U.S. Yanks Scathing Report Blasting DHS for Catching Less than 1% of Visa Overstays
MAY 16, 2017
Update 5/19/17: Public affairs officer, Arlen Morales, told Judicial Watch this
week that the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General’s office has
been “working through a number of technical issues” and sent a working link for
the report.
Fifteen years after
Islamic terrorists exploited the U.S. government’s inept method of tracking
visa overstays, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) still uses an
antiquated system that doesn’t have the capability to get the job done. This
allows foreign individuals, who may “pose severe national security risks” to
remain in the country, according to a federal audit that for unknown reasons
was yanked from the public domain. A 45-page report was issued this month by
the DHS Inspector General and Judicial Watch reviewed it thoroughly before the
watchdog mysteriously pulled it from its website. Judicial Watch has repeatedly
reached out to the DHS IG’s office but has received no response. Here’s the link that went bad as also noted by a few
other outlets.
To be sure, the findings
are an embarrassment to the government because visa overstays have been a major
national security issue for well over a decade. Several of the 9/11 hijackers
remained in the U.S. after their visa expired to plan and carry out the worst
terrorist attack on American soil. A few years after the 2001 attacks Congress
launched a system that was supposed to take care of the problem by tracking the
entry and exit of foreign nationals with electronically scanned fingerprints
and photographs. But five years and $1 billion later, the system, U.S. Visitor
and Immigration Status Indicator Technology (US VISIT), still had serious
flaws. A few years later the investigative arm of Congress, the Government Accountability
Office (GAO), published a report confirming that nearly half of the
nation’s illegal aliens entered the U.S. legally and overstayed their visas
undetected. In the years that followed the government did little to improve
what has developed into a dire national security disaster. In 2011 yet another federal audit confirmed that the U.S. had lost
track of millions who overstayed their visas and two years later the crisis
intensified when DHS lost track of 266 dangerous foreigners
with expired visas. The government determined that they “could pose a national
security or public safety concerns,” according to the director of Homeland
Security and Justice at the GAO.
Just last year Judicial
Watch obtained DHS figures showing that more than half a
million foreigners with expired visas—like the 9/11 jihadists—remained in the
country, thousands of them from terrorist nations like Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen,
Libya and Syria. More than 45,000 Mexicans overstayed their visa, according to
the DHS records, and thousands more from El Salvador, Ecuador, Venezuela and
China. The visas are granted for “business or pleasure” and the foreigners come
via sea or air port of entry. For nearly a decade a number of federal audits
have offered the alarming figures associated with visa overstays, including one
released back in 2011 that estimates half of the nation’s illegal immigrants
entered legally with visas.
This month’s DHS IG
report exposes the disturbing reality that the U.S. government has done nothing
to prevent another terrorist attack by dangerous elements that remain in the
country with an expired visa. Many fall through the cracks because Immigration
and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the DHS agency responsible for the task, must
piece together information from dozens of systems and databases that aren’t
reliable. The problem is
so out of control that ICE must
depend on often sketchy data
provided by third parties such as
commercial carrier passenger lists
that often provide false visitor
departure and arrival information. “Such false departure information resulted in [Enforcement and Removal Operations] officers closing visa overstay investigations of dangerous individuals, such as suspected criminals, who were actually still in the United States and could pose a threat to national security,” according to the DHS IG report. “For example, [a deportation] officer stated that a suspect under investigation was listed as having left the country, but had given his ticket to a family member and was still residing in the United States.”
Here are the overall
figures that illustrate how bad the problem is; of more than half a million
visa overstays identified by the DHS watchdog, a mere 3,402 were caught by
federal authorities. It gets better. The various unreliable databases that ICE
uses also provided inaccurate information on the 0.4% that got busted,
according to the report. “In some cases, the individuals arrested had been
reported in DHS systems as having already left the United States,” the report
states. “Because this information was not recorded, ICE personnel were unable
to provide an exact number when asked during our audit.”
In 2015, the U.S. issued
nearly 11 million visas and, though only a small percentage overstay, they pose
serious national security risks, the watchdog found. As an example, the report
mentions the 9/11 hijackers who overstayed their visa. “This prompted the 9/11
Commission to call for the government to ensure that all visitors to the United
States are tracked on entry and exit,” DHS investigators remind. Instead, there
is a backlog of 1.2 million expired visa cases, the report says.
BILLIONS SQUANDERED BY THE PENTAGON AND DEFENDING THE BORDERS OF MUSLIM DICTATORSHIPS WHO HAVE BEEN GENEROUS DONORS TO THE PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARIES OF BUSH, CLINTON and the OBOMB!
Report accuses Pentagon of
running multi-billion dollar slush fund for military operations
By
Jordan Shilton
22 May 2017
A report in Sunday’s edition of the Washington
Post accuses the
Pentagon of operating a multi-billion dollar slush fund which it has accrued
over the past seven years by overcharging the armed forces for the cost of fuel
purchases. The $5.9 billion it has built up since 2010 has been used to fund
military operations in Syria and Afghanistan, effectively avoiding any of the
budgetary oversight requirements necessary to obtain additional funding from
Congress.
The most significant expenditures from the fund identified by the Post were a total of $1.4 billion used in
2016 to maintain the United States’ brutal occupation of Afghanistan and the
use of $80 million to train Islamist militias in Syria in 2015 with the aim of
toppling the government of Bashar al-Assad in Damascus.
The explosion in spending on the Afghan war illustrates the
deepening crisis of the more than 15-year-old US occupation of the
impoverished, war-torn country.
Billions of dollars have been spent on waging a ruthless
counter-insurgency war against the resistance of the local population to the US
presence, led by the Islamist Taliban. This has included the expenditure of
vast sums of money to establish and prop up a corrupt puppet regime in Kabul,
which is struggling to exercise authority over more than a few major cities, is
deeply reviled by wide sections of the population, and is losing ground to the
Taliban. Just last month, Taliban fighters carried out their bloodiest attack
on the Afghan army since 2001, killing upwards of 200 soldiers.
The $80 million redirected by the Pentagon to Syria helped
continue to fund a US training program to create a Sunni militia capable of
fighting ISIS and ousting Assad. The program proved to be an unmitigated
disaster, managing to train only 150 of the original target of 5,000 fighters.
Most of these fighters were captured by al-Qaida or other groups when they were
sent into Syria, or deserted.
This setback only caused Washington to intervene even more
aggressively, first by funneling aid through its Gulf allies and the CIA to
Jihadi proxy forces to wage war in Syria, and later by bolstering the presence
of US ground forces. Under President Trump, the number of US ground forces in
Syria has more than doubled and he has relaxed restrictions on airstrikes,
leading to a dramatic spike in civilian casualties.
The sharpest criticism of the Pentagon’s slush fund came from Navy
officials, who described the surplus built up by the Pentagon as a “bishop’s
fund.”
The Post noted that the Defense Logistics
Agency, the body responsible for selling fuel, sets a fixed price which is
often substantially higher than the commercial rate and is intended to remain
in place for a year. Before 2009, no major discrepancies arose, but from 2010
onwards, the DLA began setting prices at levels sometimes $1 per barrel above
the commercial rate.
A review of Pentagon purchasing data found that the branches of
the armed forces had been charged $23 billion more for fuel between 2010 and
2016 than commercial airlines would have paid.
While Pentagon officials acknowledged that around three-quarters
of this covered additional costs, such as specialized fuel requirements and
overheads, this still left a $5.9 billion surplus. The only time Congress
appears to have directly intervened was in 2015, when it requested the Pentagon
to return $1 billion to reflect reduced fuel prices.
The Defense Department’s use of such a fund to meet the costs of
military operations is only the latest example of the increasing ability of the
military-intelligence apparatus to act outside of any accountability to
Congress. Despite the US gargantuan defense budget, which dwarfs those of all
of its nearest competitors, the Pentagon has over recent years taken advantage
of accounting methods to allocate tens of billions more in funding to military
operations beyond the funds approved by Congress.
Under the Obama administration, Democrats and Republicans included
a so-called parity regulation as part of their 2011 budget deal which
stipulated that any increase in defense spending had to be accompanied by a
corresponding rise in domestic budgets. To avoid this requirement, the Pentagon
increasingly relied on Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) funding, which is
designed to cover the costs of foreign wars. Reports suggest that the Pentagon
now uses $30 billion of OCO annually to supplement its base budget.
Such developments could only take place under conditions where
there is a bipartisan consensus to retain the US military as a force capable of
waging war around the globe. Both the Democrats and Republicans, speaking on
behalf of the super-rich oligarchy in the United States, are fully committed to
the increasing resort to military violence in a desperate bid to offset
Washington’s economic decline and retain its hegemonic position against its
geopolitical rivals in every region of the world. Under conditions in which
Washington has been waging virtually uninterrupted war for a quarter-century,
the maintenance of even a semblance of democratic control over the military’s
operations is increasingly impossible.
President Obama initiated the US intervention in Syria, expanded
the US presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, launched air and drone strikes on at
least eight countries across the Middle East and North Africa, and facilitated
the bloody Saudi onslaught on Yemen, where tens of thousands of civilians have
died.
In a revealing finding that shows how routine the waging of war
has become for the US military, the Government Accountability Office (GAO)
reported that the Pentagon’s accounting systems do not recognize a difference
between wartime operations and routine expenditure, which was traditionally
covered by the base defense budget.
The GAO wrote that the Defense Department internally reallocated
$146 billion in operations and maintenance (O&M) funding between 2009 and
2015, but added, “[T]he effects of such realignments on base obligations were
not readily apparent because DOD did not report its O&M base obligations to
Congress separately from its O&M overseas contingency operations (OCO)
obligations used to support war-related programs and activities.”
Even greater sums of money are to be allocated to the military
under Trump’s budget proposal, to which the Democrats have offered virtually no
opposition, of an annual defense spending increase of $54 billion, equivalent
to almost 10 percent of the existing budget. Such additional funds will pay for
the escalation of the conflict in the Middle East, where the US is seeking to
maintain its dominance over one of the most energy-rich regions of the world
against its chief rivals, Russia and China.
On Friday, Defense Secretary James Mattis put forward a plan for
the waging of war by the US across a region stretching from Central Asia to
West Africa. Presented as a fight against Jihadi “terrorism,” it is in reality
only one step in the global military strategy of US imperialism, which carries
the increasing risk of triggering a catastrophic world war between the major
powers.
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