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Terrorists Welcome: Chronic counterterrorism lapses at the border demand investigation

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Published April 22, 2024 by the Claremont Institute’s The American Mind

Author: Todd Bensman

The latest release into the American interior of an FBI terrorist suspect who illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border—a twice-freed Afghan national man free to roam America for 11 months until his capture—demands that the federal government regard this patterned problem as a chronic national security emergency requiring elevation to the highest priority within the intelligence community, federal law enforcement, and Congress.

The case of the 48-year-old Mohammad Kharwin, whom an overwhelmed Border Patrol freed into America on March 10, 2023 before agents could confirm the FBI watch list hit that initially flagged him and whom a swamped Texas immigration court freed a second time in February, is the seventh example of its kind that can establish, just from disparate public records, a mortally dangerous failure pattern.

More cases of accidental Border Patrol releases of illegally crossing terrorism suspects, who did not reach the public record, are highly likely if not certain.

But this latest miss-and-release propels the problem well beyond the critical mass threshold justifying coordinated high-priority government intervention, even if Congress must politically force it, before the next one—or those still roaming the country lost to authorities even now—needlessly kill and maim Americans.

By current public accounts, an initial Border Patrol database check flagged Kharwin for membership in Hezb-e-Islami, which the U.S. Director of National Intelligence describes as a “virulently anti-Western insurgent group,” when he illegally crossed the California border in March 2023. He was among 23,286 illegal aliens caught crossing that month in what would turn out to be a record-breaking year for the agency’s San Diego Border Sector. All told, there were 230,941 illegal crossers caught in 2023, up nearly 60,000 from 2022 and 90,000 more than 2021.

That extraordinary traffic no doubt strained all normal Border Patrol counterterrorism and vetting processes.

Instead of keeping Kharwin detained as a “special interest alien,” tagged until standard face-to-face interviews and corroboration of the initial hit was complete, Border Patrol agents under orders from Washington, D.C. waved him through like millions of other illegal crossers on “Alternatives to Detention” (ATD) personal recognizance papers, where they agree to voluntarily report later to ICE in a city of their choice.

NBC reports that Border Patrol never even informed ICE of the initial FBI watch list flagging; that’s evidently how the same collapsed border management system missed a second opportunity to catch Kharwin in late January of this year, when he showed up before an immigration judge in a Pearsall, Texas, ICE detention facility for a hearing. Perhaps because ICE still didn’t have the initial terrorism flag hit, that agency’s court lawyer representative did not report it to the judge, or appeal, when Kharwin was ordered released on $12,000 bond for a distant 2025 hearing.

“The judge placed no restrictions on his movements inside the U.S.” in the meantime, NBC reported.

Somehow, the FBI figured all of this out and got word to ICE agents to find and arrest Kharwin, which they did a month later, on February 28, in nearby San Antonio.

An Established New National Security Threat Pattern

Terrorism threat border lights have been blinking red for some time now in a non-specific way, especially since the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency in March 2022 began publishing “Terrorist Screening Data Set Encounters” by the month on its public-facing website. Those began breaking all national records when the Biden government took office in January 2021, when apprehended illegal border crossers on the FBI watch list ballooned from three during Trump’s last fiscal year in office to 15, then by another 98 in fiscal 2022, then 169 in fiscal 2023, and another 75 so far in fiscal 2024.

Through March 2024, Border Patrol caught 342 while partnered federal agencies like the FBI and ICE intelligence presumably investigated and dealt with each. That they did so is less a good national security story than an unacceptable sampling of much bigger flows of watch-listed illegal aliens coming into America who are not caught and handled. If some two million of these so-called “got-aways” went through since 2021 (like Kharwin evidently tried to), more suspected terrorists on the FBI watch list are almost certainly among them.

But short of vastly reducing the millions-per-year border crossings by restoring former president Donald Trump’s discarded policies, the Biden Administration could at least be forced to triple down on its counterterrorism resources at the southern border.

In recent months, the terrorism threat at the border has generated some public concern, but never explicitly about the preventable accidental releases of terrorist suspects authorities later had to chase down.

In September 2023, for instance, I testified before the U.S. House Subcommittee on the Judiciary about the accidental releases I knew about at the time. Mine was indeed a rare warning that named the accidental-release problem in juxtaposition with my 2021 book America’s Covert Border War, which revealed counterterrorism programs at the border that have kept the nation safe from infiltrated attacks for nearly 20 years. I told the members that Biden’s border crisis had severely compromised those old programs, caused a spate of accidental terror suspect releases, and elevated the threat of terror attack as a result.

The Biden Administration’s own 2024 Homeland Threat Assessment warns, with far less specificity, that “terrorists may exploit the elevated flow and increasingly complex security environment to enter the United States” and that “individuals with potential terrorism connections continue to attempt to enter the Homeland illegally between ports of entry…via the southern border.”

With even less specificity, in his latest testimony to Congress about what he regards as a rising terrorist border infiltration threat, FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that a “wide array of very dangerous threats…emanate from” the southwest border, including the designated terror group ISIS.

Despite the variably specific warnings about the border infiltration threat, the ever-growing number of known accidental-release cases like Kharwin’s and the ones I told the subcommittee about remain broadly unrecognized as the unique emerging threat problem these cases indicate. Probably because no one has been killed yet as a consequence, few federal agencies or homeland security committee lawmakers seem interested in calling it out.

Case Candidates for Investigation

To date, only one federal investigation has produced a public report branding the problem, remarkable but forgotten or given short shrift by major U.S. news media, although I did write about it. That eye-opening document was the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general’s office report about the April 19, 2022 crossing and mistaken release of a Colombian on the FBI watch list. ICE agents were not able to track him down to Florida for two long weeks.

Its key finding was that Border Patrol and ICE agents couldn’t do normal counterterrorism protocols because they were simply too “busy processing an increased flow of migrants.”

But these six other cases qualify as investigation-worthy:

Read the rest here

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Great Reset

Are climate-obsessed elites losing their grip over global politics?

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From LifeSiteNews

By James Corbett

Bill Gates appears to be spearheading a new push towards a Malthusian ‘One Health’ agenda instead of global temperature concerns amid a sudden shift in the climate change narrative.

Guess what, folks? The climate emergency has been cancelled!

That’s right, as my listeners will know by now, no less a personage than famed climate crusader Dr. [sic] Bill Gates is now admitting that climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise“ after all.

As my loyal listeners will also know by now, Gates has his reasons for backtracking on his decades of climate scare-mongering. (SPOILER: it’s not because he’s suddenly realized that the climate scare is a hoax!)

READ: Bill Gates switches stance on climate change, says it won’t bring ‘humanity’s demise’

Unsurprisingly, this very public about-face has caused much hand-wringing in the clique of climate fearmongers. Take Michael Mann – yes, that Michael Mann. He has already penned a lengthy screed to excoriate Bill for raining on the climate doomporn parade.

As for old Billy boy himself, he wants everyone to know that they’re getting him all wrongManBearPig is still super cereal, guys! In fact, Bill’s spending on the climate crusade is actually increasing!

But whether Gates’ backpedaling enables him to win him back his climate-fearing friends or not, perhaps the most important part of his new climate message was the timing of its release. You see, “Three tough truths about climate” – the blog announcing his changing views on the climate emergency – was subtitled “What I want everyone at COP30 to know,” and it was released on the eve of COP30, the U.N.’s annual global climate summit.

So, what does this (anthropogenic) tempest in a teapot tell us about the future of the climate scam? Let’s find out.

COP30

In case you hadn’t heard, there’s a party going on in Brazil right now!

No, the party that’s currently underway is #COP30, aka the “Conference of the Parties,” or the annual global climate change conference put on by the U.N. If you want the real skinny on what the COP is and the role it plays in the nascent global governmental power structure, you need to read my editorial from last November, “THIS is How Global Government is Run (and What’s Coming Next…)

Long story short: the “Conference of the Parties” is the annual meeting of the parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Established in Article 7 of the UNFCCC as “the supreme body” of the convention, it is tasked with “[p]eriodically examin[ing] the obligations of the Parties” to the treaty. It also assesses those parties’ climate change mitigation measures and policies and, of course, “mobilize[s] financial resources” to help line the pockets of U.N. kleptocrats … uhhh, I mean, to appease the angry weather gods.

As I pointed out in my editorial last year, since no one ever reads the fine print of bureaucratic documents, the climate technocrats were able to embed all sorts of goodies right there in the rules of procedure for the UNFCCC COP, such as Rule 30:

Meetings of the Conference of the Parties shall be held in public, unless the Conference of the Parties decides otherwise.

And Rule 32:

No one may speak at a meeting of the Conference of the Parties without having previously obtained the permission of the President.

And Rule 42:

Decisions on matters of substance shall be taken by consensus, except that decisions on financial matters shall be taken by a two-thirds majority vote.

READ: Pope Leo’s Vatican quadruples down on support for the green agenda

Just a decade or two ago, when the vast majority of the public still believed that the climate hoax was “settled science” and that scientists would never lie or twist the truth for a political agenda (oh, how naive!), the annual COP was a truly nerve-wracking affair. Each year, this globalist shindig threatened to put another nail in the coffin of national (let alone individual) sovereignty, and brought the world another step closer to a U.N.-led global government.

In fact, the COPpers admitted as much in their own words. For instance, do you recall that, on the eve of the COP15 conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, EU President (and Bilderberg lackey) Herman von Rompuy declared 2009 to be “the first year of global governance” and insisted that the COP in Copenhagen “is another step towards the global management of our planet”?

Back then, when the climate change religion was in the ascendant, it seemed that nothing could derail the globalists and their quest to create a global government on the back of the fake “climate emergency.”

But, interestingly, the cultural tide has shifted in recent years and COP30 is already looking set to be a flop for the climate confabulists.

FLOP30

It’s not just Bill Gates who is spoiling the COP30 party. The U.S. government has already decided it’s not going to send any high-level representatives to this year’s climate hoax conclave.

Even the climate conspirators – perhaps reading the direction the political wind is blowing – have shown themselves reticent to play the game anymore. As of last month, only 64 of the UNFCCC’s 198 parties had even submitted their national plans for cutting greenhouse emissions – plans that are required of each party to the 2015 Paris Agreement. And, according to the climate doom-mongers and corporate fake news repeaters masquerading as “journalists” at The Guardian, those plans that have been submitted “fall drastically short of what is needed to stave off the worst effects of climate breakdown.”

Of course, all of this is made-up nonsense. The COPpers may as well be fretting about how many angels are dancing on the head of a pin or precisely how many unicorn farts are needed to power their trillion-dollar green energy swindle. As Corbett Reporteers know by now, there are dozens of questions that need to be asked (and answered) before we can come to a determination of what “average global temperature“ even means. And that’s not to mention the question of the validity of the temperature records from which such assessments are being made or the reliability of the models that are being used to extrapolate from that dodgy data.

New reports coming out weekly are shining more and more light on how the climate emergency hoax has been perpetrated. This week’s inconvenient truth for the climate fraudsters? A new study demonstrating that reduction in air pollution actually exacerbates global warming.

READ: The real reason why the West is not having children (it’s not just cost of living)

You might expect the fraudsters would be ashamed to continue to lie so brazenly to the public … but if you do expect these power-hungry pathocrats to feel shame over their actions, then you clearly haven’t watched Dissent Into Madness yet. Instead of being remorseful, the psychopathic swindlers are doubling down on their scam, flying to Brazil to put on yet another farce in the name of “saving the earth.”

The first order of analysis – and, sadly, the point at which many critics of the UNFCCC and its “Conference of the Parties” tend to stop – is to simply point out the hypocrisy of the summit’s attendees.

The VIPs fly in on private jets and relax at $1,000/night resorts while they lecture us peons about reducing our comparatively miniscule carbon footprint.

To prepare for the earth-saving event, the Brazilian government felled tens of thousands of acres of Amazon rainforest and destroyed a vital ecosystem so it could build a new highway from the local airport to the summit venue.

In fact, such is the level of hypocrisy on display at these annual soirees that even climate activists have taken to calling it out.

But this isn’t about “hypocrisy,” really. To rephrase something I wrote about Matt Hancock – the Covidiot authoritarian who imposed lockdowns on the U.K. while breaking his own rules to conduct a secret affair – the people who are hectoring and lecturing the public to reduce their carbon footprints aren’t motivated to expand their own footprints out of a cheeky “rules for thee, not for me” mentality. No, they’re doing it because they know the whole “climate emergency” narrative is BS.

In truth, this isn’t about science. It never was. That’s why pesky facts that go against the Angry Weather God religion have been ignored and memory-holed.

Fortunately, more of the public than ever is finally aware that “the science” is not settled. They are waking up to the fact that they’ve been had for the last 40 years by a bunch of Chicken Littles who are not interested in saving the earth but in scaring people into giving over their power to global technocrats.

Hence Bill Gates making his narrative adjustment. Suddenly it’s not about temperature. Now it’s about health! You like health, right?

Given that COP30 is about to belly flop and no one is expecting anything of importance to come out of it, we may be tempted to simply take the win, declare the climate hoax over, and move on to the next news story of the week.

But perhaps we should take a closer look at what’s really happening here before we climate realists throw a party of our own.

STOP30

The first thing to note is that reports of the climate scam’s death may be entirely premature. For those poor, deluded souls who still believe that the new BRICS multipolar world order is going to save us from the dastardly Western technocrats, you might want to read up on how the BRICS are now introducing “multipolar” carbon markets in the name of keeping the 2030 agenda on track.

But what do we make, then, of prominent climate technocrats like Bill Gates seemingly changing narrative tack on the climate doomsday scenario?

Yes, Gates is flipping the Angry Weather God script. He realizes that the public is no longer buying the absurd theory that CO₂ is some magical thermostat with which we can dial the “global average temperature” up and down as desired. Thus, he suddenly wants us to know that temperature isn’t the best way of measuring the impact of climate change. Now, he wants us to concentrate on a different metric: improving lives.

READ: UN to launch ‘disinformation’ taskforce to silence critics of globalist Agenda 2030

This is a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives. Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries.

And you know what? If Gates were to stop there, he’d actually be right (more or less). Regardless of the tenths of a degree (tenths of a degree, I tell you!) of “global average temperature” change that may (or may not) have taken place in the post-industrial era, the real point is to enhance the quality of people’s lives in a warming (or cooling) world. To this we might add that the quality of the environment and the well-being of animal life is another relevant factor, but otherwise, this is a much more sensible approach than that of the climate apocalypticists, who insist we must end industrial civilization and eat bugs (or Impossible Burgers) and live in locked-down 15-minute cities to prevent some long-predicted but never-arriving temperature rise.

Of course, as I discussed in my recent appearance on The Jimmy Dore Show, Gates has his own motivations – financial and otherwise – for this change of heart.

As it turns out, Gates is not interested in genuine human well-being. He’s interested in demolishing any roadblocks to the erection of power-hungry AI data centers, and he’s also interested in continuing the climate agenda under another guise: One Health.

You see, the climate agenda was never actually about temperatures or greenhouse gases or preventing a climate emergency. That was just the codswallop that was forced down the public’s throat to create a cadre of true believers (a.k.a. useful idiots) who would be willing to push the real agenda.

The real agenda was always about control. It was about the ability to confine people to their designated eco-ghettos while the real rulers of the planet jet about overhead, monopolizing the earth’s natural resources. It was about imprisoning us neo-feudal peasants in our climate hovels to eke out a subsistence living from the carbon rations doled out to us under the new global government’s Universal Basic Enslavement program.

That’s the vision that the climate technocrats (and their poor, deluded true believers) have been working toward.

So, even if Gates is swapping in a new metric for measuring progress toward that technocratic goal, he isn’t changing the goal itself. Now, he (and no doubt some of his globalist compatriots) will start focusing on the next iteration of this scam: the Malthusian, anti-human “One Health” agenda.

In short: Yes, COP30 is turning into FLOP30. The global government will not be announced in the freshly cleared Amazonian rainforest. In fact, few will pay any attention to anything that comes out of this year’s climate confab.

But that does not mean that the fight against the globalist technocrats is over. On the contrary, we’re just entering into a new stage of that conflict.

READ: Pope Leo XIV warns ‘world is burning’ from ‘global warming’ at first ‘Care of Creation’ Mass

Remember: this isn’t about “equilibrium climate sensitivity” or the inaccuracy of climate models or the non-existence of weather stations. It’s about the attempt to create a one world government. And if the global warming fairytale isn’t working for the technocrats anymore, they’ll just tell us a new fairytale until we stop listening to them altogether.

This is not the time to pat ourselves on the back. We can’t rest on our laurels yet. Rather, now we must redouble our efforts to warn people about this new scam and inform them that it is (at base) the same as the old scam.

Reprinted with permission from The Corbett Report.

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The UN Pushing Carbon Taxes, Punishing Prosperity, And Promoting Poverty

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Samuel Peterson

Unelected regulators and bureaucrats from the United Nations have pushed for crushing the global economy in the name of saving the planet.

In October, the International Maritime Organization (IMO), a specialized agency within the U.N., proposed a carbon tax in order to slash the emissions of shipping vessels. This comes after the IMO’s April 2025 decision to adopt net-zero standards for global shipping.

Had the IMO agreed to the regulation, it would have been the first global tax on greenhouse gas emissions. Thankfully, the United States was able to effectively shut down those proposals; however, while these regulations have been temporarily halted, the erroneous ideas behind them continue to grow in support.

Proponents of carbon taxes generally argue that since climate change is an existential threat to human existence, drastic measures must be taken in all aspects of our lives to address the projected costs. People should eat less meat and use public transportation more often. In the political arena, they should vote out so-called “climate deniers.” In the economic sphere, carbon taxes are offered as a technocratic quick fix to carbon emissions. Is any of this worth it? Or are the benefits greater than the costs? In the case of climate change, the answer is no.

Carbon taxes are not a matter of scientific fact. As with all models, the assumptions drive the analysis. In the case of carbon taxes, the time horizon selected plays a major role in the outcome. So, too, does the discount rate and the specific integrated assessment models.

In other words, “Two economists can give vastly different estimates of the social cost of carbon, even if they agree on the objective facts underlying the analysis.” If the assumptions are subjective, as they are in carbon taxes, then they are not scientific facts. As I’ve pointed out, “carbon pricing models are as much political constructs as they are economic tools.” One must also ask whether carbon taxes will remain unchanged or gradually increase over time to advance other political agendas. In this proposal, the answer is that it increases over time.

Additionally, since these models are driven by assumptions, one would be right in asking who gets to impose these taxes? Of course, those would be the unelected bureaucrats at the IMO. No American who would be subject to these taxes ever voted for the people attempting to create the “world’s first global carbon tax.” It brings to mind the phrase “no taxation without representation.”

In an ironic twist, imposing carbon taxes on global shipping might actually be one of the worst ways to slash emissions, given the enormous gains from trade. Simply put, trade makes the world grow rich. Not just wealthy nations like those in the West, but every nation, even the most poor, grows richer. In wealthy countries, trade can help address climate change by enabling adaptation and innovation. For poorer countries, material gains from trade can help prevent their populations from starving and also help them advance along the environmental Kuznets curve.

In other words, the advantages of trade can, over time, make a country go from being so poor that a high level of air pollution is necessary for its survival to being rich enough to afford reducing or eliminating pollution. Carbon taxes, if sufficiently high, can prevent or significantly delay these processes, thereby undermining their supposed purpose. Not to mention, as of today, maritime shipping accounts for only about 3% of total global emissions.

The same ingenuity that brought us modern shipping will continue to power the global economy and fund growth and innovation, if we let it. The world does not need a layer of global bureaucracy for the sake of virtue signaling. What it needs is an understanding of both economics and human progress.

History shows that prosperity, innovation, and free trade are what make societies cleaner, healthier, and richer. Our choice is not between saving the planet and saving the economy; it is between free societies and free markets or surrendering responsibility to unelected international regulators and busybodies. The former has lifted billions out of poverty, and the latter threatens to drag us all backwards.

Samuel Peterson is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Energy Research.

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