Kilgore reached the limits of free speech here and he needs to recant.

All joking aside, all conjecture aside, this is criminal and he should be held accountable.

I’ll add a little mileage to this one:

MS-13 (aka la Mara Salvatrucha or the Salvadoran Gang) isn’t a radical Catholic gang, nor is it a franchised version of the Jets and Sharks. What distinguishes MS-13 from other gangs is its guerrilla origins prior to its transformation into a gang. As the name implies, MS-13 has its origins in El Salvador, and its original members were “demobilized” members of the FMLN, the Marxist group that sought to overthrow the Salvadoran government in the 1980s. Following the cessation of hostilities, more than a few of them found their way to the US and the US prison system, where they came into contact with the MM (Mexican Mafia) and other gangs. Many of the current crop of MS-13 members are actually the second generation. It’s also worth noting that the FMLN itself still exists in El Salvador, providing a tangible “spiritual home base” so to speak, and that MS-13 maintains contact with the homeland. As to MS-13 being a radical Catholic gang, its members, being Salvadorans, they may have taken on a number of Catholic attributes (praying to a patron saint prior to a hit, etc), but the organization’s origins are decidedly Marxist.

Does MS-13 talk to Al-Qa’ida? Who knows? I’d be willing to bet they’ve exchanged phone numbers at some point, but I doubt they are working together. Bad people tend to talk to other bad people, and sometimes, if they have enough in common, they do business. My own guess is unless there’s a mutual criminal “business interest,” the two organizations don’t have much in common to talk about. Aside from some sensationalist reporting, I don’t recall seeing much to indicate MS-13 and Al-Qa’ida have enough common interests to make them want to work together. This strikes me as just another case of hyping the threat. I personally would be far more concerned about MS-13 making common cause with Mexican drug cartels and maybe Colombian ones to facilitate the passage of coca, opiates and illegal aliens into the U.S. Kilgore is just out to lunch on this one and won’t admit a mistake. It appears to me that whomever he has advising him is very unknowledgeable on the subject of MS-13. He would do well to go to the FBI and actually listen to them, and then if he want to speak on the subject, hire someone with a little more knowledge than what they gather through Google searches.

Were MS-13 to more directly engage in terrorist activity, I’d have to wonder if its leaders/members wouldn’t take direction from their “mother” organization, the FMLN. In that case, when considering possible terrorist roles for MS-13 it might be more appropriate to consider FMLN’s own goals, foreign policies and doctrine. You can read these from FMLN’s own published writings as well as those of various academics both US and foreign, who have studied that former (former at least in name) guerrilla group. One of my own favorite sources of information on the FMLN is José Angel Moroni Bracamonte, author of Strategy and tactics of the Salvadoran FMLN guerrillas : last battle of the Cold War, blueprint for future conflicts.

These guys themselves learned their tradecraft from the North Vietnamese (and let’s not forget the Cubans), themselves no slouches in the art of guerrilla warfare. Guerrilla groups talk to other guerrilla groups, sometimes directly, sometimes through political front organizations and I wouldn’t be surprised to see that they swap “trade secrets” with one another. I think that just because you see a particular tactic associated with one group show up in another part of the world, it doesn’t necessarily mean the two are working together directly with each other. In this day and age, it’s very easy to post and read techniques on websites or even (gasp!) — blogs ;-)

Hans, Kilgore was using his usual weird phrasing, but he clearly said “is being,” the present tense. If he was using a hypothetical, then he was clearly attempting to mislead listeners into believing that he was describing an actual scenario. He may well have said “when martians are working with Democrats to eat babies, then we have a problem.” But, again, he used the present tense, so that’s that.

The idea that a radical Catholic gang would work with a radical Islamic terrorism group is bidirectionally ridiculous. It flies in the face of everything that we’ve been told about al-Qaeda.

What Kilgore is saying is that it is something we need to guard against. John Kerry talks in his book, The New War, about the danger of worldwide organized crime and its potential to team up with terrorists. Please note that he doesn’t say that it already has happened, he said if it would happen, it would be a big problem, thus we need to make sure that it doesn’t:

“Absolutely. When they’re contacted by al-Qaeda to…to work in partnership with al-Qaeda, then we have a problem, and we need to fix that problem.”

The spokesman was saying pretty much what I was saying, ““He is not mistaken at all,” Kilgore campaign spokesman Tucker Martin said Friday, producing the pair of newspaper stories. “There could be a connection we are not aware of. Many people have said there could be [a connection]. We need to be proactive.””

Amen!

[emphasis added]

“Attorney General John Ashcroft has publicly said a high-ranking al-Qaeda leader, Adnan El-Shukrijumah, has offered top dollar to infiltrate the United States via the Mexican border.”

Could this be what Kilgore is referring to? (Excuse me — “…to what he is referring?”)