Category Archives: Gangs and Crimes

Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper Initiative with Rappers

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This site has posted about the ‘My Brother’s Keeper Initiative previously. This was the genesis of the matter of equalizing law enforcement across the country. Additionally it is part of the Obama jailbreak operation, releasing only minor drug offenders from prison, you know those…there were non-violent? Of the last released of 61 he released and gave a pardon, 1/3 of them were serving life sentences.

Both Hillary and Bernie have also joined into the program by supporting a stop to ‘mass incarceration’ on the campaign trail.

This part Friday, it seems Obama brought into the White House some real experts on the matter.

Must have been a great Friday night at the White House.

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All Your Favorite Rappers Met With President Obama About Criminal Justice Reform

Nicki Minaj, Chance the Rapper, Alicia Keys, and others were in attendance

President Obama hosted some of hip-hop’s biggest stars for a meeting at the White House on Friday.

Time: According to a White House official Nicki Minaj, Chance the Rapper, Alicia Keys, Wale, J. Cole, and Ludacris were among the stars who sat down with Obama and some of his top advisers to talk about criminal justice reform and the My Brother’s Keeper Initiative. An official says the stars were singled out due to their work within communities to confront issues facing young people

“Through their own nonprofit work or artistic commitment, many of these artists have found ways to engage on the issues of criminal justice reform and empowering disadvantaged young people across the country,” an official says.

A source close to the White House says DJ Khaled is also attending the meeting.

The President and his team have focussed on the issue of criminal justice throughout his second term. Most recently, the president commuted the sentences of dozens of drug offenders, many of whom will be released from federal custody this summer. Obama has also made a point of championing programs that address disadvantages faced by young men and boys of color, chiefly through his My Brother’s Keeper Initiative.

According to the White House, the celebrities Obama has convened have also been active on the subject of criminal justice. Singer Alicia Keys has lobbied Congress to pass criminal justice reform legislation while Chance the Rapper leads an anti-violence campaign in the president’s hometown of Chicago. Many of the other guests including Common, J.Cole, and Wale encourage and support youth through programming.

The meeting is said to have started earlier in the afternoon.

U.S. Deploys Commandos to the Philippines

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Why? Well as both Barack Obama and John Kerry tell us that Islamic State has lost territory, which may only be barely accurate in Iraq or Syria, they have gained a larger footprint globally and that includes the Philippines.

The Philippines-based jihadi group Abu Sayyaf Group released a new video with its Canadian, Filipino, and Norwegian hostages, giving a final deadline for their ransoms to be met and threatening to behead one of the four on April 25.

So we are deploying special forces to the region.

MANILA, Philippines— In a military buildup certain to inflame tensions with China, the United States said Thursday it will send troops and combat aircraft to the Philippines for regular, more frequent rotations, and will conduct more joint sea and air patrols with Philippine forces in the South China Sea.

In fact, Defense Secretary Ash Carter is in the region on has taken some time to board the carrier battle group the USS Stennis.

ABOARD THE USS JOHN C. STENNIS —U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter on Friday made a second sail of the South China Sea, underscoring the U.S. commitment to its Asia-Pacific allies amid increasing tensions with China.

Carter said his presence on the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis, which was sailing about 60 to 70 miles West of the Philippines’ main island, Luzon Island, was to send “a message to the region.”

“The United States intends to continue to play a role in keeping peace and stability in this region’” said Carter, who was accompanied by Philippines defense minister Voltaire Gazmin.

What is the problem there you ask? Islamic State….the terror operation that is spreading to other regions in the world.

From Time magazine:

ISIS Is Making Inroads in the Southern Philippines and the Implications for Asia Are Alarming

Counter-terrorism operation in Philippines Anadolu Agency/Getty ImagesPhilippine army soldiers stage a counterterrorism operation against Maute terrorists, who are allegedly linked with ISIS, in Butig, the Philippine province of Lanao Del Sur, in Mindanao Island, on March 1, 2016

Islamist extremism is growing in Mindanao, with serious security implications for the region and beyond

Musa Muhammad stands at the site where 400 Islamist militants launched an invasion of the southern Philippine city of Zamboanga little over two years ago, sparking 20 days of heavy fighting with security forces. The ruins of his old house can be found there, amid several hundred other razed homes. Since then his family has lived in a sports stadium, refusing to move to a newly built house in another part of town.

“This has been our home for 50 years,” he says. “We’re afraid, but we’ll never leave.”

The Moros (“Moors”), as the Muslims of the southern Philippine region of Mindanao are called, are known for their intransigence. For centuries, they fought the Spanish, Americans and Japanese for their independence. Today, they are fighting Manila too. Some 120,000 people have died, and millions have been displaced, in the past 40 years of insurgency. (Muddying the picture, a separate communist insurgency is also sporadically waged in parts of Mindanao by the New People’s Army, which is thought to consist of some 3,200 fighters.)

Yet many Moros, like Musa, are not victims of a heavy-handed central government but the casualties of infighting among their own kin. The battle at Zamboanga, which led to the destruction of Musa’s home, started off when factions of one rebel group, the Moro National Liberation Front, wanted to signal their displeasure with the peace negotiations with Manila then being carried out by another rebel group, Moro Islamic Liberation Front. It took 3,000 troops to end the rebel occupation of several districts of the city, in an operation that saw 51 insurgents killed and drove 70,000 people from their homes.

Now those talks have stalled and, in the frustrated void that has followed their collapse, extremism has taken root. Several Moro outfits have pledged allegiance to terrorist group Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) and carried out attacks in its name.

One of those groups is the Abu Sayyaf militia, whose head Isnilon Hapilon — now styled Sheik Mujahid Abu Abdullah al-Filipini — has been appointed ISIS’s leader in the Philippines. Presently, the Philippine army is attempting to strike at the group’s jungle stronghold on the island of Basilan. In one of the bloodiest days for the armed forces in years, 18 soldiers were killed and over 50 wounded on April 9. ISIS claimed responsibility for the killings. Shortly after, Abu Sayyaf beheaded two Filipino hostages. (The group is also holding 10 Indonesians, two Canadians and a Norwegian captive.)

“It’s very likely that [Abu Sayyaf] will declare a satellite of the caliphate in the coming year,” says Rohan Gunaratna, an international terrorism expert at S. Rajaratnam School of Security Studies in Singapore. “Once that is done, it will be much more difficult to dismantle these groups.”

Already, up to 1,200 Southeast Asians have joined ISIS in the Middle East. Experts now worry that an ISIS stronghold in the southern Philippines will act as a regional lure, providing extremists from across Asia with a place to gain combat experience, before they set act to attack Asian targets or even targets further afield. The Jakarta attack in January that killed four civilians is just a taste of what could come, says Greg Barton, chair in global Islamic politics at Deakin University in Melbourne.

“Next time they won’t mess around with pistols but bring assault rifles,” says Barton. “That’s all it takes to turn amateurs into a lethal bunch of killers.”

Some claim that the biggest threat currently is that competing, ISIS-inspired groups would seek to upstage each other with small-scale attacks. However, organized, international networks still exist, even if the influence of al-Qaeda, which once funded training camps in the southern Philippines, has waned, along with that of its affiliates.

Indonesian operatives are already trading Syria-hardened tutors for weapons and training grounds in Mindanao, reports the ISIS Study Group, an intelligence collective run by the Washington, D.C., think tank Center for a New American Security. The area is evidently attracting insurgents from further afield too. Mohammad Khattab, an alleged bombmaking instructor from Morocco, was reportedly among the five killed militants on Basilan earlier in April. There have been rumors of Muslim Uighurs from China in the area. And in January last year, Zulkifli bin Hir — a Malaysian described as a key facilitator between Indonesian and Filipino extremist groups — was cornered and killed in Mamasapano in central Mindanao, but at the cost of 44 deaths among the Philippine army’s Special Action Force. Five civilians also lost their lives in an operation that turned the tide of support against President Benigno Aquino III’s peace negotiations with the Moro separatists.

“Before the Mamasapano tragedy, it looked really promising,” says Richard Javad Heydarian, a security expert at De La Salle University in Manila. “There were even rumors that Aquino would be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Unfortunately a lot of journalists sensationalized the story, fanning anti-Muslim sentiment. Politicians running for office have then been trying to score political points on this.”

Further talk of a new, autonomous province within the Philippines for the Moro — it would be called Bangsamoro — has now been suspended until the general elections in May. In the meantime, says terrorism expert Gunaratna, intolerance is putting down deeper roots. As an example, he points to the March 1 assassination attempt on a Saudi cleric, Aaidh al-Qarni. The preacher, who has been on ISIS hit lists, was shot while visiting Western Mindanao State University in Zamboanga for a two-day symposium.

“Recent arrests in Malaysia and Indonesia clearly show that a new terror attack from ISIS in the region is imminent,” Gunaratna warns. “And the next one will be bloodier.”

Passing a Law to Enforce the Law and an App

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When George W. Bush created the Department of Homeland Security, one of the missions was to bring together the mobilize key agencies into one to force collaboration, cooperation and joint use of tools and technology to secure the country. Under Barack Obama, not only were executive orders signed to waive standing law and procedures, the security of the country has reached a tipping point as a result of adding in migrants, refugees and aliens. Mandates from the White House to other agencies include edicts to ignore policy and security standards but we are virtually giving sanctuary to criminals.

Now the House of Representatives is working on legislation to force compliance with law.

The Department of Homeland Security knows there are growing threats across the country so in December of 2015 the agency re-launched the warning system.

There is an app for that. The Department of Justice even published a 10 page handbook.

WASHINGTON — Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson activated the National Terrorism Advisory System for the first time Wednesday, warning the public of “self-radicalized actors who could strike with little or no notice.”

The bulletin, which marks the addition of a new level of public warning to the system, will be in effect for the next six months, or until events dictate otherwise, Johnson said.

The Department of Homeland Security is “especially concerned that terrorist-inspired individuals and homegrown violent extremists may be encouraged or inspired to target public events or places,” the bulletin stated.

“As we saw in the recent attacks in San Bernardino and Paris, terrorists will consider a diverse and wide selection of targets for attacks,” the DHS notice said.

House Acts to Keep America Safe

Passes Legislation to Enhance Overseas Traveler Vetting & Help Stem Flow of Foreign Fighters

Washington, D.C. – Today, the House of Representatives passed the Enhancing Overseas Traveler Vetting Act (H.R. 4403).  The legislation, introduced by Rep. Will Hurd (R-TX), works to improve the vetting of travelers against terrorist watch lists and law enforcement databases, enhances border management, and improves targeting and analysis.

On the House floor, speaking in support of the bipartisan legislation, Chairman Royce delivered the following remarks (as prepared for delivery):

The global threat of terrorism has never been as high as it is today.  In just the last 12 months, we’ve seen terrorists strike in my home state of California, and in France, Belgium, Turkey, India, Tunisia, the Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Pakistan and Iraq – to name a few.  No country is immune.  The ideology of violent extremism knows no boundaries – allowing individuals to become radicalized by terrorists overseas without leaving their neighborhood.

I just returned from Iraq, Jordan and Tunisia, where I heard first-hand about the foreign fighter threat.  More than 35,000 foreigners from 120 countries have traveled to the Middle East to join ISIS, and many of these fighters are now looking to return to their homes and to the United States to carry out attacks.

That is why information sharing between countries is more critical than ever.

The bipartisan Task Force’s report highlighted the lack of any comprehensive, global database of foreign fighters and suspected terrorists.  In its absence, the U.S. and other countries rely on a patchwork system for exchanging extremist identities, which is weak and increases the odds that foreign fighters and suspected terrorists will be able to cross borders undetected.

H.R. 4403 will authorize the Secretaries of the Department of State and Homeland Security to develop open-source software platforms to vet travelers against terrorist watch lists and law enforcement databases.  It permits the open-source software to be shared with foreign governments and multilateral organizations, like INTERPOL.

This bill reflects the recommendations made by our colleagues on the Task Force, which we have worked together on.  I thank Mr. Hurd and Chairman McCaul for their leadership working to make our nation safer against terrorist threats.

Obamaphones Back in the News, the Scandal was a Secret

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Primer: Remember YOU, the taxpayer are subsidizing this program.

FNC/WSJ: The U.S. government spent about $2.2 billion last year to provide phones to low-income Americans, but a Wall Street Journal review of the program shows that a large number of those who received the phones haven’t proved they are eligible to receive them.

The Lifeline program—begun in 1984 to ensure that poor people aren’t cut off from jobs, families and emergency services—is funded by charges that appear on the monthly bills of every landline and wireless-phone customer. Payouts under the program have shot up from $819 million in 2008, as more wireless carriers have persuaded regulators to let them offer the service.

The FCC on the Lifeline program.

FCC Kept ‘Obamaphone’ Fraud Under Wraps Until After It Expanded Program

Commissioners were instructed not to reveal $5 million fine until day after controversial Lifeline expansion vote

 Tom Wheeler / APTom Wheeler / AP

Federal regulators were instructed to keep a massive fraud investigation under wraps until a day after a controversial vote to expand a program that was allegedly used to bilk taxpayers of tens of millions of dollars, one those regulators claims.

The Federal Communications Commission on Friday announced that it would seek $51 million in damages from a cell phone company that allegedly defrauded the federal Lifeline program of nearly $10 million.

The commission’s five members unanimously backed the Notice of Apparent Liability (NAL), but Republican commissioner Ajit Pai parted from his colleagues in a partial dissent. According to Pai, he and other commissioners were told not to reveal the details of its investigation until April 1, a day after the FCC voted to expand the Lifeline program.

“Commissioners were told that the Notice of Apparent Liability could not be released or publicly discussed until April 1, 2016, conveniently one day after the Commission was scheduled to expand the Lifeline program to broadband,” Pai wrote. “That’s not right.”

Pai did not say who issued that directive. However, it had the effect of preventing public knowledge of widespread fraud in the Lifeline program ahead of a contentious vote on expanding it despite persisting concerns about a lack of internal safeguards.

FCC spokesman Will Wiquist insisted that the timing was completely coincidental. “The timing of the enforcement action was in no way related to the timing of the vote on the program modernization,” he said in an email.

Lifeline has faced controversy over enrollment requirements that its critics say are too lax and vulnerable to fraud. The service, which subsidizes cell phone plans for low-income Americans, allows beneficiaries to enroll using cards issued for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), a welfare program that has also faced fraud allegations.

Critics of the Lifeline program began calling its subsidized cell phones “Obamaphones” early in the Obama administration in response to viral YouTube videos of beneficiaries thanking the president for their free phones. The program was actually created under President Ronald Reagan.

The FCC’s NAL last week accused cell phone provider Total Call Mobile, which provides Lifeline services in 19 states, of “systematic and egregious misconduct” and “widespread enrollment fraud.”

According to the commission, Total Call employees enrolled tens of thousands of duplicate Lifeline beneficiaries and pocketed the extra subsidies. The FCC caught onto the scheme when the company enrolled an undercover FCC investigator in the program without asking for any eligibility documentation.

“Since 2014, Total Call has requested and received an estimated $9.7 million dollars in improper payments from the Universal Service Fund for duplicate or ineligible consumers despite repeated and explicit warnings from its own employees, in some cases compliance specialists, that company sales agents were engaged in widespread enrollment fraud,” the FCC said in a news release.

A common means of fraudulent enrollment was the repeated use of a single SNAP identification card, according to the FCC. That drew the ire of Commissioner Michael O’Reilly, who said the use of SNAP cards as Lifeline verification mechanisms is woefully inadequate.

“I must once again lodge my extreme frustration that the Commission continues to rely on SNAP as an entry point in the Lifeline program, and has the gall to claim that it is a highly accountable program, when it is painfully obvious to anyone paying attention that SNAP is riddled with waste, fraud, and abuse,” he wrote in a partial dissent in the Total Call case.

Despite those ongoing concerns, the FCC recently voted to expand the Lifeline program to include subsidies for 3G wireless broadband service.

That vote followed a contentious debate over the scope of the expansion and its accompanying price tag. The commission approved the expansion by a narrow 3-2 vote on March 31, a day before the FCC announced its Total Call NAL.

The existence of a massive ongoing Lifeline fraud investigation might’ve affected public perception of that vote, if not the vote itself, leading Pai to call the muzzling of commissioners on the Total Call investigation “conveniently” timed.

Pai also objected to commission delays that he said prevented it from sanctioning Total Call for the full scale of its apparent misconduct.

“Even though [the FCC] identified 32,498 intra-company duplicates, we pursue only 2,587. Even though we have evidence that Total Call Mobile bypassed federal safeguards to enroll 99.8% of its subscribers, we hold the company liable for only 16%,” Pai wrote.

“Under these circumstances, our precedent suggests that a forfeiture of at least $84,295,910 would have been appropriate. Yet the Commission settles for something much less.”

Even as the FCC was investigating this pattern of alleged fraud, Total Call was pouring money into its new Washington lobbying operation. According to disclosure forms, it hired lobbyists with the firm ML Strategies in June of last year, a month after the FCC subpoenaed the company.

ML Strategies has reported collecting $120,000 in fees from Total Call to lobby Congress and the FCC on “general issues related to the Lifeline program.”

The FCC’s investigation is not Total Call’s first time running afoul of federal regulators: the commission issued a $12,000 NAL in 2010 accusing the company of failing to abide by regulations on hearing aid compatibility.

Its sister companies have faced far larger fines for more egregious offenses.

Total Call Mobile is wholly owned by prepaid phone card company Total Call International, which is wholly owned by Japanese telecommunications giant KDDI. KDDI is also the sole shareholder of Locus Telecommunications.

The FCC has targeted Locus in numerous enforcement actions over the past decade, and sought fines reaching into the eight figures.

The FCC levied a $5 million penalty against the company in October “for deceptively marketing its prepaid telephone calling cards.” Previous Notices of Apparently Liability sought fines from the company of $5 million, $330,000, $25,000, $23,000, and $12,000.

Mossack Fonseca Offices Raided, and Spies too?

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Panama raids offices of Mossack Fonseca law firm

Reuters:Panama’s attorney general late on Tuesday raided the offices of the Mossack Fonseca law firm to search for any evidence of illegal activities, authorities said in a statement.

The Panama-based law firm is at the center of the “Panama Papers” leaks scandal that has embarrassed several world leaders and shone a spotlight on the shadowy world of offshore companies.

The national police, in an earlier statement, said they were searching for documentation that “would establish the possible use of the firm for illicit activities.” The firm has been accused of tax evasion and fraud.

Police offers and patrol cars began gathering around the company’s building in the afternoon under the command of prosecutor Javier Caravallo, who specializes in organized crime and money laundering.

Mossack Fonseca, which specializes in setting up offshore companies, did not respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.

Earlier, founding partner Ramon Fonseca said the company had broken no laws, destroyed no documents, and all its operations were legal.

Governments across the world have begun investigating possible financial wrongdoing by the rich and powerful after the leak of more than 11.5 million documents, dubbed the Panama Papers, from the law firm that span four decades.

The papers have revealed financial arrangements of prominent figures, including friends of Russian President Vladimir Putin, relatives of the prime ministers of Britain and Pakistan and of China’s President Xi Jinping, and the president of Ukraine.

There are more details. From Joseph FITSANAKIS of IntelNews in part:

The Süddeutsche Zeitung said on Monday that senior intelligence officials from Rwanda and Colombia are listed as Mossack Fonseca customers, but did not report the names of the individuals. It did, however, single out the late Sheikh Kamal Adham, who was director of Saudi Arabia’s General Intelligence Directorate in the 1960s and 1970s. During his 14-year directorship of the GID, the agency became a leading intermediary between the CIA and Arab intelligence agencies, notably those of Egypt and Iraq. Sheikh Adham was also a personal friend of CIA Director George Bush, who was later elected US president.

According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Sheikh Adham is one of many individuals with close CIA links whose names appear in the Panama Papers. Another is Farhad Azima, an Iranian-born American businessman, who is rumored to have leased aircraft to the CIA in the 1980s. The American intelligence agency is said to have used the aircraft, which belonged to Azima’s Kansas City, Missouri-headquartered Global International Airways, to transport weapons to Iran. The secret transfers were part of what later became known as the Iran-Contra scandal, in which US officials secretly sold weapons to Iran in return for the release of American hostages held by Iran-linked groups in the Middle East. The funds acquired from these weapons sales were then secretly funneled to the Contras, a medley of anti-communist paramilitary groups fighting the Sandinista-led government of Nicaragua.