Category Archives: Homeland Security

MS-13 Smuggling Hundreds of Muslims Across Mexican Border

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It’s no secret that MS-13 has ties to Al-Qaeda going back at least to early 2002. Jihad Watch ran a post on Al-Qaeda’s link to MS-13 back in January of 2005 and FrontPage ran a piece a week or so earlier about the connection that included some disturbing details about high ranking known AQ operatives spotted meeting with the gang in Honduras. One of the first pieces I wrote for Red Alerts detailed the link between the Kries faction of the Aryan Nations, Radical Islamist groups and the Bolivarian revolution in Latin America.

The Narco-terror/Islamist connection has been a story that has slowly fallen off most people’s radar unfortunately. I myself forgot about it until alerted to this piece by Dr. Paul William of The Last Crusade that just ran on Family Security Matters that details how little progress we’ve made in the last few years:

In the wake of 9/11, Mara Salvatrucha attracted the attention of top al Qaeda officials, who realized that the gang could be used to smuggle operatives and weapons into the United States.[1] An agreement was forged between the terrorists and the gang-bangers. In exchange for safe passage across the border, al Qaeda – through its cells in South America – agreed to pay the Maras from $30,000 to $50,000 for each sleeper agent they managed to smuggle into the country with bogus matricula consulars.[2]

Matricula consulars are official identification cards that are issued by the Mexican government through its consular offices. The cards verify that the bearers are Mexican citizens who are living outside of Mexico
with the government’s permission.

According to U.S. officials, these cards pose a grave threat to national security. Steven McCraw, assistant director of the FBI’s Office of Intelligence, told a House Judiciary Subcommittee: “The ability of foreign nationals to use the matricula consular provides an opportunity for terrorists to move freely within the United States without triggering name-based watch lists that are disseminated to local police officers.”

Counterfeit matricula consulars are easy to obtain. In Los Angeles, the going rate is $90; in New York City, $150.

[…]

According to border patrol officials, including Sheriff D’Wayne Jenigan of Del Rio, Texas, thousands of Special Interest Aliens (SIAs), with the help of Mara Salvatrucha “coyotes,” have made their way across the Mexican border and into the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Such SIAs come from countries that pose national security concerns: Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Somalia, Yemen, Jordan, Lebanon, and even Iraq.

The routes used by illegal aliens to enter the U.S. have become littered with discarded Muslim prayer blankets, pages from Islamic texts, and Arabic newspapers. Law enforcement officials have named such passageways “terrorists’ alleys” and a street leading north from the city of Douglas, Arizona, as “Arab Road.”

Ready for that fence? The Obama administration is less interested in securing our southern border than Bush, who I respect but had a blind spot on the dangers Mexico poses to us. We need to keep stories like this circulating so that this homeland security issue doesn’t remained buried on the back page until something happens that makes the front page.

h/t reader Damien

Mormons Fighting for Their Lives in Mexico

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Though Washington Post reporter William Booth can barely keep the sneering contempt for the Mexican Mormons out of his report his piece is one of the best reports on the conflict between Mexico’s drug cartels and the religious sect that just wants to farm in peace. Mexico’s government has given the sect permission to form a rural police force and arm themselves, which just shows how out of control Mexico is.

Booth, like many here, miss the point about the Cartel’s power grab. Legalization of drugs here will do nothing to put this genie back in the bottle. Otherwise this report, and the included video, give you a sense of how hopeless the situation is down there:

In the past three months, American Mormon communities in Mexico have been sucked into a dust devil of violence sweeping the borderlands. Their relative wealth has made them targets: Their telephones ring with threats of extortion. Their children and elders are taken by kidnappers. They have been drawn into the government’s war with the drug cartels.

This month, a leader of their colony was abducted by heavily armed men dressed as police, then beaten and shot dead 10 minutes from town. Benjamin LeBaron, 31, whom everyone called Benji, had dared to denounce the criminals, while refusing to pay a $1 million ransom demanded by kidnappers who had grabbed his teenage brother from a family ranch in May.

Amid the blood and mesquite at the site of his last breath, Benjamin LeBaron’s killers posted a sign that read: “This is for the leaders of LeBaron who didn’t believe and who still don’t believe.”

[…]

“All we want to do is live in peace. We want nothing to do with the drug cartels. They can’t be stopped. What we want is just to protect ourselves from being kidnapped and killed,” said Marco LeBaron, a college student who came home for the funeral of his brother, the slain anti-crime activist. Marco LeBaron is one of 70 Mormons who have volunteered to join a rural police force to protect the town. The Mexican government has given them permission to arm themselves.

For a taste of how the gangs operate, this section describes a home invasion. Not for the squeamish:

Early on July 7, four trucks loaded with men passed through a highway tollbooth, where they were recorded on videotape outside Galeana, where Benjamin LeBaron lived in a sprawling, new stucco home with his wife and five young children. Two trucks stopped at the cemetery outside town and waited. Two pickup trucks filled with 15 to 20 heavily armed men, wearing helmets, bulletproof vests and blue uniforms, came for LeBaron.

They smashed in his home’s windows and shouted for him to open the door, as his terrified children cried inside, according to an account given by his brothers. LeBaron’s brother-in-law Luis Widmar, 29, who lived across the street, heard the commotion and ran to his aid. Both men were beaten by the gunmen, who threatened to rape LeBaron’s wife in front of her children unless the men revealed where LeBaron kept his arsenal of weapons.

“But he didn’t have any, because I promise you, if he did, he would have used them to protect his family,” Julian LeBaron said.

LeBaron and Widmar were shot in the head outside town. A banner was hung beside their bodies that blamed them for the arrest of 25 gunmen who were seized in June after terrorizing the town of Nicolas Bravo, where they burned down buildings and extorted from business owners. According to Mexican law enforcement officials, the gunmen are members of the Sinaloa drug cartel, which is fighting the Juarez cartel for billion-dollar cocaine-smuggling routes into El Paso.

After the men killed LeBaron and Widmar, a video camera captured their departure at the highway tollbooth — the make, model and year of their vehicles and the license numbers, according to family members. There have been no arrests.

h/t N.T.A.

So Why Do We Need a Steam Powered Corpse Eating Deathbot Anyway?

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steam-powered-corpse-eating-deathbot.jpg

I know this sounds like a silly question, especially it you’re like me and a fan of the Steampunk and Neo-Victorian aesthetics. I’m a huge fan of the old Arcanum PC game, would be a fan of Unhallowed Metropolis game if I were the kind of person to be a fan of roleplaying live action or not and have often idly pondered having my own Steam Powered Corpse Eating Killbot for personal use, but now that RTI has actually developed a real life version, called EATR, I find myself grasping my pistol under my frock coat in fear:

 It could be a combination of 19th-century mechanics, 21st-century technology — and a 20th-century horror movie.

A Maryland company under contract to the Pentagon is working on a steam-powered robot that would fuel itself by gobbling up whatever organic material it can find — grass, wood, old furniture, even dead bodies.

Robotic Technology Inc.’s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot — that’s right, “EATR” — “can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically-based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable,” reads the company’s Web site.

That “biomass” and “other organically-based energy sources” wouldn’t necessarily be limited to plant material — animal and human corpses contain plenty of energy, and they’d be plentiful in a war zone.

[…]

The advantages to the military are that the robot would be extremely flexible in fuel sources and could roam on its own for months, even years, without having to be refueled or serviced.

Upon the EATR platform, the Pentagon could build all sorts of things — a transport, an ambulance, a communications center, even a mobile gunship.

In press materials, Robotic Technology presents EATR as an essentially benign artificial creature that fills its belly through “foraging,” despite the obvious military purpose.

That “foraging” would include looking for (hopefully) dead humans to “eat” to power its fancy steam engine. But what are we envisioning here? An autonomous military robot that can operate independently indefinitely as long as it has “biological material” to eat? Forgive me for being confused as to why.

According to RTI’s EATR presentation (.pdf) the robot is designed to autonomously scavange for food sans human command or control, reproducing the behavior of biological entities. Since we biological entities like to kill fresh meat rather than wait for road kill to fall in our laps let’s hope this is just marketing hype.  CNET’s Technically Incorrect claims Fox News is overreacting, and seemingly doubts the corpse eating will happen but on page 19 of the presentation RTI claims to be close to achieving “machine cognition” which includes computational equivalents of imagination, true intelligence and awareness. So whether or not EATR robots decide on long pig for dinner might literally be up to the machine.

National Geographic wrote about a bug eating robot in 2006, so the corpse as fuel concept is not new.

But peruse RTI’s material for yourself and tell me exactly why we need this? Supposedly we can use EATR for the long term occupation of territory since the robots can be dropped anywhere and remain operational indefinitely, but why would we want robots that do nothing but spit out bullets and eat anything biological to occupy anything? The purpose of occupation is to control territory, but EATR is basically a Steampunk locust plague. Drop a few of these robots into an area and what will they do? At best exhaust the local food supply, at worst end up on YouTube as anti-American propaganda where cell footage of them sawing apart then “consuming” peasants will simply reinforce our reputations as The Great Satan.

I’m no peacenik but I have the feeling if the EATR team hadn’t gone into robotics they’d be busily trying to find a way to resurrect corpses as part of a plot to end the world in a zombie apocalypse. EATR seems to be little more than a nihilistic anti-human wet dream funded by a defense department well known for being easily distracted by shiny new toys. There is no possible mission where EATR will perform better than our brave fighting men and women, except in the creator’s envisioned survival horror scenario where his machines rampage across the world eating our dead to keep themselves fueled.

Wasn’t there a movie about that?

Update: My buddy Damien reminded me of this link, in which the company claims EATR is strictly a Vegetarian. Which I assume effectively rules out it being able to operate in desert environments?

Two Peace/Anti-Crime Activists Murdered in Mexico

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The men have been reported as Mormons, though KDBC is reporting that they may have been Mennonites. Regardless, two American citizens standing up for justice were murdered by the narco-terror gangs of Mexico that neither the American nor Mexican governments seem to be able to control.

Via StephenLoneWolf:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ire2ej6S03c[/youtube]

Reuters has more. h/t Newser

Obama Administration Deporting Terror Informant Back to Pakistan, Conservative Blogs Silent

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While the big Conservative blogs like Hot Air are busy reporting on Lope de Vega channeling governor/Casanova Mark Sanford, the rank betrayal of a man who has helped us avert terrorist attacks has gone largely unnoticed:

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS 5) ― He’s a Pakistani immigrant who helped the United States in the war on terror, but now the U.S. government wants to deport him. His lawyers are working furiously to try to allow him to stay in his adopted country.

The man, who wants to remain unidentified, said he put himself in harm’s way by working as an undercover informant in California for ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, searching out terrorist connections.

He said ICE agents told him if he worked for ICE, he could stay here indefinitely or even get a green card.

The former informant is originally from Karachi, Pakistan and has lived in the US for over 20 years, first as a student and then as a white-collar professional. But now he faces deportation back to Pakistan.

[…]

San Francisco immigration attorney Katherine Lewis represents the informant.

“They needed his assistance,” Lewis explained. “They needed him to go wear a wire and go to an asylum interview with this notary, who had been repeatedly filing false asylum claims, but they needed the evidence to show that he was actually doing this.”

His work paid off for ICE. The government indicted Chaudhry, who pled guilty on two counts. But that wasn’t all. The man said the agents had another job for him.

The informant said, “They said go to the mosque and talk to the people and engage them in conversation to find out if there’s any activity going on like money laundering, or you know there’s terrorist activity going on in the United States.”

Which he did, working for ICE for three years.

At the same time, the informant himself had to go back to court for a deportation hearing. So he says he asked the agents if he needed a lawyer. But he said instead, the agents came to the hearing, and then gave him this
advice:

“They told me to take the deportation order. They say don’t worry about it we will take care of it and everything will be okay,” the informant recalled.
So he said he followed their advice and then waived his appeals. His attorney said the informant, understandably, believed what the agents told him.

“I mean, it’s reasonable to think that the agency that’s deporting you tells you it’s okay to go take a deportation order,” Lewis said. “We’ll take care of you, you know, it’s reasonable for…any kind of reasonable person would say, ‘Okay, that seems like a reliable source of information to say I can take this deportation order and yet you know, it’s not going to be enforced, they’re going to let me stay in the United States.'”

Now they’re sending the man back to Pakistan where people he rolled on will no doubt be waiting, having figured out who fingered them while cooling their heels in the third world. Law enforcement folks out there know that how you treat your informants determines how willing they and other potential informants will be to help in the future. Deporting a guy who wore a wire to catch people who would have killed him if he was caught will not predispose future C.I.’s to being cooperative. This guy deserves a little consideration but now that the Obama administration has decided to play softball with terrorists I.C.E. is throwing him to the wolves.

It’s an outrage clearly, but I guess Michelle Malkin and Allahpundit have a better sense than I of what sort of political stories merit attention.

There’s video at the link. h/t N.T.A.