Spying

Mohamad Hamad, a 23-year-old Air National Guardsman from a Palestinian refugee family, was charged last month with attempting to blow up Jewish institutions in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood, using homemade pipe bombs. Hamad allegedly vandalized the buildings with antisemitic slogans accompanied by Hamas-related symbols. But Hamad was hiding in plain sight. If anyone had bothered to check his social media they have seen him boasting about holding extremist views and posing with weapons. “Been a terrorist since I was a kid in Lebanon,” he posted on social media alongside photos of him with AK-47 rifles and other firearms. His case highlights a catastrophic flaw in US military vetting procedures.

Sparks flew during a series of testy exchanges about “nonconsensual nudes,” domestic terrorism and social media censorship as FBI director Christopher Wray testified before the House’s Judiciary Committee. The hearing marked Wray’s first appearance to Congress since Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to investigate former president Donald Trump. It kicked off with some snide remarks from committee chair Jim Jordan, who chided his Democratic counterpart for mispronouncing a name, perhaps because he missed an earlier deposition. Republicans portrayed Wray as disconnected with his own department, while Democrats used him as a stand-in to praise all law enforcement.

The tacit alliance between operatives of the national security state and corporate media burst into view last week when the New York Times and the Washington Post did the FBI’s job for it by tracking down the leaker of documents that detailed, among other things, the extent of American and allied involvement in the Ukraine war.  That Bellingcat, the shadowy, government-funded open-source intelligence group, played a role in helping to identify the twenty-one-year-old Air National Guardsmen Jack Teixeira proves (once again) that many media outlets are now de facto agents of the national security state.