In this mailing:
- Soeren Kern: Islamic State Alive and Well in Europe
- Chris Farrell: Durham Needs to Bring Indictments
- Alain Destexhe: It Is Time for Europe to Take NATO Seriously
by Soeren Kern • December 2, 2019 at 5:00 am
"I think that the practice of automatic, early release where you cut a sentence in half and let really serious, violent offenders out early simply isn't working, and you've some very good evidence of how that isn't working, I am afraid, with this case." — UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson November 30, 2019, after the ISIS attack on London Bridge a day earlier.
At least 1,200 Islamic State fighters, including many from Western countries, are being held in Turkish prisons. Another 287 jihadis have been captured by Turkish forces since the start of an offensive that began on October 9 against the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in northeastern Syria.
Turkish Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu announced that Turkey would begin repatriating captured Islamic State fighters back to their countries of origin — even if their citizenship had been revoked.
"We could soon be facing a second wave of other Islamic State linked or radicalized individuals that you might call Isis 2.0." — Jürgen Stock, Secretary General, Interpol.
"From my point of view, it is better to know that these people are prosecuted in France rather than leaving them in the wilderness. How can we protect ourselves if we do not have them in custody? The best method is to judge and control them." — David De Pas, French anti-terrorism judge.
ISIS has claimed responsibility for the November 29 attack at London Bridge, where a terrorist stabbed two people to death and injured three others. Pictured: A Metropolitan Police officer stands guard near Borough Market shortly after the attack. (Photo by Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images)
The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the November 29 jihadi attack at London Bridge, where a Pakistani Islamist stabbed two people to death and injured three others. The suspect, 28-year-old Usman Khan, a convicted terrorist, was subsequently shot dead by police.
Khan, from Stoke-on-Trent, was convicted in February 2012 of plotting — on behalf of al-Qaeda — jihadi attacks against the London Stock Exchange and pubs in Stoke, in addition to setting up a jihadi training camp in Pakistan. He was sentenced to an "indeterminate sentence," meaning that he could have been kept in prison beyond his original minimum term of eight years due to the danger he posed to national security.
by Chris Farrell • December 2, 2019 at 4:30 am
The alternative to a purely domestic intelligence operation targeting a major political party's candidate for the presidency (and later, president) was to manufacture a foreign counterintelligence (FCI) "threat" that could then be "imported" back into the United States.
Plausible deniability, the Holy Grail of covert activities, was in reach for the plotters if they could develop an FCI operation outside the continental United States (OCONUS) involving FBI confidential human sources (Halper, Mifsud, others?) that would act as "lures" (intelligence jargon associated with double agent operations) to ensnare Trump associates.
We have evidence of these machinations from December 2015 when FBI lawyer Lisa Page texts to her boyfriend, the now infamous FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok, "You get all our oconus lures approved? ;)."
The coup plot failed, but the chief coup conspirators are free, crisscrossing the country on book tours and appearing as paid contributors to CNN and MSNBC.
U.S. Attorney John Durham's mandate from Attorney General William Barr (pictured) -- to uncover the seditious plot behind the Trump-Russia hoax, if pursued vigorously, will uncover the single greatest threat to the Constitution since the nation's founding. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
There is new evidence that U.S. Attorney John Durham is getting to the root of criminal abuses by senior U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials in their conspiracy to undermine the Trump campaign, transition and presidency. Mr. Durham's mandate from Attorney General William Barr -- to uncover the seditious plot behind the Trump-Russia hoax, if pursued vigorously, will uncover the single greatest threat to the Constitution since the nation's founding.
Mr. Durham's apparent interest in FBI source Stefan Halper and the contract vehicles available to the Pentagon think tank, the Office of Net Assessments, for whom Halper worked, is an important clue.
Likewise, Mr. Durham's travel to Italy for talks with the Italian government and their intelligence service points to another possible clue concerning the mysterious Maltese academic, Joseph Mifsud.
by Alain Destexhe • December 2, 2019 at 4:00 am
The second major challenge the NATO summit will face is Turkey. Following the 2016 coup attempt, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan purged his army. As a result, many senior Turkish officers assigned to NATO asked for asylum in Belgium.
Turkey has the second-largest army in NATO, but it is no longer a fully democratic country, nor it is a reliable ally. As long as Erdogan's Islamist AKP party dominates Turkish politics, the country will remain a significant problem for the Alliance.
It will be illuminating to see what the London Summit brings.
In 2014, at the Wales Summit, all NATO members pledged to meet a target of spending 2% of their GDP on defense by 2024. Five years later, only seven of the 29 NATO allies are currently reaching the agreed target of 2% of GDP. Pictured: Leaders of NATO member states watch a flypast of military aircraft at the NATO summit on September 5, 2014 in Newport, United Kingdom. (Photo by Stefan Rousseau/WPA Pool/Getty Images)
In May 2017, the new $1.23 billion NATO headquarters was inaugurated in Brussels, in the presence of US President Donald Trump. With its state-of-the-art facilities, it was supposed to be "an emblem of a strong, adaptable Alliance... a 21st century headquarters for a 21st century Alliance", according to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.
In November 2019, in an explosive interview with The Economist, French President Emmanuel Macron declared NATO to be "brain dead", thereby triggering a flood of angry reactions.
Macron is wrong. Not only was NATO highly successful in deterring the Soviet threat for half a century, it still has a key role to play in an unstable world. It is true, however, that the 70-year-old organization, which holds a summit this week in London, faces several major challenges.
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