This should make you feel real good about the fact that our borders leak like a sieve:
DEARBORN, MI. – Three years have passed since FBI counterterrorism agents raided the house at 6050 Argyle that sheltered one of Hezbollah’s top U.S. leaders.
Among the materials seized inside Mahmoud Youssef Kourani’s house in this predominantly Arab immigrant neighborhood were audio-tapes beseeching listeners to “Rise for Jihad! Rise for Jihad! I offer you, Hezbollah, my blood in my hand.” A photo showed one of Kourani’s minor children wearing a necklace hung with a photo of Hezbollah General Secretary Sheik Hassan Nasrallah.
Now that the house has been bulldozed, all that remains attesting to any Hezbollah presence here is a vacant lot, as conspicuous as a missing tooth, on an otherwise densely-packed street. As though someone tried to knock out even the memory of it.
Court records say Kourani was a ranking Hezbollah insider in Lebanon who had received “specialized training in radical Shiite fundamentalism, weaponry, spy craft and counterintelligence in Lebanon and Iran. The government described one of his brothers as “Hezbollah’s Chief of Military Security for Southern Lebanon.”
But Kourani holds a rarely acknowledged distinction: He is one of only a handful of Middle Easterners smuggled over U.S. borders to have been convicted of terrorism charges in American courts.
His distinction as a confirmed terrorist border crosser is one that goes to the heart of a central question regarding just how much of a national security threat is posed by a small category of border-jumping migrants known in homeland security agencies as “Special Interest Aliens.”
When border restriction advocates, including the Bush administration, cite special interest immigrants to justify post 9-11 border security initiatives, scoffing critics often throw down this challenge: Show me a single terrorist who has ever sneaked over the border.
There is Kourani. But there are others who are known to have sneaked over U.S. borders – from both Canada and Mexico – since Al-Qaeda began the campaign of bombing American targets in the mid-1990s that culminated in the 9-11 attacks.
Thery’re all listed here:
Link: http://www.toddbensman.com/Bensman/terrorists_who_crossed.html
Crossing methods:
Three Afghan Muslim men caught posing as Mexican nationals last month while en route to Europe were part of a human smuggling operation and carried what now are believed to be altered but genuine Mexican passports for which they paid $10,000 each, Indian investigators told the San Antonio Express-News.
An ongoing transcontinental investigation, which now involves Mexican and Indian authorities, began Feb. 11 when a suspicious airport Customs official in Kuwait noticed the three Afghans, traveling under Mexican pseudonyms, couldn’t speak Spanish during a layover on their trip from New Delhi, India, to France.
The three Afghan travelers were detained and deported to India, where they remain in custody while Mexican and Indian authorities try to learn about their backgrounds, where they were going and who sold the apparently real government-issue passports. A U.S. source confirmed the FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigators also are looking into the matter.
At issue to some U.S. national security experts is whether another of Mexico’s foreign embassies might be implicated in selling travel documents to people from countries like Afghanistan where terror organizations are active, a circumstance that potentially could bring terrorists to American borders. It wouldn’t be the first time a foreign Mexican embassy was implicated in such an affair.
In 2003, a Mexican investigation into a Lebanon-Mexico human smuggling operation produced firings and indictments of Mexican Embassy personnel in Beirut for allegedly selling travel documents to Lebanese citizens. One man who bought a Mexican visa for $3,000 turned out to be a ranking Hezbollah operative smuggled over the California border in the trunk of a car. Mahmud Kourani was convicted in 2004 of supporting the terrorist group from Detroit. Read the Kourani indictment.
……Travelers from Islamic countries carrying passports that are valid but altered with fake names and photographs are among the most difficult to detect, he said. In the black markets of human smuggling, real national passports with embedded security bar codes rank among the most valuable travel documents because they enable their bearers to more easily slip through airport inspections.
“If you’ve got a Mexican passport you’ve already crossed the bridge,” Conway said. “And you can become part of the flood of people who cross into the U.S. If terrorists wanted to exploit the infrastructure in place, they can. It’s there.”
……Ricardo Alday, a spokesman for Mexico’s embassy in Washington, also would not answer questions specific to the investigation. But he did say his government “has applied strong measures and invested considerable resources to continuously improve the security of its travel documents.”
“Mexico is a committed partner with the U.S. in ensuring our borders are not used to threaten or undermine our common security,” Alday said in an e-mail.
Yeah, right. Somebody better tell Felipe Calderon. He’s not averse to allowing human garbage to traipse right through his country and into ours.
…..According to federal court records from prosecutions of Middle Eastern smugglers, thousands of Iraqis, Syrians, Lebanese and citizens of many other Islamic countries have been able to travel illegally to Latin American countries, then over U.S. borders. They were often able to do so by using real travel documents originating from embassy offices of Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Venezuela, Colombia and Peru.
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/MYSA032208.01A.Afghan-MexicoSmugglers.387bff0.html
This is the most frightening aspect of the ‘homeland security’ measures:
Kourani holds a rarely acknowledged distinction: He is one of only a handful of Middle Easterners smuggled over U.S. borders to have been convicted of terrorism charges in American courts.
It stands to reason that these Middle Eastern motherfuckers who sneak in across the borders, are not here to assimilate in a nice way. The government had better get off its apathetic, incompetent ass and start implementing automatic charges for every one caught.
Lives depend on it.