Tag Archive for: weapon

Garland, Texas: Islamic State Jihadi Illegally Purchased Weapon from Fast and Furious Operation

The Los Angeles Times reported, Nadiv Soofi one of two Garland, Texas jihadis, the other was roommate Elton Simpson, killed in the May 2015 attack illegally purchased a weapon  in 2010 from a Fast and Furious front in Phoenix, “Assailant in Garland, Texas, attack bought gun in 2010 under Fast and Furious operation”Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) picked up on this and senate investigators are looking into how a terrorist killed in the Texas purchased a weapon illegally from the much maligned Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) “gun walking” program. Fast and Furious first came to light in 2010 with the tragic killing of US Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry by one of the ” gun walking” weapons used by a drug cartel member.

You may recall that former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder criticized Republicans in 2011 for “politicizing” the furor over the revelations.  In testimony before Congress Holder eschewed knowledge and responsibilities simply saying  it was “flawed in its concept, and flawed in its execution”. He was charged with contempt of Congress for his testimony.

The Times investigative report by Richard Serrano noted:

Five years before he was shot to death in the failed terrorist attack in Garland, Texas, Nadir Soofi walked into a suburban Phoenix gun shop to buy a 9-millimeter pistol.

At the time, Lone Wolf Trading Co. was known among gun smugglers for selling illegal firearms. And with Soofi’s history of misdemeanor drug and assault charges, there was a chance his purchase might raise red flags in the federal screening process.

Inside the store, he fudged some facts on the form required of would-be gun buyers.

Late Nadir Soofi Garland Texas Mohammed Cartoon contest assailant

Late Nadir Soofi, Garland, Texas Mohammed Cartoon contest assailant.

What Soofi could not have known was that Lone Wolf was at the center of a federal sting operation known as Fast and Furious, targeting Mexican drug lords and traffickers. The idea of the secret program was to allow Lone Wolf to sell illegal weapons to criminals and straw purchasers, and track the guns back to large smuggling networks and drug cartels.

Texas gunman’s mother: ‘He just had a normal American upbringing’

Instead, federal agents lost track of the weapons and the operation became a fiasco, particularly after several of the missing guns were linked to shootings in Mexico and the 2010 killing of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in Arizona.

Soofi’s attempt to buy a gun caught the attention of authorities, who slapped a seven-day hold on the transaction, according to his Feb. 24, 2010, firearms transaction record, which was reviewed by the Los Angeles Times. Then, for reasons that remain unclear, the hold was lifted after 24 hours, and Soofi got the 9-millimeter.

As the owner of a small pizzeria, the Dallas-born Soofi, son of a Pakistani American engineer and American nurse, would not have been the primary focus of federal authorities, who back then were looking for smugglers and drug lords.

He is now.

In May, Soofi and his roommate, Elton Simpson, burst upon the site of a Garland cartoon convention that was offering a prize for the best depiction of the prophet Muhammad, something offensive to many Muslims. Dressed in body armor and armed with three pistols, three rifles and 1,500 rounds of ammunition, the pair wounded a security officer before they were killed by local police.

A day after the attack, the Department of Justice sent an “urgent firearms disposition request” to Lone Wolf, seeking more information about Soofi and the pistol he bought in 2010, according to a June 1 letter from Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, to U.S. Atty. Gen. Loretta Lynch.

Though the request did not specify whether the gun was used in the Garland attack, Justice Department officials said the information was needed “to assist in a criminal investigation,” according to Johnson’s letter, also reviewed by The Times.

The FBI so far has refused to release any details, including serial numbers, about the weapons used in Garland by Soofi and Simpson. Senate investigators are now pressing law enforcement agencies for answers, raising the chilling possibility that a gun sold during the botched Fast and Furious operation ended up being used in a terrorist attack against Americans.

Among other things, Johnson is demanding to know whether federal authorities have recovered the gun Soofi bought in 2010, where it was recovered and whether it had been discharged, according to the letter. He also demanded an explanation about why the initial seven-day hold was placed on the 2010 pistol purchase and why it was lifted after 24 hours.

Asked recently for an update on the Garland shooting, FBI Director James B. Comey earlier this month declined to comment. “We’re still sorting that out,” he said.

This is mind numbing. Nadir Soofi, one of the two jihadis killed in the May 2015 Garland, Texas AFDI Mohammed cartoon contest attack purchased a weapon illegally from the Fast and Furious sting front in Phoenix, with the ironic name of Lone Wolf Trading. Ask yourself why this illegal transaction occurred despite Soofi’s drug and assault charges record. This latest revelation demonstrates that the BATF sting operation was totally misguided and worked against apprehension of suspects giving material aid to Islamic terrorism. Notice this info occurred after record checks were run on weapons seized by local Garland police and run through the federal gun clearance data base.

Too bad that former attorney general Eric Holder, now at premier D.C. law firm Covington and Burling, and the former BATF program officials were never investigated or referred for possible prosecution for this lame brained scheme.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review. The featured image is from Twitter.

30 Second Video: Kerry – Iran ‘Atomic Bromance’ Explained

Is John Kerry ‘related’ to Mohammed Zrif?

HAVE YOU HAD ENOUGH OF THIS IRAN-KERRY INSANITY YET?

Either Kerry is the biggest buffoon who just had an Iranian “information operation” spun on his head or he is so partial to Iran that he wants them to exert regional dominance in the Middle East, thus clearly threatening Israel.

What will it take for Americans to realize that we MUST dump this Iran nuke deal, get the Iranians back to the negotiating table and require complete dismantling of their key nuke facilities.

Washington, D.C. At today’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing regarding the Obama Administration’s nuclear deal with Iran, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) highlighted the importance of U.S. sanctions as a viable alternative to President Obama’s deal and outlined how, if the deal is implemented, Iran will be in a much stronger position when the deal expires.

“When people vote on this deal in a few weeks, you’re going to live with this for the rest of your life,” Rubio said during the hearing. “In 10 years, in 12 years, when Iran has a nuclear weapon and we can’t target them, people are going to remember this vote that’s coming up and this deal as what laid the groundwork for it, and I keep hearing this notion that there is no other alternative and no other way forward, but I disagree.

“I believe U.S. sanctions are the most important part of all the sanctions,” Rubio continued. “I believe that these banks in Europe, German banks, whatever banks may be, if they were forced to choose between having access to the American economy and access to the Iranian economy, that’s not going to be a hard choice for them.”

A video of Rubio’s remarks and the full exchanges is available here.

Transcript of Senator Rubio’s.

Senator Marco Rubio: “The choice right before us was two things.

“On the one hand was to continue with what we thought was the strategy which is international sanctions that had an impact on Iran’s economy. They continued to make progress in their enrichment capabilities and so forth, but it was a combination of international sanctions and the threat of credible military force, which no one wants to talk about, but that was on the table, and the President has said that, in fact, if it came down to it, the U.S. would do that, if it were necessary.

“Versus what we have now, which is a deal that basically argues, well what this will do is that if they comply with it, it will slow them down, and in 10 years if they want to break out, it buys us 10 years of time, and it avoids, assuming everybody complies with everything.

“Here’s my problem with that analysis. My problem with it is that in 8 to 10 years, which sounds like a long time to all of us here, it’s nothing. Ten years goes very quickly, and that’s if we’re optimistic. In 10 years, Iran will be in a much stronger position. In fact, I think in 10 years they’ll be immune from international pressure compared to where they are today, and here’s why.

“First of all, they are going to use this sanctions relief and the billions of dollars that it frees up, and I know everyone wants to believe they’re going to invest it in hospitals and roads and social services in order to win their next election. I promise you, they’re going to win they’re next election. I don’t think they’re worried about that as much as they are about their need for example, to get to modernize their enrichment capability into a 21st century industrial system.

“It actually falls right in line with the mandate that the Supreme Leader, I believe, gave to the negotiators, which is, ‘Don’t agree to anything that’s irreversible. Go as far as you need to go to get the sanctions removed, but don’t agree to anything that’s irreversible.’

“So they’ll have less centrifuges, but they’ll be better ones and they’ll be modernized, and they’ll retain that infrastructure, which is the hardest part of any nuclear program, is the infrastructure, the hardware that it takes to do this.

“But here’s what else they’re going to do, they’re going to continue to build their conventional capabilities. We don’t think about that enough, but Iran in 10 years will have conventional capabilities, maybe less, that could potentially drive us out of the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz because the price of being there will be too high, I mean they can buy Chinese asymmetrical capabilities that allow them to kill ships, add to these fast swift boats things that they’ve been able to come up with that can threaten an aircraft carrier. They’re going to continue to build long range rockets. Why are you building a long range rocket, an ICBM? Are you going to put a man on the moon? No. They’re building it for purposes of targeting the continental United States. And they look at North Korea and say, ‘Yeah the North Koreans have a long range rocket.’ We don’t know where it is going to hit yet because they aren’t very good yet at guidance, but it will hit somewhere, like the West Coast of the United States. That alone has made North Korea immune.

“And they’re going to continue to build up their surrogates in the region, which I would argue already, even now before the sanctions relief has given Iran tremendous leverage over U.S. policy. As an example: Iran has laid out some pretty clear red lines. They are going to hold back Shi’ite militias in Iraq from attacking American troops or going after Americans. They’ll agree to hold them back if, we don’t cross certain red lines they have made very clear.

“What are their red lines? For starters they don’t want to see any U.S. combat troops in Iraq, and if we make any move toward any sort of permanent presence in Iraq in the future, we are going to get attacked by Shi’ite militias at their orders. They don’t want to see us take any concrete steps to remove Assad from power. If they see us moving toward getting Assad out of power, we’re going to get hit by surrogate groups in the region, including Hezbollah and their Shi’ite militia. If we take steps to help put in place an Iraqi government that actually unifies that country and isn’t a puppet of Iran, not to mention one that might actually be hostile toward Iran’s ambitions in the region, they’re going to attack us.

“So they already have leverage over our policy. Now extrapolate that 8 to 10 years from now, when their conventional forces are higher, when these groups are better armed, when Hizballah in a couple of years doesn’t just have rockets, they have guided rockets, guided missiles that don’t just hit somewhere in Israel, they hit exactly what they want to hit.

“So imagine a world in 10 years, where Iran decides, or 8 years, or 12 years, where they just decide, ‘You know what, we’re building a nuclear weapon because we believe Israel has one or because we think someone else is going to threaten us.’

“What can the world do then? Well then reimposing sanctions really won’t be an option at that point because all these companies that are deeply invested in that economy just won’t let their nations or their governments do anything about it. We’ve already seen that in the case of the Europeans.

“But what will the price be of actually going after their systems? It’ll be worse than the price of going after North Korea now. Do we have a credible military option today to target the North Koreans’ program? We do not. We do not because we know that the price of going after the North Korean program through a credible military option, the price of that is Tokyo, the price of that is Seoul, the price of that is Hawaii, they’ll hit us back.

“Well imagine Iran where the price of going after the Iranian program in 10 years if they decide to break out will be Washington, D.C. or New York City, not to mention Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and any number of places in the region that are our allies.

“So my argument is that, in fact, what I think we’ve done here is walk right into the situation they wanted to lay out, they didn’t want a nuclear weapon next week anyway. But we have created a system where in 8 to 10 years they will be, they will have the capability to quickly become, walk into the nuclear weapons club, not sneak in, walk in to the nuclear weapons club with a world class industrial enrichment capability, a much more powerful conventional weapons force capable of actually asymmetrically driving our navy from the region or further out and quite frankly immune from any sort of credible military action because if we attack them the price is going to be a nuclear devastating strike, potentially even on the continental United States.

“So my point is that when people vote on this deal in a few weeks, you’re going to live with this for the rest of your life. In 10 years, in 12 years, when Iran has a nuclear weapon and we can’t target them, people are going to remember this vote that’s coming up and this deal as what laid the groundwork for it, and I keep hearing this notion that there is no other alternative and no other way forward, but I disagree.

“I believe U.S. sanctions are the most important part of all the sanctions. I believe that these banks in Europe, German banks, whatever banks may be, if they were forced to choose between having access to the American economy and access to the Iranian economy, that’s not going to be a hard choice for them.”

How to Con America – And Get a Nuclear Bomb!

The Clarion Project has released a new video titled “How to Con America and Get a Nuclear Bomb in 4 easy steps.”

How did Iran manage to dupe America to be set firmly on the road to nuclear weapons? What happened to the ironclad deal America had insisted on. It seems Iran cleverly dodged inspections, refused to close nuclear facilities, increased their centrifuges and continue to enrich uranium.

The Clarion project believes, “No deal is better than a bad deal.”