FBI Covertly Leaks San Bernardino Details to Media

Posted on December 5, 2015December 5, 2015 by Denise Simon

If Attorney General is going to place a gag order on FBI Director James Comey over the work of the FBI investigation into to the San Bernardino terror massacre, then leaks will be the order of the day. Additionally further details from foreign press will be important and fruitful.

The vetting process in Pakistan by our official at the State Department failed to perform a comprehensive investigation on Tashfeen.

Tashfeen could have had contact with the most dangerous and know mosque is Islamabad, Pakistan, THE RED MOSQUE.

The Siege of Lal Masjid (Urdu: لال مسجد محاصرہ, code-named Operation Sunrise^[10]^[11]^[12]) was a confrontation in July 2007 between Islamic fundamentalist militants and the Government of Pakistan, led by President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz. The focal points of the operation were the Lal Masjid (“Red Mosque”) and the Jamia Hafsa madrasah complex in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Since January 2006, Lal Masjid and the adjacent Jamia Hafsa madrasah had been operated by Islamic militants led by two brothers, Maulana Abdul Aziz and Abdul Rashid Ghazi. This organization advocated the imposition of Sharia (Islamic religious law) in Pakistan and openly called for the overthrow of the Pakistani government. Lal Masjid was in constant conflict with authorities in Islamabad for 18 months prior to the military operation. They engaged in violent demonstrations, destruction of property, kidnapping, arson and armed clashes with the authorities. After Lal Masjid militants set fire to the Ministry of Environment building and attacked the Army Rangers who guarded it, the military responded, and the siege of the Lal Masjid complex began.

The complex was besieged from July 3 to July 11, 2007, while negotiations were attempted between the militants and the state’s Shujaat Hussain and Ijaz-ul-Haq. Once negotiations failed, the complex was stormed and captured by the Pakistan Army‘s Special Service Group. The operation resulted in 154 deaths, and 50 militants were captured. It also prompted pro-Taliban rebels along the Afghan border to nullify a 10-month-old peace agreement with the Pakistani Government.

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MSN: Malik’s killing spree has horrified her Pakistani relatives. Her father cut off contact with his family after a feud over inheritance, they told Reuters, and moved to Saudi Arabia when his daughter was a toddler. There, it seems, he turned to a stricter form of Islam.

“From what we heard, they lived differently, their mindset is different. We are from a land of Sufi saints … this is very shocking for us,” said school teacher Hifza Bibi, the step-sister of Malik’s father, who lives in Karor Lal Esan town in central Punjab province.

Sufism, a strain of Islam popular in parts of Pakistan, emphasizes a mystical, personal religious connection. Devotees often play music and dance at shrines, and their practices are looked on with suspicion by orthodox Muslims.

“Our brother … went to Saudi and since then he doesn’t care about anyone here,” Bibi said. “A man who didn’t come to attend his own mother’s funeral, what can you expect from him?”

Tashfeen Malik returned to Pakistan and studied pharmacy at Bahauddin Zakaria university in Multan from 2007 to 2012. She lived in a university hostel. An identity card said she was 29 years old at the time of the shootings.

“She was known to be good student with no religious extremist tendencies,” an intelligence official based in the nearby town of Layyah told Reuters.

Malik’s uncle Javed Rabbani, a clerk in the town’s education department, said he has not seen his brother in 30 years.

“We feel a lot of sadness but we also feel ashamed that someone from our family has done this,” he said. “We can’t even imagine doing something like this. This is a mindset that is alien to us.”

Malik visited Pakistan in 2013 and 2014, security officials told Reuters, but it’s unclear who she met or where she visited.

Pakistani media reported she had links to the radical Red Mosque in the capital of Islamabad, but a cleric and a spokesman at the mosque said they had never heard of her before.

F.B.I. Treating San Bernardino Attack as Terrorism Case

NYT’s: WASHINGTON — On the day she and her husband killed 14 people and injured 21 others in San Bernardino, Calif., a woman pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in a Facebook post, officials said Friday, as the F.B.I. announced that it was treating the massacre as an act of terrorism.

“The investigation so far has developed indications of radicalization by the killers, and of potential inspiration by foreign terrorist organizations,” the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said at a news conference here. But he said that investigators had not found evidence that the killers were part of a larger group or terrorist cell. The couple died in a shootout with police on Wednesday.

“There’s no indication that they are part of a network,” he said.

The woman, Tashfeen Malik, declared allegiance to the Islamic State on Facebook at roughly the time of the shooting on Wednesday, according to a Facebook spokesman. At a news conference in San Bernardino, David Bowdich, the F.B.I. assistant director in charge of the Los Angeles office, said he was aware of the post, which was taken down by Facebook on Wednesday, but would not elaborate.

“There’s a number of pieces of evidence which has essentially pushed us off the cliff to say we are considering this an act of terrorism,” he said.

The attack could prove to be the most deadly Islamic State-inspired attack on America soil. Al Qaeda and other groups have carried out — or inspired — lethal assaults in the United States, but the Islamic State, which has a base of operations in Syria and Iraq, and carried out the attack on Paris that killed 130 people last month, has turned into a leading terrorism threat with spreading influence around the world.

What began as a local police response to gunfire in San Bernardino turned into the deadliest terrorist assault in the United States since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and led to a global investigation headed by the F.B.I., stretching from California to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. It is also the worst mass shooting in almost three years, since the slaughter at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.

Early this year, the Islamic State shifted tactics, and instead of just trying to persuade followers to travel to Syria to join the group, it began calling on sympathizers in the West to commit acts of violence at home. The F.B.I. has refocused its resources on that threat of so-called homegrown, self-radicalized extremists who might be inspired by Islamic State propaganda. Even before the Paris attacks, the bureau had heavy surveillance on at least three dozen people who the authorities feared might commit violence in the Islamic State’s name.

The exact motives of Ms. Malik, 29, and her husband Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, remain unknown, and law enforcement officials say they had not been suspected of posing a danger. But after two days of insisting that terrorism was just one of multiple possibilities, the F.B.I.’s statements on that prospect grew much stronger on Friday, as officials pointed to evidence like the Facebook post, and what they described as a bomb-making workshop at the couple’s home where they found 12 completed pipe bombs and a stockpile of thousands of rounds of ammunition. Officials say that weaponry could indicate that they were planning more attacks.

Among the components investigators seized from the couple’s house were items common to the manufacture of pipe bombs but also “miniature Christmas tree lamps.” A recent issue of Inspire, an online magazine published by an arm of Al Qaeda, included an article, “Designing a Timed Hand Grenade,” with step-by-step instruction for making a delayed igniter with a Christmas tree lamp.

Investigators have also found evidence that in their final days, Mr. Farook and Ms. Malik tried to erase their electronic footprints, another sign of premeditation. They destroyed several electronic devices, including two smashed cellphones found in a trash can near their home and erased emails, officials said.

When they were killed, Ms. Malik had what investigators believe might have been a “burner phone,” meant to be used for a short time and discarded, with no social media apps or other identifying information on it. Despite their efforts, the couple’s computers, phones and other electronics provide the best hope for reconstructing their communications and motives.

“We are going through a very large volume of electronic evidence,” Mr. Comey said. “This is electronic evidence that these killers tried to destroy and tried to conceal from us.”

On Wednesday morning, law enforcement officials say, Mr. Farook and Ms. Malik walked into a conference center at Inland Regional Center, a social services center, and gunned down people at a combination training session and holiday lunch held by the county health department. Most of the victims were co-workers of Mr. Farook, who worked for the department as a health inspector. The couple wore masks and military-style vests, carried assault rifles and semiautomatic handguns, and left behind a bomb that failed to explode.

Law enforcement officials have noted that the case defies typical patterns for mass shootings or terrorist attacks. “A number of things in this case don’t make sense,” Mr. Comey said.

The Facebook posting, which had been removed from the social media site, provides one of the first significant clues to the role that Ms. Malik played in the attacks.

She was born in Pakistan, to a family from a town, Karor Lal East, in the Layyah District of Punjab Province, according to local officials there, who added that intelligence officials were in the area Friday, searching for her relatives. Those officials, and Mustafa H. Kuko, director of the Islamic Center of Riverside, which Mr. Farook attended for a few years, said the family moved when she was a child to Saudi Arabia, and she mostly grew up in that country.

“They were living in Saudi Arabia, but they were Pakistanis,” Mr. Kuko said. “They had been in Saudi Arabia for a long time. She grew up in the city of Jidda.”

American officials have not confirmed that, but a person close to the Saudi government confirmed that Ms. Malik had spent time in Saudi Arabia over the years, staying with her father there. That person said Saudi intelligence agencies had no information that she had any ties to militant groups, and that she was not on any terrorism watch lists.

Ms. Malik returned to Pakistan for college, graduating in 2012 with a degree in pharmacy from Bahauddin Zakariya University in Multan, a major city in Punjab. Pakistani officials consider the area a center of support for extremist jihadist groups, including Lashkar-e-Taiba. A Pakistani intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an continuing investigation, said security officials were looking into Ms. Malik’s time in Pakistan, as well as travel there by Mr. Farook.

The bureau has uncovered evidence that he had contact, a few years ago, with five individuals whom the F.B.I. had investigated, but not charged, on suspicion of links to terrorism. Mr. Comey said the F.B.I. is re-examining those contacts, but added, “I would urge you not to make too much of that.”

Mr. Farook had posted profiles on Muslim dating websites, and the family’s lawyers said the couple met online. American and Saudi officials have confirmed that he spent more than a week in Saudi Arabia in July 2014, and returned with Ms. Malik, flying from Jidda to Chicago, via London. She traveled on a Pakistani passport and an American K-1 visa, the type that allows people to come to the country to marry an American citizen.

Mr. Farook applied for a permanent resident green card for Ms. Malik on Sept. 20, 2014, and was granted a conditional green card in July 2015. As a routine matter, to obtain the green card the couple had to prove that their marriage was legitimate, and Ms. Malik had to pass criminal and national security background checks that used F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security databases.

In a news conference Friday afternoon, two lawyers for the Farook family said the couple’s family were shocked by the massacre. One of the lawyers, David Chesley, also questioned whether the Facebook post was actually by Ms. Malik.

“We all want an answer,” Mr. Chesley said. “We all are angry. We’re all frustrated. We’re all sad. We want justice. But unfortunately some things in life aren’t as clear cut as that.”

Mr. Chesley said Mr. Farook’s mother, who lived with the couple, “stayed to herself” upstairs and was “not aware of what was taking place in the rest of house.” Law enforcement officials said the couple turned part of the house into a bomb-making factory. He added that just before the massacre, Mr. Farook told her that he was taking Ms. Malik to the doctor and then left their 6-month-old daughter in her care. The mother has been interviewed by investigators for seven hours, the lawyer said. And the baby is with child protective services.

A second lawyer, Mohammad Abuershaid, described Ms. Malik as a “caring” and “soft-spoken” housewife who spoke Urdu and broken English. She prayed five times a day, he said, and did not drive. He added that male relatives of Mr. Farook had never seen her face because she always kept it covered in their presence.

“She was a very, very private person,” Mr. Abuershaid said. “She kept herself pretty isolated.”

The two assault rifles the attackers used, variants of the .223-caliber AR-15 rifle, both showed signs of being illegally modified in an effort to make them more lethal, said Meredith Davis, a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Los Angeles. One had been altered to allow a larger magazine than the 10-round maximum allowed under California law, and someone had made an unsuccessful attempt to convert the other from semiautomatic to a fully automatic machine gun.

The bureau has stated that all of the couple’s guns were originally bought legally. Mr. Farook was the original purchaser of the two 9-mm handguns. The original buyer of the assault rifles was a person who has interviewed officials said, and is not considered a suspect; it is not clear how Mr. Farook and Ms. Malik obtained them, or whether that transaction was legal.

After searching the couple’s townhouse, the F.B.I. left behind a long list of items it has confiscated, which reporters were able to see when the landlord opened the home to them. It included a .22-caliber rifle purchased by Mr. Farook, boxes of ammunition, gun holsters, a cellphone SIM card, a laptop, a wireless router, and a variety of tools and hardware.

The Islamic State has not released an official statement on the San Bernardino attack, but the Amaq News Agency, which intelligence officials believe is run by Islamic State supporters, released a statement claiming that the killings had been carried out by “supporters of the Islamic State,” according to a translation provided by the SITE Intelligence Group.

More Hillary Emails, Benghazi and Bob Bergdahl

Posted on December 5, 2015December 5, 2015 by Denise Simon

Judicial Watch: New State Department Emails Reveal Hillary Clinton Slept Past Staff Efforts to Set Up Intelligence Briefing

Clinton Advisor Sidney Blumenthal Attacks Mitt Romney as “Contemptible,” a “Mixture of Greedy Ambition and Hollowness”

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released a new batch of emails of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton connected to the Benghazi attack. Included is an email chain showing that Clinton slept late the Saturday after the Benghazi attack and missed a meeting that her staff had been trying to set up about sensitive intelligence issues, including the Presidential Daily Brief, on a day she was to make a slew of phone calls to foreign leaders.

Also included in the documents is an email from Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal, sent three days after the attack, describing then-Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney as “contemptible on a level not seen in past contemptible political figures” and a “mixture of greedy ambition and hollowness.”

The documents contain an email passed to Clinton in the days following the Benghazi attack in which the father of alleged Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl anguishes over the “‘Crusade’ paradigm” which he says “will never be forgotten in this part of the world.”

An email from former Ambassador Joe Wilson to Clinton expresses his concern about “Christian Dominionists who seek to turn [the military] into an instrument of their religious zealotry.”

Other emails show approval of an effort to blame an Internet video on the Benghazi attack that aired on the Al Jazeera network.

The new emails were obtained by Judicial Watch as a result of several court orders in two separate Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits for Clinton Benghazi material. (The court orders are dated July 31, 2015, October 9, 2015, and October 20, 2015.) The documents have been made public only because Judicial Watch’s litigation has forced the State Department to conduct additional searches.

The new Benghazi documents include email traffic showing that on the Saturday two days after the Benghazi terrorist attack Hillary Clinton slept past staff efforts to set up an intelligence briefing:

From: Hanley, Monica
Sent: Saturday, September 15, 2012 09:17 AM
To: ‘[email protected]’ <[email protected]>
Cc: ‘[email protected]’ <[email protected]>
Subject: PDB

Dan will be at Whitehaven with the PDB at 9:30am this morning.

He has some sensitive items that he would like to personally show you when he arrives.

***

From: H [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Saturday, September 15, 2012 10:43 AM
To: Hanley, Monica R
Subject: Re: PDB

I just woke up so I missed Dan. Could he come back after I finish my calls? But I don’t have the call schedule yet so I don’t know when that would be. Do you?

From: Hanley, Monica R [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Saturday, September 15, 2012 10:51 AM
To: H
Subject: Re: PDB

A pouch with all of your call sheets and the schedule in en route to you. Here it is below as well.

Also in the pouch are a few read items, and an action memo authorizing the War Powers resolution for Tunisia that the office would like you to approve today. Ops can send a courier over to pick up the action memo later today.

12:00 UK FM Hague
12:15 Egyptian FM Amr
12:30 Israeli PM Netanyahu
1:15 French FM Fabius
1:30 Saudi FM Saud al-Faisal
2:00 Somali Former Transitional President Sharif
2:15 Libyan PM-elect Abu-Shakour
2:30 Turkish FM Davutoglu
3:00 Somali President Mohamoud (T)

-Moroccan King is still pending.

-NEW CALL: King Juan Carlos of Spain called today and offered anytime today or tomorrow. His office relayed that it is a personal call inquiring after the status of the Embassies in the Middle East. We are working on a call sheet.

The State Department’s records include a September 14, 2012, email from Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal to Clinton in which Blumenthal passes along a controversial article by his son Max and attacks then-Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney:

From: Sidney Blumenthal
Sent: Friday, September 14, 2012 10:48 AM
To: H
Subject: Re: m.guardian.co.uk

Max knows how to do this and fearless. Hope it’s useful and gets around, especially in the Middle East.

Keep speaking and clarifying. Your statements have been strong. Once through this phase, you might clarify history of US policy on Arab Spring, what has been accomplished, US interests at stake, varying relations with Libya & Egypt, etc.

Romney, of course, is contemptible, but contemptible on a level not seen in past contemptible political figures. His menace comes from his emptiness. His greed is not limited simply to mere filthy lucre. The mixture of greedy ambition and hollowness is combustible. He will do and say anything to get ahead, and while usually self-immolating he is also destructive. Behind his blandness lies boundless ignorance, ignited by consistently wretched judgment. His recent statements are of a piece with everything he has done from naming Ryan to his welfare ads, etc.

Keep speaking…

xo

Sid

The Blumenthal email includes a link to an article by his son Max Blumenthal that suggests that American conservatives, Zionists and the Israel government were behind the Internet video that was falsely linked by Clinton and Barack Obama to the Benghazi attack. Clinton responded with an approving, “Your Max is a Mitzvah.” Another email shows that Mrs. Clinton wanted three copies of the Max Blumenthal Benghazi video article printed out. (Max Blumenthal is a leftist journalist known for his attacks on Israel and American foreign policy. In January, 2015, he is quoted calling American Sniper hero Chris Kyle an “unrepentant, sadistic killer.”)

In addition to Blumenthal’s attack on Romney, the newly released documents also include an email chain forwarded to Clinton from her former State Department deputy chief of staff Jacob Sullivan in which Robert Bergdahl, the father of alleged Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl, relates the death of U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens to what the senior Bergdahl calls the “‘Crusade’ paradigm:”

Please convey our abiding condolences to everyone in the Foreign Service. Your service is most notable and almost invisible. Our Nation is stumbling through a very volatile world. The “Crusade” paradigm will never be forgotten in this part of the world and we force our Diplomats to carry a lot of baggage around while walking on eggshells.

Be very careful my friend!

I’m very sorry,

bob

After receiving the email from Mr. Bergdahl, Mrs. Clinton orders a response (which is not disclosed) be prepared.

The new documents also contain an email from former Ambassador Joe Wilson to Clinton concerning the Benghazi attack, in which he suggests the military is being compromised “Christian Dominionists” in the U.S. military:

From: Joe Wilson
Sent: Saturday, September 15, 2012 10:27 AM
To: H
Subject: From Joe Wilson

Dear Hillary, …

Glen Doherty [CIA contractor killed in the Benghazi attack] was a fellow member of the Military Religious Freedom Advisory Board, which fights to ensure that our military is not further compromised by the Christian Dominionists who seek to turn it into an instrument of their religious zealotry, an army for Christ rather than for the defense of our nation. He was invaluable in helping us uncover several cases where religious indoctrination was taking place under the guise of military training….

“These new Benghazi emails are disturbing and show why Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration had to be forced to disclose them,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “Hillary Clinton, despite knowing that terrorists were responsible for the attack, allowed her spokesman to go to the Arab world and blame an Internet film. Hillary Clinton trafficked in fantastical conspiracy theories that suggested both American conservatives and Israel were to blame for the Benghazi attack and jihadist violence in the Muslim world. And the crazed email from Sidney Blumenthal shows that she was taking direction on her Benghazi spin based upon attack-style presidential campaign politics. Finally, the ‘I just got up’ email shows that, smack dab in the middle of the Benghazi crisis, Hillary Clinton fell behind and may have not been fully briefed as she began an intense round of phone calls to foreign leaders.”

Judicial Watch’s FOIA lawsuits filed in 2014 and 2015 forced the release of these records.

The first lawsuit, filed on September 4, 2014, (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:14-cv-01511)), sought:

All records concerning notes, updates, or reports created in response to the September 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. This request includes, but is not limited to, notes taken by then Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton or employees of the Office of the Secretary of State during the attack and its immediate aftermath.

The second FOIA lawsuit, filed on May 6, 2015, (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:15-cv-00692), sought:

All emails of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton regarding the September 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. The timeframe for this request is September 11, 2012 to January 31, 2013.

As Judicial Watch chief investigator reporter Micah Morrison detailed last month, Sidney Blumenthal advised Clinton on Libya (and may have had business interests there). The JW report also disclosed how Hillary Clinton emailed classified information to Blumenthal in response to his lobbying for Amb. Wilson’s efforts to secure taxpayer financing for an energy project in Africa. Hillary Clinton’s contacts with Blumenthal, who was also a highly paid employee of the Clinton Foundation, should have been subject to State Department ethics reviews for conflicts of interest, as promised by Mrs. Clinton. For example, in January 2009, Hillary Clinton promised President Obama and United States Senate considering her confirmation that:

If confirmed as Secretary of State, I will not participate personally and substantially in any particular matter that has a direct and predictable effect upon this foundation, unless I first obtain a written waiver or qualify for a regulatory exemption.

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Death Benefits Still Not Paid for Benghazi

Posted on December 4, 2015December 4, 2015 by Denise Simon

Family of American Killed in Benghazi Awaits Promised Funds

NYT > WASHINGTON — Family members of Glen Doherty, a C.I.A. contractor and a former Navy SEAL who was among four Americans killed in the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, said they felt a sense of closure when they were told last December that the agency had finally agreed to pay Mr. Doherty’s death benefits.

“It was such a great Christmas gift that all this hard work and time and energy that we put in was finally done,” said Kate Quigley, Mr. Doherty’s sister, of the family’s effort in fighting for the funds. “We felt like it was honoring his name and his legacy.”

But a year later, the Doherty family has yet to see any federal money. Bureaucratic delays continue, even as the C.I.A. and Congress are now in agreement that paying the death benefit is the right thing to do.

The family’s fight has been overshadowed by the politics and recriminations surrounding the House Select Committee on Benghazi, whose Republican members have sharply criticized Hillary Clinton for what they say was her failure as secretary of state to secure the diplomatic compound in which Mr. Doherty and the other Americans died.

Mr. Doherty’s family members say he did not realize that the life insurance package he was legally required to buy from a private provider as a C.I.A. contractor would not pay death benefits — beyond funeral costs — if the deceased had no spouse or offspring. Mr. Doherty was single and did not have any children.

“An injustice has been done in his name,” Mrs. Quigley said in a recent telephone interview. “Seventeen years, he devoted his life to protecting this country.”

In response to the Doherty family’s efforts, the C.I.A. has proposed changing one of its administrative policies to allow it to pay up to $400,000 in death benefits to Mr. Doherty’s family and to families of terrorist attack victims in similar situations. The change would be retroactive to April 18, 1983, when suicide bombers killed dozens of people at the American Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon.

The proposed policy, which is modeled after one adopted by the State Department for the 2014 fiscal year, would use C.I.A. funds rather than insurance money to pay the families, providing a stopgap for those otherwise unable to collect benefits.

After months of debating the particulars of the proposal, four congressional committees responsible for approving it have done so, but the House defense appropriations subcommittee has told the C.I.A. it must find money for the death benefits in a different part of its budget than the agency initially proposed. The committees are now awaiting the C.I.A.’s response, which they must all approve.

“We are involved in a little game of Ping-Pong here,” said Representative Stephen F. Lynch, Democrat of Massachusetts, who has pushed for the rule change on Capitol Hill. “And I feel like we’re getting close, but I don’t want to take an eye off the ball.”

Mr. Lynch said that the rule change would most likely affect several dozen families. The C.I.A. declined to comment.

Mr. Lynch, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight national security subcommittee, introduced legislation in January to go further than the internal C.I.A. change and update what he and others called an outmoded law. His measure would amend the 1941 Defense Base Act, which requires overseas contractors — including those working for the C.I.A. — to carry disability and life insurance. But it allows death benefits only to surviving spouses or children.

Despite gaining the support of Senators John McCain of Arizona, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, both Republicans, the legislation has found little traction on Capitol Hill, which Mr. Lynch said in an interview might be because of its relatively narrow focus.

Jerry Komisar, the president of the C.I.A. Officers Memorial Foundation, which offers financial support to the families of officers killed in the line of duty, said that the death benefit of up to $400,000, while modest, would provide a much-needed lift to families.

“The demands on C.I.A. officers to serve on some of these hazardous assignments is going up,” said Mr. Komisar, a former member of the C.I.A.’s clandestine service. “The more we do to help incentivize them the better.”

Over the past three years, Mrs. Quigley, 42, said she has made dozens of phone calls and news media appearances, as well as trips from her home in Boston to lobby lawmakers in Washington. She has also met with members of the Benghazi committee, who she said pledged support. (Jamal Ware, a spokesman for the committee, said its chairman, Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina, has worked behind the scenes to help the family.)

My family have been trying to persuade me to look at a lawyer specialising in wrongful deaths and survival actions. But at times I just found it too much, particularly as there are so many law firms out there. I realise now that I probably shouldn’t have been so worried about getting the right lawyer involved, as it is so easy to do. A lot of law firms simply ask something like can you contact our wrongful death lawyers and you’ll hopefully get your lawsuit sorted. At one point, the family had been considering bringing a $1 million wrongful death suit against the C.I.A. and the State Department. But it decided not to press the suit after the C.I.A. agreed to the policy change. The family settled a separate suit against Rutherfoord, the insurance firm that sold Mr. Doherty his policy.

Mr. Doherty, who was 42 when he died, had served in Iraq and Afghanistan and had been hired by the C.I.A. to help with security and surveillance in Libya. According to Mrs. Quigley, her brother had designated a friend, Sean Lake, as the executor of his estate and did not know he would be unable to collect and distribute insurance benefits to the family as they had planned.

“The basic impetus of this is that this young man, a former Navy SEAL, agreed to serve us in a very meaningful way, in several very dangerous theaters,” said Mr. Lynch, who does not represent the family’s home district, but became involved in its efforts early on.

ISIS in America, Retweets to Raqqa

Posted on December 2, 2015December 2, 2015 by Denise Simon

ISIS in America Read the full study here.

IT IS APPARENT that the U.S. is home to a small but active cadre of individuals infatuated with ISIS’s ideology, some of whom have decided to mobilize in its furtherance.

This section attempts to provide an overview of this demographic by drawing on research that attempted to reconstruct the lives—both real and virtual—of U.S.-based ISIS supporters. The research effort was based on legal documents, media reports, social media monitoring, and interviews with a variety of individuals, though there were at times limitations to both the amount and reliability of publicly available information.

The 71 individuals charged for ISIS-related activities (as of November 12, 2015)

ƒ.WHILE NOT AS LARGE as in many other Western countries, ISIS-related mobilization in the United States has been unprecedented. As of the fall of 2015, U.S. authorities speak of some 250 Americans who have traveled or attempted to travel to Syria/Iraq to join the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and 900 active investigations against ISIS sympathizers in all 50 states.

ƒ. Seventy-one individuals have been charged with ISIS-related activities since March 2014. Fifty-six have been arrested in 2015 alone, a record number of terrorism-related arrests for any year since 9/11. Of those charged:

‚. The average age is 26.

‚. 86% are male.

‚. Their activities were located in 21 states.

‚. 51% traveled or attempted to travel abroad.

‚. 27% were involved in plots to carry out attacks on U.S. soil.

‚. 55% were arrested in an operation involving an informant and/or an undercover agent.

ƒ. A small number of Americans have been killed in ISIS-related activities: three inside the U.S., at least a dozen abroad.

ƒ. The profiles of individuals involved in ISIS-related activities in the U.S. differ widely in race, age, social class, education, and family background. Their motivations are equally diverse and defy easy analysis.

ƒ. Social media plays a crucial role in the radicalization and, at times, mobilization of U.S.-based ISIS sympathizers.

The Program on Extremism has identified some 300 American and/or U.S.-based ISIS sympathizers active on social media, spreading propaganda, and interacting with like-minded individuals. Some members of this online echo chamber eventually make the leap from keyboard warriors to actual militancy.

ƒ. American ISIS sympathizers are particularly active on Twitter, where they spasmodically create accounts that often get suspended in a never-ending cat-and-mouse game. Some accounts (the “nodes”) are the generators of primary content, some (the “amplifiers”) just retweet material, others (the “shout-outs”) promote newly created accounts of suspended users.

ƒ. ISIS-related radicalization is by no means limited to social media. While instances of purely web-driven, individual radicalization are numerous, in several cases U.S.-based individuals initially cultivated and later strengthened their interest in ISIS’s narrative through face-to-face relationships. In most cases online and offline dynamics complement one another.

ƒ. The spectrum of U.S.-based sympathizers’ actual involvement with ISIS varies significantly, ranging from those who are merely inspired by its message to those few who reached mid-level leadership positions within the group.

Benghazi: CIA’s GRS, 13 Hours

Posted on December 1, 2015December 1, 2015 by Denise Simon

To Hell and Back: The Untold Story of the Real Heroes of Benghazi

They survived Benghazi only to become unwitting players in a never-ending scandal. If they have to fight, they’ll fight — but this time it’s to protect their own.

MAXIM MAN December 1, 2015 By Adam Linehan

The plan was to make jack-o’-lanterns. John Tiegen and Mark Geist have brought their families out here, to the scraggly wilds of Tiegen’s 40-acre Colorado property, so the kids can carve pumpkins while the men hunt small game. But the guns prove more appealing to everyone, so the plans converge. “Cover your ears, guys,” Tiegen says as he slaps a 14-round magazine into his NEMO Watchman, the Ferrari of semiautomatic precision rifles. To his right, Geist stares through the scope of his custom AR-15. Then they light up the pumpkins. Orange guts explode. The kids cheer. The men move on to the animals.

“Want me to skin that?” Geist asks, pointing to a rabbit with a bullet in its head. Geist’s family settled on the eastern plains more than 100 years ago. He grew up the way kids here always have, with guns and horses and Wild West lore. He can tell the time using nothing but the horizon and his fist. Point to a random tree or cactus and he knows its name. He, like Tiegen, is a man of self-reliance. And so he places the carcass on the ground, kneels over it, and pulls back the sleeves of his camouflaged jacket. His left forearm is a map of scars. He’s always been proficient with a knife, but these days, his thumb doesn’t flex naturally; he has to compensate, clamping the knife hilt between his fingers and his palm. “I used to be faster at this,” he mutters.

The black memorial bracelet on his wrist flashes in the sun. Tiegen wears one, too. It reads: tyrone “rone” woods, glen “bub” doherty/libya 9-12-12.

Two of the dead in Benghazi.

On September 11, 2012, militants stormed the U.S. consulate in Libya’s second city and killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. Of the five armed guards who saved more than 25 lives that night, three have publicly stepped forward: Tiegen and Geist, who live near each other in rural Colorado, and Kris Paronto, who’s in Omaha. (The other two have been identified only by pseudonyms, Jack Silva and Dave Benton.) If you want to know what actually happened in Benghazi, go read something else. The worst night of their lives has already been rehashed ad nauseam, and there are a million contradicting versions to choose from.

The real story of these men—their lives before that night, and their lives after—is far more complex than any conspiracy theory. And now that Benghazi has gone from personal tragedy to national drama, they struggle with how to maintain control of their own stories.

Some tried returning to the battlefield. “I told my son that I was thinking about going back to fight bad guys, and he just about lost it,” Paronto says. He has three kids—an 11-year-old boy, an eight-year-old girl, and a newborn. They grew up with a dad who went off to work in dangerous places and always came home—each time a little rougher around the edges, yes, but all in one piece. Then, after Benghazi, he took a job in Yemen. He’s a professional gunslinger; what else was he going to do? “My little girl, she never used to cry when I left—but when I left to go to Yemen, she cried and cried.”

“I told my son I was going back to fight the bad guys, and he lost it.”

But after going public with their story, that wasn’t an option anyway. The men were ostracized by the CIA and the State Department. No hero’s welcome or ticker-tape parades on their behalf. That’s because they were not soldiers, sailors, airmen, or Marines. They were private security contractors—a distinction that means very little when bad guys are pointing guns at you, but turns out to mean a lot when you’re back home in America, having just shed blood in the name of your country. They now feel abandoned and disillusioned, and so they’ve retreated to what they know—their land, their families, each other—while they figure out what’s next.

Later in the day, the rabbit skinned and gutted, we hop into Geist’s Z71 4×4 truck. He pulls out his phone, the same one he was carrying when the French 81-mm mortars hit, and shows me a picture of his friend’s gravesite in California. It belongs to one of the men killed by his side in Benghazi. The words fierce patriot are engraved on the headstone. Geist turns on the stereo.

“Ever heard this?” he asks. It’s Radney Foster’s “Angel Flight,” an ode to pilots who fly fallen soldiers home. All I ever wanted to do was fly, the song begins, and Geist eases up the volume. Geist is quiet and direct, dressed head to toe in camouflage. But as we drive past cornfields and grain silos, he begins singing along. Come on brother, I’m taking you home. It’s not a performance; it’s like a man speaking the truest words he knows. He finishes the whole song.

The charred remains of the building where Ambassador Stevens and Sean Smith were killed.

What were they even doing in Benghazi? They were just working the next job, in what seemed like a never-ending series of opportunities for men with military experience who preferred to make a living outside the military. All three were reared on God and country in rural Colorado, and each entered the service right out of high school. The grandson of a decorated WWII veteran, Geist saw the Marines as the obvious continuation of a childhood spent hunting, shooting, and being outdoors. “I didn’t see much point in college,” he says. For Tiegen, the Corps was the only perceivable gateway out of town. He spent nearly every day after school hanging out at the local recruitment office until he was old enough to join. Paronto, who played wide receiver at Colorado Mesa University, was preparing to try out for the Broncos when an Army recruiter spotted him in a crowd. “I think he saw sucker written on my forehead,” he says. “He showed me this video of Rangers jumping out of helicopters, and I said, ‘Sign me up!’”

By 2003, the year the U.S. invaded Iraq, all three had completed their military service and were back home. Geist had become a bounty hunter, after a brief stint as his hometown’s police chief. Tiegen was a heating and air-conditioning technician. And Paronto was fresh out of the Army, discharged on medical grounds after doctors diagnosed him with Crohn’s disease. None had seen combat during their service, and all missed the military lifestyle and camaraderie.

The military prohibits soldiers from pulling back-to-back deployments. But there’s another option for people who prefer to make their living in war zones: private security contracting, which provides steadier work and better pay than Uncle Sam. There are plenty of these jobs to go around, as the U.S. increasingly outsources to companies like AirScan and DynCorp, turning military contracting into a multibillion-dollar industry. Tiegen, Geist, and Paronto quickly fell in love with the job; back then, in the early days of George W. Bush’s “war on terror,” coalition forces were scrambling to establish a foothold in the Middle East and private firms were free to operate on the battlefield with little oversight. “It was like the Wild West,” says Geist of his first contracting gig in Iraq with Triple Canopy, in 2004.

In theory, contractors play a strictly defensive role, usually guarding government officials and embassies in war zones. But in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the enemy usually brought the fight, they were often forced to go on the offensive. That’s what makes contractors so attractive to the Pentagon. They draw fire that would otherwise be directed at American forces, while “not getting counted as boots on the ground or, if something goes wrong, as casualties,” explains Georgetown University professor of security strategies Sean McFate, author of The Modern Mercenary. “They’re invisible people.”

For most of the three men’s careers, the risk seemed manageable. They all eventually landed on the CIA’s Global Response Staff (GRS), an elite paramilitary unit—of contractors—responsible for protecting spies operating in volatile countries, sometimes in places beyond the U.S. military’s reach. Benghazi was one of those postings.

This isn’t the space to relitigate what happened next, but it’s important to know: Tiegen, Geist, and Paronto felt abandoned and expendable. At one point, Tiegen says, he and several other GRS operators were chased through the streets of Benghazi by a group of men armed with AK-47s, and the senior CIA officer in Libya—a man known publicly only by his alias, “Bob”—refused to send help. “Bob treated us like lower class,” says Paronto. When the consulate was stormed, the Pentagon sent a surveillance drone and no additional help.

Nine months after the attack, in the spring of 2013, the team reunited for the CIA’s memorial ceremonies for two of their fallen colleagues, Woods and Doherty. By this point, the events in Benghazi had become a political football; politicians and pundits had plenty to say, but nobody had heard from the guys who were actually there. “Five minutes before the ceremony starts, the CIA hits us with nondisclosure agreements,” says Paronto. “After that, we all sat down and were like, ‘What are we going to do—start telling the truth?’”

This is a question many soldiers have wrestled with after emerging from the battlefield under controversial circumstances. When Dakota Meyer, a former Marine, was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions in Afghanistan in 2009, he used the spotlight to accuse Army commanders of denying crucial artillery support to his besieged unit, which lost four men in a Taliban ambush. Likewise, after Pat Tillman was killed in Afghanistan in 2004, a fellow Army Ranger revealed that he had been pressured by his superiors to keep secret that Tillman was accidentally killed by members of his own platoon. In both cases, the results were messy but productive: The government, when publicly chastened by its own heroes, will take action.

Paronto, Tiegen, Geist, and the other two contractors signed the NDA—they didn’t want to cause a fuss at the memorial—but decided to write a book anyway. Less than a year later, their work, 13 Hours, quickly became a best-seller. They were invited onto TV shows and to political rallies. Their careers with the CIA were over, but something new and completely unexpected was beginning. Within six months, Hollywood came calling, too. And that’s how they went from being the secret soldiers of Benghazi to Michael Bay’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. The movie comes out in January.

John Tiegan and his son at home near Colorado Springs.

Can war stories have superfans? This one does. It’s early October, Tiegen’s 39th birthday, and we’re celebrating at his ranch-style house on the outskirts of Colorado Springs. By 7 p.m., the party is in full swing, and kids are chasing each other all over the place. And there’s this woman there. She’s young, attractive, with eager brown eyes. She offers me a Budweiser with a patriotic red, white, and blue label. “The beer of heroes,” she calls it. Then she starts talking about Benghazi.

I’m not expecting this—not here, at least. To Tiegen and the others, Benghazi is almost shorthand for “what you don’t know about me.” They aren’t the Benghazi Guys inside their own homes; they’re just men who survived some awful shit and are out of a job. “We did the right thing, people crapped on us, and here we are,” Paronto once told me. “Really, it’s that simple.” When the guys were on Michael Bay’s movie set in Malta, there to ensure a Hollywood-ish level of realism in the film, the wives didn’t even come along. “It’s their thing,” Tiegen’s wife explains. Home and Benghazi: They can never truly be separate subjects, but the families build the best firewall they can.

This woman didn’t get that memo. I ask her what it is about Benghazi that resonates with her so deeply, and she responds by quoting the book 13 Hours, the way college students cite philosophers. “Numerous times, Jack Silva says, ‘We probably won’t make it out of this one, but we have to keep trying.’ It’s so profound to me,” she says, citing the pseudonym of one of the still-anonymous Benghazi contractors.

The conversation goes on like this. She seems to have the book memorized. I look around the kitchen. Who is this person? In my peripheral vision, wives have congregated, listening, and I get the feeling I’ve stepped out of bounds. The woman then reads me a poem she wrote, titled “2132,” for the time when the attacks began. Later, I excuse myself and ask a few of the wives who the woman is. The best explanation I get is basically: She introduced herself at a book reading, she’s very emotionally invested in the story, and now she’s just around.

“We did the right thing, people crapped on us, and here we are. It’s that simple.

This is the strange phenomenon of losing control of your own experience. Everybody knows at least something about it, and they fit it into their lives in ways big and small. When actor Pablo Schreiber, who plays Paronto in the film, visited Paronto in Omaha, the fathers discovered their sons chasing each other around the backyard with toy guns—“playing,” they said, the Battle of Benghazi.

Sometimes people are even actively disinterested in the honest version of events. The men are regularly invited to speak about their experience, and the first time Paronto ever did, at the Army Navy Club in D.C., the promoter pulled him aside afterward and told him that his speech was depressing. So Paronto went back to his hotel and revised it, to make it more inspiring. “We could’ve given up a bunch of times that night, but we never quit, and we saved lives,” he says now. “ ‘Never quit’—I sign that in all my books.”

Geist and Tiegen are less comfortable speaking before an audience, although they realize that in talking about Benghazi, they can at least draw some income while they figure out what’s next. The money from the movie and the book deal have earned each guy about what he’d have made in two years of overseas contracting—hardly life-changing money, but a welcome stopgap that enables a few small luxuries, like an expensive bottle of scotch. That’s what Tiegen is pouring shots of when I find him downstairs in his basement-turned-man-cave, late into the night at his party. A serious poker game has been going on for hours.

All shots are poured. A doctor told Tiegen that he has fat on his liver, so he’s not supposed to drink, but he allows himself just this one. We raise our glasses.

“To the fallen,” a woman says. I look over to see who said it: It’s the superfan.

Kris Paronto in Omaha, Nebraska.

There’s a Starbucks in a Target in Omaha where Kris Paronto knows everybody’s name. I travel here to visit him before heading to Colorado. “This is my Zen place,” he says, circling the counter to give the woman behind the register a big hug. As she gets started on his “black eye”—a large cup of coffee laced with two shots of espresso, his usual—Paronto explains that this is where he’d always come to clear his head whenever he returned from overseas. “I’d just get my coffee and walk around for hours,” he says. “Contracting isn’t like the military, where they send you to talk to a counselor the second you get off the plane.”

This likely isn’t how the average American imagines a military contractor. The industry’s public reputation was largely established in 2007, when a group of Blackwater employees killed 17 Iraqis in Nisou Square. Contractors seemed like faceless and unaccountable brutes, fueled by sweetheart government contracts that ran into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Blackwater became such a tarnished brand, the company changed its name twice—to Xe Services in 2009, and then to Academi in 2011.

But outsourced fighting has only expanded since then, and contractors have counted for more than half of the American workforce in Iraq and Afghanistan. When in the field, contractors often take orders directly from the U.S. government. And yet, they’re not entitled to the same medical or death benefits as military veterans. “A lot of these guys are deeply patriotic, but they don’t get any respect,” says McFate, the Georgetown professor. The way he sees it, military contractors are this generation’s Vietnam War soldiers—people who put their lives at risk for the American cause and then came home to a scornful public. “We have an all-volunteer military, so what’s the difference between the soldier who volunteers for the Army versus someone who gets hired by one of these companies? Why is one automatically more noble than the other?”

Paronto certainly agrees with that. He’s a former Army Ranger, but he now feels a kinship with his contracting brethren. Benghazi was just an extreme example of their struggle, he says: They’re protecting innocent people in war zones, and are rewarded with continued hardship and deep suspicion. Now he’s suspicious of the government; a faded don’t tread on me flag hangs from the flagpole in his yard, on the edge of a sloped forest about 20 minutes from downtown.

As speaking requests have rolled in to all three men, Paronto has been the most eager to take them. He gets paid about $5,000 per gig, and he packs his schedule. When we meet, he’s just booked a talk at Pepsi’s New York headquarters. But he speaks with purpose; he wants to tell a noble story, to change how Americans see and treat contractors. So he’s guarded about the circumstances he puts himself in. When a publicist relays a TV news interview request, he dismisses it. “I’m not going to do it if it’s any of that Bill O’Reilly–type shit,” he says. “I’m tired of the media just using us to push their own agendas.”

Of course, with both the Michael Bay film and the elections looming on the horizon, the real media onslaught has yet to begin. As the House committee to investigate the Benghazi attacks continues to devolve into a political slugfest, more people may turn to Paronto, Geist, and Tiegen for answers. At events, they’re often approached by people with tears in their eyes, heartbroken by the idea that their own government would ever abandon citizens in a war zone. Disillusioned as he is, Paronto’s instinct is to console. Yes, he says, Benghazi was a debacle. It exposed critical weaknesses in the system we trust to protect us. But a few good Americans were willing to step up and risk everything—and that’s our country’s strength, and the story worth telling.

You’re supposed to act different than how you normally do, because you’re in the limelight,” Tiegen says. “That’s probably the most annoying thing. I’m not going to change.” What would need changing, anyway? That’s open to speculation. Certainly, he’s not a character that every social corner of America would understand. He’s wary of the government, which may be why he’s currently teaching his three-year-old son how to shoot an AR-15. But whatever: Let America have its book and movie about his life, because he doesn’t want to read or watch either anyway. They both start with his friends alive and end with them dead. “I know what’s coming,” he says.

How will they move on from Benghazi? It’s a question they ask themselves. Sure, the experience has led to paid speaking gigs and some level of fame, but to what end—to just relive their worst experience over and over again? “All these people I don’t even know want to be buddy-buddy,” Geist says. “The principal at the local school calls me Hollywood. ‘Hey, Hollywood!’” Meanwhile, they’re still suffering a physical toll. Geist has endured 14 surgeries and still has only partial mobility in his left hand. His short-term memory has also yet to fully recover from the explosions. Tiegen suffered smoke inhalation, which scorched his lungs and left him with a perpetual cough. He now has thoracic outlet syndrome, which drained his strength by what he says is about 50 percent. “I tried going back to work,” he says, “but when we’d go to the shooting range, my pistol would just fly out of my hands.”

Interest in them will fade. This can only last for so long. They know it. “Once we’re no longer the flavor of the month, what do I do?” Paronto says. “I don’t get to do what I love anymore.”

Geist wants to show me what he’s been planning, so we hop in his truck and drive down amid the cactus-dotted hills and alfalfa fields. He started breaking and riding horses as a young boy on this land, and raised hogs for pocket money. For fun, he and his friends would make bets to see who could sneak up closest to an antelope and shoot it with a .22 pistol. “We rarely got them,” he says, “but it taught me how to use the terrain.”

Once we’re no longer flavor of the month, I don’t get to do what I love.

We drive past a house he bought for $20,000. He’s been renovating it ever since he returned from Benghazi. “It’s been good therapy,” he says. Then we head to an old tomato cannery on the edge of town. Inside, in a dimly lit nook, shelves are stacked with copies of 13 Hours. Photographs of Woods and Doherty hang on the walls. Geist hands me a flyer for Shadow Warrior Project, the foundation he and his wife recently started. The flyer reads: “To honor our brothers who are contracted to serve their country silently behind enemy lines and through their heroic and courageous acts have fallen or been injured.”

As we’re leaving his office, Geist turns to me and says, “Tiegen deserves a medal for what he did that night. If he hadn’t pulled me off that roof, I’d be dead.”

That evening, back at Tiegen’s, we all settle into the man cave to watch the trailer for Bay’s 13 Hours on his big-screen TV. After that, we stumble upon one of the Internet’s all-time lamest video genres: people filming themselves watching movie trailers. 13 Hours has proved to be a popular muse. We pull one up. “It didn’t feel really right or left wing, just kind of natural,” says a gangly hipster with a slash of bleached hair across his forehead. Geist and Tiegen are intrigued, so we watch another. Then another. And then we find one that features a bulky dude in a gray Aeropostale shirt. He’s sitting in a small apartment—his refrigerator is visible on the left of him, and his bed on the right—smirking and brow-furrowing his way through the trailer. I watch Geist and Tiegen as they watch this guy, who wants other people to watch him watch a movie based on the lives of the people I’m watching. And then Aeropostale Guy turns to the camera—in effect, turns to Geist and Tiegen—and says, “Hmm, true story, told Michael Bay–style,” and he laughs. “So you know it didn’t go exactly like that.”

Tiegen stands and flips on the lights. He’s done. But Geist remains seated.

“Yeah,” Geist says, staring at the screen. “It’s a true story.”

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