[IsraelTimes] The US State Department announces new sanctions against a pair of Hezbollah financiers operating in Guinea — Ali Saade and Ibrahim Taher.
"This action will help disrupt Hezbollah’s business network in West Africa, which relies on bribery to circumvent the rule of law," the State Department says in a statement.
The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has designated two "key Hizbullah ...Party of God, a Leb militia inspired, founded, funded and directed by Iran. Hizbullah refers to itself as The Resistance and purports to defend Leb against Israel, with whom it has started and lost one disastrous war to date, though it did claim victory... financiers" operating in Guinea, a statement said.
"This action is aimed at disrupting Hizbullah’s business network in West Africa, which relies on bribery and influence to circumvent the rule of law. In addition to other sources of funding, Hizbullah generates revenue from commercial activities across the world to sponsor acts of terrorism," the U.S. statement added.
It said the designation demonstrates Treasury’s ongoing efforts to target the group’s "international commercial activities and its global network of financiers, supporters, donors, and controllers, which enable Hizbullah to persistently threaten the security, stability, and prosperity of Lebanon Hezbollahstan ...The Lebs have the curious habit of periodically murdering their heads of state or prime ministers, a practice dating back to the heady days of human sacrifice to Baal Moloch... and other jurisdictions."
"With this action, Treasury continues to expose businessmen who support Hizbullah’s destabilizing activities through bribes and other corrupt activity," said Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Brian E. Nelson. "The illicit financial activity of those designated today not only props up Hizbullah, but also undermines the legitimate commercial sector and rule of law in countries where such financial activity takes place," he added.
The statement designated the two individuals as Ali Saade and Ibrahim Taher, describing them as "prominent Lebanese businessmen with direct connections to Hizbullah."
"Saade initiates the money transfers from Guinea to Hizbullah, transferring funds through Hizbullah representatives in Guinea and Lebanon. Taher has been identified as one of the most prominent financial supporters of Hizbullah in Guinea. He is believed to employ a number of individuals affiliated with Hizbullah within the country," the statement said.
They are being designated for "having materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods or services to or in support of, Hizbullah."
The statement added that Saade has "a close relationship with designated Hizbullah supporter Kassem Tajideen whom OFAC designated in 2009 for being an important financial contributor to Hizbullah."
At the time of his designation, Tajideen had "contributed tens of millions of dollars to Hizbullah and ran cover companies for Hizbullah in Africa with his brothers," the Treasury said.
"Saade was Tajideen’s primary political contact in Guinea. He made significant efforts to provide Tajideen with unrestricted access to corrupt members of the former Guinean administration at the highest levels and the rest of the Guinean government. Saade also advised Tajideen on methods for making financial transfers to evade detection by regulators," the Treasury added.
Taher and an associate meanwhile sent U.S. dollars collected at one of their commercial facilities to Conakry Airport and bribed Guinean customs officials to allow their currency to pass in luggage, the statement said.
"Taher has used his status as an Honorary Consul of Lebanon to Cote d’Ivoire to travel in and out of Guinea with minimal scrutiny," it added.
[AnNahar] A senior U.S. diplomat apologized Friday to thousands of Afghans stranded in the United Arab Emirates months after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban ...Arabic for students... , promising to speed repatriation for some to America while acknowledging that authorities still do not know who some of them are.
The visit comes as America still struggles with how to handle the tens of thousands who piled into planes in the hectic final days of Afghanistan's U.S.-backed government, capping the end of a 20-year experiment in replacing hard-line Taliban rule with a nascent democracy.
Continued on Page 49
— Asharq Al-Awsat English (@aawsat_eng) March 4, 2022
Security officials in Yemen on Thursday destroyed a large quantity of hashish and thousands of narcotic pills,
...probably Captagon, the favoured method of self-abuse of rich, poor, jihadi, and good citizens alike across the Middle East...
which were seized from smugglers linked to Houthi criminal gangs in the past four months, the Saudi Press Agency reported.
The National Army forces in the Fifth Military Region destroyed 1,158 kilograms of hashish and 7,700 illicit pills, which had been seized during the last four months, in the presence of the representative of the joint operations, representatives of the region’s intelligence and military police and security officials from the Hajjah governorate.
“Gangs linked to the Houthi militias rely on the trade of contraband as a source of financing for their war against the Yemenis, but the forces of the Fifth Military Region are on high alert to pursue and arrest hashish and drug smugglers in the governorate,” the statement said.
The move comes months after more than a ton of hashish and 48,000 narcotic pills were destroyed in October, bringing the total destroyed in the last three years to more than four tons.
Residents in Sanaa and other Yemeni regions accuse the Iran-backed Houthi militias of supervising the trade, sale, and promotion of drugs in their areas of control through gangs formed and supported by Houthi leaders. Houthis aim to strengthen their battlefronts with enormous wealth generated by drug trafficking.
Reports from Houthi-controlled areas reveal the involvement of prominent Houthi leaders in drug trafficking networks, Minister of Information, Culture and Tourism Muammar al-Eryani confirmed in an earlier statement.
The minister said this information “is an extension of the reports that confirm the involvement of the Tehran regime and its sectarian militias in the region, led by the Lebanese (Hezbollah) in the drug industry and trade.”
He accused Houthis of using their drug trade as a main source to finance their activities and help advance Tehran’s expansionist ambitions in the region.
[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] The mother of a British jihadi bride nicknamed 'the first lady of ISIS' who had an affair with a US congressman has insisted that she has no interest in her life and regrets giving birth to her.
One hopes Mom did a better job rearing her other children, assuming she had others.
Tania Joya, a mother-of-four who grew up in Harrow, Middlesex but now lives in Plano, Texas with her second husband, had a relationship with Representative Van Taylor after meeting him through her work as an ex-jihadist helping to de-radicalise extremists.
Earlier this week, Mr Van Taylor dropped his bid for re-election to Congress on and apologised for having a nine-month affair with the Ms Joya. Read the rest at the link
#1
The more I have read about Taylor, the more it seems he was Kinzinger lite. If I feel sorry for anyone in this story, it's his wife and children. I hope he still faces criminal charges for the payoff, if it came out of his campaign funds.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
03/05/2022 6:01 Comments ||
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#2
An interesting man. According to his House of Representatives page with emendation from Wikipedia, he joined the US Marines after getting a BA in history from Harvard in only three years, then transferred to the Reserves while getting an MBA from the same university, re-upping along the way following 9/11. He eventually worked his way up to major, with a tour in Iraq in 2003. Following his MBA he worked as an investment banker as well, adding election to the Texas legislature in 2010, then stepped away from banking when he was sworn in to the US House of Representatives in 2020. Politically he’s a Tea Partier. But then he voted for the Democrat’s January 6th travesty, and was headed for a primary run-off when he announced he was stepping down.
If this was his first affair, possibly he succumbed because for the first time in his adult life he was only working on two tracks plus his family.
#4
Not to belittle anyone's accomplishments, but this guy collected plenty of credentials. Only thing it actually shows is he "tested well." On the tests of loyalty to his party and president, and to his wife, his credential collecting aptitude let him down. Good that he won't be around to stick it to his constituents and maybe become the next Pence at some point.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
03/05/2022 10:37 Comments ||
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A court in #Sweden finds a Swedish woman guilty of #warcrimes for failing to prevent her 12-year-old son from becoming a child soldier in #Syria, where he was killed in the civil war.https://t.co/XgJURE2VuD
A Swedish court found a Swedish woman guilty of war crimes for failing to prevent her 12-year-old son from becoming a child soldier in Syria, where he was killed in the civil war.
The woman has denied the charges.
“The district court sentences Lina Ishaq to six years in prison for grave violation of international law and grave war crime,” the Stockholm district court said on Friday.
“She, in her capacity as protection guarantor, omitted to prevent her son Joan, 12-15 years, from being recruited by unknown accomplices and used as child soldier on behalf of ISIS in the armed conflict in Syria,” it said in the verdict.
The 49-year-old woman, a Swede who returned from Syria in 2020, is the first person known to have been charged in Sweden with aiding the recruitment of her own minor son as a child soldier.
The boy, born in 2001, died in 2017. Read the rest at the link
The woman and her husband had been part of a "cult-like" Islamist environment and in April 2013 she brought her son to join his father and an older son in Syria.
Around 300 Swedes or Swedish residents, a quarter of whom are women, joined IS in Syria and Iraq, mostly in 2013 and 2014, according to the Sapo intelligence service.
Sweden did not have existing legislation at the time to prosecute people for membership in a terrorist organization, so prosecutors instead sought other crimes with which to charge returnees.
#3
“She, in her capacity as protection guarantor, omitted to prevent her son Joan, 12-15 years, from being recruited by unknown accomplices and used as child soldier on behalf of ISIS in the armed conflict in Syria,”
Now apply that to our Moms in the hood. See - gentle giant, turning his life around, etc
Woo hoo! Another win for the good guys! This’ll come in handy the next time the Republicans are running things, and possibly before then.
[Yahoo] The US Supreme Court ...the political football known as The Highest Court in the Land, home of penumbrae and emanations... dealt a blow Friday to three Moslem men who accused the FBI ...Formerly one of the world's premier criminal investigation organizations, something for a nation to be proud of. Now it's a political arm of the Deep State oligarchy that is willing to trump up charges, suppress evidence, or take out insurance policies come election time... of having spied on them because of their religion after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
While it did not shut the case down completely, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the government had the right to invoke state secrets privilege to refuse to provide information to the court responsible for studying the men's complaint.
The judgment, limited in scope to a technical point, overrides a 2019 decision by an appeals court and returns the case to the lower court for it to continue its examination.
"This is a dangerous sign for religious freedom and government accountability," said the powerful American Civil Liberties Union, which represents the plaintiffs, on Twitter.
"This is not the end of the road....We will keep fighting," the ACLU added.
The case centers on three Caliphornia, an impregnable bastion of the Democratic Party, residents who said the Federal Bureau of Invesitgation introduced, in 2006 and 2007, an informant in their mosque to gather information on the congregants.
This man, who presented himself as a convert, allegedly collected telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and secretly recorded the conversations of many members of the community.
To test his interlocutors, he reportedly brought up the topic of kabooms or jihad, until the worried faithful denounced him to the police.
After that, the man argued with federal agents and decided to go public with his actions as a paid FBI informant.
The imam and two of the congregation then filed a complaint against the FBI for infringement of religious freedom and discrimination.
The Justice Department responded that it had launched the surveillance program for purely objective reasons, and not because the people were Moslems.
The department took refuge behind the state secrecy argument to refuse to detail those reasons, and asked the courts to close the case.
The local imam passed on information about the Lackawanna Six, and several fathers are in our archives after they called the police or the FBI to report their sons, including the Nigerian father of the Pantibomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.
There are mosques that are known for cultivating interest in violent jihad, and at such mosques bugging the place seems to me justified. When this program started, not long after 9/11, the feds and local police had no idea of the scope of the problem, nor did they have the manpower to to follow uo onall the leads that were flooding in.
We got lucky that so many Muslim illegal aliens — a great many of whom were student visa over-stayers from the Indian subcontinent — chose to leave America when the government announced that all Muslim men would have to register in e aftermath of 9/11, and more chose to be expelled when they were picked up for problems in their files when they presented themselves to the authorities. If we assume that only 10% were connected to Jihad, Inc, that’s an awful lot of attacks did not happen here.
[Townhall] In a 6-3 decision Friday, the Supreme Court ...the political football known as The Highest Court in the Land, home of penumbrae and emanations... of the United States reinstated the death penalty for Boston Marathon Bomber — and Biden stimulus check recipient — Dzhokhar Tsarnaev ...the pretty, ethnic-Chechen college boy from Dagestan who, with his highly connected, “self-radicalized” older brother, used pressure cooker bombs to blow up the Boston Marathon in 2013. The mosque the brothers frequented, the Islamic Society of Boston, is a hotbed of jihadi sentiment and connections to so many different jihadi groups and individuals the mind boggles. It was founded by Clinton Friend and Al Qaeda financier Abdurahman Alamoudi as a Muslim Student Association/Muslim Brotherhood project in 1981. According to Russian intelligence, whose warning about our lads President Obama’s intelligence agencies ignored until afterward, the Tsarnaev boys had lots of jihadi-connected friends back in the Olde Countrie, too, but nobody seems to have found a formal connection between them and any registered jihadi group. He’s been living in Florence Supermax prison since he was sentenced in 2015... following a previous federal appeals court decision that vacated his death sentence ...the barbaric practice of sentencing a murderer to be punished for as long as his/her/its victim is dead... Tsarnaev's actions in April 2013 — planning and executing the Boston Marathon bombing and subsequently murdering a MIT campus police officer, carjacking a graduate student, and fighting a street battle with police during which Dzhokhar ended up running over and killing his brother Tamerlan — resulted in a lengthy indictment, with more than one dozen capital offenses. A jury found Tsarnaev guilty on all counts and ultimately determined that six warranted the death penalty.
Following sentencing, a federal court of appeals vacated the death penalty based on claims that the district court where Tsarnaev was tried "abused its discretion during jury selection" and "abused its discretion during sentencing when it excluded evidence." But the Supreme Court, in its opinion authored by Justice Clarence Thomas, held that "The Court of Appeals improperly vacated Dzhokhar’s capital sentences." Justices Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor dissented.
As Justice Thomas writes for the Court:
On April 15, 2013, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev planted and detonated two homemade pressure-cooker bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. The blasts hurled nails and metal debris into the assembled crowd, killing three while maiming and wounding hundreds. Three days later, the brothers murdered a campus police officer, carjacked a graduate student, and fired on police who had located them in the stolen vehicle. Dzhokhar attempted to flee in the vehicle but inadvertently killed Tamerlan by running him over. Dzhokhar was soon arrested and indicted.
A jury found Dzhokhar guilty of 30 federal crimes and recommended the death penalty for 6 of them. The District Court accordingly sentenced Dzhokhar to death. The Court of Appeals vacated the death sentence. We now reverse.
"Dzhokhar Tsarnaev committed heinous crimes," the opinion from Thomas concludes. "The Sixth Amendment nonetheless guaranteed him a fair trial before an impartial jury. He received one. The judgment of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit is reversed."
[IsraelTimes] Victims of the September 11 terror attacks have asked the US government to seize Iranian crude oil suspected to be on an American-owned oil tanker in Asia, court documents show.
Yes, Iran protected and continues to protect one of Al Qaeda’s shuras and key personnel plus assorted wives and children — including some of Osama bin Laden’s — but a claim of 9/11 victims against Iran seems tenuous to me. Probably a good thing I never tried to be a lawyer.
The filings in New York come as US Sherlocks continue to probe the alleged involvement of the Suez Rajan, owned by Los Angeles-based private equity firm Oaktree Capital Management, in the sanctioned trade of Iranian oil as negotiations continue over Tehran’s collapsing nuclear deal with world powers.
Fleetscape, the Oaktree subsidiary that owns the Suez Rajan, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The federal court filings, submitted late Thursday in the US, call on American authorities to seize the crude oil and sell it on behalf of families to in part settle an over $3 billion judgment issued against Iran ...Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979... over the attacks.
The filing suggests as many as 1 million barrels of oil could be aboard the Suez Rajan, crude put there by the National Iranian Oil Co. and the National Iranian Tanker Corp., both now sanctioned entities by the US Treasury.
The group United Against Nuclear Iran raised allegations against the Suez Rajan in a February letter to Oaktree Capital Management, which holds assets worth over $160 billion.
Posted by: trailing wife ||
03/05/2022 00:36 ||
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[Dawn] With just two unmet targets out of 34 action points, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has retained Pakistain on its terrorism financing "grey list" and asked the country to address the remaining deficiencies in its financial system as soon as possible.
There were 27 action points for the FATF Combating the Financing of Terrorism (CFT) for Pakistan last year — did they add more again?
However, the man who has no enemies isn't anybody and has never done anything... at the concluding session of its hybrid plenary meeting on Friday, the Gay Paree-based global money laundering and terrorist financing watchdog also appreciated Pakistain’s robust progress on its global commitments to fight financial crimes.
The FATF added the United Arab Emirates to its increased monitoring list, also known as the grey list, of countries with inadequate controls over terrorism financing. The watchdog also decided to appoint T. Raja Kumar of Singapore as its next president for a fixed two-year term.
Pakistain was placed on the list in 2018, which made foreign firms more cautious about investing in the country.
The Friday plenary noted that Pakistain had completed 26 of the 27 action items in its 2018 action plan of the FATF and of the seven action items of the 2021 action plan of the watchdog’s Asia Pacific Group on Money Laundering (APG) ahead of the deadlines.
It was noted that since June 2018 — when Pakistain made a high-level political commitment to work with the FATF and APG to strengthen its anti-money laundering/combating the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) regime and to address its strategic counter-terrorist financing-related deficiencies — the country’s continued political commitment had led to significant progress across a comprehensive CFT action plan.
The FATF encouraged Pakistain to continue making progress to address, as soon as possible, the one remaining item by continuing to demonstrate that terror financing investigations and prosecutions target big shots and commanders of UN-designated terrorist groups.
In response to additional deficiencies later identified in Pakistain’s 2019 APG Mutual Evaluation Report in June 2021, Pakistain provided further high-level commitment to address these strategic deficiencies pursuant to a new action plan that primarily focuses on combating money laundering.
"Since June 2021, Pakistain has taken swift steps towards improving its AML/CFT regime and completed six of the seven action items ahead of any relevant deadlines expiring, including by demonstrating that it is enhancing the impact of sanctions by nominating individuals and entities for UN designation and restraining and confiscating proceeds of crime in line with Pakistain’s risk profile," the FATF said.
"Pakistain should continue to work to address the one remaining item in its 2021 action plan by demonstrating a positive and sustained trend of pursuing complex [money laundering] investigations and prosecutions," it said.
Officials said Pakistain now aimed to fully comply with the 2021 action plan on anti-money laundering and combating terror financing by the end of January 2023.
The country had two concurrent action plans with a total of 34 action points, of which 30 had either been fully or largely addressed to curb money laundering and terror financing. The most recent action plan of 2021 on money laundering from the APG had largely focused on money laundering.
The completion of APG’s action plan for the effectiveness of AML/CFT is also a structural benchmark of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for end-March.
Recently, the IMF asked Pakistain to complete the last remaining item in the 2018 AML/CFT action plan on the effectiveness of terror financing investigations and prosecutions of big shots of UN-designated terrorist groups, and promptly address the deficiencies identified in the APG’s Mutual Evaluation Report under the 2021 action plan.
[IsraelTimes] A Russian delegation is scheduled to land in Israel next Thursday for a monthly meeting on security coordination in Syria, the Kan public broadcaster reports.
Such meetings have been a regular occurrence in recent years, but it will be the first time since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine, and at a time when Western powers are calling on Israel to distance itself from the Kremlin.
Israel has sought to avoid aligning itself too closely with Ukraine, despite it being a fellow Western democracy, as it relies on Russia allowing Jerusalem to use the airspace it controls over Syria to carry out strikes against Iranian proxies stationed there.
Iraqi security official on Thursday warned of the threat of children residing in the notorious al-Hol camp in northeast Syria (Rojava), describing their prolonged stay as a "ticking bomb." https://t.co/90WNzOWkRE
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - A senior Iraqi official on Thursday warned of the threat of children residing in the notorious al-Hol camp in northeast Syria (Rojava), describing their prolonged stay as a "ticking bomb."
In a meeting with the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), Iraq’s National Security Advisor Qasim al-Araji described the presence of children at al-Hol camp as a “real danger,” and a “ticking bomb,” reported state media.
“The biggest victims of conflict are women and children,” Araji said.
Araji stressed the readiness of the Iraqi government to cooperate with international organizations to repatriate children.
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) arrested thousands of ISIS fighters and their wives and children when they took control of the group’s last stronghold in Syria in March 2019. Most of these people are held at al-Hol, which is home to more than 60,000 people - mostly women and children of different nationalities.
Eight hundred Iraqi refugees returned home from Rojava on Thursday.
Over one hundred ISIS-affiliated families left al-Hol in January.
Al-Hol has been branded a breeding ground for terrorism, with human rights groups warning of squalid conditions at the camp.
There have been repeated calls from Kurdish and US officials asking the international community to repatriate their nationals from al-Hol, but only a few countries have responded positively as they are worried about security concerns.
Amnesty International in November renewed its repatriation calls in a report, saying children held in al-Hol camp “have been arbitrarily deprived of their liberty and exposed to life-threatening and inhumane conditions.
Posted by: badanov ||
03/05/2022 00:00 ||
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[20 views]
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Hezbollah
...The Lebs have the curious habit of periodically murdering their heads of state or prime ministers, a practice dating back to the heady days of human sacrifice to Baal Moloch...
...the political football known as The Highest Court in the Land, home of penumbrae and emanations...
...Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979...
