Eideard

Afghan police said they rescued a convoy of 41 children, some aged as young as six, from being smuggled over the border to Pakistan and trained as suicide bombers.

The children were stopped in a convoy of cars driven by four Afghan men in the mountainous eastern province of Kunar, police and interior ministry officials said. They said their parents had been fooled into believing they were sending their children to religious schools across the border, but were instead being sent to be trained to attack Afghan and international forces.

“They were bringing these children in the name of education, but they were not being sent to schools,” a police official in the province said, “They were being sent to be suicide bombers”.

The children were to be taken to a madrassah at Shamshato, close to Peshawar, which officials said was a recruiting ground for militants belonging to Hizb-i-Islami, one of Afghanistan’s main insurgent factions…

Several said they were from the violent Pech and Korengal valleys and had lost their fathers in clashes between American troops and insurgents, or in Nato airstrikes. They told reporters that with their fathers gone, their families could not afford to look after them so they were being sent to private madrassahs where they would receive free food and clothes…

Seddiq Seddiqi, spokesman for the interior ministry, said: “It was obvious what was happening with these boys. They were being taken across the border, without any paperwork or documentation, to Pakistan where there are lots of these madrassahs. They train these children and then they send them back to carry out attacks.”

The shame, the crime of stealing the youth, the lives of these children rests solely on the heads of the base criminals leading the Taliban theocracy. They are as guilty as any thug who steals and kills children for profit.

Using schools, clothing and food for the poor as an instrument to brainwash children is nothing new – in many cultures. Doing so to turn them into murderers is reprehensible.

“We don’t need no stinking accountants!”

The FBI has focused its anti-corruption efforts on the U.S.-Mexico border, a top official told a Senate committee.

Kevin L. Perkins, assistant director of the criminal investigative division, testified before a subcommittee of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He said 120 of the 700 agents involved in anti-corruption investigations are assigned to the Southwest border.

Perkins said those agents, working with the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies, are getting results. In 2009 he said there were more than 100 arrests and 130 state and federal criminal cases.

In one case, Perkins said, agents determined a border inspector had sought the job in order to make money from drug trafficking. The inspector was sentenced to 22 years in prison after pleading guilty to conspiring to import more than 2,000 pounds of marijuana.

After another investigation, government employees working for 12 state, federal and local agencies were charged with drug trafficking, he said, with 84 guilty pleas so far.

Take a nice profitable crime operation like drug-running, it’s to be expected that bribery and corruption of the “good guys” will follow.

In today’s dollars, that would be more like $30,000. Don’t forget, I’m an old cranky geek.

“Hmmm… too tame.”

A marijuana bust along the U.S.-Mexico border revealed 30 pounds of the drug stuffed into framed pictures of Jesus Christ, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency said Wednesday.

“This is not the first time we have seen smugglers attempt to use religious figures and articles of faith to further their criminal enterprise,” said William Molaski, port director of the agency’s office in El Paso, Texas, in a statement.

“What some might find offensive or sacrilegious has unfortunately become a standard operating procedure for drug smugglers. This would include using religious symbols, children and senior citizens in their attempts to defeat the CBP inspection process.”

There’s a pun involving holy rollers in here somewhere.

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Turkey and its neighbour Armenia have moved closer to establishing diplomatic ties after decades of bitter mistrust on both sides.

They are to hold six weeks of domestic consultations on the move after which their parliaments will vote on it, their foreign ministries announced…

Turkey has resisted widespread calls for it to recognise the mass killing of Armenians during World War I as an act of genocide.

A roadmap for the normalisation of the relationship between the two countries was agreed in April…

The foreign ministries said the two countries had agreed to start internal discussions on two protocols: one establishing diplomatic relations and the other developing bilateral ties.

According to Reuters news agency, the Turkish-Armenian border – closed by Turkey in 1993 – will re-open within two months of the protocols coming into force.

The border was closed when Armenia exited the Soviet Union and assumed an independent political life. It’s been a spell; but, it looks like sensible relations can begin to pass between the two nations.

You get the idea…

They have heard of people tunneling under it, scaling it and, on the Mexican side, defacing it. But it is not often, law enforcement authorities say, that people try to rip apart the border fence to sell it.

That appears to be the motive that led to the arrest this week in Tijuana, Mexico, of six people who, the authorities there say, were caught shearing off chunks of the metal plate fence to sell as scrap.

The case began Monday afternoon when United States Border Patrol agents spotted a group tampering with the fence on the Mexican side just over a mile west of the San Ysidro port of entry, in an area where smuggling of drugs and people is common, said Mark Endicott, a Border Patrol spokesman in San Diego…

The next afternoon, another group in the same area could be seen next to the fence “attempting to dismantle it,” Mr. Endicott said. Again, they were approached, again rocks sailed over the fence, and again the Mexican police were called. The Border Patrol later learned that six people were apprehended…

Tijuana police told local reporters there that the men were planning to sell the torn-off fence parts. The police said the men had used a soldering tool to cut off parts of the fence, which perhaps unknown to the culprits, is itself scrap. That part of the fence is made of recycled steel landing mats from the Vietnam War era, Mr. Endicott said.

I always wondered if the wall might be stolen as soon as we install it?

In announcing the resumption of a “virtual fence” on the U.S.-Mexican border, the Obama administration sent a powerful message of continuity with President George W. Bush, who included a pledge to secure the border as part of a 2006 effort to persuade Congress to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws.

Much as Bush aides did three years ago, administration officials in the Department of Homeland Security described a five-year, multibillion-dollar plan yesterday to link a chain of tower-mounted sensors and other surveillance equipment over most of the 2,000-mile southern frontier. As before, the network of cameras, radar and communications gear is intended to speed deployment of U.S. Border Patrol officers to intercept illegal immigrants, drug smugglers and other violators, yielding greater “operational control” over the vast and rugged area.

What is different, DHS officials said, is that they have learned lessons from the technical problems that dogged the Bush administration’s first, 28-mile pilot project south of Tucson. What remains unclear is whether the ambitious technology will encounter fresh setbacks that would embarrass President Obama, who has urged Congress to streamline the immigration system and work out a way to deal fairly with the 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States, analysts said…

Susan Ginsburg, director of the mobility and security program at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, agreed that “the jury is out” on whether the virtual fence design makes the most sense. But she said the undertaking is necessary as much to thwart terrorism and organized crime at the border as to foil illegal immigrants looking for work, if not more so…

The government has made many changes since a $20 million pilot rushed off-the-shelf equipment into operation without testing, relied on inadequate police dispatching software and ignored the input of Border Patrol officers, who found that radar systems were triggered by rain, satellite communications were too slow to permit camera operators to track targets by remote control, and cameras had poor visibility.

Mark Borkowski said DHS has paid $600 million to its prime contractor, Boeing. It is using new software, radar, cameras and sturdier towers, and has simplified camera operation and added more thorough testing by Border Patrol officers.

None of these security systems are rocket science. They work well in a broad range of environments, commercially and in the military. The latter being closer to the reality of border security. Frankly, I’d be hard-pressed to understand how Bush’s flunkies screwed it up.

I guess that last sentence answers itself.

Turkey and Armenia have agreed on a framework to normalize ties after nearly a century of hostility, a move that could stabilize the volatile, oil-rich Caucasus but may affect European energy security plans.

The announcement, which was welcomed by Washington, came on the eve of the April 24 commemoration of mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915. The two countries have been engaged since last year in high-level talks to restore ties, which could include reopening a border closed in 1993…

The stand-off has isolated impoverished Armenia and obstructed Turkey’s efforts to join the European Union…

Turkey and Armenia did not say how they would tackle the genocide dispute, which has traumatized ties. Turkey accepts that many Christian Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks but denies that up to 1.5 million died as a result of genocide.

Turkish officials would not discuss the issue further.

Americans generally are quick to demand that other nations “learn how to forget the past”. I’m as guilty of that as anyone else – especially over the impenetrable wall of hate that winds through the Balkans. I smirk over the same people who switch their brains off regarding the genocide our nation committed against Native Americans. Or what the real history of the Monroe Doctrine did to the fabric of life and death throughout Latin America.

It’s always easiest for the oppressor to “forgive and forget”.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The Obama administration is naming a former Justice Department official, Alan Bersin, to tackle drug-related violence and illegal immigration problems plaguing the U.S. border with Mexico.

Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano is expected to make the announcement during a visit to El Paso, Texas. Outsiders have dubbed the post a “border czar.”

“Right now our goals are two-fold. No. 1 is to prevent people at the border from entering this country illegally and No. 2 is to play a part in assisting the Mexican government in its crackdown on the drug cartels,” the source said. “That will be the primary function of this new position.”

The announcement is scheduled to take place one day before President Barack Obama is to embark on a trip to Mexico, where issues of drug violence south of the U.S. border are expected to be at the top of the agenda…

Bersin was criticized by some immigrant groups for his role in Operation Gatekeeper, a federal government operation to crack down on illegal immigration along the westernmost portion of the U.S.-Mexico border. The program was a success at reducing uncontrolled immigration through that area, but immigrants and human smugglers shifted to the east. Some blame the program for increases in immigrant deaths in the desert and on highways.

People committing self-destructive acts is a measure of their stupidity and ignorance. It has little or nothing to do with law enforcement.

Daylife/AP Photo by Guillermo Arias

Rosalio Reta sits at a table inside a Laredo Police Department interrogation room. A detective, sitting across the table, asks him how it all started.

“I thought I was Superman. I loved doing it, killing that first person,” Reta says on the videotape obtained by CNN. “They tried to take the gun away, but it was like taking candy from kid.”

Rosalio Reta and his friend, Gabriel Cardona, were members of a three-person cell of American teenagers working as cartel hit men in the United States, according to prosecutors. The third was arrested by Mexican authorities and stabbed to death in prison there three days later…

The detective sitting across the table from Reta and Cardona in those sessions is Robert Garcia. He’s a veteran of the Laredo Police Department and one of the few officers who has questioned the young men.

“One thing you wonder all the time: What made them this way?” Garcia told CNN. “They were just kids themselves, waiting around playing PlayStation or Xbox, waiting around for the order to be given…”

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Two headless corpses wrapped in blankets, five beaten and bound men asphyxiated in a car, and the mayor of a sizeable town riddled with bullets. Mexico’s spiral of drugs-related violence swept on through the weekend, defying the government’s biggest ever effort to rein in the cartels.

Much of the latest bloodbath occurred in Tijuana, across the frontier from California, where nearly 50 people – including 12 found next to a primary school – were killed in the past week…

On Saturday the mayor of Ixtapan de la Sal, a spa town south-west of Mexico City, died after hooded hitmen shot at his car. Newspapers blamed Sergio Vergara’s death on Los Zetas, another of the main gangs in the bewildering assortment of Mexican trafficking organisations fighting each other across the country.

Newspapers claim the drug wars have led to the deaths of about 3,500 so far this year, already a tally 40% up on 2007′s record total. A military-led anti-cartel offensive began in December 2006. The crackdown of Mexico’s president, Felipe Calderón, was very popular to begin with, but a poll published in El Universal newspaper on Friday showed that 40% of Mexicans now feel less secure, with only 25% thinking themselves safer. About half in the poll believed things would calm down in the next three years if the fight-back continued. Calderón has repeatedly backed the strategy. “We need to rescue our liberty and our security so our young people can develop to their full potential,” he said on Friday. “We will continue our frontal battle against organised crime.”

South of the border, down Mexico way. Didn’t that used to be a cheerful song title?