From the Washington Times:
A criminal investigations report says several U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services employees are accused of aiding Islamic extremists with identification fraud and of exploiting the visa system for personal gain.
The confidential 2006 USCIS report said that despite the severity of the potential security breaches, most are not investigated “due to lack of resources” in the agency’s internal affairs department.
“Two District Adjudications Officers are allegedly involved with known (redacted) Islam terrorist members,” said the internal document obtained by The Washington Times.
The group “was responsible for numerous robberies and used the heist money to fund terrorist activities. The District Adjudications Officers made numerous DHS database queries to track (Alien)-File movement and check on the applicants’ status for (redacted) members and associates.”
According to the document, other potential security failures include reports that:
Employees are sharing detailed information on internal security measures with people outside the agency.
A Lebanese citizen bribed an immigration officer with airline tickets for visa benefits.
A USCIS officer in Harlington, Texas, sold immigration documents for $10,000 to as many as 20 people.
A USCIS employee, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal, said many of the complaints in the multipage document are as many as three years old.“Terrorists need immigration documents to embed in our society and work here without raising alarm bells,” said the employee.
“Whether through bribing an immigration officer, an employee with the department of motor vehicles, or utilizing highly effective counterfeit documents produced by the Mexican drug cartels. They are always looking for that documentation to live amongst us.”
Bill Wright, spokesman with USCIS, said that he could not comment on any ongoing investigations but that USCIS “takes all internal allegations seriously.”
“The investigations that are referenced are ongoing investigations that we can not comment on,” Mr. Wright told The Times. “We take all of these allegations seriously, and we are acting on them. For anyone to suggest that they are ignored is blatantly wrong.”
In March, USCIS established the Office of Security and Integrity to investigate internal corruption.
[…]
Last week, The Times disclosed a confidential DEA report substantiating the link between Islamic extremists and Mexican drug cartels. The 2005 DEA report states that Middle Eastern operatives, in U.S. sleeper cells, are working in conjunction with the cartels to fund terrorist organizations overseas. Several lawmakers promised congressional hearings based on the information disclosed in the DEA documents.
The DEA report also stated that Middle Eastern extremists living in the U.S.  who speak Spanish, Arabic and Hebrew fluently  are posing as Hispanic nationals.
USCIS Director Emilio Gonzalez in March told Congress that he could not establish how many terror suspects or persons of special interest have been granted immigration benefits.
“While USCIS has in place strong background check and adjudication suspension policies to avoid granting status to known terror risks, it is possible for USCIS to grant status to an individual before a risk is known, or when the security risk is not identified through standard background checks,” said a statement provided to lawmakers.
“USCIS is not in a position to quantify all cases in which this may have happened. Recognizing that there may be presently known terror risks in the ranks of those who have obtained status previously.”
Mr. Gonzalez’s response, along with the 2006 USCIS document obtained by The Times, show a “pattern of national security failures that have put the nation at risk,” the agency source said.
Plenty here to get the debates going — be the topic immigration reform, the problems inherent to governmental bureaucracies, or the War on Drugs (specifically, how it provides a lucrative market into which Islamic terrorists can invest, as well as an adversarial stance with respect to law enforcement that these terrorists can use as cover for less “libertarian-minded” pursuits).
Or perhaps there’s no significance here at all.
I (cut and paste a) report, you decide.
****
(Thanks to Stacy McCain at the Washington Times.)
You wingnuts just hate immigrants. Keep out the brown people, and suburbia will be just fine, huh? Maybe if we legalized drugs, the gangs and terrorists would not have such a lucrative source of funding available to them, but the puritanical theocrats would never go for that.
Gosh, darn. If KKKarl Rove hadn’t smeared the blessed Joseph Wilson IV, super-agent Valerie Plame would’ve fixed this years ago.
We have only Bush to blame. Not corrupt bureaucracy, let alone actual traitors.
Cordially…
*Sigh*…..Always heet, but never any light.
Cordially…
The number of similar-themed stories that have come out about the FBI, DHS, etc., makes it difficult to maintain that, in the current Us v. Them, any civilian part of the government is with Us. “Us” is determined by interests. Theirs are not ours. They behave accordingly. Just like everybody, always. Stunning.
The “libertarian-minded” might want to note that the one (force-preventing) power they believe government claims legitimately is — what a coincidence — the one power it finds least fit to use, except in defense of itself…and stop being “libertarian-minded.”
When the USCIS (etc.) is itself threatened, they’ll join Us. Temporarily. Until then, and after then, more of this.
Unfortunately, those who fund terrorism have figured out that there’s always someone willing to take a bribe–under the table like these guys and Scott Ritter, or in the form of academic grants like Mearshimer and Walt. I can’t prove the second–and these two dogs might have already been salivating enough at the thought of promoting the Saudi view of the world that they felt they were getting a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work, and that (mixed metaphor alert) the Saudi flies found the Harvard pile with the ease and grace of all things natural. But the bottom line, the wealthy enemies of the US know to find those that can be bought.
If the idea is to make drug trafficking unprofitable, how exactly will drug legalization do this? There are only two conditions (economically) in which something is unprofitable… 1, the costs are too high, or 2 the returns are too low. Which is to say to make an activity unprofitable you have to either raise the cost extremely high or find a way to make the returns plummet. Legalization might lower the returns – but then again, it might just lower the costs of operation.
Could I hear a well-reasoned argument as to how a specific form of drug legalization will make drug dealing unprofitable?
I’d like to see the internal Al Qaeda report showing the numbers of potential terrorist they’ve exported to the US on imbed operations that have in fact hooked up with strippers, used up all their rent and “flying lesson” bankroll, then simply disappeared into the system as just one more illegal alien.
Blowing oneself up might be easy if it means getting away from a lifetime in the dirt, sand, 125 degree heat and a wife that looks better in her burqa than without.. but it kinda pales next to cold beer, central cooling, some good bbq wings with ranch dressing and a hot 19 yr old blond in a string bikini delivering them.. (Hooters as Heaven..food for thought)
Forget about bribing terrorists to come forward and sell out their higher ups in Iraq and Afghanistan.. Offer up some bribes for ex-terrorists now living comfortably in the US to come forward and detail the operations.. Names in the Middle East, US handlers, everything.. The ex-terrorists are now in a position to appreciate a cool half mil tax free and a green card…
tw: this Australian … No, no bribes for ex-pat Aussies.. They got no intelligence we need unless maybe some old homemade porn from Nicole Kidman’s or Olivia Newton John’s college days.. or the formula to bootleg Foster’s or something.
I don’t think the notion is that it’ll be made unprofitable, just less so. And save a crapload of enforcement money in the bargain, along with a restoration of certain Constitutional rights that have been abrogated in the name of the war on drugs.
RiverC is also correct in that legalization would lower the cost of doing business in mind-altering crops. However, considering the amount of business that the drug trade currently drives in the areas of bribery, cross-border smuggling, money laundering, and paramilitary equipment, I can’t say that taking those elements out of operational costs would be such a bad thing.
I admit that arms dealers, financiers and customs officials may disagree.
Selling beer is still profitable, but oddly enough it’s been awhile since any bootleggers have shot up downtown Chicago. We don’t want to take the profit out of the enterprise, we just want to take the criminals out of the enterprise.
TW: But I suppose I could be suffering from a party diathesis. Now that’s just uncanny.
Here’s why drugs should not be legalized. It has nothing to do with economics and everything to do with the devastation drugs produce in their users’ lives.
TW: scent products, uh, not a good replacement, yo.
Zoloft success stories….
Zoloft….