Terrorism News Articles

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Traditionally, powerful spy satellites have been used to search for strategic threats overseas. But now the Department of Homeland Security has developed a new office to use the satellites to [monitor the US itself]. [DHS] officials ... faced extensive criticism [in Congress] about the privacy and civil liberty concerns of the new office, called the National Applications Office. [House Homeland Security] Committee members expressed concern about abuse of the satellite imagery, charging that Homeland Security had not informed the oversight committee about the program. "What's most disturbing is learning about it from The Wall Street Journal," said Committee Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss. The lawmakers also expressed concern about using military capabilities for U.S. law enforcement and Homeland Security operations, potentially a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars the military from serving as a law enforcement body within the United States. Committee members said that in addition to not being informed about the National Applications Office program, they had not yet been provided with documents defining the limits and legal guidance about the program. [They] sent a letter to Homeland Security saying, "We are so concerned that ... we are calling for a moratorium on the program. Today's testimony made clear that there is effectively no legal framework governing the domestic use of satellite imagery for the various purposes envisioned by the department."

The Bush administration rushed to defend new espionage legislation Monday amid growing concern that the changes could lead to increased spying by U.S. intelligence agencies on American citizens. But officials declined to provide details about how the new capabilities might be used by the National Security Agency and other spy services. And in many cases, they could point only to internal monitoring mechanisms to prevent abuse of the new rules that appear to give the government greater authority to tap into the traffic flowing across U.S. telecommunications networks. Officials rejected assertions that the new capabilities would enable the government to cast electronic "drift nets" that might ensnare U.S. citizens [and] that the new legislation would amount to the expansion of a controversial — and critics contend unconstitutional — warrantless wiretapping program that President Bush authorized after the 9/11 attacks. Intelligence experts said there were an array of provisions in the new legislation that appeared to make it possible for the government to engage in intelligence-collection activities that the Bush administration officials were discounting. "They are trying to shift the terms of the debate to their intentions and away from the meaning of the new law," said Steven Aftergood, an intelligence policy analyst at the Federation of American Scientists. "The new law gives them authority to do far more than simply surveil foreign communications abroad," he said. "It expands the surveillance program beyond terrorism to encompass foreign intelligence. It permits the monitoring of communications of a U.S. person as long as he or she is not the primary target. And it effectively removes judicial supervision of the surveillance process."

Since 9/11, President Bush's repeated assaults on the Constitution and celebration of international lawlessness ... have needlessly made Americans less safe. The president, for example, has flouted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in intercepting the conversations and e-mails of American citizens on American soil on his say-so alone. He has claimed authority to break into and enter our homes, open our mail and commit torture. He has insisted that the entire United States is a battlefield -- even pizza parlors -- where lethal military force may be employed to kill ... suspects with bombs or missiles. He has detained citizens and noncitizens alike as enemy combatants based on secret evidence. And he has insisted that he is constitutionally empowered to keep U.S. troops in Iraq indefinitely. Congress should restore the Constitution's checks and balances and protections against government abuses. The most frightening of Bush's abuses travels under the banner of "extraordinary rendition." In its name, Bush has kidnapped, secretly imprisoned, and tortured. The practice is what would be expected of dictators such as the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin or Iraq's Saddam Hussein. The detainees are held incommunicado without accusation or trial. No judge reviews the allegedly incriminating evidence. No law restricts interrogation methods or the conditions of confinement. And the innocent are left without recourse as "collateral damage" in Bush's ... global [war on terrorism].

Note: The author, Bruce Fein, served as Associate Attorney General under President Reagan.

The FBI is taking cues from the CIA to recruit thousands of covert informants in the United States as part of a sprawling effort to boost its intelligence capabilities. According to a recent unclassified report to Congress, the FBI expects its informants to provide secrets about possible terrorists and foreign spies, although some may also be expected to aid with criminal investigations, in the tradition of law enforcement confidential informants. The FBI said the push was driven by a 2004 directive from President Bush ordering the bureau to improve its counterterrorism efforts by boosting its human intelligence capabilities. The aggressive push for more secret informants appears to be part of a new effort to grow its intelligence and counterterrorism efforts. Other recent proposals include expanding its collection and analysis of data on U.S. persons, retaining years' worth of Americans' phone records and even increasing so-called "black bag" secret entry operations. To handle the increase in so-called human sources, the FBI also plans to overhaul its database system, so it can manage records and verify the accuracy of information from "more than 15,000" informants, according to the document. The bureau has arranged to use elements of CIA training to teach FBI agents about "Source Targeting and Development," the report states. The courses will train FBI special agents on the "comprehensive tradecraft" needed to identify, recruit and manage these "confidential human sources."

Fly into the American air base of Tallil outside Nasiriya in central Iraq and the flight path is over the great ziggurat of Ur, reputedly the earliest city on earth. Ur is safe within the base compound. But its walls are pockmarked with wartime shrapnel and a blockhouse is being built over an adjacent archaeological site. When the head of Iraq's supposedly sovereign board of antiquities and heritage, Abbas al-Hussaini, tried to inspect the site recently, the Americans refused him access to his own most important monument. Under Saddam you were likely to be tortured and shot if you let someone steal an antiquity; in today's Iraq you are likely to be tortured and shot if you don't. The tragic fate of the national museum in Baghdad in April 2003 was as if federal troops had invaded New York city, sacked the police and told the criminal community that the Metropolitan was at their disposal. The local tank commander was told specifically not to protect the museum for a full two weeks after the invasion. Even the Nazis protected the Louvre. America [has converted] Nebuchadnezzar's great city of Babylon into the hanging gardens of Halliburton. In the process the 2,500-year-old brick pavement to the Ishtar Gate was smashed by tanks and the gate itself damaged. Babylon is being rendered archaeologically barren. Outside the capital some 10,000 sites of incomparable importance to the history of western civilisation, barely 20% yet excavated, are being looted as systematically as was the museum in 2003. When [archeologists] tried to remove vulnerable carvings from the ancient city of Umma to Baghdad, [they] found gangs of looters already in place with bulldozers, dump trucks and AK47s.

In a letter written Saturday to former CIA Director George Tenet, six former CIA officers described their former boss as "the Alberto Gonzales of the intelligence community," and called his book "an admission of failed leadership." The letter, signed by Phil Giraldi, Ray McGovern, Larry Johnson, Jim Marcinkowski, Vince Cannistraro and David MacMichael, said Tenet should have resigned in protest rather than take part in the administration's buildup to the war. (Read the full letter) Johnson is a former CIA intelligence official and registered Republican who voted for Bush in 2000. Cannistraro is former head of the CIA's counterterrorism division. The writers said ... "your lament that you are a victim in a process you helped direct is self-serving. You were not a victim. You were a willing participant in a poorly considered policy to start an unnecessary war. CIA field operatives produced solid intelligence in September 2002 that stated clearly there was no stockpile of any kind of WMD in Iraq. This intelligence was ignored and later misused." The letter said CIA officers learned later that month Iraq had no contact with Osama bin Laden and that then-President Saddam Hussein considered the al Qaeda leader to be an enemy. Still, Tenet "went before Congress in February 2003 and testified that Iraq did indeed have links to al Qaeda. "You helped set the bar very low for reporting that supported favored White House positions, while raising the bar astronomically high when it came to raw intelligence that did not support the case for war. You betrayed the CIA officers who collected the intelligence. Most importantly and tragically, you failed to meet your obligations to the people of the United States."

Only this president, only in this time, only with this dangerous, even messianic certitude, could answer a country demanding an exit strategy from Iraq, by offering an entrance strategy for Iran. Only this president could look out over a vista of 3,008 dead and 22,834 wounded in Iraq, and finally say, “Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me” — only to follow that by proposing to repeat the identical mistake ... in Iran. Without any authorization from the public, which spoke so loudly and clearly to you in November’s elections — without any consultation with a Congress ... you seem to be ready to make an open-ended commitment (on America’s behalf) to do whatever you want, in Iran. Our military, Mr. Bush, is already stretched so thin by this bogus adventure in Iraq that even a majority of serving personnel are willing to tell pollsters that they are dissatisfied with your prosecution of the war. You, sir, have become the president who cried wolf. Many of us are as inclined to believe you just shuffled the director of national intelligence over to the State Department because he thought you were wrong about Iran. Many of us are as inclined to believe you just put a pilot in charge of ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because he would be truly useful in an air war next door in Iran. Your assurances ... that we trust you have lost all shape and texture. You have lost the military. You have lost the Congress to the Democrats. You have lost many of the Republicans. You are losing the credibility, not just of your presidency, but more importantly of the office itself. And most imperatively, you are guaranteeing that more American troops will be losing their lives, and more families their loved ones.

Note: For powerful information from a highly decorated U.S. General on the real reasons behind war, click here.

Testifying before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee in July 2003 about the rebuilding of Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told the story of Jumana Michael Hanna, an Iraqi woman...with a tale of her horrific torture at the hands of Saddam Hussein's regime. Hanna's tale - more than two years of imprisonment that included being subjected to electric shocks, repeatedly raped and sexually assaulted - was unusual in that she was willing to name the Iraqi police officials who participated in her torture, "information that is helping us to root out Baathist policemen who routinely tortured and killed prisoners," Wolfowitz said. But Hanna's story, which 10 days before Wolfowitz's testimony had been the subject of a front-page article in the Washington Post, appears to have unraveled. Esquire magazine, in this month's issue, published a lengthy article, by a writer who was hired to help Hanna produce a memoir, saying that her account had all but fallen apart.

U.S. intelligence officials had several warnings that terrorists might attack the United States on its home soil -- even using airplanes as weapons -- well before the September 11, 2001 attacks, two congressional committees said in a report. In 1998, U.S. intelligence had information that a group of unidentified Arabs planned to fly an explosives-laden airplane into the World Trade Center, according to a joint inquiry of the House and Senate intelligence committees. However, the Federal Aviation Administration found the plot "highly unlikely given the state of that foreign country's aviation program," and believed a flight originating outside the United States would be detected before it reached its target inside the country, the report said. "The FBI's New York office took no action on the information," it said. Another alert came just a month before the attacks, the report said, when the CIA sent a message to the FAA warning of a possible hijacking "or an act of sabotage against a commercial airliner." The information was linked to a group of Pakistanis based in South America. That warning did not mention using an airliner as a weapon and, the report said, "there was apparently little, if any, effort by intelligence community analysts to produce any strategic assessments of terrorists using aircraft as weapons."

Note: For many unanswered questions about the official account of 9/11 asked by highly-respected professors and officials, click here and here.

The motivations of men who commit mass shootings are often muddled, complex or unknown. But one common thread that connects many of them - other than access to powerful firearms - is a history of hating women, assaulting wives, girlfriends and female family members, or sharing misogynistic views online, researchers say. Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, cited a statistic that belies the sense that mass shootings are usually random: In more than half of all mass shootings in the United States from 2009 to 2017, an intimate partner or family member of the perpetrator was among the victims. “Most mass shootings are rooted in domestic violence,” Ms. Watts said. “Most mass shooters have a history of domestic or family violence in their background. It’s an important red flag.” The plagues of domestic violence and mass shootings in the United States are closely intertwined. Psychiatrists [say that] the common argument that mental illness is the explanation for these massacres cannot explain the link between misogyny and mass shootings. Misogyny - or other types of hatred - is not necessarily a diagnosable mental illness. Instead, said Amy Barnhorst ... at the University of California, Davis, who has studied mass shootings, what ties together many of the perpetrators is “this entitlement, this envy of others, this feeling that they deserve something that the world is not giving them. And they are angry at others that they see are getting it.”

Note: Domestic violence dropped sharply following the 1994 passage of the Violence Against Women Act. This drop coincided with a drop in other forms of violent crime.

The seven nations targeted for new visitation restrictions by President Trump on Friday all have something in common: They are places he does not appear to have any business interests. The executive order he signed Friday bars all entry for the next 90 days by travelers from Syria, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia and Libya. Excluded from the lists are several majority-Muslim nations where the Trump Organization is active. The restriction applies to countries that have already been excluded from programs allowing people to travel to the United States without a visa because of concerns over terrorism. Trump’s order makes no mention of Turkey. On Wednesday, the State Department updated a travel warning for Americans visiting Turkey, noting that “an increase in anti-American rhetoric has the potential to inspire independent actors to carry out acts of violence against US citizens.” Trump has licensed his name to two luxury towers in Istanbul. A Turkish company also manufactures a line of Trump-branded home furnishings. The executive order makes no mention of Saudi Arabia, home of 15 of the 19 terrorists involved in the 9/11 attacks. The Trump Organization had incorporated several limited liability companies in preparation for an attempt to build a hotel in Saudi Arabia, showing an interest in expansion in the country. The company canceled those incorporations in December.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and terrorism.

A specialist unit created by the British domestic counterintelligence and security agency MI5 to “get inside the heads” of terrorists has helped foil seven attacks in the past year. The Behavioural Science Unit at Thames House, the headquarters of MI5 [establishes] whether people flagged as potential threats are "talkers" or "walkers" - those who simply boast or those who are preparing to act. Research by MI5 shows that more than 60 per cent of so-called lone wolves unwittingly provide clues that they are preparing to strike. The BSU’s work involves picking up signs of such changing behaviour. Neil, an Arabic and Norwegian speaker who has worked for the unit for six years, said ... his team is passed intelligence by officers that is gleaned from a network of informants and the public. The BSU then looks for signs of unusual activity. The BSU team pays close attention to “lone-actor” terrorists. The number of experts working in the BSU, which was created in 2004, has more than doubled since ... 2013. “We deal with probabilities and that is the nature of our work,” said Neil, [adding that] some of those they profiled lied to themselves about their intention and the ultimate aim was to persuade them to abandon their radical ideology. He said the assumption that many extremists had mental health problems was wrong. “Only 2 per cent of members of terrorist organisations suffer from mental health problems, compared with an average of up to 30 per cent of members of the public,” Neil said.

Note: See the full text of this article on this webpage. If this article is accurate, MI5 is using very different tactics than those used by the FBI to fight the war on terror.

A series of revelations about the rocket believed to have delivered poison sarin gas to a Damascus suburb last summer are challenging American intelligence assumptions about that attack and suggest that the case U.S. officials initially made for retaliatory military action was flawed. A team of security and arms experts, meeting this week in Washington to discuss the matter, has concluded that the range of the rocket that delivered sarin in the largest attack that night was too short for the device to have been fired from the Syrian government positions where the Obama administration insists they originated. The authors of a report released Wednesday said that their study of the rocket’s design, its likely payload and its possible trajectories show that it would have been impossible for the rocket to have been fired from inside areas controlled by the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad. In the report, titled “Possible Implications of Faulty U.S. Technical Intelligence,” Richard Lloyd, a former United Nations weapons inspector, and Theodore Postol, a professor of science, technology and national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, argue that the question about the rocket’s range indicates a major weakness in the case for military action initially pressed by Obama administration officials. Postol said that a basic analysis of the weapon ... would have shown that it wasn’t capable of flying the 6 miles from the center of the Syrian government-controlled part of Damascus to the point of impact in the suburbs, or even the 3.6 miles from the edges of government-controlled ground.

Note: For more on government lies designed to start wars, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

Malaysia is brave to organise a war crimes tribunal and to recognise former United States president George W. Bush and his associates as war criminals. In a public forum entitled "9/11 and the Ecological Crisis", renowned theologian, scholar and author Professor David Ray Griffin praised Malaysia for having the courage to bring these prominent figures to justice and to expose their crimes to the international community. "Someone has to get started somewhere, and this is a good start, Malaysia is ideally placed in this aspect and hopefully the international community will take notice," he said. In his lecture, Griffin also explained his theory on the Sept 11 attacks, claiming that it was a "staged event" and could not have been the work of Muslim terrorists. He explained that the rigid steel columns of the (World Trade Center) twin towers made it impossible for them to crumble unless they had been rigged with explosives. Griffin added that the fires could not have come within 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit of the temperature needed to melt steel. He also alleged that the hijackers had minimal competence to fly single-engine aircraft, let alone be able to handle commercial jets. Griffin noted that more than any others, Muslims have paid the greatest price as a result of 9/11 that later launched the war on terrorism. "We have started something called Consensus 9/11 where we have gathered several experts to provide the world with a clear statement, based on expert independent opinion, of some of the best evidence opposing the official narrative about 9/11."

Note: The New Straits Times is Malaysia's oldest newspaper, founded in 1845. This article is a rare example of objective mainstream press coverage of alternative interpretations of the 9/11 events. WantToKnow team member Prof. David Ray Griffin's most recent book on 9/11 is 9/11 Ten Years Later.

The Pentagon is planning to ramp up its spying operations against high-priority targets such as Iran under an intelligence reorganization aimed at expanding on the military’s espionage efforts beyond war zones. The newly created Defense Clandestine Service would work closely with the CIA ... in an effort to bolster espionage operations overseas at a time when the missions of the agency and the military increasingly converge. Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, who signed off on the newly created service last week, served as CIA director at a time when the agency relied extensively on military hardware, including armed drones. Michael Vickers, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and the main force behind the changes, is best known as one of the architects of the CIA’s program to arm Islamist militants to oust the Soviets from Afghanistan in the 1980s. He is also a former member of U.S. Special Operations forces. Despite the potentially provocative name for the new service, the official played down concerns that the Pentagon was seeking to usurp the role of the CIA or its National Clandestine Service. The new service fits into a broader convergence trend. U.S. Special Operations forces are increasingly engaged in intelligence collection overseas and have collaborated with the CIA on missions. The blurring is also evident in the organizations’ upper ranks. Panetta previously served as CIA director.

Note: For lots more from major media sources on the activities of government intelligence agencies, click here.

For more than two years, a handful of Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee have warned that the government is secretly interpreting its surveillance powers under the Patriot Act in a way that would be alarming if the public — or even others in Congress — knew about it. On [March 15], two of those senators — Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado — went further. They said a top-secret intelligence operation that is based on that secret legal theory is not as crucial to national security as executive branch officials have maintained. The Justice Department has argued that disclosing information about its interpretation of the Patriot Act could alert adversaries to how the government collects certain intelligence. It is seeking the dismissal of two Freedom of Information Act lawsuits — by The New York Times and by the American Civil Liberties Union — related to how the Patriot Act has been interpreted. The dispute centers on what the government thinks it is allowed to do under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, under which agents may obtain a secret order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court allowing them to get access to any “tangible things” — like business records — that are deemed “relevant” to a terrorism or espionage investigation. The interpretation of Section 215 that authorizes this secret surveillance operation is apparently not obvious from a plain text reading of the provision, and was developed through a series of classified rulings by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Note: For key reports from major media sources on surveillance and other government restrictions of basic civil liberties, click here.

Last week we learned from Reuters that fellow countrymen labeled "militants" by the Obama administration are now unilaterally placed on a "kill list" by "a secretive panel of senior government officials. "This is a real-life death panel inside the highest governmental office in the land -- and, according to Reuters, it acts without "any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate." This neo-Star Chamber is wholly unprecedented in its willful violations of the U.S. Constitution's due-process provisions -- and our Congress' refusal to even question it is utterly detestable. However, it reminds us that government death panels in general are anything but rare; they are all around us, making blood-curdling decisions to kill people all the time. For example, at the state level, the death panel commonly called the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles recently opted to execute Troy Davis, despite compelling evidence calling his conviction into question. Likewise ... the death panel known as the U.S. House Agriculture Appropriations Committee [is] considering cuts to food stamps at a time when Louisiana State University researchers report that between 2,000 and 3,000 elderly Americans are already dying of malnutrition every year.

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Buried in FBI laboratory reports about the anthrax mail attacks that killed five people in 2001 are data suggesting that a chemical may have been added to try to heighten the powder's potency, a move that some experts say exceeded the expertise of the presumed killer. The lab data, contained in more than 9,000 pages of files that emerged a year after the Justice Department closed its inquiry and condemned the late Army microbiologist Bruce Ivins as the perpetrator, shows unusual levels of silicon and tin in anthrax powder from two of the five letters. Those elements are found in compounds that could be used to weaponize the anthrax, enabling the lethal spores to float easily so they could be readily inhaled by the intended victims, scientists say. The existence of the silicon-tin chemical signature offered investigators the possibility of tracing purchases of the more than 100 such chemical products available before the attacks, which might have produced hard evidence against Ivins or led the agency to the real culprit. But the FBI lab reports released in late February give no hint that bureau agents tried to find the buyers of additives such as tin-catalyzed silicone polymers. The apparent failure of the FBI to pursue this avenue of investigation raises the ominous possibility that the killer is still on the loose.

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President Obama signed an executive order Monday that will create a formal system of indefinite detention for those held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who continue to pose a significant threat to national security. The administration also said it will start new military commission trials for detainees there. The announcements, coming more than two years after Obama vowed in another executive order to close the detention center, all but cements Guantanamo Bay's continuing role in U.S. counterterrorism policy. The executive order recognizes the reality that some Guantanamo Bay detainees will remain in U.S. custody for many years, if not for life. Activists on either end of the debate over closing the prison cast the announcement as a reversal. "It is virtually impossible to imagine how one closes Guantanamo in light of this executive order," said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "In a little over two years, the Obama administration has done a complete about-face." Recent legislation now makes it extremely difficult to transfer any detainee out of Guantanamo Bay even if he is believed to be no threat.

Note: President Obama has repeatedly reversed his position on key elements of his election campaign, like Guantanamo, which brought him to power. To understand how members of the power elite of our world can exert tremendous pressure on anyone who becomes president, read revealing major media reports on secret societies composed of the power elite of our world at this link.

Former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura is suing the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration, saying full-body scans and pat-downs at airport checkpoints are violating his rights. Ventura filed his lawsuit [on January 24] in federal court in Minnesota. He says the new security measures violate his right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. He's asking a federal court to order officials to stop subjecting him to these searches. Ventura was governor of Minnesota from 1999 through 2002. He now hosts the television program "Conspiracy Theory." The lawsuit says Ventura had a hip replacement in 2008, and his titanium implant sets off metal detectors.

Note: Jesse Ventura is one of the heros of our time. Do a video search on his name to watch episodes of his amazingly revealing "Conspiracy Theory" programs.

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