Former Afghanistan Hostage on Trial for Abusing his Wife

Caitlan Coleman is speaking now 

Today was the second day of testimony by Caitlan Coleman in the trial of her estranged husband, Joshua Boyle. See the details here.

Joshua Boyle is the weird Muslim-obsessed self-described "pacifist Mennonite hippie-child" from rural Canada who took his very young and very pregnant American wife on a walking tour of Afghanistan several years ago. They and their children ending up staying in Afghanistan and Pakistan for the next five years as the involuntary guests of the Haqqani network until they were rescued by Pakistani forces in 2017. See this post about their return to Canada.

Caitlan Coleman was eerily silent when they returned, saying nothing in press interviews. That was a clue. A few months after they returned, Boyle was charged with 19 counts of abusing her. The charges include assault with a weapon, sexual assault, and forcible confinement. The abuse took place both in Afghanistan and in Canada.

Caitlan's testimony is devastating, and if Boyle has a defense I haven't seen it. I recall that he put off a distinctly creepy vibe when he spoke to the news media back in 2017, but I couldn't have guessed the half of it.

ISIS Defeat Ceremony Has U.S. Representation

Ambassador William Roebuck, U.S. Deputy Special Envoy to the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, attended the Syrian Democratic Forces' ceremony for the defeat of ISIS today in Baghouz, Syria.

I'm pleased to see he was wearing comfortable shoes and no necktie. A practical man with common sense.

Most Head Shakingly Bad Thing of the Week

Human rights lawyer, 50, branded Air India crew 'money grabbing c***s' in mid-air rant after being refused bottle of wine and twice being caught smoking, court hears as she admits being drunk on an aircraft - Daily Mail

Favorite part: The lawyer, who is Oirish.

"An international human rights lawyer who launched a shocking tirade on a plane where she spat at a flight attendant has pleaded guilty to being drunk on an aircraft and assault ... The business class passenger demanded to speak to the pilot after cabin crew denied her another bottle of wine due to her level of intoxication."

"The lawyer, who is Irish, will be sentenced at Isleworth Crown Court on April 4 after magistrates said the offence was too serious for them to deal with."

"She was given three bottles of wine with breakfast 'immediately after takeoff' but began to complain when she was refused more. Miss Smith said: 'She got up from her seat and began swearing and shouting. She was shouting that she was a 'f****** international lawyer' and telling them to 'f*** off'.' She also shouted: 'You f****** arses, you f****** Indian money-grabbing c****.' Burns then went into the toilet to try to light a cigarette before she was given a verbal warning three hours into the flight, the court heard ... She shouted: 'I have done so much for you f****** Indians and f****** Pakistanis, you should be grateful to me.' A cabin supervisor, Dastur Pervin, tried to intervene but she was also told to 'f*** off', shown the middle finger and assaulted, Miss Smith said ,,, After landing at Heathrow she was arrested on suspicion of racially aggravated public order, common assault and drunk and disorderly and taken to a west London police station."

New Passport, Washington Grand Jury, Is Something Happening With Julian Assange?

Yes, that's the Julian Assange update theme song, in reference to the lightest-skinned person to ever come out of Australia.

Assange has been squatting in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012 to evade extradition to Sweden in a rape case, charges which reportedly have now been dropped.

In September, Assange received a new Australian passport after several years without a valid one.

And now, we know Assange is the target of an active Federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia, AKA the Rocket Docket and the Fed's favorite jurisdiction for trying national security cases.

Does he really plan to spend the rest of his life in that Ecuadorian embassy? He's been an unhappy - and litigious - guest, so I don't suppose Ecuador would be sorry to see him leave.

The Swedes dropped their case against him after only six or seven years, but I doubt that he can wait out the U.S. government so easily. Meanwhile, he isn't getting any younger. He might as well come out and face the music.

However it Ends for the ISIS Bride, She Did it Her Way

A photo shared by Hoda Muthana on her now-closed @ZumarulJanna Twitter account

The Program on Extremism at the George Washington University issued a report last year on the phenomenon of American foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq. Read it here: The Travelers, American Jihadists in Syria and Iraq. It mentions Hoda Muthana and has some general remarks about the American women, comprising eleven percent of the travelers, who went there to join ISIS.

In November 2014, 20-year-old Hoda Muthana (kunya: Umm Jihad) left her hometown of Hoover, Alabama, for Syria. Prior to her departure, she was active in the community of English-speaking IS supporters on Twitter and other social media sites, and continued her online presence after arriving in Syria.

-- snip --

Despite the small sample size, American jihadist women travelers help shed light on Western women’s participation in jihadist networks. The three women above, alongside others in the sample, defy conventional stereotypes about how and why women (especially Western women) participate in jihadist movements. Although many presume that female jihadists are duped into participation, and motivated by the personal pursuit of love or validation, their contributions and motivations for engagement vary as much as their male counterparts. Though often relegated to support roles, women’s more “traditional” efforts as the wives and mothers of jihadists are not necessarily passive either. American women were committed to the jihadist cause and decided to travel on their own accord. They also appear to have played significant roles in their respective jihadist organizations. Muthana highlights the role of Western women in networks of online jihadist supporters, Nasrin served in a critically important and understaffed non-combat position (in a hospital), and Mansfield may have been more directly involved in operations.

Where does Hoda Muthana go from here? Will she manage to fight the State Department and get her day in court on the matter of birthright citizenship? The complaint filed on her behalf makes some fascinating points, and I would not count her out. All we know for sure is that she has no caliphate to go back to after five years of living the ISIS life. She made her own decisions, and soon she'll have to own up to what she's done.

And now the end is near, and so she'll face the final curtain. My friend, she'll say it clear, she'll state her case, of which she's certain. She's lived a life that's full, and traveled each and every highway. And more, much more than this, she did it her way.

Regrets, she's had a few. But then again, too few to mention. She did what she had to do, and saw it through without exemption. She planned each charted course, each careful step along the byway. And more, much more than this, she did it her way.

Yes, there were times, I'm sure you knew, when she bit off more than she could chew. But through it all, when there was doubt she ate it up and spit it out. She faced it all and she stood tall, and did it her way.

She's loved, she's laughed and cried, she had her fill, her share of losing. And now, as tears subside she finds it all, all so amusing. To think she did all that, and may I say, not in a shy way, oh no, no not her, she did it her way.

For what is a woman, what has she got? If not herself, then she has naught. To say the things she truly feels, and not the words of one who kneels. The record shows she took the blows, and did it her-er-er-er way.

New U.S. Ambassador to Armenia Survived a Vehicle Ambush in 2008

Photo from DOS publication

Our new Ambassador to Armenia was sworn in this week, and please see Diplopundit's post here: @StateDG Perez Swears-In Career Diplomat Lynne Tracy as US Ambassador to Armenia.

On August 26, 2008 gunmen ambushed FSO Lynne Tracy’s vehicle in Peshawar, Pakistan, riddling the car with bullets. She survived the attack.

She then remained at post for the rest of her tour in what was one of the most vulnerable and highly threatened posts in the Foreign Service. Somehow, the public image of diplomatic posts remains completely out of whack with the reality, no matter how many such incidents occur, so I'm happy to see attention paid to Ambassador Tracey. 

For details of the ambush see page 43 of Political Violence Against Americans (2008) which has diagrams as well as the above photo. The photo captured the CG's vehicle reversing out of the kill zone at high speed and taking a 'Tuk-Tuk' auto rickshaw along with it.

While you're at it, browse the whole library of PVAA reports and then compare and contrast with the next movie or TV representation you see of embassy life.

Law Suit Filed on Behalf of ISIS Bride

Social media incitement in the Spanish Civil War

I seriously think we can get a lot of insight about the foreign fighters who joined ISIS, and what to do about them now that they want to be repatriated, by looking to the historical example of the foreign fighters who joined the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.

They even had great female propagandists who riled up the troops, the most famous of whom was Dolores Ibárruri – La Pasionaria – who did all her work with just a microphone and a radio broadcast. What new levels of incitement she might have achieved with a Twitter account!

But, back to our present day social media inciter, Hoda Muthana. Her father filed a lawsuit on her behalf requesting injunctive relief to prevent the government from ruling on her lack of birthright citizenship without due process.

Hoda Muthana Lawsuit by on Scribd

It comes down to a battle of the letters. Mr. Muthana waves that 2004 USUN document with its all-important employment termination date of September 1, 1994 – just a month short of his daughter’s birth – and the USG replies with its 2016 letter that informed Muthana the U.S. Government was not notified of his loss of diplomatic employment until after his daughter’s birth.

The letters are brandished in paragraphs 21 and 25:

21. Utilizing his daughter’s birth certificate, Mr. Muthana applied for a passport for his minor daughter Hoda Muthana in 2004. After receiving this application, officials from the United States State Department initially questioned whether Ms. Muthana was eligible for a U.S. passport, based on their records showing her father’s diplomatic status remained in effect until February 6, 1995. In response, Ahmed Ali Muthana provided the government with Exhibit C, a letter from the United States Mission to the United Nations, signed by Russell F. Graham, Minister Counselor for Host Country Affairs, and addressed to Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services, which confirms that the diplomatic status he had due to his employment at the U.N. was terminated prior to the time of Ms. Muthana’s birth. The United States accepted this documentation and issued Hoda Muthana the requested passport on January 24, 2005. Exhibit D. The United States also later renewed Ms. Muthana’s passport on February 21, 2014.

25. On January 15, 2016, the United States issued a letter addressed to Ms. Muthana at her parents’ residence, purporting to revoke her passport under 22 C.F.R. 51.7 and 51.66. Exhibit D. In the revocation letter, the government again acknowledged that her father’s diplomatic position ended on September 1, 1994, but now asserted for the first time that because the U.S. Permanent Mission to the United Nations, Host Country Affairs Section, had not been officially notified of his termination until February 6, 1995, she was not “within the jurisdiction of the United States” at the time of her birth, and therefore not a United States citizen pursuant to the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

Notice the dates in para 25. It was in 2016, during the Obama administration, that the State Department revoked her passport because it had concluded she was not a citizen at the time of her birth. (Here’s a headline you'll never see: “Trump agrees with Obama, Alabama woman not a citizen under 14th Amendment”)

So then, the father was well aware of the USG’s position on the matter of his daughter’s lack of U.S. citizenship long before this became a news story. It turns out he was not entirely forthcoming when he released that 2004 USUN memo to the news media earlier this week; he could have also released the 2016 letter in which the State Department informed him that it did not end his diplomatic status until it was notified that his employment at the Yemeni UN Mission had been terminated, which notification occurred after the birth of his daughter Hoda.

And then there is the separate matter of whether or not Hoda Muthana expatriated herself, assuming she was in fact a birthright citizen, by her act of joining the ISIS caliphate. The complaint addresses that matter indirectly in a footnote on page ten:

Birthright citizenship may be revoked under 8 U.S.C. § 1481 for “formal declaration of allegiance to a foreign state or a political subdivision thereof.” However, none of the circumstances set out in § 1401 is facially applicable to the facts of this case, as ISIS is not and has not been recognized as a state by the United States, or any country. And, Ms. Muthana’s actions do not meet the definition of treason as required by the statute. Apart from § 1481, counsel is not aware of any statutory process to revoke recognized birthright citizenship.

Facially applicable? I suppose that refers to something of or pertaining to surface appearances. Well, below the surface I don’t think that argument works at all.

Of course we didn’t diplomatically recognize the ISIS caliphate. So what? It didn’t need our recognition. It declared its own sovereignty, as do all states, and it operated as a full-fledged state until it was militarily destroyed.

We also didn’t recognize the USSR as a state until 1933. Nevertheless, if a birthright U.S. citizen had moved there and declared his allegiance to the USSR before 1933, we would surely have revoked his citizenship.

Count 8 of the complaint also goes to the issue of expatriating acts:

As United States Citizens, Ms. Muthana and her minor child have the right to return to the United States under international law, and the United States government has a vested interest in assisting U.S. citizens who flee armed conflict on foreign soil.

Ms. Muthana and her young son have succeeded in escaping ISIS-controlled territory; however, they are still located in an area of Syria which is riddled by conflict and violence. Since 2011, “fighting in Syria has killed an estimated 465,000 people, injured more than one million, and forced about 12 million people - or half the country's pre-war population - from their homes.”

Although Mr. Muthana’s daughter has at times been in the company of ISIS fighters and present in ISIS-controlled territory, there is no evidence to suggest that she has taken part in any armed combat or hostilities.

Armed combat, no. But she certainly did take part in hostilities in that she incited others to violence. Furthermore she must have been in the company of ISIS fighters more than just occasionally since she married three of them, the first one only a month after she arrived in Syria. And it is a huge understatement to say she was merely "present" in ISIS-controlled territory when she had to scheme and plot to get there from Alabama without her family's knowledge, and she stayed there five years, leaving only after it collapsed.

What about her acts and words during her time in ISIS territory? See the UK Guardian article of last Sunday:

[She was] Once one of Isis’s most prominent online agitators who took to social media to call for the blood of Americans to be spilled.

- Snip -

Her experience in the so-called caliphate tracks the arc of Isis’s shocking rise and precipitous collapse over five brutal years. Muthana fled her home and took a flight to Turkey in November 2014 after several months of planning, which she kept secret from her family.

She settled into the Syrian city of Raqqa, then one of Isis’s two main hubs – the other being Mosul in Iraq – where she married an Australian jihadist, Suhan Rahman, the first of her three husbands.

Rahman was killed in the town of Kobanî, and soon afterwards Muthana angrily tweeted: “Americans wake up! Men and women altogether. You have much to do while you live under our greatest enemy, enough of your sleeping! Go on drivebys, and spill all of their blood, or rent a big truck and drive all over them. Veterans, Patriots, Memorial, etc day … Kill them.”

For many months in 2015, her Twitter feed was full of bloodcurdling incitement, and she says she remained a zealot until the following year. She now says her account was taken over by others.

And this:

That same day [as the “kill them” tweet], she tweeted out a photo of her ISIS husband’s bloodied body:

“I’m the most content I have ever been in my life. … And never think of those who have been killed in the cause of Allah as dead,” according to the UK’s Daily Mail.

And then there was the tweet in which she urged the taking down of President Barack Obama:

“You can look up Obamas schedule on the white house website. Take down that treacherous tyrant!”

That's some very high level of hostility, and all at the service of ISIS when it was at its gruesome peak.

Today, she says it was all a big mistake and we should welcome her back. Not coincidentally, today the caliphate has been destroyed and its fighters largely annihilated.