Why Was Texas-Synagogue Jihadist Akram Allowed to Enter U.S.? By Andrew C. McCarthy
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/why-was-texas-synagogue-jihadist-akram-allowed-to-enter-u-s/
When it comes to Western governments and jihadism, willful blindness is never fully cured.
EXCERPTS
Americans, particularly Jewish Americans, were justifiably nettled by agent Matthew DeSarno, who heads the FBI’s Dallas field office and who ridiculously claimed that Akram’s plot was “not specifically related to the Jewish community.” In his tin-eared way, however, DeSarno appeared to be conveying that Akram’s main objective was to extort our government into releasing convicted terrorist Aafia Siddiqui from custody, and reassuring Jewish communities across the country that the bureau does not believe that there’s a broader ongoing conspiracy to attack synagogues.
We should be understanding of officials who make good-faith errors in communicating facts about what otherwise seems to be a competent performance by government agencies. Nevertheless, we should also demand a complete, accurate accounting. The FBI and other agencies should not get to take a victory lap in which we are spun with information that casts them in a favorable light, while less-flattering facts are omitted and possibly concealed.
Which is to say, we need a lot more information about what happened here — in particular, about (a) the circumstances of Akram’s demise in the synagogue, and more important (b) how this jihadist managed to obtain a tourist visa allowing him to enter the United States.
Then there is the matter of how Akram managed to get a tourist visa. It raises questions that need to be addressed by both American and British authorities, whose close partnership in the lavishly funded counterterrorism field is said to set the first-world standard for international cooperation.
Under U.S. immigration law, aliens with criminal records, mental illness, or a history of endorsing terrorist attacks are presumptively excluded from entering our country. Governments also maintain terrorism watch lists, and allied governments — such as the U.S. and the U.K. — cooperate in screening to ensure that suspected terrorists do not cross each other’s borders. And, because of several instances of mass-murder attacks by terrorists adherent to jihadist ideology (the most virulent manifestation of “political Islam” or, more accurately, Sharia supremacism), President Trump, upon taking office in 2017, issued executive orders to intensify “screening and vetting protocols and procedures associated with visa adjudications and other immigration processes.”
Yet new reporting on Akram’s hostage-taking in Fort Worth indicates that he not only had a criminal record in Britain; in 2001, he was formally banned from a U.K. magistrate’s court (in Blackburn, Lancashire, where he resided) for menacing court personnel with rants endorsing the 9/11 attacks — expressly wishing that he had been on one of the planes weaponized by jihadists in the killing of nearly 3,000 Americans. Furthermore, the Wall Street Journal reports that British officials have confirmed the claim of Akram’s brother that, in addition to a criminal record, the jihadist had a history of mental-health problems.
Understand: Any one of these three criteria — criminal history, mental illness, or terrorism sympathies — is sufficient by itself to exclude an alien from the United States. There is increasingly good reason to believe Akram hit the trifecta . . . and got in anyway.
Meanwhile, the BBC has confirmed that, in 2020, Akram was under investigation by MI-5 and had been placed on its “Subjects of Interest” (SOI) watch list. In this regard, it appears that the British government maintains two relevant watch lists: the SOI for people regarded as high-level security threats; and “Closed Subjects of Interest” (CSOI), for those formerly listed as SOI but who have been “cleared.” Evidently, Akram was on the SOI list until being transitioned to the CSOI list. The currently sketchy reporting, all of which is anonymously sourced to officials from both governments, does not tell us when or why Akram’s threat level was downgraded.
On that point, it is worth explaining how difficult and resource-intensive this work is.
Recent estimates indicate that the Brits have approximately 3,000 people on their SOI list, and 40,000 are categorized as CSOI. The latter number, which has doubled since 2017, overwhelmingly consists of suspected jihadists (notwithstanding progressive efforts to portray the British internal security threat as driven by right-wing extremism — a demagogic political narrative we’re quite familiar with on this side of the Atlantic).
Neil Shortland, a UMass academic who has worked in Britain’s Defence Ministry, estimated in a 2017 interview that it requires a dozen surveillance officers to effectively monitor a single suspected terrorist. Therefore, to surveil 3,000 people categorized as SOI would exceed the U.K.’s law-enforcement resources. Practically speaking, they’d be able to do nothing else. Obviously, then, there is pressure to move people off the SOI list, not to relieve the pressure but so security officials can ensure, as best they can based on imperfect information, that finite resources are being spent on the right people. As Shortland bluntly put it: “Risk assessment in terrorism is very, very hard, and we don’t know how to do it. The amount of work we’re asking of the agencies involved is far exceeding their capacity.”
It appears that British authorities share SOI information with their American counterparts. Regarding CSOI, it’s less clear how comprehensive the sharing is.
Finally, as former Trump-administration adviser Stephen Miller points out, immediately upon starting his term, President Biden terminated his predecessor’s order mandating that intelligence agencies step up efforts to screen and vet aliens seeking to enter the United States.
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