Tag: the war of terror

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.’

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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. 

Keep reading

The left’s newest stealth attack on free speech

America’s two most important rights are free speech and the right to bear arms. Without the first, no people are free; and without the second, there is no first. Totalitarians always go after both; that is, they silence and disarm them. For decades, the left has been open in its war on the Second Amendment. They’ve struggled more with the war on speech, but they may finally have come up with a new approach that will sneak around constitutional muster.

When it comes to speech that incites violence or is otherwise imminently threatening, the law has always been clear: The threat must be very explicit and imminent for the speech to lose its First Amendment protections. At the most simplistic level, saying, “I wish so-and-so were dead” is not an actionable opinion. However, saying, “I’m going to kill so-and-so this week” or “You all need to kill so-and-so; I’ve got a plan” is criminally actionable speech. (The standard is more sensitive when speech is directed at the president, of course.)

This constitutional limitation on making (conservatives’) political speech criminally actionable has long vexed the left. They’ve trained their young acolytes that speech is violence (so much say that almost half of college students say “hate speech” should get the death penalty) but, so far, courts haven’t fallen for that gambit. Unless speech creates an imminent threat, it gets a pass.

Lately, though, the left has come up with a new concept that seeks to say that any speech that opposes leftist policies is actual and imminent “terrorism.” Or as leftist academia calls it, “stochastic terrorism.”

Keep reading

Former FBI Official To Testify On Agency Allegedly Inflating Domestic Terrorism Data

Former FBI Counterterrorism Division Assistant Director Jill Sanborn is to be interviewed by the House Judiciary Committee on Dec. 2 over alleged politicization, including inflating domestic terrorism numbers, House GOP members announced Thursday.

A joint letter released on Oct. 20 by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the committee’s ranking member, and Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), accused the ex-FBI official of failing to take “any meaningful steps” to arrange the interview over the past two months following an initial request.

In a letter to Sanborn on Aug. 10, the GOP lawmakers called on the former official to testify regarding whistleblower claims of the bureau pressuring agents to inflate the numbers of “domestic violent extremism” cases, including those didn’t meet the criteria. The pair asked Sanborn to contact the committee and schedule the interview no later than Aug. 24.

“Only late last Friday did your attorneys offer a specific date for a transcribed interview—December 2, 2022—a date six weeks in the future and nearly four months since our initial request,” the lawmakers wrote.

Keep reading

Pentagon’s Information Warfare Review Should Cover the Domestic Side, Too

The US Department of Defense has ordered “a sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare,” the Washington Post reports. The apparent reason for the review is an August disclosure, by Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory, that Twitter and Facebook, of social media accounts opened under fake identities and used to feed disinformation to “audiences overseas.”

That’s all well and good, but while they’re at it I wish the Pentagon would also review — and cease — its information warfare campaigns against the American public.

Among supposed American constitutional values are separation of the military from politics, and its subservience to civilian government. While those values have always proven more noticeable in the breach than in the observance in wartime, the post-World-War-Two national security state has turned that breach into a well-funded, 24/7/365, campaign of political influence.

Senior military officials routinely attempt to affect policy (and politicians, and voter sentiment) with public statements designating the next Enemy of the Week and begging for more money and more operational authority to fight the wars it chooses rather than the wars Congress declares (the last time Congress was willing to take that kind of responsibility was  in 1942, when it added Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania to its list of World War Two opponents).

The Department of Defense maintains an “Entertainment Media Office” to support filmmakers with military resources. Needless to say, only productions which glorify the US armed forces need apply. The most recent prominent example (involving no fewer than two US Navy aircraft carriers, multiple aircraft and military pilots, etc.) is mega-hit Top Gun: Maverick.

In 2015, the public learned that the National Football League’s apparently heartfelt love of military pageantry —  color guards, tributes to veterans, even aircraft flyovers and parachute jumps — was actually just a bought and paid for (with millions of taxpayer dollars) DOD marketing scheme.

And yes, they’re constantly coming for our children. I was recruited into the US Marine Corps in high school myself in the 1980s, but even I was surprised at the sheer volume of mail my own kids received from armed forces recruiters from about the time they hit the age of 16 a few years ago. They’re all over the public schools, not just to fill their recruitment quotas but to make positive impressions on future voters.

Keep reading

Senate doesn’t have to release full CIA torture report, judge rules

The U.S. Senate does not have to release its full report detailing the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation and detention program following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, a federal judge ruled Thursday.

Journalist Shawn Musgrave sought the 6,700-page document, citing a “common law right of access” to public records. The legal argument is conceptually similar to the Freedom of Information Act. Congress is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled in 2016 that the report was a congressional record. Musgrave’s legal argument was made in an attempt to get around that limitation.

Common law right of access is decided in the District of Columbia Circuit based on a two-part test that requires a determination that the document is a public record and then balancing the government’s interest in keeping the document secret against the public’s interest in disclosure.

District of Columbia District Judge Beryl Howell ruled that the report “does not qualify as a public record subject to the common law right of public access” because although it was part of the committee’s investigation, it was aimed at gathering information and did not make recommendations or propose legislation. Therefore, she said, it falls under the protections of the 1st Amendment‘s speech and debate clause protecting legislators’ speech while crafting legislation.

The government interest in keeping the information secret outweighs public interest, Howell wrote.

Keep reading

DHS: “Radicalized” Americans who believe “false narratives” online are the new terror threat

The War on Terror. You might have thought that it started in 2001, with the shocking tragedy of 9/11, and also – the shockwaves that reverberated throughout societies (in terms of how the way of life irrevocably changed from airport travel, to what can and can’t be expressed online.)

And that it’s over.

Well, US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas doesn’t seem to be on board with such “ideations” of a return to the normal.

There’s apparently ever more “enemies” to be dealt with, hinted the head of the agency – the same agency that had its figurative “ass” handed to it earlier in the year with the failed attempt to impose a censorship overlord agency in the shape of a “disinformation board.”

Post 9/11, Mayorkas said on the anniversary of the attacks, the enemy was the individual.

Keep reading