Tag Archives: counterterrorism

FTAC – Brussels – On Public Impatience and Outrage

25 Friday Mar 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation

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I don’t question the police for courage. A quick glance at the news tells how aggressive and deep the investigation has gone on this attack. As regards the better solution of having forestalled the attack, the European neighbors seem to be attending to that area of criticism. The public — and on Facebook, those now featuring the meme “Je Suis Tired of This Shit” — also tires of complacency in the presence of this implacable (“sub-state transnational”) enemy. Expect the heat to rise against this class of transnational state enemy.

From the editor’s accidental (2007 and broadband-enabled) introduction to them, the “Islamic Small Wars” have been wars for “detectives and poets” — detectives, because every element in an attack has welled up out of a chain of criminal conspiracies; poets, because what’s in the head got there through language and language-driven manipulation.

In the American experience from 2007 forward, we have seen at least the watched figure of Carlos Bledsoe (Little Rock, 2009) carry through his attack without impedance, the similarly tagged Tsarnaev brothers (Boston, 2013) similarly succeed (and there were other attacks — e.g., Nidal Hassan, Fort Hood, 2009 — that involved perpetrator signals in words and actions that should have produced responsive countermeasures — counseling, detention, investigation), and it seems not until San Bernardino (2015) that authorities acknowledge the character of the attack, its relationship with “radical Islam”, and the “gating” missed all along the timeline to the massacre.  Now, having turned that corner, the attack in Brussels adds impetus to the business of using accumulated experience and knowledge to finally “crawl up the vines” with intents shifting between investigative purposes to actually dismantling involved criminal networks.

Maybe.

“Open source” punditry ends about here where governments may (finally) set to work against the God Mob using accumulated nonpublic intelligence and methods.

As the whole sheet of martial and political music may go, the dark gifts of the 20th Century that were Hitlerism and Stalinism would seem in the mix given the contribution of both to the development and distribution of now decades of similar terrorism, especially that targeting airliners and terminals (for reading up on the 1970s experience, BackChannels recommends Brendan I. Koerner’s The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking).

Obama’s Administration, perhaps having chosen to display the least visible war possible, has perhaps effectively met the challenge posed by Putin’s post-Soviet transitioning of Russia into, for now, a feudal estate and the related aggression sustained by aligned but old powers, especially that represented by the piratical Ayatollah Khamenei with his handling of Hezbollah and Hamas and other elements in the field.

BackChannels reminds readers that the Soviet dissolved a little more than 24 years ago (December 26, 1991), that the quarter-century anniversary is therefore this year, and that Putin and NATO may be engaged in a tug of war over how the world will look — and how medieval absolute power in the modern world will have fared — on Christmas Day 2016.

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Brussels – A Note from Correspondence

22 Tuesday Mar 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars

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I can guess at the choices faced by governments better than charting out the answers.

How many Muslims currently serve in the Uniformed Services?

How many of those have committed treason in direct deed or by facilitating a “Green on Blue” attack?

The services certainly have the data from events in the combat arenas plus Fort Hood, but I’ve no idea whether anyone has bothered compiling and assessing that data for the purpose of channeling Muslim personnel.

In Israel, a vetted Muslim officer has produced honor for himself, his service, and his country: http://www.jewishnews.co.uk/theres-only-one-country-in-the-middle-east-that-could-produce-a-soldier-like-me/

In the United States, Nate Terani has done the same.

As you know, but I will repeat myself, I have seen an “Islamic Small Wars” breaking down into medieval and modern parts, and it appears to me the modern are growing their ranks while the medieval, like those producing today’s assault in Brussels, have made themselves the targets of massive transnational counterterrorism criminal investigations. The west will roll them up through the end of the year (a year that will also mark the 25th year since the dissolving of the Soviet, and the two, the Soviet and global terrorism, have never been unrelated).

No one today should blame Moscow for Brussels, not even in the most twisted of theatrical political thinking, but the perverse clinging to Medieval Political Absolutism and the relation of that to the criminal part of feudalism should perhaps not be overlooked.  When the assault on Brussels is taken apart, the experts will certainly attempt to reverse engineer every aspect of the attack back to who acquired the explosives for it, how, and involving whom.  The criminal act that makes the headlines may not be separated from the flowcharts of less visible crimes — where did the money come from? Who built the bombs?  Who else was in on the conspiracy? — associated with its design and management.

My somewhat extreme correspondent had wanted all Muslim personnel banned from U.S. military service.  Ridiculous — and on this basis: the mass casualty and recruiting center assaults that have taken place on American soil have each been preceded by caution-creating behavior, language, travel, or foreign warning sufficient to urge detention, investigation, or refusal to enter the country prior to each event.  After the attack in San Bernardino, the excuse that there had been “no warning” may be dismissed.

On a related note, Mitchell Gray’s book, I Heard You Were Going On Jihad: How a Minnesota FBI agent may have prevented a second wave of attacks before 9/11 and exposed the Oklahoma terror network certainly raises questions about the Federal government’s working methods as regards possible foreknowledge, but it doesn’t shift responsibility for the 9/11 attack away from the Jihadists that commandeered a handful of airliners.

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Link – Trump’s Deja Vu – 2004 Staff Report – National Commission on Terrorist Attacks

11 Friday Dec 2015

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The story begins with “A Factual Overview of the September 11 Border Story.” This introduction summarizes many of the key facts of the hijackers’ entry into the United States. In it, we endeavor to dispel the myth that their entry into the United States was “clean and legal.” It was not. Three hijackers carried passports with indicators of Islamic extremism linked to al Qaeda; two others carried passports manipulated in a fraudulent manner. It is likely that several more hijackers carried passports with similar fraudulent
manipulation. Two hijackers lied on their visa applications. Once in the United States, two hijackers violated the terms of their visas. One overstayed his visa. And all but one obtained some form of state identification. We know that six of the hijackers used these state issued identifications to check in for their flights on September 11. Three of them were fraudulently obtained.

Eldridge, Thomas R., Susan Ginsburg, Walter T. Hemple II, et al.  “9/11 and Terrorist Travel: Staff Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.”  August 21, 2004.

Of late, BackChannels’ reading has involved turning from one chilling, albeit bureaucratise nonfiction, page to the next.  Perhaps with the right coffee or spirits, another reader might set aside the latest McCarry (I’ll have to read him) or Silva (plenty of that here for the winter) and settle into the kind of obscure monograph that packs a moan a minute:

Once the operation was under way, the conspirators attempted to enter the United States 34 times over 21 months, through nine airports. They succeeded all but once. Border inspectors at U.S. airports were unaware of the potential significance of indicators of possible terrorist affiliation in conspirators’ passports and had no information about fraudulent travel stamps possibly associated with al Qaeda. No inspectors or agents were trained in terrorist travel intelligence and document practices. The culture at the airports was one of travel facilitation and lax enforcement, with the exception of programs to interdict drug couriers and known criminals.

Enough said — the staff report “9/11 and Terrorist Travel” is online, free, and, if it’s read, certain to add old flavor to the latest web chat about immigration and travel into the United States.

Reading at length — reading for hours — is practically a lost art but one nonetheless practiced around BackChannels.  The source of the tip to the publication cited above:

Gray, Mitchell.  I Heard You Were Going On Jihad: How a Minnesota FBI agent may have prevented a second wave of attacks before 9/11 and exposed the Oklahoma terror network.  Minneapolis: Mill City Press, 2015.

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Ahmed’s Clock In A Box – Exploitation of A Stereotype for Political Gain, Says Arab American Professor

25 Friday Sep 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars

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Posted to YouTube 9/24/2015

“This is a racial issue, this is a religious discrimination issue, and now you have a poster child, literally, a poster child for your agenda, and I think that agenda is an agenda of intimidation.  It think these Islamists want to intimidate people in our country from questioning the behavior and motives of people from their group, and I don’t think this is the first time they have tried this.  Apparently, this group they work with, the Council on American Islamic Relationships or CAIR has done other things claiming “Islamophobia” and has sometimes been successful and sometimes unsuccessful, but this is a technique they have used before.”  So what’s really unfortunate about that is western civilization, our nation, and many others are in a state of war with radical jihadism, and unfortunately, people who are Arab Americans like me and other people sometimes have parts of us that because of our appearance fit a stereotype, but sometimes stereotypes exist for a reason, and this was an exploitation of a stereotype, in my opinion, to advance a political agenda, and I think it’s wrong because we are still not completely safe in this country, and we have to watch out for our safety and the safety of our children.  So my message to you is keep your eyes open.  If you see something, say something.  Suspicious behavior should be reported.  You should not ever be afraid of to report a suspicion of something that looks amiss regardless of someone’s race or apparent religion.”

Additional Reference

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/09/16/irving-texas-fourteen-year-old-builds-clock/ – 9/16/2015.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/260279/ahmed-mohameds-qatari-vacation-muslim-brotherhood-arnold-ahlert – 9/30/2015.

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http://www.crisismagazine.com/2015/clock-and-bull-story – 10/26/2015:

The case that the teen was deliberately trying to provoke a confrontation was strengthened as more was learned about his family. His older sister, Eyman, was once suspended from her school for threatening to blow it up. His uncle runs a trucking company called Twin Towers Transportation. And his father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, is a publicity hungry activist who calls himself a sheik, wears flowing white robes, and is a 9/11 Truther. The elder Mohamed routinely returns to Sudan to run as a presidential candidate, and he once debated Pastor Terry Jones of Koran-burning fame.

Update – December 11, 2015

There’s more to include, including a suit against Irving, Texas officialdom, but BackChannels saw this from PJ Media and has elected to run it as a bookend on this piece (posted to YouTube 12/3/2015).

 

Update – August 2, 2016

The Internet is his refuge — and his attacker. He reads every story and long, rambling conspiracy theory about him. Countless blogs and videos have been dedicated to proving Ahmed’s clock was just a Radio Shack clock he put in a new box. (It was partially made of Radio Shack parts, but the design was all his own, he says.) Others insist that this was all a stunt masterminded by Mohamed to get attention. (“He can’t plan the reaction. And why would he want me to get arrested?” Ahmed says.) Still more have proclaimed that the Mohameds are terrorist sympathizers because they once owned a company called Twin Towers Transportation. (They did own a company by that name, because their offices were housed in a Dallas office building called the Twin Towers.)

Contrera, Jessica.  “A year ago, Ahmed Mohamed became ‘Clock Boy.’  Now, he can’t escape that moment.”  The Washington Post, August 2, 2016.