The War on Terror at the Mexican Border

The border situation, at its core, is not an economic issue, a cultural issue, or a racial issue. It is a national security issue.

The record is unmistakably clear.

In 2001 [1], the brother of a Hezb'allah military chief illegally entered the United States by crossing the Mexican border. He then settled in Dearborn, Michigan and raised money for Hezb'allah [2].

In 2002, illegal immigrants from Lebanon who were thought to have ties to Hezb'allah were smuggled into the United States via the Mexican border, according to a congressional report:

In December 2002, Salim Boughader Mucharrafille, a café owner in Tijuana, Mexico, was arrested for illegally smuggling more than two hundred Lebanese illegally into the United States, including several believed to have terrorist ties toairplanes, conspiracies, timings and so on [6].

Yet plotting to take advantage of the Mexican border is not new to al-Qaeda.

Back in 2004, a Time magazine article reported that captured al-Qaeda operative, Sharif al-Masri, had said that al-Qaeda had considered smuggling nuclear materials into the United States through Mexico. The article also revealed that "U.S. and Mexican intelligence conferred about reports from several al-Qaeda detainees indicating the potential use of Mexico as a staging area "to acquire end-stage chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear material" [7].

A year after the Time magazine article appeared, Representative John Culberson of Texas told Fox News:

I ... went to Laredo, went to the Rio Grande River, saw firsthand the War on Terror going on there. And the Hudspeth County sheriff, Arvin West, and the Brewster