By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com It may not be the crime of the century, nonetheless, the feds say it’s a whale of a crime. Richard M. Ertel, of Spotsylvania, Va., pleaded guilty Monday in Richmond, Va., to importation and illegal trafficking of sperm whale teeth, a violation of the Lacey Act, which prohibits the trading…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com Members and partners of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in the Washington Field Office, who were involved in a sting that targeted a plot to blow up the Washington area subway system in 2010, will be among those honored Oct. 4 in Washington at the Anti Defamation League’s second annual…
By Spencer Ackerman WIRED (Danger Room) The FBI is teaching its counterterrorism agents that “main stream” [sic] American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers; that the Prophet Mohammed was a “cult leader”; and that the Islamic practice of giving charity is no more than a “funding mechanism for combat.” At the Bureau’s training ground…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com A 22-year-old Pennsylvania man was indicted in Virginia on Thursday on charges of using the Internet to solicit Islamic extremists to commit terrorist acts on such targets as police stations and synagogues within the U.S. and posting bomb-making instructions. Emerson Winfield Begolly, of New Bethlehem, Pa., was indicted by a federal…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com Three Somali pirates pled guilty Friday in federal court in Norfolk, Va., to leading the group that hijacked the S/V Quest in the Indian Ocean, which resulted in the death of four American crew members in February. “These men have admitted to pirating an American yacht and holding four U.S. citizens…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com To the FBI, the White House, the CIA and the American people, FBI agent Robert Hanssen was nothing more than a traitor, a Russian spy who did some serious damage to national security in exchange for diamonds and cash worth $600,000. But in the real estate world, his name means little….
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com The long arm of the FBI reached into Somalia and plucked out a man suspected of being the chief negotiator for a group of pirates who hijacked an American yacht in February and ultimately killed all four people aboard, authorities announced Wednesday. Mohammad Saaili Shibin, who worked ashore as the pirates…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com Ex-CIA official Andrew Warren, who pleaded guilty last year to drugging and sexually assaulting an Algerian woman in 2008 on embassy property in Algiers, and using cocaine while possessing a firearm in Virginia, was sentenced Thursday to five years and five months in prison. Warren’s sentencing in U.S. District Court in…
