Operation Choke Point Overlord

Posted on November 10, 2015November 10, 2015 by Denise Simon

A disgusting program concocted by Eric Holder, former Attorney General was launched called Operation Choke Point. Several Federal agencies are part of this program where government intimidates private business where agency deem them high risk. Banks then are told to no longer do business with them.

Freedom and liberty is threatened.

The current Attorney General, Loretta Lynch is still operating the program and private businesses across the country continue to be squeezed. Across a spectrum of industries, they include ammunition and weapons companies, fireworks manufacturers and payday lenders. The FDIC and the Securities and Exchange Commission are part of the operation.

Senate Judiciary Committee Considers Nomination of Operation Choke Point Overlord

Fairfax, VA -(AmmoLand.com)- On Wednesday; Nov. 4, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the nomination of Stuart F. Delery for the position of associate attorney general of the United States.

If confirmed, Delery would become the third-ranking official in the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), behind the attorney general and the deputy attorney general. Delery has been serving as “acting” associate attorney general since September 2014.

The NRA is seriously troubled by Delery’s nomination because of his supervisory role over DOJ’s scandalous Operation Choke Point (OPC). Fortunately, committee members had some tough questions for him on this point. Delery’s unconvincing denials and platitudes in response demonstrate that he does not take seriously the harm OPC, whether intentionally or not, caused to legitimate businesses. The fact that the Obama administration continues to push his nomination shows that it is more interested in rewarding ideological and political fidelity than performance in the pursuit of justice.

The functions of DOJ, however, are far too important, and the department’s powers too great, to make politics its main function.

Delery himself had key oversight responsibility for OPC. He approved the operation and its tactics. He also individually approved the investigative subpoenas that resulted in various banks ceasing business with certain industries wholesale, rather than trying to separate good actors from bad within those industries. Attached to the subpoenas that Delery approved were FDIC guidance materials that included a list of supposedly “high risk” merchants and activities. These included sales of ammunition and firearms. This same list appeared in a PowerPoint presentation given in September 2013 to bank examiners at a workshop conducted by officials from the FDIC, Department of Justice, and Office of Comptroller of the Treasury.

Whatever the true intent of OPC (and DOJ has done nothing to earn the benefit of the doubt on that score), the effect of the government’s tactics was clear: banks were interpreting DOJ’s actions as directives not to deal with certain types of legal businesses. As a result, numerous gun shops and manufacturers lost long-established banking relationships or were refused those relationships in the first place.

Questioners at Wednesday’s hearings pressed Delery hard on these facts. In his opening statement, Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) called OPC a “stunning and dangerous” use of government power.

He noted that the operation was “sold to the public as merely an initiative to protect consumers from predatory payday lending practices.” Nevertheless, he continued, “we now know based on internal DOJ documents that from the outset it was specifically designed to prey on the banking industry`s fear of civil and criminal liability, with the stated goal of shutting down legal businesses” disfavored by the Obama Administration.

He also criticized the broad net the program cast over the banking industry: “three prosecutions out of 60 subpoenas is hardly a justification for the scattergun approach the Department undertook.”

Sen. Grassley went on to confront Delery with documentation that Delery was aware of the negative affect OPC had on lawful industries. DOJ’s response to these developments was to rationalize that if individual businesses were operating lawfully, they should be able to establish that fact with the banks. Yet the banks themselves had in many cases already made the decision that case-by-case determinations invited more scrutiny and pressure from DOJ than they were worth to the bank.

The toughest questioning, however, came from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). Cruz offered a blistering summary of the program and confronted Delery with examples of actual businesses that had lost banking relationships, not because of poor performance, but because the banks had decided to sever all relationships with the firearm industry. Delery insisted that no firearm businesses had even been investigated or prosecuted.

“Choke Point,” Cruz shot back, “was all about using government power to intimidate banks to cut off their money even though they weren’t violating the laws.” “The program as it pertained to firearm businesses,” Cruz continued, “was not targeted on evidence of fraud but based on an antipathy of the Obama Justice Department to the exercise of the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms by American citizens.”

Delery uniformly denied any intention to use DOJ’s authority to target lawful businesses. In essence, he blamed the banks themselves for misunderstanding DOJ’s intentions. Yet when bank after bank came to the same supposedly unintended conclusion, DOJ did not change course. Only when Congress itself stepped in to investigate DOJ’s tactics did the department issue public “clarifications” of its objectives to target specific fraudulent actors and not entire industries per se.

By that time, however, the damage to lawful industries had been done. Reports from the field, moreover, indicate that these industries continue to suffer the residual suspicion of financial service providers, notwithstanding DOJ’s more recent guidance on the professed scope of the program. For many banks, once burned means twice shy.

One of the more ridiculous aspects of Wednesday’s hearing was the repeated insistence of Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) that NRA “agrees” that OPC did not intend to target lawful businesses. To “substantiate” this point, he quoted from an alert we issued on May 2, 2014, as rumors were swirling about OPC in the media.

We stated at that point that we had “not substantiated … an overarching federal conspiracy to suppress lawful commerce in firearms and ammunition, or that the federal government has an official policy of using financial regulators to drive firearm or ammunition companies out of business.”

We cautioned, however, that “NRA will continue to monitor developments concerning Operation Choke Point and report on any significant activity of concern to gun owners.”

We also noted, “The Obama administration’s record … certainly provides no reason for confidence.”

Three weeks later, we posted an update to that story in which we specifically stated, “At the time of the [May 2] report, we were unaware of a ‘smoking gun’ to tie [banks’ decisions to drop or refuse firearms industry business] back to pressure from regulatory authorities,” and noted, “That may be changing.”

That second report went on to detail additional evidence on OPC that had since come to light, as well ongoing investigative efforts.

Since that time, NRA has reported on OPC extensively, including here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Anyone who read these reports could not fail to understand that NRA has been gravely concerned about OPC for well over a year and that whatever OPC’s original justification might have been, DOJ was willing to accept or even embrace its negative affect on the firearm and ammunition industries. Yet Sen. Franken cherry-picked one phrase from an early report to falsely portray NRA’s current position and view of the matter. Certainly, this sort of duplicity does not serve the senator’s integrity or the cause of Delery’s nomination well.

Delery’s nomination has not yet been scheduled for a vote. Based on his unconvincing performance at the hearing, however, and continued unanswered questions about the true origins, design, and scope of OPC, NRA remains deeply troubled by this nomination. America deserves better than senior DOJ officials who are merely tools for the political views and schemes of an ideologically-driven administration.

To reward such officials for this behavior with promotions is clearly beyond the pale.

About the NRA-ILA:

Established in 1975, the Institute for Legislative Action (ILA) is the “lobbying” arm of the National Rifle Association of America. ILA is responsible for preserving the right of all law-abiding individuals in the legislative, political, and legal arenas, to purchase, possess and use firearms for legitimate purposes as guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The Billion Dollar Fleece of Taxpayers at DHS

Posted on November 9, 2015November 9, 2015 by Denise Simon

There are defined dollars assigned to projects, when there is no enough money or the timeline for completion is missed, who says stop and inspects why? What have members of Congress been told, if anything? Who spends a billion dollars with no results? Sure, this Federal government. The same playbook applied to Obamacare and countless other government operations. Where is the outrage and will this too head to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee for investigation?

It should be noted that the Ellis Island did this successfully as did Ancestry.com.

A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just 1 is online

WaPo: Heaving under mountains of paperwork, the government has spent more than $1 billion trying to replace its antiquated approach to managing immigration with a system of digitized records, online applications and a full suite of nearly 100 electronic forms.

A decade in, all that officials have to show for the effort is a single form that’s now available for online applications and a single type of fee that immigrants pay electronically. The 94 other forms can be filed only with paper.

This project, run by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, was originally supposed to cost a half-billion dollars and be finished in 2013. Instead, it’s now projected to reach up to $3.1 billion and be done nearly four years from now, putting in jeopardy efforts to overhaul the nation’s immigration policies, handle immigrants already seeking citizenship and detect national security threats, according to documents and interviews with former and current federal officials.

From the start, the initiative was mismanaged, the records and interviews show. Agency officials did not complete the basic plans for the computer system until nearly three years after the initial $500 million contract had been awarded to IBM, and the approach to adopting the technology was outdated before work on it began.

By 2012, officials at the Department of Homeland Security, which includes USCIS, were aware that the project was riddled with hundreds of critical software and other defects. But the agency nonetheless began to roll it out, in part because of pressure from Obama administration officials who considered it vital for their plans to overhaul the nation’s immigration policies, according to the internal documents and interviews.

Only three of the agency’s scores of immigration forms have been digitized — and two of these were taken offline after they debuted because nearly all of the software and hardware from the original system had to be junked.

The sole form now available for electronic filing is an application for renewing or replacing a lost “green card” — the document given to legal permanent residents. By putting this application online, the agency aimed to bypass the highly inefficient system in which millions of paper applications are processed and shuttled among offices. But government documents show that scores of immigrants who applied online waited up to a year or never received their new cards, disrupting their plans to work, attend school and travel.

“You’re going on 11 years into this project, they only have one form, and we’re still a paper-based agency,’’ said Kenneth Palinkas, former president of the union that represents employees at the immigration agency. “It’s a huge albatross around our necks.’’

DHS officials acknowledge the setbacks but say the government is well on the way to automating the immigration service, which processes about 8 million applications a year. The department has scrapped the earlier technology and development method and is now adopting a new approach relying in part on cloud computing.

“In 2012, we made some hard decisions to turn the Transformation Program around using the latest industry best practices and approaches, instead of simply scratching it and starting over,’’ said Shin Inouye, a spokesman for Citizenship and Immigration Services. “We took a fresh start — a fix that required an overhaul of the development process — from contracting to development methodology to technology.’’

“Since making these changes, we have been able to develop and deploy a new system that is able to process about 1.2 million benefit requests out of USCIS’s total annual work volume,” Inouye added. “Our goals remain to improve operations, increase efficiency, and prepare for any changes to our immigration laws. Based on our recent progress, we are confident we are moving in the right direction.”

Other DHS officials emphasized that if Congress passes immigration reform in the near future, they would have an electronic system that could accommodate any significant changes, including a surge in demand from immigrants seeking legal status.

Until then, immigrants and their lawyers say they will remain hugely frustrated by the government’s archaic, error-plagued system. Processing immigration applications now often involves shipping paper documents across the country, and delays are legend. A single missing or misplaced form can set back an approval by months.

“It’s shameful that they’ve been on this for a decade and haven’t been able to get a working system in place,’’ said Vic Goel, an immigration lawyer in Reston, Va., who has followed the computerization project as a liaison for the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Online forms get pulled

When the electronic immigration system began in May 2012, it was hailed as “a significant milestone in our agency’s history” by the USCIS Director Alejandro Mayorkas, who is now the deputy secretary of homeland security.

The first form that went live was intended for foreigners who were in the United States on certain types of visas who wanted to renew their non-immigrant status.

But only a fraction of applicants ever used that form before the agency took it offline, after officials decided to abandon the initial technology and development method and move toward a cloud-based system. Some officials inside DHS said the system should never have been launched at all because of reports that it was suffering from so many technical errors.

The second form, released in 2013, didn’t fare much better. It was designed to allow a certain group of foreigners — those wanting to immigrate to the United States and invest in a business — to apply electronically. Only about 80 people used the online form, DHS officials said. More than 10,000 others opted for old-fashioned paper. It was also pulled.

The third form, which debuted last year, is the one that would allow permanent residents to renew or replace their green cards online. In nearly 200 cases, applicants did not receive their cards or had to wait up to a year, despite multiple requests, according to a June report from the USCIS ombudsman.

The agency also hoped to make it possible for immigrants to pay fees online. There are more than 40 kinds of filing fees that immigrants pay to the government with their applications. As of now, however, only one can be paid online — by those who immigrate to the United States as lawful permanent residents. And even this limited electronic payment system has encountered major problems, such as resistance from immigrants who have trouble because they may not have computers or bank accounts.

A series of government reports has skewered the online immigration system, named ELIS after Ellis Island, even after the old technology was scrapped and officials were scrambling to move to the new cloud-based approach. These studies have found that it is slow, confusing and inefficient for immigrants and government employees alike.

A report last year from the DHS inspector general’s office said it sometimes took up to 150 clicks for employees to navigate the system’s various complex features and open documents — and that the system lacked functions as basic as a usable search engine. Internal DHS evaluations have warned of “critical engineering uncertainties” and other difficulties.

“It’s incredibly slow to use the few forms they put online,’’ said Goel, the immigration lawyer. “Most immigration lawyers have concluded the system is half-baked.’’

‘It wasn’t going to work’

Government watchdogs have repeatedly blamed the mammoth problems on poor management by DHS, and in particular by the immigration agency.

When the project began, DHS was only two years old, cobbled together after the Sept. 11 attacks from myriad other government agencies, and the department was still reeling. “There was virtually no oversight back then,’’ a former federal official said. “DHS was like the Wild West on big acquisitions.”

The Government Accountability Office has blasted the immigration service for shoddy planning, saying the agency awarded the IBM contract “prior to having a full understanding of requirements and resources needed to execute the program.” As a result, basic planning documents were incomplete or unreliable, including cost estimates and schedules. The basic requirements for the project, the report said, were not completed until 2011 — nearly three years after the IBM contract was awarded.

IBM had as many as 500 people at one time working on the project. But the company and agency clashed. Agency officials, for their part, held IBM responsible for much of the subsequent failure, documents show.

The company’s initial approach proved especially controversial. Known as “Waterfall,” this approach involved developing the system in relatively long, cascading phases, resulting in a years-long wait for a final product. Current and former federal officials acknowledged in interviews that this method of carrying out IT projects was considered outdated by 2008. “The Waterfall method has not been successful for 40 years,” said a current federal official involved in the project, who was not an authorized spokesperson and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

An IBM spokesman declined to address the criticisms, saying only that the company’s work on Transformation concluded in May.

By 2012, the system’s fundamental flaws — including frequent computer crashes and bad software code — were apparent to officials involved with the project and, according to one of them, and it was clear that “it wasn’t going to work.”

But killing the project wasn’t really an option, according to officials involved at the time. President Obama was running for reelection and was intent on pushing an ambitious immigration reform program in his second term. A workable electronic system would be vital.

“There was incredible pressure over immigration reform,” a second former official said. “No one wanted to hear the system wasn’t going to work. It was like, ‘We got some points on the board, we can go back and fix it.’”

Delays and lost papers

Immigration reform never made it out of Congress, but it could resurface after the presidential election next year. If it does, and if it involves possible citizenship or legal status for the 11.3 million immigrants who are in the country illegally, the policy would flood the government with millions of complicated new applications.

“Oh, God help us,’’ said Harry Hopkins, a former immigration services official who worked on the Transformation project. “If there is immigration reform, they are going to be overwhelmed.’’

The project’s failures already have daily consequences for millions of immigrants who are in the country legally. Immigration lawyers say the current system leads to lost applications, months-long delays and errors that cause further delays. Immigrants miss deadlines for benefits, meaning they lose everything from jobs and mortgages to travel opportunities.

Luke Bellocchi, an immigration lawyer and former deputy ombudsman at Citizenship and Immigration Services, said he has handled at least 100 cases of lost applications in the past few years, mostly for green cards.

“No one knows where these applications are,” he said. “It’s an absolute nightmare.’’

Another concern is national security. DHS officials said they are confident that the current paper-based system is not putting the nation at risk. But others, like Palma Yanni, a D.C. immigration lawyer and past president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, are dubious.

“If there are some bad apples in there who should not get a green card, who are terrorists who want to do us harm, how on earth are they going to find these people if they’re sending mountains of paper immigration files all over the United States?’’ Yanni asked.

United States Ranks #3 in Refugee Destinations

Posted on November 9, 2015November 9, 2015 by Denise Simon

From the UN: The current refugee crisis arising from civil upheaval in the Middle East and Africa has caused over 4.1 million people to flee Syria alone since 2011. While the majority of asylum seekers in the region initially flee to neighboring countries (more than a quarter of the population resident in Lebanon is Syrian) most aspire to establish refugee status in Europe.

Despite the European Union’s Dublin Treaty, which states that an asylum seeker must apply for asylum in their country of first entry into the union, many are moving north to places that promise higher economic chances. At the top of their list: Germany, which expects to receive 1.5 million asylum seekers in 2015. This recent influx has resulted in diverse reactions in the European political and social spheres. Photographs of fences erected around Hungary and Austria’s border to Slovenia, and Hungarian camerawoman tripping a man fleeing with his son evidence the exclusionary sentiment present on the continent, supported by growing right wing movements.

And yet some countries and politicians have insisted that they can and will accommodate large numbers of refugees.

What makes a country a ‘good’ country for refugee resettlement, fairly assuming their burden in the global community? Here are four countries on three continents that both quantitatively and qualitatively stand out.

With as many refugees arriving in Europe last month than all of last year, this question of where they can and should resettle is all the more urgent.

1)   Germany. The huge migration of refugees seeking asylum in Germany in autumn of 2015 has dominated the news for months. Many believe that this sudden influx arose from rumors spread through co-nationals living in Germany that refugees would encounter both physical and economic security, if they made it to this EU leader. Angela Merkel made headlines with her strong position in favor of processing the huge numbers of refugees. “If Europe fails on the question of refugees, then it won’t be the Europe we wished for.” German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizere characterized the influx as “challenging but not overwhelming.” Germany now expects 1.5 million asylum applications this year alone, the highest in Europe. Last year, Germany accepted 40,000 applications, granting asylum to more individuals than any other European country.

2)   Sweden. It is important to discern between countries that process and temporarily provide residence to, and those that actually recognize large numbers of asylum seekers (the above case of Germany does both). When considering the total accepted asylum applications in relation to the overall country population, Sweden tops the charts. Sweden has historically accepted refugees from across the globe, beginning with those fleeing authoritarian rule in Chile during the 1970s. In 2013, the Swedish Migration Board granted Syrian refugees permanent residence in Sweden. In Sweden, the rights granted to refugees on account of this permanent status—immediate capacity to work, choosing place of residence and family reunification—are notable and vital for quality of life.

3)   The United States. Influenced by its political and military position regarding conflict in Syria, the U.S. has not favorably made the news on the current refugee crisis, offering to resettle only approximately 10,000 Syrian refugees. Yet looking holistically at its system reveals a sunnier picture of U.S. refugee policy. The United States permanently resettles more refugees than any other country in the world, historically taking half of all applications received via the UN Refugee Agency. Last year, this amounted to about 70,000 refugees worldwide who, for the most part, were living in limbo in the country to which they fled. The USA may not be a viable option for Syrian refugees, but large numbers of refugees from elsewhere are routinely resettled in the USA.

4)   Brazil. Comprehensively evaluating policies though a survey rating refugees’ actual access to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, as well as national human rights legislation, the World Refugee Survey 2013 grades countries based on refoulement/physical protection; detention/access to courts; freedom of movement and residence; and right to earn a livelihood. The only country reciving an “A” grade in all categories is Brazil. Additionally, the reciprocal entry policy between Brazil and numerous African countries allows asylum seekers to circumvent dangerous routes and smuggling often used by those attempting to reach the United States or Europe. Brazil, whose little known refugee system may not excel quantitatively (although asylum requests have exploded from a mere 560 in 2010 to 12,000 in 2014), excels qualitatively in its refugee resettlement policies.

Meanwhile, who is among those refugees?

Al Qaeda Terror Boss Discovered On Migrant Boat, Authorities ‘Tried To Hide News’

A convicted terrorist has been caught trying to smuggle himself into Europe by posing as an asylum seeker, in a stark event proving correct those who warned of terrorists taking advantage of the European Union’s lax border controls.

BreitbartLondon: Ben Nasr Mehdi, a Tunisian who was first arrested in Italy in 2007 and sentenced to seven years imprisonment for plotting terror attacks with an Islamic State-linked group, was caught trying to re-enter the country last month.

Authorities discovered him among 200 migrants who were rescued at sea and taken to the island of Lampedusa. Although he gave a false name, migration officers identified him through finger print records, the Independent reports.

German channel n-tv claims the Italian government initially tried to hide the story to avoid “panic” and “scare tactics”. The news did not emerge until several days after Mehdi had been detained last week.

Mehdi was then interrogated for several days before being deported back to Tunisia, where he was handed over to local police.

The revelation will likely add to fears that Islamist terrorists are using the migrant crisis as a means to enter Europe.

In April, UKIP leader Nigel Farage told the European Parliament that terrorists would try to exploit the crisis. He told MEPs: “When ISIS say they want to flood our continent with half a million Islamic extremists they mean it, and there is nothing in [the Common European Asylum Policy] that will stop them.

“I fear we face a direct threat to our civilisation if we allow large numbers of people from that war torn region into Europe.”

The following month, Italian authorities arrested Abdel Majid Touil, a Moroccan accused of being involved in a terror attack on the Bardo museum in Tunisia. He had smuggled himself into Italy on a migrant boat in February.

Italian Interior Minister Angelino Alfano has until now insisted there is no evidence that Islamist terrorists are smuggling themselves into the country among the thousands of migrants, but his ministry has admitted that Ben Nasr Mehdi is exceptionally dangerous.

When police arrested him in 2007, they found explosive detonators, poisons and guerrilla warfare manuals. Prosecutors said he had been part of a group that was setting up militant cells that had recruited potential suicide bombers.

Authorities intercepted phone calls in which he indicated he had supplied instructions and contacts to terrorists in Damascus, thus marking him out as a senior operative.

European leaders are becoming increasingly worried about the potential terror threat from the migrant crisis. Last month, German Interior Minister Thomas de Mazière said his country had become a “focus of international terrorism” thanks to migration. NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg has also expressed similar fears.

New Gitmo West, Colorado Rockies

Posted on November 7, 2015November 7, 2015 by Denise Simon

Where is your voice on this? Where is the outrage?

There is law in place where Guantanamo detainees cannot be moved to the Continental United States, but as usual Barack Obama has a pen and will release his plan this week to close the detention center and move detainees to Colorado.

Secretary of Defense Ash Carter just returned from a long trip to Asia and he made a stop today at the Reagan Library to deliver a speech in an all day forum on national defense. He never said a single word on the topic of closing Guantanamo Bay.

In part from WSJ: Mr. Obama’s inability to negotiate honestly with the legislature is a hallmark of his Presidency. More damaging is the precedent he is setting by making major policy changes with no more than a wave of his executive hand. Press reports note that Administration lawyers are working on legal justifications for the Gitmo order. Decision first, the law later.
Another day at the office for a progressive President intent on reducing the legislative branch to a nullity. For the record, the National Defense Authorization Act this year contains an explicit congressional ban on transferring detainees to the U.S. through 2016.

Pentagon to release Guantanamo detainee relocation plan, as Obama pressed ahead with closure

FNC: The Pentagon is expected to release a plan next week on President Obama’s years-long effort to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center that suggests a Colorado prison dubbed “the Alcatraz of the Rockies” as one suitable site to relocate expected life-long detainees, Obama administration officials say.

Obama made a campaign promise in his 2008 White House bid to close the facility, arguing the move would be in the United States’ best financial, national security and foreign policy interests and in the name of justice — considering some of the detainees have been held for nearly nine years without trial or sentencing.

However, critics of the promise, including many Republicans, fear transferring detainees to the U.S. mainland as part of an overall closure plan poses too much of a homeland security risk. They also say the president has yet to submit a closure plan and have been critical of the administration recently allowing some known terrorists to return to the Middle East.

The Florence, Colo., prison is among seven U.S. facilities in Colorado, Kansas and South Carolina being considered.

The Pentagon plan represents a last-gasp effort by the administration to convince staunch opponents in Congress that dangerous detainees who can’t be transferred safely to other countries should be housed in a U.S.-based prison.

The United States opened the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks to get suspected terrorists off the battlefield.

Congressional Republicans have been able to stop Obama from closing the facility by imposing financial and other restrictions.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said this week that the administration is trying “very hard” to transfer 53 more detainees, among the 112 remaining, before the end of the year.

The rest are either facing trial by military commission or the government has determined that they are too dangerous to release but are not facing charges.

Any decision to select a U.S. facility would require congressional approval — something U.S. lawmakers say is unlikely. However, Earnest also suggested that Obama has not ruled out the possibility of using an executive order to close the facility.

The Pentagon plan makes no recommendations on which of the seven sites is preferred and provides no rankings, according to administration officials.

A Pentagon assessment team reviewed the sites in recent months and detailed their advantages and disadvantages. They include locations, costs for renovations and construction, the ability to house troops and hold military commission hearings, and health care facilities.

Colorado’s Centennial Correctional Facility has advantages that could outweigh its disadvantages, according to officials. But no details were available and no conclusions have been reached. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The Florence, Colo., facility already holds convicted terrorists, including Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and Zacarias Moussaoui, one of the conspirators of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

To approve a transfer, Defense Secretary Ash Carter must conclude that the detainees will not return to terrorism or the battlefield upon release and that there is a host country willing to take them and guarantee they will secure them.

Arizona Sen. John McCain is among the congressional Republicans who have asked for an administration plan for the shutdown of Guantanamo. And the Pentagon’s assessment team visits over the last few months were part of the effort to provide options for the relocation of Guantanamo detainees.

“I’ve asked for six and a half years for this administration to come forward with a plan — a plan that we could implement in order to close Guantanamo. They have never come forward with one and it would have to be approved by Congress,” McCain said this week.

The facilities reviewed by the assessment team were the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks and Midwest Joint Regional Corrections Facility at Leavenworth, Kansas; the Consolidated Naval Brig, Charleston, South Carolina; the Federal Correctional Complex, which includes the medium, maximum and supermax facilities in Florence, Colorado; and the Colorado State Penitentiary II in Canon City, Colorado, also known as the Centennial Correctional Facility.

Colorado Republican Sen. Cory Gardner made clear this week that he opposes any move to relocate detainees to his state.

“I will not sit idly by while the president uses political promises to imperil the people of Colorado by moving enemy combatants from Cuba, Guantanamo Bay, to my state of Colorado,” he said at a Capitol Hill news conference.

He also expressed concerns about the potential impact of such a move on the state’s judicial system and concerns about detainees potentially have to transported from the rural facility to downtown Denver to the federal courthouse for a hearing.

McCain and others have said that an executive order to shutter Guantanamo would face fierce opposition, including efforts to reverse the decision through funding mechanisms.

The prison at Guantanamo presents a particularly confrontational replay of that strategy. Obama would likely have to argue that the restrictions imposed by Congress are unconstitutional, though he has abided by them for years. The dispute could set off a late-term legal battle with Republicans in Congress over executive power, potentially in the height of a presidential campaign.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

No Govt Agency Exempt from Fleecing Taxpayer Dollars

Posted on November 7, 2015November 7, 2015 by Denise Simon

We don’t even know what we don’t know and further what we think we know, we don’t really know either.

There is not a government agency throughout the entire Federal system that is not teeming with waste, fraud or abuse of our taxpayer dollars. One would easily be in the constant state of shuttering when it comes to contemplating the billions that go unaccounted for.

The mission of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee headed previously by Darryl Issa and presently with Jason Chaffetz attempts in earnest to uncover and investigate and perhaps refer for prosecution those in government guilty of malfeasance, yet the co-chair of the committee, Elijah Cummings leads his side to obstruct the duty of the committee at every turn. In fact Cummings and his crowd never find any dereliction of duty, corruption or fraud.

Just consider, Fast and Furious, Secret Service prostitution scandal, Benghazi, Planned Parenthood, EPA, IRS and Operation Choke Point for some examples.

The job of accountability goes to a particular division at the Department of Justice where all the Inspector Generals are deployed to investigate and determine money success of programs. Inspector Generals also work outside the scope of the DoJ, with not much more comprehensive success.

The IG’s are the watchdogs and while most do stellar work, others not so much and still others are completely stonewalled when it comes to gaining access to receipts, contracts, agreements and so on.

DailyCaller:Federal watchdogs are urging Congress to make sure all inspectors general, not just those at Department of Justice, have unfettered access to all official documents their respective agencies produce.

The Council of Inspectors General for Integrity and Efficiency fired off a letter to top members of Congress Thursday encouraging Congress to reiterate through new legislation that the 1978 Inspector General Act already entitles IGs to all agency records.

The letter comes two days after the Justice Department’s Office of Legislative Affairs asked Congress to pass legislation specifying that only the DOJ IG is entitled to all department records. Previously, the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel denied the department’s IG access to wiretapped communications or grand jury testimony.

But the proposed fix is too little, too late, for an IG community where other federal watchdogs are facing similar access problems.

As yet another example where dollars add up, most recently is a report on FEMA.

FEMA can’t account for up to $4.56M Sandy fuel funds

FNC: The Federal Emergency Management Agency can’t adequately account for more than 70 percent of the money spent on fuel for New York in the aftermath of superstorm Sandy, a federal audit released on Friday found.

FEMA spent $6.37 million for 1.7 million gallons of fuel as a gasoline shortage crippled the New York City area after the October 2012 storm, according to the audit from the Office of Inspector General at the Department of Homeland Security.

But the audit found “incomplete and questionable” documentation for $4.56 million of that spending. Additionally, $1.81 million worth of fuel went to recipients outside the scope of work that FEMA established for the crisis, the audit found. As a result, FEMA can’t be sure any of that fuel went to approved power restoration or emergency public transportation work in New York, the audit said.

Officials at FEMA agreed with all of the report’s recommendations, which include recovering lost funds and devising new procedures, according to the audit.

A spokeswoman for FEMA said: “FEMA concurred with all of the OIG recommendations for rectifying the issues identified in their recent report and improving mission assignment effectiveness going forward. FEMA takes seriously its duty to ensure fiscal responsibility during disaster relief operations, and has been reimbursed by New York for more than $2.1 million.”

New York state collected the $1.8 million, plus interest, from the retail gas stations that were the wrongful recipients of the fuel and reimbursed FEMA, the Dept. of Homeland Security said. Sandy, one of the most powerful Atlantic storms on record, knocked out power to gas stations, caused widespread flooding and cut gasoline-supply lines from ports.

Gasoline shortages emerged as one of the biggest problems for the region after the storm passed. At the time, the federal government estimated that only one-third of gas stations in the metropolitan area had fuel for sale, based on a survey that found more than half were shut down.

FEMA stepped up to provide fuel for urgent power restoration and transportation needs.

The unaccounted fuel deliveries occurred because FEMA didn’t comply with federal regulations requiring the agency provide proper documentation accounting for its work, the audit found.

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