embers of Osama Bin Laden's terror network have relied upon occasionally crude but largely effective phony documents to ease their way into and around the United States.Posted on 11/06/2001 1:48:00 PM PST by sarcasm
embers of Osama Bin Laden's terror network have relied upon occasionally crude but largely effective phony documents to ease their way into and around the United States.
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| Counterfeit driver's licenses and passports seized by state motor vehicle officialsy. |
Forged passports, phony driver's licenses, dummy identification cards and other documents have allowed Bin Laden's operatives to carry out their terror campaign on American soil.
In doing so, they have tapped into a surging trade in document fraud that also counts people smugglers, drug couriers and common thieves among its patrons.
State and federal officials say the growth in fraudulent ID is tied to two relatively recent advances.
One, the Internet, has become a marketplace for cheap phony IDs. The other, the desktop computer, has made it easy to reproduce key documents for the price of graphics software.
"Years ago you had to have a printing press," said James Hesse, chief intelligence officer for the Immigration and Naturalization Service's forensic documents lab in Washington. "Today you can walk into a computer store and buy the stuff you need off the shelf."
"There are thousands of sites on the Internet that will provide you with phony documents," said Bill DeVoe, chief fraud investigator for the state Department of Motor Vehicles.
The Immigration and Naturalization Service has said it does not know how six of the 19 hijackers entered the country, raising the possibility that they stole someone's identity or used fictitious documents.
No records show how the six men, using the names with which they've been identified, entered or left the country in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks.
"We can find no record of them, period. That's not just INS, that's everywhere," said INS Commissioner James Ziglar.
The other 13 entered the country legally, some with student visas.
Prosecuting those who sell such documents is not always easy, however, because the sellers often operate from foreign countries, law enforcement officials said.
Last year, the INS caught 1,694 people with phony or forged passports at the nation's borders and airports.
In the period that ended in August, the number more than doubled, to 3,693.
In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, state officials from New York to Virginia are rethinking their procedures for issuing driver's licenses and photo identification.
"We are looking at everything to make sure there are no gaps," said one high-ranking official in the Pataki administration.
Checking Records
Every month, New York DMV officials confiscate 350 to 400 pieces of phony identification that people submit to get a driver's license, and they arrest as many as 30 people a month.
The state plans to introduce a computer program in a few weeks that will compare the Social Security number that an applicant submits against Social Security Administration records. Currently, no such check is made.
"That should put a serious dent in the use of fictitious Social Security numbers," said John Hilliard, DMV's deputy commissioner for operations.
In New Jersey, state officials have met with the INS to discuss ways to catch people who submit phony immigration documents to get driver's licenses.
In Virginia, state officials closed loopholes in its photo identification program after learning that five hijackers bought nondriver photo identification cards at DMV branches near Washington in August.
New wrinkles turn up every month.
Ten years ago, the INS would send out three alerts a month to agents stationed at the nation's airports and borders, warning them of the latest trends in passport fraud.
Last year, there were 84, Hesse said.
Wide Range of Fake IDs
The quality of the knockoffs varies. There are $100 to $200 versions produced on desktop computers. They're known as "40-footers" to INS agents because of the distance from which they can be spotted.
Overseas, high-quality passports sell for as much as $10,000 and mimic the real thing, right down to the watermark.
Human smuggling networks based in Southeast Asia, whose success lies with documents good enough to fool INS agents, provide the bulk of the phony documents coming into the U.S.
And across the globe, from Pakistan to Canada, there's a burgeoning trade in stolen and bogus passports.
In December 1999, Bin Laden associate Ahmed Ressam arrived in Washington State from British Columbia, Canada, with a cache of explosives in his trunk. He was going to use them to blow up U.S. airports on the West Coast.
Ressam had with him a legitimate Canadian passport he'd gotten by using a forged baptismal certificate.
Some experts say the best defense against document fraud rests with high-tech solutions such as biometrics, a catch-all term for technology that uses fingerprints, retina measurements or facial recognition to verify identity.
Former New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, recently appointed to a federal panel on aviation security, is among those convinced there is a need to start using the technology.
"We are very good at keeping the amount of counterfeit money in the U.S. to amazing low rates," said Kelly, a former Customs Bureau commissioner. "There are lots of controls on the bills. That type of thinking can be applied to these documents, and so far it hasn't been. There hasn't been a willingess of government to spend the money. ... We are living in the dark ages, as far as that goes."
Original Publication Date: 11/6/01
I think your first instinct is the right one: not to prefer a national id. Think about how you would prove yourself to get a national id: with a string of other ids. Birth certificate, social security card, drivers' license, whatever -- all are, can, and will be faked. Identity theft etc. You take your fake ids to the national id center, get your retina scanned, and have an official tamper-proof id -- all based upon fraudulent documents.
This is NOT comparable to currency. The gov't can control the printing and distribution of currency. But short of having an agent present at the birth of each person and capturing their bio-data at that point, how can the feds assure that anyone is who they claim to be, without documentation of birth, etc.?
In other words, let's prosecute all the id fraud and counterfeiting and identity theft which is already illegal. And, unstopped, would make a national id only a feel-good answer, but not stop terrorists from getting an even more authentic looking id to use to waltz around our country with . . .
I haven't thought through all the pros and cons of a national ID. I'd like to hear from those who oppose one. (Any Christian fundamentalists who quote from Revelations and say it's the mark of the beast can save their breath, tho.) I'd like to hear from civil libertarians as to why a national ID is any worse than the myriad of databases and paper trails the government can sift through already.
I am simply testing my thesis here, so let's keep it civil, please.
I don't have any good answers for you yet! Just my fears that this national ID would be used for EVERYTHING except against illegal immigration. F.A.I.R. is in favor of national ID.
If I see Americans more serious about illegal immigration and the threat from foreign terrorists, then I will favor national ID cards. I believe they can be made very hard to counterfeit.
Call me cynical but we still have states that insist that voters shouldn't be required to show a picture ID to vote - too hard on the poor, Hispanics etc. I notice they don't give the poor etc. a pass when it comes to getting a drivers license with picture on it. These are the same people who will insist on so many loopholes in a national ID that it would be just another useless federal bureaucracy.
Your history, what you wrote in school (and I wrote some silly things to get the GPA up), medical history, all things public and private could become the tools of a potentially harmful government. I'm not saying that all in government are or can be underhanded by nature, but look at the crooks that just left the white house. Now picture the case they could build against, say, someone who would protest against a rogue president (like Clinton). Putting all this information in the hands of one entity, be it government or someone else, gives that entity an enormous amount of power.
Our government is a republic regulated by democratic elections. The power rightly belongs in the hands of its citizens. Being that information is power, I see this as a reduction of power that people carry in favor of a centralized controlling power.
I also think that federalizing the identification process would not help defend against the use of fake ID's and the like. Many states have pretty sophisticated methods of making ID cards. They are hard to counterfiet. Still, all the weaknesses that the states have in issuing identification are also potential weaknesses for the feds.
The one major weakness in having state issued ID's has been that many states are not dilligent in preventing illegals frfom obtaining drivers licenses. And, of course, with a driver's license, a person is essentially ordained a citizen complete with the prerequisite rights that citizenship provides (like voting). Perhaps FedGov ought to encourage states to not issue driving priviledges to illegals.
Sorry if this comes across as somewhat of a ramble. Like I said, I've been grappling with this idea myself. Look at the post as food for thought if it seems less coherent than it should be.
Oh wait, I forgot about the lifestyle police -- they'll still be doing what they do even if half the country is wiped out by terrorists - heaven forbid someone who hasn't reached that magic age of 21 touches a drop of alcohol.
The security on one's credit data is considerably tighter than that of one's government records. Of course, there are still rare incidents where a person's credit information will be in error. And its a pain to correct but it can be fixed. Of greater concern is that a person's credit information can be stolen (identity theft is a chief cause of this, and this falls on the government). Any ID system ought to be as close to impossible to breach as is humanly possible.
We also have to realize that the government, being composed of people, is no more or less trustworthy than any other person or entity including the likes of Bill Gates, General Electric, or the average joe on the street corner. I have a tendency to not trust any of these entities 100%. In fact, there are but a handful of people that I do trust. They are my true friends. Others must earn it.
I'd start with the embassy in Saudi Arabia, where many of the hi-jackers received fake birth records.
Why is it that so much focus seems to be placed on Keeping Certain People Off Airplanes? To talk to some people, including the National ID zealots, you'd think that the main problem with September 11th was that we simply didn't Keep Certain People Off Airplanes. If only we'd kept those people off airplanes, we'd all be fine. All our focus should therefore be on figuring out how to keep the wrong people off of airplanes.
People, wake UP. This is bull. That is NOT the problem of 9/11. You can't invent or make a perfect system of Keeping Certain People off of airplanes, it's a fool's errand, and I wouldn't WANT to, because it would also inevitably keep INNOCENT people off airplanes (or buses, or wherever). I'm so sick of the focus being placed on identity as if that's the main thing that went wrong on 9/11.
It's not.
The main thing that went wrong on 9/11 was that those guys were able to gain access to the cockpits of those planes. That's IT. That is what went wrong. Until they got into that cockpit, it DIDN'T MATTER that they were "Terrorists"; at worst they had cut a couple peoples' necks with razor blades. It is ONLY when they got into the cockpits that they now had control over guided missiles.
The solution therefore (to the REAL problem) is to arm the pilots, separate the cockpit from passenger area via thick bulkhead, and similar common-sense engineering measures designed to prevent passengers (WHOEVER they are) from taking over the plane.
But no, instead of placing the emphasis on common-sense engineering measures like this, certain people would have our emphasis placed on the problem of identity, as if that will cure everything. At best, this is a waste of effort. At worst, one suspects there are ulterior motives.
After all, when a terrorist attack occurs and almost spontaneously we get jokers popping out of the woodwork chanting "National ID Card", I can't help but think that they were just waiting for something like this to happen, because National ID Card is what they have wanted all along.
People, I don't care what their "identity" is. If you arm the pilots and separate them from the passengers by a thick bulkhead, nobody from the passenger section is getting into that cockpit. Whoever the hell they are - whether or not they are "Terrorists" or "Have a Terrorist Record" or "Are on a Terrorist Watch List" or whatever. Doesn't anyone understand that?
This "national identity" crap is simply a red herring, and it's gone on way too long.
"No records show how the six men, using the names with which they've been identified, entered or left the country in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks."
"We can find no record of them, period. That's not just INS, that's everywhere," said INS Commissioner James Ziglar."
I have a funny feeling that you are all looking in the wrong direction.
INTELLIGENCE REPORT
FROM WASHINGTON 23-092401
by Marcelo Fernandez-Zayas
Washington, D.C.
September 24, 2001
HAS CUBA CHOSEN ITS SIDE IN THE WAR ON TERRORISM ?
The terrorist attack against Washington and New York sent US fighter planes scrambling into the air over the Strait of Florida as US Cuba watchers stayed glued to their intelligence agency desks. For several days Cuba was off the screen in Washington's official press releases and the media in general. However, experienced observers of Cuba sensed that something was going on in their area of interest. They were correct. In the morning hours of Friday September 21, the FBI announced that agents had arrested in her office at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) at Bolling Air Force Base the head of the Cuban Desk, Ana Belén Montes.
Montes, 44, was born at an air force base in Germany in 1957 of Puerto Rican parents. She graduated from the University of Virginia in 1979 and went to work sometime later for the Justice Department. In 1985, Montes started work at the Department of Defense. In 1988, she received a Masters Degree at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.
From her position at the Cuba desk of the DIA, Montes was in a good spot to betray her country. From information currently available, it is not clear when she started to work for the Cuban DI (Directory of Intelligence), but one press report tied her descent into espionage to the purchase of a laptop computer in 1996. According to intelligence sources, the FBI has been carefully observing Montes since May of this year. She was seen contacting members of the Cuban Intelligence Services (DI) in the Washington metropolitan area, and reportedly making numerous calls from public phones to pager numbers.
With the media focused intently on the terrorist attacks and the anticipated first steps of retaliation, the Montes arrest has received little attention since the initial announcement. The timing of the arrest, however, has led many to believe that Washington intends to send a serious message to her handlers. It is known that Cuba has housed, facilitated travel and provided refuge to diverse terrorists for many years. There is no question that Havana is now aware that something is cooking in Washington, and that the President's comments about "terrorists and those regimes that support them” will be seen in the same viewfinder as the teams of hijackers who crashed planeloads of innocents on September 11.
As soon the media realize this connection, many questions will be asked. It is expected that by the middle of next week the press will ask what is going on with the Cuban spies in the USA. It is difficult to say at this time how much damage Montes, the spy, may have caused in real terms . However, in political and psychological terms her discovery and arrest has been a devastating blow for the Pentagon. Cuba has had an agent for many years within the defense machinery of the USA at its most sensitive point: the brain.
How will Washington react? It is impossible to say at this time. Fidel Castro went for the chest of the King and buried his knife in the body. How serious is the wound? Was he acting solely in the interests of Cuba, or was he gathering information for exchange with unsavory characters like Osama or Saddam Hussein, as many suspect? In the present mood of the United States, this question looms much larger than any issue in the bilateral relationship over the past 10 years. It may affect the course of events.
Montes did not act alone in this country. Who collaborated with her? Will Washington retaliate soon? Voices on Capitol Hill will ask for explanations and retribution. And the voices, at this time, will be heard - not to be drowned out by the usual "be nice to Castro" crowd. The injury is too large and important to be ignored. On the other hand, Castro's alliance with Iraq has now taken on a more dangerous character. During the Persian Gulf War in 1991, it is known that Cuban listening posts aimed at American territory provided intelligence to Saddam Hussein. Could this story repeat itself? All these questions have to be debated and answered in the coming week. The United States is at war and Cuba is a potential enemy in our back yard.
________________________________________
BACKGROUNDER ON ARREST OF CASTRO'S PENTAGON SPY
By Ernesto F. Betancourt
At a time when all US Government energies are supposed to be concentrated on finding bin Laden's terrorist links, it is most revealing that the FBI and the Justice Department decided to proceed with the arrest of Ana Belén Montes, the DIA Senior Analyst responsible for Cuban affairs. Usually, when our counterintelligence is monitoring a suspected foreign agent they follow the culprit but do not arrest them.
That way they can identify potential additional links. Why was this not done in this case? There are two possibilities: one, that she could leak to the Cubans relevant information on our intended response who in turn could pass it to bin Laden; the other, that there was a turf battle inside the Administration between the Bush Justice Department and left over elements from the Clinton Administration at the Pentagon on how to deal with Cuba.
The first is not easy to be discarded. Granted, Castro is unlikely to be chosen as an ally by bin Laden because he is a deeply religious Islamic fundamentalist who left a comfortable life as a millionaire in Saudi Arabia to combat Communism and the Soviets in Afghanistan, while Fidel Castro gave himself an atheistic and Marxist Constitution and was a Soviet surrogate. So, there are profound philosophical and ideological disagreements between the two. However, they share a profound hatred of the US.
Furthermore, there are many potential intermediaries in the Muslim world, including Iran, Iraq, Libya and the PLO, who are playing with both sides and could provide a bridge between the two. So, the possibility of a Cuban spy at the Pentagon being a danger to our immediate security in the war on terrorism does not have to be totally excluded as the reason for ending the observation phase in this case.
The other explanation goes back to September 14, 1998 when FBI Special Agent Raúl Fernández went to court in Miami to present an Affidavit in what turned out to be a most bizarre spy case, the Wasp Network. The main case against the Wasp Network was that its members--ten arrested and four absent--were spying on US military installations, as well as on the Cuban exile community in the Miami area. A most intriguing element mentioned by agent Fernández in his Affidavit, items 18 and 19, was that one of the spies, Antonio Guerrero, aka Lorient, had provided the Cubans with "the home addresses of hundreds of military personnel stationed at the base (Boca Chica Naval Air Station)". This information would be of little use for Cuban defensive purposes. However, it could be extremely useful in a commando raid against that installation. It so happens that the prestigious Jane's Defense Weekly, dated March 6, 1996, had reported that, since the early nineties, Cuba was training commandos in VietNam for precisely such an assignment. According to Jane's story, "Havana's strategy in pursuing such training is to attack the staging and supply areas for US forces preparing to invade Cuba. The political objective would be to bring the reality of warfare to the American public and so exert domestic pressure on Washington."
The spy trial indictment was changed in May 1999 by the Clinton administration, downplaying the military angle and focusing instead on Cuba's role in the downing of American civilian planes over international waters on February 24, 1996. The first was done to please Castro, who had claimed in a CNN interview that he never spied on US military installations, that his spying was limited to defend himself from the attacks of Miami Cubans. Clinton did not want to close the door to an agreement with Castro as one of his foreign policy successes. The second, to placate the Cuban-American community for such a concession by raising a highly emotional issue for them. This was a compensation to boost the Gore candidacy among Cuban-American voters.
The trial itself was most irregular. The presiding Federal judge agreed to the defense request to ban the seating of any members of the Cuban-American community in the jury, which ended having five non-Cuban Hispanics, three Anglos, three African-Americans and one Asian- American. She also ordered the prosecution to obtain testimony in Cuba from Cuban intelligence and military officers, which was later presented to the jury by the defense. Can you imagine a Cuban intelligence officer being asked to swear over a Bible to say the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? They must still be laughing about that one. Since these were the officers who had ordered the spies to get involved in the conspiracy to down the civilian planes, they belonged in the bench of the accused, instead of as witnesses.
But, most incredible of all, two retired Generals, Charles Wilhem and Edward Atkeson, were witnesses for the defense. Stop here and read it over again: two American generals were trying to exonerate Castro's spies from spying against the US military. It is not hard to imagine the frustration of prosecutors and FBI agents, who monitored for three years the Wasp Network to gather the evidence presented to the jury, in the presence of this behavior by senior military officers. In particular that of General Wilhem, former head of the Southern Command, who testified on April 16, 2001 that he ignored the FBI warnings because the Cubans could not penetrate the security provisions in effect at his command. Somehow, the evidence gathered and presented by the FBI and the prosecution must have seemed more persuasive to the jury, because they ignored the bizarre testimony of these two generals to find the Wasp Network spies guilty of both charges: spying on the US military and conspiracy to commit murder in the case of the civilian planes downed on February 24, 1996.
To understand these two generals' bizarre behavior it is important to point out that during the Clinton Administration a naive theory was developed somewhere at the Pentagon think tanks, most likely the National Defense University, to the effect that the optimum transition in Cuba would be one controlled by the Castro brothers. This would satisfy three basic US national security objectives: i) avoid a mass migration; ii) avoid a civil war forcing a US intervention; and, iii) provide assurances of cooperation in drug interdiction. Of course, the fact that this did not take into account at all the possible expectations of the Cuban people, did not seem to matter to the think tankers. The same arrogant blindness that led us into the Bay of Pigs disaster seems to prevail in the thinking of these Pentagon analysts. Or, was it an idea planted by the senior DIA analyst?
In the implementation of this strategy, generals Wilhem and Atkeson visited Cuba and had long meetings with Castro, one lasted nine hours and the other five hours. General Atkeson went on to report on their Cuban activities in an article in the military journal ARMY, issue of May 15, 2001. Fidel was delighted and Raul said twice in public events, first in December, 2000 and again in January, 2001, that the wisest thing for the Bush administration was to come to terms with the Cuban revolution while Fidel was still alive. The generals' answer for the future of Cuba was to make Raul the Batista of the new century.
Another general involved in this exercise was McCaffrey, Clinton's Drug Czar. His angle was that we should cooperate with Castro in drug interdiction, one of the unfulfilled goals of his last year in the Clinton Administration. On August 28, 2001, a coordinated event, or a strange coincidence, took place.
On that day, Cuba's Justice Minister expressed their willingness to cooperate with the US in drug interdiction and General McCaffrey gave a speech at Georgetown University in which he told President Bush, in an incredibly arrogant tone, that his Administration should create a joint Caribbean drug interdiction command under a Coast Guard Admiral with, among others, Cuban participation and access to our intelligence and even equipment and financing.
This advice has to be considered in the light of the abysmal record of McCaffrey in the case of General Gutierrrez Rebollo, whom he praised extensively upon his appointment as Mexican Drug Czar in 1997, to see the man arrested two weeks later for being on the payroll of Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the so-called King of the Skies. During the trial of Gutierrez Rebollo, now serving a sentence of 77 years in prison, it came out that he was turning over to the Amado Carrillo cartel the intelligence and equipment the US was providing Mexico, so Carrillo could monitor rival cartels. When I raised this point from the audience, McCaffrey did not seem pleased. In fact, he rudely rejected any information that contradicted his conclusions.
Somehow, the whole scheme started to fall apart when the Wasp Network jury ignored the advice of the two generals and found the spies guilty on June 8, 2001. Castro does not expect a judiciary behavior that is independent of the will of the military and, therefore, is likely to have been furious with the dismal results of Wilhem's and Atkeson's efforts on behalf of his spies. After a short delay, on June 20, 2001, he launched a national mobilization campaign, a la Elian, to win a reversal of that decision.
However, of late, that campaign has turned mute and the box with patriotic slogans in GRANMA's front page has been removed. Castro must have lost any hope when the Justice Department proceeded to arrest two more spies related to the Wasp Network, both of whom entered their plea bargains the same day the DIA spy was arrested. This last arrest completely ridicules the claims of the two generals that Cuban intelligence had no capability to obtain any military information from the US.
Evidently, there was a difference of opinion between the FBI and the Justice Department and some people in the military left over from the Clinton Administration on the issue of the threat represented by Cuban spying. We can assume that the generals were acting on an option developed with some substantial inputs from the DIA analyst working for Castro. After some initial hesitation under the Bush Administration, it seems that the FBI and the prosecutors won from John Ashcroft the support denied to them by Janet Reno. We do not know what has been the position of the Rumsfeld team in relation to what the generals were advocating. But, the arrest of the Senior Analyst on Cuba at the DIA indicates that, if there was any support for their notion within the new Pentagon leadership, it is now a moot issue.
It is evident Ashcroft has prevailed. Besides, the Pentagon will now have to revise all policies in which Castro's spy had an input. Quite a setback for Castro.
Ernesto F. Betancourt
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