Underground stories : 062014

Nine 'jihadist recruiters' arrested

A Spanish interior ministry statement said police detained the eight in Madrid early on Monday on suspicion of recruiting jihadist militants for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIS.
It said the cell was led by a person who live in Spain but had previously been jailed in Guantanamo Bay after being arrested in Afghanistan in 2001.

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Spain gave no immediate details on the nationalities of the arrested.
In Berlin, prosecutors' spokesman Martin Steltner said police arrested a 30-year-old Frenchman on Saturday suspected of "supporting a terrorist organisation" by fighting in Syria for the group.
Mr Steltner said the suspect, who was not named because of German privacy laws, was injured in fighting. He has also allegedly appeared in ISIS propaganda videos.
A court will decide on his extradition to France in the coming weeks.
European authorities have stepped up their cross-border co-operation since four people were killed in Belgium by a suspected French Islamic extremist returned from Syria.
Spain has arrested dozens of suspected jihadist militants in recent years, especially in its two North African enclaves, Ceuta and Melilla.

2 in Texas arrested in terror-related cases

(CNN) -- Two men have been arrested in connection with terror-related activities, a U.S. attorney in Texas said Wednesday.

Michael Todd Wolfe, 23, of Austin, was arrested Tuesday at George H.W. Bush Houston Intercontinental Airport just before he boarded a flight to Europe, authorities said in a statement.

Wolfe is charged "with attempting to provide material support to terrorists." He "planned to travel to the Middle East to provide his services to radical groups engaged in armed conflict in Syria," according to a complaint.

On February 2, an undercover agent met with Wolfe and his wife and they watched a YouTube video about foreign fighters in Syria, officials say. Wolfe allegedly discussed the activities of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Sunni militant group fighting in Syria and staging an offensive against Iraq.

"While watching the video, Wolfe occasionally stopped the video to explain the current allegiances of the various groups fighting in Syria. They include ISIS, al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, the Free Syria Army, and Dawla," a complaint said.

DISASTER: Isis Seizes Saddam Hussein’s Chemical Weapons 

You often hear liberals say no WMDs were even found in Iraq, but that’s simply not true. We found a lot of WMD’s, they just weren’t the ones we were looking for. We believed Saddam had an active weapons program, but apparently he shut the program down while keeping the assets he needed in place to restart it up. He was also stockpiling some pre-Gulf War WMDs. Happily, those old WMD’s are past their shelf life and aren’t likely to be as effective as they would have been a decade ago, but they’re still dangerous and now ISIS has them. 

16.32 Isis jihadists have seized a chemical weapons facility built by Saddam Hussein which contains a stockpile of old weapons, State Department officials have told the Wall Street Journal:

U.S. officials don’t believe the Sunni militants will be able to create a functional chemical weapon from the material. The weapons stockpiled at the Al Muthanna complex are old, contaminated and hard to move, officials said.

Nonetheless, the capture of the chemical-weapon stockpile by the forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, known as ISIS or ISIL, the militant group that is seizing territory in the country, has grabbed the attention of the U.S.

“We remain concerned about the seizure of any military site by the ISIL,” Jen Psaki, the State Department spokeswoman, said in a written statement. “We do not believe that the complex contains CW materials of military value and it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to safely move the materials.”

Oh good! The same government that bungled Obamacare, used the IRS to go after the Tea Party and that said Iraq would be fine even if we pulled out says that the anti-American terrorists who now have their hands on weapons of mass destruction probably can’t create a “functional chemical weapon” out of it. Given that the administration would probably say that, whether it is true or not — it can’t really allay anyone’s concerns, can it?

Increase in Jihadist Threat Calls for New U.S. Strategy to Combat Terrorism

There is a growing terrorist threat to the United States from a rising number of Salafi-jihadist groups overseas, according to a RAND Corporation study.
Since 2010, there has been a 58 percent increase in the number of jihadist groups, a doubling of jihadist fighters and a tripling of attacks by al Qaeda affiliates. The most significant threat to the United States, the report concludes, comes from terrorist groups operating in Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“Based on these threats, the United States cannot afford to withdraw or remain disengaged from key parts of North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia,” said Seth Jones, author of the study and associate director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. “After more than a decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, it may be tempting for the U.S. to turn its attention elsewhere and scale back on counterterrorism efforts. But this research indicates that the struggle is far from over.”
For the RAND study, Jones examined thousands of unclassified and declassified primary source documents, including public statements and internal memorandums of al Qaeda and other Salafi-jihadist leaders. The study also includes a database of information such as the number of Salafi-jihadist groups, their approximate size and their activity — attacks, fatalities and other casualties.
The RAND study focuses on Salafi-jihadist groups, a particular strand of militant Sunni Islamism. These groups, which include al Qaeda and its affiliates, emphasize the importance of returning to a “pure” Islam, that of the Salaf, the pious ancestors. They also believe that violent jihad is a personal religious duty for every devout Muslim, Jones said.
One reason for the increase in groups, fighters and attacks is the weakness of governments across North Africa and the Middle East. Weak governments have difficulty establishing law and order, which allows militant groups and other sub-state actors to fill the vacuum.
These trends suggest that the United States needs to remain focused on countering the proliferation of Salafi-jihadist groups, despite the temptation to shift attention and resources to the Asia-Pacific or other regions and to significantly decrease counterterrorism budgets in an era of fiscal constraint, Jones said.

Al Qaeda Hits Baghdad —- Obama Hits the Beach

“This was the moment,” Barack Obama had told the cheering audience in St. Paul, Minnesota. “When we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war.”

St. Paul has an Ocean Street. It has an Ocean Spa and Salon. It even has an Oceanaire Seafood Room. It does not however have an ocean. But with ObamaCare an unpopular subsidized failure, the few new jobs around being confined to a local McDonald’s and Al Qaeda taking over Iraq; Obama has nothing left to do but to go back to his old promise of defeating the rise of the ocean.
With Al Qaeda pressing in on Baghdad, Obama ruled out air strikes. He did however order the Department of Defense to assign a senior official to the vital task of fighting mislabeled seafood. While the Iraqi government was begging for air support, Obama instead issued an order in the name of the authority vested in him “by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America” to “ensure that seafood sold in the United States is legally and sustainably caught.”
The United States Constitution does not have much to say about sustainable seafood. The Founders liked their flounder and they disliked kings and emperors telling them where to fish.
King George III responded to Patrick Henry’s cry of “Give me liberty or give me death” with the Fisheries Bill which banned the fishermen of New England from the North Atlantic. A letter sent to a sea captain denounced it as, “A Bill so replete with inhumanity and cruelty… an everlasting stain on the annals of our pious Sovereign.”

Congressional Report: Obama WAS Behind IRS Targeting Scandal

The IRS targeting of conservative groups scandal, which was originally explained away as rogue agents at a local office, has proven to be a wide-ranging pattern of criminal misdeeds that have been traced back to Washington, most notably members of Congress, the Department of Justice, and even the White House.
A slew of released emails have shown that senior Democrats in Congress pressured the IRS to target Tea Party groups, ostensibly to help Democrats during election years.  Emails have also shown that instead of stopping the corruption, the DOJ actually considered arresting and charging Tea Party leaders to send a chilling message to conservative groups.
Although the White House vehemently denies it, it is increasingly obvious for many reasons that President Obama is behind the IRS abuse of conservatives.  He joked about using the IRS to audit his opposition and he met with top IRS officials numerous times while the scandal was ongoing.  It certainly appears that Obama has used the IRS like his own personal “Gestapo”.

IRS Required By Law To Keep Hard Copies Of All Agency Emails In Event Of Problem

Oopsie, guess not only do they have a ridiculous lying excuse about losing the emails in a computer crash, but choosing that excuse means they are admitting they broke the law by not maintaining the records.

Via Daily Caller:

The Internal Revenue Service is required by federal law to keep records of all agency emails and to print out hard copies of the emails to make sure they get saved in the event of a computer glitch.

The IRS recently claimed that it lost 24,000 of 67,000 emails that ex-official Lois Lerner sent between 2009 and 2011, due to a computer crash. The IRS, which agreed to turn over all of Lerner’s emails to the House Committee on Ways and Means, specifically lost emails Lerner sent to other Obama administration agencies and the White House. Lerner is a major figure in the targeting scandal that has hit the IRS.
Meanwhile, President Barack Obama’s press secretary, Josh Earnest, backed up the IRS’s claim of a computer crash. The IRS claimed that it is currently working to retrieve the emails by working with the other agencies, which are not obligated by the IRS’s agreement with the Ways and Means Committee to cooperate.
“The [Federal Records Act] requires agencies to make and preserve records of agency decisions, policies, and essential transactions, and to take steps to safeguard against the loss of agency records,” said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa, who subpoenaed IRS Commissioner John Koskinen Monday.
Keep reading…

Obama's Illegal alien tidal wave to cost taxpayers $billions annually: Report 

With many American citizens feeling helpless -- and hopeless -- as they watch their nation's border security openly violated by illegal alien children -- some of whom are over 18-years-old -- a nonpartisan watchdog group reported on Thursday that the state of California alone spends upwards of $25 billion each year to provide human services to millions of lawbreakers.
The state's estimated 3 million illegal aliens and their 1.1 million U.S.–born children, known as anchor babies, cost the average California household -- headed by a U.S. citizen – $2,370 annually.
"While President Barack Obama and many Democrats benefit from the influx of illegal aliens who may become Democrats themselves, it's the American taxpayers footing the bill for the politicians' future voters," said former police officer and security director Iris Aquino.
The group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), released a study that finds providing healthcare, education, law enforcement, and social services to a growing illegal alien population costs Californians $25.3 billion per year, according to the report.

Congressional Report: Obama WAS Behind IRS Targeting Scandal

The IRS targeting of conservative groups scandal, which was originally explained away as rogue agents at a local office, has proven to be a wide-ranging pattern of criminal misdeeds that have been traced back to Washington, most notably members of Congress, the Department of Justice, and even the White House.
A slew of released emails have shown that senior Democrats in Congress pressured the IRS to target Tea Party groups, ostensibly to help Democrats during election years.  Emails have also shown that instead of stopping the corruption, the DOJ actually considered arresting and charging Tea Party leaders to send a chilling message to conservative groups.
Although the White House vehemently denies it, it is increasingly obvious for many reasons that President Obama is behind the IRS abuse of conservatives.  He joked about using the IRS to audit his opposition and he met with top IRS officials numerous times while the scandal was ongoing.  It certainly appears that Obama has used the IRS like his own personal “Gestapo”.

Obama's Illegal alien tidal wave to cost taxpayers $billions annually: Report 

With many American citizens feeling helpless -- and hopeless -- as they watch their nation's border security openly violated by illegal alien children -- some of whom are over 18-years-old -- a nonpartisan watchdog group reported on Thursday that the state of California alone spends upwards of $25 billion each year to provide human services to millions of lawbreakers.
The state's estimated 3 million illegal aliens and their 1.1 million U.S.–born children, known as anchor babies, cost the average California household -- headed by a U.S. citizen – $2,370 annually.
"While President Barack Obama and many Democrats benefit from the influx of illegal aliens who may become Democrats themselves, it's the American taxpayers footing the bill for the politicians' future voters," said former police officer and security director Iris Aquino.
The group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), released a study that finds providing healthcare, education, law enforcement, and social services to a growing illegal alien population costs Californians $25.3 billion per year, according to the report.
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Victim Says Hillary Clinton Put Her "Through Hell" in Rape Case

On Sunday, the conservative Washington Free Beacon released a taped interview of likely presidential candidate Hillary Clinton bragging about her successful defense of an accused rapist in 1975. Today, the Daily Beast published an interview with the victim in that case. "Hillary Clinton took me through hell," she says.

Conservatives have been hammering Clinton all week about the Free Beacon tape, which they say proves she's not the advocate for girls and women she claims to be. During the interview, Clinton talks about defending then 41-year-old Thomas Alfred Taylor for allegedly raping a 12-year-old girl in Arkansas. She got him to plead to "unlawfully fondling someone under 14," and he spent only a year in jail. During the interview, she laughs:

[Of] course he claimed that he didn't [rape her] and all this stuff. I had him take a polygraph, which he passed — which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs.

(The taped interview was conducted in the mid-80s for an Esquire story that never ran.)

The victim in the case, who wishes to remain anonymous, had this to say about the tape:

I would say [to Clinton], 'You took a case of mine in '75, you lied on me … I realize the truth now, the heart of what you've done to me. And you are supposed to be for women? You call that [being] for women, what you done to me? And I hear you on tape laughing.

In addition to Clinton's laughter on the tape, the victim said she was upset about a 1975 affidavit Clinton wrote on behalf of Taylor. In the affidavit, Clinton accused the victim of being "emotionally unstable with a tendency to seek out older men and engage in fantasizing." She also wrote, "I have ... been informed that she has in the past made false accusations about persons, claiming they had attacked her body."

The victim disputes these claims and maintains that justice was not served. "I think [Clinton] wants to be a role model being who she is, to look good, but I don't think she's a role model at all," she says. "If she had have been, she would have helped me at the time, being a 12-year-old girl who was raped ... She did that to look good and she told lies on that. How many other lies has she told to get where she's at today? If she becomes president, is she gonna be telling the world the truth? No. She's going to be telling lies out there, what the world wants to hear."

The victim's remarks play into what conservatives would like the public to think about Clinton — that she's a fraudulent and ruthless self-promoter who lacks compassion.

ObamaMESS: Thousands to Be Questioned on Eligibility for Health Insurance Subsidies

The Obama administration is contacting hundreds of thousands of people with subsidized health insurance to resolve questions about their eligibility, as consumer advocates express concern that many will be required to repay some or all of the subsidies.

Of the eight million people who signed up for private health plans through insurance exchanges under the new health care law, two million reported personal information that differed from data in government records, according to federal officials and Serco, the company hired to resolve such inconsistencies.

The government is asking consumers for additional documents to verify their income, citizenship, immigration status and Social Security numbers, as well as any health coverage that they may have from employers. People who do not provide the information risk losing their subsidized coverage and may have to repay subsidies next April.

Remember the Obamacare Death Panels? They Didn’t Go Away.

[X] Our website will be easy to use.
[X] You’ll pay less for better coverage.
[X] You can keep your insurance plan.
[X] You can keep your doctor.
[ ] There aren’t any “death panels”.

Well, looks like we can finally check off the last guarantee that the president made about Obamacare. For a few years now, conservatives (read: Sarah Palin) have warned Americans of “death panels”, a group of health officials that will have the authority to determine who receives medical assistance.
As with all Obamacare warnings, mainstream media outlets and federal employees ignored these concerns and continued to drink President Obama’s kool-aid.
Now, Time magazine’s senior political analyst Mark Halperin admitted to Newsmax that the death panels are inherently built into Obamacare and will be used to control costs.

“It’s built into the plan. It’s not like a guess or like a judgment. That’s going to be part of how costs are controlled.”
“It’s clear that at the time of the passage of the Affordable Care Act and in the context of the presidential campaign, the press did nothing like an adequate job in fly-specking and scrutinizing the whole law,” Halperin said.
“Not just the provisions that have already become controversial, about which the president was misleading . . . but other aspects.
“I would hope that as we chronicle what’s going on now with the political controversy of the law and scrutiny of the president’s past statements on some issues that we all learn a lesson from that.”

BOOM: Vatican Says Nancy Pelosi “Must” Be Denied Communion

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is one of the most despised members of Congress, and there’s a laundry list of reasons that could be cited as justification for the animosity.
Pelosi was one of the central figures that spearheaded the movement to ram Obamacare down the throats of the American public, despite the majority of citizens being opposed to it.
The California congresswoman has also played the part of a pawn in the overall scheme of the Obama administration, being an ever loyal lapdog defending the actions of the White House during the Benghazi investigation.

Read more at http://conservativetribune.com/vatican-denies-pelosi-communion/#LJdBq04UdQkpZPAX.99

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is one of the most despised members of Congress, and there’s a laundry list of reasons that could be cited as justification for the animosity.
Pelosi was one of the central figures that spearheaded the movement to ram Obamacare down the throats of the American public, despite the majority of citizens being opposed to it.
The California congresswoman has also played the part of a pawn in the overall scheme of the Obama administration, being an ever loyal lapdog defending the actions of the White House during the Benghazi investigation.


Perhaps the most heinous acts of Pelosi’s career is her defense of abortion, an act which has raised the concern of the Vatican, since she claims to be a “devout” Catholic.
In light of her consistent support of “reproductive rights” and “family planning,” the Vatican has banned Pelosi from taking communion.
via CNS News:

Because of her longstanding support for abortion, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), a Catholic, must be denied Communion under the law of the Catholic Church, said Cardinal Raymond Burke, head of the highest court at the Vatican.

 Cardinal Burke referenced his remarks about Pelosi to Canon Law–the law  governing the Catholic Church–and specifically Canon 915, which says those Catholics who obstinately persevere “in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to Holy Communion.”

“Certainly this is a case when Canon 915 must be applied,” said Cardinal Burke in an interview reprinted on Sept. 5 in The Wanderer, a national Catholic weekly. “This is a person who obstinately, after repeated admonitions, persists in a grave sin–cooperating with the crime of procured abortion–and still professes to be a devout Catholic.”
“This is a prime example of what Blessed John Paul II referred to as the situation of Catholics who have divorced their faith from their public life and therefore are not serving their brothers and sisters in the way that they must–in safeguarding and promoting the life of the innocent and defenseless unborn, in safeguarding and promoting the integrity of marriage and the family,” said the cardinal.

Letter Threatening Republican Voter’s Eligibility Came With One Giant Red Flag — and Now the Jig Is Up

Just before the 2012 presidential election, Bob Hiering received a curious letter in the mail.
It was labeled with the logos of the supervisor of elections office in his county and “questioning my citizenship and my ability to vote,” he told WPTV-TV in West Palm Beach, Florida.
The letter also asked him to provide personal information to elections officials or be disqualified from voting altogether.
But the Republican from Delray Beach noticed another oddity: The envelope’s postmark was from Seattle, Washington.
Hiering alerted authorities about the letter he received…and it seems he wasn’t alone. Turns out approximately two hundred of his fellow Florida residents — all with ties to the Republican party — got those letters.
Soon state and federal agencies were looking into possible voter fraud in Palm Beach County, and now it looks they got the guy behind the fraudulent letters.
More from WPTV:

James Webb Baker, Jr., 58, of Seattle, Washington recently admitted to federal investigators that he was behind all of it. Baker told the U.S. Department of Justice that he was angered by what he believed was an attempt to suppress Hispanic voter turnout for Democratic party candidates. Baker said he created the fake voter eligibility letters to intimidate and interfere with GOP recipients’ right to vote.

Baker pleaded guilty to I.D. fraud and intimidation of voters; he faces a maximum of six years in prison and up to $350,000 in fines, WPTV reported, adding that a judge will sentence him in September.

Russian-Ukrainian ‘Satan’ rocket blasts into orbit with 33-satellite load

Dnepr rocket also dubbed ‘Satan’ has blast off into earth’s orbit carrying over 30 satellites from 17 countries, including the US. The rocket itself is of Russia-Ukraine make.
ISS crew hug, take selfie to say ‘No' to politics and Ukraine tension in space
Russia’s Dombarovsky military air base saw the launch at 19:11 GMT Thursday, the 20th such rocket whizzing off into space.
Twenty-six minutes later, "all of the 33 satellites have separated from the rocket at the pre-set time and were put into their respective orbits," Kosmotras, the launch operator, said.
One of them was TabletSat-Aurora, which came as the first Russian private mini-satellite. Weighing just some 25 kilogram, the spacecraft is to observe the Earth, returning images with a resolution of up to 15 meters.
The satellite payload also included Perseus-M 1 and 2 (US), Deimos-2 (Spain), Hodoyoshi-3 and 4 (Japan), BRITE-CA 1 and 2 (Canada), BugSat-1 (Argentina), SaudiSat-4 (Saudi Arabia) and Duchifat-1 (Israel). The latter is an Israeli experimental and educational spacecraft developed and built by Israeli students of secondary schools.
The Satan made its first launch in April 1999, when it deployed Britain’s UoSAT-12. At two points it held the record for the most satellites orbited in a single launch – the first in April 2007 with 14 payloads and the second during its last mission in November 2013. In July 2006 the Dnepr failed to launch due to a malfunctioning of the pumping hydraulic drive of combustion chamber.
The Dnepr rocket is a converted intercontinental ballistic missile based on the R-36MUTTH ICBM – called the SS-18 Satan by NATO. It was developed by the space agencies of Russia and Ukraine in cooperation with the Russian Ministry of Defense. 
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