Category Archives: government fraud spending collusion

Gitmo: Soon to be at 90 Detainees, Then What?

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Control of the released detainees after transfer? Hardly.

Former Guantanamo detainee travels to Argentina, calls for asylum for remaining detainees

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina –  A former Guantanamo detainee who was resettled in Uruguay is asking Argentina to grant asylum for detainees still at the U.S. detention facility.

Abu Wa’el Dhiab wore a Guantanamo-style orange jumpsuit as he told Barricada TV that he believes “the Argentine government could receive the prisoners at Guantanamo here in a humanitarian way.” Calls to the Foreign Ministry seeking comment were not returned.

From the Director of National Intelligence:

Section 307 (a) (2) An assessment of the likelihood that such detainees will engage in terrorism.

Based on trends identified during the past eleven years, we assess that some detainees currently at GTMO will seek to reengage in terrorist or insurgent activities after they are transferred. Transfers to countries with ongoing conflicts and internal instability as well as active recruitment by insurgent and terrorist organizations pose particular problems. While enforcement of transfer conditions may deter reengagement by many former detainees and delay reengagement by others, some detainees who are determined to reengage will do so regardless of any transfer conditions, albeit probably at a lower rate than if they were transferred without conditions.

Section 307 (a) (2) An assessment of the likelihood that such detainees will communicate with persons in terrorist organizations.

Former GTMO detainees routinely communicate with each other, families of other former detainees, and previous associates who are members of terrorist organizations. The reasons for communication span from the mundane (reminiscing about shared experiences) to the nefarious (planning terrorist operations). We assess that some GTMO detainees transferred in the future also will communicate with other former GTMO detainees and persons in terrorist organizations. We do not consider mere communication with individuals or organizations— including other former GTMO detainees—an indicator of reengagement. Rather, the motives, intentions, and purposes of each communication are taken into account when assessing whether the individual has reengaged.

Source: ‘Al Qaeda followers’ among 17 being transferred from Gitmo

FNC: The group of 17 detainees expected to be transferred out of Guantanamo Bay as early as this week includes “multiple bad guys” and “Al Qaeda followers,” a source who has reviewed the list told Fox News.

Little is known publicly about which prisoners are being prepared for transfer, but the Obama administration has notified Congress it plans to ship out 17 detainees – some of whom could be transferred within days.

While the identities of the men are closely held, the source who spoke with Fox News said it includes “multiple bad guys … not taxi drivers and cooks.”

This is a reference to the administration’s transfer of Ibrahim al Qosi to Sudan in 2012. Despite entering a “re-integration program,” the one-time cook for Usama bin Laden has now fled to Yemen, where he is among the leadership of Al Qaeda in Yemen. That transfer is now said to be a source of considerable heartburn for the Obama administration.

As for those on the docket for immediate transfer, the source told Fox News the administration will not identify the detainees until they are relocated in their new home countries — because knowing who they are in advance would create further roadblocks and increase the controversy.

Multiple countries have agreed to take the men, in small groups, and the source said some of the countries were so-called first timers — a reference to the fact those countries had not taken Guantanamo detainees in the past.

The move to clear out 17 detainees is seen as part of the administration’s long-term plan to ultimately shutter the detention camp.

The transfer of 17 prisoners would bring the number of detainees left down to 90 – the bulk of whom cannot be transferred to another country.

Many in Congress, though, fiercely oppose any plan to bring those detainees to the U.S.

President Obama in his year-end news conference justified the closure of the detention camp, claiming “Guantanamo continues to be one of the key magnets for jihadi recruitment.” But the Middle East Media Research Institute, or MEMRI, which tracks jihadist propaganda, said that terrorist groups have moved on from using Guantanamo in their recruitment efforts.

“The topic of Guantanamo prisoners appeared rather frequently in Al-Qaeda’s propaganda in past years,” MEMRI’s Eliot Zweig said. “However, the topic has received little to no attention in the last year or two … Gitmo hasn’t received much attention in official ISIS releases.”

 

U.S. Arms Exports to Mexico Mostly to Blame for Violence

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US arms, exported legally, are behind many violent crimes in Mexico (CHARTS)

 

Mexican military and police authorities are still at war with the country’s drug trafficking organizations. And the fight still isn’t going well. Since 2006, the conflict has generated as many as 164,345 civilian deaths. Experts are still unable to agree if murders are going up or down.

More Mexicans have died violently over the past decade than Afghan or Iraqi civilians over the same period, combined. High-powered weaponry, along with handguns, is playing a key role in driving the violence.

Many commentators assume that arms and ammunition are flooding into the arsenals of drug cartels from illegal dealers spanning the US-Mexican border. There are empirical studies substantiating this claim. Other analysts contend that some military-grade firepower consists of stolen and leftover kit from Central American conflicts of the 1970s and ’80s. They are also partly right.

But the full picture is more complex.

In fact, at least 50 countries have exported military-grade weapons and associated materiel to Mexico over the past five decades —with well over half of them exceeding $1 million in sales over the period. There has been a steady uptick in sales since 2006, and especially since former President Felipe Calderon ratcheted up the drug war.

According to UN customs data compiled by NISAT, a research group, the United States is by far the largest exporter of military arms to Mexico. The sums are not trivial. The US has exported more than $300 million worth of “military style” weapons to Mexican authorities since the 1960s; more than half of those sales have been since the year 2000. Top exporters following the US are Italy, Belgium, France and Israel, some of the world’s largest manufacturers.

These firearms include crew-serviced machine guns, assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, heavy explosives and related munitions, parts and accessories. However, the US and others also sell vast quantities of “civilian-style” weapons, including shotguns, handguns, and related ammunition.

An arms mapping visualization developed by the Igarapé Institute with partners including Google Ideas shows that Mexican imports of all types of weaponry increased steadily from 2006 onward. Moreover, the share of all imports that included military-style weapons shot up from around 10-25 percent a year to 30-50 percent each year during this timeframe.

While many of these weapons are officially destined for the Mexican armed forces and the country’s more than 1,600 federal, state and local police agencies, some of them fall into the hands of cartels and militia. In Mexico, military-style arms are frequently diverted and leaked from official arsenals. In some cases weapons are sent to the wrong customers altogether. For example, a recent high-profile case involved 9,000 firearms shipped illegally to Mexico by a German firm.

Of course, military-issue firearms and ammunition are routinely trafficked across international borders, including from the US. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has traced high-powered rifles and handguns shipped by land, air and sea. One especially controversial operation dubbed Fast and Furious allowed weapons from the US to be smuggled to Mexican cartels for tracking purposes —hundreds were lost en route and linked to subsequent crimes.

Igarapé Institute and University of San Diego research has determined that a considerable proportion of illegally acquired firearms in Mexico were originally sold by federally licensed dealers in the US. Meanwhile, older issue US and Soviet-style weaponry is also trafficked from post-conflict Central American countries, including via El Salvador, Honduras and of course Guatemala.

Military and police stocks in some of these Central American countries were singled out by the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala as the largest source of illegal firearms in the region. Twentieth-century M16s and AK-47s have surfaced in the arsenals of the Juarez, Sinaloa, Zeta and Gulf cartels, though the quantities are comparatively modest.

Making matters more complicated, the Mexican authorities lack a robust marking and tracing system. They have traditionally relied on their US counterparts for background checks on seized weapons. Getting a handle on leaked and trafficked weapons has simply not been a priority of successive governments.

In the past, samples of seized weapons were submitted to the ATF (using eTrace). Extrapolations generated from these assessments suggest that up to 70 percent of recovered firearms were from the US, though these numbers are disputed on both sides of the border.

While internationally supportive of more gun regulation, Mexico is not especially transparent when it comes to reporting on weapons exports, imports or recovery, as the Small Arms Survey arms barometer makes clear. It is also unable to comprehensively get to grips with where illegal guns are coming from.

At least part of the problem is that under Mexican law, all firearms seized by the government must be surrendered to the armed forces within 48 hours. The military is charged with “safeguarding” these arms and is under no compulsion to assist in related law enforcement investigations. The fact that the armed forces may well be one of the key sources of illicit arms is problematic, to say the least.

In the case of the US, ATF officials are required to submit a formal request to the Mexican Attorney General for each and every weapon (with accompanying data on the firearm type/caliber). As a result, most weapons are simply not traced and abusers go unpunished.

The development of a more effective system for tracing the origins of illicit firearms is a priority for both the US and Mexican governments. The current approach is deeply inefficient. If Mexico wants to do more to stop the shooting, it cannot afford to keep asking questions later.

 

Oregon: BLM and the Hammonds

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All is not what it seems much less what both the right and left are reporting with regard to the Hammond family and the stand-off in Burn, Oregon with respect to grazing permits and the Bureau of Land Management.

Click here for an article on the Hammonds in 1994.

The Hammonds agreed to the re-sentencing in court. AGREED! Click here for the court testimony.

Further, the Hammonds have been challenging government for decades and even threatened them with death as well as volunteer firefighters. Click here for an interactive map of the land designations in Oregon.

The full .pdf document is here.

Nearly half of the western United States is owned by the federal government. In recent years, several western states have considered resolutions demanding that the federal government transfer much of this land to state ownership. These efforts are motivated by concerns over federal land management, including restrictions on natural resource development, poor land stewardship, limitations on access, and low financial returns.

This study compares state and federal land management in the West. It examines the revenues and expenditures associated with federal land management and compares them with state trust land management in four western states: Montana, Idaho, New Mexico, and Arizona. The report explains why revenues and expenditures differ between state and federal land agencies and discusses several possible implications of transferring federal lands to the states.



Key Points:

  • The federal government loses money managing valuable natural resources on federal lands, while states generate significant financial returns from state trust lands.
  • The states examined in this study earn an average of $14.51 for every dollar spent on state trust land management. The U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management generate only 73 cents in return for every dollar spent on federal land management.
  • On average, states generate more revenue per dollar spent than the federal government on a variety of land management activities, including timber, grazing, minerals, and recreation.
  • These outcomes are the result of the different statutory, regulatory, and administrative frameworks that govern state and federal lands. States have a fiduciary responsibility to generate revenues from state trust lands, while federal land agencies face overlapping and conflicting regulations and often lack a clear mandate.
  • If federal lands were transferred, states could likely earn much greater revenues than the federal government. However, transfer proponents must consider how land management would have to change in order to generate those revenues under state control.

 

Entire Police Dept. Busted for Laundering Drug Money

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Entire Florida police department busted for laundering millions for international drug cartels

RawStory: The village of Bal Harbour, population 2,513, may have a tiny footprint on the northern tip of Miami Beach, but its police department had grand aspirations of going after international drug traffickers, and making a few million dollars while they were at it.

The Bal Harbour PD and the Glades County Sheriff’s Office set up a giant money laundering scheme with the purported goal of busting drug cartels and stemming the surge of drug dealing going on in the area. But it all fell apart when federal investigators and the Miami-Herald found strange things going on.

The two-year operation, which took in more than $55 million from criminal groups, resulted in zero arrests but netted $2.4 million for the police posing as money launderers. Members of the 12-person task force traveled far and wide to carry out their deals, from Los Angeles to New York to Puerto Rico.

Along the way, the small-town cops got a taste of luxury as they used the money for first-class flights, luxury hotels, Mac computers and submachine guns. Meanwhile, the Bal Harbour PD and Glades County Sheriffs were buying all sorts of fancy new equipment.

Besides these “official” uses of the money, confidential records obtained by the Miami-Herald show that officers withdrew hundreds of thousands of dollars with no record of where the money went.

“They were like bank robbers with badges,” said Dennis Fitzgerald, an attorney and former Drug Enforcement Administration agent who taught undercover tactics for the U.S. State Department. “It had no law enforcement objective. The objective was to make money.”

The operation, which was not fully reported to federal authorities, funneled millions of dollars to overseas criminals and interfered with investigations being carried out on known money launderers.

The latest revelations show that at least 20 people in Venezuela were sent drug money from the Florida cops, including William Amaro Sanchez, the foreign minister under Hugo Chavez and now special assistant to President Nicolas Maduro.

They wired a total of $211,000 to Sanchez, even while the U.S. government was investigating Venezuelan government leaders involved in the drug trade. Instead of reporting their knowledge of Sanchez to federal agencies, the cops went on laundering money, taking their cut, and all the while aiding Sanchez in his machinations, which likely included political corruption.

Four other Venezuelan criminals and smugglers were major recipients of the millions being wired from the Bal Harbour PD and Glades County Sheriff’s Office, including a figure tied to one of the largest drug cartels in the hemisphere.

These actions violated strict federal bans on sending illegal money overseas, and the Florida cops never investigated the backgrounds of the people receiving their laundered drug money.

“I can’t think of a more podunk town than Bal Harbour — not in a bad way. But in the sense that these cops would have otherwise been stopping traffic or shooting radar,” said Ruben Oliva, who has represented alleged narco-traffickers since the 1980s. “In reality they were being launderers. The minute they started doing busts, it would have been over.

“This is like a movie. You’ve got these guys and they’re flying all over. They’re saying, ‘Hey, I’m in the big leagues.’ I’ve seen every kind of law enforcement money-laundering investigations. I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s really one for the ages.”

After the Department of Justice busted the Bal Harbour PD for misspending seized money to pay police salaries, the Miami-Herald began deeper investigations and found a much bigger pool of money that was never noticed by the feds. Soon after that, the ambitious sting operation—which was really just a money-making scheme—began to fall apart.

“The Miami Herald gained unprecedented access to the confidential records of the undercover investigation, reviewing thousands of records including cash pickup reports, emails, DEA reports, bank statements and wire transfers for millions of dollars. The inquiry found:

▪ Police routinely withdrew cash — thousands at a time — totaling $1.3 million from undercover bank accounts, but to this day there are no records to show where the money was spent. “In all my years of law enforcement, I’ve never seen anything like it,” Chief Overton said.

▪ Bal Harbour officials say they cannot find receipts for hundreds of thousands in expenses, including five-star hotel bookings, dinners that ran up to $1,000 and scores of purchases like laptops, iPads, electronic money counters, flower deliveries, and even iTunes downloads.

▪ While posing as launderers, police delivered nearly $20 million to storefront businesses in Miami-Dade to launder the money for drug groups — gathering critical evidence against the business owners — yet took no action against them. Years later, the businesses are still open, some still suspected by federal agents of laundering for the cartels.”

Cash deposits to SunTrust Bank totaling $28 million do not appear anywhere in police records. It’s no coincidence that the operation was launched “at a time law enforcement agencies across Florida were looking to boost their budgets during one of the state’s toughest economic periods.”

“We had to find a revenue stream,” said Duane Pottorff, chief of law enforcement for Glades. “It allowed us to have resources we wouldn’t normally have.”

Federal authorities and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement have launched probes into the Bal Harbour police, which will surely confirm the rampant abuses of power. However, the fact that these types of shady operations, carried out with the help of agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, can occur at all is even more troubling.

Government creates a black market of drugs and blood money through prohibition, then under the War on Drugs it grants itself the power to break the law and get involved in money laundering operations. While the professed goal is to “sting” the bad guys, government rakes in millions upon millions of dollars to further bolster its prohibition and war on drugs.

Muslim Brotherhood in U.S. Gets Millions in Grants

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The Muslim Brotherhood in the United States document is here.

The House Intelligence Committee Testimony on the Muslim Brotherhood is here.

Mosque Linked To Muslim Brotherhood Has Received Millions In Federal Grants

DailyCaller: A Kansas City mosque owned by an Islamic umbrella organization with deep ties to the U.S. arm of the Muslim Brotherhood has received millions of dollars in federal grants over the past several years, according to a federal spending database.

The Islamic Center of Greater Kansas City has received $2,739,891 from the Department of Agriculture since 2010, a Daily Caller analysis has found. The money largely went to the mosque’s Crescent Clinic to provide services through the Women, Infant and Children nutrition program, known as WIC.

The most recent federal payment — in the amount of $327,436 — was handed out Oct. 1.

Property records show the mosque is owned by the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), which acts as a financial holding company for Islamic organizations. It offers sharia-compliant financial products to Muslim investors, operates Islamic schools and owns more than 300 other mosques throughout the U.S.

Founded in 1973 as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood-backed Muslim Students Association, NAIT’s most controversial connection is to the 2007 and 2008 Holy Land Foundation terror financing cases. Along with other Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations like the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), NAIT was named a co-conspirator in the federal case but was not indicted.

At the Holy Land Foundation trial, evidence was presented that ISNA diverted funds from the accounts it held with NAIT to institutions linked to Hamas and to Mousa Abu Marzook, a senior Hamas leader.

Federal prosecutors introduced evidence in the case that “established that ISNA and NAIT were among those organizations created by the U.S.-Muslim Brotherhood.” Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of checks drawn from ISNA’s account and deposited in the Holy Land Foundation’s account with NAIT were made payable to “the Palestinian Mujahadeen,” which is the original name for Hamas’ military wing.

While Hamas was designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. government in 1997 and is considered the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, the larger Muslim Brotherhood is not itself designated as a terrorist group.

NAIT has other ties to the Holy Land Foundation case. Its newly-appointed executive director, Salah Obeidallah, was a founding member and former president of the Islamic Center of Passaic County in Paterson, N.J.

In the 1990s, the imam at that mosque was Mohammad El-Mezain, a founding member of the Holy Land Foundation who was sentenced to 15 years in prison for helping fund Hamas. Obeidallah has said that he was not aware of El-Mezain’s terror funding activities.

In being owned by NAIT, the Kansas City organization is in company with numerous mosques with ties to known terrorists, terror sympathizers and fundamentalist Islamists.

Purportedly backed by money from Saudi Arabia and supporting a fundamentalist branch of Sunni Islam known as Wahhabism, NAIT holds the deed to the Islamic Society of Boston, which operates the mosque attended by Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the so-called Boston Marathon bombers.

It also controls the Islamic Center of San Diego, which was attended by Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, two al-Qaeda members who helped fly American Flight 77 into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.

According to a 2002 Newsweek investigation, members of the San Diego mosque helped the two terrorists obtain housing, driver’s licences and social security numbers. They claimed not to have known about the men’s terror plans.

NAIT also owns the Dar Al-Hijrah mosque in Fairfax Co., Va. — a known hotbed of terrorist activity. Al-Qaeda recruiter Anwar al-Awlaki served as imam at that location in 2001 and 2002. He was killed by an American drone in Yemen in 2011.

The Islamic Center of Greater Kansas City has its own loose links to terrorist activities. The mosque made news earlier this year when it held the funeral for Nadir Soofi, one of the two jihadis who attempted to pull off a terrorist attack in Garland, Tex. Soofi, who was 34, and his accomplice, 30-year-old Elton Simpson, opened fire outside of an art exhibit featuring cartoons of Muhammad, but were killed by a security guard.

Both Soofi and Simpson attended the Islamic Community Center in Phoenix, which land deeds show is owned by NAIT.

That particular mosque posted $100,000 bond for Simpson following his 2010 arrest for lying to FBI agents about his plans to travel to Somalia to join a terrorist group. Simpson was given three years probation in that case.

The Islamic Center of Greater Kansas City has also hosted Imam Khalid Yasin, an American-born convert to Islam, who has publicly supported sharia law and claimed that homosexuals should receive the death penalty.

As a May 2010 Yahoo! message board post shows, Yasin visited the Islamic Center of Greater Kansas City and other area mosques that month to hold a series of lectures and workshops about Islam.

That was nearly two years after Yasin touted the virtues of sharia law and capital punishment in a speech at a British mosque. Full article here.