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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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Censorship Industrial Complex

Joe Rogan Responds To YouTube Censorship of Trump Interview

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From Reclaim The Net

By

Joe Rogan has accused YouTube of making it difficult for users to find his recent interview with former President Donald Trump, saying that the platform initially only displayed short clips from mainstream media instead of the full episode. Rogan sarcastically remarked on YouTube’s actions, saying, “I’m sure it was a mistake at YouTube where you couldn’t search for it. Yeah. I’m sure it was a mistake. It’s just a mistake.”

In episode 2200, Rogan explained that even though his team contacted YouTube multiple times, the episode remained difficult to find. X CEO Elon Musk intervened, contacting Spotify CEO Daniel Ek about the issue. (Spotify exclusively licenses The Joe Rogan Experience but allows the show on third-party platforms like YouTube.)

Watch the video clip here.

Rogan noted the explosive viewership once the content was available, with the episode racking up “six and a half million views on mine and eight plus million on his.”

Emphasizing the episode’s broad reach, Rogan expressed frustration with the initial suppression, stating, “You can’t suppress shit. It doesn’t work. This is the internet. This is 2024. People are going to realize what you’re doing.” He pointed to the significance of this episode’s reach, asking, “If one show has 36 million downloads in two days, like that’s not trending? Like what’s trending for you? Mr. Beast?”

Describing the power of YouTube’s algorithmic influence, Rogan claimed the algorithm worked against the interview’s visibility, only showing clips instead of the full conversation. According to him, when YouTube initially fixed the issue, users had to enter highly specific keywords, like “Joe Rogan Trump interview,” to find the episode.

Rogan argued that YouTube’s gatekeeping reflected an ideological stance, remarking, “They hate it because ideologically they’re opposed to the idea of him being more popular.” He suggested that major tech platforms, such as YouTube and Facebook, which hold significant influence, often push agendas that favor specific narratives, stating, “They didn’t like that this one was slipping away. And so they did something.”

In a telling moment, Rogan noted the impact of the initial suppression, explaining how “the interactions…dropped off a cliff because people couldn’t find it.” He claimed that this caused viewers either to give up or settle for short clips, leading to a dip in views before the episode gained traction on Spotify and X.

 

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Agriculture

Sweeping ‘pandemic prevention’ bill would give Trudeau government ability to regulate meat production

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Bill C-293, ‘An Act respecting pandemic prevention and preparedness,’ gives sweeping powers to the federal government in the event of a crisis, including the ability to regulate meat production.

The Trudeau Liberals’ “pandemic prevention and preparedness” bill is set to become law despite concerns raised by Conservative senators that the sweeping powers it gives government, particularly over agriculture, have many concerned.

Bill C-293, or An Act respecting pandemic prevention and preparedness, is soon to pass its second reading in the Senate, which all but guarantees it will become law. Last Tuesday in the Senate, Conservative senators’ calls for caution on the bill seemed to fall on deaf ears. 

“Being from Saskatchewan I have heard from many farmers who are very concerned about this bill. Now we hear quite a short second reading speech that doesn’t really address some of those major concerns they have about the promotion of alternative proteins and about the phase-out, as Senator Plett was saying, of some of their very livelihoods,” said Conservative Senator Denise Batters during debate of the bill. 

Batters asked one of the bill’s proponents, Senator Marie-Françoise Mégie, how they will “alleviate those concerns for them other than telling them that they can come to committee, perhaps — if the committee invites them — and have their say there so that they don’t have to worry about their livelihoods being threatened?” 

In response, Mégie replied, “We have to invite the right witnesses and those who will speak about their industry, what they are doing and their concerns. Then we can find solutions with them, and we will do a thorough analysis of the issue. This was done intentionally, and I can provide all these details later. If I shared these details now, I would have to propose solutions myself and I do not have those solutions. I purposely did not present them.” 

Bill C-293 was introduced to the House of Commons in the summer of 2022 by Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith. The House later passed the bill in June of 2024 with support from the Liberals and NDP (New Democratic Party), with the Conservatives and Bloc Quebecois opposing it.   

Bill C-293 would amend the Department of Health Act to allow the minister of health to appoint a “National pandemic prevention and preparedness coordinator from among the officials of the Public Health Agency of Canada to coordinate the activities under the Pandemic Prevention and Preparedness Act.”  

It would also, as reported by LifeSiteNews, allow the government to mandate industry help it in procuring products relevant to “pandemic preparedness, including vaccines, testing equipment and personal protective equipment, and the measures that the Minister of Industry intends to take to address any supply chain gaps identified.”

A close look at this bill shows that, if it becomes law, it would allow the government via officials of the Public Health Agency of Canada, after consulting the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food and of Industry and provincial governments, to “regulate commercial activities that can contribute to pandemic risk, including industrial animal agriculture.”  

The bill has been blasted by the Alberta government, who warned that it could “mandate the consumption of vegetable proteins by Canadians” as well as allow the “the federal government to tell Canadians what they can eat.” 

As reported by LifeSiteNews, the Trudeau government has funded companies that produce food made from bugs. The World Economic Forum, a globalist group with links to the Trudeau government, has as part of its Great Reset agenda the promotion of “alternative” proteins such as insects to replace or minimize the consumption of beef, pork, and other meats that they say have high “carbon” footprints.  

Trudeau’s current environmental goals are in lockstep with the United Nations’ “2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” and include phasing out coal-fired power plants, reducing fertilizer usage, and curbing natural gas use over the coming decades, as well as curbing red meat and dairy consumption. 

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