Mexico Trucker Online

The US Department of Justice,National Drug Intelligence Centerhas published the document NDIC Accomplishments, Fiscal Year 2007 which some are suggesting shows ties between Mexican drug cartels and Islamic terrorist groups.

The site in question, and I am not going to give them the pleasure of a link to this site reports:

“Information from intelligence and investigations on narcoterrorism that we have carried out identifies ties between Mexican narcotics traffickers, [and] those of the Philippines and Colombia, with elements belonging to foreign organizations designated as terrorists by the [U.S.] Department of State,” the NDIC document indicates. Based on information from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the NDIC document emphasized: “The results of 74 investigations of narcoterrorism that have been carried out by the Special Operations Division of the DEA document that Islamic groups present on the common border of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay launder money, sell arms and traffic drugs of the main Mexican criminal organizations.”

Scares you doesn’t it? It is supposed to. It would scare me also if I didn’t have a brain and the ability to use it.

What does the intelligence report actually say that was subverted to promote this nativist point of view and scare us all into thinking the southern border is a hotbed of Terrorist activity?

In FY2007, the Doc Ex Branch supported several drug-terrorism investigations including a Doc Ex mission that identified links between southern Philippines drug traffickers and elements of designated foreign terrorist organizations, namely the Abu Sayyaf Group and Jamayah Islamiyah.

Hmm, last time I looked, we did not share a border, nor does Mexico with the Phillipines. Of course I don’t have the benefit of rural Arkansas home schooling so I could be wrong.

But it goes on to explain in further detail.

Doc Ex Branch has supported another drug-terror investigation aimed at disrupting and dismantling five Arab Tri-Border Area (TBA) drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) that operate in Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay as well as in surrounding areas and in Europe and the Middle East. All five groups have been linked to Islamic Radical Groups.

There again, there is mention of Islamic or Arab drug trafficking organizations operating in countries far removed from Mexico and the United States. It seems they conduct their drug trade with Europe and their own countries. How interesting.

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MEXICO CITY: A Mexican judge on Thursday recommended that a reputed leader of a Tijuana-based drug cartel not be extradited to the United States, after his defense argued he should not be tried twice on the same charges.

The judge made the recommendation to Mexico’s Foreign Relations Department, which has overseen an increasing number of extraditions in recent years.

While the opinion in the case of accused drug lord Benjamin Arellano Felix is not binding, the government is required to take such rulings into account. The department did not comment.

Arellano Felix was arrested in 2002 and has already been sentenced to 22 years in prison in Mexico on drug-trafficking and organized-crime charges. He faces indictments on similar charges in the United States. He also has been sentenced to more than five years for weapons possession.

Lawyer Americo Delgado, who represented Arellano Felix, said the judge’s ruling was based on the legal precept that suspects should not be tried twice on the same charge.

Mexico was once reticent to extradite its citizens to the U.S., but has recently stepped up the pace of extraditions. Some convicted drug lords have reportedly continued to run their gangs from behind bars in Mexico, something that presumably would be harder to do from U.S. prisons.

U.S. State Department officials said Mexico extradited 73 suspects to the U.S. in 2007. The law allows defendants to appeal their extraditions in court.

The Arellano Felix cartel emerged as a drug-trafficking powerhouse in the 1980s in Tijuana, across the border from San Diego, California. Operated by several brothers of the same name, the cartel recruited dozens of police into its ranks and paid millions of dollars in bribes to law enforcement and military personnel.

One of the brothers, Francisco Javier Arellano Felix, was sentenced to life in prison in the U.S. in November on charges that he led the cartel. Another brother, Ramon Arellano Felix, was killed in a shootout with Mexican police in February 2002.