Racial-profiling concerns hurt counterterror efforts?

WorldNetDaily.com ^ | Tuesday, November 23, 2004

[JohnHuang2]

The FBI agent who wrote a pre-9/11 memo warning about terrorists from Middle Eastern countries training at U.S. flight schools says government officials didn't take action in response to his letter due to concerns about racial profiling.

Ken Williams spoke to the Arizona Republic Saturday – his first interview since the now-famous memo was written.

"If you look at the world prior to 9-11, we were prevented from doing certain things," he told the paper. "We were victimized by our own restraints."

According to the report, Williams said he never blamed supervisors for what has been described as an intelligence failure.

"Intelligence is not an exact science," he said. "I tell people it is like drinking from a fire hydrant."

Racial profiling – the targeting of people for investigation based on ethnicity – is opposed by many activists and elected officials who consider it discriminatory.

Williams, a Phoenix FBI agent, warned in his memo, dated July 10, 2001, that Osama bin Laden was using flight schools to train terrorists.

His prediction was based on investigations of local aviation students in the Phoenix area tied to al-Qaida. In the memo, he recommended that the State Department coordinate with the FBI to give information on flight students from Middle Eastern countries.

Saying terrorists "are going to try and hit us again," the agent also told the Republic Americans must reclaim the sense of unity and purpose that gripped the nation three years ago to thwart the next terrorist attack.

"We are in a war with people o really want to hurt us," he told the paper. "In my opinion, it is not over."

[cyborg]

I don't think our people have what it takes to profile correctly. I've heard the Israelis have it down pat.

[JohnHuang2]

I don't think our people have what it takes to profile correctly.

One would think that, after 9/11, all this PC crap would be canned but apparently not.

[cyborg]

Yes you're right. I see an inability to achieve balance. The downside to only profiling and ignoring everyone else is that the terrorists will start using everyone else.

[meenie]

One reason might be the PC problem where we have to profile the same number of grannies with knitting needles as the ragheads to keep from being accused of racial profiling. Also, it seems the Israelis have a handle on the borders and the people who might cross them.

[cyborg]

I think it has a lot to do with not being sued. CAIR and other islamicist groups have armies of lawyers waiting to sue the government. El Al has never had a hijacking btw.

[broadsword]

CAIR and other islamicist groups intend to PC-whip and out-breed us into oblivion, because they cannot stand up to us in an honest fight.

[cyborg]

agreed... as for the outbreeding that's OUR fault. I can educate you about how Planned Parenthood's new mission doesn't involve abortion so much as BIRTH CONTROL. Plus, we're aborting ourselves to extinction just so we can have two more SUVs in the driveway. Know what I mean?

[NY Attitude]

El AL has a very tight security operation. One would be out of his/her mind to try to hijack one of their aircraft.

[NY Attitude]

El AL has a very tight security operation. One would be out of his/her mind to try to hijack one of their aircraft.

[broadsword]

I know exactly what you mean.

This present situation is not a joke. Hell is coming to us here in the USA.

I will NOT be forced onto a filthy prayer rug and worship a damned meteorite! I will spill a lot of mohammedan blood before I see American women forced into burkahs!

[JohnHuang2]

The downside to only profiling and ignoring everyone else is that the terrorists will start using everyone else.

That's a concern, but the notion of putting silver-haired, 80-year-old Grandmas through a full-body search is ridiculous.

[NetValue]

There will be another attack....probably using large fuel-transport trucks as fuel-fertilizer bombs like McVey's mixture in Oklahoma City. A number of fuel-transport trucks across the US have already been stolen and have completely disappeared despite intensive police and FBI searches.

What may not have been done (due to PC concers that they cannot even appear to be doing racial profiling) is looking into the truck-driving schools that teach how to drive these large trucks that carry or store liquid fuel. One almost has to believe that a large number of Islamic student truck drivers should be suspect.

QUESTION FOR THE FBI: What will you say to the public and Conmgress AFTER the truck-bomb scenario plays out? Racial profiling considerations inhibited us from looking into these matters?

[AuntB]

There is no doubt that Pres. Bush's administration has done more than the Clinton or any dems would have. But there are glaring gaps that are being ignored. Minnetta (A Clinton holdover -- when will they learn?) of Transportation forbids any ethnic profiling at airports and has fined airlines for trying to pull questionable Arabs aside for further determination (from the book 'Flying Blind".) Custom agents are frustrated because they are not allowed to do their jobs. One whistleblower, Darlene Fitzgerald, who is profiled in an article below by Gary Aldrich, is still fighting to disclose the gaps in court (case keeps getting delayed, now until Feb.) and states there are NO x-ray type machines on the borders examining vehicles (especially tankers) as we are told...I'd like to know if it's true.

---

http://www.conservativetruth.org/article.php?id=497
Dangero-US Customs

By Gary Aldrich, Patrick Henry Center



As parents and children fanned out to walk neighborhoods on Halloween night, a real danger lurks in rail yards in virtually any town or major city accessible to railroad traffic.

Parents may be worried about unwanted substances in candy, but what’s really scary is what may be parked a couple hundred yards away from their children’s public school, according to one courageous whistle blower who had the guts to come forward.

Thousands of pressurized rail cars cross U.S. borders daily, and U.S. Customs is doing virtually nothing to inspect them, making each one a handy vehicle for contraband distribution. Worse, deadly chemicals available to any terrorist with phony identification and a credit card can be purchased in Mexico, then moved around the United States to be parked indefinitely at thousands of rental rail spurs. Rail cars can even be moved back and forth with a laptop computer, to be placed in key areas for later illegal drug off-loading, or worse.

Fill one of these pressure tanks with diesel fuel oil and fertilizer, and what do you have? The world’s largest pipe bomb. Imagine that if one Ryder rental truck-bomb in Oklahoma City destroyed half of a giant federal office building, what could a huge rail tanker filled with poison gas or explosives do to your average city?

Are these the concerns of hysterical citizens looking under every bed for a post-September 11 bogeyman? Hardly. U.S. Customs’ federal agents have been warning about this danger for years, without any real action to stop it taken by U.S. Customs managers. When several U.S. Customs agents brought their concerns to the local FBI office in California, fearing their own agency had been compromised, nothing happened, they claim. Finally, frustrated by inaction and fear, they went public. Some have testified in front of the U.S. Senate, but still there is no substantive action to address this real danger.

Former U.S. Customs federal agent Darlene Fitzgerald-Catalan recently contacted my foundation - The Patrick Henry Center - because she had heard that I tried to warn others about national security dangers, but had also hit a brick-wall when agency bureaucrats simply did not want to listen. She thought we could help.

Darlene is a classic whistle blower. The difference is that Fitzgerald-Catalan and six other federal agent associates, and a U.S. prosecutor walked out en masse in 1999, but their brave mutiny, complete with staged public protests, netted them nothing but scorn and retribution from U.S. Customs managers.

Fitzgerald-Catalan cannot prove that Customs managers were on the take. In fact, she can recite many examples of agent managers who reeked of incompetence. But, U.S. Customs managers’ inability to manage agents and investigations is one thing. When Fitzgerald-Catalan tried to conduct pressurized rail car investigations to determine the extent of contraband coming into the United States from a corrupt rail yard in Mexico, her investigations were shut down by worried and strangely acting managers. When other agents attempted to help her, they were punished severely and subjected to endless administrative probes, designed to get them to resign or retire.

Every time a federal agent exhibited interest in conducting a serious probe of rail car smuggling, he or she found themselves on the wrong end of U.S. Customs’ fury. They were followed and subjected to false allegations designed to destroy their careers. They even found "hidden" video surveillance cameras aimed at their personal residences which they believe were meant to be seen, so as to intimate them into leaving the rail car investigation alone.

Did they have grounds to suspect that pressurized cars were being used to haul illegal drugs or worse? Not only did they find cars filled with illegal drugs, but they had railroad detectives pointing out numerous cars that by their very weight records - which made each car appear empty - were actually filled with mysterious material weighing tons. Why would anybody pay to have "empty" cars moved about the United States? Of course nobody would, and that is why the railroad detectives and honest U.S. Customs agents knew something was up!

Why did Fitzgerald-Catalan’s managers shut down her investigation and punish anybody who tried to help her, or who came to her defense when Customs internal affairs agents set out to ruin her? ~snip~

[AuntB]

See post #14