Headline: Southern border sheriffs outgunned by drug cartels (link to article here)
Headline: Texas Sheriffs Say Terrorists Entering US from Mexico (link here)
Headline: Chinese set their sights on Kelly AFB (see article below)
These are just two recent headlines and they demonstrate how toll agreements and trade agreements may be inviting border violence to San Antonio. With hundreds of thousands of containers arriving at the Port of San Antonio (formerly known as Kelly USA) without ANY prior inspection by US customs or officials (read more on containers here), it opens the door to all sorts of smuggling operations.
With sheriffs already seeing criminal smuggling of terrorists into the country via drug cartels, and with the trade agreements and toll plans in place to allow exponential growth in foreign trade (mostly to benefit China), security and our way of life may be threatened since criminals exploit such openings regardless of the assurances and precautions taken by those playing by the rules.
Read these and decide for yourself…
China sets sights on Kelly AFB
American Free Press
By Mike Blair
August 14, 2006
The Chinese are eyeing facilities in Texas to further their economic invasion of the United States.
Negotiations are under way for communist Beijing to utilize as a “logistics hub” the former Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, which was closed in 1995 during the Clinton administration’s base reduction program.
If the deal is consummated the Chinese will also gain access to two major Texas ports at Corpus Christi and Houston on the Texas coast of the Gulf of Mexico, an 11,000-foot-long airstrip, which is part of the Kelly base facilities, rail links with railcar switching facilities and links with five interstate highways. The Chinese are keenly interested in the deal because the San Antonio base will help facilitate its trade with Mexico.
San Antonio will give China access to a highway corridor along I-35, linking San Antonio to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, which is just across the border from Laredo in west Texas.
Nuevo Laredo is a major staging ground for Mexican drug cartels, which have fostered an atmosphere of lawlessness in the city. Almost daily people, including police, are shot in the streets. In addition, frequent clashes occur between drug smugglers and U.S. Border Patrol and state and local police on the U.S. side of the border in Laredo.
There have also been reports that Chinese military units have been operating with Mexican army troops, who assist the drug smugglers and have made incursions into the United States.
“San Antonio is a strategic site for commerce between China and the United States and for the exportation of Chinese products to Mexico and Latin America,” Zhou Ming, general director of the Chinese State Agency of Promotions and Chinese Investments, said after a Chinese delegation visited San Antonio last year, according to a report in the Spanish-language newspaper Rumbo, which reports on activities in Mexico and U.S. border states.
Like most Chinese industrial, investment and commerce kingpins, Ming has ties to the People’s Liberation Army, which controls most industry in China with much of the profits going to build up the Chinese military.
Considerable slave labor is used, making it impossible for U.S. workers to compete.
A year ago, San Antonio Mayor Phil Hardberger and other municipal officials traveled to China to promote the former air base facilities, now renamed the San Antonio Port Authority.
The mayor’s office is working with the Port Authority, the Free Trade Alliance San Antonio and the San Antonio based Omega Group International, which maintains offices in Austin, Texas, San Francisco, Mexico City and Beijing and Qingdao, China.
According to Rumbo, Omega International sponsored visits by Chinese officials last year to San Antonio. J.J. Saulino, press secretary to Hardberger, told AFP that the mayor is interested in the project and traveled to Guangdong province in China to promote it.
Jorge Canavati, vice president of the San Antonio Port Authority, claimed the Rumbo article was “not accurate” and abrasively brushed off questions about the effort to get the Chinese into the former U.S. air base facilities.
The former air base, often referred to as a “dry port” or an “inland port,” because it is not a coastal facility or located on a navigable waterway, “has no limits for the products, from toys to heavy equipment [from China],” Vivian Lee, president of the Omega Group, was quoted by Rumbo as saying.
AFP was told by Rogello Garcia, a spokesman for the Free Trade Alliance San Antonio, that a Chinese delegation was in San Antonio last spring to further work out details of the project.
Kelly Air Force Base was opened in 1916 as a training facility. Nearby Lackland Air Force Base was a spin-off from Kelly. The Texas Air National Guard 149th Fighter Wing still utilizes the facility, along with the Air Force Reserve 433rd Airlift Wing.
A spokesperson with the Port Authority told AFP that the base has been used to repair and maintain C-5A Galaxy transport planes, which are the largest aircraft in the Air Force. The base has an 11,000-foot runway to accommodate the C-5A, which the military shares with the Port Authority.
In addition to the airstrip, the Port Authority has a 1,200-acre yard operated by the Union Pacific Railroad. The Burlington Northern-Santa Fe Railroad is also linked to the inland port. A retired Air Force intelligence officer told AFP that taking over the San Antonio base would likely streamline Chinese exports to the United States and would give them access to ports in Houston and Corpus Christi on the Gulf coast. The Chinese already control the Panama Canal, through the Hutchison-Whampoa Company, and maintain a major airfield and port facility at Freeport, Bahamas, where Hutchison-Whampoa has a contract through the Bush administration to provide security for container ships bound for U.S. ports on the East Coast.
Chinese state-owned shipping company Cosco has taken over port facilities and warehousing space at the California ports of Los Angeles, San Francisco and Long Beach. This is one of the reasons cited for China’s interest in the San Antonio inland port, as it has extensive space available for constructing warehouse buildings. According to Port Authority sources, a 108,800-square-foot warehouse facility has already been built at the former base at a cost of $5 million and a slightly smaller 102,400-squarefoot building has also been built.
Best known for his ground-breaking work exposing the U.S. government’s abandonment of American POWs and MIAs in Korea and Vietnam, Mike Blair specializes in military affairs and gunowners’ rights, Blair was cited by Project Censored for having uncovered the top “most censored” story of 1990—a scheme to scuttle the Bill of Rights in the name of “fighting crime.” ________________________________
Texas Sheriffs Say Terrorists Entering US from Mexico
By Kevin Mooney
CNSNews.com
August 21, 2006
(CNSNews.com) – The chief law enforcement officers of several Texas counties along the southern U.S. border warn that Arabic-speaking individuals are learning Spanish and integrating into Mexican culture before paying smugglers to sneak them into the United States. The Texas Sheriffs’ Border Coalition believes those individuals are likely terrorists and that drug cartels and some members of the Mexican military are helping them get across the border.
Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez of Zapata County, Texas told Cybercast News Service that Iranian currency, military badges in Arabic, jackets and other clothing are among the items that have been discovered along the banks of the Rio Grande River. The sheriff also said there are a substantial number of individuals crossing the southern border into the U.S. who are not Mexican. He described the individuals in question as well-funded and able to pay so-called “coyotes” – human smugglers – large sums of money for help gaining illegal entry into the U.S.
Although many of the non-Mexican illegal aliens are fluent in Spanish, Gonzalez said they speak with an accent that is not native.
“It’s clear these people are coming in for reasons other than employment,” Gonzalez said.
That sentiment is shared by Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.).
“For years, Muslims and other ‘Special Interest Aliens’ from places other than Mexico have been streaming into the U.S. across our porous border,” Tancredo told Cybercast News Service. “These people are not paying $50,000 or more a head just to ‘take jobs no American will do.’
“Terrorists are working round the clock to infiltrate the United States,” he added. “Congress and this administration must address this gaping hole in our national security and they must do it now.”
Patch with Arabic lettering lion’s head and paratrooper wingsSome of the more high profile pieces of evidence pointing to terrorist infiltration of the U.S. have been uncovered in Jim Hogg County, Texas, which experiences a high volume of smuggling activity, according to local law enforcement.
“We see patches on jackets from countries where we know al Qaeda to be active,” Gonzalez explained.
The patches appear to be military badges with Arabic lettering. One patch in particular, discovered this past December, caught the attention of federal homeland security officials, according to Gonzalez and local officials familiar with the investigation.
Patch with Arabic lettering depicting airplane flying toward towersSheriff Wayne Jernigan of Valverde County, Texas, told members of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in March about one patch that read “midnight mission” and displayed an airplane flying over a building heading towards a tower. Translators with DHS have said some of the various phrases and slogans on the items could mean “martyr,” “way to eternal life,” or “way to immortality.”
Gonzalez told the House International Relations Subcommittee on International Terrorism and Nonproliferation in July that the terrorists are getting smarter.
“To avoid apprehension, we feel many of these terrorists attempt to blend in with persons of Hispanic origin when entering the country.” Gonzalez stated. “We feel that terrorists are already here and continue to enter our country on a daily basis.”
Sheriff Arvin West of Hudspeth County, Texas, told Cybercast News Service that he believes some Mexican soldiers are operating in concert with the drug cartels to aid the terrorists.
“There’s no doubt in my mind,” he said, “although the Mexican government and our government adamantly deny it.”
Statistics made available through the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) show more than 40,000 illegal aliens from countries “Other Than Mexico,” designated as OTMs, were apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol in the period ranging from October 2003 to June 2004, as they attempted to cross the southwestern border. An overview of border security challenges produced through the office of Texas Gov. Rick Perry indicates that almost 120,000 OTMs were apprehended while attempting to cross into the state from January through July 2005.
Local authorities are particularly concerned about illegal aliens arriving from Special Interest Countries (SICs) where a radical version of Islam is known to flourish. Perry’s office cites Iraq, Iran, Indonesia and Bangladesh among those countries. A Tancredo spokesperson said the list also includes Afghanistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen.
As Cybercast News Service previously reported an internal audit of DHS that combines the number of illegal aliens arriving from SICs with the documented instances of illegal aliens arriving from countries identified as being state sponsors of terrorism (SSTs) yields a grand total of over 90,000 such illegal aliens who have been apprehended during the five year period from fiscal year 2001 to fiscal year 2005.
The border security report delivered by Perry’s office focuses attention on the “Triborder region” of Latin America, which spans an area between Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay.
“The Triborder Region is a focal point of Islamic extremism,” the report states. “Al Qaeda leadership plans to use criminal alien smuggling organizations to bring terrorist operatives across the border into the U.S.”
Carlos Espinosa, a press spokesman for Tancredo, said his office is aware of a training camp in Brazil that actually teaches people from outside of Latin America how they can assimilate into the Mexican culture.
“They come up as illegal aliens and disguise themselves as potential migrant workers,” Espinosa said.