Category Archives: Whistleblower

Terrorists Financially Supported by Welfare

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Deceased ISIS Terrorist Was On Maine’s Welfare Rolls

DailyCaller: Adnan Fazeli lived in Freeport, Maine with his wife and children. An Iranian refugee, he worked several jobs between 2009 and 2013, before boarding a plane to Turkey without his family.

 Photo: Circa

He never returned. Documents released earlier this month show he became an ISIS fighter and was killed by Lebanese forces in January 2015. And during his four years, he and his family used federal and state welfare programs that The Boston Herald reports allowed him the time to self-radicalize over the Internet.

Maine Governor Paul LePage reacted strongly to the news. “I’m having [the Maine Department of Health and Human Services] look at our welfare rolls closer,” he said last week. “All the other states should look at the eligibility, too.”

According to LePage, the federal government is at fault for letting Fazeli in the country. “If people need to eat, I’ll feed them. But I want to keep Americans safe,” LePage said. “This is very embarrassing to the state of Maine, and I point the finger at the president and say, ‘How did this happen?’ If the federal government doesn’t do their job we don’t know what we’re getting.”

LePage’s comments drew criticism from Maine’s branch of the ACLU. The group’s executive director, Alison Beyea, accused him of violating federal laws requiring the privacy of welfare recipients after the Herald reported a LePage administration source disclosed the receipts.

“The LePage administration reportedly exposed a family’s private information in order to further its anti-welfare agenda. Who knows whom the next target will be – the elderly, people with disabilities,” said Beyea. “No one should have to worry about their personal lives being leaked to the press anytime the administration wants to score political points. But if it happened to one family, it could happen to any of us.”

A LePage spokesperson says that the governor’s office did not disclose the information to the newspaper. “The reporters [at the Boston Herald] already had the information when the governor spoke with them,” said the spokesperson.

Steve Robinson, the Executive Director of the Howie Carr show who previously worked at the Maine Heritage Policy Center, told TheDC, “This so-called ‘Freeport Man’ should not have been in the country. Cursory vetting would have flagged him as a risk.”

“Maine’s sanctuary policies and easy-money welfare system allowed him to spend his free time watching Anwar Al-Awlaki propaganda videos rather than working,” continued Robinson, who said that “LePage has been extraordinarily successful reforming Maine’s welfare system despite stubborn opposition from left-wingers in Augusta. The reforms he has implemented are helping Mainers move from welfare to work and reducing fraud throughout the system.”

The Portland Press Herald reported that 105 welfare fraud cases were sent to the state Attorney General’s office. A total of 36 convictions came from those cases, all against U.S. citizens, and restitution totaling $467,300 was ordered, according to a spokesperson for the Attorney General’s office.

The Herald also examined Maine state records and found that “there were 35 non-citizen families out of a total of 4,854 families receiving TANF benefits, and 361 non-citizen families out of a total of 100,648 families receiving food stamps.”

Fazeli is not the first suspected or proven terrorist to have used government welfare funds. At Conservative Review, Ben Johnson highlighted several prominent examples, including the Tsarnaev brothers who committed the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013.

“The most conspicuous example are the Tsarnaev brothers,” writes Johnson, “who collectively received in excess of $100,000 in welfare payments from food stamps and Section 8 housing. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a onetime Golden Gloves boxer, remained on food stamps until his family income — earned primarily by his wife — exceeded the amount Massachusetts allows for food stamp beneficiaries.”

Johnson also highlighted recently convicted terrorist supporter Anjem Choudary, who in Britain received “£8,000 pounds more on public assistance than soldiers fighting the Taliban,” according to Johnson. Likewise, 9/11 conspirator Zacarious Moussaoui received welfare in Britain.

According to recordings released in 2013, Choudary preached that jihadists should work as little as possible, and “take money from the kuffar [non-believers]” so they can be “be busy with jihad and things like that.”

A nephew of Fazeli says the deceased terrorist’s wife and children, as well as Fazeli’s extended family, were unaware of his radicalization. The family was taken off of welfare rolls after Fazeli left the country.

In Europe also:

Terrorist Suspects in Europe Got Welfare Benefits While Plotting Attacks

SofRep: Belgian financial investigators looking into recent terror plots have discovered a disturbing trend: Some of the suspects were collecting welfare benefits until shortly before they carried out their attacks.

At least five of the alleged plotters in the Paris and Brussels terror attacks partly financed themselves with payments from Belgium’s generous social-welfare system, authorities have concluded. In total they received more than €50,000, or about $56,000 at today’s rate.

The main surviving Paris suspect, Salah Abdeslam, collected unemployment benefits until three weeks before the November attacks—€19,000 in all, according to people familiar with the case. At the time, he was manager and part-owner of a bar, which Belgian officials say should have made him ineligible.

Many of the participants in a disrupted Belgian terror plot also had been on the dole, according to the judge who sentenced more than a dozen people in the so-called Verviers cell last month. Police thwarted the plot early last year, finding explosives, weapons and police uniforms after a shootout that killed two people.

The revelations raise a difficult conundrum for Europe.

Read More- The Wall Street Journal

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Anjem Choudary sentenced to prison

‘Claim jobseeker’s allowance and plan holy war’: Hate preacher pocketing £25,000 a year in benefits calls on fanatics to live off the state

  • Anjem Choudary called benefits ‘Jihadseeker’s allowance’
  • The extremist told followers they must hate democracy and freedom
  • Also listed bizarre sharia laws, including ‘not riding cats and sheep’
  • Later said he had been ‘joking’ and his words were misconstrued
  • He called Osama bin Laden his ‘hero’    Full story here from DailyMail

 

 

 

Iran vs. U.S. Navy in Persian Gulf, More Aggression

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NYT: The Nitze was accompanied by the U.S.S. Mason during the episode, which Commander Raines said had taken place near the Strait of Hormuz, the entry to the Persian Gulf and a strategically vital shipping route.

Unsure of Iranian intentions, the Nitze changed course several times during the encounter to try to keep a safe distance from offshore oil rigs in the area, the commander said.

Responding on Thursday to the Pentagon complaint, Iran essentially rejected the American version of events. The country’s defense minister, Brig. Gen. Hossein Dehghan, said in remarks quoted by state news media that the Iranian boats patrolled only Iran’s territorial waters and had a mission to “counter any unintentional or aggressive intrusion.”

Iranian naval forces, General Dehqan said, “warn any foreign vessel that enters the country’s waters and take action if the intrusion is deemed aggressive.” More here.

Three More Naval Incidents Reported in Persian Gulf

WASHINGTON — Three more close encounters have been reported between US Navy warships and vessels operated by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps navy (IRGCN). In one instance, a US warship fired warning shots at an Iranian vessel.

The latest incidents took place Wednesday in the northern Persian Gulf, US defense officials reported today. They follow Tuesday’s incident near the Strait of Hormuz when high-speed vessels approached two US Navy destroyers.

 

In the first incident, as reported by US defense officials, the US patrol coastal ships Tempest and Squall were patrolling in international waters in the northern Gulf. Three IRGCN vessels approached at high speed and crossed the bow of the Tempest at 600 yards on three separate occasions. Tempest sounded five short blasts from the ship’s whistle, indicating the maneuvers were unsafe, and attempted to establish radio communications, apparently without success.

Later that same day Tempest and Squall were harassed by an Iranian Naser-class patrol boat, of a type known to be operated by the Guards. That vessel approached Tempest head-on to within 200 yards, said Cmdr. Bill Urban, a spokesman for the US Navy’s Central Command (NAVCENT) in Bahrain.

“This situation presented a drastically increased risk of collision,” Urban said, “and the Iranian vessel refused to safely maneuver in accordance with internationally recognized maritime rules of the road, despite several request and warnings via radio, and visual and audible warnings from both US ships.”

During the encounter Tempest fired three warning flares in the direction of the vessel, Urban said, while also attempting radio communications and sounding loud audible warnings via loudspeaker.

Squall fired three warning shots from a .50-caliber gun and that caused the Iranian vessel to turn away.

The shots “were fired well in advance of the vessels,” Urban said, adding that Squall took efforts to make sure the shots were fired clear of both the Iranian vessel and civilian traffic. “No one was injured or hit by the warning shots,” he said.

In a third event, the destroyer Stout was underway in the northern Gulf when, Urban said, the same Naser vessel conducted an “unsafe intercept,” crossing the bow of Stout three times “at close range.” The destroyer, capable of much higher speeds than the Naser, maneuvered away from the vessel to avoid collision and, Urban added, “employed devices to discourage the IRGCN vessel from continuing their approach towards Stout.”

NAVCENT, Urban said, “assessed all of these interactions as unsafe and unprofessional due to the Iranian vessels not abiding by international law and maritime standards, including the 1972 Convention on the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGS) maritime ‘Rules of the Road.’

“The Iranian high-rate-of-speed approaches towards three Unites States ships operating in international waters in accordance with international law along with multiple bow crossings at short range and the disregard of multiple warning attempts created a dangerous, harassing situation that could have led to further escalation,” Urban said.

US officials noted the most recent series of incidents all have involved the Revolutionary Guards and not the Iranian navy. Navy-to-navy relations between the US and Iran, while by no means warm, are generally categorized by the US as professional. The Guards, also known as the Pasdaran, generally operate outside of Iran’s military hierarchy.

The latest series of incidents follow another encounter that took place Tuesday at the southeastern end of the Gulf near the Strait of Hormuz, where four high-speed IRCGN craft approached the US destroyers Nitze and Mason. Two of the Iranian craft approached to within 300 yards of Nitze before the destroyers increased to high speed and pulled away.

Protests have not been filed over these incidents, said Cmdr. Bill Urban, a spokesman for the US Navy’s Central Command (NAVCENT) command in Bahrain.

“The nature of this incident would have led NAVCENT recommend a diplomatic message of protest if this interaction had been with a country with which the United States had an official diplomatic relationship,” Urban said, noting that the US has no official relations with Iran.  Defense News

Ben Rhodes, WH NSC Advisor an Employee of Iran Lobby?

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Primer:

A U.S. Navy coastal patrol ship fired three warning shots at an Iranian ship that sailed within 200 yards in the Northern Persian Gulf Wednesday after one of four close calls this week involving U.S. and Iranian vessels, a U.S. official confirmed to Fox News on Thursday.

The USS Squall fired the shots, according to the official.

On Tuesday, four Iranian small boats “harassed” the USS Nitze, sailing near the guided missile destroyer in the narrow Strait of Hormuz, a U.S. Navy official told Fox News.

and….

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned government officials not to trust the U.S. after alleged shortcomings in the nuclear deal’s implementation.

Khamenei criticized America’s “misconduct” in implementing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) during a meeting with President Hassan Rouhani and his cabinet on August 24. Khamenei warned, “This experience teaches us that one cannot trust the promises of any administration in America.” As in his past criticisms of the nuclear deal, Khamenei fell short of calling for Iran to abandon the accord, however. More here.

Benjamin “Ben” Rhodes is President Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting. From the beginning of his career, Rhodes has made a mark in policy, international relations, and writing. He worked as an assistant to Lee Hamilton at the Wilson Center, and then went on to the Iraq Study Group Report and the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations. He then went on to become President Obama’s foreign policy advisor during the 2008 Presidential Elections. He has worked with President Obama’s negotiating team for the JCPOA agreement and his outreach to the Iranian people, such as the President’s Nowruz Message in 2012.

Rhodes is a speaker at this conference.

NIAC LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE

NIAC’s annual three-day Leadership Conference is the event of the year for supporters of peace and renewed friendship between the peoples of Iran and the United States. Participants will cultivate new leadership and advocacy skills, learn from some of America’s most influential thought leaders, interact with elected officials, and network with prominent Iranian American entrepreneurs and grassroots leaders.

Sponsors

NIAC’s Sixth Annual Leadership Conference is brought to you by:

Cap and Trade DID Not Go Away

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New Principles to Help Accelerate the Growing Global Momentum for Carbon Pricing

2015:

  • New report shows the number of implemented or planned carbon pricing schemes around the world has almost doubled since 2012, with existing schemes now worth about $50 billion.

 

  • About 40 nations and 23 cities, states or regions are using a carbon price. This represents the equivalent of about 7 billion tons of carbon dioxide, or 12 percent of annual global greenhouse gas emissions.
  • And new report lays out six key principles to put a price on carbon – the FASTER principles – for putting a price on carbon based on economic principles and experience of what is already working around the world

The spotlight is on New York now with the upcoming United Nations meeting on the new Sustainable Development Goals, Climate Week New York, and in about two months, global leaders will meet again in Paris for COP 21.  More from the World Bank.

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California’s Cap-And-Trade Program Is Sick And Will Take High-Speed Rail Down With It

Chuck DeVore,  Contributor

Forbes: California concluded its most recent cap-and-trade program auction last week. Out of 44,268,323 metric tons of carbon dioxide credits offered for sale by the state Air Resources Board, only 660,560 were sold, 1.5 percent of the total, raising a paltry $8.4 million out of a hoped-for $620 million. Last May’s auction was almost as bad, raising $10 million out of an anticipated $500 million.

California’s carbon dioxide cap-and-trade auction program was expected to bring in more than $2 billion in the current fiscal year that ends June 30, 2017, a quarter of which is earmarked for the high-speed rail project narrowly approved by voters in a 2008 ballot initiative. As a hedge against uncertainty, a $500 million reserve was built into the cap-and-trade budget. But, with the August auction falling 98.5 percent short, the entire reserve was consumed in the first of four auctions for the fiscal year.

Further complicating matters is a pending lawsuit against the legality of California’s cap-and-trade program. Business groups and fiscal conservatives claim the program amounts to a tax, under a 2010 ballot initiative that better defined what exactly constitutes taxes and fees under California law, thus would requiring a two-thirds majority vote of the legislature.

Further, with the program slated to end in 2020, many businesses that are forced to buy the carbon credits are conflicted by the risk that they may end up buying the California equivalent of Confederate bonds, doomed to be worthless when the state loses its cap-and-trade war.

In the meantime, the High-Speed Rail project, currently promised to cost “only” $68 billion to run from the Bay Area some 400 miles south to Los Angeles may be looking at $50 billion in overruns. To fund the costly train, which was sold to voters as not costing a dime in new taxes, the expected revenue stream from cap-and-trade has been securitized, putting the state on the hook to Wall Street for billions in construction money advanced on the promise of future cap-and-trade revenue.

But the cap-and-trade market is showing dangerous signs of weakness. Not only have auction revenues collapsed in the last two auctions in May and August, but the competitive landscape for the auctions has collapsed as well. The Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI), a commonly-used measure of competitive markets, signaled that last May’s auction was dominated by a sole market player. Last week’s auction improved somewhat, but was still moderately concentrated among a small number of buyers and sellers.

The lack of interest in California’s cap-and-trade carbon credits shows that the Golden State will likely have to come up with a significant amount of General Fund tax revenue, more than $2 billion annually, to build out its government-run rail project—something that isn’t likely to last much beyond the end of Gov. Jerry Brown’s fourth term in office in January 2019.

California's Cap and Trade Auction is Collapsing

California’s Cap and Trade Auction is Collapsing

**** Back in 2014:

In part from Politico: Cap and trade was a key part of the George H.W. Bush administration’s strategy for reducing acid rain in 1990, and it would have been the centerpiece of the climate bill that stalled and died in the Senate in 2010.

Despite the concept’s bipartisan heritage, cap and trade has become politically toxic in some circles — especially among supporters of coal, the carbon-intensive fuel that would face the heaviest costs under any trading system. Republicans derided the climate bill as “cap and tax,” while West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin famously unloaded a rifle into a copy of the legislation during a Senate campaign commercial.

Still, cap and trade never went away.

With RGGI and California combined, about a quarter of the U.S. population lives in areas covered by trading programs designed to drive down carbon emissions, said Janet Peace, vice president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, at a Senate briefing Thursday.

Other programs exist in Alberta, Canada; Australia; New Zealand; Norway; and South Korea. Next year, cap-and-trade programs are expected to launch in Switzerland, Tokyo, the United Kingdom and South Africa. Others are in development or undergoing pilot tests in Brazil, China, India, Japan, Mexico and even Kazakhstan.

“Eventually, 250 million people will be covered by a carbon price in China,” Peace said. The full article here.

*** The New York Times stays current on Cap and Trade.

 

C’mon Hillary and Bill, Really?

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Hillary State Dept. Helped Jailed Clinton Foundation Donor Get $10 Mil from U.S. for Failed Haiti

The new batch of emails showing that the State Department gave special access to top Clinton Foundation donors while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state brings to mind the case of a shady Miami businessman serving a 12-year prison sentence after scamming the government out of millions. His name is Claudio Osorio, a Clinton Foundation donor who got $10 million from the government after the Clinton State Department reportedly pulled some strings.

Osorio got the money from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), a federal agency that operates under the guidance of the State Department, to build houses in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. The OPIC supposedly promotes U.S. government investments abroad to foster the development and growth of free markets. Osorio’s “Haiti project” was supposed to build 500 homes for displaced families in the aftermath of the earthquake. The project never broke ground and Osorio used the money to finance his lavish lifestyle and fund his illicit business ventures. He also ran a fraudulent international company with facilities in the U.S., United Arab Emirates, Germany, Angola and Tanzania that stole millions from investors. Some of the OPIC Haiti money was used to repay investors of his fraudulent company (Innovida), according to federal prosecutors. In September 2013, Osorio was sentenced to 150 months imprisonment and three years of supervised release.

Not surprisingly, the Department of Justice (DOJ) never mentioned Osorio’s Clinton connections and seemed to downplay the $10 million scam of taxpayer funds by focusing on the “victims” that invested in his bogus company. More here.

The inside story of how the Clintons built a $2 billion global empire

In part from WashingtonPost: The foundation now includes 11 major initiatives, focused on issues as divergent as crop yields in Africa, earthquake relief in Haiti and the cost of AIDS drugs worldwide. In all, the Clintons’ constellation of related charities has raised $2 billion, employs more than 2,000 people and has a combined annual budget of more than $223 million.

As donations have surged, particularly as her bid for the Democratic nomination grew closer, she has been forced to answer for whether those supporters have been not merely giving to a charity but also paying to curry favor with a former secretary of state and a would-be president.

Sights on something big

In the beginning of it all, Bill Clinton was feeling unfulfilled.

Plenty of room for their dogs and grandchild(ren) to run around... and with a pool to blow off steam from the stress of the campaign trail.  More photos here.

In the months after he left the White House in 2001, he was living at his family’s new home in Chappaqua, N.Y. His wife was in the Senate. His daughter was away, first at Stanford, then at Oxford. He stewed about leftover legal bills and bad press over last-minute pardons.

To pass the time, he turned to TiVo.
No sign of that pesky server though.

At the same time, Clinton did more formal planning with aides. He was just 56. He would be an ex-president for a long time. He wanted to do something big. And something international. He wanted to stay out of domestic policy, so it didn’t look as though he was meddling in the domain of the president who had succeeded him. Or the senator he was married to.

Ira Magaziner, a longtime aide, had an idea that fit both criteria.

New drugs were available to fight the progress of HIV and AIDS, but in Africa the drugs were too expensive for many people. Magaziner wanted to lower the cost. He knew Clinton didn’t have the money to help, because he was still fundraising for the library and his own legal bills.

But, Magaziner told Clinton, he had a name brand with limitless value.

“We should use that reputation and your contacts for something big. If we succeed at this, we can help save millions of lives,” Magaziner wrote in a memo he handed to Clinton at an AIDS conference in 2002. “If we are not so successful, we still might help save tens of thousands of lives which would not be so bad.”

Expanding in all directions

“Now here’s something else in my hot little hand,” Clinton said, standing on a stage at the Sheraton Times Square, according to media reports. “My old friend Carlos Slim Helú here has just said he’s willing to develop a cellphone network for Gaza and link it to Jordan’s network. Why, thanks, Carlos. Come up here and be recognized.”

It was September 2005. A year and a half after Band’s brainstorm, the first meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative was a smashing success. Some Clinton aides had been skeptical that it would work, but Clinton had shrewdly timed it to coincide with a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly — when New York was already chockablock with world leaders looking for something more interesting than a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly.

This is quite the story so please read it in full here. There are stunning connections, people, agendas, timelines, money and access. A real picture has emerged on the collusion and the work of Hillary and Bill’s circle of friends. This is hardly the whole story but it does begin to explain why they had at least 2 private servers and refused FOIA requests.

Last year, the Washington Post offer an early comprehensive summary:

The Post identified donations from roughly 336,000 individuals, corporations, unions and foreign governments in support of their political or philanthropic endeavors — a list that includes top patrons such as Steven Spielberg and George Soros, as well as lesser-known backers who have given smaller amounts dozens of times. Not included in the count are an untold number of small donors whose names are not identified in campaign finance reports but together have given millions to the Clintons over the years.

The majority of the money — $2 billion — has gone to the Clinton Foundation, one of the world’s fastest-growing charities, which supports health, education and economic development initiatives around the globe. A handful of elite givers have contributed more than $25 million to the foundation, including Canadian mining magnate Frank Giustra, who is among the wealthy foreign donors who have given tens of millions.

Keep reading here as it is full of names and under-handed requests and access.