Category Archives: Failed foreign policy

The Mailbox for Evacuation Requests at State Dept is Full

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For that matter, most of the mailboxes for all of government, the same is true including those in Congress. I have called at least 9 myself several times this past week. I was only able to speak to a real person in Congressman Ken Buck’s office, her name was Monica and she had some factual interesting things to say. I made a couple of requests and like wow….she said she would call me back…..SHE DID. Mission complete with my request.

Anyway….from Jim Geraghty at National Review:

This morning I heard from a longtime NR reader who spent years in Afghanistan working for a defense contractor. This reader’s company worked on the construction of camps and garrisons, parts of bases at Bagram and Kandahar, as well as several government buildings for the Afghan military and police.

“We directly employed thousands of Afghans,” he told me. “Their lives are in danger of retaliation by the Taliban because they helped the American military. Recognizing this, on August 2nd the U.S. government created another classification of asylum/visa processing called ‘Priority 2’.”

The announcement of the Priority 2 program can be found here. An unidentified senior state department official stated, “Many thousands of Afghans and their immediate family members are at risk due to these U.S. affiliations and are not eligible for a Special Immigrant Visa because either they did not have qualifying employment, or they have not met the time-in-service requirement to become eligible; however, they may be eligible for a P-2 referral, and thus, to the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program.” Priority 2 covers Afghans who worked with U.S. government-funded programs, as well as those who were employed in Afghanistan by a U.S.-based non-governmental or media organization that does not require U.S. government funding.

My reader said, “I’ve been busy the last week submitting referrals to the State Department on behalf of Afghans and their families who worked for us and whose very lives have been threatened. The submission is through email to a dedicated inbox at State. We began receiving messages that the inbox is full and that we should try later. This has been going on for half a day now.”

He shared with me an  automatic reply e-mail that declared, “The recipient’s mailbox is full and can’t accept messages now. Please try resending your message later, or contact the recipient directly.”

My reader is furious. “Lives are in danger. Evacuations are in chaos  — don’t believe a damn word any American spokesman says – they’re either making it up or they are lying. And the damn system for prioritizing our Afghan workers is a cluster because the DOS can’t manage a damn email inbox! I have never been so disappointed and angry at my government than today. It is maddening.”

My reader has contacted one of his senators – a Republican – but had to leave a message on the constituent line.

I rest my case on this fact…sadly. But to continue on.

All week long, officials in the Biden administration have told us they don’t know how many Americans are stuck in various locations around Afghanistan. Only part of that is true. They know how many Americans are in Afghanistan, that is a fact…where they may be at any particular moment could be true. Understand this: anyone from the United States that travels to Afghanistan must get a visa and ensure they have a passport. Both of those things are permanent records and are maintained at the State Department in a database. As simple keyboard inquiry is all that is needed. Going deeper on the matter, is your passport and boarding pass. The TSA scans both. And in most airports with international travel gates, those two documents at the time of travel are merged. For details on the chipped passports, e-Passport or biometric passports, go here.

Is there a chance the actual database may be off on the actual number? Sure based on the traveler’s movement, but you can be assured our State Department knows the number with at least above 90% accuracy. The reason the ‘don’t know answer’ is given is because it would admit we cannot possibly get Americans out of likely peril in Afghanistan within the Biden timeline.

Once Americans arrive in Afghanistan, they are to register with the US Embassy so officials there know who is in country and why. Well, that too may now be a big problem as we evacuated the embassy and removed the flag that that database still is held by some official or was likely uploaded to a cloud system.

https://afgnews.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/US-embassy-staff-still-functioning-in-Kabul.jpg Building on the right is the US Embassy, Kabul – source

Now the Biden administration is telling us that anyone that is in Afghanistan and wants to leave, we will get them out. Really? ‘who wants to leave’? Who the hell would want to stay? C’mon are we that stupid?

Below is a map published by al Jazeera. While I have no use for this media source…at least it does given some timeline of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan as of August 15.

The Taliban has captured 26 of the 34 provincial capitals in Afghanistan, with more than half of them falling to the armed group in less than two weeks.

The armed group is now at the gate of the capital Kabul after taking major cities such as Herat, Kandahar and Mazar-i-Sharif.

The group had already gained vast parts of rural Afghanistan since launching a series of offensives in May to coincide with the start of the final withdrawal of US-led foreign forces after 20 years of war.

***

Many in the diplomatic staff at our Kabul embassy knew precisely what the conditions on the ground were as far back as at least June. As it was getting more threatening, many of their warnings went unheard so they wrote a letter of dissent in July. Still our Secretary of State ignored the level of the threat and hence the Biden White House ignored all the same but slowly began a process.

WASHINGTON — Last month, two dozen diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, warned about the possibility of a Taliban takeover and urged the State Department to begin an airlift operation in a dissent cable sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, according to a source familiar with the situation.

The July 13 cable called on Washington to be firm and direct in describing atrocities by the Taliban, the source said. NBC News has not seen the cable.

A dissent channel cable is a confidential, formal way for State Department diplomats to voice disagreement or concern about U.S. policies without fear of retribution.

The cable was first Thursday by The Wall Street Journal.

The day after the cable was sent, the Biden administration announced Operation Allies Refuge, a program to transport Afghans and their families at risk of retaliation from the Taliban for their work with U.S. troops. State Department leaders sent a response a few days later thanking the writers of the dissent cable and describing the task force set up to facilitate evacuations of Special Immigrant Visa applicants, the source said.

“We value constructive internal dissent. It’s patriotic. It’s protected. And it makes us more effective,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said Thursday. “Maintaining the channel’s integrity and the notion of disciplined dissent is key to that revitalization. It’s why we keep communication strictly between the Department’s leadership and the authors of the dissent messages and why we don’t comment publicly on the substance of messages or the replies, regardless of the classification.”

Once the Taliban began the march to take over capitols and provinces, all actions needed to be launched. Nah…not until August did that even begin. Get the picture?

 

 

Biden Ends Combat Operations in Iraq, Except we Already Did

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In part from Reuters:

(Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden and Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi on Monday sealed an agreement formally ending the U.S. combat mission in Iraq by the end of 2021, more than 18 years after U.S. troops were sent to the country.

Coupled with Biden’s withdrawal of the last American forces in Afghanistan by the end of August, the Democratic president is completing U.S. combat missions in the two wars that then-President George W. Bush began under his watch.

Biden and Kadhimi met in the Oval Office for their first face-to-face talks as part of a strategic dialogue between the United States and Iraq.

“Our role in Iraq will be … to be available, to continue to train, to assist, to help and to deal with ISIS as it arises, but we’re not going to be, by the end of the year, in a combat mission,” Biden told reporters as he and Kadhimi met.

There are currently 2,500 U.S. troops in Iraq focusing on countering the remnants of Islamic State. The U.S. role in Iraq will shift entirely to training and advising the Iraqi military to defend itself.

The shift is not expected to have a major impact since the United States has already moved toward focusing on training Iraqi forces.

President Joe Biden, right, speaks as Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi, left, listens during their meeting in the Oval…

President Joe Biden, right, speaks as Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi listens during their meeting in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, July 26, 2021.  source

The real truth?

The Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhemi on Monday in his first meeting with the weakened leader, whose loyalties are precariously split between the US ally and pro-Iran factions at home.

At the heart of the meeting will be the presence of US troops in Iraq and more broadly, whether Baghdad has what it takes to stand up to residual Islamic State jihadist group cells within the country’s borders.

Just last week, the IS group claimed a deadly suicide bombing at a Baghdad market that killed 30 people, according to the official toll.

All the while, US forces in Iraq have been subject to repeat attacks by pro-Iran militias, who in turn have suffered military reprisals launched by Washington.

Some 2,500 US troops still remain in Iraq as part of an anti-IS coalition — a number on top of which there are likely additional special forces, whose numbers are not publicly known.

Kadhemi, whose country has been ravaged by a trifecta of violence, poverty and corruption, would like the United States to commit, at least formally, to a reassessment of its presence in his country.

With three months to go before legislative elections, the head of the Iraqi government is hoping to regain a bit of ground with his country’s powerful pro-Iran factions, which are overtly hostile to the US presence.

Technically, there are no actual combat troops on the ground in Iraq, where the US military has officially only deployed advisors or trainers.

Iraq is an important strategic link for the United States, which leads the international coalition fighting the IS group next-door in Syria.

Abandoning Iraq to Iranian influence is out of the question for the United States, with Washington and Tehran mired in renewed tensions — even if Biden has signaled his readiness to return to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

In the context of this tug-of-war “it doesn’t seem likely that the number of US troops in Iraq will be reduced dramatically,” said Hamdi Malik of the Washington Institute think tank.

Ramzy Mardini, an Iraq specialist at the University of Chicago’s Pearson Institute, believes the Biden-Kadhemi meeting may cosmetically be “shaped” to help the Iraqi premier alleviate domestic pressures, “but the reality on the ground will reflect the status quo and an enduring US presence.”

What regional specialists fear most, however, is a continuation or even intensification of the attacks perpetrated by the pro-Iran factions.

Again on Friday, a drone attack was carried out on a military base in Iraqi Kurdistan that hosts American troops, but did not cause any casualties.

The Iraqi Resistance Coordination Committee, a group of militia factions, on Friday threatened to continue the attacks unless the United States withdraws all its forces and ends the “occupation.”

France Warned the US About the Wuhan Lab Often

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Will this Biden ordered investigation within 100 days include anything from the past including what France warned us about regarding the Wuhan Lab? You be the judge…read on.

In part:

The U.S. federal government should have stopped funding research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2015 when China reduced its cooperation with the French in building and operating the lab, according to the leader of an investigation into COVID-19’s origins by the State Department under the Trump administration.

In 2015, French intelligence officials warned the U.S. State Department and their own foreign ministry that China was cutting back on agreed collaboration at the lab, former State official David Asher, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute think tank, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

By 2017, the French “were kicked out” of the lab and cooperation ceased, leading French officials to warn the State Department that they had grave concerns as to Chinese motivations, according to Asher.

The State Department alleged in January 2021, at the end of the Trump administration, that the Wuhan lab had engaged in classified research on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.

Between October 2009 and May 2019, the U.S. Agency for International Development provided $1.1 million to the U.S.-based EcoHealth Alliance for a sub-agreement with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to USAID. EcoHealth Alliance also received funding from the Department of Defense’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency that was subcontracted to the Wuhan lab, New York magazine reported. National Institutes of Health grants to EcoHealth Alliance totaling $600,000 between 2014 and 2019 were subcontracted to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The NIH, Defense Department and USAID should have stopped sending U.S. federal funding to the Wuhan lab back when the French warned the State Department in 2015, Asher said. More here.

***

Stephen Mosher, a REAL China expert and previous radio guest on my radio show (several times) had this piece in the NY Post in part:

  • China had only one Level 4 lab that can “handle deadly coronaviruses,” and that lab just happened to be located in Wuhan at the very “epicenter of the epidemic.”
  • Underlining China’s shoddy lab-safety record, Xi Jinping himself had, in the early days of the crisis, warned about “lab safety” as a national-security priority.
  • Following Xi’s guidance, “the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology released a new directive titled: ‘Instructions on strengthening biosecurity management in ­microbiology labs that handle advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus.’ ”
  • As soon as the outbreak began, China’s military was put in charge, with the PLA’s top biowar expert, General Chen Wei, dispatched to Wuhan to deal with it.

Even at the time there was other evidence available, which likewise pointed to the lab — and to the PLA’s involvement:

  • The authorities ordered all of the early samples of the coronavirus collected by private and university labs in China — vital for tracing the origin and early spread of the disease — to be destroyed.
  • China’s civilian Center for Disease Control was completely shut out of the picture in favor of the PLA, suggesting a classified military program was involved.
  • Military academies and installations in and around Wuhan were closed around January 1, well before the Chinese public was notified that there was a problem.
  • China lied about human-to-human transmission, leaving the US and other countries unprepared for the rapid spread of the virus, ensuring that more lives would be lost.

The evidence was circumstantial, to be sure, but I was fairly certain by that point that I could have convinced a jury of China’s culpability. Even so, while I waited for more facts to surface, I was careful to call the “lab origin” just a possibility.

Facebook, however, didn’t wait. It quickly moved to suppress the column as “False Information,” refusing to unblock it until April 17. The mainstream media likewise piled on, slamming The Post for publishing the writings of a “conspiracy theorist.” Others who raised questions about the pandemic’s origins were heavily censored as well — if not “canceled” entirely.

Security personnel keep watch outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Security personnel keep watch outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Thomas Peter/REUTERS

China locked down the Wuhan lab, and the US virology establishment closed ranks, both denying that gain-of-function research — or a PLA bioweapons research program — had anything to do with the pandemic.

It has taken over a year, but the attempted cover-ups on both sides of the Pacific have gradually unraveled.

During that time China has burned through a half-dozen increasingly implausible cover stories. After the collapse of the Wuhan Wet Market fable, China tried to pin the blame on a wild succession of animals — bats and pangolins and raccoon-dogs, oh my! — for harboring the virus. We seem now to be back to bats, and are being told that many years ago, in a cave far away from the Wuhan lab, minors fell ill from being peed upon, pooped upon, and even bitten by those same nasty, virus-harboring creatures.

But the wildest tale by far being bandied about by the Chinese authorities is that CoV-2 was a US bioweapon, created in the U. Army’s research labs in Fort Detrick, Maryland. As to how the “American Virus” — as they unabashedly call it — got to China, they have an answer for that too: it was secretly released on the unsuspecting Chinese population of Wuhan by the American soldier-athletes who participated in the October 2019 Military World Games in that city.

Biological science specialists, background, wear biosafety protective clothing for handling viral diseases at U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md.
Biological science specialists, background, wear biosafety protective clothing for handling viral diseases at US Army Medical Research and Development Command at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland.
Andrew Harnik/AP

Who makes up such bat-sh*t crazy stories about secret bioweapons and superspreading soldiers? The same people, it seems, whose fever dream for decades has been to do exactly the same thing. There are numerous scientific publications that prove Chinese labs were engaged in dangerous gain-of-function research, along with new evidence that these techniques were being used in an active bioweapons program that included the Wuhan lab. As China defector Dr. Yan Limeng has taught us, the PLA itself isolated the original bat coronavirus that served as the “backbone” or “template” for CoV-2. Additional genetic material was then spliced into this virus to make it more infectious and deadly to humans. This is not speculation.

Those doing the splicing left “signatures” behind in the genome itself. To boost a virus’ lethality, for example, those doing gain-of-function research customarily insert a snippet of RNA that codes for two arginine amino acids. This snippet — called double CGG — has never been found in any other coronaviruses, but is present in CoV-2. Besides this damning evidence, there are other indications of tampering as well.

The dwindling ranks of lab “deniers” continue to insist that the vast laboratory of nature is capable of infinite surprises. Of course that’s true. And it’s also true that if you have enough monkeys typing the four DNA bases A, C, G, and T on enough computer keyboards they will eventually produce a complete and accurate copy of the human genome, which is 6.4 billion such bases long. But what are the odds?

And what are the odds that the virus passed naturally from animals to humans?

Volunteers in protective suits disinfect a factory with sanitizing equipment, as the country is hit by an outbreak of the novel coronavirus, in Huzhou, Zhejiang province, China February 18, 2020.
Volunteers in protective suits disinfect a factory with sanitizing equipment in China on Feb. 18, 2020.
China Daily via REUTERS

Dr. David Asher, who headed the now-canceled State Department investigation, put that very question to a biostatistician, and was told that the odds were roughly … 1 in 13 billion. In the face of that vanishingly small probability, Asher remarked, “to say this came out of a zoonotic situation is sort of ridiculous.”

What we do know, as former Deputy National Security Advisor (DNSA) Mathew Pottinger pointed out in a February interview, is that the PLA had been “doing secret classified animal experiments in that same laboratory [Wuhan Institute of Virology]” as early as 2017. While the Wuhan lab poses as a “civilian institution,” Pottinger said, US intelligence has determined that the lab has collaborated with China’s military on publications and secret bioweapons projects.

That’s David Asher’s opinion as well. “The Wuhan Institute of Virology is not the National Institute of Health,” he says. “It was operating a secret, classified program. In my view, and I’m just one person, my view is it was a biological weapons program.”

Dr. David Asher
Dr. David Asher believes the Wuhan Institute of Virology was running a biological weapons program.
Rod Lamkey/CNP

A Chinese book that recently fell into the hands of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) further confirms that Chinese military scientists have been focused on what they called the “new era of genetic weapons” since at least 2015. They begin by asserting that World War III would be fought with biological weapons, and go on to describe how viruses can be collected from nature and “artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponized and unleashed.”

Sound familiar?

In fact, the scientists even singled out coronaviruses as a class of viruses that can be readily weaponized, and they suggest that the ideal candidate for a bioweapon would be something like the coronavirus that causes Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS. It is worth noting that the virus that causes COVID-19 is a type of SARS virus, which is why the World Health Organization insists that we call it SARS-CoV-2. As in, the “second” SARS virus.

Peter Jennings, the executive director of ASPI, said the new document “clearly shows that Chinese scientists were thinking about military application for different strains of the coronavirus and thinking about how it could be deployed. It begins to firm up the possibility that what we have here is the accidental release of a pathogen for military use.”

Wuhan Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market before its closure in Hankou, Wuhan city, central China's Hubei province, 31 December 2019.
After the collapse of the Wuhan Wet Market fable, China tried to pin the blame on a wild succession of animals — bats and pangolin.
Alamy

The document, he went on to say, is the closest thing to a “smoking gun as we’ve got.”

Is it really that surprising that the same murderous regime that has brought us forced abortion and sterilization, forced organ harvesting, and genocide in real time would also be developing deadly bioweapons to release upon the world?

China had both the intention and the capability to take a harmless bat virus, turn it into a deadly pathogen, and then release it upon the world. And the evidence suggests that it did just that.

More than half of all Americans — including 59 percent of Republicans and 52 percent of Democrats — now believe the virus was made in a lab and released either accidentally or intentionally. Indeed, there has been a massive hardening of public opinion against the communist giant across the board, with 89 percent of adults now seeing the country as hostile or dangerous.

By killing 600,000 Americans, China has proven that it is both.

But whether the Biden administration makes China pay for its crimes is another question.

Steven W. Mosher is the author of the forthcoming “Politically Incorrect Guide to Pandemics” (Regnery Press).

 

Biden Getting Softer on Moscow

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Was any of this actually discussed in that summit between Biden and Putin? No mention of any of it during the press conference. Read on…

The state trials of Russia’s newest Zircon hypersonic missile from a surface carrier will begin in August 2021, a source in the military-industrial complex told.

source

Newsweek reports in part:

Moscow has warned the Pentagon that the U.S. deploying hypersonic missiles in Europe could unintentionally spark hostilities, just hours after Russia test-fired a weapon it wants to equip its warships and submarines with.

On Monday, Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby was asked about Russia’s claims that it had successfully tested a Tsirkon hypersonic cruise missile.

“The tactical and technical characteristics of the Tsirkon missile were confirmed during the tests,” the Defense Ministry said, also releasing video of the weapon, which President Vladimir Putin had previously boasted would be able to reach speeds of Mach 9, and hit targets up to 700 miles away.

When asked about the test, Kirby said: “We’re certainly aware of President Putin’s claims, […] it’s important to note that Russia’s new hypersonic missiles are potentially destabilizing and pose significant risks because they are nuclear capable systems.”

Kirby added: “By contrast, the United States is developing solely non-nuclear hypersonic strike capabilities. So alongside our NATO allies we remain committed to deterrence while promoting greater stability in the region.”

But then we have the matter of the Havana Syndrome.

The US government is investigating a series of health incidents in the Austrian capital Vienna involving its diplomats and other administration staff.

More than 20 officials have reported symptoms similar to Havana Syndrome – a mystery brain illness – since President Joe Biden took office in January.

The syndrome is unexplained, but US scientists say it is most probably caused by directed microwave radiation.

It was first found in Cuba in 2016-17.

US and Canadian diplomats in Havana complained of symptoms ranging from dizziness, loss of balance, hearing loss and anxiety to something they described as “cognitive fog”.

The US accused Cuba of carrying out “sonic attacks”, which it strongly denied, and the incident led to increased tension between the two nations.

A 2019 US academic study found “brain abnormalities” in the diplomats who had fallen ill, but Cuba dismissed the report.

The Vienna cases first came to light in the New Yorker magazine on Friday and were later confirmed by the US State Department, which said it was “vigorously investigating”.

Reuters quoted an Austrian foreign ministry statement saying it was “working with the US authorities on jointly getting to the bottom of this”.

Vienna has long been a centre for diplomatic activity and has had a reputation as a hotspot for espionage, particularly during the Cold War.

Countries like the US have a large diplomatic presence there.

The city is currently hosting indirect talks between Iran and the US over attempts to resurrect the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

Cases of the condition have been reported elsewhere in the world, but US officials say the numbers in Vienna are greater than in any other city apart from Havana.

In June, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced a wide-ranging review into the causes of the illness.

Then there is the matter of that pesky pipeline…Russia’s….Biden shuttered our own Keystone pipeline  on day one.

More Evidence of the Persistent China Threat to the US

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Exactly how much is the United States going to tolerate?

Not only is the United States and the Western world concerned about the constant military threat of China in the South China Sea but the cyber war continues.

Just read through this Department of Justice report for context –>

Four Chinese Nationals Working with the Ministry of State Security Charged with Global Computer Intrusion Campaign Targeting Intellectual Property and Confidential Business Information, Including Infectious Disease Research

Indictment Alleges Three Defendants Were Officers in the Hainan State Security Department (HSSD), a provincial arm of China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS)

A federal grand jury in San Diego, California, returned an indictment in May charging four nationals and residents of the People’s Republic of China with a campaign to hack into the computer systems of dozens of victim companies, universities and government entities in the United States and abroad between 2011 and 2018. The indictment, which was unsealed on Friday, alleges that much of the conspiracy’s theft was focused on information that was of significant economic benefit to China’s companies and commercial sectors, including information that would allow the circumvention of lengthy and resource-intensive research and development processes. The defendants and their Hainan State Security Department (HSSD) conspirators sought to obfuscate the Chinese government’s role in such theft by establishing a front company, Hainan Xiandun Technology Development Co., Ltd. (海南仙盾) (Hainan Xiandun), since disbanded, to operate out of Haikou, Hainan Province.

The two-count indictment alleges that Ding Xiaoyang (丁晓阳), Cheng Qingmin (程庆民) and Zhu Yunmin (朱允敏), were HSSD officers responsible for coordinating, facilitating and managing computer hackers and linguists at Hainan Xiandun and other MSS front companies to conduct hacking for the benefit of China and its state-owned and sponsored instrumentalities. The indictment alleges that Wu Shurong (吴淑荣) was a computer hacker who, as part of his job duties at Hainan Xiandun, created malware, hacked into computer systems operated by foreign governments, companies and universities, and supervised other Hainan Xiandun hackers.

The conspiracy’s hacking campaign targeted victims in the United States, Austria, Cambodia, Canada, Germany, Indonesia, Malaysia, Norway, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Targeted industries included, among others, aviation, defense, education, government, health care, biopharmaceutical and maritime. Stolen trade secrets and confidential business information included, among other things, sensitive technologies used for submersibles and autonomous vehicles, specialty chemical formulas, commercial aircraft servicing, proprietary genetic-sequencing technology and data, and foreign information to support China’s efforts to secure contracts for state-owned enterprises within the targeted country (e.g., large-scale high-speed railway development projects). At research institutes and universities, the conspiracy targeted infectious-disease research related to Ebola, MERS, HIV/AIDS, Marburg and tularemia.

As alleged, the charged MSS officers coordinated with staff and professors at various universities in Hainan and elsewhere in China to further the conspiracy’s goals. Not only did such universities assist the MSS in identifying and recruiting hackers and linguists to penetrate and steal from the computer networks of targeted entities, including peers at many foreign universities, but personnel at one identified Hainan-based university also helped support and manage Hainan Xiandun as a front company, including through payroll, benefits and a mailing address.

“These criminal charges once again highlight that China continues to use cyber-enabled attacks to steal what other countries make, in flagrant disregard of its bilateral and multilateral commitments,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco. “The breadth and duration of China’s hacking campaigns, including these efforts targeting a dozen countries across sectors ranging from healthcare and biomedical research to aviation and defense, remind us that no country or industry is safe. Today’s international condemnation shows that the world wants fair rules, where countries invest in innovation, not theft.”

“The FBI, alongside our federal and international partners, remains committed to imposing risk and consequences on these malicious cyber actors here in the U.S. and abroad,” said Deputy Director Paul M. Abbate of the FBI. “We will not allow the Chinese government to continue to use these tactics to obtain unfair economic advantage for its companies and commercial sectors through criminal intrusion and theft. With these types of actions, the Chinese government continues to undercut its own claims of being a trusted and effective partner in the international community.”

“This indictment alleges a worldwide hacking and economic espionage campaign led by the government of China,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Randy Grossman for the Southern District of California. “The defendants include foreign intelligence officials who orchestrated the alleged offenses, and the indictment demonstrates how China’s government made a deliberate choice to cheat and steal instead of innovate. These offenses threaten our economy and national security, and this prosecution reflects the Department of Justice’s commitment and ability to hold individuals and nations accountable for stealing the ideas and intellectual achievements of our nation’s best and brightest people.”

“The FBI’s San Diego Field Office is committed to protecting the people of the United States and the community of San Diego, to include our universities, health care systems, research institutes, and defense contractors,” said Special Agent in Charge Suzanne Turner of the FBI’s San Diego Field Office. “The charges outlined today demonstrate China’s continued, persistent computer intrusion efforts, which will not be tolerated here or abroad. We stand steadfast with our law enforcement partners in the United States and around the world and will continue to hold accountable those who commit economic espionage and theft of intellectual property.”

The defendants’ activity had been previously identified by private sector security researchers, who have referred to the group as Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) 40, BRONZE, MOHAWK, FEVERDREAM, G0065, Gadolinium, GreenCrash, Hellsing, Kryptonite Panda, Leviathan, Mudcarp, Periscope, Temp.Periscope and Temp.Jumper.

According to the indictment, to gain initial access to victim networks, the conspiracy sent fraudulent spearphishing emails, that were buttressed by fictitious online profiles and contained links to doppelgänger domain names, which were created to mimic or resemble the domains of legitimate companies. In some instances, the conspiracy used hijacked credentials, and the access they provided, to launch spearphishing campaigns against other users within the same victim entity or at other targeted entities. The conspiracy also used multiple and evolving sets of sophisticated malware, including both publicly available and customized malware, to obtain, expand and maintain unauthorized access to victim computers and networks. The conspiracy’s malware included those identified by security researchers as BADFLICK, aka GreenCrash; PHOTO, aka Derusbi; MURKYTOP, aka mt.exe; and HOMEFRY, aka dp.dll. Such malware allowed for initial and continued intrusions into victim systems, lateral movement within a system, and theft of credentials, including administrator passwords.

The conspiracy often used anonymizer services, such as The Onion Router (TOR), to access malware on victim networks and manage their hacking infrastructure, including servers, domains and email accounts. The conspiracy further attempted to obscure its hacking activities through other third-party services. For example, the conspiracy used GitHub to both store malware and stolen data, which was concealed using steganography. The conspiracy also used Dropbox Application Programming Interface (API) keys in commands to upload stolen data directly to conspiracy-controlled Dropbox accounts to make it appear to network defenders that such data exfiltration was an employee’s legitimate use of the Dropbox service.

Coinciding with today’s announcement, to enhance private sector network defense efforts against the conspirators, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released a Joint Cybersecurity Advisory containing these and further technical details, indicators of compromise and mitigation measures.

The defendants are each charged with one count of conspiracy to commit computer fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison, and one count of conspiracy to commit economic espionage, which carries a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison. The maximum potential sentences in this case are prescribed by Congress and are provided here for informational purposes only, as any sentencings of the defendants will be determined by the assigned judge.

The investigation was conducted jointly by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of California, the National Security Division’s Counterintelligence and Export Controls Section, and the FBI’s San Diego Field Office. The FBI’s Cyber Division, Cyber Assistant Legal Attachés and Legal Attachés in countries around the world provided essential support. Numerous victims cooperated and provided valuable assistance in the investigation.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Fred Sheppard and Sabrina Feve of the Southern District of California and Trial Attorney Matthew McKenzie of the National Security Division’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section are prosecuting this case.

***   source

The threat however does not end in the cyber realm, there is the matter of nuclear weapons. Just days ago, China threatened Japan, an ally of the United States with a nuclear attack over the matter of Taiwan.

“We will use nuclear bombs first. We will use nuclear bombs continuously. We will do this until Japan declares unconditional surrender for the second time,” a threatening video circulated among official Chinese Communist Party channels warns.

“When we liberate Taiwan, if Japan dares to intervene by force – even if it only deploys one soldier, one plane or one ship – we will not only return fire but also wage full-scale war against Japan itself.”

Tensions between Tokyo and Beijing have spiked high in recent weeks.

Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso said: “We must defend Taiwan, under our alliance with the US”.

Defence Minister Yasuhide Nakayama added Japan and the US must “protect Taiwan as a democratic country”.

This was not what Beijing wanted to hear.

 

“We will never allow anyone to intervene in the Taiwan question in any way,” retorted Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian at a press briefing last week.

But a Chinese Communist Party approved video channel with close ties to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) took the anger to the next level.

*** Is the Biden administration taking anything seriously? Rather Kamala? Recently Foreign Policy magazine published in part the following:

For the past couple of months, a rumor has been going around Washington that China might be dramatically expanding its arsenal of nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that can strike the United States. I had heard that rumor and so had many of my colleagues.

According to a report released by the U.S. Defense Department last September, China had about 100 of those missiles but was expected to double that number in the coming years. Read in full here.