Catch a Car Thief...

...stop a terrorist?

The FBI's counterterrorism unit has launched a broad investigation of US-based theft rings after discovering that some of the vehicles used in deadly car bombings in Iraq, including attacks that killed US troops and Iraqi civilians, were probably stolen in the United States, according to senior government officials.

Story here. As I understand it, the FBI is to begin working with local and state law enforcement agencies to begin cracking down on car thefts. Some cars, the FBI believes, that have been stolen in the states have ended up overseas and been used in bombings. Think about that next time a car alarm goes off in the middle of the night.

It makes sense to me. For the past four years, residents in border towns like San Diego have had to start seriously considering what ramifications our porous borders are having. In some places, the coyotes could easily transport illegal OTM (other than Mexican) aliens across the border to have them conduct attacks against US civilians and assets. Why not use that same pathway to smuggle vehicles and equipment out of the country, into Mexico and overseas?

We have already had a task force working on our car theft problems, but it gets complicated when the border is involved. Mexican extradition laws have made it difficult to work against the rising rate of car theft. Companies like LoJack mostly give up on trying to recover vehicles from south of the border, since most recovered vehicles are deemed a "total loss" anyway.

It is not inconceivable that the car theft rings that operate in San Diego are dealing with other buyers and distributors that deal directly with terrorist forces overseas and supplying them with vehicles to blow up in Iraq. Some of the groups, like MS-13, are so rabidly anti-American and violent that they have offered bodily harm and death to the Minutemen volunteers in addition to their standard drug- and people-trafficking, that I don't believe for one second that they would blink at the oppurtunity to make a buck and further the cause of "la raza" by dealing a blow to los norteamericanos.

Tracing the path of these vehicles from the streets of America to the local ''chop shop" -- where criminal wholesalers process stolen vehicles -- and then on to the black market half a world away could help thwart a terrorist network that has wrought some of the worst violence against US troops and thousands of Iraqi civilians.

''They want to follow it through the whole process so they can identify as many people in the process as they can," Terp said. ''As you go back to the chop shop guy, he may not know the end user is some terrorist, but who are his contacts?"

They may just be bringing the thunder on themselves with their increasingly violent criminal behavior. What would otherwise be something the insurance company would handle is now something the FBI is carefully tracing back to the source. Vaya con muerte, cabron.