Tag: the war of terror

The FBI Entraps Another Fake Assassin

Two attempts on the life of a former president, less than two months apart, is unprecedented in American history. And yet it’s not entirely surprising given that the country’s most powerful institutions and industries have spent the last eight years weaponizing the most suggestible and mentally ill of our citizenry to target Donald Trump and his supporters. Now it seems the FBI may be recruiting from abroad as well. 

According to the Trump campaign, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence recently briefed the Republican candidate on “real and specific threats from Iran to assassinate him in an effort to destabilize and sow chaos in the United States.” The Secret Service was alerted to the threat before the July 13 attempt on Trump’s life and reportedly increased his security because of it. But that was not enough to stop Thomas Matthew Crooks from shooting Trump in the face, killing Corey Comperatore, and wounding two other attendees.  

There’s little doubt the Iranians are targeting Trump, say former intelligence officials with whom I spoke. “The Iranians are promiscuous assassins, and they hate Trump more than anyone else on earth,” says Peter Theroux, a retired CIA officer who worked on Iran and related issues during his tenure at Langley. “Trump enforced sanctions against Iran. He moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. He was the most antithetical to everything Tehran wants, including the triumphal visit to Riyadh he made for his first presidential trip in 2017.” 

But above all, there’s the fact Trump ordered the January 2020 assassination of Qasem Soleimani, onetime chief of the Quds Force, the external operations unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), and second in command only to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The Iranians have vowed to avenge the terror master’s death and have threatened not only the former president but also former Trump administration officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Iran envoy Brian Hook, National Security Advisor John Bolton, and his successor Robert O’Brien. In August 2022, the Justice Department charged an IRGC officer for plotting to kill Bolton. 

The Islamic Republic definitely has it out for Trump, but it seems this most recent Iranian plot to kill the Republican candidate was hatched by the FBI. 

Last month the DOJ announced it had charged a Pakistani national with ties to Iran in connection to a plot to assassinate a politician or U.S. government official on U.S. soil. According to reports, Trump was the target.

The suspect, Asif Merchant, entered the country in April and was arrested on July 12 as he prepared to leave the country. It appears that Merchant was the Iranian threat the Secret Service was briefed on before the July 13 rally in Butler, PA.

The FBI arranged his entry into the U.S. According to an August Twitter post from Fox correspondent Bill Melugin, Merchant “was admitted into the U.S. via parole for ‘significant public benefit’ when [Customs and Border Patrol] encountered him at the airport in [Texas] in April after he flew in from overseas.” The sponsor of his parole, Melugin reported, “was the FBI’s Dallas office, for ‘security interests.’”

Melugin’s sources told him the FBI had intelligence on Merchant “before he arrived in the U.S. and needed him to physically come into the country to develop the case on him and arrest him, and that if they had arrested him at Customs, they would not have been able to gather evidence and information about his plot.”

But to date there’s little evidence the FBI developed a case based on intelligence collected before Merchant’s entry. Rather, it seems more likely that federal law enforcement imported a terrorist entrapment target for the purpose of fabricating a plot. Former FBI agent turned whistleblower Steve Friend says the Bureau’s playbook is simple: “Identify a vulnerable person. Establish fake friendships with undercover agents and informants. Encourage him to agree to commit a terrorist act he is otherwise incapable of committing. Arrest him.”

Friend says that if the FBI really had probable cause for an arrest, it would make sense to facilitate Merchant’s travel rather than going through a lengthy and possibly contentious extradition process. But what’s curious, he says, “is that he was in the country for several months before they executed the arrest.”

If the FBI had intelligence on Merchant’s plan to kill Trump before he arrived in the United States, there’s no evidence of it in the affidavit for his arrest. “It was all information about his actions while in the United States,” says Friend. “That doesn’t mean that he hadn’t done anything before then. But it confirms that they didn’t have enough to arrest him when he arrived here.”

Neither the affidavit nor the indictment make a strong case that Merchant is an experienced operative. The “use of coded language, use of multiple cellular telephones, and removal of cellular telephones to attempt to avoid surveillance” cited in the affidavit do not, contrary to the arresting agent’s contention, exemplify expert “tradecraft and operational security measures.” “It’s laughable,” says Friend. “Like complex tradecraft is telling an accomplice to put his phone in a box? A corner drug dealer’s tradecraft is more sophisticated than that.”

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Will the Forever Wars Ever End?

September marked the 23rd anniversary of al-Qaeda’s 2001 attacks on the United States, which left nearly 3,000 people dead. For the two decades since then, I’ve been writing, often for TomDispatch, about the ways the American response to 9/11, which quickly came to be known as the Global War on Terror, or GWOT, changed this country. As I’ve explored in several books, in the name of that war, we transformed our institutions, privileged secrecy over transparency and accountability, side-stepped and even violated longstanding laws and constitutional principles, and basically tossed aside many of the norms that had guided us as a nation for two centuries-plus, opening the way for a country now in Trumpian-style difficulty at home.

Even today, more than two decades later, the question remains: Will the war on terror ever end?

Certainly, one might be inclined to answer in the affirmative following the recent unexpected endorsement of presidential candidate Kamala Harris by two leading members of the George W. Bush administration which, in response to those attacks, launched the GWOT. First, Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, who, after September 11th, sought to take the country down the path to what he called “the dark side” and was a chief instigator of the misguided and fraudulently justified invasion of Iraq in 2003, endorsed Vice President Harris. Then, so did Alberto Gonzales who, while serving as White House counsel to George W. Bush and then as his attorney general, was intricately involved in crafting that administration’s grim torture policy. (You remember, of course, those “enhanced interrogation techniques.”) He was similarly involved in creating the overreaching surveillance policy designed and implemented during the first years of the war on terror.

Consider those surprising endorsements by former Bush war hawks a possible coda for the war on terror as a major factor in American politics. In fact, for almost a decade and a half now, there have been signs suggesting that the denouement of that war might be at hand (though it never quite was). Those markers included the May 2011 lethal raid on the hideout of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden; President Barack Obama’s December 2011 authorization for the “final” withdrawal of American troops from Iraq (though a cadre of 2,500 military personnel are stationed there presently and another 900 are in neighboring Syria). In August 2021, 10 years after the killing of bin Laden, the U.S. did finally exit, however disastrously, from its lost war in Afghanistan. And in 2022, a U.S. drone strike killed bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

The counterterrorism measures have had an impact on the American threat environment. As reported in the Department of Homeland Security’s 2024 Homeland Threat Assessment, in 2022, “Only one attack in the United States was conducted by an individual inspired by a foreign terrorist organization” such as al-Qaeda or ISIS.

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Censorship and Transparency Issues in “Anti-Terror” Tech Alliance

Big Tech’s Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) alliance, often accused of censorship of legal content, continues to face allegations about an ongoing lack of transparency regarding its operations.

Founded two years ago by Meta, Microsoft, then Twitter, and YouTube (Google), it now has 25 members, and the stated goal is to flag and remove violent content from the internet.

The latest development regarding to controversial group – other than the ongoing transparency issues – is X deciding to leave the GIFCT board.

Two major problems have emerged around GIFCT’s activities and influence on the web: transparency, including around funding, and having a system in place that makes sure legal, non-violent content – such as that actually opposing terrorism, satire, media reports, etc – doesn’t get caught in the GIFTC net as well, resulting in censorship.

But, not one of the 25 members publicly shares how much content is removed (due to hash matches). Yet some idea of the size of the operation can be gleaned from YouTube’s contribution to the GIFCT database last year alone: 45,000 hashes.

There is also no information available about the number of appeals users lodge against content removal resulting from this process. It’s also unknown how many hashes are added by the companies themselves, and how many come from the government or researchers.

And apparently, GIFCT itself isn’t sure how many companies automate hash-sharing or flagging and removing content based on matches, and how many employ humans to do it.

The obscurity in which GIFCT labors is quite extraordinary, even by Big Tech standards: it is not known how many companies use the said database, and there is no independent auditing or internal review of the alliances’s work. In 2021, the BSR consultancy was hired to produce “a human rights impact assessment.”

47 changes were recommended, but the GIFCT board has not yet implemented any. And while at it – not even the founding four have always accepted suggestions coming from an independent advisory committee within GIFCT.

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UK Using Terrorism Law To Silence Journalists, Protestors Who Commit ‘Speech Crimes’

British police and prosecutors are relying on a recently adopted “speech crime” provision in terrorism legislation to target journalists, commentators, activists, and protesters.

The crackdown accelerated after Israel launched its genocidal campaign against Palestinians following the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. Among the most well-known examples of this crackdown is the case of British-Syrian journalist and commentator Richard Medhurst. 

Medhurst, the son of two United Nations peacekeepers, was arrested on August 15 by counter-terrorism police after his plane landed at London’s Heathrow airport. He was due to participate in a panel at the Better Days Festival in Devon.

“Something in my gut told me something was up,” Medhurst told The Dissenter, because there was an “unusually long gap” after the plane stopped and the doors opened. 

The pilot said that they were waiting for a plane to move out of their spot, but this turned out to be false. “One of the flight attendants said, ‘can Richard Medhurst please come to the front of the plane?’ I was literally in the front row.”

Officers, who were not in uniform, initially refused to answer any questions as to who they were and what they wanted and declined to identify themselves. Police demanded to know where Medhurst’s bags were and then took him and his property away. After he was taken to a small room, he was searched, placed in double-lock handcuffs in a painful manner, and transferred to a police station.

Medhurst, who is a member of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) as well as the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), is well-known for his coverage of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s extradition case as well as his reporting on geopolitics as it relates to West Asia.

This is the first known example of British authorities invoking section 12(1A) of the Terrorism Act 2000 to justify arresting and interrogating a journalist, which was passed in 2019 as part of the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act.

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Israel seeks bill to allow police to probe ‘incitement to terrorism’ without approval

A new bill advancing through the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee would allow Israel Police to investigate suspected incitement to terrorism without needing approval from the State Attorney’s Office.

According to the Times of Israel, this proposal has raised alarms among civil rights groups and opposition MKs, who argue it could limit free speech.

Currently, such investigations require State Attorney approval to prevent overly broad interpretations of the law that could infringe on free expression. In July, State Attorney Amit Aisman revealed that police had initiated several investigations into incitement or speech-related offences without proper authorisation, bypassing his office’s directives.

Introduced by far-right MK Limor Son Har Melech, of the ultranationalist Otzma Yehudit Party, the new clause in the legislation is part of a broader bill that aims to tighten restrictions on incitement, extending the ban to include praise for individuals who commit terrorist acts, not just the acts themselves, reported the Times of Israel. 

If enacted, the law would enable police to act on formal complaints “or in any other manner.”

The bill passed its first reading in the Knesset in July, but Son Har Melech is now pushing for even stricter measures. A committee hearing on the bill, scheduled for today, was postponed due to scheduling conflicts with officials from the State Attorney’s Office and the National Security Ministry. The hearing is expected to be rescheduled soon.

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‘Can’t Make This Up’: Journalist Arrested Under UK Anti-Terror Law Hours After Criticizing It

Richard Medhurst, a Syrian-British independent journalist who defends Palestinians’ right to resist Israeli apartheid, occupation, and other crimes, said this week that he was recently arrested at London’s Heathrow Airport and held for nearly 24 hours for allegedly running afoul of a highly controversial anti-terrorism law critics say is used to silence legitimate dissent.

Medhurst – who is known for his work opposing U.S., British, and Israeli war crimes in the Middle East and for his advocacy for formerly imprisoned WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange – said on social media Tuesday: “I criticized the Terrorism Act before getting on the plane, then got arrested under the Terrorism Act upon landing. Can’t make this up.”

In a nearly nine-minute video posted Monday night on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, Medhurst said that “on Thursday, as I landed in London Heathrow Airport, I was immediately escorted off the plane by six police officers who were waiting for me at the entrance of the aircraft.”

“They arrested me – not detained – they arrested me under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act of 2000 and accused me of allegedly ‘expressing an opinion or belief that is supportive of a prescribed organization,’ but wouldn’t explain what this meant,” he continued.

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Tulsi Gabbard Suing Biden/Harris Admin For Placing Her On Terrorist Watch List

Former Democratic Representative Tulsi Gabbard is taking legal action against the Biden/Harris Administration after she discovered that she has essentially been placed on a terrorist watch list.

Gabbard, a military veteran, had it brought to her attention by Federal Air Marshal whistleblowers that she has been marked under the Quiet Skies program, a TSA scheme that seeks to identify travellers who may pose a risk to aviation security.

Those on this watchlist are not banned from flying, but are subject to enhanced searches and surveillance at airports, including having armed Air Marshals accompanying them on flights.

The whistleblowers have informed Gabbard that she is being monitored by two Explosive Detection Canine Teams, one Transportation Security Specialist specializing in explosives, one plainclothes TSA Supervisor, and three Federal Air Marshals every time she flies.

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House Report: Biden DHS Released At Least 99 Terror Watchlist Illegals Into U.S.

An interim staff report from the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement has confirmed that the Department of Homeland Security caught and released around 100 migrants on the federal government’s terrorist watchlist into the country between fiscal years 2021 to 2023.

The report notes that “Under the Biden-Harris administration, of the more than 250 illegal aliens on the terrorist watchlist who were encountered by Border Patrol at the southwest border between fiscal years 2021 and 2023, DHS has released into American communities at least 99, with at least 34 others in DHS custody but not yet removed from the United States.”

It also highlights that the “Border Patrol at the southwest border encountered aliens on the terrorist watchlist from 36 different countries, including places with an active terrorist presence such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Kyrgyzstan, Mauritania, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkey, Uzbekistan, and Yemen.”

“So far during fiscal year 2024, Border Patrol has encountered tens of thousands of illegal aliens nationwide from countries that could present national security risks, including 2,134 Afghan nationals, 33,347 Chinese nationals, 541 Iranian nationals, 520 Syrian nationals, and 3,104 Uzbek nationals,” the report also warns.

The report details one case in particular, that of 48-year-old Afghan national Mohammad Kharwin, a member of the terrorist group Hezb-e-Islami, whom federal agents arrested in April after he had been twice released into the country by the Border Patrol.

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CENTCOM Says It Was Involved in 196 Operations Against ISIS in Iraq and Syria in First Half of 2024

According to US Central Command, the US and its partner forces were involved in 196 missions against ISIS in Iraq and Syria that killed 44 ISIS operatives during the first half of 2024.

In Iraq, CENTCOM said it was involved in 137 operations with government forces that killed 30 ISIS fighters, and 74 more were detained.

Earlier this year, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani was calling for the US to withdraw and said Iraqi forces could handle ISIS remnants on their own. But the US insisted on staying, and at this point, there’s no sign a withdrawal is being considered.

In Syria, CENTCOM said it participated in 59 operations with the Kurdish-led SDF that killed 14, and another 92 were detained. This year, Amnesty International said in a report that the SDF was responsible for torture and “mass death” due to the conditions of the prisons it has set up for ISIS, which hold many children.

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FBI is Now Investigating Attempted Assassination of Donald Trump as ‘Potential Domestic Terrorism’

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has revealed that it is currently investigating the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump as a case of “potential domestic terrorism.”

On Sunday, the FBI disclosed in a statement that the suspected assailant, identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, appeared to have acted alone.

However, the bureau has not decided on the possible involvement of co-conspirators in the Saturday assassination attempt.

“The FBI is investigating the shooting incident at the July 13 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, which resulted in one victim’s death and injuries to former President Trump and other spectators, as an assassination attempt and potential domestic terrorism,” the bureau said in a statement.

“While our investigation to date indicates that the shooter acted alone, we continue to conduct thorough investigative activities to determine if any other individuals are connected with this heinous act,” it added.

During a press conference, FBI Pittsburgh Special Agent in Charge Kevin Rojek told reporters that the firearm used in the attempted assassination of Trump, during which the shooter also died, was an “AR-style 5.56 rifle” purchased legally.

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