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Category Archives: Department of Homeland Security
Congress should sanction China operations due to synthetic opioid production and should also list all variants of synthetic opioids as weapons of mass destruction under the chemical and biological weapons convention. DEA now has offices in China to work with officials there and investigation trafficking patterns.
The United States consumes 85% of all the world’s natural and synthetic opiates, which in 2015 factored in 33,091 U.S. deaths, up more than 4000 from the previous year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Opioid overdoses have quadrupled since 1999. When average U.S. life expectancies for men and women edged downward last year, for the first time in decades, many health professionals blamed opiate abuse.
The opium poppy is no longer the starting point for many of the opiates on the street. The new compounds, often sold mixed with heroin, originate in illicit labs in China. “For the cartels, why wait for a field of poppies to grow and harvest if you can get your hands on the precursor chemicals and cook a batch of fentanyl in a lab?” says Tim Reagan, resident agent in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA’s) Cincinnati office.
In late 2015, the drug agency persuaded its Chinese counterpart to add 116 synthetic drugs to its list of controlled substances; fentanyl and several analogs were included. In response, underground Chinese labs began tweaking the fentanyl molecule, which is easy to alter for anyone with basic knowledge of chemistry and lab tools. By adding chemical groups, unscrupulous chemists have created new, unregulated variants, some of them even more potent than the original.
Hoping to stem the tide of synthetic opiates, DEA has taken the fight to China, as prolific a maker of illicit drugs as it is of legitimate chemicals. According to a U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission report last month, “China is a global source of illicit fentanyl and other [new psychoactive substances] because the country’s vast chemical and pharmaceutical industries are weakly regulated and poorly monitored.” In response to U.S. pressure, China has scheduled fentanyl and several other derivatives. More here.
U-47700 is a short-acting synthetic opioid analgesic that first became available via online vendors in late 2014. It has only a short history of human use. U-47700 has been detected in counterfeit pharmaceutical opioids and associated with deaths.
Mar-Apr 2016 – Fake oxycodone tablets containing U-47700 are seized by law enforcement in Ohio and fake Norco tablets containing U-47700 and fentanyl appear in the Sacramento, CA area.
A fatal overdose in East Portland leads detectives into the Dark Web, where lab-created opioids are bought with Bitcoin.
Courtesy of Jessica Collins
Even by Portland standards, the weather was dreary on the day Aisha Zughbieh-Collins died.
It was late morning Feb. 16 when Jessica Collins drove through a 40-degree drizzle to the pink and yellow townhouse on Southeast 84th Avenue, where Aisha, her 18-year-old daughter, lived.
Collins drove gingerly down the rutted, dead-end gravel street. It’s the kind of street that’s often lined with abandoned shopping carts.
She got out of her truck, walked into Aisha’s townhouse and climbed the stairs with a sense of dread. For the past 12 hours, Collins had been unable to reach her daughter.
Just two weeks earlier, Aisha had overdosed, her life saved when a roommate called paramedics.
As Collins entered her daughter’s bedroom, Aisha was sitting lotus-style on her bed.
“Each step closer I could tell something was really wrong,” Collins recalls.
Aisha had a syringe in her right arm, and a shoelace tourniquet tied around her biceps. She wasn’t breathing. Her skin was cold.
“I know it sounds strange,” Collins says, “but a sense of peace came over me—that she’s OK now—even though she was dead in front of me.”
Drug overdoses now kill more people than firearms or automobile crashes in Oregon, according to state figures, and are the largest cause of accidental death in the U.S. As the country’s overdose death total continues to soar, Oregon officials have responded far more effectively than officials in most states (see chart below).
While opioid overdose deaths nationally rose 57 percent from 2010 to 2015, they actually dropped slightly in Oregon over the same period. Source: Oregon Health Authority
But even in Portland, which has slowed overdose deaths resulting from heroin and prescription opioids such as oxycodone, Aisha’s death is part of a new and dangerous development.
The drug that killed her was a potent “synthetic” opioid manufactured in China—a drug so new that narcotics investigators and Portland’s public health officials had never encountered it before.
“What we don’t have a lot of here yet is the synthetics,” says Dr. Paul Lewis, the Multnomah County health officer. “That could change.”
When Portland Police Bureau detectives arrived at Aisha’s townhouse, they were initially stymied. Their investigation would eventually lead them across the country and into the deepest recesses of the internet: places where the common currency is Bitcoin, and where buyers and sellers are anonymous and far removed from each other. Bitcoin is used for a lot of other purposes though, as people find it a lot easier to buy bitcoin. It just depends on the circumstances though obviously.
The trail would take them to a condo in South Carolina, and to one of the Dark Web’s most prolific synthetic opioid sellers.
“We’d never done a case like this,” says the Police Bureau detective who led the investigation. “We weren’t familiar with the substance. And we had no idea where it came from.”
Aisha Zughbieh-Collins traveled a long way in a short life that started on the Gulf Coast of Florida.
She was petite—barely 5 feet 4 inches tall, with a quick smile. She loved animals: She used to have a cat named Bebe and a Burmese python named Applejack. She liked sushi and Thai food, root beer and cream soda. She listened to Bright Eyes and Nirvana.
In November 2015, Aisha ran away from a foster-care facility in Baltimore, where her mother says she’d been assaulted. Aisha reconnected with her mother, who was also living in Maryland but who had lost custody of Aisha three years earlier.
Rather than return Aisha to foster care, the pair decided to head west to begin new lives. They left shortly before Thanksgiving. “We didn’t know where to go, but we wanted warm weather,” Collins says.
They drove west in a sunflower-colored Nissan Xterra, using throwaway phones and paying cash at cheap motels. They feared authorities might be looking for Aisha, who was 17 years old and still a ward of the state.
They arrived in Oregon in February 2016, and Collins found work as a host in a remote campground in Mount Hood National Forest.
They liked the woods, but for Aisha, there was little in the way of entertainment—nobody her age, nowhere to eat, and no WiFi. “It was hard for Aisha to be without the internet,” Collins says.
In May of that year, Aisha found a place to live on Craigslist and moved to the Brentwood-Darlington neighborhood just east of 82nd Avenue, sharing with several housemates the townhouse where she would eventually die.
Collins says her daughter had been using hard drugs in Maryland, and had started using again when Collins moved to Portland, living near Aisha.
She told her mother she was using a drug called U-47700.
U-47700, known sometimes as U4 or “pink,” was developed by the pharmaceutical company Upjohn in 1976 as an alternative to morphine but never received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval. As a result, it was never placed on the FDA’s schedule of illicit drugs, so for decades there was no prohibition on its manufacture or distribution. It existed in a gray zone—neither approved for use nor specifically illegal.
And while Upjohn never manufactured the drug, laboratories in China—where law enforcement officials say many synthetic opioids are made—figured out how to do so.
U-47700 is also lethal—nearly eight times more potent than heroin. Records show the feds first became aware that people were using U4 to get high in October 2015, although they weren’t sure where the drug was coming from.
In the next year, they recorded 46 overdose deaths, most on the Eastern Seaboard. In November 2016, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, “responding to the imminent threat to public health and safety,” made U-47700 a schedule I substance, classifying it among the most dangerous street drugs.
“I told Aisha U4 was suicide,” Collins recalls. “You can’t choose whether you live or die. It’s like Russian roulette.”
Rising Synthetic Tide: Overdose deaths from synthetic opioids rose much faster last year than overdose deaths from heroin or prescription pain pills.
Source: Centers for Disease Control
The day Aisha died, Portland narcotics detectives arrived at her townhouse. The lead detective is a stocky cop, with salt-and-pepper hair and, considering his job, a cheery demeanor.
The detective later spoke to WW but insisted on anonymity because he works undercover. He sees a lot of dead bodies: There are about two fatal overdoses a week in Portland, most opioid-related.
But this one stood out, the detective says, not only because he’d never heard of the drug that killed Aisha, but also because she was a woman, and so young—the average overdose victim in Oregon is a man over 35.
The house where Aisha Zughbieh-Collins died. (Hilary Sanders)
Portland’s approach to overdose deaths changed in 2007, when Kraig Crow, a Lincoln High School graduate, fatally overdosed.
“Our policy here is different from other jurisdictions’,” the detective says. “Before, we just walked away and let the medical examiner handle it.
“After the Lincoln case,” he continues, “we started asking, ‘What can we find at the scene that can allow us to investigate further?'”
When Portland detectives respond to an overdose death now, they are looking for witnesses, phones and the packaging in which drugs are delivered.
In the Crow case, prosecutors won convictions of six defendants, including what’s called a “Len Bias conviction” for the top dealer.
That law, named after University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias, who died of a cocaine overdose in 1986 after being picked second overall in the NBA draft, became a potent tool for prosecutors because it replaced lighter sentences with a 20-year prison term for those who deal drugs leading to a death.
Federal prosecutors in Oregon are recognized as national leaders in bringing Len Bias cases.
Investigators try to determine how the fatal dose moved from the original source to the consumer, establishing a chain of custody. “Every person in the chain is potentially liable for the overdose death,” says Steve Mygrant, an assistant U.S. attorney who has prosecuted several dealers in fatal overdose cases. (Local and federal officials often cooperate on Len Bias cases.)
Aisha’s mother told detectives she thought her daughter bought U4 online, and she provided them with Aisha’s email address.
The detectives also found unusual materials in Aisha’s bedroom—distinctive packaging suggested someone had carefully disguised the U-47700 to send it through the mail.
The drug Aisha bought had been hidden in a VeriQuick brand pregnancy test kit—sold only at Dollar Tree stores—and appeared to have arrived from an unknown seller in a U.S. Postal Service shipping envelope from South Carolina.
Those were clues. But the detectives couldn’t work their way up the usual chain of delivery as they do in heroin cases.
“Our calls usually come from people complaining about a neighborhood drug house,” the detective says. “This online stuff is at a completely different level.”
The next day, the detectives asked for help from federal experts who knew how to navigate the deepest recesses of the internet.
In 2013, federal agents busted Silk Road, a vast online bazaar for drugs, child pornography, illegal weapons, stolen credit cards, valuable personal information, hacking services and even contract killers.
Silk Road operated on what’s called the Dark Web. That’s the term used to describe the vast array of websites that operate out of reach of the average web surfer.
The internet is like an iceberg: Experts say less than 5 percent of websites are visible using typical browsers such as Safari, Firefox or Chrome.
Some of what’s under the surface is benign material that is simply password-protected: legitimate financial and medical records, for instance, that are shielded for privacy reasons. But it is also used by dissidents in countries where free speech isn’t allowed—and by criminals of all kinds.
Dark Web users need a couple of things to access such sites: a specialized (and easily downloadable) browser called Tor and, if they want to remain anonymous, a tool that encrypts their communications and preserves their anonymity. Aisha used what’s called a PGP (“pretty good privacy”) key to hide her activity.
And for people who wish to buy or sell goods or services on the Dark Web, using Bitcoin or another virtual currency adds another layer of anonymity. Bitcoin, which Aisha used, allowed her to purchase drugs without creating the kind of easily traceable trail that credit or debit cards leave behind.
“But once you clear the smoke,” says George Chamberlin, chief of the FBI’s Oregon Cyber Task Force, “it’s not that different from the visible internet.”
When Silk Road disappeared because of the indictment and conviction of its creator, other Dark Web marketplaces took its place. One, called AlphaBay, offers a staggering array of illicit drugs.
Sellers hawk their wares aggressively and encourage buyers to rate their experiences just as customers do on conventional sites such as Amazon, Yelp or Trip Advisor. But instead of rating tacos or hotel rooms, buyers are rating heroin, meth or the newest kind of illicit narcotic, synthetic opioids.
“The game is changing,” the FBI’s Chamberlin says, “especially because of synthetics. They are different because of their potency and because they are trafficked on the Dark Web.”
Detectives found that Aisha had written an alphanumeric code on a pad in her bedroom. That code identified her PGP key.
They determined that Aisha’s PGP key had been used to buy drugs on AlphaBay.
The detective learned that, using her PGP, Aisha had purchased U-47700 on Feb. 11, five days before her death, from a vendor who called himself “Peter the Great”—like the Russian emperor.
A U.S. postal inspector determined the envelope found in Aisha’s bedroom had a fictitious return address but was purchased at a post office in Greenville, S.C.
In April, the Portland detective bought U4 over the Dark Web from Peter the Great. The drugs arrived, wrapped in material from Dollar Tree.
The person who purchased the shipping labels—presumably Peter the Great—used secure email addresses. The investigators then filed a subpoena for all records related to those addresses.
They turned up a name: Ted Khleborod, a resident of Greenville.
Peter the Great—who detectives now believed was Khleborod—was a prolific salesman: Figures on AlphaBay showed he’d done 9,553 transactions.
The Portland detective contacted federal officials in South Carolina. “We scared the crap out the assistant U.S. attorney back there when we told him about the substance and volume of sales,” the detective says. “This guy was sending out the equivalent of bombs.”
Ted Khleborod (Spartanburg County Sheriff’s Office)
Khleborod, now 28, was born in Moldova, part of the former Soviet Union. When he was in high school, records show he spent time on bodybuilder chat boards, discussing the benefits of steroid use and posting as “Arnoldismyhero,” a tribute to former California governor and champion body builder Arnold Schwarzenegger.
He later studied at the University of South Carolina, where, according to his Facebook page, he was pre-med. He graduated in 2016.
Khleborod lived well for a college student, records show, driving a BMW—with a vanity plate that read “TEDALICUS”—and a Ducati motorcycle.
In late April, Portland detectives flew to Greenville to coordinate with local police.
For three days, they staked out Khleborod at his condo. They saw his girlfriend, Ana Barrero, leave his place twice to mail dozens of parcels, with labels matching those they’d found earlier in Aisha’s room and identical to those matching labels from the drugs that investigators bought over the Dark Web from Peter the Great.
They also obtained video of Barrero buying 71 VeriQuick pregnancy test kits at a Dollar Tree in Greenville.
On April 26, officers arrested Khleborod as he left work at an urgent care clinic. “He was a quiet guy, contemplative,” says the Portland detective. “I don’t think he used his own product, and based on his numbers, he could have made a million bucks in the past couple years.”
Khleborod, who is now in custody, faces federal charges in South Carolina. (His attorney did not respond to a request for comment.)
When officers served a search warrant on Khleborod’s condo, they wore hazmat suits to guard against the toxicity of U-47700. They hauled away 9 kilos of the drug, worth $270,000.
They also found a book, written for prospective doctors, called Kill as Few Patients as Possible.
The Portland detective says Aisha’s case revealed to him a new world of synthetic opioids and the Dark Web. He says he also realized that despite all the technically sophisticated tools dealers like Peter the Great employ, they are subject to human mistakes.
“Internet privacy—even with encryption—is not as great as you think,” the detective says. “People on the Dark Web still leave breadcrumbs we can follow.”
Jessica Collins says she’s happy police arrested Khleborod. But she remains heartbroken over her daughter’s death.
“I feel like she’s with me every day,” Collins says, “and I worry about how many other families this might happen to.”
Cam Strahm, the DEA chief for Oregon, applauds the police work that led to Khleborod’s capture. But he says after 26 years of chasing drug dealers, he’s come to understand the limits of that work.
“Addiction is a treatable disease,” he says, “and we’re facing an epidemic. We can’t arrest our way out of it.”
Aisha Collins (Courtesy of Jessica Collins)
The Wages of Synthetics
The new challenge from synthetic opioids marketed over the Dark Web comes at a time when the trend in overdose deaths in Oregon is relatively positive.
Opioid deaths here have declined in recent years, while the trend in the rest of the country is still sharply upward. (The New York Times recently reported deaths jumped nearly 20 percent nationally in 2016.)
“When you look at the rest of the country, flat is good,”says Multnomah County Health Officer Dr. Paul Lewis.
There are two reasons for the good news. The first is naloxone, marketed under the brand name Narcan, a nasal spray that reverses overdoses. Under the leadership of former Multnomah County Health Officer Dr. Gary Oxman, the Portland area was a national pioneer in making naloxone widely available (“Who Wants to Save a Junkie?” WW, March 13, 2013).
And Oxman’s successor, Lewis, pushed large metro-area medical systems to decrease the number of opioid pain pills prescribed to patients. That number has decreased each of the past five quarters.
Together, those two developments have caused the number of overdose deaths in Oregon to decline, a result most states would envy.
But deaths such as Aisha Zughbieh-Collins’ highlight a new danger: synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, carfentanil and U-47700 that are not prescribed by physicians but instead manufactured and sold illegally.
Lewis says there have been just two confirmed deaths in the metro area in the past 18 months in which U-47700 was the primary cause. But synthetic opioids are now the nation’s fastest-growing cause of overdose deaths. The death toll in some states is extraordinary: Last year, for instance, there were 34 deaths from synthetics in Oregon in 2015—and 949 in Massachusetts.
“The synthetic thing is new to everybody,” Lewis says. “We thought heroin was the foe, but now these synthetics come along. It’s a new chapter, and we don’t know how it ends.”
Cam Strahm of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration notes that synthetics such as fentanyl and carfentanil are dozens or even hundreds of times stronger than heroin.
Strahm says synthetics are also less predictable than heroin, which is now fairly standard in quality and potency. The dealers who sell synthetics often mix them in nonstandard “cocktails” and also frequently misrepresent what they are selling.
“When you are making illicit purchases from anonymous sources, you can’t depend on purity or that what you think you are buying is what you actually get,” Strahm says. “You really don’t know what you are purchasing. It’s like going on a vacation without knowing your destination.”
Bloomberg: Specialized teams from Homeland Security and the FBI have been scrambled to help extricate the hackers from the power stations, in some cases without informing local and state officials. Meanwhile, the U.S. National Security Agency is working to confirm the identity of the hackers, who are said to be using computer servers in Germany, Italy, Malaysia and Turkey to cover their tracks.
Many of the power plants are conventional, but the targeting of a nuclear facility adds to the pressure. While the core of a nuclear generator is heavily protected, a sudden shutdown of the turbine can trigger safety systems. These safety devices are designed to disperse excess heat while the nuclear reaction is halted, but the safety systems themselves may be vulnerable to attack.
Homeland Security and the FBI sent out a general warning about the cyberattack to utilities and related parties on June 28, though it contained few details or the number of plants affected. The government said it was most concerned about the “persistence” of the attacks on choke points of the U.S. power supply. That language suggests hackers are trying to establish backdoors on the plants’ systems for later use, according to a former senior DHS official who asked not to be identified.
Those backdoors can be used to insert software specifically designed to penetrate a facility’s operational controls and disrupt critical systems, according to Galina Antova, co-founder of Claroty, a New York firm that specializes in securing industrial control systems.
Since May, hackers have been penetrating the computer networks of companies that operate nuclear power stations and other energy facilities, as well as manufacturing plants in the United States and other countries.
Among the companies targeted was the Wolf Creek Nuclear Operating Corporation, which runs a nuclear power plant near Burlington, Kan., according to security consultants and an urgent joint report issued by the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation last week.
The joint report was obtained by The New York Times and confirmed by security specialists who have been responding to the attacks. It carried an urgent amber warning, the second-highest rating for the sensitivity of the threat.
The report did not indicate whether the cyberattacks were an attempt at espionage — such as stealing industrial secrets — or part of a plan to cause destruction. There is no indication that hackers were able to jump from their victims’ computers into the control systems of the facilities, nor is it clear how many facilities were breached.
Wolf Creek officials said that while they could not comment on cyberattacks or security issues, no “operations systems” had been affected and that their corporate network and the internet were separate from the network that runs the plant.
In a joint statement with the F.B.I., a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security said, “There is no indication of a threat to public safety, as any potential impact appears to be limited to administrative and business networks.”
The hackers appeared determined to map out computer networks for future attacks, the report concluded. But investigators have not been able to analyze the malicious “payload” of the hackers’ code, which would offer more detail into what they were after.
John Keeley, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, which works with all 99 electric utilities that operate nuclear plants in the United States, said nuclear facilities are required to report cyberattacks that relate to their “safety, security and operations.” None have reported that the security of their operations was affected by the latest attacks, Mr. Keeley said.
In most cases, the attacks targeted people — industrial control engineers who have direct access to systems that, if damaged, could lead to an explosion, fire or a spill of dangerous material, according to two people familiar with the attacks who could not be named because of confidentiality agreements.
The origins of the hackers are not known. But the report indicated that an “advanced persistent threat” actor was responsible, which is the language security specialists often use to describe hackers backed by governments.
The two people familiar with the investigation say that, while it is still in its early stages, the hackers’ techniques mimicked those of the organization known to cybersecurity specialists as “Energetic Bear,” the Russian hacking group that researchers have tied to attacks on the energy sector since at least 2012.
Hackers wrote highly targeted email messages containing fake résumés for control engineering jobs and sent them to the senior industrial control engineers who maintain broad access to critical industrial control systems, the government report said.
The fake résumés were Microsoft Word documents that were laced with malicious code. Once the recipients clicked on those documents, attackers could steal their credentials and proceed to other machines on a network.
In some cases, the hackers also compromised legitimate websites that they knew their victims frequented — something security specialists call a watering hole attack. And in others, they deployed what are known as man-in-the-middle attacks in which they redirected their victims’ internet traffic through their own machines.
Energy, nuclear and critical manufacturing organizations have frequently been targets for sophisticated cyberattacks. The Department of Homeland Security has called cyberattacks on critical infrastructure “one of the most serious national security challenges we must confront.”
On May 11, during the attacks, President Trump signed an executive order to strengthen the cybersecurity defenses of federal networks and critical infrastructure. The order required government agencies to work with public companies to mitigate risks and help defend critical infrastructure organizations “at greatest risk of attacks that could reasonably result in catastrophic regional or national effects on public health or safety, economic security, or national security.”
The order specifically addressed the threats from “electricity disruptions and prolonged power outages resulting from cybersecurity incidents.”
Jon Wellinghoff, the former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said in an interview last week that while the security of United States’ critical infrastructure systems had improved in recent years, they were still vulnerable to advanced hacking attacks, particularly those that use tools stolen from the National Security Agency.
“We never anticipated that our critical infrastructure control systems would be facing advanced levels of malware,” Mr. Wellinghoff said.
In 2008, an attack called Stuxnet that was designed by the United States and Israel to hit Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facility, demonstrated how computer attacks could disrupt and destroy physical infrastructure.
The government hackers infiltrated the systems that controlled Iran’s nuclear centrifuges and spun them wildly out of control, or stopped them from spinning entirely, destroying a fifth of Iran’s centrifuges.
In retrospect, Mr. Wellinghoff said that attack should have foreshadowed the threats the United States would face on its own infrastructure.
Critical infrastructure is increasingly controlled by Scada, or supervisory control and data acquisition systems. They are used by manufacturers, nuclear plant operators and pipeline operators to monitor variables like pressure and flow rates through pipelines. The software also allows operators to monitor and diagnose unexpected problems.
But like any software, Scada systems are susceptible to hacking and computer viruses. And for years, security specialists have warned that hackers could use remote access to these systems to cause physical destruction.
Title of the conference:54th Annual ISNA Convention
Hope and Guidance Through the Qur’an
Chicago Tribune: “ISNA’s Annual Convention is more than simply a coming together of the Muslim community,” said Azhar Azeez, ISNA President. “Our goal is to unite people across different faiths and backgrounds in the spirit of peace and better understanding. We hope the convention will be used as platform and catalyst for social change”, he added.
ISNA has invited a rich list of speakers, scholars, community leaders and public servants to address Convention attendees. Linda Sarsour, co-chair of the National Women’s March, will be the keynote speaker during the Community Service Recognition Luncheon which will honor Dr. Sayyid M. Syeed for his lifelong dedication to serving the community, building interfaith relationships and social justice advocacy.
Complementing the main ISNA offering of programs, there are conferences being hosted by the Muslim Students Association of the U.S. & Canada (MSA National) and the Muslim Youth of North America (MYNA).
ISNA is the largest and oldest Islamic umbrella organization in North America. Its mission is to foster the development of the Muslim community, interfaith relations, civic engagement, and better understanding of Islam.
*** So, what did one of these esteemed speakers have to say at this convention?
Do you suppose anyone from CNN, MSNBC or NBC attended and reported this? Nah….but the Huffington Post did publish a report and well, they used the same definition of ‘jihad’ that former CIA Director John Brennan used…..it just means struggle. Ah sure… Anwar al Awlaki called for peaceful demonstrations too. Maybe HuffPo should check with their counterpart Peter Bergen at CNN on al Awlaki. After the Secret Service visited with Kathy Griffin for an hour, will they too go pay a visit to ISNA or to Linda?
Speaking in Chicago at the annual Islamic Society of North America convention over the weekend, Sarsour, an organizer of January’s Women’s March, discussed what it means to be a patriot in the United States.
In her speech, which was posted online Monday, Sarsour discussed leaders like Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali who helped shift culture by being unapologetically themselves.
A number of conservativeoutlets zeroed in on a particular section of Sarsour’s speech, in which she used the word “jihad” to describe efforts to resist unjust policies.
The word “jihad” has long been misused and misunderstood by both Muslim extremists and people seeking to spread hatred against Muslims. But for the majority of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims, “jihad” is a word that literally means “to struggle.” It’s a concept within Islam that represents a commitment to serve God, and to be good to yourself and your neighbors. It can be personal, like struggling to get through a rough workday, or overarching, like striving to seek justice for all people.
As Sarsour recounted in her speech, the Prophet Muhammad is said to have described the best form of jihad as “a word of truth in front of a tyrant, ruler or leader.”
FBN: She said that Muslim-Americans’ number one priority should be protecting and defending their communities, not assimilating or pleasing people in power.
“I hope, that when we stand up to those who oppress our communities, that Allah accepts from us that as a form of jihad, that we are struggling against tyrants and rulers not only abroad in the Middle East or the other side of the world, but here in these United States of America, where you have fascists and white supremacists and Islamophobes reining in the White House,” she said.
Sarsour was a leader behind January’s Women’s March, and she was named a “Champion of Change” by the Obama administration in 2012.
Watch her full address above, and see Asra Nomani weigh in on Sarsour and the anti-Trump movement using this link.
U-S lawmakers say there is new evidence that Soviet-era leaders were backing plans for a secret war to be fought by Soviet agents in America during the cold war.
Former agents of the Soviet intelligence service, the K-G-B, say there were plans for sabotage, assassination, and perhaps even the use of small nuclear devices on U-S soil as late as the 1970’s. And you think Moscow is trustworthy? Remember, China and Russia are the lead team now dealing with the North Korea threat.
Fragment of the cover of Disinformation, a book by Ion Mihai Pacepa, ex-deputy chief of communist Romania’s foreign intelligence, and law professor Ronald J. Rychlak
It may have seemed like any other Thursday in Moscow. The dismally overcast sky and near-freezing temperature lay heavy on the city, heralding the darkening days of winter. On that morning, the historical Art Nouveau-style Hotel Metropol Moscow, situated between the Kremlin and the FSB (formerly KGB) headquarters, was slowly and quietly filling with important guests. It is unlikely that many passers-by noticed the members of Russia’s power elite, headed by President Vladimir Putin, arriving one by one at the hidden entrance.
It was 10 December 2015. Russia’s global propaganda television channel RT (formerly Russia Today) was celebrating its 10th anniversary with a lavish gala. The organizers had put great effort into hand-picking the guests: the tables were filled with high-calibre figures active in the fields of politics, the economy, and propaganda.
When analyzing images taken at the event in light of the information available today, it is immediately clear to a watchful eye that this was a carefully planned Russian active influence operation. Its main objective was not to promote the television channel but to prepare for the massive interference in the upcoming US presidential elections.
Retired US General Michael T. Flynn had taken his place at Putin’s right hand. By that time, it was well known in Moscow that Flynn could play a key role in advising presidential candidate Donald Trump on national security issues. A battle-hardened veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Flynn’s pronounced negativity towards Islam suited Russia very well.
Putin and General Flynn at the celebration of RT anniversary in Moscow, 10 December 2015. Photo: Mikhail Klimentyev
Flynn did not fail to meet the expectations of those who had ordered the speech. For 40,000 dollars, the retired general scolded Obama’s administration for its Middle East policy and kept mum about Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, as well as the many civilian casualties of air strikes in Syria. One must not forget that during the Metropol gala the international situation was rather tense, especially when it came to Russia’s relationship with the West. Only a couple of weeks had passed since Turkey had shot down a Russian Su-24M attack aircraft on 24 November 2015. Flynn was not bothered by this.
Putin did not shy away from egging Flynn on during their dinner-table talk. Having essentially been removed from the position of director of the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), Flynn had a bone to pick with President Barack Obama. Thus, Putin’s jaundiced views on Obama and Hillary Clinton fell on fertile ground. Flynn admitted in a later interview with Dana Priest of The Washington Post that the only thing he remembers from his table talk with Putin was the latter’s deep mistrust of the Obama administration.
Flynn had likely been under surveillance for a while. When he was still the director of the DIA in 2013, the three-star General Flynn received an unusually warm welcome in Moscow. He was the first—and so far the only—high-profile US officer to have entered the headquarters of Russia’s Main Intelligence Agency (GRU). Flynn himself remembers this with great pride because he was asked to conduct a masterclass on the professional development of leadership. The mind boggles at the thought of what the listeners made of him at the time. After all, countering the activities of the US and its allies was and continues to be one of the GRU’s main priorities.
Nevertheless, it is evident that Flynn ending up as the main guest at the December 2015 gala was no coincidence; the role of RT commentator was merely a suitable cover. However, Flynn was not the only one to attract attention on that table of ten bigwigs.
Right across from Putin sat another fateful figure from the US—the Green Party’s presidential candidate Jill Stein, who is known for her accentuated friendliness towards Russia. She also made a presentation at the gala, although her presence was advertised more modestly than Flynn’s. Still, it was Stein who became the dark horse of the November 2016 elections.
To-be U.S. presidential candidate Jill Stein in Moscow’s Red Square, December 2015. Screenshot from a video
Stein drew more votes in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan than Trump’s margin of victory over Hillary Clinton. Stein received the votes of 1.4 million people nationwide, i.e. 1% of voters. All this could have been an additional reason for stopping Clinton from becoming president.
Putin was not the only one gracing Flynn and Stein with his undivided attention at the main table. The conversation was steered by the then Kremlin Chief of Staff and former KGB general Sergey Ivanov, the president’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov (who is also regarded in intelligence circles as Putin’s national defence adviser), one of the Kremlin’s leading propaganda chiefs Alexey Gromov, and RT’s Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan, who is known to be friends with Putin.
In order to help Flynn and Stein blend in with the crowd, the main table also included Willy Wimmer, a veteran German politician from Angela Merkel’s party and a former member of the Bundestag (1976–2009), and the former Czech foreign minister, Cyril Svoboda. Both are also known for their pro-Russian attitude. For instance, Wimmer has said that pursuing an anti-Russia policy is a crime against the whole of Europe. As expected, Wimmer’s analysis has no room for Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, because he believes that the coup in Kyiv was caused by the West.
The picture of what transpired at the Metropol would be incomplete without mention of Julian Assange, whose presentation was broadcast via a live link and who was later suspected of leaking 20,000 emails stolen from the server of the US Democratic Party; former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone, who has justified Russia’s aggression against Ukraine with the need for protection from NATO; and a former analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, Raymond McGovern, who had become a scandalous political activist in the 1990s. McGovern later admitted to having voted for Stein in the 2016 elections.
As the event at the Metropol drew to a close, few people realized that something big was happening. Back then, nobody outside his immediate circle knew Flynn. Today, his name features in the international media almost every day, and with good reason. The most dramatic outside interference in the US presidential elections is a fact, and Flynn played one of the key roles in it.
Trump and Flynn during the 2016 presidential race. Photo: George Frey
Even though his career as President Trump’s national security adviser was cut short, his suspicious and covert ties managed to cause serious damage to the reputation of the US as the leader of the Western world. The story does not end there. One thing is certain: this is the first time the global public has felt the reach of Russia’s influence operations and the professionalism of its subterfuge so clearly. Many see this as something new and unexpected but, in reality, it was a long time coming.
II. The Marquis de Custine’s timeless testament
In 1839, a French aristocrat, the Marquis de Custine, traveled to Russia to seek support for his reactionary views. He was resentful of the representative democracy of his own country and thought it would lead to mob rule. He was a well-known travel writer and had published eloquent accounts of Spain and Italy.
Custine got the idea to write about Russia from the 1835 book by Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, in which the author foretells a great future for Russia and the US. Custine was later called “the Russian Tocqueville”.
He spent most of his time in Russia in Saint Petersburg, but he also visited Moscow and Yaroslavl. Custine was interested in the lives, customs, and mindsets of both the aristocracy and common folk. His hopes of finding support for his ideas in Russian authoritarianism were promptly crushed. He was especially appalled by the fact that Russians were ready to cheerfully collaborate with their own enslavers.
Having collected only one year’s worth of immediate impressions and information, Custine managed to turn the material into a book titled La Russie en 1839, which captures the nature of Russia extremely well. The book was so successful that for a long time it was banned by the Russian authorities. The unabridged version of Custine’s book was finally published in Russia 157 years later, in 1996.
Among other things, the author noticed the tendency of Russians to deceive their guests or alter reality. Custine wrote that everything in the country was an illusion and the professional misleading of foreigners was a practice only known in Russia.
In 1839, Custine recorded the thoughts of a noble Russian companion on the role of lie in his government’s policy
A former US ambassador in Moscow, General Walter Bedell Smith, wrote an introduction to the English edition of Custine’s book in 1951. Smith stressed that Custine’s political analysis was “so penetrating and timeless that it could be called the best work so far produced about the Soviet Union.” All of today’s extensive historical books on Russia owe thanks to Custine’s contribution. In Russia, however, the Frenchman is seen as the father of classic Russophobia.
Custine was not the first or only person to draw attention to Russia’s “Susaninist” nature. Even during the Livonian War (1558–83), the tsar’s negotiators tried to leave the misleading impression that Tallinn was situated on ancient Russian land and that Livonia should, therefore, be ruled by Moscow. The “villages” of Prince Potemkin, a favorite of Catherine the Great, have even acquired a proverbial meaning.
III. The KGB and the beginnings of disinformation as a science
The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 changed everything. All previous experiences paled before the extent to which deliberate lying, deception and misleading became a conscious choice in the forge of the Bolshevik special services. In the course of a century, many people from all over the world, from popes to presidents, from countries to international organizations, witnessed the disinformation skills of the Cheka/GPU/NKVD/KGB/FSB and the implementation of active influence measures in the service of Russian foreign policy.
The use of disinformation as a tactical weapon of influence became organized as early as 1923, when the Deputy Director of the GPU, Józef Unszlicht, formed a special disinformation unit to conduct active intelligence operations. Born in Poland, Unszlicht was one of the founders of the Cheka and saw disinformation as an excellent opportunity to create successful diversions in open Western societies.
On 22 December 1922, Unszlicht and Roman Pillar wrote to Stalin’s Politburo that the special disinformation unit should focus on the creation and distribution of misleading information. The best way to spread disinformation in a credible manner was to use the media of open societies. Stalin and the Politburo approved the proposal and urged Unszlicht to proceed.
The first notable and successful use of disinformation was Operation Trust. This ran from 1923 to 1927 with the aim to mislead the White Army and monarchist organizations in exile and foreign intelligence institutions with false information about an extensive resistance organization, Trust, operating within the Soviet Union. The illusion helped to lure many anti-Soviet (Boris Savinkov and Pavel Dolgorukov) and foreign (Sidney Reilly) agents into Russia, who were then arrested and executed. Interestingly, both the beginning and the end of the operation had close ties to Estonia and Latvia.
Trial of Boris Savinkov, an ardent anti-Bolshevik, who was lured to the USSR by Soviet secret services in August 1924. He was sentenced to 10-year imprisonment and was said to have committed suicide in jail in May 1925. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Trust was followed by a number of other known and less-known operations that have provided material for hundreds of books. One of the best sources is the collection of notes made by Vasili Mitrokhin during his 30 years as a KGB archivist before he fled to the West in 1992. The historian Christopher Andrew has written two hefty books based on these notes.
Another person who deserves a mention is Ion Pacepa, a general in the Romanian communist special service Securitate, who fled to the US in 1978. In 2013, he published the book Disinformation, in which he uses his own immediate knowledge to shed light on the creation of false narratives such as the framing of Pope Pius XII as “Hitler’s Pope” during World War II.
In the Soviet Union, disinformation became a science in its own right and was honed to perfection over the years. The term was first used in The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia in 1952, where it was presented as classic disinformation. According to the book, disinformation constitutes false news distributed in the media with the intention of misleading the public. The entry added that such tactics were used by the West against the Soviet Union. The truth was, naturally, the exact opposite.
Curiously, “disinformation” did not enter Western dictionaries until the late 1980s. The English word is directly derived from the Russian дезинформация [dezinformatsiya — ed.].
In the late 1960s, the Director of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, took disinformation as a successful instrument of influence to a whole new level. Andropov himself said that
“disinformation is like cocaine—sniff once or twice, it may not change your life. If you use it every day, though, it will make you an addict—a different man.”
FSB reinstalled the memorial plaque to Andropov, which was dismantled in 1991, on its Moscow headquarters in December 1999, shortly before ex-FSB director Vladimir Putin became acting president of Russia. Photo: Anatoly Novak
In general, it is customary for foreign intelligence services to be created on the basis of collected information to advise a country’s political authorities in matters of foreign relations. However, in addition to collecting past facts, the tasks of Russian foreign intelligence involve manipulating the future.
Furthermore, the masterclass of Russian special services includes the creation of a new past to destabilize the opponent, which is then used to tamper with the latter’s international image. I will look at Estonian examples later, but Russian attempts to change the past to serve its foreign-policy interests are best illustrated by the subject of World War II.
It is crucial to understand that the fall of the Soviet Union changed nothing. The KGB was broken up and reorganized, but its tasks remained roughly the same. Mistrust in the Western system of values and security persisted.
For instance, in his 2007 book Comrade J, Pete Earley uses the story of Sergei Tretyakov, a high-ranking Russian intelligence officer who defected while at the UN in 2000, to demonstrate how Moscow continued with active intelligence and influence operations against the US even in the 1990s, the friendliest period in their relationship.
Tretyakov makes a thought-provoking statement in the book:
I want to warn Americans. As a people, you are very naive about Russia and its intentions. You believe because the Soviet Union no longer exists, Russia now is your friend. It isn’t, and I can show you how the SVR [Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service — ed.] is trying to destroy the US even today and even more than the KGB did during the Cold War.
Thanks to the endless possibilities of the internet, disinformation and national propaganda acquired an entirely new meaning with the rise to power of the former KGB intelligence officer and FSB director Vladimir Putin in 1999. The KGB’s machinery was polished and harnessed to serve Russia’s imperialist interests. The state quickly assumed control over the media, and the leading television stations became the world’s most professional propaganda outlets.
The authorities turned their attention to information security, which quickly found its way into new strategy documents. Its nuances were made famous by Russian general and current Chief of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, in his notorious doctrine.
The introduction of social media and its rapid development have proved to be an unprecedented goldmine for intelligence services. The distribution of disinformation is considerably easier in today’s world than it was in the late 1980s, for instance.To compare: it took more than three years for the KGB’s Operation INFEKTION to succeed in spreading a global rumor that the HIV virus originated from the Pentagon’s biological weapons program. This information leak first appeared in a small pro-Soviet Indian paper, Patriot, on 17 July 1983. Two years later, this was referenced by a popular Soviet weekly, Literaturnaya Gazeta, as the source of the scandalous story. From there it found its way to the front page of a British tabloid, and by April 1987 the fake news had been published by the mainstream media of 50 countries.
A standard message featured by a leftist paper within the AIDS disinformation campaign
On the eve of the decisive round of the 2017 French presidential elections, the favorite, Emmanuel Macron, fell victim to a massive hacking attack. The database of his e-mails and other documents went viral on a file-sharing service within minutes. In the space of just three hours, the post was shared around 47,000 times, and half a day later it was trending worldwide on Twitter. Even though Russia has denied involvement, the cyber trails prove otherwise.
In the noughties, several Western intelligence leaders were already complaining that Russia had become more active than it had been during the Cold War, but this went largely unnoticed. Russia was off the radar while the focus lay on Afghanistan and the Middle East in general. The Western political elite began to regard Russia as a threat only after the occupation and annexation of Crimea. This also brought Moscow’s activities back into the sights of intelligence services.
IV. Estonia as a target of Russian information attacks
Depicting Estonia (and Latvia) as a country that discriminates against minorities and promotes Nazism has been one of Russia’s largest and most consistent international deception operations in the last 25 years. The reasons for this are numerous, the main one being Moscow’s strategic interest in restoring its authority over the Baltic States. Russia became particularly pushy in the 1990s when Estonia and the other Baltic States were applying for membership of NATO and the European Union.
On 4 December 1991, only three months after the restoration of independence, the Estonian foreign ministry was forced to send its Soviet counterpart a note condemning President Mikhail Gorbachev’s hostile attitude towards the Baltic States during his appearance on Soviet Central Television the previous day. Gorbachev first blamed the Baltic States for violating the human rights of minorities and then added that Russians, Ukrainians and other minorities living in the Baltic States had requested protection from the Soviet Union. Estonian diplomats treated this as a threat to national security.
Active measures continued to be taken in this spirit on both diplomatic and journalistic levels for years. Essentially, it has not stopped, even today. The situation was particularly severe in the 1990s when Russia tried to influence the West to ignore the Baltic States. Moscow also tried to discourage Estonia from adopting the Aliens Act in 1993 by issuing threats bordering on the undiplomatic.
For instance, on 18 June 1993, the then Russian deputy foreign minister, Vitaly Churkin, who later became Russia’s Permanent Representative to the UN, said on Radio Moscow that: “Russian-Estonian relations are clearly deteriorating. We are currently preparing a package of serious diplomatic, political and perhaps not only political measures with regard to Estonia.” Six days later, President Boris Yeltsin said that Estonia had “forgotten” geopolitical and demographic reality and threatened that Russia had the means to refresh its memory. Foreign Minister Andrey Kozyrev did not hold back on 14 August 1993, saying that international relations in the Baltic States had “strong potential for violence and unrest.”
On 23 August 1993—exactly 54 years after the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact—Yeltsin’s press secretary, Vyacheslav Kostikov, naively stated that
“the forces that try to push Russia out of the Baltic States must consider that Russia governed the Baltic geopolitical area for centuries and it has invested great material and intellectual resources into its development.”
On 2 March 1994, Artur Laast, a diplomat at the Estonian Embassy in Moscow, was invited to the Russian foreign ministry, where the head of the Second European Department, Yuri Fokin, made a threatening oral statement about President Lennart Meri’s criticism of Russia in his speech at the annual Matthiae-Mahl dinner in Hamburg on 25 February. The memo of the meeting ends with Laast quoting the Russian diplomat: “If the course that is focused on aggravating the relations between the two neighboring countries does not change, Estonia will assume full responsibility.”
In the 1994 report “Russian Threats to Estonia” by the embassy in Moscow, an Estonian diplomat discusses political hazards among other questions. The author of the report writes that Russia
“attempts to influence Estonia by damaging us on the international arena. For this, it uses the well-known thesis of violating the human rights of the Russian minority, spreads rumors that Estonia has become a transit country for crime and that Estonian citizens participate in military conflicts in Tajikistan and Chechnya, and accuses us of supporting separatism in Russia.”
These are only a few examples from the archive of the Estonian foreign ministry that illustrate Russia’s diplomatic pressure on Estonia, but also on the West. At the time, occupying forces were still in Estonia. The troops were withdrawn on 31 August 1994.
When the First Chechen War broke out at the end of 1994, Russian media gave extensive coverage to a false news story about alleged Baltic female biathletes serving as snipers on Dudayev’s side. As the so-called “White Tights,” the phantom snipers even featured in songs.
From my time as a foreign correspondent in Moscow, I clearly remember a detailed, multi-page account in the daily Moskovskiye Novosti of how Estonians were skilled and disciplined killers: all this to distort our image and influence public opinion at home and abroad.
World War II has remained one of the main arguments in the information war against Estonia over the last 25 years. The tension grew at the beginning of Putin’s tenure and finally led to the Bronze Night events in 2007. Russia has not made much progress on this matter or on other topics.
Russian anti-Estonian cartoon attacks Estonian schools as an alleged hotbed of Nazism as opposed to Russian/Soviet-style “peace education.” Source: newsbalt.ru
Estonia has now been a member of NATO and the EU for 13 years and will use its presidency of the EU Council to collaborate with other member states to implement more effective means to combat Russia’s information attacks and disinformation campaigns.
V. In place of an epilogue
In 1930, Professor Dmitry Manuilsky of Moscow’s Leninist School of Political Warfare wrote that Russia was creating the world’s most progressive peace movement to lull the West to sleep. Convinced that a war between the two great systems was inevitable, Manuilsky thought that
“foolish and decadent capitalist countries will be happy to use the opportunity to cooperate with us to bring about their own destruction. They will use every opportunity to become friends. As soon as the enemy lets their guard down, we will crush them with our iron fist.”
The Soviet empire used various means to achieve its geopolitical goals and, to an extent, world domination. At the forefront of the campaign in the free world were the “useful idiots” and agents of influence.Moscow took good care of its mouthpieces. In the 1980s, French communists were paid 24 million dollars, while Americans received 21 million dollars. Finnish communists received a generous reward of 16.5 million dollars for their pro-Russian views. During the final two decades of the Soviet Union, Moscow distributed more than 400 million dollars of such benefits all over the world, mainly to extremist communist movements.
The fight for the hearts and minds of the free world was on, and it has not subsided even today. Russia’s new clients are mainly extremist forces of both left and right, and by supporting them Moscow tries to weaken the integrity of the European Union and NATO, disrupt the internal stability of their member countries, and create the circumstances for a Finlandization of Europe.
Russia has managed to make a right mess of America’s domestic politics. However, the Dutch and French elections provided some assurance that Moscow’s influence operations have limits and that Europe is not disintegrating. Then again, the fight continues and it is too early to draw any final conclusions.
The international debate has provided many good ideas and political suggestions to counter Russia’s aggression, information attacks, and propaganda. History provides good counsel, even here.
On 14 April 1950, only 12 months after the founding of NATO, the US National Security Council’s special task force presented President Harry Truman with top-secret report No. 68. The 58-page document was essentially the basis for the US long-term policy on the Soviet Union, which culminated with the victory in the Cold War in the late 1980s. The report described the challenge posed by the Soviet Union as something that could cause “the destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself.” The Soviet Union was treated as the exact opposite of the US, with Moscow’s expansionist policy deemed a great threat to the security of the free world.
Among other topics, the report also highlighted the fight against the Soviet Union’s influence operations. The document stressed that the campaign for truth must above all become a fight for people’s minds.
Putin boasts of Russia’s fight against ISIS in Syria to the filmmaker Oliver Stone showing a U.S. video from Afghanistan. Screenshots from Stone’s film The Putin Interviews (2017)
A lot has changed by 2017 but, in general, Russia and the US, together with the latter’s allies, remain in fundamental opposition. Hence it is vital that the allies’ conflict-avoidance strategy looks beyond the false hope of solving problems with meaningless dialogue.
Terror-related acts committed by refugees widespread, according to new report
FNC: At least 61 people who came to the United States as refugees engaged in terrorist activities between 2002 and 2016, according to an explosive new report coming on the heels of the Supreme Court’s reinstatement of much of President Trump’s travel ban.
The alarming report by the Heritage Foundation identified scores of refugees, including many who came prior to 2002, as having taken part in activities ranging from lying to investigators about terror plots, to actually taking part in them. The report, aimed at reforming the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, or USRAP, calls for stricter limits and restrictions on refugees.
“There is no universal right to migrate, resettlement is not the solution to mass displacement, and U.S. policymakers have a responsibility to ensure that the United States takes in only as many refugees as it can safely vet and assimilate,” the report states. “The United States operates the program not because it is obligated to resettle refugees, but because the U.S. is a humane country and USRAP serves its national interests.”
Refugee Admissions Totals from Global Regions to the U.S. (The Heritage Foundation )
The report, written by policy analyst David Inserra, could lend weight to the Trump administration’s effort to curtail the number of refugees who come to the U.S. every year. But perhaps most worrisome, the report warns that no amount of refugee vetting can account for the “1.5 generation” — those who come to the U.S. with peaceful intentions and then become radicalized while living in America.
“Given the threat that we found in the 1.5 generation, more needs to be done in the U.S. assimilation process,” said John Cooper, spokesman for the Heritage Foundation. “We can’t vet an 8-year-old to see if he will become a terrorist when he turns 18 or 28. Instead, we as a country need to rethink the way we assimilate refugees, and immigrants as a whole for that matter.
The Vetting Process for Refugees Coming to the U.S. (The Heritage Foundation )
“In the past few decades, the United States has drifted from its strong assimilation ethos, and the terrorism in Europe paints a disturbing picture of where non-assimilation leads,” he added.
The Trump administration has taken measures to both limit and more tightly screen refugees. Earlier this year, the administration reduced the number of refugees that it would accept this fiscal year from the Obama administration’s intended 110,000 to 50,000 – and that cap has almost been reached.
“A review is especially critical following the Obama administration’s rapid, and largely unprecedented, expansion of the program in the final year of his administration,” Cooper added. “Any administration has a responsibility to ensure all existing refugee and immigration programs, including the USRAP, best serve U.S. interests.”
A U.S. State Department official told Fox News the administration will soon provide guidance regarding those already scheduled for travel before last week’s Supreme Court decision lifting an injunction against Trump’s executive order banning travel from six mostly Muslim countries plagued by terror.
But the report leaves little doubt that the perpetrators of future terror attacks are already here, including some who may not yet be radicalized. It recommends a long-term focus be placed on migrants “embracing an American creed, learning English and gaining an education” which will in turn help them to develop and sustain “an American identity and sense of belonging.”
The report also supported the widely reported claim that refugees coming to the U.S undergo more vetting than any other immigrants coming to the country under other types of programs and visa categories. The vetting process for refugees typically takes 18 to 24 months from the time of the initial referral by the U.N. refugee agency, but “in the waning months of the Obama administration the U.S. reduced the time to as little as three months for Syrians by surging resources to the region.”
It also mandated that a “foolproof vetting system” is impossible, with obvious limitations, such as lack of identification or forged documents especially when fleeing war.
“To be as cost-effective as possible – which saves the most lives – the U.S. should focus the majority of its refugee efforts on helping front-line states care for the refugees they shelter,” the report states.
Specifically, the report suggests that the U.S. can do more to urge Middle Eastern countries – most notably the oil-wealthy Gulf States – to resettle Syrian and Iraqi refugees.
“Many Syrian and Iraqi refugees share similar cultural and religious values with the people of the Gulf States, which have the financial capacity for resettlement,” the report found. “Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates have donated hundreds of millions of dollars each for relief efforts, but the U.S. should urge the Gulf States to increase their aid for their Arab Muslim neighbors by resettling Syrians with all the rights and protections due to refugees.”
As it stands, the Gulf States are not signatories to the U.N. Refugee Protocol and thus do not offer refugee status. They will admit some primarily as migrant workers or to reunify families.
Fraud is also a cause for concern, according to the report. It cites as an example the Dadaab refugee camp in northern Kenya, which was exposed several years ago for developing an entire industry centered on “coaching applicants” and selling resettlement slots for as much as $10,000.
The report goes on to outline ways in which the U.S. could minimize fiscal costs and improve economic outcomes by establishing private resettlement programs on a trial basis rather than relying solely on government. But above all, the report emphasizes the need to ensure the program first and foremost puts America first.
It argues that refugee resettlement can indeed advance national interests by enabling the U.S. to “assert American leadership in foreign crisis,” providing “the U.S. with a way to respond positively to intractable crisis” and assisting allies and partners in crisis. But reviews by the Trump team to the program to achieve this objective are crucial.
The Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) is one of the State Department’s “functional,” as opposed to “geographic” bureaus. This indicates a Bureau that focuses on a particular issue wherever it arises around the world. As described in our mission statement, our focus is refugees, other migrants, and conflict victims. Our goal is to protect these people, who are often living in quite dangerous conditions.
The Bureau’s mission statement:
The mission of the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) is to provide protection, ease suffering, and resolve the plight of persecuted and uprooted people around the world on behalf of the American people by providing life-sustaining assistance, working through multilateral systems to build global partnerships, promoting best practices in humanitarian response, and ensuring that humanitarian principles are thoroughly integrated into U.S. foreign and national security policy.
What does the Bureau do internationally?
The Bureau works with the international community to develop humane and what are termed “durable” solutions to their displacement. The three durable solutions, are:
Repatriation – going home when they are no longer at risk of persecution
Local Integration – settling permanently in the country to which they have fled
Resettlement – settling permanently in a third country
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), fewer than 1% of refugees worldwide are ever resettled. However, although resettlement often is the durable solution of “last resort,” it remains a vital tool for providing international protection and for meeting the special needs of individual refugees who are unable to return home.
Are internally displaced persons (IDPs) part of the Bureau’s portfolio?
Internally displaced persons are people who have been displaced from their homes but who have not crossed an internationally recognized border. The Bureau supports the work of UNHCR and ICRC when these organizations respond to the needs of internally displaced persons.
Numerous other organizations, such as UNICEF, the World Food Program, and others also provide assistance to IDPs that complement the activities of UNHCR and ICRC. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funds the work of these other international organizations as well as non-governmental organizations to respond to IDP needs as well.
Who does the work?
The Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM) has approximately 130 civil service and foreign service staff. On the foreign aid side, we are divided into geographic offices. Our program to resettle refugees in the United States is handled by our Admissions Office. We also have a policy office that monitors and evaluates the relief work conducted by the organizations we fund.
How does the Bureau deliver assistance to refugees?
The Bureau does not operate refugee camps, or otherwise give aid directly to refugees. Instead, in the interests of effectiveness and efficiency, we work with the United Nations (UN) and other international organizations, as well as with non-governmental organizations, that operate these programs. The Bureau manages the contributions to these organizations, and monitors the programs we fund: we make sure they are working properly and ascertain that they are in line with U.S. government policies.
For instance, take the refugee relief set-up on the border between Thailand and Burma. Many of the camps were built with assistance from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The Burmese refugees receive health services, in part, from a private American charity, International Medical Corps. In Bangkok, the refugee resettlement center, called an “overseas processing entity,” handles cases of Burmese referred for resettlement, and is managed by another U.S.-based group, the International Rescue Committee. All these groups receive funding from the Bureau.
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Starsalliance
Fragment of the cover of Disinformation, a book by Ion Mihai Pacepa, ex-deputy chief of communist Romania’s foreign intelligence, and law professor Ronald J. Rychlak 
