Category: Terrorism

An UNBELIEVABLY Appropriate Use of the KKK Act

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Various Biden campaigners have sued Texas terrorists who attempted to force their campaign bus off of the road in October of last year under the Klu Klux Klan act of 1871.

This seems about right:

Timothy Holloway clutched the wheel of a Biden-Harris campaign bus last October, swerving and dodging as one hostile car bearing a Trump flag after another tried to run him off a Texas highway.

“We were terrified,” Holloway said in a news release. “They were clearly trying to scare us and prevent us from arriving at our destination in peace.”

The tactic worked — the Biden campaign canceled the rest of the day’s events, saying it feared for the safety of campaign staffers, supporters and local political candidates. Some prominent Republicans cheered the effort by the self-proclaimed “Trump Train,” while President Donald Trump himself lauded their efforts, calling the drivers “patriots” who “did nothing wrong.”

Now, Holloway — along with a White House staffer, a former Texas lawmaker and a campaign volunteer — are suing several members of the caravan, accusing them of violating the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which bars violent election intimidation, as well as local Texas laws. The group is also suing local law enforcement, claiming they failed to provide protection.

“Those on the bus feared injury or for their lives. All suffered lingering trauma in the days and months thereafter,” says one of a pair of federal lawsuits filed to the Western District of Texas court on Thursday. “The events of October 30 arose from a campaign of politically motivated intimidation.”

………

The case isn’t the only recent attempt to invoke the Ku Klux Klan Act against Trump supporters. In February, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, invoked the Klan Act in a lawsuit against Trump, Rudolph W. Giuliani and two extremist groups whose members are accused of participating in the insurrection. Thompson alleged that Trump and Giuliani violated the act by inciting the riots with false claims of a rigged election. The lawsuit is ongoing.

This was terrorism, pure and simple, and they should be treated at LEAST as severely as the Muslim losers that the FBI entraps in their sting operations.

Take their guns while the trials are going on, and seize their trucks, as they are the instruments of the crimes.

Took Long Enough

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Oregon state Representative Mike Nearman, who allowed right wing terrorists into the state house, has been charged with first-degree official misconduct and second-degree criminal trespass.

I’m surprised that he got charged at all:

An Oregon lawmaker who let violent far-right demonstrators into the state Capitol during a Dec. 21 special session was criminally charged on Friday with first-degree official misconduct and second-degree criminal trespass.

Rep. Mike Nearman, R-Independence, was caught on security videos opening a door and allowing demonstrators to enter the building. He had been under investigation since at least January for enabling the breach.

He was caught on tape, and it took them 4 months to charge this mook?

What is up with that?

………

The first-degree official misconduct charge is for allegedly knowingly taking action that constituted an unauthorized exercise of his official duties to benefit someone else, according to court filings. The second charge is for allegedly abetting another person to enter and remain in the Capitol.

………

Oregon’s Capitol has been closed to the public for the last year due to the pandemic. On Dec. 21, lawmakers were in the building for the third special session of 2020, which Gov. Kate Brown called to extend the state’s eviction moratorium, create a relief fund for landlords and pass wildfire and COVID-19 related funding.

As House lawmakers debated rules for the one-day proceeding around 8:30 a.m., Nearman left the chamber and exited a door near where right-wing demonstrators had gathered to protest the state’s coronavirus restrictions. Demonstrators, including some carrying rifles, were circulating outside the north face of the Capitol and one man carrying a large flag waited just outside the door that Nearman opened, according to security footage obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive through a public records request. Nearman exited and walked around the man with the flag, making no effort to keep him from entering the Capitol.

Surveillance video showed that once Nearman allowed demonstrators into the northwest Capitol vestibule, the group clashed with Oregon State Police and Salem police who tried to keep them out of the building. Demonstrators attempted to push past police, who rushed to eject the initial insurgents and physically block the doorway Nearman had just opened.

They have him on at least 4 cameras.  He’s been cut way too much slack by law enforcement.

He should have been frog marched out of his office in handcuffs months ago.

Support Your Local Police

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A cop in Georgia (where else?) was planning to arrest black people to prevent them from voting. 

He is also hooked up with white supremacists online.

Am I the only one who thinks that this guy is not an isolated case?

A former Middle Georgia sheriff’s deputy bragged in text messages with members of an alleged extremist group that he had beaten a Black person he arrested and planned to charge Black Georgians with felonies to keep them from voting, according to an FBI affidavit.

The ex-Wilkinson County deputy, Cody Richard Griggers, of Montrose, was fired last November after the FBI contacted the sheriff there about an investigation into illegal guns and their alleged ties to a California man said to have made violent political statements on Facebook.

Griggers, 28, a former Marine, pleaded guilty on Monday in federal court in Macon to one count of possession of an unregistered firearm, a crime the authorities discovered in their probe, which began last summer. He faces a maximum of 10 years in prison when he is sentenced in July.

………

Griggers, in the texts, was said to have claimed he was making and gathering illegal firearms and explosives.

Griggers, who is white, “also expressed viewpoints consistent with racially motivated violent extremism, including the use of racial slurs, slurs against homosexuals and making frequent positive references to the Nazi holocaust,” prosecutors said in a statement on Wednesday announcing Griggers’ plea.

The prosecutors said that on Nov. 19 last year that the FBI searched Griggers’ patrol car and found a machine gun “with an obliterated serial number,” a weapon he was not allowed to have in his patrol car.

It was Griggers’ statements in text messages, however, that most concerned Wilkinson Sheriff Richard Chatman.

………

“I beat the (expletive) out of a (racial slur) Saturday. (Expletive) tried to steal (a gun magazine) from the local gun store. … Sheriff’s dept. said it looked like he fell,” the affidavit noted, quoting Griggers.

Griggers went on to write that the beating was for him “sweet stress relief.”

………

The affidavit also said Griggers had texted how he “intended to charge black people with felonies in order to keep them from voting.”

“It’s a sign of beautiful things to come,” he wrote, according to the affidavit. “Also I’m going to charge them with whatever felonies I can to take away their ability to vote.”

Griggers had worked as a deputy in Wilkinson County — which lies just east of Macon and has a population of about 9,000 people, about 40% of them Black — for just over a year, the sheriff said.

According to the FBI affidavit, Griggers also discussed “killing liberal politicians” with other members of the text group, writing they could “make it look like Muslims” were responsible.

This is only the tip of the iceberg, and I am not just talking about the Wilkinson County sheriff’s department.

Police departments across the nation are objectively pro-white supremacist.

RTead more here: https://www.bnd.com/news/nation-world/national/article251004169.html#storylink=cpy

The Vaccine Makers are Hostage Takers

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Something that we are missing in the story of the vaccines is how the vaccine manufacturers are attempting to hold whole countries hostage.

It’s not a good look:

Pfizer has backed down over its controversial demand that the South African government put up sovereign assets guaranteeing an indemnity against the cost of any future legal cases. During Covid-19 vaccine negotiations, the company sought indemnity against civil claims from citizens who had experienced adverse vaccine effects – meaning that the government would have to cover the costs instead.

On Wednesday, the South African health minister, Zweli Mkhize, voiced frustrations about “difficult and sometimes unreasonable” terms his country’s government had been presented with during contract negotiations with vaccine manufacturers including Pfizer.

In a briefing letter sent ahead of his appearance at the parliamentary health committee, Mkhize said one condition in particular demanded by Pfizer was “too risky” – that the country put up sovereign assets as potential collateral.

In its negotiations to provide vaccines to countries around the world, Pfizer has been asking governments for wide-ranging indemnity protection against any civil claims a citizen might file. This means that if Pfizer was to be sued by someone who had suffered a rare adverse effect from the vaccine then the government, not the company, would have to pay for legal costs and compensation. This would apply even if the case had been brought as a result of the company’s own acts of negligence, fraud or malice. In other negotiations, Pfizer went further.

The company required some Latin American governments to put up sovereign assets – which could include federal bank reserves, embassy buildings or military bases – as a guarantee against indemnifying the cost of future legal cases. This was reported by the Bureau in February and picked up by more than 100 media organisations worldwide.

………

Experts have raised concerns about the fact that Pfizer and some other big pharma companies have demanded complete confidentiality during the recent vaccine negotiations, which would prevent the public from knowing about issues including indemnity protection and price. In South Africa, there are fears that any such secrecy clauses could undo public trust built up by years of anti-corruption work.

………

The delayed Pfizer deal arrives as South Africa is facing a third wave of Covid-19. In total, the country has recorded nearly 1.6m cases and more than 53,000 deaths.

We need to be clear about this:  The pharmaceutical industry will let nothing stand between them and their outrageous rents and are now behaving like mob bosses.

Their power needs to broken thoroughly and completely.

Why am I Not Surprised?

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I’m shocked! Shocked! To find that gambling is going on this establishment

It appears that white supremacist terrorists are getting extensive support from elements of the Christian right.

I probably should not say that this is because they are one and the same, but it’s because they are one and the same:

A data breach from Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo has revealed that millions of dollars have been raised on the site for far-right causes and groups, many of whom are banned from raising funds on other platforms.

It also identifies previously anonymous high-dollar donors to far-right actors, some of whom enjoy positions of wealth, power or public responsibility.

Some of the biggest beneficiaries have been members of groups such as the Proud Boys, designated as a terrorist group in Canada, many of whose fundraising efforts were directly related to the 6 January attack on the United States Capitol.

The breach, shared with journalists by transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets, shows the site was used for a wide range of legitimate charitable purposes, such as crowdfunding medical bills, aid projects and religious missions.

………

A large proportion of that money came from a number of high-dollar donors who elected to be anonymous on the website, but whose identifying details were nevertheless preserved by GiveSendGo.

………

Of Tarrio’s donors, none immediately responded to requests for comment except for Gerardo G Gonzalez, who anonymously donated $1,000 to Tarrio on 7 January.

………

In a telephone conversation, Gonzalez said that his support of the Proud Boys was motivated by his belief that “there is no systemic racism in this country”, and his opposition to “BLM and Antifa” who he said represented “the real extremism” in the United States. He also used derogatory terms for Latinos and Democrats.

Other Proud Boy fundraisers raised large amounts, and attracted a similar range of high-value anonymous donations.

………

Candyce Kelshall, the president of the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies-Vancouver, who at at Simon Fraser University researches violent transnational social movements, said that far-right crowdfunding on GiveSendGo was just “the tip of the iceberg”, and similar efforts were happening across up to 54 other crowdfunding sites that her research had revealed.

She said, however, that GiveSendGo was “particularly insidious” due to its presentation of such crowdfunding in the guise of religion-based charity.

This is not “religion-based charity”, the religion is real:  White Christian Fundamentalism in the United States is a part of white nationalism and white supremacism, they simply sell themselves slightly differently.

I call them, “Talibabtists,” thought the term,. “Christo-Fascist,” might also work.

They need to be shown for what they actually are, and it is my belief that a majority of the American public will shun them and their projects.

So Not a Surprise

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A study of the insurrectionist rioters show that economic hardship did not drive them to be there, it was a fear of losing white privilege.

Why am I not surprised?

The Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol by a violent mob at the behest of former president Donald Trump was an act of political violence intended to alter the outcome of a legitimate democratic election. That much was always evident.

What we know 90 days later is that the insurrection was the result of a large, diffuse and new kind of protest movement congealing in the United States.

The Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST), working with court records, has analyzed the demographics and home county characteristics of the 377 Americans, from 250 counties in 44 states, arrested or charged in the Capitol attack.

Those involved are, by and large, older and more professional than right-wing protesters we have surveyed in the past. They typically have no ties to existing right-wing groups. But like earlier protesters, they are 95 percent White and 85 percent male, and many live near and among Biden supporters in blue and purple counties.

The charges have, so far, been generally in proportion to state and county populations as a whole. Only Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri and Montana appear to have sent more protesters to D.C. suspected of crimes than their populations would suggest.

………

When compared with almost 2,900 other counties in the United States, our analysis of the 250 counties where those charged or arrested live reveals that the counties that had the greatest decline in White population had an 18 percent chance of sending an insurrectionist to D.C., while the counties that saw the least decline in the White population had only a 3 percent chance. This finding holds even when controlling for population size, distance to D.C., unemployment rate and urban/rural location. It also would occur by chance less than once in 1,000 times.

Put another way, the people alleged by authorities to have taken the law into their hands on Jan. 6 typically hail from places where non-White populations are growing fastest.

CPOST also conducted two independent surveys in February and March, including a National Opinion Research Council survey, to help understand the roots of this rage. One driver overwhelmingly stood out: fear of the “Great Replacement.” Great Replacement theory has achieved iconic status with white nationalists and holds that minorities are progressively replacing White populations due to mass immigration policies and low birthrates. Extensive social media exposure is the second-biggest driver of this view, our surveys found. Replacement theory might help explain why such a high percentage of the rioters hail from counties with fast-rising, non-White populations. 

There are legitimate economic causes of unrest in the United States, but a fear of losing privilege seems to be driving the worst of the extremism.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

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Just when you thought we were done with this crap, some knife weilding maniac crashes a barrier in front of the Congress, killing a Capitol Policeman.

To paraphrase Samuel L. Jackson, “I’m sick of these motherf%$#ing nuts, attacking the motherf%$#ing Congress.”

There needs to be an intense focus by law enforcement on the violent movements in the United States, and it needs to start with an aggressive effort to get said violent extremists out of law enforcement in the United States:

The band of razor wire-topped fencing around the Capitol had recently come down. The heavy National Guard presence had begun to thin.

But on Friday, not quite three months after the deadly Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, a car came careening midday onto the Capitol grounds, slamming into two Capitol Police officers and leaving one of them dead and the other injured.

This time, the source of the violence was not an angry pro-Trump mob, but a lone driver, armed with a knife, who had recently told friends he had left his job and had “afflictions.” After crashing his car and menacing officers, he was shot and killed.

“It is with a very, very heavy heart that I announce one of our officers has succumbed to his injuries,” Yogananda D. Pittman, the acting Capitol Police chief, said during a news conference near the scene. “This has been an extremely difficult time for U.S. Capitol Police, after the events of Jan. 6 and now the events that have occurred here today.”

The attacker “exited the vehicle with a knife in hand” and began “lunging” at the officers, Ms. Pittman said. The suspect was subsequently identified by a senior law enforcement official as Noah R. Green, 25.

It appears that Mr. Green was NOI, and not a right wing nationalist, but the increasing violence related to various extremest movements needs to be addressed sooner rather than later.  (I will not be offering an opinion as to the right-left positioning on NOI, it’s confusing)

Do Not Imagine that Mark Zuckerberg is Your Friend

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Whether he agrees with Alex Jones and the rest of his wacko, my parents are first cousins, X-Files wannabe, black helicopter, tinfoil hat wearing, stupid, dim-witted, thinks pro wrestling is real, lunatics*, or just thinks that they are good for his bottom line, Mark Zuckerberg’s choice to put right wing nut Joel Kaplan in charge of Facebook policy is an indication that Zuckerberg is dangerous and needs to be brought to heel.†

Case in point, when Facebook finally came up with a policy to deal with fabulists fomenting violence, Mark Zuckerberg killed it to make sure that Alex Jones still had a platform.

I am not sure how to handle such issues on social media, but making sure that sociopaths like Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandburg are not making what are literally life or death decisions about terrorist groups on the basis of web site engagement seems to me to be a good start:

In April 2019, Facebook was preparing to ban one of the internet’s most notorious spreaders of misinformation and hate, Infowars founder Alex Jones. Then CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally intervened.

Jones had gained infamy for claiming that the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre was a “giant hoax,” and that the teenage survivors of the 2018 Parkland shooting were “crisis actors.” But Facebook had found that he was also relentlessly spreading hate against various groups, including Muslims and trans people. That behavior qualified him for expulsion from the social network under the company’s policies for “dangerous individuals and organizations,” which required Facebook to also remove any content that expressed “praise or support” for them.

But Zuckerberg didn’t consider the Infowars founder to be a hate figure, according to a person familiar with the decision, so he overruled his own internal experts and opened a gaping loophole: Facebook would permanently ban Jones and his company — but would not touch posts of praise and support for them from other Facebook users. This meant that Jones’ legions of followers could continue to share his lies across the world’s largest social network.

“Mark personally didn’t like the punishment, so he changed the rules,” a former policy employee told BuzzFeed News, noting that the original rule had already been in use and represented the product of untold hours of work between multiple teams and experts.

………

Zuckerberg’s “more nuanced policy” set off a cascading effect, the two former employees said, which delayed the company’s efforts to remove right-wing militant organizations such as the Oath Keepers, which were involved the Jan. 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. It is also a case study in Facebook’s willingness to change its rules to placate America’s right wing and avoid political backlash.

Internal documents obtained by BuzzFeed News and interviews with 14 current and former employees show how the company’s policy team — guided by Joel Kaplan, the vice president of global public policy, and Zuckerberg’s whims — has exerted outsize influence while obstructing content moderation decisions, stymieing product rollouts, and intervening on behalf of popular conservative figures who have violated Facebook’s rules.

In December, a former core data scientist wrote a memo titled, “Political Influences on Content Policy.” Seen by BuzzFeed News, the memo stated that Kaplan’s policy team “regularly protects powerful constituencies” and listed several examples, including: removing penalties for misinformation from right-wing pages, blunting attempts to improve content quality in News Feed, and briefly blocking a proposal to stop recommending political groups ahead of the US election.

………

An integrity researcher who worked on Facebook’s efforts to protect the democratic process and rein in radicalization said the company caused direct harm to users by rejecting product changes due to concerns of political backlash.

“Out of fears over potential public and policy stakeholder responses, we are knowingly exposing users to risks of integrity,” they wrote in an internal note seen by BuzzFeed News. They quit in August.

Those most affected by Jones’ rhetoric have taken notice, too. Lenny Pozner, whose 6-year-old son Noah was the youngest victim of the Sandy Hook shooting, called the revelation that Zuckerberg weakened penalties facing the Infowars founder “disheartening, but not surprising.” He said the company had made a promise to do better in dealing with hate and hoaxes following a 2018 letter from HONR Network, his organization for survivors of mass casualty events. Yet Facebook continues to fail to remove harmful content.

“At some point,” Pozner told BuzzFeed News, “Zuckerberg has to be held responsible for his role in allowing his platform to be weaponized and for ensuring that the ludicrous and the dangerous are given equal importance as the factual.”

………

When Kaplan joined Facebook to lead its DC operation in 2011, he had the connections and pedigree the company needed to court the American right. A former clerk for conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, he served as a White House deputy chief of staff under President George W. Bush after participating in the Brooks Brothers riot during the 2000 Florida presidential election dispute. During a Senate confirmation hearing in 2003 for a post with the Office of Management and Budget, Kaplan was questioned about his role in the event, which sought to stop the tallying of votes during the Florida recount.

Though he initially maintained a low public profile at Facebook, Kaplan — COO Sheryl Sandberg’s Harvard classmate and former boyfriend — was valued by Zuckerberg for his understanding of GOP policymakers and conservative Americans, who the CEO believed were underrepresented by a liberal-leaning leadership team and employee base.

(Emphasis mine)

Kaplan is a man who literally pretended to be a Florida resident and then used the threat of violence to shut down vote counting in Miami/Dade County in the 2000 election, but because he went to Harvard (Zuckerberg’s alma mater) and dated Sheryl Sandberg, so because he’s “someone like them”, and because they just ……… don’t ……… care, this individual is  Facebook’s VP of global public policy.

That this man has the ear of Mark Zuckerberg says a lot of things about the CEO of Facebook, none of it good.

The most important thing to note here is not that Kaplan is a bad person, but that Zuckerberg is a horrible person, and a horribly dangerous one as well.

*Sorry, I think that I just channeled the con Denis Leary.
†Sorry, I think that I just channeled the non even a bit of a comedian Hillary Clinton.

When You Manufacture Terrorism, You Create Terrorism

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In 2015, at a “Draw Muhammad” cartoon contest in (where else) Texas, 2 gunman opened fire, and were shot to death by police.

If you are wondering how they managed to plan this, wonder no more. Not only did the FBI know about it, the TBI was actively encouraging them so as to create a more media friendly arrest:

Days before an ISIS sympathizer attacked a cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, he received a text from an undercover FBI agent.

“Tear up Texas,” the agent messaged Elton Simpson days before he opened fire at the Draw Muhammad event, according to an affidavit (pdf) filed in federal court Thursday.

“U know what happened in Paris,” Simpson responded. “So that goes without saying… No need to be direct.”

That revelation comes amidst a national debate about the use of undercover officers and human sources in terrorism cases. Undercover sources are used in more than half of ISIS-related terror cases, according to statistics kept by the George Washington University Program on Extremism, and civil liberties advocates say some of those charged might not have escalated their behavior without those interventions.

“It would certainly be inappropriate for an FBI undercover agent or cooperating witness to provoke or inspire or urge a person to commit an act of violence,” Michael German, a former FBI agent now at the Brennan Center for Justice, told The Daily Beast. “I could imagine an undercover agent thinking it was just the hyperbolic rhetoric they are participating in, and it wasn’t an intent to go to Texas and do harm.

………

Press officers for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Ohio, the Cleveland FBI Office, and the Department of Justice declined to comment beyond the affidavit. FBI spokeswoman Carol Cratty hung up on The Daily Beast after being asked about the “tear up Texas” text.

But shortly after that exchange, Simpson and his accomplice, Nadir Soofi, drove up to the contest and opened fire on police officers, injuring one of them slightly. Both men were killed in the altercation, but Hendricks would remain free for another year.

Hendricks’s arrest means that every major U.S. attack was linked to FBI investigation before it happened, Seamus Hughes, deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told The Daily Beast.

This is not just an organization doing its job well, this is an organization actively sabotaging its own efforts in an attempt to generate bogus statistics.

The FBI truly is the misbegotten child of J. Edgar Hoover, and it is completely broken.

What a Surprise, The 911 Report on the House of Saud is Dumped on a Friday Evening

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The 28 pages on the potential connections between the House of Saud and the 911 hijackers has finally been released.

There are what appear to be connections between Saudi Officials and the 911 hijackers, though they are indirect:

Saudi nationals connected to the government in Riyadh may have aided some of the Sept. 11 hijackers in the U.S. before they carried out their attacks, according to a long-classified portion of a congressional inquiry.

“While in the United States, some of the September 11 hijackers were in contact with, and received support or assistance from, individuals who may be connected to the Saudi government,” according to the section released Friday by the House Intelligence Committee with some portions blacked out.

But top U.S. intelligence officials who approved releasing the report, as families of some of the 3,000 victims of the attacks have long demanded, emphasized that they didn’t consider it accurate or reliable. Saudi officials have long said the 28 pages from the report written in 2002 provide no evidence that the U.S. ally was involved in the attacks, and that conclusion was echoed by the lawmakers who released the document.

The 28 pages do “not put forward vetted conclusions, but rather unverified leads that were later fully investigated by the intelligence committee,” Representative Devin Nunes of California, the committee’s Republican chairman, said in a statement.

………

The release also was praised by former Democratic Senator Bob Graham of Florida, who has long differed with most fellow lawmakers about the significance of the 28 pages and the likelihood of Saudi involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks.

“We’re now at a point where the American people can read the 28 pages and form their own opinion,” Graham, a former Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, said in a telephone interview. “This makes a very compelling case that the Saudis were the source of assistance to the 9/11 hijackers.”

Rather unsurprisingly, there appear to be ties between the hijackers and Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan:

One of the individuals cited in the previously classified material is Osama Bassnan, who the FBI and CIA suspected may have been in contact in San Diego with two of the 19 hijackers — 15 of whom were Saudi nationals. The document states that the FBI “confirmed” that Bassnan’s wife received money directly from the wife of Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, then the ambassador to the United States.

Like a bad penny, we find Prince Bandar yet again.

I won’t go as far as the folks at New York Post, who flat out declare Saudi culpability, but the history of the Saudi regime, particularly when juxtaposed by efforts to suppress this information by the Saudis, does create the impression that the House of Saud is not the stalwart ally that the conventional wisdom in Washington, DC portrays them to be.

Admittedly, Just One Report, But If True, Nice Was Not Terrorism

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There is a report that  Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the alleged perpetrator of an attack in Nice that has killed over 80 people,  may have been depressed because his wife left him.

If this is true, it means that this guy was not ISIS or al Qaeda, but a spree killer driven over the edge by family problems,

That would make him culturally American:

A terrorist who used a hired lorry to kill at least 84 people in a rampage during Bastille Day celebrations in Nice has been named as a convicted criminal well known to the police for armed attacks.

Tunisian-born Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel – described as a “weird loner” who “became depressed” when his wife left him – was a French passport holder who lived in the Riviera city and was regularly in trouble with the law.

The 31-year-old delivery driver’s wife is this afternoon in police custody as officers question her about his alleged Islamist links. Bouhlel was reportedly not on a terrorist watch list and investigators are seeking to establish his motives – and are also looking for possible accomplices.

………

Neighbours described him as a “very weird loner” and father of three who had recently become estranged from his wife and had become depressed following the breakdown of his marriage.

Seriously, if these reports are accurate, he sounds a lot like the majority of the white mass shooters in the United States.

The Chilcot Report is Out, and It’s 12 Volumes of Whup Ass

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The reporting is reveals the mendacity, incompetence, and complete impotenceof Tony Blair on Iraq:

The Chilcot inquiry has delivered a damning verdict on the decision by former prime minister Tony Blair to commit British troops to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. It says:

The UK chose to join the invasion before peaceful options had been exhausted
Chilcot is withering about Blair’s choice to join the US invasion. He says: “We have concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort.”

Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein
Chilcot finds that Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by the Iraqi regime as he sought to make the case for military action to MPs and the public in the buildup to the invasion in 2002 and 2003. The then prime minister disregarded warnings about the potential consequences of military action, and relied too heavily on his own beliefs, rather than the more nuanced judgments of the intelligence services. “The judgments about Iraq’s capabilities … were presented with a certainty that was not justified,” the report says.

Blair promised George Bush: ’I will be with you, whatever’
Tony Blair wrote to George W Bush eight months before the Iraq invasion to offer his unqualified backing for war well before UN weapons inspectors had complete their work, saying: “I will be with you, whatever.” In a six-page memo marked secret and personal, the then British prime minister told Bush, US president at the time, in July 2002 that the removal of Saddam Hussein would “free up the region” even if Iraqis may “feel ambivalent about being invaded”. It was one of 29 letters Blair sent to Bush in the run-up to the Iraq war, during the conflict and in its devastating aftermath, released on Wednesday as part of the Chilcot report.

“I will be with you whatever”.

He really was Bush’s Poodle.

I would also note that current Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is suggesting that the parliament should take some sort of action against blair, which implies that he is generally supportive of efforts by some Scottish National Party MPs to draft bills of impeachment against Blair: (Impeachment is a very different thing in the UK)

Senior figures from Labour and the Scottish National party are considering calls for legal action against Tony Blair if the former prime minister faces severe criticisms from the long-awaited inquiry into the war in Iraq.

A number of MPs led by Alex Salmond are expected to use an ancient law to try to impeach the former prime minister when the Chilcot report comes out on Wednesday.

The law, last used in 1806 when the Tory minister Lord Melville was charged for misappropriating official funds, is seen in Westminster as an alternative form of punishment that could ensure Blair never holds office again.

Triggering the process simply requires an MP to propose a motion and provide supporting evidence as part of a document called the article of impeachment which has no time limit placed upon it. If the impeachment attempt is approved by MPs, the defendant is delivered to Black Rod [kind of like a sergeant at arms] before a trial.

A simple majority is required to convict, at which point a sentence can be passed which could, in theory, involve Blair being sent to prison. However, MPs have said the attempt will be symbolic and is unlikely to result in imprisonment.

Salmond, the former Scottish first minister, said there “has to be a judicial or political reckoning” for Blair’s role in the Iraq conflict. “He seemed puzzled as to why Jeremy Corbyn thinks he is a war criminal, why people don’t like him,” he told Sky News.

“The reason is 179 British war dead, 150,000 immediate dead from the Iraq conflict, the Middle East in flames, the world faced with an existential crisis on terrorism – these are just some of the reasons perhaps he should understand why people don’t hold him in the highest regard.

“[MPs] believe you cannot have a situation where this country blunders into an illegal war with the appalling consequences and at the end of the day there isn’t a reckoning. There has to be a judicial or political reckoning for that.”

John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, did not disagree with the suggestion that he and Corbyn were going to “crucify” the former leader for “being a war criminal”.

I really hope that Blair is impeached.

It would result in his living he rest of his life in well-deserved disgrace, and it would also mean that his lucrative consultancy business would likely be dashed.

I’d like to see jail time, but that won’t happen, so disgrace is the best one can hope for.

It’s a Self Licking Ice Cream Cone

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Terrorism has increased by 4500% since we overthrew Iraq and Libya and tried to overthrow Syria:

An analysis of terror attacks since 2002 suggests U.S. efforts to combat terrorism — i.e., the “war on terror” — have led to a dramatic increase in death and suffering from terrorism.

Published this year on Sept. 11, Paul Gottinger, a staff reporter for Reader Supported News, analyzed incidents of terrorism from George Bush declaring the war on terror in the aftermath of 9/11 through the present, and found a staggering 6,500 percent increase in terrorism. Gottinger, who used data provided by the State Department in his analysis, found that casualties have increased by 4,500 percent.

Countries occupied by or being bombed the U.S. military seem to fare worst of all:

“[F]rom 2007 to 2011 almost half of all the world’s terror took place in Iraq or Afghanistan – two countries being occupied by the US at the time.

Countries experiencing US military interventions continue to be subjected to high numbers of terror attacks, according to the data. In 2014, 74 percent of all terror-related casualties occurred in Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Syria. Of these five, only Nigeria did not experience either US air strikes or a military occupation in that year.”

Further illustrating the devastating impact of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Gottinger’s report showed that terror attacks in that country jumped from 208 in 2002 to 11,000 by 2005.

In a Dec. 10 appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz suggested the Middle East was more stable before the war on terror began.

The thesis that the US is a force for good in the world is simply not supported by the facts.

H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

I’m With Jim………

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Specifically Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut.

As much as I hate praising a vice chair of the Wall Street loving New Democrat Coalition, particularly one who is an alumnus of the Vampire Squid, but he is right when he announces that he is going to boycott the Congressional moment of silence for the Tampa shooting victims, because it is hypocritical political theater that is used to excuse cowardly inaction:

Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) says he won’t participate in any more moments of silence on the House floor for victims of mass shootings out of frustration that they don’t lead to action on gun control.

In a House floor speech on Monday, the day after the massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., Himes said the moments of silence offer a symbol of lawmakers’ lack of a legislative response to mass shootings.

“Silence. That is how the leadership of the most powerful country in the world will respond to this week’s massacre of its citizens,” he said.

“Silence. Not me. Not anymore. I will no longer stand here absorbing the faux concern, contrived gravity and tepid smugness of a House complicit in the weekly bloodshed,” Himes said angrily.………

………

“As you bow your head and think of what you say to your God when you are asked what you did to slow the slaughter of innocents, there will be silence,” Himes said.

Himes first declared his boycott of future moments of silence in a series of tweets late Sunday night, writing that they “have become an abomination.”

He may be a conservadem, but he’s completely right on this issue.

The moment of silence is a completely hypocritical excuse for doing nothing.

Maybe If the FBI Spent More Time Pursuing Real Terrorists, and Less Time Manufacturing Them for High Profile Arrests………

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We don’t know everything now, but what we do know is that a gunman murdered 50 people at a gay bar in Tampa, Florida, and that he contemporaneously made ISIS claims:

A man who called 911 to proclaim allegiance to the Islamic State terrorist group, and who had been investigated in the past for possible terrorist ties, stormed a gay nightclub here Sunday morning, wielding an assault rifle and a pistol, and carried out the worst mass shooting in United States history, leaving 50 people dead and 53 wounded.

 The attacker, identified by law enforcement officials as Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old who was born in New York, turned what had been a celebratory night of dancing to salsa and merengue music at the crowded Pulse nightclub into a panicked scene of unimaginable slaughter, the floors slicked with blood, the dead and the injured piled atop one another. Terrified people poured onto the darkened streets of the surrounding neighborhood, some carried wounded victims to safety, and police vehicles were pressed into service as makeshift ambulances to rush people to hospitals.

 Joel Figueroa and his friends “were dancing by the hip-hop area when I heard shots, bam, bam, bam,” he said, adding, “Everybody was screaming and running toward the front door.”

Of course, we have calls for effective gun control, but, as always, we can expect them to come to nothing.

Here is what we know so far:

  • He worked for G4S, a UK based private security firm which is big into (among other unsavory things) the private prison system.
  • He had previously been under investigation by the FBI.
  • He bought the guns used recently.
  • This is the largest mass shooting in US history.
  • The shooter was a big fan of the New York Police Department repeatedly posting selfies of himself in NYOPD gear.

I tend to think that gay bashing was at the core of the shooting, though in what is probably an unrelated event, an Indiana man drove to West Hollywood with a car full of bombs and guns to attack a gay pride parade:

Police in Santa Monica, California, arrested a man intent on attacking a nearby gay pride parade on Sunday, hours after a terrorist opened fire at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing at least 50 and wounding over 50 more people in the worst mass shooting attack in modern U.S. history.

 20-year-old James Wesley Howell was arrested in Santa Monica after assault rifles and chemicals capable of creating an explosive device were found in his vehicle early Sunday morning, police say. He reportedly admitted to officials that he was planning to “harm” the West Hollywood gay pride parade that was taking place about seven miles away later Sunday.

The most obvious point to made here is that the FBI has been too busy engaging in sting operations against people who constitute no meaningful threat to actually do their job on real threats:

The attack on a gay club in Orlando in which 50 people were killed and more than 50 wounded — now the largest mass shooting in U.S. history — demonstrates how potential threats are escaping the FBI’s vast counterterrorism dragnet.

While it’s unclear whether gunman Omar Mateen’s inspiration was hatred of gays, the Islamic State, or something else, attackers like him are the intended targets of the FBI’s post-9/11 prevention program. Federal law enforcement’s top priority today is to stop the attacker of tomorrow.

But Mateen’s mass shooting is an example of how dangerous men slip past the FBI’s watch while federal agents focus on targets of questionable capacity.

………

According to The Daily Beast, whose reporter quoted an unnamed “senior law enforcement source,” Mateen was a person of interest to the FBI in 2013 and again in 2014. The Intercept has been unable confirm independently from sources that Mateen had been under FBI investigation during those years.

If the FBI had in fact investigated Mateen, his capacity for violence would have been easily verified: He had a state firearms license.

With connections to homes in Martin and St. Lucie counties, Mateen would have fallen under the jurisdiction of the FBI’s Miami office, which has among the bureau’s most active and aggressive counterterrorism units.

The Miami FBI investigated the so-called Liberty City 7 in one of the earliest and most controversial post-9/11 counterterrorism stings, and prosecutors in Florida’s Southern District have prosecuted dozens on terrorism related charges in the last 15 years.

………

For more than a year ending in April — a time during which investigators will now be looking for any clues from Mateen that might have been missed — the FBI in Miami focused on a counterterrorism sting that targeted James Medina, a homeless man with mental problems.

………

According to the FBI’s affidavit, the informant, not Medina, came up with the idea of crediting the planned attack to the Islamic State.

“You can do all that,” Medina told the informant. “Yeah, we can print up or something and make it look like it’s ISIS here in America. Just like that.”
………

Does the FBI’s focus on men like Medina and Suarez — questionable targets of questionable mental fitness — prevent agents from identifying and investigating armed and dangerous men like the one behind what is now America’s worst mass shooting?

It’s a question the FBI, which has faced little congressional scrutiny over its counterterrorism program, has never been forced to answer.

The Orlando shooting isn’t the first case to raise this question. In 2011, when the FBI investigated Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, agents did not deem him a threat.

Instead, at about the same time, the Boston FBI started a nine-month sting operation against Rezwan Ferdaus, who had no weapons and no connections to international terrorists, and whose mental wellness had deteriorated so much that he was wearing adult diapers at the time of his arrest on terrorism charges.

I’ve not heard about a successful FBI counter-terrorism operation that did not involve them using informants to manufacture the a high profile arrest in a very long time.

It’s pretty clear that the FBI desperately needs some adult supervision.

Nuland’s Folly

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Following the US supported coup, The Ukraine has turned into an open air arms bazaar for criminals and terrorists:

When the the Ukrainian Security Service, the SBU, announced recently that it had detained a 25-year-old French citizen, Grégoire Moutaux, who was trying to cross the country’s border into Poland in a vehicle full of explosives and weapons, that sounded like a major blow against terrorism.

SBU spokesman Vasyl Hrytsak declared that after two weeks of investigation, which is to say of interrogation, “The Ukrainian Security Service managed to prevent 15 terrorist attacks targeting the territory of France.”

According to the SBU this alleged French criminal attempted to smuggle five Kalashnikov assault rifles, more than 50,000 bullets, two RPG-7 anti-tank grenade-launchers, 100 electronic detonators, and 125 kilograms of TNT across Ukraine’s frontier.

Perhaps. But in Kiev, the announcement was greeted with deep skepticism. Neither local journalists nor independent observers place much trust in SBU reports these days, and with good reason.
………

“Unfortunately, when both Ukraine and Europe are endangered by terrorism and need professional security services more than ever, there is not much confidence in what the SBU tells us,” independent journalist Saken Aymurzaev told The Daily Beast.

The ideological and ethnic conflict that has torn Ukraine apart over the last two hears has attracted radical nationalists from different countries, some of them involved in weapon smuggling. Among these, notably, were a few French volunteers, ideological supporters of pro-Russian forces who were fighting in eastern Ukraine two years ago.

Poland had to increase security measures last year to try to prevent criminals attempting to transport weapons from Ukraine into its territory. If in 2013 Polish police seized only three firearms smuggled from Ukraine, last year law enforcement arrested smugglers with 53 guns, and there are many, many more where those came from.

Between right wing Neocons, and Liberal Interventionists, our foreign policy establishment is going to destroy us all.

Insanity Is Defined as Doing the Same Thing over and over Again and Expecting Different Results

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Barack Obama has decided that terrorizing the population of Yemen with drones, and allowing the House of Saud to indiscriminately bomb civilians is a successful antiterrorism strategy.

The net effect has been to quadrupling the size of al Qaeda in Yemen:

On September 10, 2014, President Obama gave a speech advocating for the same kind of approach to counterterrorism against ISIL his Administration had been using with Yemen (and Somalia).

………

Today, the Soufan Group wrote up an alarming detail from the State Department Country Report on Terrorism for last year: AQAP has quadrupled in size since Obama’s speech.

This is what happens you have a failed policy, and you stick with the conventional wisdom.

It is a failure of intellect.

It is a failure of imagination.

It is an unalloyed failure.

Time to Stop Covering for Our Friends in Riyadh

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At a Congressional hearing, former 9/11 commissioners refused to contradict an implication that the House of Saud knew of the attacks before they occurred:

A former member of the 9/11 Commission on Tuesday left open the possibility that the Saudi royal family knew about the 9/11 terror plot before it happened.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., asked members of the panel at a House Foreign Relations subcommittee hearing to raise their hands in response to this question:

“How many of you there believe that the royal family of Saudi Arabia did not know and was unaware that there was a terrorist plot being implemented that would result in a historic terrorist attack in the United States, in the lead-up to 9/11?”

Two of the four panelists raised their hands, but Tim Roemer, 9/11 Commission member and a former congressman from Indiana, did not. Neither did Simon Henderson, director of the Gulf and Energy Policy Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

………

Those 28 pages remain classified despite calls for their release from several former members of the 9/11 Commission — a bipartisan blue-ribbon panel that from 2002 to 2004 investigated the 9/11 attacks and the intelligence failures that allowed them to succeed.

Sen. Bob Graham, co-chairman of the congressional inquiry into the attacks, has suggested that the pages contain “substantial” evidence of Saudi involvement — both by the government and private citizens. “I think it is implausible to believe that 19 people, most of whom didn’t speak English, most of whom had never been in the United States before, many of whom didn’t have a high school education — could’ve carried out such a complicated task without some support from within the United States,” Graham said on 60 Minutes last month.

………

Graham and his Republican co-chair, former Sen. Porter Goss, have joined 9/11 victims’ family members, activists, and congressional leadership to call for the release of the 28 pages. The chapter was initially classified by the George W. Bush White House, fearful of upsetting a U.S. ally. Despite twice promising to release the pages, President Obama has withheld them.

We really need to stop coddling the Saudis.  It’s bad policy, and with a Presidential election coming up, it is piss poor politics.

And yet I find just the opposite to be true. The replacement is even more extreme

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What a surprise.  The US policy of assassination makes extremest groups more extreme and more dangerous:


The elimination of Taliban leader Mansour will only increase the danger to Afghan civilians, a US terrorism analyst, whose research focuses on the impact of targeted killings, predicts.

Dr Max Abrahms, from Northeastern University in Boston, said the US Government does not look carefully enough at the strategic implications of its strikes on extremist leaders.

He said he had done a number of studies on leadership decapitation of a militant group and he had not found a statistically significant reduction in the amount of violence perpetrated by the group after a leader was removed.

“In fact these decapitation strikes can actually be counter-productive, because one of the assumptions of the targeted killing campaigns is that the replacement of the leader that you killed will be more moderate,” Dr Abrahms said.

“And yet I find just the opposite to be true. The replacement is even more extreme.

“So for that reason, in the immediate aftermath of a successful targeted killing, like over this weekend, the group’s violence tends to become even more extreme, in the sense that it’s even more likely to attack civilian targets.”

………

“What I’ve seen is that the younger people to emerge in the Taliban are actually even crazier, if you will, than the old guard.”

And then Abrams says that, “He did not think the US Government very carefully studied the strategic implications of taking out Mansour.”

Gee, you think?

The problem here is that there are way too many people out there who think that our “Freedumb Bomz” will make the world a better place because they are our weapons.

Like the bite of a dog into a stone, it is a stupidity.

H/t Empty Wheel.

Oh Snap!

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Despite a veto threat from the Obama administration, the Senate passed a bill allowing 911 victims to sue them for their ties to the terrorists:

A bill that would let the families of those killed in the Sept. 11 attacks sue Saudi Arabia for any role in the terrorist plot passed the Senate unanimously on Tuesday, bringing Congress closer to a showdown with the White House, which has threatened to veto the legislation.

The Senate’s passage of the bill, which will now be taken up in the House, is another sign of escalating tensions in a relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia that once received little scrutiny from lawmakers.

Administration officials have lobbied against the bill, a view that the White House spokesman Josh Earnest reiterated after the vote. And the Saudi government has warned that if the legislation passes, it might begin selling off up to $750 billion in Treasury securities and other assets in the United States before they face a danger of being frozen by American courts. Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister, delivered the warning to lawmakers and the administration while in Washington in March.

The House of Saud is claiming that if this passes, they will dump their Treasuries on the market, which will cause the dollar to tumble.

So the dollar falls, making imports more expensive, and our exports more expensive.

This would have the effect of reinforcing our manufacturing economy and improving our balance of trade.*

The Senate bill carves out an exception to the [1976] law [which grants immunity to foreign governments] if foreign countries are found culpable for terrorist attacks that kill American citizens within the United States. If the bill were to pass both houses and be signed by the president, it could clear a path for the role of the Saudi government to be examined in the Sept. 11 suits.

………

Mr. Schumer said he believed that Democrats would override a veto from Mr. Obama. ………

So, if the House follows suit, and Obama vetoes the bill, this is going be a major sh%$ storm, and it’s going to jam up the Democrats something fierce.

It plays into one of Trump’s narratives, and it’s a very popular idea among the American public.

What’s more, Republicans would love to override an Obama veto.

The simple solution would be for Obama not to veto the bill, but because the foreign policy establishment continues to view the House of Saud to be an invaluable ally, as opposed to the medieval terrorism supporters that they actually are, so the ever establishment Obama will follow through on his veto.

*Only please, Brer Fox, please don’t throw me into the briar patch.