OUR PICKSISIS Planned Chemical Attacks | International Norms on Cyber Operations | U.S. Successful Hypersonic Missile Test, and more

Homeland Security Watchdog Delayed Inquiry, Complaint Says (Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Eileen Sullivan, New York Times)
The department’s inspector general delayed looking into a retaliation complaint by a former intelligence chief until after the 2020 election, according to officials and a whistle-blower.

ISIS Planned Chemical Attacks in Europe, New Details on Weapons Program Reveal (Joby Warrick, Washington Post)
In the summer of 2014, as his followers were ravaging the cities of northern Iraq, Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi convened a secret meeting with a weapons expert whose unusual skills the terrorist chief was anxious to acquire. His guest was a small man, barely above 5 feet tall, and he had only recently been freed from a years-long stint in U.S. and Iraqi prisons. But before that, Salih al-Sabawi had been an Iraqi official of some renown: a Russian-trained engineer who had once helped President Saddam Hussein build his extensive arsenal of chemical weapons. Baghdadi had summoned Sabawi, 52, to offer him a job. If supplied with the right equipment and resources, could he produce the same weapons for the Islamic State? Sabawi’s reply, according to a later intelligence report about the meeting, was yes. He could do that and more. Thus began what U.S. and Iraqi Kurdish officials describe as a crash effort aimed at building the biggest arsenal of chemical and, potentially, biological weapons ever assembled by a terrorist group. Within six months, under Sabawi’s direction, the Islamic State would manufacture mustard gas, a chemical weapon from the World War I era, as well as bombs and rockets filled with chlorine. But Sabawi’s ambitions, and by extension Baghdadi’s, were much broader, according to newly disclosed details on the Islamic State weapons program.

Domestic Terror Cases Increasingly Cross Borders, FBI Director Says  (Devlin Barrett, Washington Post)
Many domestic terrorism cases now have an international component, as would-be killers are “egging each other on” and drawing inspiration from racist or neo-Nazi attacks overseas, the head of the FBI and his British counterpart said Friday. FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, speaking to reporters alongside Ken McCallum, director general of the British domestic security agency MI5, said their agencies have spent decades developing tip-sharing systems to handle international terrorism cases, but that “muscle memory” is now being applied to domestic terrorism investigations. (Cont.)