RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/03/renew_the_patriot_act_or_risk_another_911.html

Before the Patriot Act, the FBI would have been stymied in conducting a counterterrorism investigation involving a now infamous American agent of a foreign power.

Anwar al-Awlaki was born in the United States. Yet, apparently, Senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee believe the only thing worth remembering about him is that President Obama “illegally” had him killed in Yemen using a Hellfire missile. (No matter that al-Awlaki: had sent “panty bomber” Abdulmuttalab to blow up a passenger plane over Detroit; attempted to blow up a DHL cargo airplane in flight; had become the well-publicized spiritual leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula [AQAP]; and was heavily guarded in Yemen’s remote tribal areas — sending Americans into those wilds to arrest him would have been difficult and dangerous.)

Most of us vividly recall that twice before 9/11 al-Awlaki met with future hijackers.

I agree with former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy that the collection of metadata should be abolished. Further, I agree that judges are unqualified to conduct national security. Republicans and Democrats in Congress have repeatedly abdicated their oversight responsibilities of our intelligence community. Now, some Republicans are seeking to give the FISA court even more authority. Far too many Democrats — who seek to vest America’s foreign enemies with our constitutional rights — are cheering them on.

Yet Senators Paul and Lee seem to assume America could also safely let the business records and roving wiretap provisions of the Patriot Act expire after March 15, 2020.

https://www.andrewbostom.org/2020/03/asma-uddin-abets-hateful-sharia-supremacism-in-america/

Granting her contention she is “not affiliated (directly) with CAIR or the Muslim Brotherhood”—CAIR having been founded as the political wing of Hamas, which, per the Hamas Covenant is a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot—Uddin nonetheless just accepted CAIR’s sponsorship of her speaking event Tuesday, January 28, 2020, in Maryland. Moreover, Uddin’s calumny about “Gaffneyism” fuses so-called paranoid ideations regarding an “Islamic coup,” with bowdlerization of the Sharia’s living doctrinal and historical reality, past as prologue. For example, here is Uddin’s 2012 apologetic summary negation of theSharia (curiously relegated to a footnote) that completely ignores its doubly totalitarian essence—promulgation of jihad war to submit mankind to its jurisdiction, with the resultant crushing of all basic liberties, including freedom of conscience, and speech, sanctioned discrimination against all non-Muslims, and Muslim women, and barbaric, dehumanizing punishments such as stoning for adultery, and mutilation for theft:  

Sharia is the ideal law of God according to Islam. Muslims believe that the Islamic legal system is one that aims toward ideals of justice, fairness, and the good life. Sharia has tremendous diversity, as jurists and learned scholars figure out and articulate what that law is. Historically, Sharia served as a means for political dissent against arbitrary rule. It is not a monolithic doctrine of violence, as has been characterized in the recently introduced Tennessee bill that would criminalize practices of Sharia.

Uddin’s updated commentary on the Sharia from her 2019 book is equally disingenuous in its omissions, merely reiterating such bowdlerized apologetics: Sharia’s “divine message” blandly analogized to the miracle of rain water in the desert; “my (her) experience does not square with your (the non-Muslim reader’s?) idea of sharia”; “even in states where Muslims want a sharia-based legal code,…what they are asking for is justice and fairness.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/fisa-reform-and-national-security/Repealing vital national-security powers is not the right way to hold government officials responsible for abuse of power.

National security has become an afterthought in the latest national-security debate. The debate centers, instead, on what is called “FISA reform,” the imperative of which appears to be making foreign intelligence surveillance powers harder to use.

I’ve long been worried that this was the way the wind was blowing. That would be apparent to anyone who read Ball of Collusion, my book about the absurd political narrative that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to steal the 2016 election from Democrats through cyber-espionage operations (mainly hacking), after which the new president was to become the Kremlin’s agent in the White House.

This narrative fueled a wide-ranging government investigation, launched by the Obama administration. Under the rubric of highly classified foreign counterintelligence operations, the investigation prominently featured FBI spying on the Trump campaign. (As I noted yesterday, the New York Times is back to describing the FBI’s covert monitoring as “spying,” so I’m assuming the era of garment rending at utterance of the dread s-word is over.)

In the course of that investigation, as catalogued by the Justice Department’s inspector general and highlighted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the FBI serially abused its authority: providing misleading information to the FISC, falsifying a key document, running confidential informants at Trump campaign surrogates in the absence of a sound investigative predicate, making public statements that suggested the president was a criminal suspect (while privately telling him he was not), making private statements (dozens of them) that have convinced reasonable people that bureau decisions were influenced by political bias, and so on.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/republicans-blocking-renewal-commonsense-anti-terrorism-tools/

Our surveillance laws need revision, but this is not the way to do it.

I  wonder if Congressman Andy Biggs (R., Ariz.) has ever heard of Sayyid Nosair. There was a time not that long ago when Nosair was something of a household name, the kind that the Arizona Republican, a strong conservative who cares a great deal about our national security, would know.

Time flies, though, and memories fade. It’s been 30 years since Nosair, a naturalized American citizen and a hardened jihadist, murdered Jewish Defense League founder Meir Kahane in one of New York City’s most notorious late-20th-century homicides. It has been 25 years since I led a team of prosecutors who convicted Nosair of conducting a terrorist war against the United States — a war waged by a foreign terrorist organization that included the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which was plotted in his upstate New York prison cell.

The question of Representative Biggs’s familiarity with Nosair — to say nothing of many other historical instances of Americans collaborating with foreign powers against American interests — suggested itself when I watched him get interviewed on Fox News Thursday morning (see here, about three minutes in). Biggs was asked to weigh in on the GOP’s ongoing intramural skirmish over what is being called “FISA reform,” but, in actuality, has very little to do with that important subject — at least, not directly.

Biggs reminded Fox’s Ed Henry that “the F in FISA stands for ‘foreign,’” his ill-informed point being that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is supposed to be about the surveillance of foreigners, not Americans. Therefore, the argument continued, we need to reform FISA so it is limited to non-Americans; otherwise, the FBI could once again pretextually use it to spy on President Trump, or on another American political campaign, or on the rest of us.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/terrorist-collaborat

“The mother of Syed Rizwan Farook, the male shooter in the 2015 San Bernardino terrorist attack,” the U.S. Attorney for California’s central district reports, “has agreed to plead guilty to a federal criminal charge of intending to impede a federal criminal investigation by shredding a map her son generated in connection with the attack.”

Rafia Sultana Shareef, 66 also known as Rafia Farook, “has agreed to plead guilty to a one-count information charging her with alteration, destruction, and mutilation of records,” according to the March 3 statement.

After the attack, Shareef learned her son Syed had been identified as a suspect, and told family members that Syed and his wife Tashfeen Malik had perpetrated the attack at the Inland Regional Center. Shareef “fed into a shredder” Syed’s map, directly related to the planning of the attack that took place on December 2, 2015. For those who may have forgotten, Bringing Calm to Chaos: A Police Foundation Review of the San Bernardino Terrorist Attacks provides a chilling description by those on the scene.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/pentagon-linguist-charged-with-exposing-us-spies-to-hezbollah/

A contractor for the Pentagon has been charged with providing classified U.S. intelligence to a Lebanese national connected with terrorist group Hezbollah, the Justice Department announced on Wednesday.

The department alleges Mariam Taha Thompson, 61, began transmitting the classified intelligence around December 30, when Iraqi militiamen stormed the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Thompson is a linguist who at the time was working at a U.S. special forces base in Erbil in northern Iraq.

The classified “files contained classified national defense information including true names, personal identification data, background information, and photographs of the human sources, as well as operations cables detailing information the human sources provided to the United States government,” read an FBI affidavit filed in the case.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/doj-battle-against-chinese-communist-infiltration-reaches-historic-scale_3260176.html

The Justice Department (DOJ) campaign to counter the Chinese Communist Party’s multifaceted onslaught on U.S. interests has ramped up to an unprecedented level, according to government officials and documents.

As of last month, the FBI was conducting roughly 1,000 investigations into China’s attempted theft of trade secrets, just one of many fronts in the communist regime’s wide-ranging campaign against the United States. Every FBI field office was working on trade secrets theft cases involving China with potential victims spanning almost every sector and industry, according to FBI Director Christopher Wray.

With the DOJ and the FBI under relentless partisan fire over politically charged domestic investigations dating back to the 2016 presidential election, the initiative to counteract the offensive by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has ramped up to a historic scale while going largely unnoticed. According to a review of DOJ press releases, the department has brought more indictments related to Chinese infiltration since 2019 than during the entire eight years of the Obama administration.

“We believe that no country poses a greater threat than communist China,” John Brown, an assistant director at the FBI, said during a Feb. 6 conference. “From our vantage point the United States has not faced a similar threat like this since the Soviet Union and the Cold War.”

https://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/2020/03/02/is-america-falling-behind-in-opposing-radical-islam/

Americans expect their nation to be the leader in opposing serious threats to world peace and security. While there is room for differences regarding how best to approach these threats, Americans were at the front lines, real and rhetorical, in the battles with fascism and communism, as well as the war against radical Islam dubbed the Global War on Terror.

U.S. leadership -under President Trump- was indispensable in rolling back the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. And the U.S. has continued to aggressively target individual terrorist leaders, including the recent targeted killing of AQAP leader Qassim Al-Rimi and Iranian terrorist leader Qassem Soleimani.

But in the larger ideological fight the U.S. has been largely absent despite President Trump’s clarion call from Riyadh to “drive out” radicals from our midst.

As Lorenzo Vidino of the George Washington University Program on Extremism notes in Foreign Policy, major changes are taking place to the way European governments understand the threat posed by Islamist ideology, which they increasingly view as a more significant threat than kinetic jihadist violence. Vidino writes:

Various countries have adopted measures aimed at tackling certain aspects: banning foreign funding (as Austria did) or limiting it (as the Netherlands is discussing); training imams (as Germany does) and deporting radical ones (Italy does this more than any other country); and cutting public funding to organizations connected to Islamist networks for religious, social, pro-integration, anti-Islamophobia, or radicalization prevention activities (as Sweden recently did for a Muslim Brotherhood youth group that did not “fulfill the democracy requirement” necessary to receive aid).

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/mar/4/fbi-missed-chances-stop-domestic-terror-attacks-be/?utm_source=onesignal&utm_campaign=pushnotify&utm_medium=push

The FBI missed opportunities to stop domestic terrorists from killing Americans because field offices failed to further investigate individuals who had been labeled homegrown violent extremists, the Justice Department watchdog said in a scathing report released Wednesday.

At least six terrorists who later carried out attacks killing a total of 70 people were on the FBI’s radar prior to the attacks. However, the agents quickly closed the cases, concluding the suspects were not threats to national security, according to the Justice Department inspector general.

Among the more high-profile individuals the FBI failed to recognize as a potential source of terrorism were Omar Mateen, who killed 49 individuals at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in 2016, Nidal Hasan, who massacred 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009, and Esteban Santiago, who killed five people in a 2017 terror attack at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.

Inspector General Michael Horowitz said the FBI’s counterterrorism program division managers failed to conduct consistent oversight of its homegrown violent extremist assessments, allowing potential terrorists to fall through the cracks.