RUTHFULLY YOURS

The FBI held an unusual press conference today in the case of last month’s terror attack at a shopping mall in St. Cloud, Minnesota. The attacker, 20-year old Somali refugee Dahir Adan, was shot and killed on the scene by an off-duty police officer after stabbing ten mall workers and shoppers.

The press conference was unusual in that the investigation into the matter is still ongoing, but the FBI and local law enforcement felt the need to release graphic video of the attacks in order to shoot down various conspiracy theories circulating in the Minnesota Somali community and perpetuated by Black Lives Matter groups.

The county prosecutor in St. Cloud says an off-duty police officer was justified in fatally shooting Dahir Adan, the mall stabbing suspect.

— Mitch Smith (@MitchKSmith) October 6, 2016

Stearns Co. Atty: Jason Faulkner told Dahir Adan to drop his knives several times, followed him through Macy’s, shooting when Adan charged

— Courtney Godfrey (@courtneygodfrey) October 6, 2016

One of the early conspiracy theories floated by Adan’s family was the claim that he was an innocent bystander who was in the mall to pick up his new iPhone at the mall:

Family of St Cloud stabber tells community leader Dahir Adan was headed to Mall Sat to pick up a preordered iPhone 7 @wcco 5 and 6 pm

— esme murphy – WCCO (@esmemurphy) September 19, 2016

Those false rumors led some in the Somali community to use the incident to circulate claims that the shooting of Adan was unjustified:

ARLINGTON, Va. — The Pentagon today said that the U.S. government has pinpointed the whereabouts of most — but not all — of dozens of Afghan troops who came to the United States for training and went AWOL.

Reuters reported today that 44 Afghan troops have gone missing since January 2015, including eight who have left U.S. bases without authorization since last month alone.

Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook told reporters today that all Afghan trainees who come to the United States “first of all go through a vetting process to be able to qualify to come here to the United States.”

“In those instances where they have gone missing — and this has been something we’ve had to deal with over the years — we’ve been training Afghans in this country for some time. I think more than 2,000 have been trained even in the last few years alone — there’s a notification process that we go through, of course trying to determine where these people are,” Cook said.

“Of the people who have been missing in — over the last two years or so, I believe the number that was provided to you was somewhere around 40 — more than 40 individuals; 32, we understand the status of those people.”

He added that “every effort’s made to try to determine where these people are going, what the reasons are.”

“In some cases they’ve gone home. In some cases there have been efforts — as I understand it — to go to Canada. Some have sought to legally remain in the United States,” Cook continued. “And so there are different explanations for each one of these circumstances.”

In 1980, Robert Dickson Crane converted to Islam. From that year to the present day, Crane has built a successful career as a high-level official in multiple Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas-affiliated organizations in the U.S. and Qatar. At the same time, from 1988 to 2013, his son John Ruedel Crane rose to similar prominence in the Department of Defense to the position of Assistant Inspector General and director of both the Department of Defense and NSA’s whistleblower programs. Crane’s position in the DoD Inspector General office came with high-level clearances and access to a broad scope of DoD information. His tenure of twenty-five years within DoD also encompassed a time of multiple jihadist attacks against American targets, including the 1993 and 2001 World Trade Center attacks and the global war on terror waged in response. http://counterjihad.com/should-family-affiliations-with-foreign-islamist-movements-prevent-a-security-clearance

In a recent phone conversation, John Crane confirmed that Robert Crane is his father and stated that, during background investigations throughout his career, he was never asked, nor did he volunteer, any information about his father’s affiliations. We don’t know if the relationship was, in fact, known and approved by the Department of Defense, the intelligence community or by political administrations during Crane’s over two-decade year career. But we can state that the relationship between Robert Crane and John Crane is being described for the first time to the general public in this investigative report.

John Crane’s management of the whistleblower offices included the years when Edward Snowden stole over 1.5 million classified documents. Crane has recently been the subject of numerous media interviews as “The Third Man” in the new book Bravehearts: Whistleblowing in the Age of Snowden, a defense of Edward Snowden’s theft of classified documents from the U.S., UK and Australia. John Crane was quietly removed from his Inspector General and whistleblower office positions in February 2013, four months before the Edward Snowden case became public knowledge. He immediately became a consultant for the General Accountability Project (GAP), the legal counsel for Snowden. GAP was founded in 1977 by the extreme far left Institute for Policy Studies.

On September 15, 2016 the House Intelligence Committee issued a bipartisan, unanimous report summarizing their investigation of National Security Agency computer technician Edward Snowden’s theft of 1.5 million classified documents. The Committee’s critique of Snowden was devastating: “These findings demonstrate that the public narrative popularized by Snowden and his allies is rife with falsehoods, exaggerations, and crucial omissions, a pattern that began before he stole 1.5 million sensitive documents.” As former Intelligence Committee staff Fred Fleitz has observed, “Snowden is not a whistleblower; he is a disgruntled former intelligence employee who did enormous damage to U.S. national security.”

Left-wing activists have mounted a campaign for Snowden’s vindication and pardon before Obama leaves office, including Oliver Stone’s hagiographic movie, Snowden, and Bravehearts, the book by Nation magazine reporter Mark Hertsgaard in which John Crane figures so prominently. Crane’s allegations against the DoD in Bravehearts have been cited as a vindication of Snowden’s acts by the Intercept, the website of Snowden advocate Glenn Greenwald (“Vindication for Edward Snowden From a New Player in NSA Whistleblowing Saga”).

In February 2013, John Crane was placed on “administrative leave” from his position as DoD Assistant Inspector General, his security clearances and pay were suspended, and he was forbidden to come to the office. He has resurfaced in the public eye in 2016 as the subject of numerous articles and interviews promoting the Bravehearts book in Der Spiegel, The Guardian, Government Executive, Democracy Now!, Russia Today, New York Times, The Intercept, and of course Hertsgaard’s Nation. Crane asserts in Bravehearts and in these interviews that Edward Snowden’s theft of U.S. classified information was simply an understandable reaction to the DoD’s prior treatment of whistleblowers, which discouraged Snowden from becoming a “whistleblower” himself inside the system.

WASHINGTON — CIA Director John Brennan said comments that “taint” Islam “as being the source of the problem” are “tremendously detrimental to our interests and to a better understanding of this phenomenon” of terrorism.

Speaking at the Washington Ideas Forum this week, Brennan said he’s met with “princes or presidents and prime ministers throughout the Middle East” who are “outraged that their community — their Muslim community — has been infected by this cancer, individuals who have this distorted and very perverted interpretation of Islam that pursue these psychopathic agendas of horrific violence, and they recognize that they have a very important role — the leading role to help purge their communities of these influences.”

“These individuals who are fanatics — extremists and terrorists — they are driven by this ideology that is not rooted in Islam,” Brennan said. “It’s a psychopathic ideology that is very absolutist, that either you are with us or against us.”

“And that’s why the establishment of the caliphate — the so-called caliphate by ISIL, as well as al-Qaeda’s agenda, really, are trying to cause this …clash of civilizations. They want to drive this wedge between the West and the Muslim world.”

Brennan said he has not spoken with Donald Trump, but “anybody who promotes that type of characterization of the problem, and mischaracterization, in my mind, I would try to describe how those comments are being interpreted and how they are feeding this narrative that the terrorist organizations are propagating, that it does not help to arrest this cancer that has taken over so many of the communities because of a lot of the underlying conditions that exist within Middle East and Africa, South Asia, the areas, because of economic deprivation, political disenfranchisements, lack of opportunity.”

Comey’s reputation is unraveling……..rsk
Earlier this week FBI Director James Comey told the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs about a looming “terrorist diaspora” that would come from the eventual defeat of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, and yet in October 2014 he told 60 Minutes that any American with a passport who fought with the Islamic State was welcome to return to the U.S.

Testifying on Tuesday in the wake of the NY-NJ bombings by Ahmad Rahami just over a week ago, Director Comey issued this ominous warning:

The number of Americans traveling to Syria to fight alongside the Islamic State group has slowed to a trickle in the last year, but as the so-called caliphate is “crushed,” many militants from Western nations who are already there will stream out of the region and create new security threats.

“There will be a terrorist diaspora sometime in the next two to five years like we’ve never seen before,” Comey said.

This is identical to his warning in late July, when he told a cybersecurity conference about the “terrorist diaspora” threat:

At some point, there is going to be a terrorist diaspora out of Syria like we’ve never seen before. Not all of the Islamic State’s killers are going to die on the battlefield. Hundreds and hundreds of them, when the coalition succeeds and I’m confident they will in crushing the Islamic State–through the fingers of the crush–are going to come hundreds of really dangerous people and they’re going to flow out primarily towards Western Europe, but we might as well be right next door to Western Europe given the ease with which people can travel.

And this is an order of magnitude greater than any diaspora we’ve seen before. A lot of terrorists fled out of Afghanistan in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. This is 10 times that or more.

But in an interview with 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley in October 2014, Comey said that any American with a passport who had fought with the Islamic State (and presumably with any other designated terrorist organization operating in Syria) was welcome to return:

On Sept. 8, the Homeland Security Department’s inspector-general reported that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services mistakenly granted citizenship to at least 858 individuals who were under deportation or removal orders.

On Tuesday, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson told Congress the actual number is “somewhere around” 750. But Johnson could not say how many of them were from countries known to be havens for terrorists.

“Were any of them from special interest countries?” Sen. Ben Sasse, a member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, asked Johnson.

“Not off hand,” Johnson replied. “I — I can’t — I can’t give you that breakdown offhand. It is a — I suspect it is a knowable fact, which we can provide you.”

Johnson said a process to “denaturalize” those people is now under way. “And we’re going to continue to do that.”

“Were any of them from Iran, Syria, or Libya?” Sasse asked Johnson.

“I’d have to check. I don’t know sitting here right now, sir,” the secretary responded.

“How — how would you not know that?” Sasse asked. “Why would that not be something that’s urgent to you to understand the categories under the 700–”

“Oh, yes. It’s a knowable fact,” Johnson repeated. “I can get you the information. Just sitting here right now, I don’t have the list in front of me. You know, I don’t want to be wrong.”

“Do you think any of them were terrorists?” Sasse asked.

He might want to talk to his boss about it. Because his boss is the one bringing them here to enrich us and become “part of our story”. Just like in New York, Boston and Orlando.

Intelligence and law enforcement agencies worry that a surge of violent extremists will eventually move from ISIS-controlled areas in Syria and Iraq into Western nations with the aim of committing terrorist attacks, FBI Director James Comey told Congress on Tuesday.

“The caliphate will be crushed,” but hundreds of people will remain and become part of a “terrorist diaspora” in the next two to five years. “When ISIS is reduced to an insurgency, those people will try to come to Western Europe and here,” Comey said in testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.

They’re already coming here. And Obama has brought thousands into this country. We’ve already seen ISIS acts of terror on our soil due to our immigration policies.

Comey testified alongside Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and Nicholas Rasmussen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, at a hearing examining threats to national security 15 years after the 9/11 attacks. The hearing took place just over a week after bombings in New York and New Jersey and a separate stabbing attack at a Minnesota mall.

Rassmussen said the U.S. watchlisting system “allows us to have confidence that if we have an identity, we are very likely to prevent an individual from getting into the United States.”