Counterterrorism Blog

Today we now know of 11 young men from Egypt who have gone missing among us. They are joining a large number of other illegal aliens who have gone missing in our midst, hiding in plain sight. I hope that when we next hear about them it will not be in conjunction with another terrorist attack.

Perhaps these students from a country that has a very serious terrorism problem simply went sightseeing. Perhaps they are driving taxis and will go home to Egypt when they have had their fill of New York's rush hour. Or, perhaps, just maybe, they are hiding in plain sight while they await instructions to participate in a terrorist attack.

I have heard it said that you can tell if you are insane if you do the same things the same way and are then surprised that the outcome does not change.

Our nation is waging a war against terrorists. This is not a new development. We have been waging this war since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, nearly five years ago.

The 911 Commission on the Terror Attacks against our nation was convened and interviewed many experts and reviewed truck-loads of documents, presumably to make our nation more secure by, in part, determining the vulnerabilities the terrorists exploited as they prepared to attack our nation and slaughter roughly 3 thousand innocent human beings.

It was no surprise that the commission members came to the conclusion that in order to attack our nation, the terrorists, first of all, needed to be able to enter the United States. They also found that the next order of business for the 19 alien terrorists was to be able to travel freely around our country and embed themselves in our country.

In considering the ways in which the terrorists who attacked our nation so savagely managed to find the holes in the system and then exploited them, you would think that our government would have moved speedily to make the necessary changes to the various components of the immigration system to better protect our nation and our citizens. Simply stated, our supposed leaders, starting with the President of the United States and his cabinet, did not!

Consider that the borders are wide open. Consider that since the creation of DHS special agents charged with enforcing the immigration laws from within the interior of the United States are no longer receiving Spanish language training that had been an integral part of training under the former INS. I have raised this issue at a number of Congressional hearings art which I was called to testify. I also suggested that foreign language training be offered in strategic languages. This has also not happened.

We still have a visa waiver program and from what I understand, when visas are required, many of the consular officials who issue visas have no appropriate foreign language training. Additionally, we still permit the monitoring of foreign students to be left up to the foreign student advisors who are employed by the various colleges and other schools who make so much money from the tuition paid to their respective schools by foreign students. It is the equivalent of having your accountant being put in charge of auditing the tax returns he prepared for his clients! Even when, as is the case in the article I have attached below, that ICE is informed about the failure of foreign students to show up for classes or otherwise fail to comply with the requirements established for foreign students, there are virtually no available special agents who can be called upon to search for such errant students. As I have stated on many previous occasions, there are only about 3,000 special agents assigned to ICE to do all of the interior enforcement missions where immigration laws are concerned. This is one of many reasons I am adamantly opposed to a guest worker amnesty program. ICE is reminiscent of the supposed expert chess player who play multiple chess games simultaneously and succeeds in losing all of them!

The pressure brought to bear against our consular officials who determine whether or not to issue a visa, to interview as many applcants for visas as possible are not able to do as thorough a job as they should, just as the CBP inspectors at ports of entry are under the "gun" to move the lines of arriving aliens as well.

Don't ask DHS or ICE about this, because their obvious operating instructions is to whisper reassuring words in our ears with effective-sounding field operations such as; "Operation Tarmac," "Operation Return to Sender," "Operation Glow Worm" and the ever popular and reassuring, "Operation Community Shield." In truth, all of these operations should be referred to by one name, "Operation Back Rub!" They are treating the citizens of our nation the way parent treats a child who awakens in the middle of the night because of a nightmare. The parent rubs the child's back and softly speaks comforting words into the child's ear in the hope that the child will quickly fall asleep so that the parent may also go back to sleep without further effort. The child's nightmare may have been brought on by an over-active imagination or a bit too much desert. America's nightmare, however, is based on the realities we all witnessed on a number of horrific occasions including, of course, September 11, 2001.

Consequently, I am not reassured when the FBI says that they do not know of any terrorist affiliations that these illegal aliens may have. It is not reassuring that we do not know, as these public relations spokespersons claim. The point is that I find it curious that there are millions of illegal aliens currently present in our country, but these 11 are the subject of a "Be on the lookout" alert. I do not believe that there are many other such illegal aliens who are the subject of a similar alert.

I for one am not going to role over and go back to sleep. We must not be caught napping again!

EGYPTIAN STUDENTS VANISH IN BIG APPLE

By DAN MANGAN

August 8, 2006 -- Eleven Egyptian students who were supposed to travel to a Montana university after flying to JFK airport late last month disappeared in New York, spurring federal authorities to issue a nationwide alert, officials said yesterday.

The students - who were traveling with six classmates from Mansoura University in Egypt - had their student visas revoked for failing to show up at Montana State University in Bozeman, the officials said.

The other six students made it to the college.

"The FBI and ICE [Immigration and Custom Enforcement] would like to locate these 11 students in order to speak with them," said FBI Special Agent Richard Kolko after the "be-on-the-lookout" alert was issued to all police in the United States.

Kolko said there is no reason to believe the missing students, all men around 20 years old, represent a threat.

"At this point, all they have done is not show up for a scheduled academic program, and their visas have been revoked," Kolko said.

"We do not know of any association with any terrorist or criminal groups. There is no threat associated with these men. We have simply asked law enforcement's assistance in locating them so that the FBI and ICE may interview them."

Rep. Peter King (R-L.I.), who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, said the situation "has to be taken very seriously."

"Having a number of students from an Arab country arriving on student visas and disappearing is cause for concern," he said.

Montana State University Provost David Dooley said 17 Mansoura University students signed up for a 32-day cultural-exchange program to intensively study English, learn about Montana history and go on several field trips.

They arrived at JFK on a flight from Egypt on July 29, but only one managed to clear immigration in time to make a connecting flight, Dooley said.

By July 31, five others had arrived in Bozeman, but the rest were unaccounted for.

Dooley said the ones who showed up "were not certain about the status of their fellow students and why they haven't made it."

MSU alerted federal Homeland Security and Mansoura officials and notified the students via e-mail they had 24 hours to show up in Bozeman. None of them did, Dooley said.

He added, "We're very disappointed by this. It would be regrettable if the misadventures or irresponsibility of a number of students damaged these kinds of programs."

Officials at the Egyptian Consulate in New York and the Egyptian Embassy in Washington, D.C., said they were unfamiliar with the situation.

dan.mangan@nypost.com