Buried deep in the Washington Post article today about a post 9/11 dragnet that has revealed a shocking number of terrorists caught on the battlefield in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia have already been in the US, is this little gem of information. Homeland Security has turned down 365 suspected terrorists who have applied to come to the United States as refugees, and we have been led to believe they have all been our good little helpers in Iraq. Matthew Lee (AP reporter), you missed this story!
Investigators are working on ever more sophisticated ways to evaluate the data. Analysts at the Army’s National Ground Intelligence Center in Charlottesville, for instance, use software to scrutinize intelligence reports from sources such as electronic surveillance and informants. They then link the information to a person’s biographic and biometric data, and look for relationships that might detect terrorists and plots.
For example, a roadside bomb may explode and a patrol may fingerprint bystanders because insurgents have been known to remain at the scene to observe the results of their work. Prints also can be lifted off tiny fragments of exploded bombs, said military officials and contractors involved in the work.
Analysts are not just trying to identify the prints on the bomb. They want to find out who the bomb-carrier associates with. Who he calls. Who calls him. That could lead to the higher-level operatives who planned and financed attacks.
Already, fingerprints lifted off a bomb fragment have been linked to people trying to enter the United States, they said.
In a separate data-sharing program, 365 Iraqis who have applied to the Department of Homeland Security for refugee status have been denied because their fingerprints turned up in the Defense Department‘s database of known or suspected terrorists, Richardson said.
There was something to laugh (or cry) about in this deadly serious story. Demonstrating our absolutely abysmal level of understanding of Islam, a high level FBI official said this about many of those terrorists who had already been in the US:
Many of those with U.S. arrest records had come to the United States to study, said former Criminal Justice Information Services head Michael Kirkpatrick, who led the FBI effort to use biometrics in counterterrorism after Sept. 11. “It suggests there was some familiarity with Western culture, the United States specifically, and for whatever reason they did not agree with that culture,” he said. “Either they became disaffected or put up with it, and then they went overseas.”
For whatever reason, oh my God!