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HOMELAND SECURITY

Another Muslim-American Soldier Turns to Terrorism Exposing where his true loyalties lie. Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/another-muslim-american-soldier-turns-terrorism-raymond-ibrahim/

Cole Bridges, a 20-year-old American who joined the U.S. Army in late 2019—and who was earlier described as “a polite, responsible and trustworthy teen”—was recently arrested and faces two federal charges: “attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State group and the attempted murder of U.S. military service members.”

Earlier, in October, 2020, Bridges, a convert to Islam, came into contact with an FBI online covert employee (OCE) posing as a Muslim supporter of and in contact with the Islamic State.  In their communiques, Bridges made clear that his allegiance was to Islam and jihad, not America and its soldiers.  According to the criminal complaint against him:

BRIDGES then provided training and guidance to purported ISIS fighters who were planning attacks, including advice about potential targets in New York City, such as the 9/11 Memorial.  BRIDGES also provided the OCE with portions of a U.S. Army training manual and guidance about military combat tactics, for use by ISIS.

In or about December 2020, BRIDGES began to supply the OCE with instructions for the purported ISIS fighters on how to attack U.S. forces in the Middle East.  Among other things, BRIDGES diagrammed specific military maneuvers intended to help ISIS fighters maximize the lethality of attacks on U.S. troops.  BRIDGES further provided advice about the best way to fortify an ISIS encampment to repel an attack by U.S. Special Forces, including by wiring certain buildings with explosives to kill the U.S. troops.  Then, in January 2021, BRIDGES provided the OCE with a video of himself in body armor standing before a flag often used by ISIS fighters and making a gesture symbolic of support for ISIS.  Approximately a week later, BRIDGES sent a second video in which BRIDGES, using a voice manipulator, narrated a propaganda speech in support of the anticipated ambush by ISIS on U.S. troops.

Beijing Fills the Mideast Vacuum China’s projection of power isn’t only a regional concern. It will eventually pose a threat to the U.S. By Robert D. Kaplan

https://www.wsj.com/articles/beijing-fills-the-mideast-vacuum-11611183756?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

The Biden administration’s Middle East policy will reportedly focus on rejoining the Iran nuclear deal and renewing Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. This could undermine key allies in Israel and Saudi Arabia while ignoring a core geopolitical challenge that few in Washington are addressing: growing Chinese influence in the Middle East.

Through its trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative, China has invested in a port near the Persian Gulf in Gwadar, Pakistan, and a military base by the entrance to the Red Sea at Djibouti. The Chinese also envision a military base at Port Sudan, further north on the Red Sea, and a naval facility at Jiwani, Pakistan, on the Iranian border. Then there are the new Israeli port facilities at Haifa and Ashdod, which the Chinese will likely be administering. Afghanistan could one day become a branch line for the Belt and Road corridor from western China through Pakistan to the Arabian Sea. China is the largest trading partner for both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. China is investing billions of dollars in Egypt and more billions as part of a strategic pact with Iran.

Unlike many in Washington, who separate regions in order of perceived importance, Chinese strategists think organically about geography. They recognize that in a smaller, more interconnected and confining world, regions and continents work together and flow into each other. Thus, the Chinese know that the road, railway and port system they are building across the Middle East will one day give them a strong hand in Europe and East Asia—not to mention East Africa.

Beijing doesn’t take sides. China is happy to work with Iran, Israel and Saudi Arabia. Rather than promote a liberal vision—or any vision—the Chinese are remorselessly mercantile and imperial in their approach. It’s all about money and transportation links: classical geography fitted to a postmodern world.

How an ISIS Member Got Past Immigration and Became a U.S. Citizen Over a thousand Iraqi refugees have been resettled in Portland. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/how-isis-member-got-past-immigration-and-became-us-daniel-greenfield/

The year that the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Trump administration’s Islamic terror state travel ban, an Iraqi member of ISIS applied for American citizenship.

Hawazen Sameer Mothafar didn’t have much to worry about. Not only was he already living in the United States, but under political pressure, Iraq had been taken off the travel ban list.

And no one would have suspected Mothafar of being an ISIS terrorist. He was in a wheelchair.

When Mothafar was asked at his immigrantion interview this year whether he was involved with a terrorist organization, he must have thought it was a formality. But three months later, Mothafar was under arrest, charged with lying to a government agency, and aiding ISIS.

Mothafar not only managed to get through an immigration interview while denying any terrorist ties, but he spoke in court through an Arabic translator, suggesting a poor grasp of English.

Not only did our immigration system make an alleged ISIS member a citizen, but took an immigrant with nothing to offer this country, who doesn’t even speak the language, and who, according to his lawyer, has to be cared for by his family, and welcomed him in.

Over a thousand Iraqi refugees have been resettled in Portland, Oregon. The small city of Troutdale near Portland, once an all-American locale perfect for picture postcards, has absorbed some of the spillover. And there was nothing all-American about Mothafar.

Mothafar hadn’t come to Troutdale for the annual summerfest parade (cancelled this year because of the pandemic) or hiking past waterfalls. When he came into town under the great ‘Gateway to the Gorge’ arch that’s Troutdale’s claim to fame, he was coming for Jihad.

China Using Covid to Overtake America’s Economy by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16902/china-covid-economy

China’s economy is worse than it appears, and its vaccines, needed for a full recovery, are still in development, far behind America’s. In the meantime, Beijing’s response to the coronavirus, which includes the smearing of America, is resulting in China losing friends worldwide.

Government stimulus is powering much of the current growth as are net exports. Yet the current “flood of defaults” in China points to widespread weakness. Beijing’s spending spree, therefore, is not sustainable, even with the help of foreign investment.

Ultimately, the economy will recover only when China has an effective and safe vaccine. Although the Chinese have had months of head start, they are far behind America.

China is fast losing support in capitals around the world. It is not hard to figure out why. Chinese ruler Xi Jinping deliberately spread the virus beyond China’s borders — by lying about the transmissibility of the disease and, while locking down Wuhan, forcing countries to take arrivals from China — and others are now starting to understand the maliciousness of the Communist Party. Moreover, they are learning about its venality. For instance, China this spring sold Italy medical protective gear that Italians had donated to Beijing a few weeks earlier.

The U.K.-based Centre for Economics and Business Research believes that, due to China’s superior response to COVID-19, the Chinese economy will become the world’s largest by 2028, five years earlier than previously forecast.

“For some time, an overarching theme of global economics has been the economic and soft power struggle between the United States and China,” the Centre wrote in a December 26 report. “The COVID-19 pandemic and corresponding economic fallout have certainly tipped this rivalry in China’s favor.”

No, it has not. In fact, the opposite looks to be true. The Centre’s prediction, which mimics one of Beijing’s narratives, is more than just premature. It is based on fundamentally wrong assumptions.

Drug Trafficking: The Dirtiest Little Secret by Chris Farrell

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16874/mexico-border-drug-trafficking

In a border community like El Paso, the Mexican cartels have an insidious, silent and powerful control that few people wish to acknowledge or accept — that includes a largely compliant news media who usually report what happens, but rarely, if ever, ask “Why?” or “How can this go on, decade after decade, without accountability or resolution?”

If a population is dying from overdoses that is one-third as large as the COVID pandemic — and we don’t see, don’t hear about it, and apparently don’t really care about it, what does that say about us?

Tens of thousands of law enforcement officers, billions of taxpayer dollars, fifty years — and the highest overdose rate in history? It is terribly unpopular to blame law enforcement, especially when they are being unfairly attacked by the militant fringe elements like Antifa and various lunatic municipal officials seeking to defund them — but cleaning house within various agencies and increasing police pay would go a long way towards thwarting our greatest domestic threat.

A year ago, President Donald J. Trump declared he would name Mexican Cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. He paused his decision, and then tabled it, based on assurances from Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and a reported wave of resistance from his own cabinet. The incoming Biden administration has the cartels virtually “high-fiving” each other — they know a Biden administration will do nothing to stop cartel dominance and control of the US-Mexico border.

Here is the answer: Law enforcement corruption. The question? Why are we continuing to fight and lose the “War on Drugs,” proclaimed by President Nixon, almost fifty years ago, in June 1971?

Think about the U.S. forces arrayed against Mexican drug cartels: DEA, FBI, Homeland Security, state police forces, county sheriffs, municipal police forces, even the postal service. We have established High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area task forces with their own regional fusion centers.

Terror Arrest Highlights How Perilous Biden’s Immigration Plans Are Biden administration would order U.S. to lower its shields. Michael Cutler

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/terror-arrest-highlights-how-perilous-bidens-michael-cutler/

On December 16, 2020 the Justice Department issued a press release about the arrest of alleged terrorist, Cholo Abdi Abdullah, who was conspiring with other terrorists from an al Qaeda-affiliated terror organization to carry out a 9/11-style terror attack inside the United States.  This substantiates a point I have made on numerous occasions, where the threats posed to America and Americans by foreign radical Islamic Terrorist organizations are concerned, the “All Clear” has most certainly not been sounded. 

However apparently Joe Biden and Kamal Harris never got or, more likely, never read the memo. 

Biden and Harris have both enthusiastically promised (threatened) to all but end immigration law enforcement and remove the restrictions that prohibit the entry of aliens from countries that sponsor terrorism and whose backgrounds cannot be effectively vetted.

While the media refers to the countries on the list of those countries as being “Muslim majority countries” implying that the so-call “travel ban” which is actually an entry restriction, was created to target Muslims, in reality, has nothing to do with religion but national security.  The  countries on that very limited list have a direct nexus to terrorism and for a variety of reasons, our officials are unable to effectively vet the citizens of those countries.

In point of fact, the three most populous Muslim-majority countries are Indonesia, Pakistan and India.  Yet those countries do not appear on that list.

For Americans to be happy that Biden would eliminate that entry restriction makes as much sense as a flock of chickens celebrating that Colonel Sanders has announced a new recipe for fried chicken!

Yes, Cyber-Spying is That Bad Shoshana Bryen and Stephen Bryen

https://www.newsweek.com/yes-cyber-spying-that-bad-opinion-1556487

The United States has been attempting to strengthen its cybersecurity since at least 1988, when it enacted the first Computer Security Act—replaced in 2002 by the Federal Security Management Act. It sounds great in concept: federal agencies are required to “develop, document, and implement” programs for security management “including those provided or managed by another agency, contractor, or other source.”

How’s it working out?

Solarwinds, a network management software company, was recently discovered to have had malware inserted into its products. Its clients’ systems have been compromised for as long as nine months. Someone—possibly the Russians, possibly the Chinese—has been inside the U.S. Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the Treasury Department and major American industries. The list gets longer every day.

The U.S. has a cybersecurity industry that costs the government and private companies billions of dollars. But all that is money down the toilet if the entire infrastructure is compromised—which it currently is. Virtually every computer and computer processor used in the United States is, in part or entirely, made in foreign countries, with China directly and indirectly providing 90 percent of the hardware. We haven’t been looking at hardware for possible infiltration, but we should have been.

Deep State Strike Force The obscure Senior Executive Service deploys in force against the people. Lloyd Billingsley

/https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/deep-state-strike-force-lloyd-billingsley/

The DOJ (Sessions, Rosenstein), FBI (Comey, Strzok), and CIA (Brennan) were all key players in the attempted coup against President Trump. As that unfolded, and long before, a more powerful agency was playing a bigger role, largely out of sight from the media and public.

The Senior Executive Service (SES) was established to “ensure that the executive management of the Government of the United States is responsive to the needs, policies, and goals of the Nation and otherwise is of the highest quality.” SES leaders “serve in the key positions just below the top Presidential appointees” as “the major link between these appointees and the rest of the Federal workforce. They operate and oversee nearly every government activity in approximately 75 Federal agencies,” including the State Department, the Army, Navy, the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security and the Department of Justice.

The SES launched during the Carter administration as part of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 and a response to the “moral and management failures of Watergate and Great Society program implementation.” The response was to create another bureaucracy more powerful than the others, “a cadre of high-level managers in the government.”  In 1981, Karlyn Barker of the Washington Post reported that the SES wasn’t working as intended, and that raised an issue.

Back in 1978, Rep. Herb Harris, Virginia Democrat, warned that the SES “will open the door to politicization.” The government provides evidence that the SES was political from the start.

China: The Conquest of Hollywood by Judith Bergman

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16842/china-films-hollywood-censorship

One Hollywood producer told PEN America that suggestions for projects critical of China aroused the fear that “you or your company will actively be blacklisted, and they will interfere with your current or future project. So not only will you bear the brunt [of your decision], but also your company, and future companies that you work for. And that’s absolutely in the back of our minds.”

“It’s not just the Hollywood issue, it’s not just the tech issue, it’s not just the basketball or the sports issue, or various other industries. … It’s all across the board. To get products and services into that market, there are certain rules you have to play… so they allow you access to the consumers. But those processes… have gotten worse and worse… and more amplified over time…. [It]has got to the point where we either need to stop it now and fight back, or we are just going to lose….” — Chris Fenton, Hollywood executive and author of Feeding the Dragon: Inside the Trillion Dollar Dilemma Facing Hollywood, the NBA, and American Business. voanews.com, October 16, 2020.

The problem is much larger than just the movie business.

In October, for the first time, China overtook North America as the world’s largest film market. “Movie ticket sales in China for 2020 climbed to $1.988 billion on Sunday, surpassing North America’s total of $1.937 billion, according to data from Artisan Gateway. The gap is expected to widen considerably by year’s end,” wrote The Hollywood Reporter on October 18. “Analysts have long predicted that the world’s most populous country would one day top the global charts. But the results still represent a historic sea change”.

“The day has finally arrived when China is the world’s No.1 film market, surpassing the box office total of North America for 2020,” said the authorized government portal site to China, published under the auspices of China’s State Council Information Office, also known as the CCP’s Foreign Propaganda Office, China.org.cn, in a self-congratulatory article, “China officially the world’s biggest film market.” The article, published on October 20, went on to mention the Chinese blockbuster, The Eight Hundred, a WWII movie about a group of Chinese soldiers under siege by the Japanese army, which was the highest grossing film in the world in 2020, as well as a handful of other Chinese-made films scheduled for release in the final quarter of 2020.

As Bad as That Hack of U.S. Government Agencies Was, It’s Far Worse Than You Think By Rick Moran

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/12/18/as-bad-as-that-hack-of-u-s-government-agencies-was-its-far-worse-than-you-think-n1218811

Information about the massive hack of U.S. government networks just keeps getting worse and worse. Now we learn that America’s nuclear infrastructure was probably compromised, starting with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees a broad range of nuclear activities and includes the NNSA — the National Nuclear Security Administration. It makes and stores the nuclear weapons.

Politico:

They found suspicious activity in networks belonging to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories in New Mexico and Washington, the Office of Secure Transportation at NNSA, and the Richland Field Office of the DOE.

The hackers have been able to do more damage at FERC than the other agencies, and officials there have evidence of highly malicious activity, the officials said, but did not elaborate.

It’s not likely the hackers were able to penetrate the really sensitive information. The Pentagon says that the malware employed only affected business systems.

“At this point, the investigation has found that the malware has been isolated to business networks only, and has not impacted the mission essential national security functions of the department, including the National Nuclear Security Administration,” Hynes said in a statement. “When DOE identified vulnerable software, immediate action was taken to mitigate the risk, and all software identified as being vulnerable to this attack was disconnected from the DOE network.”