More Proof of Vetting Failures in the Immigration Process

Two more recent terrorism-related law enforcement cases have led to three more chuckleheads who pledged allegiance to ISIS being in custody for material support of terror.

One of the three, Iraqi refugee Omar Faraj Saeed Al Hardan, copped a plea to the charge in a Houston federal court. His co-conspirator and fellow Iraqi refugee, Aws Mohammed Younis Al-Jayab, is detained in Chicago awaiting trial, unless he too decides to plead out.

In a separate case, a Bangladeshi named Nelash Mohamed Das was arrested and indicted by federal authorities in Maryland for plotting with ISIS to target and kill American soldiers. In typical politically correct fashion for this administration, even the Justice Department's press release describes Das as "a Maryland man". Neither it nor the indictment mentions Das's immigration status other than being a citizen of Bangladesh, although the Baltimore Sun tells us that Das is a resident alien who came to the United States two decades ago. The indictment is bare-bones, but unusual in that it lays out the government's intent to seize property belonging to Das. Clearly there is more here than meets the eye.

These things are so much the "new normal" that one can almost hear the collective public yawn when reading articles relating to such arrests, which rarely even merit mention on national news programs anymore, often being relegated, if anywhere, to the telegraphic tickertape announcements that flow across the bottom of the TV screen.

We have come to expect that the FBI and other agencies will be there, Johnny-on-the-spot, to take these often pathetically inept individuals into custody before they perpetrate something god-awful; that is, until they don't get to them in time and that god-awful thing does come to pass, at which point the "how could this happen?" questions begin in earnest, usually focusing on whether or not the individual(s) were ever, or should have been, "on the radar" of the FBI or other law enforcement or intelligence agencies.

Sometimes the question of immigration vetting arises when it's inescapable, such as in the case of Syed Farook and his jihadi bride Tashfeen Malik, the perpetrators of the San Bernardino massacre. But no one in officialdom or the media really seems to want to get to the bottom of the matter, which is the fundamental inability of our current immigration system to screen out would-be terrorists — an inability compounded by the Obama administration's willful blindness to ever connecting bad things with the sheer overwhelming volume of migration to the United States. And make no mistake, it is a quantitative as well as qualitative failure. The capacity to find a needle is in direct proportion to the size of the haystack.

In a couple of weeks, give or take, Americans will be going to the polls. One of the things you will be voting on, like it or not, acknowledge it or not, is that haystack.