CRC Open-Source Intelligence Briefs

from W. Thomas Smith Jr., Director of the Counterterrorism Research Center

NORTH AMERICA: A Wednesday note from my friend Christopher Holton at the Center for Security Policy:

“Apparently, very good news in Indiana. I just got word from our bill sponsor that our bill passed through the first senate committee today without even any hearing. The better news is that a possible opponent, the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee

, has also evidently released the bill, so it will NOT have to go through his committee at all, but will head straight to the floor for a vote. So far, no one has voted against this bill, so things look very good indeed. To reiterate, this bill divests the state pensions from foreign companies doing business in/with Iran and Syria, with no qualifier as to sector. (Indiana already divested from the other terror sponsor, Sudan, two years ago.)”

Christopher also shares these very disturbing videos:

First, the Taliban beating a teenage girl in Pakistan. THIS, my friends, is the madness of Shariah.

Second, an English speaking (American accent), Jihadi boasts about killing Ethiopian and Somali soldiers.

Then there is Peter Roff writing for U.S. News & World Report, who says – and we agree:

The “Obama administration should focus on stopping terrorists, not tweaking verbiage.”

…

“It is hard to take seriously the idea that America is protected from a global terrorist threat, which events over the last eight years have shown to be all too real, when very real issues like what we do with the people we have already caught in terrorist plots we have uncovered, one way or another, appear to be less important than the need to soften the language. And it is this kind of potential miscalculation that the White House undertakes at its own peril. One slip, and the whole thing could come down like a house of cards in a wind storm.”

IRAN-SUDAN-ERITREA: Private and open sources in the U.S. and the Middle East are reporting to us details regarding Sudanese president and indicted war-crimes fugitive Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s recent visit to Eritrea where he met with a top-level Iranian military delegation. According to reports in the Kuwaiti newspaper Alsyassa, the development of an Iranian-Sudanese-Eritrean alliance is an effort aimed at putting up a front against Egypt and Saudi Arabia along the red sea.

Alsyassa has reported (the newspaper’s information based on sources in the UK) that Al Bashir (indicted for killing ethnic black Darfurians in Sudan) visited Eritrea on Mar. 23 despite an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Iranians were supposed to visit Khartoum, but the itinerary – according to two separate sources – was switched to Eritrea because of the warrant against Bashir. The Iranian military delegation included generals from the Ministry of Defense as well as missile technology experts and Iranian security/intelligence forces.

According to our sources, the meeting covered the resupply of Sudanese military equipment (including missiles and seacraft) as well as the establishment of a tri-party pact (Iran, Sudan, Eritrea) with the ultimate goal being Iran gaining a strategic presence on the Red Sea, threatening Saudi Arabia from the southwest and fronting Egypt and Ethiopia.

Iran already has been smuggling weapons into Africa. Some have been intercepted.

According to Iranian press, Bashir has traveled to Egypt, Eritrea, Libya, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia since the ICC arrest warrant was issued against him on March 4.