Lost in the debate over whether we can legally tap the conversations of terrorists abroad and their contacts in the United States is why there is anyone here willing to pick up the phone.
The arrest in January 2005 of Noel Exinia and Cesario Nunez appeared on the surface to be just another drug bust. But court documents obtained by the Brownsville (Texas) Herald show the necessity of surveillance of overseas call and e-mails.
They also show why Osama bin Laden's latest audiotape warning of a new attack that Homeland Security won't be able to stop should be taken seriously.
Both Exinia and Nunez eventually pleaded guilty to drug conspiracy charges, including moving more than a quarter-ton of cocaine from Mexico through the Rio Grande Valley and on to New York City. But court documents filed in Exinia's case contain details of a December 2004 incident where he allegedly tried to secure transportation for 20 Middle Eastern men waiting to enter the U.S. from Puebla, Monterrey and Chiapas in Mexico.
As the Herald reported, "Recorded conversations authorized under the U.S. Patriot Act and a court order captured the (suspect) referring to the 20 men as 'gente de Osama,' or 'Osama's people.' " During a Jan. 5, 2005, conversation, Exinia described the men as "Iraqis," ages 25 to 33, who were willing to pay $8,000 for transportation past Border Patrol checkpoints in South Texas and into the U.S. interior.
Could they have been terrorists? Coast Guard Adm. James Loy, who was acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security before the swearing-in of Michael Chertoff, told the Senate Intelligence Committee last year: "Several al-Qaida leaders believe operatives can pay their way through Mexico and also believe illegal entry is more advantageous than legal entry for operational security reasons." Recent information, he added, showed "al-Qaida has considered using the Southwest border to infiltrate the United States."
They may already have. According to Olivia Albrecht of the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., "Many of the people who have been identified as communicating with terrorist networks abroad have entered this country by means of illegal or fraudulent immigration, suggesting an illegal immigration problem so great in this country that the system cannot properly screen applicants and safeguard among terrorist-connected entrants."
In August 2004, as Leo W. Banks reported in the Tucson Weekly, Arizona rancher William Kolbe, brother of Republican Rep. Jim Kolbe, in whose district he lives, was chasing some wild animals off his property when he found a backpack hooked to the barbed wire fence behind their house.
In the backpack was a diary largely written in Arabic. Looking through the book, Mrs. Kolbe noticed two names and two numbers — one listing in Canada, the other in Iran — with the beginning numbers being the international calling codes for those two countries.
Rep. Solomon Ortiz, a Democrat from Corpus Christi and former sheriff of Nuences County, said the information found in court documents underscores the U.S.-Mexico border's vulnerability to terrorist infiltration. "We know there are terrorist cells in the United States," he told the Herald. "These guys are coming through the back door."
Ortiz reports that local ranchers have found clothing native to the Middle East and items such as Sudanese money in the South Texas brush and that al-Qaida is trying to use the MS-13 gang (Mara Salvatruchas) "to move high value al-Qaida operatives across the border for a large sum of money."
Is Osama so confident in his latest tape because he knows a new group of Mohammed Attas are already here and in place, having snuck across our southern border?
The price of liberty, it has been said, is eternal vigilance. The back door to the United States remains unlocked, and al-Qaida knows it. Not everybody coming here is looking for a better life. Some may be coming here to end ours as we know it.
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