Connection: Business As Usual

When suspected terrorists entered Washington state from British Columbia in December, Border Patrol offices in Spokane and Blaine, Wash., laid on as much overtime as their thin ranks would allow. There are only 29 agents between the Cascades and the Rockies.

Now, though, the federal agency’s operations along the Canadian border between the Strait of Georgia and the Continental Divide are pretty much back to business as usual.

That increasingly means bagging smugglers of “B.C. Bud,” popular high-grade Canadian marijuana, rather than terrorists.

Just about three weeks ago, Border Patrol agents confiscated 103 pounds of marijuana in Okanogan County. Blaine Border Patrol agents seized 760 pounds of pot in the first four months of the fiscal year that began Oct. 1, more than in the entire preceding 12 months.

On average, only about one terrorism suspect a year is caught entering the Northwest, and all of those have been in the Blaine area.

One of them, Palestinian Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer, was sent back to Canada twice in 1996, and was released on bail when Border Patrol agents arrested him again in 1997. Abu Mezer then made his way to New York City, where he was caught making bombs to plant on subway trains in Jewish neighborhoods.

Dave Keller, intelligence officer at the Blaine Border Patrol office, said the agency is working on better ways to “identify the true nature” of people like Abu Mezer.

Meanwhile, Keller and his Spokane counterpart, Paul Jones, say all available agents and equipment are deployed. More cameras on poles are to be mounted this year to supplement the scopes, cameras, motion detectors and bomb-sniffing dogs and machines already in use.

A still-unspecified staff increase is working its way through Congress, but new agents must train on the more-active Mexican border before they can be transferred to the Canadian border.

* Nation’s other border at risk, say senators * Northern exposure