Canadian Border Terrorists

http://www.futureofcapitalism.com/2010/10/canadian-border-terrorists

From a New York Times editorial about Sharron Angle, the Republican running against Senator Harry Reid:

In a particularly preposterous bit of spin, she told a group of Hispanic students a few days ago, when she did not realize she was being recorded, that those people were not necessarily Hispanic. They might have been coming through the Canadian border, she said, calling it "the most porous border that we have" and adding that that is "where the terrorists came through." (The Canadian ambassador immediately protested this nonsense.)

Nonsense? From a PBS Frontline timeline on Ahmed Ressam's "Millennium Plot":

Ressam says that on the morning of Dec. 14, he called Meskini and told him he would be in Seattle that evening. That afternoon, he took a ferry from Victoria, B.C., to Port Angeles, Wash., with more than 100 pounds of explosives stashed in the wheelbed of the trunk of his rental car. His accomplice, Dahoumane, did not travel with him.

At Victoria, U.S. immigration pre-clearance agents were mildly suspicious of Ressam. They made him open his trunk, but saw nothing. He presented his fake Canadian passport, and the computer check turned up no previous convictions or warrants in the name of Benni Noris. Ressam drove his rental car, with its concealed bomb, onto the ferry heading for Washington state. Upon his arrival at Port Angeles, a U.S. customs agent became suspicious of his hesitant answers to her questions, and she asked for identification. Agents began searching the car. As they discovered the explosive materials -- which they at first took to be drugs -- in the trunk of the car, Ressam tried to run away. He was caught and arrested.

Now, one could argue that because Ressam was eventually caught and arrested, Ms. Angle is wrong to say that the Canadian border was where the terrorists "came through." But he had gone back and forth between America and Canada before the time he was caught. And he was caught in America, not in Canada, so technically you could say that he did get through.

by Ira Stoll  |  Oct 21, 2010 at 11:54 am Related Topics:  Immigration, Politics receive the latest by email: subscribe to the free futureofcapitalism.com mailing list