Category Archives: Insurgency

Brennan and his Kill Drone Operation

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Catch him if you can, as speeches to one audience are very different from those to another audience. CIA Chief, John Brennan is the designer of the Obama drone program and ‘that’ kill list.

In part: No one else was double-checking the administration’s work, and making sure that what Brennan called the “surgical” approach was only killing bad guys and not simply peasants with guns, civilians whose deaths might prolong the conflict. It was a secret program with an ad hoc structure and no real oversight or outside checks — only John Brennan. The courts weren’t interested even when Americans started showing up on the kill lists, and Congress was lost in a confused thicket of jurisdictional limitations surrounding covert action in the military and CIA. As one congressional staffer told me last year, “No one has a 360-degree view of this.” That left only public opinion, and the White House had a strategy for that. *** Almost a year later, in May 2012, the New York Times revealed that the U.S. had developed a new way of counting casualties. Instead of two categories, the U.S. had only one: militant. The U.S. assumed that every adult male who was killed — whether their names were known or not — was guilty. There were no innocent among the dead. The whole thing was an accounting trick.

But, Obama declared he has a pen and a phone. He can change anything, and does. Meanwhile, the family of Dr. Weinstein, the USAID worker killed in the drone strike, did pay a ransom to get him released. So that pesky and common question remains often, what did the White House know and when did it know it?

President Obama secretly granted the Central Intelligence Agency more flexibility to conduct drone strikes targeting terror suspects in Pakistan than anywhere else in the world after approving more restrictive rules in 2013, according to a published report.

The Wall Street Journal, citing current and former U.S. officials, reported that Obama approved a waiver exempting the CIA from proving that militants targeted in Pakistan posed an imminent threat to the U.S. According to the paper, under that standard, the agency might have been prevented from carrying out a Jan. 15 strike that killed an American and an Italian who were held hostage by Al Qaeda-linked militants.

The deaths of Dr. Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto have renewed debate in Washington over what, if any, new limits should be put on the drone program. After announcing the deaths of Weinstein and Lo Porto on Thursday, Obama said that he had ordered a “full review,” but said the strike that killed the hostages was “fully consistent with the guidelines under which we conduct counterterrorism efforts in the region.”

The CIA conducts drone strikes in Pakistan as well as in Yemen, where it works alongside the military. The Pentagon has also conducted drone strikes in Somalia.

Drone strikes carried out by the CIA fall into two categories. Specific terror leaders are targeted due to their presence on a so-called “kill list.” Strikes that target anyone on a “kill list” must be approved personally by Obama. The second type of operation is a so-called “signature strike”, which does not need the president’s approval and can be carried out against any suspected group of militants. It was the latter type of operation that resulted in the hostages’ deaths on Jan. 15.

The Journal reports that while Obama issued a directive in 2013 aimed at eventually eliminated “signature strikes” in an effort to cut down on civilian deaths, officials say many of the changes specified in the directive either haven’t been implemented or have been works in progress.

The paper also reports that the CIA’s Pakistan drone strike program was initially exempted from the “imminent threat” requirement until the end of U.S. and NATO combat operations in Afghanistan. Officials told the Journal that waiver was extended when Obama decided to keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan beyond the original withdrawal date of December 2014, though it is not clear exactly when this happened.

If the “imminent threat” requirement had been extended to Pakistan, the Journal reports, the CIA would have had to carry out more surveillance of the suspected militants, possibly preventing the fatal Jan. 15 mission from being launched.

In addition to Weinstein and Lo Porto, the drone strike also killed two Americans who had leadership roles with Al Qaeda. U.S. officials told the Associated Press late last week that the compound was targeted because intelligence showed it was frequented by Al Qaeda leaders.

Late Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported that heat sensors and other surveillance tolls indicated that there were only four people at the compound, not the six who were ultimately killed. Analysts tell the paper that they now believe Weinstein and Lo Porto were kept underground, either in a basement or a tunnel, which would have prevented them from being detected by heat sensors.

War in Afghanistan is NOT over, Forbids Release of Detainee

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Finally some real truth from the Department of Justice?

Especially compelling is the notion that this detainee is from Yemen, a country that is over-run with an AQAP militant faction as well as the Houthi, an Iranian terror group presently engaged in hostilities with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States, where the United States is playing an intelligence role.

Muktar Yahya Najee al Warafi is a 40- or 41-year-old citizen of Yemen. As of April 27, 2015, he has been held at Guantánamo for 12 years 11 months. As of January 2010, the Guantánamo Review Task Force had recommended him for transfer to Yemen provided that certain security conditions were met.* The Department of Defense assessment of this detainee can be found here.

The Justice Department Just Declared That the War in Afghanistan Is Not Over

The war in Afghanistan is not ending, US government attorneys said in court documents unsealed Friday, undercutting statements President Barack Obama made last December and in his State of the Union address a few weeks later when he formally declared that “the longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion.”

But Obama didn’t really mean that the war was over, the government now argues.

“Simply put, the President’s statements signify a transition in United States military operations, not a cessation …” Andrew Warden, a Justice Department attorney, wrote. “Although the United States has ended its combat mission in Afghanistan, the fighting there certainly has not stopped.”

Warden made the argument in a 34-page motion (viewable below as a PDF) filed in US District Court for the District of Columbia in response to a legal challenge by Guantanamo detainee Mukhtar Yahi Naji al-Warafi. The detainee asked a federal court to grant his writ of habeas corpus and set him free because Obama said the war in Afghanistan is over and the legal authorization the US has relied upon to hold him for the past 13 years is no longer valid.

Muktar Yahya Najee al Warafi

“The government’s position is incoherent,” David Remes, al-Warafi’s Washington, DC-based attorney, told VICE News. “The president says the war is over. The brief says the war isn’t over and will never be over. And the government says they are being consistent with what the president said. They are twisting the president’s own words. Obama was clearly making the point that the war was over, that hostilities have ended.”

Al-Warafi, a Yemeni national held by the US solely on the basis of his alleged Taliban membership, is one of a handful of Guantanamo captives who have filed so-called end of hostilities challenges in federal court arguing that Obama’s formal declaration signifying an end to the war in Afghanistan paves the way toward their immediate release from Guantanamo.

“Since the US war with the Taliban in Afghanistan is over, the government has to let a Taliban-only detainee go. There’s no need to debate whether the US war with other groups is over,” Remes told VICE News last month when he filed the habeas petition.

But the Obama administration is now arguing that the US military is still very much engaged in hostilities in Afghanistan against al Qaeda and the Taliban, and that the war there is unlikely to end anytime soon. Justice Department attorneys have filed hundreds of pages of documents to support their conclusion.

‘The president says the war is over. The brief says the war isn’t over and will never be over.’

Because the fighting is ongoing, the US argues they can continue to detain al-Warafi and other prisoners at Guantanamo under the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF), in which Congress granted the president the power to detain certain prisoners “under the law of war without trial until the end of hostilities.”

The government goes on to argue that, despite Obama’s statements declaring an end to the war in Afghanistan, Congress did not repeal or amend the 2001 AUMF, indicating that lawmakers are in agreement with the executive branch that “hostilities have not ceased” and the power to indefinitely detain war on terror detainees is on solid legal ground.

The government said al-Warafi has misinterpreted Obama’s statements about the Afghan war’s conclusion and has failed to understand that the “relevant inquiry is whether active hostilities have ceased not whether a particular combat mission has ended.”

“The President has not declared that active hostilities against al-Qaeda, Taliban have ceased or that the fighting in Afghanistan has stopped,” Warden wrote in the government’s motion. “Rather, the President’s public statements made clear that, in light of the continuing threats faced by the United States in Afghanistan, counterterrorism and other military operations would continue even after the end of the combat mission … [Al-Warafi’s] motion should be denied because active hostilities against al-Qaeda, Taliban and associated forces remain ongoing and have not ceased.”

Marty Lederman, a Justice Department attorney during Obama’s first term, opined in a blog post last month when al-Warafi filed his habeas petition that if the government argued that hostilities in Afghanistan are not over, then “the court would then be confronted with at least two fundamental questions: (i) What are the criteria for determining whether an armed conflict has ended, for purposes of international law (which in turn affects AUMF and other domestic-law authorities)? And (ii) who decides?

“As for the substantive question of how to determine when the conflict has ended, well… it’s very complicated, to say the least,” Lederman continued. “The intensity and regularity of hostilities between the relevant parties would certainly be important determinants. If, for example, the US and the Taliban rarely exchange fire (or other forms of attack) for an extended period of time, it would become increasingly difficult to sustain the notion that the armed conflict continues between those parties.”

The attorney added that “there’s no easy formula that explains where, exactly, to draw the line separating ‘war’ from ‘the end of the conflict,” and that the question “is typically determined by the political branches.”

The Justice Department attorneys argue that the US can still hold al-Warafi even while the administration is trying to fulfill Obama’s campaign pledge to shutter the Guantanamo detention facility and repatriate dozens of detainees by the end of the year before Congress implements measures to block transfers, according to a report published last week by the Washington Post.

The government’s position in al-Warafi’s case could conflict with Obama’s larger goal of permanently shutting down the detention facility.

“This goes beyond whether Obama closes Guantanamo or keeps it open,” Remes said. The government’s brief “is one with the administration’s position that it can detain its captives in the war on terror indefinitely. The brief provides a rationale for continuing to hold detainees captured when there in fact was a war.”

Last month, Obama announced that, at the request of Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani, the US would slow the withdrawal of military personnel from the country and leave about 9,800 troops, “at 21 military bases across Afghanistan,” according to the court documents.

And if there is any doubt that US military will continue fighting the Taliban and al Qaeda, the government secured a sworn declaration from Navy Rear Adm. Sinclair M. Harris, the vice director for operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said that while the US combat mission in Afghanistan known as Operation Enduring Freedom has formally ended, the US military has “commenced a new support and counterterrorism mission” in the country, dubbed Operation Freedom’s Sentinel.

Operation Freedom’s Sentinel “is executed under specified rules of engagement that delineate the circumstances and conditions under which the U.S. forces may engage [redacted],” Harris wrote, noting that the 9,800 troops who will stay behind in Afghanistan will be used to support the new mission.

Harris even laid out the timeframe for when “hostile engagements” the US will participate in will begin, which he said demonstrates why the US still considers Afghanistan “as an area of active hostilities” and why al-Warafi is wrong to assume that the war is over and he should be released.

“The height of ‘fighting season’ in Afghanistan generally lasts from April until October,” he said. “Although it is difficult to predict with specificity, it is probable that instances of hostilities between the United States and enemy forces in Afghanistan will increase throughout the coming months.”

A decision in al-Warafi’s case is expected later this year. If you want to read the DoJ’s legal findings, click here for the full document.

Instigators of the Baltimore Riots

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Update: Seems the Baltimore police are investigating who is out to kill them. They have had previous warnings from militant groups and gangs we have seen before. Now, some harder questions need to be asked of the Mayor….hello Mayor?

Baltimore Police say they have received a “credible threat” that rival gangs have teamed up to “take out” law enforcement officers. Police said in a statement that they have received information that members of “various gangs” — including the Black Guerrilla Family, the Bloods and the Crips — have “entered into a partnership” to harm police.

“Law enforcement agencies should take appropriate precautions to ensure the safety of their officers,” police said.

Capt. Eric Kowalczyk, the agency’s chief spokesman, said he could not immediately elaborate on how the information was received or why police found it credible. He would not say whether it was believed connected to the ongoing demonstrations regarding the death of Freddie Gray.  In December, the Baltimore FBI office issued a memo that the Black Guerrilla Family gang was targeting “white cops” in Maryland, an agency spokeswoman confirmed. The memo, circulating among officers, said a contact who had given reliable information in the past said members of the gang — connected to the high-profile corruption scandal at the Baltimore City Detention Center — were planning to target white officers to “send a message.”

BALTIMORE—Police made 34 arrests after protests over the death of Freddie Gray turned violent Saturday evening, as some protesters damaged several police cars and broke windows at a number of downtown businesses, officials said.

Authorities said six police officers suffered minor injuries in the fracas, which prompted officials to briefly hold baseball fans at nearby Camden Yards, where the Baltimore Orioles and Boston Red Sox were playing. At downtown intersections, protesters stood facing officers who had put on helmets after police were pelted by water bottles and other objects.

So, who is behind this insurrection in Baltimore? All the same groups behind Ferguson, Oakland and New York. One group in particular is very familiar however…

  Does the name Malik Shabazz ring a bell? Yes…you’re correct the New Black Panthers. Only now there is a cohesive operation and it includes black lawyers.

Black Lawyers ForJustice

CALL US: (515) 447-9230

Ah, but there is more. This kind of rioting and looting is also taught at the university level and there is a book titled “Race & Police Brutality, Roots of an Urban Dilemma. Authors are Malcolm Holmes and Brad Smith. Malcolm D. Holmes is Professor of Sociology at the University of Wyoming, and Brad W. Smith is Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at Wayne State University.

Expect more to come and then ask your local law enforcement what they know and how prepared are they. If you want to go to a baseball game, take caution.

 

 

Obama’s Emails Hacked, Russia’s Cyberwar

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Russian Hackers Read Obama’s Unclassified Emails, Officials Say

WASHINGTON — Some of President Obama’s email correspondence was swept up by Russian hackers last year in a breach of the White House’s unclassified computer system that was far more intrusive and worrisome than has been publicly acknowledged, according to senior American officials briefed on the investigation.

The hackers, who also got deeply into the State Department’s unclassified system, do not appear to have penetrated closely guarded servers that control the message traffic from Mr. Obama’s BlackBerry, which he or an aide carries constantly.

But they obtained access to the email archives of people inside the White House, and perhaps some outside, with whom Mr. Obama regularly communicated. From those accounts, they reached emails that the president had sent and received, according to officials briefed on the investigation.

White House officials said that no classified networks had been compromised, and that the hackers had collected no classified information. Many senior officials have two computers in their offices, one operating on a highly secure classified network and another connected to the outside world for unclassified communications.

But officials have conceded that the unclassified system routinely contains much information that is considered highly sensitive: schedules, email exchanges with ambassadors and diplomats, discussions of pending personnel moves and legislation, and, inevitably, some debate about policy.

Officials did not disclose the number of Mr. Obama’s emails that were harvested by hackers, nor the sensitivity of their content. The president’s email account itself does not appear to have been hacked. Aides say that most of Mr. Obama’s classified briefings — such as the morning Presidential Daily Brief — are delivered orally or on paper (sometimes supplemented by an iPad system connected to classified networks) and that they are usually confined to the Oval Office or the Situation Room.

Still, the fact that Mr. Obama’s communications were among those hit by the hackers — who are presumed to be linked to the Russian government, if not working for it — has been one of the most closely held findings of the inquiry. Senior White House officials have known for months about the depth of the intrusion.

“This has been one of the most sophisticated actors we’ve seen,” said one senior American official briefed on the investigation.

Others confirmed that the White House intrusion was viewed as so serious that officials met on a nearly daily basis for several weeks after it was discovered. “It’s the Russian angle to this that’s particularly worrisome,” another senior official said.

While Chinese hacking groups are known for sweeping up vast amounts of commercial and design information, the best Russian hackers tend to hide their tracks better and focus on specific, often political targets. And the hacking happened at a moment of renewed tension with Russia — over its annexation of Crimea, the presence of its forces in Ukraine and its renewed military patrols in Europe, reminiscent of the Cold War.

Inside the White House, the intrusion has raised a new debate about whether it is possible to protect a president’s electronic presence, especially when it reaches out from behind the presumably secure firewalls of the executive branch.

Mr. Obama is no stranger to computer-network attacks: His 2008 campaign was hit by Chinese hackers. Nonetheless, he has long been a frequent user of email, and publicly fought the Secret Service in 2009 to retain his BlackBerry, a topic he has joked about in public. He was issued a special smartphone, and the list of those he can exchange emails with is highly restricted.

When asked about the investigation’s findings, the spokeswoman for the National Security Council, Bernadette Meehan, said, “We’ll decline to comment.” The White House has also declined to provide any explanations about how the breach was handled, though the State Department has been more candid about what kind of systems were hit and what it has done since to improve security. A spokesman for the F.B.I. declined to comment.

Officials who discussed the investigation spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicate nature of the hacking. While the White House has refused to identify the nationality of the hackers, others familiar with the investigation said that in both the White House and State Department cases, all signs pointed to Russians.

On Thursday, Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter revealed for the first time that Russian hackers had attacked the Pentagon’s unclassified systems, but said they had been identified and “kicked off.” Defense Department officials declined to say if the signatures of the attacks on the Pentagon appeared related to the White House and State Department attacks.

The discovery of the hacking in October led to a partial shutdown of the White House email system. The hackers appear to have been evicted from the White House systems by the end of October. But they continued to plague the State Department, whose system is much more far-flung. The disruptions were so severe that during the Iranian nuclear negotiations in Vienna in November, officials needed to distribute personal email accounts, to one another and to some reporters, to maintain contact.

Earlier this month, officials at the White House said that the hacking had not damaged its systems and that, while elements had been shut down to mitigate the effects of the attack, everything had been restored.

One of the curiosities of the White House and State Department attacks is that the administration, which recently has been looking to name and punish state and nonstate hackers in an effort to deter attacks, has refused to reveal its conclusions about who was responsible for this complex and artful intrusion into the government. That is in sharp contrast to Mr. Obama’s decision, after considerable internal debate in December, to name North Korea for ordering the attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment, and to the director of national intelligence’s decision to name Iranian hackers as the source of a destructive attack on the Sands Casino.

This month, after CNN reported that hackers had gained access to sensitive areas of the White House computer network, including sections that contained the president’s schedule, the White House spokesman, Josh Earnest, said the administration had not publicly named who was behind the hack because federal investigators had concluded that “it’s not in our best interests.”

By contrast, in the North Korea case, he said, investigators concluded that “we’re more likely to be successful in terms of holding them accountable by naming them publicly.”

But the breach of the president’s emails appeared to be a major factor in the government secrecy. “All of this is very tightly held,” one senior American official said, adding that the content of what had been breached was being kept secret to avoid tipping off the Russians about what had been learned from the investigation.

Mr. Obama’s friends and associates say that he is a committed user of his BlackBerry, but that he is careful when emailing outside the White House system.

“The frequency has dropped off in the last six months or so,” one of his close associates said, though this person added that he did not know if the drop was related to the hacking.

Mr. Obama is known to send emails to aides late at night from his residence, providing them with his feedback on speeches or, at times, entirely new drafts. Others say he has emailed on topics as diverse as his golf game and the struggle with Congress over the Iranian nuclear negotiations.

George W. Bush gave up emailing for the course of his presidency and did not carry a smartphone. But after Mr. Bush left office, his sister’s email account was hacked, and several photos — including some of his paintings — were made public.

The White House is bombarded with cyberattacks daily, not only from Russia and China. Most are easily deflected.

The White House, the State Department, the Pentagon and intelligence agencies put their most classified material into a system called Jwics, for Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System. That is where top-secret and “secret compartmentalized information” traverses within the government, to officials cleared for it — and it includes imagery, data and graphics. There is no evidence, senior officials said, that this hacking pierced it.

Fleecing Taxpayers on Boston Bombers Trial

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If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you. When you apply for asylum, you are not allowed to travel back to the home country. Under U.S. asylum rules, America is beyond generous with financially assisted housing, food, healthcare and education. The Tsarneav family took full advantage of your money, to the point of fraud and criminal activity. It gets worse. You are paying millions of dollars for the trial, hotels, transportation, food, travel and security and the dollars will continue to mount…

Survivors outraged after learning Tsarnaev’s family’s trip to US paid for with American tax dollars

BOSTON (MyFoxBoston.com) — The family of the convicted marathon bomber is in America, on your tax dollars, and survivors are outraged after learning the news.

  Defense Team

 

As of Thursday, family members of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev have been staying at the Hampton Inn in Revere under very tight security, just one of the things tax dollars are paying for. FOX25’s Sharman Sacchetti investigated how much this trip is costing you.

Sources say these family members are being called as witnesses and not only that, at least three agencies are working around the clock to protect and transport them. This is all part of the defense team’s strategy to save Tsarnaev. While it’s unclear when their flight started, we know the last part of it came through Amsterdam and landed at Logan Airport and cost nearly $2,500 per person.

The cost to put them up at the Hampton Inn at the government rate: almost $200 per night, per person. And a source says at least three agencies, the FBI, US Marshal’s and Revere Police are involved in constant protection.

“I think you’re probably talking about $100,000 plus in that neighborhood in terms of security and out of pocket costs associated with travel,” former US attorney Michael Sullivan said.

And that’s just for this trip.

Lawyer fees or even what all witnesses during the trial cost is still unclear. One defense witness, Mark Spencer of Arsenal Consulting, charged $375 per hour and billing taxpayers for $150,000.

Governor Charlie Baker said, “It’s a federal trial, it’s a federal case, the feds ultimately need to make the decisions about this.”

Baker was non-committal about how resources are being used, even state ones.

Sullivan told Sacchetti that while he understands taxpayer outrage, the whole point is to make sure it’s done right.

“The court wants to make sure that at the end of the day, the defendant gets a fair trial and would not want to add any potential issues on appeal in the penalty phase, prosecutors finished making their case yesterday,” he said.

Marathon survivor Marc Fucarile reached out to us Friday night, reacting to this news, saying that he’s outraged that Tsarnaev’s family’s expenses are being paid for when “myself and some of the other survivors and our families have to pay for our own parking at court, lunch, and we were told that if the trial was moved out of state, we’d have to pay for our own travel and lodging, there.”

The statement went on to say: “Why should our country pay for them when that family committed a violent act against our country? Not to mention, all of the free government services this family previously enjoyed on the backs of the taxpayers including government assistance and a free ride to UMass Dartmouth. In contrast, I was denied housing assistance I sought after the bombings, even though I needed a handicapped accessible apartment, and my wife lost her job as a result of the events.”

He ended by saying he feels badly for the taxpayers that have to pay for this after they were so generous to all the survivors and the One Fund.

The defense team is up next. And the penalty phase picks up again Monday.