How the Hezbollah Plot in Brazil is a Harbinger for America
Todd Bensman on American Thought Leaders Now, 15 Nov 2023.
Epoch TV: American Thought Leaders Now
JAN JEKIELEK: Today, our very special guest, back on the show, is Todd Bensman. Todd is Senior National Security Fellow for Counterterrorism Studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, and the author of Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis In U.S. History.
Todd, it’s great to have you back.
TODD BENSMAN: Great to be here, thank you.
JJ: So, Todd, what do you make of this? Last Wednesday in Brazil there was a bust, two people were [arrested] on terror charges ostensibly as part of an operation to take down a Hezbollah cell. Tell me about that?
BENSMAN: I think that operations in Brazil, and probably other ones planned elsewhere in the world, are part of a Hezbollah-Iranian strategy, to start taking retaliation against Israel for exchanging fire on the northern border.
And also for the war against Hamas in the south. I think it’s linked to that war. I think that that’s a harbinger. That case, in Brazil — which, by the way, was investigated jointly by Israeli Mossad and the FBI working together, with a little bit of Brazilian assistance as well.
(1:25)
I think we can probably expect to see more of the same.
Hezbollah has clandestine agents all over the world. They are the most powerful U.S.-designated terrorist organization in the world. The most capable, the most dangerous. They have proved it time and again, all over the world. They can kill, anywhere they wanna kill — including in the United States.
JJ: Ok. That’s a very strong statement. You’ve actually done some reporting on some sleeper cells, I believe it was in 2018, linked to Hezbollah.
Let me put it this way, a lot of Americans are not that familiar with Hezbollah — or these kinds of realities that you’ve been reporting on — so maybe give me a primer?
(2:18)
BENSMAN: Right. When I say that Hezbollah has clandestine agents all over the world, that’s actually coming from U.S. prosecutions, court cases in the United States. And court cases in other parts of the world as well. But the ones in the United States gave us an open window on Hezbollah’s Unit 910, is what it has been called for many years, Unit 910.
Which is a foreign clandestine service of Hezbollah, where people — from Lebanon, usually — who have U.S. citizenship, naturalized, or are here on green cards, et cetera, and are able to travel in and out of the country, are on the Hezbollah payroll monthly. Stipends, with healthcare benefits and everything.
(3:15)
And their job is to amass target lists and weapons to execute on those target lists — explosives, guns, ammunition. And also surveillance footage and video of hard targets — just inanimate locations, that sort of thing.
Human beings. Like dual Israeli-U.S. citizens, Israeli businessmen doing business in the United States. Synagogues, U.S. federal offices, that sort of thing.
(3:50)
And they’re there waiting for an order from Tehran, or from Beirut, to go into action against those targets.
That’s likely what we saw happen in Brazil, and we’ve seen that happen in Bulgaria and Thailand and Argentina. Where agents who were planted for a long time, and prepared, waiting for the order, actually went into action.
JJ: This is something that many Americans may have trouble believing in the veracity of.
(4:26)
BENSMAN: Well, yeah. It’s unbelievable that some organization actually succeeded in doing this, but the United States government has succeeded in catching them, and that’s how we know. And putting them on trial.
You mentioned a series of stories I did in 2018. Those stories are based entirely — no interview, I did nothing, I just simply went to the court case files. And found that the prosecutors had loaded it up with things like FBI 302s. Which is this very rarified, highly protected document produced by the FBI, from interviews with defendants, with suspects. They loaded them up, into the court files.
(5:18)
They loaded tremendous amounts of material in these court files. And so I was able to take all of that — there were two cases, one in Dearborn and one in Brooklyn, that were tied. And really was able to put together a picture of Unit 910 inside the United States.
Some of those court records actually named other 910 suspects in other cities around the country. Just put their names out there. Put organizations out there. Named names, people and places.
And just left it like that. I’m assuming they did that maybe to spook them off, make them close shop and flee the country rather than make the government prosecute them.
(6:12)
JJ: Yeah, that’s very interesting. Some of the audience will be familiar with this type of strategy of basically loading evidence into court proceedings as a means of alerting, perhaps both — like you suggested, in this cases — the suspects, but also the American public.
BENSMAN: Those stories, I wrote them originally for PJ Media, they’re still up, at PJ Media under my name, but you can also find them on my website, ToddBensman.com. All three of them. Five years old, now, but certainly more relevant than they were five years ago.
(6:48)
Although, we’ve had times of tension with the Iranians. Like, when Donald Trump assassinated the Iranian General Soleimani, in Iraq, which was a — the Iranians have been promising retribution ever since. They haven’t done it. But at that time, I wrote that Unit 910 was going to be a potential problem.
(7:15)
JJ: There’s a particular problem that comes to my mind. The work that — you and I have spoken about before, of course, what you wrote about in your book, and so forth.
There’s a huge number of people that we are aware of that have entered the country that are simply of unknown identity. And I think, 2 million so-called “gotaways” — what we talk about in our film by our border reporter Charlotte Cuthbertson, Gotaways. And when you’re describing this situation, makes me think of that.
(7:52)
BENSMAN: Well, as you and I have discussed previously in other interviews, this is by far the greatest mass migration crisis in U.S. history, by far. Nothing like this has ever befallen the United States, in terms of numbers.
When you have unbelievable numbers, like 300,000 a month, pouring over that border, it tends to collapse all of the systems.
The administration has chosen to allow the majority, the vast majority of those people into the United States, a free ride to any city they want. And that requires a little bit of processing.
(8:33)
The people doing the processing tend to be Border Patrol agents that would normally be on the line patrolling, all along that 2,000 mile-long border. But they’re gone. You can drive for hours along that border, and never see a single agent, any more.
(8:53)
And so that has given rise to ladder crews. People on the Mexican side who now just toss a ladder up and climb up it, and rope down it the other end, all day and all night.
Cutting holes in the wall, cutting holes in older fences, and pouring through. And running into the American interior, catching rides to cities that way.
We think based on leaked data — because this is not made public, the gotaway data is not made public, but there are leaks all over the place. […]
(9:35)
We think that there are on the order of two million gotaways in 36 months. That is just unbelievable, that number. It’s unbelievable.
And the percentage of people coming from all over the world — not Mexico, and not Central America, but 160 different countries, is at about 45 percent of everybody reaching that border. From every country in Africa, every country in the Middle East, Asia, South Asia, Eurasia, you name it. They are at that border, and they are crossing through.
And if you have two million — at a minimum, those are always under-counted, that’s known gotaways — then you are almost certainly, I’m not going to say a hundred percent, but I’m gonna say damn close — that you are gonna have spies, war criminals, terrorists, regular murders and rapists of every kind, gang members, syndicate operatives, in the country right now. Hiding. That we will have to be contending with as a nation for many years. Probably permanently.
(10:50)
JJ: Something that’s come out from our past conversations, and also my discussions with Charlotte Cuthbertson, has been that the standard strategy for coming into the country, as I understand it these days, is simply that as soon as you get over the border, you report to the authorities, because that basically will often guarantee you being let into the country.
Although I might add there’s been on the order of 200 plus people on the terrorist watch list, who most likely were sent back.
(11:24)
But the people who don’t show up, that go to the border, those are, a particular class of people who are using a different strategy.
BENSMAN: That’s right. The first category you’re describing, people in border security, like me, and Border Patrol agents, we call those “give ups.”
On paper they’re called “apprehensions” — as though we tackled them, or hunted them down, or something. The truth is they just turn themselves in. They look for Border Patrol agents because they know they will be processed into the country in 24 to 48 hours. They’ll be in any city they want to go. Almost at one hundred percent.
(12:08)
But if you have a criminal record, or you’ve been in the United States previously, and got caught doing something and been deported, you are not going to qualify. They do run a basic background check on the give-ups.
And when they find that they’ve never been here, or there’s no record, then they let those people in. But if you know you’ve been deported — and that’s almost always going to be because of some sort of criminal behavior — then you’re not going to get in.
(12:35)
You’re going to get probably pushed back, or put into some kind of proceedings….
So you pay cartel smugglers to bring you in and run. And a good runner graduates to gotaway status. So you’ve got runners and gotaways. That’s who we’re talking about. […]
High level of criminal[s] in the runner crowd. That is a dangerous crowd. We presume that is a very dangerous crowd because, obviously, they know that they have some piece of disqualifying information that’s going to turn up.
(13:40)
JJ: Tell me a little bit about these ones who actually have been apprehended.
BENSMAN: Well, among those — we don’t know whether they were runners or whether they were caught. But we do know, from government reporting — the government reports this number monthly, for about a year and a half, now, they’ve been reporting FBI watch listed individuals suspected of terrorism.
A lot of those people do not know that they are on the FBI terrorism watch list. Or on any U.S. watch list. It’s supposed to be a secret, from them, so that when they show up we can flag on them.
(14:20)
We don’t know whether they were give-ups or runners. But the government has caught about 170 as of September of 2023. Those people are the ones we know of. They did get caught, or most likely they were among the give ups.
The number that are among the 2 million gotaways is the scary, concerning, disturbing number. Because almost certainly some of those who are watchlisted, or damn well should be watchlisted, are among the runners.
We have caught, here and there, Iranians, for example, running. And Pakistanis running. And Somalis running. They may know they are already watchlisted.
(15:14)
Last year I wrote about an Iranian caught in the trunk of a car with a bunch of Hondurans. What’s an Iranian doing hiding in the trunk of a car, driving into the U.S. interior? That’s not a good thing.
That’s really what the problem is with runners, and the fact that 270 people on the terror watch list is beyond all known bounds. We’ve never seen that many on the terror watch list caught crossing the U.S. southern border.
JJ: Astonishing numbers. You know, given everything that’s happening — the Israel Hamas war is going on, the IDF is clearing out Hamas, they’re going after the HQ as I understand it, systematically. Hezbollah has been doing these incursions with rockets from the north….
And we’ve got 2 million gotaways and — it strains credulity to imagine that bad actors wouldn’t use this rather large loophole to try to take advantage of the situation.
(16:40)
BENSMAN: I think reasonable people, not just on the conservative right, all reasonable people should be able to take a look at this border and understand that we are in a really unusual situation down there. A vulnerability. Of high elevated risk of something like that happening.
I testified before Congress on September 14, about this, and what I explained to Congress on the record in my testimony is that the United States since 9/11 has had really good counterterrorism programs at the southern border designed specifically to tag people from terror countries for enhanced security screening.
Which includes eyeball to eyeball interviews between FBI agents or intelligence officers, and those subjects. Because they come in with no ID. […]
(17:48)
That was one of many programs we had down there to vet special interest aliens — that’s what the government tags them as, when they’re from those countries.
I testified that the numbers of those special interest aliens that are pouring over that border is so vast, now. I mean, 75,000 the Daily Caller reported, a couple months ago, in an 8 month period, where in prior years, normal years, it was maybe 3,000. And we had trouble keeping up with interviews with just the 3,000,
What I testified to was that none of that enhanced security screening, or very little of it, is actually happening, especially the interviews.
(18:35)
And that jacks up the security threat that they are going to sneak some people in here. They did it in Europe in 2015. They snuck operatives from ISIS over those borders, posing as refugees, and asylum seekers, and all the rest.
And the blew up targets in Paris and in Brussels, and have created bloody mayhem in those countries in all the years since they came over the borders.
(19:12)
This is not a hypothesis. It’s happened in other places. I testified, also, about a case, a prosecution that just wrapped up in Ohio in April, about an Iraqi asylum seeker who plotted to bring over the souther border four operatives from ISIS to kill former president George W. Bush.
This was a real plot, this was not some sting operation. Thank God we found it. But what it shows is that bad guys understand that that border is a way in, now. It’s an easier way to get into the country than trying to gain visa systems and fly in.
(20:12)
During that case it emerged in the court papers that he brought in two Hezbollah agents as well, earlier, successfully. There was no more information about that in the court records, but I suspect there was a big man hunt for those operators.
JJ: Well Todd, I like asking you this question — right now, given the state of the border, what is the single most useful thing that could be done to change the situation?
BENSMAN: Return illegal immigrants. Stop letting them in. Because I’ve spent thousands of hours with thousands of immigrants and […] the only thing that motivates illegal immigrants to cross illegally is the forehand knowledge that we are going to let them in.
When they don’t have that confidence that they are going to be let in to stay, they stay home.
(21:29)
So we have to return to policies which are just embossed in statute, to either detain them, like we’re supposed to, until we can adjudicate their cases, or put them in Mexico to wait there.
Once you do that, this ends. It’s that simple. When you return them, they don’t come, when you let them in, they come.
JJ: Well Todd Bensman, always the voice of reason on the show here, thank you so much.
BENSMAN: Thank you for having me.
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