charges by a court in Jordan last autumn after a long legal battle to extradite him from the UK. Dean kept an eye on them and others while preaching in mosques and Islamic societies.

Q: The difficulty is though that if you’re there under cover, welcomed there as an al-Qaeda man, you have to keep up this pretence by talking to people at the mosque, you have to encourage them to join the jihad?

A: Yes… although there are limits. I was aware of my boundaries basically about how much you can incite. You use guarded words about general rather than specific incitement. But then the most difficult part actually was after 7/7, 2005. That’s when the laws and regulations regarding incitement like you know were really tightened.

Q: So you couldn’t say what, and you could say what?

A: You can’t specifically urge someone to go. You can’t specifically call for an attack. You can’t glorify violence committed against civilians. You know you have to be careful there. You can sit down there basically and blast the West for what they do. You can sit down there and talk about martyrdom in general without you know touching directly on what’s happening right now. So you have to be clever about how you phrase your words.

Q: Do you ever feel guilty about having encouraged somebody to go to jihad?

A: Yes.

Q: Are there many occasions that this might have happened?

A: There were some occasions where that happened.

Q: What’s the nature of the guilt, because of what they might have been involved in or because of how they ended up?

A: I’m glad that no one was killed. However, one particular person ended up in prison for a long time.

Q: And you were instrumental in getting him out there?

A: I was a contributing factor but I wasn’t the only one.

Saving lives

Dean says he foiled attacks involving suicide bombings and the use of poisons against civilians. He was also able to hand plans to British intelligence of a device that was intended to be used for a chemical attack on the New York subway. In the event, Osama Bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, called off the attack.

They would have used chemical weapons if it wasn’t for al-Zawahiri saying, “No, don’t use it.”

Because it was a cell that was seeking permission from al-Zawahiri saying, “We are in possession of this weapon, we know how to use it now, we know how to deliver it and we have a target for you. It’s the New York subway because we believe that the subway system with all the ventilation mechanism there will be a perfect vehicle for delivering the gas and dispersing it across a wide network.”

And so that’s where Zawahiri said, “No, don’t do it because the retaliation could get out of control.”

Q: He didn’t stop it because he thought it was the wrong thing to do, to put gas on the subway?

A: He stopped it because he was afraid of the ramifications.

Q: So you got these important plans. Can you tell me where you got those plans from?

A: Well, I wouldn’t say even if I was allowed to!

Q: The fact you got those plans though suggests you had a high degree of clearance in al-Qaeda, trust.

A: I think I was privy to these plans because I have a certain talent, and I [pretended I] wanted to use that talent for enabling these attacks. That’s why.

Q: That’s what al-Qaeda thought?

A: Yeah.

Q: What was your certain talent?

A: I wouldn’t say!

Valued first by al-Qaeda and then British security and intelligence, Aimen Dean’s life under cover came to an abrupt end when the cover was blown. An American writer disclosed his identity with details that could only be sourced to Dean. That was eight years ago.

Not Just Hillary Who Ignored .Gov Emails

Posted on by

Heck America….ask every employee if they use or have used outside secret emails to do the business of government. It seems it began with Lisa Jackson at the EPA. What about secret emails to other secret email accounts? There is no .gov record and there is law on this. So back to lil miss Hillary…

.

Maybe Hillary’s covert and cover-up agenda started back at TravelGate.

The computer server that transmitted and received Hillary Rodham Clinton’s emails – on a private account she used exclusively for official business when she was secretary of state – traced back to an Internet service registered to her family’s home in Chappaqua, New York, according to Internet records reviewed by The Associated Press.

Clinton has not described her motivation for using a private email account – [email protected], which traced back to her own private email server registered under an apparent pseudonym – for official State Department business.

Operating her own server would have afforded Clinton additional legal opportunities to block government or private subpoenas in criminal, administrative or civil cases because her lawyers could object in court before being forced to turn over any emails. And since the Secret Service was guarding Clinton’s home, an email server there would have been well protected from theft or a physical hacking. Read more here and then lets track down Sidney Blumenthal and see what he has to say.

Source: Top Clinton Aides Used Secret Email Accounts at State Dept.

by J.K. Trotter

Hillary Clinton is defending her use of a private email address, hosted at ClintonEmail.com, to conduct official State Department business by claiming that her emails were captured by official @state.gov accounts that other agency employees were instructed to use to contact her. But according to a knowledgeable source, at least two other top Clinton aides also used private email accounts to conduct government business—placing their official communications outside the scope of federal record-keeping regulations. “Her top staffers used those Clinton email addresses” at the agency, said the source, who has worked with Clinton in the past. The source named two staffers in particular, Philippe Reines and Huma Abedin, who are said to have used private email addresses in the course of their agency duties. Reines served as deputy assistant secretary of state, and Abedin as Clinton’s deputy chief of staff. Both rank among Clinton’s most loyal confidantes, in and out of the State Department.

We were able to independently verify that Abedin used a ClintonEmail.com address at some point in time. There are several email addresses associated with Abedin’s name in records maintained by Lexis-Nexis; one of them is [email protected]. An email sent to that address today went through without bouncing.

In an email to Gawker, Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill denied that Reines was ever given, or ever used, a ClintonEmail.com address. “He has never had one, not for communicating with anyone about anything,” he wrote.Merrill did not respond, however, to questions about whether Reines used a private account at a different provider, such as Yahoo! or Gmail, to conduct official agency business. He also refused to address multiple questions regarding how Abedin used her ClintonEmail.com address.

The use of private email addresses may explain the State Department’s puzzling response to several FOIA requests filed by Gawker in the past two years. One of our requests, in September 2012, sought correspondence between Reines and a variety of reporters, including former BuzzFeed reporter Michael Hastings, who engaged in a profanity-flecked exchange with Reines in 2012. That request was confoundingly denied on the grounds that the State Department had no record of Reines—whose job it was to communicate with reporters—emailing Hastings or any other journalists (Gawker is currently appealing the rejection). Another request in June 2011 sought Abedin’s email correspondence; the State Department rejected that one as well, although we could not immediately locate the denial letter to determine on what grounds.

“It pokes a big hole in her explanation,” the source added, referring to spokesman Nick Merrill’s statement to Business Insider. “Like Secretaries of State before her,” Merrill told the site, she used her own email account when engaging with any Department officials. For government business, she emailed them on their Department accounts, with every expectation they would be retained.”