by William F. Jasper The New American, October 3, 2005 Issue
The United States of America is being abolished. Piecemeal. Before our very eyes. By our own elected officials — under the guidance and direction of unelected elites. Incredible? Certainly. But, unfortunately, true nonetheless.
For decades, federal officials have ignored the pleas of American citizens to secure our borders against an immense, ongoing migration invasion that includes not only millions of “common variety” illegal aliens, but also drug traffickers, terrorists, and other violent criminals. Now, under the pretense of providing security, the Bush administration is adopting an outrageous policy that, in effect, does away with our borders with Mexico and Canada altogether. Regular readers of THE NEW AMERICAN know that this magazine has been warning that this direct assault on our nationhood was coming, that it is part and parcel of the NAFTA-CAFTA-FTAA process.
However, almost a million Americans received their first notice of this fast-looming threat from a startling special report on CNN. On June 9, CNN anchorman Lou Dobbs began his evening broadcast with this provocative announcement: “Good evening, everybody. Tonight, an astonishing proposal to expand our borders to incorporate Mexico and Canada and simultaneously further diminish U.S. sovereignty. Have our political elites gone mad?”
Mr. Dobbs, who has been virtually the lone voice in the Establishment media cartel opposing the bipartisan immigration and trade policies that are destroying our borders and national sovereignty, then noted:
Border security is arguably the critical issue in this country’s fight against radical Islamist terrorism. But our borders remain porous. So porous that three million illegal aliens entered this country last year, nearly all of them from Mexico. Now, incredibly, a panel sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations wants the United States to focus not on the defense of our own borders, but rather create what effectively would be a common border that includes Mexico and Canada.
Dobbs then switched to CNN correspondent Christine Romans in Washington, D.C., who reported: “On Capitol Hill, testimony calling for Americans to start thinking like citizens of North America and treat the U.S., Mexico and Canada like one big country.” Romans then showed brief excerpts of congressional testimony by Professor Robert Pastor, one of the six co-chairmen of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Task Force on North America. “The best way to secure the United States today is not at our two borders with Mexico and Canada but at the borders of North America as a whole,” Pastor told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “What we hope to accomplish by 2010,” Pastor continued, “is a common external tariff which will mean that goods can move easily across the border. We want a common security perimeter around all of North America, so as to ease the travel of people within North America.”
Pastor’s testimony encapsulated the proposals put forward in the CFR Task Force report, entitled Building a North American Community. As CNN’s Christine Romans noted, the CFR program “envisions a common border around the U.S., Mexico and Canada in just five years, a border pass for residents of the three countries, and a freer flow of goods and people.” Romans went on to report: “Buried in 49 pages of recommendations from the task force, the brief mention, ‘We must maintain respect for each other’s sovereignty.’ But security experts say folding Mexico and Canada into the U.S. is a grave breach of that sovereignty.”
The CNN program further noted that the CFR Task Force also called for:
• “military and law enforcement cooperation between all three countries”;
• “an exchange of personnel that bring Canadians and Mexicans into the Department of Homeland Security”; and
• “temporary migrant worker programs expanded with full mobility of labor between the three countries in the next five years.”
That portion of the CNN broadcast concluded with the following exchange between Christine Romans and Lou Dobbs.
Romans: “The idea here is to make North America more like the European Union....”
Dobbs: “Americans must think that our political and academic elites have gone utterly mad at a time when three-and-a-half years, approaching four years after September 11, we still don’t have border security. And this group of elites is talking about not defending our borders, finally, but rather creating new ones. It’s astonishing.”
Romans: “The theory here is that we are stronger together, three countries in one, rather than alone.”
Dobbs: “Well, it’s a — it’s a mind-boggling concept....”
Not Just a “Concept”
Mind-boggling, yes. Unfortunately, this “utterly mad” proposal is not merely a “concept” in the woolly minds of political and academic elites; it has already become official U.S. policy!
On March 23, 2005, President Bush convened a special summit in Waco, Texas, with Mexican President Vicente Fox and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin. The three amigos met at Baylor University to call for a “Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America” before retiring to the president’s ranch in Crawford. The trio of leaders instructed their respective cabinet officials to form a dozen working groups and to report back within 90 days with concrete proposals to implement the new “partnership.”
On June 27, cabinet ministers of the three countries issued their joint report, entitled Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America. Signing the report for the United States were Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff and Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez. They and their counterparts from Mexico and Canada state in their introduction to the report:
We recognize that this Partnership is designed to be a dynamic, permanent process and that the attached work plans are but a first step. We know that after today, the real work begins. We will now need to transform the ideas into reality and the initiatives into prosperity and security.
The key phrase here, “dynamic, permanent process,” should set off alarm bells. Like NAFTA and CAFTA, to which it is intimately tied, this new “partnership” is intended to be an ongoing, constantly evolving process to bring about the economic, political, and social “integration” and “convergence” of the three nation states into a supranational regional system of governance that will then be merged into a larger regional system for the entire hemisphere — which includes the proposed FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas). It is this dangerous, subversive process that should command every American’s immediate serious attention.
On July 27, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger F. Noriega told a House Subcommittee concerning the new partnership: “Thus far, we have identified over 300 initiatives spread over twenty trilateral [meaning U.S., Canada, and Mexico] working groups on which the three countries will collaborate.” What is being concocted in the hundreds of “initiatives” underway by these “working groups”? We don’t know, and that’s a major part of the problem. They have only revealed a very small part of their program thus far. The new “partnership” comes replete with pledges of “transparency.” That’s supposed to mean that all dealings will be above board and open and visible to the public. We hear a lot about transparency at the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, NAFTA, and other international forums. But there’s an old saying that applies here: “The more he talked of honor, the faster we counted our spoons.” So it is with the international elites who craft the global and regional agreements: the more they talk of transparency, the more you know they are covering up.
The so-called Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP)* was launched by the newly elected Presidents George Bush and Vicente Fox in 2001 as the “Partnership for Prosperity.” (There’s no mention of Security in the original project.) President Fox was pushing for more U.S. financial aid, amnesty, and legalization for Mexicans already in the U.S. illegally, and easier access for more Mexican “guest workers” into the United States. Fox said he wanted “as many rights as possible, for as many Mexican immigrants as possible, as soon as possible.” In a June 21, 2001 interview, he declared, “Those Mexicans that are working in the United States should be considered legally working in the United States.” Mexico’s foreign minister, Jorge Castañeda, echoing Fox’s demands for legalization and more guest workers, told reporters, “It’s the whole enchilada or nothing.”
President Bush caused a significant national uproar (even a revolt among many of the GOP Bush faithful) by his willingness to buy almost the “whole enchilada.” In comments at a White House lawn press conference on September 6, 2001, marking the end of President Fox’s visit to the U.S., President Bush announced his commitment to a more expansive immigration policy that would “match a willing [U.S.] employer with a willing [Mexican] employee.” Which, of course, is a prescription for virtually unlimited migration of Mexican workers into the U.S. That was just five days before the 9/11 terror attacks.
The Gulliver Strategy
For several months prior to the September 2001 Fox-Bush meeting, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Foreign Minister Castañeda had been co-chairing a binational Migration Working Group aimed at changing U.S. border policies. At a November 22, 2002 press conference in Mexico City, Secretary Powell praised Castañeda and declared: “In Mexico, the Bush administration sees much more than a neighbor. We see a partner.... Our partnership rests on common values, on trust, on honesty.”
However, at the very same time that Secretary Powell was extolling the wonders of our new “partnership,” Senor Castañeda was presenting a vivid contrasting image. “I like very much the metaphor of Gulliver, of ensnarling the giant,” Castañeda told Mexican journalists in a November 2002 interview. “Tying it up, with nails, with thread, with 20,000 nets that bog it down: these nets being norms, principles, resolutions, agreements, and bilateral, regional and international covenants.”
That sounds like a rather adversarial partnership, not one based “on common values, on trust, on honesty.” Was Team Bush/Powell unaware of this less-than-neighborly attitude on the part of Team Fox/Castañeda? Were they out-foxed by Fox/Castañeda? Not at all; they were participating in a giant charade with Fox/Castañeda to out-fox the American people. It was a charade completely scripted by the brain trust at Pratt House, the New York headquarters of the Council on Foreign Relations. Secretary Powell is a longtime Insider at the CFR, as are many other members of the Bush administration (including Powell’s successor, Condoleezza Rice). Señor Castañeda, while not a CFR member, has been nevertheless a favorite guest at Pratt House for more than two decades. He has been the featured speaker at CFR programs, has written articles for the CFR’s journal Foreign Affairs, and has received adulatory reviews for his books by CFR reviewers. And this, despite the fact that Castañeda, a longtime radical intellectual leader in Mexico’s Communist Party, has participated in the annual terrorist convention known as the Sao Paulo Forum, and continues to admire Communist revolutionary Che Guevarra!
Perhaps most important, as it pertains to this joint charade, is the fact that Castañeda has been a very close partner with Robert Pastor, the main author of the CFR’s blueprint for a North American Community. Pastor, a longtime Marxist associated with the radical Institute for Policy Studies (virtually a front for the Soviet KGB), even coauthored a book on U.S.-Mexico relations with Castañeda.
Castañeda, who stepped down as Fox’s foreign minister and took a professorship at New York University, is now running for president in Mexico’s 2006 elections. This past July 12, Castañeda appeared as an expert witness at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on border security. “No border security is possible without Mexican cooperation,” declared Castañeda. “There can be no future cooperation beyond what already exists without some form of immigration package.” He warned that border security is “very, very sensitive” to Mexicans. Any cooperation, he said, would have to be purchased with more U.S. liberalization of our immigration policies. To some, that sounds more like extortion than cooperation, but to the Bush administration and the bipartisan break-down-the-borders lobby in Congress, it passes for harmonious “partnering.”
The senators at the hearing did not challenge Castañeda or take him to task for his belligerent stance on this important security issue. Indeed, they seem to be primarily concerned with pushing through as much of the Fox/Castañeda program as their constituents will tolerate. They are considering two major competing bills now, S. 1033 by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), and S. 1438 by Sens. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) and Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.). Both bills pretend to provide meaningful “reform” to enhance border security, but both of them are designed to propel North American “integration” forward by making our borders easier to cross, legalizing millions of illegal aliens already here, and opening the door for millions more “guest workers.” At the same time, both bills would dramatically increase federal surveillance and intrusion into the lives of American citizens.
Much of this appears to be already underway without congressional approval, under the Security and Prosperity Partnership. The SPP joint statement mentioned previously, for instance, states: “We will test technology and make recommendations, over the next 12 months, to enhance the use of biometrics in screening travelers … with a view to developing compatible biometric border and immigration systems.” The statement’s section on “Safer, Faster and More Efficient Border Crossings,” like so much of the administration’s immigration program, is clearly more focused on faster border crossings, not stronger border security.
Premeditated Merger
The administration has not come right out and endorsed the merger of U.S. and Mexican immigration, military, and law enforcement personnel, as recommended by the CFR’s Task Force report, but it is headed in that direction, noting that “increased economic integration and security cooperation will further a unique and strong North American relationship.” In fact, it is becoming more and more apparent that the administration’s Security and Prosperity Partnership is actually an official adaptation of the CFR’s Building a North American Community.
The Task Force blueprint was the culmination of several years of specific efforts to launch a concrete program aimed at the physical merger of the U.S. with other nations in the hemisphere. As we’ve noted, one of the principal authors of that CFR proposal is Dr. Robert Pastor. More than a year before the Waco summit, the CFR publicly floated the idea with an important article by Pastor entitled, “North America’s Second Decade,” in the January/February 2004 issue of its flagship journal, Foreign Affairs.
“NAFTA was merely the first draft of an economic constitution for North America,” Pastor explained to the elite in-the-know readership of the journal. The CFR spinmeisters repeatedly insisted for over a decade that NAFTA was merely a “trade agreement.” Now they are being a bit more candid: NAFTA was merely the first draft of an ongoing “dynamic, permanent process.” The border demolition is part of the next draft, which is intended to deal with political and security issues.
“Overcoming the tension between security and trade,” said Pastor, “requires a bolder approach to continental integration.” So he boldly proposed, among other things, “a North American customs union with a common external tariff (CET), which would significantly reduce border inspections.” (Emphasis added.) In addition, he says, the Department of Homeland Security “should expand its mission” to cover the entire continent “by incorporating Mexican and Canadian perspectives and personnel into its design and operation.”
Pastor opines that, properly managed, the post-9/11 “security fears would serve as a catalyst for deeper integration.” “That would require new structures,” he says, “to assure mutual security.” It would also require, he notes, “a redefinition of security that puts the United States, Mexico, and Canada inside a continental perimeter.”
He means a very radical redefinition of security, to say the least. The claim by Pastor and the CFR claque that stretching our already dangerously porous borders to include two additional huge countries — both of which are already fraught with their own serious security problems — is so far beyond ludicrous that it can only be explained as openly fraudulent. That the so-called “wise men” of the CFR could actually believe their own propaganda in this case is preposterous.
After all, as CNN’s Lou Dobbs reported on the same June 9 broadcast, Mexico is descending ever more rapidly into a maelstrom of chaos, corruption, and open warfare, as rival drug cartels, police, the military, and government officials (many of whom are in the pockets of the narco-terrorists) battle it out.
Mexico is notorious for official corruption — police, military, and elected and appointed officials — from top to bottom. In 1997, it may be recalled, Mexico’s top official in its War on Drugs, Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, was arrested for working with one of the top drug cartels! However, evidence that came out during the course of his trial pointed to many other top military, police, and federal officials as accomplices as well.
More than 2,000 Mexican police officers are under investigation for drug-related corruption, and more than 700 officers have been charged with serious offenses ranging from kidnapping and murder to taking bribes from the drug cartels. Mexico, with its close diplomatic ties to Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, has also long been a friendly hangout for many revolutionary terrorist organizations.
One needn’t be a Latin American expert (like Dr. Pastor) to realize the absurdity of trying to make America more secure by entrusting our homeland security in part to Mexican law enforcement, and by incorporating all of Mexico’s horrendous problems inside an unconstitutional and amorphous “common perimeter.”
Canada also presents us with serious security considerations. Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) director Ward Elcock has testified to Parliament that more than 50 terrorist organizations — representing Middle East, Tamil, Sikh, Latin American, and Irish terrorists — are active in Canada. CSIS spokesman Dan Lambert has stated that “with the exception of the United States, there are more terrorist groups active in Canada than perhaps any other country in the world.”
All considered, the so-called Security and Prosperity Partnership threatens our very survival as a free nation. Congress must reject it — totally. But that will only happen if Congress hears an undeniable roar of outrage from us, the American people.
* Details about the Security and Prosperity Partnership can be found at www.spp.gov.
The United States of America is being abolished. Piecemeal. Before our very eyes. By our own elected officials — under the guidance and direction of unelected elites. Incredible? Certainly. But, unfortunately, true nonetheless.
For decades, federal officials have ignored the pleas of American citizens to secure our borders against an immense, ongoing migration invasion that includes not only millions of “common variety” illegal aliens, but also drug traffickers, terrorists, and other violent criminals. Now, under the pretense of providing security, the Bush administration is adopting an outrageous policy that, in effect, does away with our borders with Mexico and Canada altogether. Regular readers of THE NEW AMERICAN know that this magazine has been warning that this direct assault on our nationhood was coming, that it is part and parcel of the NAFTA-CAFTA-FTAA process.
However, almost a million Americans received their first notice of this fast-looming threat from a startling special report on CNN. On June 9, CNN anchorman Lou Dobbs began his evening broadcast with this provocative announcement: “Good evening, everybody. Tonight, an astonishing proposal to expand our borders to incorporate Mexico and Canada and simultaneously further diminish U.S. sovereignty. Have our political elites gone mad?”
Mr. Dobbs, who has been virtually the lone voice in the Establishment media cartel opposing the bipartisan immigration and trade policies that are destroying our borders and national sovereignty, then noted:
Border security is arguably the critical issue in this country’s fight against radical Islamist terrorism. But our borders remain porous. So porous that three million illegal aliens entered this country last year, nearly all of them from Mexico. Now, incredibly, a panel sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations wants the United States to focus not on the defense of our own borders, but rather create what effectively would be a common border that includes Mexico and Canada.
Dobbs then switched to CNN correspondent Christine Romans in Washington, D.C., who reported: “On Capitol Hill, testimony calling for Americans to start thinking like citizens of North America and treat the U.S., Mexico and Canada like one big country.” Romans then showed brief excerpts of congressional testimony by Professor Robert Pastor, one of the six co-chairmen of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Task Force on North America. “The best way to secure the United States today is not at our two borders with Mexico and Canada but at the borders of North America as a whole,” Pastor told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “What we hope to accomplish by 2010,” Pastor continued, “is a common external tariff which will mean that goods can move easily across the border. We want a common security perimeter around all of North America, so as to ease the travel of people within North America.”
Pastor’s testimony encapsulated the proposals put forward in the CFR Task Force report, entitled Building a North American Community. As CNN’s Christine Romans noted, the CFR program “envisions a common border around the U.S., Mexico and Canada in just five years, a border pass for residents of the three countries, and a freer flow of goods and people.” Romans went on to report: “Buried in 49 pages of recommendations from the task force, the brief mention, ‘We must maintain respect for each other’s sovereignty.’ But security experts say folding Mexico and Canada into the U.S. is a grave breach of that sovereignty.”
The CNN program further noted that the CFR Task Force also called for:
• “military and law enforcement cooperation between all three countries”;
• “an exchange of personnel that bring Canadians and Mexicans into the Department of Homeland Security”; and
• “temporary migrant worker programs expanded with full mobility of labor between the three countries in the next five years.”
That portion of the CNN broadcast concluded with the following exchange between Christine Romans and Lou Dobbs.
Romans: “The idea here is to make North America more like the European Union....”
Dobbs: “Americans must think that our political and academic elites have gone utterly mad at a time when three-and-a-half years, approaching four years after September 11, we still don’t have border security. And this group of elites is talking about not defending our borders, finally, but rather creating new ones. It’s astonishing.”
Romans: “The theory here is that we are stronger together, three countries in one, rather than alone.”
Dobbs: “Well, it’s a — it’s a mind-boggling concept....”
Not Just a “Concept”
Mind-boggling, yes. Unfortunately, this “utterly mad” proposal is not merely a “concept” in the woolly minds of political and academic elites; it has already become official U.S. policy!
On March 23, 2005, President Bush convened a special summit in Waco, Texas, with Mexican President Vicente Fox and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin. The three amigos met at Baylor University to call for a “Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America” before retiring to the president’s ranch in Crawford. The trio of leaders instructed their respective cabinet officials to form a dozen working groups and to report back within 90 days with concrete proposals to implement the new “partnership.”
On June 27, cabinet ministers of the three countries issued their joint report, entitled Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America. Signing the report for the United States were Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff and Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez. They and their counterparts from Mexico and Canada state in their introduction to the report:
We recognize that this Partnership is designed to be a dynamic, permanent process and that the attached work plans are but a first step. We know that after today, the real work begins. We will now need to transform the ideas into reality and the initiatives into prosperity and security.
The key phrase here, “dynamic, permanent process,” should set off alarm bells. Like NAFTA and CAFTA, to which it is intimately tied, this new “partnership” is intended to be an ongoing, constantly evolving process to bring about the economic, political, and social “integration” and “convergence” of the three nation states into a supranational regional system of governance that will then be merged into a larger regional system for the entire hemisphere — which includes the proposed FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas). It is this dangerous, subversive process that should command every American’s immediate serious attention.
On July 27, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger F. Noriega told a House Subcommittee concerning the new partnership: “Thus far, we have identified over 300 initiatives spread over twenty trilateral [meaning U.S., Canada, and Mexico] working groups on which the three countries will collaborate.” What is being concocted in the hundreds of “initiatives” underway by these “working groups”? We don’t know, and that’s a major part of the problem. They have only revealed a very small part of their program thus far. The new “partnership” comes replete with pledges of “transparency.” That’s supposed to mean that all dealings will be above board and open and visible to the public. We hear a lot about transparency at the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, NAFTA, and other international forums. But there’s an old saying that applies here: “The more he talked of honor, the faster we counted our spoons.” So it is with the international elites who craft the global and regional agreements: the more they talk of transparency, the more you know they are covering up.
The so-called Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP)* was launched by the newly elected Presidents George Bush and Vicente Fox in 2001 as the “Partnership for Prosperity.” (There’s no mention of Security in the original project.) President Fox was pushing for more U.S. financial aid, amnesty, and legalization for Mexicans already in the U.S. illegally, and easier access for more Mexican “guest workers” into the United States. Fox said he wanted “as many rights as possible, for as many Mexican immigrants as possible, as soon as possible.” In a June 21, 2001 interview, he declared, “Those Mexicans that are working in the United States should be considered legally working in the United States.” Mexico’s foreign minister, Jorge Castañeda, echoing Fox’s demands for legalization and more guest workers, told reporters, “It’s the whole enchilada or nothing.”
President Bush caused a significant national uproar (even a revolt among many of the GOP Bush faithful) by his willingness to buy almost the “whole enchilada.” In comments at a White House lawn press conference on September 6, 2001, marking the end of President Fox’s visit to the U.S., President Bush announced his commitment to a more expansive immigration policy that would “match a willing [U.S.] employer with a willing [Mexican] employee.” Which, of course, is a prescription for virtually unlimited migration of Mexican workers into the U.S. That was just five days before the 9/11 terror attacks.
The Gulliver Strategy
For several months prior to the September 2001 Fox-Bush meeting, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Foreign Minister Castañeda had been co-chairing a binational Migration Working Group aimed at changing U.S. border policies. At a November 22, 2002 press conference in Mexico City, Secretary Powell praised Castañeda and declared: “In Mexico, the Bush administration sees much more than a neighbor. We see a partner.... Our partnership rests on common values, on trust, on honesty.”
However, at the very same time that Secretary Powell was extolling the wonders of our new “partnership,” Senor Castañeda was presenting a vivid contrasting image. “I like very much the metaphor of Gulliver, of ensnarling the giant,” Castañeda told Mexican journalists in a November 2002 interview. “Tying it up, with nails, with thread, with 20,000 nets that bog it down: these nets being norms, principles, resolutions, agreements, and bilateral, regional and international covenants.”
That sounds like a rather adversarial partnership, not one based “on common values, on trust, on honesty.” Was Team Bush/Powell unaware of this less-than-neighborly attitude on the part of Team Fox/Castañeda? Were they out-foxed by Fox/Castañeda? Not at all; they were participating in a giant charade with Fox/Castañeda to out-fox the American people. It was a charade completely scripted by the brain trust at Pratt House, the New York headquarters of the Council on Foreign Relations. Secretary Powell is a longtime Insider at the CFR, as are many other members of the Bush administration (including Powell’s successor, Condoleezza Rice). Señor Castañeda, while not a CFR member, has been nevertheless a favorite guest at Pratt House for more than two decades. He has been the featured speaker at CFR programs, has written articles for the CFR’s journal Foreign Affairs, and has received adulatory reviews for his books by CFR reviewers. And this, despite the fact that Castañeda, a longtime radical intellectual leader in Mexico’s Communist Party, has participated in the annual terrorist convention known as the Sao Paulo Forum, and continues to admire Communist revolutionary Che Guevarra!
Perhaps most important, as it pertains to this joint charade, is the fact that Castañeda has been a very close partner with Robert Pastor, the main author of the CFR’s blueprint for a North American Community. Pastor, a longtime Marxist associated with the radical Institute for Policy Studies (virtually a front for the Soviet KGB), even coauthored a book on U.S.-Mexico relations with Castañeda.
Castañeda, who stepped down as Fox’s foreign minister and took a professorship at New York University, is now running for president in Mexico’s 2006 elections. This past July 12, Castañeda appeared as an expert witness at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on border security. “No border security is possible without Mexican cooperation,” declared Castañeda. “There can be no future cooperation beyond what already exists without some form of immigration package.” He warned that border security is “very, very sensitive” to Mexicans. Any cooperation, he said, would have to be purchased with more U.S. liberalization of our immigration policies. To some, that sounds more like extortion than cooperation, but to the Bush administration and the bipartisan break-down-the-borders lobby in Congress, it passes for harmonious “partnering.”
The senators at the hearing did not challenge Castañeda or take him to task for his belligerent stance on this important security issue. Indeed, they seem to be primarily concerned with pushing through as much of the Fox/Castañeda program as their constituents will tolerate. They are considering two major competing bills now, S. 1033 by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), and S. 1438 by Sens. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) and Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.). Both bills pretend to provide meaningful “reform” to enhance border security, but both of them are designed to propel North American “integration” forward by making our borders easier to cross, legalizing millions of illegal aliens already here, and opening the door for millions more “guest workers.” At the same time, both bills would dramatically increase federal surveillance and intrusion into the lives of American citizens.
Much of this appears to be already underway without congressional approval, under the Security and Prosperity Partnership. The SPP joint statement mentioned previously, for instance, states: “We will test technology and make recommendations, over the next 12 months, to enhance the use of biometrics in screening travelers … with a view to developing compatible biometric border and immigration systems.” The statement’s section on “Safer, Faster and More Efficient Border Crossings,” like so much of the administration’s immigration program, is clearly more focused on faster border crossings, not stronger border security.
Premeditated Merger
The administration has not come right out and endorsed the merger of U.S. and Mexican immigration, military, and law enforcement personnel, as recommended by the CFR’s Task Force report, but it is headed in that direction, noting that “increased economic integration and security cooperation will further a unique and strong North American relationship.” In fact, it is becoming more and more apparent that the administration’s Security and Prosperity Partnership is actually an official adaptation of the CFR’s Building a North American Community.
The Task Force blueprint was the culmination of several years of specific efforts to launch a concrete program aimed at the physical merger of the U.S. with other nations in the hemisphere. As we’ve noted, one of the principal authors of that CFR proposal is Dr. Robert Pastor. More than a year before the Waco summit, the CFR publicly floated the idea with an important article by Pastor entitled, “North America’s Second Decade,” in the January/February 2004 issue of its flagship journal, Foreign Affairs.
“NAFTA was merely the first draft of an economic constitution for North America,” Pastor explained to the elite in-the-know readership of the journal. The CFR spinmeisters repeatedly insisted for over a decade that NAFTA was merely a “trade agreement.” Now they are being a bit more candid: NAFTA was merely the first draft of an ongoing “dynamic, permanent process.” The border demolition is part of the next draft, which is intended to deal with political and security issues.
“Overcoming the tension between security and trade,” said Pastor, “requires a bolder approach to continental integration.” So he boldly proposed, among other things, “a North American customs union with a common external tariff (CET), which would significantly reduce border inspections.” (Emphasis added.) In addition, he says, the Department of Homeland Security “should expand its mission” to cover the entire continent “by incorporating Mexican and Canadian perspectives and personnel into its design and operation.”
Pastor opines that, properly managed, the post-9/11 “security fears would serve as a catalyst for deeper integration.” “That would require new structures,” he says, “to assure mutual security.” It would also require, he notes, “a redefinition of security that puts the United States, Mexico, and Canada inside a continental perimeter.”
He means a very radical redefinition of security, to say the least. The claim by Pastor and the CFR claque that stretching our already dangerously porous borders to include two additional huge countries — both of which are already fraught with their own serious security problems — is so far beyond ludicrous that it can only be explained as openly fraudulent. That the so-called “wise men” of the CFR could actually believe their own propaganda in this case is preposterous.
After all, as CNN’s Lou Dobbs reported on the same June 9 broadcast, Mexico is descending ever more rapidly into a maelstrom of chaos, corruption, and open warfare, as rival drug cartels, police, the military, and government officials (many of whom are in the pockets of the narco-terrorists) battle it out.
Mexico is notorious for official corruption — police, military, and elected and appointed officials — from top to bottom. In 1997, it may be recalled, Mexico’s top official in its War on Drugs, Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, was arrested for working with one of the top drug cartels! However, evidence that came out during the course of his trial pointed to many other top military, police, and federal officials as accomplices as well.
More than 2,000 Mexican police officers are under investigation for drug-related corruption, and more than 700 officers have been charged with serious offenses ranging from kidnapping and murder to taking bribes from the drug cartels. Mexico, with its close diplomatic ties to Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, has also long been a friendly hangout for many revolutionary terrorist organizations.
One needn’t be a Latin American expert (like Dr. Pastor) to realize the absurdity of trying to make America more secure by entrusting our homeland security in part to Mexican law enforcement, and by incorporating all of Mexico’s horrendous problems inside an unconstitutional and amorphous “common perimeter.”
Canada also presents us with serious security considerations. Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) director Ward Elcock has testified to Parliament that more than 50 terrorist organizations — representing Middle East, Tamil, Sikh, Latin American, and Irish terrorists — are active in Canada. CSIS spokesman Dan Lambert has stated that “with the exception of the United States, there are more terrorist groups active in Canada than perhaps any other country in the world.”
All considered, the so-called Security and Prosperity Partnership threatens our very survival as a free nation. Congress must reject it — totally. But that will only happen if Congress hears an undeniable roar of outrage from us, the American people.
* Details about the Security and Prosperity Partnership can be found at www.spp.gov.
