Globe Trot: Taking ISIS’s claim seriously

FRANCE Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the Bastille Day attack in Nice last week that killed 84 people, and while European and U.S. officials downplay the claim, terrorism expert Wassim Nasr says we should take it seriously:

“[ISIS spokesman Abu Mohammad al-Adnani said] you can hit civilian targets because there are no innocent people in the West [emphasis mine]. … This response from the Tunisian attacker is to this call very particularly. … Each time we are surprised—they don’t have anything to do with Islam … they have a criminal past … but in the jihadi construction and ideology, a person, even if he had a criminal past, even if he wasn’t a good Muslim, he can by joining the jihad … make all his past sins, as they say, forgotten. … Him being not a good Muslim … doesn’t mean he cannot act in the name of the Islamic State.”

Attacker Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel apparently rented the truck he used weeks ahead of time and trained for the attack along Nice’s Promenade des Anglais.

TURKEY: Authorities have rounded up more than 6,000 people following this past weekend’s coup attempt against President Recip Tayyip Erdogan, and 290 people are reported dead in the uprising. The swift rounding up of judges and top military officers indicates Turkey had prepared its list beforehand, say EU officials.

Erdogan charges U.S. resident Fethullah Gulen—once reportedly an ally—as the man behind the coup, but Secretary of State John Kerry has denied there’s evidence for it.

Erdogan’s government is responsible for cracking down on Christians, seizing churches in recent months.

SYRIA: The family of longtime journalist Marie Colvin, killed in Syria in 2012, has filed suit against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for purposely targeting the building where she was killed in a bombing.

KENYA: A court in Nairobi has charged four police officers in connection with the murder of a lawyer and two companions working for the International Justice Mission.

UNITED STATES: You won’t find Charles McCullough’s testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on July 7 in The New York Times or The Washington Post, so you better watch a video clip of it posted on YouTube and above.

McCullough, the inspector general for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), testified that he did not have the security clearance (and related computer access) to see the Hillary Clinton emails under review. He also could not reveal the name of the government agency that would not allow him to share a particular segment of those emails with Congress, to which committee chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, responded incredulously, “So you can’t even tell me which agency won’t allow us as members of Congress to see something that Hillary Clinton allowed somebody without a security clearance in a non-protected format to see?”