More than six and a half years after 9/11, the U.S. bureaucracy is starting to get basic tasks done.

Fingerprints from one out of a hundred detainees in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Horn of Africa are matching those in U.S. local police files:

From the Washington Post:

As they analyzed the results, they were surprised to learn that one out of every 100 detainees was already in the FBI’s database for arrests. Many arrests were for drunken driving, passing bad checks and traffic violations, FBI officials said.

“Frankly I was surprised that we were getting those kind of hits at all,” recalled Townsend, who left government in January. They identified “a potential vulnerability” to national security the government had not fully appreciated, she said.The people being fingerprinted had come from the Middle East, North Africa and Pakistan. They were mostly in their 20s, Shannon recalled. “One of the things we learned is we were dealing with relatively young guys who were very committed and what they would openly tell you is that when they got out they were going back to jihad,” he said. “They’d already made this commitment.”

One of the first men fingerprinted by the FBI team was a fighter who claimed he was in Afghanistan to learn the ancient art of falconry. But a fingerprint check showed that in August 2001 he had been turned away from Orlando International Airport by an immigration official who thought he might overstay his visa. Mohamed al Kahtani would later be named by the Sept. 11 Commission as someone who allegedly had sought to participate in hijackings. He currently is in custody at Guantanamo Bay.

Similarly, in 2004, an FBI team choppered to a remote desert camp on the Iraq-Iran border, home to the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), whose aim is to overthrow the Iranian government. The MEK lead an austere lifestyle in which men are segregated from women and material goods are renounced. The U.S. State Department considers the organization to be a terrorist group.

The FBI team fingerprinted 3,800 fighters. More than 40, Shannon said, had previous criminal records in the agency’s database.

While the FBI was busy collecting fingerprints, the military was setting up its own biometrics database, adding in iris and facial data as well. By October, the two organizations agreed to collaborate, running queries through both systems. The very first match was on the man who claimed to be a poor dirt farmer. Among his many charges were misdemeanors for theft and public drunkenness in Chicago and Utah, a criminal record that ran from 1993 to 2001, said Herb Richardson, who serves as operations manager for the military’s Automated Biometric Identification System under a contract with Ideal Innovations of Arlington.

Many of those with U.S. arrest records had come to the United States to study …[Post-9/11 Dragnet Turns Up Surprises, By Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post, July 6, 2008]

So, one percent is just the fraction of jihadis who got fingerprinted in America when they got caught by the police screwing up. What fraction managed to not get caught when they were in America? Of course, we don’t seem to collect fingerprints on foreigners in the U.S., so nobody knows.

Not every young foreign man who attends college in America develops a lifelong love of America. John Updike’s 1978 novel “The Coup” explains the psychological mechanics of this in a character very similar to Barack Obama Sr.

So, why did our President go out of his way to start up a new program with the King of Saudi Arabia to bring thousands of Saudi college students to America?

GOP candidate John McCain was down here in Mexico this past week. McCain didn’t visit me, and it’s a pity. I could have pointed out a few things to him. Nor did McCain come to Mexico to visit, sympathize with, and to stir up the Gringo Community in Mexico, as a Mexican politician would do with the Mexican Community in the United States. But McCain is not interested in Gringos in Mexico. The senator was here to campaign.

In today’s globalized context, U.S. presidential campaigns are no longer limited to U.S. territory. They are now international affairs. Presumably, McCain thinks he can pick up Latino votes in the U.S. by visiting Mexico. The candidate may be wrong about that, but that’s what he thought.

One of McCain’s activities here was a visit to the Virgin of Guadalupe Basilica in Mexico City. (I’ve written an article on “The Virgin of Guadalupe and the National Question,” located here.)

Reportedly, the Basilica visit was at the behest of former Mexican cabinet member and current McCain adviser Juan Hernandez.

In Mexico the Virgin of Guadalupe is considered off limits to politicians, Vicente Fox took a lot of heat once for waving a Guadalupe banner.

McCain, though, is presumably in Mexico to win votes of Mexican-Americans in the United States. It’s still not clear though that the Basilica visit will gain many votes .

At another venue in Mexico , McCain spoke about immigration and actually said something that sounded halfway sensible.

I believe we must have comprehensive immigration reform. The American people want our borders secured first. That will require some walls. It will require virtual fences. It will require high-technology equipment. We must secure our borders, and then we will address the issue of comprehensive immigration reform.

Of course, “comprehensive immigration reform” is a code word for amnesty. McCain is saying the border must be secured before enacting an amnesty. I oppose an amnesty no matter what the border is like, and I still don’t trust McCain. However, I am impressed that he actually defended walls and border security in Mexico, that took some courage.

Even an editorial in Mexico’s El Universal gave McCain good marks, and said that McCain exhibits “a better understanding of this country [Mexico] than his opponent [Obama].”

It was still not good enough for some Hispanic leaders in Chicago who were interviewed by El Porvenir:

Leaders of the Mexican immigrant community considered offensive the pronouncement of the Republican candidate to the Presidency, John McCain, in favor of the (border) wall before immigration reform. Interviewed separately, the leaders said that his (McCain) visit to Mexico was a mockery against Mexicans, their symbols and aspirations with respect to the relationship with their northern neighbor.

You just can’t make these guys happy!

The political director of the Coalition for the Defense of Immigrants and Refugees, Artemio Arreola, exposed that the Republican politician only intended to exploit an image of identification with Mexico to attract the Latin American vote. “But in the end, the message was that he will continue the same politics of president George W. Bush, with the message regarding the immigration issue: “I will hit you first and and comfort you later”, he added.

Bush has pandered to Mexicans and Mexican-Americans throughout his presidency, and this is the thanks he gets ?

The leader of the Front for the Defense of the Immigrant, Carlos Arango, thought that McCain showed a lack of respect and an arrogance with his words, besides he made his visit to the Basilica of Guadalupe into a mockery against the Mexicans. “It was an insult, a slap in the face to the Mexicans to say that if he is president he will build a wall before resolving the situation of millions of undocumented workers”, he declared.

So after all McCain has done to pander to this crowd, this is the thanks he gets ?
Why should the GOP even try to please these people ?