RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://nypost.com/2019/02/19/why-its-so-hard-to-revoke-the-citizenship-of-terrorists/

What allegiance does the United States owe to our enemies when they are our own citizens?

More than we should.

The question arises due to the case of Hoda Muthana, a young woman born in Alabama, the daughter of Yemeni immigrant parents.

As too often happens, the impressionable young Muslim was drawn, in her teen years, into fundamentalist Islam. This ideology — commonly called “radical Islam,” but more accurately labeled “sharia supremacism” — teaches that Muslims have a duty to impose and spread Islamic law throughout the world. It fuels violent jihadism and other aggressive Islamist strategies, pressuring governments and societies to concede to fundamentalist Muslims the right to live autonomously — i.e., to adhere to sharia whenever it conflicts with domestic law.

This is a profoundly dangerous concession. Sharia supremacism is anti-American and anti-Western. It systematically discriminates against women and non-Muslims; it rejects our notions of equality, freedom, and privacy. Basically, it is counter-constitutional.

The result in Muthana’s case was dire. She fled to Syria to join the Islamic State terrorist network — the ISIS caliphate. And she was all in, calling for violent jihad against the West and the annihilation of the United States in ISIS recruiting messages on social media. “Spill all of their blood or rent a big truck n drive all over them. Kill them” — that is what she called for her fellow radicals to do to her fellow Americans.

Though just 24 years old, Muthana is on her third marriage, her first two husbands having been ISIS militants killed fighting American and other armed forces. She has an 18-month-old son, born of her second marriage, to a jihadi killed in Mosul.

She was captured by Kurdish forces and is now living in a refugee camp in Syria. Naturally, she is expressing remorse and pleading that she be permitted to return with her son to her family in Alabama.

Clearly, she is not a sympathetic case. Nevertheless, she has a right as an American to be admitted back into the United States.

https://www.hstoday.us/subject-matter-areas/infrastructure-security

Protecting our critical infrastructure from both cyber and physical threats will be a key challenge for 2019 and the years following. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) describes critical infrastructure as “the physical and cyber systems and assets that are so vital to the United States that their incapacity or destruction would have a debilitating impact on our physical or economic security or public health or safety.”

Critical infrastructure has and is being targeted by hackers, nefarious organizations, and state actors because of its vitality to the American economy. The energy sector stands out as being particularly vulnerable. This ecosystem of insecurity includes power plants, utilities, nuclear plants, and The Grid. Protecting our National Grid is certainly an encompassing topic that keeps DHS, DoD and intelligence community planners up at night. The threats can be cybersecurity attacks, from Electronic Magnetic Pulse (EMP) generated from a geomagnetic solar flare or from a terrorist short-range missile, or from a physical assault on utilities or power plants.

According to a recent Ponemon Institute Report, three-quarters of energy companies and utilities have experienced at least one recent data breach. Overseas in Ukraine and Japan, hostile cyber attacks on power plants have been successful. We are quite vulnerable. Much of our grid still relies on antiquated technologies, and more investment in hardening defenses is needed. As technology exponentially advances with artificial intelligence, and as threat actors (including cyber mercenaries) easily gain destructive tools via the dark web, the risks grow.

A recent report by the House Energy and Commerce Committee summed up the challenges: ”Cybersecurity is a shared problem, and not just abstractly. The Internet by its technical design requires at least two devices, connected through wires or spectrum, communicating through standardized networking protocols. Consequently, even if one end of a connection is secure, the other might not be, and that puts both at risk. Multiplied by the millions upon millions of individual connections that make up the Internet, the end result is that the only feasible way to provide any appreciable level of cybersecurity is cooperation. More so than nearly any other shared resource, cybersecurity requires a ‘whole-of-society’ approach, in which individuals and organizations across both the public and private sectors play vital, integral roles.”

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/l-a-skyscraper-shown-exploding-in-new-isis-promise-fulfilled-threat/

An ISIS-supporting group posted an image online depicting an explosion at the top of the third-tallest office tower in downtown Los Angeles.

Though ISIS backers operating under a number of media alliances regularly craft and circulate threats and recruitment propaganda in the form of posters and video, Los Angeles is rarely featured as a target. The online jihadists trend toward threatening New York, Washington, Las Vegas, and large European cities.

The new image shows a camouflage-clad jihadist holding an ISIS flag with the evening L.A. skyline in the background and the glow of flames photoshopped coming from the hillside beneath his feet. An explosion is photoshopped onto the top of the Aon Center, the 62-story tower at 707 Wilshire Blvd. in the city’s financial district. The original photo used appears to be from Shutterstock.

The words above the image: “Our promise will soon be fulfilled.”

The city of Los Angeles routinely reminds residents that landmarks and transportation hubs — such as Los Angeles International Airport, targeted in a foiled 2000 al-Qaeda plot — are potential terrorist targets. Terror groups have always routinely complained about products from Hollywood making their way into popular culture in Muslim-majority nations.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/former-air-force-intel-agent-indicted-for-sharing-secret-information-with-iran/

A former Air Force counterintelligence agent has been indicted by a grand jury on espionage charges after she defected to Iran to work on behalf of its intelligence services, Department of Justice officials announced Wednesday.

Monica Elfriede Witt provided the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), a branch of the country’s armed forces, with information related to her work on a secret Pentagon program, according to the indictment released publicly Wednesday.

In August 2013, Witt reached out to an individual with ties to Iranian intelligence offering her services. Weeks later, she moved to Iran and began compiling the personal information of her former colleagues into “target packages,” which the IRGC used to target American intelligence agents.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272763/chinese-aggression-against-usa-michael-cutler

My previous article for FrontPage Magazine focused on specific threats to the United States that were linked to border security issues raised in the January 29, 2019 Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Worldwide Threats that was itself predicated on the Intelligence Community’s just-released World-Wide Threat Assessment.

I used the information disclosed at the hearing and contained in that threat assessment report about the dangers to America created by transnational criminal organizations and translational gangs such as MS-13 and the drug cartels in Mexico, as well as the crimes and activities of human traffickers that support the Trump administration’s demands for a border wall, a wall that unbelievably, the leaders of the Democratic Party adamantly oppose.

However, the report included much more material about other global threats that confront the United States and its interests. Simply stated, the world is a dangerous place.

Among the other threats addressed in the report were those posed by China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.

Today we will take a hard look at China and how its aggressive and relentless pursuit of global dominance threatens America.

Before we go any further, we must remember that China is led by a totalitarian Communist regime that is not an ally but rather a serious adversary of the United States.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/missile-defense-alert-11549233033

There is nothing inevitable about the U.S. winning wars, and on that point the Pentagon’s new missile defense review is alarming. Russia and China are ramping up investments in sophisticated technologies while America is spending less on defending itself. One urgent priority: A constellation of space sensors that could shore up U.S. missile defenses.

More than 20 nations have offensive missile technology, the Defense Department notes in its review released last month. China can already threaten the U.S. with some 125 nuclear missiles. Iran’s medium-range missiles threaten Israel and Europe, and the report notes that Iran “has transferred missile systems to terrorist organizations,” which use them on U.S. allies. Russia is violating the 1987 INF nuclear-missile treaty.

China has been increasing its medium- and intermediate-range missile stocks. “This includes sophisticated anti-ship missiles that pose a direct threat to U.S. aircraft carriers,” the report says. The U.S. has dominated the seas for decades with aircraft carriers, yet Chinese missiles could keep carrier strike groups from operating in the Western Pacific.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/01/who

It was a mistake to disband the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1945, just months after we had won World War II.

Within just two years, President Truman realized he had to have a permanent intelligence capability and so in 1947 he signed the National Security Act, which, in addition to creating the National Security Council as the highest national security policymaking body in the U.S. government, created the Central Intelligence Agency out of the ashes of the OSS.

Since 1947, the U.S. Intelligence Community has grown and grown. Originally it was given the task of collecting intelligence on our Cold War adversaries. After the September 11 attacks, it was expanded and reorganized to include today’s 17 agencies.

But whether it was just the OSS during the war, or the 17 federal agencies we have today, the mission of the American intelligence was always the same: to provide its sole client with raw intelligence and analysis so that he can make his decisions on how best to secure America and her citizens. That end-user, of course, is the incumbent president.

This week’s “Fake News” swirling around the Director of National Intelligence’s (DNI) testimony before Congress on his annual “National Worldwide Threat Assessment” isn’t simply dishonest. It is dangerous.

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/time-to-reconsider-cairs-non-profit-status-again/

In an era of increasing anti-Muslim attacks, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) markets itself as a mainstream Muslim civil liberties organization fighting tirelessly for the rights of immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and on behalf of religious freedom. To support its efforts, CAIR, like most other American non-profit organizations, solicits public tax-deductible donations from concerned citizens all over the country. Unlike most other non-profits, however, questions about what CAIR does with its donations have dogged the organization for years — with good reason.

Founded in 1994, CAIR’s officials have long nurtured ties to extremism and funding overseas terrorism. Indeed, in 2009, the FBI banned its offices from cooperating with CAIR after federal prosecutors named the Islamist group an unindicted co-conspirator during the 2008 Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial. Despite its subsequent designation as a terrorist organization in the UAE, CAIR has so far avoided such a designation in the United States. However, as the Middle East Forum has uncovered, CAIR’s activity in the months leading up to this November’s midterm elections could land the group in hot water for other funding-related issues.

Every American non-profit organization is subject to IRS rules that make it eligible for a federal exemption from payment of tax. One of the requirements for a registered charity’s tax-exemption is that it may not be an action organization, meaning that it “may not participate in any campaign activity for or against political candidates.” Non-profits are also prohibited from “directly or indirectly participating in …voter education or registration activities with evidence of bias that (a) would favor one candidate over another; (b) oppose a candidate in some manner; or (c) have the effect of favoring a candidate or group of candidates.”

In the months prior to the midterm elections, CAIR stepped up its political activism nationwide. Multiple chapters published ”voting guides” — documents that summarize the platforms of the main candidates, the issues up for a vote, and that explain American election processes. Other chapters have held candidate forums, enabling local constituents to connect directly with candidates and ask questions. While this all sounds helpful and benign, some CAIR chapters’ political “education” has been decidedly partisan. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272693/al-qaedas-little-sister-joe-kaufman

Four years ago this past December, Saudi-born al-Qaeda senior member Adnan Gulshair el-Shukrijumah (Shukri Jumah) lost his life during a Pakistani Special Forces pre-dawn raid in South Waziristan. Last month, Adnan’s sister Aidah took to Facebook to mourn the anniversary of his passing. Few can fault the sister for mourning her brother’s death, but many can and should question her for the extremism that she herself has exhibited.

Adnan Shukrijumah was a top-ranking al-Qaeda commander and chief of al-Qaeda’s global operations. At one point, he was said to be second-in-command of the terrorist group.

In May 2001, Shukrijumah left his family home in Miramar, Florida and disappeared from the United States. Reports show he had taken flight training with 9/11 hijackers, and information gathered from top-tier al-Qaeda operatives, including 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, would paint Shukrijumah as the next Mohamed Atta and leading a future 9/11-style strike against the US.

In July 2010, Shukrijumah was charged by the US government with overseeing a bomb plot to attack three New York City subway lines and a related plot to blow up a shopping center in Manchester, England. In the subway plot, he had recruited three young men for the attack. Prior to that, he had allegedly been involved in a plot to blow up high-rise apartment buildings.

Aidah el-Shukri a.k.a. Umm Taibah (Mother of Taibah) was one of Adnan’s younger sisters and is currently an oncology nurse advocate at Cardinal Health, located in Lewisville, Texas.

On December 8th, Aidah, along with photos of her now-deceased brother, wrote on her Facebook, “Can’t believe it’s been 4 years. Until we meet again my brother. Inshallah.” The photos had been reposted from a previous post she had made, on December 8, 2014, the date that the Taliban had confirmed Adnan’s death and two days following the Pakistani government’s South Waziristan raid.