Posted By Josh RoginFriday, October 21, 2011 - 8:14 PM
When President Barack
Obama and senior administration officials proudly
announced that all U.S. troops in Iraq would leave by the end of the year,
there was no mention of the millions of Iraqis who were forced to flee their
homes by the U.S. invasion or the thousands who risked their lives by working directly
for the U.S. military.
"It is wonderful
that American troops will finally be able to come home, but we must remember
that for the nearly three million Iraqis displaced by the war, returning home
is still not an option," said Becca
Heller, director of the
Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project at the Urban Justice Center.
The U.S. neglect of Iraqi refugees -- especially those who
can no longer live in safety in Iraq due to their work with the U.S. military
-- is not a new phenomenon. Your humble Cable guy has met dozens of Iraqi
refugees over the years, mostly women, who had somehow managed to secure a rare
special visa to enter the United States, but this status has been offered to only
a fraction of those who helped the U.S. military by working as guides or
translators.
Most of those refugees were living in the United States
without jobs, permanent residences, or any financial support from the U.S.
government. Many were wholly dependent on the kindness of the soldiers they had
worked with in Iraq, who felt an obligation to aid them. Some even married
those soldiers.
As early as 2007, The
New Yorker and other outlets were
reporting about the herculean efforts U.S. soldiers had gone to in order to
help their Iraqi staffers flee to safety, even creating an "underground
railroad" to bring Iraqis to the U.S. embassy in Amman, Jordan, because the
Baghdad embassy would not process their visa requests.
The late Sen. Edward
Kennedy (D-MA) took up the issue of Iraqi refugees, introducing a
resolution to expand the available number of visas and pressing the State
Department to streamline the process for those who sacrificed on behalf of the
U.S. effort. He had some
success, but died before finishing the work.
Four years later, advocates are still pressing the
administration to issue all the visas it can to help Iraqis resettle in the United
States and then help them get on with their new lives.
"The United States
failed to honor its commitment to Iraqi refugees this year, admitting less than
half of the 17,000 refugees we had promised to help. This includes thousands of
Iraqis whose lives are at risk, or family members have been killed, as a direct
result of their work as interpreters and drivers with U.S. forces in Iraq,"
Heller said. "The U.S. must continue to honor its obligations to the Iraqis for
whom withdrawal is not an option."
Posted By Josh RoginFriday, July 2, 2010 - 5:16 PM
The State Department is issuing cards for crossing
the U.S.-Mexico border that may be vulnerable to counterfeiting, according to a
new report.
In 2008, the State Department's Bureau of Consular
Affairs took over from the now-defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service
the job of producing and issuing passport cards, which can be used by Americans
as cheaper alternative to passports, and Border Crossing Cards, which are used
by Mexican nationals who cross the border on a regular basis. However, the
Government Accountability Office said in
a report released Thursday that "State
does not fully understand the security and durability of the [U.S. passport]
card." Though State "generally" is following accepted standards and
procedures for designing the passport cards, it didn't test the final version
of the cards -- leaving opportunities for criminals to forge their own.
Making the problem worse, when State began planning to
produce a second-generation Border Crossing Card, the department issued the
work to the same company that produced the flawed passport cards.
"Because the second generation BCC was
added to the passport contract, it did not undergo any formal security testing
and evaluation activities and no security or durability testing was done on the
second-generation passport card," the GAO said.
The
Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Customs and Border Protection bureau
intercepted more than 13,000 fraudulent Border Crossing Cards in 2009 alone. Last July, only one month after the use of the Border
Crossing Cards became mandatory, the DHS's Forensic Document Laboratory alerted
U.S. Border Patrol officers that counterfeits had begun appearing at U.S. ports
of entry and issued an
alert explaining how to detect forgeries.
"The 9-11 Commission's final report makes clear that
‘for terrorists, travel documents are as important as weapons,'" six congressmen
wrote
to the
GAO in December 2008, in requesting the investigation. "We are concerned that
the physical and electronic security of the U.S. Passport Card and the new
Mexican Border Crossing Card may be inadequate."
State received the responsibility for manufacturing
these cards as part of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, which was
supposed to tighten up the U.S. southern border as part of the reforms spelled
out in the Intelligence Reform and Terrorist Prevention Act of 2004.
The Forensic
Document Laboratory, ,which specializes in travel-document fraud, told the
GAO that State should use a different material to make the card, a higher
standard of engraving, and put more visible security features on the front of
the cards.
State responded that it has to balance the cost of
security features with the benefit and therefore didn't think the bulk of the
laboratory's recommendations were worth the expense.
Why didn't State even test the final version of the
passport card, as the laboratory recommended?
"Because it was in the final stages of procurement
when the design was finalized and it wanted to meet schedule," the GAO said.
State is working on the new version of the passport card now.
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