TERRORISM

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17 May 2013

THE THREAT WITHIN:
THIS IS SERIOUS, FOLKS

A Muslim woman has been arrested in California for attempting to poison customers at Starbucks.

For more on this story, please click on the link below:

LONE WOLF ATTACK

16 May 2013

SUSPICIOUS INDEED

According to police in Blechertown, MA, seven people were arrested for trespassing at the Quabbin Reservoir, which supplies water to Boston. Five of the seven were men, two were women, all were Muslims and and all were foreign nationals from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia or Singapore. Identifying themselves to the police as chemical engineers, they claimed they had trespassed the facility for professional reasons. Apparently, they wanted to see how American reservoirs are built and operated.

Maybe so, but water is the Achilles Heel of modern cities: Although it is difficult to poison a municipal water supply due to the enormous volumes of water involved, it's an easy matter to destroy a reservoir's pumps with explosives or through computer or mechanical sabotage. Absent a minimum of 100 gallons of potable water per day per person in warm weather, it is a virtual certainty that dysentery will break out within a matter of days.

Although an overwhelming majority of dysentery victims survive, the disease can disable a healthy adult for a month or more, even with prompt and proper medical care. Imagine 10,000 dysentery cases in the city the size of Boston - in addition to the inevitable loss of life, the economic devastation caused by lost productivity and otherwise unnecessary hospitalization could easily run into the billions of dollars.

24 October 2012

DOMESTIC TERRORISM:
STILL A PROBLEM

FBI FOILS A BOMB PLOT IN NEW YORK

10 October 2012

CURIOUS INDEED:
AMERICAN AND FRENCH DEPLOYMENTS SUGGEST SOMETHING'S UP

From Stratfor: CURIOUS DEPLOYMENTS

TRADECRAFT: THE TERRORIST VARIETY

Believe it or not, terrorists have tradecraft too. That's not encouraging...

For an excellent article from Strafor, please click on the link below:

TERRORISM TRADECRAFT

20 SEPTEMBER 2012

DOMESTIC TERRORISM, POLITICAL STABILITY

Governments rarely acknowledge the true costs of war. Although the expenditure of blood and treasure in the course of military conflicts are often staggering, they represent no more than a down payment on the total costs incurred.

The public tends to view these costs in terms of obligations to individual soldiers: caring for the wounded and the disabled, well-earned veterans' benefits, and military pensions. To these, economists add the opportunity costs of a lost peace, and the unrealized productivity of those killed, wounded and disabled. But governments take an even more expansive view, for in addition to lost and shattered lives and staggering financial costs that cascade across generations, wars are politically destabilizing as well. Returning veterans are often seen as a serious threat to the established order, and not without reason.

Unable or unwilling to reintegrate into peacetime society, demobilized veterans of the Blue and Grey flooded the American West after the Civil War and turned it into what was, for all practical purposes, yet another battleground. In the early 1920s, demobilized Italian veterans formed the core of Mussolini's Fascist movement, and placed him in power; while in Germany, demobilized veterans flocked to the Nazi Party a decade later. And in a little known chapter of American history, Wall Street interests sought to enlist the support of the American Legion for a coup d'etat during the Great Depression, in an effort to force an end to President Roosevelt's "New Deal."

Simply put, disaffected veterans have a long history of turning against the governments they once served, and using - or at least threatening to use - the violent skills they learned in the military against the political order. This was the reason the Department of Homeland Security identified veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan as a potential domestic security threat in a 2009 analysis.

Former soldier Timothy McVeigh, who truck-bombed a federal office building in 1995, was no doubt on the minds of the analysts who wrote the Homeland Security analysis. But there are other chilling and more recent examples as well: Last December a former soldier shot and killed his girlfriend in Georgia, to prevent her from revealing a plot that included four serving U.S. Army soldiers, who were developing plans to unleash a campaign of terror in the United States. Prospective targets included a dam in Washington State, poisoning apple fields, seizing control of Ft. Stuart, and assassinating the President.

The Grand Irony in all this is the nascent terrorist cell didn't have a snowball's chance in Hades of achieving their stated goal of overthrowing the U.S. Government. The United States has one of the largest and most capable domestic security apparatuses in the world. Had the prospective terrorists proceeded, they would have been uncovered and neutralized in short order.

But there is an even deeper irony in all this, which is the fact that the U.S. domestic security apparatus is focused on violent efforts to overthrow the United States government - by far and away the means least likely to succeed in disposing of the present political order. A far more plausible scenario is the one envisioned in the Wall Street Plot referenced above (also known as the Banker's Plot), which intended to fund a mass organization of veterans and other disaffected citizens, organize a mass march on Washington, paralyze the government, and impose an unofficial - and unconstitutional - "Assistant President" on the elected one.

Editor's Note: For more on the Wall Street Plot, please see Jules Archer's 1973 book entitled The Plot to Seize the White House, or the more recent The Plots Against the President, by former DIA analyst Sally Denton.

10 July 2012

SLEEPER CELLS IN AMERICA

An Iranian who once spied for the CIA says he lives in fear because Iran's government has targeted him for assassination.

Reza Kahlili says Iran has established sleeper cells in the U.S., which have weapons, explosives, money and safe houses. According to Kahlili, they have developed a working relationship with Mexican and Latin American drug cartels, making it possible for them to smuggle weapons and other contraband across the southern border into the into the U.S.

By his account, Iranian intelligence has also successfully infiltrated American universities, Islamic cultural centers and charitable institutions, posing as academics, policy experts and officers of nonprofits [in order to] influence American policymakers and encourage the negotiations Iran intends to exploit to complete it nuclear weapons research and development program.

28 June 2012

BIG BROTHER IN BRITAIN

The British government has always taken the security of the realm seriously. Compared to Americans, the British have few constitutional rights; compared to the FBI, the British security service (MI5) labors under few limitations.

Now the British government has announced plans to log the details of every phone call, e-mail and text message sent from, or received in, the United Kingdom. For the British, at least, Big Brother is definitely watching.

For more on this story, please click on the title link below:

BIG BROTHER IN BRITAIN

24 June 2012

A CONTINUING THREAT

An illegal Moroccan immigrant and would-be suicide bomber has pleaded guilty to attempting to attack the U.S. Capitol.

Amine El Khalifi came to the attention of the FBI in January 2011, after an informer reported he had attended a meeting of Islamic militants. After determining Khalifi was intent on attacking American targets in retaliation for what he claimed was America's "war on Islam," undercover agents posing as radicals made contact and offered to provide him with weapons and explosives. Unaware of the fact that the suicide vest and AK47 they provided him were harmless, he attempted to implement his plan of attack on February 17.

Khalifi will be sentenced on September 14, and may receive up to 30 years imprisonment.

4 May 2012

WE KID YOU NOT

The Al Qaeda terrorist organization, which infamously attacked the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, has an English language magazine for aspiring terrorists and wannabes. Entitled Inspire, the online magazine was founded by American turncoat Anwar al-Awlaki and his colleague in crime, Samir Kahn. Both men were killed by an American missile strike in Yemen in 2011.

Having apparently lifted a play from the Japanese, the latest edition of Inspire recommends American Jihadists start forest fires in Montana. During the Second World War, Japan carried out an extensive bombing campaign against the American Northwest by releasing balloons armed with timers and incendiary munitions into the Pacific jet stream: after the estimated flight time to American forests, the bombs were released.

The Japanese campaign was ingenious, but largely ineffectual. Although it did force the Pentagon to divert thousands of troops to fight the resulting fires, and unexploded munitions eventually killed six civilians, the Japanese attacks had no impact on the larger war.

But if al Qaeda's plan to burn the American West doesn't work out, not to worry. The same issue provides helpful hints on how to become an "urban assassin."

1 May 2012

AL QAEDA ISN'T THE ONLY PROBLEM

On the first anniversary of Osama bin Laden's killing by U.S. Navy SEALs, American security and intelligence officials are quietly confident that they have Al Qaeda on the run. In addition to killing its founder, U.S. drone strikes have decimated the terrorist organization's leadership.

But unfortunately, Al Qaeda isn't their only problem: seething discontent at the government's mismanagement of the economy is encouraging home-grown radicalism, as evidenced by the arrest of five anarchists in the Cleveland area who were plotting to blow up a bridge.

For more on this story, please click on the link below:

FIVE ARRESTED IN PLOT TO BLOW UP BRIDGE

28 March 2012

MULTICULTURALISM

A year after the British and French governments formally rejected the Multicultural dogma that had dominated their immigration policies for decades, and a week after the Toulouse shooter provided them with an object lesson in Multiculturalism's failure by killing three French paratroops and four Jewish civilians, French authorities arrested the killer's older brother, Abdelkader Merah, on suspicion of complicity in murder, theft, and involvement in terrorism. He will be kept in custody, prosecutors said.

Although the elder Merah's may have been truthful when he denied previously published reports that he had applauded his younger brothers actions, the case nonetheless illustrates the damage Muslim immigrants have inflicted on French society. Islam asserts the faithful practice of Islamic precepts will create an ideal society on Earth, but despite the undoubted piety of many believers this has never happened - an inconvenient fact that places the devout in a difficult position: either accept that Islam cannot provide worldly perfection, or find an excuse to blame it on.

A great many have chosen the latter, blaming apostates, corrupt rulers, Jews, Crusaders, European imperialists, Zionists, and now America and the West in general. Implausibly, they seek to impose islam on their adopted countries in the forlorn hope that somehow, some way, Islam will finally fulfill its promise of a just society.

Islam comes in many varieties, and is often strongly influenced by local conditions: as a rule, Muslims from countries that have had the longest and most extensive contact with the West are best able to assimilate to Western societies: the French paratroops killed or wounded by the younger Merah were Muslims from the Maghreb - but then, rather ironically, so was Merah.

Far from enriching societies, "Multiculturalism" weakens them by creating a Fifth Column in their midst. Although a great many Muslim immigrants, such as the slain Paratroops, are undoubtedly loyal to their adoptive countries, others are not - and there is no sure way to distinguish between them. Short of revoking their citizenship and deporting the lot - a constitutional impossibility - the only other way to deal with the artificially created threat from within is to effectively abrogate civil rights and liberties, and hide a police state behind the sort of false-front democracy that prevails in post-Soviet Russia.

The Grand Irony is that former French President Charles De Gaulle foresaw the problem clearly: after the French military eventually suppressed the pro-independence rebellion in what was then the province of Algeria, De Gaulle nonetheless decided in 1962 to grant Algeria its freedom. The only way to hold the province was to grant full citizenship and voting rights to the approximately 8,000,000 Muslim Algerians - and that, as the French President correctly observed, would destroy France.

As a result of the Multiculturalist folly that controlled immigration policy for the past 20 years or so, the Muslim population of France is now somewhere between 4 and 6 million - not quite the 8,000,000 De Gaulle feared, and not yet enough to destroy the Republic.

But it is enough to effectively destroy French democracy.

20 March 2011

TERROR IN FRANCE

Less than a week after three French paratroopers were killed and another wounded by a gunman on a motorcycle in the south western city of Montauban, four people were similarly killed outside a Jewish school in Toulouse.

The French paratroops belonged to a regiment that had fought in Afghanistan, and all four of the civilians killed in Toulouse were Jewish, suggesting the attacks were politically motivated terrorism rather than the work of a serial killer. The fact that the same handgun was used in both attacks, however, suggests the terrorist is a lone-wolf amateur.

Using motorcycles or scooters to conduct terrorist attacks is a tried and tested technique: during the Viet Nam War, Viet Cong terrorists carried out hundreds of such attacks in Saigon and other South Vietnamese cities. Motorcycles provide a relatively stable platform for firing a handgun at close range, they are easily stolen and just as easily discarded, they are fast and maneuverable, and they are capable of jumping curbs and navigating the narrow alleys typically found in major cities. The likelihood of catching a motorcycle terrorist ranges from slim to none.

At the time of this writing, French police are scrambling to find and neutralize the terrorist responsible for the attacks, before others from the large and often alienated French Muslim population copy his modus operandi.

15 March 2012

ACTION-REACTION

Conflict tends to generate action-reaction cycles - a tendency that holds true with weapons, tactics, strategies, and terrorism as well.

One of the most feared weapons in the terrorist arsenal is Bacillus Anthraces, the bacteria that causes the deadly disease of anthrax. Like other types of bacteria, Anthraces can form dormant endospores that can last decades and even centuries. These endospores may activate if inhaled, or if they find entry to a human or animal body through an open wound.

Protecting populations against terrorist attacks employing anthrax spores is difficult under any circumstances, especially since they are capable of surviving extreme heat, radiation, harsh environmental conditions, antibiotics and common water treatment techniques. Finding a way to kill spores introduced into municipal water systems is therefore a major priority.

According to Physicsorg.com, a recent breakthrough employing treated silk may provide a solution: silk soaked in a chlorine solution for an hour killed almost 100 per cent of the test sample exposed to it.

One obvious application is with water filters - either large filters protecting municipal water supplies, or small filters designed for personal or small group needs. Another important application that suggests itself is water purification in disaster response and relief operations.

Presumably, silk-cl filters, as they have been named, may also be employed in air filtration.

27 FEBRUARY 2012

SURVEILLANCE: A TRICKY BUSINESS AT BEST

Former CIA officer David Cohen is in hot water. Now the New York City Police Department's Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence, Cohen attempted to place police agents or informers in every Islamic mosque within 250 miles of New York City.

Given al Qaeda's historic fixation on The City, that makes a great deal of sense - as long as you can keep it quiet. Unfortunately, word leaked out and now  civil rights advocates are complaining about the size, scale, and range of the program: the New York police intelligence division was not only monitoring mosques, but college campuses as well.

The NYPD is presently engaged in damage control operations, and for that reason it make take some time for them to figure out that intelligence officers trained to operate abroad are probably not the best choice to run politically sensitive domestic intelligence operations. The rules are different, and the price can be high indeed when caught with chalk on one's toes.

For a detailed account of the controversy, please click on the title link below:

NYPD INTELLIGENCE DIVISION: CHALK ON THEIR TOES

22 February 2012

NOT QUITE A LONE WOLF

On Friday, February 17, a Moroccan national by the name of Amine El Khalifi was arrested by federal authorities at a parking garage near Capitol Hill, and charged with terrorism-related offenses. According to the Justice department, Khalifi intended to attack the U.S. Capitol building, armed with an AK-47 rifle and a suicide vest.

In actual fact, neither the suicide vest nor the rifle were operable. Both had been provided to Khalifi by federal undercover agents, who had been monitoring him for more than a year.

According to Assistant Attorney General Lisa Monaco, “Today’s case underscores the continuing threat we face from homegrown violent extremists. Thanks to a coordinated law enforcement effort, [the] alleged plot was thwarted before anyone was harmed.”

Well, sort of...

In actual fact, the greatest domestic danger is not posed by amateur loudmouths like Khalifi, who managed to attract police attention by publicly complaining that the War on Terror was a war on Islam, but rather by more quiet and calculating Jihadists who plan and act entirely alone. In the immediate aftermath of 9-11, some 60,000 Muslim males of military age residing in the United States apparently vanished into the woodwork, and haven't been seen or heard from since.

Most were illegal immigrants who went to ground for fear of deportation, but some, undoubtedly, have since become radicalized to the extent they may tempted to grab a gun and start killing Americans on an opportunistic basis.

An associated problem is the fact that both the Al Qaeda terror network and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' elite Quds Force are known to have dispatched agents across the Mexican border into the U.S. Presumably, they have made contact with elements of the illegal Muslim underground which - at the very least - provides distractive cover for their presence.