Daniel Borunda
El Paso Times
January 3, 2005
The Mara Salvatrucha -- a large, ruthless Central American street gang linked to a recent bus massacre in Honduras whose members have been popping up along the Texas-Mexico border -- may be making its way to El Paso, police said.
Excerpted
http://www.borderlandnews.com/stories/borderland/20050103-7469.shtml
The new intelligence reform bill signed into law by President Bush on December 17 may ultimately end up being remembered more for the provisions it didn't contain rather than those it did.
After much heated debate, House and Senate negotiators ultimately threw out proposed provisions to the bill that would have tightened immigration laws. Although House Speaker Dennis Hastert has promised to bring drivers' license standards, asylum procedures and other border security provisions back to the House floor by early 2005, in the meantime, the very real danger that Islamist terrorists will infiltrate America's porous southern border persists.
Roughly 60,000 illegal immigrants designated as 'other-than-Mexican,' or OTMs, were detained last year along the U.S.-Mexico border, including a sizable number from Arab and Muslim countries. And if recent reports are any indication, they may be getting some troubling new help in their efforts to enter the United States.
In a December 4 incident that received scant media attention, a Bangladeshi Muslim man named Fakhrul Islam was among a group of 13 illegal aliens arrested near Brownsville, Texas, just across the border from Mexico. Border Patrol agents have said that one of the men detained along with Islam was a member of Mara Salvatrucha, a violent Salvadoran criminal gang with more than 300,000 members across Central and North America, including powerful enterprises in several major U.S. cities.
Excerpted
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16509
AL-JAZEERA IN LEAGUE WITH SADDAM
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16515
Tin SoldierAn American Vigilante In Afghanistan
http://www.cjr.org/issues/2005/1/blake-soldier.asp
http://www.swans.com/library/art11/mgarci28.html
2. Paul Krugman, the economist and New York Times columnist was arrested in a joint operation carried on by the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice, and charged with being an "enemy combatant." Spokesmen for the government, citing reasons of security, would not comment where Krugman is being held, but an unnamed source said Krugman had been sent to the US base at Guantánamo, Cuba. "He's chilling in the cell we had ready for Aristide," was all the information available at this time.
8. In a shocking revelation, Federal investigators announced they have uncovered a major network of underground interstate commerce in pornography organized by a wealthy, ruthless and previously unknown syndicate -- evangelical churches. It seems this syndicate would fund the production of pornographic movies and Internet web pages in the San Fernando Valley of California for distribution throughout the country, but primarily in the church's stronghold areas of the Mid-West and South. The money for these activities would first be funneled through overseas ministries and charitable funds with offices in Las Vegas, Nevada, to disguise the connection. The distribution of the pornography was facilitated by the transfer of congregation membership lists to the production companies. The profits from this operation swelled church coffers, especially as they are exempt from taxes. Indictments of several prominent tele-evangelists named as principals in the syndicate were quashed, and grand juries investigating the matter were disbanded, shortly after President Bush gave his much loved speech to the nation on "my belief in the power of Christian forgiveness, as I have been forgiven to go on and make good, so I feel it important to forgive others so they, too, can go on to do greater good for themselves." A spokesman for the League Of American Christian Evangelicals countered the allegations by saying "Our pastors understand the meaning of sin and the power of redemption to overcome sin and be forgiven for it. By helping our flocks to know sin, and from turning away from the works of the devil, we build our congregation here on earth, joined in anticipation of our reward in heaven." Critics point to the parallel growth of the evangelical and fundamentalist population and the extent of the pornography business, and claim this indicates a major national problem. "Very convenient," said a leading American critic, too far to the left to actually be named or quoted in a respectable family newspaper. "What we have here is tax-exempt pornography with a no-fault chaser for the customers, who are absolved of any moral consequence until after they are safely dead. What a racket."
16. The US Coast Guard came upon a group of forty-three American vacationers clinging to a swamped fishing boat south of Key West. In a surprise to officials, the trip these people had intended was "one way" to Cuba, and their vacation was intended to be "permanent." By odd coincidence, all members of the group lacked any health insurance, and nearly all had some chronic condition, or were elderly. One man, who refused to give his name because his son-in-law is a prison guard in the United States, and whom he feared might lose his security clearance and his job in retaliation, said "After I lost my Social Security at Atlantic City, I wasn't able to borrow anything and start over again. So, rather than drain my daughter's savings since she got a baby and all, I figured I'd go where I could sweep the streets or shine shoes and still be able to stay alive, seeing as I'm old and no one hires you for nothing after even forty in the States, and I need to be able to see a doctor for my heart and the injury workman's comp wouldn't cover, and to keep from freezing in winter; I figured it's time to get to Cuba. I'm even learning Spanish." The old man was very disappointed when he learned he'd been rescued and was being taken back to Florida. "You mean you're not going to help us pump out the boat?" he cried. "Man, you people go out of your way to be mean."
20. It has just been disclosed that an experimental strain of bacteria, created by genetic manipulation of synthetically fabricated genes, has been accidentally lost. After it is synthesized the new bug is irradiated, producing a rapidly-multiplying mutant strain that has so far been immune to germicidal agents. The new organism is a hydrocarbon eating bug, based on a natural petroleum eating bacteria. The accidental release of this bug -- called the High-Carb Eater, or HCE -- is beginning to cause panic, the prior secrecy was an effort to prevent this. The accident occurred somewhere between Fort Detrick, Maryland, and Savannah River, Georgia. The leaked description of the original plan was to develop a super-bug to eat petroleum, which was a joint project of the EPA and Army, to have a bacterial agent to clean up oil spills and, in a mutant version of much greater appetite, to attack an opponent's oil supplies in time of war. Newly synthesized batches of the Carb-Eating Bacteria, or CEB, were taken from the Bio-Warfare Lab at Fort Detrick to be irradiated in nuclear reactors at Savannah River. During a recent tropical storm, one such shipment returning from Savannah River was released as a result of a highway accident. It appears that gallons of the radioactive bacterial sludge leaked into a local stream along with rainwater runoff from the scene of the accident, and was dispersed into the riparian systems of the southern United States and possibly the Ogalalla Aquifer. It appears now that the increase in carb-eating potency produced by the radiation was much larger than anticipated, and the antigermicidal immunity was unanticipated. The news of the incident was finally leaked to the press as the epidemic of dissolving automobile tires spreads north and west. The bacteria will eat any hydrocarbon material, for example oil products and plastics. At this time, further questions remain unanswered.