Tag: the war of terror

The Legacy of George W. Bush and His Torturers

In the days and months following the attacks of 9/11, the government laid the blame for orchestrating the attacks on Osama bin Ladin. Then, after bin Ladin was murdered in his home in Pakistan in 2011, the government decided that the true mastermind of 9/11 was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

By the time of bin Ladin’s death, Mohammed had already been tortured by CIA agents for two years in Pakistan and charged with conspiracy to commit mass murder, to be tried before an American military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Throughout the entire existence of the U.S. military detention camp at Gitmo, no one has been tried for causing or carrying out the crimes of 9/11. The government only tried one person for crimes related to 9/11. That was Zacharias Moussaoui who pleaded guilty in federal court in Virginia to being the 20th hijacker and then was tried in a penalty phase trial where the issue was life in prison or death. The government spent millions in its death penalty case, which it lost. A civilian jury sentenced Moussaoui, who never harmed a hair on the head of anyone, to life in prison.

Mohammed, meanwhile, and four other alleged conspirators, have been awaiting trial since their arrivals at Gitmo in 2006. Since then, numerous government military and civilian prosecutors, as well as numerous military judges, have rotated into and out of the case.

The concept of military tribunals was born in the administration of President George W. Bush, who argued that 9/11, though conducted by civilians, was an attack of military magnitude and thus warranted a military response. This pathetic knee-jerk argument, of course, not only brought us the fruitless and destructive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; it also brought a host of legal problems unforeseen by Bush and his revenge-over-justice thirsty colleagues.

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Feds Adapting A.I. Used to Track ISIS to Combat American Dissent on Vaccines, Elections

The government’s campaign to fight “misinformation” has expanded to adapt military-grade artificial intelligence once used to silence the Islamic State (ISIS) to quickly identify and censor American dissent on issues like vaccine safety and election integrity, according to grant documents and cyber experts.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded several million dollars in grants recently to universities and private firms to develop tools eerily similar to those developed in 2011 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program.

DARPA said those tools were used “to help identify misinformation or deception campaigns and counter them with truthful information,” beginning with the Arab Spring uprisings in the the Middle East that spawned ISIS over a decade ago.

The initial idea was to track dissidents who were interested in toppling U.S.-friendly regimes or to follow any potentially radical threats by examining political posts on Big Tech platforms.

DARPA set four specific goals for the program:

  1. Detect, classify, measure and track the (a) formation, development and spread of ideas and concepts (memes), and (b) purposeful or deceptive messaging and misinformation.
  2. Recognize persuasion campaign structures and influence operations across social media sites and communities.
  3. Identify participants and intent, and measure effects of persuasion campaigns.
  4. Counter messaging of detected adversary influence operations.

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Is the FBI secretly running dark web terrorist recruitment?

A high-level conspiracy of silence surrounding a US terrorism prosecution raises serious questions over whether the FBI possesses technological means to bypass dark web user anonymity, or alternatively manages extremist group recruitment sites in secret, in order to entrap unsuspecting visitors.

US citizen Muhammed Momtaz Al-Azhari was charged in May 2020 with attempting to provide material support to ISIS. He came to the attention of the FBI due to a series of visits he made to a dark web site, which hosts “unofficial propaganda and photographs related to ISIS” in May 2019.

The Bureau pinpointed specific pages of the site Al-Azhari perused including sections on making donations, ISIS media assets, photos and videos, and stories of military operations allegedly conducted by ISIS fighters in Iraq, Syria, and Nigeria. These actions were linked to him directly by uncovering his IP address, and therefore his identity and location.

Al-Azhari accessed the site via the TOR browser, which theoretically provides anonymity to users, and makes it difficult if not impossible for a site’s owner or external prying eyes to track visitor IPs. A recent court filing by Al-Azhari’s lawyers reveals that’s precisely what the FBI did though and exactly how they achieved this is being withheld by government decree. 

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US No Fly List Leaked After It Was Found in Unsecured Server – Includes Over One Million Names

A Swiss hacker named “maia arson crimew” leaked a copy of the US No Fly list after it was discovered recently in an open server.

The list from 2019 included over 1.5 million names and aliases.

The list was leaked on The Daily Dot.

Because the list is from 2019, it will not include the thousands of names of US patriots who were added to the list following the Jan. 6, 2021, protests in Washington DC.

WalkAway Founder Brandon Straka told Tucker Carlson earlier this week that hundreds of Trump supporters were added to the “no fly list” following the 2021 DC protests.

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WHO: Anti-Vaccine Activism Is Deadlier Than Global Terrorism

The World Health Organization shared a video on Twitter promoting the claim that anti-vaccine activism is deadlier than global terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and gun violence.

Yes, really.

The video quoted Baylor College of Medicine’s Dr. Peter Hotez, who stated, “We have to recognize that anti-vaccine activism, which I actually call anti-science aggression, has now become a major killing force globally.”

Hotez went on to assert that 200,000 Americans died from COVID because they refused to get the vaccine, a claim that isn’t backed up by any source.

“And now the anti-vaccine activism is expanding across the world, even into low and middle income countries,” added Hotez.

Once again with providing any source for his dubious claims, Hotez asserted that “anti-science now kills more people than things like gun violence, global terrorism, nuclear proliferation or cyber attacks.”

The doctor went on to complain about how anti-vaccine skepticism had now become a “political movement” linked to “far-right extremism” in both the United States and Germany.

Hotez ominously called for “political solutions to address this.”

Unsurprisingly, respondents to the tweet completely savaged the WHO for sharing the video, with one pointing to stats that suggest, “Doctors and “medicine” kill more people than car accidents and guns.”

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British officials were in favour of ‘whacking’ Osama Bin Laden nine months before 9/11 terror attacks, newly-released papers show

Britain was ‘all in favour of whacking’ Osama Bin Laden at least nine months before 9/11.

The readiness to target the Al Qaeda chief was mentioned in a briefing to Tony Blair ahead of a dinner with Bill Clinton. 

The then-PM’s foreign affairs adviser Sir John Sawers laid out points the ex-US president ‘may raise or which you might want to ask about’.

Sir John briefed on the US’s likely response to the bombing of USS Cole, which killed 17 US sailors, off Yemen and discussed possible air strikes.

Sir John said the US ‘won’t launch strikes until they have a smoking gun.’ He added: ‘We’re all in favour of whacking [Bin Laden], but need a bit of notice and a chance to influence the timing.’ Bin Laden was eventually killed by the US in 2011.

Sir Tony had a famously close relationship with Mr Clinton, whose presidency ended in January 2001, and the files also reveal No 10’s initial nerves about how to handle his successor George Bush.

Soon after Mr Bush’s election, Britain’s ambassador to the US Sir Christopher Meyer warned of a potential ‘cultural clash’, the files show.

He wrote to Sir John and Downing Street chief of staff Jonathan Powell about a conversation with US trade representative Bob Zoellick ‘who spent most of dinner giving advice on how the prime minister should handle Bush.’

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FBI arrests Libyan operative charged in 1988 airline bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland

The FBI has arrested a Libyan intelligence operative suspected of making the bomb that downed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988 in one of the deadliest terror attacks in history, Scottish authorities announced Sunday.

The U.S. Justice Department confirmed the arrest of Abu Agela Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi, announcing “he is expected to make his initial appearance in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.”

The arrest marks a four-decade hunt for Mas’ud, who was charged with making the bomb that killed 270 passengers, including 190 Americans.

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FBI Ramps Up Spending to Fight MAGA Terrorism

The FBI is conducting three times as many domestic terrorism investigations than it was five years ago, with 70 percent of its open cases focused on “civil unrest” and anti-government activity, according to FBI documents and government specialists. The Bureau has also quietly changed the general classification of white supremacy, antisemitism, abortion-, and anti-LGBTQI+-related extremism to “hate crimes” rather than “terrorism.” Since terrorism remains the top national security priority, this has lowered the visibility and resources dedicated to those issues.

The FBI considers all violent acts (and threats of violence) with a political motive to be terrorism, a senior government official explains to Newsweek. But not all acts of extremism are considered terrorism. “If an act is focused on the government, it’s terrorism,” the source says. “But if extremism is focused on private individuals or institutions, it’s considered just a crime or classified as a hate crime.” The source was granted anonymity to speak about classified matters.

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The US military is operating in more countries than we think

U.S. military forces have been engaged in unauthorized hostilities in many more countries than the Pentagon has disclosed to Congress, let alone the public, according to a major new report released late last week by New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice.

“Afghanistan, Iraq, maybe Libya. If you asked the average American where the United States has been at war in the past two decades, you would likely get this short list,” according to the report, Secret War: How the U.S. Uses Partnerships and Proxy Forces to Wage War Under the Radar. “But this list is wrong – off by at least 17 countries in which the United States has engaged in armed conflict through ground forces, proxy forces, or air strikes.”

“This proliferation of secret war is a relatively recent phenomenon, and it is undemocratic and dangerous,” the report’s author, Katherine Yon Ebright, wrote in the introduction. “The conduct of undisclosed hostilities in unreported countries contravenes our constitutional design. It invites military escalation that is unforeseeable to the public, to Congress, and even to the diplomats charged with managing U.S. foreign relations.” 

The 39-page report focuses on so-called “security cooperation” programs authorized by Congress pursuant to the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, or AUMF, against certain terrorist groups. One such program, known as Section 127e, authorized the Defense Department to “provide support to foreign forces, irregular forces, groups or individuals engaged in supporting or facilitating authorized ongoing military operations by United States special operations forces to combat terrorism.”

According to the report, that “support” has been broadly — or, more accurately, too broadly — interpreted by the Pentagon. In practice, it has enabled the U.S. military to “develop and control proxy forces that fight on behalf of and sometimes alongside U.S. forces” and to use armed force to defend its local partners against adversaries (in what the Pentagon calls “collective self-defense”) regardless of whether those adversaries pose any threat to U.S. territory or persons, and, in some cases, whether or not the adversaries have been officially designated as legitimate targets under the 2001 AUMF. 

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