DHS ready to deport Saudi student questioned in Boston
The show must go on. Two days ago, I opined that the Boston Bomber, if identified as a Saudi national (the pressure cooker bombs at the site in Boston are most typically employed in Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan and India), would put our Saudi-friendly administration, with its reach-out to the Muslim world and most recently, the AQI-linked Free Syrian Army, between an economic rock and a political hard place.
The result would be a scramble on the part of the administration and U.S. law enforcement officials, to control the investigation and contain the media coverage. The phone lines between D.C. and Riyadh, I’m betting, would be burning up. According to reports, President Obama attended an unscheduled meeting with the Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. on April 17, when Ali Alharbi became a “non-suspect.”
No matter. The ensuing slew of confused and just plan wrong news reports tells us somebody did his or her job well.
A whopper of a story by Time’s “entertainment writer”and TV critic, James Poniewozik, is worth reading twice. Pay special attention to the bold allusion by a CNN broadcaster to a “theory that CNN had been intentionally misled by law-enforcement authorities as a strategy to catch the bomber.”
The media might have been intentionally misled, but someone who describes the motivation behind such diversionary tactics as a legitimate “strategy to catch the bomber” is overly generous or, a better suggestion, irritated but still keen to stay employed.
Here’s a piece of Poniewozik’s article –the title is “Un-Arrested Development: On Boston Bomber, Media Outlets Walk Back a Big Story, Again.” And entertaining it is,
Last June, after CNN (and Fox News) blew one of the biggest stories of the year by misreading an opinion and wrongly reporting that the Supreme Court had overturned Obamacare, the network said it was launching an internal investigation into what went wrong and how: “We take mistakes seriously, especially mistakes on such important stories. We are looking into exactly what happened and we will learn from it.”
Sure enough, as CNN was covering the fast-moving investigation into the Boston Marathon bombing, it didn’t make the same embarrassing mistake on an important story. It—and a few others—made a brand-new embarrassing mistake on an important story. It started just before 2 p.m. ET, when CNN’s John King, citing multiple sources, reported that a suspect had been arrested. And Fox News did. And the AP did. (And time.com posted the wire service’s report.) And The Boston Globe did.
He continues,
And NBC… didn’t. Pete Williams–who you might remember being the first, with Dan Abrams, to correctly read the Bush v. Gore ruling in 2000–went on a special report with Brian Williams and said that his multiple sources said there had been no arrest. Live on air, he stuck to his guns even as Brian Williams read the numerous competitor reports contradicting him.
It was a standoff. Pete Williams won. Over the next, excruciating hour, the reports of the arrest fell apart, on live TV, in real time. NBC stood its ground; CBS joined it. Behind the scenes, calls were made. And as Anderson Cooper, Chris Cuomo, and Juliette Kayyem filled time on the street in Boston, their language began to get more tentative: If an arrest had been made. If our sources are correct. “Suspect Arrested” in CNN’s breaking-news chyron silently changed to “Sources: Suspect Arrested.”
Then the FBI weighs in,
Finally, CNN got a report on live air from former FBI assistant director Tom Fuentes, who, citing separate sources, told the funereal on-air trio that their breaking report was wrong. “Ok, now,” Cuomo vamped, “We don’t know what’s right or not right at this point…” (Can we get James Earl Jones to say that in the ads? “CNN: We don’t know what’s right or not right at this point!”) And just as smoothly, “Sources: Suspect Arrested” changed–poof!–to “Conflicting Reports.”
Eventually, King came on to debunk his own report: “Anyone who said there is an arrest is getting ahead of themselves,” he said, as though he had no idea who “themselves” might be. At one point, Kayyem floated the theory that CNN had been intentionally misled by law-enforcement authorities as a strategy to catch the bomber. It was ghastly. It was awkward. I began to wonder if my TV set could be short-circuited by flop sweat.
I’m thinking Time should make Poniewozik its lead political and foreign affairs writer. Good job, guy.
Clues
Ali Alharbi on his way home to Saudi Arabia
Let’s revisit that last blog I dashed off on April 16 — the one in which I pointed out that in the United States, law enforcement officials could not have obtained a search warrant, which is what they did in regard to the Saudi national here on a student visa, unless they were able to convince a judge they had “probable cause” to believe that individual could have been a criminal actor and that evidence supporting that supposition was to be found at his residence, among his belongings, in his vehicle, etc.
But no one told the media that, and no one in the media, including broadcasters with law degrees of their own, made that connection. Law enforcement officials (Fourth Amendment again) don’t present affidavits in order to obtain search warrants unless their target is a real “suspect.” But government and enforcement spokespeople were telling the media that the Saudi student wasn’t a “suspect” or even “a person of interest.” Later, there were reports that he might have been characterized as a “witness.”
I’m with Poniewozik: It was ghastly.
Worse, even, than the stampede of cabinet officials and law enforcement heads to the U.N. in reponse to the Georgetown bistro assassination attempt by Mexican cartel hitmen on behalf of the Iranian government against the Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. As you may recall, this push to distract the press occurred when media coverage of “Fast and Furious,” a government-inspired operation that allowed (whistleblowers say “facilitated”) 2000+ combat-ready weapons to pass unnoticed into the land of los Zetas and their compatriots–was heating up. And Attorney General Eric Holder was bemoaning the efforts of the media “to get us.”
Under Deportation Order
But the obfuscation, or confusion — it’s your call — in the Boston Bomber case is masterful. Now we hear reports that Ali Alharbi the young Saudi national in Boston on a student visa, the same young man authorities released after questioning him so he could “get back to classes” (and who issued the order to release him is still unknown) is under a DHS-issued deportation order based on an investigation that determined he has “suspicious terrorist ties” and has been determined by the U.S. government to be “a security risk.” (Please see my blog of February 26–“ICE Agents Claim Napolitano Forcing Them to Violate U.S. Law–New Immigration Directives Invitation to Terrorists and Cartels.”)
QED: Let’s assume enforcement officials used the fact that Ali Alharbi had been investigated and was scheduled for deportation, and that it was this information, that the young man had already been tagged as a “national security risk,” that helped authorities convince a judge that a search warrant was in order.
So what’s happening now? Will the Saudi student with the black backpack be retained in the U.S. while enforcement officials continue to work with him to obtain more information? Keep him around, look for connections, leads, associations? Makes sense, don’t you think?
Not to the FBI, apparently, nor to Janet Napolitano, who heads the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). DHS, it is rumored, is said to be following through with Alharbi’s deportation and getting ready to send him back home to Saudi Arabia.
The administration wants that boy gone.
Why?
Congressman Jeff Duncan (R-SC) is confused and upset. Like a lot of us, he doesn’t understand the rush: If Ali Alharbi was deemed a security risk previous to the Boston bombing and served with a deportation order issued by DHS (which Alharbi either ignored or the deportation date was subsequent to April 15), why is DHS so bent on implementing the deportation, asap, of a Saudi national who may, at the very least, be able to play an important part in the ongoing FBI investigation?
From an April 18 report by Blaze correspondent (yes, it’s a conservative outlet) Madeleine Morgenstern:
A visibly irritated Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano refused to answer a Republican congressman’s questions about the possible deportation of the Saudi national questioned as a witness in the Boston Marathon bombings.
Napolitano called South Carolina Rep. Jeff Duncan’s question “so full of misstatements and misapprehension that it’s just not worthy of an answer.”
Duncan was not put off, and Napolitano did not specifically note or attempt to dismantle his “misstatements and misapprehension.”
“We have someone who’s being deported due to national security concerns,” Duncan had said during a Capitol Hill hearing Thursday. “We’ve got this guy who was there, we know he was there…and yet we’re going to deport him? We’re going to remove him from the scene?”
“If I might, I am unaware of anyone who is being deported for national security concerns at all related to Boston,” Napolitano said.
“He is being deported,” Duncan said.
Napolitano said, as she understood it, the man was not technically a person of interest or a suspect, and “this is is an example of why it is so important to let law enforcement do its job.”
Do you understand that? I don’t, and it appears Duncan is still confused,
“I want them to do their job,” Duncan said. “Wouldn’t you agree with me that it’s negligent for us as an American administration to deport someone who was reportedly at the scene of the bombing and we’re going to deport him, not to be able to question him anymore?”
All I can say to the mainstream media is, “Good luck with this,” because when it comes to digging for the truth, it’s not the guy with the shovel you’ve got to watch — it’s the fellow with the backhoe.
