by Todd Bensman
A Jordanian immigrant who illegally crossed the Southwest Border from Mexico finally staged the first known terrorism attack on U.S. soil on May 3 after having accessed the target from the Mexican border.
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By refusing repeated chances to simply rule out a terrorism motive for a May 3 truck-breaching attack on the Quantico Marine Corps base, the Biden administration and all involved agencies have essentially confirmed one of America's worst — and most politically consequential — nightmares related to the ongoing border crisis. A terror attack emanating from an illegal Southwest Border crossing just happened, and since that precedent is now established, more are likely on the way.
In my reasoned opinion, a Jordanian immigrant who illegally crossed the Southwest Border from Mexico finally staged the first known terrorism attack on U.S. soil on May 3 after having accessed the target from the Mexican border.
To date, the government will only confirm the border-crossing Jordanian joined with another illegally present Jordanian, who overstayed a student visa, and together posed as Amazon deliverymen in a large box truck, then tried to plow it through the gates of Quantico, which houses the FBI training academy, military officer training schools, and military criminal investigations and intelligence commands.
Quick-thinking military police thwarted the attack and charged the men with trespassing before turning them over U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The government didn't offer a word about this incident until Potomac Local News' Kelly Sienkowski initially broke the story and provided the politically explosive elements that one of the Jordanians had crossed the southern border first and that one was on the FBI terrorism watch list.
After I amplified the Potomac Local News story in a May 13 New York Post column demanding to know more, some scattered conservative media outlets, broadcasters, and law-makers joined in the quest for an answer to the main question: Was this a terror attack by a border-crossing extremist? But the administration's coordinated refusal to address the terrorism aspects led me — and should lead everyone else — to the conclusion that it most definitely was a terror attack by a border-crossing "special interest alien".
I base my reasoned conclusion that a border-crossing terrorist did finally strike — a fear that has gone unconsummated and often ridiculed since 9/11 — in part on repeated refusals by the White House, the Department of Defense, the FBI, and ICE to address terrorism as the motive.
Consider that since the 9/11 attacks federal authorities and the American people have enjoyed a kind of public compact that now stands broken. It is that the government almost always clarifies to the American public whether its top counterterrorism professionals regard initially ambiguous attacks as motivated by international or domestic terrorism — or not — and often a thumbs up or down as to whether the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force was investigating.
But the Biden administration will not engage in this one rare case, a startling break with post-9/11 tradition.
I believe the reason Biden's people won't acknowledge the first-ever border-crossing terror attack attempts to serve political aims, at the expense of public safety. They know that acknowledging a terror attack from the border crisis would further damage a Biden re-election campaign that is already suffering dearly from it.
Much recent polling shows the border crisis and its attendant national security fears constitute a major political vulnerability for the Biden re-election campaign for which voters already plan to punish Biden and reward Donald Trump. The border crisis could swing the election already, and now come credible reports that at least one Jordanian border-crosser just tried to ram a huge truck through an important military and law enforcement installation.
Any official acknowledgement that it was done for the global jihad delivers a giant new sledgehammer at the doorstep of Trump's campaign headquarters.
But more logic undergirds my conclusion that a border-crossing terrorist just struck for the first time due to the border crisis.
It's that the Biden administration will not rule it out even though doing so would quickly end the political threat to Biden's reelection. A rule-out would quickly send packing people like me and assure the story can never grow into a Trump sledgehammer. With a simple rule-out, we all just disappear, and columns like this never get written.
I believe the Biden administration won't rule out terrorism because they know the May 3 attempted truck ramming was a terrorism attack, and officials are not willing to risk impugning themselves by publicly saying otherwise.
In lockstep, the DOD, FBI, and ICE have all refused to rule out terrorism as a motive.
"ICE confirms attack on Quantico; Ignores questions on terrorist threat," reads the headline on Sienkowski's follow-up report a full 14 days after the terror attack. Fox News' Peter Doocy got the same response when he asked the ICE commissioner the question. An FBI spokesperson in the northern Virginia field office refused to confirm or deny investigative interest in the matter, Sienkowski told me in a phone interview.
Not even the White House would reap the advantage of an official "terrorism-ruled-out" when Fox News's Doocy pressed White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre if the White House would characterize what happened as a "failed terror attack."
"Given that it is an active law enforcement matter, I would have to refer you to ICE," she replied. "I just can't dive into that, again, because there is a law enforcement matter."
That dodge is, in my view, as good as confirmation, considering all the circumstances.
Finally, I know this was a terror attack — the first ever by an extremist border-crosser from the Middle East — because Karine Jean-Pierre and all these agencies are in lockstep on the messaging and strategy of neither confirming nor denying or ruling out terrorism. That means a whole lot of high-level talking and coordination went on because ... they know it was a terror attack and that great electoral danger resides in that reality.
This rare government refusal to say "terrorism" also suggests top Biden administration and campaign brass devised a strategy to hope against hope that legacy media won't pick up this story. That it will all be forgotten. And that Trump will never realize he has in hand a sledgehammer for the first televised debate.
But those who care about the national security threat that Biden's open-borders policy has created are not going away until his administration publicly goes on record ruling out a terrorism motive. Certainly not Texas Rep. Chip Roy and the dozen congressmen who just sent a letter demanding answers about the attack. Not me. And not Potomac Local News' Kelly Sienkowski, she tells me.
The American people have a right and need to know that a border-crosser has just conducted the first terror attack on U.S. soil, just like those who have fretted about such a thing for three years worried would happen.
Government failure to acknowledge, willingly publicize, and fix that problem — in favor of selfish political gain — will only aid and abet new attacks, some of which U.S. Marines may not be able to thwart.
Todd Bensman is a Milstein Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum and a senior national security fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies. He previously led counterterrorism-related intelligence efforts for the Texas Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division.
Source: https://www.meforum.org/65927/calling-it-america-just-suffered-the-first-terror
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