Category Archives: Whistleblower

Anyone Notice the Battle for the Arctic?

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The Pentagon has a civilian advisory committee where retired flag officers meet and discuss global and domestic conflicts, research them and then present those items to key Pentagon personnel. The question is, do any discussions include the battle for the Arctic?

When General Lloyd Austin, Secretary of Defense says that climate change and white supremacy are the biggest existential threat to the homeland…others for sure are arguing other real threats and that includes the Arctic.

Back in March of 2018, testimony was presented the Senate Armed Services Committee by commanders of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, the U.S. European Command and the Coast Guard Commandant that the Russian footprint in the Arctic has robustly surpassed that of the United States.

In part:

The U.S. lacks abilities
Despite a change in rhetoric, the facts on the ground remain the same: The U.S. is falling further and further behind in the region, operating a single aging polar-class icebreaker.

“The Arctic is the only theater of operations where the U.S. Navy is outclassed by a peer competitor. Russian surface warships have demonstrated the ability to carry out complex combined operations in the High North, while the American Navy maintains a policy that only submarines operate above the Bering Strait. Are submarines enough of a deterrence? Probably. But I don’t think they provide the real presence needed to assert the U.S.’ rights to the opening Arctic,” Holland explains.

Any reaction by the U.S. to catch up in the Arctic comes about 10 years to late, says Huebert. “Yes, as the current ICEX military exercise shows U.S. submarines have the capability of patrolling the Arctic and surfacing through the ice, but what is lacking are the constabulary capabilities in the form of surface vessels and icebreakers.”

Is the U.S. Waking up?
After more than a decade of lobbying by the U.S. Coast Guard to secure funds to construct a new icebreaker, the agency may finally make progress on this front. Congress’ upcoming appropriations bill is likely to include funding to design and construct a new icebreaker. Still, this falls way short of what would be needed, says Holland. “That is good, but it is late, and there’s no commitment to build the three to five more [icebreakers] that is estimated we’ll need. Nor is there any thought about designing the Navy’s ships of the future so they can operate in the High North.”

Holland hopes that the change in rhetoric marks a newfound seriousness by America’s military leadership about the rapidly growing challenges in the Arctic. This also includes China’s emergence as an Arctic power and its desire to utilize the NSR as its own Polar Silk Road as laid out in its newly-released Arctic strategy.

“These countries have a clear strategic vision for what they want out of the Arctic. As do European Arctic states. It’s time for the U.S. to stand up for its rights and responsibilities as an Arctic nation.” More here.

Why is this even a topic for real?

President Vladimir Putin in recent years has made Russia’s Arctic region a strategic priority and ordered investment in military infrastructure and mineral extraction.

Moscow: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Monday warned Western countries against staking claims in the Arctic ahead of this week’s Arctic Council meeting in Reykjavik.

The Arctic in recent years has become the site of geopolitical competition between the countries that form the Arctic Council (Russia, the United States, Canada, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Iceland) as global warming makes the region more accessible.

A ministerial meeting of the eight-country council will take place on Wednesday and Thursday.

“It has been absolutely clear for everyone for a long time that this is our territory, this is our land,” Lavrov said at a press conference in Moscow.

“We are responsible for ensuring our Arctic coast is safe,” he said.

“Let me emphasise once again — this is our land and our waters,” he added.

“But when NATO tries to justify its advance into the Arctic, this is probably a slightly different situation and here we have questions for our neighbours like Norway who are trying to justify the need for NATO to come into the Arctic.”

The United States in February sent strategic bombers to train in Norway as part of Western efforts to bolster its military presence in the region.

For the first time since the 1980s, the US Navy deployed an aircraft carrier in the Norwegian Sea in 2018.

President Vladimir Putin in recent years has made Russia’s Arctic region a strategic priority and ordered investment in military infrastructure and mineral extraction.

As ice cover in the Arctic decreases, Russia is hoping to make use of the Northern Sea Route shipping channel to export oil and gas to overseas markets.

Lavrov will meet with his US counterpart Antony Blinken on the sidelines of the Arctic Council ministerial meeting in a test of Moscow’s strained relationship with Washington.

Despite mounting tensions, Russia and the United States during climate negotiations earlier this year noted the Arctic as an area of cooperation.

Three Russian ballistic missile submarines participated in Arctic training drills near the North Pole, and the Russian Ministry of Defense shared footage on Friday of the submarines bursting through the ice.
The drills entailed Russian submarines breaching the ice and Russian troops conducting cold-weather ground maneuvers on the open ice. A pair of MiG-31 Foxhound jet interceptors also flew over the Arctic, with support from an Il-78 aerial refueling tanker. According to Russia’s Navy, about 600 Russian military personnel and civilian personnel were present and about 200 models of Russian weapons and military equipment were involved. Source
An officer speaks on walkie-talkie as the Bastion anti-ship missile systems take positions on the Alexandra Land island near Nagurskoye, Russia, Monday, May 17, 2021. Bristling with missiles and radar, Russia’s northernmost military base projects the country’s power and influence across the Arctic from a remote, desolate island amid an intensifying international competition for the region’s vast resources. Russia’s northernmost military outpost sits on the 80th parallel North, projecting power over wide swathes of Arctic amid an intensifying international rivalry over the polar region’s vast resources. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

For a scary photo essay of the Russians in the Arctic, click here.

 

So while it appears that nobody is really heeding these warnings, yet another discussion was held in 2019 at the Aspen Security Conference. Here the Pentagon released a new Arctic strategy document challenging and addressing the gains made by China and Russia in the Arctic region.

Moscow is deploying more resources northwards and investing in Arctic-capable forces, while Beijing has declared itself a “near-Arctic” power. The U.S. is moving to meet this challenge and give the region more prominence in its strategic planning.

Schultz said the U.S. “should be concerned about Russia, who is way ahead of us in this game, and the emerging aggressive China, who is pushing into the game.” He noted that while Americans may “think about the Arctic as a very faraway place,” the “Russian world view is very much based on the Arctic.”

A “polar security cutter” is currently under construction for the Coast Guard, effectively a militarized ice breaker. Its order demonstrates the U.S military pivot towards the Arctic and an effort to close the gap with its rivals, particularly Russia. More here.

In part of that released strategy document is the following:

NDS goals and priorities guide DoD’s strategic approach to the Arctic.The Joint Force must be able to deter, and if necessary, defeat great power aggression. DoD must prioritize efforts to address the central problem the NDS identifies–i.e., the Joint Force’s eroding competitive edge against China and Russia,and the NDS imperative to ensure favorable regional balances of power in the Indo–Pacific and Europe. Developing a more lethal, resilient, agile, and ready Joint Force will ensure that our military sustains its competitive advantages, not only for these key regions of strategic competition, but globally as well.Maintaining a credible deterrent for the Arctic region requires DoD to understand and shape the Arctic’s geo–strategic landscape for future operations and to respond effectively to contingencies in the Arctic region, both independently and in cooperation with others. DoD’s strategic approach seeks to do so by implementing three ways in support of thedesired Arctic end–state(each described in detail in this document):

•Building Arctic awareness;

•Enhancing Arctic operations;and

•Strengthening the rules–based order in the Arctic

Read the full 19 page document here.

 

At Least 18 Scientists Demand Lab Leak Investigation on Covid

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Primer: Who is Dr. Ralph Baric and what is his role in the Wuhan lab?

UNC-CH ranks as a world leader in COVID-19 research - here ...

This page lists documents in Professor Ralph Baric’s emails, which U.S. Right to Know obtained via a public records request. Dr. Baric is a coronavirus expert at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC). He has developed genetic techniques to enhance the pandemic potential of existing bat coronaviruses in collaboration with Dr. Zhengli Shi at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and with EcoHealth Alliance.

The emails show internal discussions and an early draft of a key scientists’ letter about coronavirus origins, and shed some light on relationships between U.S. and Chinese experts in biodefense and infectious diseases, and the roles of organizations such as EcoHealth Alliance and National Academy of Sciences (NAS).

Please email anything of interest we may have missed to [email protected], so that we can include them below.

Items from Baric emails

  1. Tracy McNamara, Professor of Pathology at Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, California wrote on March 25, 2020: : “The Federal govt has spent over $1 billion dollars in support of the Global Health Security Agenda to help developing nations create the capacity to detect/report/respond to pandemic threats. An additional $200 million was spent on the PREDICT project via USAID looking for emerging viruses in bats, rats and monkeys overseas. And now the Global Virome Project wants $1.5 billion dollars to run around the world hunting down every virus on the face of the earth. They will probably get funding. But none of these programs have made taxpayers safer right here at home.” (emphasis in the original)
  2. Dr. Jonathan Epstein, Vice President for Science and Outreach at EcoHealth Alliance, sought guidance for a request from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) about communicating “potentially sensitive dual-use information” (March 2018).
  3. EcoHealth Alliance paid Dr. Baric an undisclosed sum as honorarium (January 2018).
  4. Invitation to U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) and the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) U.S. China Dialogue and Workshop on the Challenges of Emerging Infections, Laboratory Safety, Global Health Security and Responsible Conduct in the Use of Gene Editing in Viral Infectious Disease Research, Harbin, China, Jan 8-10, 2019 (November 2018-January 2019). Preparatoryemails and a travel memorandum indicate the identities of the American participants.
  5. NAS invitation to a meeting of U.S. and Chinese experts working to counter infectious disease and improve global health (November 2017). The meeting was convened by the NAS and the Galveston National Laboratory. It took place on January 16-18, 2018, in Galveston, Texas. A travel memorandum indicates the identities of the American participants. Subsequent emails show that the WIV’s Dr. Zhengli Shi is present at the meeting.
  6. On February 27, 2020, Baric wrote, “at this moment the most likely origins are bats, and I note that it is a mistake to assume that an intermediate host is needed.”
  7. On March 5, 2020, Baric wrote, “there is absolutely no evidence that this virus is bioengineered.”

For more information

A link to Professor Ralph Baric’s emails can be found here:Baric emails (~83,416 pages)

U.S. Right to Know is posting documents from our Biohazards investigation. See:FOI documents on origins of SARS-CoV-2, hazards of gain-of-function research and biosafety labs.

NR:

For well over a year, a certain clique of researchers tarred the idea that COVID-19 initially escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan as a conspiracy theory. Now, their grip on that narrative within the scientific community is loosening, as a growing chorus of experts calls for a closer look at this lab-leak hypothesis.

In a letter published this afternoon at Science, 18 scientists call for an investigation into the pandemic’s origins that does not discount the possibility of a lab leak. “Theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable,” they write. “Knowing how COVID-19 emerged is critical for informing global strategies to mitigate the risk of future outbreaks.”

These researchers include Dr. Ralph Baric, a leading coronavirus expert who has done research on bat coronaviruses with Dr. Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and several other prominent virologists. They have joined the WHO director-general, top intelligence officials, and other U.S. government experts in asserting that such a leak remains a possible explanation, despite a joint WHO-China study’s findings that such a theory is “extremely unlikely.” Like the Biden administration and 13 other countries that signed onto a U.S.-led statement after the report’s release, they raise concerns about how the panel reached its findings. Their letter comes as members of Congress have started to ramp up their scrutiny of a potential lab-leak origin. Already, the scientists’ letter has caught the attention of lawmakers involved in COVID investigation efforts, with Representatives Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Brett Guthrie, and Morgan Griffith, saying in a statement, “We look forward to working with them and all who will follow the science in order to complete this investigation.”

Jamie Metzl, an adviser to the WHO and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, explained the letter’s significance on Twitter. “The chokehold on public consideration of an accidental lab incident as a possible #pandemic origin has just been broken. Following publication of the Science letter, it will be irresponsible for any scientific journal or news outlet to not fully represent this viable hypothesis.”

The Science letter finds the joint WHO-China report lacking and evaluates the likelihood of the different origin theories that the panel assessed: “Although there were no findings in clear support of either a natural spillover or a lab accident, the team assessed a zoonotic spillover from an intermediate host as ‘likely to very likely, and a laboratory incident as ‘extremely unlikely.’”

The authors of the letters add, “Furthermore, the two theories were not given balanced consideration. Only 4 of the 313 pages of the report and its annexes addressed the possibility of a laboratory accident.”

The letter doesn’t claim that the lab-leak hypothesis is more credible than the zoonotic origin theory. It’s notable, however, that a letter in a major scientific journal is putting these two theories on equal footing.

The Lancet, another journal, rejected a letter submitted by 14 biologists and geneticists in January arguing that “a lab origin cannot be formally discarded.”

Some figures associated with The Lancet have called the lab-leak scenario a conspiracy theory, including Jeffrey Sachs, the chair of the medical journal’s COVID commission, and Peter Daszak, the chair of the commission’s sub-committee on COVID’s origins. Daszak, whose nonprofit research group received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the National Institutes of Health for studies on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was a member of the joint WHO-China panel and has faced accusations that he failed to disclose potential conflicts of interest.

Richard Ebright, a Rutgers University chemical biology professor, told National Review last month that their efforts helped to create the false impression that there is a scientific consensus against the possibility of a lab-leak origin. “No such consensus existed then. No such consensus exists now,” he said.

This latest entry into the debate, in the pages of a preeminent scientific journal, shows that the ground is shifting away from a hollow narrative that has been all-too pervasive since the start of the pandemic.

 

Will Biden Challenge Turkey/Erdogan for Funding Hamas?

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Primer: The IDF spokesperson, LTC Jonathan Conricus declared in a recent briefing:

IDF had assassinated Hussam Abu Harbeed, who commanded Islamic Jihad’s northern Gaza brigade and led attacks against Israeli soldiers and civilians for almost 15 years.

In a statement, the IDF said Harbeed “was behind several anti-tank missile terror attacks against Israeli civilians.” One of those attacks occurred on the first day of the current round of fighting when a civilian was wounded, Conricus said.

There was no immediate confirmation from Islamic Jihad or its armed wing, the al-Quds Brigades, about the assassination.

Conricus also announced Monday it had destroyed just about 60 miles of militant tunnels.

“Our fighter jets neutralized 9.3 miles of the Hamas ‘Metro’ terror tunnel system overnight. That’s 9.3 miles that can no longer be used for terror,” it said in a statement before the updated information was provided by Conricus.

Air strike kills jihad commander in Gaza

I was asked 2 days ago who funds Gaza….there is no single name or organization actually…it is hardly that simple. The Islamic National Bank in Gaza served as a terrorist vault for Hamas, directly funding its rocket production operations. So, the U.S. Treasury has some extraordinary tools to investigate monies going in and out of financial institutions across the world, why not use them, or do they and just ignore their findings? Would other countries and nefarious organizations be cast in funding terror? Yes…much like Turkey.

Taken from The Investigative Project:

Turkish Support for Hamas

We should remember that Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) and Hamas have roots in Muslim Brotherhood networks. They share a similar anti-Western, anti-Israel ideology. Turkey’s ties to Hamas – and specific members who are Specially Designated Global Terrorists – have been extensively documented. Hamas officials and Egyptian Islamists have found shelter and have been free to pursue their financing and planning their operations there. For example, Hamas finance chief Zaher Jabarin developed a financial network in Turkey that enabled Hamas “to raise, invest, and launder money prior to transferring it to Gaza and the West Bank,” a 2019 U.S. Treasury Department statement said.

Turkish presence in the Palestinian territories, and especially the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, is cemented by official agreements and its actions are conducted under the guise of technical and humanitarian assistance. Turkey is already implicated in upgrading Palestinian military structures and forces against Israel.

Turkey has trained Palestinian Authority security forces, not only to fight organized crime, Deputy Foreign Minister Yavuz Selim Kıran said last year, but to “create a significant [Palestinian] resistance against Israel’s occupation policies and its oppression.”

The Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA), a relief agency, has permanent offices in the Gaza Strip and in Ramallah. TIKA funds are channeled to various field organizations controlled by Hamas, thus indirectly supporting Hamas operations. İHH (Humanitarian Relief Foundation) is a radical anti-Western and anti-Israeli Turkish NGO, also present in Gaza. İHH has been designated as a terrorist organization by Israeli authorities since 2008 due to its funding of Hamas’ military wing. IHH was also implicated in the notorious 2010 Mavi Marmara incident, when a flotilla trying to break a blockade on Gaza was boarded by Israeli commandos. Passengers attacked the Israeli troops, causing the soldiers to fight back, killing 10 people.

Erdogan broke off diplomatic relations with Israel and accused it of lying about the incident.

In addition to supporting Hamas, İHH has cooperated with radical Islamist groups in Algeria and Iran by helping with counterfeited passports, weapons trafficking, and assisting mujahideen to reach various war zones, such as Bosnia and Chechnya.

As Turkey provides financial assistance to Gaza through TIKA and IHH, it consciously assists Hamas, which can focus solely on preparing its aggression against Israeli civilians. Once again, Turkey proves to be an invaluable diplomatic ally of Hamas.

By appealing to the Muslim world and using the Palestinian issue as a pretext, Turkey repeats its attempt to head the Islamist International. Turkey has since long decided to part ways with the Western world and its values by affiliating itself with radical Islamists. It is time for the United States and for NATO to realize that Turkey is a state acting in contrast to the shared values and the geostrategic interests of the West.

In part from JW:

Now that the Islamic terrorists of Hamas and the PLO have responded to a pro-terrorist administration in the White House by restarting a full-scale war, the Biden administration is sending their best man out to mediate between Israel and the terrorists.

S Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced Wednesday that he is sending an envoy to the Middle East to “seek to calm tensions” even as he urged Israel to avoid killing civilians.

Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Hady Amr, who oversees Israeli and Palestinian Authority affairs at the department, was to leave Wednesday. He is expected to meet with both Israeli and Palestinian Authority leaders.

If the man sounds at all familiar, it ought to.

“I was inspired by the Palestinian intifada,” Hady Amr wrote a year after September 11, discussing his work as the national coordinator of the anti-Israel Middle East Justice Network.

“I have news for every Israeli,” Amr ranted in one column written after Sheikh Salah Shahada, the head of Hamas’ Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, was taken out by an Israeli air strike.

Amr warned that Arabs “now have televisions, and they will never, never forget what the Israeli people, the Israeli military and Israeli democracy have done to Palestinian children. And there will be thousands who will seek to avenge these brutal murders of innocents.”

He also threatened Americans that “we too shouldn’t be shocked when our military assistance to Israel and our security council vetoes that keep on protecting Israel come back to haunt us”

Amr then got a gig from Qatar: the state sponsor of Hamas.

A few years later, the Beirut-born extremist had become an advisor on Muslim relations to the World Economic Forum before heading up Brookings’ Doha Center for Qatar. The tiny Islamic tyranny is allied with Iran, Al Qaeda, and the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s a backer of Hamas.

A decade after Amr had responded to the death of a Hamas leader by ranting that “there will be thousands who will seek to avenge these brutal murders of innocents”, the Obama administration made him a Deputy to its Special Envoy for Israeli Palestinian negotiations.

At Brookings Doha, Amr had urged that the “Muslim brotherhood organizations across the Muslim World should be engaged”. Then he wondered, “in Lebanese and Palestinian society, the faith-based organizations are seen as the least corrupt… Hamas and Hezbollah are often cited by their populations as being non-corrupt. This needs more analysis. Is this the case?”

Over the past few years, Amr has repeatedly urged negotiations with Hamas. When the Trump administration unveiled its proposed peace deal, Amr co-wrote an article declaring that it should be scrapped in favor of focusing on a deal with Hamas.

“By laying out the terms of a three-way Hamas-Israel-PA/PLO deal now, and building an international consensus around it, the United States could create a pathway toward resolution,” the article had argued. That would potentially not only restart Obama’s attempt to impose a plan on Israel, but would do so not only on behalf of the PLO, but also on behalf of Hamas.

Hady Amr got the flow of US aid restarted. Now the fighting will help him bring Hamas into the “negotiations”.

In 2019, Amr had co-written an article arguing that the United States should lay “out the terms of a three-way Hamas-Israel-PA/PLO deal now” and “build an international consensus around it.”

That would mean the Biden administration and its point man developing a plan to legitimize Hamas, gaining the support of the Europeans and the Russians, and then imposing it on Israel.

Hamas, according to Amr and his co-authors, would offer Israel nothing more than a cease-fire, while Israel would have to “incentivize” by “offering a significant move” on peace.

You can’t have a cease-fire without a war.

 

HHS Shifting $2 Billion to UAC’s Confirms it is a Crisis

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Shuffling money to cover for a self-made crisis at the border…..remember President Trump was excoriated for doing the same thing but this is different?

So, we sacrifice the national stockpile for pandemics for the border insurgency? This is $ billion but does that only cover what has already been spent or for the next month or so…inquiring minds want to know the full accounting..

*** The Trump administration is currently housing 12,800 ...

Politico: The Department of Health and Human Services has diverted more than $2 billion meant for other health initiatives toward covering the cost of caring for unaccompanied immigrant children, as the Biden administration grapples with a record influx of migrants on the southern border.

The redirected funds include $850 million that Congress originally allocated to rebuild the nation’s Strategic National Stockpile, the emergency medical reserve strained by the Covid-19 response. Another $850 million is being taken from a pot intended to help expand coronavirus testing, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.

The reshuffling, which HHS detailed to congressional appropriators in notices over the last two months, illustrates the extraordinary financial toll that sheltering more than 20,000 unaccompanied children has taken on the department so far this year, as it scrambled to open emergency housing and add staff and services across the country.

It also could open the administration up to further scrutiny over a border strategy that has dogged President Joe Biden for months, as administration officials struggle to stem the flow of tens of thousands of unaccompanied children into the U.S.

On its own, the $2.13 billion in diverted money exceeds the government’s annual budget for the unaccompanied children program in each of the last two fiscal years. It is also far above the roughly half-billion dollars that the Trump administration shifted in 2018 toward sheltering a migrant child population that had swelled as a result of its strict immigration policies, including separating children from adults at the border.

In addition to transferring money from the Strategic National Stockpile and Covid-19 testing, HHS also has pulled roughly $436 million from a range of existing health initiatives across the department.

“They’ve been in a situation of needing to very rapidly expand capacity, and emergency capacity is much more expensive,” said Mark Greenberg, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute who led HHS’ Administration for Children and Families from 2013 to 2015. “You can’t just say there’s going to be a waiting list or we’re going to shut off intake. There’s literally not a choice.”

HHS spokesperson Mark Weber told POLITICO that the department has worked closely with the Office of Management and Budget to find ways to keep its unaccompanied minor operation funded in the face of rising costs.

“All options are on the table,” he said, adding that HHS has traditionally sought to pull funding from parts of the department where the money is not immediately needed. “This program has relied, year after year, on the transfer of funds.”

Health secretary Xavier Becerra has the ability to shift money among programs within the sprawling department so long as he notifies Congress, an authority that his predecessors have often resorted to during past influxes of migrant children.

But these transfers come as HHS has publicly sought to pump new funds into the Strategic National Stockpile and Covid-19 testing efforts by emphasizing the critical role that both play in the pandemic response and future preparedness efforts.

“The fight against Covid-19 is not yet over,” Becerra testified to a House panel on Wednesday in defense of a budget request that would allocate $905 million for the stockpile. “Even as HHS works to beat this pandemic, we are also preparing for the next public health crisis.”

Becerra later stressed the need to “make sure we’ve got the resources” to replenish the Strategic National Stockpile, which came under scrutiny early in the pandemic after officials discovered it lacked anywhere near the amount of protective equipment and medical supplies needed to respond to the crisis.

“We’ve learned that this is going to be a critical component of being able to respond adequately and quickly to any future health care crisis,” he told Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.).

In another exchange, Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) repeatedly pressed Becerra over whether HHS would benefit from Congress investing more in other parts of its operation, rather than funding a further expansion of Covid testing. Mullin specifically cited the record numbers of migrant children arriving at the border.

But Becerra batted that suggestion away, telling him that “we have to continue an aggressive testing strategy.”

“We have to continue to make investments to prevent the spread of Covid and its variants,” he said.

Beyond taking funding from the stockpile and Covid testing, Weber could not immediately say what other areas within HHS have been affected. After publication of this article, HHS insisted that additional public health funding Congress allocated as part of a Covid aid bill passed in February could be steered toward the stockpile and supplementing its pandemic response.

Still, funneling money away from existing HHS programs could raise fears of undermining other critical health initiatives and irritate the public health groups and lawmakers who advocate for the funding every year.

The Trump administration faced withering criticism in 2018 for transferring hundreds of millions of dollars meant for biomedical research, HIV/AIDS services and other purposes to cover the expenses tied to an unaccompanied child population that would peak close to 14,000 that year.

That scrutiny was driven in part by bipartisan disapproval over then-President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy that separated children from their parents, which left HHS with responsibility for carrying out a costly reunification effort.

The Biden administration, by contrast, has moved to unwind several of the Trump era’s most restrictive immigration policies. Yet as it confronts the need to care for an even greater number of migrant children, health groups have bristled at the prospect it could take away from public health priorities even as the U.S. combats a pandemic.

“It is concerning any time funds need to be diverted from their originally intended purpose because of limited resources,” said Erin Morton, executive director of the Coalition for Health Funding. “We have consistently asked our public health system to do more with less and we have underfunded essential programs that today are critical to addressing the multitude of challenges facing the country.”

The transfers could also stretch funding for other programs within HHS’ Administration for Children and Families, which oversees various social services including child care and support for newly arrived refugees.

Biden cited concerns about the strain on the HHS refugee office involved with both aiding refugees and caring for unaccompanied children in his initial refusal to raise the refugee admissions cap from historic lows — a decision he later reversed in the face of swift blowback.

“Obviously this will have a significant impact on the ability of ORR to serve refugees and asylees,” Bob Carey, who ran the Office of Refugee Resettlement from 2015 to 2017, said of the potential need to shift more funding toward sheltering migrant children.

Still, Carey and others defended the transfers as unfortunate yet necessary, and a consequence of the urgent need to get rising numbers of unaccompanied children out of jail-like facilities at the border.

After effectively sealing the southern border last year, the Trump administration never expanded its shelter capacity to the level that HHS has pegged as critical to its preparedness, Greenberg said, leaving the department shorthanded when Biden resumed allowing migrant children into the country.

The pandemic further handicapped HHS, halving its number of available beds due to the need to follow Covid-19 precautions. That forced a scramble to build out a dozen emergency shelters that have historically, on average, cost more than double the amount per day to house each child than it does in licensed facilities.

More than half the migrant children in HHS custody are now housed in emergency shelters, Weber confirmed. And implementing pandemic measures like testing and quarantine areas in shelters has cost HHS at least $850 million in additional expenses alone.

HHS in recent months has additionally agreed to hundreds of millions of dollars in no-bid contracts with an array of emergency response and logistics companies to build out services and staff at the emergency shelters.

“If they had started this year with 16,000 beds instead of 8,000, they could have managed in February and had time to determine how in an orderly way to expand capacity for the very large numbers in March,” Greenberg said. “Fundamentally, it’s this mix of: numbers were greater than expected, capacity was less than needed and there was tremendous pressure to alleviate crowding at [the border].”

Those dynamics are expected to hold for at least the next couple months, as hundreds of new unaccompanied minors arrive at the border daily and are transferred into the health department’s care.

And with no indication so far that the Biden administration will seek new emergency border aid from Congress, that means HHS’ expenses are only likely to balloon further, forcing additional costly transfers within the department.

“It’s going to be expensive,” Carey said. “I can’t think of a situation that’s more complex than this.”

 

 

Is this an Extension of Red Flag Law(s) by DHS?

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JTN: The Department of Homeland Security has launched a $500,000 grant program for research and data collection on insider threats in the country’s law enforcement agencies.

A blue banner displaying the U.S. Department of Homeland Security seal with the text National Terrorism Advisory System - Bulletin - www.dhs.gov/advisories

The premise for the grant, “Insider Threats in American Law Enforcement,” is that the U.S. is facing a rising number of internal threats and an understanding of the changing environment is needed.

“Due to the growing number of threats our nation is combating,” the grant synopsis explains, the DHS Science and Technology Directorate “supports the evolving threat landscape of a dynamic world with changing motivations, actors, communication models and weaponry.”

The grant prioritizes data collection and technological innovation as means to identify, understand and combat the purported threat of penetration of U.S. law enforcement agencies by violent extremists.

“Objectives of this effort will identify high quality data to understand the risks posed to the United States by the potential for violent extremist organizations or lone actors to infiltrate law enforcement agencies (LEAs) and other government institutions,” the synopsis states.

While billing U.S. taxpayers $500K for this initiative to understand these clandestine “extremist organizations” infiltrating law enforcement, the grant neglects to define what it means by “extremist organizations.”

The research and data collected under the grant is to be shared with a variety of agencies, including private organizations. Yet civil rights and liberties will not be violated in the combined public-private harvesting and sharing of data about undefined “extremists,” DHS insists.

“Knowledge and findings from this research will be transferred to federal, state, local, and private organizations to enable education and awareness to reinforce a whole-of-society prevention architecture while respecting civil rights and civil liberties,” according to the grant description. “These prevention efforts will equip and empower local efforts — including peers, teachers, community leaders, and law enforcement — to minimize a threat as it evolves while enhancing emergency preparedness and response.”

The grant will task the awardee with understanding law enforcement threats from the perspectives of numerous fields, including including economics, psychology, politics and criminology. “The awardee(s) will assist with a range of activities,” the grant specifies, including designing data collection strategies, collecting data from primary and secondary sources, and analyzing data while identifying subject matter experts to participate in interviews and/or focus groups.”

Analyzing research from these various fields and experts will help fill in the gaps in understanding the threat environment and help “counter the threats posed by violent extremists and violent ideologies to United States LEAs and the public,”

The closing date for the grant applications is May 16, a day after the country concludes National Police Week. The week of May 9-May 15 has been designated as National Police Week since 1962 to recognize the service and sacrifice of federal, state and local law enforcement.

As reported by Just the News this week, the DHS and the Department of Defense have announced internal investigations of “extremism” within their departments, raising alarms among conservative civil liberties watchdogs, as the agencies’ notions of “extremism” were  vague and appeared to omit from scrutiny far-left extremist groups implicated in widespread political violence in 2020.

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Date Issued:  Friday, May 14, 2021 02:00 pm ET
View as PDF:  National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin – May 14, 2021 (pdf, 1 page, 359.67KB)

Summary of Terrorism Threat to the U.S. Homeland

 

The Secretary of Homeland Security has issued a new National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS) Bulletin regarding the current heightened threat environment across the United States.  The Homeland is facing threats that have evolved significantly and become increasingly complex and volatile in 2021. These threats include those posed by domestic terrorists, individuals and groups engaged in grievance-based violence, and those inspired or influenced by foreign terrorists and other malign foreign influences.  Social media and online forums are increasingly exploited by these actors to influence and spread violent extremist narratives and activity.  Such threats also are exacerbated by the impacts from the ongoing global pandemic.

 

Duration

Issued:  May 14, 2021 02:00 pm
Expires:  August 13, 2021 02:00 pm

Additional Details

  • Violent extremists may seek to exploit the easing of COVID-19-related restrictions across the United States to conduct attacks against a broader range of targets after previous public capacity limits reduced opportunities for lethal attacks.
  • Historically, mass-casualty Domestic Violent Extremist (DVE) attacks linked to racially- or ethnically-motivated violent extremists (RMVEs) have targeted houses of worship and crowded commercial facilities or gatherings. Some RMVEs advocate via social media and online platforms for a race war and have stated that civil disorder provides opportunities to engage in violence in furtherance of ideological objectives.
  • Through 2020 and into 2021, government facilities and personnel have been common targets of DVEs, and opportunistic violent criminals are likely to exploit Constitutionally-protected freedom of speech activity linked to racial justice grievances and police use of force concerns, potentially targeting protestors perceived to be ideological opponents.
  • Ideologically-motivated violent extremists fueled by perceived grievances, false narratives, and conspiracy theories continue to share information online with the intent to incite violence. Online narratives across sites known to be frequented by individuals who hold violent extremist ideologies have called for violence against elected officials, political representatives, government facilities, law enforcement, religious or commercial facilities, and perceived ideologically-opposed individuals.
  • The use of encrypted messaging by lone offenders and small violent extremist cells may obscure operational indicators that provide specific warning of a pending act of violence.
  • Messaging from foreign terrorist organizations, including al-Qa‘ida and ISIS, intended to inspire U.S.-based homegrown violent extremists (HVEs) continues to amplify narratives related to exploiting protests. HVEs, who have typically conducted attacks against soft targets, mass gatherings, and law enforcement, remain a threat to the Homeland.
  • Nation-state adversaries have increased efforts to sow discord. For example, Russian, Chinese and Iranian government-linked media outlets have repeatedly amplified conspiracy theories concerning the origins of COVID-19 and effectiveness of vaccines; in some cases, amplifying calls for violence targeting persons of Asian descent.
  • DHS encourages law enforcement and homeland security partners to be alert to these developments and prepared for any effects to public safety. Consistent with applicable law, state, local, tribal, and territorial (SLTT) law enforcement organizations should maintain situational awareness of online and physical activities that may be related to an evolving threat of violence.

How We Are Responding

  • DHS and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) continue to provide guidance to SLTT partners about the current threat environment. Specifically, DHS has issued numerous intelligence assessments to SLTT officials on the evolving threat.
  • DHS is collaborating with industry partners to identify and respond to those individuals encouraging violence and attempting to radicalize others through spreading disinformation, conspiracy theories, and false narratives on social media and other online platforms.
  • DHS has prioritized combatting DVE threats within its FEMA grants as a National Priority Area.
  • DHS remains committed to identifying and preventing domestic terrorism.

How You Can Help

Be Prepared and Stay Informed

  • Be prepared for any emergency situations and remain aware of circumstances that may place your personal safety at risk.
  • Maintain digital media literacy to recognize and build resilience to false and harmful narratives.
  • Make note of your surroundings and the nearest security personnel.
  • Business owners should consider the safety and security of customers, employees, facilities, infrastructure, and cyber networks.
  • Government agencies will provide details about emerging threats as information is identified. The public is encouraged to listen to local authorities and public safety officials.

If You See Something, Say Something®. Report suspicious activity to local law enforcement or call 911.