The Homeland Security Show with Janice Kephart - Premiere Show

By Janice Kephart on March 22, 2012

"The Homeland Security Show with Janice Kephart", my new Internet radio show, premiered on vipinternetradio.com on Monday, March 19. I invite you to download the first episode and hope you will tune in every Monday at 7 p.m. EST to listen to the show live. The show is something I do on my own and is not a Center for Immigration Studies project.

Each week I will begin with a "Homeland Security Roundup", covering and analyzing important events from the prior week. The core of the show will be topically focused and simply titled "Tonight's Homeland Topic(s)". My background in border and identity security will be pivotal to the show's success and I welcome topic suggestions from CIS readers!

My first guest was Emmy Award-winning investigative journalist William Lajeunesse, now with FOX News. Lajeunesse has conducted the most extensive investigative journalism on the misguided Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) operation "Fast and Furious", which encouraged U.S. gun dealers to sell weapons to suspected Mexican cartel traffickers in an effort to catch the "big fish", and in the process allowed over 2,000 guns to "walk" across the border. So far about 400 guns illegally imported from the United States have been found at Mexican crime scenes and 300 have been recovered in the United States. The Justice Department still will not provide exact numbers.

The ATF has been claiming since "Fast and Furious" became public that the agency never had probable cause to dismantle the operation, but Lajeunesse found a document showing that the ATF had more than sufficient probable cause after a border stop of a gunrunning kingpin at the Lukeville port of entry (POE) in Arizona a few months into the operation. Apparently the senior agent who conducted the interview allowed him to walk and asked the gunrunner to call the POE when he was back in the States — despite a full admission to arms trafficking and arms found in the vehicle. The ATF was given this information, failed to use it, and when challenged, claimed that ATF leadership had never received the POE report. Lajeunesse also discussed the soundness of the overarching mission of "Fast and Furious", the congressional investigation, and what potential outcomes could mean for the presidential campaigns.

In my "Homeland Security Roundup", I discussed my analysis of the viral documentary "Invisible Children", about wanted Ugandan rebel leader and brutal killer Josef Kony, and that documentary's relationship to homeland security and human trafficking issues; the Obama administration's announcement of a biometric exit program; and the Canadian government's Capitol Hill briefings on the new "security perimeter action plan", which is designed to increase efficiency in northern border operations.