The Wire - December 5, 2025

//The Wire//2300Z December 5, 2025//
//ROUTINE//
//BLUF: POTENTIAL TERROR PLOT HALTED IN DELAWARE AS INFORMATION WARFARE CAMPAIGN COMPLICATES THE CASE. WHITE HOUSE RELEASES NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY FOR 2025.//

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-International Events-

Asia: President Macron continues his state visit to China, as part of France's growing desire to strengthen economic ties with Beijing. No major policy changes have been announced yet, however Macron is trying to smooth over the impact of EU tariffs on Chinese vehicles (which were implemented last year), in addition to securing other trade deals.

Analyst Comment: So far, nothing major has been agreed upon, but France has indirectly reiterated support for the "One China" policy, namely the Chinese position that Taiwan should be under the control of the mainland. This is not surprising, but when it comes to security in the region it's becoming more clear that France (a big power-player within the EU) won't intervene in the event hostilities kick off with Taiwan.

-HomeFront-

Washington D.C. - Last night, the White House released the National Security Strategy for 2025. This is a standard document published every year which highlights the priorities for the United States in the international arena.

Analyst Comment: Normally, this document is fairly boring and uneventful, but this year's document signaled some pretty significant shifts in policy interests. This year, the top priority is immigration, as one might expect. Other high priorities are countering hostile influence, rebuilding infrastructure, as well as domestic manufacturing. A sharp increase in military might was also heavily mentioned in the form of general military technologies, but also missile defense. In terms of focus on specific regions, the US is now less focused on security in Europe, shifting priorities to dominating our own American hemisphere. The Far East also a priority as the document specifically mentioned a strengthening of the First Island Chain defense strategy. The section on Europe largely revolved around how Europe can help itself, and the very short section on the Middle East more or less stated that the region is not really a concern anymore. Of course, all of this is quite subjective and thus will be debated for some time. However the more boring document releases like this one often provide the gameplan for where senior politicians are allocating resources.

Delaware: Yesterday more details came to light regarding a potential mass shooting plot at the University of Delaware. A few days ago, a man was arrested after a routine traffic stop revealed his attack plot. The incident deteriorated once the officer discovered that the driver was Luqmaan Khan, an immigrant from either Afghanistan or Pakistan who came to the US when he was a child.

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Analyst Comment: Regarding the incident in Delaware, what happened on the night of the original arrest is not clear, and it's not known what caused the initial encounter. Either way, at some point Khan was approached by police in his vehicle and became uncooperative, at which point he was subsequently taken in to the station for further investigation. From there, his attack plan came to light. A notebook was found with sector sketches of the University of Delaware police station floor plan, as well as other attack planning details indicating that he was moving into the final stages of preparation before an attack.

A search of Khan's vehicle on the night of the initial incident allegedly revealed a Glock with a pistol brace, and a search of his home discovered a Glock 19 with a switch and an AR-style rifle.

The contents of the notebook were provided today, which helps round out the story. This bit of evidence is the most important to figure out what was going on here, and it's quite helpful when terrorists write down their attack plans in excruciating detail, leaving a massive paper trail of evidence for investigators to find. However any time a terror attack is halted right before it begins, and the circumstances are not clear as to how or why the initial suspect got detained, there's probably more to the story than meets the eye. As such, once the full indictment comes out we'll have to see what this case was really about. It wouldn't be surprising in the slightest for a would-be terrorist to be bagged by a random traffic stop, which is an unfortunate sentiment that points to the saturation rate of just how many potential terrorists there are throughout society.

One detail that is important to consider is that police allegedly found references to the name of one officer who worked for the UD Police Department in the notebook found during the vehicle search. This provides a clue which might indicate a personal grievance was the motive for this incident. This is supported by the comparatively small cache of weapons found at the suspects residence; it wouldn't be enough for a mass shooting spree, but a few mags would be adequate to carry out a murder of one specific employee that the student had a personal grievance with.

Regarding the origin of Khan, it's not entirely clear which nation he is from, and there is significant propaganda efforts to obscure the truth on that front. Initially, most media sources claimed he was from Afghanistan, having immigrated to the United States as a child. However, this story came under fire after pro-Pakistan social media accounts started circulating a fake Afghan Citizen Card with his name and photo, which is quite obviously fake. One can go down the rabbit hole of forensic analysis on imagery such as this, however it's also easy to identify as fake because it's very unlikely that Afghanistan would be using a Delaware Driver's License photo on their identification documents. The photo of Khan came directly from the New Castle County Police Department Facebook page, so the Afghan ID card circulating online can be easily dismissed as a fake. It's also easy to find the original ID card that was used to produce this fake, because when the term "Afghan Citizen Card" is put into Google, the original photo is right at the top of the search results. Despite this lazy propaganda effort, this fake image of the suspect's ID card circulated so widely that even mainstream media sources referenced the suspect as an Afghan citizen. By this evening, most groups have retracted initial claims about the suspect's citizenship, simply because no one really knows for sure where he's from.

There are some claims that Khan is actually Pakistani, or might have been ethnically Pashtun, but physically born in a refugee camp inside Pakistan. In the Third World, it's often hard to determine exactly where a person is from, and this might be one of those cases. It's also equally possible that the suspect is actually Afghan, but the Pakistani propaganda farms picked this one up just naturally, even before they knew who he was themselves. Officially, no authority figure in the United States has yet confirmed where he's from in the court documents provided to the public. This is a basic detail of the case, so it will come to light eventually, but it's still quite interesting to observe the international information warfare being waged after a random guy gets arrested with a Glock switch in Delaware.

Analyst: S2A1
Research: https://publish.obsidian.md/s2underground
Disclaimer: No LLMs were used in the writing of this report.
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