Borderline Psychosis- The Often Overlooked Northern Border Edition: GAO- Only 32 miles of Canadian Border 'Secure'; Smugglers Pipeline in Northern NY

Looking north from the Whitetail, MT border crossing- Mike Stebelton/ Daniels County Leader

A study released in February indicates that just over 32 miles of the nearly 4,000 mile US/Canadian border is considered 'secure' according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) states the threat of terrorism from the northern border is higher than from the southern Mexico border, given the large expanse of area with limited law enforcement coverage. DHS reports networks of illicit criminal activity and smuggling of drugs, currency, people, and weapons across the northern border.

The report focuses on whether federal agencies are working together to secure the vast stretches of the border owned by the federal government.

The study points out critical gaps in security along the U.S.-Canadian border that limit the ability of Customs and Border Protection to fully secure the border—gaps including a lack of interoperable communications systems and limited sharing of intelligence and information between local and federal officials.

U.S. Customs head Alan Bersin told a US Senate Subcommittee earlier this month that even though the Canadian border sees far fewer arrests than the US/Mexican border, the Canadian border is considered a 'more significant threat' by Customs and DHS.

Although certainly not marred by the bloody narco-violence like Mexico, there are concerns that radical Islamists would attempt to enter the USA through Canada to carry out attacks. In December 1999, an Algerian national was arrested at Port Angeles, WA after entering the country from Victoria, BC when a search of his vehicle turned up plastic bags filled with explosives and some homemade timing devices.

MICHIGAN: Drug traffickers flying in private aircraft have taken to making their drops at small, rural and sometimes unstaffed airports along some border states.

The bust by federal agents didn't happen on the southwestern border. It was in Michigan's rural Thumb region next to a soybean field. The remote airport here in Sandusky offers a smooth runway at any hour to anyone who needs it, a perfect landing spot for brazen drug smugglers who can cross the Great Lakes from Canada in minutes.

Beefed-up enforcement along the Mexican border has made smuggling more challenging for criminal cartels using the major southern routes, but drugs continue to flow across the porous northern border through airstrips like this one as officials look for new ways to fight back.

Tracking rogue planes at low altitude with their transponders off is “like trying to pick a needle out of a haystack,” said John Beutlich of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, who oversees air and marine operations from Washington state to Maine.

“Shoot, we're just a big cherry to pick and didn't realize it,” said Joe Allen, manager of the Sandusky airport, 145 kilometres northeast of Detroit.

He installed a fence to keep cars from meeting planes at the runway, but the property is not staffed at night. Border agents could offer just two signs asking people to call an 800 number if they see something unusual.

Canada is a significant source of high-quality marijuana and the amphetamine Ecstasy. More than 2 million doses of Ecstasy were seized on the northern border in 2009 compared to just 312,000 in 2004, the Drug Enforcement Administration said, offering a snapshot of what's popular and what gets confiscated.

Most shipments come by road. But the 2009 flight from Ontario to Michigan, the subject of a recent federal trial, provided insight into drug operations that use small planes. Officials don't know how frequent such flights are but consider the vulnerability alarming.

Matthew Moody and nephew Jesse Rusenstrom, both from Amherstburg, Ontario, were the couriers captured that night in Sandusky. Their job was to enter the country through Detroit, meet the Canadian plane and deliver the drugs to others in the U.S. They also put 27 kilograms of cocaine worth more than $500,000 on the return flight to Guelph, Ontario.

Matthew Moody and nephew Jesse Rusenstrom, both from Amherstburg, Ontario, were the couriers captured that night in Sandusky. Their job was to enter the country through Detroit, meet the Canadian plane and deliver the drugs to others in the U.S. [In addition to the 79kg of pot and 400,000 ecstacy pills they had flown in and were apprehended with] they also put 27 kilograms of cocaine worth more than $500,000 on the return flight to Guelph, Ontario.

It was just one in a series of shipments. Mr. Rusenstrom said he met the drug plane at least 10 times at other tiny airports in the Thumb region — Marlette, Ray, Lapeer — as well as in Greenville in western Michigan and an airport in Pennsylvania. The pilot activated runway lights from the cockpit, a standard practice in aviation.

Mr. Rusenstrom, testifying at the trial of an accomplice, Robert “Romeo” D'Leone, said hundreds of airports were studied on Google Maps.

“We would go around looking for airports, seeing if there was fences or cameras,” the 21-year-old told jurors.

Mr. D'Leone, who lives in the Toronto area, stopped his trial and pleaded guilty on April 14. Mr. Rusenstrom and Mr. Moody co-operated, pleaded guilty and were recently sentenced to time served in custody. The U.S. still wants to extradite four others in Ontario who are accused of major roles, including the pilot.

Some jurors were alarmed by the revelations during the D'Leone trial.

“You always hear Homeland Security has an eye on everything. It's surprising that airfields aren't manned 24 hours,” Robert Simpson, 47, told The Associated Press.

The Sandusky airport has spent $2,000 on cameras and hopes to install more.
“We're outside radar,” Mr. Allen, the manager, said, running his finger over a map of Michigan's Thumb. “You can come and go as you please. You don't even have to file a flight plan.”

The minimal help he received from border authorities — warning signs — had to be fixed before he posted them: They referred to suspicious boats, not planes.

[What is it with Homeland Security and thinking signs are the answer!?- NANESB!]

NEW YORK: Another locale popular with smugglers and organized crime on both sides of the border is the Akwesasne Indian Reservation just outside of , which straddles the borders between New York State, Quebec and Ontario along the St Lawrence River.

The area's unique geography and patchwork of jurisdictions on both sides of the border has had the attention of smugglers and bootleggers since Prohibition. In more recent years, local residents will either run contraband across the border themselves- either in snowmobiles during wintertime or motorboats when the St Lawrence is navigable- or charge landing fees to smugglers for using their property.

Illegal immigrants, hydroponic marijuana and Ecstasy are usually smuggled into the USA from the Canadian side while illegal firearms, cocaine and untaxed tobacco or alcohol make their way north. Some estimates say that 20% of Canadian grown marijuana smuggled into the USA moves through the Akwesasne/St Regis reservation.

While there are some cigarette factories on the US side of the reservation, the sale of tax free cigarettes on reservation stores has caught the attention of groups like the 'Ndrangheta, Hells Angels and Bulgarian Mafia who will often purchase cigarettes in bulk then turn around and sell the untaxed cigarettes in high tax municipalities like New York City, Montreal or Toronto.

Terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah and the Real IRA have also raised funds through trafficking untaxed cigarettes in the last decade.

Civil War Quiz Now Closed

Thanks to those who participated.

Although Williamsport, PA sounds like the most logical answer (45% of you guessed that), the real answer is St. Albans, VT.

Staying in a local hotel and checking in two or three at a time in the days leading up to what's known as the St. Albans Raid, Confederate Lt Bennett H. Young and 20 Confederate Cavalrymen (identifying themselves as sportsmen from Canada), the men struck on the afternoon of October 19, 1864. While eight or nine Confederate soldiers rounded up the townspeople and held them at gunpoint in the town common, Young and his men proceeded to rob the town's three banks before stealing horses from the townspeople and fleeing back across the Canadian border with his men and with more than $200,000. They intended to torch the village as well, but the incendiary devices that Young's men failed to go off properly, and only a woodshed was burnt down that day.

Young- a former Union POW- had managed to escape to neutral Canada and suggested the raid as a means of sowing panic and diverting resources among the Union, linking up with other Confederate escapees to carry out the raid. Most of the men were arrested in Montreal shortly after the raid, but at the time the Canadian courts decided the men were belligerents in a war they were officially neutral in and would not be extradited to the Union- although some $80,000 found on the men at the time of their arrest was ordered returned to St Albans.

Some 36% of you correctly guessed St Albans, so assuming you didn't look it up on Google or Wikipedia, congratulations! You really know your Civil War (and New England) history!

Quebec Women's Group: Canadian Soldiers 'Cannon Fodder'

Isn't that something? Apparently they don't have their own Cindy Sheehan up there, so anti-war and anti-military groups have to make up their own.

MONTREAL— A feminist coalition in Quebec has come under fire for placing on YouTube an anti-war video that compares military recruits to “cannon fodder.”

It shows an actress playing the part of a grieving mother. As she fills a military-issue bag with her children’s personal belongings, including a rifle, she explains that her eldest son has died in Afghanistan and, as she places a red, flowery bra in the bag, that her youngest daughter has just been recruited in school.

“People say, ‘Make love not war,’” the actress begins. “But you should say, ‘Make love for war,’ because you need a lot of children to make an army.”

“If I’d known that in giving birth I was going to supply cannon fodder,” she continues, “I might not have had kids.”

When challenged by real-life mothers of Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan, the Quebec-based group was initially defiant before issuing a tepid non-apology apology and editing the video.

“I can understand why some women and mothers of military officers felt hurt but it was never and still not our intention to question them or the role of their children,” Conradi said. “What we’re trying to do is make the government responsive to a critique.”

There are different perspectives that need to be heard, Conradi reasoned. “What we’re saying is that the army is using our children. We’re not saying that women shouldn’t have had those children.”

For Céline Lizotte, these words strike at the heart of what it means to be a mother, and particularly the mother of a soldier.

Lizotte’s son, Corporal Jonathan Couturier, died in September, 2009 after his vehicle hit a roadside bomb in the Panjwaii district near Kandahar, Afghanistan. He was 23.

“It’s a huge lack of respect, an insult,” Lizotte said in an interview. “I don’t consider my son as cannon fodder. What were they looking to get across with this video? It has nothing to do with feminists.”

Lizotte, who is demanding the video be removed from the web, said you can’t criticize the government by “going after someone’s grief.”

No mother can know what her child will grow up to be, she added. “It’s the career my son chose and it’s the career I respect.”

This story was actually brought to my attention on another news outlet's website, but the sheer, willful idiocy and malice directed at some of these military mothers in the comments section was staggering....starting with a basic reading comprehension problem (many commenters in favor of the group failed to realize the woman in the video was an actress) and followed up with a selective application of Freedom of Expression- i.e. the Quebecois women's group was within their rights to make the video, but the military families had no business objecting to it.