RUTHFULLY YOURS

ISIS has called for jihadis in the U.S. to use trucks to kill as many attendees as possible at this year’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City.http://www.foreigndesknews.com/world/middle-east/isis-suggests-targeting-macys-thanksgiving-day-parade-ramming-trucks-crowds/

The terror group posted a new message to potential jihadis in the third issue of its Rumiyah (Rome) Magazine intended for its supporters in the West, suggesting that using cars in high-speed ram attacks are the easiest and most effective way to cause major carnage.

“Very few actually comprehend the deadly and destructive capability of the motor vehicle and its capacity of reaping large numbers of casualties if used in a premeditated manner,” the post states, emphasizing the success of the Bastille Day attack in Nice, France July 14 in which Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel’s killed 85 and injured 434 by intentionally ramming a cargo truck through a crowded promenade.

“The method of such an attack is that a vehicle is plunged at a high speed into a large congregation of kuffar, smashing their bodies…crushing their heads, torsos, and limbs under the vehicle’s wheels and chassis – and leaving behind a trail of carnage,” the post says.

And when a jihadi comes to choose a potential target, they advice, priority should be given to the accessibility of vehicles.

Practical locations to target include large outdoor gatherings, heavily congested streets, festivals, parades and political rallies.

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A photo of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade appears with the caption beneath: “An excellent target.”

“It has been shown that smaller vehicles are incapable of granting the level of carnage that is sought,” the author argues, citing that one of the central reasons for this is that smaller cars don’t have the weight and wheel span needed to cause a large number of casualties.

Following up on their October instructions for lone jihadists to conduct knife attacks, the Islamic State’s latest magazine offers tactical instructions on how to use a vehicle as a weapon to inflict the greatest damage.

Their muse, of course, is Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, who plowed a cargo truck through a crowd of Bastille Day revelers in Nice, France, this summer.

“Vehicles are like knives, as they are extremely easy to acquire. But unlike knives, which if found in one’s possession can be a cause for suspicion, vehicles arouse absolutely no doubts due to their widespread use throughout the world,” states the article in the third issue of Rumiyah, ISIS’ recently launched monthly English-language magazine, adding that cars are one of the “safest and easiest” weapons as well as “most successful in harvesting large numbers of the kuffar [disbelievers].”

ISIS encourages shying away from budget sedans and “off-roaders, SUVs, and four-wheel drive vehicles” that “lack the necessary attributes required for causing a blood bath” as “smaller vehicles lack the weight and wheel span required for crushing many victims.” They recommended trucks with double wheels for “giving victims less of a chance to escape being crushed by the vehicle’s tires.” Long semi trucks are discouraged because of the possibility of jack-knifing.

The article encourages jihadists to find a vehicle with a “metal outer frame which are usually found in older cars, as the stronger outer frame allows for more damage to be caused when the vehicle is slammed into crowds, contrary to newer cars that are usually made of plastics and other weaker materials.”

A picture of a U-Haul truck is shown with the caption “an affordable weapon.”

On the next page of the article, a picture of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade is shown with the words “an excellent target.”

It was encouraging Wednesday to hear that President Obama intends to emulate President Bush, who generously provided Obama with a highly informative and smooth transition process.

Running the executive branch is a daunting task, so there is no aspect of the transition to a new administration that is unimportant. But obviously, the most crucial focus for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who is heading up President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team, must be national security.

That transition is going to be more complicated than it should be, but there are things Gov. Christie can do – better to say, people he ought to consult — to make sure his team is getting accurate information.

The Bush National Security Council was very good about putting together briefing books so their successors could hit the ground running. The problem now, however, is the trustworthiness of what is in those books.

As PJ Media has reported, a highly disturbing report by a congressional task force this summer found that the Obama administration had politicized its intelligence product.

Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS), who has been stellar on national security issues and was among the leaders of the task force (comprised of the Intelligence, Armed Services, and Appropriations Committees), put it this way when the report was issued:

After months of investigation, this much is very clear: from the middle of 2014 to the middle of 2015, the United States Central Command’s most senior intelligence leaders manipulated the command’s intelligence products to downplay the threat from ISIS in Iraq.

The result: consumers of those intelligence products were provided a consistently “rosy” view of U.S. operational success against ISIS. That may well have resulted in putting American troops at risk as policymakers relied on this intelligence when formulating policy and allocating resources for the fight.

The intelligence manipulation became a controversy in 2015, when 50 intelligence-community whistleblowers complained that their reports on the Islamic State and al-Qaeda terror networks were being altered.

“With this ruling, Judge Haight contributes to the slander of one of the world’s most professional police forces and encourages anti-cop activists to escalate their demands—all while making it more difficult to keep New Yorkers safe from attack.”

This week a federal judge fed the myth of a New York City police department bent on violating the rights of innocent Muslims by unlawfully spying on them.

Senior District Judge Charles Haight did so in an extraordinary ruling rejecting a settlement that Mayor Bill de Blasio had reached with liberal activists and Muslim groups. Though the settlement was good enough for the progressives, somehow it wasn’t for Judge Haight. He’s ordered them to return with an agreement that would give the court and a civilian appointee more authority over how police operate.

Never mind that the judge’s decision is mostly based on a politicized inspector general’s report that never found evidence of the widespread spying on innocent Muslims that was alleged. Or that most of the “violations” in this same report had to do with timetables and deadlines, not spying. The judge nonetheless ruled the cops were guilty of “near-systemic violations” of the so-called Handschu guidelines—which date from a 1985 settlement approved by Judge Haight in a class-action suit originally involving the Black Panthers and Communists.

Lost in this legal fog is the truth that the program at issue was never about Muslim “surveillance.” This was about the police gathering intelligence that would help them identify places and neighborhoods where a terrorist might seek a job, a meal or a place to crash. Such information would have come in handy if, say, the Tsarnaev brothers, after bombing the 2013 Boston Marathon, had made their way to New York City to bomb Times Square as they’d planned.

It speaks to the real agenda that one of the activist demands included in the earlier settlement was that the NYPD would purge from its website a 2007 report called “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat.” The activists claimed the report was being used to justify discriminatory surveillance on Muslims. CONTINUE AT SITE

There are four cyber-security stories that have cropped up recently to which everyone should be paying close attention:

This past week, DMV offices all over California had their computer systems shut down by what was apparently a hardware failure. There’s evidently no reason to suspect the DMV’s systems were attacked, but the incident shows off the frailty of government computer systems, the ease with which the whole edifice can collapse when a single brick is smashed (accidentally or intentionally).

The week before, websites all over the country were shut down when a major American Domain Name System host was attacked. DNS hosts handle the conversion of web addresses that make sense to men — say, NationalReview.com — into the universal system of numerical addresses that make sense to computers. Without the conversion of one to the other, the name you type into your browser’s address bar won’t connect you to that website’s servers; your internet provider won’t understand what you’re looking for. Unless you know your destination website’s IP address (National Review’s is, for instance, 104.16.126.47) and unless it allows direct IP access (National Review does not) the website becomes inaccessible.

That is exactly what happened to large swaths of the Internet two weeks ago, when Dyn, one of the U.S.’s major DNS hosts, was flooded by a tidal wave of artificial internet traffic. It tried to convert addresses for so many fake browsing requests that it was unable to respond to the real ones, like a bartender getting 10,000 orders for Banana Daiquiris just before you try to order a beer. With their DNS host overwhelmed, sites such as Twitter, CNN, Paypal, Reddit, Spotify, and Netflix stopped working.

One week before that, WikiLeaks began publishing John Podesta’s e-mails, and the Clinton campaign decided that it would try to redirect the story toward Russia, which they say is responsible for stealing Podesta’s email. That might not be true; it’s certainly possible that it is — various intelligence agencies seem to think so. There is no doubt that Russia would like to tamper with our elections, or, short of that, to appear to be tampering with them. Because the Obama administration has a more or less established policy of non-response to cyber-attacks — from Russia, from China, from North Korea, from Iran — the Kremlin no doubt felt comfortable giving it a try.

LOS ANGELES—Federal prosecutors charged two California men with conspiring to smuggle fighter-jet parts to Iran in a scheme that allegedly dates to 2009.

The pair worked with two Iranian nationals to break laws that restrict exports to the longtime U.S. adversary, the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles said in a statement Friday.

A nine-count federal indictment unsealed Wednesday alleged that Zavik Zargarian of Glendale tried to help one of the Iranians purchase more than $3 million worth of parts for fighter jets, including F-15s and F-18s. Their would-be supplier was an undercover federal agent.

Prosecutors also said Vache Nayirian of Los Angeles exported more than 7,000 fluorocarbon rubber O-rings, which could have military uses, including for aircraft landing gear.

To evade detection, the shipments went to other destinations in the Persian Gulf before being routed to Iran, where the national air force received them, prosecutors said.

Both defendants have been assigned court-appointed attorneys and pleaded not guilty Wednesday. The attorney representing Mr. Nayirian questioned the strength of the government’s case, given that it began seven years ago and a grand jury produced the indictment in 2014.