90 Miles From Tyranny

Sunday, May 5, 2019

Sean Penn - Hollywood Excrement...

Morning Mistress

You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?

It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,

from the beautiful to the repugnant,

from the mysterious to the familiar.

If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,

you could be inspired, you could be appalled.

This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.

You have been warned.

Dallas-area ISIS recruiter goes on trial for recruiting jihadists to kill nonbelievers

“ISIS will chop your head off.”

That was how Taryn Meeks began her opening statement Tuesday to a federal jury in Dallas that’s hearing testimony in the international terrorism trial of a Richardson man.

Meeks, a trial attorney with the Justice Department’s National Security Division, said those were among the words Azzam Mohamad Rahim uttered during his lengthy online campaign to recruit others to join ISIS and kill nonbelievers at home and abroad.

“Smash his head on the wall,” the government also quoted Rahim as saying on Zello, a social media platform. “Think of a way to kill the biggest number of people possible.”

Rahim, 42, sporting a bald head and thick beard, is charged with lying to the FBI about his support for the Islamic State and with plotting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization. He has been locked up since his March 2017 arrest. The trial is expected to last about a week.

Details from his indictment and two detention hearings revealed how Rahim allegedly used the internet to mobilize people to engage in jihad, or holy war. Rahim, a U.S. citizen who owns or used to own an Oak Cliff convenience store, told listeners on Zello to kill as many “infidels” as possible, court records say.

He is charged with six counts of making a false statement to a federal agency, one count of attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, and one count of conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization.

The indictment says Rahim provided ISIS with “services and personnel” from October 2014 to March 2017. Prosecutors plan to detail those allegations during the trial.

Rahim didn’t just encourage people to kill, he did so with specific detail, such as the use of poison, rocks, trucks, burning or even by pushing people off buildings, prosecutors said.

And Meeks said Rahim not only used the Zello channel he controlled to recruit people around the world to commit “horrendous acts of violence,” he bragged about how many members of his channel had already mobilized for jihad.

“This isn’t just talk,” Meeks told the jury. “They would seek out the defendant for guidance.”

Rahim even took credit for an ISIS-inspired attack on an Istanbul nightclub in 2017 that killed 39 people, Meeks said. Rahim claimed to have called for an attack in Turkey about a month before, she said.

And when a truck barreled into a crowd of people in Nice, France, that same year, Rahim cheered the resulting murders of 86 people, she said.

“I was happy for this act,” Rahim said, according to Meeks. “Those dogs.”

Meeks also told jurors that Rahim conspired with Mouner El Aoual, a Moroccan citizen who is being held an Italian prison for allegedly planning a terrorist attack in that country. Italian police officials are expected to ...

‘Worse Than Watergate’: Barr Opens Probe of FBI’s Spying of Trump Campaign

Attorney General William Barr has formed a team to investigate allegations the FBI and Justice Department spied on the Trump campaign in 2016.

“To the extent there was overreach, what we have to be concerned about is a few people at the top getting it into their heads that they know better than the American people,” Barr informed the Senate Judiciary Panel on Friday.

Rt.com reports: “We now know that he was being falsely accused,” the AG said of President Donald Trump. “We have to stop using the criminal justice process as a political weapon.”

Barr hinted he was zeroing in on senior figures in the Justice Department and FBI and said he would concentrate on when exactly intel collection had begun, whether it was earlier than previously reported, and how many “confidential informants” the FBI had in Trump’s campaign.

Barr’s announcement comes amid heated demand for such an investigation among top GOP figures. Republican party chair Ronna McDaniel echoed Trump’s denouncement of the prosecutorial “witch hunt,” calling out former President Barack Obama and former FBI Director James Comey for overseeing a scandal she called “worse than Watergate.”

McDaniel’s tweet came a day after the New York Times ran a story detailing how the FBI sent an agent named “Azra Turk”to London to meet with former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos in 2016. Papadopoulos said he’d met with several spies while in London, who probed him for connections between the Trump campaign and Russia. He maintains that he knew Turk to be a spy from their first meeting, and figured her for a CIA operative.

The FBI’s counterintelligence operation against Papadopoulos and the Trump campaign is currently being probed by the Justice Department’s Inspector General Michael Horowitz, with a report due later this month or in June, according to Attorney General William Barr.

Among other things, Horowitz’s report will examine the actions of Stefan Halper, a Cambridge University professor and FBI informant who invited Papadopoulos to London and spoke to several other Trump campaign officials to gather information for...