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HOMELAND SECURITY

Who Deserves The Drug Cartels’ MVP Award? The growing list of those feeding the opioid crisis. Michael Cutler

There has been a long-standing debate as to whether or not marijuana is a “gateway drug” to hardcore drugs. However, there is no such debate about whether abused prescription opiates are gateway drugs to heroin and fentanyl — they are.

Today America finds itself suffering from the worst heroin epidemic in history.

The unprecedented numbers of Americans who have become addicted to prescription opiates provide the drug cartels with more potential “customers” than ever before and, as I noted in an article awhile back, Obama’s border failures have only made their business easier.

There are other parties who bear blame for the creation of this crisis as well. On Sunday, October 15, 2017 the CBS News program, “60 Minutes” aired an infuriating report, “Ex-DEA agent: Opioid crisis fueled by drug industry and Congress.”

That “ex-DEA agent” is Joe Rannazzisi who headed the DEA’s Office of Diversion Control, the division that regulates and investigates the pharmaceutical industry. According to the 60 Minutes report, “Rannazzisi tells the inside story of how, he says, the opioid crisis was allowed to spread — aided by Congress, lobbyists, and a drug distribution industry that shipped, almost unchecked, hundreds of millions of pills to rogue pharmacies and pain clinics providing the rocket fuel for a crisis that, over the last two decades, has claimed 200,000 lives.”

A subsequent Washington Post editorial detailed how the situation unfolded:

A DEA effort was undertaken in the mid-2000s to target drug distribution companies that were shipping unusually large volumes of opioids. For example, one midsize distributor had shipped 20 million doses to pharmacies in West Virginia over five years; 11 million doses went to one county alone with a population of 25,000 people. Some pharmacies in Florida were nothing more than illicit drug dens, with streams of customers arriving in vans from Appalachia. “Back home, each 30-pill bottle of oxycodone was worth $900,” The Post reports. By going after the distributors, the DEA hoped to stanch this deadly trade. The DEA brought at least 17 enforcement cases against 13 drug distributors and one manufacturer under a hard-charging head of the Office of Diversion Control, Joseph T. Rannazzisi.

Then the rules changed. The DEA originally could freeze drug shipments that posed an “imminent danger” to the community, giving the agency broad authority to act. In 2014, the industry launched an effort to slow enforcement by changing the standard. The legislation was sponsored by Rep. Tom Marino (R-Pa.) and aided by former DEA officials who went through the revolving door to help the drug companies.

The 60 Minutes report and a parallel eye-opening investigative report published by the Washington Post sent shockwaves around the country and resulted in Pennsylvania Congressman Tom Marino issuing a statement requesting that President Trump withdraw his name from consideration to lead the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) as the so-called “Drug Czar.”

Although I was an INS special agent, I had a front row seat to America’s purported “War on Drugs.” In 1988 I became the first INS special agent to be assigned to DEA’s Unified Intelligence Division (UID) in New York City. In 1991 I was promoted to the position of Senior Special Agent and assigned to the Organized Crime, Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF) where I remained for the balance of my career, working with the DEA, FBI and other federal and local law enforcement agencies and the law enforcement agencies of other governments.

I did not generally participate in DEA investigations into so-called “diversion” cases because those investigations rarely involved foreign nationals. However, what the excellent 60 Minutes report did not discuss was how, all too often, hapless patients who became hooked on prescription opiates were either unable to get more prescriptions for those drugs or were unable to continue to pay for those expensive drugs and, consequently, some of these desperate addicts have resorted to committing violent robberies at local pharmacies. Others resorted to cheaper street drugs such as heroin.

Somali Who Executed Canadian Terror Attack Entered U.S. Via Mexico see note pleas

Janet Levy wrote about the porous border for narco terrorists in February 2017: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/02/narcoterrorism_on_the_usmexico_border.html

Somali Who Executed Canadian Terror Attack Entered U.S. Via Mexico

The Somali terrorist who stabbed a Canadian police officer and ran over four pedestrians a few weeks ago entered the United States through the Mexican border and was released by Obama’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS), allowing him to continue his journey north. The ISIS operative, Abdulahi Hasan Sharif, was ordered deported, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spokeswoman told various media outlets recently, but was released on an “order of supervision” and the feds never saw him again.

Sharif entered the U.S. in 2011 through the San Ysidro port of entry in California without documentation and was briefly held at the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego, a local newspaper reported. A year later he crossed the border into Canada and settled in Edmonton after being granted refugee status. On September 30 he slammed into an Edmonton police officer with his car then got out of the vehicle and repeatedly stabbed the cop with a knife. After fleeing the scene, Sharif stole a truck and deliberately mowed down four pedestrians. Canadian authorities found an ISIS flag in his car and have charged him with multiple counts of attempted murder, criminal flight causing bodily harm and possession of a weapon. Two years ago, Canadian authorities investigated the 30-year-old terrorist for espousing extremist views. It’s disturbing that Sharif’s northbound trek took him through the U.S.-Mexico border.

As part of an ongoing investigation into cartels, corruption and terrorism, Judicial Watch has for years reported that Islamic extremists are entering the country through Mexico and that ISIS is operating in border towns just miles from American cities. Judicial Watch launched the project in 2014 by exposing a sophisticated narco-terror ring with strong ties to ISIS and connections running from El Paso to Chicago to New York City. Two of the FBI’s most wanted were embroiled in the operation that also had deep ties to Mexico. Less than a year later, Judicial Watch reported that ISIS is operating in a Mexican border town just eight miles from El Paso, the result of Islamic terrorists joining forces with drug cartels and human smugglers knowns as “coyotes.”

When Judicial Watch reported that Mexican cartels were smuggling foreigners from countries with terrorist links into a small Texas rural town, federal authorities publicly denied the story was true. Never the less, high-level sources on both sides of the border confirmed to Judicial Watch that foreigners, classified as Special Interest Aliens (SIA), were being transported to stash areas in Acala, a rural crossroads located around 54 miles from El Paso on a state road – Highway 20. Once in the U.S., the SIAs waited for pick-up in the area’s sand hills just across Highway 20. At the time a Texas Department of Public Safety report leaked by the media had already confirmed that for years members of known Islamist terrorist organizations had been apprehended crossing the southern border.

Last year a high-ranking DHS official told Judicial Watch that Mexican drug traffickers help Islamic terrorists stationed in Mexico cross into the United States to explore targets for future attacks. Among the jihadists that travel back and forth through the porous southern border is a Kuwaiti named Shaykh Mahmood Omar Khabir, an ISIS operative who lives in the Mexican state of Chihuahua not far from El Paso. Khabir trained hundreds of Al Qaeda fighters in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen and has lived in Mexico for more than a year, according to information provided by Judicial Watch’s government source. Now Khabir trains thousands of men—mostly Syrians and Yemenis—to fight in an ISIS base situated in the Mexico-U.S. border region near Ciudad Juárez, the intelligence gathered by Judicial Watch’s source reveals. Staking out U.S. targets is not difficult and Khabir actually bragged in an Italian newspaper article that the border region is so open that he “could get in with a handful of men, and kill thousands of people in Texas or in Arizona in the space of a few hours.” In the same article Mexico’s top diplomat, Foreign Affairs Secretary Claudia Ruiz, said “this new wave of fundamentalism could have nasty surprises in store for the United States.”

While much of the American mainstream media ignores that Sharif made it to Canada via the U.S.-Mexico border, it’s hardly surprising considering Islamic extremists have been infiltrating the country through the famously unprotected region for years. Referring to the recent Canadian attack, a think-tank dedicated to investigating the operations, funding, activities and front groups of Islamic extremists worldwide writes: “Fears about a terrorist using the U.S.-Mexican border as a gateway for an attack have been realized.”

Imran Awan Made “Massive” Data Transfers What did Democrats know and when did they know it? Lloyd Billingsley

Imran Awan was the preferred IT man for former DNC boss Debbie Wasserman Schultz and other prominent Democrats. When Awan attempted to flee the country in July, authorities busted him for bank fraud, but for Andrew McCarthy, who prosecuted “Blind Sheik” Omar Abdel-Rahman, “this appears to be a real conspiracy, aimed at undermining American national security.” Now some in Congress agree.

On Tuesday, Fox News reported, Rep. Scott Perry said Awan had made “massive” data transfers that posed a “substantial security threat.” Awan and four of his associates made 5,400 unauthorized logins on a single government server that belonged to Xavier Becerra, then head of House Democratic Caucus and now attorney general of California.

On October 6, Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller reported that Awan’s attorney wants to bar authorities from recovering data off the hard drive from a laptop with the username “RepDWS.” Capitol police found that laptop in a phone booth in the Rayburn House Office Building after Imran Awan had been banned from the House network from which he made massive data transfers.

Xavier Becerra was one of five House Democratic Caucus members who hired Imran Awan in 2004 but Becerra made more payments to Awan than any other Caucus member. Awan had access to data from 45 House Democrats including members of the House Intelligence and Foreign Affairs Committees. To access that kind of information requires a security clearance, and as Andrew McCarthy noted, Awan and his crew could not possibly have qualified for such a clearance.

Florida Democrat Debbie Wasserman granted Awan free access to her computer and also brought aboard Abid Awan’s wife Natalia Sova and Awan’s brother Jamal. Wasserman Schultz refused to fire Awan even after he became the target of a criminal investigation, and she threatened investigators when they sought to inspect a laptop that belonged to the intrusive IT man.

In August, Wasserman Schultz told the Sun-Sentinel she was concerned that Awan’s

due process rights were “being violated,” that the Muslim was “put under scrutiny because of his religious faith,” and that “the right-wing media circus fringe” was jumping to “outrageous, egregious conclusions that they have ties to terrorists and that they were stealing data.” Wasserman Schultz also said it was absurd to conclude that Awan was trying to flee the country.

As Luke Rosiak noted, when Imran Awan tried to board a flight to Pakistan in July he was carrying documents with an alias in the Jackson Heights, Queens neighborhood of New York City, and possibly planning to relocate there under a different identity. According to prosecutors, Awan was taking “active measures” to hide evidence, such as wiping clean his cell phone.

Awan’s attorney Chris Gowen is a former aide to Bill and Hillary Clinton. Gowen described Awan’s arrest as “clearly a right-wing media-driven prosecution by a United States Attorney’s Office that wants to prosecute people for working while Muslim.”

Some three months later, Rep. Scott Perry announced a “substantial security threat” from “massive” data breaches by the Democrats’ favorite IT man. Of all the IT men in all the IT companies in all the world, why did the Democrats hire Imran Awan? After learning that the Pakistani-born Muslim was under investigation, why did the Democrats keep paying him? And why did they bring on board other members of his family?

THE GLAZOV GANG WARNER MOMENT: THE NEAR ENEMY VIDEOS

This special edition of the Glazov Gang presents the Dr. Bill Warner Moment with Dr. Bill Warner, the president of politicalislam.com.http://jamieglazov.com/2017/10/09/warner-moment-the-near-enemy/

Bill focused on The Near Enemy, analyzing the urgency of opening of a new front in a civilizational war.

Don’t miss it!

And make sure to watch Dr. Warner focus on How to Use the Elements of Islam to Vet Muslim Migrants, where he asks: Is the Koran wrong or right about wife-beating, sexual slavery, killing unbelievers and political assassinations?

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel and to Jamie Glazov Productions. Also LIKE us on Facebook and LIKE Jamie’s FB Fan Page.
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Kirstjen Nielsen, White House Aide, Is Picked to Run Homeland Security By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS

WASHINGTON — President Trump said on Wednesday that he intended to name Kirstjen Nielsen, a top White House aide, to lead the Department of Homeland Security, elevating a former homeland security official in the George W. Bush administration who has lately worked to impose order in Mr. Trump’s chaotic West Wing.

Mr. Trump announced his choice in a statement that noted Ms. Nielsen’s “extensive professional experience in the areas of homeland security policy and strategy, cybersecurity, critical infrastructure and emergency management.” She is the first nominee for the homeland security post who had served in the department, according to the statement.

If confirmed, Ms. Nielsen would replace John F. Kelly, who was homeland security secretary until he left in July to serve as the White House chief of staff and bring discipline and direction to a West Wing plagued by disorganization and infighting. Mr. Kelly had drafted Ms. Nielsen to be his chief of staff at the Homeland Security department, and when the president plucked him for the White House, he brought her as his No. 2.

Known as a no-nonsense player and policy wonk, Ms. Nielsen appears unlikely to land at the center of the type of controversies that have engulfed Mr. Trump’s presidency. But her regimented style in a freewheeling and often dysfunctional West Wing frustrated some senior officials and people close to the president, who chafed under her dictates. On Wednesday, some of them described Ms. Nielsen’s promotion as a solution to a toxic personnel situation, while others fretted privately that her departure would create a void at the White House that would be difficult to fill.

Mr. Kelly pushed hard for her selection, making a personal appeal to Mr. Trump during a monthslong search process. Among the other candidates considered, according to people familiar with the process, was Representative Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas and the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.

Former colleagues said on Wednesday that Ms. Nielsen was well qualified.

“She’s a total homeland security expert — absolutely has no learning curve,” said Michael Allen, who worked with Ms. Nielsen during the Bush administration. “She’s an experienced manager, she’s an implementer, she knows how to get under the hood and figure out what needs to be connected to what.”

Added Frances Townsend, her boss at the White House during the Bush administration: “She is tough as nails, competent and has rightly earned the president’s respect.”

ISIS in Ohio (Part One): The Terror Attack at Ohio State University By Patrick Poole

Ohio State students returning from their Thanksgiving break last November had their first day back on campus shattered by one of their fellow students, Abdul Razak Ali Artan. He drove his brother’s grey Honda Civic into a crowd gathered outside Watts Hall on campus, injuring a number of them. He then emerged from the wrecked vehicle with an eight-inch knife and began attacking bystanders, some of whom were already tending to the injured.

The Islamic State would hail Artan the very next day, calling him a “soldier” and praising him for responding to their call for Muslims living in the West to conduct terror attacks in its name.

Artan, however, isn’t the only Islamic State “soldier” from Ohio to answer the terror group’s call.

In fact, a growing number of ISIS supporters and operatives have emerged from the Buckeye State over the past two years. The ISIS-inspired terror attack at Ohio State on November 28, 2016, should have been a wake-up call to the escalating problem in the state, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. Rather, the terror incident is yet another example of how the problem has been buried while the threat has metastasized.

Buckeye Battle Cry: “Run, Hide, Fight”

The pageantry of a football game at Ohio Stadium is among the top spectacles in American college athletics, with 100,000-plus fans (usually) cheering their team on to victory. The bells ringing after a score. The “Skull Session” with the football team and the marching band prior to the game. And the band’s entry into the stadium at the beginning of the game, leading the crowd with Ohio State’s fight song, “Buckeye Battle Cry.”

But after Abdul Razak Artan’s terror attack last year, Ohio State has a new fight song, as do hundreds of other college campuses: “Run, Hide, Fight.”

Artan’s victims didn’t have much time to run and hide when his car jumped the curb and rammed into a crowd of students. Eleven people were injured, most by the car-ramming; two were slashed by Artan with his knife. One victim had a fractured skull. Artan was shot and killed by a campus police officer two minutes after the attack began.

It was the first semester for the Logistics Management third-year student at Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business, having graduated cum laude in May 2016 with an associate’s degree from Columbus State Community College.

On his first day on campus, Artan was interviewed by the Ohio State student newspaper, The Lantern. He whined to the reporter about the absence of places for Muslims to pray on campus (there is a dedicated room at the student union) and about misconceptions other students might have about him and Islam if he prayed in public. The reporter later related how quickly Artan was able to recite from memory the laundry list of Islamic grievances, and his perception that Muslims were under siege in America from pervasive Islamophobia.

Among the courses he was taking that first semester was a class on “microaggressions” called “Crossing Identity Borders,” where students are encouraged to “identify ways in which they can challenge or address systems of power and privilege.”

One might say that given Artan’s background, he had already been the beneficiary of privilege.

Born and raised in Somalia, he and his family lived as refugees in Pakistan from 2007 until 2014, at which time they moved to the U.S. and received legal permanent resident status. Among the stated reasons for his family moving to America was his mother’s concern that she didn’t want Abdul Razak and his siblings being recruited by the Somali terror group Al-Shabaab.

First landing in Dallas for a few weeks, they were resettled in Columbus — home of the second largest Somali community in the country. He apparently quickly enrolled at Columbus State, which has one of the largest Muslim student populations of any higher education institution in America.

Artan’s friends in Ohio and Pakistan claimed that he “loved America,” but that contrasts dramatically with the Facebook post he left just three minutes before his attack: CONTINUE AT SITE

Homeland Security Uncovers Massive Immigration Failures The devastating consequences for national security. Michael Cutler

President Trump has been rightfully demanding that aliens who are citizens of countries that have an involvement with terrorism must undergo “extreme vetting.”

This is certainly an important and commonsense requirement. However, the computer systems used by both Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) inside the United States are unable to provide CBP inspectors at ports of entry the data they need to prevent transnational criminals and international terrorists from entering the country. Nor can these systems provide the vital information and records to USCIS adjudications officers that would allow them to prevent aliens present in the United States from improperly acquiring immigration benefits such as political asylum, lawful immigrant status and even United States citizenship.

Simply stated, today — more than 16 years after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 — the effective vetting of any alien seeking entry into the United States or for any alien seeking immigration benefits has been elusive goals.

The September 28, 2017 Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General’s (DHS OIG) report, “CBP’s IT Systems and Infrastructure Did Not Fully Support Border Security Operations,” noted:

CBP’s IT systems and infrastructure did not fully support its border security objective of preventing the entry of inadmissible aliens to the country. The slow performance of a critical pre-screening system greatly reduced Office of Field Operations officers’ ability to identify any passengers who may represent concerns, including national security threats. Further, incoming passenger screening at U.S. international airports was hampered by frequent system outages that created passenger delays and public safety risks. The outages required that CBP officers rely on backup systems that weakened the screening process, leading to officers potentially being unable to identify travelers that may be attempting to enter the United States with harmful intent.

On September 25, 2017, a report was published by DHS OIG on the distressing issue of individuals with multiple identities in US fingerprint enrollment records receiving immigration benefits. This disastrous situation has profound national security and public safety implications. Yet the report stated in part:

As of April 24, 2017, 9,389 aliens USCIS identified as having multiple identities had received an immigration benefit. When taking into account the most current immigration benefit these aliens received, we determined that naturalization, permanent residence, work authorization, and temporary protected status represent the greatest number of benefits, accounting for 8,447 or 90 percent of the 9,389 cases. Benefits approved by USCIS for the other 10 percent of cases, but not discussed in this report, include applications for asylum and travel documents. According to USCIS, receiving a deportation order or having used another identity does not necessarily render an individual ineligible for immigration benefits.

That last sentence should give us all serious cause for pause.

Apparently the “get to yes” philosophy of the Obama administration still permeates management at USCIS where adjudications officers were ordered to do whatever they had to do in order to approve virtually all applications for various immigration benefits.

We will, a bit later on, take a look back at how the Obama administration dismantled a program that sought to uncover immigration fraud and imbue the immigration benefits program with integrity.

But let’s first consider some additional facts.

Saudi government allegedly funded a ‘dry run’ for 9/11 By Paul Sperry

Fresh evidence submitted in a major 9/11 lawsuit moving forward against the Saudi Arabian government reveals its embassy in Washington may have funded a “dry run” for the hijackings carried out by two Saudi employees, further reinforcing the claim that employees and agents of the kingdom directed and aided the 9/11 hijackers and plotters.

Two years before the airliner attacks, the Saudi Embassy paid for two Saudi nationals, living undercover in the US as students, to fly from Phoenix to Washington “in a dry run for the 9/11 attacks,” alleges the amended complaint filed on behalf of the families of some 1,400 victims who died in the terrorist attacks 16 years ago.

The court filing provides new details that paint “a pattern of both financial and operational support” for the 9/11 conspiracy from official Saudi sources, lawyers for the plaintiffs say. In fact, the Saudi government may have been involved in underwriting the attacks from the earliest stages — including testing cockpit security.

“We’ve long asserted that there were longstanding and close relationships between al Qaeda and the religious components of the Saudi government,” said Sean Carter, the lead attorney for the 9/11 plaintiffs. “This is further evidence of that.”

Lawyers representing Saudi Arabia last month filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, which may finally be headed toward trial now that Congress has cleared diplomatic-immunity hurdles. A Manhattan federal judge has asked the 9/11 plaintiffs, represented by lead law firm Cozen O’Connor, to respond to the motion by November.

Citing FBI documents, the complaint alleges that the Saudi students — Mohammed al-Qudhaeein and Hamdan al-Shalawi — were in fact members of “the Kingdom’s network of agents in the US,” and participated in the terrorist conspiracy.

They had trained at al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan at the same time some of the hijackers were there. And while living in Arizona, they had regular contacts with a Saudi hijacker pilot and a senior al Qaeda leader from Saudi now incarcerated at Gitmo. At least one tried to re-enter the US a month before the attacks as a possible muscle hijacker but was denied admission because he appeared on a terrorist watch list.

Qudhaeein and Shalawi both worked for and received money from the Saudi government, with Qudhaeein employed at the Ministry of Islamic Affairs. Shalawi was also “a longtime employee of the Saudi government.” The pair were in “frequent contact” with Saudi officials while in the US, according to the filings.

During a November 1999 America West flight to Washington, Qudhaeein and Shalawi are reported to have tried multiple times to gain access to the cockpit of the plane in an attempt to test flight-deck security in advance of the hijackings.

‘The dry run reveals more of the fingerprints of the Saudi government.’
– Kristen Breitweiser

“After they boarded the plane in Phoenix, they began asking the flight attendants technical questions about the flight that the flight attendants found suspicious,” according to a summary of the FBI case files.

Canada ISIS-Inspired Attack Exposes Terror Suspects Illegally Crossing U.S. Border By Patrick Poole

According to the media, an alien illegally crossing the U.S. border and then committing a terror attack is supposed to be an urban myth.

But after an apparent ISIS-inspired terror attack in Edmonton, Canada, last week by a Somali asylee we now have a documented case of that exact scenario happening.

Abdullahi Hasan Sharif illegally crossed the U.S. southern border in July 2011. After he was released here he fled to Canada and claimed asylum.

As I reported here at PJ Media, last Saturday in two separate incidents he ran over and stabbed an Edmonton police officer, then later ran down pedestrians in downtown Edmonton in a U-Haul truck. An ISIS flag was found in one of the vehicles he used.

The police chief described the injuries to the pedestrians struck as ranging from “broken arms to brain bleeds.”

He’s now facing five counts of attempted murder.

Sharif had been reported to Canadian authorities for extremism in 2015 but had been deemed “not a threat,” making this yet another case of “Known Wolf” terrorism.

Macleans reports:

Two years ago, city police and RCMP had investigated Sharif after receiving a complaint about him espousing extremist ideological views— reportedly incoherent rants about genocide, and praise for Islamic State leaders. Police at least interviewed the complainant and the suspect, performing what they called this week an “exhaustive investigation” yet concluding the young resident didn’t pose a security threat and didn’t warrant charges or further investigation […]

A construction site co-worker had complained to police about Sharif, saying the suspect confided to him his hatred for Shia Muslims, and said that polytheists “needed to die,” CBC reported Monday. After he alerted city police, the co-worker was interviewed by RCMP, as part of the local branch of the Integrated National Security Enforcement Teams (INSET). That multi-agency force, formed after the 9/11 terror attacks, has had its share of successes, helping thwart the 2006 “Toronto 18” terror plot. In 2015, it arrested a group of young Montrealers hoping to fly abroad to join jihadist groups, and the same year arrested a man in Fort St. John, B.C., after he allegedly posted Islamic State propaganda advocating murder.

Speaking to reporters Monday, the head of Alberta’s INSET team would not say how many complaints it has received similar to the one that prompted its investigation of Sharif two years ago. Carvin says the number of national investigations likely numbers in the hundreds—far fewer than European countries are handling. The RCMP couldn’t legally or logistically monitor all such individuals all the time, so authorities must prioritize, she says.

Feds Unseal Indictments on ISIS Sympathizers Who Planned New York Attacks in 2016 By Rick Moran

An ISIS-inspired plot to attack the New York City subway, concerts, and other landmarks was foiled in 2016. Now the terrorists, who said they wanted to create the “next 9/11,” have been charged on multiple terrorism counts.

Charged in the case are Abdulrahman El Bahnasawy, 19, a Canadian citizen; Talha Haroon, 19, a US citizen living in Pakistan; and Russell Salic, 37, a Philippines citizen, the release said. According to prosecutors, all three have been arrested and El Bahnasawy has already pleaded guilty following his May 2016 arrest. Haroon and Salic have been arrested overseas, and the US is seeking to have them extradited to stand trial here.

El Bahnasawy allegedly traveled to New Jersey to carry out the attacks, purchased bomb-making materials and helped rent a cabin for building the devices, the news release said. Haroon is alleged to have planned to travel from Pakistan to New York to help and met with bomb experts in Pakistan. Salic is charged with wiring money from the Philippines to further the plot.

El Bahnasawy and Haroon allegedly communicated with an undercover officer posing as an ISIS supporter about their plot and declared their allegiance to ISIS in the communications, according to investigators.

Authorities tracked the international plot using an undercover officer.

According to the court documents, El Bahnasawy and Haroon claimed to the undercover agent to have contacts with an ISIS branch known as Khorasan Province, which is active in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

El Bahnasawy wrote of wanting to “create the next 9/11,” investigators said, and Haroon wanted to “cause great destruction to the filthy (disbelievers) by our hands.”

Targets included the subway, Times Square and concerts — inspired by the Paris attack. One message also mentioned targeting a Jewish neighborhood.

“(W)e seriously need a car bomb at Times Square. … Look at these crowds of people!” El Bahnasawy said in one message. He also talked of a desire to “shoot up concerts cuz they kill a lot of people. … (W)e just walk in with guns in our hands. … That’s how the Paris guys did it.”

Haroon called the subway a “perfect” target and spoke of killing as many people as possible on a “very busy day,” not stopping even if there were “women or kids.”

That would be followed up with explosions, Haroon said, adding, if they “get trapped” or “when we run out of bullets we let the vests go off.”

“No mercy is rule one,” Haroon said.

“I wanna kill . . . them in thousands,” he added later. “(W)e have to make a ocean out of their blood(.) Leave no one standing.”

El Bahnasawy bought bomb supplies including 40 pounds of hydrogen peroxide, a key ingredient in triacetone triperoxide (TATP), which is commonly used in improvised explosives, and he also bought batteries, Christmas lights, thermometers and aluminum foil, the court documents said. He then rented the cabin they would use to build the bombs.

Salic was introduced to the undercover agent by El Bahnasawy as a trusted supporter of ISIS who would help fund the operation. Using an alias, Salic then contacted the operative about transferring the money, and also said he was “desperate” to join ISIS in Syria. He wired just over $400 in mid-May to support the attacks.

I have no doubt the terrorists were dead serious and capable of carrying out the attacks. But talk of killing thousands with 40 pounds of TATP? Their plot is both chilling and pathetic — bragging to each other how many people they were going to kill, “no mercy,” “make an ocean of their blood” — they sounded more like terrorist wannabees than ISIS trained militants. CONTINUE AT SITE