Bill Gertz Discusses the Danger of ICANN

FRANK GAFFNEY:

We’re back for a tour inside the ring. That is something we are privileged to do each week with our friend and guide, Bill Gertz, the author of a prize-winning column at the Washington Times of that name. Also the senior editor at an indispensable outlet, the Washington Free Beacon. The author of six, count them, six bestselling books including The Failure Factory. Also a new one on the way, I’m pleased to say, looking forward to hearing more about that in due course. Bill Gertz, welcome back. It’s good to have you.

BILL GERTZ:

Hi, Frank. Good to be on the show.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

So Bill, I was just talking with Congressman Trent Franks about the failure of the congress to impede president Obama’s efforts to surrender what I think of as our internet. You have been writing extensively and keeping book on, perhaps better than anybody, what the gravity is of the cyber threat to this country and not just to our national security and government agencies, but to, you know, civilian economy and even individuals as well. Give the prospect that we may have unfriendly folks playing a larger role in the management and perhaps even determining the character of the internet, should that be of concern from a cyber threat perspective?

BILL GERTZ:

Absolutely. The intelligence community has assessed that Russia and China in particular have been trying to gain control of the internet from the United States as a way to control their populations, especially the information that they get. So this is a real problem. And with China, the cyber threat keeps getting worse. I reported in my “Inside the Ring” column this week that since September, October of 2015, a year ago, China has continued cyber espionage and against one particular software company that I was unable to get the name of. They stole almost two terabytes of data, that’s a huge amount of information. This is proprietary corporate information that is really kind of vitally important for our economy. And yet, the Obama administration is sticking by this feckless and damaging agreement with China that says somehow that they would not engage in government supported cyber espionage. And it’s continuing to happen. But yet, nothing’s being done to stop it.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Bill, you have written recently about this attack in Iraq of a drone that seemingly was a motivating factor for Omar Mateen to engage in his massacre at the nightclub, the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, an act of jihad, make no mistake about it, and clearly, demonstrating the lie of what we were told for a while that none of this had anything to do with international terrorist activity. Walk us through that, if you would.

BILL GERTZ:

Yeah, this is a really important story that was based on some transcripts that had been withheld for months by the FBI with no explanation and were released last week. And the transcripts show that the shooter made very clear early on in his attack when he had a conversation with the Orlando Police Department negotiator in which he said, first of all, that he was doing this on behalf of the Islamic State. That was released at the time. But what was not made public was the fact that he explained that what specifically triggered the attack was the May 6^th drone strike in Iraq by the Pentagon of a senior Islamic State leader named Abu Wahid. And he was a military commander in Anbar Province. And they took him off the field and here was this guy stating this. And the other thing he revealed was that he was also doing the attack in support of the Tsarnaev brothers who carried out the Boston Marathon bombing as well as one other domestic jihadist attack that was not identified in the transcript. It was listed as unintelligible. But he was saying that he’s doing it like those people. The failure to release this information created the false news reports. In fact, probably the most embarrassing was the New York Times editorialising that the attack was a hate crime that had nothing to do with terrorism. It’s just outrageous and yet the FBI, which has very little accountability, was allowed to get away with withholding this. I contacted the FBI, they refused to comment. The mayor’s office in Orlando told me that they had withheld it because of the investigation and then when the investigation was done they released it just last Friday.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Bill, you’ve been monitoring national security issues and policies in this city for years, many years, and with great acumen. And your reporting has been, I think, just about unparalleled. Have you ever seen anything quite like what’s happening to the Federal Bureau of Investigation these days? You just mentioned this business of concealing information about the terrorist threat that we’re facing. Congressman Franks talked with considerable feeling about what they’ve been doing with respect to Hillary Clinton’s emails and their investigation thereof. I mean, is there something seriously amiss with this frontline agency responsible for homeland security?

BILL GERTZ:

Absolutely. This is an untold story and I think that congress is largely to blame. They have oversight of the FBI. The FBI has been allowed to engage in a string of counter-terrorism failures. I had a piece on FBI training just recently that highlighted six different domestic jihadist terrorist attacks in which the FBI had some advance indication that the people involved in this were going to carry out a terror attack and yet were unable to stop it. In the case of Omar Mateen, the Orlando shooter, they investigated him twice and let him go. Clearly, this was a major failure and the FBI is not being held accountable for it. You mentioned also the email cases. I mean, you can go through the FBI’s recent list of failures and we’ve got a real problem. We’ve got to fix this problem or we’re going to be attacked further. Part of the problem is this politically correct, left wing narrative that has been imposed on the FBI in both its training and its investigative standards. And that’s preventing us from stopping these attacks.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Yeah, we’re going to be talking more about that so-called politically correct – I think of it, really, as submissive approach, with Dr. Zuhdi Jasser in our next segment. But Bill, just staying with this terrorist theme, you’ve had a chilling report in your “Inside the Ring” column, I believe, about people who may be now at large in our country, perhaps associated with Ahmad Rahami, the man accused of engineering those, fortunately, not fatal but nonetheless destructive bombings recently in New York and New Jersey. Tell us about these Afghan nationals who seem to be AWOL from the military training programs and perhaps at large with malevolent intent.

BILL GERTZ:

Yeah, this was a Free Beacon story, an exclusive that I did this week, which revealed that at least seven Afghan military students went missing just this month. The numbers are fairly large over the course of this training program where we’ve been bringing Afghan military officials to the US and they basically take off. And three in particular left from military bases on the same weekend as Ahmad Rahami, the New York bomber. And that triggered all kinds of potential terrorist warnings, because they don’t know where these guys are. And of course, we know that from the Afghan military there has been a serious insider threat where jihadists have been posing as Afghan military and then conducting attacks. We’ve lost a number of our service personnel from that. So this is an important story. DHS is looking for these guys. They’ve found a couple. Some have gone to Mexico. But they’re basically at large in the United States and they represent a potential terrorist threat.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Bill, I know you’ll stay on it We appreciate so much your visits with us and the superb job you do covering all of these issues at the Free Beacon and at the Washington Times. I look forward to our visit next week. In the meantime, keep it up. Come back to us in good order next week. Next up, we’ll talk with Dr. Jasser and more, straight ahead.