Category Archives: Department of Homeland Security

Al-Qaeda Chief Urges 9/11-Style Attacks In New Audio Message

Posted on by

Al-Qaeda leader calls for new 9/11 strikes against the US and praises Palestinian knife attacks on Israelis in new audio message to fanatics

  • Ayman al-Zawahiri released a 16-minute tirade of hate against the West 
  • The al-Qaeda chief praised terrorists who attacked London, Paris and Bali
  • He called on his followers to start attacking targets in western countries 
  • Al-Zawahiri called on all Muslim terror groups to unite against the west 

 

Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri has called for a new wave of 9/11 strikes on the United States while praising Palestinians who are carrying out stabbing attacks across Israel.

The terror chief, who was a close advisor of Osama Bin Laden released the 16-minute propaganda message on the internet where it was spread by social media by armchair jihadists.

In the message, al-Zawahiri ordered his followers to attack ‘the West’, with the United States the main target over its continuing support for Israel.

According to Vocativ.com, which has listened to the broadcast entitled ‘we shall unite to liberate Jerusalem’.

He specifically praises the terrorists involved in stabbing Israeli citizens while urging followers in western countries.

He also specifically mentions ‘the attacks in Madrid, Bali, London and Paris’.

The terrorist leader urged fellow Muslims to ‘liberate Palestine’ while facing down ‘American-European-Russian-Shiite-Alawite aggression.’

Echoing Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech he told Muslims to stop fighting amongst themselves and ‘stand in one line, from East Turkestan to Morocco, against the satanic alliance that attacks Islam, its nation and its house’.

The audio file was released on Sunday night.

Al-Zawahiri currently has a $25million bounty on his head.

He had previously cited the Charlie Hebdo killers in earlier broadcasts.

In August he pledged Al-Qaeda’s allegiance to the Taliban following the death of its leader Mullah Mohammad Omar.

***

Al-Qaeda Chief Urges 9/11-Style Attacks In New Audio Message

Ayman al-Zawahiri also praises a spate of recent stabbing attacks by Palestinians against Israelis

In a new audio message released late Sunday night, Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri urged 9/11-style attacks against the U.S. and praised a recent spate of stabbing attacks by Palestinians against Israelis.

The 16-minute message, discovered by Vocativ’s deep web technology as the recording was initially distributed on social media platforms, features al-Zawahiri calling for attacks against “the West,” especially against the U.S. for its support of Israel. “Those who support Israel should pay in their blood and economy the price for supporting the crimes of Israel against Islam and Muslims,” al-Zawahiri says on the recording, titled “We Shall Unite To Liberate Jerusalem.”

He also called on fighters to follow in the path of those who carried out the September 11, 2001 attacks, “and the attacks in Madrid, Bali, London and Paris.”

Al-Zawahiri urged Muslims to unite, saying they must establish a Caliphate and an Islamic state in Egypt and the Levant, and that they must “liberate Palestine.” Muslims today face “American-European-Russian-Shiite-Alawite aggression,” he said, before calling on jihadist organizations worldwide to stop infighting and “stand in one line, from East Turkestan to Morocco, against the satanic alliance that attacks Islam, its nation and its house.”

Al-Zawahiri has released a string of audio statements in recent months following a long silence. In August, he pledged allegiance to the new Taliban leader, Mullah Akhtar, and later continued with a series of audio recordings blaming ISIS leader Abu Baker al-Baghdadi for creating civil war in Islam.

Sunday’s statement was the first time al-Zawahiri referenced a recent wave of rising Israeli-Palestinian violence, which has centered in part around access to the site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

Obama’s New Executive Action: Ban the Box

Posted on by

In part from Officer.com: The federal Bureau of Prisons plans to release 6,000 prisoners at the end of October, implementing a decision last year to slash the number of incarcerated drug offenders by nearly half.

Officials said the nationwide releases over four days starting Oct. 30 will be the largest in U.S. history.

Last year, in line with a concerted effort by the Obama administration to reduce the number of drug offenders in U.S. prisons, the U.S. Sentencing Commission voted to cut drug sentences by an average of two years, potentially affecting as many as 46,000 of 100,000 cases.

In the coming year, an additional 8,550 prisoners will be eligible for release, according to Sentencing Commission spokesman Matt Osterrieder, though he said that not all of them will be approved.

What are employers supposed to do to vet applicants especially in positions where a clean background is required, something like banking, retail or any position for that matter where integrity and morality is centric to employment? Well…there is always Facebook, where employers are presently using social media platforms to determine history, friends, associates and even political bias.

Further, presidential executive orders are designed for exclusive use of operating government, yet with Barack Obama and this mission of his, he is injecting his policies into private enterprise. There must be legal challenges to this new ‘protected class’ operation which is common in the Obama administration, as we clearly know foreign illegals are a proven protected class.

HuffPo:WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama on Monday will announce a series of measures designed to reduce obstacles facing former prisoners reintegrating into society, including an executive action directing federal employers to delay asking questions about a job applicant’s criminal history until later in the application process.

Many states, cities and private employers have already taken steps to “ban the box,” which refers to the checkbox on employment applications asking if the applicant has ever been convicted of a crime. However, some federal employers and contractors still ask the question. Obama’s executive action will apply to federal employers, but not to contractors.

Hillary joins Barack Obama on this same objective calling it ‘racial profiling’. This is all yet another misguided social engineering plan to reform the criminal justice system, where law enforcement, district attorneys and judges don’t seem to get any opportunity to voice their respective positions.

Obama to announce executive actions to help prisoners rejoin society

Plans for current and former inmates include education and housing efforts and a push to remove criminal-background questions from job applications

Barack Obama will announce a series of executive actions to help current and former prisoners re-enter society on Monday, as the president continues his campaign to wind down the war on drugs and reform a “broken” system.

Obama’s plans include millions of dollars in education grants for current prisoners, new policies to help former inmates find housing, a “clean slate clearing house” to help former prisoners clear their records where possible, and a call to Congress to “ban the box” – the space on a job application that asks about criminal backgrounds.

Obama is expected to unveil the plans at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, the hometown of Democratic senator Cory Booker, one of the leaders of a bipartisan push for criminal justice reform.

The president has for months toured the nation in a loose campaign for reform, visiting police in Chicago, the NAACP in Philadelphia, and inmates in Oklahoma. On Saturday, he again raised the issue in his weekly address, saying: “We know that having millions of people in the criminal justice system, without any ability to find a job after release, is unsustainable.”

There are 2.2m people incarcerated in federal and state prisons around the US, roughly 20% of the world’s total number of imprisoned people. The number ballooned in the decades of the “war on drugs”, in particular due to “tough on crime” laws enacted during the 1990s.

Obama’s latest push for reform coincides with the early release of several thousand federal prisoners this past weekend. About 6,000 drug offenders were granted early releases thanks to policy changes by the US Sentencing Commission, which made the revisions retroactive last year. Judges then reviewed tens of thousands of applications, with the 6,000 federal prisoners the first to receive early release.

But despite the push for reducing mandatory minimum sentences – often seen as a major cause of mass incarceration over minor crimes – reform advocates around the country have called for more attention for former prisoners. About 650,000 inmates are released every year, and many return to an alien, hostile America facing bars to housing and employment and with little to their names. More here.

Can FBI Investigate the Director of CIA over Private Emails?

Posted on by

There have been countless top agency people within the Obama administration that have violated law, procedures and even a White House directive regarding use of private emails and violations of communications security and operational security.

First we came to know about Lisa Jackson, Secretary of the EPA, then there was Eric Holder himself, while he was the top lawyer at the Department of Justice. Hillary and her server operation made an art of violating all protocols, but now John Brennan appears to be the next one in line where the FBI needs to open an investigation case. Is that possible? Has anyone asked Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson about his use of private emails? How about a massive campaign where every administration official has to sign a compliance document, then take a polygraph, then be terminated for violations? Imagine…..just imagine the fallout. If for nothing else, these people should lose their respective security clearances, this is dereliction of duty and malfeasance, much less a violation of Oath.

Hackers release info on Obama’s national security transition team

by: Aaron Boyd 

The slow drip of information allegedly stolen from CIA Director John Brennan’s personal email account continues to find its way onto WikiLeaks, with a list of personal information about 20 members of President Obama’s transition team added to the leak in the most recent post on Oct. 26.

The list — which includes names, personal emails, phone numbers, Social Security numbers and more — was originally posted to Twitter by user @_CWA_ on Oct. 19, however the account was quickly suspended and the post removed.

After the Twitter account was shut down, “Crackas With Attitude” — the duo claiming to have perpetrated the hack — began slowly posting the information to WikiLeaks. The third and latest dump came on Oct. 26, including the list and the dossier of a FBI agent in the counterterrorism division.

The list posted Monday mostly includes names of former intelligence and national security officials, some of whom served under President George W. Bush and some who served or currently serve under President Barack Obama, including Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson.

The names have something else in common, as well.

All of the people listed were part of the Obama administration’s transition team, with most of them serving on the National Security Team. The team members listed covered the Defense Department, DHS, CIA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Only three names advised on other aspects of the transition but Federal Times confirmed that everyone whose information was exposed served in some capacity.

The document was created (or most recently updated) on Nov. 16, 2008, according to the associated metadata.

The breadth of the release is minor compared to the high-profile breach of the Office of Personnel Management last year but the implications are still serious, especially as this information was released publicly on the Internet.

“It’s a pretty serious proposition to have any of that information out there,” said Marcus Christian, a former federal prosecutor and current partner with the law firm of Mayer Brown’s cybersecurity and data privacy practice.

While the perpetrators reportedly used social engineering to trick a helpline support employee into changing Brennan’s account password, the subsequent exfiltration of data and postings online still constitute a cyber crime, Christian said.

“Often times we look to the technological solution [for cybersecurity] but often times the problem — no matter how intricate and hardened we think our technology happens to be — there’s always some weakness,” he said, including the human element.

If the perpetrators are caught, Christian expects they could be prosecuted under a combination of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and federal Aggravated Identity Theft statutes, with the latter carrying a two-year mandatory minimum sentence.

Putin’s Most Terrifying Army

Posted on by

This hacking wing of the Kremlin is not lost on our Congressional members, they clearly are aware of the names and events.

Organized crime is now a major element of Russia statecraft
BusinessInsider: In the past couple years, Russian hackers have launched attacks on a French television network, a German steelmaker, the Polish stock market, the White House, the US House of Representatives, the US State Department, and The New York Times.

And according to press reports citing Western intelligence officials, the perpetrators weren’t rogue cyber-pranksters. They were working for the Kremlin.

Cybercrime, it appears, has become a tool of Russian statecraft. And not just cybercrime.

Vladimir Putin’s regime has become increasingly adept at deploying a whole range of practices that are more common among crime syndicates than permanent members of the UN Security Council.

In some cases, as with the hacking, this involves the Kremlin subcontracting organized crime groups to do things the Russian state cannot do itself with plausible deniability. And in others, it involves the state itself engaging in kidnapping, extortion, blackmail, bribery, and fraud to advance its agenda.

Spanish prosecutor Jose Grinda has noted that the activities of Russian criminal networks are virtually indistinguishable from those of the government.

“It’s not so much a mafia state as a nationalized mafia,” Russian organized crime expert Mark Galeotti, a professor at New York University and co-host of the Power Vertical Podcast, said in a recent lecture at the Hudson Institute.

Hackers, Gangsters, And Goblins
According to a report by the FBI and US intelligence agencies, Russia is home to the most skilled community of cybercriminals on the globe, and the Kremlin has close ties to them.

“They have let loose the hounds,” Tom Kellermann, chief security officer at Trend Micro, a Tokyo-based security firm, told Bloomberg News.

Citing unidentified officials, Bloomberg reported that Russian hackers had stepped up surveillance of essential infrastructure, including power grids and energy-supply networks, in the United States, Europe, and Canada.

Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of the security firm CrowdStrike, noted recently that the Russian security services have been actively recruiting an army of hackers.

“When someone is identified as being technically proficient in the Russian underground,” a pending criminal case against them “suddenly disappears and those people are never heard from again,” Alperovitch said in an interview with The Hill, adding that the hacker in question is then working for the Russian security services.

“We know that’s going on,” Alperovitch added.

And as a result, criminal hackers “that used to hunt banks eight hours a day are now operating two hours a day turning their guns on NATO and government targets,” Kellermann of Trend Micro told The Hill, adding that these groups are “willingly operating as cyber-militias.”

The hacking is just one example of how the Kremlin effectively uses organized crime as a geopolitical weapon.

Moscow relied heavily on local organized crime structures in its support for separatist movements in Transdniester, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Donbas.

In the conflict in eastern Ukraine, organized crime groups served as agents for the Kremlin, fomenting pro-Russia unrest and funneling arms to rebel groups.

In annexed Crimea, the Kremlin installed a reputed gangster known as “The Goblin” as the peninsula’s chief executive.

And of course there is the case of Eston Kohver, the Estonian law enforcement officer who was investigating a smuggling ring run jointly by Russian organized crime groups and the Russian Federal Security Service.

Kohver was kidnapped in Estonia September 2014, brought across the Russian border at gunpoint, and convicted of espionage. He was released in a prisoner exchange last month.

The Geopolitics Of Extortion
But Putin’s mafia statecraft doesn’t just involve using and colluding with organized crime groups.

It often acts like an organized crime group itself.
In some cases this involves using graft as a means of control. This is a tactic Moscow has deployed throughout the former Soviet space, involving elites in corrupt schemes — everything from shady energy deals or money-laundering operations — to secure a “captured constituency.”

This is a tactic Russia attempted to use in Georgia following the 2003 Rose Revolution and in Ukraine after the 2004 Orange Revolution, where “corruption and shadow networks were mobilized to undermine the new leadership’s reform agenda,” according to James Greene in a 2012 report for Chatham House.

This was particularly successful in Ukraine, where opaque gas deals were used “to suborn Ukraine’s post-Orange Revolution new leadership,” Greene wrote.

And Putin is clearly hoping to repeat this success in eastern Ukraine today — especially after elections are held in the rebel areas of Donbas.

“His bet in the eastern Ukraine local election, if it ever takes place, won’t be on the rebel field commanders but on local oligarchs who ran the region before the 2014 ‘revolution of dignity.’ Through them, he will hope to exert both economic and political influence on Kiev.” political commentator Leonid Bershidsky wrote in Bloomberg View.

In addition to graft, Moscow has also effectively utilized blackmail — making the international community a series of offers it can’t refuse.

It’s a neat trick. First you create instability, as in Ukraine, or exasperate existing instability, as in Syria.Then offer your services to establish order.

You essentially create demand — and then meet it. You get to act like a rogue and be treated like a statesman.

It’s how protection rackets operate. And it has become one of the pillars of Putin’s foreign policy.
“It’s the geopolitics of extortion, but it’s probably working,” Galeotti told Voice of America in a recent interview.

“He’s identifying a whole series of potential trouble spots around the world, places that matter to the West, and is essentially indicating that he can either be a good partner, if they’re willing to make a deal with him, or he can stir up more trouble.”

Cold War Part 2, Gathering Conditions

Posted on by

At the center of the conditions we have Iran, Russia, China and for extra measure, more aggressive terror factions and cells.

We had Afghanistan won until Barack Obama declared a termination to hostilities and combat roles. Now, conditions include:

Islamic State militants who say they are based in Afghanistan have in recent days promoted their alleged successes in the country. And on Wednesday they issued a call for Muslims to “take up arms” against Jews and Christians and “fight them in whatever way we can.”

The message in the Pashto language was the third time in less than a week that IS has highlighted its activities in Afghanistan on its website. In recent days, U.S. and Afghan officials have warned of an increased IS presence in Afghanistan and of its threat to Central Asia.

FNC: Russia has helped Iran deliver weapons into Syria twice a day over the past 10 days, western intelligence sources tell Fox News. Those sources say Russian cargo planes transported the weapons. The planes were spotted earlier this month on the tarmac at the Russian air base in Latakia, Syria’s primary port city. The flights are not registered, and are in breach of two United Nations Security Council resolutions which impose an arms embargo on Iran.

Fox News is told the increased Russian transport of Iranian weapons is being coordinated by Qassem Soulimeini, the head of the Iranian Al-Quds force, as well as President Vladimir Putin and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. An Iranian civilian airline, Mahan Air, is flying military personnel into Syria several times each day from Tehran to Latakia.

Tehran’s support has been crucial to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s survival. Besides significant financial aid to Assad, Iran has acknowledged that its Revolutionary Guard officers are on the ground in Syria in an advisory role. There have been multiple Iranian officers and soldiers killed in fighting in Syria, though Tehran denies the presence of actual combat troops in the country.

In part: The United States has upgraded the security at its two largest overseas nuclear weapons bases, Incirlik Air Base in Turkey and Aviano Air Base in Italy. Incirlik is undergoing a particularly extensive upgrade, a move connected to its vulnerable location close to the Syrian border.

Recent satellite images from Incirlik and Aviano show double-fence security perimeters—a sealed-off area where intruders can be shot—being built around the nuclear weapons storage areas. At Incirlik the garage holding the trucks that service the warheads is also being improved, along with the trucks themselves. Incirlik’s newly upgraded area contains 21 vaults, each holding two to three warheads, and will be equipped with lighting, cameras, and intrusion-detection devices. In addition to soldiers already guarding the enclosure, manned vehicles will also patrol space between the two fences around the clock.

Combined, the Incirlik measures amount to a major security upgrade. “They didn’t use to have the special double-fence security perimeter with sensors and the patrol road around the nuclear weapons vaults,” explained Hans Kristensen, a nuclear expert at the Federation of American Scientists, who first reported the Incirlik and Aviano activity on his blog. “When the vaults were constructed in the nineties, they were considered so secure that the special security perimeter that had previously been used for nuclear weapons storage areas was no longer considered necessary.” He added that it’s unclear whether the upgrade is a direct result of volatility in the region or related to changed Pentagon security requirements.

More Cold War Part 2 Indicators:

Just as Russia has increased its military activism in the Middle East, the Kremlin is turning down the temperature in eastern Ukraine in recent weeks, as the September 1 cease-fire is largely holding and larger caliber weaponry is being pulled back. The October 2 Paris meeting of the leaders of France, Germany, Ukraine, and Russia—the so-called Normandy Format—yielded a modest but positive result in postponing unsanctioned elections in the separatist areas. Yet the ultimate goal of returning Ukraine’s sovereignty over its eastern border still seems distant. Russia’s shadow therefore continues to loom over NATO’s eastern flank.

Against this geopolitical backdrop, 28 NATO defense ministers agreed on a plan to expand the NATO Response Force (NRF) to 40,000 troops, more than double its current size. This implements one of the principal elements of the program launched by NATO leaders at the September 2014 Wales Summit to upgrade NATO’s rapid-response capacity and to begin adapting the alliance to the challenges from Russia in the east. Among the other key elements in NATO’s adaptation are the creation of a high-readiness “spearhead” task force—Secretary General Stoltenberg announced October 8 that lead nations for the spearhead force have been identified through 2022 (France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Turkey, and the United Kingdom), demonstrating resolve by NATO members to put resources behind its top-priority initiative. Thus far, the United States has deferred a decision to become a lead nation for the spearhead force, but the Obama administration’s European Reassurance Initiative invested $1 billion in Fiscal Year 2015 in strengthening European defense, enabling U.S. force rotations, security assistance, and pre-positioning of equipment in Europe. Sustaining U.S. investments beyond FY15 will be essential to ensuring European—and transatlantic—security.

Need more? al Qaeda in the Maghreb, deploying more special forces to Iraq against ISIS, additional success and growth of ISIS in Afghanistan, terror plan or Asia discovered, the Taliban is aiding and harboring al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

There is more, but you understand that since America under Barack Obama has retreated, the enemies are exploiting the weakness and lack of strategy by the West, where the United States used to lead.