Russia Threatening Scotland?

Posted on November 23, 2015November 23, 2015 by Denise Simon

Britain calls in French to hunt Russian sub lurking off Scotland

A Royal Navy frigate, HMS Sutherland, and a hunter killer submarine have also been sent on the search

Telegraph: French patrol planes are scouring the seas off Scotland for a Russian submarine after Britain was forced to call on allies for help because it has scrapped its own sub-hunting aircraft.

A French Atlantique 2 maritime patrol plane has been searching for the submarine for at least 10 days, since the vessel was detected north of Scotland.

Britain scrapped its own Nimrod sub-hunting aircraft in 2010

A Royal Navy frigate, HMS Sutherland, and a hunter killer submarine have also been sent on the search, amid fears the Russian boat could be trying to spy on a Trident nuclear deterrent sub.

HMS Sutherland has been called into the hunt Photo: MoD

Britain scrapped its own Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft after the cost cutting 2010 defence review, leading to warnings from defence chiefs that the country would be left reliant on others for aircraft to search its own waters.

Admirals have argued that filling the gap is a priority for the Government’s defence review which will be unveiled on Monday. More here.

*** ‘Allied’ Aircraft Hunt Russian Sub Off Scotland

SkyNews: French patrol aircraft are reportedly among those helping with the search from RAF Lossiemouth.

Aircraft based at an RAF base are conducting “activity” off Scotland in response to reports a Russian submarine has been seen nearby, the Ministry of Defence has confirmed.

It is understood that a Royal Navy frigate and a submarine are also involved in the hunt.

It comes days after RAF Typhoons were forced to intercept Russian Tu-160 Blackjack aircraft that strayed into the vicinity of UK airspace.

The Sun on Sunday reported that a French patrol aircraft was carrying out the search as the UK no longer has any specialist sub-hunting aircraft.

Britain scrapped the RAF’s Nimrods with search capability in 2010 after the Strategic Defence Services Review.

The Telegraph reported that two French Atlantique 2 maritime patrol planes and a Canadian plane were now operating out of RAF Lossiemouth, about 37 miles (60km) east of Inverness.

The MoD admitted that allied planes were operating from the base but refused to comment on naval manoeuvres.

“We can confirm that allied maritime patrol aircraft based at RAF Lossiemouth for a limited period are conducting activity with the Royal Navy,” a statement said.

00:00/02:11

Video: More British Troops To Baltics

“We do not discuss the detail of maritime operations.”

The search comes as the Prime Minister is due to announce a large investment in resources for the military, which has undergone several years of cuts.

One of the commitments is to buy nine Boeing P8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft which will be capable of hunting submarines.

Norwegian jet in near-miss with Russian plane

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Video: Pilot’s Shock At Close Call

Last year, the Ministry of Defence faced embarrassment when it emerged it had to seek the help of the US, France and Canada when trying to find another Russian submarine spotted off the west coast of Scotland.

At that time it was thought the Russian vessel was possibly tracking UK nuclear submarine movements from the Clyde.

Russian anti-submarine vessel Severomorsk. Pic US Navy

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Video: Russian Naval Drills In The Channel

DHS Knew Illegals Made False Claims for Asylum

Posted on November 23, 2015November 23, 2015 by Denise Simon

Fire the bastard, Jeh Johnson, recall him, prosecute him and dis-BAR him….and the rest of his staff that are complicit in this scam.

JudicialWatch: The Obama administration let hundreds of illegal immigrants stay in the U.S. even though federal authorities knew in advance that an open borders group coached them to falsely claim “credible fear” to get asylum, according to documents obtained by Judicial Watch from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The operation was part of a scam conducted by an immigrant rights organization called the National Immigrant Youth Alliance (NITA), which in recent years has coordinated demonstrations along the Southwest border in Texas and Arizona. In mid-2014 the group orchestrated a racket seeking to bring 250 illegal aliens into the U.S. through the Otay Mesa Port of Entry in San Diego, California. To assure the migrants were allowed to stay in the U.S., the group had them falsely claim that they had a “credible fear” of returning to their native country. Foreigners can claim asylum under five categories, based on fear of persecution over race, religion, nationality, political opinions or membership in a specific social group

In this particular case, the DHS agency charged with guarding the border—Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—actually admits knowing about the ploy in advance but allows the illegal aliens to stay anyways. Here’s an excerpt from the records obtained by JW through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA): “BACKGROUND: The National Immigrant Youth Alliance (NITA) activists have coordinated previous demonstrations along the Southwest Border (Laredo, Texas and Nogales, Arizona). During this iteration, NIYA seek to bring 250 people to the Otay Mesa Port of Entry where they will request entry to the U.S. Previous CBP reporting of these events indicate the individuals applying for entry will have no entitlements to enter, pass through or remain in the United States and will summarily claim Credible Fear (CF).”

This is downright outrageous and has been going on for years, though we’ve never seen written evidence that the feds were complicit in a specific “credible fear” scam. In 2013 JW wrote about a San Diego news report that said droves of illegal aliens were flooding the Otay crossing claiming “credible fear” of Mexican drug cartels. In just one day 199 migrants had entered through Otay, the story revealed. The piece quoted a Border Patrol agent saying this: “They are being told if they come across, when they come up to the border and they say certain words, they will be allowed into the country.”

Credible fear asylum in the U.S. has become so popular that illegal aliens are hearing about it on Facebook and federal immigration authorities are overwhelmed with applications. In the last few years the number of foreigners, including large numbers from terrorist countries, asserting credible fear to gain asylum in this country has skyrocketed. During congressional testimony a few years ago, the heads of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and CBP confirmed that the percentage of individuals expressing a fear to remain in the U.S. has risen tremendously in the last few years.

The figures are incredibly alarming. In the last five years the number of “credible fear” asylum applications made at the border has increased sevenfold, from less than 5,000 to more than 36,000, a former Department of Justice (DOJ) and federal immigration official told Congress during a hearing earlier this year. Now a law professor at a prominent university, the official told lawmakers that statistics from USCIS Asylum Division show an approval rate of 92% for credible fear claims before the 2014 border surge. “Unfortunately the high approval rate for credible fear claims, and the resulting backlog in the immigration court system, have meant that in practice ‘credible fear’ has served to screen into the United States undocumented aliens wishing to make asylum claims,” the professor, Jan C. Ting told Congress. “That explains why many illegal border crossers don’t run from the U.S. Border Patrol, but instead seek them out to make asylum claims subject only to the low threshold of credible fear.”

Today, the backlog of credible fear cases pending in federal immigration courts is an astounding 450,000, according to a news report published this month. This could create huge national security risks because often asylum seekers are released from custody to await a court hearing. Just last week eight Syrian refugees turned themselves into U.S. immigration authorities along the U.S.-Mexico border. They are asking for asylum because the fear returning to their war-torn, terrorist-infested nation, but U.S. authorities have no reliable way to vet them.

Obama Orders ISIS Intel Report Investigations

Posted on November 23, 2015November 23, 2015 by Denise Simon

Great, now the White House deflects blame and places it on the intelligence community. This is also coming from a commander in chief that misses 59% of the daily presidential briefings. Imagine what we know by virtue of watching any of the news, by doing individual research or listening to testimony before Congress. Perhaps Barack Obama should watch C-Span if he refuses and wants intelligence reports altered to fit his political narrative. Further, imagine what more troubling the intelligence facts and estimates can be outside of the scope what is in the public domain.

Barack Obama is being highly criticized by the domestic media, world leaders, the Pentagon, Centcom and the intelligence community for his lack of attention and ‘will’ to engage in defeating terror in the Middle East and Europe. Heck, his campaign on fighting terror is perfect as he tells us and all others are wrong, so he blames the analysts. Further, how about all those personal phone calls the White House has with other world leaders? What is Susan Rice, his top National Security Council advisor and director of this war on ISIS telling her boss?

But one should ask what is in the evidence like White House emails on the topic.

Tampa: Speaking at a news conference before leaving Malaysia to return home at the end of a 10-day overseas trip, Obama said he expected the Pentagon’s inspector general to investigate allegations that significant changes were made to reports from analysts at the U.S. Central Command, which is based at Tampa’s MacDill Air Force Base.

“I don’t know what we’ll discover with respect to what was going on in CentCom,” Obama said. “What I do know is my expectation — which is the highest fidelity to facts, data, the truth.”

Emails show DOD analysts told to ‘cut it out’ on ISIS warnings; IG probe expands

FNC: Analysts at U.S. Central Command were pressured to ease off negative assessments about the Islamic State threat and were even told in an email to “cut it out,” Fox News has learned – as an investigation expands into whether intelligence reports were altered to present a more positive picture.

Fox News is told by a source close to the CENTCOM analysts that the pressure on them included at least two emails saying they needed to “cut it out” and “toe the line.”

Separately, a former Pentagon official told Fox News there apparently was an attempt to destroy the communications. The Pentagon official said the email warnings were “not well received” by the analysts.

Those emails, among others, are now in the possession of the Pentagon inspector general. The IG’s probe is expanding into whether intelligence assessments were changed to give a more positive picture of the anti-ISIS campaign.

The former Pentagon official said there were “multiple assessments” from military intelligence and the CIA regarding the “rapid rise” of ISIS in Iraq and North Africa in the year leading up to the group’s territory grab in 2014.

Similar intelligence was included in the President’s Daily Brief, or PDB – the intelligence community’s most authoritative product — during the same time period. Yet the official, who was part of the White House discussions, said the administration kept “kicking the can down the road.” The official said there was no discussion of the military involvement needed to make a difference.

The IG probe started earlier this year amid complaints that information was changed to make ISIS look more degraded than it really was.

Among the complaints is that after the U.S. air campaign started in August 2014, the metrics to measure progress changed. They were modified to use measures such as the number of sorties and body counts — a metric not used since the Vietnam War — to paint a more positive picture.

Critics say this “activity-based approach” to tracking the effectiveness of strikes does not paint a comprehensive picture of whether ISIS is being degraded and contained.

The New York Times first reported on Sunday that the IG investigation was expanding and adding more investigators, and that the office had taken possession of a trove of documents and emails as part of that probe.

Asked about the report, House intelligence committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., said Sunday that his committee and others are involved in the investigation.

“We heard from a lot of whistle-blowers and other informants who have given us information. And not just … related strictly to the latest allegations,” Nunes said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Citing the renewed focus on ISIS after the Paris terror attacks, he added: “So the president to have a successful strategy is going to admit that they’ve got it wrong and they need to relook at a larger strategy that deals with north Africa, the Middle East, all the way over to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and then work closely with our NATO allies with what appears to be a command and control structure that ISIS has created successfully in Europe.”

President Obama, speaking at a press conference in Malaysia over the weekend, said he expects to “get to the bottom” of whether ISIS intelligence reports were altered – and has told his top military officials as much.

“One of the things I insisted on the day I walked into the Oval Office was that I don’t want intelligence shaded by politics. I don’t want it shaded by the desire to tell a feel-good story,” Obama said Sunday. “I believe that the Department of Defense and all those who head up our intelligence agencies understand that, and that I have made it repeatedly clear to all my top national security advisors that I never want them to hold back, even if the intelligence or their opinions about the intelligence, their analysis or interpretations of the data contradict current policy.”

At the same time, he said, “As a consumer of this intelligence, it’s not as if I’ve been receiving wonderfully rosy, glowing portraits of what’s been happening in Iraq and Syria over the last year and a half. … [I]t feels to me like, at my level at least, we’ve had a pretty clear-eyed, sober assessment.”

The president’s call for a thorough investigation was greeted with cynicism by those involved in the 2014 intelligence assessments, since the administration did not act on the earlier raw intelligence that painted a dire picture of developments, especially in Iraq.

The Vatican, the White House, the Migrants, Millions

Posted on November 21, 2015November 21, 2015 by Denise Simon

Catholic Bishops Financial statement (see page 10 for description summary)

In an NTEB Special Report, we have recently received information that the Catholic Church received payments totalling $79,590,512.00 to facilitate the flow of undocumented and illegal immigrants into the United States in 2014. This is six million dollars more than they were paid in 2013. Now y0u know why Pope Francis is so eager to push Obama’s insane flood of illegal migrants, he’s getting paid millions to do it!

In the face of President Obama’s veto threat, the House passed a bill to slow Syrian refugees. But the Republican Congress also has the power to hold hearings into the millions of taxpayer dollars being funneled through Catholic and other church groupsto bring them here. Many Catholics and non-Catholics alike would like to know how “religious compassion,” using federal money, is increasing the potential terrorist threat to America.

You may recall that Pope Francis promoted the Obama administration’s pro-immigration policies during his visit to the U.S. Left unsaid was the fact that the American branch of the Roman Catholic Church is getting millions of taxpayer dollars to settle refugees. According to their financial statement for 2014, the latest year for which figures are available, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops received over $79 million in government grants to provide benefits to refugees.

Europe Warned Months Ago to Plug the Border Holes

Posted on November 21, 2015November 21, 2015 by Denise Simon

The United States had better take a reality check especially when it comes to visa waiver countries, vacation visas and student visas. Those are easier to obtain that any refugee status.

EU border agency warned of migrant terror threat 18 months ago – but nothing was done

After years of inaction, sources warn it will take “months, if not years” to plug holes in Europe’s sieve-like borders.

Between France and Belgium

By Peter Foster, Europe Editor and Matthew Holehouse in Brussels

3:51PM GMT 21 Nov 2015

TheTelegraph: Frontex, the European border agency warned more than 18 months ago that radicalised European jihadis could exploit the migrant crisis in order to return to Europe and commit terrorism, but systematic checks on migrants only began last Friday, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.

The failure of Europe’s border bureaucracy to respond to the terror threat emerged as security sources told The Sunday Telegraph that it will still be “months, even years” before Europe’s borders are fully capable of screening arrivals.

Frontex’s own risk assessment for April 2014 said that the numbers of foreign fighters travelling to Syria and Iraq for jihad had “risen threefold”, with some would-be fighters as young 15 years old.

The report noted that EU representatives were “increasingly discussing ways” to monitor and prevent young people moving to Syria, while clearly acknowledging that the fighters could return to Europe “ideologically and militarily trained, thus posing a terrorist threat to societies.”

A Frontex helicopter flies over an overcrowded raft with refugees and migrants approaching the shores of the Greek island of Lesbos Photo: REUTERS/Alkis Konstantinidis

“Overall, there is an underlying threat of terrorism-related travel movements especially due to the appeal of the Syrian conflict to both idealist and radicalised youths. It is possible that foreign fighters use irregular migration routes and/or facilitation networks (irrespective of whether this is recommended by terrorist structures or not), especially when the associated risks and costs are perceived as low in comparison to legal travel options,” the report said.

“It will take many months – and realistically years – before we screen everyone entering Europe.”

Security source to Sunday Telegraph

The cost of inaction over securing Europe’s external borders were displayed to devastating effect this week, when it emerged that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the mastermind behind the Paris attacks, had slipped into France unchecked – via Greece – without setting off alarms.

He had previously joked in the Islamic State magazine, Dabiq, how he had once been stopped by Belgian police but not arrested.

The inability of Europe to protect its borders has been blamed on a combination of a lack of resources in poorer members like Greece, Romania and Bulgaria and privacy concerns that have stalled necessary legislation in the European Parliament.

Mohamad Nouv Khanji, a Syrian doctor waits to register with the police in refugee center in the southern Serbian town of Presevo. Khanji traveled with his passport, but the EU border security agency Frontex says most migrants enter Europe with no valid documents. Photo: AP/Darko Vojinovic

Timothy Kirkhope, a Tory MEP and former immigration minister, blamed “political correctness” and the view that “people should be allowed to go anywhere they like” for the failure to adequately stand up Frontex.

“The external border has to be protected, and if the Greeks and Italians can’t do it we have to beef up Frontex. We’ve got to put the money in,” he added. “I’ve been pressing them to get on this: to not let anyone go anywhere without being processed.”

“Frontex has no access to operational intelligence,’

Fabrice Leggeri, the executive director of Frontex

In a sign of the glacial rate of progress, the same warnings on the potential security risk posed by migrant were repeated almost word-for-word in the 2015 version of the Frontex report.

As recently as September Fabrice Leggeri, the executive director of Frontex, admitted to a House of Lords committee that Frontex had “no access to intelligence” since it was an EU agency.

Mr Leggeri said that Frontex could find “no evidence” that potential terrorists had used migrant routes to cross back into the EU, but was forced to admit that this was probably because it was not connected with anti-terror databases.

A Frontex helicopter flies over refugees and migrants seen on a beach, moments after arriving on a dinghy on the Greek island of Lesbos Photo: REUTERS/Alkis Konstantinidis

“FRONTEX, as an EU agency, has no access to this kind of operational intelligence,’ he admitted, “This may be why we cannot trace evidence of people who might be involved in terrorist activities.”

France has been demanding tough new controls ever since last January’s terror attacks on the offices of the satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, which were finally agreed to a meeting of EU home ministers in Brussels last week.

These include that European passenger name records (PNR) data should be collected and available for scrutiny by intelligence agencies, and that EU citizens should also be subjected to “systematic” checks when re-entering Europe.

However, senior officials have admitted to The Sunday Telegraph that it will take “months, if not years” to secure the EU borders, even as richer EU nations were offering to send small ‘hit squads’ to plug the most obvious gaps in Bulgaria, Romania and Greece.

“This kind of capacity cannot be stood up overnight,” said the source close to the discussions over securing Europe’s borders, “it will take many months – and realistically years – before we really do screen everyone entering Europe against databases of known terrorists and criminals.”

The scale of challenge was revealed in the official communique from the EU Home Ministers meeting, that admitted that many EU border posts still required “electronic connection” to relevant Interpol databases.

As a sign of the depth of concern, Dutch officials this week even floated the idea of a “mini-Schengen”, that would dramatically cut Europe’s 26-member open-frontier zone, taking it back to its original core of group of Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.

Germany and the European Commission have rejected the idea, arguing the answer must be to focus on fixing Schengen as it currently exists, perhaps even by creating an EU-wide intelligence agency, an idea that was quickly shot down by member states.

Even before the Paris attacks, Donald Tusk, the European Council president had acknowledged that the EU was in a “race against time” to stop the collapse of Schengen. “The clock is ticking, we are under pressure, we need to act fast,” he said.

In the meantime, Europe remains at risk of further terror attacks that analysts warn could shatter confidence in a Schengen free-movement system whose credibility has already been seriously damaged by two major terror attacks on Paris in the space of nine months.

Carsten Nickel, Europe analyst with Teneo Intelligence, compared the existential nature of the Schengen crisis with that of the Euro crisis earlier this year, but warned that the security issues would be even harder to fix at a European level.

“The reality is that it is going to take a while to build up the administrative and physical capabilities required to protect Europe’s external borders,” he said.

“As with the Eurozone crisis, there is a logic to creating a centralized, supra-national institutions – like, say in the case of the Eurozone, the ECB – to tackle the problem; but when it comes to security it is just not clear there is the same administrative and political capacity to deliver,” he said.