"Again and again, the American people are forced to confront the fact that its ruling class is not on its side."...Codevilla, Oct. 20, 2011, "The Lost Decade," subhead, 'Public safety'
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10/9/17, "Homeland Security Uncovers Massive Immigration Failures," Michael Cutler, Frontpage Mag
"The devastating consequences for national security."
"President Trump has been rightfully demanding that aliens who are citizens of countries that have an involvement with terrorism must undergo “extreme vetting.”
This is certainly an important and commonsense requirement. However, the computer systems used by both Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) inside the United States are unable to provide CBP inspectors at ports of entry the data they need to prevent transnational criminals and international terrorists from entering the country. Nor can these systems provide the vital information and records to USCIS adjudications officers that would allow them to prevent aliens present in the United States from improperly acquiring immigration benefits such as political asylum, lawful immigrant status and even United States citizenship....
The September 28, 2017 Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General's (DHS OIG) report, "CBP’s IT Systems and Infrastructure Did Not Fully Support Border Security Operations," noted:
"CBP’s IT systems and infrastructure did not fully support its border security objective of preventing the entry of inadmissible aliens to the country. The slow performance of a critical pre-screening system greatly reduced Office of Field Operations officers’ ability to identify any passengers who may represent concerns, including national security threats. Further, incoming passenger screening at U.S. international airports was hampered by frequent system outages that created passenger delays and public safety risks. The outages required that CBP officers rely on backup systems that weakened the screening process, leading to officers potentially being unable to identify travelers that may be attempting to enter the United States with harmful intent."
On September 25, 2017, a report was published by DHS OIG on the distressing issue of individuals with multiple identities in US fingerprint enrollment records receiving immigration benefits. This disastrous situation has profound national security and public safety implications. Yet the report stated in part:
That last sentence should give us all serious cause for pause. Apparently the “get to yes” philosophy of the Obama administration still permeates management at USCIS where adjudications officers were ordered to do whatever they had to do in order to approve virtually all applications for various immigration benefits.
We will, a bit later on, take a look back at how the Obama administration dismantled a program that sought to uncover immigration fraud and imbue the immigration benefits program with integrity.
But let’s first consider some additional facts.
The official report 9/11 and Terrorist Travel was issued well over a decade ago and focused specifically on the ability of the terrorists to travel around the world, enter the United States and ultimately embed themselves in the U.S. as they went about their deadly preparations to carry out an attack.
The report noted:
"Once terrorists had entered the United States, their next challenge was to find a way to remain here. Their primary method was immigration fraud. For example, Yousef and Ajaj concocted bogus political asylum stories when they arrived in the United States. Mahmoud Abouhalima, involved in both the World Trade Center and landmarks plots, received temporary residence under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers (SAW) program, after falsely claiming that he picked beans in Florida.” Mohammed Salameh, who rented the truck used in the bombing, overstayed his tourist visa. He then applied for permanent residency under the agricultural workers program, but was rejected. Eyad Mahmoud Ismail, who drove the van containing the bomb, took English-language classes at Wichita State University in Kansas on a student visa; after he dropped out, he remained in the United States out of status."
Under the title “Immigration Benefits” the following paragraph on page 98 of the same report states that
"[t]errorists in the 1990s, as well as the September 11 hijackers, needed to find a way to stay in or embed themselves in the United States if their operational plans were to come to fruition. As already discussed, this could be accomplished legally by marrying an American citizen, achieving temporary worker status, or applying for asylum after entering. In many cases, the act of filing for an immigration benefit sufficed to permit the alien to remain in the country until the petition was adjudicated. Terrorists were free to conduct surveillance, coordinate operations, obtain and receive funding, go to school and learn English, make contacts in the United States, acquire necessary materials, and execute an attack."
These multiple serious failures of the immigration system today are hardly new.
Roughly one year ago a disturbing DHS/OIG Report prompted me to write an article about Weaponized Immigration. I focused on the fact that 858 aliens who had been ordered deported were improperly granted United States citizenship through the process of naturalization due to the fact hat their fingerprints were not on file because they were not properly uploaded when INS, the predecessor agency to DHS, digitized these fingerprints.
As bad as that was, that report went on to state:
"Later, ICE identified missing fingerprint records for about 315,000 aliens who had final deportation orders or who were criminals or fugitives, but it has not yet reviewed about 148,000 aliens’ files to try to retrieve and digitize the old fingerprint cards."
The report noted that in 2010 a program known as “Operation Janus” was created to identify aliens who may have committed immigration fraud, yet the report documented that in the final months of the Obama administration, inexplicably, the Operation Janus working group was disbanded, stymieing efforts to identify aliens who had committed naturalization fraud and thereby seriously undermining national security.
While it was in operation, the working group of Operation Janus identified wrongly naturalized aliens who had been able to parlay their U.S. citizenship into sensitive jobs at airports and seaports and at least one of these individuals became a law enforcement officer. Consequently, appropriate actions were taken to denaturalize some of these individuals and seek criminal prosecutions, although only a small percentage of these aliens were dealt with effectively.
What was even more disconcerting was that some of these aliens were citizens of “Special Interest Countries,” that is to say, countries that are associated with possible terrorist links.
Nevertheless, consider how many politicians from both political parties are determined to provide lawful status to unknown tens of millions of illegal aliens whose true identities are unknown and unknowable. These politicians all know that the immigration bureaucracy is unable to effectively deal with its current workload.
Any massive legalization program would cause this already failing system to implode.
We must also consider how many cities and states have declared themselves to be “sanctuaries” for illegal aliens who entered the United States surreptitiously or who may have lost their lawful status because of the serious crimes that they committed. These jurisdictions have become magnets for foreign criminals and terrorists and undermine national security and public safety.
The immigration system lacks meaningful integrity while the Damoclean Sword of terrorism hangs above our heads each and every day. Every year thousands of innocent victims lose their lives to criminal aliens, yet the immigration anarchists and their allies in the media castigate anyone who would dare suggest that the United States must act to secure its borders and enforce its immigration laws, branding them xenophobes, racists and haters.
Suicide is not an act of compassion. All of the failing and dysfunctional elements of the immigration system must be repaired as swiftly as possible-- not as a prerequisite for any additional action, but simply as ends unto themselves. The potential for massive losses of life should provide the clear imperative for getting the job done- for once and for all."
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Added:
Oct. 20, 2011, "The Lost Decade," Angelo M. Codevilla, Claremont
(subhead) "Public safety"
"The assumption on which our ruling class based its approach to internal security against terrorism—namely, that it is impossible to distinguish ordinary Americans from terrorists—negates the basis for mutual trust. Ordinary Americans, on whom the government imposed ever more intrusive security measures and whom it scolded for being "Islamophobes," reasonably felt that government might regard them as "violent extremists." Our rulers also went out of their way to appease the most unfriendly parts of America's tiny Islamic population, including seeking advice on the proper attitude to take toward Muslims from the transparently anti-American Council On American Islamic Relations. But this simply gave such people more power to further their agendas, while foisting upon the American people a dispiriting political correctness. How could anyone have imagined that any people would not lose confidence in elites that seemed arguably more solicitous of enemies than of fellow citizens?...
Again and again, the American people are forced to confront the fact that its ruling class is not on its side."...
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Added: LA Times, 10/14/2001
Lax behavior by FBI and CIA led to 9/11/2001. They ignored evidence and missed chances to prevent terrorist activities from 1991-2001, including untranslated prison conversations with fellow conspirators, untranslated terror manuals, unchecked Calif. DMV records, and unchecked credit card purchases:
10/14/2001, "Haunted by Years of Missed Warnings," LA Times,
"As suspected terrorists traversed the U.S. over a decade [1991-2001], signs pointing to their plans went unheeded until after the attacks were carried out."
. They have plotted against America while in federal custody. And key evidence that pointed to operatives or their plans was ignored until well after the attack....
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(subhead): "Force the Closure of Their Companies"
"The U.S. government was pretty sure Ahmad Mohammad Ajaj was a terrorist from the moment he stepped foot on U.S. soil.
The 26-year-old Palestinian's suitcases were stuffed with fake passports, fake IDs and a cheat sheet on how to lie to U.S. immigration inspectors. And then there were the two handwritten notebooks filled with bomb recipes, the six bomb-making manuals, the four how-to videotapes concerning weaponry and the advanced guide to surveillance training.
But all federal prosecutors charged him with after Ajaj flew into New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport from Pakistan on Sept. 1, 1992, was passport fraud--a crude, photo paste job on a stolen Swedish passport....Ajaj was sentenced to six months in prison....
Over the next five months Ajaj would speak frequently over a prison phone with Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who had flown with him to New York. Yousef left the country Feb. 26, 1993, 12 hours after his bomb killed six, injured more than a thousand and caused $550 million worth of damage in the first World Trade Center attack.
Although prison phone calls are taped, no one monitored Ajaj's 20 calls to Yousef and other conspirators--or tried to translate them from Arabic--until long after the blast. And no one traced his plane ticket until after the blast to determine that he and Yousef had sat together on the first leg of their journey to New York.
The result: No one figured out Ajaj's plot or identified his co-conspirators until after the attack. Indeed, Ajaj was released from prison three days after the explosion and only later was rearrested and sentenced to more than 100 years in prison for his role.
"I think what we've gotten really good at is going back and re-creating the trail after an incident," said Henry DePippo, who eventually prosecuted Ajaj for conspiracy in the bombing....
For starters, it would have helped to know just what Ajaj actually had in his Arabic-language "terrorist kit." But his manuals had not been "disseminated to the intelligence community for full translation and exploitation of the information," nine years after they were seized, L. Paul Bremer III, head of the National Commission on Terrorism, told a Senate committee in June."
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(parag. 8): "Federal authorities also knew that Ramzi Yousef, who masterminded the 1993 truck bombing of the World Trade Center, later planned to blow up 12 United Airlines, Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines jumbo jets over the Pacific Ocean. After the plot was uncovered in 1995, a co-conspirator, Abdul Hakim Murad, told police in the Philippines that he had hoped to hijack a passenger plane and crash it into CIA headquarters outside Washington. Murad had attended four U.S. flight schools.
Yet no surveillance was in place to scrutinize aspiring pilots or to raise a warning flag when the men who would eventually hijack four jetliners Sept. 11 trained at flight schools around the country.
Agents have been slow to recognize suspects. After the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, Abdul Rahman Yasin was held and questioned by the FBI--and then allowed to leave the country. President Bush last week named Yasin one of the country's 22 "most wanted" terrorists in connection with his alleged role in that attack. Another would-be bomber in that case used prison telephones 20 times to contact fellow plotters....
And in February [2001], the U.S. Embassy in London granted a student visa to an unemployed 33-year-old French Moroccan man, Habib Zacarias Moussaoui, even though he was on a special French immigration watch list of suspected Islamic extremists. Moussaoui was detained Aug. 17 on immigration charges after he allegedly told a Minnesota flight school that he wanted to learn to steer jumbo jets, but not learn to land them. Moussaoui remains in FBI custody in New York as a material witness while investigators try to determine whether he was involved with the skyjackers or any other terrorist plot....
.......
Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammed, a London-based Muslim cleric who had dubbed himself the "mouth, eyes and ears of Osama bin Laden..." released what he called Bin Laden's four specific objectives for a holy war against the U.S.
"Bring down their airliners," read the instruction.
"Prevent the safe passage of their ships.
Occupy their embassies.
Force the closure of their companies and banks."
It is fair to say he has achieved at least some of his goals. It also is fair to say U.S. authorities had the plotters in their grasp--or in their sights--in almost every case. Those missed opportunities thus form the backdrop to the country's current war on terror."...
From last part of article:
"But a routine check of addresses and records from the California Department of Motor Vehicles would have shown that Almihdhar and Alhazmi had been living at a series of addresses in and around San Diego.
And a check with credit card companies would have shown that Alhazmi used a Visa card in his name on the Internet to purchase a ticket on Flight 77 for Sept. 11. He bought the ticket Aug. 27 and gave an address in Fort Lee, N.J., according to law enforcement records.
If the FBI had provided the airlines with the two men's names, then the airlines could have alerted authorities to their travel plans and prevented them from boarding....
Senior intelligence and law enforcement officials insist they acted appropriately given the scant information they had....
Not everyone agrees. Loch Johnson, a University of Georgia professor of political science and an expert on terrorism, said the case appears to be "a double failure: a failure on behalf of the CIA not emphasizing the importance of tracking these two, and a failure on behalf of the FBI in light of other bombings.""
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