That may sound like a ridiculous question, and it certainly should be. But now President Obama has once again chosen to ignore the laws of the land as he announced an “asylum” program for those who have provided support to terrorists.
On February 5th, The Federal Register, a daily journal of the US government, included an announcement by the US Departments of State and Homeland Security that foreign asylum seekers who had “loose or incidental ties to terror or insurgent groups” would be granted asylum in the United States. Americans were supposed to be comforted by the assurance that there would be a thorough background check on these people before they were allowed to enter the country.
Edward Snowden’s background check should be a perfect example of how flawed this background check system is. In reality, our government agencies are very incapable of doing a thorough job at this, due largely to priorities and workloads.
This is a reckless policy done by fiat, and it reflects a total disregard for the seriousness of the threat from Islamic extremists at a time when the administration has made no effort to bring to justice the perpetrators of the Benghazi attacks. The intelligence community has good info on at least some of these attackers. Furthermore, the administration has an incredible history ignoring threats and of going all out to appease terrorists and their supporters in myriad ways.
Remember that the FBI had a record of at least fourteen emails between Maj. Nadal Hassan and a known Islamic extremist Imam, Anwar Al-Awlaki, before the November 2009 Ft. Hood shooting yet did nothing. In December 2009, the administration ignored warnings regarding a young extremist named Umar Abdulmutulab, who tried to blow up a commercial airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009. In February 2012, then-FBI director Robert Muller allowed Muslim advocacy groups to purge over a thousand pages related to Islam from the counter-terrorism training curriculum for FBI agents.
Congresswoman Michelle Bachman visited the FBI a few weeks later and reviewed the purged material. She later expressed to several national security specialists that everything that was purged was directly from the Koran and Hadith and that the FBI could not explain why the documents were removed. Also consider the volume of information that the U.S. Government had on the Tsarnaev brothers before the Boston Marathon bombing. Again, it was ignored.
And now we have significant information available about those who killed four brave Americans in Benghazi, yet no action has been taken at the same time that we are announcing that terrorist supporters can legally immigrate to America. Will that include some who supported the attack in Benghazi? Since the administration has shown no inclination to find the whole truth about Benghazi and no actions have been taken to capture or kill the perpetrators, it seems logical to ask whether this new policy will include any of these terrorist supporters.
As a nation, we should all be outraged by this new policy and by the failure to get to the bottom of the Benghazi attacks. Congress has yet to get all the facts out in public about what happened in Benghazi, and no one has been held accountable. The question is why. Anyone who thinks that this problem is just Harry Reid and the Democrats needs to rethink that assessment.
The Republicans are just as culpable, especially Speaker John Boehner. Rep. Frank Wolf called for a special bi-partisan committee with subpoena power (HR 36) to do a thorough investigation of Benghazi over a year ago. Republicans have slowly signed up in support of Wolf’s proposal, with 186 signatures on the Resolution now. The problem is that Speaker Boehner refuses to convene this special committee for esoteric reasons, opting instead to use the current committee structure which has had more than adequate time to call in the long list of survivors of Benghazi as well as myriad key military, diplomatic, and CIA personnel.
Why is Boehner stalling? What is he covering up? Will this new policy of asylum for terror supporters eventually allow the killers or their cohorts to enter the U.S. legally? This is an ugly story and one that is getting uglier. Americans cannot forget Benghazi and must rise up in a groundswell of overwhelming outrage over the lack of support for getting to the full story about what happened there, and more importantly, what did not happen. Why wasn’t there a rescue attempt by the U.S. military?
We all need to demand support for Rep. Wolf’s HR 36, as it is likely the only way to get to the whole truth. Additionally, concerned Americans should be burning up the phone lines demanding that congressional leadership hold the president accountable for this incredible breach of public trust.
Retired Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin is executive vice president at the Family Research Council and was an original member of the U.S. Army’s Delta Force.