Do You Still Feel Safe from Another Terrorist Account?

Jennie Taer reported that a Pakistani man who illegally crossed our southern border was caught and released by federal immigration authorities. He was released even though his name is on a terror watchlist. 

The Pakistani national entered the U.S. illegally Nov. 9 and was nabbed by the Border Patrol the next day in Tecate, California, according to the memo [from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] which was received from two different sources in the Department of Homeland Security, parent agency to both ICE and the Border Patrol.

While the Pakistani was in Border Patrol custody Nov. 22, the Terrorism Screening Center confirmed that he was a positive match on the terror watchlist, according to the memo.

Despite this, the memo says, the terror suspect was released Jan. 23 from the custody of ICE’s San Diego office after the agency served him with an Order of Release on Recognizance with tracking technology through a program called Alternatives to Detention.

Border agents served the Pakistani with an expedited removal order Nov 11, after which he said that he had a credible fear of going back to Pakistan, according to the memo.

On Jan. 24, however, the ICE office in San Diego informed the agency’s office in Los Angeles of the man’s presence on the terror watchlist, along with his “mandatory detention requirement,” and had him report on his own to the Alternatives to Detention check-in office. ICE in Los Angeles was able to arrest him when he showed up for the check-in….

The Border Patrol caught 172 individuals on the terrorist watchlist attempting to enter the United States illegally in fiscal year 2023, which ended Sept. 30. From October through December, the Border Patrol recorded 50 encounters with individuals on the terrorist watchlist, according to federal data.

Border Patrol agents also recorded 98 encounters with individuals on the terror watchlist in fiscal year 2022 and 16 in fiscal year 2021, according to the data.

Those figures add up to more than 325 people named on the terror watchlist who have been caught. How many other such people have not been caught? Do you remember the damage done to our nation by 18 terrorists on airliners on September 11, 2001. How much more damage can hundreds of terrorists do?

 

Will the U.S. Suffer a Terrorist Attack Because of Our Open Border?

Israel is well known for having one of the most secure borders in the world. Yet Hamas was able to conduct a large, coordinated attack against Israel. The attack killed 1,400 people, more Jews than any other attack in the last 50 years. To conduct the attack, Hamas penetrated an extremely secure border.

Matthew Kuckelman at The Daily Signal compared the Hamas attack on Israel with the open southern U.S. border. He wrote that there are more than 6,000 miles between Israel and the southern U.S. border, but Americans have a crisis at the border. He explained that “Americans have lived through other crises caused by President Joe Biden’s open border – crime, fentanyl deaths, and human trafficking – but we may not survive a terrorist attack brought by people who took advantage of the open border. 

Customs and Border Protection has encountered over 7 million illegal aliens since January 2021 who have poured across President Joe Biden’s open Border. This does not include the more than 1.5 million known “gotaways” who evaded the Border Patrol.

At least 172 migrants that Customs and Border Protection has apprehended between ports of entry matched those on the terrorist watchlist during fiscal year 2023. This compares to three in 2020. That’s an increase of over 5,000%.

On Monday, it was reported that at least two Iranian nationals on the watchlist had been apprehended in the first two weeks of October. So concerning is the threat of terrorists entering the United States that the president of Guatemala is highlighting the dangers posed by inaction to secure the border. And yet, the Biden administration has continued to ignore the crisis.

In fact, just two days before the attack on Israel, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Aleandro Mayorkas released a statement reaffirming the administration’s opposition to border walls. Since the attack on Israel, there has been no indication of a change in course from the Biden administration.

As the administration has continued down its path of unlimited illegal immigration, the door has been wide open for the terrorists to come in and broaden their operations in the U.S. Charles Marino, former senior law enforcement advisor at DHS, alerted members of Congress that terrorist groups “can and will exploit our open borders with help of the Mexican cartels.” If you thought the border crisis couldn’t get any worse, … it can.

Perhaps the most worrying part of the debate is that there really should not be much of a debate. The need to address this issue is not a new one, and it should not be partisan. The American people have suffered from the historic border crisis. Congress knows how to solve this problem and mitigate threats posed to the homeland – by securing our borders.

Kuckelman explained that the House of Representatives passed a historic bill – Secure the Border Act – earlier in 2023. The bill, if passed and signed into law, would take the necessary “steps to ensure terrorists cannot freely enter the United States through our southern border.” The bill would direct the restoration of our national security by resuming “construction of the border wall,” increasing “the number of Border Patrol agents,” preventing asylum fraud, and ramping “up interior enforcement to remove illegal aliens who may pose a threat to Americans.”

America needs to act to protect its people from another terrorist attack, but we have a weak and (possibly) compromised POTUS. He refuses to close the border and to put sanctions on Iran, a terrorist-producing state. I agree with Kuckelman that America will see another terrorist attack if we do not act forcefully and quickly.

Why Does the Biden Administration Say that Parents Are Terrorists?

             The crisis at the southern border could be allowing terrorists to enter the United States. However, the Biden administration does not seem to care. They are more concerned about home-grown terrorists otherwise known as “parents.”

            On Monday, Attorney General Merrick Garland directed the Department of Justice and the FBI to “launch a series of additional efforts in the coming days designed to address the rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel.” In plain language, he is concerned about the increasing number of parents attending school board meetings and demanding that schools stop indoctrinating their children.

            Garland did not include any examples or evidence of terroristic actions. GianCarlo Canaparo and Mike Howell suggested that the memo from Garland “looks like an effort to use the FBI to threaten and silence parents who are outspoken opponents of critical race theory in schools.” They emphasized that being interrogated by FBI agents could be intimidating to parents. It is possible that Garland does not intend to use the FBI but is hoping that the memo will do the intimidating. Canaparo and Howell explained the following. 

To understand what Garland is doing with this memo, you’ll need a short primer on the background facts and government legalese.

Starting with the facts: What is this “rise in criminal conduct” against school officials? You won’t find any evidence cited in Garland’s memo. You won’t find any evidence in the FBI’s crime data either.

            The memo may be the result of a letter sent by the National School Boards Association to President Joe Biden. The authors wrote, “That letter made vague claims about ‘threats and acts of violence’ against school board members from parents who oppose critical race theory.” They continued, “The letter complained about ‘disruptions’ by angry parents but managed to find only one example of violence against a school official (likely a security guard), which was handled by local law enforcement.”

It is a sad day when the Attorney General answer does the bidding of school boards. The authors call this a clear “example of political influence seeping into the DOJ.” However, “Garland’s weaponization of the DOJ has a problem: There is no conceivable basis for federal law enforcement action against these parents.” Canaparo and Howell summarized the situation as follows.

First, there is no reason to bring federal law enforcement into this; local authorities have this under control.

Second, Garland has demonstrated, disappointingly, that he is beholden to powerful leftist political groups and perfectly happy to let them use the threat of federal government’s law enforcement power to suppress their critics’ right to free speech. The promised impendence of the DOJ is a farce.

Third, it is more important to Garland to spend scarce law enforcement resources appeasing liberal interest groups than on more pressing national concerns.

Fourth, some good news, parents need not be afraid. It is their constitutional right to push back in legal ways against schools teaching children critical race theory.

            The bottom line is: “Go forth to the school boards and make your voices heard.” Parents have the right and the responsibility to be involved in the education of their children

Terrorist Attacks

I searched for an event during the Clinton Administration that would be significant for a history lesson this week and had to settle for terrorist attacks. In researching for this post, I discovered that the first terrorist attack took place in 1920. On September 16 of that year, a TNT bomb was planted in an unattended horse-drawn wagon in New York City. It exploded on Wall Street opposite the House of Morgan; it killed 35 people and injured hundreds of other people. The crime was never solved, but Bolshevist or anarchist terrorists were believed to be responsible. The next terrorist attack apparently took place in 1975 when a bomb was set off on January 24 in Fraunces Tavern in New York City. This bomb killed 4 people and injured more than 50 other people. A Puerto Rican nationalist group (FALN) claimed to be responsible. Police tied 13 other bombings to the group. In the thirty year period from 1979 when Iranian radical students seized the U.S. Embassy on November 4,took 66 hostages and kept 52 of them prisoners for 444 days until the Christmas Day bomber in 2009, there have been more than 40 separate terrorist attacks or attempted attacks within the United States or against Americans abroad. Most of them were credited to people from the Middle East. I'll elaborate on only those that took place while Bill Clinton was in the White House. On February 26, 1993, a bomb exploded in the basement garage of the World Trade Center in New York City. It killed 6 people and injured at least 1,040 other people. Militant Islamist Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 9 other people were convicted on conspiracy charges in 1995. In 1998, the suspected mastermind, Ramzi Yousef, was convicted of the bombing. Al-Qaeda involvement is suspected. On April 19, 1995, in Oklahoma City, a car bomb exploded outside the federal office building. Walls and floors collapsed, killing 168 people - including 19 children and 1 person who died in the rescue attempt. More than 220 other buildings received some damage from the bomb. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were later convicted in the anti-government plot to avenge the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco, Texas, exactly 2 years earlier. On November 13, 1995, a car bomb exploded at U.S. military headquarters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and killed 5 United States military servicemen. On June 25, 1996, in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, a truck bomb exploded outside Khobar Towers military complex. It killed 19 American servicemen and injured hundreds of others. In June 2001, 13 Saudis and a Lebanese, all alleged to be members of Islamic militant group Hezbollah, were indicted on charges relating to the attack. On August 7, 1998, in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, truck bombs exploded almost at the same time near 2 United States embassies. These attacks killed 224 people (213 in Kenya and 11 in Tanzania) and injured 4,500. In May 2001, 4 men connected with Al-Qaeda - 2 of them were trained at Al-Qaeda camps inside Afghanistan - were convicted of the killings and later sentenced to life in prison. Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden, who remained at large, was one of 22 men indicted by a federal grand jury in connection with the attacks. On October 12, 2000, the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Cole was docked and refueling in the Port of Aden in Yemen when a small boat carrying two men approached the ship. Explosives packed into the small boat were detonated alongside the U.S.S. Cole. The resulting explosion killed 17 sailors on board the destroyer and injured 39 others. It also tore a hole 40 feet high and 40 feet wide in the side of the 505-foot-long vessel. Some international analysts suspected that the bombers were connected to Arabs who were sympathetic to the Palestinian uprising while other analysts thought that the blame for the bombing lay with Osama bin Laden, a Saudi millionaire who was believed by the United States of funding terrorist attacks such as the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Bin Laden was responsible for a pledge to drive the United States military forces out of the Middle East, and his main supporters were Islamist militants from various Arab countries who were referred to as "Arab Afghans." Several Arab Afghans were detained by Yemeni authorities for questioning in the bombing. Investigators for the Yemeni government concluded that the two bombers who were killed in the attack on the U.S.S. Cole had been Arab Afghans from Saudi Arabia. Three to six Yemenis were suspected as being accomplices in the incident. It seemed at the time that President Clinton was not all that interested in pursuing Bin Laden. Maybe the destruction of 9/11 could have been avoided or lessened by concentrating on stopping Bin Laden during the Clinton Administration instead of the investigation about oral sex in the Oval Office.

Airport Security

Are terrorists becoming bolder or are we less secure under the Obama Administration? Official sources tell us that there have been twenty-eight terror attacks, either successful or attempted, since 9/11. Twenty-eight divided by nine averages out to about three per year. I understand that there have been six attacks during 2009. So, what's up? One fact is very clear, and that fact is that the United States and the world's airways remain vulnerable to terrorists. I believe that one of the reasons that we are so vulnerable is that our liberal left wants everything to be politically correct. I understand that our newest terrorist now has an attorney and will be tried in our court system - just as if he were a United States citizen. When are our leaders going to understand that our enemies are using our humanity to destroy us? The question that I want to discuss today is, how much freedom will we need to surrender in order to be safe? I do not have any problem with profiling for security reasons. If older, Caucasian women were to become known for blowing up airplanes, I would expect everyone to wonder about me, and I would try to be as cooperative as possible with those in authority. I don't particularly enjoy the experience of having dogs sniff around my private parts, but I think that I prefer dogs sniffing around than being patted down. I know that I prefer dogs to full body scans in public. I think that my second choice would be to be patted down by a same-sex employee. This seems less intrusive to me than a body scan. My last choice would be a full body scan. I am very uncomfortable with the idea of somebody - anybody - taking a detailed look at my body. I endure physical examinations by my doctor simply because I consider them necessary to preserve my health. I suppose I could endure body scans to preserve my life, but I wouldn't like it! I like freedom and privacy as well as being innocent until proven guilty. I do not like the fact that my life, liberty, property and privacy are being threatened because some deranged people from another country think it necessary. The more freedoms I give up, whether voluntarily or by force, the more determined I am to win this war against terrorism. I hope that Obama gets his act together soon!