MS-13 Raid and Nukes?

Not quite. For either one.

Today, I briefly wondered whether this:

Federal agents working with police departments across the country rounded up 582 immigrant street gang members in the last two weeks of July, including eight from Houston and South Texas.

Some of those captured during the ongoing "Operation Community Shield" are expected to be charged with violent crimes. But the majority are illegal immigrants who will be prepared for deportation to Central America and Mexico.

"For too long, these gangs have gone unchecked, flouting our laws and demonstrating a blatant disregard for public safety," Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said at a news conference in Washington Monday.

The operation in late July targeted more than 50 gangs, including some with links to Asia and the Caribbean as well as Latin America. An earlier phase of the operation started in February and specifically targeted a Salvadoran street gang with roots in Los Angeles known as Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13 [emphasis mine].

"Some of these guys are committing horrible crimes back in Guatemala, El Salvador or Honduras and then fleeing to the United States," said Luisa Deason, a spokeswoman with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Houston office.

Might have something to do with this.

Several reporters and top intelligence analysts -- people including me, Yossef Bodansky, the former terrorism guru to the U.S. Congress, Paul Williams, author of the upcoming book, "The Al Qaeda Connection," and others -- have been working quietly and independently for years on this issue of al-Qaida's acquisition and plans for nuclear weapons. What's happening is that this independent work has led to surprisingly similar conclusions -- that al-Qaida has nuclear weapons, probably many of them, and that some of them, according to a variety of sources, have already been smuggled into this country using our porous borders and with the help of criminal enterprises like the MS-13 gang [all emphasis mine].

"Holy Sheet!" I said, before I read the rest of the interview....

The FrontPage Magazine article goes on to say that the urban hit list is based on which cities have the highest Jewish populations and that one possible detonation date is the upcoming 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima this August 6.

This certainly sounds shocking. (The blog I learned about this from seemed to buy it.) But the interviewee, Joseph Farah, starts sounding progressively nuttier the further the interview goes, offering up a conspiracy theory that Michael Moore will wish he'd thought up first, but which Oliver Stone will get to use in his remake of Farenheit 9/11 instead.

FP: Why wouldn't the Bush administration secure our borders? What are the advantages of leaving them unsecured? Is it too politically incorrect to secure them?

Farah: I've asked this question myself over and over. It is the most frequently asked question I hear from my radio audience and from the thousands of emails I receive from readers. President Bush candidly said it was a matter of cheap labor a few months ago. I believe that is dead wrong. I don't believe there is anything cheap about this labor. It is bankrupting our health-care system. [No. Government involvement is doing that, aided by indigent immigrants. -- ed] It is taking jobs away from law-abiding American citizens. It is raising crime rates and it is threatening our national security.

No, I believe there is another more sinister reason. There is a master plan for global governance being plotted in meetings of groups like the Council on Foreign Relations. You can read its reports. And, I believe this open-borders policy is a direct result of those plans, which have been secretly adopted by our highest leaders, including President Bush.

Ummm. (Rolling my eyes.) Right. This guy's credibility quotient just dropped like a rock. This guy is just grabbing attention. Shame on him.

A little digging revealed that a similar news story also occurred as an older article in Newsmax. (And which, despite the fact that it is over two weeks old, I had not heard of it until today.) I have never heard of either Joseph Farah or Paul Williams. Quick googling turned up nothing very useful and there wasn't much about this on the blogs as far as I could tell when I checked. (But I was a little pressed for time at the moment.) Some rabid left-winger goes over the top in the opposite direction with a fisking, (of yet another article, from World Net Daily, dated July 18) but does make some interesting points.

There are nuclear weapons already hidden in America, but the terrorists will have to smuggle them into America [This happens in the above-mentioned interview as well. -- ed], but there are some suitcase nukes already here, but just the news sent George Bush [Whom Farah fingers above as being involved in the conspiracy. -- ed] through the roof, but Farah and Williams' little fable goes around and around in the strangest convoluted circles. So why all of the smoke? Is this farce just intended to sell Williams’ book? Are Farah and his Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin in for a piece of the book action? Is outsourcing U.S. intelligence to the famously effective Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin service the wave of the future? Are we to have a future?

Despite my political differences with this guy, methinks he strikes the right tone on Farah and Williams, at least. (And it's guys like Farah and Williams who play into his hands when he trivializes the current war.)

But back to the MS-13 story for a moment. Note two disturbing facts about the gang sweep, which I'd considered blogging earlier anyway. (1) MS-13 has long been suspected of being interested in smuggling terrorists. (2) Our government's plan to "protect" us from these smugglers involves, of all things, deporting them, even though, "Of the 14 presumed gang members captured in Houston and South Texas since the operation began, three had been previously deported."

My verdicts: (1) The nuke story, in the context of the later part of the interview, the recent release of Williams's book , and the failure of any major media -- or blogger -- to pick up the story, screams "book promotion!" (2) Merely deporting members of MS-13 is ridiculously inexcusable. As are six-party talks. With government "action" like this, al Qaeda doesn't need a byzantine nuclear conspiracy. Time will do.

God bless you, Mr. Farah -- and God bless us all.

-- CAV