Reader Snapple referred us to some truly fascinating information regarding terrorists we have captured in Iraq and elsewhere – they were drawn out of America to fight our forces overseas!

In the 6 ½ 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 claimed to be a poor dirt farmer – but also had 11 felony charges in the United States, including assault with a deadly weapon.

…

“I found the number stunning,” said Frances Fragos Townsend, a security consultant and former assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism.

Emphasis mine, and I find the number stunning as well. More here:

HILL: How did you pick the people that you would fingerprint? Did it have to be somebody that you found with a gun firing at our troops or at NATO forces? How would you pick the people?

SHANNON: Well, generally we went with military detainees in Afghanistan and we also went with detainees that were being held by the Northern Alliance forces in places like Mazar e-Sharif, Kandahar and in other locations because we knew that those people had been plucked right off the battlefield and we knew that they had been fighting against us.

We also fingerprinted people on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan because the foreign fighters were trying to flee the country. And that was our main concern. 

This is truly amazing and important. I am not sure ‘when’ these people left America, but one thing is for sure – if they left to fight us on the other side of the world, they were not here to plan another 9-11. If they were there prior to 9-11, then it was a good thing we took the fight to them so they did not come back here again and cause havoc.

Basically, this proves the ‘fly paper’ component of the Iraq war. While liberals love to say Iraq distracted us from our target, the fact is Iraq caused Bin Laden to throw his large army of trained terrorists (remember, he was training for years in a large number of camps in Afghanistan) against our forces in Iraq and basically lose them. There are reports that the once large Islamo Fascist forces of Bin Laden are all gone (see here for one example).  One report was pretty blunt and where this has left al-Qaeda:

The version of al-Qaeda that Osama bin Laden founded is a fading force. After five detainees who allegedly planned the Sept. 11, 2001, atrocities were arraigned recently before a U.S. military tribunal at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, it’s worth remembering that the terrorists behind 9/11 were mostly young, well-educated middle-class expatriates from Muslim countries who had become radicalized abroad, especially in the West. Such key 9/11 plotters as Mohamed Atta, Ramzi Binalshibh, Ziad Jarrah and Marwan al-Shehhi met and became radicalized as students in Hamburg, then went to Afghanistan looking for al Qaeda.

But over the past six years, most of the professional terrorists who fit this profile have been eliminated during the U.S.-led manhunt for ”high-value targets.” The few that remain are huddled in the Afghan-Pakistani border area, struggling to extend their reach beyond Pakistan.

One thing is for sure. If hundreds of potential or active Jihadists have lived or visited the US, then I am sure more are still here – and that is why today’s FISA vote in the Senate is so important. We have to stay vigilant. But it is also good to know the wars on the other side of the world made us safer here, in more ways than one, if they pull even one potential killer out of America and into the hands of our military forces.

Tags: Afghanistan, America, Iraq, Terrorists