BIRD SANCTUARY

Regarding USA's opposition to Chinese infrastructure projects abroad:

Back during Yugoslavia's participation and leading role in the NAM, it engaged in a number of infrastructure projects all over the world, and due to Yugoslavia's policy of not interfering in local affairs, being willing to share knowledge and provide training and education needed to maintain and expand the projects it made, and not outsourcing parts of the project to someone who couldn't be trusted, it was frequently invited to other nations to undertake some projects of very high importance.

In general, when you're doing large projects like that, you are by necessity involved in matters of national security of the host nation. Either because of the importance of the project and thus power given by the knowledge of its exact specifications, or by the nature of alterations made to account for something else of importance, or just straight up integration of the infrastructure project and something else (while you're making this tunnel, we want you to make changes here, here, and here, we're going to make a fortified observation post above or somesuch and want a concealed access point to it), etc

Usually, USA has means getting its hands on information about these projects, but Yugoslavia took their security seriously, and they remained out of NATO's hands.

During Yugoslavia's destruction, a lot of information suddenly became accessible to USA, but the most important things remained in Belgrade. NATO used Albanian paramilitaries to pressure Macedonia into cooperating and handing NATO over all the information they had on military infrastructure in Serbia. This was used to great effect during the NATO bombing campaign in Serbia in 1999. Notably, several key military facilities and fortifications were destroyed by directly targeting the structural supports. (as a sidenote, a few years later NATO also strongarmed Macedonia's only ally, Ukraine, into not supplying Macedonians with weapons, so that NATO would have an easier time molding Macedonia to its will, but that's a whole 'nother can of worms)

Once NATO gained access to the archives in Belgrade, it meant that it received an intelligence treasure trove. Yugoslavia built a lot of Iraq's military infrastructure. Yugoslavia built a bunch of key logistics of Libya. And plenty of other places I know less specifics of. NATO put all of that information to use.



So, the issue with China doing these projects now is that... well, USA can't get any information the easy way anymore, and the hard way is significantly harder than it was with Yugoslavia. Which poses a threat to USA's ability to project its power effectively.

UAE Bird Expert wrote: ↑Wed Jul 10, 2024 8:21 pm

Over the course of a seven-month period, Takhistov outlined his plans to sabotage PSE&G’s electrical infrastructure, according to authorities.

He also encouraged violence against different ethnic and religious communities, referenced Adolf Hitler and praised mass shooters, investigators allege.

Takhistov was arrested Wednesday at Newark Liberty International Airport, “allegedly on his way to Ukraine to join the Russian Volunteer Corps when we arrested him on charges of recruiting an individual to destroy an electrical substation here in the United States in order to advance his white supremacist ideology,” US Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said.

On November 24, 2008, the government obtained guilty verdicts on all counts against HLF and the five individual defendants in the retrial. HLF was found guilty of giving more than $12 million to support Hamas. The charges on which the jury found the defendants guilty included conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

"Today's verdicts are important milestones in America's efforts against financiers of terrorism," Patrick Rowan, assistant attorney general for national security, said after the trial. "This prosecution demonstrates our resolve to ensure that humanitarian relief efforts are not used as a mechanism to disguise and enable support for terrorist groups."

The five convicted individuals were Ghassan Elashi, former CEO Shukri Abu-Baker, Mufid Abdulqader, Abdulrahman Odeh, and Mohammad El-Mezain.

Abu-Baker was sentenced to 65 years.
Elashi, also a member of the founding Board of Directors of the Texas branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), was sentenced to 65 years.
Mufid Abdulqader was sentenced to years.
Abdelrahman Odeh was sentenced to 15 years.
El-Mezain, former endowments director, sentenced to 15 years.
Because of the potential lengthy sentences for the criminal convictions, the individual defendants were remanded into custody without bail pending any appeal.[59]

A 2011 NPR report claimed some of the people associated with this group were imprisoned in a highly restrictive Communication Management Unit.[60]

The defendants appealed their convictions and sentences to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. On December 7, 2011, the court of appeals affirmed the convictions and sentences.[61] The court found that the trial court had erred in admitting each of the additional items of evidence on which the prosecution relied in the second trial (the Simon testimony, the McBrien testimony, the Shorbagi testimony, and the documents recovered from the Palestinian Authority headquarters).[62] But the court of appeals found that the errors in admitting this evidence were harmless (i.e., that the errors did not affect the outcome of the trial).[63]

The defendants petitioned the court of appeals for rehearing. They contended that the four erroneously admitted items of evidence were the key differences between the first trial, where the jury did not return a single guilty verdict, and the second trial, where the jury returned guilty verdicts on every count.[64] The court of appeals denied the petition for rehearing without comment.[65]