America’s prisons, breeding grounds for terrorism

One of the things that could tie the United States down considerably would be the emergence of a terrorist Fifth Column here at home. As columnist Michelle Malkin noted in Sunday’s New York Post, a new study performed at the request of Senators Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, and Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General has confirmed earlier, frightening press reports: U.S. and state prison systems have been penetrated for years by proselytizers for the radical subset of the Muslim faith known as Islamism – notably, the virulently intolerant, jihadist strain associated with Saudi Arabia’s state-sanctioned Wahhabi cult.

Incredibly, neither their interactions with prisoners nor even those of incarcerated Islamist terrorists have been adequately supervised out of what the I.G. deemed to be misplaced concern about "privacy rights" and "religious freedom." Worse still, released felons are but one source, if a particularly dangerous one, for attacks in this country by al Qaeda sympathizers that have been cultivated over the past three decades by institutions tied to Saudi Arabia.

The Center for Security Policy has long called attention to this threat. In October 2003 Dr. J. Michael Waller, the Center’s Vice President for Information Operations, testified before the Judiciary Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security regarding the long term threat posed by terrorist recruitment and infilitration in the U.S. prison system as well as the U.S. military. Dr. Waller warned: "The recruitment and organization of ideological extremists in prison systems and armed forces is a centuries-old problem, as is the difficulty that civil societies have had in understanding and confronting the matter."

Click here to learn more about Islamist infiltration of U.S. prisons and military bases.

Click here to read the Inspector General’s "Review of the Bureau of Prisons’ Selection of Muslim Religious Services Providers."