President "Jayvee" (11/12/15): ISIS is contained.
ISIS (11/13/15): No we're not.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs (12/1/15): No they're not.
Who could have seen this coming? Our intelligence community, that's who. But their specific, accurate warnings were ignored, and their subsequent assessments were systematically manipulated. Because 'The Narrative' was, and is, king:
The former DIA director also told CNN's Jake Tapper that a Paris-style attack inside the United States is simply a "matter of time." This, on the heels of a new report detailing the "unprecedented" mobilization of ISIS-related sympathizers and radicals on US soil. As the debate over Syrian refugees continues to rage -- fueled by concerns about jihadists posing as refugees, as several Paris collaborators and attackers appear to have done -- the Wall Street Journal raises another potential threat:
The Paris attacks have raised fears of terrorists slipping into Europe by posing as refugees. But in Germany, the top migrant destination, security officials have another worry: Local extremists will recruit the newcomers to join the Islamist cause once they arrive. German authorities warn that migrants seeking out Arabic-language mosques in search of the familiar are increasingly ending up at those attended by Islamist radicals. In interviews, security officials from Berlin to the southwest German state of Saarland said they have registered a sharp rise in the number of asylum-seekers attending mosques they believed attracted extremists. Federal officials said they have counted more than 100 cases in which Islamists known to them have tried to establish contact with refugees. According to state and local agencies across the country, Islamists have offered migrants rides, food, shelter and translation help. In some cases, they have invited them to soccer games and grill parties, or brought them copies of the Quran and conservative Muslim clothing. “They start by saying, ‘We will help you live your faith,’ ” said Torsten Voss, the head of the German domestic intelligence agency’s Hamburg branch. “The Islamist area comes later—that is, of course, their goal.”
Former federal prosecutor and terrorism expert Andy McCarthy writes, "If our government had access to the background information necessary to vet them (it doesn’t), we would still be inviting a national security catastrophe for two reasons: (1) we vet for the wrong thing (i.e., only for whether the immigrants have known connections to terrorist groups, not whether they are adherent to Islamic-supremacist ideology), and (2) the main issue is not whether refugees are already terrorists but whether they are likely to become terrorists after they get here." Is it abject fear-mongering merely to raise these indelicate questions? Or is doing so equipping ISIS with yet another "recruiting tool"? And why, again, should we trust the Obama administration, which has gotten so much wrong already, to handle any of this competently?