Sitrep, America vs. al Qaeda

Posted on May 23, 2014May 23, 2014 by Denise Simon

Twelve years later and counting, lets examine any advances in destroying Usama bin Ladin’s mission.

In the Name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful,

“Permission to fight (against disbelievers) is given to those (believers) who are fought against, because they have been wronged and surely, Allah is Able to give them (believers) victory” [Quran 22:39]

“Those who believe, fight in the Cause of Allah, and those who disbelieve, fight in the cause of Taghut (anything worshipped other than Allah e.g. Satan). So fight you against the friends of Satan; ever feeble is indeed the plot of Satan.”[Quran 4:76]

Some American writers have published articles under the title ‘On what basis are we fighting?’ These articles have generated a number of responses, some of which adhered to the truth and were based on Islamic Law, and others which have not. Here we wanted to outline the truth – as an explanation and warning – hoping for Allah’s reward, seeking success and support from Him.

While seeking Allah’s help, we form our reply based on two questions directed at the Americans:

(Q1) Why are we fighting and opposing you? Q2)What are we calling you to, and what do we want from you?

As for the first question: Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple:

(1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.

a) You attacked us in Palestine:

(i) Palestine, which has sunk under military occupation for more than 80 years. The British handed over Palestine, with your help and your support, to the Jews, who have occupied it for more than 50 years; years overflowing with oppression, tyranny, crimes, killing, expulsion, destruction and devastation. The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you are the leaders of its criminals. And of course there is no need to explain and prove the degree of American support for Israel. The creation of Israel is a crime which must be erased. Each and every person whose hands have become polluted in the contribution towards this crime must pay its*price, and pay for it heavily.

(ii) It brings us both laughter and tears to see that you have not yet tired of repeating your fabricated lies that the Jews have a historical right to Palestine, as it was promised to them in the Torah. Anyone who disputes with them on this alleged fact is accused of anti-semitism. This is one of the most fallacious, widely-circulated fabrications in history. The people of Palestine are pure Arabs and original Semites. It is the Muslims who are the inheritors of Moses (peace be upon him) and the inheritors of the real Torah that has not been changed. Muslims believe in all of the Prophets, including Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, peace and blessings of Allah be upon them all. If the followers of Moses have been promised a right to Palestine in the Torah, then the Muslims are the most worthy nation of this.

When the Muslims conquered Palestine and drove out the Romans, Palestine and Jerusalem returned to Islaam, the religion of all the Prophets peace be upon them. Therefore, the call to a historical right to Palestine cannot be raised against the Islamic Ummah that believes in all the Prophets of Allah (peace and blessings be upon them) – and we make no distinction between them.

(iii) The blood pouring out of Palestine must be equally revenged. You must know that the Palestinians do not cry alone; their women are not widowed alone; their sons are not orphaned alone.

(b) You attacked us in Somalia; you supported the Russian atrocities against us in Chechnya, the Indian oppression against us in Kashmir, and the Jewish aggression against us in Lebanon.

(c) Under your supervision, consent and orders, the governments of our countries which act as your agents, attack us on a daily basis;

(i) These governments prevent our people from establishing the Islamic Shariah, using violence and lies to do so.

(ii) These governments give us a taste of humiliation, and places us in a large prison of fear and subdual.

(iii) These governments steal our Ummah’s wealth and sell them to you at a paltry price.

(iv) These governments have surrendered to the Jews, and handed them most of Palestine, acknowledging the existence of their state over the dismembered limbs of their own people.

(v) The removal of these governments is an obligation upon us, and a necessary step to free the Ummah, to make the Shariah the supreme law and to regain Palestine. And our fight against these governments is not separate from out fight against you.

(d) You steal our wealth and oil at paltry prices because of you international influence and military threats. This theft is indeed the biggest theft ever witnessed by mankind in the history of the world.

(e) Your forces occupy our countries; you spread your military bases throughout them; you corrupt our lands, and you besiege our sanctities, to protect the security of the Jews and to ensure the continuity of your pillage of our treasures.

(f) You have starved the Muslims of Iraq, where children die every day. It is a wonder that more than 1.5 million Iraqi children have died as a result of your sanctions, and you did not show concern. Yet when 3000 of your people died, the entire world rises and has not yet sat down.

(g) You have supported the Jews in their idea that Jerusalem is their eternal capital, and agreed to move your embassy there. With your help and under your protection, the Israelis are planning to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque. Under the protection of your weapons, Sharon entered the Al-Aqsa mosque, to pollute it as a preparation to capture and destroy it.

(2) These tragedies and calamities are only a few examples of your oppression and aggression against us. It is commanded by our religion and intellect that the oppressed have a right to return the aggression. Do not await anything from us but Jihad, resistance and revenge. Is it in any way rational to expect that after America has attacked us for more than half a century, that we will then leave her to live in security and peace?!!

(3) You may then dispute that all the above does not justify aggression against civilians, for crimes they did not commit and offenses in which they did not partake:

(a) This argument contradicts your continuous repetition that America is the land of freedom, and its leaders in this world. Therefore, the American people are the ones who choose their government by way of their own free will; a choice which stems from their agreement to its policies. Thus the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, the occupation and usurpation of their land, and its continuous killing, torture, punishment and expulsion of the Palestinians. The American people have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their Government and even to change it if they want.

(b) The American people are the ones who pay the taxes which fund the planes that bomb us in Afghanistan, the tanks that strike and destroy our homes in Palestine, the armies which occupy our lands in the Arabian Gulf, and the fleets which ensure the blockade of Iraq. These tax dollars are given to Israel for it to continue to attack us and penetrate our lands. So the American people are the ones who fund the attacks against us, and they are the ones who oversee the expenditure of these monies in the way they wish, through their elected candidates.

(c) Also the American army is part of the American people. It is this very same people who are shamelessly helping the Jews fight against us.

(d) The American people are the ones who employ both their men and their women in the American Forces which attack us.

(e) This is why the American people cannot be not innocent of all the crimes committed by the Americans and Jews against us.

(f) Allah, the Almighty, legislated the permission and the option to take revenge. Thus, if we are attacked, then we have the right to attack back. Whoever has destroyed our villages and towns, then we have the right to destroy their villages and towns. Whoever has stolen our wealth, then we have the right to destroy their economy. And whoever has killed our civilians, then we have the right to kill theirs.

The American Government and press still refuses to answer the question:

Why did they attack us in New York and Washington?

If Sharon is a man of peace in the eyes of Bush, then we are also men of peace!!! America does not understand the language of manners and principles, so we are addressing it using the language it understands.

(Q2) As for the second question that we want to answer: What are we calling you to, and what do we want from you?

(1) The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam.

(a) The religion of the Unification of God; of freedom from associating partners with Him, and rejection of this; of complete love of Him, the Exalted; of complete submission to His Laws; and of the discarding of all the opinions, orders, theories and religions which contradict with the religion He sent down to His Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). Islam is the religion of all the prophets, and makes no distinction between them – peace be upon them all.

It is to this religion that we call you; the seal of all the previous religions. It is the religion of Unification of God, sincerity, the best of manners, righteousness, mercy, honour, purity, and piety. It is the religion of showing kindness to others, establishing justice between them, granting them their rights, and defending the oppressed and the persecuted. It is the religion of enjoining the good and forbidding the evil with the hand, tongue and heart. It is the religion of Jihad in the way of Allah so that Allah’s Word and religion reign Supreme. And it is the religion of unity and agreement on the obedience to Allah, and total equality between all people, without regarding their colour, sex, or language.

(b) It is the religion whose book – the Quran – will remained preserved and unchanged, after the other Divine books and messages have been changed. The Quran is the miracle until the Day of Judgment. Allah has challenged anyone to bring a book like the Quran or even ten verses like it.

(2) The second thing we call you to, is to stop your oppression, lies, immorality and debauchery that has spread among you.

(a) We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honour, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling’s, and trading with interest.

We call you to all of this that you may be freed from that which you have become caught up in; that you may be freed from the deceptive lies that you are a great nation, that your leaders spread amongst you to conceal from you the despicable state to which you have reached.

(b) It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind:

(i) You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord and your Creator. You flee from the embarrassing question posed to you: How is it possible for Allah the Almighty to create His creation, grant them power over all the creatures and land, grant them all the amenities of life, and then deny them that which they are most in need of: knowledge of the laws which govern their lives?

(ii) You are the nation that permits Usury, which has been forbidden by all the religions. Yet you build your economy and investments on Usury. As a result of this, in all its different forms and guises, the Jews have taken control of your economy, through which they have then taken control of your media, and now control all aspects of your life making you their servants and achieving their aims at your expense; precisely what Benjamin Franklin warned you against.

(iii) You are a nation that permits the production, trading and usage of intoxicants. You also permit drugs, and only forbid the trade of them, even though your nation is the largest consumer of them.

(iv) You are a nation that permits acts of immorality, and you consider them to be pillars of personal freedom. You have continued to sink down this abyss from level to level until incest has spread amongst you, in the face of which neither your sense of honour nor your laws object.

Who can forget your President Clinton’s immoral acts committed in the official Oval office? After that you did not even bring him to account, other than that he ‘made a mistake’, after which everything passed with no punishment. Is there a worse kind of event for which your name will go down in history and remembered by nations?

(v) You are a nation that permits gambling in its all forms. The companies practice this as well, resulting in the investments becoming active and the criminals becoming rich.

(vi) You are a nation that exploits women like consumer products or advertising tools calling upon customers to purchase them. You use women to serve passengers, visitors, and strangers to increase your profit margins. You then rant that you support the liberation of women.

(vii) You are a nation that practices the trade of sex in all its forms, directly and indirectly. Giant corporations and establishments are established on this, under the name of art, entertainment, tourism and freedom, and other deceptive names you attribute to it.

(viii) And because of all this, you have been described in history as a nation that spreads diseases that were unknown to man in the past. Go ahead and boast to the nations of man, that you brought them AIDS as a Satanic American Invention.

(xi) You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and*industries.

(x) Your law is the law of the rich and wealthy people, who hold sway in their political parties, and fund their election campaigns with their gifts. Behind them stand the Jews, who control your policies, media and economy.

(xi) That which you are singled out for in the history of mankind, is that you have used your force to destroy mankind more than any other nation in history; not to defend principles and values, but to hasten to secure your interests and profits. You who dropped a nuclear bomb on Japan, even though Japan was ready to negotiate an end to the war. How many acts of oppression, tyranny and injustice have you carried out, O callers to freedom?

(xii) Let us not forget one of your major characteristics: your duality in both manners and values; your hypocrisy in manners and principles. All*manners, principles and values have two scales: one for you and one for the others.

(a)The freedom and democracy that you call to is for yourselves and for white race only; as for the rest of the world, you impose upon them your monstrous, destructive policies and Governments, which you call the ‘American friends’. Yet you prevent them from establishing democracies. When the Islamic party in Algeria wanted to practice democracy and they won the election, you unleashed your agents in the Algerian army onto them, and to attack them with tanks and guns, to imprison them and torture them – a new lesson from the ‘American book of democracy’!!!

(b)Your policy on prohibiting and forcibly removing weapons of mass destruction to ensure world peace: it only applies to those countries which you do not permit to possess such weapons. As for the countries you consent to, such as Israel, then they are allowed to keep and use such weapons to defend their security. Anyone else who you suspect might be manufacturing or keeping these kinds of weapons, you call them criminals and you take military action against them.

(c)You are the last ones to respect the resolutions and policies of International Law, yet you claim to want to selectively punish anyone else who does the same. Israel has for more than 50 years been pushing UN resolutions and rules against the wall with the full support of America.

(d)As for the war criminals which you censure and form criminal courts for – you shamelessly ask that your own are granted immunity!! However, history will not forget the war crimes that you committed against the Muslims and the rest of the world; those you have killed in Japan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Lebanon and Iraq will remain a shame that you will never be able to escape. It will suffice to remind you of your latest war crimes in Afghanistan, in which densely populated innocent civilian villages were destroyed, bombs were dropped on mosques causing the roof of the mosque to come crashing down on the heads of the Muslims praying inside. You are the ones who broke the agreement with the Mujahideen when they left Qunduz, bombing them in Jangi fort, and killing more than 1,000 of your prisoners through suffocation and thirst. Allah alone knows how many people have died by torture at the hands of you and your agents. Your planes remain in the Afghan skies, looking for anyone remotely suspicious.

(e)You have claimed to be the vanguards of Human Rights, and your Ministry of Foreign affairs issues annual reports containing statistics of those countries that violate any Human Rights. However, all these things vanished when the Mujahideen hit you, and you then implemented the methods of the same documented governments that you used to curse. In America, you captured thousands the Muslims and Arabs, took them into custody with neither reason, court trial, nor even disclosing their names. You issued newer, harsher laws.

What happens in Guatanamo is a historical embarrassment to America and its values, and it screams into your faces – you hypocrites, “What is the value of your signature on any agreement or treaty?”

(3) What we call you to thirdly is to take an honest stance with yourselves – and I doubt you will do so – to discover that you are a nation without principles or manners, and that the values and principles to you are something which you merely demand from others, not that which you yourself must adhere to.

(4) We also advise you to stop supporting Israel, and to end your support of the Indians in Kashmir, the Russians against the Chechens and to also cease supporting the Manila Government against the Muslims in Southern Philippines.

(5) We also advise you to pack your luggage and get out of our lands. We desire for your goodness, guidance, and righteousness, so do not force us to send you back as cargo in coffins.

(6) Sixthly, we call upon you to end your support of the corrupt leaders in our countries. Do not interfere in our politics and method of education. Leave us alone, or else expect us in New York and Washington.

(7) We also call you to deal with us and interact with us on the basis of mutual interests and benefits, rather than the policies of sub dual, theft and occupation, and not to continue your policy of supporting the Jews because this will result in more disasters for you.

If you fail to respond to all these conditions, then prepare for fight with the Islamic Nation. The Nation of Monotheism, that puts complete trust on Allah and fears none other than Him. The Nation which is addressed by its Quran with the words: “Do you fear them? Allah has more right that you should fear Him if you are believers. Fight against them so that Allah will punish them by your hands and disgrace them and give you victory over them and heal the breasts of believing people. And remove the anger of their (believers’) hearts. Allah accepts the repentance of whom He wills. Allah is All-Knowing, All-Wise.” [Quran9:13-1]

The Nation of honour and respect:

“But honour, power and glory belong to Allah, and to His Messenger (Muhammad- peace be upon him) and to the believers.” [Quran 63:8]

“So do not become weak (against your enemy), nor be sad, and you will be*superior ( in victory )if you are indeed (true) believers” [Quran 3:139]

The Nation of Martyrdom; the Nation that desires death more than you desire life:

“Think not of those who are killed in the way of Allah as dead. Nay, they are alive with their Lord, and they are being provided for. They rejoice in what Allah has bestowed upon them from His bounty and rejoice for the sake of those who have not yet joined them, but are left behind (not yet martyred) that on them no fear shall come, nor shall they grieve. They rejoice in a grace and a bounty from Allah, and that Allah will not waste the reward of the believers.” [Quran 3:169-171]

The Nation of victory and success that Allah has promised:

“It is He Who has sent His Messenger (Muhammad peace be upon him) with guidance and the religion of truth (Islam), to make it victorious over all other religions even though the Polytheists hate it.” [Quran 61:9]

“Allah has decreed that ‘Verily it is I and My Messengers who shall be victorious.’ Verily Allah is All-Powerful, All-Mighty.” [Quran 58:21]

The Islamic Nation that was able to dismiss and destroy the previous evil Empires like yourself; the Nation that rejects your attacks, wishes to remove your evils, and is prepared to fight you. You are well aware that the Islamic Nation, from the very core of its soul, despises your haughtiness and arrogance.

If the Americans refuse to listen to our advice and the goodness, guidance and righteousness that we call them to, then be aware that you will lose this Crusade Bush began, just like the other previous Crusades in which you were humiliated by the hands of the Mujahideen, fleeing to your home in great silence and disgrace. If the Americans do not respond, then their fate will be that of the Soviets who fled from Afghanistan to deal with their military defeat, political breakup, ideological downfall, and economic bankruptcy.

This is our message to the Americans, as an answer to theirs. Do they now know why we fight them and over which form of ignorance, by the permission of Allah, we shall be victorious?

Translated and published, November, 2002

The Intelligence Community has only released and published 17 documents found at bin Ladin’s compound in Abbotabad, Pakistan. No others to date have been released. The summary of the documents released can be read here.

Imam’s Don’t Care about Rape Gangs

Posted on May 22, 2014May 22, 2014 by Denise Simon

It is clear that parts of England are under siege by Muslim men and the respective Muslim leadership and Imans don’t care. It is with some satisfaction that local Christians are taking the fight right to the local UK mosques. Even PM David Cameron and law enforcement is taking notice.

So it is the Muslim Rape Gangs that is but one component at issue and if you don’t think it is not our worry in America, then you are sadly mistaken.

So taking the fight to the Muslim’s front door can be seen here.

Muslim Child-Rape Gangs in Britain

It recently emerged that British police had known for more than a decade that Muslim rape gangs were targeting young girls, but they ignored the evidence of rapes because “they were petrified of being called racist.” Rather than acknowledge that there is a problem, Muslim groups have decided to play the victim card instead. They are working overtime trying to silence public discussion about Muslim sex crimes by branding critics as “far-right racists” and “Islamophobic.” Several of the men on trial in Liverpool apparently told their victims that it was all right for the girls to be passed around for sex with dozens of men “because it’s what we do in our country.”

Chilling testimony can be read here. A full summary of rapes in the UK is here.

Now for America and this is even more terrifying.

Detroit imam sentenced to 35-50 years in prison for raping girls

Mohammed Masroor, who used to teach Islam to students in Detroit and Hamtramck, was convicted earlier this month on 15 counts in the sexual assaults of three young girls, who were his relatives, in 2000.

The case drew attention because the Wayne County judge handling the case, Michael Hathaway, ruled that victims, who are now adults, and other witnesses could testify wearing the niqab, a religious face veil that covers the entire head except for a narrow slit that shows the eyes. It may be the first time in the U.S. that a judge allowed women to testify while wearing a niqab.

Judges in England and Canada ruled last year in separate cases that women could not testify wearing the niqab. But prosecutors in Wayne County said women in Masroor’s case should be allowed to testify wearing the veil, and Judge Hathaway agreed.

Prosecutors said Masroor used his knowledge of religion to manipulate his victims, who ranged in age from 10 to 13 at the time of the assaults.

Masroor’s attorney, Mitch Foster, has said his client maintains his innocence.

Why Muslims Rape

In Bangladesh in 2011, a 14 year-old girl, who was sexually assaulted by her 40 year-old cousin, received 100 lashes for her “adulterous” behavior. She did not survive her punishment for being a victim. Over the past decade, several hundred women have been flogged in Bangladesh under similar circumstances.

Flogging is the punishment for fornication in Islam, whether the woman had casual sex by choice outside of marriage or was raped. Without four male witnesses or the confession of the attacker, no rape case can be proven, according to Shariah law. So if the victim is “brazen” enough to report the crime, she is thus admitting to having sex, which in itself is a crime if the sex was not with her husband. And in normal circumstances, a rapist would not attack in front of any witnesses, unless they were also a part of the attack. Facing such dire punishments, it is highly probable that most Muslim women would not dare report these attacks, even if they need medical attention.

With such laws, it’s no surprise that rapes have become a part of Muslim culture. During the “Arab Spring” in Egypt, hundreds of women were raped in Tahrir Square by those Egyptians who were glorified in the West as “fighters against the cruel dictatorship of Mubarak” and who then voted for the Islamist Muhammad Mursi and made him the President of Egypt. Then, just 13 months later, those same Egyptians again crowded into Tahrir Square and enthusiastically supported the military coup against Mursi “for democracy”– and in just four days raped 130 more women on the way to that democracy.

Sadly no local or federal lawmakers see a pattern of Muslim crimes in America, all the facts are there. Perhaps America needs a like organization to the Britain First Defense Force, our own law enforcement are not allowed to be proactive.

We Cant Find Them

Posted on May 21, 2014May 21, 2014 by Denise Simon

The UK and several other European countries have been desperate to track down Europeans fighters that went to Syria for front line AQ training and they have returned home. This has been going on for months. Only this past week did Dianne Feinstein just say on a Sunday talk show that the domestic threat by AQ jihadi fighters is growing exponentially such that she has seen the intelligence and the United States now needs to be concerned.

Well at least Feinstein did say something and put out a feeble warning. It is also interesting that the matter of drone strikes ordered by Barack Obama on U.S citizens has come back into the news reports in a small way as there are likely some others that are slated for assassination as approved by Barack Obama.

So, it must be noted that many Americans have also traveled to Syria to get front line al Qaeda training and some too have returned home, yet our own intelligence cant find them.

The number of American extremists who have flocked to Syria is higher than previously understood, American intelligence sources say. And some of the fighters are coming home.

Western intelligence services have been warning that European and American jihadists have been flocking to Syria to fight. But they’ve been reluctant to say how many Americans have joined the extremist forces there—until now. The latest U.S. intelligence estimates say that more than 100 Americans have joined the jihad in Syria to fight alongside Sunni terrorists there.

Senior American intelligence officials tell The Daily Beast that they believe between six and 12 Americans who have gone to Syria to fight Assad have now returned to America. “We know where some are,” one senior U.S. intelligence official told The Daily Beast. “The concern is the scale of the problem we are dealing with.”

The scale of that problem by all accounts has gotten worse. Last fall, the official U.S. estimate on Americans specifically who have joined the jihad in Syria was in the low double digits. In January, the New York Times reported that at least 70 Americans have either traveled or attempted to travel to Syria. Earlier this month FBI Director James Comey told reporters that he believed “dozens” of Americans were suspected to be foreign fighters in Syria, but declined to give a more precise number.

In recent months, the U.S. intelligence community has made the tracking of all Westerners going to fight into Syria a top priority. Speaking in March before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Matthew Olsen, the director of the National Counter-Terrorism Center, described in vague terms an effort by the whole government to find Western citizens traveling to Syria and to track their travel.

“In light of the large foreign fighter component in Syria crisis, we are working together to gather every piece of information we can about the identity of these individuals,” he said at the time.

More recently, the issue of Western foreign fighters came up in top-level meetings between the Syrian opposition delegation and the Obama administration last week to Washington, D.C.

“We view all foreign fighters as a threat and they are not welcome. There is a convergence of interests between the moderate Syrian opposition and the international community in fighting these foreign fighters and insuring they do not use Syria as a launching pad for external attacks,” said Oubai Shabandar, a strategic communications adviser to the Syrian opposition’s foreign mission in Washington. “This was a major topic of conversation this month in meetings with the Syrian opposition delegation and top U.S. officials.”

The problem, U.S. counter-terrorism and intelligence officials tell The Daily Beast, is that there are just so many jihadists with Western passports traveling to fight in Syria that they worry some of them may slip back into the United States without being detected.

“The NSA does not have the ability to track thousands of bad guys—and on the human intelligence side, this is even more difficult,” another senior U.S. intelligence official told The Daily Beast. “So we are worried that people are slipping through the cracks.”

Olsen in his March testimony said there were thousands of foreign fighters in Syria and that hundreds of those fighters held Western passports.

“This raises our concern that radicalized individuals with extremist contacts and battlefield experience could return to their home countries to commit violence on their own initiative or participate in al Qaeda-directed plots aimed at Western targets outside of Syria,” he said. Olsen also said that a group of “al Qaeda veterans” from Afghanistan and Pakistan have gone to Syria, making the prospect of recruiting new members for the organization even more likely.

Aaron Zelin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who closely tracks the flow of foreign fighters into Syria, said, “In the past when we’ve seen Americans go abroad to fight in foreign countries and a number of individuals have been trained to go back to attempt attacks on the homeland.” The best example he said is Faisal al-Shahzad, the Pakistani American who traveled to Taliban training camps in Pakistan and then attempted to set off a bomb in Times Square in 2010. Al-Shahzad failed to properly detonate his bomb and was reported to the New York police by a Muslim-American street vendor.

“It’s not just Americans who are going to Syria, but there are up to 3,000 European citizens from countries that have visa waivers with the United States who have also joined the jihad in Syria,” Zelin said. “This is why so many Western counter-terrorism officials are so worried, it’s much easier to get into our country with a Western passport.”

Those Americans that have gone off to fight in Syria also do not fit the typical terrorist profile. Last May, the Detroit Free Press reported that Nicole Lynn Mansfield, a convert to Islam, was killed in fighting in Syria fighting Assad. In April of 2013, a federal court charged Eric Harroun, a former U.S. Army private, with firing a rocket-propelled grenade while fighting alongside al-Nusra, al Qaeda’s official affiliate in Syria. If U.S. intelligence estimates are correct, these cases could be unfortunate harbingers of things to come.

In case you need more on this go here. This is a time to raise your own local situational awareness.

Hey Barack, it IS Iran Stupid…

Posted on May 20, 2014May 20, 2014 by Denise Simon

As SecState, John Kerry continues to press Iran over the failed talks on the nuclear program, there is much more to be known that apparently the NSC at the White House has yet to learn via the media, which is how Barack Obama learns about every scandal.

John Kerry has relied heavily on the UK’s Catherine Ashton as the main voice of negotiations with Iran and now she is set to leave the post. This leaves the talks exclusively in the laps of Iran and Washington.

The other main ‘go-to’ point person working the Iranian nuclear program for John Kerry is Martin Indyk. He has a long history in foreign policy, more than John Kerry and yet, Indyk has never sided with Israel either, especially when it comes to the peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. Remember it is Israel that is fighting so hard to exterminate the Iranian nuclear program as is Saudi Arabia. So, Indyk has been straddling both sides of the debate and talks all the way around. It was just recently that in a bar, with probably a few martinis under his belt, the truth comes out of Indyk’s mouth. For a full 30 minutes, Indyk was on a bashing Israel diatribe eliminating all fault of the Palestinians.

In the meantime, another memo was delivered to the U.S. and Barack Obama and John Kerry much less the NSC apparently dismissed it when it comes to Iran recruiting Afghan fighters with full salaries to join the jihad in Syria. This has sparked a full Parliament outrage and an investigation is underway with exactly what Iran’s mission is.

Not to be omitted, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has gone full blown high tech and we cannot forget that U.S. drone that ended up in Iran’s possession.

‘The unveiling of an Iranian copy of the Lockheed Martin RQ-170 unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) overshadowed other, potentially more significant, revelations that emerged when Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei visited the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Aerospace Force on 11 May. An operational anti-radiation version of the Fateh-110 would in theory allow Iran to suppress the radars essential to the ballistic missile defence systems deployed in the Arab Gulf states.’

We also in summary cannot overlook what is really happening to Christians in the region.

“The growing number of Iranian Christians fleeing their homeland to come to Germany should alarm us that Iran’s regime is getting more and more radicalized and repressive – on a daily basis,” Saba Farzan, a German-Iranian expert on human rights, told FoxNews.com.

A telling example of Iran’s heavy-handed crackdown on Christians is the case of a 40-something Iranian woman named Afsaneh. A spiritual display brought down the full force of Tehran’s hard-line regime.

“I was so excited about Christmas that I put up a tree in my home and work,” Afsaneh told The Guardian.

However, she along with her cousin would pay a steep price for their embrace of the Christian faith in the Sharia-dominated Islamic Republic. Iranian authorities imprisoned both converts and imposed more than 70 lashes on Afsaneh and her cousin for merely practicing Christianity.

Remember through all of this neither Barack Obama or John Kerry have worked nor found success in releasing the American pastor held prisoner in Iran.

Iran, a state sponsor of terror continues terror, virtually unchecked by any country in the West. Next we could see Rouhani at Disneyworld.

FBI’s Comey Stunned about al Qaeda

Posted on May 19, 2014May 19, 2014 by Denise Simon

So Barack Obama continues to say that al Qaeda leadership has been defeated and the Director of the FBI, James Comey agrees.

Well, we have countless al Qaeda factions all over the globe and they are more bold as we have seen with the kidnapping and killing of young children by Boko Harem in Nigeria. So it defies logic that Comey is stunned to determine that the garden variety attitude in the United States and with the few allies left that is al Qaeda has not been defeated.

Drone strikes abound in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan dropping hellfire missiles on some high value targets yet, al Qaeda factions like al Nusra, al Shabaab and Boko Harem are still out there. Perhaps James Comey’s name is not on the memo distribution list.

WASHINGTON — When James B. Comey was nominated last June to be director of the F.B.I., it seemed to herald the beginning of a new era at the bureau.

His predecessor, Robert S. Mueller III, began the job just days before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and Mr. Mueller’s years leading the F.B.I. had one overwhelming focus: fighting terrorism. Mr. Comey was appointed a month after President Obama delivered a sweeping speech on the future of the fight against terrorism and said the United States was at a “crossroads” and needed to move off its wartime footing.

As deputy attorney general in the George W. Bush administration, Mr. Comey had questioned the legality of a National Security Agency surveillance program regarded as a major component of the president’s counterterrorism strategy. And given Mr. Comey’s earlier experience in the Justice Department prosecuting gun cases, the F.B.I. seemed likely to shift resources into more traditional criminal prosecutions.

By Mr. Comey’s own account, he also brought to the job a belief, based on news media reports, that the threat from Al Qaeda was diminished. But nine months into his tenure as director, Mr. Comey acknowledges that he underestimated the threat the United States still faces from terrorism.

“I didn’t have anywhere near the appreciation I got after I came into this job just how virulent those affiliates had become,” Mr. Comey said, referring to offshoots of Al Qaeda in Africa and in the Middle East during an interview in his sprawling office on the seventh floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building. “There are both many more than I appreciated, and they are stronger than I appreciated.”

Based on what he now knows, Mr. Comey said, he is convinced that terrorism should remain the main focus of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The agency he inherited from Mr. Mueller had roughly half its 16,000 agents and analysts working on national security issues, and Mr. Comey made it clear that he would not be changing those priorities.

In his speech at the National Defense University a year ago, Mr. Obama could also not have been clearer. He said that the United States was entering “a new phase,” and that “we have to recognize that the scale of the threat resembles the types of attacks we faced before 9/11.”

But for his administration, translating that vision has proved difficult. The National Security Agency has resisted demands that it change after its secret surveillance programs were disclosed in documents released by Edward J. Snowden, a former contractor. The C.I.A. has continued to operate a drone program that Mr. Obama said would be transferred to the Pentagon, and it is likely to face renewed criticism when a long-awaited report on its secret prison program is finally released.

Critics say that, at the F.B.I., Mr. Comey has chosen to continue a strategy that is no longer appropriate for the way the terrorist threat has evolved.

“The F.B.I.’s evolution since 9/11 into a domestic intelligence agency is troubling both from a civil liberties standpoint and its effectiveness,” said Mike German, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security program at New York University, “and in the face of evidence that it is ineffective, it’s troubling that Comey would embrace it.”

Mr. Comey’s defenders say he has simply accepted the reality that it still is a dangerous world.

“The problem is that as they have wanted to dial back, the threat has persisted in places like Syria, Yemen and East Africa,” said Rick Nelson, a former senior counterterrorism official with the F.B.I. “There’s still a legitimate threat and we can’t stop what we have been doing and change the model, and that has limited what Comey can do at the F.B.I.”

In briefings with senior administration officials, testimony before Congress and interviews with the news media, Mr. Comey has said that while the United States has “dramatically reduced” the “primary tumor” of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, “that threat has metastasized” in places like North Africa, Yemen and the United States.

The metaphor has personal meaning for Mr. Comey, who had a malignant tumor removed from his colon eight years ago and whose mother died of cancer. Just as the United States believed it had diminished Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, he said, doctors believed they had defeated his mother’s cancer.

For Mr. Comey and the F.B.I., the Boston Marathon bombings in April 2013 and the scrutiny that followed have illustrated the conundrum the bureau faces 12 and a half years after planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

After the inspectors general who oversee the American intelligence and law enforcement agencies released a report on whether warning signs had been missed before the bombings, a diverse group of critics seized on its findings, but for different reasons.

Local officials and congressional Republicans criticized the F.B.I. as not having done enough, saying that it should have more closely investigated Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the bombing suspects, after he returned to the United States from a 2012 trip to Dagestan. Civil libertarians said that it was the latest example of how the F.B.I.’s traditional approach to terrorism — deploying large numbers of agents to gather information — had failed.

“What we learned in the Boston Marathon bombing is that it wasn’t that the F.B.I. didn’t have enough information — it was drowning in information,” said Carol Rose, the executive director of the Massachusetts A.C.L.U. “If the F.B.I. and the police had done investigative work like they should be doing, they would have looked more closely” at a triple murder in 2011 that the F.B.I. now says Mr. Tsarnaev was involved in, she said.

Critics like Ms. Rose said the bombings exposed a problem that existed before the Sept. 11 attacks: that the F.B.I. needs to better investigate the information it has, not simply collect more of it. They contend that the bureau’s buildup under Mr. Mueller did not solve the problem, but made it worse.

“You had all this information coming in, and nearly all of it wasn’t helpful,” said Mr. German, a former F.B.I. agent, “so agents became accustomed to leads going nowhere and everything they opened became an exercise in how quickly you can close it.”

In the case of the Boston bombing, Russian officials had previously told the F.B.I. that Mr. Tsarnaev had become radicalized and planned to travel to Russia to join underground groups. In their report last month, the inspectors general found that the agent who investigated that lead never questioned Mr. Tsarnaev or his family about his travels, and did not reopen an investigation of him after he returned to the United States.

“The year the F.B.I. investigated the older brother, it said it did 1,000 assessments,” Mr. German said. “There weren’t 1,000 terrorists in Boston that year, and a vast majority of resources were obviously going to things that didn’t matter.”

The F.B.I. has said that it did all it could, given the information it had from the Russian government and the legal restrictions on how it conducts its investigations.

But the bureau’s focus on counterterrorism has led to criticism that a generation of agents have spent their entire careers doing nothing else. Mr. German and other critics say they never learned the basic policing skills needed for a criminal investigation. Mr. Comey hasacknowledged the problem, ordering that the F.B.I.’s newest class of recruits, scheduled to start training in June, spend significant time on criminal investigation squads. And he has given his field offices more power to devote resources to helping local authorities.

He has also spent time studying the cybersecurity issue — which Mr. Mueller has said would be one of his most significant challenges — in an effort to determine how the bureau can be more effective in policing it.

And Mr. Comey said he also wanted to apply the lessons learned in fighting terrorism to fighting other crimes. If Congress approves, he plans to move the bureau’s head of intelligence out of the national security division and create a new intelligence branch that will amass information on crimes like fraud in an effort to more quickly identify trends and perpetrators.

Using another metaphor — this time a football one — Mr. Comey said that he envisioned the F.B.I. as a free safety who has some primary responsibilities but is often called on to help other defenders on the field.

“We have certain assigned defensive responsibilities, those are the national securities ones, but beyond that I want to look to the line of scrimmage, which is the primary line of defense, which is state and local law enforcement and say, ‘O.K. where do you need us to make a tackle?’ ” Mr. Comey said. “ ‘Do you need us to stay deep, do you need us to cover over the middle, do you need us to come up and play run support?’ And that’s very different in each game with each opponent.”

If Mr. Comey has not changed Mr. Mueller’s policies, he has brought a distinctly different style to the bureau, devoting much of his time to raising morale, which had sagged because of Mr. Mueller’s demanding approach to management as well as budget cuts ordered by Congress.

While both had a background as federal prosecutors, Mr. Mueller was a prep school and Princeton graduate who wore a white shirt nearly every day as director and stipulated that agents keep their coats on at meetings. Mr. Comey, a less intimidating figure despite being 6-foot-8, struck a more casual note with a blue shirt on his first day as director and has gone out of his way to personally connect with his agents.

He has vowed to visit every one of the 56 field offices in his first year as director, and on a recent visit to the Buffalo office explained his theory that a more informal F.B.I. might be a more effective one.

“My first day everyone showed up and everyone was dressed up looking beautiful,” he said “And I said, ‘Listen, I don’t want people for their regular staff meetings with me wearing jackets because I worry that physical buttoning-up leads to a metaphysical buttoning-up.’ ”