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Great Reset

Terrorists Welcome: Chronic counterterrorism lapses at the border demand investigation

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9 minute read

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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Digital ID

Thousands protest UK government’s plans to introduce mandatory digital IDs

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From LifeSiteNews

By Andreas Wailzer

Protestors rallied in London in opposition to ‘BritCard’, which would require the personal information of all UK workers

Thousands of protestors gathered in London to voice their opposition to the UK government’s plan to introduce mandatory digital IDs.

Last Saturday, the protestors marched through central London carrying signs that read “No to Digital ID,” “If You Accept Digital ID Today, You’ve Accepted Social Credit Tomorrow,” and “Once Scanned, Never Free.”

The protests came in response to Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer announcing the government’s plan to introduce a mandatory digital ID, called “BritCard,” for everyone who wants to work in the UK. The plan has been met with a strong backlash from the public, including protests in other cities, as reported by LifeSiteNews. Almost three million people have signed a petition opposing the government’s plan to make the “BritCard” mandatory for all workers by 2029. According to the petition, “no one should be forced to register with a state-controlled ID system,” which it describes as a “step towards mass surveillance and digital control.”

Starmer and his government used the problem of illegal immigration, for which they are at least partly responsible, as a pretext to mandate digital ID. However, critics say the real purpose of the scheme is to introduce mass surveillance of British citizens in order to control them.

The globalist NGO of the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the “Tony Blair Institute for Global Change,” is one of the premier proponents of the digital ID scheme.

The protest in London was led by former Tory MP Andrew Bridgen, who was expelled from the Conservative Party in 2023 over his opposition to the COVID shots.

Silkie Carlo, director of civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, told the Daily Mail that digital ID was “fast becoming a digital permit required to live our everyday lives.”

“Starmer has sold his Orwellian digital ID scheme to the public on the lie that it will only be used to stop illegal working but now the truth, buried in the small print, is becoming clear,” she continued.

“We now know that digital IDs could be the backbone of a surveillance state and used for everything from tax and pensions to banking and education.”

“No one voted for this and millions of people who have signed the petition against it are simply being ignored,” Carlo concluded.

The BritCard would be stored on smartphones and include personal details such as name, date of birth, residency status, nationality, a photograph, and potentially more sensitive personal data. The government is reportedly considering introducing digital IDs for children as young as 13.

Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch said the proposal was a “gimmick that will do nothing to stop the boats,” while the head of Reform UK, Nigel Farage, said he was “firmly opposed” to it.

Farage has vowed to undo any digital ID system rolled out by the Labour government if he becomes UK’s next prime minister.

“It will make no difference to illegal immigration, but it will be used to control and penalize the rest of us,” Farage said regarding the BritCard. “The state should never have this much power.”

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Brownstone Institute

The Doctor Will Kill You Now

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From the Brownstone Institute

Clayton-J-BakerClayton J. Baker, MD 

Way back in the B.C. era (Before Covid), I taught Medical Humanities and Bioethics at an American medical school. One of my older colleagues – I’ll call him Dr. Quinlan – was a prominent member of the faculty and a nationally recognized proponent of physician-assisted suicide.

Dr. Quinlan was a very nice man. He was soft-spoken, friendly, and intelligent. He had originally become involved in the subject of physician-assisted suicide by accident, while trying to help a patient near the end of her life who was suffering terribly.

That particular clinical case, which Dr. Quinlan wrote up and published in a major medical journal, launched a second career of sorts for him, as he became a leading figure in the physician-assisted suicide movement. In fact, he was lead plaintiff in a challenge of New York’s then-prohibition against physician-assisted suicide.

The case eventually went all the way to the US Supreme Court, which added to his fame. As it happened, SCOTUS ruled 9-0 against him, definitively establishing that there is no “right to die” enshrined in the Constitution, and affirming that the state has a compelling interest to protect the vulnerable.

SCOTUS’s unanimous decision against Dr. Quinlan meant that his side had somehow pulled off the impressive feat of uniting Antonin Scalia, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and all points in between against their cause. (I never quite saw how that added to his luster, but such is the Academy.)

At any rate, I once had a conversation with Dr. Quinlan about physician-assisted suicide. I told him that I opposed it ever becoming legal. I recall he calmly, pleasantly asked me why I felt that way.

First, I acknowledged that his formative case must have been very tough, and allowed that maybe, just maybe, he had done right in that exceptionally difficult situation. But as the legal saying goes, hard cases make bad law.

Second, as a clinical physician, I felt strongly that no patient should ever see their doctor and have to wonder if he was coming to help keep them alive or to kill them.

Finally, perhaps most importantly, there’s this thing called the slippery slope.

As I recall, he replied that he couldn’t imagine the slippery slope becoming a problem in a matter so profound as causing a patient’s death.

Well, maybe not with you personally, Dr. Quinlan, I thought. I said no more.

But having done my residency at a major liver transplant center in Boston, I had had more than enough experience with the rather slapdash ethics of the organ transplantation world. The opaque shuffling of patients up and down the transplant list, the endless and rather macabre scrounging for donors, and the nebulous, vaguely sinister concept of brain death had all unsettled me.

Prior to residency, I had attended medical school in Canada. In those days, the McGill University Faculty of Medicine was still almost Victorian in its ways: an old-school, stiff-upper-lip, Workaholics-Anonymous-chapter-house sort of place. The ethic was hard work, personal accountability for mistakes, and above all primum non nocere – first, do no harm.

Fast forward to today’s soft-core totalitarian state of Canada, the land of debanking and convicting peaceful protesterspersecuting honest physicians for speaking obvious truth, fining people $25,000 for hiking on their own property, and spitefully seeking to slaughter harmless animals precisely because they may hold unique medical and scientific value.

To all those offenses against liberty, morality, and basic decency, we must add Canada’s aggressive policy of legalizing, and, in fact, encouraging industrial-scale physician-assisted suicide. Under Canada’s Medical Assistance In Dying (MAiD) program, which has been in place only since 2016, physician-assisted suicide now accounts for a terrifying 4.7 percent of all deaths in Canada.

MAiD will be permitted for patients suffering from mental illness in Canada in 2027, putting it on par with the Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland.

To its credit, and unlike the Netherlands and Belgium, Canada does not allow minors to access MAiD. Not yet.

However, patients scheduled to be terminated via MAiD in Canada are actively recruited to have their organs harvested. In fact, MAiD accounts for 6 percent of all deceased organ donors in Canada.

In summary, in Canada, in less than 10 years, physician-assisted suicide has gone from illegal to both an epidemic cause of death and a highly successful organ-harvesting source for the organ transplantation industry.

Physician-assisted suicide has not slid down the slippery slope in Canada. It has thrown itself off the face of El Capitan.

And now, at long last, physician-assisted suicide may be coming to New York. It has passed the House and Senate, and just awaits the Governor’s signature. It seems that the 9-0 Supreme Court shellacking back in the day was just a bump in the road. The long march through the institutions, indeed.

For a brief period in Western history, roughly from the introduction of antibiotics until Covid, hospitals ceased to be a place one entered fully expecting to die. It appears that era is coming to an end.

Covid demonstrated that Western allopathic medicine has a dark, sadistic, anti-human side – fueled by 20th-century scientism and 21st-century technocratic globalism – to which it is increasingly turning. Physician-assisted suicide is a growing part of this death cult transformation. It should be fought at every step.

I have not seen Dr. Quinlan in years. I do not know how he might feel about my slippery slope argument today.

I still believe I was correct.

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