Tag: Terrorism

You Gotta Love the Right Wing Media

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Fox and its ilk are continuing to proclaim that the terrorist who shot up a mosque in Quebec is a Moroccan, despite the fact that this is not true.

The  Mohamed el Khadir, who is of Moroccan extraction in this crime was the guy who called 911:

A mass shooting at a Quebec City mosque last night left six people dead and eight wounded. The targeted mosque, the Cultural Islamic Center of Quebec, was the same one at which a severed pig’s head was left during Ramadan last June. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the episode a “terrorist attack on Muslims.”

Almost immediately, various news outlets and political figures depicted the shooter as Muslim. Right-wing nationalist tabloids in the UK instantly linked it to Islamic violence. Fox News claimed that “witnesses said at least one gunman shouted ‘Allahu akbar!’,” and then added this about the shooter’s national origin:

Suspect in Quebec mosque terror attack was of Moroccan origin, reports show https://t.co/oRzxGHEXDm pic.twitter.com/aEsEtccMvi

— Fox News (@FoxNews) January 30, 2017

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer exploited the attack to justify President Trump’s ban on immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries. “It’s a terrible reminder of why we must remain vigilant and why the President is taking steps to be proactive rather than reactive when it comes to our nation’s safety and security,” Spicer said at this afternoon’s briefing when speaking of the Quebec City attack.

But these assertions are utterly false. The suspect is neither Moroccan nor Muslim. The Moroccan individual, Mohamed el Khadir, was actually one of the worshippers at the mosque and called 911 to summon the police, and played no role whatsoever in the shooting.

The actual shooting suspect is 27-year-old Alexandre Bissonnette, a white French Canadian who is, by all appearances, a rabid anti-immigrant nationalist. A leader of a local immigration rights groups, François Deschamps, told a local paper he recognized his photo as an anti-immigrant far-right “troll” who has been hostile to the group online. And Bisonnette’s Facebook page – now taken down but still archived – lists among its “likes” the far right French nationalist Marine Le Pen, Islam critics Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the Israeli Defense Forces, and Donald J. Trump (he also “likes” the liberal Canadian Party NDP along with more neutral “likes” such as Tom Hanks, the Sopranos and Katy Perry).

Clearly, we need to ban Katy Perry fans from entering the United States.

They are dangerous.

This is a Direct Consequence of Turkey’s Support of Daesh

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Over 30 people were killed in a terrorist attack of an Istanbul night club:

The manhunt continues for a gunman who killed 39 people in an Istanbul nightclub as Turkey marked the start of the new year.

The unknown assailant opened fire at Reina nightclub early on Sunday, before managing to flee amid the chaos.

The motive for the attack is not clear, but suspicion has fallen on the Islamic State group, already linked to at least two terror attacks in Turkey last year.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said such groups tried “to create chaos”.

I would argue that they are not trying to, “Create chaos,” they are exploiting the chaos that Erdogan created in Syria through tacit and explicit support of Salafist fighters in his attempt to depose Assad.

This sort of sh%$ always comes back to bite you in the ass.

A Lot is Going on in Syria

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First, as I am sure most of you are aware, the evacuation of Aleppo is complete, and the Assad Regime has full control of the city:

The evacuation of civilians and fighters from the last rebel-held part of Aleppo concluded on Thursday after long delays because of frigid weather, putting all of Syria’s industrial capital back in the hands of President Bashar al-Assad’s forces for the first time since 2012.

 The last buses carrying residents from eastern Aleppo left the city late Thursday night, according to the Syrian state news agency.

 Tens of thousands of people have been removed from eastern Aleppo since Dec. 15. Before the last buses left on Thursday, the Red Cross said that 34,000 people had left the city, including 4,000 fighters who had left in their own vehicles the previous night.

 A separate convoy was waiting to carry residents out of two pro-government villages in neighboring Idlib Province that have been surrounded by rebels for years. It was unclear late Thursday whether the convoy had completed its trip.

 The seizure of all of Aleppo by Mr. Assad and his allies signals a turning point in the nearly six-year conflict.

Rather unsurprisingly, despite representation in western media, upon entering East Aleppo, evidence of mass torture and mass executions were found:

Russian military forces have discovered mass graves in eastern parts of the Syrian city of Aleppo, with many of the bodies reportedly showing signs of torture.

 Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, a spokesperson for the Russian defense ministry, announced the horrifying discovery on Monday. “Many of the corpses were found with missing body parts, and most had gunshot wounds to the head,” he said, according to RT, a Russian state-owned news network.

 Until recently, the eastern portion of Aleppo, once Syria’s largest city and industrial and financial center, was under the control of so-called “moderate” rebels, many of whom have received both intelligence and material support from the United States and its allies in the Middle East.

 Last week, Russian and Syrian military forces oversaw the evacuation of civilians from eastern Aleppo. Prior to that, the rebel-held portion of the city had been controlled by two main factions, Jabhat al-Nusra, a terrorist group with ties to al-Qaida also known as the Nusra Front, and Ahrar al-Sham, another extremist group that receives U.S. support despite being designated a terrorist organization.

 ………

 Russian forces also found massive stockpiles of weaponry abandoned by fleeing rebel groups. “In one small area, three tanks, two cannons, two multiple rocket launchers and numerous homemade mortars were found,” reported RT.

In related news, a Syrian refugee was charged with war crimes in Sweden for his role in executing captured Syrian government soldiers:

A former Syrian opposition fighter has been charged with breaching international law over the execution in 2012 of seven soldiers loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, the Swedish prosecutor’s office said on Thursday.

 The 46-year-old man, who was arrested in March, appears in a video showing the killings, the prosecutor’s office said.

 The man, who was not named, denies any crime.

 “The soldiers were captured and defenseless when this happened,” prosecutor Kristina Lindhoff Carleson said in a statement.

While this was going on, Russia, Iran and Turkey met for cease fire negotiations.  Notably, the US, NATO, and the UN were not included, which is rather unsurprising, considering that those three entities have remained committed to replacing Assad.

What’s more, it appears that these negotiations have born fruit, with cease fire coming into effect across Syria, though it it’s success is still not certain:

A cease-fire announced by the Syrian government went into ­effect across the country early Friday as part of a broader deal that includes a return to peace talks to end more than five years of war.

Forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad reestablished control over the northern city of Aleppo earlier this month, forcing rebels to flee what was once their largest stronghold and handing the government a victory that appeared to bring the war’s endgame into view.

The Assad government, backed by Russia and Iran, is now in its strongest position since the start of the war, while rebel groups are mostly boxed into the northwestern province of Idlib and hold no strategically significant urban areas.

The Syrian military declared in a statement issued Thursday that the “comprehensive” cessation of hostilities follows “victories and advances” by the armed forces.

Russia and Turkey, which brokered the deal, said they could guarantee compliance from the government and its armed opposition, respectively, after weeks of negotiations.

………

The Syrian army said the cease-fire excluded “terrorist organizations,” notably the Islamic State but also the country’s al-Qaeda affiliate, an influential component of what remains of Syria’s armed opposition. The caveat suggested that the fighting could continue in Idlib, now the rebels’ final bastion.

ISIS and al Qaeda (al Nusra/al-Sham) aren’t just an “influential component” of Syrian opposition. They are the bulk of viable rebel military forces.

As I have stated before, there is no moderate opposition. They are all salafist Sunni extremists, sponsored by Turkey, the House of Saud, and the Persian Gulf Potentiates.

Turkish President Erdogan is claiming that he has evidence to prove that the US is supporting terrorist organizations, including al Nusra, Daesh, and the YPG:

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said “it’s very clear” that the US-led coalition is supporting terrorist groups in Syria, Islamic State (IS, also known as ISIS/ISIL) among them.

“They give support to terrorist groups including Daesh (Arabic for IS),” Erdogan said.

Saying that the US have accused Turkey of supporting IS, speaking at a press conference on Tuesday the Turkish leader blamed the US-led coalition for assisting terrorists themselves.

Apart from IS, he also mentioned Kurdish People’s Protection Units in northern Syria (YPG) and Democratic Union Party (PYD) as groups supported by the coalition.

“We have confirmed evidence, with pictures, photos and videos,” he added.

Best evidence is that he is right on two of those three counts, our military haxs supported Kurdish fighters, and the CIA has been supporting (at least indirectly through its completely incompent grooming of “moderates”) al Nusra.

Our policy, which largely consists of incompetent CIA operations running at cross purposes to military and diplomatic efforts that are in large part intended to slavishly follow the dictates of the House of Saud.

Same as It Ever Was………

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It appears that ground troops are back in combat in Iraq:

U.S. forces assisting Iraqi troops to retake Mosul from Islamic State are embedding more extensively, a senior commander said on Friday, a move that could accelerate a two month-old campaign which has slackened after quick initial advances.

 More than 5,000 American service members are currently deployed in Iraq as part of an international coalition that is advising local forces in a bid to recapture the third of the country the jihadists seized in 2014 when Iraq’s army and police dropped their weapons and fled.

 Coalition advisors were initially concentrated at a high-level headquarters in Baghdad but have fanned out over the past two years to multiple locations to stay near advancing troops.

Now, as Iraqi forces controlling around a quarter of Mosul – Islamic State’s last major stronghold in Iraq – proceed deeper into the northern city and encounter fierce counter-attacks that render progress slow and punishing, U.S. troops are stepping up their involvement.

………

“We have always had opportunities to work side-by-side, but we have never been embedded to this degree,” he [U.S. Army Colonel Brett G. Sylvia, commander of Task Force Strike] said. “That was always a smaller niche mission. Well, this is our mission now and it is big and we are embedded inside their formations.”

Obama said that he would get us out of Iraq.

Not so much.

Well, That Only Took 4 Years

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It appears that Barack Obama has finally decided that overthrowing the Assad regime is not at the forefront of US interests, if I were a cynic, and I am, I would suggest that the timing of the decision to make al Qaeda in Syria a primary target, even though they are the most effective anti-Assad force, was only made because there is no longer a domestic political cost to the decision:

President Obama has ordered the Pentagon to find and kill the leaders of an al-Qaeda-linked group in Syria that the administration had largely ignored until now and that has been at the vanguard of the fight against the Syrian government, U.S. officials said.

 The decision to deploy more drones and intelligence assets against the militant group formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra reflects Obama’s concern that it is turning parts of Syria into a new base of operations for al-Qaeda on Europe’s southern doorstep, the officials said.

 The move underlines the extent to which Obama has come to prioritize the counter­terrorism mission in Syria over efforts to pressure President Bashar al-Assad to step aside, as al-Nusra is among the most effective forces­­ battling the Syrian government.

 That shift is likely to accelerate once President-elect Donald Trump [Gaah!!!!] takes office. Trump has said he will be even more aggressive in going after militants than Obama, a stance that could lead to the expansion of the campaign against al-Nusra, possibly in direct cooperation with Moscow. The group now calls itself Jabhat Fatah al-Sham — or Front for the Conquest of Syria — and says it has broken with al-Qaeda, an assertion discounted by U.S. officials.

………

Obama’s new order gives the U.S. military’s Joint Special ­Operations Command, or JSOC, wider authority and additional intelligence-collection re­sources to go after al-Nusra’s broader leadership, not just al-Qaeda veterans or those directly involved in external plotting.

But aides say Obama grew frustrated that more wasn’t being done by the Pentagon and the intelligence community to kill al-Nusra leaders given the warnings he had received from top counter­terrorism officials about the gathering threat they posed.

In the president’s Daily Brief, the most highly classified intelligence report produced by U.S. spy agencies, Obama was repeatedly told over the summer that the group was allowing al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan and Afghanistan to create in northwest Syria the largest haven for the network since it was scattered after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Officials also warned Obama that al-Nusra could try to fill the void as its rival, the Islamic State, lost ground.

Lisa Monaco, Obama’s White House homeland security and counter­terrorism adviser, said Obama’s decision “prioritized our fight against al-Qaeda in Syria, including through targeting their leaders and operatives, some of whom are legacy al-Qaeda members.”

“We have made clear to all parties in Syria that we will not allow al-Qaeda to grow its capacity to attack the U.S., our allies, and our interests,” she said in a statement. “We will continue to take action to deny these terrorists any safe haven in Syria.”

………

A growing number of White House and State Department officials, however, have privately voiced doubts about the wisdom of applying U.S. military power, even covertly, to pressure Assad to step aside, particularly since Russia’s military intervention in Syria last year.

U.S. intelligence officials say they aren’t sure what Trump’s approach to U.S.-backed rebel units will be once he gets briefed on the extent of the covert CIA program. Trump has voiced strong skepticism about arming Syrian rebels in the past, suggesting that U.S. intelligence agencies don’t have enough knowledge about rebel intentions to pick reliable allies.

Needless to say, the Russians are pleased about the decision, though they are hoping for some independent confirmation of the shift in policy.

This is a major move in the direction of the Russian position, which is that fighting the Salafist jihadists in Syria is the first priority, and that regime changes under the current condition is likely to benefit no one,

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!?!?!?

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How the F%$# did prosecutors manage to let the Malheur wildlife refuge occupiers get acquitted:

A jury has ruled that brothers Ammon and Ryan Bundy were not guilty of conspiring against the government, a surprising end to the high-profile Oregon standoff trial that sparked national debates about public lands and the rights of ranchers in the American west.

The decision, unveiled in federal court in Portland on Thursday, is a blow to the US government, which had aggressively prosecuted the rightwing activists who led an armed takeover of public property to protest American land-use regulations.

The Bundy brothers, who orchestrated a 2 January takeover of the Malheur national wildlife refuge, were acquitted on Thursday on a number of serious charges, along with five other defendants. Only a day earlier the court dismissed a juror over fears of bias, raising concerns that the trial would drag on for weeks.

………

Prosecutors charged the Bundy brothers and 24 other defendants with conspiracy to impede officers through use of force, intimidation or threats, and some also faced additional charges of firearm possession and theft of public property.

Some of the defendants signed plea deals in hopes of getting shorter prison sentences, and a total of seven defendants have been on trial since September.

The defendants were acquitted on the conspiracy and firearm charges, though the jury could not come to an agreement on a property theft offense that faces Ryan.

………

A separate trial, involving Ammon, Ryan, Cliven and two other Bundy men, is planned for next year in Nevada on charges stemming from the 2014 standoff. Given the pending case, authorities refused to release Ammon in Oregon. When Mumford argued, he allegedly ended up in a scuffle with US marshals, resulting in his arrest.

I will repeat my question, “ow the f%$# did they lose this case?”

They were guilty as hell, they looted an Indian burial site, and they took firearms into a federal office.

I guess the law doesn’t apply to white folks.

Well, That Only Took Fifteen Years

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After over a decade of reports that many of the prisoners at Guantanamo were jailed on faulty information, we are finally getting something approaching an official acknowledgment of this fact:

The “Dirty 30” probably weren’t all Osama bin Laden bodyguards after all. The “Karachi 6” weren’t a cell of bombers plotting attacks in Pakistan for al-Qaida. An Afghan man captured 14 years ago as a suspected chemical weapons maker was confused for somebody else.

An ongoing review shows the U.S. intelligence community has been debunking long-held myths about some of the “worst of the worst” at Guantanamo, some of them still held today. The retreat emerges in a series of unclassified prisoner profiles released by the Pentagon in recent years, snapshots of much larger dossiers the public cannot see, prepared for the Periodic Review Board examining the Pentagon’s “forever prisoner” population.

………

The documents also offer a window into the wobbly world of early war-on-terror intelligence gathering and analysis where a suspicion built on circumstances of capture gelled into allegations of membership in a terror cell that on reflection more than a decade later probably didn’t exist. In a series of interviews, intelligence sources — including people who served at Guantanamo at the time — blamed bad intelligence on a combination of urgency to produce, ignorance about al-Qaida and Afghanistan at the prison’s inception and inexperience in the art of investigation and analysis.

“It was clear early on that the intelligence was grossly wrong,” said Mark Fallon, a retired 30-year federal officer who between 2002 and 2004 was Special Agent in Charge of the Department of Defense’s Criminal Investigation Task Force. Most “weren’t battlefield captives,” he said, calling many “bounty babies” — men captured by Afghan warlords or Pakistani security forces and sent to Guantanamo “on the sketchiest bit of intelligence with nothing to corroborate.”

………

Fallon was responsible for some interrogations and evaluating intelligence with an eye toward prosecution by military commission. Now, more than decade later, he is in the final stages of publishing a book of his criticisms and said in a recent interview that it’s no surprise that early prisoner profiles are imploding under Periodic Review Board scrutiny.

“That’s why people are so successful doing cold case homicide cases,” he said. “People make decisions based on what they knew then. I don’t want to say that the facts changed. The facts grew. When you’re working cases, cases evolve. As you get additional facts, you interpret it differently.”

Guantanamo has been a complete fiasco.

We have the wrong people there, and it has served as one of the most effect recruiting tools for terrorists.

Nothing to See Here, Move Along

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The Department of Justice has dropped charges against a man accused of illegal weapons transfers to Libyan rebels because it raises uncomfortable questions about Hillary’s role in the Libya clusterf%$#:

The Obama administration is moving to dismiss charges against an arms dealer it had accused of selling weapons that were destined for Libyan rebels.

Lawyers for the Justice Department on Monday filed a motion in federal court in Phoenix to drop the case against the arms dealer, an American named Marc Turi, whose lawyers also signed the motion.

The deal averts a trial that threatened to cast additional scrutiny on Hillary Clinton’s private emails as Secretary of State, and to expose reported Central Intelligence Agency attempts to arm rebels fighting Libyan leader Moammar Qadhafi.

Government lawyers were facing a Wednesday deadline to produce documents to Turi’s legal team, and the trial was officially set to begin on Election Day, although it likely would have been delayed by protracted disputes about classified information in the case.

A Turi associate asserted that the government dropped the case because the proceedings could have embarrassed Clinton and President Barack Obama by calling attention to the reported role of their administration in supplying weapons that fell into the hands of Islamic extremist militants.

“They don’t want this stuff to come out because it will look really bad for Obama and Clinton just before the election,” said the associate.

How convenient.

This Sort of Thing Keeps Me Up at Night

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India has just sent combat troops into Pakistani areas of Kashmir:

India announced on Thursday that it had carried out early morning “surgical strikes” on terrorist camps in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, a step that risks escalating the conflict between the two nuclear powers.

However, Pakistan denied that a cross-border strike had taken place, saying that Indian troops had fired small arms across the Line of Control, killing two soldiers and injuring nine.

A senior Pakistani security official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said Pakistan would consider a cross-border strike by India an act of war.

The official warned that Pakistan could use tactical nuclear weapons in self-defense if India initiates a war.

The Indian operation, if it occurred as described in Delhi, would be precedent setting. Though India’s military has almost certainly carried out cross-border raids, the government has never publicly announced them, even during the brief conflict in Kargil in 1999.

Indian officials said that ground troops crossed the de facto border shortly after midnight and destroyed a handful of terrorist camps in Pakistani-controlled territory, inflicting “significant casualties” and returning across the Line of Control before dawn.

The operation was planned in retaliation for two attacks this month on Indian positions, including one that killed 19 Indian soldiers.

Remember: both India and Pakistan have significant nuclear arsenals.

The DPRK does not scare me. This does.

You have two military establishments that are fixated on a final cataclysmic conflict, and, particularly in Pakistan, these beliefs exhibit significant sway over the decision making process.

We are dealing with a bunch of generals who would make Curtis LeMay look like a wimp.

Hell Yeah!

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The House of Representatives and the US Senate just overrode Barack Obama’s veto of a bill allowing Saudi Arabia to be sued for its support of terrorism:

Barack Obama suffered a unique political blow on Wednesday, when the US Congress overturned his veto of a bill that would allow families of the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks to sue Saudi Arabia.

 The overwhelming bipartisan vote in both the Senate and House inflicted the first veto override of Obama’s presidency, less than four months before he leaves office. The White House issued an unusually scathing response.

 “I would venture to say that this is the single most embarrassing thing that the United States Senate has done, possibly, since 1983,” press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters. “Ultimately these senators are going to have to answer their own conscience and their constituents as they account for their actions today.”

Not even close to the worst thing that the Senate has done since 1983.

Not contesting the 2000 election, the invasion or Iraq, NAFTA, the bankruptcy bill, etc. were all way worse.

It wasn’t even close:

The Senate voted 97-1, with the Democratic minority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, alone in supporting the veto. The House followed suit a short time later, voting 348-77 to override and putting Congress directly at odds with the White House and national security establishment.

BTW, I would note that one of the arguments:

In a letter sent to [Senate Minority Leader Harry] Reid this week, Obama warned the bill would erode sovereign immunity principles that prevent foreign litigants “from second-guessing our counter-terrorism operations and other actions that we take every day”.

Obama is now aggressively pushing the TPP and TTIP, which include an Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) apparatus allow for just this sort of second guessing on environmental protections, regulation of speculation, labor protections, etc.

I really hope that Saudi Arabia retaliates over this, because any estrangement between the United States and the House of Saud is an unalloyed good.

Obama got a well deserved black eye over this.

This is Unconscionable

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“Nobody believes in it. You’re like, ‘F%$# this,’” a former Green Beret says of America’s covert and clandestine programs to train and arm Syrian militias. “Everyone on the ground knows they are jihadis. No one on the ground believes in this mission or this effort, and they know they are just training the next generation of jihadis, so they are sabotaging it by saying, ‘F%$# it, who cares?’”

 “I don’t want to be responsible for Nusra guys saying they were trained by Americans,” the Green Beret added. A second Special Forces soldier commented that one Syrian militia they had trained recently crossed the border from Jordan on what had been pitched as a large-scale shaping operation that would change the course of the war. Watching the battle on a monitor while a drone flew overhead, “We literally watched them, with 30 guys in their force, run away from three or four ISIS guys.”

The term for this is, “Going The Good Soldier Švejk.”

Expanding on this, Jack Murphy notes that the CIA continues to be uninterested in fighting ISIS, instead focusing on overthrowing the Assad regime, while different CIA task forces are fighting each other:

One of the major points of this article is that the CIA doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Islamic State in Syria or Iraq. By the end of 2014 there were only twenty CIA targeting officers and analysts were dedicated to IS. By early 2016, it was not much better. Instead, the CIA neurotically focused on removing Assad from power by any means possible. This laser focus was established by Brennan. I surmise this focus is shared by most in the Obama Administration

In spite of this focus, the CIA’s efforts in Syria is plagued by bureaucratic infighting. The CIA has three elements jockeying for power. The Syria Task Force is similar to the Iraqi Task Force and Iranian Operations Group that preceded it. It is Brennan’s baby. Damascus X is the Syrian CIA station now operating in Amman. And then there is the CTC/SI (Counterterrorist Center/Syria-Iraq), which is tragically focused on the Assad government rather than the terrorists. I have seen this kind of food fight for resources and prestige in the CIA and even in the DIA during the fat money days of the GWOT. I’m sure this cat fight is even more intense in today’s leaner fiscal environment.

The buck on this stops at Barack Obama’s desk.

It is clear that he has been passive, and allowed the US state security apparatus to set their own, frequently conflicting priorities, and Obama’s passivity with regard to this is the main cause.

It doesn’t help that current DCIA, John Brennan, was a former station chief in Saudi Arabia, and has relentlessly supported Saudi policy goals ever since.

This is not as much of a clusterf%$# as the invasion of Iraq, yet, but it really is a level of incompetence simply buggers the mind.

Huh, It Appears That I Got It Wrong Yesterday

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Police have arrested a suspect, one Ahmad Khan Rahami, an immigrant from Afghanistan whose
family came to the United States in 1995 when he was 7:

The man who the police said sowed terror across two states, setting off bombs in Manhattan and on the Jersey Shore and touching off a furious manhunt, was tracked down on Monday morning sleeping in the dank doorway of a neighborhood bar and taken into custody after being wounded in a gun battle with officers.

………

Even as the remarkably swift arrest eased fears across the region, investigators were still in the earliest stages of trying to determine what provoked the attacks, why a street in Chelsea was one of the targets and whether the bomber was aided by others. While investigators have been focused on Mr. Rahami’s actions immediately before and after the bombings, they were also working on Monday to trace his activities and travel in both recent months and years.

One law enforcement official said that the bomb technicians involved in the investigation believed that Mr. Rahami constructed all the devices and that his handiwork raised the possibility that he had received training from someone with experience building improvised explosive devices.

“If you’re working off the premise that the guy made all these devices,” the official said, “then the guy is a pretty good bombmaker. And you don’t get that good on the internet.”

………

Mr. Rahami and his family had traveled periodically to Pakistan, and on one trip, he stayed for nearly a year. A senior law enforcement official said that no evidence had yet been uncovered that he had received military training abroad.

I was figuring a white supremacist/Christian dominionist.

It appears that my first guess was wrong.

Just Lovely

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It looks like some whack job set off a bomb in Manhattan. Thankfully, there are no fatalities:

A powerful explosion caused by what the authorities believe was a homemade bomb injured at least 29 people on a crowded sidewalk in the bustling Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan on Saturday night.

A few hours later, the authorities found and removed what they described as a second explosive device four blocks away, raising the possibility that two bombs had been planted in the heart of the city.

Mayor Bill de Blasio called the explosion — which occurred about 8:30 p.m. on West 23rd Street — “an intentional act” but initially said there was no connection to terrorism and no immediate claim of responsibility.

Police officers swarmed Chelsea’s streets after the blast, which reverberated across a city scarred by terrorism and vigilant about threats, just days after the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

“Whatever the cause,” Mr. de Blasio said, “New Yorkers will not be intimidated.”

As the authorities sought to identify what had caused the explosion, they described the second device as a pressure cooker resembling the one used in the deadly Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, according to a police official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a continuing investigation.

No word on who yet, but seeing as authorities have not yet tried to finger ISIS or al Qaeda, which makes me wonder if this might have been a Timothy McVeigh type, rather than Islamist terrorism.