May 22, 2005

February 4th, 2001, on the US-Mexico border.

Juan Ortiz, brothers Felipe and Fernando Lopez, Alberto Gonzalez and Alphonso Montijo made their way across the border and into the United States. Scampering across a dirt road that ran between the cacti and scrub brush just inside America, they were disappointed when the Border Patrol agent materialized in front of them from the lip of an arroyo and told them in Spanish to stop, which they did. The agent then took them into custody. This delay meant they wouldn’t be able to make another attempt at El Norte until tomorrow, following there release and return to Mexico.

Not far from the agent and the four illegal aliens, Mahmoud Youssef Kourani, 30, of Yater, Lebanon, had also just infiltrated America. No Border Patrol agent intercepted him in his hiding spot: the trunk of a car crossing the border (he paid someone to smuggle him across). Kourani had arrived in Mexico after bribing a Mexican consular official in Beirut with $3,000. Soon after the successful infiltration into the land of the Great Satan, Kourani’s brother, head of security in southern Lebanon for Hezbollah, was notified that all was well and the operation devised in Lebanon and Iran was progressing.

Kourani hadn’t come to America to set up a falafel stand.

In fact, Kourani had received extensive training in terror trade craft–counterintelligence, weapons acquisition and employment, target reconnaissance, covers (he would become a carpenter in Dearborn, Michigan, which has a huge Muslim immigrant population), logistics, fund raising–in Lebanon and Iran, with the latter’s government funding, training, equipping and deploying Hezbollah.

Kourani had just become a key member of a Hezbollah cell, joining at least nine other Hezbollah cells in the United States.

But the Federal Bureau of Investigation, an evil and insidious organization according to many members of the American Civil Liberties Union, was far from being asleep at the switch regarding Kourani. In the spring of 2003, assisted by the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security, the good guys grabbed Kourani at his home on Argyle Street in Dearborn. He was arrested for harboring an illegal alien and pleaded guilty, for which he served six months. As he was cooling his heels in a federal clink, the FBI kept digging. They were still digging when Kourani was released and awaiting deportation.

Before he was sent packing, he was again arrested.

In early March 2005, in a plea deal the terrorist pleaded guilty to conspiracy to provide material support to the designated foreign terrorist organization and is scheduled to be sentenced on June 14th to no more than five years in prison, a sentence upon completion of which he will be deported back to Lebanon.

Back to Hezbollah.

The government of the United States made a deal with a known terrorist whose brother is very high-ranking in Hezbollah. That deal reduced his possible sentence from 15 years to a mere five, after which the United States will send him on his merry way to–to what?

To become a goat herder in Lebanon? A cab driver? A fisherman? A carpenter?

Why did the American public ever hear about Mahmoud Youssef Kourani? Why didn’t he vanish into an FBI black hole for extensive and eternal interrogation? Imagine the potential treasure trove of intelligence he might have provided had that been his fate.

We’ll never know how many American lives might have saved had the "Black Hole Option" been approved.

Before al Qaeda arrived on the scene, Hezbollah had taken far more American lives than any other terrorist group with the exception of the Ku Klux Klan. Established in Lebanon in June 1982* by operatives belonging to the governments of Iran (Iran allocates $100 million annually to Hezbollah) and Syria, it was Hezbollah that carried out the attacks on the United States Embassy and its annex in Beirut, and the Marine Amphibious Unit located at Beirut International Airport. The results were hundreds of Americans dead. I recall shaking in anger in the fall of 1983 as I stood among 241 dead Marines and sailors as they lay stiff and stark on gurneys in the V Corps morgue in Frankfurt, West Germany. I looked into the lifeless eyes of a friend of mine. He still kids with me from time to time in my nightmares.

Mahmoud Youssef Kourani was 12 years old when a Hezbollah member drove a massive truck bomb into the Marines’ building. I wonder if he dreamed even then of killing Americans.

Now Hezbollah is here and here in force. Their mission is twofold: (1) conduct fund-raising operations and (2) be prepared to wage jihad ("holy war") in America should America go to war in any fashion with Iran.

If a nation that has sworn itself to the destruction of America, which has already killed hundreds of Americans in terrorist attacks, is sending terrorists into America, why are we not bombing them into oblivion? Such acts are literally acts of war. How many more Americans must die on Iran’s orders before we hold them graphically responsible?

Why are we and Europe negotiating with the most deadly terrorist state in existence?

Shortly after 9-11, President Bush promised to seek out and destroy our enemies wherever we found them.

Well, Mr. President, we know precisely where they are in this case.

Hezbollah cells have for years been compiling "target folders"** in the United States for possible attack in case America comes to blows with Iran, which is a very distinct possibility, some would say probability, given Iran’s nuclear weapons development program (now buried almost entirely deep underground in hardened facilities designed to be resistant to ground-penetrating "smart" munitions).

In an excellent Washington Times editorial dated May 20^th 2005, the paper pointed out that "Outside of metropolitan Detroit, last month's arrest of Nemr Ali Rahal, a 41-year-old businessman, at his Dearborn home on charges of smuggling funds to Hezbollah, went largely unreported by the news media around the United States. But the story deserves our attention. In Mr. Rahal's house, agents found a videotape of a Hezbollah rally he attended in Lebanon three years ago. The FBI said it found $600 worth of change in buckets in the Rahal home, and that he said the money was meant to go to "orphans" -- the children of suicide bombers. Mr. Rahal has been charged with stealing more than $400,000 by means of credit-card fraud. When Mr. Rahal returned Feb. 9 from a trip to Canada, Customs agents found traces of explosives on his passport."

The immigrant (legal or otherwise) Muslim communities of America are the perfect locale for Hezbollah to raise funds and recruit, and from which to base their reconnaissance operations for any coming jihad. But otherwise dormant jihadists are also living and working and planning and waiting outside of Muslim communities in middle-class and upscale neighborhoods consisting mostly of white Christians.

If the FBI isn’t attempting to infiltrate these communities with undercover agents, which they should be doing, we will lose far more people in any jihad that erupts in America than we should have.

Meanwhile, the ACLU says law enforcement should not attempt to infiltrate Muslim communities because profiling is evil, Handgun Control doesn’t want you to have the right to immediately buy a firearm to defend yourself if jihad returns to the United States en masse, and Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are worried that an American interrogator might talk mean to a captured terrorist.

I trust you are prepared.

Bob Newman