Tomgram: Nick Turse, Tomorrow's Terror Today | TomDispatch

Tomgram: Nick Turse, Tomorrow's Terror Today | TomDispatch:

Narco-Corruption, ISIS 3.0, and the Terror Drone Attack That Never Happened
Pentagon Documents Detail Dystopian Dangers
By Nick Turse


For almost 20 years, U.S. drone warfare was largely one-sided. Unlike
Afghans and Yemenis, Iraqis and Somalis, Americans never had to worry
about lethal robots hovering overhead and raining down missiles. Until,
that is, one appeared in the skies above Florida.


But that’s a story for later. For now, let’s focus on a 2017 executive order issued by President Trump, part of his second attempt
at a travel ban directed primarily at citizens of Muslim-majority
nations. It begins: “It is the policy of the United States to protect
its citizens from terrorist attacks.”


That sentence would be repeated in a January report
from the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Homeland
Security (DHS), “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into
the United States.” Meant to strengthen the president’s case for the
travel ban, it was panned for its methodological flaws, pilloried for its inaccuracies,
and would even spur a lawsuit by the civil rights organization, Muslim
Advocates, and the watchdog group, Democracy Forward Foundation. In
their complaint,
those groups contend that the report was “biased, misleading, and
incomplete” and “manipulates information to support its anti-immigrant
and anti-Muslim conclusions.”


To bolster the president’s arguments for restricting the entry of
foreigners into the United States, the DOJ/DHS analysis contained a
collection of case summaries. Examples included: the Sudanese national
who, in 2016, “pleaded guilty to attempting to provide material support
to ISIS”; the Uzbek who “posted a threat on an Uzbek-language website to
kill President Obama in an act of martyrdom on behalf of ISIS”; the
Syrian who, in a plea agreement, “admitted that he knew a member of ISIS
and that while in Syria he participated in a battle against the Syrian
regime, including shooting at others, in coordination with Al Nusrah,”
an al-Qaeda offshoot.


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