For One Syrian Militant Group, “Pick-Up Lines” Have a Texas Twang

For One Syrian Militant Group, “Pick-Up Lines” Have a Texas Twang

 

A pick-up truck that belonged to a Texas plumber a year ago wound up in jihadi hands. How did it get there? Here is what we know – and what the mainstream media and a handful of angry, completely confounded Americans do not know.  

By Tom Wyld

For the past week, #HiveInt, the league of strategists and intelligence analysts on Twitter, have been digging deeper into a report, first written by Caleb Weiss, on the appearance of a pick-up truck on the internet.

But this was no ordinary pick-up truck advertised on E-Bay.

The Ford F-250 photo was posted on the website of a self-identified Syria-based militant alliance, and the men onboard were members of a largely Chechen anti-Assad militant group.

And mounted on the truck bed: a Russian-made heavy machine gun.

The truck’s logo captured everyone’s attention – including press here and abroad. The logo was not that of the Chechen fighters’ Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar (“Army of Emigrants and Supporters”). It was not the sign of the alliance to which this particular Jaish or Army belongs, namely Jabhat Ansar al-Din (“Partisans of the Religion Front”).

The logo was that of Mark-1 Plumbing of Texas City, Texas – complete with the small business’ phone number.

According to the militant posting, the photo was taken in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city ravaged by violence, jihadi infighting and the war against dictator Bashar Al-Assad. Aleppo is also 20 miles west of Al-Safirah, site of Assad’s largest chemical weapons compound. A writer with the blog Line of Steel and a contributor to the warrior-favorite Long War Journal, Caleb Weiss was first to break the story. Bravo Zulu to this young political science student who studies security policy and militant trends. (Unmarked photo from a militant site.)  

I telephoned the Texas firm. Many rings, no answer, no voice mail. Caleb Weiss was more fortunate. He reached a “very nice woman” who was “happy” to answer his questions about the pick-up. When he said he had called about a photo, the woman knew which one. After all, she had received many phone inquiries about it before Caleb’s call.

Not surprisingly, those calls included “about six” that were “threatening” and voiced by people the employee “couldn’t understand.” The woman said the firm had notified the authorities about the photo and the threats. Read Caleb’s post for details here.  Keep in mind his was the first report on the incident posted on Monday, 15 December. Since then, the story has garnered major media attention, has undergone many twists and turns and prompted outraged, threatening phone calls – and the employee understood all to0 well those additional angry calls.

The Fabled Truck – Sold, But By Whom? 

By Tuesday, CBS News reported that the firm had brought an attorney aboard. Presumably this was the small business’ “representative” who told CBS the pick-up was sold in October 2013 to Auto Nation. An Auto Nation representative refused to provide the network the vehicle’s sales history over the phone and hung up.

 

Also on Tuesday, ABC News reported the truck was driven to Auto Nation and traded “last fall.” The truck was then sent to auction and subsequently sold to a “Southwest Houston” company. It may have been sold many times since. A source describes the area in SW Houston as a “heavy immigrant and auto trading” hub – a motor-mecca, if you will.

Today (Wednesday, 17 December), the Galveston County Daily News wrote that the truck was sold to Auto Nation “three years ago,” attributing the statement to Mark-1 owner Mark Oberholtzer. The businessman said he usually takes his firm’s decals off the truck when they are sold, but reckoned Auto Nation would do that for him.

Among the decals on the F-250 in question? A state inspection sticker that expired September 2013. But state inspections must be conducted annually in Texas, casting doubt on the claim by the Galveston County Daily News that the truck was sold “three years ago.”

Also in support of a transaction occurring last year, USA Today reported today that Mr. Oberholtzer drove the truck to Auto Nation and traded it in November 2013. 

In short, give or take a month or two, Mark-1’s pick-up truck was sold legitimately about a year ago to a dealer and, from there, to an auctioneer.

So How Did a Texas Truck Get to a Battlefield in Syria? 

Aboard ship, obviously. But how did the truck get aboard ship? That is the trickier question.

“Technicals” – intelligence parlance for pick-up trucks modified for combat use – are the vehicles-of-choice for militants worldwide. Conflicts and hot zones are expanding, not contracting, and that creates a burgeoning demand and, therefore, a black market, for plain vanilla pick-ups, even from the U.S. Only upon arrival in an area controlled by jihadis are the pick-ups converted to “technicals.”

From the dealership to an auction in Southwest Houston, the truck was likely loaded into a container that was ultimately lifted aboard a container ship (a.k.a. “box ship” among mariners) moored pier-side at the Port of Galveston or Port of Houston. The Port of Galveston accommodates about 1,000 ships and handles 10 million short tons of cargo annually. Much of that cargo is inside containers. The sort of boxes motorists see aboard trains and trucks on the highway, these containers are measured in “Twenty-Foot Equivalent units” or TEUs.

The world’s largest box ship, EMMA MAERSK, can carry more than 18,000 TEUs. If every container aboard EMMA MAERSK held cars or trucks, that would equate to 36,000 vehicles. (Promotional photo from The Maersk Group.) 

Assessment: Jihadi Sympathizers Love East Coast Seaports 

Assessment number one: Alarmingly, citing Mr. Oberholtzer, USA Today reported that recent threats are being conveyed from people across the USA. “We have a secretary here,” he said. “She’s scared to death. We have families. We don’t want no problems.” Presumably, some of those American callers are making the outrageous leap that, by selling the truck last year, he was aiding jihadis.

Here’s an assessment from a former Navy commander in his sixth year of intelligence and counterterrorism analysis – namely, me: Neither Mr. Oberholtzer, his firm nor his employees have anything whatsoever to do with Islamic militants, and Americans have no right or foundation to assert same, much less place angry, threatening phone calls. Basing those angry calls on reports by mainstream media (which those same callers uniformly mistrust) only serves to double their shameful behavior. Knock it off.

Assessment number two: The Ports of Galveston and Houston are not alone. I assess that used car dealers in close proximity to east coast seaports are shipping pick-up trucks to all sorts of legitimate buyers overseas. Some find their way to recipients in, say, Turkey and the Middle East. Most are legit. Some are not.

Shipping is a simple affair. The shipper completes a manifest or cargo declaration (“1 pick-up truck, brand ABC, worth X dollars”), signs the form, seals and locks the container, and off it goes. On arrival, only the recipient listed on the manifest may open the container, and the truck rolls to its final destination.

What about inspecting all containers? Impossible, impractical and wholly disruptive of an extremely time-sensitive business. And also fruitless. The top 25 U.S. ports that accommodate container ships handle 11 million TEUs annually.

What if authorities opened the container that held the Texas truck? What would they find? Why, they’d find a truck – the very one lawfully owned and accurately listed on the manifest. To get a handle on this, law enforcement and port security must look ashore – upstream from the seaport, not along the waterfront.

In closing, I have only one source for the following piece of evidence, but that source has proven impeccable.

In the case of the truck that took to sea from a Galveston or Houston seaport, the shipper was not a plumber in Texas.

He is a Syrian.

[SIDEBAR IS BELOW—–]

Are the New F-250 Owners Al Qaeda?  

Not according to research by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, an Oxford graduate and analyst with the Middle East Forum, a think-tank devoted to promoting American interests in the region. That said, Chechen jihadis in Syria vs. Al Qaeda may be a difference without a distinction.

The new truck owners’ group, Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar (JMWA) belongs to an alliance of three other groups formed in July 2013. The alliance is called Jabhat Ansar al-Din (JAD). The pick-up photo was found on the JAD website.

In November 2013, JMWA transformed when its previous leader and a cadre of his followers joined Ad-Dawlah Al-Islamiyya (“The Islamic State” or IS, now mislabeled by the White House, the Pentagon and mainstream media as “ISIS” or “ISIL”). Made up largely of Chechen jihadis, JMWA can best be viewed as the Syria-based wing of the Caucasus Emirate, designated a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. and many other nations.

Fighters in Syria from the largely Chechen Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar (JMWA). (Photo from a jihadi site, courtesy of Caleb Weiss) 

JAD and its 4 member-groups advocate Shari’a Law and the formation of a caliphate and oppose the U.S.-led coalition operating above, if not in, Syria and Iraq. The alliance opposes the U.S. and the West for all the usual reasons that prompt militants to kill Westerners: from Afghanistan and Gitmo to the fuel rod of Islamist rage: “the Jews’ occupation of Al-Aqsa” mosque in Jerusalem. So, JAD hardly consists of the “moderate Syrian rebels” Congress has just voted to arm.

So JAD is akin to IS and the Al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra (“Victory Front” or JAN). JAD, however, will not join JAN and wants nothing at all to do with IS. Their fighters don’t even refer to IS by name. Reasons: fierce competition among the groups, persistent enmity between leaders and perhaps a non-aggression pact, however tacit. Said one JAD spokesman to analyst Aymenn Al-Tamimi: “We don’t fight [IS], and they don’t fight us. Anyone who says [JAD] is affiliated with [IS] is lying.”

Thus, the new owners of a Texas plumber’s old pick-up truck hate us for the same reasons IS and JAN hate us. All are driving hard toward the same destination. Each just prefers to travel alone and via a different route.

__________

A former Navy Commander, Tom Wyld served nearly 5 years as director of intelligence for a private security firm specializing in training and operational support of U.S. Navy SEALs. He continues to provide intelligence, investigative and counterterrorism support to former SEALs. Prior assignments include Communications Coordinator, Swift Boat Veterans & POWs for Truth; lobbyist for State Motorcyclists’ Rights Organizations (e.g., ABATEs); and Chief of Staff and PR Director for the Institute for Legislative Action, the lobbying and political arm of the NRA.

Hillary’s Collusion and Favors via Ecuador

Paying to play goes from the Senate to the State Department. Video here.

MIAMI — The Obama administration overturned a ban preventing a wealthy, politically connected Ecuadorean woman from entering the United States after her family gave tens of thousands of dollars to Democratic campaigns, according to finance records and government officials.

The woman, Estefanía Isaías, had been barred from coming to the United States after being caught fraudulently obtaining visas for her maids. But the ban was lifted at the request of the State Department under former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton so that Ms. Isaías could work for an Obama fund-raiser with close ties to the administration.

It was one of several favorable decisions the Obama administration made in recent years involving the Isaías family, which the government of Ecuador accuses of buying protection from Washington and living comfortably in Miami off the profits of a looted bank in Ecuador.

The family, which has been investigated by federal law enforcement agencies on suspicion of money laundering and immigration fraud, has made hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions to American political campaigns in recent years. During that time, it has repeatedly received favorable treatment from the highest levels of the American government, including from New Jersey’s senior senator and the State Department.

The Obama administration has allowed the family’s patriarchs, Roberto and William Isaías, to remain in the United States, refusing to extradite them to Ecuador. The two brothers were sentenced in absentia in 2012 to eight years in prison, accused of running their bank into the ground and then presenting false balance sheets to profit from bailout funds. In a highly politicized case, Ecuador says the fraud cost the country $400 million.

The family’s affairs have rankled Ecuador and strained relations with the United States at a time when the two nations are also at odds over another international fugitive: Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, who has taken refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.

But while scrutiny has typically focused on whether the family’s generous campaign donations have helped its patriarchs avoid extradition, the unorthodox help given to Ms. Isaías, the daughter of Roberto, has received little attention.

In the spring of 2011, Ms. Isaías, a television executive, was in a difficult situation.

Her father and uncle were Ecuadorean fugitives living in Miami, but she was barred from entering the United States after she brought maids into the country under false visa pretenses and left them at her parents’ Miami home while she traveled.

“Alien smuggling” is what American consular officials in Ecuador called it.

American diplomats began enforcing the ban against Ms. Isaías, blocking her from coming to Miami for a job with a communications strategist who had raised up to $500,000 for President Obama.

What happened next illustrates the kind of access and influence available to people with vast amounts of money.

A Senator’s Assistance 

For more than a year, Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, and his staff engaged in a relentless effort to help Ms. Isaías, urging senior government officials, including Mrs. Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, to waive the ban. The senator’s assistance came even though Ms. Isaías’s family, a major donor to him and other American politicians, does not live in his state.

The Obama administration then reversed its decision and gave Ms. Isaías the waiver she needed to come to the United States — just as tens of thousands of dollars in donations from the family poured into Mr. Obama’s campaign coffers.

An email from Mr. Menendez’s office sharing the good news was dated May 15, 2012, one day after, campaign finance records show, Ms. Isaías’s mother gave $40,000 to the Obama Victory Fund, which provided donations to the president and other Democrats.

“In my old profession as a prosecutor, timelines mean a lot,” said Ken Boehm, a former Pennsylvania prosecutor who is chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, a government watchdog. “When a donation happens and then something else happens, like the favor, as long as they are very, very close, that really paints a story.”

In 2012, the Isaías family donated about $100,000 to the Obama Victory Fund. Campaign finance records show that their most generous donations came just before a request to the administration.

Ms. Isaías’s mother, María Mercedes, had recently donated $30,000 to the Senate campaign committee that Mr. Menendez led when she turned to him for help in her daughter’s case. At least two members of Mr. Menendez’s staff worked with Ms. Isaías and her father, as well as lawyers and other congressional offices, to argue that she had been unfairly denied entry into the United States.

Over the course of the next year, as various members of the Isaías family donated to Mr. Menendez’s re-election campaign, the senator and his staff repeatedly made calls, sent emails and wrote letters about Ms. Isaías’s case to Mrs. Clinton, Ms. Mills, the consulate in Ecuador, and the departments of State and Homeland Security.

After months of resistance from State Department offices in Ecuador and Washington, the senator lobbied Ms. Mills himself, and the ban against Ms. Isaías was eventually overturned.

Mr. Menendez’s office acknowledged going to bat for Ms. Isaías, but insisted that the advocacy was not motivated by money.

“Our office handled this case no differently than we have thousands of other immigration-related requests over the years, and to suggest that somehow the senator’s longstanding and principled beliefs on immigration have been compromised is just plain absurd,” said Patricia Enright, the senator’s spokeswoman.

Ms. Enright said Mr. Menendez’s office worked on the case because Ms. Isaías had previously been allowed to travel to the United States six times despite the ban, and the decision to suddenly enforce it seemed arbitrary and wrong. She said the senator routinely acted on cases he got from across the nation.

In the Isaías case, the senator wrote seven letters for various members of the family, including four on April 2, 2012, alone.

Photo

Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey, lobbied on behalf of Estefanía Isaías, though she is not a constituent. Credit Mel Evans/Associated Press

A month after succeeding in Ms. Isaías’s case, Mr. Menendez sent another letter to the head of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to waive a ban on her sister, María — who had also been deemed an immigrant smuggler because she had brought maids into the United States and left them with her parents while she traveled abroad.

As that letter went out, their mother gave $20,000 more to the Obama Victory Fund.

Immigration officials forwarded the senator’s inquiries to Homeland Security Investigations, the immigration bureau’s investigative arm. Officials there noticed that the Isaías family had made several donations to the senator, and informed the F.B.I. in Miami.

Agents with Homeland Security Investigations are working to have the Isaías brothers deported. The Ecuadorean government has repeatedly requested that the men be extradited, but Washington has declined, saying that the extradition request was poorly prepared and did not meet legal standards. The criminal case in Ecuador was also marred by irregularities.

Support on Capitol Hill

The Isaías brothers consider themselves political exiles unfairly attacked by the Ecuadorean government and have garnered support on Capitol Hill, where sentiment against Ecuador’s leftist president runs strong.

But the case involving Estefanía could prove awkward for Mrs. Clinton, who was in charge of the State Department at the time high-ranking officials overruled the agency’s ban on Ms. Isaías for immigration fraud, and whose office made calls on the matter

Alfredo J. Balsera, the Obama fund-raiser whose firm, Balsera Communications, sponsored Ms. Isaías’s visa, was featured recently in USA Today as a prominent Latino fund-raiser backing Mrs. Clinton for president in 2016.

Mr. Balsera declined repeated requests to explain what work Ms. Isaías had done for his company, which has close ties to the Obama administration. To stay in the country under her three-year visa, Ms. Isaías would have to remain employed by Balsera Communications, request a change of immigration status or get another employer to sponsor her.

The company website does not list her as one of its 12 employees, though it has biographies and photos of even junior account executives, and news releases were issued when others were hired. Ms. Isaías’s name has not been mentioned on the company’s blog, Facebook page or Twitter timeline, and she is not present in any of the dozens of photographs posted on social media sites of company outings, parties, and professional and social events.

David A. Duckenfield, a partner at the company who is now on leave for a position as deputy assistant secretary of public affairs at the State Department, said Ms. Isaías worked for the firm but declined to comment further. Another senior executive at the firm said she must work outside the office because he had never heard of her.

Cheryl Mills, who was former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s chief of staff. Credit Michael Buckner/Getty Images for J/P Haitian Relief Organization and Cinema for Peace

A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton and her chief of staff, Ms. Mills, denied any special treatment for Ms. Isaías. Although Ms. Mills is unlikely to serve in any official capacity on a potential 2016 presidential campaign, she would undoubtedly be a strong behind-the-scenes presence and one of a small number of longtime advisers whom Mrs. Clinton would rely on for advice.

“There are rigorous processes in place for matters such as these, and they were followed,” said the spokesman, Nick Merrill. “Nothing more, nothing less.”

A White House spokesman, Eric Schultz, declined to comment, saying that visas are issued free from political interference by other federal agencies.

‘Not His Constituents’

Linda Jewell, the American ambassador in Quito, Ecuador, from 2005 to 2008, when Ms. Isaías’s immigration fraud was detected, said the intervention in Ms. Isaías’s case was far from routine.

“Such close and detailed involvement by a congressional office in an individual visa case would be quite unusual, especially for an applicant who is not a constituent of the member of Congress,” Ms. Jewell said after reviewing emails and documents related to the case. “This example of inquiry is substantially beyond the usual level of interest.”

Others have expressed concern. When Mr. Menendez’s office reached out to Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, to get him to write a letter on Ms. Isaías’s behalf, his office refused.

The office “discovered from the State Department that there were some red flags associated with the individual in question, and we took no further action,” said Mr. Nelson’s spokesman, Dan McLaughlin.

Mr. Boehm, the former Pennsylvania prosecutor, said Senate ethics rules allowed members of Congress to reach out to the administration on behalf of a constituent. “Members of Congress do a lot for their constituents,” Mr. Boehm said.

“These folks are not his constituents,” he added, referring to Mr. Menendez.

The Isaías family did not return several requests for comment. Ms. Isaías did not respond to emails and messages left at her home in Miami. Her lawyer, Roy J. Barquet, did not respond to phone and email messages.

In an interview this year, Roberto Isaías said the family’s donations were targeted to members of Congress who fight for human rights and freedom of speech in Latin America. He said he had met Mr. Menendez once or twice. “If you go to his website,” Mr. Isaías said, “it says, ‘If you have an immigration problem, call me.’ ”

The senator’s website does offer such casework assistance, under a category titled “Services for New Jerseyans.”