OPINION:
The warning by the FBI that the radical Islamic terrorists are plotting a holiday surprise for the nation’s capital has to be taken as a grim and serious alarm. The Islamic State, or ISIS, is working to reprise Paris in the United States, and no occasion would suit the terrorists better than the season of thanksgiving and the festive celebration of the Prince of Peace.
The bureau is worried that it does not have the resources to track a growing number of radicalized Americans nurtured in the resentment culture of the Middle East. The fight against ISIS has opened a wide breach between the FBI, which sees the threat to the nation writ vivid and plain, and President Obama, whose insouciance invites one and all to join him in his nap.
There’s movement in Congress to take charge of a situation the president seems determined to ignore. In an hour of peril he offers empty reassurance, a lethal invitation to catastrophe. House Speaker Paul Ryan wants to impose a pause in taking in more Syrian refugees until a satisfactory vetting of the migrants can be put in place. Others, including Democrats, agree.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, disputes Mr. Obama’s claim, offered before the Paris massacre and repeated the day after, that the Islamic State is “contained.” Sen. Feinstein says she has “never been more concerned.”
There is lack of concern bordering on indifference in other places. High-ranking sources at the FBI tell our John Solomon that the bureau is frustrated that the president and the Justice Department have not pressured Congress to force technology companies to break the encrypted communications of suspects. Political appointees in certain government agencies, these FBI sources say, have been too deferential to the technology companies that can be generous with spreading their wealth.
“We have suspects we’ve been tracking that have gone dark,” these sources tell this newspaper, “because we can no longer follow their encrypted activities. Physical surveillance can only take us so far and the urgency to solve that gap in the political realm isn’t there.”
Another high-ranking official agrees. “The [Obama] administration offers a calming public story line that we have all this under control and life can go on as normal. But we’re one crack in the sidewalk away from a tragedy, and that crack could be an encrypted message we can’t follow, a lead we couldn’t [pursue] or a refugee who slips in like [the one] we saw in Paris.”
One FBI official says the terrorists have switched to encryption, some of it from games like PlayStation 4, that the FBI labs have so far been unable to penetrate. This enables the ISIS terrorists to communicate without fear of FBI intervention. The hour is late, and getting later. John Brennan, the director of the CIA, says more plots are afoot and more attacks are “already in the pipeline” to the United States.
President Obama, watching his administration beginning the long slow slide into the history books, is obsessed with his legacy, and how those history books will describe his administration. He thinks victory laps after his remarkable give-away deal with Iran will write his story in vivid colors.
He may leave more legacy and more vivid colors than he imagines. If the terrorists, whose very name he is unable to speak, succeed in writing their exploits in blood on the streets of America, the president of the United States will have to explain to America why he slept the sleep of the indifferent and the incompetent.
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