by Bill Gertz
The Mersad hackers were linked to financial institution attacks conducted between September 2012 and May 2013, targeting different institutions, including Ally Bank, American Express, Ameriprise, Bank of America, Bank of Montreal, BB&T, Banco Nilbao Vizyana Argentaria, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Citizens Bank, Fifth Third Bank, FirstBank, HSBC, Key Bank, NYSE, PNC, Regions Bank, State Street Bank, SunTrust Bank, Union Bank, U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo, and Zions First National Bank. The Mersad hackers were formed from two other Iranian hacking groups, the Sun Army and the Ashiyane Digital Security Team—both of which claimed credit for cyberattacks on U.S. government servers, with Ashiyane claiming its work on behalf of the Iranian government. The Sun Army claimed credit for hacking NASA in 2012.
The attack on the Bowman Dam took place between August and September 2013 with repeated intrusions into the remote computer controls of the dam, the supervisory control and data acquisition system, or SCADA. The intrusions were traced to Iranian national Hamid Firoozi, one of the ITSec hackers. Once inside, Firoozi gathered data on the water levels and temperature, and the status of the sluice gate that controls the water flow from the dam. What Firoozi did not know, according to the indictment, was that the dam control system had been manually disconnected for maintenance before he gained access to the controller. Firoozi for a year “would and did attempt to cause a threat to public health or safety” by gaining access to the controller of the Bowman Dam, the indictment stated.
If they had succeeded, the Iranians might have been able to cause a major flood that would have caused mass casualties among the people living nearby.
In Iran, the information warfare system struck back in response to the indictments. The Iranian Foreign Ministry, through spokesman Hossein Jaberi Ansari, stated on March 27, 2016, that “Washington is not in any position to accuse other countries’ citizens without providing documentary evidence.” Ansari added that the United States has a “history of cyber attacks against Iran’s peaceful nuclear facilities.” The response also played up Iran’s demand that non-U.S. governments be allowed to control the Internet in their own countries.
The Bowman Dam cyberattack, however, was a stark reminder for American security officials that ever-increasing Iranian cyber and information warfare threats will require more than feckless and unprosecutable indictments.
Former CIA director James Woolsey believes Iran’s information warfare capabilities will be combined with nuclear weapons in the future to produce a major attack: a nuclear burst in near-earth space to create a devastating electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, shock wave capable of knocking out all electronics for a thousand miles in all directions.
“Our cyber and information warfare doctrines are dangerously blind to the likelihood that a potential adversary making an all-out information warfare campaign designed to cripple U.S. critical infrastructures would include an EMP attack,” Woolsey said. The Iranians who are working on long-range missile capabilities under cover of space launch vehicles also are likely to employ nuclear EMP attack from freighters sailing near U.S. shores that would launch 620-mile-range mobile Shahab missiles over the United States to knock out power. A congressional commission several years ago revealed that Iran’s military doctrine includes explicit writings on the use of nuclear EMP attacks that could eliminate the United States as a major actor on the world stage through information warfare. “Nuclear weapons . . . can be used to determine the outcome of a war . . . without inflicting serious human damage [by neutralizing] strategic and information networks,” states one Iranian military report. “Terrorist information warfare [includes] . . . using the technology of directed energy weapons (DEW) or electromagnetic pulse (EMP).”
“Today when you disable a country’s military high command through disruption of communications you will, in effect, disrupt all the affairs of that country,” the Iranians threatened. “If the world’s industrial countries fail to devise effective ways to defend themselves against dangerous electronic assaults, then they will disintegrate within a few years.”
From the damaging, pro-Iranian information warfare operation launched against the American people by Barack Obama and his administration in pursuit of a dangerous nuclear deal with Iran, to successively more damaging Iranian-origin cyberattacks, the strategic nature of the Iranian information warfare threat is a direct outgrowth of the hard-line Islamist regime in Tehran. Mitigating the threat of information warfare will require a U.S. offensive and defensive information warfare program.
The Obama administration’s information offensive against America was part of a larger ideological assault on the nation, as will be shown in a look at the ongoing leftist information war on the homeland.
8
THE LEFT
Workplace Violence, Safe Spaces, and Other Politically Correct Nonsense
The strategy of the long march through the institutions: working against the established institutions while working in them.
—NEW LEFT MARXIST PHILOSOPHER HERBERT MARCUSE, COUNTERREVOLUTION AND REVOLT, 1972
Information warfare is not limited to foreign powers. An ideological enemy within the United States also is employing systematic ideological information warfare against American culture and traditions. It is based on revolutionary Marxist ideology carried out through the seemingly innocuous practice of political correctness. Today, political correctness is fundamentally transforming the United States from a country built by American founders who believed in the ideas of freedom, prosperity, and limited government, to one based on aggravating past resentments and self-centered identities. Instead of supporting patriotism, anyone who declares the United States of America to be a great nation is denounced for failing to understand the dominant, false leftist narrative that America must be pummeled, ceaselessly, as a racist, imperialist power whose culture and traditions are to be destroyed and replaced with socialistic and hedonistic values.
Typical of this view is Hillary Clinton. Clinton, driven to the political left during the early 2016 campaign by democratic socialist senator Bernie Sanders, denounced her Republican challenger, Donald Trump, and his supporters. “To just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables,” Clinton announced in the fall of 2016. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.” In other words, Clinton, a liberal politician operating under the canons of ideological information warfare, simply dismissed the millions of Americans who supported Trump as evil retrogrades.
The dominant liberal left narrative gained unprecedented prominence during the administration of President Barack Obama, who enforced the most radical agenda in the history of any American presidency. Obama was greatly assisted by an elite media, like the New York Times, Washington Post, and others, that became his unquestioning facilitators.
• • •
“Run! Get out! There’s a guy with a gun!” So screamed Pascal Mignon, a patron at the gay nightclub Pulse, to crowds of people on a busy night in Orlando, Florida. It was around 2 a.m. on June 12, 2016, and Pascal was trying to alert people that a militant Muslim extremist had begun opening fire with a rifle and pistol. The terror attack would later expose the deadly nature of the liberal Left’s political correctness agenda as never before. The gunman, twenty-nine-year-old Omar Mateen, was a radical Muslim who systematically crossed the main dance floor at the Pulse nightclub firing methodically at revelers along the way. Around 2:09 a.m., the club posted a terse message on Facebook: “Everyone get out of pulse and keep running.” Three local police officers working security at the club reacted by firing at Mateen, who by 2:15 had retreated to a bathroom at the back of the building. Around fifteen minutes later he dialed 911 on his smartphone and informed the dispatcher that the attack was a protest against what he said was “the bombing of my country,” a reference to U.S.-led military air strikes in Syria. Additionally, Mateen announced the shooting rampage was being carried out on behalf of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of the Muslim terr
orist organization known as the Islamic State. The ultraviolent group had burst on the scene two years earlier in Syria and Iraq and quickly began spreading radical Muslim–inspired death and hatred throughout the Middle East, while declaring the restoration of an Islamic caliphate, a geographical region led by a Muslim caliph—none other than Baghdadi. Mateen had pledged loyalty to the terrorist group during the call. Earlier murderous attacks by Islamic State terrorists had struck the heart of Europe in Paris and Belgium. Now a supporter of the group had carried out the worst mass killing by a terrorist organization in the United States since the September 11, 2001, suicide airline bombings.
Not content with having made the 911 call, fifteen minutes later Mateen phoned a local television station. “I’m the shooter. It’s me,” he announced. Mateen again explained the attack was being conducted in support of the Islamic State terrorist group—to hammer home the message. As the standoff ensued over the next three hours, Mateen would conduct Internet searches on his smartphone, scanning reports about his terrible killing spree. On Facebook, he posted: “America and Russia stop bombing the Islamic state. The real Muslims will never accept the filthy ways of the west. . . . You kill innocent women and children by doing us airstrikes . . . now taste the Islamic state vengeance.” His final post issued an ominous warning: “In the next few days you will see attacks from the Islamic state in the usa.” In a conversation with a police negotiator, Mateen threatened to put four of the hostages he held in bomb-laced vests, and also said he was wearing an explosive suicide bomb vest. The threat prompted police to end negotiations and storm the club. After breaking through a wall near the restroom, police opened fire, killing Mateen. At 5:53 a.m., Orlando police tweeted: “Pulse Shooting: The shooter inside the club is dead.”
When the deadly terrorist attack was over, a total of forty-nine people lay murdered; fifty-three others were wounded, many critically, and certainly scarred, both emotionally and physically, for life. The club floor was covered in blood and bodies. Reports from survivors revealed Mateen fired at least one hundred rounds, taking time to fire extra rounds into some of the wounded to ensure he had killed them.
In the days that followed, the mass murder would be revealed as one of the worst failures—if not the worst—in the illustrious history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Formed in July 1908, the FBI was reoriented after the 2001 terror attacks from a predominantly law enforcement and investigatory agency into one whose primary mission, as stated on the FBI website, is to “protect the United States from terrorist attack.” In the Orlando shooting case, the FBI did not stop the attack and FBI director James Comey later disclosed that Mateen was investigated twice for links to Islamic State terrorism and in both cases let go. Comey irrationally defended the bureau in a statement at FBI headquarters, insisting his agents had done the best job they could in the two investigations of Mateen.
Warning signs of the attack had been missed. Mateen was the U.S.-born son of an Afghan refugee who had voiced support for the Taliban terrorist organization in Afghanistan. Mateen first came onto the FBI’s radar in May 2013 when a coworker at the local Florida courthouse where he worked as a security guard reported to authorities that he had voiced sympathies with Islamic terrorism, indeed saying that he was a member of al Qaeda and the Iran-backed group Hezbollah, at the time, two of the world’s most deadly terrorist organizations. According to the informant, Mateen had said he hoped law enforcement agents would raid his apartment and assault his wife and child so he could martyr himself—commit suicide in the cause of jihad—in response.
FBI agents questioned Mateen and he admitted making the statements. But he claimed the comments were made in anger because Mateen felt discriminated against by coworkers for being Muslim. The FBI investigation was not perfunctory. It employed both confidential informants and electronic surveillance. The probe was dropped after Mateen’s admission. However, the bureau mistakenly accepted his claims of Muslim discrimination by coworkers as leading to the outburst. Two months later, in July 2014, the FBI investigated Mateen a second time for links to an American suicide bomber in Syria, Abu Hurayra Al-Amriki, also known as Moner Mohammad Abu-Salha, a member of the al Qaeda–affiliated terrorist group Al-Nusra Front. Mateen and Abu-Salha attended the same mosque in Florida, the Islamic Center of Fort Pierce. Again the FBI dropped its investigation based on what Comey said were “no ties of any consequence” between the two Islamists.
During the 2014 investigation, an informant told the FBI that Mateen mentioned watching videos produced by Islamic terror recruiter and American Anwar al-Awlaki, an al Qaeda member in Yemen (killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2011). Awlaki figured prominently in three deadly terrorist attacks in the United States and yet the FBI ignored the clues.
Mateen was watching videos of the same al Qaeda terrorist in Yemen, Awlaki, who had communicated with army major Nidal Hassan, the Muslim extremist who killed thirteen people at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009.
Awlaki’s terrorist recruiting activities had also surfaced during the investigation into the attack six months earlier in San Bernardino, California. Court papers revealed that one of the terrorists who killed fourteen people in the December 2015 shooting, Syed Rizwan Farook, introduced a Muslim convert, Enrique Marquez Jr., to the Islamic teachings of Awlaki in 2007.
According to Comey, the FBI also dropped that investigation because investigators had no indication of an imminent attack.
It was the second botched domestic terrorism case. Similarly, the two terrorists who carried out the bombing of the Boston Marathon in April 2013, Chechen immigrants Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, were missed by the FBI despite warnings from Russian security services that the two could be terrorists.
Why was the FBI unable to prevent deadly terrorist attacks? Two words explain it: political correctness. By 2016, liberal left ideologues within the U.S. government had systematically blocked the FBI from training its agents on how to investigate and respond to Islamist terror suspects. Former FBI agent John Guandolo believes the FBI mistakenly closed the Mateen investigations as a result of a lack of training for agents on how to properly investigate jihadist threats. Under pressure from liberal advocacy groups, the FBI stopped teaching its agents about the internal aspects of Islamist threat and warfare doctrine, such as jihad and sharia law, that guide terrorist activities and operations. “This investigation was closed because FBI leadership has systematically refused to look at and teach sharia to its agents because it is getting its advice on Islam from Muslims who are hostile to us and our system of government,” Guandolo told me.
A source within the FBI angered by the Orlando failure also revealed that beginning three or four years before the nightclub attack, the FBI halted all counterterrorism radicalization classes for both special agents and bureau counterterrorism analysts. The training was stopped because of fears of discrimination lawsuits filed against the bureau by Muslim employees and outside liberal activist groups. “The threat of internal complaints has killed the training,” the source told me.
The main force at work behind the deadly policy, which prevents urgently needed training for agents and analysts in the tenets of Islamist terrorism, was the political correctness agenda imposed aggressively on the entire U.S. government by the White House under President Barack Obama, the source said. The FBI had become very afraid of religious discrimination lawsuits based on the liberal notion that teaching Islamic warfare tenets and principles might create a “hostile work environment”—vague code that has been used in liberal left lawfare to limit training and impose leftist policies. As a result, the FBI canceled all classes and removed all instructors who taught the subject.
“The FBI has a documented track record of mishandling reports of credible derogatory information and failing to rigorously follow referrals from other law enforcement and intelligence services concerning terrorism suspects,” Judicial Watch investigator Chris Farrell, a former counterintelligence officer, said. “The impression the public is left wit
h is of an agency that is overwhelmed, underresourced, inattentive, or all of the above.”
For the Left, the Orlando shooting had to be spun for political reasons as not the result of Islamic terrorism. Instead, the false narrative was spread to portray it as the result of lax American gun laws and to promote the liberal left policy of tighter government gun control. Mateen, whose terrorism ties had been documented, at one time was placed on a terrorism watch list, and when he was taken off after the FBI ended its investigations, he was able to purchase the AR-15–style carbine rifle used in the killing spree. Still others on the left falsely promoted the theme that the cause of the attack was rooted in antihomosexual prejudice. Despite clear evidence of Mateen’s Islamist terrorist motives, the New York Times produced an incredible and false editorial blaming the Orlando attack on antigay hate. Other false news stories were circulated that Mateen was a homosexual and had patronized the gay nightclub. The FBI later declared there was no evidence Mateen was gay.
President Obama revealed his administration’s true devotion to the deadly leftist canon of political correctness less than a week after the grisly massacre in Florida. Following a meeting of his National Security Council, Obama launched into an angry tirade—but not against the Islamic State terrorist group, which inspired the attack. The president, in a pattern followed during his tenure in office, instead criticized Republicans. Such partisanship and deception had been a hallmark of the liberal commander in chief.