November 20, 2007

Announcement: The Briefing Room
Gerard Group's Intelligence-led Information Services for Law Enforcement Begins.

Illegal Infiltration The Nada Nadim Prouty Case
By Ilana Freedman, CEO, Editor, Gerard Group International, with contributions by Timothy Thompson

SHORT TAKES:
Economic Oversight, Counterfeit Super Notes
America's Pressure for Democracy in Pakistan is a Double Edged Sword
A Summit Doomed to Failure
By Ilana Freedman, CEO, Editor, Gerard Group International

Announcement: The Briefing Room

An intelligence-led information sharing network for Law Enforcement Professionals is coming your way!

Is your department struggling to deal with violent gangs and the complex baggage they bring along... with little or NO outside support?

Do you worry that the next illegal immigrant you apprehend may be a drug dealer, a pedophile, a murderer, an armed robber, a drunk driver without a license or insurance, or even worse, a TERRORIST?

Are you concerned that a terrorist cell may be operating in your community but you don't know if what you are seeing are signs of activity?

Would it be of value to you and your community to get the information that can help your staff, and the public you serve, need and deserve?

Gerard Group Intelligence Center is pleased to announce that it will begin its new program geared for the Law Enforcement Community next week. The program provides law enforcement with the background information and intelligence that is designed to aid the "boots-on-the-ground" personnel and the public who are the first defenders of our communities.

Our intelligence-led backgrounders and analyses are performed by some of the leading research analysts and intelligence experts in the country. These experts employ our patent pending methodology Collaborative AnalyticsTM to help you better understand the clues that you gather daily and turn raw data into actionable intelligence.

The Gerard Group Intelligence Center is ready to help.

If you are interested, please send an email to: subscribe@gerardgroup.com and include the words Briefing Room in the subject line.

Illegal Infiltration: The Nada Nadim Prouty Case
By Ilana Freedman, Editor and Timothy Thompson, Analyst

It is difficult to imagine how an illegal immigrant with family ties to Hezbollah, who gained American citizenship through a fraudulent marriage, could be hired by both the FBI and the CIA and was able to access classified computer files on ongoing operations.

Nada Nadim Prouty was a field agent who carried a weapon, received security clearance, took classified documents home, and accessed information about current investigations regarding the activities of Hezbollah in Detroit (which she likely shared with those under scrutiny). These egregious breaches of basic security that enabled the transfer of classified information to a terrorist organization were resolved with a plea bargain that will see Proudy in jail for less than one year. Have we gone totally mad?

The connection between illegal immigration and terrorism has been on our radar for a long time. In May 2006, I wrote that ongoing intelligence "makes it abundantly clear that al Qaeda continues to send their agents into our country in any way they can, including across the porous Mexican and Canadian borders." Hezbollah routinely uses phony marriages, forged documents, and human smuggling to bring their operatives into the country.

In that same article, I wrote, "Last year [2005] an estimated 4 million people crossed illegally from Mexico alone, of whom fewer than 25% were caught [this according to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE)]. The three million people who made it across the border unimpeded have long since disappeared into cities and towns across the country. A growing concern for our national security in the face of such a population influx is more than warranted . . . . The lessons we learned from 9/11 should be ringing loud and clear."

With their orders emanating from Lebanon, Hezbollah operators like Proudy overstay student visas and get lost in an overtaxed system. They use forged documents and marriages of convenience to get into and stay in this country. The funding for their enterprises come directly from the coffers of Hezbollah, who pour money into the immigration effort that positions their operators within the US.

The most recent alert from Arizona underscores the threat and the urgency of an intelligent and appropriate response. KOLD-TV News 13 in Tucson reported on an urgent FBI report regarding a possible threat against the Army's Ft. Huachuca in Sierra Vista, Arizona. No timetable or explanation was given about the nature of the threat, but the report stated that "a group of Iraqis may have entered the United States through tunnels from Mexico into Arizona," and that the same "Iraqis are believed to be the ones who will perpetrate the attack on Fort Huachuca." According to the report, the Iraqis may currently be located on an "unidentified Indian reservation" in Arizona. The report stated that the group already had an arsenal of weapons in the United States, including Soviet made surface to air missiles, Milan surface to surface, anti-tank missiles, and grenade launchers.

How many warnings do we need to have before America wakes up to the threat within our own borders?

The 9/11 Commission Report, which included in-depth coverage of issues relating to illegal immigration, should be required reading by every intelligence officer, since the lessons we should have learned from 9/11 have clearly been lost.

There are three things that are keeping Americans from addressing the real and credible terrorist threat facing this country:

1. Demands for political correctness are forcing us to abandon the principles of freedom and self-reliance. We take rights away from one group (Christian Americans, for example, whose children can no longer pray in school) and give them to another (Muslims whose religion is now part of the curriculum in some public schools, where all the children 'practice' being Muslim, including daily prayers). This is inherently unfair and self-destructive, since it denies the majority the protections of the First Amendment which promises "the free exercise" of religion and "freedom of speech".

2. Our unwillingness to acknowledge that there is a real terrorist threat that comes from within as well as from outside our borders puts us at enormous risk. By ignoring the dangers that come from radical Islam, by allowing their organizations - from the well-known Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood to the lesser known but equally dangerous Jama'at al Fuqra and Darul Uloom - to flourish within our communities without restraint or inquiry, we are putting ourselves, our families, our communities, and our country in mortal danger.

It is essential that we identify the enemy, call it by name, recognize that it is infiltrating our institutions - our universities, our communities, our local government, and, yes, our national intelligence agencies. By bending over backwards to ignore the offenses of the people who are using our own democratic systems to ultimately destroy us, when they have made their intentions very clear, we are entering into a suicide pact with ourselves.

3. The loathing that has arisen between liberals and conservatives has so polarized us that it prevents us from facing the real threat. Abraham Lincoln said, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." One hundred and forty years later, this nation faces a division no less destructive than the Civil War, because the fall of our great republic is the stated goal of our enemy.

The destruction that took place on 9/11 did not distinguish between liberal and conservative. Nor does the aim of our enemy distinguish between them. If the Islamists prevail and the Constitution is replaced by the Koran, and the country is ruled by Shariah law, no one will remember - or care - whether anyone was on the left or the right. It is time for the country to heal itself and fight this battle for our national future together.

The arrest of Nada Nadim Prouty for immigration fraud and conspiracy to defraud the United States is only the tip of the iceberg, and the outcome of her plea bargain was sadly inappropriate. When FBI Agent Robert Hanssen spied against us for the Soviet Union, our enemy, and later for Russia, in what was called "possibly the worst intelligence disaster in US history", he received a life sentence in solitary confinement. When Jonathan Pollard, a United States Naval civilian intelligence analyst, was convicted of passing information to our ally, Israel, in 1986 (information to which Israel was arguably entitled by treaty), he too received a life sentence with a recommendation against parole. Prouty has bargained her way into what may amount to her never seeing the inside of a jail cell.

Her case is one more in a long list of wake-up calls that we continue to ignore at our peril. The relatively low level of the charges and her ridiculously brief sentence is a burning indication that we still don't get it.

What will it take for America to WAKE UP? The need is urgent and the time is now.

Analyst Timothy Thompson contributed to this commentary.

Short Takes

Economic Oversight, Counterfeit Super Notes

The weakening dollar remains a subject of considerable discussion. Much of the commentary focuses on China's economic growth and America's imbalance of trade, as well as our economic and foreign policies, the cost of the Iraq war, and America's dependence on high-priced foreign oil.

But there is virtually no discussion about a phenomenon that is much more insidious - the flooding of foreign markets with counterfeit dollars. Since early in 2003, according to Iraqi MP Mithal al-Alusi, Iran has been flooding the Iraqi economy with millions of dollars of high quality, counterfeit hundred dollar bills, intended to destabilize the local economy.

After the war in Lebanon, Hezbollah was handing our stacks of Iran's counterfeit bills, which the people called "yellow money" to pay for reconstruction. It ended up flowing throughout the region, including the West Bank. The people knew that it wasn't real, but they spent it as though it were. That was the point. In fact, Iran has been aggressively pushing their high quality counterfeit versions of our currency throughout the Middle East and beyond.

North Korea is thought to have begun its counterfeiting in the 1980s, but has ratcheted up its activities in recent years and has poured over a $100 million of almost perfect counterfeit bills into the global economy every year. These bills are of such high quality that they are called "super notes" and they are showing up all over the world.

We need to stabilize our currency in order to compete effectively in the world markets, but to do so, we must take into account all the causes of its rapid decline and apply our considerable resources to solving the problem.

America's Pressure for Democracy in Pakistan is a Double Edged Sword

By Ilana Freedman, Editor

It seems to be an unending story that American diplomacy requires that our allies adopt our American form of democracy. It is a bad policy, and it continues to amaze me that we haven't learned that.

The 'free and fair' elections in Gaza were a perfect example of how our misjudgment of the situation and our insistence on American-style process resulted in the whole of Gaza falling to a terrorist regime with no interest in a democratic society. They drove the opposition into exile and now rule Gaza with an iron hand, moving inexorably towards Sharia law, while carrying out daily terrorist attacks against the civilian population of their neighbor, Israel.

In Pakistan the stakes are much higher. Our pressure on Musharraf to lift martial law and apply American-style democratic process to the country may result in the fall of his government. Pakistan is a country with nuclear capabilities, and the developer of its nuclear program, Abdul Qarim Khan, is still living there. He was responsible for the proliferation of the technology (which he stole from the Netherlands) to Iran and North Korea.

The entire northwestern part of the country is a rugged, lawless region where al Qaeda has found refuge and is fully supported by local tribes. Their law is savage and their aim is to acquire nuclear power. The fall of Musharraf's government, in the absence of a strong enough political will to stop the advance of al Qaeda, may result in al Qaeda taking over the government and achieving their nuclear goals.

It has been known for some time that Musharraf's secret service has been compromised by al Qaeda, and the future position of the army, faced with the fall from power of their leader, is unknown. If these two organizations alone capitulate to al Qaeda, the limits of freedom now seen in Pakistan under Musharraf's recent decree will seem like nothing compared to the repression that will accompany a rise to power of al Qaeda there.

It's about time that our leaders recognize that what works for us here will not work in other countries whose cultures lack both the experience and the will to support a free society. Our foreign policy must reflect realistic programs, not wishful thinking.

A Summit Doomed To Fail

By Ilana Freedman, Editor

The scheduled November Annapolis Conference between Israel and the Palestinians, championed by Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, is a failure waiting to happen. Just like Madrid, Oslo, and Taba, this pipe dream is Rice's last stab at immortality, hoping to negotiate a 'lasting peace' between the people who have been at war for over fifty years.

But as in Pakistan, the wishful thinking is not linked at all to the reality. Israel has no partners to the peace process. Today, the Israel Defense Forces are in a heightened state of alert ahead of the Annapolis summit next week. They are acting on the assumption, based on hard experience that the Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad will try to perpetrate a large terrorist attack in order to undermine the peace talks. The fact that the Palestinians are now divided in a brutal conflict among themselves makes a true peace between Palestinians and Israel even more unlikely than in the past.

Recently, during a visit to the region to promote the Annapolis Conference, Rice compared Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas to Martin Luther King, calling them both men of peace. Wrong again. Abbas was never a man of peace; not long ago, he stood shoulder to shoulder with Yassir Arafat, a terrorist icon. Recently members of Abbas' own military wing, Fatah, were arrested for planning the assassination of Ehud Olmert, Israel's incompetent but duly elected Prime Minister.

With a team like this coming to the table, hopes for any positive outcome seem no more than flights of fancy. The talks will fail because the principal participants will be an Israeli prime minister with a self-serving agenda and single digit approval ratings from his own people, a Palestinian terrorist in a suit whose ultimate agenda is the destruction of the State of Israel, and an American Secretary of State who remains indifferent to the real issues confronting the region.

Our future is directly connected to that of our closest ally in the region (Israel) and our economic needs (oil) to those of her enemies (Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, etc). The future for the region and for America depends on our getting it right. The prospects could be a lot better.

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