Category Archives: Presidential campaign

U.S. refugee agency put Central American kids at risk

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The problem was identified by the GAO in 2012.

Even more terrifying is this report:

PROPOSED REFUGEE ADMISSIONS

FOR

FISCAL YEAR 2015

REPORT TO THE CONGRESS

 

U.S. refugee agency put Central American kids at risk, GAO report says

WashingtonPost: The government agency tasked with placing thousands of Central American children into communities while they await immigration court decisions has no system for tracking the children, does not keep complete case files and has allowed contractors to operate with little oversight, according to a report released Monday by the Government Accountability Office.

“Based on the findings in this report, it’s no wonder that we are hearing of children being mistreated or simply falling off the grid once they are turned over to sponsors,” said Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa). “The Obama administration isn’t adequately monitoring the grantees or sponsors whom we are entrusting to provide basic care for unaccompanied children.”

Three senators — Grassley, Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) — asked the GAO in October to review policies of the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement. The agency provides shelter for unaccompanied minors fleeing violence in Central America and identifies sponsors to care for them while they await hearings in immigration courts. More than 125,000 unaccompanied minors from Central America have been caught at the U.S.-Mexico border since 2011. The 64-page report is being released one day before the Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to hear testimony from Obama administration officials about their handling of the children.

“Their records are incomplete, they are not appropriately checking in on the facilities that house the children, and they don’t even have a dedicated system to follow up on the children once they’ve been placed with sponsors,” Grassley said.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services, has come under criticism in recent weeks for its handling of a number of cases involving unaccompanied minors.

Advocates for unaccompanied minors say that the refu­gee office was overwhelmed by the surge of children crossing the border in 2014 but that the system is a much better alternative than longer detention for vulnerable children.

On Jan. 28, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations issued a report focusing on cases in which Central American children were victims of abuse by their sponsors, including one case where the agency released several Guatemalan teenagers to labor traffickers who forced them to work long hours at an Ohio egg farm for as little as $2 a day.

“We agree with the GAO’s recommendations, which is why we’ve already implemented some of them and are in the process of implementing the rest,” said Andrea Helling, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services. “This is part of the process of improving the program to care for the children who come into our custody.”

The GAO found that children’s case files were often incomplete, making it difficult for investigators to determine whether they had received proper care such as group counseling and clinical services. Investigators reviewed 27 randomly selected children’s case files. None of them contained all of the required documents.

The report also criticized the agency’s oversight of nonprofit groups that it pays to operate shelters for the children and locate sponsors. In 2014, the agency implemented a new monitoring process, requiring site visits every two years. However, investigators found that the agency didn’t complete the site visits in 2014 and 2015. In 2014, agency staff members visited 12 of 133 sites. By August 2015, they visited 22 of 140 sites.

These monitoring visits revealed several problems at the nonprofit-run shelters. At one site, agency workers discovered that the facility didn’t give children the proper amount of medication, leading them to accidentally overdose.

Helling said the Office of Refugee Resettlement is aware of the issues and has hired additional staff and implemented new policies to ensure that all site visits are completed in fiscal 2016.

 

Once children are released to sponsors, the agency has no system for tracking their whereabouts, according to the report. Some children, including those who have been identified as trafficking victims, are supposed to receive services such as mental- health care. In fiscal 2014, only 9.5 percent of children released by the agency received these services. The agency has established a call center for children who want to report problems with their sponsors and requires its caseworkers to call all children and sponsors after the children are placed.

Grassley sharply criticized the lack of follow-up for released children.

“Beyond the risks to the children created by these shortcomings, our communities are left to cope with the crime and violence from gang members and other delinquents who are not identified or tracked because of HHS’s haphazard and porous practices,” he said.

Helling said the agency is looking at ways to expand post-release services for children, adding that “the overwhelming majority of these children are fleeing violence and chaos, not looking to create it.”

Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who co-chaired the Jan. 28 Senate hearing about problems within the agency, said he will testify at Tuesday’s hearing.

“I’m pleased the Judiciary Committee is following up on the subcommittee’s bipartisan investigation,” he said. “The administration must be held accountable for turning young children over to traffickers and criminals.”

Jennifer Podkul, a migrant rights expert at the Women’s Refugee Commission, said: “Overall, we’re incredibly happy that ORR is the agency that’s been designated to release the kids. What happened when there were incredible numbers was that it showed the strain and the weaknesses in the system. It was like a magnifying glass on the system.”

Obama Secret Talks, World is Normalized with DPRK

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Upon Obama’s departure from  the Oval Office in January 2017, there will be no more rogue nations or enemies of America and the West.

Next up after Iran and Cuba is North Korea. (shhhh, but I predicted this)

TheHill: The White House had signaled to the Kim Jung Un regime that it is willing to cut a deal similar to that brokered with Iran to curtail its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.

But North Korea has expedited its plans to develop a nuclear bomb, which it sees as a valuable bargaining chip in eventual peace negotiations.

A long-range rocket launched by North Korea earlier this month triggered additional international sanctions, including a law signed Thursday by President Obama imposing steeper penalties.

Un, who took power at the end of 2011, has demanded additional conditions for a treaty with South Korea, 63 years after the Korean War ended with an armistice.

Obama Administration Secretly Approached North Korea About Diplomatic Talks Days Before Its Latest Nuclear Test: WSJ

Days before North Korea’s Jan. 6 nuclear test, the Obama administration clandestinely agreed to talks that would have formally ended the Korean War, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday.

As part of the offer, reported to have been made at a U.N. meeting, the U.S. dropped its longstanding prerequisite that North Korea first make efforts to reduce its nuclear arsenal, instead calling for the military dictatorship to make its nuclear weapons program part of the talks. But the test ended those discussions.

North Korea began 2016 on a belligerent footing, even considering the unpredictable pariah state’s history. In addition to the January nuclear test, North Korea launched a rocket earlier this month, resulting in swift pushback from Japan and South Korea, which closed a joint industrial park that provided North Korea with valuable hard currency.

The most recent offer to North Korea was one of several overtures extended by the Obama administration, insiders told the Journal, which happened at the same time the administration was working on an ultimately successful diplomatic outreach to Iran. North Korea first tested a nuclear weapon in 2006, and its nuclear capabilities were confirmed in 2009. North and South Korea have technically been at war ever since the “hot” phase of the Korean War ended in 1953, but the North’s recent nuclear developments have increased the urgency to ultimately resolve the dispute diplomatically.

In addition to its unsanctioned nuclear activity, the North Korean regime is also alleged to operate a system of concentration camps where political prisoners are worked and starved to death. The U.N. released a 2014 report that suggested the regime’s security chiefs and leader Kim Jong Un should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity.

*** Note there is nothing about Unit 121, North Korea’s hacking division. Known since at least 2007.

CNet: North Korea’s Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB) is in charge of both traditional and cyber operations, and is known for sending agents abroad for training in cyberwarfare. The RGB reportedly oversees six bureaus that specialize in operations, reconnaissance, technology, and cyber matters — and two of which have been identified as the No. 91 Office and Unit 121. The two bureaus in question comprise of intelligence operations and are based in China.

The RGB also reportedly oversees state-run espionage businesses located in 30 to 40 countries, often hosted in unsuspecting places such as cafes. Members of this espionage network reportedly “send more than $100 million in cash per year to the regime and provide cover for spies,” the report says.

In addition, the country’s Worker’s Party oversees a faction of ethnic North Koreans living in Japan. Established in 1955, the group — dubbed the Chosen Soren — refuse to assimilate in to Japanese culture and live in the country in order to covertly raise funds via weapons trafficking, drug trafficking, and other black market activities. The group also gathers intelligence for the country and attempts to procure advanced technologies.

Despite aging infrastructure and power supply problems, North Korea reportedly was able to gain access to 33 of 80 South Korean military wireless communication networks in 2004, and an attack on the US State Department believed to be approved by North Korean officials coincided with US-North Korea talks over nuclear missile testing in the same time period. In addition, a month later, South Korea claimed that Unit 121 was responsible for hacking into South Korean and US defense department networks.

 

Hillary’s ServerGate, Dates Matter Especially Here

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Politico in part:

Cause of Action, revealed a new Mills email addressed to Clinton’s former top IT staffer Bryan Pagliano at his 2008 campaign address, [email protected], rather than his State.gov account. The group is questioning whether Clinton aides turned over emails from such campaign accounts if they used them for official business as well.

“What other emails, potentially involving official government business, did [Huma] Abedin, Mills, Pagliano and perhaps other federal employees send/receive using Clinton’s 2008 campaign email account?” asked a Cause of Action spockesperson. “And have such emails been recovered and saved to official government record keeping systems? To date, we don’t know the answer to any of those questions.”  More here and for sure below. Dates matter. (Brian Pagliano was at least one person who set up the Hillary email platform. He appeared for testimony via a subpoena and claimed protection under the 5th Amendment).

JW just recently obtained State Department records showing that the Obama agency asked Hillary Clinton to return emails in July 2014. This contradicts statements made in court that State only requested via a November 2014 letter (a version of which was sent to several former secretaries of state) that Mrs. Clinton return records to the State Department. Other new emails show the State Department has separate policies for handling the documents of State Department senior officials “and the rest of the department.” The emails are found in a batch of 189 pages of documents produced under court order in a major Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuit specifically seeking all of Clinton’s emails and records about her email practices. An astonishing email from Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton’s former counselor and chief of staff, to David E. Wade, then-chief of staff to Secretary of State John Kerry, shows that the State Department asked for the Clinton emails in July 2014.

From: Cheryl Mills Sent: Friday, August 22, 2014 9:20 AM To: Wade, David E Cc: Visek, Richard C; Philippe Reines Subject: Following Up Dear David (and Rich) I wanted to follow up on your request last month about getting hard copies of Secretary Clinton’s emails to/from accounts ending in “.gov” for her tenure at the Department. I will be able to get that to you, to the best of its availability. Given the volume, it will take some time to do but I wanted to let you know that I am working to get it to you. Hope you are having a great end to your summer. Best. cdm (Sorry for not copying Jen, I don’t have her email).

Judicial Watch filed this new email with U.S. District Court Judge Emmett Sullivan, who is now considering whether to grant discovery in another JW lawsuit seeking information on the “special government employee” status of Huma Abedin. The court specifically asked the State Department about how and when it requested that Mrs. Clinton return records. In our latest court filing, Judicial Watch states:

This [Mills] email indisputably shows that the State Department first asked Mrs. Clinton to return records as late as July 2014, not November 2014 as the State Department would have this Court and [Judicial Watch] believe.

Hillary Clinton also misled the American people, as she suggested during her infamous March 2015 United Nations press statement that she turned over the emails only after a request in October 2014 and responded “right away.” In fact, these new emails show it took at least five months for her to turn over only half of the emails in question. Another email, on the heels of the initial Clinton email story in the New York Times, details how a top State Department official tried to allay the concerns of National Archivist Paul Wester about the Clinton email issue. Margaret Grafeld, deputy assistant secretary of global information systems, recounts to other top State Department officials a March 3, 2015, call with National Archives:

I just had a very cordial 45 minute conversation with Paul Wester regarding the press coverage of the HRC email personal account and State records, focusing on State actions and those NARA will take today. I explained to Paul the environment in which State operates (and the bifurcated management of records for principals vs the rest of the Department), as well as steps that M and others have initiated to ensure that we are compliant with laws and regulations. In short, we can expect a letter from Paul to me later today covering the alienation (a legal term of art) of the former Secretary’s records [Redacted] requesting an explanation both of what happened and what we are doing to remedy the situation. I requested that he cc M on the letter as the Senior Agency Official for Records Management, which shall be done. I will share the letter with you all as soon as I receive it.

Don’t you love the phrase “bifurcated management of records for principals vs. the rest of the Department”! That phrase is Orwellian bureaucratese for: “We treated Hillary Clinton as if she were above the law.” The special treatment of Hillary Clinton continued after she left the State Department. Another email suggests the State Department provided Mrs. Clinton’s lawyers with a “two drawer safe” in which to store classified emails from the Clinton email server. The documents also show that a report was to be prepared regarding security issues with the Clinton emails, which included a security inspection made of the Clinton lawyers’ offices. One related email states:

Please ask the appropriate DS subject matter experts to contact [Clinton lawyer Kathleen] Turner to arrange for appointment to do a thorough security review to include physical security of area/safe in which document/electronic versions are being kept, who has access to the area/safe, do those individuals have appropriate clearances, when the electronic version is uploaded on a computer is it a stand-alone computer, when the disk/thumb drive is removed is any residual information deleted from the computer and any other appropriate questions. This review/inspection needs to be carried out as soon as possible.

The records also show that, as of December 2, 2014, the Select Committee on Benghazi was still in the dark about the separate Clinton email system. Mrs. Clinton would return some of the requested emails to the State Department on December 5, 2014, but the Select Committee was not informed of this transaction until March 2015. In fact, a December 29, 2014, letter from Mr. Kendall responding to the December 2 request for documents simply refers to the Committee’s request to the State Department with no mention of the Clinton email transfer that took place over three weeks earlier. Last week, this same lawsuit produced records that included a State Department letter to Hillary Clinton’s lawyers that includes a list of classified records to be either deleted or returned to the State Department. In September 2015, Judicial Watch released State Department documents showing a nearly five-month gap in the emails that Clinton chose to return to the State Department. Shortly afterward, Judicial Watch released correspondence from Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick F. Kennedy asking Hillary Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, to destroy or return all copies of a classified email “forwarded by Jacob Sullivan to Secretary Clinton … (Subject: Fw: FYI – Report of arrests – possible Benghazi connection).” Kendall rejected the request, as Congress and other investigators had demanded electronic records be preserved. The correspondence also shows Hillary Clinton ignored a demand to turn over all electronic copies of the approximately 55,000 pages of emails she previously returned in paper form. The State Department and Mrs. Clinton have been misleading the American people, the Congress, and the courts about when the State Department asked her for the government emails she took with her when she left State. The new emails show that Hillary Clinton was specifically and separately asked for her government emails months earlier than what the State Department represented to the courts and what Clinton told the American people. These new documents ought to be of keen interest to the FBI and federal prosecutors investigating Hillary Clinton and her colleagues in the Obama administration. Were the White House and John Kerry in on this deception? You can see how the Clinton email controversy is only worsening. So as America waits for the FBI and a compromised Justice Department to act – and as Congress is completely AWOL – your JW is doing the work of getting to the truth about this truly historic scandal.

Hillary – Sid: There is a Hezbollah Base in Cuba

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Just for collaboration on the matter, the Justice Department published a 2014 report.

Additional Hezbollah facts.

A few years before the Obama administration removed Cuba from the U.S. list of nations that sponsor terrorism Hezbollah established an operational base on the communist island, according to intelligence received by Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State.

This Sid fella is good, but why didn’t  Hillary get the intelligence from her own State Department ops department? Did she ever really have security clearance or did she waive it and hand it over to Sidney Blumenthal? (snarky)

JW: The information comes straight from electronic mail released by the State Department over the weekend as part of ongoing litigation from several groups, including Judicial Watch, and media outlets surrounding Clinton’s use of a private server to send and receive classified information as Secretary of State. This alarming information has been ignored by the mainstream media, which served as the president’s most vocal cheerleader when he established diplomatic ties with Cuba last summer. After appearing for decades on the U.S. government’s list of nations that sponsor terrorism, the Obama administration officially removed it to lay the groundwork for a full renewal of diplomatic ties.

Nevertheless, the administration knew that the radical Lebanon-based Islamic group Hezbollah had opened a base in Cuba, just 90 miles from the U.S, a few years earlier. In a cable dated September 9, 2011 Clinton is informed that “extremely sensitive sources reported in confidence that the Israeli Intelligence and Security Service (Mossad) has informed the leadership of the Israeli Government that Hezbollah is establishing an operational base in Cuba, designed to support terrorist attacks throughout Latin America.” The cable goes on to say that “the Hezbollah office in Cuba is being established under direct orders from the current General Secretary Hasan Nasrallah, who replaced Musawi in 1992. According to the information available to this source, in preparation for establishment of the base, Nasrallah, working from inside of Lebanon, carried out secret negotiations with representatives of the Cuban Government, particularly the Cuban Intelligence Service (General Intelligence Directorate — DGI), agreeing to , maintain a very low profile inside of Cuba. Nasrallah also promised to take measures to avoid any trail of evidence that could lead back to Cuba in the event of a Hezbollah attack in Latin America.”

Obama’s report to Congress indicating his intent to rescind Cuba’s State Sponsor of Terrorism designation included a certification that Cuba had not provided any support for international terrorism during the previous six-months. It also claimed that Cuba had provided assurances that it will not support acts of international terrorism in the future. This was May, 2015 when the State Department announced the island nation was officially off the terrorist list because it “meets the statutory criteria for rescission.” In the announcement the agency also wrote this: “While the United States has significant concerns and disagreements with a wide range of Cuba’s policies and actions, these fall outside the criteria relevant to the rescission of a State Sponsor of Terrorism designation.” The new Clinton email creates a number of questions relating to the agency’s abrupt move to clear Cuba as a sponsor of terrorism.

Hezbollah’s involvement in Latin America is nothing new and in fact Judicial Watch has been reporting it for years. In 2013 JW published a story about Hezbollah infiltrating the southwest U.S. border by joining forces with Mexican drug cartels that have long operated in the region. The recently released Clinton email, states that a “particularly sensitive source” confirmed that in the 1980s Hezbollah carried out similar contingency casing operations against U.S., British, and Israeli facilities and businesses in Latin America, Europe and North Africa. In 1992 Islamic Jihad, acting on behalf of Hezbollah, bombed the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina in retaliation for the death of Hezbollah General Secretary Abbas al-Musawi, the email says.

A few years before the Obama administration removed Cuba from the U.S. list of nations that sponsor terrorism Hezbollah established an operational base on the communist island, according to intelligence received by Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State.

The information comes straight from electronic mail released by the State Department over the weekend as part of ongoing litigation from several groups, including Judicial Watch, and media outlets surrounding Clinton’s use of a private server to send and receive classified information as Secretary of State. This alarming information has been ignored by the mainstream media, which served as the president’s most vocal cheerleader when he established diplomatic ties with Cuba last summer. After appearing for decades on the U.S. government’s list of nations that sponsor terrorism, the Obama administration officially removed it to lay the groundwork for a full renewal of diplomatic ties.

Nevertheless, the administration knew that the radical Lebanon-based Islamic group Hezbollah had opened a base in Cuba, just 90 miles from the U.S, a few years earlier. In a cable dated September 9, 2011 Clinton is informed that “extremely sensitive sources reported in confidence that the Israeli Intelligence and Security Service (Mossad) has informed the leadership of the Israeli Government that Hezbollah is establishing an operational base in Cuba, designed to support terrorist attacks throughout Latin America.” The cable goes on to say that “the Hezbollah office in Cuba is being established under direct orders from the current General Secretary Hasan Nasrallah, who replaced Musawi in 1992. According to the information available to this source, in preparation for establishment of the base, Nasrallah, working from inside of Lebanon, carried out secret negotiations with representatives of the Cuban Government, particularly the Cuban Intelligence Service (General Intelligence Directorate — DGI), agreeing to , maintain a very low profile inside of Cuba. Nasrallah also promised to take measures to avoid any trail of evidence that could lead back to Cuba in the event of a Hezbollah attack in Latin America.”

Obama’s report to Congress indicating his intent to rescind Cuba’s State Sponsor of Terrorism designation included a certification that Cuba had not provided any support for international terrorism during the previous six-months. It also claimed that Cuba had provided assurances that it will not support acts of international terrorism in the future. This was May, 2015 when the State Department announced the island nation was officially off the terrorist list because it “meets the statutory criteria for rescission.” In the announcement the agency also wrote this: “While the United States has significant concerns and disagreements with a wide range of Cuba’s policies and actions, these fall outside the criteria relevant to the rescission of a State Sponsor of Terrorism designation.” The new Clinton email creates a number of questions relating to the agency’s abrupt move to clear Cuba as a sponsor of terrorism.

Hezbollah’s involvement in Latin America is nothing new and in fact Judicial Watch has been reporting it for years. In 2013 JW published a story about Hezbollah infiltrating the southwest U.S. border by joining forces with Mexican drug cartels that have long operated in the region. The recently released Clinton email, states that a “particularly sensitive source” confirmed that in the 1980s Hezbollah carried out similar contingency casing operations against U.S., British, and Israeli facilities and businesses in Latin America, Europe and North Africa. In 1992 Islamic Jihad, acting on behalf of Hezbollah, bombed the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina in retaliation for the death of Hezbollah General Secretary Abbas al-Musawi, the email says.

 

c 05782918 – FOIA State Cuba Hezbollah by Jason I. Poblete

Joint Chiefs, ‘NO’ on Closing Gitmo

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Obama tweets: I’m going to Cuba

BI: President Barack Obama announced Thursday on Twitter that he was going to Cuba next month, which will be the first time a sitting president has visited the country since 1928.

The US recently restored diplomatic relations with the communist country after a 54-year break.

“14 months ago, I announced that we would begin normalizing relations with Cuba — and we’ve already made significant progress,” Obama tweeted.

In subsequent tweets, he said:

Our flag flies over our Embassy in Havana once again. More Americans are traveling to Cuba than at any time in the last 50 years. We still have differences with the Cuban government that I will raise directly. America will always stand for human rights around the world. Next month, I’ll travel to Cuba to advance our progress and efforts that can improve the lives of the Cuban people.

Obama also tweeted a link to a post on the website Medium that explained the thinking behind his trip.

Ben Rhodes, a national security adviser to Obama, wrote that the president would “have the opportunity to meet with President [Raúl] Castro, and with Cuban civil society and people from different walks of life” on the trip.

“Yes, we have a complicated and difficult history,” Rhodes wrote. “But we need not be defined by it. Indeed, the extraordinary success of the Cuban-American community demonstrates that when we engage Cuba, it is not simply foreign policy  —  for many Americans, it’s family.”

JW: As President Obama frees droves of terrorists—including five Yemenis this week—from the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo news reports confirm that a Gitmo alum who once led a Taliban unit has established the first Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) base in Afghanistan.

His name is Mullah Abdul Rauf and international and domestic media reports say he’s operating in Helmand province, actively recruiting fighters for ISIS. Citing local sources, a British newspaper writes that Rauf set up a base and is offering good wages to anyone willing to fight for the Islamic State. Rauf was a corps commander during the Taliban’s 1996-2001 rule of Afghanistan, according to intelligence reports. After getting captured by U.S. forces, he was sent to Gitmo in southeast Cuba but was released in 2007. More here.

*** The Obama administration is in somewhat of a panic over the most recent development of Ibrahim al Qosi.

FNC: When Ibrahim al Qosi was released from Guantanamo Bay in 2012, a lawyer for the former Usama bin Laden aide said he looked forward to living a life of peace in his native Sudan.

Three years later, Qosi has emerged as a prominent voice of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, appearing in a number of AQAP propaganda videos — including a 50-minute lecture calling for the takeover of Saudi Arabia.

The 56-year-old Qosi delivered a scathing critique of the Saudi monarchy — which appeared online on Feb. 6 — denouncing the Saudi government’s execution of more than 40 “mujahedeen” in January, according to the Long War Journal.

Joint Chiefs Issue Resounding ‘No’ to Obama on Gitmo Closure

Granger – TheBlaze: Just in case it couldn’t be more clear, the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the armed forces of the United States said “no, we won’t help” to the president in a letter regarding his possible use of an executive order to close the U.S. military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and then bring the remaining detainees to the United States.

Quoting the law, Lt. Gen. William Mayville Jr., the director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote:

“Current law prohibits the use of funds to ‘transfer, release or assist in the transfer or release’ of detainees of Guantanamo Bay to or within the United States, and prohibits the construction, modification or acquisition of any facility within the United States to house any Guantanamo detainee. The Joint Staff will not take any action contrary to those restrictions.”

Sixteen members of the U.S. House of Representatives with military experience had written to the Joint Chiefs regarding the legal question of whether or not they would follow an executive order by President Barack Obama to close Gitmo by relocating the remaining detainees to the U.S.

Getty Images

The president is now alone in his fantasy of bringing detainees to U.S. shores.

Without the cooperation of the military, no physical transfer of Gitmo detainees can take place.

The president said in his end-of-year press conference, “We will wait until Congress has definitively said no to a well-thought-out plan with numbers attached to it before we say anything definitive about my executive authority here.”

Apparently, the Joint Chiefs beat Congress to the punch. There is no authority of the president to move anybody anywhere against the law.

Far from just an opinion, the Joint Chiefs are factually correct in their decision. Unless an order, even coming from the commander in chief, is legal, ethical and moral, the nation’s most responsible generals may not carry it out.

The letter is a first response in what could be a legal argument that could reach the attorney general and/or the Supreme Court.

With the balance of power in the highest court tilting slightly to the left now that conservative Antonin Scalia has passed away and his seat is vacant for the foreseeable future, any decision made by that body in question of the president’s Constitutional authority would probably side with him.

Without reaction to the letter, the Obama administration is surely scrambling for ideas on what next to do.

The really disappointing aspect of Obama’s obsession with closing Gitmo is the fact that he has forgotten the reason for the facility in the first place.

Sept. 11, 2001, is the reason for Gitmo. It is the reason for detaining as many potential sources of important information (that could save many lives) as possible. It is the reason so many lives have been lost and others changed forever.

Why has Obama forsaken the safety and security of the American people by releasing unlawful combatant Islamists who want to kill Americans before the Global War on Terror is won?

Thirty percent of all released Gitmo detainees are known or are suspected of returning to the fight. If that isn’t bad enough, there is NO information on the other 70 percent. Where are they; your neighborhood?

The president’s reckless behavior, from releasing dangerous enemies to wanting to bring others to the U.S. is proof that his priorities are confused. Thankfully, the Joint Chiefs of Staff have just reminded him that even he is bound by law, and they will not help him break it.

Montgomery Granger is a three-times mobilized U.S. Army major (Ret.) and author of “Saving Grace at Guantanamo Bay: A Memoir of a Citizen Warrior.” Amazon, Blog, Facebook