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ECM investigation identifies photo purported to be training camp dates back to 2009
By Miriam Raftery
April 15, 2015 (San Diego’s East County) – For the second time in recent months, an apparently false claim about ISIS terrorists at our border made by Judicial Watch has been making the rounds, primarily on blogs and right-wing media sites. But fact checkers at ABC news, Media Matters and Snopes.com say the latest rumor is likely false.
Moreover, an East County Magazine online search found the photo claimed as a terrorist camp in 2015 is actually an AFP/Getty Image of Anapra taken by photographer Jorge Uzon. It was published in 2009 in VQR, a literary journal, in an article about a smuggler in Anapra, including an anecdote in which his father mistakenly thinks men seeking to be smuggled into America are Al Qaeda terrorists. View the 2009 story and photo here (2nd large image, with green structure).
The same photo appears in the latest story by Judicial Watch, a conservative group.Their story published April 14th, 2015 claims that ISIS terrorists have set up a training camp just over the Texas border near El Paso in Anapra or Juarez, Mexico. The article claims its sources are a Mexican army officer and a Mexican federal police inspector, and that documents purportedly from ISIS were found in Anapra. It further claimed that ISIS terrorists are being smuggled across the border.
But KVIA, an ABC TV station in El Paso, reports that it checked with several federal law agencies involved with border security who said the report is unverified and likely false.
Media Matters, a non-partisan fact-check organization, calls the Judicial Watch story “spurious” and notes that the story about an ISIS camp just over the Texas border was repeated without fact-checking by Fox News host Sean Hannity and others.
“Right-wing media have a history of echoing dubious Judicial Watch reports to incite fear about terrorists crossing the U.S. border,” Media Watch reports, noting that. Fox News also parroted Judicial Watch’s September 2014 claim that a terrorist attack from the U.S.-Mexico border was "imminent," although the claim was roundly denounced by terrorism experts and rated "mostly false" by Politifact, which found a long history of dubious and debunked claims made by the Judicial Watch over various terrorist operations supposedly in Mexico, such as Hezbollah.
The most widely publicized claim came in 2014, when Judicial Watch claimed that “Islamic terrorist groups are operating in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez and planning to attack the United States with car bombs or other vehicle borne improvised explosive devices," citing several anonymous "high-level federal law enforcement, intelligence and other sources."
Politico found no substantiation for the claims and reports that Homeland Security stated when asked about the claims, "There is no credible intelligence to suggest that there is an active plot by (ISIS) to attempt to cross the southern border."
Snopes.com, a website that debunks urban legends and myths, also debunks the Judicial Watch story on the purported training camp, stating, “This information is apparently unknown to every source other than Judicial Watch, as several federal law agencies involved with border security said the report is unverified, and that it is unlikely that ISIS is in Anapra or Juarez, Mexico.
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