Terrorism. Well, sort of. At least that’s what our federal government thinks.
CQ Politics revealed earlier this month that the FBI, in 2005 and 2006, mined data from San Francisco-based grocery stores hoping to connect increased sales of Middle Eastern food to the presence of Iranian spies and Hezbollah operatives seeking to attack inside the U.S. The program has since been nixed, reportedly because higher-ups thought it “ridiculous” and “possibly illegal.” (The FBI, for the record denied it had such a program.)
But while federal law enforcement agents were (reportedly) engaging in this folly, serious security breaches were growing unchecked in some of the nation’s largest airports and even within the FBI itself.
Today we learned that a Lebanese national somehow managed to arrange a fake marriage and pass an FBI background check that landed her jobs as an FBI agent and later as a CIA case officer. She then stole classified information on terrorist activities and Lebanese terror group Hezbollah.
And last week the Chicago Tribune reported on a federal raid at O’Hare International Airport that uncovered at least 110 fake security badges issued to an airport contractor and provided to 100 workers assigned to jobs in restricted areas. At least a quarter of the workers were illegal immigrants. Most of them were never subjected to background checks or fingerprinted as required by federal authorities.
This follows on news in August that dozens of guns were stolen from checked luggage at O’Hare, Seattle’s Sea-Tac and even Washington Reagan National Airport during the past couple of years – the same period of time the FBI was supposedly running its gastronomic investigations. Dare we assume that the illegitimate workers and the missing guns might be connected? Law enforcement isn’t sure, but think the guns were “probably sold or used in crimes.”
Last year, well before last week’s raid, O’Hare spokeswoman Wendy Abrams reportedly said the missing guns – belonging mostly to law enforcement or military personnel – presented “no risk to airport safety and security.” Yet the tenor of federal officials was decidedly different last week when they admitted that the investigation that netted the illegal workers “identified national security vulnerabilities.”
CQ reported that the FBI’s falafel dragnet… “is a measure of how desperate the FBI is to disrupt domestic terrorism plots,” but maybe, just maybe, they’re just barking up the wrong trees.
I wrote an article this week about how airports are beefing up the amenities for in-transit passengers, which is welcome and well overdue. But one has to wonder whether they, much like our government has done since 9/11, may just be trying to distract us from the really scary stuff going on behind the scenes.
