they vetted Tashfeen Malik three times before allowing her to come to the United States with her “fiancee” and settle in San Bernardino. Unfortunately, as the New York Times was forced to report last night, they missed a few things, such as the fact that she’d apparently been going on social media for years and talking about how she was in favor of violent jihad and wanted to be a part of the movement.
Tashfeen Malik, who with her husband carried out the massacre in San Bernardino, Calif., passed three background checks by American immigration officials as she moved to the United States from Pakistan. None uncovered what Ms. Malik had made little effort to hide — that she talked openly on social media about her views on violent jihad.
She said she supported it. And she said she wanted to be a part of it.
American law enforcement officials said they recently discovered those old — and previously unreported — postings as they pieced together the lives of Ms. Malik and her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, trying to understand how they pulled off the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil since Sept. 11, 2001.
So how did that happen? They’re looking at a lot of people every year, so if there’s one needle in a haystack you may very well miss it I suppose. But that’s not the situation at all. The Department of Homeland Security told the Times that, immigration officials do not routinely review social media as part of their background checks. If that’s not bad enough, they followed up by saying that the department is still debating whether it is even appropriate to do so.
So we’re not yet at the point of asking whether we’re even capable of going through the social media posts of visitors looking to come to us from terrorist infested places like Pakistan. We’re still arguing about whether we even should? Our extraordinarily thorough and comprehensive vetting process doesn’t include checking Twitter to see if the girl was recently chatting with her friends about how cool it would be to blow up a football stadium. But at the very same time, you’re an Islamophobe if you don’t want the refugees settled in your community or if you think we should slow down the flow of new visas being issued to applicants from the most sketchy regions. Yeah… that makes a lot of sense.
More at HotAir.