RUTHFULLY YOURS

Iranian dissident Mansoor Osanloo, the exiled former head of the bus driver’s union in Tehran, was savagely attacked on Tuesday, May 1, while traveling on a PATH train into New York City, and left for dead.

Multiple assailants sprayed him with a corrosive chemical, then clubbed him in the back of the neck with what appears to have been a tire iron. He lay in a coma for several days and required 17 stitches in his neck.

I spoke with Osanloo on Monday, not long after he awoke from a coma.

“I don’t remember anything,” he said. “But you can see from the pictures that I was sprayed with some kind of a chemical weapon and smashed in the head.This was a terrorist attack.”

Photographs taken at the hospital show a horribly-disfugured Osanloo. The burns to his skin are reminiscent of mustard gas attacks.

Osanloo has been instrumental in planning mass protests across Iran in recent months, and is the most prominent Iranian labor leader, in Iran or in exile. He was traveling to the New York studio of Iran International Television for an interview at the invitation of broadcaster Askar Ramazanzadi.

It remains unclear who funds the new “exile” TV based in London. But it has attracted many former broadcasters from Voice of America, such as Mohammad Manzapour, who were forced to resign from VOA because of alleged ties to the Islamic State of Iran authorities.

Matin Azizi-Yarand had two cats and an older sister. He had taken taekwondo and piano lessons.

But while he went through life as a normal high school student, living with his parents in a home in a bland residential development in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, he was also plotting to murder as many non-Muslims as he could at a shopping mall. Unlike the green lawns of nearby houses, the Azizi family had a dead lawn. And there was something just as dead behind the high windows of its Plano home.

“There is a Hindu temple I want to shoot up,” Matin messaged. Then he moved on to plotting an attack at Plano West High School, which he attended and where he was eventually arrested. “School is a perfect place for an attack. Even a blind man could take 10 easily,” he gloated. His ISIS contact had told him that killing ten or a hundred infidels would be easy. “Just fire where you hear screams.”

But finally he settled on the Stonebriar Centre, a shopping mall in nearby Frisco. He collected pictures and scouted the mall. “The security guards don’t even have guns lmao,” he messaged.

Matin worried that the civilians in the mall might have concealed weapons. And he made plans for ambushing the one armed officer in the mall. “I’d actually like to make a cop surrender and drop his gun, then douse him with gasoline and burn him.”

The area has a large Muslim community and Matin didn’t want to harm the Muslim “sisters” who frequented the mall. So he decided to attack during Ramadan, “iftar time//to limit Muslim casualties.”

“No Muslims are going to be at mall when it’s time to be breaking your fast//in sha Allah. (Allah willing)”

His victims might be Hindus, his fellow students, or random shoppers at Stonebridge mall. Matin and his correspondent only worried about accidentally killing non-Muslims. They considered taking hostages to better weed out any Muslims from the Americans whom they would stab, shoot, or burn to death.

A Congressional Committee report states that a large electromagnetic pulse (EMP) inundating America could cause 90% of Americans to die. The EMP is inevitable. The dead Americans are not.

Mark Levin invited Dr. Peter Pry on to his show to illuminate this issue. It’s not hard to see why Pry is considered America’s foremost expert on this topic. He has two PhDs, a certificate on nuclear weapon design, worked at the CIA for a decade, worked on the House Armed Services Committee, and then served as Director of the EMP Committee.

Pry explained that an EMP can happen a few different ways: if adversary attacks America using nuclear weapons, or naturally via a large solar storm. The reason a large EMP hitting earth is inevitable is that solar storms are inevitable. They happen regularly. The only question is when a large one will cross earth’s path. For instance, NASA reported that if a solar superstorm from 2012 had happened just one week earlier, it would have blasted the earth with a catastrophic EMP. We are playing this slot machine every day. Eventually we’re going to hit the jackpot.

Actually, we have already been hit by a large solar storm. In 1859, the Carrington Event melted circuits, caused forest fires when telegraph wires burst into flames, and even destroyed the transatlantic cable placed miles beneath the surface of the ocean.

UN Ambassador Nikki Haley warned at a UN Security Council briefing on the nerve agent attack in the UK that “we are rapidly confronting a frightening new reality — if chemical weapons can appear in a small English town, where might they start appearing next?”

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) Report on the Attack in Salisbury confirmed the British conclusion that the “high purity” nerve agent used in the attack was Russian Novichok. The UK says it was delivered in liquid form; one of the highest concentrations investigators has found was on Sergei Skripal’s front door handle.

Skripal, a former Russian spy who fed intelligence to the Brits from 1995 to 2004 and was sent to the UK in a spy exchange in 2010, and his daughter Yulia collapsed March 4 at a shopping center in Salisbury. The first police officer on scene, Nick Bailey, was hospitalized in serious condition and later released. A restaurant and a pub in the center tested positive for traces of the nerve agent.

“Last week, the Council met five times to discuss the chemical weapons attack in Douma. Today, we are here yet again talking about chemical weapons. This time, it’s about a military grade nerve agent used against two people on British soil. In the constant push of meeting after meeting here in this chamber, it’s easy to lose track of what this means,” Haley said at the UNSC meeting.

Security, industry and government officials are increasingly warning that the U.S. electrical power grid faces potential widespread failure from broad-based, systemic threats such as a cyberattack or massive electromagnetic pulse (EMP) disturbance. Indeed, nations as varied as North Korea, Iran, China and Russia have hacked into the U.S power grid. As for EMPs, a senior Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official recently testified before Congress, “EMP can cause widespread disruption and serious damage to electronic devices and networks, including those upon which many critical infrastructures rely.” These so-called “grid-down” risks have yet to be met with the urgency they demand, but time is not on our side.

On the one hand, following growing awareness of the system’s vulnerability to such threats, Duke Energy recently added EMP threats to its emergency plans. Even Congress has gotten engaged by passing EMP-related provisions in the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act which, among other actions, directs DHS to include various grid-down scenarios into its planning and exercises.

Yet there has been little progress beyond studies and assessments, many of which conclude that we need more studies and assessments. This is happening even as the potential of conflict this year with Iran and North Korea seems worrisomely high.

If so many authorities agree grid-down cyber and EMP threats are real, why isn’t more being done? The answer, regrettably, lies hidden somewhere in the conflicting roles and responsibilities held by multiple federal, state and local public-sector stakeholders and the thousands of private sector firms that actually run the power grid.

Who sets the standards, who pays for the research, who implements the remedies, and who is liable if they don’t work? The answers, according to most people in each camp, always seems to be the same: “someone else.”

The First Gulf War put American technological advantage on display against an adversary with no means to respond. Media images released throughout the campaign paid tribute to smart bombs, long-range rockets, and vastly improved ground, air and sea-based systems. America’s technological abilities were awe-inspiring.

A quarter-century later, the United States continues to seek technological superiority. Laser weapons, artificial intelligence and unmanned systems—the very stuff of sci-fi movies—are within our grasp. Unfortunately, such advances do not provide the comfort level they previously did.

Unlike the hapless Iraqi Army circa 1991, today’s potential threats and adversaries have the means to respond. Gulf War-era technological advantages like night vision and GPS are becoming commonplace. Advances in computer and information technology enable adversaries to develop new tactics in cyberspace. And nation states have invested in weapon systems and strategies that offset American advantages.

Geography, another traditional American advantage, no longer acts as a protective security barrier. Terror cells and cyber warriors have already shown they can penetrate our borders and deliver devastating blows. The Homeland is no longer a safe haven to build might and project power. Our factories, military bases, and infrastructure will high priority targets in a future war.