Waada Alwan and Mohanad Hammadi. (Photo courtesy of U.S. Marshal’s Service)
Until this morning, I didn’t have the time to watch the Nightline Exclusive about how those two Iraqi refugee terrorists, arrested in Bowling Green, KY in 2011, were exposed.
It is really a fascinating piece if you haven’t watched it.
We reported the ABC News report on the story here, two days ago.
Go here to watch the whole thing! The investigation is continuing into whether there are others like Waada Alwan and Mohanad Hammadi who got into the US with American blood on their hands after checking boxes on their refugee application that they had not been part of any terrorist action in Iraq.
We have written an awful lot on the case, if you type ‘Kentucky Iraqi terrorists’ into our search function, most of those earlier reports should be archived with those key words.
By the way, I noticed in the Nightline piece that there was some consternation by officials interviewed about why Bowling Green. Bowling Green is a preferred refugee resettlement site for the US State Department and its nine federal contractors and has been for probably two decades.
How does a city become “preferred?” First, it has to have some big companies nearby in need of cheap labor (chicken processing in this case), available public housing, and then it must have a low number on the squawk index! What is that you ask? That’s my terminology for whether there develops a cadre citizens in the community who ask what the heck is happening to our city? No (or little) squawking=more refugees will be resettled there!
You betcha! I am continually amazed at how long it takes the mainstream media to catch up with the blogosphere. I don’t want to brag, but heck we wrote about this now old news way back in June of 2011.
Senator Rand Paul has been asking from day one why are we permitting so many Iraqis into the US. ABC doesn’t mention his name.
And, it cannot go unmentioned—-Senator Rand Paul was, and still is, the only US Senator I’ve seen in the last 6 years to have the guts to ask why the h*** are we doing this?
See here for just one of many posts about Paul’s demands for answers about how this Kentucky case happened. Isn’t it interesting that this lengthy ABC News investigation doesn’t even mention his name!
We have admitted 19,491 Iraqi refugees to the US in 2013 alone!
Thanks to all who sent the story today, including Judy who sent former Rep. Allen West’s poston the story and Brenda Walker at Limits to Growth for her write-up. Walker has been on top of the story from day one as well!
Good Morning America: Exclusive: US May Have Let ‘Dozens’ of Terrorists Into Country As Refugees
Several dozen suspected terrorist bombmakers, including some believed to have targeted American troops, may have mistakenly been allowed to move to the United States as war refugees, according to FBI agents investigating the remnants of roadside bombs recovered from Iraq and Afghanistan.
The discovery in 2009 of two al Qaeda-Iraq terrorists living as refugees in Bowling Green, Kentucky — who later admitted in court that they’d attacked U.S. soldiers in Iraq — prompted the bureau to assign hundreds of specialists to an around-the-clock effort aimed at checking its archive of 100,000 improvised explosive devices collected in the war zones, known as IEDs, for other suspected terrorists’ fingerprints.
“We are currently supporting dozens of current counter-terrorism investigations like that,” FBI Agent Gregory Carl, director of the Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center (TEDAC), said in an ABC News interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC News’ “World News with Diane Sawyer” and “Nightline”.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if there were many more than that,” said House Committee on Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul. “And these are trained terrorists in the art of bombmaking that are inside the United States; and quite frankly, from a homeland security perspective, that really concerns me.”
As a result of the Kentucky case, the State Department stopped processing Iraq refugees for six months in 2011, federal officials told ABC News …. [But, of course the refugee agencies and their contractors are making up now for lost time. Iraqis were the largest group of refugees resettled in 2013.—ed]
The now imprisoned pair were resettled in Kentucky:
In 2009 Alwan applied as a refugee and was allowed to move to Bowling Green, where he quit a job he briefly held and moved into public housing on Gordon Ave., across the street from a school bus stop, and collected public assistance payouts, federal officials told ABC News.
“How do you have somebody that we now know was a known actor in terrorism overseas, how does that person get into the United States? How do they get into our community?” wondered Bowling Green Police Chief Doug Hawkins, whose department assisted the FBI.
One of the saddest parts of this whole story is that these creeps may well have helped themselves to American welfare after killing American soldiers from Pennsylvania:
The FBI secretly taped Alwan bragging to the informant that he’d built a dozen or more bombs in Iraq and used a sniper rifle to kill American soldiers in the Bayji area north of Baghdad.
“He said that he had them ‘for lunch and dinner,'” recalled FBI Louisville Supervisory Special Agent Tim Beam, “meaning that he had killed them.”
Read the whole ABC story for details. Most regular readers will note that we reported most of this “exclusive” story over the last couple of years.
This is our 596th post on Iraqi refugees, click here for the entire archive.
For first timers, who have no clue what ‘refugee resettlement’ is, go here for our fact sheet on how the program works. Also, Bowling Green is a preferred resettlement site for the contractors. Type ‘Bowling Green’ into our search function and learn more about the problems there over the years.
This may, or may not, still be the largest mosque in America, but since there are so many grandiose mosque-building projects on-going, I doubt it.
Update: Could there be terrorists among them, ABC says so!
Every time I see a glowing story like this one about the growing Iraqi “community” in Dearborn, Michigan, I’m reminded that there would never be a story about Americans with Western European origins living in a community that shares its cultural values without it being a story about racism, hatred, xenophobia and “unwelcoming” rednecks.
Conversely, it is absolutely fine and understandable, even celebrated, that Iraqis want to live with their kind.
BTW, there is a mention in here about an Iraqi resettled by the US State Department in Montana who bailed-out of that backwater as fast as he could and beat a path to Dearborn!
Driving through the streets of Dearborn, Michigan, one may easily confuse their surroundings with that of the Middle East. The city of Dearborn, which is surrounded on three sides by the economically embattled Detroit, Michigan, is often referred to as “little Iraq,” for its large Iraqi contingency. The Iraqi community in Dearborn has grown significantly since the onset of the Iraq war in 2003. While the new Iraqi diaspora in the United States is undoubtedly in a safer environment than their native country, it seems these communities have left a war-ravaged country, only to begin fighting a different battle: One of acclimation to a foreign country.
The Iraqi diaspora is now dispersed throughout the world – with the United States accepting well over 90,000 Iraqi refugees since 2003.Many refugees sent to the United States are moving to Dearborn, largely due to the fact that there is a large Lebanese community establishment there, as well as a “newer” Iraqi immigrant base that came to the United States in the early 1990s after the first Gulf War.
“It is no accident that many are finding their way to Michigan and carving a niche for themselves. I think there is a comfort in being in the vicinity of a large concentration of mostly Lebanese coreligionists,” said Dr. Hani Bawardi, a professor of History and Arab American Studies at the University of Michigan. However, “there is no evidence that, save entry level jobs in Lebanese-owned grocery stores and restaurants, that the two communities are coordinating some form of safety nets for newcomers,” Bawardi said. But, “being part of an Arab American population may have softened the blow, at least psychologically,” he added.
[….]
Flooding in
Since 2003, an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 Iraqi refugees a year come to the Dearborn, Michigan area in search of social, economic and professional stability. Refugees are not given the choice of where to live, but, the U.S. State Department gives strong consideration to placing refugees into communities where some sort of support system is in place.
On this last point, a few years back the US State Department actually stopped overloading the Dearborn area with Iraqis (there are no jobs! as this article mentions), but it would seem that even the State Department social planners can’t engineer the human desire to want to live among people one is culturally compatible with.
Iraqis “community cushion” is a good thing they say, what about a “community cushion” for struggling white Americans? The hypocrisy is maddening.
Over 30 percent of the Detroit area’s residents are of Arab descent, which brings with it a strong sense of social, cultural and religious understanding. The streets of the Detroit area are lined with mosques, Arab restaurants, and businesses run by Arab-Americans. The community “cushion” eases the anxietythat most refugees feel, as they are expected to start working within 12 months of arriving to the U.S.. Particularly in areas like Detroit, which were hit hard by the collapse of the auto industry, the challenges of being a foreigner seeking employment are only amplified within the context of an embattled economy.
Iraqis have “not lost their unity in identity!”
Despite these years of tumult, Faily said that the Iraqi people have not lost their unity in identity. “The Iraqi identity is very clear,” he said, “they share the same culture, food, and history,” among other things. When you speak to an Iraqi, Faily said, “you ask them are you Iraqi?
They share the same culture, food, and history and wish to live among their kind, but if you are an American with a Western European background, no such wish is permitted to you!
For new and ambitious readers, we have 594 previous posts on Iraqi Refugees!
Instead of selling phoney asylum seekers seats on a potentially rickety boat to Australia they now have an air route and fake visas for them.
Iraqis are running the operation!
Iraqi national Abu Tarek
Before I get to the story, I see there is news this morning that more Rohingya have been caught in Indonesia headed for a another of those boat crossings. Indonesia is a Muslim country, so why aren’t the Rohingya satisfied to break in there and stay in their own culture zone, why Australia? (silly question!)
Where the heck are these destitute “refugees” getting $16,000 to pay for a ticket? From 9News:
People smugglers are selling asylum seekers passports and Australian visas for entry to the country by plane – offering them an alternative to a potentially deadly boat journey.
The ABC’s Four Corners reported that it secretly filmed people smuggler Abu Tarek in Malaysia talking about the deal.
The Iraqi man tells a potential customer that for $16,000 they get a passport with an Australia visa.
“The passport is from Oman or Bahrain, they get the Bahrain passport with the Australia visa in it, both official – not fake,” he said in a conversational secretly recorded by the ABC’s Four Corners.
“They use the passport to fly there and when they arrive safely, they tear it up and enter the country (Australia).”
He tells the person that when they enter the country they can then apply for refugee status.
His business partner Abu Saleh, also from Iraq, is accused of running his people smuggling business from an Indonesian prison with the help of corrupt prison officials.
One asylum seeker who dealt with him while he was in prison said he was “like a king”.
The photo is from a much more detailed story (found after beginning this post) about this illegal operation at ABC News Australia. Some of the flights are to New Zealand as well.
But surely the money will flow when Obamacare is in full swing—-right?
Therapist, Husam Abdulkhaleq, a Palestinian, says the Israelis imprisoned him for 6 months and tortured him in the early 1980’s, so he fled to America. hmmmm…
Muntaha Flufel says on most days she sits alone at home watching TV, unable to interact with the community she lives in. She keeps her windows and doors locked, in fear that someone might break in and attack her like they did in Baghdad in 2004. Her scars are constant reminders — marks where the perpetrators dropped acid on her skin.
Although troops left Iraq nearly two years ago, hundreds of civilians are still being killed each month, leading many Iraqis to flee the continuing violence, which is contributing to an already dire refugee situation. According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, since April of this year, 84, 902 Iraqis have been settled in the U.S., and new arrivals like Muntaha are reporting symptoms associated with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
We need to give some credit to this Huffington Post article by Erin Banco for even mentioning that these Chaldeans were tormented by Islamists!
According to health officials at ACCESS, a community organization dedicated to empowering and enabling individuals and families in the Detroit area, many of the new Iraqi Chaldean arrivals experienced primary and secondary trauma, having witnessed family members being killed, oftentimes persecuted at the hands of Islamist militias.
The trauma has caused what Husam Abdulkhaleq, the program manager of the psychosocial rehabilitation center, says includes nightmares, poor concentration, and extreme anger. The grueling process of integrating and assimilating in a new country only exacerbates the symptoms. [Reporter Banco even dares to use the word “assimilating” a term usually verboten by the professional resettlers!—-ed]
It will be “disastrous” when the Syrians come!
The ACCESS psychosocial rehabilitation program receives the majority of its funding from the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), an organization that provides refugees with the services needed to integrate into their new communities. ACCESS just recently received another three years of funding from the group, but Abdulkhaleq says the money is significantly less than what it received in previous years.
ACCESS is barely able to provide services for the most recent arrivals from Iraq with the money it has. The next area of concern is the possible wave of Syrian refugees it could see over the next five years. If the UN begins to resettle even a portion of the hundreds of thousands who have been displaced by the violence in the US, officials at ACCESS say the consequences could be “disastrous.”
The photo is from this 2001 storyabout ACCESS in the wake of 9/11 (his clients were really stressed!), but I found another article from 2004 only as a ‘document’ in which he describes his “torture” for no reason at all at the hands of the wicked Israelis.
