Since 2016, I’ve felt sort of hyperaware about the potentiality of Russian disinfo because obviously, WikiLeaks and the IRA. Per the Senate Intelligence Committee, in multiple volumes, this was anything but a hoax. The claim Trump didn’t welcome it and appreciate it is more than answered by his campaign’s silence about it and even attempted cover-up. Money was funneled through Facebook and Twitter ads and RW-pressure groups like NRA. I joke that we are still living in 2016 because we are still finding out how that election was, well, weird.
I deleted a post about how weird it was that Benny Johnson was a dupe to launder Russian talking points in the Tenet exploit because I realized that his basic dopiness and right-wing credulity is a whole fucking bigger mood than I was handling at the moment. We get that RW dopey incendiaries are out here–and they are pretty well-funded domestically as it is. Like, you pick a random concern-trolling “Liberty” “Freedom” “Heritage” or “Family”-labelled group from the last 100 years, and it was probably founded by some freaky Christian billionaire bigot family like the DeVos, Wilkes, Prince, Mellon, Coors, Koch, Busch, etc. The family-tree of theocratic and Bircher-light think tankitude has been incestuous and generously endowed since forever.
But where there is money and batshit, you have a real problem–people who love the hell out of money and don’t care what degree of batshit they spew. If you wanted useful idiots for foreign actors, this is one way you could open up a path for useful idiots to wrongfully mobilize people by playing on their fears and so on. Propaganda is cheap and effective. Even when we try to sanction the fuck out of the players to try and make it prohibitively costly to shit in the US litterbox–someone will try it.
Part of the reason why is we have a great big permission-structure to lie on the GOP side of things. We talk about it, but I don’t think we talk about it as much as we need to. The media is in part at fault, but also, money has generated a whole right-wing puke funnel, just feeding viewers like baby birds. And the results of the propaganda: fear and anger–short circuit logical critical thinking pathways. Well-fed ducklings become sitting ducks.
The internet influencer thing though, is even more perverse. There’s no reason to believe these people are anything but cons. I’ve thought of it as the “Triumph of the Swill”, because it’s propaganda without even artistry or competence. It relies on people being poorly educated or getting hopped-up on the idea that contrarianism is “independent thinking”–because you are a super genius of rare qualities, you can see through Big Atmosphere’s lies since Joseph Priestly and reject climate change, or see where that shill Jenner was headed with his vaccination/germ theory nonsense. You have clearly beat the mentality of Darwin and Le Compte de Buffon regarding that evolution jazz, too.
Conspiracy theories proliferate and why not? Anything might be true once anything can be called false.
Why not DARVO Russia and Ukraine? Why not introduce a little Holocaust denial? Why not suggest civil wars are actually good and healthy, or that secession could be beneficial to a large US State?
Harmful, wrongheaded views can be pimped out to attractive or engaging morons, who speak down to controversy-curious people without the tools to resist. They’ll even have you believing education itself is a problem and suggest you do away with it.
I think it’s good it’s being addressed, but the right wing is super-great at trying to say their free speech right are denied whenever they get told to stop being shills for utter bullshit. I get the feeling the pool of people who have been Russian-cash injected and super-bullshit charged will widen. And yes to people maybe being made examples of, because the shit has to stop.
But we clearly have a problem with toxic “elements” in our political environment. Some remediation feels like a good thing. Geting people to realize and care that one side has been enabling foreign propaganda to influence us and to recognize it as a national security threat is very important–that we haven’t been screaming about it enough since 2016 feels like a failure.
Also the Feds need to do Posobiec and Flynn. because I can’t believe those asses aren’t being handled from elsewhere.
(Now that things have calmed down media-wise, and there is solid information, here’s a post. I’m glad to see the parent and gun owner held accountable; for this, and always. I am never in favor of charging a minor as an adult, though there should be consequences laced heavily with rehabilitation. But the parent and gun owner should be fully responsible because they’re actual adults, and the parents (some child shooters will not have parents, so this goes to the caregiver.) Gun owners should always know that their guns are secure, and tell law enforcement when they’re not secure. Others’s mileage with these things may vary, and you’re welcome to chime in!)
Colin Gray faces four involuntary manslaughter, two second-degree murder and eight cruelty to children counts
The father of the teen suspected in the Georgia school shooting has been arrested, the Georgia bureau of investigation has said.
Colin Gray, 54, was arrested by the bureau in connection to the shooting at Apalachee high school. Colin is the father of Colt Gray, the 14-year-old who is suspected of fatally shooting two students and two teachers with an assault-style rifle at the high school on Wednesday.
He is charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children, the Georgia bureau said.
“His charges are directly connected with the actions of his son and allowing him to possess a weapon,” Chris Hosey, director of the Georgia bureau of investigations, told reporters on Thursday evening.
“What are we facing? Heartbreak. A young person brought a gun into a school, committed an evil act and took lives, and injured people not just physically but mentally,” said the Barrow county sheriff, Jud Smith, during the news conference.
The teenager has been charged as an adult in the deaths of the school students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and educators Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Christina Irimie, 53, Hosey said.
At least nine other people – seven students and two teachers – were taken to hospitals with injuries and all are expected to make a full recovery, Smith said.
Colin Gray is being held at the Barrow county detention center.
More than a year ago, the alleged shooter was interviewed by Georgia police after they received tips about online posts threatening a school shooting. Police did not have enough probable cause to arrest him then, according to the Georgia bureau of investigation.
In that 2023 inquiry, the father said he had hunting guns in the house but that his son did not have unsupervised access to them, and the son denied making the threats online, the FBI said.
Georgia state and Barrow county investigators say the younger Gray used an “AR platform style weapon”, or semiautomatic rifle, to carry out the attack in which two teachers and two 14-year-old students were killed.
It remained unclear how the shooter obtained the weapon.
Investigators have yet to comment on what may have motivated the first US campus mass shooting since the start of the school year.
Jackson county sheriff’s investigators closed the case after being unable to substantiate that either Gray was connected to the Discord account where the threats were made, and did not find grounds to seek the needed court order to confiscate the family’s guns, according to police reports released by the sheriff’s office on Thursday.
“This case was worked, and at the time the boy was 13, and it wasn’t enough to substantiate,” Janis Mangum, the Jackson county sheriff, said in an interview. “If we get a judge’s order or we charge somebody, we take firearms for safekeeping.”
The younger Gray was taken into custody shortly after the shooting and was being held without bond at the Gainesville regional youth detention center, Glenn Allen, the Georgia department of juvenile justice communications director, said on Thursday.
His arraignment is set for Friday morning before a Georgia superior court judge in Barrow county by video camera.
While parents are not usually held criminally liable if their child shoots someone, recent high-profile events are evidence that they could face charges in the future. In November 2023, Deja Taylor of Virginia was sentenced to 21 months on two federal charges after her then six-year-old son shot his teacher in January.
The elder Gray’s arrest also comes months after the unprecedented conviction of the parents of a Michigan high school student who shot and killed four students on 30 November. In February, Jennifer Crumbley was convicted on four counts of involuntary manslaughter. The next month, her husband, James Crumbley, was convicted on the same charges. The pair was sentenced to serve at least 10 years in prison.
“I didn’t really think about what precedent it was setting,” Karen McDonald, the prosecutor for Oakland county who brought the case against the Crumbleys, told CNN on Thursday. “If nothing else I would’ve hoped that the highly publicized details of this case would steer parents and make them think twice.”
“It’s enraging that this could still happen when it’s so easily preventable,” she continued.
This article was amended on 6 September 2024. An early version said Deja Taylor was sentenced to 21 years, not 21 months.
I’m just an ordinary Catholic, but I’m thinking that Jesus probably wouldn’t come down for a man found liable by a jury for sexual assault.
And since Jesus invented the laws of the universe, including math, He would certify that Trump lost California. And GA, NV, AZ, WI, MI, PA. https://t.co/NVfVyr1bVh
By DAVID KLEPPER Updated 11:56 AM CDT, September 3, 2024
WASHINGTON (AP) — When he first emerged on social media, the user known as Harlan claimed to be a New Yorker and an Army veteran who supported Donald Trump for president. Harlan said he was 29, and his profile picture showed a smiling, handsome young man.
A few months later, Harlan underwent a transformation. Now, he claimed to be 31 and from Florida.
New research into Chinese disinformation networks targeting American voters shows Harlan’s claims were as fictitious as his profile picture, which analysts think was created using artificial intelligence.
As voters prepare to cast their ballots this fall, China has been making its own plans, cultivating networks of fake social media users designed to mimic Americans. Whoever or wherever he really is, Harlan is a small part of a larger effort by U.S. adversaries to use social media to influence and upend America’s political debate.
The account was traced back to Spamouflage, a Chinese disinformation group, by analysts at Graphika, a New York-based firm that tracks online networks. Known to online researchers for several years, Spamouflage earned its moniker through its habit of spreading large amounts of seemingly unrelated content alongside disinformation.
“One of the world’s largest covert online influence operations — an operation run by Chinese state actors — has become more aggressive in its efforts to infiltrate and to sway U.S. political conversations ahead of the election,” Jack Stubbs, Graphika’s chief intelligence officer, told The Associated Press.
Intelligence and national security officials have said that Russia, China and Iran have all mounted online influence operations targeting U.S. voters ahead of the November election. Russia remains the top threat, intelligence officials say, even as Iran has become more aggressive in recent months, covertly supporting U.S. protests against the war in Gaza and attempting to hack into the email systems of the two presidential candidates. (snip-More)
Paul Robeson, scholar, athlete, musician and leader, defying a racist and red-baiting mob, sang to 15,000 at a Labor Day gathering in Peekskill, New York.
Paul Robeson (at microphone) singing to the Labor Day gathering in Peekskill, New York
September 4, 1954 The Peace Pledge Union (PPU) organized a demonstration against the H-Bomb in London’s Trafalgar Square. The PPU dates back to October 1934. Young Peace Pledge Union members today. The PPU today
September 4, 1957 Elizabeth Eckford and eight other young Negroes were blocked from becoming the first black student at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Governor Orval Faubus had called out the National Guard to prevent the court-ordered integration of the public schools in the state’s capital. President Dwight Eisenhower eventually sent in federal troops to guarantee the law was enforced. Elizabeth Eckford Read moreElizabeth Eckford followed and taunted by mob, 1957. A very interesting related story:
September 4, 1970 Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) began Operation RAW (Rapid American Withdrawal). Over the following three days more than 200 veterans, assisted by the Philadelphia Guerilla Theater, staged a march from Morristown, New Jersey, to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, reenacting the invasion of small rural hamlets along the way. Operation Rapid American Withdrawal 1970-2005: An Exhibition:
September 4, 1978 Simultaneous demonstrations in Moscow’s Red Square and in front of the White House in Washington, D.C. were organized by the War Resisters League, calling for nuclear disarmament.
I forgot to shut off the A/C in the room. Let me know if it causes too much background noise. Also we had a thunderstorm during this recording, so you might hear some of it. Hugs. Scottie
My morning, my day trying to find sneakers, a few news articles such as Kennedy and chem trails, red states block methane regulations, Israeli settlers attack Palestinians and kill them, steal their homes / land, and think genocide is not a problem.
Last night the Boston Globe published a leaked email from a top volunteer with the Trump campaign, former Massachusetts Republican Party vice chair Tom Mountain, telling volunteers that the Trump campaign “no longer thinks New Hampshire is winnable” and is “pulling back” from that important swing state. He urged volunteers to turn their attention instead to Pennsylvania. After the story dropped, the Trump campaign cut ties with Mountain.
Stephen Collinson of CNN and Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey, and Marianne LeVine of the Washington Post reported today that Trump’s team has given up on trying to get Trump to talk about the economy and other issues voters care about. The former president has decided to spend the rest of the campaign attacking Vice President Harris to destroy her popularity and drive voters away from her, rather than trying to attract them to himself. The Washington Post reporters noted that likely voters view Trump unfavorably and his team has concluded that while he can’t improve his own standing, he can damage hers.
Collinson dubbed Trump’s plans a “feral political offensive.”
It is not clear that this will work. As Collinson notes, Harris has refused to get dragged into the gutter with Trump, and Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark, who studies focus groups, notes that voters appear to want to put the nastiness of the past several years behind them. Still, the media-tracking company AdImpact reported that between August 23 and August 29, 57% of the total television spending for political ads was on Republican attacks on Harris.
Trump also continues to demand that Republicans support his attempt to suppress voting. Having failed to pass any of the necessary appropriations bills before going on August recess, Congress will be in a rush when it comes back into session next week. It needs to fund the government before the end of the fiscal year on September 30 in order to prevent a partial shutdown. Last Thursday, Trump told right-wing podcast host Monica Crowley that he would “shut down the government in a heartbeat” unless the government funding package includes the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act—which would give credence to the idea that noncitizens are voting in national elections despite the fact it is already illegal—and a bill restricting legal immigration.
Zeeshan Aleem of MSNBC today took public notice of Trump’s “deteriorating ability to clearly communicate.” His speeches “seem to be growing more discursive and difficult to comprehend by the day,” Aleem wrote. “Those speeches are making it hard, if not impossible, for people listening to them to understand what he wants to do with his power in office, and they’re reportedly turning off voters.” A reporter for The Guardian pointed out that attendees at Trump’s rallies are leaving as he rambles for nearly two hours, and complaining that he is “babbling.”
For his part, Trump says his wandering speech is deliberate. He calls it “the weave.” I’ll talk about, like, nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together, and it’s like, and friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’”
Aleem notes that this less-focused, less-capable Trump would be exceptionally dangerous in office a second time. And yet, he was dangerous enough the first time. Today Adam Klasfeld and Ryan Goodman of Just Security released a study showing at least twelve times that Trump used the power of the presidency to retaliate against his political enemies. They note that there is no evidence that President Joe Biden or anyone else at the Biden White House ever took similar actions.
John McCain’s son Jimmy today announced that he has switched his voter registration from Republican to Democrat and will work to elect Vice President Harris and Minnesota governor Tim Walz in 2024. The younger McCain enlisted in the Marine Corps at 17 and is now an intelligence officer in the 158th Infantry Regiment of the Arizona Army National Guard. He said he is speaking out because Trump’s conduct at Arlington National Cemetery was a “violation.”
Last Friday, just before the long weekend, Trump announced that he would vote against a Florida ballot measure that would essentially enshrine in the Florida state constitution the abortion rights formerly protected by the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. When Trump had bowed to popular support for abortion rights and expressed uneasiness at the state’s current six-week ban—a cutoff reached before most women know they’re pregnant—antiabortion activists launched fierce attacks on him. So, on Friday, Trump switched his position and announced he would vote against restoring access to abortion in Florida.
That announcement has given wings to the Democrats’ messaging about Republicans’ determination to end abortion rights. It did not help the Republicans that more videos have been unearthed in which Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance said that “a childless elite” is ruling the country. He went on to excoriate this elite for what he claimed was their pride that they didn’t have children and that they had abortions, and said “they look down on people who invest their time and their future in their children. And that is a dangerous place to live as a country.” Even a right-wing Newsmax interviewer suggested that he was “painting this group with perhaps a broad brush?”
On October 1, in Louisiana, a law will go into effect that reclassified the drug misoprostol as a controlled dangerous substance. Misoprostol can be used for abortion. It is also used for routine reproductive care and during medical emergencies to treat postpartum hemorrhage. It is on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medications, a list containing those medications that are the most effective and safe to meet a health care system’s most important needs. After antiabortion activists targeted the drug, Louisiana governor Jeff Landry signed a law reclassifying it as a controlled dangerous substance. The reclassification means that the drug will no longer be easily available on obstetric hemorrhage carts.
“Take it off the carts?” one doctor said to Lorena O’Neil of the Louisiana Illuminator. “That’s death. That’s a matter of life or death.”
The Harris campaign said: “Let’s be clear: Donald Trump is the reason Louisiana women who are suffering from miscarriages or bleeding out after birth can no longer receive the critical care they would have received before Trump overturned Roe. Because of Trump, doctors are scrambling to find solutions to save their patients and are left at the whims of politicians who think they know better. Trump is proud of what he’s done. He brags about it. And if he wins, he will threaten to bring the crisis he created for Louisiana women to all 50 states.”
Vice President Harris’s campaign started its “Fighting for Reproductive Freedom” bus tour today in Palm Beach, Florida, where it drove past the Trump Organization’s Mar-a-Lago club. The bus will make at least 50 stops across the country.
Pollster Tom Bonier today continued his examination of new registrants to vote. This time his focus was North Carolina. The pattern he has found across the country continues: “surges in registration are being driven by women.” In North Carolina, he writes, the number of registrants was almost 50% higher during the week of July 21 than in the same week in 2020, and the gender gap was +12 women, compared to +6 women in 2020. The new registrants were +6 Democratic, and 43% were younger than 30.
The Harris-Walz campaign today joined the Democratic National Committee in announcing a transfer of nearly $25 million to support Democratic candidates in down-ballot state and federal races. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee will get $10 million each in hopes of supporting a Democratic majority in each chamber of Congress in the new administration.
The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, the organization devoted to winning state legislatures, will receive $2.5 million. The Democratic Governors Association and the Democratic Attorneys General Association will get $1 million each.
Finally, today, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction to stop the Trump campaign from playing the song he likes to dance to at his rallies: “Hold On, I’m Coming.” The estate of Isaac Hayes Jr., the artist who co-wrote the song, filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Trump, his campaign, and a number of his allies, noting that they have never obtained a public performance license for the song although they have used it at least 133 times.
Starlink, the satellite broadband company led by Elon Musk, said on Tuesday that it would comply with a court order and block access to X in Brazil. It marked yet another surprising twist in a wild saga that has been simmering all year but boiled over this weekend when a Brazilian judge single-handedly moved to ban X in the country.
Today let’s talk about how a personality clash between two powerful men led to tens of millions of Brazilians being prevented from accessing X — and how the move could be used to justify further restrictions on internet freedom around the world.
In April, I wrote here about how Musk had decided to risk a ban of X in Brazil over a court’s order that the platform ban a number of accounts belonging to right-wing users. Musk decided to restore the accounts in defiance of a powerful Supreme Court justice named Alexandre de Moraes, who subsequently opened an inquiry into the billionaire.
Musk, who has said he bought Twitter to turn the platform into a bulwark of free speech, positioned the move as a defense of liberty against an extremist government. Moraes, for his part, called Musk an “outlaw” whose X would “allow the massive spread of disinformation, hate speech and attacks on the democratic rule of law, violating the free choice of the electorate, by keeping voters away from real and accurate information.”
After Musk’s April outburst, X quickly reversed course, and said it would comply with the judge’s order. But the accounts that Moraes sought to terminate remained active, and last month X said he threatened to arrest a local employee for the platform’s failure to comply with his order. (The court wouldn’t comment, but threatening platform employees with jail time is an increasingly common and typically quite effective means of allowing government agents to moderate content as they see fit.)
Typically, threatening an employee with jail is all it takes to get a company to reverse course. Musk, on the other hand, said X would close its offices in Brazil.
In a highly unusual move, Justice Moraes also said that any person in Brazil who tried to still use X via common privacy software called a virtual private network, or VPN, could be fined nearly $9,000 a day.
Justice Moraes also froze the finances of a second Musk business in Brazil, SpaceX’s Starlink satellite-internet service, to try to collect $3 million in fines he has levied against X. Starlink — which has recently exploded in popularity in Brazil, with more than 250,000 customers — said that it planned to fight the order and would make its service free in Brazil if necessary.
Moreover, while he quickly reversed course, Moraes initially ordered Apple and Google to block X at the level of the app store in Brazil, as well as blocking VPN apps that let users circumvent geographic barriers to app usage.
While moves like these are common in authoritarian countries such as Russia or China, they are extraordinary to see in democracies, which typically place a higher value on free expression.
What makes the story of Brazil and X such an unusual tech policy story is the way it has been driven almost entirely by two people.
On one side is Musk, who has often claimed the mantle of free speech warrior in public while capitulating to government requests in private. One analysis last year found that under Musk, X had given into 83 percent of requests from authoritarian governments to remove content. And he appears more willing to accede to the requests of right-wing governments, such as India’s.
In 2021, it seemed possible that India would be the first democracy to ban Twitter, after the company fought court orders to remove political dissent — including from left-wing opponents to the government of Narendra Modi. But relations have warmed between Musk and the Modi government since he stopped fighting those battles.
“The rules in India for what can appear on social media are quite strict, and we can’t go beyond the laws of a country,” Musk told the BBC last year. “If we have a choice of either our people go to prison or we comply with the laws, we will comply with the laws.” At another point in the interview, Musk said: “If people of a given country are against a certain type of speech, they should talk to their elected representatives and pass a law to prevent it.”
Brazil once again gave Musk the choice of sending an employee to prison or complying with its laws. This time, he chose not to comply.
Musk’s defiance likely would have sparked a backlash in most countries where X operates. But he has found a particularly pugnacious opponent in Moraes, a hugely powerful and controversial figure within Brazilian politics who came to prominence during the tenure of former president Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro, a Trump-like figure who threatened to undermine Brazil’s democracy, lost the 2022 election and left office after a violent riot at the capitol by his supporters last year.
Both during and since Bolsonaro’s presidency, Moraes has used the unusual powers of his office to order people arrested over their social media posts, account bans on the platforms where they posted, and even temporarily removing a governor from office. At X, he has sought the removal of at least 140 accounts, the Times reported, and often delivers his orders in sealed documents that do not specify any rationale for his decision.
Moraes is not the first government agent to make overbroad legal requests of a tech platform. Google, Meta, and other companies receive thousands of requests like these every year, and disclose them in aggregate in annual transparency reports. The reason they publish those reports is to serve as a check on governments that seek to abuse their power by seeking information from platforms for surveillance and other potentially problematic uses.
Crucially, Google and Meta also fight against overbroad requests in court. Sometimes, they win. The result is a kind of dance between platforms and governments that leaves everyone at least somewhat disappointed but is also the reason that so many people around the world can speak freely online.
I don’t post on X any more myself, and I will not lament its passing when it disappears. But whatever role the 140 X accounts in question in Brazil may have played in threatening Brazil’s democracy, they cannot have threatened it more than silencing the 20 million or so Brazilians who have been using it regularly. Particularly when Brazil’s move will be seen by autocracies as justification to enact ever more onerous speech restrictions of their own.
Like Pavel Durov before him, Musk appears to have thought he could escape the reach of regulators indefinitely. This weekend, he began to learn the same lesson Durov has: you can’t outrun the legal system forever. Had Musk fought for his users in court earlier, he might have avoided a ban. Instead, as he has before in so many other things, Musk chose to do it the hard way.
Defendants Are Senior Leaders of Hamas Responsible for Planning, Supporting, and Perpetrating Hamas’s October 7 Terrorist Attacks in Israel Resulting in the Brutal Murders of More Than a Thousand Innocent Civilians, Including Over 40 American Citizens
The Justice Department announced today the unsealing of terrorism, murder conspiracy, and sanctions-evasion charges against six senior leaders of Hamas, a designated foreign terrorist organization. The charges relate to the defendants’ central roles in planning, supporting, and perpetrating the terrorist atrocities that Hamas committed in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 (the October 7 Hamas Massacres), involving the murders and kidnappings of countless innocent civilians, including American citizens, which was the culmination of Hamas’s decades-long campaign of terrorism and violence against Israel and its allies, including American citizens. The defendants are either deceased or remain at large.
“The Justice Department has charged Yahya Sinwar and other senior leaders of Hamas for financing, directing, and overseeing a decades-long campaign to murder American citizens and endanger the national security of the United States,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. “On October 7th, Hamas terrorists, led by these defendants, murdered nearly 1200 people, including over 40 Americans, and kidnapped hundreds of civilians. This weekend, we learned that Hamas murdered an additional six people they had kidnapped and held captive for nearly a year, including Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a 23 year old Israeli American. We are investigating Hersh’s murder, and each and every one of Hamas’ brutal murders of Americans, as an act of terrorism. The charges unsealed today are just one part of our effort to target every aspect of Hamas’ operations. These actions will not be our last.”
“Yahya Sinwar and the other senior leaders of Hamas are charged today with orchestrating this terrorist organization’s decades-long campaign of mass violence and terror — including on October 7th. On that horrible day, Hamas terrorists viciously massacred nearly 1,200 innocent men, women, and children, including over 40 Americans, kidnapped hundreds more, and used sexual violence as a weapon of brutality,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. “Since that horrific day, we have worked to investigate and hold accountable those responsible, and we will not rest until all those who kidnapped or murdered Americans are brought to justice. Our thoughts continue to be with the families of all the victims of this barbaric terrorist attack.”
“From the moment Hamas launched its horrific attack on October 7, the FBI has been dedicated to identifying and charging those responsible for these heinous crimes,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray. “The FBI has and will continue to relentlessly investigate these attacks on civilians, including Americans. Hamas is a Foreign Terrorist Organization with a long history of violence, and the group’s actions have resulted in increased terrorism threats in the U.S. and against American interests throughout the world. Countering terrorism remains our number one priority, and our work continues.”
“The core mission of the National Security Division is to protect Americans from violent terrorists and extremist organizations like Hamas,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division. “The atrocities committed by Hamas in Israel on October 7 are intolerable, and the Justice Department will not rest in our pursuit to hold Hamas accountable for perpetrating its campaign of terror, death, and destruction.”
“For decades, Hamas and its leadership have dedicated themselves to the eradication of the State of Israel, and to murdering, maiming, and brutalizing anyone — including dozens of Americans — who stood in their way,” said U.S. Attorney Damian Williams for the Southern District of New York. “The October 7 Hamas Massacres – in which over 40 American citizens were murdered – is only the latest act of savagery carried out by Hamas. This office has long been dedicated to serving as a bulwark against terrorism, and striking blows against its leaders. Our commitment is clear: if you hurt one member of our community, you hurt all of us — and we stand with all victims of Hamas’ reign of terror. We will bring justice to this terrorist organization from the top down for the atrocities they have committed.”
According to court documents, Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyya, commonly known as Hamas, is a terrorist organization that was founded in 1987, and has been designated as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO) by the United States since 1997. From its inception, Hamas’ stated purpose has been to create an Islamic Palestinian state throughout Israel by eliminating the State of Israel through violent holy war, or jihad. Hamas also promotes attacks against the U.S. and its citizens and, over more than two decades, Hamas has murdered and injured dozens of Americans as part of its campaign of violence and terror. (snip-More)
Young Peace Pledge Union members today.
Elizabeth Eckford 
