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Devout Muslims In Key Homeland Security Posts

Judicial Watch Blog — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:44:49 -0500

Days after a devout Muslim terrorized a U.S. Army base in Texas several news reports remind that two key Homeland Security posts are occupied by equally devout Muslims, one of them a former Los Angeles deputy mayor who eliminated a crucial program that tracked terrorist activities in the city.

Earlier this year President Obama appointed Arif Alikhan to be the nation’s Assistant Secretary for Policy Development at the Department of Homeland Security and Kareem Shora to the agency’s influential advisory council, which provides recommendations and advice directly to the Secretary of Homeland Security.

Alikhan, who leads a Homeland Security team responsible for developing policy issues to secure the country against terrorism, has referred to the renowned terrorist organization Hezbollah as a “liberation movement” and was responsible for killing a Los Angeles Police project that monitored terrorist activities in the city’s notoriously radical mosques. The defunct Muslim terror tracking plan was designed to identify hotbeds of extremism in an area where several locals offered the September 11 hijackers support.

Shora was the head of a well-known Arab organization whose officials refer to anti-U.S. jihadists as heroes. As executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), Shora had close ties to radical Ivy League professor Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian terror supporter who has reportedly worked on behalf of the extremist Palestine Liberation Organization.

An Israeli newspaper criticizes Obama for reaching out to Muslims by appointing them to key security posts amid charges he wrongly ignored internal Muslim terror. The passage undoubtedly refers to the Muslim, al Qaeda wannabe Army major (Nidal Malik Hasan) who went on a murderous rampage at Ft. Hood as he chanted "Allahu Akbar!" ("God is great!") in Arabic.

Days after the massacre, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano was most concerned about preventing a wave of anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States. She vowed that her agency is working hard with groups across the U.S. to deflect any retaliation against Muslims for one man’s fury.

Monthly Abortion Fee In Senate Health Plan

Judicial Watch Blog — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:27:09 -0500

Although its illegal to use federal money to pay for abortions, the gargantuan healthcare bill presented this week by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will levy a new “abortion premium” fee on Americans in the government-run insurance plan.

The much-ballyhooed 2,074-page bill (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) that will start being debated this weekend in the U.S. Senate includes a monthly abortion premium charged to all enrollees in the government-operated health plan. The $848 billion overhaul package is being touted by Reid as a measure that will “save lives” even though it covers a procedure that ends them.

Since most people don’t have the stomach to sort through the cumbersome bill, a Republican lawmaker had his staff do it and highlight the contentious abortion coverage Democrats included in the measure. It begins on line seven of page 118, section 1303. Under “Voluntary Choice of Coverage of Abortion Services” it states that the nation’s Health and Human Services Secretary (ardent pro-abortion advocate Kathleen Sebelius) is given the authority to determine when abortion is allowed under the government-run health plan. It also requires at least one public insurance plan offered in the exchange to cover abortion (line 13 of page 120).

A section titled “Actuarial Value of Optional Service Coverage” on page 122 (line 11, section 1303) says the abortion premium will be paid into a U.S. Treasury account and the federal funds will then be used to pay for abortion services. A Health Benefits Commissioner will assess the monthly premiums that will be used for abortions in the public plan and for those offered through an affordability credit to purchase coverage through the exchange.

The heated abortion issue almost derailed the House bill, which passed by a narrow margin only after an amendment was inserted banning federal funds for the procedure. Evidently Reid and his clan didn’t learn a thing from that close call. Their bill also lets private companies that get government funds offer plans that include abortion coverage.

Since 1996 the U.S. government has banned (Hyde Amendment) the use of federal dollars to pay for abortions, though some states use local resources to fund the procedure. The federal ban applies to government health programs for the disabled and elderly (Medicare) and the poor (Medicaid). A separate provision, known as the Smith Amendment, prohibits federal funding of abortion under the federal employees’ health benefits plan.

Chicago Aldermen Keep Secret Slush Fund

Judicial Watch Blog — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:00:40 -0500

Elected officials in a leading U.S. city long distinguished for its pandemic of public corruption keep a secret, taxpayer-funded slush fund to pay family members, campaign workers and political allies for a variety of questionable jobs.

The covert account has been utilized for decades by Chicago aldermen but has escaped public scrutiny because it’s kept under wraps. This week the Windy City’s local newspaper exposed the surreptitious pot of cash ($1.3 million a year) in a story that says the mayor is on the verge of asking a federal judge to end decades of court supervision over City Hall corruption.

Indeed Chicago is a hotbed of pay-to-play politics where clout and patronage are rampant. In the last few years several dozen officials have been convicted and more than 30 indicted for taking bribes, shaking down companies for political contributions and rigging hiring. Among the convictions were fraud, violating court orders against using politics as a basis for hiring city workers and the disappearance of 840 truckloads of asphalt intended for city jobs.

Earlier this year a Chicago alderman (Arenda Troutman) went to prison for accepting bribes from a developer in exchange for her support on building projects and another (Isaac Carothers) got indicted for taking tens of thousands of dollars in bribes from a developer in return for his vote on zoning changes that resulted in lucrative profits for the contractor.

Not surprisingly Carothers, a prominent Democrat who has represented Chicago’s far west side since 1999, regularly dips into the stealth city account. He’s paid a relative more than $30,000 in the last year alone and claims all aldermen have family members on the payroll. The best part is that employees paid through the fund don’t show up on the regular city payroll.

Besides family members of city officials, they include campaign operatives, disgruntled city employees ousted for criminal behavior, a former mayoral aide convicted of rigging city hiring and a variety of folks who clearly don’t deserve to get tax dollars. About half a dozen of them are directly associated with a jailed mayoral aide convicted for rewarding political campaign workers with city jobs.

Judicial Watch has extensively investigated Chicago corruption, most recently the conflicted ties of top White House officials to the city, including Barack and Michelle Obama as well as top administration officials like Chief of Staff Rahm Emanual and Senior Advisor David Axelrod. This month Judicial Watch sued Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's office to obtain records related to the president’s failed bid to bring the Olympics to the city.

D.C. Council Chair Adds To Growing Local Scandals

Judicial Watch Blog — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:20:02 -0500

In the latest scandal to rock a perpetually corrupt local government, the District of Columbia’s council chairman illegally used official stationary to solicit donations for the Democratic Party and secretly had a politically connected city contractor renovate his house.

The double whammy was exposed this week by two separate Washington D.C. newspapers hot on the prominent lawmaker’s tracks. At the very least they constitute serious ethics violations by D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray, a popular politician with a decades-long career in social services. Gray once headed the District’s Department of Human Services as well as a notable organization dedicated to serving homeless and at-risk youth.

Now, like several of his colleagues in D.C. government, he faces public scrutiny and possibly legal consequences for his unscrupulous actions. Gray used official council stationary to solicit a $20,000 contribution from a cable company to help pay for Democratic Party activities at last year’s national convention. Like most government’s, D.C. forbids taxpayer resources to be used for political reasons or to raise cash for a particular party.

Additionally, the cable company ended up giving $10,000 even though D.C. law has a $5,000 limit on contributions by a single donor to a political committee during an election cycle. Gray actually got busted as part of a larger investigation into how the party committee raised and spent cash for convention activities.

The council chair is also in hot water for having a mega developer that does strictly large commercial projects renovate his house. The company has a $300 million real estate contract in an area that Gray represents and initially the council chair denied any work had been done on his 2,800-square-foot home last summer. He only came clean after a reporter dug around and gathered evidence of the shady arrangement.

Gray joins several D.C. government colleagues who have been exposed for fraud or wrongdoing recently. Among them is Mayor Adrian Fenty who used taxpayer-funded advertisements to promote a family business that donated generously to his campaign and took controversial overseas trips paid for by international governments. Judicial Watch has obtained the documents, through public records requests, detailing the highly questionable jaunts.

None of this seems to compare to the D.C. Council’s most famous member, a renowned crack head who has been elected four times after prison. Since getting captured on FBI surveillance video smoking crack as D.C. mayor in 1990, Marion Barry has been in trouble for evading taxes, violating the terms of his probation and, just a few months ago, for stalking his former girlfriend. Yet he’s a fixture in D.C. government where he currently represents Ward 8.

Feds Help Criminal Aliens Escape Justice In Texas

Judicial Watch Blog — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:28:33 -0500

More than 1,000 illegal immigrants awaiting trial for serious crimes in one major U.S. county were instead deported by federal immigration authorities and freed in their home countries.

The released offenders include at least 128 murderers, more than 400 child rapists and molesters, some 300 charged with aggravated assault and dozens more accused of sexual assault, aggravated robbery, kidnapping and other grave felonies.

The offenders’ newfound freedom came courtesy of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the federal agency that provided a one-way ticket home after bail was posted in their state criminal case. This sort of voluntary deportation to escape justice occurs nationwide, but this batch focuses on just one county in Texas.

Dallas County prosecutors provided the data to a local newspaper, calling it a “wish list” of people they would have liked to see tried. Instead the illegal immigrant criminals got away after bonding out and getting transferred to immigration facilities where they agreed that returning home was better than going to prison in America.

The 1,000 figure doesn’t even include all the illegal immigrant criminals the feds helped get off in the nation’s eighth-largest county, only the most serious, according to frustrated Dallas County officials. They assure defendants knowingly use the system as a means to avoid prosecution. The sad thing, of course, is that a federal agency is aiding and abetting them.

It could be worse, however. The criminals could be released in the U.S., which ICE does regularly and attributes to resource shortages. Earlier this year a Houston newspaper obtained public records that revealed the agency has freed hundreds of illegal immigrants convicted of felonies—including homicide, sexual assault and weapons violations—in the last few years alone. In many cases ICE doesn’t even know the whereabouts of the criminal aliens, who were released in various different states.

More Stimulus Fraud Exposed

Judicial Watch Blog — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:37:20 -0500

President Obama’s highly acclaimed stimulus spending transparency has turned out to be a painful thorn that’s exposed embarrassing falsities the administration publishes as fact to make the fraud-infested economic recovery plan look successful.

Weeks after getting busted for drastically inflating the number of jobs created by the scandal-plagued $787 billion stimulus, the White House is crediting the controversial spending program with saving or creating numerous jobs in congressional district that don’t even exist.

The humiliating revelation was exposed this week by a national news outlet that examined the latest data posted on Obama’s touted (and quite costly at $18 million) government website that claims to allow taxpayers to see precisely what entities receive stimulus money and how the money is spent. It’s all part of the administration’s goal of fostering greater accountability and transparency.

It turns out that much of the information is fiction. Misidentified congressional districts, or districts that simply don’t exist, are listed as receiving hundreds of millions of recovery dollars and creating a plethora of jobs. Additionally, U.S. territories such as Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands are falsely reported as creating hundreds of jobs with tens of millions of dollars in recovery funds.

Several congressional districts that don’t exist in Oklahoma are listed as utilizing $20 million to create 15 jobs and nonexistent districts in Iowa show spending $10.6 million to conceive 39 jobs. In Arizona, which has only eight congressional districts, the fictitious 15th district is listed as saving 30 jobs with $761,420 and a nonexistent Connecticut district (the 42nd) claims to have generated more than two dozen jobs with zero stimulus dollars.

A powerful Democrat who chairs the House appropriations Committee called the inaccuracies “outrageous” and “ludicrous” and demanded the data be immediately corrected. Just a few weeks ago the administration distorted by thousands the number of recovery-funded jobs in a desperate effort to show that it’s on track to meet its goal of creating 3.5 million new ones by the end of next year.

Besides blatant fact distortion, fraud and corruption have been pervasive in the monstrous stimulus program that has so far lost millions to waste, abuse and highly questionable projects. Many of the details are laid out in scathing U.S. Senate report (A Second Opinion on the Stimulus) that tracks tens of millions of dollars in wasteful stimulus projects and predicts that at least $55 billion will be lost to fraud and abuse by the time all the money is spent.

U.S. Prof. Maps Out Safe Routes For Mexicans Heading North

Judicial Watch Blog — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:59:31 -0500

An activist Chicano professor at a taxpayer-funded university has created special technology to help Mexicans enter the United States illegally by mapping the safest routes through the notoriously rigorous southern border desert.

The innovative Transborder Immigrant Tool is a simple mobile application—inserted into the cheapest available cell phone on the market—which guides illegal aliens through the least dangerous routes, areas with shelter, food, water and so-called Quaker help centers that provide medical attention and directions to the nearest major U.S. highway.

The Transborder Immigrant Tool is simply the latest of several devices created by members of a technologically sophisticated, pro illegal immigration group (Mexico/U.S. Border Disturbance Art Project) that aims to help Mexican migrants evade the U.S. Border Patrol. The new mobile program is touted as an “intelligent agent algorithm” that parses out the best routes and trails on a particular day and hour so that Mexicans can cross the “vertiginous landscape” as safely as possible.

It was created because hundreds of would-be illegal immigrants have died crossing the U.S./Mexico border because they got lost in the treacherous terrain. The virtual geography application will mark new trails and secure routes that will facilitate illegal aliens in reaching their U.S. destination unscathed, according to Mexico/U.S. Border Disturbance Art Project officials.

The rebel group is headed by a visual arts professor (Ricardo Dominguez) at the University of California San Diego, a major public institution not far from the Mexican border. His university biography boasts that he earned scrutiny from the National Security Agency for creating a program that allows activists to slow any web site to a halt by flooding it with requests (known as a virtual sit-in).

In the past Mexico’s government has provided its nationals with valuable tools to help them cross the border safely but this marks the first time an American resident, whose salary is provided by U.S. taxpayers, openly promotes such a gadget. A few years ago Mexican officials published a 32-page booklet (Guia Del Migrante Mexicano) with safety tips for border crossers and distributed hand-held satellite devices to ensure the violators complete their journey safely.

Shady Judge Sues House Panel To Block Impeachment

Judicial Watch Blog — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:34:56 -0500

In a desperate effort to avoid impeachment, a Louisiana federal judge embroiled in a corruption scandal is suing the congressional task force that could remove him from the bench to block it from using incriminating evidence that could lead to his demise.

U.S. District Judge G. Thomas Portreous claims that the impeachment task force of the U.S. House of Representative’s Committee on the Judiciary is illegally using testimony he gave under a promise of immunity to make a case for his ouster. Prosecutors agree not to use immunized testimony against defendants but its not clear what effect, if any, the deals have on impeachment proceedings which are conducted by federal legislators.

The veteran judge is under investigation for taking money and valuable gifts from attorneys with cases before him, hiding assets, filing for bankruptcy under a bogus name and defying a bankruptcy court’s order relating to credit. Porteous’ unscrupulous actions were discovered during an FBI investigation of state judges in Jefferson Parish, where he served until Bill Clinton named him to the federal bench in 1994.

During the years-long criminal probe, Judge Porteous offered incriminating information relating to the judicial misconduct investigation and he wants the House impeachment panel to disregard the lengthy transcript with the juicy details. In his complaint, the judge asserts that his right not to be compelled to be a witness against himself under the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution is being violated.

If the House impeaches Porteous, the Senate will hold a trial on the matter. Only 14 federal judges have been impeached by the U.S. House and only one in the last two decades. That Texas judge, Samuel Kent (appointed to the bench by George H.W. Bush in 1990), is serving a three-year prison sentence for obstructing an investigation into charges that he sexually assaulted two female employees.