Over the last 24 hours two stories came to my attention about how the federal government and local law enforcement supposedly have their hands full and are crafting programs and spending big bucks on surveillance of the Somali refugee “community” in several Office of Refugee Resettlement “preferred” resettlement cities—notably Minneapolis and San Diego. They are looking for budding terrorist activity.
Both articles question how well the spy agencies and local FBI are doing. Both are leading readers to conclude that spying on Somalis is a waste of money and take away their civil liberties.
The first article, published yesterday in the New Yorker is too long to keep my interest, maybe it will keep yours! I feel like saying yes, we know about San Diego’s nest of Somalis connected to Al-Shabaab. We have written about them on many occasions (click here for our San Diego archive).
Although the writer is busy trying really hard to show that phone surveillance under the Patriot Act is catching only a small handful of little-fish funders of the jihad in Africa, I was most interested in what it never mentions!
Not once in this giant tome is there any reference to how the Somalis got here in the first place through the Refugee Resettlement Program of the US State Department.
Some readers, new to the whole Somali migration to America issue, would think that Somalis got in some migration ‘line’ in Africa and simply ‘found their way’ to San Diego. Although there is much discussion about where they live in San Diego, again, not a word about the federally-funded resettlement contractors (Alliance for African Assistance, Jewish Family Services, International Rescue Committee, and Catholic Charities) who found them their apartments, or the State Department that flew them there. The word “refugee” appears only once in the article and that is in conjunction with the word “camp” as in “refugee camp.”
One thing that is mentioned as if it is just your normal every day occurrence is the discussion about Somalis (refugees remember! who have escaped PERSECUTION) simply traveling back and forth to Somalia (in one case to find a wife). If Somalia was safe enough for regular visits why in hell did we bring them here!
Through remittances your money is holding up hell holes around the world!
Then there is this section in the New Yorker piece (one of the few that got my attention!) that is only used to describe why the Somali star of the story needed to get involved with a hawala, Shidaal Express, a money transfer agency. (We first wrote about Shidaal Express in 2009 and have mentioned it a few times since, here).
In 2013, foreign remittances to Somalia reached $1.3 billion, which accounts for roughly half of the country’s G.D.P. Most of this money moves through hawalas, informal networks of Islamic money-transfer agents. Some U.S. hawalas are underground; some are affiliated with licensed banks. It’s difficult for authorities to track which hawala transfers buy food and other necessities in Somalia and which might be support for militant groups. But most agree that the current system is preferable to Somali émigrés’ making periodic trips with bundles of cash. “Somehow the money’s going to move,” Carol Beaumier, a former federal bank examiner, said in a recent interview with American Banker.
Although some of the $1.3 billion goes from other countries to Somalia, much of that comes from YOU (the US taxpayer)! through the myriad welfare programs and other state and federally funded “programs” Somali refugees tap into.
Only last month we learned about a fraudulent day care scheme in Minneapolis where funds skimmed from the state were allegedly being sent to Africa!
I will bet a buck that those ‘economic’ studies being used in cities by the pro-open borders propagandists at Welcoming America, which claim that immigrants and refugees bring boom times to troubled cities, do not include how much of a city’s money is leaving the country.
You can read the whole New Yorker story (hat tip: ‘Pungentpeppers’) yourself, if you find something you think needs to be flagged, add it as comment to this post.
The Intercept
The other story that came to my attention yesterday is from Minneapolis where the news magazine—The Intercept—a publication created and funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar exposes NSA information in the wake of the Snowden leak.
The article entitled, ‘Spies Among Us: How Community Outreach Programs to Muslims Blur Lines between Outreach and Intelligence,’ is apparently trying to make the point that the Somali “community” of Minneapolis is being snookered (and spied upon) by the FBI.
Here is how The Intercept story begins:
Last May, after getting a ride to school with his dad, 18-year-old Abdullahi Yusuf absconded to the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport to board a flight to Turkey. There, FBI agents stopped Yusuf and later charged him with conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization—he was allegedly associated with another Minnesota man believed to have gone to fight for the Islamic State in Syria.
To keep other youth from following Yusuf’s path, U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger recently said that the federal government would be launching a new initiative to work with Islamic community groups and promote after-school programs and job training–to address the “root causes” of extremist groups’ appeal. “This is not about gathering intelligence, it’s not about expanding surveillance or any of the things that some people want to claim it is,” Luger said.
Luger’s comments spoke to the concerns of civil liberties advocates, who believe that blurring the line between engagement and intelligence gathering could end up with the monitoring of innocent individuals. If past programs in this area are any guide, those concerns are well founded.
Documents obtained by attorneys at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, and shared with the Intercept, show that previous community outreach efforts in Minnesota–launched in 2009 in response to the threat of young Americans joining the al-Qaeda-linked militia al-Shabab, in Somalia—were, in fact, conceived to gather intelligence.
A grant proposal from the St. Paul Police Department to the Justice Department, which the Brennan Center obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI, lays out a plan in which Somali-speaking advocates would hold outreach meetings with community groups and direct people toward the Police Athletic League and programs at the YWCA. The proposal says that “the team will also identify radicalized individuals, gang members, and violent offenders who refuse to cooperate with our efforts.” [I believe they need to be watched, but this is dumb!—CAIR must be jumping for joy!—ed]
“It’s startling how explicit it was – ‘You don’t want to join the Police Athletic League? You sound like you might join al-Shabab!’” said Michael Price, an attorney with the Brennan Center.
Read it all. Sure sounds like there is a movement afoot to throw cold water on any attempt by the federal government to monitor the growing Somali COMMUNITY for possible Islamic terrorist connections.
Meanwhile, another arm of the federal government, the US State Department, is importing new Somalis to America at record speed!
The State Department has admitted well over 100,000 in the last three decades, here. 9,000 were admitted in FY 2014 here. And, in this fiscal year (three months old) we have already admitted 2,801. If we keep that pace, FY2015 will see 11,204 NEW Somalis!
So while everyone has angst about keeping an eye on them, many more are coming in every single day!
