RUTHFULLY YOURS

The disturbing report that appeared on the Fox News website on Tuesday, December 28th also makes it clear that the Mexican cartels are also moving south into Guatemala.

The “War on Terror” has been referred to as “asymmetrical warfare” because it involves individuals who are not the leaders of governments but are rather part of wide-ranging organizations that are intent on spreading their influence and ideology across international borders but do not provide clear targets for the nation being attacked to go after.

In a conventional war one nation is able to attack the nation that attacked them- where the efforts to eradicate terrorists are concerned, our forces must seek out those involved in the terrorist organizations that are responsible for attacking us or posing a threat to our safety and security.

The Mexican cartels are, in my judgement, similar to terrorist organizations in that the leadership of these organizations also don’t represent the countries in which they operate but represent rogue elements operating with increasing impunity in Mexico. Apparently they are now seeking to acquire control over territories in other countries such as Guatemala.

When nations seek to conquer new territory this quest is referred to as “Imperialism.”  Here is the definition of imperialism as posted by the online Merriam-Webster Dictionary:

noun \im-ˈpir-Ä“-É™–ËŒli-zÉ™m\

1: imperial government, authority, or system

2: the policy, practice, or advocacy of extending the power and dominion of a nation especially by direct territorial acquisitions or by gaining indirect control over the political or economic life of other areas; broadly : the extension or imposition of power, authority, or influence <union imperialism>

— im·pe·ri·al·ist \-list\ noun or adjective

— im·pe·ri·al·is·tic \-ËŒpir-Ä“-É™–ˈlis-tik\ adjective

— im·pe·ri·al·is·ti·cal·ly \-ti-k(É™-)lÄ“\ adverb

I believe that the government of Mexico is attempting to combat the Mexican drug cartels, but these wide-ranging criminal organizations have become more powerful through efforts to amass ever increasing amounts of cash from the highly lucrative drug trade. They have, consequently, become increasingly bold in their criminal activities. They take what have to be seen as strategies taken from terrorist play-books to use extreme violence and the threats of violence to intimidate ordinary people, law enforcement officials, members of the military and government in Mexico and perhaps other countries, to achieve their increasingly expansive goals.

Meanwhile the consistent failures of the Department of Homeland Security not only to secure our nation’s porous borders in meaningful terms and the abject failure of DHS to focus on law enforcement strategies within the interior of the United States, create further problems.  The DHS does not aggressively combat Drug cartel members operating in more than 230 cities within the United States from coast to coast and border to border. The DHS will not stop the onslaught of the cartels within the United States and will also not protect our nation from the ever present threat of a terrorist attack.

The occasional headline-grabbing arrests of members of transnational gangs and drug trafficking organizations may be intended to allay the fears and concerns of our citizens. These  will not prevent the cartels from flooding our country with members of their organizations.

When a patient has surgery to remove a cancer from his (or her) body, the patient and his doctors wait with bated breath to hear if the pathology report indicates that the removed tumor has “clean margins.”  This means that an examination of the removed growth has no evidence of cancerous tissue along the perimeter of the tumor.  This is of extreme importance to make certain that there is no cancerous tissue left behind that can then multiply and create a new tumor.  The very survival of the patient hangs in the balance.

If our nation’s leaders think they are going to be effective in combating the pernicious and extremely violent Mexican cartels by arresting a few dozen cartel members every few months, issuing breathless press releases and expect that we will successful in combating the huge and ever growing threat that these cartels pose to our nation’s security and the safety of our communities, then our “leaders” need to be fitted for straitjackets!

Just over a year ago the “Underwear Bomber”  Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (also referred to as Umar Abdul Mutallab and Omar Farooq al-Niger) fortunately failed to effectively detonate the explosives he had concealed in his underwear on the airliner in which he was a passenger, as it descended towards a landing at Detroit International Airport. After this near-miss, Secretary of DHS (the Department of Homeland Surrender) Janet Napolitano had the chutzpah to declare that the “System worked!”

This was an unbelievable effort at spinning a massive failure by our government to properly respond to a threat that should have resulted in Captain Underpants, as I have come to refer to Abdulmutallab, from ever getting on that airliner in the first place!

Back then I wrote, “If hope is not a strategy, then dumb luck is not a success!”

It was easy for Ms Napolitano to make it up as she went along, because that airliner landed safely and only the would-be bomber was injured when he scorched his genitals.  In reality, the system failed abysmally and the passengers on that airliner and the people over whom the airliner passed en route to the airport were not injured – not because of what our government did right, but because of what Captain Underpants did wrong!

Our nation will not win the “War on Terror” by writing press releases.  Our nation will not prevent the violence and corruption of the Mexican drug cartels operating in increasing strength within our nation’s borders by writing press releases and making extravagant if not blatantly false statements to the news media!

Today our government acknowledges that at least 230 cities are infested by members of the Mexican cartels while additional cities across our vast nation are infested by other transnational gangs and likely individuals who are supportive of terrorist organizations.  The great majority of these individuals have one thing in common- they are foreign nationals who are likely present in our country in violation of our nation’s immigration laws along with a host of other laws.

I speak from first hand and personal experience when I tell you that the effective enforcement of our nation’s immigration laws could go an extremely long way to combating the continuing entry of these criminals and terrorists into our country and prevent them from easily embedding themselves in communities throughout our nation.  However, our federal government is not only failing to seize these opportunities but is doing everything imaginable to make it ever easier for aliens to violate our nation’s borders, violate other provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act and set up shop with virtual impunity in whatever community they want.  When leaders such as those to be found in the State of Arizona attempt to seize the opportunity to harness the immigration laws to protect their residents, incredibly the federal government steps in and seeks to block those states from enforcing the same immigration laws the federal government adamantly refuses to enforce!

Time and again ICE issues press releases to crow about how they arrested individuals who conspired with aliens to commit visa fraud- a tactic that has been used extensively by terrorists and criminals to enter our country and embed themselves in our country- enabling them to hide in plain sight.  The unbelievable issue is not that ICE leadership would issue press releases about the successful prosecution of fraud rings, but that there is never any mention about any effort, whatsoever, to attempt to track down the thousands of aliens who availed themselves of the “services” offered by the fraud rings to obtain visas to enter our country!

In many of these press releases it is clear that a component of the fraud that was committed involved providing the aliens with false identities in order to facilitate the process by which they secured those visas and lawful status in our country- yet nothing is ever said about any effort to find these co-conspirators!

Stop and give this thought.  If an alien requires a false name in order to obtain a visa- it must be presumed that there is a strong possibility that the person’s real name may well be contained in our government’s databases identifying that alien as being a criminal, an alien who has been previously deported or someone who has been identified as being a terrorist!  Yet the folks at the Department of Homeland Surrender appear content to arrest a couple of bad guys and ignore the hundreds or perhaps thousands of illegal aliens who entered our country illicitly and are now living in communities throughout our country and may simply be working at a conventional job or are up to something far more sinister!  (I like to make the point that the day before a terrorist participates in a terrorist attack he (she) is likely to be hiding in plain sight by reporting to work or attending a class at a school where they have been going for months or years awaiting the instructions to carry out an attack!)

The news report I have focused on today addresses the increasingly brazen actions of the ever more violent and ever more powerful Mexican cartels who are operating in Guatemala.  Clearly these thugs are pursuing their dreams of conquest with ever greater audacity and our government appears content to sit back and do nothing!

This is nothing less than a prescription for failure.

Gene Kranz was the Director of Mission Control for the early manned space program.  He was the Director who took charge in NASA’s successful efforts to return the Apollo 13 three man crew to earth when the service module on that mission suffered a catastrophic explosion midway to the moon.  He wrote a book that bears the title taken from a quote he is famously remembered for telling the thousands of scientists, engineers and technicians under his command as they brought all of their resources and talent to bear to bring those three valiant astronauts home safely, “Failure is not an option!”

Where our nation’s efforts to combat the cartels, transnational criminal organizations and terrorist organizations that are focuses on destroying our nation and killing as many of our citizens as possible I would submit that Gene Kranz’s five word and highly focused admonition certainly applies:

The bottom line- our nation’s leaders, members of our courts and other official in decision making positions act with reckless abandon to minimize the importance of our nation’s borders and the significance of the immigration laws that are supposed to protect our nation and our citizens for foreign nationals whose presence in our country may prove to be harmful if not deadly!

Meanwhile our nation’s “leaders” slice away at our expectations of privacy and freedom where the citizens of our nation are concerned.  The time has come for the effective and fair enforcement of the immigration laws to be seen as an important component of national security and an effective tool in combating transnational crime as well as terrorism.

How can anyone really talk about a “War on Terror” with a straight face?