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Townhall...
All Quiet on the
Southern Front?
By Oliver North
WASHINGTON -- According to Homeland Security Secretary Janet
Napolitano, everything is hunky-dory on America’s southern border. In
her public appearances and speeches, Napolitano consistently claims
that things along our side of the U.S.-Mexico border are “safer than
ever” and that “spillover violence” is simply “a widespread
misperception.” In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed column she
co-authored with Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, Napolitano claimed,
“The Southwest Border Is Open for Business.” Unfortunately, too much of
the business is in drugs, murder and mayhem -- and business is good.
“Illegal immigration is decreasing. Deportations are increasing. And
crime rates have gone down.” Those oft-repeated assertions by the Obama
administration make a nice sound bite, but like so many other things
coming from the O-Team, the facts don’t square with the rhetoric. As
usual, there’s more to the story -- and very little of it is being
covered by the so-called mainstream media.
Less than 24 hours after Napolitano and Locke boasted about how “major
investments to renovate and expand outdated ports of entry” have
improved cross-border trade and “bolstered security,” two American
citizens were murdered while waiting to come into the U.S. at the San
Ysidro port of entry, south of San Diego. The incident was buried by
the potentates of the press, but Fox News correspondent William La
Jeunesse reported the victims were killed by a lone male gunman, who
calmly “walked through the lanes of traffic and boldly unloaded five
rounds from a 9-mm. handgun.” Apparently, the Obama administration’s
“improvements” on the border do not include long-range, high-resolution
cameras capable of identifying a perpetrator just a few yards into
Mexico.
In the past four months, two federal law officers have been murdered by
heavily armed criminals. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed 13
miles deep in Arizona on the night of Dec. 14-15. U.S. Immigration and
Customs Enforcement Special Agent Jaime Zapata was assassinated south
of Monterrey, Mexico, on Feb. 15. Napolitano offers reassurance by
throwing out numbers. She says federal agents “seized 81 percent more
currency, 25 percent more drugs and 47 percent more weapons” last year
than they did during the final year of the Bush administration. She
also contends that apprehensions of illegal aliens “have dropped by 36
percent over the past two years to less than a third of its all-time
high.”
The National Border Patrol Council, a union representing Border Patrol
agents, isn’t buying into the numbers game. In a statement posted March
25, the NBPC said: “Mexico is hemorrhaging violence and we are being
hit with the splatter. The U.S.-Mexico border is unsafe and to say
anything else is not true.”
Auditors at the U.S. Government Accountability Office also maintain
that Napolitano’s numbers don’t add up. According to the congressional
bean counters, “over the last three years, apprehensions on federal
lands (820 miles of the 2,000-mile border) have not kept pace with
Border Patrol estimates.” The GAO reports the number of “illegal
entries” in 2009 was three times higher than the number of
apprehensions.
Sheriff Larry Dever of Cochise County, Ariz., agrees. When our Fox
News’ “War Stories” team interviewed him for a documentary titled “The
Third Front,” he described the situation along his 82-mile stretch of
the U.S.-Mexico boundary as “under siege.” Last week, Dever explained
how the Department of Homeland Security cooks the books and why drug,
gun and money stats are up while apprehensions are down. He has told
his outgunned and outnumbered deputies that the Border Patrol’s mission
is “not to catch anyone, arrest anyone. Their job was to set up
posture, to intimidate people, to get them to go back.”
All of this pales in comparison with charges now being investigated by
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, ranking member of the Senate Judiciary
Committee, and Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman of the House
Judiciary Committee. They want to know whether the Department of
Justice is complicit in illegally exporting thousands of firearms being
used to threaten and kill American citizens on both sides of the
border. According to congressional sources and court documents, weapons
recovered after the murders of federal agents Terry and Zapata are
linked to a DOJ-approved undercover operation dubbed “Fast and Furious.”
Several current and former federal agents allege that the operation
began in 2010 as a way to “take down” a major cartel and that it all
went seriously awry. One congressional investigator asserts that the
DOJ “all but ordered” licensed firearms dealers to “facilitate” the
sale of guns to “known and suspected criminals who were illegally
moving the weapons across the border.” If these charges are borne out,
it was all kept secret from Mexican President Felipe Calderon -- as he
wages war against drug lords, who have killed nearly 35,000 of his
countrymen.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder promises that his inspector general
will “fully investigate the matter.” And this week in San Fernando,
Mexico -- just 50 miles from Texas -- authorities found 59 “freshly
buried bodies in mass graves.” They were apparently all passengers on a
bus that was hijacked March 25. All quiet on our southern front, indeed.
Read it at Townhall
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