Investor's Business Daily, August 10th, 2007
Border Control: Islamofascists are teaming up with Mexican drug cartels to finance their terror networks. If it hasn't happened already, nannies and busboys may soon not be the only ones sneaking across the border.
In what may be the perfect storm of terror, reports from the Drug Enforcement Administration indicate that al-Qaida-linked terrorist cells and Mexican drug cartels have joined forces to make money and wreak havoc, even to the point 15f facilitating and financing the next terrorist attack on the U.S.
A DEA report obtained by the Washington Times, written and stamped "secret" in 2005, states that as a result of this unholy alliance, "It is very likely that any future 'September 11' type of terrorist event in the United States may be facilitated, wittingly or unwittingly, by drug traffickers operating on both sides of the United States-Mexico border."
The report provides examples of Middle Eastern drug-trafficking and terrorist cells in the U.S. funding terror networks overseas with the aid of Mexican drug cartels.
It includes pictures of Middle Easterners who "appear to be Hispanic; they are in fact, all Spanish-speaking Arabic drug traffickers supporting Middle East terrorism from their base of operations" in the American southwest.
The report even tells of a new kind of crime family with a Middle Eastern member of the Muslim Brotherhood, involved in narcotics sales and other crimes, who married into a Mexican narcotics family. Guess who's coming to dinner?
Mark Juergensmeyer, director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, worries about this link between drug trafficking and terror. It's "frightening to think that drug-trafficking operations in Mexico may adopt some jihadist ideology," he says.
These smuggling operations may involve more than drugs.
"Al-Qaida has been trying to smuggle terrorists and terrorist weapons into the United States," a 2006 Department of Homeland Security report states. "This organization has also tried to enter the U.S. by taking advantage of its most vulnerable border areas. They seek to smuggle OTMs (other than Mexicans) from Middle Eastern countries into the U.S."
FBI Director Robert Mueller told Congress in March 2005 that "there are individuals from countries with known al-Qaida connections who are changing their Islamic surnames to Hispanic-sounding names and obtaining false Hispanic identities, learning to speak Spanish, and pretending to be Hispanic immigrants."
Michael Maxwell, senior analyst with the House Appropriations homeland security committee, states: "While the procurement of fraudulent or multiple identities by terrorists to hide criminal activity is not new, the information suggests terrorist tradecraft is evolving and relationships now exist between Mexican and Middle Eastern individuals or groups, embedded here in the United States."
An El Paso, Texas, law enforcement report tells of "approximately 20 Arab persons a week utilizing the Travis County Court in Austin to change their names and driver's licenses from Arabic to Hispanic surnames."
To what purpose?
Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif., ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs terrorism and nonproliferation subcommittee, has called for hearings, saying, "A flood of name changes from Arabic to Hispanic and the reported linking of drug cartels on the Texas border with Middle East terrorism needs to be thoroughly investigated."
That is if Congress can break away from investigating the Bush administration long enough to protect our borders.
Last fiscal year, 98,153 OTMs were caught sneaking across our still-porous southern border, including some from terror-friendly states.
How many were not caught is not known. Nor are their intentions. What is known is that al-Qaida may already be walking in through our back door, flush with drug money.
