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U.S. at Second-Highest Threat Level for Terrorist Attack: Expert

July 3, 2024/in Culture War, Elections, Hot Topics, National Security, News, Policy, Politics/by Family Research Council

American soldiers abroad and U.S. citizens at home face perilously high odds of suffering a terrorist attack caused by the Biden administration’s policies, a national security expert has revealed. In his estimation, the American homeland stands at the second-highest level of terrorist alert.

His estimation comes days after U.S. European Command (EUCOM), which oversees 83,000 U.S. soldiers across the continent, raised the threat of a terrorist attack over the next week to “Force Protection Charlie,” the second-highest level.

“There are a host of issues that might be at play,” said retired Lt. Col. Bob Maginnis on “Washington Watch” Monday. “Certainly, the Olympics come to mind,” as they start later this month, as well as possible Russian activity in response to U.S. sponsorship of Ukraine. On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced the Biden administration would give an additional $2.3 billion in taxpayer funding to Ukraine. That comes as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has asked President Biden for permission to use U.S.-donated Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) missiles to strike deep into the interior of Russia, significantly widening the war.

But, Maginnis warned, the potential to suffer from some form of terrorist attack is far from confined to Americans overseas — and the primary danger comes from uncontrolled illegal immigration.

“Where would you suspect we are right here in the homeland?” asked guest host and former Congressman Jody Hice.

“Probably Charlie trending to Delta,” replied Maginnis.

The force protection levels, from lowest to highest, are: Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, and Delta.

“We are at a very heightened level, even though it’s not acknowledged by Homeland Security,” said Maginnis, senior fellow for National Security at Family Research Council and author of the book “Kings of the East: China’s Plan to Eliminate America and Impose a Communist World Order.”

“The risk is high,” he said.

“The southern border has been wide open for a long time. Millions of people have come in” during the Biden administration — an estimated 10 million illegal border crossings, not including unknown gotaways. That includes “many thousands of military-age communist Chinese, many from the Middle East, many from northern Africa — where we don’t have any real friends — and then, of course an odd lot from Eastern Europe that we could very well have bad characters in sleeper cells posted around this country near our critical infrastructure.”

“As we saw on September 11, 2001, it only takes 19 bad dudes to disrupt the entire United States,” said Maginnis.

Potential terrorists continue to swarm over the southern border, a problem that has intensified with each passing month of the Biden administration. Last month, ICE agents arrested eight illegal immigrants from Tajikistan with ties to ISIS in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and New York City. At least two of the potential terrorists had background checks conducted at the southern border by agents with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), but nothing alerted CBP to the men’s nefarious connections — so they were released into the interior of the United States, in accordance with the Biden administration’s standard operating procedure. Another of the men used the CBP One App, created by the Biden administration to expedite the importation of illegal aliens into the U.S., to schedule a smooth entry into the U.S.

“The arrest of eight men affiliated with ISIS in the interior of the United States is enough proof to show that terrorist organizations are, in fact, exploiting our border to possibly carry out an attack on American soil,” wrote a group of Republican congressmen led by House Committee on Homeland Security Chairman Mark E. Green (R-Tenn.) to the now-impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and FBI Director Christopher Wray. “Unfortunately, the unacceptable security failures that have allowed individuals with terrorist ties to enter the United States through the Southwest [b]order have become an alarming pattern under this administration.” In addition to the eight Tajikis:

An ISIS-affiliated human smuggling ring reportedly brought 400 illegal immigrants into the United States. Only 150 had been arrested as of last week. The whereabouts of 50 of them remained unknown.
48-year-old Mohammad Kharwin, a native of Afghanistan and a suspected member of the terrorist group Hezb-e-Islami (HIG), illegally entered the United States last March 10 near San Ysidro, California. Although he was on the U.S. terrorist watchlist, the information reportedly did not show up on his background check, so agents released him two days later, only to track him down and take him into custody this February.
A 2022 George Washington University report on Hezbollah activity inside the United States identified 128 individuals carrying out Hezbollah -related illegal activity in Michigan (55 cases), California (19 cases), North Carolina (16 cases), and New York (15 cases). Of those, 19 offered operational support for Hezbollah, “including as human smugglers, weapons procurers, pre-operational surveillance, and travelers who sought to join the group.”
U.S. Customs and Border Protection has encountered 1,703 people on the U.S. terrorist watchlist since the beginning of the 2021 fiscal year (which began in October 2020): 173 in 2021, 478 in 2022, 736 in 2023, and 316 people so far this fiscal year.
Robert Lee, CEO of the energy cybersecurity company Dragos, testified before the Senate last March that it is “a very reasonable assumption” to believe Chinese and Russian sleeper cells have already penetrated the U.S. energy grid in preparation for a future attack. “If they’re not already in key parts of it, I don’t think they’re doing the job very well,” said Lee.

The Biden administration’s soft-on-crime “prioritization of catch, process, and release” at the southern border “presents a grave danger to national security,” the congressmen wrote.

Sleeper cells, which may lay dormant for months or years before engaging in deadly activity, have proven their lethality in every corner of the globe. Last week, a Russian official revealed that “sleeper cells” had carried out the June 23 Islamist terrorist attack on churches and synagogues in Dagestan, which left 22 people dead, including 66-year-old priest Fr. Nikolai Kotelnikov. The leader of the Russian Orthodox Church condemned the attacks as having “diabolic” origins.

“This is a dangerous time,” Maginnis told Hice.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

DHS: ‘Domestic violent extremists’ are ‘infiltrating’ the abortion debate

May 23, 2022/in Culture War, Healthcare, National Security, News, Policy, Politics, Science, Social Issues/by Center For Security Policy

What would we do without the Department of Homeland Security? Those intrepid defenders of our liberties are showing these days how richly they deserve our taxpayer billions, as DHS officials, ever on the watch, warned on Monday that “domestic violent extremists” are “infiltrating” the national debate over abortion, with nefarious plans to “incite violence amongst their supporters.”

Now, I must admit, I’m not as sharp as the all the knives in the drawer over at the DHS, and I don’t have my finger on the pulse of threats to “our democracy,” which Leftists are constantly telling us is in imminent peril from people who believe in the U.S. Constitution and the basic goodness of the American experiment. So I hope that Alejandro Mayorkas and his henchmen, that is, colleagues, at the DHS will forgive me for not realizing that domestic violent extremists have only recently infiltrated the abortion debate. I had the crazy idea that domestic violent extremists had actually infiltrated the abortion debate decades ago; in fact, I thought they had been there from the very beginning. After all, there are people out there who think that those who dismember babies in the womb are performing a decent and righteous act; if that’s not domestic violent extremism, what is?

But that is, of course, not the kind of domestic violent extremism that the DHS has in mind. To be sure, our intrepid defenders didn’t specify exactly what kind of domestic violent extremism they did have in mind. ABC News reported that the DHS official who disclosed this warning “did not specify which side, if any, the extremists were taking.” However, it’s not hard to figure out which side the DHS has in mind. The FBI, as well as DHS officials, have quite frequently repeated the claim that “white supremacists” are the most formidable “domestic extremist” threat that the nation faces today.

This is an administration that has likened parents who have protested at school board meetings against Communist indoctrination and transgender propaganda in public schools to terrorists, while not saying a thing about genuine Antifa violence and thuggery, so when the DHS warns that “domestic violent extremists” are infiltrating the abortion debate, it’s absolutely certain that the people they are tarring with this label are pro-lifers. And while there have been a handful of pro-lifers who were violent in the past, it’s far more likely that DHS is equating dissenting words with violence.

Why do I say that? Because it has happened to me. Last year, the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), an organization created by Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube to police terrorism on the Internet, bizarrely designated my organization Jihad Watch a “violent extremist” group, despite the fact that pretty much all we do is type and report on jihad activity in the U.S. and around the world. In response to a letter from my attorney demanding a retraction, the GIFCT refused to back down. Those who designated Jihad Watch as a “violent extremist” group explained that we reported on violent activity — terrorist bombings, murders, etc. — and that this in some way “dehumanized” Muslims.

How we did this was left unexplained; it would have been impossible to explain, as it was absurd on its face. If reporting news that puts some group in a bad light is “dehumanizing,” the GIFCT and DHS should go after the establishment media for “dehumanizing” Trump and his supporters. The response to my attorney’s letter was essentially the increasingly common Leftist argument that speech that dissents from its party line is violence, and hence must be shut down.

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, fresh from defending his sinister and Orwellian new Disinformation Governance Board, promises that his department is right on top of this alleged “domestic violent extremist” threat: “Over the past year, we in the Department of Homeland Security have improved and strengthened our approach to combating this dynamic, evolving threat.”

How reassuring. Meanwhile, Leftist pro-abortion ideologues have been demonstrating at the homes of the Supreme Court Justices who are likely to vote to overturn Roe v. Wade in a naked attempt to intimidate them into changing their vote. Despite the fact that it is a felony to demonstrate at private homes, the Biden administration has applauded these protests. The government is presently in the hands of thugs who believe that bullying and frightening people into submission is an acceptable political tactic. Can the DHS, in such an environment, spare even a few agents to try to head off any possible Leftist violence regarding a possible overturning of Roe? After all, Leftists are much, much more likely to be violent than pro-lifers. This is true both historically and recently and is indicated by the nature of what they’re so avidly defending.

AUTHOR

Robert Spencer

Senior Fellow.

New ‘domestic terrorism’ bill supposedly targets white supremacists and neo-Nazis

May 20, 2022/in Culture War, National Security, News, Policy, Politics, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Jihad Watch

The problem with this bill is that it is increasingly common for Leftists, including high-level members of the political and media establishment, to call all those who oppose the Leftist agenda “white supremacists” and “neo-Nazis,” including law-abiding Americans who abhor racism and fascism and are simply standing against Communist indoctrination, transgender delusions, and other lies foisted upon us from above these days.

Domestic Terrorism Bill Targets White Supremacists, Neo-Nazis

by Ellen M. Gilmer, Bloomberg, May 18, 2022:

Three federal agencies would be tasked with rooting out domestic terrorism threats within the government and across the US under a bill slated for a House vote Wednesday.

The measure (H.R. 350) would authorize domestic terrorism offices within the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department, and the FBI. It would also require officials to assess White supremacist and neo-Nazi threats in the US and inside agencies.

The May 14 mass shooting of mostly Black victims at a Buffalo, N.Y., grocery store prompted renewed urgency for passing the bill after lawmakers scrapped plans for a floor vote last month.

Similar legislation (S. 963) is pending in the Senate but may face challenges if Republicans in that chamber take up their House colleagues’ complaints that the bill would allow federal officials to target everyday people as potential threats for speaking out about issues such as Covid-19 and school policies. Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the bill’s sponsor, said Monday that his panel will hold a hearing on the bill.

House bill sponsor Rep. Brad Schneider (D-Ill.) acknowledged that Republicans’ complaints about potential federal overreach have weighed heavily in the House but said Democrats would try to return focus to the bill’s purpose does during floor debate….

The House bill has also created friction on the left, with some groups, including the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, lauding it as a way to counter domestic terrorism without profiling racial and religious minorities. The [Hamas-linked — ed.] Council on American-Islamic Relations and others argued last month that agencies would inevitably use new authorities to target marginalized communities.

Bill supporters aimed to address those concerns this week through an amendment that tweaked the definition of domestic terrorism and added a section on First Amendment protections. CAIR, Defending Rights & Dissent, and other groups on Monday said they appreciated the changes and would no longer push lawmakers to vote no….

DOJ, DHS, and the FBI already have teams that investigate domestic terrorism. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the three agencies would need more than 100 new analysts, agents, lawyers, and support staff to address the bill’s requirements.

AUTHOR

ROBERT SPENCER

RELATED TWEET:

The attacks against me should be viewed through a political lens – this is their standard (despicable) playbook – but nothing will deter me from fighting for a good future and your right to free speech

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 20, 2022