ISIS’ Chemical Weapons Operation | Domestic Terrorism Prevention | Telegram: Media Refuge, for Good and Ill, and more

These grant recipients will be required to spend at least 7.5% of their grant awards on combating domestic violent extremism, which will amount to $77 million in grant funding across the US, according to DHS. “Today the most significant terrorist threat facing the nation comes from lone offenders and small groups of individuals who commit acts of violence motivated by domestic extremist ideological beliefs,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement. CNN reported last week that the Biden administration planned to lean on FEMA to help state and local authorities combat domestic extremism.

How Pro-Trump Forces Pushed a Lie About Antifa at the Capitol Riot  (Michael M. Grynbaum, Davey Alba and Reid J. Epstein, New York Times)
On social media, on cable networks and even in the halls of Congress, supporters of Donald J. Trump tried to rewrite history in real time, pushing the fiction that left-wing agitators were to blame for the violence on Jan. 6.

Telegram: A Growing Social Media Refuge, for Good and Ill  (Veronika Velch, Just Security)
As social media giants like Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter try to oust extremists, and web-hosting services toss some of the biggest propaganda purveyors like Parler, the quickly growing Telegram platform is becoming an alternative hub for disinformation.

We Have a “Domestic Terrorism” Double-Standard Problem (Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency)
To paraphrase the great sage Samuel Johnson, nothing concentrates the mind of a member of Congress like the prospect of being hanged in a mass assault on the U.S. Capitol.
And in a similar vein, nothing divides lawmakers — even in the same party — like the question of what to do after the domestic terrorism that put thoughts of being hanged on many minds, helped along by the actual gallows that some clown erected near the Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Foreign Perpetrators among Fraudsters Shamming State’s Unemployment Systems  (Joseph Choi, The Hill)
State governments plan to update their security systems as they prepare for a new round of enhanced unemployment payments in an attempt to bar fraudsters from around the world believed to have already obtained billions of dollars from pandemic jobless aid.

Don’t Blame the Capitol Police for January 6^th  (Wallace C. Gregson, National Interest)
Do not blame the troops—in this case, the police at the U.S. Capitol—for failures at the top of the chain of command.

How the Pentagon Got inside ISIS’ Chemical Weapons Operation—and Ended It  (Joby Warrick, Politico)
The Kurdish fighters dug in along Highway 47 in Kesik Kupri, Iraq, on January 23, 2015, could hear the truck from far off and knew the attack was coming. The defenders crouched behind their vehicles or squatted along a low ridge, rifles trained on the narrow road. From the ridge to the earthen barrier across the highway were perhaps 500 men, skilled veterans of Iraq’s Kurdish Peshmerga brigades as well as teenagers and elderly volunteers from neighboring villages who had come in their civilian coats, sneakers and checkered scarves to reclaim their homes from the men of ISIS. In two hard days of combat, they had seized a strategic crossroads and now effectively controlled the main route between the Iraqi city of Mosul and the Syrian frontier. The Islamists would do whatever they could to take it back. The afternoon was nearly spent when the suicide vehicle appeared. The Kurds positioned along the ridge could see it clearly: a red farm truck with steel plates welded to the front for ramming and a trailer bed stacked high with metal tanks. The truck picked up speed as it approached the Kurdish line, and from the ridge the defenders unleashed a volley of rifle fire aimed at the passenger cabin.

Runaway Schoolgirl Who Joined ISIS Cannot Return to U.K., Top Court Says  (Reuters / NBC News)
A British-born woman who went to Syria as a schoolgirl to join the Islamic State militant group should not be allowed to return to Britain to challenge the government taking away her citizenship because she poses a security risk, the U.K.’s Supreme Court ruled Friday. Shamima Begum left London in 2015 when she was 15 and went to Syria via Turkey with two schoolfriends where she married an ISIS fighter. Begum, 21, who is being held in a detention camp in Syria, was stripped of her British citizenship in 2019 but the Court of Appeal previously agreed she could only have a fair appeal of that decision if she were allowed back to Britain. But the country’s top court overturned that decision, meaning that although she can still pursue her appeal against the decision to take away her citizenship, she cannot do that in Britain.  The British government had argued that the intelligence agencies concluded those who aligned with ISIS posed a serious current risk to national security. “If a vital public interest — in this case, the safety of the public — makes it impossible for a case to be fairly heard, then the courts cannot ordinarily hear it,” the Supreme Court judges concluded.