Since Muslims tend to recruit in prison, and radical Muslims tend to be degenerates it didn’t shock me to learn many Jihadis fighting in the Middle East and Africa had records here. It did shock the government though, proving once again that few people truly understand the enemy we face:
WASHINGTON — In the 6  1/2 years that the U.S. government has been fingerprinting insurgents, detainees and ordinary people in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Horn of Africa, hundreds have turned out to share an unexpected background, FBI and military officials said. They have criminal arrest records in the United States.
There was the suspected militant fleeing Somalia who had been arrested on a minor drug charge in New Jersey. And the man stopped at a checkpoint in Tikrit, Iraq, who said he was a poor dirt farmer but had 11 felony charges in the United States, including assault with a deadly weapon.
The records suggest that potential enemies abroad know a great deal about the United States because many of them have lived here, officials said. The matches also reflect the power of sharing data across agencies and even countries, data that links an identity to a distinguishing human characteristic such as a fingerprint.
“I found the number stunning,” said Frances Fragos Townsend, a security consultant and former assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism. “It suggested to me that this was going to give us far greater insight into the relationships between individuals fighting against U.S. forces in the theater and potential U.S. cells or support networks here in the United States.”
[…]
Fingerprints lifted off a bomb fragment in Iraq have been linked to people trying to enter the United States, analysts said.
In a separate data-sharing program, 365 Iraqis who have applied to the Department of Homeland Security for refugee status have been denied because their fingerprints turned up in the Defense Department’s database of terrorists or suspects, Richardson said.
h/t N.T.A.