Month: February 2017

A Missouri native who said he wanted to participate in a terrorist attack that would cause many deaths and injuries is charged with helping plan a Presidents Day attack on buses, trains and a train station in Kansas City, federal officials said Tuesday.

Robert Lorenzo Hester Jr., 25, a Missouri-born U.S. citizen from Columbia, was charged in federal court in Kansas City with attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization.

He was arrested Friday when he arrived at a meeting with what he thought was an Islamic State sympathizer who was an undercover FBI agent. The arrest was made public Tuesday after Hester made his first court appearance, during which a judge ordered him to remain in custody. A detention hearing was scheduled for Friday.

Online court records didn’t list an attorney for Hester on Tuesday.

Suspect a married father

A criminal complaint said federal officials began investigating Hester in August 2016 after receiving tips about social media posts in which he said he had converted to Islam and expressed hatred for the United States and a tendency toward violence. Undercover FBI agents contacted Hester first online and then in several face-to-face meetings to discuss whether he wanted to participate in a terrorist attack.

During those contacts, Hester “expressed his interest in and exhibited his willingness to commit violence in support of a foreign terrorist organization,” according to the complaint.

Hester, a married father of two children who served less than a year in the U.S. Army, also provided materials such as roofing nails, batteries and other items that he was told would be used to build bombs for the attack, the complaint said. He also was shown weapons and was told several backpacks containing explosives would be placed in different locations in Kansas City.

The undercover agent told Hester the supposed terrorist organization was planning on “killing a lot of people” in an attack “10 times more” severe than the Boston Marathon attack, according to the complaint. Hester approved of the plans and rejected the undercover agent’s offer to walk away if he didn’t want to participate, the complaint said.

Used encrypted messaging app

Hester communicated five times in early February with an undercover employee via an encrypted messaging app, saying he was “happy to be part” of the plan and predicting the day of the attack would be “a good day for Muslims,” according to the complaint.

On February 17, Hester met with another undercover employee and provided more nails before they went to a storage facility, where Hester believed the components would be stored, the complaint said. He was arrested shortly thereafter.

On October 3, 2016, Hester was arrested in Columbia in an unrelated case after he allegedly threw a knife through a store window and threatened an employee during an argument with his wife. He pleaded guilty to one count of felony property damage and one count of unlawful use of a weapon and was released on his own recognizance awaiting sentencing, which was scheduled for March.
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Assertions from the White House that immigration enforcement agents had their hands tied in the last administration are difficult to square with the massive deportations of Barack Obama’s presidency.

President Donald Trump’s press secretary made a claim about two agencies, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Customs and Border Protection:

SEAN SPICER: “For so long, the people at ICE and CBP had their hands cuffed behind them.” The Obama administration, he said, had so many exceptions for who could be adjudicated “that it made it very difficult for the customs and enforcement people to do their job and enforce the laws of this country.”

THE FACTS: Whatever constraints agents might have faced, they deported more than 2 million immigrants during the eight years Obama was in office, more than in previous administrations. They sent back 409,000 in 2012 alone, a record.

Republican lawmakers and some ICE officials did complain that they were directed to ignore some immigrants found living in the country illegally if they didn’t have serious criminal histories or otherwise pose a threat to national security or public safety.

Spicer outlined a similar priority, saying enforcement would focus “first and foremost” on those who have criminal records or pose risks to the public. Still, there’s little question that enforcement will be broadened.

Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly has signed a pair of memos that eliminate the Obama-era enforcement rules and has made clear that nearly any immigrant caught living in the country illegally — not just those with  criminal records — will now be a target for deportation.
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Millions of people living in the United States illegally could be targeted for deportation — including people simply arrested for traffic violations — under a sweeping rewrite of immigration enforcement policies announced Tuesday by the Trump administration.

Any immigrant who is in the country illegally and is charged with or convicted of any offense, or even suspected of a crime, will now be an enforcement priority, according to Homeland Security Department memos signed by Secretary John Kelly. That could include people arrested for shoplifting or minor offenses, or simply having crossed the border illegally.

The Trump administration memos replace more narrow guidance focusing on immigrants who have been convicted of serious crimes, are considered threats to national security or are recent border crossers.

Under the Obama administration guidance, immigrants whose only violation was being in the country illegally were generally left alone. Those immigrants fall into two categories: those who crossed the border without permission and those who overstayed their visas.

Crossing the border illegally is a criminal offense, and the new memos make clear that those who have done so are included in the broad list of enforcement priorities.

Overstaying a visa is a civil, not criminal, offense. Those who do so are not specifically included in the priority list but, under the memos, they are still more likely to face deportation than they were before.

More opposition expected

The new enforcement documents are the latest efforts by President Donald Trump to follow through on campaign promises to strictly enforce immigration laws. He’s also promised to build a wall at the Mexican border — he insists Mexico will eventually foot the bill — and Kelly’s memos reiterate calls for Homeland Security to start planning for the costs and construction.

Trump’s earlier immigration orders, which banned all refugees as well as foreigners from seven Muslim-majority countries, have faced widespread criticism and legal action. A federal appeals court has upheld a temporary halt.

Kelly’s enforcement plans call for enforcing a long-standing but obscure provision of immigration law that allows the government to send some people caught illegally crossing the Mexican border back to Mexico, regardless of where they are from. Those foreigners would wait in that country for U.S. deportation proceedings to be complete. This would be used for people who aren’t considered a threat to cross the border illegally again, the memo says.

That provision is almost certain to face opposition from civil libertarians and Mexican officials, and it’s unclear whether the United States has the authority to force Mexico to accept third-country nationals. But the memo also calls for Homeland Security to provide an account of U.S. aid to Mexico, a possible signal that Trump plans to use that funding to get Mexico to accept the foreigners.

Historically, the U.S. has quickly repatriated Mexican nationals caught at the border but has detained immigrants from other countries pending deportation proceedings that could take years.

Tougher enforcement

The memos do not change U.S. immigration laws, but take a far harder line toward enforcement.

One example involves broader use of a program that fast-tracks deportations. It will now be applied to immigrants who cannot prove they have been in the United States longer than two years. It’s unclear how many immigrants that could include.

WATCH: California Senator Harris on expanded immigration policies

Since at least 2002 that fast deportation effort — which does not require a judge’s order — has been used only for immigrants caught within 100 miles of the border, within two weeks of crossing illegally.

The administration also plans to expand immigration jail capacity. Currently, Homeland Security has money and space to jail 34,000 immigrants at a time. It’s unclear how much an increase would cost, but Congress would have to approve any new spending.

The American Civil Liberties Union said it would challenge the directives.

“These memos confirm that the Trump administration is willing to trample on due process, human decency, the well-being of our communities, and even protections for vulnerable children, in pursuit of a hyper-aggressive mass deportation policy,” said Omar Jadwat, director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.

However, Representative Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican who sits on the House Homeland Security Committee, applauded the Trump effort, saying the memos “overturn dangerous” policies from the Obama administration.

Young people

The directives do not affect former President Barack Obama’s program that has protected more than 750,000 young immigrants from deportation. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals remains in place, though participants could be deported if they commit crimes or otherwise are deemed to be threats to public safety or national security, according to the department.

During the campaign, Trump vowed to immediately end that program, which he described as illegal amnesty.

The directives indicate that some young people caught crossing the border illegally by themselves may not be eligible for special legal protections if they are reunited with parents in the United States. And those parents or other relatives that the government believes helped the children would face criminal and immigration investigations.

Under the Obama administration, more than 100,000 children, mostly from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, were caught at the border. Most were reunited with parents or relatives living in the United States, regardless of the adults’ immigration status.

The enforcement memos also call for the hiring of 5,000 new Border Patrol agents and 10,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, but it’s unclear how quickly that could take place. Currently, two of every three applicants for Customs and Border Protection jobs fail polygraph exams, and there are about 2,000 vacancies.

The government also plans to review a program that allows local police and jailers to act as immigration agents and a program that used fingerprint records from local jails to identify immigrants who had been arrested.
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As dawn breaks over an encampment that was once home to thousands of people protesting the Dakota Access oil pipeline, a few hundred holdouts rise for another day of resistance.

They aren’t deterred by the threat of flooding, nor by declarations from state and federal authorities that they must leave by Wednesday or face possible arrest. They’re determined to remain and fight a pipeline they maintain threatens the very sanctity of the land.

“If we don’t stand now, when will we?” said Tiffanie Pieper of San Diego, who has been in the camp most of the winter.

Protest started in August

Protesters have been at the campsite since August to fight the $3.8 billion pipeline that will carry oil from North Dakota through South Dakota and Iowa to a shipping point in Illinois. Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners began work on the last big section of the pipeline this month after the Army gave it permission to lay pipe under a reservoir on the Missouri River. The protest camp is on Army Corp of Engineers land nearby.

The protests have been led by Native American tribes, particularly the Standing Rock Sioux and Cheyenne River Sioux, whose reservation is downstream. They say the pipeline threatens drinking water and cultural sites. ETP disputes that.

Faced with the prospect of spring flooding, some protesters are considering moving to higher ground, though not necessarily off the federal land. Some may move to the Standing Rock Reservation, where the Cheyenne River Sioux is leasing land to provide camping space even though Standing Rock Sioux Chairman Dave Archambault has urged protesters to leave.

“We have the same goals,” Cheyenne River Chairman Harold Frazier said of himself and Archambault. “We don’t agree on whether or not the water protectors should be on the ground.”

No camp re-entry after Wednesday

On Monday, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum talked with Archambault on the telephone about efforts to clean up and vacate the protest camp, Burgum’s office said. Burgum and Archambault both stressed the importance of keeping lines of communication open, including a one-page flyer that the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs will distribute in the camp, reminding protesters that the main camp will be evacuated at 2 p.m. Wednesday and re-entry will not be allowed, Burgum’s office said.

More than 230 truckloads of debris have been hauled out as of Monday, according to the governor’s office.

Those urging the protesters to leave say they’re concerned about possible flooding in the area as snow melts.

“The purpose of this is to close the land to ensure no one gets harmed,” said Corps Capt. Ryan Hignight.

Debris from camp a concern

One concern is that floodwaters could wash tons of trash and debris at the encampment into the nearby rivers.

“One of the biggest environmental threats to the Missouri is the camp itself,” Burgum said.

Many in camp think authorities are exaggerating the flood threat and trying to turn public sentiment against them.

“They’re talking like it will be a flood that will wipe out all of existence,” said Luke Black Elk, a Cheyenne River Sioux from South Dakota. Some flooding is likely, he said, but “most of it won’t be that bad.”

The camp has been the site of numerous and sometimes violent clashes between police and protesters who call themselves “water protectors,” with more than 700 arrests. The camp’s population has dwindled as the pipeline battle has largely moved into the courts.

Protesters won’t make it easy

Protesters who remain say they’re prepared to be arrested, but will remain peaceful.

“We’ll make it difficult for them to handcuff us, but there will be no forceful opposition,” said Bryce Peppard of Oregon.

The Corps and the governor say they would rather there were no arrests.

“The ideal situation is zero arrests are made because everybody figures out that it’s not a place where you want to be when the flood starts to happen,” Burgum said.
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Right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos has been disinvited to this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference after his attempt to clarify past comments on relationships between boys and older men fell flat with organizers. Hours later, his publisher cancelled his book Dangerous, which had been scheduled to come out in June.

The American Conservative Union founded and hosts CPAC, which is being held Wednesday through Saturday outside Washington. In a tweet on Monday, ACU chairman Matt Schlapp said that “due to the revelation of an offensive video in the past 24 hours condoning pedophilia, the American Conservative Union has decided to rescind the invitation of Milo Yiannopoulos to speak.”

After the polarizing Breitbart News editor was invited, his invitation sparked a backlash. The conservative Reagan Battalion blog tweeted video clips Sunday in which Yiannopoulos discussed Jews, sexual consent, statutory rape, child abuse and homosexuality.

Later Monday, Simon & Schuster and its Threshold Editions imprint announced that “after careful consideration” they had pulled the book, for which pre-orders placed it high on Amazon.com’s best-seller lists. The subject of intense controversy, Dangerous was originally scheduled to come out in March. But Yiannopoulos pushed back the release to June so he could write about the protests during his recent campus tour, including a cancelled appearance at the University of California, Berkeley.

At the time of his publisher’s decision Monday, Dangerous ranked No. 83 on Amazon’s overall list and No. 1 in the subcategory of “Censorship & Politics.”

More than 100 Simon & Schuster authors had objected to his book deal, which was announced last December, and Roxane Gay withdrew a planned book. Some bookstores had said they would not sell it, although the National Coalition Against Censorship and other free speech organizations had defended the publisher. Threshold is a conservative imprint that has published books by President Donald Trump, who has defended Yiannopoulos, and former Vice President Dick Cheney among others.

On Facebook, Yiannopoulos blamed deceptive editing and his own “sloppy phrasing” for any indication he supported pedophilia. The British author said he spoke of his own relationship when he was 17 with a man who was 29. The age of consent in the U.K. is 16.

It’s unclear who edited the videos.

“We realize that Mr. Yiannopoulos has responded on Facebook, but it is insufficient,” Schlapp said. “We urge him to immediately further address these disturbing comments.”

Schlapp said the invitation was initially extended knowing that free speech on college campuses is a “battlefield where we need brave, conservative standard-bearers.”

But he added: “There is no disagreement among our attendees on the evils of sexual abuse of children.”

Yiannopoulos writes for Breitbart News, considered by many a platform for the so-called alt-right movement, an offshoot of conservatism that mixes racism, white nationalism and populism.
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They both call themselves the Taliban. They regularly carry out deadly suicide bombings, kill civilians with impunity and, in many respects, behave like brutish terrorist groups. So why is one — the Tehrik-I Taliban of Pakistan — on the State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, while the other — Afghanistan’s Taliban — is not?

To the U.S., the Afghan Taliban is largely an insurgency with control over vast swaths of territory and aspirations to govern the country, while its Pakistani offspring is considered nothing but a terrorist organization. But the real reason the Afghan Taliban is not on the list has more to do with political considerations than whether or not it meets the statutory criteria for a terrorist designation.

To be declared a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department, a foreign group must engage in terrorism and threaten the security of U.S. nationals or the national security of the United States. The Afghan Taliban meet both criteria.

Yet political expedience has obligated keeping the group off the list of 61 organizations ranging from the Afghanistan branch of the Islamic State group to the Palestinian group Hamas. In the case of the Taliban, the deterring factor has long been a concern that applying the terror label to the group would restrict U.S. and Afghan government diplomatic contacts with the Taliban, making peace talks more difficult.

“There is no doubt that the Taliban occasionally attacks civilians intentionally, not accidentally, and that’s the definition of terrorism,” said James Dobbins, a former U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. “And, thus, the designation would be accurate enough. The question is whether or not it would serve the U.S. and Afghan government purposes for that step to be taken.”

‘Call the enemy by its name’

With the Trump administration scaling up its war on Islamic terrorist groups with a vow to “call the enemy by its name,” the question has entered into discussions over a new Afghan war strategy.

Gen. John Nicholson, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, told VOA’s Afghan service earlier this month that the question of whether the Taliban should be designated as a terrorist organization “is an important one for the [new] administration to consider and it will be part of our conversation with them as the weeks unfold.”

Nicholson did not say whether he favored a terrorist designation, but he left little doubt how he viewed the Taliban, calling the group “an enabler of terrorists” with links to many terrorist organizations, including al-Qaida and the Haqqani network.

Nicholson told the U.S. Senate’s Armed Services Committee earlier that 20 of the 98 U.S.-designated terrorist groups in the world operate in Afghanistan and Pakistan and that the U.S. was seeking to set up an “enduring counterterrorism platform” in Afghanistan.

Asked whether the administration is considering designating the Taliban as a terror group, a State Department spokesperson referred to a 2002 executive order labeling the Taliban a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist Entity” and a 2008 Congressional law mandating that the Taliban be considered a terrorist organization for immigration purposes.

While the Global Terrorist Entity sanctions are focused on financial transactions, a foreign terrorist organization designation prohibits “material support,” such as training, and carries greater weight, according to Oliver Krischik, a trade law attorney specializing in U.S. economic sanctions.

“Just the act of designating an organization on the Foreign Terrorist Organization list itself is a powerful move just in name, and that is something which can have a severe impact on the way other people around the world will or will not engage in business with you,” Krischik said.

Long eager to reach a political settlement with the Taliban, successive Afghan governments have stopped short of calling for the group to be designated as a terrorist organization, said Dobbins, who led the 2001 Bonn negotiations that created the first post-Taliban government in Afghanistan.

“If the U.S. was seriously proposing to do it, my guess is it would lead some Afghan officials to counsel against it precisely because they’d still hope eventually to be able to launch some process of reconciliation,” Dobbins said.  “If [the Trump administration] really wants to create an obstacle to communications with the Taliban, then this probably could have that effect.”

A spokesman for Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said he was unaware of any proposal to designate the Taliban as a terrorist organization.

Advantages of the label

With the U.S. military enjoying broad authority to target the Taliban, a terrorist designation would have little impact on the battlefield. But declaring the Taliban a terror group could have one advantage, according to Michael Ryan, a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation in Washington: It would make it politically easier for the Trump administration to pressure foreign governments backing the Taliban. The U.S. has long accused Pakistan of sheltering the Taliban, a charge denied by Islamabad.

In labeling the Taliban a terror group, the administration could also argue that “we’re just tidying up the list,” Ryan said, noting that the Taliban-allied Haqqani network and IS branch of Afghanistan and Pakistan are on the list. “Or they could say, as some Republicans said in the last administration, President [Barack] Obama was too weak on this issue and they’re going to strengthen it up.”

Gianni Koskinas, a former military officer now with the New America think tank in Washington, argued that merely excluding the Taliban from the terror list is unlikely to encourage the group to enter into peace talks.

“Ultimately, if the Afghan government chooses to reconcile with the Taliban, that is irrelevant as far as I’m concerned to the designation of terrorist or not,” Koskinas said. “The notion that you can tie and bind reconciliation with something that is a very black-and-white fact that they’re a terrorist organization, that they’re behaving as one, is illogical to me.”

Designating the Taliban as a terrorist organization would bring clarity to the U.S. position in Afghanistan, Koskinas said. “The message should be clear: If you behave like this, then you’re a terrorist organization. Period,” he said.

VOA State Department correspondent Nike Ching and VOA’s Afghanistan Service contributed to this report.
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More than a thousand people of various faiths rallied in New York City in support of Muslim Americans and to protest President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.

The “I Am A Muslim Too” rally was held in Times Square on Sunday and was organized by several groups, including the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding.

The protesters waved American flags, held signs saying “No Muslim Ban,” and chanted “We are One.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio spoke at the peaceful rally, saying “we have to dispel the stereotypes” and that America is “a country founded to protect all faiths and all beliefs.”

Hip-Hop mogul Russell Simmons headlined the rally. He said the Muslim community was being used as a scapegoat, but that “diversity will prevail.”
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A senior Trump administration official was fired following criticism in a private speech of President Donald Trump’s policies and his inner circle of advisers.

Craig Deare, whom Trump appointed a month ago to head the National Security Council’s Western Hemisphere division, was on Friday escorted out of the Executive Office Building, where he worked in Washington.

A senior White House official confirmed that Deare is no longer working at the NSC and has returned to the position he previously held at the National Defense University. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an incident not otherwise made public, and provided no further details.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Sunday that Deare “was sent back to his original position.” Asked if government employees should be concerned that they could be fired for criticizing the president, she said: “I don’t think any person that is there in order to carry out the president’s agenda should be against the president’s agenda.”

Current and former administration officials say Deare’s termination was linked to remarks he made Thursday at a private talk at the Wilson Center, a Washington think tank. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.

According to one person who attended the discussion, Deare slammed the Trump administration for its policies on Latin America, specifically its rocky start to relations with Mexico. That person spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a private event.

Trump signed an order in the first week of his presidency to build a border wall with Mexico, jumpstarting a campaign promise. The move prompted Mexico’s President Enrique Pena Nieto to cancel his trip to Washington in late January.

The person who attended the Wilson Center discussion also said that Deare openly expressed frustration over being cut out of most of the policy discussions about Mexico, saying that members of Trump’s inner circle, including chief strategist Steve Bannon and Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, have not consulted with NSC directorates as the White House formulates policy.

Deare has been on the faculty of National Defense University in Washington since 2001. He joined the university’s College of International Security Affairs in 2010 and most recently served as dean of administration.

The person who attended the Wilson Center talk also noted that Deare made several remarks about how attractive Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, appeared, remarks that person described as “awkward.”

Deare did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Officials with the Wilson Center also declined a request for information, saying the discussion was off the record.

Deare is the second senior NSC official to leave in under a week. On Monday, Trump’s national security adviser, retired Gen. Michael Flynn, resigned after revelations that he discussed sanctions with a Russian diplomat before Trump was sworn in, then misled Vice President Mike Pence about the nature of those conversations.
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Home to countless journalists and defenders of a free press, Washington is abuzz over President Donald Trump’s increasingly ferocious attacks on America’s news media. VOA’s Michael Bowman reports, U.S. lawmakers are weighing in, with Republican Senator John McCain telling a television network that cracking down on press freedom is ‘how dictators get started.’
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