Militant Islam Mentoring Program in U.S. Prisons

A senate hearing in 2006 delivered focused testimony on terror cells forming in U.S. prisons. The complexities of Islam in prison came to the fore in the United States through the disruption of an alleged terrorist plot in Los Angeles in 2005.  Prosecutors charge the plot was hatched in prison by a group of Muslim converts.   The case added to the national debate on how Islam is taught in our prisons, as well as on the American approach to incarceration itself.

This is not a new phenomenon however, it is much worse today. An clear example of the prison conditions is found in this indictment from California in 2004. Then there is yet another from New York which has many moving parts and a host of militants.

This brings us today. This particular person proves the dramatic change and mentoring to militant Islam. The Department of Justice promotes faith-based programs and outreach to Imams and mosques where the DoJ clearly has the history of cases from Jose Padilla, al Qaeda and all prior terror cases.

Gangster-turned-radical imam may have radicalized dozens behind bars

A former U.S. Marine who became a Muslim radical, gang leader and bodyguard to the blind sheik behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing is so adept at turning fellow prisoners into potential extreme jihadists that Florida prison officials have kept him in shackles and in solitary confinement for the last three years, and federal authorities want a judge to tack on another three decades.

Marcus Dwayne Robertson, a Muslim extremist also known as Imam Abu Taubah who once led a murderous New York gang dubbed “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” before resurfacing decades later as a radical imam at a Florida mosque, has been held at the John E. Polk Correctional Facility in Seminole County, Fla. Currently imprisoned on a weapons conviction, he faces sentencing on June 26 for a tax fraud conviction. Federal authorities want him locked up and kept away from other inmates out of fear he will turn them into dangerous jihadists, as he converted a number of fellow inmates including a white supremacist.
“He is good at selling the dream.”
– Former associate of Marcus Dwayne Robertson
“The United States believes that the defendant is still an extremist, just as he was in the early 1990s,” prosecutors said in recent court filings in which they alleged Robertson continues to be a terrorism threat. “The only differences are that the defendant is now focused on training others to commit violent acts as opposed to committing them himself, and the violent acts are to occur overseas instead of inside the United States.”

Robertson, 46, who served time in the 1990s for crimes related to his days as a Brooklyn gang leader, has been imprisoned in Florida in 2011 on a gun charge. In just one year behind bars and among the general population, he allegedly radicalized 36 fellow inmates. Prison officials moved the persuasive imam into solitary confinement in 2012, where he has remained since. He faces sentencing later this month on a tax fraud conviction that prosecutors hope will keep him in prison for more than three decades. The U.S. attorney is using the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to seek an enhanced sentence for Robertson.

Robertson’s attorney wants his client, who has been held for four years, released immediately with time served, but federal authorities are believed to fear that, if freed, Robertson could use his Orlando-area mosque to convince more young Muslims to go overseas and take up arms against the west.

“He is good at selling the dream,” said one of Robertson’s former colleagues.


Robertson’s Orlando-based Fundamental Islamic Knowledge Seminary is not taking students while he fights charges against him. Robertson has been held in a windowless cell in an otherwise empty wing of the prison facility and kept shackled to the floor with an armed guard assigned exclusively to him around the clock, according to a federal civil rights lawsuit he filed against the government pro se in 2012 that was ultimately dismissed. A person familiar with Robertson’s case confirmed the conditions and told FoxNews.com prison officials fear Robertson’s military skills, which include special operations training, make him a threat to escape.

A prison spokeswoman told FoxNews.com that Robertson was put in solitary confinement “for his own protection” and is now held there by his own choice. But the tight security around Robertson extends outside the prison, with at least a 7-car armed caravan of federal marshals escorting him to his court appearances. Robertson’s attorney said his client believes he was put in solitary confinement in retaliation for filing a federal lawsuit against the government.

“Marcus Robertson has never tried to radicalize anyone,” said Robertson’s attorney Daniel Brodersen, who believes his client should be released immediately. “He’s tried to practice his religion in prison to the best of his ability.”

Over the last 30 years, Robertson has traveled a bizarre path that has seen him serve in the U.S. military, lead a murderous New York gang, consort with top Al Qaeda associates, go undercover for the FBI in Egypt, Africa and the U.S., and ultimately end up in a federal lockup facing more than 30 years in prison. Those who know him say Robertson became disenchanted while in the military, where he claims to have served in the elite counter-terrorism unit Joint Special Operations Command before leaving the service as a conscientious objector.

National Archives records confirm Robertson’s service from May 16, 1986 to May 1994, in the U.S. Marine Corps 2nd Force Reconnaissance Company as a field radio operator, but records indicate he was released from active duty in March 1990, discharged in the rank of corporal with training in radiotelegraph, scuba diving, marksmanship, parachuting, terrorism counteraction, surveillance, infantry patrolling and finance.

In early 1991, Robertson joined with other former Muslim security guards to form a robbery gang they called the ‘Forty Thieves’ with Robertson as the leader known as “Ali Baba.”

They robbed more than 10 banks, private homes and post offices at gunpoint, shot three police officers, and attacked one cop after he was injured by a homemade pipe bomb.

Robertson also served as a bodyguard to Omar Abdel Rahman, nicknamed the “Blind Sheik,” who was part of the extremist Islamic group accused of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Government records claim Robertson donated more than $300,000 in stolen funds to mosques he attended.

After he was arrested in 1991 along with most of the other members of the Forty Thieves gang, Robertson cut a deal with prosecutors, serving just four years in prison while others remain behind bars.

Part of the pact involved Robertson going undercover for the FBI to document terrorists’ plans and networks in Africa, Egypt and the United States.

According to a source familiar with Robertson’s history, Robertson was thrown out of the program in Feb. 8, 2007 after he attacked his CIA handler in Africa.

Robertson quickly reinvented himself, founding the Orlando-based Fundamental Islamic Knowledge Seminary in 2008 and taking his Muslim name. He traveled the world, teaching at universities, including some in the United States. Videos of his lectures show him preaching against gays, “devil worshipers,” non-Muslims and such American pop culture icons as cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants, who he says is “gay.”

Under Islamic law, the Brooklyn-born Robertson married two women, Zulaika and Itisha Wills. Between them, and children he fathered outside these marriages, Robertson has 15 children. Through his teachings, videos and social media, he recruited an extensive network of followers in Florida and New York, an estimated 150 who reportedly are a concern for federal law enforcement.

Robertson was arrested on a firearms charge in 2011 and pleaded guilty in January, 2012. Just two months later, federal authorities charged him in with conspiring to defraud the IRS. Through wiretaps, the federal government documented interactions between Robertson and one of his student, Jonathan Paul Jimenez, who Robertson allegedly instructed to file false tax returns to obtain a tax refund to pay for travel to Mauritania, Northwest Africa, for study and violent jihadist training.

Jimenez, who reportedly knew Robertson for 11 years and, by his own admission, trained with the imam for a year in preparation for his travel to Mauritania, where he would study and further his training in killing, suicide bombing, and identifying and murdering U.S. military personnel, pleaded guilty Aug. 28, 2012, to making a false statement to a federal agency in a matter involving international terrorism and conspiring to defraud the IRS, and was sentenced April 18, 2013, to 10 years in federal prison.

While Robertson has been awaiting sentencing in the tax fraud charge, prosecutors have built a case against him for enhanced sentencing, alleging he’s involved with terrorism activities.

Robertson denies sending Jimenez overseas “to commit violent jihad.”

“The prosecution is attempting to characterize me as a ‘Teacher of Terrorists.’ … They are attempting to twist my statements to fit into a terrorist plot,” he said in a statement that appeared on his website. In reality, they know I am not a terrorist teacher.”

Baltimore Mayor Partners with Islamic Terror Group

Terror Group: 

Islamic Relief gave $118K to terror-linked groups
September 21, 2014
New tax documents reveal that Islamic Relief USA (IR-USA), the largest Islamic charity in the United States, gave over $118,000 in grants in 2013 to entities with previous connections to terrorism.

IR-USA’s 2013 tax return, which was filed in July 2014, showed that the charity gave $45,495 in grants to the Florida branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). CAIR was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in the successful 2007 prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for financing the terrorist organization Hamas.

Their form 990 also shows that IR-USA gave $40,000 to the radical mosque Dar Al-Hijrah in Falls Church, Virginia, for a “zakat partner program.” Deceased terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki served as the mosque’s imam leading up to and immediately following the 9/11 attacks.

The tax schedule also documented almost $32,909 in grants to Services for Human Advancement and Resource Enhancement (SHARE) affiliates in Atlanta and Indianapolis of the Muslim Alliance of North America (MANA), a group which was founded by an unindicted co-conspirator of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

IR-USA has been involved in several scandals in recent years: Money Jihad previously reported that IR-USA gives about $5 to $10 million per year to its parent charity Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW), which has recently been banned from Israel for funding Hamas. IR-USA was also implicated in fraudulent multi-million dollar valuations of its drug stockpiles. More recently, Islamic Relief affiliates have described their own partnerships with the pro-Hamas front charity IHH to conduct operations in rebel-controlled territory in Syria.

Baltimore Mayor:      

Baltimore’s “Space to Destroy” Mayor Working w/Terror Linked Islamic Group

If you want to create “Space to Destroy”, why not go all the way?

Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlins-Blake is all about creating “Space to Destroy” for misguided youth. But most of Baltimore still hasn’t been destroyed. It’s time to bring in the talented folks who destroyed Syria to get the job done.

Ann at the invaluable Refugee Resettlement Watch blog has the story.

Islamic Relief USA is helping immigrants and refugees to find promising opportunities as instruments of economic and community growth in Baltimore.

Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlins-Blake recognized the successes of this program at a local film screening this past Wednesday. She congratulated prospective home buyers and urged non-profits to continue supporting this work.

In Next City’s film “Building Resilience in Baltimore through Immigration,” immigrants are portrayed as key actors in societal change.

Islamic migrants are unquestionably key actors in social change. Just ask the Christians of Syria… if you can find them.

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake announced at her inauguration in December 2011 that she would work to grow the city by 10,000 families within a decade.

“I am inspired by the optimism, determination, and resilience of immigrant communities living in our city and their ability to rebuild a brighter future after great adversity,” Rawlings-Blake said in a statement.

And nothing says great adversity like Baltimore. Now with more Afghans and Sudanese.

The IRC building sure had its share of energy! The place bustled with Bhutanese, Sudanese and Afghans, IRC staff, volunteer tutors and people dropping off donations of clothing and household items.

The latest census delivered good news for Baltimore: for the first time in 60 years, the city’s population increased. Many people, including Ruben, attribute that to the initiative to attract and retain immigrants and refugees. But the population increase was small, and it’s not clear yet whether or not the mayor’s plan will revive the city. Critics worry that immigrants are actually a drain on the economy.

Elements of the Islamic Relief Worldwide network has been accused of being linked to terrorist groups. The UAE and Israel have outlawed it. Obama works closely with Islamic Relief USA and its leadership is interlinked with the Brotherhood’s front groups such as the Muslim American Society and ISNA.

But I guess you can ask their public relations director about it.

Sheikh Omar Shahin identified himself as IRUSA’s Public Relations Director in 2010 and a bio stated he held the position in 2007.

Shahin raised money for the Holy Land Foundation and also held a position with KindHearts, both charities shut down for funding Hamas. He also hosted events by the Islamic Association for Palestine, a Hamas-tied group that is now defunct.

In 2002, Shahin preached: “Prophet Mohammed peace be upon him said: ‘You will keep on fighting with the Jews until the fight reaches the east of Jordan river then the stones and trees will say: oh Muslim, oh (servant) slaves of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him…’”

Or better not ask him. If the Pakistani settlers in Baltimore hoping for talking rocks and trees to lead them to the Jews, they’re going to be disappointed.

Reprinted from: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/dgreenfield/baltimores-space-to-destroy-mayor-working-wterror-linked-islamic-group/

 

KGB Model: Army of Russia Trolls vs. America

Has anyone checked David Brock’s (Media Matters) passport for recent visits to Russia or George Soros or Michael Moore’s? SARCASM…

Yet when you read this piece, you may ask yourself the same question and perhaps can add a few additional names. A virtual Potemkin Village, the American version.

The Agency

By: Adrian Chen:

From a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg, Russia, an army of well-paid “trolls” has tried to wreak havoc all around the Internet — and in real-life American communities.

Around 8:30 a.m. on Sept. 11 last year, Duval Arthur, director of the Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness for St. Mary Parish, Louisiana, got a call from a resident who had just received a disturbing text message. “Toxic fume hazard warning in this area until 1:30 PM,” the message read. “Take Shelter. Check Local Media and columbiachemical.com.”

St. Mary Parish is home to many processing plants for chemicals and natural gas, and keeping track of dangerous accidents at those plants is Arthur’s job. But he hadn’t heard of any chemical release that morning. In fact, he hadn’t even heard of Columbia Chemical. St. Mary Parish had a Columbian Chemicals plant, which made carbon black, a petroleum product used in rubber and plastics. But he’d heard nothing from them that morning, either. Soon, two other residents called and reported the same text message. Arthur was worried: Had one of his employees sent out an alert without telling him?

If Arthur had checked Twitter, he might have become much more worried. Hundreds of Twitter accounts were documenting a disaster right down the road. “A powerful explosion heard from miles away happened at a chemical plant in Centerville, Louisiana #ColumbianChemicals,” a man named Jon Merritt tweeted. The #ColumbianChemicals hashtag was full of eyewitness accounts of the horror in Centerville. @AnnRussela shared an image of flames engulfing the plant. @Ksarah12 posted a video of surveillance footage from a local gas station, capturing the flash of the explosion. Others shared a video in which thick black smoke rose in the distance.

Dozens of journalists, media outlets and politicians, from Louisiana to New York City, found their Twitter accounts inundated with messages about the disaster. “Heather, I’m sure that the explosion at the #ColumbianChemicals is really dangerous. Louisiana is really screwed now,” a user named @EricTraPPP tweeted at the New Orleans Times-Picayune reporter Heather Nolan. Another posted a screenshot of CNN’s home page, showing that the story had already made national news. ISIS had claimed credit for the attack, according to one YouTube video; in it, a man showed his TV screen, tuned to an Arabic news channel, on which masked ISIS fighters delivered a speech next to looping footage of an explosion. A woman named Anna McClaren (@zpokodon9) tweeted at Karl Rove: “Karl, Is this really ISIS who is responsible for #ColumbianChemicals? Tell @Obama that we should bomb Iraq!” But anyone who took the trouble to check CNN.com would have found no news of a spectacular Sept. 11 attack by ISIS. It was all fake: the screenshot, the videos, the photographs.

In St. Mary Parish, Duval Arthur quickly made a few calls and found that none of his employees had sent the alert. He called Columbian Chemicals, which reported no problems at the plant. Roughly two hours after the first text message was sent, the company put out a news release, explaining that reports of an explosion were false. When I called Arthur a few months later, he dismissed the incident as a tasteless prank, timed to the anniversary of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “Personally I think it’s just a real sad, sick sense of humor,” he told me. “It was just someone who just liked scaring the daylights out of people.” Authorities, he said, had tried to trace the numbers that the text messages had come from, but with no luck. (The F.B.I. told me the investigation was still open.)

The Columbian Chemicals hoax was not some simple prank by a bored sadist. It was a highly coordinated disinformation campaign, involving dozens of fake accounts that posted hundreds of tweets for hours, targeting a list of figures precisely chosen to generate maximum attention. The perpetrators didn’t just doctor screenshots from CNN; they also created fully functional clones of the websites of Louisiana TV stations and newspapers. The YouTube video of the man watching TV had been tailor-made for the project. A Wikipedia page was even created for the Columbian Chemicals disaster, which cited the fake YouTube video. As the virtual assault unfolded, it was complemented by text messages to actual residents in St. Mary Parish. It must have taken a team of programmers and content producers to pull off.

And the hoax was just one in a wave of similar attacks during the second half of last year. On Dec. 13, two months after a handful of Ebola cases in the United States touched off a minor media panic, many of the same Twitter accounts used to spread the Columbian Chemicals hoax began to post about an outbreak of Ebola in Atlanta. The campaign followed the same pattern of fake news reports and videos, this time under the hashtag #EbolaInAtlanta, which briefly trended in Atlanta. Again, the attention to detail was remarkable, suggesting a tremendous amount of effort. A YouTube video showed a team of hazmat-suited medical workers transporting a victim from the airport. Beyoncé’s recent single “7/11” played in the background, an apparent attempt to establish the video’s contemporaneity. A truck in the parking lot sported the logo of the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

On the same day as the Ebola hoax, a totally different group of accounts began spreading a rumor that an unarmed black woman had been shot to death by police. They all used the hashtag #shockingmurderinatlanta. Here again, the hoax seemed designed to piggyback on real public anxiety; that summer and fall were marked by protests over the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. In this case, a blurry video purports to show the shooting, as an onlooker narrates. Watching it, I thought I recognized the voice — it sounded the same as the man watching TV in the Columbian Chemicals video, the one in which ISIS supposedly claims responsibility. The accent was unmistakable, if unplaceable, and in both videos he was making a very strained attempt to sound American. Somehow the result was vaguely Australian.

Who was behind all of this? When I stumbled on it last fall, I had an idea. I was already investigating a shadowy organization in St. Petersburg, Russia, that spreads false information on the Internet. It has gone by a few names, but I will refer to it by its best known: the Internet Research Agency. The agency had become known for employing hundreds of Russians to post pro-Kremlin propaganda online under fake identities, including on Twitter, in order to create the illusion of a massive army of supporters; it has often been called a “troll farm.” The more I investigated this group, the more links I discovered between it and the hoaxes. In April, I went to St. Petersburg to learn more about the agency and its brand of information warfare, which it has aggressively deployed against political opponents at home, Russia’s perceived enemies abroad and, more recently, me.

Seven months after the Columbian Chemicals hoax, I was in a dim restaurant in St. Petersburg, peering out the window at an office building at 55 Savushkina Street, the last known home of the Internet Research Agency. It sits in St. Petersburg’s northwestern Primorsky District, a quiet neighborhood of ugly Soviet apartment buildings and equally ugly new office complexes. Among the latter is 55 Savushkina; from the front, its perfect gray symmetry, framed by the rectangular pillars that flank its entrance, suggests the grim impenetrability of a medieval fortress. Behind the glass doors, a pair of metal turnstiles stand guard at the top of a short flight of stairs in the lobby. At 9 o’clock on this Friday night in April, except for the stairwell and the lobby, the building was entirely dark.

This puzzled my dining companion, a former agency employee named Ludmila Savchuk. She shook her head as she lifted the heavy floral curtain to take another look. It was a traditional Russian restaurant, with a dining room done up like a parlor from the early 1900s, complete with bentwood chairs and a vintage globe that showed Alaska as part of Russia. Savchuk’s 5-year-old son sat next to her, slurping down a bowl of ukha, a traditional fish soup. For two and a half months, Savchuk told me, she had worked 12-hour shifts in the building, always beginning at 9 a.m. and finishing at 9 p.m., at which point she and her co-workers would eagerly stream out the door at once. “At 9 p.m. sharp, there should be a crowd of people walking outside the building,” she said. “Nine p.m. sharp.” One Russian newspaper put the number of employees at 400, with a budget of at least 20 million rubles (roughly $400,000) a month. During her time in the organization, there were many departments, creating content for every popular social network: LiveJournal, which remains popular in Russia; VKontakte, Russia’s homegrown version of Facebook; Facebook; Twitter; Instagram; and the comment sections of Russian news outlets. One employee estimated the operation filled 40 rooms.

Every day at the Internet Research Agency was essentially the same, Savchuk told me. The first thing employees did upon arriving at their desks was to switch on an Internet proxy service, which hid their I.P. addresses from the places they posted; those digital addresses can sometimes be used to reveal the real identity of the poster. Savchuk would be given a list of the opinions she was responsible for promulgating that day. Workers received a constant stream of “technical tasks” — point-by-point exegeses of the themes they were to address, all pegged to the latest news. Ukraine was always a major topic, because of the civil war there between Russian-backed separatists and the Ukrainian Army; Savchuk and her co-workers would post comments that disparaged the Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, and highlighted Ukrainian Army atrocities. Russian domestic affairs were also a major topic. Last year, after a financial crisis hit Russia and the ruble collapsed, the professional trolls left optimistic posts about the pace of recovery. Savchuk also says that in March, after the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was murdered, she and her entire team were moved to the department that left comments on the websites of Russian news outlets and ordered to suggest that the opposition itself had set up the murder.

In fact, she was a troll. The word “troll” was popularized in the early 1990s to denounce the people who derailed conversation on Usenet discussion lists with interminable flame wars, or spammed chat rooms with streams of disgusting photos, choking users with a cloud of filth. As the Internet has grown, the problem posed by trolls has grown more salient even as their tactics have remained remarkably constant. Today an ISIS supporter might adopt a pseudonym to harass a critical journalist on Twitter, or a right-wing agitator in the United States might smear demonstrations against police brutality by posing as a thieving, violent protester. Any major conflict is accompanied by a raging online battle between trolls on both sides.

As Savchuk and other former employees describe it, the Internet Research Agency had industrialized the art of trolling. Management was obsessed with statistics — page views, number of posts, a blog’s place on LiveJournal’s traffic charts — and team leaders compelled hard work through a system of bonuses and fines. “It was a very strong corporate feeling,” Savchuk says. Her schedule gave her two 12-hour days in a row, followed by two days off. Over those two shifts she had to meet a quota of five political posts, 10 nonpolitical posts and 150 to 200 comments on other workers’ posts. The grueling schedule wore her down. She began to feel queasy, she said, posting vitriol about opposition leaders of whom she had no actual opinion, or writing nasty words about Ukrainians when some of her closest acquaintances, including her own ex-husband, were Ukrainian.

Employees were mostly in their 20s but were drawn from a broad cross-section of Russian society. It seemed as if the agency’s task was so large that it would hire almost anyone who responded to the many ads it posted on job boards, no matter how undereducated or politically ignorant they were. Posts teemed with logical and grammatical errors. “They were so stupid,” says Marat Burkhardt, who worked for two months in the department of forums, posting 135 comments a day on little-read message boards about remote Russian towns. “You see these people with a lot of tattoos. They’re so cool, like they’re from New York; very hip clothing, very hip tattoos, like they’re from Williamsburg. But they are stupid.” In office conversation, they used gay slurs to refer to Petro Poroshenko and called Barack Obama a monkey. Management tried to rectify their ignorance with grammar classes. Others had “politology” classes to outline the proper Russian point of view on current events.

Yet the exact point of their work was left unclear to them. The handful of employees I spoke with did not even know the name of the company’s chief executive. They had signed a nondisclosure agreement but no official contract. Salaries were surprisingly high for the work; Savchuk’s was 41,000 rubles a month ($777), or as much as a tenured university professor earns. “I can’t say they clearly explain to you what your purpose there is,” Savchuk says. “But they created such an atmosphere that people would understand they were doing something important and secretive and very highly paid. And that they won’t be able to find a job like this anywhere else.”

Savchuk is 34, but her taste in clothes runs toward the teenage: The night of our dinner she wore a plaid dress and a billowing neon yellow jacket, and her head was swaddled in a fuzzy hood with animal ears. She credits her innocent appearance for allowing her to infiltrate the Internet Research Agency without raising alarms. While employed there, she copied dozens of documents to her personal email account and also plied her co-workers for information. She made a clandestine video of the office. In February, she leaked it all to a reporter for Moi Raion, a local newspaper known for its independent reporting. The documents, together with her story, offered the most detailed look yet into the daily life of a pro-Kremlin troll. Though she quit the agency the day the exposé was published, she was continuing her surveillance from the outside. She brought a camera to our dinner in hopes of documenting the changing of the shifts, which she planned to post to the VKontakte page of Information Peace, the group she founded to fight the agency. Her ultimate goal is to shut it down entirely, believing that its information warfare is contributing to an increasingly dark atmosphere in Russia. “Information peace is the start of real peace,” she says.

But at 10 minutes after 9 p.m., still no crowd had entered or left 55 Savushkina. Finally, around 9:30, a group of five young people approached the building and walked inside. Savchuk perked up, grabbed the camera and began to film the scene. Now more started filtering in, each of them stopping at the guard desk to check in. I counted at least 30 in all. Savchuk told me with pride that she believed the agency had changed its schedule to confound journalists, who began to stake out the place after her exposé.

Savchuk is accustomed to antagonizing powerful people. She has been a longtime environmental activist in the town of Pushkin, the suburb of St. Petersburg where she lives; her main cause before the troll farm was saving forests and parks from being paved over by well-connected developers. Last year she even ran for a seat on her municipal council as an independent, which in Russia requires a level of optimism bordering on delusion. On Election Day, she told me, state employees — health care workers, teachers, law enforcement, etc. — came to the polls wielding lists of candidates they had been “encouraged” to vote for, all of them associated with United Russia, the governing party of Vladimir Putin. (She lost her race.) Savchuk has filed a lawsuit against the Internet Research Agency for violating labor rights laws, citing the lack of official contracts. She has enlisted the help of a well-known human rights lawyer named Ivan Pavlov, who has spent years fighting for transparency laws in Russia; he took on Savchuk’s case in hopes that it would force the agency to answer questions about its business on the record.

Savchuk’s revelations about the agency have fascinated Russia not because they are shocking but because they confirm what everyone has long suspected: The Russian Internet is awash in trolls. “This troll business becomes more popular year by year,” says Platon Mamatov, who says that he ran his own troll farm in the Ural Mountains from 2008 to 2013. During that time he employed from 20 to 40 people, mostly students and young mothers, to carry out online tasks for Kremlin contacts and local and regional authorities from Putin’s United Russia party. Mamatov says there are scores of operations like his around the country, working for government authorities at every level. Because the industry is secretive, with its funds funneled through a maze of innocuous-sounding contracts and shell businesses, it is difficult to estimate exactly how many people are at work trolling today. But Mamatov claims “there are thousands — I’m not sure about how many, but yes, really, thousands.”

The boom in pro-Kremlin trolling can be traced to the antigovernment protests of 2011, when tens of thousands of people took to the streets after evidence of fraud in the recent Parliamentary election emerged. The protests were organized largely over Facebook and Twitter and spearheaded by leaders, like the anticorruption crusader Alexei Navalny, who used LiveJournal blogs to mobilize support. The following year, when Vyascheslav Volodin, the new deputy head of Putin’s administration and architect of his domestic policy, came into office, one of his main tasks was to rein in the Internet. Volodin, a lawyer who studied engineering in college, approached the problem as if it were a design flaw in a heating system. Forbes Russia reported that Volodin installed in his office a custom-designed computer terminal loaded with a system called Prism, which monitored public sentiment online using 60 million sources. According to the website of its manufacturer, Prism “actively tracks the social media activities that result in increased social tension, disorderly conduct, protest sentiments and extremism.” Or, as Forbes put it, “Prism sees social media as a battlefield.”

The battle was conducted on multiple fronts. Laws were passed requiring bloggers to register with the state. A blacklist allowed the government to censor websites without a court order. Internet platforms like Yandex were subjected to political pressure, while others, like VKontakte, were brought under the control of Kremlin allies. Putin gave ideological cover to the crackdown by calling the entire Internet a “C.I.A. project,” one that Russia needed to be protected from. Restrictions online were paired with a new wave of digital propaganda. The government consulted with the same public relations firms that worked with major corporate brands on social-media strategy. It began paying fashion and fitness bloggers to place pro-Kremlin material among innocuous posts about shoes and diets, according to Yelizaveta Surnacheva, a journalist with the magazine Kommersant Vlast. Surnacheva told me over Skype that the government was even trying to place propaganda with popular gay bloggers — a surprising choice given the notorious new law against “gay propaganda,” which fines anyone who promotes homosexuality to minors.

All of this has contributed to a dawning sense, among the Russian journalists and activists I spoke with, that the Internet is no longer a natural medium for political opposition. “The myth that the Internet is controlled by the opposition is very, very old,” says Leonid Volkov, a liberal politician and campaign manager to Alexei Navalny. “It’s not true since at least three years.” Part of this is simple demographics: The Internet audience has expanded from its early adopters, who were more likely to be well-educated liberal intelligentsia, to the whole of Russia, which overwhelmingly supports Putin. Also, by working every day to spread Kremlin propaganda, the paid trolls have made it impossible for the normal Internet user to separate truth from fiction.

“The point is to spoil it, to create the atmosphere of hate, to make it so stinky that normal people won’t want to touch it,” Volkov said, when we met in the office of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. “You have to remember the Internet population of Russia is just over 50 percent. The rest are yet to join, and when they join it’s very important what is their first impression.” The Internet still remains the one medium where the opposition can reliably get its message out. But their message is now surrounded by so much garbage from trolls that readers can become resistant before the message even gets to them. During the protests, a favorite tactic of the opposition was making anti-Putin hashtags trend on Twitter. Today, waves of trolls and bots regularly promote pro-Putin hashtags. What once was an exhilarating act of popular defiance now feels empty. “It kind of discredited the idea of political hashtags,” says Ilya Klishin, the web editor for the independent television station TV Rain who, in 2011, created the Facebook page for the antigovernment protests.

Russia’s information war might be thought of as the biggest trolling operation in history, and its target is nothing less than the utility of the Internet as a democratic space. In the midst of such a war, the Runet (as the Russian Internet is often called) can be an unpleasant place for anyone caught in the crossfire. Soon after I met Leonid Volkov, he wrote a post on his Facebook wall about our interview, saying that he had spoken with someone from The New York Times. A former pro-Kremlin blogger later warned me about this. Kremlin allies, he explained, monitored Volkov’s page, and now they would be on guard. “That was not smart,” he said.

The chain that links the Columbian Chemicals hoax to the Internet Research Agency begins with an act of digital subterfuge perpetrated by its online enemies. Last summer, a group called Anonymous International — believed to be unaffiliated with the well-known hacktivist group Anonymous — published a cache of hundreds of emails said to have been stolen from employees at the agency. It was just one hack in a long series that Anonymous International had carried out against the Kremlin in recent months. The group leaked embarrassing photos of Putin allies and incriminating emails among officials. It claimed to have hacked into Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev’s phone, and reportedly hacked his Twitter account, tweeting: “I’m resigning. I am ashamed of this government’s actions. Forgive me.”

The emails indicated that the Internet Research Agency had begun to troll in English. One document outlined a project called “World Translation”; the problem, it explained, was that the foreign Internet was biased four to one against Russia, and the project aimed to change the ratio. Another email contained a spreadsheet that listed some of the troll accounts the agency was using on the English-language web. After BuzzFeed reported on the leak, I used the spreadsheet to start mapping the network of accounts on Facebook and Twitter, trying to draw connections.

One account was called “I Am Ass.” Ass had a Twitter account, an Instagram account, multiple Facebook accounts and his own website. In his avatars, Ass was depicted as a pair of cartoon buttocks with an ugly, smirking face. He filled his social-media presences with links to news articles, along with his own commentary. Ass had a puerile sense of humor and only a rudimentary grasp of the English language. He also really hated Barack Obama. Ass denounced Obama in posts strewn with all-caps rants and scatological puns. One characteristic post linked to a news article about an ISIS massacre in Iraq, which Ass shared on Facebook with the comment: “I’m scared and farting! ISIS is a monster awakened by Obama when he unleashed this disastrous Iraq war!”

Despite his unpleasant disposition, Ass had a half-dozen or so fans who regularly liked and commented on his posts. These fans shared some unusual characteristics. Their Facebook accounts had all been created in the summer of 2014. They all appeared to be well-dressed young men and women who lived in large American cities, yet they seemed to have no real-life friends. Instead, they spent their free time leaving anti-Obama comments on the Facebook posts of American media outlets like CNN, Politico and Fox News. Their main Facebook interactions, especially those of the women, appeared to be with strangers who commented on their physical appearance. The women were all very attractive — so attractive, indeed, that a search revealed that some of their profile photos had been stolen from models and actors. It became clear that the vast majority of Ass’s fans were not real people. They were also trolls.

I friended as many of the trolls on Facebook as I could and began to observe their ways. Most of the content they shared was drawn from a network of other pages that, like Ass’s, were clearly meant to produce entertaining and shareable social-media content. There was the patriotic Spread Your Wings, which described itself as “a community for everyone whose heart is with America.” Spread Your Wings posted photos of American flags and memes about how great it was to be an American, but the patriotism rang hollow once you tried to parse the frequent criticisms of Obama, an incoherent mishmash of liberal and conservative attacks that no actual American would espouse. There was also Art Gone Conscious, which posted bad art and then tenuously connected it to Obama’s policy failures, and the self-explanatory Celebrities Against Obama. The posts churned out every day by this network of pages were commented on and shared by the same group of trolls, a virtual Potemkin village of disaffected Americans.

After following the accounts for a few weeks, I saw a strange notification on Facebook. One account, which claimed to be a woman from Seattle named Polly Turner, RSVPed to a real-life event. It was a talk in New York City to commemorate the opening of an art exhibit called Material Evidence. I was vaguely aware of Material Evidence, thanks to eye-catching advertisements that had appeared in subway stations and on the sides of buses throughout New York City: a black-and-white photo of masked men in camouflage, overlaid with the slogan “Syria, Ukraine … Who’s Next?” Material Evidence’s website described it as a traveling exhibition that would reveal “the full truth” about the civil war in Syria, as well as about 2014’s Euromaidan revolution in Ukraine, through a combination of “unique footage, artefacts, video.” I clicked on the Material Evidence talk and saw that a number of other trolls had been invited, including my old friend I Am Ass.

Walking into Material Evidence, mounted last September in the cavernous ArtBeam gallery in Chelsea, was like walking into a real-life version of the hall of mirrors I’d stumbled into on Facebook. A sign at the front declared that the show did not “support a specific political goal,” but the message became clear as soon as I began to browse the images. Large, well-composed photos testified to the barbarity of the Syrian rebels, bent on slaughtering handsome Syrian soldiers and innocent civilians alike. A grim panorama showed a gymnasium supposedly used by rebels to torture prisoners. There was a heroic, sunlit portrait of a Syrian Army officer. A room hidden behind a curtain displayed gory photos of rebel-caused civilian causalities, “provided by the Syrian ministry of defense.”

Then there were the pictures from the Ukrainian revolution, which focused almost exclusively on the Right Sector, a small group of violent, right-wing, anti-Russian protesters with a fondness for black balaclavas. Russian authorities have seized upon Right Sector to paint the entire revolution, backed by a huge swath of Ukrainian society, as orchestrated by neo-fascist thugs. The show’s decision to juxtapose the rebellions in Syria and Ukraine was never clearly explained, perhaps because the only connection possible was that both targeted leaders supported by Russia.

On the floor in front of many of the photos sat the actual items that appeared in them, displayed under glass cases. How, exactly, did organizers procure the very same battered motorcycle helmet that a Ukrainian protester wore in a photo while brawling with riot police? Who had fronted the money to purchase a mangled white van, supposedly used by Syrian rebels in a botched suicide bombing, and transport it to New York City? Few answers were forthcoming from Benjamin Hiller, the Berlin-based German-American photojournalist who was put forth as the curator of Material Evidence. He sat at a table in the front of the gallery, a heavyset bearded man dressed entirely in black. He told me that the show had been organized by an independent collective of European, Russian and Syrian war photographers who were fed up with the one-sided view of conflicts presented by Western media. He said they simply wanted to show the “other side.” Hiller claimed that the funds to rent the space, take out the ads, transport the material and create a $40,000 grant advertised on the Material Evidence website had been raised through “crowdfunding.” (Hiller has since left the organization and says that because of the show’s “misinformations” and “nonjournalistic approach,” he “does not want to be affiliated anymore with the project.”)

When I got home, I searched Twitter for signs of a campaign. Sure enough, dozens of accounts had been spamming rave reviews under the hashtag #MaterialEvidence. I clicked on one, a young woman in aviator sunglasses calling herself Zoe Foreman. (I later discovered her avatar had been stolen.) Most of her tweets were unremarkable song lyrics and inspirational quotes. But on Sept. 11 of last year, she spent hours spamming politicians and journalists about a horrific chemical plant explosion in St. Mary Parish, La. The source field on Twitter showed that the tweets Zoe Foreman — and the majority of other trolls — sent about #ColumbianChemicals were posted using a tool called Masss Post, which is associated with a nonworking page on the domain Add1.ru. According to online records, Add1​.ru was originally registered in January 2009 by Mikhail Burchik, whose email address remained connected to the domain until 2012. Documents leaked by Anonymous International listed a Mikhail Burchik as the executive director of the Internet Research Agency.

In early February, I called Burchik, a young tech entrepreneur in St. Petersburg, to ask him about the hoax and its connection to the Internet Research Agency. In an article for the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, the German journalist Julian Hans had claimed that Burchik confirmed the authenticity of the leaked documents. But when I called Burchik, he denied working at the Internet Research Agency. “I have heard of it, but I don’t work in this organization,” he said. Burchik said he had never heard of the Masss Post app; he had no specific memory of the Add1.ru domain, he said, but he noted that he had bought and sold many domains and didn’t remember them all. Burchik suggested that perhaps a different Mikhail Burchik was the agency’s executive director. But the email address used by the Mikhail Burchik in the leak matched the address listed at that time on the website of the Mikhail Burchik I spoke with.

In St. Petersburg, I finally had a chance to compare notes with Andrei Soshnikov, the young investigative journalist at Moi Raion to whom Ludmila Savchuk leaked her documents. Soshnikov is an indefatigable reporter: During one investigation, he had gone so far as to create a 3-D computer model of a roadway in order to calculate how much asphalt had been stolen during its construction. He was one of the first journalists to expose the Internet Research Agency when he went undercover and got a job there in 2013. Since then, he had followed the agency’s Russian trolls as obsessively as I had been tracking their English counterparts.

I showed Soshnikov a YouTube video posted on Facebook by one of the trolls. The video was a slick animated infographic about the faults of the United States Secret Service. What had caught my attention was the narrator. He sounded just like the voice from the videos spread during the Columbian Chemicals and Atlanta shooting hoaxes: a man trying desperately to sound American but coming off as Australian instead.

Soshnikov instantly recognized the style of the animation. It was made, he said, by an outfit called Infosurfing, which posts pro-Kremlin infographics on Instagram and VKontakte. Soshnikov showed me how he used a service called Yomapic, which maps the locations of social-media users, to determine that photos posted to Infosurfing’s Instagram account came from 55 Savushkina. He had been monitoring all of the content posted from 55 Savushkina for weeks and had assembled a huge database of troll content.

He brought up Infosurfing’s YouTube channel, and as we scrolled down, I noticed several videos in the same style as the Secret Service animation. In fact, Infosurfing had posted the exact same video on its own account — except instead of the unfortunate Australian voice-over, it was narrated in Russian. It was the most tantalizing connection yet: It seemed as if the man in the hoax videos had worked for an outfit connected to the same building that housed the Internet Research Agency.

Still, no one had heard of any department that might have orchestrated the hoax. The English-language trolling team was an elite and secretive group. Marat Burkhardt, who worked in the forums department, was asked to try out for an English-language team but didn’t get the job. The only person I spoke with who worked in the English department was a woman named Katarina Aistova. A former hotel receptionist, she told me she joined the Internet Research Agency when it was in a previous, smaller office. I found her through the Anonymous International leak, which included emails she had sent to her bosses, reporting on the pro-Putin comments she left on sites like The Blaze and Politico. One of her assignments had been to write an essay from the point of view of an average American woman. “I live in such developed society, so that people have practically ceased to walk on foot,” she wrote. When I emailed Aistova, she wasn’t eager to talk. She told me she had been harassed by critics of the Internet Research Agency after her email appeared in the leak; some men had even come to her door. She would meet me for an interview, but only if she could bring her brother for protection. I agreed, and we met at an out-of-the-way Chinese restaurant.

Aistova and her brother made an unusual pair. She was a short young woman with midlength brown hair, dressed all in black: sweater, leggings, big wedge boots. She insisted on paying for my coffee. “You are a Russian guest,” she said. He, by contrast, was a hulking skinhead with arms full of Nazi-themed tattoos, most prominent among them a five-inch swastika on his left biceps. “My brother, he looks like a strongman,” Aistova said, giggling. He wore a black T-shirt emblazoned with the skull-and-crossbones insignia of the SS Totenkopf division, which administered the Nazi concentration camps. I asked him what his T-shirt meant. “Totenkopf,” he grunted. During the interview he sat across the table from Aistova and me, smiling silently behind his sunglasses.

Aistova said that she worked for the Internet Research Agency for a month and a half. The majority of her work was translating news articles from English to Russian. The news articles covered everything from Ukraine to traffic accidents. On a few occasions, her bosses asked her to leave comments on American news sites about Russia, but she said that they never told her what to say. She loves Russia, she told me. She truly believes that Putin is just trying to help the people of Eastern Ukraine, and that his actions are being unfairly spun by the Western media. “I was like, Hey, you guys, you are saying these bad things about Putin, but people are suffering.”

But she claimed to harbor no ill will toward the United States. She wants to visit New York City, she said, and see the locations from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” one of her favorite films. “I don’t feel aggressive toward America. We’re the same people, we just speak different languages,” she said. After the interview, we shook hands outside the restaurant. “You seem like a journalist who will tell the truth,” she said. “I wish you luck on your story.”

On my last morning in St. Petersburg, I returned to 55 Savushkina. The clouds had lifted after a miserable week of snow and howling wind. At a few minutes before 10, my translator and I positioned ourselves on the sidewalk in front of the entrance, hoping to catch some of the trolls as they began the day shift. This was not a very well thought out strategy. Any employees arriving so close to the start of their shift didn’t have time to talk to a journalist even if they wanted to. A large van lurched to a halt in front of us and deposited a half-dozen young people, who hurried in the door before we had the chance to approach them. A bus stopped halfway down the block, and another gaggle of workers emerged. They waved off my translator’s inquiries with annoyed grunts or stone-faced silence. A young man smoking a cigarette said he didn’t work inside the building. He finished his cigarette and promptly went inside the building.

At 10 a.m. sharp, the flow of workers stopped. I decided we might as well try walking inside. I had read of other journalists who tried to enter the building, only to be kicked out immediately, so I entered with some trepidation. Two men in suits guarded the turnstiles. My translator and I approached a receptionist behind a desk and asked if we could speak with someone from Internet Research. (It dropped the “Agency” on moving to 55 Savushkina.) She informed us that Internet Research was no longer a tenant. “A couple of months ago, we had to say goodbye, because it was giving the entire building a bad reputation,” she said, matter-of-factly.

She pointed to a board that displayed a makeshift directory of the building’s current occupants. The names were printed out on small scraps of paper, and none of them were Internet Research. But I did recognize one: “FAN,” or Federal News Agency. I had read some news articles claiming that FAN was part of a network of pro-Kremlin news sites run out of 55 Savushkina, also funded by Evgeny Prigozhin. Former Internet Research Agency employees I had spoken to said they believed FAN was another wing of the same operation, under a different name. I asked to speak to someone from FAN. To my surprise, the receptionist picked up the phone, spoke into it for a few seconds and then informed us that Evgeny Zubarev, the editor in chief of FAN, would be right out to meet us.

Zubarev, who looked to be in his 50s, had close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair and a weary face. He greeted me with a handshake and invited me into his office. We made our way through the turnstiles and signed in with the guards, then took a brief walk down a long hallway to FAN’s two-room office on the first floor. It was unusually quiet for an online news operation that, according to Zubarev, had a staff of 40 people. The newsroom was equipped for a sizable team, with about a dozen identical black desktop computers sitting on identical brown laminate desks, but only two young reporters sat at them. The shades were drawn and the furniture looked just barely unpacked.

As we sat at Zubarev’s desk, I told him about the articles I’d read accusing FAN of being a Kremlin propaganda outfit. He shook his head in indignation. He turned to his computer and brought up FAN’s website, pointing to the masthead and the certificate number that showed FAN was an officially registered Russian mass-media organization. “FAN is a news agency,” he declared. It had stringers and reporters in Ukraine, and in many former Soviet states; they did original reporting, sometimes at great personal risk. Zubarev himself was a veteran journalist who covered the annexation of Crimea for the Russian news agency Rosbalt before joining FAN. But ever since reports linked him to the Internet Research Agency, he had faced questions about his integrity.

“We understand being in this building may discredit us, but we can’t afford to move at the moment,” Zubarev said with a sigh. “So we have to face the situation where reporters like you, Mr. Chen, come in here and ask us questions every day.”

Zubarev said he believed that he and FAN were victims of a smear campaign. I asked him who would do such a thing.

“Listen, that’s my position, not a confirmed fact,” he said. “It’s possible that there are some business interests, I don’t know. Maybe it’s an attack on our investors.” But when I asked who those investors were, he declined to comment. “I can’t discuss the identities of investors,” he said. “That’s in my contract.”

I left St. Petersburg on April 28. One day later, FAN published an article with the headline “What Does a New York Times Journalist Have in Common With a Nazi From St. Petersburg?” The story detailed a mysterious meeting in St. Petersburg between a New York Times journalist — me — and a neo-Nazi. Its lead image was a photo of a skinhead giving an enthusiastic Nazi salute. But it was not just any skinhead. It was the skinhead whom Katarina Aistova brought to our meeting and introduced to me as her brother. As I learned from reading the article, Aistova’s “brother” was in fact a notorious neo-Nazi named Alexei Maximov.

The article explained that Maximov, who goes by the nickname Fly, is a member of Totenkopf, a prominent skinhead group in St. Petersburg. He reportedly served nine years in prison for stabbing a man to death. Just a month before I met him, Maximov again made headlines when, during an investigation into beatings of immigrants around St. Petersburg, the police found weaponry and Nazi paraphernalia in his apartment.

The story made no mention of Katarina Aistova or the Internet Research Agency. Instead, the article claimed I met with Maximov because I wanted his help in creating a provocation against Russia. Maximov told FAN that I requested to meet him because I was “very keenly interested in sentiment among Russian nationalists.” He continued: “He evidently needed stories about how the murderous Kremlin regime persecutes free Russian people. It’s not the first time I’ve come across such requests on the part of Western journalists, but I’m not going to help them with this. Many want to see in Russian nationalists a ‘fifth column,’ which will function on orders from the West and sweep away the Kremlin.” Apparently I was trying to foment a mini-Euromaidan, right there in St. Petersburg.

The article was illustrated with photos of my meeting with Aistova and Maximov. One photo appears to have been shot surreptitiously through the restaurant window while we sat and talked. The point of view is such that Aistova is barely visible; indeed, at first glance, I seem to be having a friendly chat with a skinhead over a cup of coffee. Another photo, this one taken outside the restaurant, somehow makes me look deep in conversation with Maximov, even though I distinctly recall that Aistova was standing between us.

I had to admire the brazenness of the scheme. I remembered how, at the restaurant, Aistova had sat next to me so I had to twist around to talk to her, while Maximov sat silently across from us. Apparently they had arranged themselves so it could appear, from the right perspective, that I was meeting Maximov alone. I emailed Aistova to ask her to explain what happened. She responded only: “I would also like you to explain yourself and the situation!!” (A few weeks later, when I tried calling her by phone, she pretended I had the wrong number.)

Over the course of a few days, the sensational story circulated among a network of small pro-Kremlin blogs. In fact, the FAN story itself had been aggregated from another pro-Kremlin news site called People’s News, which Andrei Soshnikov, the Moi Raion journalist, has reported also operates out of 55 Savushkina. As it spread, it mutated to become even more alarming. One website suggested I was working for the C.I.A.; another, the National Security Agency. A YouTube channel called Russia Today — not the well-known state television channel but a knockoff — posted a slick video about the meeting, set to a pounding dubstep soundtrack. Disconcertingly, it included a photo of me leaving my hotel. The video currently has more than 60,000 views. Many of those views were a result of a familiar pattern of social-media promotion: Dozens of trolls on Twitter began tweeting links to the video using the hashtag #ВербовкаНацистов — “Recruitment of Nazis.” The hashtag trended on Russian Twitter.

After recovering from the initial shock, I began to track the campaign against me. I had practice, after all, from my months spent on the trail of the Internet Research Agency. I Googled the various Russian spellings of my name every hour to catch the latest posts as soon as they surfaced on LiveJournal and VKontakte. I searched Twitter for the URL of the YouTube video to catch every post.

A few days later, Soshnikov chatted with me on Skype. “Did you see an article about you on FAN?” he asked. “They know you are going to publish a loud article, so they are trying to make you look stupid in front of the Russian audience.”

I explained the setup, and as I did I began to feel a nagging paranoia. The more I explained, the more absurd my own words seemed — the more they seemed like exactly the sort of elaborate alibi a C.I.A. agent might concoct once his cover was blown. The trolls had done the only thing they knew how to do, but this time they had done it well. They had gotten into my head.

Obama Not Stopping Russia

Putin Aggression:

There are several people in the Ukraine that are hunting down Soviet loyalist soldiers and providing evidence of Putin’s continued aggression towards Ukraine. They are using social media, photos, tracing steps and following Russian troops footsteps.

The United States needs to take new steps to respond to the Ukraine conflict because economic sanctions and other Western actions have failed to get Russian President Vladimir Putin to reverse course, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said June 5.

Carter, speaking after conferring with U.S. diplomats and military officers in Stuttgart, Germany, said the Pentagon was concerned about “further things happening” after the worst upsurge in fighting in months broke out this week in eastern Ukraine.

Carter’s warning comes after NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg accused Moscow of sending sophisticated new weapons to Russian-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine, including artillery and anti-aircraft systems.

“What’s clear is that sanctions are working on the Russian economy,” causing considerable hardship for ordinary Russians and a deep recession this year, Carter told reporters on his plane back to Washington.

“What is not apparent is that that effect on his economy is deterring Putin from following the course that was evidenced in Crimea last year,” when Moscow annexed the Ukrainian territory, he said. Read more here.

Then without any warning or briefing from the State Department, a Russian violation has not been corrected as it relates to intermediate ranged ground launched missiles from a 1987 arms deal.

WASHINGTON — The State Department reported on Friday that Russia had failed to correct a violation of a landmark arms control accord between Washington and Moscow that prohibits intermediate-range ground-launched missiles.

At issue is the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty, known as the I.N.F. Treaty, which the Obama administration says the Russians breached by testing a cruise missile. But American officials have made no discernible headway in persuading the Russians to acknowledge the compliance problem, let alone resolve it.

In December, the Pentagon told Congress that it had developed a range of military options to pressure Russia to remedy the violation or neutralize any advantages it might gain if the diplomatic efforts fail. But no Pentagon countermeasures have been announced.

The American allegation was outlined in the State Department’s annual report on compliance with arms control agreements. It comes as the Obama administration has sought to identify new areas for potential cooperation with Russia, including the crisis in Syria, even as it has continued to object to Moscow’s military intervention in Ukraine.

The State Department did nothing to draw attention to the report. An unclassified version of it was posted on the agency’s website late on Friday afternoon with no advance notice, and no officials were made available to discuss it. (A classified version of the report was provided to Congress earlier this week.)

Representative Mac Thornberry, the Texas Republican who is the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said that the Obama administration had not been forceful enough in pressing Moscow to comply with the agreement.

“Russia’s development of intermediate-range nuclear platforms is designed to hold our interests at risk and enable Putin’s expansionist policies,” Mr. Thornberry said in a statement, referring to President Vladimir V. Putin. “It is not a situation we should accommodate for two years running. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has proposed meaningful military options to deal with Russia’s I.N.F. violations. The president should order their implementation without delay.”

American officials say that Russia began carrying out flight tests of the missile as early as 2008, and Rose Gottemoeller, the State Department’s senior arms control official, first raised the possibility of a violation with Russian officials two years ago.

Despite the allegation of a violation, the State Department report asserted that it was in the interest of the United States not to withdraw from the agreement, which it said “contributes to the security of our allies and to regional stability in Europe and in the Asia-Pacific region.” The accord bans American and Russian ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles that are able to fly 300 to 3,400 miles.

It is unclear what steps the Obama administration might take next. Ms. Gottemoeller told Congress in December that the development of ground-launched cruise missiles had proceeded far enough that Russia had “the capability to deploy it.”

Those concerns are not the only ones about Russian compliance with arms control accords. The State Department report asserted that Russia may have violated troop notification requirements under the Vienna Document, an agreement between the member states of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Russian forces who were massed near Ukraine last year, the State Department report said, “exceeded personnel and/or equipment levels intended to trigger notification requirements.” But when Russia was asked for additional information, “It failed to provide responsive replies.”

The report also faulted Russia’s adherence to the Open Skies Treaty, which seeks to reduce the risk of war by providing for unarmed observation flights.

In 2014, the report noted, Russia imposed new restrictions on such flights over Kaliningrad, a heavily militarized Russian enclave near the Baltic Sea.

“Russia continues to fail to meet treaty obligations to allow effective observation of its entire territory,” the report said.

Russia has leveled its own charges against the United States, including that the Aegis missile defense system that is being deployed in Europe is able to launch intermediate-range missiles.

The State Department report said that this system did not have any “offensive capability” and was allowed by the treaty.

Bergdahl Case Delayed, 10 More Detainees Approved

Bowe Bergdahl’s court martial was to begin in July and has been postponed until September, reasons cited is more time needed for discovery. Yet his lawyer is using lawfare on behalf of his client.

Not only did Bergdahl’s platoon mates know without question of his desertion in 2009, but the then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mullen himself knew the exact details as did General McChrystal. There was in fact a private meeting that took place where details by his platoon mates were explained and non-disclosures were also forced to be signed.

Bergdahl wants court to disqualify courts-martial general

WASHINGTON (AP) – Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl (boh BURG’-dahl), the soldier who left his post in Afghanistan and was held by the Taliban for five years, is asking a military appellate court to disqualify the general with broad discretion in his case.

Bergdahl’s attorney, Eugene Fidell, says Bergdahl filed the request Friday in the U.S. Army Court of Criminal Appeals in Washington.

Bergdahl wants the court to disqualify Gen. Mark Milley because he has a personal interest in being confirmed as the next Army chief of staff.

The Idaho native, who is charged with desertion, was exchanged last year for five senior Taliban officials held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Bergdahl’s preliminary hearing, which is similar to a civilian grand jury, is set for September. From there, his case could be referred for trial.

*** Meanwhile the release of the Taliban 5 that were swapped for Bergdahl has been delayed until more monitoring and managing details can be worked out between the United States, the Taliban and Qatar. Then 10 more Gitmo detainees are chosen to be released by the end of this month, June.

Expect Up to 10 Guantanamo Transfers Within Weeks

The Obama administration intends to transfer up to 10 detainees from the Guantanamo detention center to other countries this month, a senior defense official told Defense One. These would be the first since transfers came to a pregnant pause in January.

“You’re likely to see some progress in June,” the defense official said Wednesday. “I just talked to the National Security Council and State [Department], so we can say maybe up to 10 — no specific timeframe, but in the near future. And then we’re actively engaged with a number of countries in additional negotiations regarding the 57 that are eligible. But sometime this summer, maybe June, up to 10.”

Of the prison’s 122 detainees, 57 have been cleared for transfer to other countries by the Pentagon as part of an interagency review.

Last year, the Obama administration sped up transfers in a race to empty the detention center before the Republican-led Congress could block attempts to close it. Those transfers came to a halt in January. In April, the Washington Post reported they might start again, and today, the official told Defense One that some June transfers are likely.

These would be the first prisoners to leave Guantanamo under new Defense Secretary Ashton Carter. In February, he replaced Chuck Hagel, who clashed with the administration over his recalcitrance to approve transfers. Ultimately, Hagel transferred 44 Guantanamo detainees — more than half of those in the weeks before he stepped down in November. Still, that was ten times more than his predecessor, Leon Panetta, who transferred just four.

 

Carter wants to close Guantanamo. “He has also said that he wants to take a holistic approach,” the official said. “So he wants to focus on the 57 who are cleared for transfer, but he wants to see what we’re doing with the rest of those. So he’s thinking about all 122, not just the 57.”

The official said Carter was working hard on the issue. “I think it’s fair to say he’s fully engaged in all things Guantanamo — transfers, dealing with the Senate and the House and the Hill, talking with the White House on a regular basis,” the official said.

For Carter and others in the Obama administration, the official said, “There’s a been a lot of oversight and follow-up on the Hill, explaining why a specific transfer meets the statute; why somebody, who hypothetically is in Guantanamo because they’re not a choir boy, that threat can be substantially mitigated.”

On Wednesday, the Senate began considering the 2016 defense authorization bill, or NDAA, which over the years has become the main battleground for the fight to keep or close the prison.

Both existing versions of House and Senate NDAA would extend current restrictions on transferring prisoners to the United States, and restore stricter provisions stripped out in past years. In some cases, they would also add new obstacles, essentially blocking many of the third-party transfers. The House version would withhold 25 percent of Carter’s budget as punishment for what House Armed Services Chairman Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, characterized as foot-dragging on providing documents related to the detainees swapped for Bowe Bergdahl.

The Senate Armed Services Committee inserted a compromise provision drawn up by Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va.: the president can close the prison if he can draw up a plan that gets Congressional approval; if not, stricter restrictions go into effect.

“This legislation contains a bipartisan compromise on how to address the challenge of the detention facility of Guantanamo Bay,” McCain said in his opening statement on the floor Wednesday. “President Obama has said from day one of his presidency that he wants to close Guantanamo, but six and a half years into his administration, the President has never provided a plan to do so.”

SASC Ranking Member Jack Reed, D-R.I., voted against the bill and spoke against it on the floor. “One problem is the familiar, oft-debated and very complicated challenge of Guantanamo,” he said. “While we have had some carefully crafted compromise language in this bill, there are other provisions that reverse progress, particularly on the overseas transfers of detainees.”

The White House has threatened to veto the NDAAs as drafted, arguing they not only move backward rather than forward on closing the facility, but that portions are unconstitutional infringements on the executive.

“The bill also continues unwarranted restrictions, and imposes onerous additional ones, regarding detainees at Guantanamo Bay,” the administration policy statement on the Senate NDAA reads, repeating the veto threat. “These provisions undermine our national security by limiting our ability to act as our military, diplomatic, and other national security professionals deem appropriate in a given case.”

The administration also specifically rejected the provision touted by McCain, who has long supported closing the facility, saying, “This process for congressional approval is unnecessary and overly restrictive.”