Iran’s Weapons Program in Africa, King Abdullah

An investigation supports King Abdullah’s claims with 9 countries.

EXCLUSIVE: Jordan’s Abdullah claims Iran exporting weapons to Africa

Jordan’s King Abdullah has accused Iran of exporting weapons to Africa and lauded efforts by Saudi Arabia to curtail the influence of the Islamic Republic, Middle East Eye can reveal.The Jordanian king made the accusations in a meeting with US congressional leaders, a source close to the meeting told MEE on the condition of anonymity.In the meeting one unnamed congressman reportedly noted that “Iran is also exporting weapons to Asia and Africa, and there is a need for a strategy to draw the line”.

The King said he “agrees” and said that Jordan had also “noted this in Africa,” without mentioning specific countries.He added that “this is also happening in Afghanistan” warning that if the Islamic State (IS) was degraded in these countries, “Iran will come in to fill the gap,” according to MEE’s source.Jordan has backed Saudi Arabia in its long-running rivalry with Iran that was recently enflamed by the burning and looting of the Saudi embassy in Tehran in January.The Kingdom withdrew its ambassador to Iran and complained of “Iranian interference” in Arab affairs, according to the Jordanian state news agency Petra.The destruction of the embassy had come as an angry response to a decision by Saudi to execute a prominent Shia cleric, Nimr al-Nimr along with 46 other people on 2 January.

In the congressional meeting, Abdullah said that Shia Muslims had been “lumped in” with the executions carried out that day. To purely kill Sunnis would have “looked bad domestically,” he said.He added, however, that it was unfortunate that Nimr had been included among those executed, saying that as a result, the “action took [on a life of] its own and there is a potential that this could become a bigger problem”.Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh added that Saudi Arabia had been “very good at clipping the wings of Iran’s foreign activities, including Africa” and noted that the Saudis had “reengaged in Azerbaijan and in Asia so they can stand up against Iran”.He also said that Saudi Arabia had “put up with a lot” from Iran.Last week,

Jordan endorsed a statement by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) that condemned Iran for the “terrorist” attacks on the Saudi embassy in Tehran and affirmed the sovereignty of three islands contested by the UAE and Iran in the Gulf.The relationship between Iran and Jordan has historically been lukewarm at best, particularly after the 1979 Islamic Revolution overthrew the Shah, a Jordanian ally.

The evidence is there for the world to see including the entire Obama administration going back to as recently as 2010.

In part from TheTower: Iran scrapes for asymmetrical gains within a challenging diplomatic environment, and in spite of its own internally divided conventional diplomacy—repeated itself in Nigeria. In October of 2010, Nigerian authorities scored the largest seizure of an Iranian weapons shipment in African history, when a container ship carrying crates of rocket launchers and heavy mortars was impounded in the port of Lagos. This embarrassment hardly ended Iran’s efforts in the country. In June of 2013, a Hezbollah cell was uncovered in the northern Nigerian city of Kano. And Iran has an asset in Nigeria that’s arguably more valuable than a foothold for its Lebanese proxies: Sheikh Ibrahim Zakzaky, a radical Iranian-trained Shi’ite cleric and a promoter of Iranian state ideology in Sub-Saharan Africa’s most populous country. A must read full summary is here.

It comes down to at least Hezbollah, Iran’s terror proxy.

CSP: The Iranian terror proxy group, Hezbollah, has operated inside Africa for decades. Most notable are the group’s weapons smuggling activities in East and West Africa. Iran exploits the remoteness of Eastern Sudan and parts of Egypt to smuggle weapons into the Gaza Strip for Hamas militants. Iran has also used Hezbollah networks in Eastern Africa to transfer weapons into the hands of Kenyan and Somali militants in attempts to attack Israeli interests in the region. Hezbollah in Africa gives Tehran logistical reach and illicit income that can support overseas operations.i Official members of the Iranian Quds Forces carry out terrorist planning and operations in Africa and have received diplomatic protection from Iranian embassies in Nigeria and Kenya.
In addition to its proxy influence on the ground, Iran maintains a heavy maritime presence in the Red Sea — which is facilitated through its relationships with Sudan and Eritrea. This naval presence expands Iran’s power throughout the East African region and further allows the illicit transport of weapons.

8 Points to Know on Closing Gitmo

8 Key Points on President Obama’s Plan to Close the Terrorist Prison at Guantanamo Bay

Yesterday, the House Foreign Affairs Committee questioned two top administration officials at the Department of State and Department of Defense charged with overseeing the president’s push to empty out the terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay before he leaves office.

Here are 8 key takeaways from the hearing:

  1. Bringing terrorists held at GITMO to the United States is still against the law.Chairman Royce: Secretary of Defense Carter and Attorney General Lynch have both stated that transfers of Guantanamo detainees to the United States are legally prohibited. Is that your understanding of the law as well?

    Mr. Wolosky: It is my understanding of the law that the statute in its current form prohibits transfers to the United States.

  2. It won’t deter ISIS.Rep. Trott: So if we move the detainees to U.S. soil, that’s not going to be used as a recruitment tool by ISIS? They’re going to go silent now that we’ve ‘done right by our allies?’

    Mr. Lewis: It still will be a tool.

  3. Instead, it would likely result in more threats to the U.S. homeland.Chairman Royce: If you move them to U.S. soil, in fact that will be a magnet for terrorists—the fact that jihadists are being held in the United States.
  4. In its rush to empty out the terrorist prison, the Obama administration is being less than straightforward with foreign countries.Chairman Royce: The top State Department official overseeing Guantanamo at the time wrote to the President of Uruguay that there was no information about these 6 that they were involved in conducting or facilitating terrorist activities against the United States or its partners or allies. No information? They were known to have been hardened al-Qaeda fighters involved in forging documents, trained as suicide bombers, fighting at Tora Bora, committing mayhem, committing murders in Afghanistan.
  5. Making matters worse, the Obama administration is releasing detainees to countries that don’t have the capability or the intent to keep them from returning to the terrorist battlefield.Chairman Royce:But the fact is [Ghana] doesn’t have top-notch intelligence or law enforcement services to deal with this kind of problem. The GDP per capita is like $4,000. It’s 175th in the world. The fact is that their leaders have many, many challenges in Ghana facing them every day.

    “So I’m going to guess that tracking and monitoring former Guantanamo detainees isn’t a priority, just as it wasn’t in other examples that I’ve…laid out for you, like Uruguay.”

  6. And, in some cases, the Obama admin doesn’t know the key foreign officials charged with mitigating threats posed by these terrorists.Rep. Smith: And if a government has a person walking point on a particular issue, like this one, and it happens to be this Minister of Interior, I think we would want to know whether or not he is a person who can be trusted. Particularly with such people who have committed terrorism, and may recommit.

    Mr. Wolosky: Well again, as I’ve said, I have not met him, so I feel uncomfortable offering a personal assessment.

  7. According to the Obama administration’s own figures, more than 30 percent of released detainees have returned to the terrorist battlefield.Chairman Royce:The overall number is in the neighborhood of 31 percent.

    “And if we begin to focus on some of the recent examples of those who did, it is — it is pretty concerning, given Ibrahim al-Qosi — he was one of the high-risk detainees, transferred by this administration. And by 2014, he had joined Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. And now he is in their leadership. And last month, we saw a video urging a takeover in Saudi Arabia.”

  8. Some of these terrorists have returned to killing Americans.Rep. Rohrabacher: How many lives have been lost by those terrorists who went back to their terrorist activities? American lives.

    Mr. Lewis: I can talk about that in a classified setting, but…

    Rep. Rohrabacher: Oh, classified? So, is it over ten?

    Mr. Lewis: Sir, what I can tell you is, unfortunately, there have been Americans that have died because of GITMO detainees.

Stalking Iran and bin Ladin with a Drone

We don’t have an intelligence problem, we don’t have a signit problem, not even a humint problem, we have a lack of will which translates to a lack of strategy and a mission objective. We did get Usama bin Ladin but what was the real gain?

At least for we weary Americans, we can take some confidence that we do have technology.

The Drone that Stalked Bin Laden

AirandSpace: In 2009, after two weeks of being embedded as an independent journalist with a small team of U.S. Marines in Afghanistan, I ended up at Combat Outpost Monti, a 14-acre camp of tents, plywood huts, a few concrete bunkers and makeshift guard towers, and a helicopter landing area, all ringed by collapsible barriers. At the outpost, one of hundreds built in Afghanistan during the 13 years of NATO combat operations, the Marines were training and fighting alongside Afghan National Army soldiers. COP Monti was less than 10 miles from the Pakistan border, near the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

RQ-170

My time with the team was just about up when they were ordered to move up the Kunar River valley on a large combat operation. I stayed behind with the Afghan soldiers and, before I managed to find a ride out, weathered a mortar and rocket attack from combatants who had undoubtedly planned the attack and stockpiled the weapons for it at a site across the border, in Pakistan. Even if the Marines had still been there, they could not have pursued the attackers. Al-Qaeda, Taliban, and other belligerents have hidden from the U.S. military in Pakistan’s tribal areas, with varying success, since Americans entered Afghanistan in 2001.

“Everybody knows that the Taliban and other groups train, raise money, plan operations, and even recruit in the tribal areas of Pakistan,” says a retired U.S. infantry officer who served two tours in Afghanistan as well as a rotation in Iraq. (All of the sources quoted in this article spoke to me on the condition that I would not name them because they do not have permission to speak on the record.) “The insurgent leadership move men and materials into Afghanistan and attack American and coalition forces and assets.” Then, he says, they scurry back to Pakistan, where U.S. forces can’t follow.

At least, not on the ground.

Since 2004, the United States has followed insurgents into Pakistan, and has spied on and sometimes killed them there. The CIA flies Predator and Reaper unpiloted aerial vehicles over the tribal districts, often with the approval of Pakistani leaders, who have enemies of their own among the militants inhabiting the country’s northwest. Some missions though are conducted without approval from Pakistan’s authorities. For those missions, the CIA needed a different aircraft.

In late 2007, reporters and observers at Afghanistan’s Kandahar Airfield discovered that a new spy had joined the team. Grainy photographs emerged of what appeared to be an unmanned flying wing. Aviation reporter Bill Sweetman (who writes a column for this magazine) nicknamed the aircraft “the Beast of Kandahar,” and the name has stuck, though the airplane doesn’t have the ferocity or power of a beast. It is an unarmed, stealthy observer designed to glide silently over its targets and transmit photos, video, and other intelligence to a worldwide network of users. The Air Force acknowledged it in 2009 and revealed its official name: the Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel.

The RQ-170 is operated by the U.S. Air Force 432nd Wing, which also operates Predators and Reapers. The 432nd, stationed at Creech Air Force Base, northwest of Las Vegas, declined to speak about the Sentinel, and a spokesperson for Lockheed Martin would state only that it is a “low-observable Unmanned Aerial System” and that its “primary mission is Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance.”

Trying to put together a picture of how the RQ-170 might have been used in the mysterious Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, I spoke to a U.S. military pilot who had flown in the 2003 Iraq war and who had later served in a senior position in an unmanned aerial vehicle unit. “At the start of [Operation Iraqi Freedom], one of our missions was to fly right up against the Iranian border, with our targeting pods slewed to the side to scan for border activity,” the pilot said. “We were right on the border, but we couldn’t cross it. Their radar had us. We were doing ISR work, trying to figure out just what, if any, activity was taking place on and as far inside their border as possible.” One type of activity the U.S. military was trying to follow and disrupt was the Iranian manufacture of devices called EFPs—explosively formed penetrators—and their distribution to enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Historically, insurgencies have required bases of support outside the contested country. “When discussing the RQ-170,” the pilot continued, “you have to understand that both Pakistan and Iran are outside of the ISR grasp of a targeting pod on an aircraft flying on the border, or of satellites. Sheer distance degrades certain aspects of a satellite’s ability to observe.”

The United States needed an intelligence-gathering platform that could avoid detection by Iranian and Pakistani radars. A retired military aviator who held a senior position at Kandahar Airfield during Sentinel operations pointed out that the UAV’s size and shape give it a low radar cross-section—the measure of the amount of energy a target reflects toward the radar that illuminated it. “It’s a large airfoil, roughly 65 to 70 feet in length,” he said. “Being a main wing only, with no fuselage and tail surfaces, drastically reduces both its radar signature and aerodynamic drag.” The Sentinel has the stealthy form of the 172-foot-span B-2 bomber, but is less than half its size.

Because the Sentinel is manufactured by the company that brought us the F-22 stealth fighter and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (and, before that, the F-117, SR-71, and U-2), we can assume that its skin uses radar-absorbent materials to further diminish radar return. Although its shape and materials keep it invisible to some radars, the aviator explained, others would be able to detect the aircraft but might not be able to track or target it.

At medium altitudes, the Sentinel’s light gray color enables it to blend in with the sky. It must also be quiet enough that it won’t be heard on the ground. An aviator who held a senior position at Kandahar Airfield during the Sentinel’s operation said its sound during takeoff wasn’t loud but distinctive—different from the propeller-driven UAVs and military jets that operated from the airfield.

Kandahar Airfield

An early image of the drone, at Kandahar Airfield before 2010. (Anonymous)

Engine noise or heat can never be eliminated but can be reduced. “[A stealth UAV] would use a high-efficiency turbofan engine, and its exhaust would be spread out as much as possible, masking both heat and noise,” the aviator said. A nozzle that spreads the exhaust eliminates concentrations of heat and helps mix hot exhaust with cooler ambient air.

An earlier, short-lived Lockheed Martin stealth UAV, the RQ-3 DarkStar, used a Williams-Rolls-Royce FJ44-1A turbofan, an engine favored for 1990s-era business jets, whose manufacturers claimed noise reductions. But those reductions were due partly to a change in the jets’ takeoff and landing profiles. Flight profile, according to an expert in unmanned aerial systems, is key to maintaining low observability. He explained that to fly low over a location of interest, an aircraft would most likely be put into a shallow descent, with its engine throttled back, so that it would essentially glide over the target. After one pass, “it will turn and gently increase power, but in a geometry such that nobody at or near the target could hear.” Once back at a higher altitude, the Sentinel would, if necessary, set up for another pass. This description suggests that maintaining continuous observation of a location would require two, possibly three, Sentinels flying overlapping patterns, not a sole craft orbiting.

**********

In December 2011, one or several of the Sentinel’s stealthy protections could have failed: An RQ-170 was taken prisoner in Iran. It had been on a reconnaissance mission and landed within the country, mainly intact, a few hundred miles from its home runway at Kandahar Airfield. The Iranians seized it, put it on display, and broadcast claims that they had spoofed its guidance system. Another possibility is that the UAV lost power or that its guidance system simply malfunctioned, an explanation that several Pentagon officials offered the press in the days after the incident.

“These systems have trip wires,” an aviator explained. “They’re meant to automatically return home, or at least to friendly airspace. But you have to consider: Was there a possibility of an oversight that the Iranians figured out they could exploit?” The guidance system, he noted, likely uses a combination of GPS and inertial navigation. With inertial navigation, highly sensitive accelerometers and gyros determine a craft’s route in three axes. Inertial systems cannot be fooled, though they can drift. GPS signals and guidance systems can be jammed or fooled; receivers can be sent signals making the onboard navigation system believe that the aircraft’s home airport is hundreds of miles from where the airport really is.

In 2008, at a Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics training exercise outside Yuma, Arizona, a GPS guidance unit was accidentally spoofed, with a near-disastrous result. The unit was attached to a Containerized Delivery System, a pallet with stuff to resupply ground troops—food, ammunition, water—that had been released from a C-130 transport, and was tracking a GPS signal so it would arrive at a certain point on the ground. In the exercise with the C-130 were a number of airplanes and helicopters, many of them using electronic jamming equipment or testing electronic warfare systems. In the signal-rich environment, the CDS, instead of landing at its programmed landing point, was heading straight for the Chevy Suburban that was waiting to return the pallet to base. Seeing the CDS headed for him, the Suburban driver stepped on it, but he wasn’t fast enough; the cargo crashed into the back of the van. The driver was uninjured.

Reporters have surmised that the Sentinel was in Iran to gather information about Iranian progress in developing nuclear weapons. Satellites can detect nuclear detonations, but to passively sniff for isotopic and other signs of uranium enrichment, analysts would need a platform much closer to the ground. Although reporters have also speculated that the Sentinel, to keep from being heard, flies upwards of 50,000 feet, it probably flies much lower—to be closer to its targets of observation. “Most aircraft are inaudible above 8,000 feet,” says a Department of Defense UAV expert. He explains that if a sensor is operated at a high altitude, it needs to be much larger and heavier to obtain the same degree of accuracy as smaller, lighter ones operating at low altitudes.

He also used intelligence from the MC-12 Liberty, another King Air, this one stuffed with a more exotic sensor suite than the Predator or Guardrail has, including a “complete collection, processing, analysis and dissemination system,” according to its U.S. Air Force fact sheet. The Liberty is brought to bear when commanders want to know what’s going on inside a building, whether people are “manufacturing explosives, packaging opium, or something else,” the officer said. The MC-12 “can sniff things out based on their chemical or metallurgical signatures. They’re incredibly accurate.”

But they aren’t stealthy and can fly only in airspace where the enemy has no radar. So is the purpose of the RQ-170 to carry any combination of the instruments deployed on the Predator, Guardrail, and Liberty into places where those three aircraft can’t go? A former unmanned aircraft systems commander answered: “Yes, definitely.”

The expert pointed out the two bumps on the top of the craft: “Not one antenna but two, so it can be serving multiple, distinct tasks, simultaneously, for users all over the world.”

**********

When I left Combat Outpost Monti—on a blue and white Bell B412 helicopter flown not by the U.S. military but by a Canadian contracting company working for the military (with the call sign “Molson Air,” for the Canadian beer)—we flew for roughly 15 minutes, then landed in a field next to a compound outside a small village. I checked my GPS; we were idling about a half-mile from Pakistan. Two U.S. military personnel, wearing camouflage and helmets unfamiliar to me, climbed aboard the helicopter. We then continued the journey to Asadabad.

A model of the RQ-170, which Iran claimed to have reverse-engineered, on display in Tehran (The Office of the Supreme Leader, Iran)

After returning home, I got an inkling of what those guys in unfamiliar camouflage might have been doing there near the Pakistan border and how they may have used the RQ-170. I learned about counter-terrorism units in a program called Omega, which combined special forces with CIA teams for missions into Pakistan to conduct raids on Taliban and other insurgent and terrorist targets. Putting this information together with what my sources had described, I had little doubt that intelligence about those targets was gathered in part by Sentinels.

The joint CIA–special operations forces mission that would best show off the RQ-170’s surveillance capabilities was conducted years later, in support of the SEAL team who, on the night of May 1, 2011, flew into Pakistan on two modified Black Hawk helicopters, entered a compound in Abbottabad, and killed Osama bin Laden. U.S. government officials told Washington Post reporter Greg Miller that stealth drones had flown dozens of missions to monitor the Abbottabad compound.

My own experience in Afghanistan suggests other missions the RQ-170 might have flown. I often heard intelligence officers or patrol commanders request “a pattern of movement” or a “pattern of life” for targets and enemy forces. To provide that information, analysts would draw data from a number of types of surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft. Learning about the capabilities of these aircraft helped me understand the kind of surveillance the Sentinel might perform.

One of the most important reconnaissance aircraft collecting data for the coalitions in Iraq and Afghanistan is also one of the least known: the Northrop Grumman RC-12 Guardrail. “The Guardrail is probably the most boring-looking airplane in the Department of Defense, but in my opinion, it brings some of the most important capabilities to ground forces,” said the retired infantry officer. The RC-12 is a Hawker Beechcraft Super King Air sprouting antennas to collect signals intelligence. “Looks like a flying porcupine, with all the antennas dangling off it,” the officer said. He regularly requested the Guardrail’s listening capabilities to identify, locate, and track insurgents and to help develop ground operations. The Guardrail does not process the data it collects; instead, it transmits it via a secure satellite link to locations in the United States or, according to a U.S. Army fact sheet, in Germany or Korea, where the data is processed and the results beamed back to the aircraft, which transmits it to the commanders who requested it. It happens fast. Within a second, the system can identify an individual’s or a group’s precise location. It takes a little longer to record and analyze their transmissions.

“I’ve tasked all sorts of assets, manned and unmanned, to look at ground targets and areas of interest,” said the infantry officer. For imagery intelligence, he said, “we used Predator a lot.”

“The beauty of how intelligence gets disseminated with the systems we have in place is that you just request an intelligence product, and you get it based on classification level and need-to-know,” says the aviator who served in a senior position at Kandahar Airfield. “You don’t ask for a platform, just a product. Much of the time intelligence users won’t know they are seeing something that was sourced from a Sentinel.”

The Sentinel is one platform in a complex intelligence system that collects information from every U.S. military command around the world. Analysts at various centers process 20 terabytes of data, of all intelligence types, every day. “Once each type is processed into a product, then it gets fused together with other intelligence products to give a multidimensional picture,” the aviator says.

“Think of a compound, say in Abbottabad, Pakistan, one with some walls that imagery shows to be 16 feet high. Combine that knowledge with signals collections of those in and around the structure, learn the pattern of life, maybe pick up a tall guy walking around, and maybe do some sniffing for weapons in the compound, soak up computer noise that can be analyzed, and then put that together with some human intelligence gathered on the ground about who that tall guy is.” He laughs. “There you go.”

 

Operation Hemorrhage

It has been said often, either fight the enemy in a true war theater on the battlefield with real war tactics or fight them at home. Brussels and Paris and in the United States in Boston and San Bernardino to mention a few, the hybrid war gets real expensive. These costs are rarely measured or questioned. We are also not measuring the cost of freedoms are giving up. Add in the cost of the cyber war…..well….going back much earlier than 9-11-01 the costs cannot be calculated.

Operation Hemorrhage: The Terror Plans to Wreck the West’s Economy

DailyBeast: Every European who flies frequently knows the airport in Zaventem, has spent time in the ticketing area that was strewn with blood, limbs, broken glass, battered luggage and other wreckage.

It was another attack on aviation that pulled the United States into the conflict sometimes known as the “global war on terror” in the first place. Since then, airports and airplanes have remained a constant target for Islamic militants, with travelers being encumbered by new batches of security measures after each new attack or attempt.

After the ex-con Richard Reid managed to sneak a bomb aboard a transatlantic flight in December 2001, but failed to detonate the explosives, American passengers were forced to start removing their shoes on their way through security. After British authorities foiled a 2006 plot in which terrorists planned to bring liquid explosives hidden in sport drink bottles aboard multiple transatlantic flights, authorities strictly limited the quantity of liquids passengers were allowed to carry. When Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab snuck explosives hidden in his underwear onto a flight on Christmas Day 2009, he ushered in full-body scans and intrusive pat-downs.

Those are the misses. There have been hits, too. In August 2004, two female Chechen suicide bombers, so-called “black widows,” destroyed two domestic Russian flights. In January 2011, a suicide bomber struck Moscow’s Domodedovo airport in an attack that looked almost identical to the one that rocked the airport in Brussels: the bomber struck just outside the security cordon, where the airport is transformed from a “soft” target to a “hard” one. Just months ago, the self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS)—the perpetrator of the Brussels attacks—destroyed a Russian passenger jet flying out of Egypt’s Sinai, killing 224 people.

The targeting of airports and airplanes has been so frequent that in lighter times—back when the terrorists seemed so much worse at what they do—some pundits openly mocked their continuing return to airplanes and airports. In one representative discussion from early 2010, a well-known commentator described jihadists as having a “sort of schoolboy fixation” with aviation.

But the reason for this targeting, of course, is neither mysterious nor quixotic, and it’s one the jihadists have explained for themselves. Following the November Paris attacks, ISIS released an infographic boasting that its slaughter on the streets of Paris would force Belgium “to strengthen its security measures … which will cost them tens of millions of dollars.” Moreover, the group claimed, “the intensified security measures and the general state of unease will cost Europe in general and France in specific tends of billions of dollars due to the resulting decrease in tourism, delayed flights, and restrictions on freedom of movement and travel between European countries.”

And that was before the group successfully attacked the Brussels airport, despite those costly new security measures.

Even before 9/11, jihadists saw bleeding the American economy as the surest path to defeating their “far enemy.” When Osama bin Laden declared war against the “Jews and crusaders” in 1996, he emphasized that jihadist strikes should be coupled with an economic boycott by Saudi women. Otherwise, the Muslims would be sending their enemy money, “which is the foundation of wars and armies.”

Indeed, when bin Laden first had the opportunity to publicly explain what the 9/11 attacks had accomplished, in an October 2001 interview with Al Jazeera journalist Taysir Allouni, he emphasized the costs that the attacks imposed on the United States. “According to their own admissions, the share of the losses on the Wall Street market reached 16 percent,” he said. “The gross amount that is traded in that market reaches $4 trillion. So if we multiply 16 percent with $4 trillion to find out the loss that affected the stocks, it reaches $640 billion of losses.” He told Allouni that the economic effect was even greater due to building and construction losses and missed work, so that the damage inflicted was “no less than $1 trillion by the lowest estimate.”

In his October 2004 address to the American people, dramatically delivered just before that year’s elections, bin Laden noted that the 9/11 attacks cost Al Qaeda only a fraction of the damage inflicted upon the United States. “Al Qaeda spent $500,000 on the event,” he said, “while America in the incident and its aftermath lost—according to the lowest estimates—more than $500 billion, meaning that every dollar of Al Qaeda defeated a million dollars.”

Al Qaeda fit the wars the United States had become embroiled in after 9/11 into its economic schema. In that same video, bin Laden explained how his movement sought to suck the United States and its allies into draining wars in the Muslim world. The mujahedin “bled Russia for ten years, until it went bankrupt,” bin Laden said, and they would now do the same to the United States.

Just prior to 2011, there was a brief period when jihadism appeared to be in decline. Al Qaeda in Iraq, the group that later became ISIS, had all but met with defeat at the hands of the United States and local Sunni uprisings. Successful attacks were few and far between.

People gather at a memorial for victims of attacks in Brussels on Wednesday, March 23, 2016. Belgian authorities were searching Wednesday for a top suspect in the country's deadliest attacks in decades, as the European Union's capital awoke under guard and with limited public transport after scores were killed and injured in bombings on the Brussels airport and a subway station. (AP Photo/Valentin Bianchi)

Valentin Bianchi/AP

Representative of those dark times for jihadists, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula released a special issue of its online magazine Inspire celebrating a terrorist attack that claimed no victims. In October 2010, jihadists were able to sneak bombs hidden in printer cartridges onto two cargo planes. Due to strong intelligence efforts, authorities disabled both bombs before they were set to explode, but the group drew satisfaction from merely getting them aboard the planes.

“Two Nokia phones, $150 each, two HP printers, $300 each, plus shipping, transportation and other miscellaneous expenses add up to a total bill of $4,200. That is all what Operation Hemorrhage cost us,” the lead article in that special issue of Inspire boasted. “On the other hand this supposedly ‘foiled plot’, as some of our enemies would like to call [it], will without a doubt cost America and other Western countries billions of dollars in new security measures.” The magazine warned that future attacks will be “smaller, but more frequent”—an approach that “some may refer to as the strategy of a thousand cuts.”

The radical cleric Anwar Al Awlaki, writing in Inspire, explained the dilemma that he saw gripping Al Qaeda’s foes. “You either spend billions of dollars to inspect each and every package in the world,” he wrote, “or you do nothing and we keep trying again.”

Even in those days when the terrorist threat loomed so much smaller, the point was not a bad one. Security is expensive, and driving up costs is one way jihadists aim to wear down Western economies.

Unfortunately, Al Qaeda’s envisioned world of smaller but more frequent attacks proved unnecessary for the jihadists. Less than two months after the special issue of Inspire appeared that celebrated an at best half-successful attack, the revolutionary events that we then knew as the “Arab Spring” sent shockwaves through the Middle East and North Africa.

This instability would help jihadism reach the current heights to which it has ascended, where the attacks are not only more frequent but larger. Unfortunately, the United States—blinded at the time by the misguided belief that revolutions in the Arab world would devastate the jihadist movement—pursued policies that hastened the region’s instability. The damages wrought by these policies are still not fully appreciated.

The silver lining to the jihadist economic strategy is that they, too, are economically vulnerable. The damage inflicted on ISIS’s “state” by coalition bombings and other pressures forced the group to slice its fighters’ salaries at the beginning of this year. But as Al Qaeda watches its flashier jihadist rival carry out gruesome attacks on Western targets and get bombarded in return, it discerns further proof of the wisdom of its strategy of attrition.

As it watches these two sets of foes exhaust each other, Al Qaeda believes that its comparative patience will pay off. It believes that its own time will come.

 

Border Security Facts or Not

March 23, 2016

National Security and Border Threats

Key word, key term for entry: CREDIBLE FEAR = immediate entry, on the fly on asylum.

Horowitz: What is Homeland Security Hiding Behind Immigration Numbers?

CR: As Americans ominously observe the raging fire of suicidal immigration policies implemented by our European friends across the pond, one of the first questions on their minds is: how many of these Islamic radicals have been admitted to our country?  The answer is we don’t even know how many people in total have come to our country since 2013 because the Department of Homeland Security has refused to publish that data or make it available to Congress.

It is already March 2016, yet the public and members of Congress still do not have any of the immigration data for 2014, much less 2015.

Over the past year we’ve been posting data on the number of immigrants, naturalized citizens, and immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries we have accepted in recent years.  The immigration and naturalization trends are skyrocketing across the board, particularly from Muslim countries.  Roughly 680,000 immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries have been given green cards from 2009-2013.  But notice we have no data since 2013.

While data on refugees can be pulled from the State Department’s database (when it is working) and information on some non-immigrant visas can be pulled from the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs, the public is in the dark as to the number of people who have been granted green cards in total (and the breakdown by country) without access to the annual “Yearbook on Immigration Statistics” from the Department of Homeland Security.

It is already March 2016, yet the public and members of Congress still do not have any of the immigration data for 2014, much less 2015.  Typically, the statistics are published during the spring of the following year.  The release of data has gotten progressively slower since the INS was restructured into the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, but the Obama administration has consistently stonewalled on publishing data.  For example, it wasn’t until last week that HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement published its 2014 report on refugees.  But even Obama’s DHS had the 2013 data posted by June of 2014.  Why is there still no data on 2014 two years later?

With evidence from Census data indicating a surge in immigration overall and a spike in immigration from the Middle East, why is it that in a first world country we don’t even know how many people have come in since the advent of ISIS?  Given the terrorism threats and the growing population from the Middle East, wouldn’t it be nice to know how many people from predominantly Muslim countries have been granted green cards over the past two years?

Given the influx of Central American illegal immigrants, shouldn’t we know how many were granted asylum and how many children were granted Special Immigrants Juvenile Status, which leads to a pathway to citizenship?

Given Obama’s unprecedented move of advertising and recruiting immigrants to become naturalized citizens last year, shouldn’t we know how many have signed up and from where they originated?

The notion that even members of Congress don’t know the details of who is being added to our civil society until two years later is patently absurd and dangerous.  Congress should have the full reports the following year and topline data every month.

Unfortunately, there aren’t enough members of Congress who care enough to exercise proper oversight over this administration’s violation of our sovereignty.