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Dhimmitude at DHS, where political correctness seems to have trumped the evidence -- evidence that keeps on being confirmed, as with the Lodi arrests recently. "Service Before Security," from Paul Sperry in FrontPage, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:
The good news is U.S. airport traffic is returning to pre-9/11 levels. The bad news is, so are security priorities at international terminals, where some of the 9/11 hijackers entered the U.S. illegally.New internal memos I've obtained show the Homeland Security Department seems more worried about getting foreign travelers to their destinations on time than screening them for terror ties.
In fact, I've learned the department has formed a so-called Airport Wait Time working group, which met for the first time in December to come up with a national strategy to clock federal inspectors processing foreign travelers entering the U.S. at major international airports. Those who take too long are written up.
Airport immigration inspectors are our first line of defense against terrorists entering the country. They check fingerprints and photographs against terror watchlists and question suspicious foreign passengers.
Yet they are under new pressure to clear planes in response to complaints from airlines about security related delays.
"Flight times are now much more important than catching terrorists, drugs or illegals," a Customs and Border Protection supervisor at a major international airport told me. "We are always pressured to clear passengers in under 60 minutes, no matter what -- even though Congress lifted that mandate after 9/11."...
To reduce flight delays at these airports, DHS exempts a number of passengers from US-VISIT security screening if necessary, including teens, elderly, families, foreign pilots and religious workers such as imams, according to memo dated Jan. 2, 2004, and marked "LAW ENFORCEMENT SENSITIVE."
Foreign air crews are exempt even though a number of Saudi and other foreign Muslim airline pilots have been linked to terrorism.
So are Muslim clerics staying in the U.S. on R-1 and R-2 visas. Such foreign religious workers have been ranked the "lowest threat" among the 10 visa classifications (I've redacted the specific rankings, from highest threat to lowest, for obvious reasons). Yet hundreds of Muslim clerics have been linked to terrorism, many of whom still preach in the U.S.
Just last week, federal authorities arrested two Pakistani imams in connection with a terror case involving a possible al-Qaeda cell in the sleepy farming community of Lodi, Calif. The men allegedly violated the terms of their religious worker visas.
The leniency DHS gives such visiting clerics alarms GOP U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, chairman of the House Immigration Reform Caucus, since many are "calling for the violent overthrow of the nation" from mosque pulpits.
"They enter into this country, they are assigned to mosques. And most of the mosques in the United States are being built with Saudi money, most of them are Wahhabi. And these people, many of them, preach essentially sedition," Tancredo asserted in a recent hearing on border security held by the House International Relations Committee. "What these imams have said even outside the mosque would under any other situation, if anybody else would say these things, be considered to be seditious, and even charges would be brought on that basis."
He says putting them at the top of the list for exemption from fingerprinting and terror monitoring is the height of naiveté, and he's right. Many Muslim clerics use their religiosity simply as cover to carry out terror-related activities, such as recently convicted imam Ali al-Timimi, who encouraged young Virginia Muslims to kill Americans abroad.
Posted by Robert at June 17, 2005 5:35 AM
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Everyone should read Bat Ye'or's Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis in which Ye'or describes the Islamization of Europe in slow increments using the "guarantee of a steady energy supply" as the carrot and jihad violence as the stick. Ominous parallel developments seem to be occurring now in the United States...
Posted by: epg![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/nav-commenters.gif)
at June 17, 2005 6:56 AM
"DHS ranks Muslim clerics as "lowest threat"-
Sure!
They are only concerned with box-cutters and Mohammedans who go to flight school to learn mid-air turns.
Nobody told them that Imams & Muftis are walking time-bombs that carry ideological semtex.
America is incredibly naive when it comes to that...
Posted by: Terminator at June 17, 2005 7:03 AM
As long as DHS promotes exempting from security checks and investigative scrutiny imams and mosques, many of which are of Wahhabist orientation, our national security is in peril.
DHS is well on the way to becoming an oxymoron.
Posted by: WatchfulEye at June 17, 2005 7:12 AM
The mullahs may well be a low threat in an immediate sense. I cannot recall news of any of them blowing themselves up and laying claim to their 72 virgins. Their role in counselling terrorism and raising money to support such activities, however, should be cause not to grant them visas, and keep them off air flights in the first place, like Cat Stevens/Yusef Islam.
Posted by: waterdragon52 at June 17, 2005 8:54 AM
Today, the CAIR-proxies of LeftMedia published a heart-rending story of a Bangladeshi teenaged girl who was deported from NY after a London 'cleric' turned her into a suicide bomber-in-waiting. When the civilized world is finally jolted out of its stupor, this London brainwasher and others of his ilk will be dispatched to join their cult leader in hell.
Posted by: Infidel33 at June 17, 2005 10:17 AM
Two words missing from this equation render all security precautions moot if they are not included:
Sky Marshalls.
If the bureaucrats had not gutted this 1970's program by 9/11/2001, the result on that day would have benn:
19 dead attempted hijackers.
If every plane (of any potentially dangerous size) flying does NOT have a pair of Marshalls onboard, then ALL the preceding security has a built-out fatal flaw.
(Almost any object, in the hands of a trained martial arts student, is lethal, and wouldn't be caught by machinery scanning for other things... and I won't even give any examples of materials, etc. )
The government can be as blind as its wants, and as long as two people with enough firepower are on the plane, we have a decent level of security.
Without Sky Marshalls, we are STILL flying 'populated cruise missiles' across the nation's skies. And, as the recent 'scare' in Washinton., D.C. showed (with a Piper Cub-sized SLOW plane), there aren't enough fighter planes ALWAYS in the air to stop a jet turned off-course from Reagan International, etc., to do any good IN TIME.
Imams- with lethal instructions for delusional suicidal jihadists- are a root problem that has to be infiltrated and cauterized at the source, but the last line of defense is even more important.
And the subject gets almost no attention.
Which is why 9/11 was allowed to occur. (Like the Mexican bandit and "The Treasure of the Sierre Madre", the Congress, before September 2001, spat: "Badges... we don't need no stinkin' badges!" )
(What IS the percentage of planes in the air, large enough to cause 9/11 sized damage, WITH Sky Marshalls? You know it isn't 100%, which means our security is NOW open to catastrophic mass-murder. Not to mention cargo jets...)
I've emailed this concern again and again to representatives, and I would advise everyone to keep beating them over their numbed skulls with this demand.
Otherwise it would be as fatalistically foolish as removing fire extinguishers from office buildings "because fires are so uncommmon... plus they cost so much to keep recharged... inspected... dusted...".
They all cry so wonderfully like Grand Opera divas after the fact, but have to be dragged like mules beforehand to the simplest point.
Posted by: BigSleep at June 17, 2005 11:23 AM
Welcome to the bizarro world.
Posted by: ted at June 17, 2005 11:37 AM
It seems that nobody remembers that one of the suicide bombers to blow up Israli civilians was a Muslim cleric.
at June 17, 2005 12:08 PM
Once again (and again and again) Bush & Co. put Americans' safety last. From Visa Express to this mess, to spiriting Saudis out of the country and away from the FBI post 9/11, Bush seems more inclined to so Saudis' bidding then protect us.
Posted by: Seymour Paine at June 17, 2005 12:24 PM
Moslem clerics are the equivalent to Mafia crime bosses. They don't usually bloody their own hands, but instead direct their street thugs to do the dirty work.
Like I've said repeatedly, RICO Act islam; have the clerics, imams, sheiks, ayotollahs and muftis indicted for racketeering; have all the street moslems rounded up and jailed as co-conspirators; and make their time behind bars so brutal that Abu Grahb and Gitmo seem like family picnics in comparison.
Chop off the heads and gut the fish.
at June 17, 2005 2:58 PM
We can all remember the experience of the writer for the Womens Wallstreet Journal regarding Northwest flight 327.
The passengers and airline employees experienced terror and still have seen no credibility given to thier story. And here we see the goverment overlook the issue. We are at war, and I thought that our goverment knew that!?
We must overcome the ideology of Political Correctness. I thought that we had the people in office that had the balls to make the call. I have no problem making changes for economics, as long as we have declared what we are doing.
The issues are simple, the reasons that we are sidestepping the issues is becoming more difficult to accept.
Posted by: alaskan1000 at June 17, 2005 3:32 PM
Bush is a fool, he attacks Saddam, who is was no great threat but holds hands with the scum who run Saudi Arabia and chants the usual dhimmi mantras about Islam. I am not surprised!
Posted by: Dumbo at June 20, 2005 12:27 PM
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