Category Archives: Drug Cartels

About Those Gangs Across America

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After the big shoot-out and arrests a few days ago in Waco, here is a detailed summary of the list of gangs and who are the members. Simply stated, no town is safe, hence we are not safe.

Featured photo - Exclusive: Leaked Report Profiles Military, Police Members of Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs

Exclusive: Leaked Report Profiles Military, Police Members of Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs

Nuclear power plant technicians, senior military officers, FBI contractors and an employee of “a highly-secretive Department of Defense agency” with a Top Secret clearance. Those are just a few of the more than 100 people with sensitive military and government connections that law enforcement is tracking because they are linked to “outlaw motorcycle gangs.”

A year before the deadly Texas shootout that killed nine people on May 17, a lengthy report by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives detailed the involvement of U.S. military personnel and government employees in outlaw motorcycle gangs, or OMGs. A copy of the report was obtained by The Intercept.

The full report/presentation is here.

The report lays out, in almost obsessive detail, the extent to which OMG members are represented in nearly every part of the military, and in federal and local government, from police and fire departments to state utility agencies. Specific examples from the report include dozens of Defense Department contractors with Secret or Top Secret clearances; multiple FBI contractors; radiological technicians with security clearances; U.S. Department of Homeland Security employees; Army, Navy and Air Force active-duty personnel, including from the special operations force community; and police officers.

“The OMG community continues to spread its tentacles throughout all facets of government,” the report says.

The relationship between OMGs and law enforcement has come under scrutiny after it became known that law enforcement were on site in Waco bracing for conflict.

The 40-page report, “OMGs and the Military 2014,” issued by ATF’s Office of Strategic Intelligence and Information in July of last year, warned of the escalating violence of these gangs. “Their insatiable appetite for dominance has led to shootings, assaults and malicious attacks across the globe. OMGs continue to maim and murder over territory,” the report said. “As tensions escalate, brazen shootings are occurring in broad daylight.”

The ATF report is based on intelligence gathered by dozens of law enforcement and military intelligence agencies, and identifies about 100 alleged associates of the country’s most violent outlaw motorcycle gangs and support clubs who have worked in sensitive government or military positions.

Those gangs “continue to court active-duty military personnel and government workers, both civilians and contractors, for their knowledge, reliable income, tactical skills and dedication to a cause,” according to the report. “Through our extensive analysis, it has been revealed that a large number of support clubs are utilizing active-duty military personnel and U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) contractors and employees to spread their tentacles across the United States.”

The report predicted that six dominant OMGs — Mongols, Hells Angels, Outlaws, Pagans, Bandidos and Vagos — would continue to expand, with escalating violence. The groups are known as “one-percenter” clubs, a moniker they proudly use to denote their outlaw status. The report identifies the most violent as Bandidos and Hell’s Angels support clubs — the same groups involved in a deadly shootout in Waco, Texas on Sunday.

The deadly confrontation involved the Bandidos and a rival club, the Cossacks MC, who are backed by Bandidos’ arch rivals, the Hell’s Angels. The shootout was part of a ongoing turf battle: Without permission from the Bandidos, Cossacks members have begun wearing a patch on their vests that claims Texas as the club’s territory — a figurative thumb in the eye of the Bandidos, long the state’s dominant motorcycle club. Nine people were killed and more than 170 bikers were arrested in the noontime showdown.

On Wednesday, law enforcement in Texas confirmed to several media outlets that one of the bikers arrested in the massive post-shootout sweep was a former San Antonio police detective, who joined the Bandidos after retiring from the department after 32 years.

The ATF report identifies the Bandidos as the dominant and most violent of the motorcycle gangs in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, and identifies a staff sergeant instructor in the United States Air Force, currently stationed at Keesler Air Force Base, as the president of the local Pistoleros chapter, a Bandidos support club. According to the report, he routinely hosts parties for active duty military personnel.

In response to questions about the report, an ATF spokesperson said, “This was supposed to be solely a law enforcement tool to help fight violent crime. It was not supposed to be out there in the ether for general consumption.” The Intercept, after consulting with ATF, has redacted some portions of the report.

In an interview, Edward Winterhalder, a former high-ranking member of the Bandidos who left the club in 2003, said that while military veterans have long been involved in motorcycle clubs — many of the current outlaw clubs were formed in the wake of World War II — current-duty military or law enforcement members are not generally involved in the most violent gangs.

According to Winterhalder, biker clubs not associated with the violent one-percenters have many government employees — current military, law enforcement and firefighters — as members. Indeed, some clubs have emerged that pointedly disavow any connections to violence or lawlessness, or that specifically bill themselves as a LEMC — law enforcement motorcycle club.

Among those are the Iron Circle LEMC, a Texas club formed in 2006; the Arizona-founded Roughnecks Country MC — for the “99 percent … that gives a shit about society and the laws that govern the world we live in”; the Iron Order MC, a fiercely independent club that strongly rejects the ethos of the one-percenters; and the Protectors LEMC, which requires a criminal background check for prospective members.

Nonetheless, the report documents extensive involvement of current-duty military and government personnel in the outlaw groups, and does not mention LEMCs.

The report is a testament to how seriously law enforcement takes the issue of outlaw motorcycle gangs, detailing extensive surveillance; the document includes copies of military or government identification photos, some gained from traffic stops, and information from what appears to be close monitoring of military and government officials who attend the groups’ gatherings and activities across the country.

The Buzzwords are Refugee and Asylum

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UN pushes for migrants to be called refugees

In part: SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (AP) — United Nations officials are pushing for many of the Central Americans fleeing to the U.S. to be treated as refugees displaced by armed conflict, a designation meant to increase pressure on the United States and Mexico to accept tens of thousands of people currently ineligible for asylum.

Officials with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees say they hope to see movement toward a regional agreement on that status Thursday when migration and interior department representatives from the U.S., Mexico, and Central America meet in Nicaragua. The group will discuss updating a 30-year-old declaration regarding the obligations that nations have to aid refugees.

Sure there are thousands and in some cases millions that have fled their home country over brutal regimes, civil wars, disease, lack of economic opportunity and to perhaps incite attacks and terrorism in other countries.

U.N. Calls on Western Nations to Shelter Syrian Refugees

With Syria’s neighbors increasingly shutting their borders to refugees and thousands trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea in search of safety, the war in Syria is creating the worst global refugee crisis in decades, putting new pressure on the United States and other Western countries to open their doors — and in turn, prompting domestic political backlash.

Not since the wave of people who fled Southeast Asia after the war in Vietnam have the world’s industrialized countries been under such intense pressure to share the burden of taking in refugees, experts say. Nor has the task of offering sanctuary been so politically fraught.

The United States is scheduled to take in its largest group of Syrian refugees to date — up to 2,000 by the fall of this year, compared with a total of about 700 since the civil war in Syria began four years ago, according to the State Department.

Here is a disturbing fact, the work that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees division does for refugees and asylees does NOT collaborate with U.S. agencies as they claim, unless it is on an exceptional basis. They maintain a database of applications and fingerprints that is not integrated or actually shared for background checks.

UNHCR seeks to contribute to informed decision-making and public debate by providing accurate, relevant and up-to-date statistics. As such, the Statistical Online Population Database provides data and trends on the “Population of concern to UNHCR”: refugees, asylum-seekers, returned refugees, internally displaced persons (IDPs) protected/assisted by UNHCR, returned IDPs, stateless persons, and others of concern to UNHCR, in more than 180 countries.

In a single electronic platform, UNHCR’s Statistical Online Population Database is bringing together for analysis and comparison standardized data on UNHCR’s population of concern at country, regional, and global levels.

The database is work-in-progress and will be updated on an ongoing basis. Currently, data up to 31 December 2012 can be downloaded from the Statistical Online Population Database. Some of the statistics contained in the Statistical Online Population Database, in particular the ones for 2012 should be considered provisional and subject to change. Some data in the database may differ from statistics published previously due to retroactive changes or the inclusion of previously unavailable data.

 

‘All data refer to the number of individuals with the exception of asylum-seekers in the United States of America, where figures are available only for the number of cases (which may include several individuals) submitted to the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS). However, applications submitted to the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR) of the United States department of Justice are recorded as individuals.’

‘A combination of armed conflict, deterioration of security or humanitarian situation and human rights concerns in a number of countries – notably the Syrian Arab Republic – have been among the main reasons for the sharp increase in the number of asylum-seekers registered among the main reasons for the sharp increase in the number of asylum-seekers registered among industrialized countries during 2014.’  Full document here. (It is a must read).

Sample application for asylum:

Note the cost of security weakness and lack of full collaboration:

Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals. There were significant security weaknesses in the Saudi government’s issuance of Saudi passports in the period when the visas to the hijackers were issued. Two of the Saudi 9/11 hijackers may have obtained their passports legitimately or illegitimately with the help of a family member who worked in the passport office.

 

 

 

WH Task Force-Retooling Nations Law Enforcement

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Enter the new protected class as mandated by the White House Task Force, titled 21st Century Policing.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 13684 signed by Barack Obama is de-facto altering law enforcement across America. A sample action item includes:

Decouple federal immi-gration enforcement from routine local policing for civil enforcement and nonserious crime.

Another action item:

Law enforcement agencies should adopt and enforce policies prohibiting profiling and discrimination based on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, age, gender, gender identity/expression, sexual orientation, immigration status, disability, housing status, occupation, or language fluency.

There are many action items in the White House mandate found here.

 

The need for understanding, tolerance, and sensitivity to African Americans, Latinos, recent immigrants, Muslims, and the LGBTQ community was discussed at length at the listening session, with witnesses giving examples of unacceptable behavior in law enforcement’s dealings with all of these groups. Participants also discussed the need to move towards practices that respect all members of the community equally and away from policing tactics that can unintentionally lead to excessive enforcement against minorities.

Witnesses noted that officers need to develop the skills and knowledge necessary in the fight against terrorism by gaining an understanding of the links between normal criminal activity and terrorism, for example. What is more, this training must be ongoing, as threats and procedures for combatting terrorism evolve.

The Federal Government should support the development of partnerships with training facilities across the country to promote consistent standards for high quality training and establish training innovation hubs.

A starting point for changing the culture of policing is to change the culture of training academies. The designation of certain training academies as federally supported regional “training innovation hubs” could act as leverage points for changing training culture while taking into consideration regional variations. Federal funding would be a powerful incentive to these designated academies to conduct the necessary research to develop and implement the highest quality curricula focused on the needs of 21st century American policing, along with cutting-edge delivery modalities.

Get paid to protest law enforcement…it is lucrative.

Even ABC News found some alarming issues in the White House agenda.

6 Things the Obama Administration Is Doing to Improve Police-Community Relations

Amid continued tension between police and communities of color, President Obama will travel to Camden, New Jersey this afternoon to highlight the city’s efforts improve police-community relations.

In cities like Camden, “for too long, both jobs and hope have been hard to find. That sense of unfairness and powerlessness has helped to fuel the kind of unrest we’ve seen in Ferguson and Baltimore and New York and other cities across our country,” White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett told reporters. “It has many causes, from a basic lack of opportunity to folks feeling unfairly targeted by the police.”

But Camden – recently named a “promise zone” and a My Brother’s Keeper community challenge partner – is making strides, and the Obama administration wants to help other cities follow suit.

Here are six things they’re doing to shore up trust between law enforcement and minority communities:

1. Confidence ‘Blueprint’

After months of study by the president’s task force on 21st century policing, administration today is releasing its final “blueprint” for building trust between officers and the communities they serve.

“I can tell you, there is widespread understanding by the police that police- community relations must be improved, especially in communities of color,” Ron Davis, a former police chief who now heads the Justice Department’s COPS Office told reporters.

“We are without a doubt sitting at a defining moment in American policing,” Davis said. “We have a unique opportunity to redefine policing in our democracy, to ensure that public safety is more than the absence of crime, that it must also include the presence of justice.”

2. Data, Data, Data.

Statisticians, get ready: the White House has also launched a police data initiative designed to increase transparency and identify problematic trends.

According to officials, 21 jurisdictions have committed to release 101 data sets not previously accessible to the public, like reports on use of force, pedestrian and vehicle stops, and officer-involved shootings. (The administration’s “open data playbook” will set out best practices for other jurisdictions that want to post data publicly.)

“It’s equally important that we educate the community so they set the expectation for their agencies to follow those practices and not just leave it up to the police department by itself,” Davis said yesterday.

Internal data will be shared with analysts who can, in the words of Domestic Policy Council Director Cecilia Munoz, “identify patterns to prevent problems or problematic behaviors before they lead to a crisis situation.”

3. $163 Million

The Justice Department today is announcing $163 million in hiring grants for positions focused on building community trust.

4. Virtual Body Cam Toolkit

In the wake of the Ferguson protests last year, President Obama pledged $75 million to buy 50,000 body cameras.

Today, the Justice Department is launching a web-based “toolkit” laying out best practices for hardware, software, and data storage, as well as dealing with public information requests, civilian privacy issues, and officers’ rights issues.

5. Bayonets, Be Gone

To curb the “militarization” of local police that upset so many people during the Ferguson protests, President Obama has authorized a series of recommendations to regulate the transfer of equipment from federal agencies to state/local law enforcement.

The plan divides equipment into two main categories: (1) “prohibited” equipment – including bayonets, grenade launchers, weaponized aircraft, tracked armored vehicles and large caliber weapons – that have been deemed inappropriate for local law enforcement and should not be made available local police “under any circumstances,” and (2) “controlled” equipment – including riot gear, explosives, armored vehicles, and specialized firearms – that police departments can acquire only if they comply with certain “vigorous” controls.

“The idea is to make sure that we strike a balance in providing the equipment which is appropriate and useful and important for local law agencies to keep the community safe, while at the same time putting standard in places,” Munoz said.

To obtain controlled equipment under these new recommendations, law enforcement agencies have to gain the consent of a local civilian governing body such as a mayor or city council and provide a “clear and persuasive explanation” for why the department needs the equipment. They’ll also be required to complete additional training in community and constitutional policing and collect data on how the equipment is used – particularly if it is involved in a “significant incident.”

6. National Community Policing Tour

Newly confirmed Attorney General Loretta Lynch is slated to travel to Cincinnati as part of a “national community policing tour.”

Lynch’s aides have indicated that one of her first priorities will be improving police morale and finding common ground between officers and minority communities.

 

Billion$ Leave the U.S. by Immigrants

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Ah, but all those immigrants in our country today are here with families right? Not so much. Further, wide debates circle around re-patrioting U.S. currency stashed in foreign countries, but can that really happen or keep pace with what foreign nationals are sending out of the country? We are talking billions here. They are pointing to Mexicans, but there should be a real challenge, are they all really Mexicans? How much is terror money or narco-dollars?

Imagine if the Mexicans are doing this, then are the militant Islamic factions that support Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad doing the same thing? Combine these dollars with those that are own federal government is doing at the behest of the White House, the State Department, USAID and secret grants. The Palestinians are hostile to Israel and the United States but the Federal government sends them billions. The Obama administration supported militants in Gaza, not to mention Hezbollah.

If Mexico was not a failed state, then why the billions in just the cooperative agreement called the Merida Initiative?

Mexicans in U.S. sent home $5.7 billion in remittances in first 3 months of 2015

Mexican living in the United States sent $5.7 billion in remittances back home in the first three months of 2015 alone, the highest amount of money sent to the country by expats since 2008, Banco de Mexico reported.

The amount of money that Mexicans living abroad sent to their family and friends back home between January and March of 2015 is 5 percent higher than it was in the same period last year, with remittances in March increasing 7.6 percent to $2.26 billion.

This averages out to each Mexican family living in the U.S. sending around $312 back to Mexico in March – or around $9 more than in March of 2014. The only time this number was higher was in July 2012, when Mexican families sent home an average of $314 that month.

“We hope that the slight increase in remittances in 2015 gives a brighter indication for growth and employment in the U.S. perspective,” said Alberto Ramos, an economist at Goldman Sachs report, according to Univision.

Ramos added that “a weaker Mexican peso and low domestic inflation increase the real purchasing power in local currency remittance flows.”

Banco de Mexico reported that 97 percent of remittances to the country came from the United States, with the other 3 percent coming from Canada, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Spain. The U.S. states where the majority of remittances came from were California, Texas, Illinois, Florida, Georgia and New York.

Some 11 million Mexicans live in the United States and many of them work in the construction sector. In this economic context, remittances are the main source of foreign exchange in Mexico, after oil and foreign direct investment, and also represent a vital income for millions of people.

 

Obama, Tattle-Tail Runs to UN on Law Enforcement

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Obama and his previous and current U.S. Attorney General at the Department of Justice are on an alarming mission to destroy law enforcement across the United States, calling their work violations of human rights. Obama has chosen to whine about police departments in America to the United Nations Human Rights Council. Really? Is he asking for the United Nations to apply sanctions to our law enforcement?

The UN Security Council is and never has been a judge of Human Rights where countries like Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, Libya, Syria are omitted from his diatribe and are ignored by the UN as well.

Anyone remember Hamas using children as human shields during the last round of hostilities in Gaza?

Congress has stopped Barack Obama from transferring Guantanamo detainees and closing the facility while the White House has been sneaky and doing transfers and trades without advising Congress. Barack Obama is working to stop all death penalty sentences in America but he says little about sex trafficking, known slavery by other countries and worse he has no interest in protecting the slaughter of Jews and Christians in the Middle East.

Obama’s twisted logic is to report what he considers misguided adherence to law to the United Nations inviting other countries to participate our domestic debates. Simply stated, Barack Obama is deferring oversight of our justice and legal system to an international corrupt institution.

Remember that ‘red-line’ Obama declared on the use of chemical weapons in Syria? Crickets as Syria continues to use chlorine barrel bombs against citizens. Is there any doubt that Obama really does hate America? Shameful…

Obama Admin Apologizes to U.N. for American Cops

Promises to prosecute those who “wilfully use excessive force.”

The Obama administration apologized Monday to the United Nation’s Human Rights Council for American law enforcement personnel whom it described as “willfully us[ing] excessive force,” at times with racist motivation. In its defense of its handling of the issue, the administration touts prosecuting over 400 law-enforcement officials and committing itself to take down those found guilty in the future.

The Associated Press reports that the U.N. human rights council—which includes dozens of countries with deplorable human rights records—voiced “widespread concern” about unjust practices by American police. The Obama administration responded by vowing to “rededicate” itself to ensuring that “our civil-rights laws live up to their promise” and touting its punishment of out-of-control personnel:

“We must rededicate ourselves to ensuring that our civil-rights laws live up to their promise,” Justice Department official James Cadogan told delegates, adding that that is particularly important in the area of police practices and pointing to recent high-profile cases of officers killing unarmed black residents.

“These events challenge us to do better and to work harder for progress through both dialogue and action,” he said at the session’s opening. He added that the government has the authority to prosecute officials who “willfully use excessive force,” and that criminal charges have been brought against more than 400 law-enforcement officials in the past six years.

The council presented calls for changes to other U.S. policies, including abolishing the death penalty, curbing NSA surveillance programs, and closing Guantanamo Bay.

Administration officials responded with the standard non-answers. On execution, Deputy Assistant Attorney General David Bitkower explained that the “controversy” over executions in America was an ongoing “extensive debate.” As for U.S intelligence gathering, Bitkower vaguely defended the programs by saying they are “subject to stringent and multilayered oversight mechanisms.”

As for the call to close Gitmo, Brig. Gen. Richard Gross said President Obama has called shutting down Gitmo a “national imperative” and remains committed to the cause despite being thwarted by Congress. The remaining inmates after Obama’s transfer of many in recent years, the administration maintained, were all there legally.

The U.S. human rights review was part of the “Universal Periodic Reviews” of U.N. members. The reviews occur every four years. This is the second such review for the U.S, the last occurring in 2010.