Report: ISIS Using Refugee Program to Smuggle Terrorists Into the U.S.

Islamic State terrorists and other Islamic extremists are actively seeking to find a way to exploit the refugee program so they can enter the United States, intelligence sources have told the head of the House Homeland Security Committee. Yesterday, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) released portions of a classified letter from the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), and said the infiltration attempts are already underway. Via The Hill:

The NCTC has identified “individuals with ties to terrorist groups in Syria attempting to gain entry to the U.S. through the U.S. refugee program,” the intelligence agency told McCaul in a letter.

“The refugee system, like all immigration programs, is vulnerable to exploitation from extremist groups seeking to send operatives to the West,” the agency added, noting that a small number of Iraqi refugees were arrested on terror charges in 2010.

McCaul said that it was “very courageous” for the intelligence sources “to come forward with this, to tell me about this personally, given the political debate on the Hill.” Note that this information has not been previously disclosed by the Obama administration.

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The same president who told the American people that the Islamic State was a “JV team,” and that they were “contained,” chose not to clue us into the actual intel about the terror group’s plans to sneak operatives into the United States. This comes as a new U.S. intelligence report on ISIS, commissioned by the White House, predicts that the terror group “will spread worldwide and grow in numbers, unless it suffers a significant loss of territory on the battlefield in Iraq and Syria.”

Via The Daily Beast:

The report stands in stark contrast to earlier White House assurances that ISIS had been “contained” in Iraq and Syria. And it is already spurring changes in how the U.S. grapples with ISIS, these officials said.

It’s also a tacit admission that coalition efforts so far—dropping thousands of bombs and deploying 3,500 U.S. troops as well as other coalition trainers—have been outpaced by ISIS’s ability to expand and attract new followers, even as the yearlong coalition air campaign has helped local forces drive ISIS out of parts of Iraq and Syria.

The White House commissioned the intelligence report prior to last month’s deadly strikes in Paris, and long before last week’s terror attacks in San Bernardino, California, three senior U.S. officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to describe a confidential document and policy changes. It was also commissioned before President Barack Obama declared ISIS “contained” in Iraq and Syria—just a day before the Paris attacks—but it was delivered to the White House in the weeks afterward.

Even absent the report, evidence has long pointed to the fact that the Islamic State is expanding. There was no reason to believe that the terrorists were “contained,” and yet Obama confidently declared on national television that they were. It almost looks as if somebody was “cooking” the intel to suit the very particular needs of a president who prefers happy talk to inconvenient truths:

We’ve been following serious, credible claims leveled by dozens of current and former US intelligence professionals who allege that their work product was regularly altered and manipulated to downplay the growing threat and alarming advance of ISIS. The former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency has stated that the current investigation into these accusations should start at the White House, which he says has subordinated accurate information to political narratives. Other American spies have alleged that the Obama administration also deliberately kept a lid on intel gathered during the Bin Laden raid that contradicted the White House’s messaging about Al Qaeda. Yesterday afternoon, prior to the president’s Oval Office remarks, a former NSA analyst and Naval War College professor with deep ties to the US intelligence community tweeted something provocative:

Talked 2 an old friend, snr IC official – who said on #ISIS: “If the public knew the truth, Obama would be impeached.” Friend’s a Dem, btw.

— John Schindler (@20committee) December 6, 2015