Terrorists in the U.S.

Forums:
Email this Topic • Print this Page

Smugglers help terrorists into U.S.

BY PAULINE ARRILLAGA AND OLGA RODRIGUEZ
ASSOCIATED PRESS

TIJUANA, Mexico - Editor's note: This is the first story in a three-part series.

The men flocked to the cafe under the sign with the cedar tree, symbol of their Mideast home. In this alien border land, it was the beacon that led to an Arab "brother" who would help them complete their journey from Lebanon into America.

They would come to find Salim Boughader Mucharrafille -- the cafe owner who catered to some of Tijuana's more affluent denizens, including workers at the U.S. consulate. His American customers were unaware that the boss of La Libanesa cafe ran a less reputable business on the side.

Until his arrest in December 2002, Boughader smuggled about 200 Lebanese compatriots into the United States, including sympathizers of Hezbollah, designated a terrorist organization by U.S. authorities. One client worked for a Hezbollah-owned television network, which glorifies suicide bombers and is itself on an American terrorism watch list.

"If they had the cedar on their passport, you were going to help them," Boughader said from a Mexico City prison, where he faces charges following a human-smuggling conviction in the United States. "What's the crime in bringing your brother so that he can get out of a war zone?"

NETWORKS GROW

A report released by the Sept. 11 commission staff last year examining how terrorists travel the world cited Boughader as the only "human smuggler with suspected links to terrorists" convicted to date in the United States.

But he is not unique.

After Boughader was locked up, other smugglers continued to help Hezbollah-affiliated migrants in their effort to illicitly enter from Tijuana, a U.S. immigration investigator said in Mexican court documents.

Another smuggling network that is controlled by Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger rebel group -- a U.S.-designated terrorist organization -- tried sneaking four Tigers over the California-Mexico border not long after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, said Steven Schultz, of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. The four were caught.

An AP investigation found these are just some of the many pipelines in Latin America and Canada that have illegally channeled thousands of people into the United States from "special-interest" countries -- those identified by the U.S. government as sponsors or supporters of terrorism.

The AP reviewed hundreds of pages of court indictments, affidavits, congressional testimony and government reports, and conducted dozens of interviews in Mexico and the United States to determine how migrants from countries with terrorist ties were brought illegally to America -- and how the smugglers they hired operated.

Many of the travelers, unassociated with any extremist group, genuinely came fleeing war or in search of work. But some, once in the United States, committed fraud to obtain Social Security numbers, driver's licenses or false immigration documents, court records showed.

One, Lebanese carpenter Mahmoud Youssef Kourani, admitted spending part of his time in the United States raising money to support Hezbollah -- at least $40,000, according to an FBI affidavit.

U.S. homeland security officials maintain they know of no cases of al-Qaeda operatives using smuggling operations to enter over the northern or southern boundaries, though they warn that intelligence suggests the terrorist group is eyeing the borders as a way in.

"Several al-Qaeda leaders believe operatives can pay their way into the country through Mexico," Jim Loy, deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, told a congressional committee in February. Further, he said, "entrenched human smuggling networks and corruption in areas beyond our borders can be exploited by terrorist organizations."

EASY TO ENTER

The Boughader case and others show just how easy it would be.

Smugglers employ recruiters and facilitators in such "special-interest" countries as Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq and Pakistan. One immigrant testified in a 2002 case about a "market of passports" in Iraq where individuals could illegally purchase travel documents.

These "special-interest" smugglers use staging areas and transportation coordinators in such places as Quito, Ecuador; Lima, Peru; Cali, Colombia; and Guatemala City. They pay for foot guides, drivers and stash-house operators in Mexico and the United States.

They have moved people by plane -- into suburban Washington, D.C., Florida, California. And they have crossed clients in vehicles or on foot into Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California and over the Canadian border.

They have partnered with other smugglers transporting Mexican or Central American migrants.

"People from places in the Middle East will hear about who to go through, and they tend to be people from their same country, but once you get into the system, we saw associations that really were driven by, 'What's the most effective way for me to move my product?' " said Laura Ingersoll, an assistant U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C.

"A Mafia," is how one of Boughader's clients, Roland Nassib Maksoud, once described the business.

Maksoud, a liquor distributor, traveled from Lebanon to Mexico on a legal visa in late 2000, he told investigators in Mexican court documents. Two compatriots passed along Boughader's name for help crossing the U.S. border.

Boughader informed his newest client the fee would be $2,000 up front, plus another $2,000 once Maksoud was in the States. In January 2001, Maksoud was taken to a house on the Mexican side where migrants of "different nationalities" were awaiting passage, he told investigators. One morning, he was crammed into the trunk of a vehicle and driven through the border port of entry.

Other people-couriers, including convicted smuggler Mohammed Hussein Assadi, use altered passports to fly clients to the United States. Assadi schooled his Iraqi customers to carry nothing identifying them as Arab. He advised one migrant to shave his mustache, still another to get a "European" haircut, U.S. court records showed.

Central and South America are popular transit points. Assadi, an Iranian, worked from Ecuador.

Bribery is also common. Boughader's clients told U.S. and Mexican investigators they paid thousands to obtain fraudulent visas from Mexico's consular office in Beirut.

Former U.S. immigration supervisor Maximiano Ramos admitted taking $12,500 to smuggle immigrants from the Philippines, home of the al-Qaeda-linked militant group Abu Sayyaf. From 1996 to 2002, at least 40 migrants were diverted from connecting flights at Los Angeles International Airport and escorted out by security guards while Ramos was on duty.

Linda Sesi, an assistant ombudsman for Detroit, is awaiting trial on charges of conspiring with four others to smuggle more than 200 migrants from Iraq, Jordan and other Middle Eastern countries into the United States from 2001 until September.

Some say human smuggling is too risky to be used by terrorist operatives. But a former Sept. 11 commission counsel, Janice Kephart, said smuggling already is a chosen transportation mode for such groups.

Intelligence suggests that since 1999 human smugglers have facilitated the travel of terrorists associated with more than a dozen groups, according to the Sept. 11 commission travel report that Kephart helped write.

Terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda, "use human smugglers and document forgers to a great extent," Kephart said. "It only makes sense that they would transfer that to infiltrate the United States."

STOPPING SMUGGLING A PRIORITY

Dismantling groups smuggling people from countries with terrorist ties is a priority, said John Torres, ICE's deputy assistant director for smuggling. But often when one smuggler is busted another eagerly fills his shoes.

Following Boughader's arrest, smuggling of Lebanese through Tijuana ceased for several months, ICE investigator Ramon Romo said in court documents filed in Mexico. Then intelligence in April 2003 revealed that five members of Hezbollah were preparing to cross the border, Romo said. Mexican authorities made some arrests.

Others have made it through. Kourani entered the United States via the Lebanon-Tijuana pipeline, paying $3,000 in Beirut to get a Mexican visa, according to court documents. On Feb. 4, 2001, he and another man were smuggled into California in the hidden compartment of a vehicle.

Last month, Kourani was sentenced to 4 1/2 years in prison for conspiring to provide material support to a terrorist group.

Boughader acknowledged transporting a Lebanese man who worked at al-Manar, a global satellite television network owned and operated by Hezbollah and included on the U.S. State Department's Terror Exclusion List.

"I regret that what I was doing is against the law," said Boughader, a Mexican of Lebanese descent, "but I don't regret what I did to help people."

People are still getting such help.

"The checks they do at the border are still very bad," Boughader said, "because, regardless of everything, it is still easy to cross."

Source[/color]

Topic Stats
Top Replies
Link to this Topic

Type: Discussion • Score: 1 • Views: 1,952 • Replies: 6

No top replies

Terror-Linked Migrants Crossing Into U.S.Source[/color]

0 Replies

Terrorists could target US milk supply killing thousands

PressEsc
Contributed by John Hashcrop
Wednesday, 13 July 2005

Terrorists could easily target the US milk supply killing or causing serious illness to hundreds of thousands, a Stanford University researcher claims.

New testing procedures and hardening government safety rules could prevent a nightmare scenario of threats to the nation's milk supply, warned Prof. Lawrence Wein.

Mere 4 grams of botulinum toxin dropped into a milk production facility could cause serious illness and even death for 400,000 people in the United States.

Investments that would cost the public only 1 cent more per half-gallon of milk could prevent this nightmare scenario, according to Lawrence M. Wein of the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Not only milk, but soft drinks, fruit and vegetable juices, processed tomato products, and even grains - anything that goes through large-scale storage and production and rapid distribution - could be at risk for such an attack, with catastrophic consequences for the American public, Wein said in his most recent study.

In the case of milk, says Wein, all it would take is for someone to obtain a suitable strain of botulinum toxin - the most poisonous substance known to humans - from an overseas black market lab, grow it in culture, and pour it into an unlocked milk tank or milk truck.

From there, the contaminated milk would make its way into large processing silos, where it would poison at least 100,000 additional gallons.

Only a fraction of the toxin would remain active after pasteurization, but according to Wein's mathematical model, that could be enough to infect the approximately 400,000 people who would drink the milk.

"Only 1 millionth of a gram is enough to poison an adult," Wein said, "And there would be more than that per person remaining in the distributed milk to do the job."

Based on their mathematical models of current distribution of milk, Wein and Liu estimate that within 48 hours of ingesting contaminated milk, consumers would begin to display symptoms.

If authorities were able to notify the public within the subsequent 24 hours to stop drinking milk (an ambitious time period), the contamination could be reduced.

But, of those eventually exposed, "about half would die," Wein said.

The death toll would be high (as much as 50,000 he estimated), due to the current insufficient supply of ventilators and antitoxins in the U.S. medical system.

Wein called for the US Food and Drug Administration to make current volunteer safety guidelines mandatory, such as requiring that milk tanks and trucks be locked and that two people be present when milk is transferred from one stage of the supply chain to the next.

Before releasing milk into silos, milk-tank truck drivers should be required to employ a new 15-minute test that can detect the four types of toxins associated with human botulism.

Drivers currently are required to wait for an antibiotic residue test and the toxin test could be conveniently accomplished at the same time.

"A single set of tests can be performed on each 5,500 gallon truck at a cost to milk producers that would raise consumer prices only several cents a gallon," Wein said. "We the public need to ask ourselves whether the elimination of this catastrophic threat is worth a 1 cent increase in the cost of a half-gallon of milk."

Source[/color]

0 Replies

Majority of Americans think terrorists will strike U.S. soon

US News
By DPA
Jul 12, 2005, 19:00 GMT

Washington - A poll conducted after the July 7 terrorist attacks in London and released Tuesday found that most Americans think there will be an act of terrorism in the U.S. soon.

According to the CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, 55 per cent of Americans think it is very or somewhat likely that terrorists will strike the U.S. "over the next several weeks". That figure has increased by 20 per cent over the past month.

The public now also feels that the war in Iraq has made the U.S. less safe from terrorism, with 54 per cent of respondents sharing that view. That figure was up 15 per cent from two weeks ago.

The London terrorist attacks, and the media attention they received, also contributed to twice as many people as a month ago who now name terrorism as the most important problem. Seventeen per cent of those asked said terrorism is the most important problem, up from 8 per cent at the beginning of June.

The poll also showed that views of President George W. Bush's ability to protect the U.S. from terrorist attacks have not changed.

Source[/color]

0 Replies

Do you feel that border security needs to be strengthened?

In battle against terrorists, border security is vital

Sun-Gazette Editor
July 19, 2005

Could a London-like attack be carried out in the United States by a "sleeper cell" of terrorists? The risk is there, of course, but U.S. security officials publicly point to signs that al-Qaida, at least, has not been successful in nurturing such cells here.

Terrorist border-crossers are another story, highlighted by the recent formation of the Texas Border Sheriff's Coalition, among whose top priorities is border security.

The group notes an apparently growing number of non-Mexicans illegally crossing the U.S. border into Texas.

The U.S. Border Patrol says that nearly 100,000 non-Mexicans have entered Texas illegally so far this year, perhaps triple the number for the same period last year. Surely some of the increase in Texas crossings reflects increased border enforcement efforts elsewhere, but the Texas sheriffs' point is no less valid: Terrorists easily could be among such a large number of illegal border crossers.

Once inside the United States, illegal immigrants find that political correctness will lend them a helping hand to blend into American society.

Many banks, aided and encouraged by federal agencies, will even open accounts for people known to be illegal immigrants; immigration authorities are kept in the dark about such transactions, of course.

The Texas Border Sheriff's Coalition seeks federal homeland security funds to pay for border policing that the federal government ought to be doing. Local police agencies along the border need and deserve such assistance.

But they should not be expected to bear the brunt of border enforcement alone.

The federal government needs to get serious about bolstering border security, and it should put an end to efforts, however well intentioned, to coddle illegal immigrants once they have gotten past the border.

Source[/color]

0 Replies

Tancredo: If They Nuke Us, Bomb MeccaSource[/color]

0 Replies

Tunnels, like the subway tunnels mentioned in the below article, are security weaklinks that need to be strengthened.

Who's Watching the Underwater Tunnels?

The New York times
July 20, 2005
By SEWELL CHAN

Hours after the London subway and bus bombings on July 7, New York City's police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, announced that officers would be posted immediately at the entrances to all 14 of the city's underwater subway tunnels.

The action underscored the Police Department's concerns about the tunnels, but it also exposed this reality: For most of the time since 9/11, nearly half of the tunnels have not been continuously guarded by the police.

The chief police spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said the department staffed the tunnels' fixed guard posts as needed, on the basis of threat assessments and other forms of intelligence.

The question of how best to safeguard the tunnels is among the most vexing for the police and transportation officials struggling to address the many security challenges posed by the country's busiest mass transit system. It involves decisions about money, personnel and technology.

The reasons for concern are straightforward. One vulnerability assessment after another conducted since Sept. 11, 2001, by or on behalf of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has placed the underwater tunnels at the top of the list of critical infrastructure.

The 14 tunnels form a vital network and are the product of varied construction methods spanning decades. The tunnels link four of the city's five boroughs under three bodies of water - the East River, the Harlem River and Newtown Creek - and range in length from 650 to 5,489 feet.

The authorities have so far focused their efforts on trying to control access to the tunnels, while exploring longer-term improvements like using new synthetic materials to buffer tunnels against an attack.

A major problem is that hundreds of people - from transit workers to outside contractors - regularly enter the tunnels to fix everything from track ties to train signals, without being asked for so much as an identification card.

In 2002 and 2003, the authority and an Army research center discussed a counterterrorism plan that would have included electronic access cards to enter the tunnels and sensors that use sound, heat or motion to detect the presence of an intruder. The plan fell apart because of disagreements over the scope of the Army's control.

Meanwhile, shortly after 9/11, New York City Transit, an authority subsidiary that operates the subways, erected simple booths at tunnel entrances to house police officers. By 2003, at a cost of nearly $7 million, the booths had been upgraded to include intercoms, telephone lines and video monitors linked to closed-circuit television cameras.

But the new booths were not entirely satisfactory. Although heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems were installed, police officers complained of foul odors and poor air circulation.

And although the police officers were assigned to serve as antiterror sentries at the tunnels, there has been pressure for them to respond to regular crimes underground.

After Sept. 11, the department assigned officers to guard the entrances to all 14 tunnels at all times. It also did so after the Moscow subway explosions in February 2004 and the Madrid commuter train bombings in March 2004.

But for most of the time since early 2002, the police have kept a permanent presence at only eight of the tunnels, Mr. Browne, the police spokesman, said in a statement.

At the other six tunnels, officers were posted round the clock to ride back and forth, standing in the first car so they could observe any intruder trying to enter a tunnel. When the officers reached the station at the other side of a tunnel, they exited and crossed over to the opposite platform for the return ride.

"We evaluate threats against the city every day," Mr. Browne said. "Obviously, there are periods when the collective intelligence judgment is to add resources and to provide fixed coverage to certain sensitive locations. Ideally, you'd want to have all things covered at all time, but we can't do that."

The current 24-hour coverage at all 14 tunnels will continue at least as long as the country's mass transit systems remain in a state of high alert, Mr. Browne said. The transportation authority plans to reimburse the police for much of the overtime duty, which has cost more than $1.9 million a week, he said.

In addition, officers from a special operations division, attached to the Police Department's Transportation Bureau, regularly inspect, on foot, the underwater tunnels and emergency exits for intruders. None have been detected since Sept. 11, Mr. Browne said.

While there have been no intruders found in the underwater tunnels, homeless people and others have been found wandering onto the tracks and into regular subway tunnels underneath the streets and have been arrested or ejected from the system.

Experts said that a constant police presence around the tunnels may be necessary, no matter the expense.

"At its root, while the immediate purpose of terrorism is to kill or harm people, its ultimate purpose is to frighten or demoralize," said Arnold M. Howitt, the executive director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at Harvard, who has written extensively about domestic preparedness. "Having people die in a tunnel, particularly if it were flooded, would be a dramatic statement and a propaganda victory for terrorists."

Dr. Howitt quickly added that he did not believe such a calamity was likely, and indeed, civil engineers said it would be enormously difficult to rupture the outer wall of an underwater tunnel.

"It would take just an enormous explosion to breach the lining," said Jack K. Lemley, a civil engineer who, from 1989 to 1993, oversaw the design and construction of the Eurotunnel, the world's longest underwater tunnel, which connects Britain and France under the English Channel.

Mr. Lemley, who runs an engineering firm in Boise, Idaho, has worked on major tunneling projects in New York City, including reconstruction of the Holland Tunnel and the East Side Access project, which will eventually connect the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central Terminal.

Because many of the city's subway tunnels were bored into solid rock, an explosion would "tend to relieve itself up and down the tunnel" rather than cause a break in the tunnel itself, Mr. Lemley said.

"The difficulty, obviously, would be the people that were in the tunnel at the time of an explosion or some other kind of attack, and how to extract them," he said.

Most of the subway system's underwater tunnels were excavated in rock. The major exception is the 63rd Street tunnel, which is used by the F train and connects Manhattan and Queens via Roosevelt Island. An immersed-tube tunnel, it was prefabricated and then carefully submerged, section by section, into a trench dug into the bed of the East River. In partial use since 1989, the tunnel was completed in 2001.

Source[/color]

0 Replies

Forums
» Terrorists in the U.S.

Read Discussion
Reply to All

Terrorists in the U.S.

Quick Links

My Account

able2know