Espionage Files: South Korean Intelligence Warns Of ISIS Threat To U.S. Bases

Link this article with a recent article from John Schindler at XX Committee stating that ISIS’ Cyber Arm is indeed Russian Intelligence and you have quite a different story.-SF

South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) said in a statement release on June 19 that ISIS, through its hacking network called United Cyber Caliphate, has collected its own intelligence information on U.S. bases in South Korea — as well as dozens of other U.S. and NATO air force facilities around the world.

A June 20 report from CNN stated that in addition to potential threat against the bases posed by its intelligence gathering, ISIS has also released information on individuals in 21 countries, including the personal details of an employee of a South Korean welfare organization who has been placed under the government’s protection.

South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency reported a statement released by NIS:

While disseminating the location data of the installations and information on the individuals, [ISIS] incited [its sympathizers around the world] to retaliate for the benefit of Muslims.

South Korea’s NIS said that ISIS has disseminated its intelligence data, including Google satellite maps, through the Telegram messaging service. Through the messaging program, ISIS unveiled the locations of U.S. Air Force units in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province, and Gunsan, North Jeolla Province, both in South Korea. An article posted on the Security Affairs website last November said that, following the Paris terrorist attacks, the nonprofit organization running the Telegram messaging service had identified several channels used by the ISIS and blocked them. However, Telegram said that terrorists could still establish private connections, and that it is not able to block communications that happen in private groups, which can include up to 200 users. This effectively means that the messaging service could not cut off ISIS’s means of communications.

In response to the NIS announcement, U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) issued a statement on June 20 indicating that it took the threat seriously and will remain vigilant:

Through constant vigilance and regular exercises with our South Korean counterparts, we remain prepared to respond at any time to any emerging threats.

USFK remains committed to ensuring the highest degree of security on the Korean Peninsula.

ISIS has gone from relative obscurity to becoming the world’s best-known terrorist organization in just two years. It first gained prominence in early 2014 when it drove Iraqi government forces out of Western Iraq, an offensive in which it captured the important city of Mosul.

Previously ISIS fought in Syria, under a different name, and made rapid military gains in Northern Syria starting in April 2013, gaining control of large parts of that region by mid-2014. American jets began bombing ISIS in Syria in September 2014, despite the fact that much U.S. aid to the anti-Assad rebels had found its way to ISIS, which had become allied with them in their battle against Assad.

The supreme irony, however, is that ISIS owes its existence to U.S. activity, despite our nation’s current preoccupation with defeating ISIS (and, from the latest reports from the South Koreans, the apparent preoccupation of ISIS with attacking U.S. military targets).

The first action taken by the United States that led to the rise of what would eventually be called ISIS (or the Islamic State) was to invade Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power in 2003. This created a power vacuum as the authoritarian but stable government headed by Saddam was filled by an assortment of radicalized factions and an ineffective, weak central government in Baghdad unable to maintain order. With the withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2011 things only worsened, and ISIS began its quest to capture much of Iraq and begin its reign of terror. George W. Bush, who authorized the invasion as president, all but admitted this during an interview with CBS Television’s Face the Nation in November 2014 — though he still would not admit that the invasion, itself, had been a mistake.

“I think it was the right decision [to go into Iraq],” Bush told CBS News’ Bob Schieffer. “My regret is that … a violent group of people have risen up again…. This is ‘Al Qaeda plus’ … they need to be defeated. And I hope we do…. I hope the strategy works.”

That “violent group of people,” of course, is ISIS. Bush did not explain why he thought that, given the rise of ISIS in the vacuum created by the ouster of Saddam Hussein, he still thought it “was the right decision” to invade Iraq.

If Bush’s action created fertile ground for ISIS in Iraq, his successor, Barack Obama did the same in Syria.

The New American has published multiple articles providing details of how the foreign policy of the Obama administration has contributed to the growth of ISIS and its success in gaining control over much of Syria. One of the most revealing is “Anti-ISIS Coalition Built ISIS,” published on August 10, 2015.

The article cites the words of Vice President Joe Biden, U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey, and the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, demonstrating that the U.S.-supported “anti-ISIS coalition” armed, trained, and funded ISIS with the goal of establishing an Islamic State in Eastern Syria to destabilize the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

The article quoted from Biden’s 2014 speech at Harvard:

The idea of identifying a “moderate middle” has been a chase America’s been engaged in for a long time…. The fact remains that the ability to identify a “moderate middle” in Syria was — there was no “moderate middle” because the “moderate middle” are made up of shopkeepers, not soldiers…. What my constant cry was was that our biggest problem was our allies…. What were they doing? They were so determined to take down Assad and have a proxy Sunni-Shia war, what did they do? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands, of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight. Except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra and al-Qaeda and extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.

While being questioned by Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), General Dempsey also reinforced the fact that ISIS was supported by members of the “anti-ISIS” coalition:

Dempsey: It really comes down to building a coalition so that what the Arab Muslim world sees is “them” rejecting ISIS, not…

Graham: They already reject ISIL. Do you know any major Arab [U.S.] allies who embrace ISIL?

Dempsey: I know major Arab allies who fund them.

Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) speaking on CBS’s This Morning back in 2014, spoke out against the measure proposed in Congress to aid the Syrian rebels:

It’s a mistake to arm them. Most of the arms we’ve given to the so-called moderate rebels have wound up in the hands of ISIS, because ISIS simply takes it from them, or it’s given to them, or we mistakenly actually give it to some of the radicals.

A report in The Hill on September 15, 2014 cited Paul’s assertion that rebel fighters in Syria are focused on overthrowing Syrian President Assad, rather than fighting ISIS and noted that some rebels units had recently agreed to a truce with ISIS.

“I would say one insightful piece of news from the last week is, some of the moderate rebels, so-called moderate rebels have now signed a cease-fire with ISIS,” Paul said. “So, really their enemy is really Assad. They don’t really care what ISIS does.”

The recent news from South Korea illustrates more than one very negative result of our nation’s continued interventionist foreign policy. We are engaged in what is rapidly becoming a worldwide war on ISIS terrorists, when it has been our own policies in Iraq and Syria that have enabled ISIS and turned it from a ragtag assortment of jihadists into a highly efficient terrorism machine.

A second lesson to be learned from the South Korean intelligence report is that our widespread military presence around the world only provides a larger number of vulnerable targets for ISIS and any other anti-American forces that seek to wage war against us. While a strong military is essential to our national defense, our military would better defend us at bases right here in the United States and on the oceans of the world.

Read the Original Article at New American

Denial of Jihad and Fear of Islamophobia Killed 49 People, Not Assault Weapons with High Capacity Magazines

This is a combination of excerpts from two articles by John R. Schindler.

Jihad Denial Kills…Again

 America just suffered our worst terrorist attack since 9/11. We need to start talking honestly about the enemy that keeps butchering Americans.

Tonight we burn illusions. A terrorist attack on a popular gay club in Orlando, Florida in the middle of the night ended before the dawn with the violent deaths of at least 50 innocents and the maiming of 53 more. This was the bloodiest terrorist attack on America since 9/11. The Pulse nightclub, something of an icon in Florida LGBT circles, was transformed into a charnel house.

The United States had been lucky, having avoided truly mass casualty terrorist incidents since that awful day 15 years ago, through a combination of luck, inept enemies, and excellent intelligence work. But the Orlando horror demonstrates that attacks on soft targets in public places can cause huge numbers of casualties, here as well as in Europe, like last November’s assaults on Paris that killed 130 people, 89 of them at the Bataclan theater, where a hostage situation resulted in a bloodbath. Something similar has just happened in Florida.

While the Paris attacks were the work of nine terrorists, plus several others providing logistical support, so far only one killer has been identified in the Orlando atrocity. While there are reports of other shooters, these remain unconfirmed, and the sole terrorist definitely involved was Omar Mateen, born in this country in 1986 to immigrant parents from Afghanistan. He was killed by police at the end of the nightmare he inflicted on Orlando.

So far, his story is shaping up as the now-customary list of jihadist clichés. The 29-year-old went from a relatively normal American life towards extremism, winding up on the radar of the FBI more than once for his aggressive beliefs. A brief marriage failed, in part because he frequently beat his wife, she claims,asserting that Mateen “was not a stable person.” A trauma like divorce leading to an embrace of jihadism is as common as can be in extremist circles.

Read the rest at The Observer …

 

The Road to Orlando

A clear picture of what exactly happened in Orlando in the pre-dawn hours of Sunday is slowly emerging. While reports persist of more than one shooter, these remain unconfirmed, meaning that Omar Mateen killed more than four dozen people by himself over a three-hour period. Since it took nine jihadists to kill 130 people in Paris last November, and several of those murderers were veterans of the Islamic State’s jihad in the Middle East, Mr. Mateen appears to have been a significantly deadlier ISIS killer than usual, despite his complete lack of combat experience.

The enormity of that death toll at Pulse nightclub has something to do with the fact that Orlando police waited until 5 a.m. to send in their SWAT team to save hostages – a decision that was at odds with normal police procedures in active shooter situations and appears to have been an error that cost lives.

That said, it’s important to place blame where it really belongs: on Omar Mateen and any helpers or co-conspirators he may have possessed. Although progressives are chanting their usual mantra about gun control being the solution to jihadism, creating heat rather than light, it’s fair to ask why on earth Mr. Mateen had an AR-15 rifle after being questioned by the FBI twice about possible ties to extremism.

Just as we should ask why he remained employed with a security firm that did significant work for the U.S. Government, we should be concerned that Mr. Mateen bought an AR-15, a near-military-grade weapon that surely did the lion’s share of the killing on Sunday, just days before he became the deadliest mass murderer in American history. The legalistic answer – that he had been convicted of no crime and the FBI’s investigations into Mr. Mateen never went very far – is correct but unsatisfying when 49 innocent Americans are dead.

Read the rest at The Observer…

 

 

 

Cold War Files: The Third World War that Almost Was in 1950

 

With the comfort and hindsight of a half-century, President Harry Truman’s decision to commit American power to save South Korea from Communist aggression in late June 1950 stands as perhaps America’s finest moment of the Cold War. By making a difficult commitment, by sacrificing 50,000 American lives in the end, Truman upheld Western values and interests where they were directly threatened. It is easy to overlook the unpopularity and unpleasantness of a war which, though necessary, nevertheless remains unknown to most Americans today. Our sacrifices in Korea beginning in the disastrous summer of 1950 merit recognition and honor in their own right, yet they deserve our attention for another reason almost completely neglected in accounts of the period. By dispatching the 24th Infantry and 1st Cavalry Divisions from comfortable occupation duty in Japan to death and destruction in Korea in mid-summer 1950, the United States actually did nothing less than save the world from a global conflagration.

The issue was found not in Asia but on the other side of the planet: in Stalin’s private war with Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia. Determined to destroy Tito and his heretic Communist regime at any cost, Stalin was impatiently planning for an all-out invasion of Yugoslavia by the Soviet military and East European satellite forces. As U.S. and NATO records indicate, the thoroughly planned Soviet attack would have resulted in Western military commitment and almost certainly nuclear response. It would have been the Third World War.

Perhaps ironically, Stalin was initially inflamed by Tito’s revolutionary ardor. Beginning in mid-1947, Tito’s intelligence appa- )o~eph \/ Stalin ratus opened the “Greek line,” supplying Communist insurgents in neighboring Greece “”ith weapons and supplies, an effort which quickly outpaced Soviet support to the guerrillas; 10,000 Yugoslav “volunteers” fought alongside their Greek allies too. Stalin found Tito’s fervor and undue risk-taking troubling; indeed, the Greek issue was the last of a long series of Yugoslav actions Moscow disliked. Stalin sent Tito a letter criticizing the “Greek line,” observing that the Communist insurgency stood no chance of success due to support for Athens by the United States, “the strongest state in the world.”

When Belgrade astonishingly refused to back down, Moscow exacted retribution. On June 28, 1948, Serbia’s national day, Stalin expelled Yugoslavia from the Communist Information Bureau – the Cominform, the Moscow-led successor to the Comintern – setting off an unprecedented conflict in Communist he opi ni ons expressed in thi sarti cle are those of ranks which would nearly provoke the Third World War. The Soviets immediately dispensed vitriolic propaganda, denouncing Tito and his government as a “spy group” in the pay of American and British “imperialism.” 2 Purges of alleged “Titoists” began with fervor throughout the Soviet bloc, nowhere more thoroughly than in Hungary, the satellite on the frontline of the Yugoslav menace. Iilszl6 Rajk, Budapest’s interior minister, was executed in mid-1949 for his supposed ideological deviation, while the Hungarian People’s Army simultaneously saw a dozen generals and 1,100 high-ranking officers purged, and some executed, for alleged pro-Yugoslav sentiments.

Read the Remainder at XX Committee