A Deliberate act of Terrorism

By now, most of us have heard about the coordinated assassinations of our government consulate representatives in Mexico, only yards from our border as they frantically tried to escape the killers. We have yet to hear of any of our elected officials speaking out against this most recent outrage, except to be told our president is 'outraged'.

On CBS news last night, Mexican security analyst, Alberto Islas put it this way, "It was a deliberate act of terrorism."

Our friends with the National Association of Former Border Patrol Agents, who translate the daily news for us from south of the border, have long been warning of the danger in Mexico to our citizens , as well as the danger crossing into our own country daily. Many instances have been cited concerning threats to our officials and law enforcement.

Yet, as we watch our citizens senselessly die, the Obama administration, propped up by pretend republican Lindsey Graham, is pushing for amnesty for those same cartel members hiding in plain site within our own borders.

We were warned years ago by Donald Rumsfeld when he stated, " The risk is that some of these human-smuggling routes into our country from this hemisphere could be used just as easily for terrorists."

Secretary Rumsfeld also said the United States has to be, as he put it, smarter and quicker in securing our borders. The federal government’s failure to secure those borders is leading individual states to take action.

Congressman Warns Mexico More Dangerous than Iraq, Could Become Failed State Wednesday, March 25, 2009

[snips]At a House of Representatives hearing on federal law enforcement’s response to the violence along the border between the United States and Mexico, Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas) said there is more danger in that region than in the Middle East.

“Mexico is more dangerous than Iraq,” Culberson said. “There were more deaths in Mexico than there were in Iraq.”

The per capita rate of civilian killings in the Mexican border city in 2008 was nearly three-and-a-half times (3.4) as great as the per capita rate of civilian killings in the Iraqi province of Baghdad

In fact, CNSNews.com has calculated that approximately 113 per 100,000 people were killed by violence in Juarez, while in Baghdad about 33 per 100,000 civilians shared the same fate.

“Yet the testimony that this committee’s received, that we have on Homeland Security – many members of this committee are also on the Homeland Security Committee – the U.S. military has ranked the Mexican government, the Pakistani government and the Afghan government as the three most unstable, potentially likely to collapse governments in the world,” Culberson said.

“The level of violence we’re seeing in Mexico certainly has to be qualified essentially as a civil war,” he said. “The level of violence is unprecedented.”

Culberson also questioned the Drug Enforcement Agency’s (DEA) definition of “spillover,” as when drug cartels or gangs target Americans or American assets.

“In Houston, Texas, in broad daylight, we had a machine-gun fight at one of the biggest intersections in southwest Houston,” Culberson said. “A machine-gun battle between two human smugglers. They’re trying to kill each other. That’s not counted as spillover because they are shooting at each other and it’s not a deliberate attack on U.S. civilians.”

“Those bullets weren’t hitting each other, those bullets were flying everywhere,” Culberson said.

"American officials said they had several theories about the killings, but the strongest one was that the three were killed by a drug gang to send a message to both the Mexican and United States governments."

United States officials reiterated on Monday their support for Mr. Calderón’s battle against Mexico’s drug gangs, which first the Bush administration and then the Obama administration have backed with more than $1 billion in aid. The money has been spread across an array of agencies charged with fighting the drug war. It has bought helicopters for the army, X-ray equipment for customs, training for judges and a new police academy for federal police recruits.

Still, our government insists it cannot afford to finish the fence mandated by law on the southern border.

The war next door is here and until our government sees fit to enforce the rule of law, instead of babysitting and paying off a dysfunctional Mexico and the terrorism it promotes , it will only get worse.

The murderers of our citizens was an organized hit. Corruption of our officials is becoming rampant because the cartels have the money to buy them. It is not out of the realm of possibilities that these coordinated attacks may have been precipitated by cartel allies within or connected to the embassy.

This article by way of NAFBPO.

Drug Cartels Target US Officials Print
by Phil Leggiere
Monday, 15 March 2010

Bribery becoming major cartel weapon on US border.

Mexican drug cartels, squeezed by heightened US border defenses, are trying to regain an advantage by aggressively bribing and corrupting American officials, experts testified last Thursday at a hearing of the Ad Hoc Subcommittee on State, Local, and Private Sector Preparedness and Integration.

The purpose of the hearing, titled New Border War: Corruption of US Officials by Drug Cartels, was to review the efforts by drug trade organizations (DTOs) to infiltrate and corrupt federal, state, and local law enforcement in order to improve their ability to counter US border control measures.

At the hearing Kevin L. Perkins, Assistant Director, Criminal Investigative Division Federal Bureau of Investigation, outlined the FBI’s perspective on the issue.

“In the past two years alone,” Perkins said, “ our efforts have helped convict 1,600 federal, state, and local officials. We have another 3,200 public corruption cases pending, approximately 2,500 of which involve corruption of public officials. But more remains to be done. Because the interests at stake are so important and the magnitude of the problem so great, we have deployed approximately 700 agents to fight corruption around the country.”

Perkins cited one particular case he said highlighted the potential national security implications of public corruption along our nation’s borders. In that case, an individual gained employment as a border inspector for the specific purpose of trafficking in drugs.

“Through our collaborative efforts and a year-long investigation,” he said, “ this former public official pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to import more than 1000 kilograms of marijuana into the United States and received more than $5 Million in bribe payments. This individual has since been sentenced to 22 years in prison.”

In another extensive undercover investigation described by Perkins, the FBI and its partners netted corrupt officials from 12 different federal, state, and local government agencies who allegedly used their positions to traffic in drugs. To date, 84 of those subjects have pled guilty to related charges.

Thomas M. Frost, Assistant Inspector General for Investigations, US Department of Homeland Security, explained that border related corruption is not limited to one DHS component, but, unfortunately, could involve employees and contractors from across DHS, from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS) and others.

In Fiscal Year (FY) 2009, Frost said, the Office of Inspector General (OIG) received about 12,458 allegations of fraud and initiated over 1,085 investigations. Investigations resulted in 313 arrests, 293 indictments, 281 convictions and 59 administrative actions.

The corruption activities of drug trafficking organizations are not limited to those employees such as customs inspectors and border patrol officers, Frost commented. In addition ICE employees, including sworn law enforcement officers, have been targeted and recruited, as have TSA employees.

Frost identified several areas where continued improvement could help the department address employee corruption: employee suitability, monitoring and oversight; ongoing employee training, enforcing administrative Action; hotline allegations; and improved information and intelligence sharing.

James F. Tomsheck, Assistant Commisioner Office of Internal Affairs, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported that CBP had become a major target of drug cartels.

“There is a concerted effort on the part of transnational criminal organizations to infiltrate CBP through hiring initiatives and compromise our existing agents and officers” Tomsheck explained. “Since Oct. 1, 2004, 103 CBP law enforcement officers have been arrested or indicted on mission-critical corruption charges, including drug smuggling, alien smuggling, money laundering and conspiracy.”Drug cartels

To counter this very real threat, Tomsheck said, CBP has developed an operational strategy including background investigations and clearances, employee misconduct investigations, physical, informational, industrial, internal and operational security; and management inspections.

http://www.hstoday.us/content/view/12492/149/

More news by way of NAFBPO.

http://www.nafbpo.org/

Napolitano Says People From Countries Tied to Terrorism Could ‘Potentially’ Enter USA, But DHS Reports Says Thousands Already Have

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/62027

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told senators it is a national security concern that people from countries with ties to terrorism could ‘potentially’ gain entry into the United States by crossing the country’s southern border.

But according to the Department of Homeland Security’s own reports, thousands of people from 14 “special interest” countries already have come into the United States illegally, including some across the U.S.-Mexico border. (The State Department designates some nations as “special interest” counties because of their links to terrorism.)

McCain responded: “Countries of special interest – people could come up through our southern border?” [DUH!!!]

“Potentially, yes,” Napolitano said.

The State Department lists four special interest countries as sponsors of terror – Cuba, Sudan, Syria and Iran. The other 10 countries of interest are: Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen.

According to the DHS’s 2008 Yearbook of Immigration Studies, from the Office of Immigration Statistics, a total of 791,568 people where detained by federal law enforcement agencies in fiscal year 2008 – 5,506 of those people were from those 14 “special interest” countries. [snips]

More info on this weekends killings:

Mexican drug war killings hit closer to U.S.

Two of the victims were U.S. citizens; one of them a U.S. government employee. The apparently coordinated attacks took place in broad daylight as the three were leaving a consulate children’s party. Three children were with them when the two separate assaults took place.

Now, the international investigation has expanded****** to both sides of the border in the search for clues *****about the killers as well as their motives.

“There are leads to follow up on this side, witnesses to be interviewed,” said Andrea Simmons, spokeswoman for the FBI in El Paso, which is across from Juarez. “We are going through intelligence now.”

Mexican state and federal authorities are in charge of the investigation, as blood was spilled on Mexican soil, but an array of U.S. agencies are backing them up, including the FBI and State Department.

The murders immediately triggered a spate of theories as to what the killers attempted to accomplish by striking out at the Americans.

“My theory at this point is it was a reaction by the narcos to announcements of greater involvement of Americans in the drug war,” said Gustavo de la Rosa, a Chihuahua state human rights official who was forced to flee to El Paso because of death threats.

The killings came three weeks after news reports described how U.S. drug agents were going to become more closely involved in Mexico’s war against the drug cartels.

De la Rosa theorized that******* the narcos perversely hope to tap a deep Mexican resentment against any American meddling in domestic affairs, a sentiment that dates back to the Mexican Revolution.**********

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2010/03/16/MN171CG7RA.DTL

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