StormWarning’s Counterterrorism

Well, I was busy for alot of the day, and never got to write this.  Doug Farah at CTBlog (and his own blog) beat me to it.  Its time for all of the people arguing to relax the border wake up to the very real danger.  I’ve written about this so many times before!  In this case, 3 Afghan men with legal Mexican passports tried to enter the U.S.

Three Afghani Muslim men caught posing as Mexican nationals last month while en route to Europe were part of a human smuggling operation and carried what are now believed to be altered but genuine Mexican passports for which they paid $10,000 each, Indian investigators told The San Antonio Express-News.

The key point is this: “At issue to some U.S. national security experts is whether another of Mexico’s embassies and consulates abroad might be implicated in selling travel documents to people from countries like Afghanistan where terrorist organizations are active…”

Here’s more for the disbelievers and those who want to have an open border!

Travelers from Islamic countries carrying passports that are valid but altered with fake names and photographs are among the most difficult to detect, he said. In the black markets of human smuggling, real national passports with embedded security bar codes rank among the most valuable travel documents because they enable their bearers to more easily slip through airport inspections.

“If you’ve got a Mexican passport you’ve already crossed the bridge,” Conway said. “And you can become part of the flood of people who cross into the U.S. If terrorists wanted to exploit the infrastructure in place, they can. It’s there.”

We are dealing with a very persistent enemy…they have multiple faces and skin colors…they come from many different countries…

So, here is the question for the moment: HAVE TERRORISTS CROSSED? (the U.S.-Mexican border). Of course they have!…Border security critics assert no terrorist has ever crossed; they would be wrong.

…the heart of a central question regarding just how much of a national security threat is posed by a small category of border-jumping migrants known in homeland security agencies as “Special Interest Aliens.”

Terrorists across the border???

According to unearthed intelligence reports, court records, interviews with federal agents and a variety of open sources, other border jumpers that can be publicly tied to terrorism since Al-Qaeda began its international bombing campaign against American targets in the mid-1990s are:

– Kuwaiti national Nabil al-Marabh. Listed as number 27 on the FBI’s list of Most Wanted Terrorists for alleged links to the 9-11 hijackers and other plots…

– Palestinian Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer. Found guilty of conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction after authorities uncovered his 1997 plot to bomb a New York City subway…

– Ahmed Ressam. Convicted of plotting the 1999 “millennium” bomb attack on the Los Angeles International Airport after he was caught trying to cross into Washington State in a car loaded with explosives and bomb components…

– Algerian Abdelghani Meskini and Abdelhakim Tizegha. Convicted of charges related to the thwarted 1999 “millennium” plot…

– Mohmoud Khalil and Ziad Saleh. Among a group of men, including members of the designated terrorist group Hamas, arrested in January 2005 in connection to a wire fraud, trademark violations and alien smuggling investigation…

– Ahilan Nadarajah and Saluja Thangaraja. Reputed members of the Tamil Tigers caught at the Mexico border in 2001 after being smuggled through Thailand, South Africa and Brazil en route to Toronto Canada…

Close the freakin’ border! Control the documents…make them more secure than they are…or will be under the current regulations and guidelines.

And here is the point…

One territory where Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina meet, known as the “Tri-Border” region, home to tens of thousands of Arab immigrants, has been under unrelenting scrutiny by American intelligence services since 9-11.

The U.S. Treasury Department in December designated nine people and two organizations in the Tri-Border region it says “provided financial and logistical support to the Hezbollah terrorist organization.” A department fact sheet accuses some of the men of trafficking in weaponry, another of running Hezbollah front businesses in Chile. Another man is named as an expert in illegally acquiring Brazilian citizenship and bogus Paraguayan travel documents.

I don’t know how many times I have written about the Tri-Border region…or about so many of the other issues relating to illegal immigration. We’ve got a problem here, and now, more than 6½ years after the attacks of September 11th, we are still playing politics with immigration.

I’ve written about this many times before:
Terrorists Have Been Arrested at Texas Border
Breaching America: Iraqi Chaldean Christian Granted Asylum
Chaldean Christians - Aliens in Search of Religious Freedom
Border Security - The Danger of Illegal Immigration from Islamic Countries - Part 4
Border Security - The Danger of Illegal Immigration from Islamic Countries - Part 3
Border Security - Breaching America: The Latin Connection

border security, Hezbollah, immigration, State Department, Tri Border region