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Posts tagged ‘INTEL’

BOMBSHELL: House Intel Chairman Turner Warns Russia Has ‘Serious National Security Threat’


Wednesday, 14 February 2024 03:14 PM EST

Read more at https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/house-intel-chair/2024/02/14/id/1153586/

The chairman of the House intelligence committee, Rep. Mike Turner, issued an unusual cryptic statement on Wednesday saying the committee had made available to all members of Congress information about an unspecified “serious national security threat.” But sources close to ABC News report that the threat relates to Russia’s plans to place a nuclear weapon in space.

According to ABC: “This is not to drop a nuclear weapon onto Earth but rather to possibly use against satellites.”

The network said the development is “very concerning” and “a big deal.”

Turner wants the White House and Pentagon to release information about the threat.

“I am requesting that President Biden declassify all information relating to this threat so that Congress, the Administration, and our allies can openly discuss the actions necessary to respond to this threat,” Representative Mike Turner said in the statement.

Turner provided no further information, and his office did not immediately respond to requests for further comment.

Turner’s statement was released in the midst of intense debate in Congress over how the United States should be dealing with global threats from Russia and other rivals, with security hawks urging greater global involvement and some lawmakers most closely allied with former Republican President Donald Trump advocating for a more “America First” approach to world affairs.

The Biden administration has been ramping up its criticism of House Republicans for possibly blocking a $95-billion bill passed by the Senate that would supply aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. Supporters of the bill argue that a major reason for the United States to back the government in Kyiv is to push back against threats from Russia that extend beyond Ukraine.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a staunch Trump ally who says he will not rush to allow a vote on the Senate bill, told reporters at the Capitol there was no need for public alarm. “Steady hands are at the wheel. We’re working on it and there’s no need for alarm,” he said.

‘NOT A CAUSE FOR PANIC’

Senators Mark Warner and Marco Rubio, the Democratic chairperson and Republican vice chairperson of the Senate Intelligence Committee, issued a joint statement saying their panel has the intelligence in question and has been “rigorously” tracking the issue.

“We continue to take this matter seriously and are discussing an appropriate response with the administration. In the meantime, we must be cautious about potentially disclosing sources and methods that may be key to preserving a range of options for U.S. action,” the statement said.

A source familiar with the matter said Warner and Rubio had been briefed on the threat two weeks ago. The source said the issue was not unrelated to the security spending bill, but there is no direct tie between them.

Representative Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House intelligence panel, said the issue in Turner’s statement is significant, “but it is not a cause for panic.”

“As to whether more can be declassified about this issue, that is a worthwhile discussion but it is not a discussion to be had in public,” Himes said in a statement.

Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, declined to provide specifics. He said he had arranged a briefing for Thursday with congressional leaders and that he was surprised by Turner’s decision to issue the statement.

“That’s been on the books so I am a bit surprised that Congressman Turner came out publicly today, in advance of a meeting on the books, for me to go sit with him alongside our intelligence and defense professionals tomorrow,” Sullivan told a briefing.

“I’m not in a position to say anything further today. Like I said, I look forward to the discussion with (Turner) and obviously from there we will determine how to proceed, but standing here at the podium today I can’t share anything further,” Sullivan said.

Sullivan made clear that he had initiated the meeting with the Gang of Eight scheduled for Thursday. The Gang of Eight refers to the Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate, and the top Republican and Democrat on the House and Senate intelligence committees.

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Report: US Intel Disregarded Hamas After 9/11


By Charlie McCarthy    |   Wednesday, 01 November 2023 01:28 PM EDT

Read more at https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/u-s-israel-intel/2023/11/01/id/1140579/

U.S. intelligence agencies virtually disregarded Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups in the years following the 9-11 attacks, The Wall Street Journal reported. Instead, the focus was on leaders of al-Qaida and the Islamic State, according to U.S. officials.

Mainstream media reports in the past several weeks have asked how Israeli and U.S. intelligence failed to discover what Hamas had planned for Oct. 7, when the group’s terrorists attacked Israel. More than 1,400 Israelis have been killed, and more than 200 others were taken to Gaza as hostages. AP reported that the death toll among Palestinians has exceeded 8,000, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. 

Current and former U.S. officials said intelligence agencies had a handful of analysts tracking events in the Gaza Strip before the attacks, but the U.S. ceded the responsibility for monitoring Hamas to Israel, the Journal reported Wednesday.

“In terms of intelligence failures, which really do lie mostly on Israel, I think we should also share some blame for missing this event,” Marc Polymeropoulos, a retired CIA operations officer with extensive counterterrorism experience, told the Journal. “Ceding the target to the Israelis now looks to have had consequences.”

Israel’s intelligence services have relied on human intelligence, eavesdropping, and other technical means throughout the West Bank and Gaza.

“It is almost inconceivable how they missed this,” Polymeropoulos told NBC News.

Soon after the Hamas attack on Israel, The Washington Post’s David Ignatius wrote an opinion column under the headline, “Hamas attack is an intelligence failure that may take Israel years to unravel.”

“True intelligence failures result not simply from a lack of information but also an inability to understand it,” Ignatius wrote. “Israelis knew the malevolent hatred that animated Hamas and its backers in Iran. What they didn’t appreciate was the creativity and competence of their adversaries. This was a level of organized malice that was, literally, unthinkable.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a comment Sunday on X, formerly Twitter, blamed the security failures on the country’s defense and intelligence services. However, he soon deleted the post and apologized. Members of Netanyahu’s Likud party have said Israel needs to focus on defeating Hamas before analyzing what went wrong. 

Neither Hamas nor Gaza were mentioned in the U.S. director of national intelligence’s Annual Threat Assessment, which was issued in February.

Jonathan Schanzer, who tracked Hamas as a U.S. Treasury terrorism finance analyst, now is at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He said the Oct. 7 attacks should prompt a review of U.S. policy toward Iran-backed proxy groups.

“There should be one. If there isn’t, it’s foreign policy malpractice,” Schanzer told the Journal.

Charlie McCarthy | editorial.mccarthy@newsmax.com

Charlie McCarthy, a writer/editor at Newsmax, has nearly 40 years of experience covering news, sports, and politics.

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Classified Documents Are a New Potential Trap for Any Politician Who Crosses the Deep State


BY: JOY PULLMANN | JANUARY 30, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/01/30/classified-documents-are-a-new-potential-trap-for-any-politician-who-crosses-the-deep-state/

Chuck Schumer and Merrick Garland talking
The Trump years saw a massive acceleration in the trend of unelected bureaucrats exercising power over elected officials, including by weaponizing classified information.

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Procedural complaints about classified documents are quickly turning into a catch-all trap that can depose duly elected officials, especially those tasked with oversight of U.S. intelligence agencies. Last August, an unprecedented classified document complaint provided a pretext for an FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s home, in an eerie echo of the use of police and military resources against opposing politicians typical of banana republics.

That administrative power flex has now been turned into the unprecedented appointment of three special counsels, most recently against the deeply unpopular current Democrat Party figurehead, Joe Biden. This all reverses the American structure of elected officials maintaining oversight of unelected permanent administrators. Instead, we now have unelected bureaucrats performing selective “oversight” of elected officials.

Of course, that pattern erases Americans’ deepest political birthright: government of the people, by the people, and for the people. A government not ultimately controlled by elected representatives of the citizenry is not a republic, nor is it any kind of democracy. Without elections truly affecting government policies, the original United States is no more, and its elections are a sham.

The subversion of elected representative government via weaponized intelligence has been expanding for some time. The Trump presidential years saw a massive acceleration in this pre-existing trend of unelected bureaucrats exercising increasing power over elected officials, including by weaponizing classified information, usually via highly selective leaks to leftist media.

Recall that Michael Flynn, a would-be reformer of U.S. intelligence, was neatly precluded from becoming Trump’s national security advisor via leaks of classified intel to the media that a (still) gullible Vice President Mike Pence bought hook, line, and sinker. Rather than the leaker being sought, caught, and punished, Flynn was. The selective and deceptive leaks were shanghaied into a Justice Department investigation that ended with Flynn narrowly escaping jail time and professional repercussions for his son so long as he promised to disappear from public view.

The same pattern occurred in multiple cycles with Spygate, the wholly manufactured projection of treasonous collusion with Russia from the Democratic Party onto Trump. Rep. Adam Schiff, who has been recently kicked off the House Intelligence Committee, repeatedly used his access to classified intelligence to fan the Spygate flames as well as the two impeachments of Trump. So did multiple other deep-state actors, including the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Notice there’s no probe into Schiff’s blatant and repeated misuse of the classified information he was privileged to receive on the House Intelligence Committee. But there could be if he stopped being such a useful Democrat.

This is how, as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer threatened Trump early in the latter’s term, intelligence agencies “have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” It is how the intelligence tail can — and now does — wag the congressional dog. This has been ongoing now for decades and is perpetually expanding its reach.

This allows the document-holders to function as a shadow government that essentially controls the elected government by picking what bits of information to release to achieve its own ends rather than the priorities of American voters. This selective deployment of intelligence has been even used to goad the United States into wars it doesn’t win that expand the military-industrial complex and distract U.S. officials while defenestrating U.S. national interests. It was used to lie to Trump about U.S. military activities and prevent him from exercising his due presidential authority over U.S. military affairs.

Those who presented unreliable, counterproductive, and false intelligence to presidents from George W. Bush to Barack Obama to Trump have not been punished, nor often even identified. Neither has the person who compromised the safety and collegiality of the U.S. Supreme Court by leaking the pro-life Dobbs decision last May.

Curiously, neither have there been any administrative-state leaks about the many connections between the Biden family and the Chinese Communist Party. This is not a tool to be applied equally, you see, or in service of the public good. It’s only yet another knife to pull out against those who cross the wrong people.

That’s how expansive, vague, and proliferating laws, regulations, and bureaucracies all work: as tools of selective prosecution to be wielded at the whims of the powerful against those who threaten their power. The erasure of self-government and the rule of law go hand in hand, collapsed by the administrative state’s erasure of the separation of powers that protect individual liberty and justice for all.

This expanding weaponization of classified intel into selective probes of those who have access to at least some of it allows deep-state entities even more control over elected officials. This standard of probes for possessing “unauthorized” classified documents can be applied to any current or former president, as well as many other officials.

As a Project for Government Oversight lawyer told USA Today: “I’d bet you that if they go back to all of the living presidents and root through their homes and their libraries and their warehouses and garages, they’re going to unearth some classified documents there.” Other presidential experts told USA Today that essentially every presidential administration since 1978 has mishandled classified documents.

The same applies to numerous other elected and unelected officials, such as those on House and Senate military intelligence committees and in the executive branch. This is partly because U.S. intelligence agencies improperly classify “millions” of materials, partly to hide their activities by lying that materials elected representatives seek implicate “national security.” It’s a convenient, unfalsifiable excuse that allows U.S. intelligence agencies to function as poisonous self-licking ice cream cones.

U.S. intelligence agencies improperly classify “millions” of materials, partly to hide their activities by lying that materials elected representatives seek implicate “national security.” It’s a convenient, unfalsifiable excuse that allows U.S. intelligence agencies to function as poisonous self-licking ice cream cones.

This all recalls one of the famous lines of one of the world’s most famous of secret police, Joseph Stalin’s NKVD chief, Lavrentiy Beria: “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.” That is how secret police function. It is how U.S. intelligence agencies function now, with help from their administrative-state allies such as the Department of So-Called Justice. Their use of selective prosecutions and investigations to hamstring and punish their enemies may not be unlimited now, but it is expanding.

All members of Congress must be aware of this and use all the powers at their disposal to fight it, for as the administrative apparatus strengthens, the American republic dissolves.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her just-published ebook is “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. Her many books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. Joy is also a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.

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