Active Shooter San Bernardino

[stickdog99]

TODAY: Email threats close all Los Angeles district schools

LOS ANGELES (RNN) - The mayor said Tuesday that officials were acting out of "an abundance of caution" in their investigation of a threat that closed the Los Angeles Unified School District for the day.

Mayor Eric Garcetti said threats of violence at all of the district's campuses were made by email Monday night. He said they learned later that other cities, like New York, also received threats. He said the city, police and school officials were working to make sure it was nothing more than a threat.

"If it had any credibility here or any place in the U.S., especially given what happened in San Bernardino, we wanted to make sure that we supported the school district," Garcetti said.

Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck said the email was very specific to LAUSD campuses and threatened an attack with explosive devices and assault rifles. The email was routed through Germany, but they believe the origin to be much closer to them, Beck said. The FBI assisted in vetting the threat.

"Any time these threats are made against our campuses, given all the school shootings in America, given San Bernardino, we take them seriously," Beck said. "We gave our school district our best advice on this, and they chose a path."

[stickdog99]

Cops' Shoot'em Up Story

The lead officer who was first to pursue the San Bernardino shooters in their get-away SUV commended his fellow officers for mitigating further deadly violence. Sgt. Andy Capps of the Redlands Police Department was in the first police vehicle that chased the vehicle that authorities say Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik were in after they fatally shot 14 people and wounded 17 others on Dec. 2.

Capps recalled the gunfire that erupted after the black SUV stopped. "It was apparent what they intended to do. They were going to fight with us and they were going to hurt more people and we just couldn't allow that," Capps said.

The attack in San Bernardino happened a few hours before the shootout with police. Capps was on watch command at the Redlands Police Department and went into the field after the sighting of the SUV believed to be connected to the San Bernardino mass shooters.

"I saw them putting on what I believed to be bullet proof vests."

OK, so they changed out of their tactical gear after the workplace shooting, then just happened to get dressed up in SUV in front of the leaf cop?

Shortly after, the vehicle exited the freeway and turned onto San Bernardino Avenue. Capps said he saw the SUV's back window shatter and he saw gunfire coming from inside the vehicle. "I didn't want to get shot so I backed off just a little bit. I knew how it was going to end. I envisioned they're going to stop and whoever is in that car is going to get out with rifles, and start shooting at the police cars."

Capps said he saw the driver exit the SUV and aim his rifle at the deputies across the street. Capps took cover behind his police car and said he had enough support.

[MacCruiskeen]

They can close down any school or university in the country now, any time they feel like it. No plausible reason required, and certainly no proof.

To ask any serious question is to be guilty of sympathising with Terrorists™.

[stickdog99]

Sacramento Bee Editorial

First came the East Bay state worker who flung hot coffee at a Muslim prayer group. Then came the man who pulled a knife on a Muslim woman at a car wash in Chino Hills.

Then the Santa Clara office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations had to be evacuated after a threatening letter full of suspicious white powder showed up in the mailbox. Then someone set fire to a mosque in Coachella. Then, on Sunday, vandals spray-painted graffiti about Jesus at two mosques in Hawthorne and left a fake hand grenade at one of them.

This is just in the last 10 days in California. It doesn’t count, say, the two Muslim women who were attacked in Florida just for wearing headscarves. Or the Ku Klux Klan fliers circulating in Alabama asking the public to “help us fight the spread of Islam in our country.” Or the eighth-grade Muslim girl in Georgia whose teacher stopped her in class and demanded to know whether she was carrying a bomb in her book bag.

We could go on. There are ways to honor the 14 people shot by Islamic extremists this month in San Bernardino, but this kind of sick behavior isn’t among them. The anti-Muslim bigotry sweeping the country in the wake of the San Bernardino massacre is un-American, pure and simple, and should be denounced by people of conscience everywhere.

THERE ARE WAYS TO HONOR THE 14 PEOPLE SHOT BY ISLAMIC EXTREMISTS THIS MONTH IN SAN BERNARDINO, BUT ANTI-MUSLIM BIGOTRY ISN’T AMONG THEM.

Unfortunately, conscience appears not to be among the threshold criteria for candidacy for elective office. Though many politicians – including a few brave conservatives – have denounced what Islamic groups say is the worst flare-up of Islamophobia in this country since 9/11, others have used this moment as a craven opportunity to play to the mob.

It isn’t just GOP presidential contender Donald Trump’s call for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Or his rival Ted Cruz’s misrepresentation of the White House’s appeals for nonviolence as politically correct censorship.

Rep. Loretta Sanchez, an Orange County Democrat who hopes to succeed U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, was right in there with them when she said last week that “anywhere between 5 and 20 percent” of Muslims worldwide want an Islamic caliphate, and “are willing to go to extremes” to “put their way on everybody.”

On Monday, Sanchez, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, defended the premise of her remarks. She should know better. Her claim is an invitation to harass law-abiding people.

Tashfeen Malik and Syed Farook’s cowardly attack on unarmed people in San Bernardino was horrific, and, yes, scary. But times like these test our values. This pandering to mob ignorance must stop now. It’s bringing out the worst in us.

[82_28]

I'm a 6'1" male (athletic at the time) and a single shot from a 12 gauge in shooting clay pigeons knocked me on my ass. A single shot and I was on the ground.

[MacCruiskeen]

I'm a 6'1" male (athletic at the time) and a single shot from a 12 gauge in shooting clay pigeons knocked me on my ass. A single shot and I was on the ground.

82, do you mean the recoil from the 12-gauge you were firing was so strong that it floored you? (Or someone else fired a shot and actually hit you?)

[stickdog99]

NY Times Magazine: Who is Really Radical?

For the last couple of centuries, the word ‘‘radical’’ referred to people who try to pull things up from the root. After the Civil War, Radical Republicans, as they were called, pushed Reconstruction policies through Congress on behalf of freed slaves, trying to tear down the plantation-based power structure of the antebellum South. Eugene Debs, the most prominent socialist of the early 20th century (and a hero to Bernie Sanders), ran for president five times on what was seen as a radical platform of condemning capitalist oppression. ...

Right now we’re most likely to see ‘‘radical’’ paired with ‘‘Islam’’ in news stories and conversations about the motivations of the San Bernardino shooters, Tashfeen Malik and Syed Rizwan Farook. Yet many Muslims reject the term ‘‘radical Islam.’’ They say that ISIS’s reading of the Quran and other texts is so selective as to be unrecognizable as Muslim at all. Dar al-Ifta, an authority on Islamic law in Egypt, asked the media and others to stop referring to ISIS as ‘‘the Islamic State’’ and instead use the name QSIS, for Qaeda Separatists in Iraq and Syria.

President Obama and Hillary Clinton live in the world of politics, where rhetoric is often more heated, but they avoid using ‘‘radical Islam’’ or ‘‘jihad’’ to describe the terror driven by ISIS. After the group took credit for the attacks in Paris that killed 130 people last month, Obama said that Muslims around the world were our allies and encouraged them ‘‘to ask very serious questions about how did these extremist ideologies take root, even if it’s only affecting a very small fraction of the population.’’ He and Clinton have warned that defining ISIS in terms of Islam — even with ‘‘radical’’ attached — risks alienating Muslims and handing ISIS a recruitment tool. ‘‘It helps to create this clash of civilizations,’’ Clinton said the weekend after the San Bernardino shootings.

But Republican candidates for president charge Obama and Clinton with making a dangerous denial in linguistic form. ‘‘Look, we are having a tremendous problem with radical Islamic terrorism,’’ Donald Trump said on ‘‘Face the Nation’’ after the San Bernardino shootings. ‘‘And we have a president that won’t issue the term. He won’t talk about it.’’ Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey made the same point on the same show: ‘‘They won’t say radical Islamic jihadist.’’ The implied question was, How can the country fight its enemies if the president won’t say who they are? ...

The terms ‘‘radical Christian’’ and ‘‘radical Jew’’ have little purchase, not because there aren’t people who commit violence in the name of Christianity or Judaism but because they don’t loom large in the public consciousness and threaten to swallow a religion’s whole identity. Robert Dear, suspected of killing three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs in November, was an ‘‘extremely evangelistic’’ Christian, according to his ex-wife. Online, he wrote about Jesus. Scott Roeder, who in 2009 killed Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider in Kansas, testified at his trial about his conversion to Christianity and said that his faith and his views about abortion went ‘‘hand in hand.’’ Yet most Americans would not equate anti-abortion violence with radical Christianity. We assume that these men are outliers — not exemplars.

Republican candidates for president charge Obama and Clinton with making a dangerous denial in linguistic form.
The same assumptions, in the West at this moment, are not accorded Muslims. ‘‘It puts the onus on Muslims to prove they are not one of them,’’ Jamal J. Elias, a professor of religious and South Asian studies at the University of Pennsylvania, told me over the phone. For Trump, the use of ‘‘radical’’ is a kind of entry point for blatant discrimination. We are ‘‘at war with radical Islam,’’ he said earlier this month — defending his call to bar all Muslims abroad from entering the United States.

The use of ‘‘radical’’ has played out similarly in other moments of American history. In 1919, when he was 24, J. Edgar Hoover earned a promotion at the Department of Justice to head a new unit called the Radical Division. ‘‘It was a time of deep concern over radical revolutionaries and terrorists supposedly pouring into the country from Italy, Russia and Eastern Europe, who also often happened to come from Catholic and Jewish backgrounds,’’ says Beverly Gage, a Yale historian who is writing a biography of Hoover. In April and June 1919, two nationwide bomb plots targeted dozens of prominent businessmen and politicians, including Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. In response, Hoover helped engineer the Palmer raids, arresting several thousand people, most of them immigrants who belonged to anarchist and Communist groups. Congress followed by passing stringent immigration restrictions based on national origin.

And yet ‘‘radical’’ has also been a term of honor rather than contempt. If you see an urgent need for change, you may decide that reform — working within the system — will serve only to prop it up. The left, in particular, has often embraced that view over the last century. Opposing the Vietnam War in 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. called for the nation ‘‘to undergo a radical revolution of values.’’ It was the country’s most dissent-filled decade, when feminists, labor organizers, environmentalists and student groups also unabashedly agitated for significant change. They looked to American history for intellectual forebears. ‘‘Many of the radicals of the ’60s tried to resuscitate an American tradition of resistance from the bottom up and giving voice to the powerless,’’ the New York University historian Thomas Sugrue told me. ‘‘They went back as far as the early Republic, to validate their critique and to defend grass-roots participatory democracy as essential.’’ For years, the historian Eric Foner has taught a course at Columbia University called the Radical Tradition in America. Two of his former teaching assistants, Timothy McCarthy and John McMillian, edited a 2003 collection, ‘‘The Radical Reader,’’ which opens with American revolutionaries like Thomas Paine and moves to utopians like Walt Whitman, abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and suffragists like Sojourner Truth.

The 1960s radicals who advocated armed self-defense, like the Black Panthers, or turned to violence, like the Weathermen, also laid claim to deep American roots. In 1969, the Weathermen blew up a statue in Chicago built to honor the police who died during the Haymarket affair in 1886, in which the police dispersed a peaceful labor demonstration, and someone in the crowd threw a bomb. ‘‘The statue commemorated the oppression of radicalism,’’ Gage says. ‘‘By blowing it up, the Weathermen commemorated the anarchists. They were very self-conscious about that.’’

Blowing up the system is generally less appealing to conservatives, who tend to defend the status quo. But there are exceptions to that rule. ‘‘Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,’’ Barry Goldwater said when he accepted the Republican nomination as their party’s presidential candidate in 1964. At the time, he was the hero of a newly identified ‘‘radical right,’’ epitomized by the John Birch Society, a conspiratorial anti-Communist and anti-civil-rights group with chapters throughout the nation. Mainstream conservatives set out to marginalize the Birch Society as an irresponsible fringe element. Radicals, after all, are the members of a group who push its limits and either end up leading or getting pushed out. Today Republicans in the House of Representatives who call themselves the Freedom Caucus and unseated the House speaker John Boehner last fall are nurturing the spirit of radical rebellion on the right.

In a sense, ‘‘radical’’ is a protean word, Sugrue points out, with more meanings and possibilities than we can track. But one common thread that ties radicals together is their scorn for authority outside their own movement. On the inside, the experience of radicalization is a conversion to be celebrated, when false trappings appear to fall away and a deeper truth emerges. But what if the radicals are too full of their own self-certainty? That’s the danger inherent in the definition. Then, like Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, they turn into walking sticks of dynamite.

[IanEye]

Cops' Shoot'em Up Story

The lead officer who was first to pursue the San Bernardino shooters in their get-away SUV commended his fellow officers for mitigating further deadly violence. Sgt. Andy Capps of the Redlands Police Department was in the first police vehicle that chased the vehicle that authorities say Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik were in after they fatally shot 14 people and wounded 17 others on Dec. 2.

Capps recalled the gunfire that erupted after the black SUV stopped. "It was apparent what they intended to do. They were going to fight with us and they were going to hurt more people and we just couldn't allow that," Capps said.

.

[stickdog99]

This is why LA closed all its schools today!

The first tip-off for New York City police that the alleged emailed threat to schools there and in Los Angeles today, which has been obtained by ABC News, may not be real was that it seemed remarkably similar to a plot line of the Showtime TV program “Homeland.”

“The instigator of the threat may be a ‘Homeland’ fan,” NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton told reporters. “Basically, watching ‘Homeland’ episodes that it mirrors, a lot of recent episodes of Homeland... This is not a credible threat. This is not something we’re concerned with.”

ABC News obtained a copy of the email that was sent to New York City school officials that Bratton said was “almost exactly the same” as the one that prompted school closings today in Los Angeles. The message says in part, “I am a devout Muslim, and was once against violence, but I have teamed up with a local jihadist cell as it is the only way I’ll be able to accomplish my massacre the correct way.”

“Something big is going down. Something very big. It will make national headlines. Perhaps, even international ones,” the message reads. The writer claims he was bullied and rejected at “one of the district high schools,” but does not say which.

“Every school in the New York City district is being targeted. We have bombs hidden in lockers already at several schools,” the email says. In addition to explosives, the email says “nerve gas” would also be a part of the attack. Bratton presumably drew the “Homeland” comparison from this portion, since a nerve gas threat is part of this season’s story line.

While thousands of children were kept from school in Los Angeles, New York officials said they knew almost immediately that it was a hoax.

“It was so generic, so outlandish and posted to so many school systems simultaneously,” NYC Mayor Bill DeBlasio said.

Bratton indicated that an analysis of the email indicated to the NYPD that it was not actually an Islamist threat.

“The language in the email would lead us to believe this is not a jihadist initiative,” he said. “For example, that Allah was not spelled with a capital ‘A’. That would be incredible to think that any jihadist would not spell Allah with a capital ‘A’.”

[elfismiles]

Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think tactical gear = bullet proof vest. So it's possible they wore tactical gear to the shooting but no bp vests until later.

Cops' Shoot'em Up Story
<snip>
"I saw them putting on what I believed to be bullet proof vests."[/i]

OK, so they changed out of their tactical gear after the workplace shooting, then just happened to get dressed up in SUV in front of the leaf cop?

[MacCruiskeen]

:wallhead: ah feck, i have just deleted my own lengthy dismantling of the Andy Capp(s) yarn because the board was telling me i had posted a duplicate.

Can't face re-writing it all (it was a sentence-by-sentence analysis of that farrago), but a few things briefly:

1) Read the article closely. Nowhere, at any time, does Andy Capp(s) say who fired first.

2) He says he saw them putting on vests. Weren't all the windows of the SUV dark, including the back window?

3) He claims he was in the car immediately behind the SUV, and that the Deathloving Superparents fired at him through their back window. Yet they didn't even manage to hit his car???

3) Other "sources" have already told us that Tiny Woman (aka The Islamist Bonnie) drove the SUV. Yet Daffy Ducks Andy Capps doesn't think her size or gender even worth mentioning, even though he claims he saw the driver get out of that SUV.

[elfismiles]

Pretty sure he means the recoil.

I almost fell on my ass from the recoil of a snub-nosed revolver I shot when I was a child but I've never felt like I was going to be knocked over from shooting a 12-guage shotgun since being a teenager and adult. About 150 lbs as teen and 180 lbs as adult at 6 feet. But I've seen plenty of footage of average sized adult men falling over from the recoil. All I can figure is noone bothered to tell them how to stand and what to expect.

I'm a 6'1" male (athletic at the time) and a single shot from a 12 gauge in shooting clay pigeons knocked me on my ass. A single shot and I was on the ground.

82, do you mean the recoil from the 12-gauge you were firing was so strong that it floored you? (Or someone else fired a shot and actually hit you?)

[stickdog99]

Just in the nick of time!

Hillary Clinton to Unveil Counterterrorism Strategy

In the weeks since the Dec. 2 attack in San Bernardino, Calif., Hillary Clinton has urged tolerance toward Muslims and reiterated her calls for increased gun control measures. What she has not done is speak extensively about what she would do to stop a terrorist attack in the United States.

That will change on Tuesday when Mrs. Clinton presents a counterterrorism strategy specifically aimed at preventing attacks on American soil. In a speech at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Mrs. Clinton is expected to propose a multifaceted plan that would address the Islamic State’s recruiting methods and to call for better monitoring and vetting of people in the United States who could become radicalized.

The topic is filled with pitfalls. She must appear tougher on the Islamic State than President Obama, who has faced criticism for his response to the attacks in Paris and California, but she must also avoid turning off Democratic primary voters who view her as overly hawkish on foreign policy, or who have concerns about the government’s infringing on civil liberties in order to monitor would-be terrorism suspects.

In a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations after the Paris attack last month, Mrs. Clinton expressed support for the White House’s strategy to defeat the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, but also offered a more muscular approach, calling for a no-fly zone in some areas of Syria and for the swift dispatch of special forces to train local troops. “Our goal is not to deter or contain ISIS, but to defeat and destroy ISIS,” Mrs. Clinton said.

Mrs. Clinton has given hints about her approach to combating radicalization in the United States. At a forum on foreign policy hosted by a top donor, Haim Saban, in Washington on Dec. 4, she called the Islamic State “the most effective recruiter in the world” and implored American technology companies to block or take down militant websites, videos and encrypted communications, a call she will most likely reiterate in Tuesday’s remarks. “We need to put the great disrupters at work at disrupting ISIS,” Mrs. Clinton said of Silicon Valley companies.

One of the San Bernardino suspects, Tashfeen Malik, a Pakistani immigrant, had posted on social media about her sympathies for violent jihad, but the Department of Homeland Security does not routinely monitor Facebook and other social media websites in its background check process.

Mrs. Clinton, anticipating opposition from the left wing of the Democratic Party, which views such measures as infringing on civil rights, said at the forum in Washington: “You are going to hear all the familiar complaints: ‘freedom of speech.’ ”

[Iamwhomiam]

Yeah, "Radical Islamist" should be replaced by "poor Islamists who've become possessed by evil Jin."

[stickdog99]

Blame Encryption!

The head of the Senate Homeland Security Committee is asking the Justice Department to disclose whether encryption was used in the Dec. 2 terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif.

"Please provide any evidence of encrypted communication retrieved from the electronic devices of [Syed] Farook and [Tashfeen] Malik that may have masked specific plans and logistics," requests the letter from Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., addressed to Attorney General Loretta Lynch on Monday.

Following the attack, some members of Congress have expressed support for ending strong encryption. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said last week that she intends to propose legislation prohibiting the sort of end-to-end encryption that law enforcement officials are unable to access. "I think this world is really changing in terms of people wanting the protection and wanting law enforcement, if there is conspiracy going on over the Internet, that that encryption ought to be able to be pierced," she said during a Wednesday committee hearing.

However, it is not clear that the perpetrators in the Dec. 2 attack used encryption. Johnson's letter represents the first instance of a lawmaker seeking to answer that question.

The letter additionally requests information on a range of other topics addressing when the couple became radicalized, how they acquired weapons used in the attack, when they came to the attention of authorities, and whether the termination of the National Security Agency's bulk data collection program on Nov. 29 hindered the ability of the intelligence community to prevent the attack.