If your answer is Al Qaeda’s replacement for 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, then you would be correct. It turns out that Al Qaeda facilitator and terrorist mastermind Adnan Shukrijumah was just as familiar with the United States as the man who inspired the Ft. Hood massacre, Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. The New York Daily News has an interesting story about how the rest of his family-filled with its own dubious elements-embedded itself into United States society as he made his meteoric rise witin the hierarchy of Al Qaeda.
Granted, Shukrijumah doesn’t have quite the same status as Awlaki-who is, in fact, a United States citizen-but the fact that he and his father-who, as the story points out, was a confidant of convicted ’93 WTC bomber Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman-were able to navigate their way through the United States immigration process with such ease points up the failure of our federal government in controlling the surge of immigration from developing nations that it unleashed on an unsuspecting American public over four decades ago.
It would be one thing if the cases of Awlaki and KSM II were isolated examples, aberrations that are not likely to be repeated. Unfortunately, as the Center For Immigration Studies points out, that is not the case. In fact, one of the chief conspirators behind the first World Trade Center attack, Mahmud Aboulahima, was allowed to remain in this country only after he successfully applied for a guest-worker, agricultural visa under the nationwide amnesty known as the Immigration Control and Reform Act of 1986.
You would have thought that after the destruction of the Twin Towers, and the recommendations by the commission investigating the 9/11 attacks, we would have learned a thing or two. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case, as even now many of our nation’s legislators-and occupant of the Oval Office-seek to dilute the already weak safeguards in place preventing the next pan-national, Islamic terrorist-whether he be from Yemen, or Guyana, or Pakistan-from arriving on our shores and obtaining the documents necessary to enact his terrorist schemes.
http://www.cis.org/kephart/ICE-mission-melt-1
Thanks for the link. I’m aware of the discontent among the rank-and-file, and have been planning on addressing this topic in a future post. FWIW, Debbie Schlussel has written extensively about this issue on her website, based upon personal conversations with ICE agents.