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December 4, 2009
Exclusive: ‘Gitmo’ Spy Scandal Highlights Loopholes in Immigration Policy
This recent New York Post article deals with yet another spy scandal involving interpreters who were born outside the United States, lawfully immigrated here, and ultimately acquired United States citizenship via the naturalization process. It was forwarded to me by a good friend and a founding member of 9/11 Families for a Secure America, Bruce DeCell. Bruce is a former New York City police officer whose son-in-law was one of many people who were slaughtered at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. I serve as a volunteer advisor to Bruce's organization.
The article reports on a number of interpreters being actively investigated, who are working at the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba as were other such spies who were discovered in 2003.
Many aliens who legally immigrate to the United States and are naturalized are loyal American citizens, and the majority of such naturalized citizens have a great love for our nation.
Unfortunately, there are immigrants whose presence represents a threat to national security. Among such malevolent individuals are those who have exploited their position of trust in our nation that their certificate of United States citizenship represents. These individuals have become citizens of our nation and, because they possess foreign language skills that are of great importance to our nation, have parlayed their United States citizenship and language abilities into jobs that provide them with access to our nation's intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
I have previously written about a Lebanese woman, Nada Nadim Prouty, who committed such immigration fraud. She became an FBI special agent, then a CIA agent, and used her position of trust at those agencies to apparently spy on our government for Hezbollah.
The Post article linked above shows how interpreters, in acting as the eyes, ears and mouths of military, law enforcement and intelligence officers at Guantanamo have gained access to the terror suspects being confined at Guantanamo. This access enables the interpreters to alter or eliminate certain responses that those in custody have given when questioned by our officials.
These duplicitous interpreters have also disrupted the interrogation process by passing information to the detainees at Gitmo and have provided them with advice on how to make allegations against their interrogators and otherwise undermine efforts aimed at punishing those who slaughtered three thousand innocent victims on September 11, 2001 and possibly thwart future terrorist attacks.
There have been well-documented failures of USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) to create a bureaucracy that provides appropriate immigration benefits to those aliens who are entitled to them while identifying, investigating and denying the applications for benefits filed by aliens who are committing fraud and/or are involved in terrorist or criminal schemes that endanger the lives of our citizens and compromises the security of our nation. The USCIS needs to be made to function as more than a high-speed assembly line where its employees are praised for moving the applications quickly and where the integrity of the process is all but ignored, and in fact, is all too often seen as an impediment to apparent primary goal of clearing up backlogs of applications.
United States Rear Adm. David Glasgow Farragut is remembered for his orders during the Civil War at the Battle of Mobile Bay that are paraphrased by the exclamation: "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" At USCIS it would certainly appear that those in charge of that inept and beleaguered agency are similarly instructing their subordinates.
Of course, Adm. Farragut's orders to his men represented courage and determination while at USCIS, expediency rules – but at what cost?
Time and time again the GAO and the Office of the Inspector General have issued reports of investigations that paint a clear picture of incompetence and ineptitude at an agency that adjudicates applications for a variety of immigration benefits including the conferring of resident alien status and even United States citizenship upon aliens. Immigration benefit fraud is hardly a "victimless crime." All too often immigration fraud, in its various guises compromises national security and in many ways imperils the citizens of our nation. Immigration fraud also encourages still more fraud and makes honest aliens seeking to lawfully immigrate to the United States wait on the back of huge lines.
Immigration fraud has been identified by the 9/11 Commission as an entry and embedding tactic of aliens involved in terrorism. Yet little is really done to combat this huge and insidious threat to our nation..
Immigration fraud was a major issue during the Amnesty of 1986 that was enacted during the Reagan Administration. Immigration fraud was a major issue during Citizenship USA or "CUSA" a program created by the Clinton Administration to seek to naturalize more than a million aliens over a relatively short period of time. The GAO noted that perhaps as many as 100,000 of the aliens who were naturalized never should have been naturalized and, in fact, a significant number of them should probably been deported.
Worth considering is the fact CUSA was created years after the terrorist attacks of 1993- the January 1993 attack at the CIA by a citizen of Pakistan, Amir Kansi, who successfully gamed the immigration benefits program and receive political asylum by filing a fraud laden application. Kansi repaid our nation for its kindness by standing outside the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia on January 25, 1973, with an AK-47 and gunned down two CIA officers and seriously wounded three others. The very next month the World Trade Center was bombed by a number of Middle Eastern Terrorists including Ramzi Yousef, Mahmoud Abouhalima, Nidal Ayyad, Mohammad Salameh, Abdul Rahman Yasin and Ahmad Ajaj.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), in addition to being the alleged mastermind of the attacks of 9/11, is alleged to have financed this first attack on the World Trade Center that was carried out on February 26, 1993.
Mahmoud Abouhalima acquired amnesty as an agricultural worker during the 1986 Amnesty. He never worked on any farm but, rather, drove a cab and had his driver's license suspended on numerous occasions for a variety of vehicle and traffic law violations. In fact the only thing he was ever found to have planted was a bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center that left six people dead, hundreds of people injured, and an estimated one half billion dollars in damages inflicted to that iconic fixture of the New York City Skyline that was later reduced to rubble, along with the victims who were trapped in that complex and the airliners that struck them, as a result of the attacks of 9/11.
Time and time again, spies, terrorists and criminals have been shown to have easily committed immigration fraud and yet, our government has done absolutely nothing to plug this major leak that compromises the survival of our citizens and our nation. In fact, this very same screwed up agency, USCIS, would be the agency that would be called upon to administer Comprehensive Immigration Reform if the duplicitous leaders of our nation jammed this insane program down our throats.
There is a stock brokerage firm that includes a disclaimer in its radio advertisements that essentially says that previous performance is no guarantee of future performance. Perhaps where profits in the highly volatile stock market are concerned, this disclaimer makes sense. But where immigration and the DHS (Department of Homeland Surrender) are concerned, I believe that previous performance all but guarantees future performance. If the inept and incompetent USCIS is put in charge of “Comprehensive Immigration Reform.”
Back when I worked for the legacy INS, only INS employees (virtually all of whom were attorneys) who had many years of government service were allowed to adjudicate applications for U.S. citizenship. Back then, United States citizenship really meant something. There were clear distinctions between what it was to be a United States citizen, a resident alien, a temporary visitor or an illegal alien.
Today, our nation's "leaders" engage in deceptive language that is designed to blur these important distinctions. Illegal aliens are now referred to as undocumented workers. Alien Registration Cards are now referred to as PERMs (God forbid we should use the legally accurate and entirely descriptive term "alien.")
By the way, the term "alien" is absolutely not a pejorative. The definition of an alien as noted in the Immigration and Nationality Act is: "Any person who is not a citizen or national of the United States." The problem is not that the term "alien" is demeaning or insulting – it is that it is accurate and represents a clear definition – something the open borders advocates hate. The issue is not that the illegal aliens are living in the shadows as the open borders often allege – it is that they want the truth to be hidden from view in the shadows.
Today, it seems, that all too many of our leaders would sooner provide benefits to illegal aliens than they would to the citizens they were purportedly elected to represent.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michael Cutler is a Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies and a recognized authority who addresses the implications of immigration on national security and criminal justice.
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