Guest Column
The Border, Terrorism Tales and the 2008 Election
- Security/Political News
Frontera NorteSur (FNS) - November 28, 2007
Time will tell if the now-discredited story of Afghan and Iraqi terrorists sneaking across the US-Mexico border to storm Fort Huachuca, Arizona, will quietly fade away or later be recycled as polemical darts in the debate over border security. In case you missed the original tale first published by the Moonie-founded Washington Times and then picked up by major media outlets like Fox News in recent days, the basic story went like this: working in tandem with Mexico's Gulf Cartel, a squad of 60 Afghan and Iraqi terrorists, armed with weapons including anti-tank missiles smuggled through Mexican narco-tunnels, would slip into the United States and launch an assault on strategic Fort Huachuca in southern Arizona.
According to the explosive story, information altering to the plot came from secondary US Drug Enforcement Administration sources, or informants, within the Gulf Cartel. "A thorough investigation was conducted, and there is no evidence showing that the threat was credible," Manuel Johnson, a Phoenix FBI spokesman, told the Arizona Daily Star this week.
Prior to Johnson's refutation of the Washington Times piece, the story got wide media play in the United States and Mexico. Most media accounts did not probe details of the story that made little sense to anyone familiar with border geography or the current security situation in the region. For example, an important part of the story contended that foreign terrorists would move from the border town of Laredo, Texas, to the Arizona desert hundreds of miles away in order to stage their bloody attack on Fort Huachuca.
News reports did not mention that Laredo-based terrorists would either have to possess a private air force or pass through multiple US Border Patrol highway checkpoints on their way to Arizona. None of the stories explained the means by which scores of assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and even anti-tank missiles would be moved from the Mexican border to the proximity of Fort Huachuca. Did the would-be attackers intend on utilizing SUVs? How about ATVs or pack mules? Despite the presence of illogical elements, the Washington Times’ story initially was treated as a serious news item.
The purported plot against Fort Huachuca wasn't the first time US and Mexican media outlets have reported on possible plans of Middle Eastern terrorists to attack the US from Mexican soil. As early as 1999, two years before the 9-11 attacks, Ciudad Juarez Mayor Gustavo Elizondo declared that a joint US-Mexican plan had been drafted to prevent terrorist attacks. According to Elizondo, the FBI had information that Frankfurt-based terrorists could send letter bombs to the US, and that some members of terrorist groups might cross the border at Ciudad Juarez.
In response to allegations that Al-Qaeda could have infiltrated the US from Mexico in early 2005, Hector Rodriguez, then head of the Mexican federal attorney general’s office in Chihuahua state, denied that Mexican authorities had detected terrorists lurking in Ciudad Juarez. Two years later, in early 2007, top law enforcement officials from both sides of the border, including representatives of the agency responsible for monitoring internal security in Mexico, publicly discounted a purported Internet threat by Al-Qaeda to attack energy-producing installations of US oil-supplier nations like Mexico.
While little or no evidence ultimately supported the Fort Huachuca or earlier stories, the specter of Middle Eastern terrorists crossing the US border from Mexico has become a recurrent image in the debate over border security raging away in Washington and the US heartland. The most recent terrorist tale comes at a time when border security and illegal immigration are re-emerging as hot button issues in the 2008 US presidential election. Increasingly, heated talk on the topics is defining US television and radio talk shows, from Lou Dobbs on the "right" to Ed Schultz on the "left." Callers and hosts on the shows frequently use warfare-related words like "unprotected" and "invasion" to characterize the situation on the US-Mexico border.
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Sources: Arizona Daily Star, November 27, 2007. Article by Aaron Mackey. Washington Times, November 26, 2007. Article by Sara A. Carter. El Universal, March 6, 2007. Article by Jose Carreno. El Imparical/EFE, February 20, 2007. El Diario de Juarez, March 17, 2005. La Jornada, December 28, 1999; November 26 and 27, 2007. Articles by Ruben Villalpando, Jesus Aranda and news agencies.
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