Category Archives: ISIS ISIL Islamic State Caliphate

AQAP new Threat and the U.S. Attorney in Minnesota

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It was just June of 2015  that the leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was killed in a drone strike in Yemen. The next top military leader of AQAP has now assumed control and called for attacks on the United States.

AQAP is one of the most dangerous branches of the jihadist network.

Prior to his current position, al-Rimi was the group’s military chief.

“Qasm al-Rimi was considered the brains of the operation,” CNN terrorism analyst Paul Cruickshank said when news of al-Wuhayshi’s death broke. “For more than a decade, he’s really been at the helm of the military side of things for AQAP but also planning their large international operations.”

The FBI investigated Abdullahi Yusuf and Abdi Nur in Minneapolis in 2011. In 2014, the criminal complaint was filed.

In April, Newsweek reported:

MINNEAPOLIS (Reuters) – U.S. authorities have charged six Somali-American young men from Minnesota with planning to join Islamic State and fight for the militant group in Syria, the U.S. attorney for Minnesota said on Monday.

The six, all U.S. citizens, were part of a larger group of friends and relatives that had been conspiring for the past 10 months, many trying multiple times to leave the country, U.S. prosecutors alleged.

They were arrested Sunday as part of a yearlong FBI investigation into young men from the area trying to travel to join Islamic State and there is no evidence they had plans to conduct an attack inside the United States, prosecutors said.

“They are not confused young men; they were not easily influenced,” Luger said. “These were focused men who were intent on joining a terrorist organization by any means possible.”

They received advice and encouragement from another group member, Abdi Nur, who has stayed in contact with them since he left the United States last year and joined the Islamic State in Syria, prosecutors said. Nur was charged in November. The full story is here.

This brings us to the work performed leading up to the Independence Day, 2015, the FBI has been aggressive and assertive in their efforts, led by Director James Comey. 200 known people from the United States have been proven to have traveled to jihad in the Middle East.

Comey’s testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is here.

From Reuters:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. authorities foiled attacks planned around the Fourth of July, arresting more than 10 people in the month before the holiday who were inspired by Islamic State online recruitment, FBI Director James Comey said on Thursday.

“I do believe our work disrupted efforts to kill people likely in connection with July 4th,” Comey told reporters at the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He did not detail the number of plots uncovered or their targets.

Separately, a national security source said multiple overseas plots by Islamic State sympathizers had also been halted in recent days.

The FBI and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had warned local law enforcement to be on alert for attacks around the July 4 holiday celebrating the 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence. No such attacks occurred.

Authorities’ concern heightened around the holiday as Islamic State leaders called for followers to do what they could wherever they could to carry out violence on behalf of the militant group.

Comey described the tactic as “crowd sourcing terrorism” and said the FBI had accepted the heightened state as the “new normal.”

Some of those arrested were communicating with Islamic State via encrypted data, a second U.S. security source said.

The FBI has pressured tech companies to remove encryption that gives users privacy protections that cannot be broken by law enforcement.

Comey estimated that dozens of people influenced by Islamic State have “gone dark” and disappeared from the FBI’s watch because of encrypted data.

The United States is engaged in a military campaign with allies in the Middle East to fight Islamic State militants who have taken over parts of Iraq and Syria and created cells in other countries racked by conflict in the region.

Hamas, Qatar and the Sinai, Terror Attacks

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Of particular note, U.S. Central Command has a satellite location in Qatar. Qatar is the location of the Taliban 5 released in exchange for Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl and Qatar is the ‘go-to’ country that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton launched as the official Middle East diplomacy interlocutor. Corruption reigns in Qatar. The United States policy under Barack Obama is dealing with the devil.

 

From Reuters:

Israel says Islamic State’s Sinai assault aimed to help Hamas get arms

Israel accused Hamas on Tuesday of supporting last week’s assaults by Islamic State affiliates on Egyptian forces in the Sinai in hope of freeing up arms smuggling to the Gaza Strip.

The remarks followed Israeli allegations that Hamas members provided training and medical treatment for the Sinai insurgents – charges dismissed by the Palestinian Islamist group as a bid to further fray its troubled ties with Cairo.

Egypt said more than 100 insurgents and 17 of its soldiers were killed in Wednesday’s simultaneous assaults, carried out against military checkpoints around the North Sinai towns of Sheikh Zuweid and Rafah. Islamic State’s Egypt affiliate, Sinai Province, took credit for the attacks.

Rafah straddles the border between Egypt and Gaza and had long seen smuggling to the Hamas-controlled enclave. But Cairo has been cracking down on such activity and deems Hamas a threat to Egyptian interests.

An Israeli intelligence colonel responsible for monitoring the borders with Egypt and Gaza said on Tuesday that Hamas, short of weaponry after its war against Israel last year, supported the Sinai assaults with the “objective of opening up a conduit” for renewed smuggling. More here.

Reports Prove Qatar is a sponsor of terror.

From the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs:

On July 2, the Egyptian El Balad channel reported statements by Egyptian security experts that the explosives used to assassinate Prosecutor-General Hisham Barakat were delivered to Egypt through the Qatari embassy’s diplomatic mail. Meanwhile, the Jordanian newspaper Al-Arab al-Youm openly accused Qatar of being behind the attack. In a July 5 report, the newspaper claimed Qatar had funded the terror attack by the Islamic State’s Ansar Beit al-Maqdis against Egyptian army units in Sinai; it also allegedly had brought terror operatives from Syria, Iraq, and Libya to Sinai, where they had undergone training for the attack.

The report also claimed that Qatar had coordinated the media coverage of the Sinai onslaught in the Arab and international media. For example, Al Jazeera, which broadcasts from Doha and is funded by the Qatari government, provided direct coverage of the offensive against the Egyptian army from the moment it began that day at seven in the morning, and highlighted the raising of the black flags of Islamic State in the town of Sheikh Zuweid.

These reports are substantiated by the rising tension between Egypt and Qatar in recent days. Two days after last week’s attacks in Egypt, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry appointed Mohamed Awad — previously its ambassador to Qatar — to the post of Egyptian consul-general in Mumbai while leaving the Egyptian embassy in Doha without an ambassador. The Egyptian ambassador to Qatar was recalled in January 2014 to protest “Qatar’s interference in Egypt’s internal affairs” and since then had waited in Cairo to be reassigned. Egyptian commentators view this step as Egypt signaling its displeasure to Qatar, as well as the fact that Egyptian security officials are aware of Qatar’s involvement in the recent terror incidents. Although Qatar issued a condemnation of the Egyptian prosecutor-general’s assassination, Egyptians have dismissed Qatar’s statement as a standard denunciation and no more than lip service.

Private Powerbrokers Bankrolled Iran Diplomacy

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Thomas Pickering, an anti-Israel steward of progressive bent was designated by Hillary Clinton to head up the task of the Accountability Review Board report to investigate the Benghazi deadly attack.

Being a powerbroker with lots of money, an agenda and the quest to create expanded business opportunity with the enemy is what the Iran Project is about.

Iran has been an rogue country for decades and a state sponsor of terror, yet to some that does not matter even when American have been killed. Shameful.

The deal being negotiated with Iran by the P5+1 comes down to lifting sanctions, funding and missiles. Through this the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is about to being even richer than the $8 billion in their control now. Does that even sound remotely acceptable?

Click here for the Iran Project summary and review the signatories.

Cunning Diplomacy Bubbles to the Surface

How Freelance Diplomacy Bankrolled by Rockefellers Has Paved the Way for an Iran Deal

Bloomberg:

Cutting a nuclear deal with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be the easy part for President Obama, who must then persuade both houses of Congress to sign off on the pact. Republicans and many Democrats abhor the idea of lifting sanctions and readmitting oil-rich Iran to the global economy until it disavows all nuclear research and stops meddling through proxies in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen.

Advocating for an Iran truce is a loose coalition of peace groups, think tanks, and former high-ranking U.S. diplomats bound together by millions of dollars given by the Rockefeller family through its $870 million Rockefeller Brothers Fund. The philanthropy, which is run by a board split between family members and outsiders, has spent $4.3 million since 2003 promoting a nuclear pact with Iran, chiefly through the New York-based Iran Project, a nonprofit led by former U.S. diplomats. For more than a decade they’ve conducted a dialogue with well-placed Iranians, including Mohammad Javad Zarif, now Tehran’s chief nuclear negotiator. The Americans routinely briefed officials in the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, including William Burns, Obama’s former deputy secretary of state. Burns hammered out much of an interim nuclear agreement in secret 2013 talks with his Iranian counterparts that paved the way for the current summit in Vienna, where Secretary of State John Kerry leads the U.S. delegation.

The Rockefellers’ Iran foray began in late 2001, after the Sept. 11 attacks. Stephen Heintz, president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, convened a board retreat at the Rockefellers’ Pocantico Center in Westchester, just north of New York City, to consider new approaches to the Islamic world at a time when the U.S. was focused on the threat from al-Qaeda. One invited speaker was Seyyed Hossein Nasr, an Iranian-American professor at George Washington University. “He got me thinking more and more about Iran, its geostrategic importance and its relationship to the Sunni world,” says Heintz.

The Rockefeller fund decided to create the Iran Project in cooperation with the United Nations Association of the U.S., a nonprofit that promotes the UN’s work then headed by William Luers, a career diplomat who served as ambassador to Venezuela and Czechoslovakia. Luers made contact with Zarif through Iran’s mission to the UN in New York. He also recruited career diplomats Thomas Pickering, who served as Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to Israel and George H.W. Bush’s ambassador to the UN, and Frank G. Wisner, who served as Reagan’s ambassador to Egypt and whose father was a high-ranking officer in the Office of Strategic Services and then in the CIA. “Each of us came from a special place on the compass,” Wisner says.

With encouragement from the Bush administration, says Heintz, the trio developed a relationship with Zarif, who was stationed in New York representing Iran at the UN. In early 2002, the Iran Project set up a meeting with Iranians affiliated with the Institute for Political and International Studies in Tehran, a think tank with close government ties. It was hosted by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute at a small hotel outside Stockholm. The Iranians came armed with talking points, Heintz says, and the meetings were stiff and unproductive. The initial goal of developing a road map to restoring relations between Washington and Tehran, along the lines of Nixon’s 1972 Shanghai Communique preceding U.S.-China relations, proved elusive, according to Pickering. After every meeting, Heintz says, Iran Project leaders would brief staffers at the State Department or White House, including Stephen Hadley, Bush’s national security adviser, and Condoleezza Rice, his secretary of state. “As we had no contacts at all with Iran at the time, their insights were very valuable,” says R. Nicholas Burns, who served as under secretary of state for political affairs under Bush.

The secret meetings in European capitals were suspended after Mahmoud Ahmedinejad won Iran’s presidency in 2005. But the group’s relationship with Zarif proved key in helping to jump-start negotiations after he was made foreign minister in 2013 by Rouhani, the newly elected president. A State Department official says the administration welcomes back-channel efforts like the Iran Project’s because “it proves useful both to have knowledgeable former officials and country experts engaging with their counterparts and in reinforcing our own messages when possible.”

The Iran Project kept an eye on public opinion from the start. Among those invited to its events in New York was Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, who found them “helpful in framing ideas for a workable nuclear treaty,” he says. The ideas floated at the meetings included letting the Iranians keep a limited capacity for enriching uranium to save face. “But everyone knew that a huge amount depended on how far the Iranians would go.” Silvers published multiple essays detailing the proposals by Pickering and Jessica Mathews, another Iran Project participant who preceded William Burns as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The Iran Project’s briefing papers have provided a counterweight to criticism from pro-Israel groups, led by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, opposed to a deal.

For Wisner, breaking bread with Iranians exorcised a few ghosts. He was on Secretary of State Cyrus Vance’s senior staff during the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis in 1979 and knew diplomats held at the embassy. “I lived that,” he says. He also remembers listening to his dad planning the military coup that removed Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, from power in 1953 and replaced him with the U.S.-backed shah, Reza Pahlavi. “They don’t trust us, and we don’t trust them,” says Wisner. He says his father’s role in the Mosaddegh coup didn’t come up in any of the Iran Project meetings. “The Iranians, like us, have made a major political decision to engage,” he says.

The Rockefeller fund has given about $3.3 million to the Ploughshares Fund, a San Francisco-based disarmament group that has spent $4 million since 2010 to promote a deal with Iran and shepherded the peace groups and think tanks it supports to back Obama. “We’re trying to leverage our investments to play on our strengths,” says Joseph Cirincione, its president.

On June 23, when the New York Times ran an op-ed, “The Iran Deal’s Fatal Flaw,” Ploughshares coordinated its grantees’ responses to the claim that the deal would leave Iran capable of producing a nuclear weapon within three months. The Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan group established in 1971, published a rebuttal on its daily blog, which other Ploughshares-affiliated groups sent to their contacts in Congress. “The pro-deal side has done a very good job systematically co-opting what used to be the arms control community and transforming it into an absolutist, antiwar movement,” says Omri Ceren, senior adviser for strategy for the Israel Project, a nonprofit that opposes a deal. “Sometimes, if your goal is stopping the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, you have to make the hard decision to take military action, or at least signal you’re willing to.” Cirincione says that mistakes the rationale behind the Iran Project. “Iran is the boulder in the road,” he says. “You have to resolve this issue to get to the rest of the nonproliferation agenda. That’s why we’re doing this.”

 

Bunker Busters vs. Kerry’s Pro-Iran Lobby

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Sanctions and Ballistic Missiles

From Reuters:

A dispute over U.N. sanctions on Iran’s ballistic missile program and a broader arms embargo were among issues holding up a nuclear deal between Tehran and six world powers on Monday, the day before their latest self-imposed deadline.

“The Iranians want the ballistic missile sanctions lifted. They say there is no reason to connect it with the nuclear issue, a view that is difficult to accept,” one Western official told Reuters. “There’s no appetite for that on our part.”

Iranian and other Western officials confirmed this view as the foreign ministers of the six powers – Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States – gathered in Vienna to try to strike a deal with Iran by Tuesday night.

“The Western side insists that not only should it (ballistic missiles) remain under sanctions, but that Iran should suspend its program as well,” an Iranian official said.

“But Iran is insisting on its rights and says all the sanctions, including on the ballistic missiles, should be lifted when the U.N. sanctions are lifted.”

Lobbying on Behalf of Tehran

From Reuters:

It’s always awkward to defend your enemies. But that’s the position U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration has found itself in with Iran as it pushes for an historic accord that would end a 12-year nuclear standoff.

Tehran and Washington, which have called each other the “Great Satan” and a member of the “Axis of Evil” during 36 years of hostility, are more used to exchanging insults than defending each other. The two foes cut diplomatic ties after Iranian revolutionaries seized 52 hostages in Tehran’s U.S. embassy during the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Yet for a month now the U.S. State Department has been defending Iran from suggestions that it was on the verge of violating a requirement to reduce its low-enriched uranium stockpile under a 2013 interim nuclear with major powers.

Offensive Measure, Bunker Busters

From LA Times:

As diplomats rush to reach an agreement to curb Iran’s nuclear program, the U.S. military is stockpiling conventional bombs so powerful that strategists say they could cripple Tehran’s most heavily fortified nuclear complexes, including one deep underground.

The bunker-busting bombs are America’s most destructive munitions short of atomic weapons. At 15 tons, each is 5 tons heavier than any other bomb in the U.S. arsenal.

In development for more than a decade, the latest iteration of the MOP — massive ordnance penetrator — was successfully tested on a deeply buried target this year at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The test followed upgrades to the bomb’s guidance system and electronics to stop jammers from sending it off course.

U.S. officials say the huge bombs, which have never been used in combat, are a crucial element in the White House deterrent strategy and contingency planning should diplomacy go awry and Iran seek to develop a nuclear bomb.

Obama has made it clear that he has no desire to order an attack, warning that U.S. airstrikes on Iran’s air defense network and nuclear facilities would spark a destabilizing new war in the Middle East, and would only delay Iran by several years should it choose to build a bomb.

“A military solution will not fix it,” Obama told Israeli TV on June 1. An attack “would temporarily slow down an Iranian nuclear program, but it will not eliminate it.”

Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, speaking to reporters Thursday at the Pentagon, sought to downplay the likelihood or the utility of an attack. He said no plan under consideration, including use of the bunker-busters, could deliver a permanent knockout blow to Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and enrichment plants.

Obama’s Middle East Policy is IN This Book

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2003:

At Khalidi’s 2003 farewell party, for example, a young Palestinian American recited a poem accusing the Israeli government of terrorism in its treatment of Palestinians and sharply criticizing U.S. support of Israel. If Palestinians cannot secure their own land, she said, “then you will never see a day of peace.”

One speaker likened “Zionist settlers on the West Bank” to Osama bin Laden, saying both had been “blinded by ideology.”

2004

Rashid Khalidi wrote a book. Fittingly the title is ‘Resurrecting Empire’. Released in 2004, Khalidi cherry picked facts to build his case against any Western intervention into the Middle East and wrote often about early colonization and occupation by Britain and France with the aid of the United States. How many times have we heard the words colonization and occupation out of this White House?

2008

CHICAGO — It was a celebration of Palestinian culture — a night of music, dancing and a dash of politics. Local Arab Americans were bidding farewell to Rashid Khalidi, an internationally known scholar, critic of Israel and advocate for Palestinian rights, who was leaving town for a job in New York.

A special tribute came from Khalidi’s friend and frequent dinner companion, the young state Sen. Barack Obama. Speaking to the crowd, Obama reminisced about meals prepared by Khalidi’s wife, Mona, and conversations that had challenged his thinking. Obama also calls for the U.S. to talk to such declared enemies as Iran, Syria and Cuba. But he argues that the Palestinian militant organization Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip, is an exception, calling it a terrorist group that should renounce violence and recognize Israel’s right to exist before dialogue begins. That viewpoint, which also matches current U.S. policy, clashes with that of many Palestinian advocates who urge the United States and Israel to treat Hamas as a partner in negotiations.

2010

From Politico: An Arab-American activist who attended an outreach session at the White House complex in April had his Chicago home raided by the FBI last week and appears to be a focus of an unfolding federal terrorism-support investigation.

Hatem Abudayyeh, who serves as executive director of the Arab-American Action Network, took part in a meeting for Arab-American leaders held in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on April 22, according to appointment data posted on the White House website.

FBI agents executed a search warrant at Abudayyeh’s Chicago home as part of a coordinated series of raids involving at least one other Chicago site, along with the homes of anti-war activists in Minnesota. A copy posted on the web of a grand jury subpoena served on one target of the raids in Minneapolis demands “all records of any payment provided directly or indirectly to Hatem Abudayyeh, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (“PFLP”) or the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (“FARC”).”

A search warrant served on a Minneapolis anti-war activist, Michael Kelly, ordered agents to seize records relating to Kelly’s travels to “Palestine, Colombia, and … within the United States.” It also mentions possible connections to Hezbollah.

The warrant and subpoena suggest the probe, which is being run by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald in Chicago, is focusing on illegal support for terrorist organizations, particularly by a Minnesota-based group called the Freedom Road Socialist Organization. PFLP, FARC and Hezbollah are designated as terrorist groups by the U.S. government. A spokesman for Fitzgerald’s office declined to comment on the probe.

In a 2006 interview with Fight Back News, an outlet run by Minneapolis activist Kelly, Abudayyeh seemed to disagree rather strenuously with at least some of the U.S. government’s use of the “terrorist” label.

“The U.S. and Israel will continue to describe Hamas, Hezbollah and the other Palestinian and Lebanese resistance organizations as ‘terrorists,’ but the real terrorists are the governments and military forces of the U.S. and Israel,” Abudayyeh said. “The vast majority of the world sees and understands this, and are in full support of Lebanese, Palestinian and worldwide resistance to Israel and the U.S.’s naked aggression, war, imperialism and occupation.”

2011

In part from TWS:

Barack Obama and Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi both taught at the University of Chicago in the ’90s, and at a farewell dinner for Khalidi in 2003, Obama warmly praised Khalidi’s advice, which took the form of “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases.” Since the Los Angeles Times never released its videotape of the event, we may never know Obama’s blind spots or the enlightenment on offer from his friend and colleague Khalidi​—​a PLO spokesman in Beirut during the Lebanese civil wars.

Khalidi has denied his role with the PLO, but Martin Kramer, the Wexler-Fromer fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, has him dead to rights. On his website, www.martinkramer.org, Kramer explains that between 1976 and 1982 Khalidi was consistently identified​—​by, among others, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times​—​as a PLO spokesman, without once demanding a correction. Still, all Khalidi will admit today is that he was “deeply involved in politics in Beirut.”

Perhaps it’s understandable that Khalidi won’t come clean about his role in the civil wars, for everyone came out of the conflict dripping with blood, not just the Christians and Israelis, but the Palestinians, too. Why the Christians are typically censured for their brutality while the PLO seems to get a pass from so many U.S. analysts, journalists, and even former government employees like Pillar is strange, especially since PLO chairman Yasser Arafat showed that, unlike the Lebanese Forces, he was willing to kill Americans as well.

In summary, is can be stated that the basis of Barack Obama’s policy on Israel and the rest of the Middle East is grounded in the book, authored by Khalidi. From the word ‘resurrection’ in the title, to relations with Israel, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon and even Cuba, now Venezuela is on the near horizon.

Fits like a globe….