FSB reports 11 suspects detained over terrorist attack

RT | March 23, 2024
Eleven people have been detained over the terrorist attack on the Crocus Crocus City Hall concert venue outside Moscow, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has said in a statement.
The arrested suspects include “four terrorists who were directly involved in the terrorist attack on Crocus,” the statement read. Investigative work to track down other accomplices are ongoing, it added.
After carrying out the attack on Friday night, “the perpetrators tried to escape by car, fleeing towards the Russian-Ukrainian border,” the FSB said on Saturday. “The criminals intended to cross the Russia-Ukraine border and had relevant contacts on the Ukrainian side,” it added.
According to the agency, “all four terrorists” were arrested in Russia’s Bryansk Region within several hours as a result of well-coordinated actions by the security services and the police. The detainees are now being transferred to Moscow, it added.
The attack on Crocus Crocus City Hall was “carefully planned,” with the perpetrators using weapons that had been placed in a stash in advance, the FSB said.
Russia’s Investigative Committee also confirmed that four suspects, who “committed the terrorist attack” on Crocus City Hall, were detained in Bryansk Region, “not far from the border with Ukraine.”
Crocus City Hall, in the town of Krasnogorsk in Moscow’s western outskirts, was attacked by gunmen on Friday night. It happened before a concert by Russian rock band Picnic, when the venue, which has an estimated capacity of 7,500, was nearly at capacity.
The attackers shot at the crowd indiscriminately then set the building on fire. They managed to flee the scene in what was said to be a white Renault Symbol/Clio car, prompting a large-scale manhunt.
According to Russia’s Investigative Committee, the death toll in the attack has reached at least 115. The Moscow Region Health Ministry said that at least 121 people were also wounded, with 107 requiring hospitalization.
This Is Not ISIS – Rossiya Segodnya Editor-in-Chief on Moscow Concert Hall Attack
Sputnik – 23.03.2024
Ukraine and the West have resorted to false flag operations to persuade everyone that ISIS was behind the terror attack in the Crocus City Hall concert venue near Moscow, said Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of Sputnik’s parent media group Rossiya Segodnya.
The head of the media group stressed that the names and faces of the perpetrators are already known to authorities and that the terrorists gave everything away during interrogation.
“It immediately became obvious why US media were claiming in unison that it was ISIS,” she said.
Simonyan explained that the perpetrators were chosen to carry out the attack in a manner that would allow the West to persuade the international community that ISIS was behind the attack.
“Basic sleight of hand. The level of a railway thimble-rigger,” she added.” It has nothing to do with ISIS. It’s Ukrainians.”
She added that the enthusiasm displayed by Western media when they tried to persuade everyone that ISIS was responsible even before arrests were made gave them away completely.
“This is not ISIS. This is a well-coordinated team of several other, also widely known, abbreviations,” Simonyan concluded.
The shooting occurred on Friday evening in the Crocus City Hall concert venue just outside Moscow and was followed by a massive fire, claiming at least 143 lives.
In the hours following the attack, Western media insisted that radical jihadist organization ISIS was behind it, while Ukrainian officials also said that they had nothing to do with the tragedy.
However, suspects were detained in Russia’s Bryansk region near Ukrainian border. According to the data provided by law enforcing agencies, they had a support base on the other side of the border.
Moreover, while Kiev rushed to deny its involvement into the shooting, Ukrainian secret services have a long track record of terror attacks on Russian territory, from shelling in the Belgorod region to assassinations of political scientist Daria Dugina and journalist Vladlen Tatarsky.
‘Unacceptable’: Hungarian FM Hits Out at Nord Stream Blasts Not Being Investigated
Sputnik – 08.02.2024
The absence of any serious investigation into the Nord Stream blasts is unacceptable, and Hungary urges other countries to take this issue seriously, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto told Sputnik after Sweden terminated its probe into the explosions.
On Wednesday, the Swedish Prosecutor’s Office announced the termination of its investigation into the blasts, ruling it does not belong to its jurisdiction. Sweden has handed the materials on the issue to Germany for its investigation into the matter, Swedish public prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist said.
“Hundreds of days have been passed, and no serious investigation has taken place yet. No details have been revealed yet. And I think it’s unacceptable,” Szijjarto said.
The minister called it “a terrorist attack against a strategic infrastructure in Europe.”
“An attack against the safe supply of energy of ours, is a strategic issue, and the matter of European security. And the fact that no investigation has taken place is very irresponsible and from our perspective, it’s really unacceptable. Therefore we urge authorities, be they national or international to take it seriously,” Szijjarto said.
Hersh: West’s Hesitance to Conclude Nord Stream Probe Implicates Culprits
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 07.02.2024
Sweden’s decision to abruptly quit an investigation into the Nord Stream sabotage attack raises new questions about who the real culprits behind the blast are, and turns the spotlight on the German probe.
Almost a year ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published his bombshell story about the US’ and Norway’s participation in the September 26, 2022, sabotage attack on Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines.
To date, none of the Western countries involved in the subsequent investigation – Sweden, Denmark, and Germany – have presented explanations of what happened or named a culprit. Moreover, Sweden announced on February 7 that it would drop its investigation into explosions.
Sweden and Denmark announced they would conduct an inquiry within days of the attack, Hersh recalled in his Tuesday’s piece. Germany followed suit on October 2, 2022.
Remarkably, very soon, Sweden said it would not join any joint investigations because “it would involve the transfer of information related to Sweden’s national security,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist pointed out.
“Nothing more about the cause of the underwater bombings has been heard since from either Sweden or Denmark, although both nations knew, as I have written, that the US was practicing underwater diving in the Baltic Sea for months before the explosions,” Hersh wrote. “The failure of the two nations to complete their inquiry may have stemmed from the fact, as I was told, that some senior officials in both countries understood precisely what was going on.”
For its part, the Kremlin announced on September 28, 2022, that Russia was ready to consider applications from EU countries for a joint investigation into the Nord Stream incident. However, not only did the West reject Moscow’s request but also blamed Russia for destroying its own pipelines. On October 12, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin qualified the incident as “an act of international terrorism”.
However, it was not only Sweden and Denmark that demonstrated little if any curiosity in digging to the bottom of the incident. The US also seemed uninterested, according to Hersh.
“After the explosions, which became an international sensation, it took four days for a White House correspondent to bring up the Nord Stream issue,” Hersh wrote.
He particularly cited the White House stating at the time that it would not make a “definitive determination” until its allies in the region concluded their work.
“There is no evidence that President Biden, in the sixteen months since the pipelines were destroyed, has tasked its experts to conduct an all-source investigation into the explosions,” Hersh wrote.
Moreover, “the US has since vetoed at least one attempt by Russia to get an independent United Nations investigation into the explosions,” he added.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist pointed out that despite Germany suffering the most from the blast (which deprived its industries of the source of relatively cheap and reliable energy flow from Russia), Chancellor Olaf Scholz or any other senior German leader didn’t make any significant push to determine who did what.
“A subsequent investigation sought by some members of the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, was undertaken but its conclusion has been withheld from the public for what are said to be security reasons,” Hersh pointed out.
The investigative journalist pointed out that the US and German mainstream media were circulating the story of “a 49-foot yacht said to be the vessel for the high-risk technical diving involved” instead.
In his previous articles, Hersh debunked the Andromeda yacht plot, suggesting that the CIA invented the story and fed it to the Western press to distract the public attention from his bombshell. Remarkably, some Western media soon found numerous gaps in the Andromeda story and called them out.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist believes that “the sabotage in the Baltic Sea was the result of a long-standing US policy of driving a wedge between Russia and Western Europe.”
He quoted Emmanuel Todd, a French demographer and political scientist, who said in his recent interview that “one of the great goals of American politics, and therefore of NATO, was to stop the inevitable reconciliation of Russia and Germany.” Therefore, according to Todd, Washington “blew up the Nord Stream pipeline.”
“At the time Biden ordered the destruction of the pipelines, the American fear was that [German] Chancellor Scholz, who at the request of Washington had shut off 750 miles of Russian gas in the new Nord Stream 2 pipeline that was ready in the fall of 2021 to be delivered to a port in Germany, might change his mind and let the gas flow, easing German economic worries and reinstating an important energy force for German industry. That would not be allowed to happen, and Germany has been in economic and political turmoil since,” Hersh concluded.
Having dropped the probe Sweden is expected to hand evidence uncovered in the probe over to Germany.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on February 7 that Russia would watch closely how German investigators proceed with the probe.
“Of course, now we need to see how Germany itself reacts to this, as a country that has lost a lot in relation to this terrorist attack,” Peskov said. “Taxpayers in Germany suffer, German firms and companies suffer, lose their competitiveness, lose their profitability without this gas. It will be interesting to see how scrupulously the German authorities will conduct this investigation.”
Who Will Fight These Wars Anyhow?

By Kym Robinson | The Libertarian Institute | February 6, 2024
The war drums are beating, and public officials and the media are certain that the enemy must be conquered. The war is over there, away from home, in someone else’s land. The public is conditioned to accept that war is inevitable, that for the liberal democracies of Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States it is an “obligation.” It seldom matters whether the voting tax base wants war or not. As bombs drop in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq, as Israel destroys Gaza and the Russians fight in Ukraine, Washington and its allies talk about expanding the warfront to include Iran, China, and North Korea. Perpetual war is the health of empire, the glory of the nation, and the profit for a few. But who fights these wars?
Many of the veterans who fought in the Global War on Terror in Iraq and Afghanistan are past their prime, dead, injured, or cynical of the government that exploited them. The recruitment drives, even as the criteria are lowered, are seducing less and less willing bodies to fill the uniforms. The career incentive to join the military is not as appealing when war is a guarantee. Eligible young men are not so naive and removed from the understanding that their mental and physical health may be at risk that they’ll venture into another overseas war. Those who traditionally joined to protect and defend are less inclined to do so given that the mlitary is an offensive instrument of policy, recklessly used without regard for consequence.
In 2024 it’s hard enough for employers to find capable young workers who can handle physical or moderately skilled work, and who will turn up consistently. It’s easier for a lot of people to lean into the welfare state, to seek comfortable, inconsequential jobs or to find careers that don’t involve killing. Physical and mental health is a meandering factor in a culture that swells with obesity and has a populace riddled with depression and anxiety over the mundane. In Australia it is easier and far more profitable for someone to either go on a disability pension (for a litany of real or imagined reasons), or to become a high paid support worker for said pensioners rather than diving into military or even police service.
War is often a voyeur’s experience, where some are cuckolded for the entertainment or cynicism of others. War is the religion of the Anglosphere. Every generation has its war, a foreign land that rolls off the tongue with ease only to return to forgotten obscurity in a generation’s time. Some, however, like Vietnam or Iraq linger permanently. But most are forgotten as war zones and now only exist as destinations for the soldier’s grandchildren to visit, enjoy the food, or marry from, like Korea and Malaysia. The adventurers, true believers, mercenaries, and those with seemingly no other options do still enlist, but there’s less of them.
It’s not just that the military is struggling to get new recruits, but also re-enlistments. The relationship between the military and its members is disfigured as inefficiency and dysfunction become more openly discussed. On social media anti-military voices are competing against their slogans and the empty promises of recruiters in a tug of war between the warfare state and those who are skeptical of its very existence. Social media “influencers” like the Island Boys are paid to push recruitment for the Army alongside the advertising of energy drinks and other affiliate marketing thrown their way—though it is unlikely that they themselves would enlist or be capable of doing so. The children watching are impressionable, all the same.
Woke cultural messaging has also harmed the military, as it has disenfranchised its traditional base while attempting to appeal to those who have no stomach for training, let alone warfare. The wars themselves, along with the government’s own woke cultural shift and attempts at inclusion, have deranged the recruiters task of satisfying numbers and valuable candidates for the services. Confused advertising and a disdain for the people who usually fill the uniforms in warfare has hamstrung the military when it needs bodies to kill and die for it. A woke window dressing to satisfy the academic and corporate zeitgeist may seem empowering, but in reality is another form of mandated delusion.
The government’s will for war exceeds its population’s capacity to wage it. Conscription tends to not be a viable solution. Ukraine and Russia have embraced such traditions of martial slavery and it has unveiled a force of fodder to be killed. Another generation of “McNamara’s Morons” is an unsatisfactory solution which may lead to liability for both commanders and what few skilled and motivated professionals remain in the military.
Regardless of the human attrition and how thinly spread the capable and willing may become in such a war, the high maintenance of modern weapon systems will erode their capabilities over time. Skilled crews and technicians will be required to work almost non-stop, not to mention the manufacture and logistics required to feed such machines for prolonged operations, especially in combat against an enemy who is near peer or in some theaters a peer level threat. It is one thing to attack Houthis in Yemen who are recovering from years of war against the Saudi coalition but it is another to wage war against Iran or China on their home turf, a war they have been preparing for. Let’s not forget, neither of them have ambitions to invade Australia, the United States or United Kingdom. But the reverse is a constant.
Images of drones chasing Russian or Ukraine soldiers around their AFVs, only to detonate once in proximity, exposes us to the modern realities of war. The distance between the killer and the killed is not a new thing. The drone and remote weapon system is becoming smaller, with a greater range and versatility that may have people logging on for a few hours a day from home to assassinate strangers thousands of miles away with as much regard as though they are killing NPCs in a computer game. That in itself is not how wars are to be won. That same technology and efficiency of distance will be used against the invader as well. The likeliness of sympathetic outsiders “logging on” to join the fight is a reality that may also occur. Those who will fight for either side given any incentive is also a reality, so long as they have a device that allows them to connect to the remote killing machines. The future remains.
Contractors are becoming more common, professionals who are not constrained by government religion when it comes to how a military must serve and act in matters of formal tradition and legal status. They’re killers and operators who serve the government, work alongside the military, and should they die will not become a statistic that influences politics at home. Many are ex-servicemen of the government that they now are hired by, trained and motivated elements that perform tasks as a service to their singular customer. The Russians on the other hand have a more varied mercenary custom, one that is made up of contractors while also using prisoner units, inspired by the promise of pay and freedom. Both ancient aspects of war are to be dug up in a modern context.
Mercenaries and even drone operators are still only a finite resource, and automated systems are a little ways off. Wars of such a grand scale on so many fronts will still require boots on the ground. The imaginations of the stoic German soldier manning the Atlantic wall in the weeks before D-Day betray the reality that many of the defending Wehrmacht were former Soviet soldiers and a rag tag of convalescing others. Horse-drawn weapons from those captured to mutations of expedience with men in ill fitting uniforms crisscrossing a frontier that consumed men and material was the other reality far in the East. Contrary to the mechanized depictions of a technologically superior, super race of warriors, the reality, then as it is now, is that logistics, man power, and attrition are immutable factors in war.
Waging numerous small wars on a limited scale or even as an occupying force in an attempt to “civilize” a wilderness will always consume. They can become black holes that suck the life, money, and material out of an invader. Yet, still mostly men will be required for these prolonged operations and the well for such men is running dry. The post-9/11 era provided many eager bodies who felt the euphoria for vengeance against enemies. The terrorists and their “alien religion” was an easy to hate specter as the twin towers smouldered into smoke and ash. Over two decades later and the reality of such wars is more apparent to the wider public, while those willing men are now dead, injured, or robbed of their youth. The next generation does not have the eagerness for war, and the crusader’s zeal is not so widely felt.
So, as the drums of war beat and the call to arms is made by those who will never fight it, the question remains: who will? No matter what the claimed reasons for war is—spreading democracy, human rights, humanitarianism, security, or hegemonic expedience for many at home—many may very well. But agree enough to enlist? Unlikely. Many who do believe in the need for war are the creatures of Facebook or social media bobble heads, spectators and opinion spewers alike. They are most welcome to form their own battalions to fight for their cause. They won’t, but rather instead they will merely support the government in its ambition to send mostly men to die and kill. Those killers, however, are becoming fewer. Improving technology so that the human element for war is less important and finding incentives to pay, reward, and motivate human beings so that they will kill strangers with little regard are weak solutions.
The one constant, regardless of the means and methods, is that war will always hurt the innocent. Perhaps in time, as the liberal democracies depress into ill health and rely on automated machines to do the killing, it will be from the minds of the weapons who grow the morality to say, “No more.” For now, while some minds in government seek more war, the public’s flesh is less willing or too flabby to make it so.
Explosives sent from Ukraine for terrorist attacks in Russia seized
RT | February 5, 2024
Georgia’s State Security Service has said that its operatives have seized a batch of explosives that Ukrainians had attempted to ship to Russia via third countries in order to stage terror attacks.
The illegal cargo, which included six sophisticated explosive devices weighing a total of 14 kilograms, had been shipped from the Ukrainian port city of Odessa, the agency said in a statement on Monday.
The explosives were brought into Georgia in a minivan after traveling through Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey on January 19, it said. During the search of the vehicle, the bombs were found hidden inside the batteries for an electric car, it added.
According to the security service, seven citizens of Georgia, three Ukrainians and two Armenians were involved in the delivery of the explosives. The people in question might have been unaware that they were actually transporting bombs, it stressed.
The whole operation had allegedly been organized by a Ukrainian citizen of Georgian origin, whom the agency identified as Andrey Sharashidze, the statement read. Sharashidze, who was born in the Georgian coastal city of Batumi, ran in a local election in Odessa in 2020 for Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s Servant of the People party, it said.
As a result of “comprehensive actions carried out by the Anti-Terrorism Center, based on the testimony of interviewed witnesses and recovered audio files,” it was established that the explosives were intended to be delivered to Russia, specifically to the city of Voronezh, the security service stressed.
The bombs contained military-grade C-4 plastic explosives and were apparently made by “high-level specialists,” the statement read. “Deploying such a device in a crowded area might have caused significant damage to infrastructure and large-scale casualties,” it warned.
The agency also didn’t rule out the possibility that the suspects had been planning to use some of the explosives to stage attacks inside Georgia. It could’ve been done in order to blame Tbilisi for preparing and carrying out those terrorist activities, it suggested.
The investigation continues in order to establish the identities of all those involved in the criminal activity, the manufacturers of the explosives and along which route they were smuggled into the country, the security service said.
Who wants the next pandemic and why?
By Drago Bosnic | January 16, 2024
It’s been nearly two years since Russia uncovered the extremely disturbing truth about American involvement in bioweapons testing in Ukraine. However, the institutions of the so-called “rules-based world order” (posing as the “international community”) have completely ignored these findings, while the mainstream propaganda machine has done everything in its power to present them as supposed “conspiracy theories”. Still, the world has been demanding answers from the US-led political West. This includes non-aligned countries, often dubbed the “fence sitters” by the United States, although there have been far worse descriptions used by the European Union. American diplomacy (if one could even call it that) is too busy meddling in the internal affairs of other countries, so it usually refuses to comment on allegations regarding the Pentagon-run “biological research facilities” in Ukraine.
Luckily for the world, the Russian military never stopped investigating this issue, despite constant attempts to prevent, sabotage and/or discredit these efforts. On January 15, TASS reported that the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) identified over 50 participants in America’s bioweapons program in Ukraine last year alone. During a briefing held on the same day, Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, Head of the Russian Armed Forces’ Nuclear, Biological and Chemical (NBC) Protection Troops, warned about the dangers of these US-sponsored illicit activities. Kirillov revealed that an event that can only be described as a false flag training exercise was held in Lvov back in August 2023. The goal was to accuse Russia of supposed bioweapons usage in Ukraine, likely as a way for the US/NATO to both incriminate Moscow and divert attention away from itself and its illegal biological warfare activities in the war-torn country.
“I would like to note the work carried out in 2023 to identify the organizers and participants of military-biological activities on the territory of Ukraine. As a result of the analysis of the documentation obtained, more than 50 people were identified, including officials of US and Ukrainian government agencies, and employees of intermediary organizations and private companies,” Kirillov said at the briefing.
Among others, he named Kenneth Myers, Robert Pope and Joanna Wintrol, employees of the US DoD’s Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, as well as representatives of the companies Battelle and EcoHealth Alliance, Kevin Olival, Karen Saylors and Lewis von Thaer.
“The [false flag] event [in Lvov] was attended by Filippa Lentzos; Gemma Bowsher; and Irina Demchyshyna, Head of the Reference Laboratories of the Public Health Center of the Ukrainian Health Ministry; as well as Darya Ponomarenko, Head of the Department of Biological Safety and Biological Protection of the Public Health Center of the Ukrainian Health Ministry,” Kirillov said.
He added that R&D on pathogens that could cause massive economic damage was extensively conducted in these biolabs, including research on mechanisms for their more efficient distribution and spreading. The program was conducted under the leadership of Denis Muziyka. In addition, Viktor Gavrilenko and Alexander Mezinov were involved in the collection and shipment of materials. It can be argued the report essentially shows that the endgame was to cause long-term damage to the Russian economy (particularly its massive agricultural potential). In turn, this was supposed to cause instability in the country, possibly even a famine that could destabilize the Russian government. Needless to say, such activities are tantamount to a declaration of war. And yet, those conducting them are completely unmoved by the possibility of a direct confrontation between nuclear-armed superpowers.
In further reports published later that day, TASS revealed additional goals of these US-run biolabs. General Kirillov touched upon the US strategy of (ab)using its publicly stated goals of supposedly “monitoring infectious diseases and providing assistance to developing countries” to further expand its biological warfare capabilities.
“Over the past year, the Pentagon has developed and adopted a number of conceptual documents that involve expanding the foreign network of US-controlled biological laboratories and continuing military biological research beyond national jurisdiction. <…> While the stated goals are monitoring infectious diseases and providing assistance to developing countries, using the example of Ukraine, it became clear how the military-biological potential of the United States is being built up,” he stated.
Kirillov also recalled that Washington DC created new administrative and technical agencies last year – the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, and the Bureau of Global Health Security and Diplomacy. These two agencies are supposed to serve as fronts for further bioweapons programs, not only in Ukraine, but around the world. Kirillov also reiterated previous findings uncovered after the start of the special military operation (SMO). He specifically mentioned the Pentagon’s two major projects in Ukraine, aimed at studying the causative agents of particularly dangerous pathogens and diseases such as tularemia, anthrax and hantavirus infections.
“The research was carried out in three main areas. These are monitoring the biological situation, collecting endemic strains, and studying the susceptibility of the local population,” Kirillov said.
In an additional report by South Front, the Russian military revealed that the US Department of Defense conducted a series of experiments with smallpox viruses, which is prohibited by the World Health Assembly. This also includes research on the use of the monkeypox virus as a bioweapon, as well as R&D on the usage of agent-based simulators of smallpox viruses. Two strains of this pathogen are used in the course of aerobic studies. The World Health Assembly allows only two organizations to conduct such research – the Vector State Scientific Center in Russia and the Center for Disease Control in the US. However, these experiments were conducted by the employees of the Institute of Infectious Diseases, which is subordinate to the Pentagon. The US DoD was also engaged in studying other orthopoxviruses that are deadly and pose great danger to human life and health.
Interestingly (or perhaps “terrifyingly” would be a much more fitting term), concurrently with the Russian military’s briefings, the infamous World Economic Forum announced it would discuss the new unspecified deadly pathogen that causes what they call the “Disease X”, which the WEF claims is “10 times deadlier than the COVID-19”. Considering the fact that the WEF is deeply intertwined with the political West and its vaunted “rules-based world order”, the timing is rather peculiar. Why are the WEF and the so-called “international community” so “worried” about an unknown disease, but they keep ignoring clear-cut evidence of America’s massive (and rapidly expanding) bioweapons program? Why is the US military conducting this sort of research (on a global scale, at that), although any official civilian public health institution could easily do so on its own and without such deadly biohazard risks?
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
FBI Recruiting, Entrapping Autistic Children Terror Patsies for National Security
By Ben Bartee | Armageddon Prose | January 15, 2024
Your tax dollars at work, ladies and gentlemen.
The good folks over at the Department of Justice (Ministry of Love), are spending our hard-earned bucks forked over to the IRS at gunpoint to recruit and entrap autistic adolescents in manufactured terror plots in the name of national security.
“Humzah Mashkoor had just cleared security at Denver International Airport when the FBI showed up. The agents had come to arrest the 18-year-old, who is diagnosed with a developmental disability, and charge him with terror-related crimes. At the time of the arrest, a relative later said in court, Mashkoor was reading ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid,’ a book written for elementary school children.
Mashkoor had gone to the airport on December 18 to fly to Dubai, and from there to either Syria or Afghanistan, as part of his alleged plot to join the Islamic State. The trip had been spurred by over a year of online exchanges starting when Mashkoor was 16 years old with four people he believed were members of ISIS. According to the Justice Department’s criminal complaint, the four were actually undercover FBI agents. As a result of his conversations with the FBI, Mashkoor could face a lengthy sentence for attempting to provide material support to a terrorist organization…
Law enforcement agents first became aware of Mashkoor’s online activities in support of ISIS in November 2021. But instead of alerting his family, Mashkoor’s lawyers told The Intercept, FBI agents posing as ISIS members befriended him a year later and strung him along until he became a legal adult.
‘It is appalling* that the government never once reached out to his parents, even while they were sending undercover agents to befriend him online starting when he was 16 years old,’ said Joshua Herman, a defense attorney representing Mashkoor. ‘Almost all of the conduct he is alleged to have committed took place when he was a juvenile.’”
*Appalling, perhaps, but not shocking. Why would the FBI agents try to prevent crime when they can get a promotion out of egging it on? There’s no money or prestige in quietly extinguishing terror in the womb.
What they need to sell to the masses is spectacle — Bread and Circus.
Anyone who knows anything about how the feds work recognizes this modus operandi:
· recruit a mentally ill patsy
· pump them full of cash and bad ideas
· set up a terror plot on their behalf
· swoop in to save the day from the threat that they created in the first place
· Parlay the alleged foiled terror plot into fatter budgets to do more of the same
And around and around we go!
I, for one, feel much safer now that the FBI is capturing autistic minor terrorists for posting naughty stuff online and putting them in prison for life where they belong.
God bless our heroes in law enforcement.
Where would we be without the FBI?
That’s a rhetorical question: inundated with autistic child terrorists, obviously.
They keep us safe. They keep us warm. They give us life. The Lord has sent them down from heaven to calm our flighty hearts.
And, by the way — and this isn’t said these days nearly enough — thank God for Saint George W. Bush, whose handlers pushed the PATRIOT Act through.
It’s called the PATRIOT Act (in capital letters) because it’s patriotic to arrest and prosecute autistic children for their terror. If you disagree, you’re probably a terrorist yourself.
You don’t hate Freedom™, do you?
If you aren’t doing anything wrong, like doing autistic child terrorist the heroes of the FBI entrapped, what do you have to hide?
Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist.

