Cleared by that meticulous, thorough, super-duper rigorous two-year vetting process the Obama administration promises is adequate to 10,000 (or more) Syrian refugees:
Two men born in Iraq who came to the U.S. as refugees were set to appear in court Friday on terror-related charges in California and Texas, as investigators say one of the men wrote that he wanted to travel to Syria because he was “eager to see blood.”
A criminal complaint unsealed Thursday accused 23-year-old Aws Mohammed Younis Al-Jayab, of Sacramento, Calif., of traveling to Syria to fight alongside terrorist organizations and lying to government investigators about it.
Almost simultaneously in Houston, federal authorities announced the arrest of Omar Faraj Saeed Al Hardan, 24, on charges of attempting to provide material support to ISIS, procurement of citizenship or naturalization unlawfully and making false statements to investigators.
In addition to writing that he was “eager to see blood,” Al-Jayab also claimed that he wanted to learn “long range shooting,” and that “God has facilitated” his travels. [via Fox News]
If you want an illustration of why some people are skeptical about accepting Syrian refugees en masse, here you go. Our vetting measures must be sufficient not just to identify asylum-seekers who currently have terroristic sympathies; they must also be sufficient to identify those who might, sometime in the future. If they didn’t work for Jayab, who came to the U.S. in 2012, and Hardan, who came in 2009 — in both cases, before the Islamic State had gone public with its savage campaign, and when U.S. officials would have been at comparative leisure to evaluate refugees — why should we expect them to work now, when the Islamic State’s visibility and reach are global, and when the potential refugee population is overwhelming?
Additionally, our vetting procedures are apparently so lousy that Jayab was able not only to enter the United States in 2012, but to leave, travel to Syria, murder and pillage — then return to the United States:
According to the complaint, Al-Jayab traveled to Syria from Chicago via Turkey in November 2013. He remained in Syria until the following January and fought alongside several terror groups, including Ansar al-Islam, which merged with ISIS in 2014 after Al-Jayab had returned to the United States. He settled in Sacramento following his return to the U.S.
The severed heads in his luggage didn’t raise an eyebrow when he landed at O’Hare?
The president and his ilk have done a top-notch job dismissing anyone skeptical of his Syrian refugee policy as “racist” and “xenophobic” and “Islamophobic.” But it’s none of those things to look at the facts of the situation in Syria, to note the obvious weaknesses in our vetting procedures, and to ask whether we have the capabilities to separate victims of the Islamic State from those who, now or in the future, want to aid it.