“Heightened Precautions” My Foot!

Remember the group al-Qaeda in Iraq, the one we’re told has no attachment at all with al-Qaeda? It seems they were trying pretty hard to get a bunch of terrorists into the US on student visas to kill a whole bunch of us. Now, that doesn’t seem like the best tactic given the public opinion situation on Iraq, but that doesn’t seem to matter to them.

Ace gives us the story and this comment:

These people are simply kill-crazy insane. This proves it– they are winning this war, at least where it ultimately counts, in the court of public opinion. And yet they planned to actually slaughter Americans on American soil and thereby guarantee themselves the full and utter decimation they deserve.

I think that’s a pretty dead-on analysis. The Islamists are clearly winning in Iraq, not on the ground where our military chews them up like a Dobie crunches up a pigear, but right here in America where we see anything but a clear picture of things on the ground and are getting Islamist propaganda piped right to us courtesy of a very willing MSM.

Here, though, is the part of the article that caught my attention most.

Sources tell ABC News that the plot may have involved moving between 10 and 20 suspects believed to be affiliated with al Qaeda in Iraq into the United States with student visas — the same method used by the 19 al Qaeda terrorists who struck American targets on Sept. 11.

U.S. officials now require universities to closely track foreign nationals who use student visas to study in the United States. University officials must report international students who fail to arrive on campus or miss class regularly.

In August, the FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement alerted intelligence agencies and state and local law enforcement about 11 Egyptian students who had failed to report to their classes at Montana State University. The students were ultimately apprehended.

Still, despite the heightened precautions, some security analysts fear that skilled terrorists — handpicked because of their clean records and because they are carefully trained — could still slip through an academic setting.

“Heightened precautions”? What “heightened precautions”? You might remember the case of the 11 runaway Muslim students. I mentioned it when it hit the news back in August. Let me give you a quick rundown of the time line.

Montana State University reported on June 29 that eleven of seventeen students who were supposed to come straight to Montana from New York City didn’t arrive. The Feds made a public announcement on August 7 and it hit the media on August 8.

The last students were captured on August 13 in Richmond, VA. The week before, one was arrested in Minneapolis, MN, two were in Manville, NJ, two more were in Dundalk, MD, one was at O’Hare Airport in Chicago, IL, and three were in Des Moines, IA.

It took authorities two weeks to apprehend all eleven students. The last two had enough time and money to rent an apartment in Richmond outside which they were arrested. They were, the FBI and ICE assured us, simply college students and no threat at all.

But what if they weren’t? Remember, these students entered the US on a student visa under the “heightened precautions” it took our government five years to put into place. They had two weeks to do anything they wanted. If they had been members of al-Qaeda in Iraq what could they have done in two weeks? If two of them had the time and resources to rent an apartment, they certainly could have rented a truck or a small airplane. They could have made contact with cells operating here in the US. They could have simply gone to ground until the initial media furor died down. Assuming that our hypothetical terrorists had no better training than Egyptian college students, they had two weeks with which to work.

That’s a lot of time. Actually, it’s way too much time, this long after 9/11. The story of the Egyptian students could have ended differently. Instead of being “ultimately apprehended”, they could have died in a blinding flash as their truck bomb detonated next to a school or high rise or shopping mall. We could have been reading how tens of thousands were dying of some unknown biological agent or how Des Moines or Richmond or Minneapolis was evacuating its downtown area because of a dirty bomb detonation.

Thanks to our soldiers in Iraq, we dodged another bullet aimed straight at our hearts. We got lucky last August.

We can’t rely on luck to keep us safe and we surely can’t continue to rely on our soldiers breaking up plot after plot after plot in Iraq. We need to get serious about who we admit into this country and for what reason. We need to get serious about not giving al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Mullahs in Iran, or anyone else who wants to keep whispering defeat in our ears any sort of serious hearing.

And we need to remember that we are still at war. It is not a war we asked for, nor one we chose. But we need to fight it as viciously as we can with as much resolve as our hearts can muster. If we don’t, we may find that our luck has run out.

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Category: Fighting the Islamists