If Drug, Immigrant Smugglers Can Exploit System, So Can Terrorists
By PIERRE THOMAS and JEAN SHIN
Aug. 22, 2010
A recent spate of airport security breaches, with airline or airport employees allegedly involved in smuggling drugs or illegal immigrants, have federal officials concerned.
Federal authorities warn crimes by airport workers are not isolated.
"They knew how to exploit that system because they worked there," said Anthony Mangione, Special Agent in Charge of the Homeland Security Investigations office in Miami. "The person within the system knows the strengths of it and knows the weaknesses and like anything else, will target those weaknesses."
If you thought nine years after 9/11 that corruption at the nation's airports would have been rooted out or dramatically reduced, think again.
In another breach in 2008, airport authorities and federal officials got a tip that drugs were being smuggled out of John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City, leading to the arrest of two American Airline employees.
In exclusive surveillance video obtained by ABC News of the drug bust, we see how airline employees can circumvent the system and elude security checks.
In the video, one of the suspects pulls up on the tarmac at JFK airport in a baggage car. Seconds later, in a perfectly synchronized act, another airport employee arrives in another truck and retrieves a package full of several thousand dollars
The two employees involved have since been convicted.
Recent security breaches at airports across the country have law enforcement and security officials concerned.
(ABC News)
Corruption at the airports is not just confined to narcotics smuggling. In addition to reports of several airports employing illegal immigrants, airport employees have been accused of smuggling illegal immigrants into the United States.
An elevator mechanic at Los Angeles International Airport was arrested and charged for smuggling at least 15 illegal immigrants into the country from Mexico.
CUERNAVACA, Mexico — The decapitated bodies of four men were hung from a bridge Sunday in this central Mexican city besieged by fighting between two drug lords.
A gang led by kingpin Hector Beltran Leyva took responsibility for the killings in a message left with the bodies, the attorney general’s office of Morelos state said in a statement.
The beheaded and mutilated bodies were hung by their feet early Sunday from the bridge in Cuernavaca, a popular weekend getaway for Mexico City residents.
Cuernavaca has become a battleground for control of the Beltran Leyva cartel since its leader, Arturo Beltran Leyva, was killed there in a December shootout with marines.
Mexican authorities say the cartel split between a faction led by Hector Beltran Leyva, brother of Arturo, and another led by Edgar Valdez Villarreal, a U.S.-born kingpin known as “the Barbie.”
The message left with the bodies threatened: “This is what will happen to all those who support the traitor Edgar Valdez Villarreal.”
Authorities said the four men had been kidnapped days earlier. The family of one of the men reported the abduction to police.
In western Mexico, police found the body of a U.S. citizen inside a car along the highway between the Pacific resorts of Acapulco and Zihuatanejo.
A report from Guerrero state police said the man was shot to death and had identification indicating he was from Georgia.
The U.S. Embassy could not be reached to confirm the man’s identity.
Police said they had no suspects and had not determined a motive.
Guerrero state has been wracked by drug-gang violence, including the strife within the Beltran Leyva cartel. There have also been a series of deadly carjackings this year along highways in the state.
Mexico has seen unprecedented gang violence since President Felipe Calderon stepped up the fight against drug trafficking when he took office in December 2006, deploying thousands of troops and federal police to cartel strongholds.
Since then, more than 28,000 people have been killed in violence tied to Mexico’s drug war.
(This version CORRECTS tate where Cuernavaca is located to Morelos instead of state of Mexico, corrects the second family name of `Barbie’ to Villarreal instead of Villareal.)
Around 30 women aged between 18 and 30 years have learned in recent months to carry out killings accompanied by hit men, and most have killed people, said Rogelio Amaya.
“They’re pretty, good-looking, to help mislead opponents,” said the suspected member of a gang of enforcers for the Juarez cartel in the country’s most violent city of Ciudad Juarez
The women operate in the same way as men and carry both light and heavy weapons, the suspect said.
Mexico’s drug battles have left a trail of blood and fear across the country, particularly in Ciudad Juarez.
More than 2,660 suspected drug murders were reported in the city across from El Paso, Texas, in 2009 and some 1,860 have been reported this year already.
Most are blamed on turf wars between the Juarez and Sinaloa gangs over key trafficking routes into the United States.
At least 11 suspected drug-related deaths were reported overnight on Monday in Ciudad Juarez.
More than 28,000 people have died in suspected drug violence since the end of 2006, when Mexico‘s President Felipe Calderon launched a controversial military crackdown on organised crime.
Recovery of the bodies: Difficult and dangerousBetween 20 and 25 bodies, thought to be the victims of drug gang violence, have been found in an abandoned silver mine in southern Mexico, officials say.
The bodies appeared to have been thrown down a 200m (650ft) ventilation shaft over a period of time, police said.
The mine is near the city of Taxco in Guerrero state, a focal point for drug-related violence that has claimed some 23,000 lives nationwide since 2006.
A tip-off from a person arrested on Friday sparked the search.
Police and soldiers have been using breathing equipment as they descend deep underground to recover the bodies.
Many of the corpses had their hands and feet tied, Mexican media reported.
The mine is located near Taxco, a colonial era city popular with tourists.
While much of the drug violence over the past four years has been in northern Mexico, in particular in areas bordering the US, other regions have not been immune.
Guerrero, in the south and with a Pacific coastline, has also seen vicious bouts of bloodshed amid bitter turf wars for control of the trade in illegal drugs.
Whistleblower lawsuit raises troubling questions about cross-border commerce
As the Obama administration prepares to send some 1,200 National Guard troops to the Southwest to secure the border, it may well be the nation’s northern border with Canada that has already been breached.
A document detailing that potential threat to U.S. national security surfaced in a lawsuit in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Canada. That document, an internal Federal Express Canada Ltd. report dubbed the “GTS Update,” reveals that a significant percentage of shipments involving high-value merchandise and/or controlled goods exported using FedEx Canada as the carrier appear to be leaving Canada without the proper Customs paperwork.
Under Canadian Customs law, goods exported to foreign countries, other than those destined for the U.S., that are valued at [Canadian] $2,000 or more, or that are deemed “controlled goods,” must be reported to the Canadian Border Service Agency via an “export declaration,” otherwise known as a B13A form. Proof that the declaration has been filed also must be presented to CBSA at the time the goods are shipped.
Consequently, this class of shipments would likely include a high percentage of controlled goods (defined as strategic, dangerous or regulated, such as nuclear dual-use technology, dangerous chemicals or U.S. goods being shipped from Canada). According to Canadian Customs regulations, these controlled goods are monitored closely, in part, to assure that they don’t pose a security threat to other nations, such as the United States.
The still-pending lawsuit, filed by a former Federal Express Canada Ltd. customs department employee named Nazir Ghany, alleges that FedEx Canada has engaged in “unlawful activities” that violate the Canadian Customs Act. As a consequence of reporting these alleged violations, Ghany contends he was demoted and subjected to retaliation by FedEx Canada management — to the point where he claims he had no choice but to resign from his job.
FedEx Canada has not yet filed a statement of defense with the court in the case. However, a letter penned by one of the company’s legal representatives and directed to Dharamjit Singh, Ghany’s solicitor, or lawyer, argues that Ghany’s pleadings lack “material facts,” are “time barred” and are otherwise not supported by Canadian law.
Singh counters in his pleadings that Ghany will be able to produce evidence at the proper point in the proceedings. He also points to the GTS Update as proof of FedEx Canada’s lack of vigor in following Canadian Customs laws. That GTS Update includes an analysis of the total number of shipments FedEx Canada “exported with out proof of report” — proof that an export declaration, or B13A, had been filed with the Canadian Border Service Agency, or CBSA.
Susan Foster, manager of Customs Regulatory Trade and Compliance for FedEx Canada, in an affidavit filed in the Gh any lawsuit, states the following concerning the shipments involving missing B13A forms:
The GTS Update “shows that there were approximately 19,549 shipments exported without proof of report” and as a result of the foregoing, the potential … penalties to FedEx customers just for the period of May 2005 to April 2006 would have been approximately [Canadian] $19 million.
Singh, however, contends the potential damage to the “national security of the USA and Canada” is much greater. He stresses that, according to the GTS Update, the nearly 20,000 “illegal shipments in just one year” represented 21 percent of total B13A-eligible shipments for that period. That means, he alleges, nearly one-fifth of those shipments were exported in violation of Canadian Customs law.
“It would be inconceivable that nuclear and other technology was not involved [in some of those shipments],” Singh contends. “In any event, there is no excuse for these shipments to have been shipped.”
FedEx Canada’s Foster stresses in her affidavit that “exporters of shipments, not carriers such as FedEx Canada, are ultimately accountable for meeting the export reporting requirements [such as filing required B13A documents]. …”
Big Stakes
FedEx Canada, which employs some 5,000 people, is based in Mississauga, Ontario, and is a subsidiary of USA-based FedEx Corp. — which ships some 6 million packages daily to nearly 230 countries. So, in the scheme of things, a total of 20,000 shipments lacking the proper paperwork doesn’t seem like a big deal.
“Unless there’s a pattern to it,” says U.S. attorney Mark Conrad, a former supervisory special agent with the U.S. Customs Service — since integrated into the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
And that pattern, Singh argues, is the fact that the shipments would have involved a high percentage of “controlled” goods destined for foreign nations, including to countries that might serve as transshipment points for materials destined for Iran.
President Barack Obama, Singh stresses, has been very clear about his concern over Iran’s nuclear intentions, expressed most recently in a letterObama sent to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, president of Brazil, and last year during a presentation he made at the G20 Conference in Pittsburgh [video below].
Singh also points to an article that appeared in the Vancouver Sun last year that quoted the head of CBSA’s Counter Proliferation Section, George Webb: “We have anything [and everything] to do with a nuclear program going to Iran.”
The story claims Canadian authorities “have seized everything from centrifuge parts to programmable logic controllers that were being illegally shipped to Iran through third countries.”
In fact, Singh adds, a trial is now underway in Toronto involving a Canadian man accused of attempting to ship to Iran, via Dubai, nuclear dual-use goods (10 specialized gas-pressure gauges, which would have required a B13A filing for export from Canada). The gauges, which are commercial products that could have been used to help centrifuges produce the highly enriched uranium needed for a nuclear weapon, were purchased from a U.S. company and shipped from Boston to Toronto “and undervalued when declared,” according to a story in the Canadian Globe and Mail. The alleged plot was uncovered in this case because the U.S. company reported the suspicious shipment to law enforcement authorities.
There is no information available publicly on how the accused planned to ship the gauges to Dubai, according to Singh. Still, he says the case is an example of how violations of Canada’s export laws can involve real threats to global security.
One U.S. Customs official who spoke with Narco News explains that even if all the proper paperwork is filed with an export shipment, that still does not guarantee an illegal shipment will be caught by Customs officials, in either the U.S. or Canada, since criminals lie on forms and the government “bureaucracy takes time to have the AM coffee, get up, and get going.”
The Customs official adds that in cases where required export documents are not filled out, it’s usually because the shipper wants to avoid the extra paperwork and duties involved — with the rare exception being a situation where a shipper is part of a criminal conspiracy.
However, if shipments are known to lack the proper customs declarations, as is allegedly the case with the shipments outlined in the GTS Update, then that should raise some red flags, even if it is likely that only a small fraction of those shipments might involve controlled or dangerous goods, the U.S. Customs official points out.
Singh adds that in the case of FedEx Canada, most of the exports destined for foreign nations other than the U.S. are routed first through FedEx terminals in the U.S. Foster, in a separate deposition she underwent as part of Ghany’s litigation, confirms that the B13A-eligible shipments outlined in the GTS Update “go to the U.S.” prior to being transported to their final destinations.
That fact, the Customs official says, creates a whole other set of potential problems on the U.S. Side of the border, where self-regulation is the guiding hand.
The U.S. Customs officials explains:
You are looking into a truly bottomless pit. First, the shipper has to be honest. Then, the common carrier, say FedEx, has to be honest. All of the employees at both companies have to be honest; no one can be bribed, because generally, all it takes is one person taking a bribe to fiddle with the paperwork. Self-regulation does not work for precisely this reason. You only need one weak link, and that criminal doesn’t have to be a boss, or a senior manager; it can be a clerk in the shipping office.
“Gaping Hole”
In the case of controlled goods exported from Canada and destined for the U.S., there is no requirement for a B13A filing under Canadian law. That’s because Canada and the U.S. have in place a memorandum of understanding that calls for each nation to exchange import data.
However, major criticisms have been raised about U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s reliance on self-regulation under programs such as “C-TPAT,” which allows qualifying private-sector companies to oversee their own shipment security. In exchange, these C-TPAT-approved companies are granted a reduction in cargo examinations as well as expedited processing when their shipments are selected for examination.
The rational for such programs is that it allows U.S. border enforcers to better allocate scarce resources toward monitoring the immense volume of goods moved by shippers who have not been prescreened through C-TPAT and similar self-regulation programs.
Over the first six months of fiscal 2009, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, goods shipped via C-TPAT and a sister program called Importer Self Assessment (ISA), accounted for about half of all U.S. import value for the period — some $454 billion worth of goods.
The Washington, D.C.-based Project on Government Oversight (POGO), in a letter sent to members of Congress late last year, pointed out some serious flaws in this self-regulation model.
In our efforts to further this mission, we want to bring to your attention two troubling self-policing programs—the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (C-TPAT) and Importer Self-Assessment (ISA) programs—administered by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Inherent in this sort of self-regulation is a reduction of federal oversight of imported goods coming into the country. POGO believes that self-regulation programs, by their very nature, are unsound because they are not objective or reliable, and that they are ripe for abuse, placing U.S. citizens in jeopardy.
… Specifically, POGO has received insider information that importers non-compliant with trade laws and regulations have been approved and are applying for the C-TPAT and ISA programs.
… It must also be noted that a number of the known C-TPAT companies have committed serious trade violations in the past, yet have been granted membership into C-TPAT and ISA, without testing to verify their problems have been corrected.
…. It is easy to conclude that all of these programs are, in part, the result of limited resources to monitor the hundreds of billions of dollars of goods that enter the U.S. each year. However, the risk inherent with that strategy becomes a financial, security, and safety issue.
Although CBP does not make public the list of companies participating in C-TPAT or ISA, POGO was able to identify a number of those firms via government and company Web sites. Among the companies in the program, according to POGO, are BP America, Tektronix, Target Corp. and FedEx.
Singh concedes he does not yet know how FedEx Canada knew about the 20,000 or so shipments lacking the proper B13A filings, or when they discovered the problem. However, he contends that the confidential FedEx Canada GTS Update report now entered into evidence in Ghany’s lawsuit — even though it is some four years old — is not an isolated document and that FedEx has been tracking this data across multiple years.
“We haven’t gone for discoveries as yet,” Singh says. “But my client did tell me that there were status reports every year and FedEx obviously knew of these shortcomings.”
For its part, FedEx Canada is not conceding the GTS Update is or is not part of a regular reporting regime, nor that the report included in the lawsuit was even seen by the company’s top management.
Whether the nearly 20,000 exports that left Canada absent the proper export declaration, per the GTS Update, are part of a continuing pattern or not, or whether some of those shipments might have contained materials destined for a foreign arms program, is simply not known at this point.
However, according to former U.S. Customs supervisory special agent Conrad, the questions raised by the Ghany case are not new.
“All of us in law enforcement that dealt with technology theft from the U.S. by the old USSR were aware that high-speed, efficient organizations such as FedEx … were problems because of their need to move things through the system faster than the government could [track it],” Conrad says. “That is still the case today.
“It is it a huge gaping hole. … The bad guys are always thinking of ways and means to beat us.”
As a retired clinical psychologist, Clark Martin was well acquainted with traditional treatments for depression, but his own case seemed untreatable as he struggled throughchemotherapy and other grueling regimens for kidney cancer. Counseling seemed futile to him. So did the antidepressant pills he tried.
Nothing had any lasting effect until, at the age of 65, he had his first psychedelic experience. He left his home in Vancouver, Wash., to take part in an experiment at Johns Hopkins medical school involving psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient found in certain mushrooms.
Scientists are taking a new look at hallucinogens, which became taboo among regulators after enthusiasts like Timothy Leary promoted them in the 1960s with the slogan “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Now, using rigorous protocols and safeguards, scientists have won permission to study once again the drugs’ potential for treating mental problems and illuminating the nature of consciousness.
After taking the hallucinogen, Dr. Martin put on an eye mask and headphones, and lay on a couch listening to classical music as he contemplated the universe.
“All of a sudden, everything familiar started evaporating,” he recalled. “Imagine you fall off a boat out in the open ocean, and you turn around, and the boat is gone. And then the water’s gone. And then you’re gone.”
Today, more than a year later, Dr. Martin credits that six-hour experience with helping him overcome his depression and profoundly transforming his relationships with his daughter and friends. He ranks it among the most meaningful events of his life, which makes him a fairly typical member of a growing club of experimental subjects.
Researchers from around the world are gathering this week in San Jose, Calif., for the largest conference on psychedelic science held in the United States in four decades. They plan to discuss studies of psilocybin and other psychedelics for treating depression in cancer patients, obsessive-compulsive disorder, end-of-life anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction to drugs or alcohol.
The results so far are encouraging but also preliminary, and researchers caution against reading too much into these small-scale studies. They do not want to repeat the mistakes of the 1960s, when some scientists-turned-evangelists exaggerated their understanding of the drugs’ risks and benefits.
Because reactions to hallucinogens can vary so much depending on the setting, experimenters and review boards have developed guidelines to set up a comfortable environment with expert monitors in the room to deal with adverse reactions. They have established standard protocols so that the drugs’ effects can be gauged more accurately, and they have also directly observed the drugs’ effects by scanning the brains of people under the influence of hallucinogens.
Scientists are especially intrigued by the similarities between hallucinogenic experiences and the life-changing revelations reported throughout history by religious mystics and those who meditate. These similarities have been identified in neural imaging studies conducted by Swiss researchers and in experiments led by Roland Griffiths, a professor of behavioral biology at Johns Hopkins.
In one of Dr. Griffiths’s first studies, involving 36 people with no serious physical or emotional problems, he and colleagues found that psilocybin could induce what the experimental subjects described as a profound spiritual experience with lasting positive effects for most of them. None had had any previous experience with hallucinogens, and none were even sure what drug was being administered.
To make the experiment double-blind, neither the subjects nor the two experts monitoring them knew whether the subjects were receiving a placebo, psilocybin or another drug like Ritalin, nicotine, caffeine or an amphetamine. Although veterans of the ’60s psychedelic culture may have a hard time believing it, Dr. Griffiths said that even the monitors sometimes could not tell from the reactions whether the person had taken psilocybin or Ritalin.
The monitors sometimes had to console people through periods of anxiety, Dr. Griffiths said, but these were generally short-lived, and none of the people reported any serious negative effects. In a survey conducted two months later, the people who received psilocybin reported significantly more improvements in their general feelings and behavior than did the members of the control group.
The findings were repeated in another follow-up survey, taken 14 months after the experiment. At that point most of the psilocybin subjects once again expressed more satisfaction with their lives and rated the experience as one of the five most meaningful events of their lives.
Since that study, which was published in 2008, Dr. Griffiths and his colleagues have gone on to give psilocybin to people dealing with cancer and depression, like Dr. Martin, the retired psychologist from Vancouver. Dr. Martin’s experience is fairly typical, Dr. Griffiths said: an improved outlook on life after an experience in which the boundaries between the self and others disappear.
In interviews, Dr. Martin and other subjects described their egos and bodies vanishing as they felt part of some larger state of consciousness in which their personal worries and insecurities vanished. They found themselves reviewing past relationships with lovers and relatives with a new sense of empathy.
“It was a whole personality shift for me,” Dr. Martin said. “I wasn’t any longer attached to my performance and trying to control things. I could see that the really good things in life will happen if you just show up and share your natural enthusiasms with people. You have a feeling of attunement with other people.”
The subjects’ reports mirrored so closely the accounts of religious mystical experiences, Dr. Griffiths said, that it seems likely the human brain is wired to undergo these “unitive” experiences, perhaps because of some evolutionary advantage.
“This feeling that we’re all in it together may have benefited communities by encouraging reciprocal generosity,” Dr. Griffiths said. “On the other hand, universal love isn’t always adaptive, either.”
The work has been supported by nonprofit groups like the Heffter Research Institute and MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.
“There’s this coming together of science and spirituality,” said Rick Doblin, the executive director of MAPS. “We’re hoping that the mainstream and the psychedelic community can meet in the middle and avoid another culture war. Thanks to changes over the last 40 years in the social acceptance of the hospice movement and yoga and meditation, our culture is much more receptive now, and we’re showing that these drugs can provide benefits that current treatments can’t.”
Researchers are reporting preliminary success in using psilocybin to ease the anxiety of patients with terminal illnesses. Dr. Charles S. Grob, a psychiatrist who is involved in an experiment at U.C.L.A., describes it as “existential medicine” that helps dying people overcome fear, panic and depression.
“Under the influences of hallucinogens,” Dr. Grob writes, “individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states before the time of their actual physical demise, and return with a new perspective and profound acceptance of the life constant: change.”
Recovery of the bodies: Difficult and dangerousBetween 20 and 25 bodies, thought to be the victims of drug gang violence, have been found in an abandoned silver mine in southern Mexico, officials say.