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Additional Titles

US MILITARY TO ENLIST FOREIGN NATIONALS

 

By Michael Cutler
February 16, 2009
NewsWithViews.com

Our nation's leaders in government and in the private sector have made numerous errors as they sought quick and simple solutions to daunting challenges. An news article appeared in today's edition of the New York Times, reports on plans of our military to enlist foreign nationals (aliens) in our military. While this might help recruiters meet their quotas of new enlistees, in my judgement, this decision is fraught with real perils.

Let me, however, start out by saying that most people who want to immigrate to the United States simply want to share the "American Dream." Among those people were my mother who legally immigrated to the United States several years before the onslaught of the Holocaust in Europe which took the lives of 6 million Jews and a total of 13 million people irrespective of their religious beliefs. Among those slaughtered were many members of my mother's family, including her mother (my grandmother) for whom I was named.

My dad's parents and many of his siblings also immigrated legally to the United States shortly after the turn of the previous century.

Many of my friends' families were also the children of immigrants. My concern is not that America permits aliens to immigrate to the United States, my concern is that we have millions of illegal aliens currently living in the United States whose identities, backgrounds, affiliations and intentions are unknown and unknowable. Each day, thousands more succeed in either running our nation's borders or entering the United States through the inspection process and then, in one way or another violate the terms of their admission.

Furthermore, I am concerned that even among the aliens who gain visas to enter the United States for either temporary periods or for permanent residence or enter the United States under the perilous Visa Waiver Program, are those whose intentions are anything but benign and that the State Department fails to adequately screen the bad players who apply for visas. Often the pressure on the consular officers who adjudicate applications for visas for the United States to approve the applications to keep the lines and the applications moving, is no less severe than is the pressure applied to the CBP (Customs and Border Protection) inspectors to keep the lines of arriving aliens who seek to enter the United States moving.

When you realize the magnitude of the challenge- each and every year, more than one million aliens are granted resident aliens status and even more aliens are provided with nonimmigrant ("temporary") visas.

There have been many reports of naturalized citizens who parlayed their newly acquired citizenship into positions of profound trust in our country that enabled them to spy on the CIA, FBI and our military. Those positions of trust also enabled such duplicitous individuals to gain jobs in companies that were engaged in doing classified work for the military that had national security implications.

Often aliens who seek to remain in the United States employ fraud schemes to acquire resident alien status and even United States citizenship.

This tactic is employed in huge numbers by aliens simply seeking to circumvent the immigration laws of the United States. There have been numerous GAO reports concerning the frequency with which this ploy is used by foreign nationals. A summary of one such report can be found here.

(A marriage fraud is committed when two people agree to enter into a marriage but to not live as husband and wife. The point to this arrangement is for the United States citizen or resident alien, to receive a payment of money or otherwise gain something of value if he (she) enters into the marriage and then files an application with the United States government to afford the alien spouse with resident alien status. The form that is filed is the I-130 Petition.) This arrangement constitutes a criminal conspiracy that enables the alien beneficiary to circumvent the immigration laws of the United States and represents one of several such schemes that are used by those aliens who wish to circumvent the immigration laws.

I am quite familiar with the way that this plays out, because I was not only a special agent of the former INS where we conducted investigations into such suspected arranged marriages, but for a period of about one year, from 1973 until 1974 I was assigned as an examiner to the unit that conducted interviews to attempt to identify such fraud marriages. Today those immigration officials are known as "adjudications officers.")

The story of Nada Nadim Prouty exemplifies such a situation. She was a citizen of Lebanon who managed to enter the United States with a student visa in 1988 and subsequently overstayed her authorized period of admission into the United States. Her solution was to enter into a marriage fraud. This plan worked for her. She was granted a green card that signified that she had been given resident alien (lawful immigrant status). Green card in hand she got a job as a waitress in her brother-in-law's restaurant in Detroit.

Several years later she filed an application for United States citizenship and was naturalized. Now in possession of that newly minted naturalization certificate and having much needed foreign language skills, she was hired as an employee of the FBI. In fact, she was sworn in as an FBI special agent! A couple of years later she left the FBI for a job at the CIA. Both jobs being made possible by her having become a United States citizen.

Ultimately it was determined that she had accessed databases on FBI and CIA investigations into Hezbollah, a pernicious and sophisticated terrorist organization. This is even more alarming when you realize that her brother-in-law is now a fugitive, wanted for allegedly sending millions of dollars to Hezbollah in Lebanon!

There was a news report of another naturalized citizen who managed to parlay his naturalization certificate and fluency in Arabic and other languages into a sensitive job with a subsidiary of Halliburton, Titan Industries. His job was to serve as a contract employee translator at a U.S. military base in Iraq. It was subsequently determined that he had been spying on our military for none other than al-Qaeda!

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I would love to tell you his name, but the news reports indicated that he had used numerous identities and even his true nationality had been unverifiable- but he had been granted United States citizenship!

Additionally, speaking from my personal experience as a former INS special agent, I can tell you that in the late 1970's, I assisted the NYPD and the Office of Naval Intelligence (as it was then known) in a wide ranging investigation of citizens of Panama, Jamaica and other Caribbean countries who had lied about their immigration status to be eligible to enlist in the U.S. Marine Corps and the Navy. In a number of instances, recruiters knew about the lies that these enlistees committed on their applications, but being under pressure to meet recruitment quotas, they became the accomplices of these aliens.

All went along smoothly until a number of these individuals went AWOL. It turned out that they had wanted to join the military to gain training in weapons and tactics. They had chosen a career path that made good use of this invaluable training- they stole high powered weapons and trained in military tactics and strategy they committed violent bank robberies!

Hope is not a strategy! It is imperative that we not take the enlistment of soldiers into the various branches of our military services lightly. Enlistees are given training into weapons and tactics. They are given the "play book" for our military. This is one of the ways that the Zetas, the members of the Mexican military and law enforcement who are challenging the powerful drug cartels for supremacy gained their knowledge- we trained them when they claimed that they would assist the United States in the interdiction of drugs flowing across our border with Mexico.

Additionally, members of the military are given access to military bases and other secure strategic installations. The security badges and access to facilities truly represent the "Keys to the Kingdom!"

It is certainly admirable that there are those whose commitment to the United States is so great that they are volunteering to serve in our military and go in harm's way for the security of our nation. My concern is that with the ineptitude consistently demonstrated by State Department in granting visas (all 19 terrorists who attacked our nation on 9/11 had been granted visas and entered the United States through the inspections process) that the military must not presume that any alien who entered the United States through a flawed program can be considered on face value to be trustworthy!

This is yet another reason why immigration fraud must be effectively addressed- yet I have yet to hear any member of Congress in either the Senate or the House of Representatives even raise the issue of immigration fraud.

With all of the talk about an economic stimulus package, I would love to hear that thousands of news special agents will be hired for ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to create a system that possesses real integrity. At present, there are only a relative handful of adjudications officers and investigators who are attempting to create even an illusion of integrity for that program.

The issue of a lack of integrity within the immigration bureaucracy is nothing short of an integral part of national security and has been a component of national security that has been all but ignored, even as our nation attempts to secure itself against terrorist attacks nearly seven and a half years after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Our nation can do better than this- indeed, it must do better!

The large scale apathy demonstrated by citizens of this nation has emboldened elected representatives to all but ignore the needs of the average American citizen in a quest for massive campaign funds and the promises of votes to be ostensibly delivered by special interest groups. There is much that we cannot do but there is one thing that We the People absolutely must do- we must stop sitting on the sidelines!

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The collective failure of We the People to get involved in make our concerns known to our politicians have nearly made the concerns of the great majority of the citizens of this nation all but irrelevant to the politicians.

I implore you to get involved!

© 2009 - Michael Cutler - All Rights Reserved