RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/25/space-force

In the October 15, 2018 edition of Strategika I wrote: “Three cheers for President Trump’s decision to add a Space Force to the Navy, Marines, Army, Air Force, and Coast Guard.” I was enthusiastic because, “though the logic of war and technology has long counseled establishing a U.S Space Force, the logic of military bureaucracy has forestalled it. . . .For human beings to turn any technology’s potential to military effect, those who really want to do it must be in a position to make it happen . . . that is why establishing the U.S Space Force is no mere rewiring of bureaucratic diagrams.”

But the directive that formally establishes that force, which Trump signed last Tuesday in response to bureaucratic and corporate resistance, is nothing more than a dysfunctional rewiring.

Specifically: though dominance of orbital space has become ever more vital to all other military functions, as well as for protection of our satellites and for defense against ballistic missiles, U.S. space policy has been in the hands of the Air Force, which has regarded what happens in space as subordinate to its traditional missions and—to say the least—has not made a priority of either satellite warfare or missile defense.

Establishing the U.S. Space Force was supposed to change all that. It won’t. Trump’s words notwithstanding, the directive he signed reaffirms the Air Force’s control over orbital space matters.

At the February 19 signing ceremony, Trump said, “With today’s action, we will ensure that our people are secure, our interests are protected, and our power continues to be unmatched. There will be nobody that can come close to matching us. It won’t be close.”

https://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/timeline-of-the-isis-bride/

What are we to make of the ISIS bride who now wants to return to America? Hoda Muthana left her home in Alabama in 2014 to join the terrorist “caliphate” of ISIS in Syria. Now, reportedly thrice-married to ISIS terrorists, twice-widowed, and recently arrived with her 18-month-old son at a Kurdish-run refugee camp in northern Syria, she says she “deeply regrets” joining ISIS, and wants to come back to the United States.

How this plays out under U.S. law is likely to be decided by the legal wranglers in court, based on technicalities of dates and documents. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has called her a terrorist, described her as having inflicted “enormous risk” on Americans, and released a statement that she is not a U.S. citizen and does not have any legal basis to travel to the United States. President Trump has tweeted that he has instructed Pompeo “not to allow Hoda Muthana back into the Country!” Hoda’s father, Ahmed Ali Muthana, a naturalized U.S. citizen, is now suing Trump, Pompeo and Attorney General William Barr to have Hoda and her son “declared to be U.S. citizens and returned to the United States,” which, according to the complaint, is what she wants, even if that could mean facing criminal prosecution.

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/flashback-comeys-fbi-embraced-american-isis-terrorist-helped-him-get-justice-department-job/

One of the biggest questions for Western governments that has played out in recent days in the American media is what to do with Western ISIS recruits who are now in the custody of U.S.-backed forces as the Islamic State’s geographical military presence collapses into nothing.

At least one previous case involving disgraced former FBI Director James Comey — where the FBI under his direction welcomed back an American ISIS terrorist from Syria and gave him a job working with the Justice Department — may be an example of how *not* to handle such cases.

The American media are now rallying around the plight of Alabama ISIS bride Hoda Muthana, who left the U.S. for Syria to marry an ISIS fighter in 2014.

The script that Muthana and her attorneys appear to be following is the case of Brooklyn ISIS terrorist Mohimanul Alam Bhuiya, who joined the terror group in Syria in June 2014 and defected back to the U.S. with FBI assistance later that same year.

Bhuiya was charged with material support for terrorism upon his return and faced 25 years in prison, but a federal judge last June sentenced him to supervised release with no jail time thanks to the intervention and recommendation of his Justice Department co-workers.

According to the Wall Street Journal, he now works with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn. CONTINUE AT SITE

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.