The Middle East has become a roiling cauldron as multiple and often competing terror groups continue their bloody rampages throughout that embattled region of the world.
By its words and deeds — or more properly, by lack of deeds — the Obama administration created a power vacuum. The situation was further exacerbated when the president drew “lines in the sand” and demonstrated an abject lack of resolve when he failed to act when those lines were crossed.
Negotiations must always be conducted from a position of strength, however, the administration’s posture and apparent lack of resolve projected anything but strength.
Our adversaries respect strength and, conversely, become emboldened when we demonstrate weakness.
Radical Islamists saw opportunities in all of the above and ISIS pushed on with its plans to create a Caliphate. Today huge numbers of people are understandably fleeing the violence and chaos that has enveloped Syria and other parts of the Middle East.
I am certainly sympathetic to the plight of refugees. My grandmother (my mother’s mother for whom I was named), was slaughtered during the Holocaust in Poland because we are Jews. In point of fact, many of my mother’s family died during the Holocaust. My first wife died of cancer 30 years ago. Her mother (my mother-in-law) had been held in a concentration camp in Poland during the Holocaust while her father lived in forests, always somehow managing to stay one step ahead of the Nazis, although many of his family members were caught and killed during World War II.
However, the undeniable problem we now face is that there is no reliable way to vet these refugees. This is hardly a minor problem. Isis and other terror organizations have made it clear that their goal is to attack our nation and ultimately fly their flag over the White House.
On September 20, 2013 Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS) posted my article,“Comprehensive Immigration Reform: Background Checks Require a Reality Check.” In my article I presented my “insider’s” perspectives about just how difficult it is for the various federal agencies, especially Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the United States Citizenship and Immigration Benefits (USCIS), to effectively screen applications filed by millions of aliens who seek various immigration benefits. Because the number of alien applicants is so huge, most often applications are adjudicated without so much as a face-to-face interview, let alone an actual field investigation.
On November 10, 2014 Newsweek Magazine published a disturbing report, “Inside the CIA’s Syrian Rebels Vetting Machine.” The article focused on the utter ineptitude in the program by which the CIA attempted to vet a force of only 5,000 Syrians they recruited to fight against terrorists.
Here is how this important article begins:
Nothing has come in for more mockery during the Obama administration’s halting steps into the Syrian civil war than its employment of “moderate” to describe the kind of rebels it is willing to back. In one of the more widely cited japes, The New Yorker’s resident humorist, Andy Borowitz, presented a “Moderate Syrian Application Form,” in which applicants were asked to describe themselves as either “A) Moderate, B) Very moderate, C) Crazy moderate or D) Other.”
After Senator John McCain allegedly posed with Syrians “on our side” who turned out to be kidnappers—a report later called into question—Jon Stewart cracked, “Not everyone is going to be wearing their ‘HELLO I’M A TERRORIST’ name badge.”
Behind the jokes, however, is the deadly serious responsibility of the CIA and Defense Department to vet Syrians before they receive covert American training, aid and arms. But according to U.S. counterterrorism veterans, a system that worked pretty well during four decades of the Cold War has been no match for the linguistic, cultural, tribal and political complexities of the Middle East, especially now in Syria. “We’re completely out of our league,” one former CIA vetting expert declared on condition of anonymity, reflecting the consensus of intelligence professionals with firsthand knowledge of the Syrian situation. “To be really honest, very few people know how to vet well. It’s a very specialized skill. It’s extremely difficult to do well” in the best of circumstances, the former operative said. And in Syria it has proved impossible.
Daunted by the task of fielding a 5,000-strong force virtually overnight, the Defense Department and CIA field operatives, known as case officers, have largely fallen back on the system used in Afghanistan, first during the covert campaign to rout the Soviet Red Army in the 1980s and then again after the 2001 U.S. invasion to expel Al-Qaeda: Pick a tribal leader who in turn recruits a fighting force. But these warlords have had their own agendas, including drug-running, and shifting alliances, sometimes collaborating with terrorist enemies of the United States, sometimes not.
“Vetting is a word we throw a lot around a lot, but actually very few people know what it really means,” said the former CIA operative, who had several postings in the Middle East for a decade after the 9/11 attacks. “It’s not like you’ve got a booth set up at a camp somewhere. What normally happens is that a case officer will identify a source who is a leader in one of the Free Syrian Army groups. And he’ll say, ‘Hey…can you come up with 200 [guys] you can trust?’ And of course they say yes—they always say yes. So Ahmed brings you a list and the details you need to do the traces,” the CIA’s word for background checks. “So you’re taking that guy’s word on the people he’s recruited. So we rely on a source whom we’ve done traces on to do the recruiting. Does that make sense?”
No, says former CIA operative Patrick Skinner, who still travels the region for the Soufan Group, a private intelligence organization headed by FBI, CIA and MI6 veterans. “Syria is a vetting nightmare,” he told Newsweek, “with no way to discern the loyalties of not only those being vetted but also of those bringing the people to our attention.”
A particularly vivid example was provided recently by Peter Theo Curtis, an American held hostage in Syria for two years. A U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) unit that briefly held him hostage casually revealed how it collaborated with Al-Qaeda’s al-Nusra Front, even after being “vetted” and trained by the CIA in Jordan, he wrote in The New York Times Magazine.
“About this business of fighting Jabhat al-Nusra?” Curtis said he asked his FSA captors.
“Oh, that,” one said. “We lied to the Americans about that.”
On September 12, 2015 Fox News posted a Wall Street Journal article, “Refugees pose as Syrians to open door to asylum in Europe,” which reported on how many of the aliens who have poured into Europe claiming to be refugees from Syria are actually citizens of other countries who are seizing the opportunity to falsely claim to be Syrians to be granted asylum in Europe. This level of chaos could easily enable a relative handful of terrorists from a wide variety of countries to conceal themselves in this human tsunami.
What is happening in Europe mirrors what will happen in the United States as the administration moves to admit tens of thousands of refugees.
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