Posted on 07/18/2004 12:48:18 PM PDT by jimbo123
BROOKFIELD, Ill. - A Jordanian man living in the U.S. illegally is accused of lying about his immigration status to obtain a pilot's license.
Sami Abuhamatto, 24, was arrested on Friday and is charged in federal court with making a false statement on his application. He will remain in custody until Monday when a detention hearing will be held.
Abuhamatto has lived in the U.S. illegally since his six-month visitors visa expired in late 1996, according to court documents. He applied for the license in May 2002 after passing a flight test at DeKalb Municipal Airport.
Abuhamatto apparently claimed on the application that he was a U.S. citizen who was born in Brookfield, the Chicago suburb where he lives.
The application was approved by the Federal Aviation Administration less than a week later.
Officials said Abuhamatto was actually born in Quwasmeh, Jordan.
There are no allegations Abuhamatto's actions were terrorism-related.
Authorities say they learned of the incident after Abuhamatto arranged a bogus marriage late last year in an effort to gain resident alien status. According to an affidavit filed in federal court, Abuhamatto offered a woman who was a U.S. citizen money to marry him.
After the two were married in December, Abuhamatto and the unnamed women "both went their separate ways," according to the affidavit.
"The application was approved by the Federal Aviation Administration less than a week later."
Yeppers! Great job they're doing, not. Maybe we can hire some Mexicans to keep our borders and airspace safe, you know they love to do the jobs Americans won't do.
There are no allegations Abuhamatto's actions were terrorism-related.To suggest that an undocumentend worker of middle-eastern descent were anything other than law-abiding and civic-minded would be racist and hateful and might suggest a society willing to defend itself.
Wait a minute--
1) I'm sure that license was just for flying, and couldn't be used by an undocumented guest worker as an i.d.
2) We're issuing these licenses because these undocumented workers are here anyway and will be flying anyway, so at least we can keep their flying safer.
3) If undocumented workers were able to take the flight check and the written test, they would be better prepared to fly.
4) It's essential that these undocumented workers continue to work and earn money, and so they are forced to fly.
5) SUBSTITUTE WACKY PARALLEL TO DRIVER'S LICENSE RATIONALIZATION HERE
Abuhamatto apparently claimed on the application that he was a U.S. citizen who was born in Brookfield, the Chicago suburb where he lives.
Nobody checked on this? No one asked him to provide proof (birth certificate/passport)? By law, an employer is required to verify that a new employee is either a US Citizen; a Lawful Permanent Resident (i.e., has the "green card"); or is allowed to work (has an Employment Authorization Card from the DHS). I guess the standards for identity-verification for a pilot's license are more lax.
Officials said Abuhamatto was actually born in Quwasmeh, Jordan.
Oooooooooops! DHS/ICE (Immigration & Customs Enforcement) can get him on at least two, maybe three, grounds of removability: overstaying a visa; false claim to US citizenship (and that will bar him from EVER coming back -- legally, that is); and -- if they charge and convict him for his false statements (US Code, Title 18, section 1001), perhaps he will be removable for having committed a "crime involving moral terpitude."
One can hope.
es
ping
Abuhamatto apparently claimed on the application that he was a U.S. citizen who was born in Brookfield, the Chicago suburb where he lives.There are a buch of these people here...and they have been here a long time...and more are coming across the southern border and elsewhere every day (OTM's don't you know). They are gearing up for round two.
The application was approved by the Federal Aviation Administration less than a week later.
Officials said Abuhamatto was actually born in Quwasmeh, Jordan.
There are no allegations Abuhamatto's actions were terrorism-related.
Authorities say they learned of the incident after Abuhamatto arranged a bogus marriage late last year in an effort to gain resident alien status. According to an affidavit filed in federal court, Abuhamatto offered a woman who was a U.S. citizen money to marry him.
After the two were married in December, Abuhamatto and the unnamed women "both went their separate ways," according to the affidavit.
The application was approved by the Federal Aviation Administration less than a week later.
There are no allegations Abuhamatto's actions were terrorism-related.
The FAA has only required secondary identification for the application in the last couple of years. Undoubtedly, he has an Illinois driver's license which is valid, since he probably paid someone in the IL DMV to get one (there have been a number of DMV employees arrested from Illinois in the last few years for that).
I would suspect he was nailed because of internal FAA secondary checks that have been instituted since 9/11, which may have flagged him due to his ethnicity (horrors). The first tier checks they do on that would have been to match his driver's license, which would have come up OK. But other things, like a SSAN, would not. And then a match on the name with the State Department would have put up a red flag.
Note that this guy was caught because he was dumb and was most likely using his original name that was on his visa. Smarter illegals are using false names tied to false government documentation obtained with the false name. These will not get flagged without a much deeper look, and no one will do that unless there is a reason to, which won't come from the cosmetically complete paper trail.
And those guys are out there doing what they want. You can hear their voices on the frequencies in the air these days, where once upon a time it was rare to hear a foreign accent. Like about 15 years ago.
There are a bunch of these people here ... and they have been here a long time ... and more are coming across the southern border and elsewhere every day (OTM's don't you know). They are gearing up for round two … Jeff Head
Lax security measures are one thing. The purposeful imposition of legal barriers to prevent the identifying of potential terrorists, simply in order to placate the politically correct among us, is quite another. The former represents laziness or carelessness. The latter is insanity. And there is an excellent chance that it is the insanity of the latter that will result in ‘9/11, The Sequel’.
How many of us are aware that there are federal statutes prohibiting air carriers from subjecting any air traveler to discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, or ancestry (specifically 49 U.S.C. 40127(a) and 49 U.S.C. 41310)? How many of us are aware that, post 9/11, airlines have been fined countless times because they have held more than two Arab males, scheduled to board a single flight, in secondary questioning. That is considered illegally ‘discriminatory’.
Until I recently read the testimony of Michael Smerconish in the hearing before the Government Subcommittee on Passenger Screening and Airline Authority to Deny Boarding , I was not aware that a potential twentieth hijacker may have been thwarted on 9/11/01 by an alert airport security officer – which is probably why only three of the four hijacked airliners involved in the 9/11 tragedy had five hijackers aboard. The fourth airliner was probably missing one of its terrorists because an alert Customs and Border Protection Inspector at Orlando Airport wisely practiced what today might well be defined as ‘illegal profiling’ and kept the fifth hijacker from boarding United Flight 93, which met its fiery fate in a western Pennsylvania farm field.
From Smerconish’s testimony:
… I point to an American hero named Jose Melendez Perez for support of my view. This man engaged in what some would deride as ‘profiling’, and probably saved either the White House or U.S. Capitol Building in the process. Let me explain.
Three of the four aircraft involved in the hijackings on 9/11 had five hijackers aboard. But United Airlines Flight 93, a Boeing 757 that departed from Newark bound for San Francisco at 8:42 AM, and crashed in a field in Stony Creek Township, Pennsylvania, at 10:03 AM, had only four. Surely that was not its intended target. Presumably, it was headed for Washington, D.C. Perhaps being one man shy of the other planes hijacker population is the reason why this airplane crashed. And for that, we can probably thank Jose E. Melendez-Perez.
On August 4, 2001, Melendez-Perez was a U.S. Customs and Border Protection Inspector at Orlando International Airport, Orlando, Florida. Reflecting before the 9/11 Commission on his role that day, he said:
‘…I note that another inspector on duty that day made a comment that I was going to get into trouble for refusing a Saudi national. I replied that I have to do my job, and I cannot do my work with dignity if I base my recommendations on refusals/admissions on someone’s nationality.’
At approximately 1735 hours, he was assigned the case of a Saudi national who had arrived on Virgin Atlantic #15 from London, Gatwick Airport … Melendez-Perez sized up the situation by noting the individual’s nationality (Saudi), his grooming, dress, height, and shape. He figured the man to be military. And, he thought he was cocky. Dare I say it, he was profiling. And thank goodness he did. Keep in mind this was pre-9/11. If such an assessment occurred post-9/11, you would say, ‘well, of course’ this is how it should be handled. But this was before those horrific events. Melendez Perez told the 9/11 Commission that the man ‘gave him the creeps’. The man was put on a flight out of the United States.
So who was the man and what was he doing? This became clear when Melendez-Perez was questioned by Richard Ben-Veniste. It turns out that while Melendez-Perez was performing his duties at Orlando Airport on August 4, 2001, and screening a man named Mohammed Kahtani, there was someone else present at that very airport: Mohamed Atta, the presumed ringleader of the operation. Coincidence? Hardly. According to Ben-Veniste, while Melendez-Perez was questioning Mohammed Kahtani, and while Kahtani was claiming that someone was upstairs to meet him, Mohamed Atta made a telephone call from that location to a telephone number associated with the 9/11 plot. In other words, the good work of Melendez-Perez kept out of the United States the presumed 20th hijacker.
So … as insane as it appears, long before the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, long before the routine frisking of grey-haired old ladies and Boy Scouts (so as to abide by arbitrary quotas, and so as not to offend, or trample on the civil rights of, anyone of Middle Eastern descent), a kind of necessary, common-sense ‘profiling’ apparently kept the last of the terrorists from boarding the doomed United Flight 93 on that fateful day. And there is an outside chance that it may have even prevented that plane from reaching the White House or the Capitol. Yet, post-the worst foreign attack ever to occur on American soil, such rational, potential heroic behavior is now considered illegal.
Simple incompetence will not be the catalyst for the next terrorist attack on America. If truth and justice are served (and, in America 2004, I figure the odds of that are about even), the blame will be laid at the feet of the scourge known as political correctness.
In 1955, Israeli philosopher Yishavayahu Leibowitz, in a letter to Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, complained about innocent Palestinians killed in Israeli operations.
Ben Gurion replied:
I received your letter and I do not agree with you. Were all the human ideals to be given to me on the one hand and Israeli security on the other, I would choose Israeli security because while it is good that there be a world full of peace, fraternity, justice, and honesty, it is even more important that we be in it.
~ joanie
<< "The application was approved by the Federal Aviation Administration less than a week later."
Yeppers! Great job they're doing, not. Maybe we can hire some Mexicans to keep our borders and airspace safe, you know they love to do the jobs Americans won't do. >>
That is gradually happening.
The people who used to pick lettuce now run INS, the Border Patrol, the FBI, the CIA, the FAA -- and, by the score, are becoming state and feral representatives and senators.
Really scary stuff if anyone ever stopped to think about it.
Thank God they also run the gummint institutions what provide the indoktrination also known as and what passes for "'public' education."
Or we might.
Blessings -- Brian
BUMPping
When I was heavily into building my airplane - back in the mid 90's - I spent a lot of time at my hangar at Titusville, FL. I always had my handheld radio tuned to the tower frequency just to know what was going on.
Thinking back, there were a lot of Middle-Eastern students taking lessons back then. They could hardly speak English. The tower controller had to repeat everything for them.
We had even more students from Great Britain, two of whom I spoke with one day to ask them why they came all the way over here to learn to fly.
They told me that America was the last place on earth where people were free to fly. Oh, nominally they could still fly over in Europe, but the government had made it so regulated and so expensive that it was impossible. They have landing fees over there, so every time a student practices a landing (you have to do literally hundreds to get it right), it cost him $400 or so.
The Brits said they could come over here on an airline, spend two months in a nice hotel or condo, learn to fly, visit all the attractions, all for half what it cost just for the flying in England.
Regardless of the anti-freedom rabble here on FR, I will not let it go without a fight.
In Saudi Arabia, only members of the "royal" family are allowed to fly or own aircraft. I taught a couple of Saudi's to fly in the early '80s (engineering students along with me) who told me that this was the only place they could learn and fly. One guy bought an ultra-light and took it home with him; he told the Saudi Customs guys that all that canvas and aluminum tubing was for a porch awning! He flies it in secret over the Red Sea and keeps it hidden.
It's one thing to talk about how great it is that anyone with the cash can learn to fly in this country. I loved that these guys could do that (the guy with the ultra light still comes back to the U.S. just to rent a 150 and go around the pattern). But it's another thing to simply let anyone in to do it without vetting their background. Now that the genie is out of the bottle, it would be senseless not to do that.
We pilots already have to have our driving record, credit history, and medical history "vetted". What more do you want?
And considering that motor vehicles are the terrorist weapon of choice around the world, please explain why "vetting" shouldn't apply to those who apply for drivers licenses.
...and why should anyone at all be allowed to drive a boat through the middle of Chicago, NYC, Memphis, San Antonio, etc. without "vetting"?
Certainly you can see the double standard here.
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