Uzbek terrorist shines light on Tampa as a Pentagon-enabled center for radicalism - By The Wayne Madsen Report

Uzbek terrorist shines light on Tampa as a Pentagon-enabled center for radicalism - By The Wayne Madsen Report

Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, the accused New York bicycle path terrorist who reportedly moved into an apartment in Tampa, Florida a week ago, shines a spotlight on the Florida city that hosts the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) and the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOC). Saipov, who was wounded by New York police after plowing his Home Depot rental pickup truck into cyclists along Manhattan's west side Greenway bike and pedestrian path, killing 8 people, claimed to have carried out his attack on behalf of the Islamic State. 

Saipov, a permanent resident of the United States who arrived from Uzbekistan in 2010, lived in Paterson, New Jersey with his wife and two children. Saipov and his wife are both natives of Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan.

Tampa authorities are reporting that Saipov's Florida address of 5586 Granada Boulevard, Apartment 102, Tampa, Florida 33617 on his Florida driver's license is for an apartment that is currently undergoing the type of refurbishment that is common prior to a new renter moving in. [pictured, right] It is unclear whether Saipov, a commercial truck and Uber driver, was planning to move to Tampa, where he had recently established Florida residency by obtaining a Florida license. Saipov also drove a white Toyota Sienna with Florida license plates. Saipov and his family had lived in Paterson for only a few months.

Saipov previously lived in an apartment in Stow, Ohio area, near Akron, where he owned a company, Bright Auto LLC, which was registered at an address in Cuyahoga Falls. Saipov also previously lived in the Cincinnati area, where he registered a firm called Sayf Motors Inc. 

Over the past few decades, the two military commands, which oversee military operations in the Middle East and Central and South Asia, have drawn to the Tampa Bay area several Muslims from hotbeds of Islamist radicalism. It is not known why Saipov was planning to move to Tampa, however, it is noteworthy that simultaneous to Saipov carrying out his terrorist attack in Manhattan, not far from the World Trade Center, CENTCOM, through an intelligence contractor called COLSA, Inc., advertised two job openings for fluent Uzbek speakers whose jobs would be to monitor social media. The FBI and New York Police Department are currently analyzing Facebook, Twitter, and other social media for any communications involving Saipov and possible radical Islamist colleagues.

The two October 31, 2017 CENTCOM job postings for Uzbek linguists and an addition job posted on October 20, are below:

Cleared Uzbek Social Media Analyst I (Entry Level/CENTCOM) COLSA Tampa, FL -- Cleared Uzbek Social Media Analyst II (CENTCOM) at COLSA Tampa, FL 33621 -- Posted 11 days ago: Cleared Uzbek Social Media Analyst III (CENTCOM) at COLSA Tampa, FL 33621

In an effort to fill a vacuum of qualified linguists in such "critical" languages as Uzbek, CENTCOM and other military commands have lowered vetting requirements for intelligence analysts. In addition, CENTCOM and other military commands have relied on foreign partners to vet military personnel sent to the United States for training in such areas as logistics, ordnance, field artillery, communications, and engineering. Since 2005, 320 foreign military trainees out of 253,977 have gone AWOL while attending classes in the United States. 152 of the AWOL trainees were from Afghanistan. Since 2015, the number of AWOLs of foreign military trainees has increased. The foreign trainees come to the United States on A-2 visas, which are foreign government officials traveling to the United States for official business. Some AWOL foreign military personnel have successfully petitioned the government for permanent residency status, such as that possessed by Saipov. 39 AWOL personnel from Afghanistan were granted legal residency status in the United States. Thirteen Afghan trainees disappeared in the United States altogether.

CENTCOM has not only been a magnet for Middle East and Central and South Asian A-2 visa trainees but also for their families, including extended family members. Noting the problems with the foreign military training programs, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) recently said, "If the U.S. government can't keep tabs on foreign military trainees, maybe the training shouldn't take place in the United States." 

Of the AWOL trainees in the United States, Uzbeks account for those who are members of the Uzbekistan armed forces, as well as Uzbek members of the armed forces of Afghanistan. Other AWOL trainees came from Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Iraq, Bangladesh, and Azerbaijan, all primarily Muslim countries, some of which, like Uzbekistan, have active jihadist movements that have aided the Islamic State in the battlefields of Syria and Iraq.

Uzbekistan was subject to a suspension of most U.S. military training in 2005, owing to that nation's human rights abuses. However, the Pentagon's Expanded International Military Education and Training (E-IMET) program was resumed with Uzbekistan in 2010, the same year Saipov arrived in the United States from the central Asian country.

Syria crisis has Pentagon's sock puppet software working overtime by Wayne Madsen

Syria crisis has Pentagon's sock puppet software working overtime

by Wayne Madsen

The U.S. Defense Department's and the U.S. Cyber Command's offensive information warfare operations to program "sock puppet" software to post U.S. propaganda messages on social media and web page comment sites has been working overtime since Turkey's downing of a Russian war plane in contested Syrian-Turkish airspace.

In 2013, the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), which is based in Tampa, issued a contract to California-based Ntrepid Corporation for an "online persona management program" that would permit a single military member to operate 10 separate online identities in cyberspace. The operation is code named "Operation Earnest Voice"  and its area of coverage includes the Middle East, including Syria and Iraq. Through a procedure known as "traffic mixing," military personnel would blend their Internet personae with users in other U.S. military commands and government agencies, including U.S. Cyber Command and the Central Intelligence Agency, to maintain "powerful deniability." Other classified U.S. contracts support sock puppets acting as Wikipedia editors to alter the online encyclopedia's entries to keep in line with U.S. propaganda and disinformation aims.

online persona management service" that will allow one U.S. serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world. - See more at: http://www.occupy.com/article/revealed-sock-puppet-software-allows-us-military-creat-fake-online-identities#sthash.Wwu1p52L.dpuf

An example of an anti-Russian sock puppet program in action was recently discovered on the George Soros- and Democratic Third Way-influenced social media website, Democratic Underground (DU), which is often quoted by Soros acolyte Thom Hartmann. Interestingly, Hartmann also continues to broadcast from the studios of RT in Washington, which makes the following use of a sock puppet program all the more interesting.

On November 25, a DU user with the handle of "dantana21" posted a video of RT's CrossTalk program, which featured three guests agreeing that Turkey's shootdown of a Russian Sukhoi-24 fighter bomber was a senseless provocation. A sock puppet program using the handle "uhnope," and which has been wall papering the DU site with non-stop anti-Russia propaganda for well over a year, experienced a glitch and, after launching into a predictable attack on RT, went into a happy Thanksgiving mode.

The "uhnope" sock puppet came back and posted the same message using the handle "uppityperson." Both sock puppets also asked the RT video poster how his girls were doing. "Dantana21," aware that these posts were sock puppets, replied that he had no girls.

Rather than delete the "uhnope" and "uppityperson" sock puppet personae, DU, which is primarily used by gay and lesbian single-issue activists and Israel supporters to push their agendas, deleted the user dantana 21 and the RT video. RT has been informed on numerous occasions that its host Hartmann has close ties to Soros web operations like DU and DailyKos, however, the Moscow-based management of the network has chosen to ignore these repeated warnings to its own detriment.

Hartmann's past employment includes a stint at Radio Free Europe in Berlin at a time when the network was funded totally by the CIA. His expertise is in neuro-linguistics.



It is noteworthy that DU has banned any excerpts from or links to WMR articles.

Predator and Reaper UAV operations -- from the inside

WMR has received a number of briefings on the operations of the MQ-1 Predator and the MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). For the operators of the remotely-piloted vehicles, however, they do not consider the aircraft "unmanned" because they provide 24 hours and seven days a week coverage and there is a large support team behind every Predator and Reaper flight. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Lance "Sky" King is quick to point out that "we do not fly drones, we fly aircraft."

The Air Force has proudly claimed that it has not had one Predator shot down. Unofficially, however, there are reports of Predators being shot down in Iraq. There are plans afoot to place more than two A6M-114P laser-guided Hellfire supersonic missiles on the Predator, replace the Predator with a new and more foolproof radar-avoiding stealthy version. The present fleet of Predators and Reapers already possess stealth capabilities due to their carbon-fiber skin and very little metal components. An advanced version of the Reaper foresees the capability for in-flight re-fueling. Currently, the larger Reaper, which can carry four Hellfire missiles, can operate with 18 hours of sustained flight. There are plans to increase to eight the number of Hellfires carried by a Reaper.

One drawback of the Predators and Reapers are that they are not all weather. Because of the satellite links to operators at Nellis Air Force base in Nevada, cloud cover poses problems for the satellite links, requiring operations to be conducted from line-of-sight forward ground control centers.

When UAVs were first used by the Air Force in 1995, they only has line-of-sight capabilities, which meant they could operate 100 miles from the ground control station. Beyond line-of-sight capabilities, using satellite links via the Predator Primary Satellite Link (PPSL) for Predator in-flight operations, began in 2001. Hellfires were also first fitted on the Predators in 2001.

There have also been reported icing problems with the Predator and Reaper, which has resulted in them being grounded. The reconnaissance capabilities of the forward camera on the Predator and Reaper, known as the "MTS Ball" or MQ-16 electro-optical/intra-red camera, can read a driver's license from 20,000 plus feet. Infra-red sensors are so sensitive, often the operators have honed on lit cigarettes at night to target people. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) permits day and night operations in most weather conditions. The infra-red surveillance systems have one drawback at night that does not exist for daytime operations. At night, the color of a vehicle, for example, cannot be determined.

Currently, the Air Force can fly 50 UAVs 24 hours a day. Two-thirds of the remotely-piloted vehicle training squadrons are at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, while the others are at Creech Air Force Base, north of Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. Four every four UAVs, there are two ground control stations. Reservist training on the UAVs takes place at Ellington Field, Houston, Texas and Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona.

Each Predator and Reaper has a "cockpit" comprised of a pilot on the left, usually a qualified Air Force pilot, and and a sensor operator on the right, usually a senior enlisted person. The pilot controls a throttle stick and a rudder control. The sensor operator controls the camera at the bottom of the aircraft. There is also a moving map display with a Global Positioning System (GPS) overlay.

The pilot's screen permits the pilot to look out from the nose and the bottom of the aircraft. The screen feature is of primary importance during takeoffs and landings. For deployment operations, there is a two second delay in sending instructions to the aircraft from either Nellis or Creech.

The pilot and sensor operator also have access to the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network or "SIPRNET" screen, which allows them to read email and scan Internet websites. A third member of the UAV team is the mission intelligence contol (MIC) operator. The MIC monitors additional screens to gather real-time and other intelligence.

Presently, Predators and Reapers, which are exchanged between the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters, are a high priority for the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), Central Command (CENTCOM), and European Command (EUCOM). However, at the present time, 90 percent of all UAVs are dedicated to operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Although the Hellfire missiles are billed by the Air Force as causing "minimal collateral damage," some Air Force personnel pointed out that they do not exclusively use the weaponry or the Predators. It is known that the CIA maintains its own fleet of Predators and that some of the operations were contracted out to the former Blackwater USA, now Xe Security Services. Predators firing Hellfires have been reported to have killed hundreds of civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and possibly, Somalia.

In 2007, there were 112 Hellfire attacks from UAVs, in 2008, the number climbed to 132, and in 2009, so far, there have been 87 missile attacks. The UAVs are a personal favorite of Defense Secretary Robert Gates.