Bipartisan report: Obama ‘losing’ struggle to keep Americans out of ISIS

The Obama administration has failed to prevent Americans from joining the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), leaving the United States vulnerable to attack, a bipartisan congressional report said on Tuesday.

The analysis from a House Homeland Security Committee task force concluded that the administration has no coherent plan to prevent radicalized foreigners from entering the U.S.

{mosads}“The findings are concerning,” Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, said at a press conference.

“The findings indicate that, number one, the threat is getting worse, not better,” he added. “We are losing in this struggle to keep Americans from the battlefield, because many are still going to the region and coming back.

“Most importantly, we lack a national strategy to deal with this problem.”

Rep. Bennie Thompson (Miss.), the committee’s top Democrat, said the effort would lead to “meaningful legislation” to turn its list of 32 recommendations into policy.

”There’s no question about the terrorist threat that we face,” Thompson said.

“There’s no question about Americans going to join ISIL and foreign fighters abroad,” he added, using an alternate acronym for ISIS. “The question is whether or not we can determine that some of those people are trying to get back into the United States.”

Roughly 30,000 foreigners from more than 100 countries have flooded into Iraq and Syria to join ISIS in the last year, according to federal estimates. Only a small fraction of those — roughly 250 — have been American, though law enforcement officials have repeatedly warned that disaffected Americans can also easily be recruited into the ISIS fold by the group’s sophisticated social media presence.

National security officials have grown increasingly concerned in recent months about the damage that even one or two of those foreign-trained extremists could do if they returned into the U.S. As evidence, they have pointed to the failed plot to target a “draw Muhammad” event in Texas and multiple foiled attacks throughout the country.  

Officials have also worried about radicalized Europeans traveling into the U.S., given the relatively lax visa restrictions.

“Europe has a real problem on their hand,” McCaul said. “Europe is wide open.”

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said that Tuesday’s report “should be a serious wake-up call to this administration.”

“President Obama’s failure to outline a broad, overarching strategy to defeat and destroy ISIL has put America at risk,” he said in a statement.

“We are losing the fight to stem the flow of foreign fighters overseas.  We aren’t doing enough to combat ISIL’s sophisticated use of social media and communications.”

As the House task force was releasing its work in Washington, President Obama was addressing a United Nations group in New York to help rally global efforts to tackle ISIS’s growth across Iraq and Syria.

“Our approach will take time. This is not an easy task,” Obama told delegates from countries across the globe. 

“It is not going to be enough to defeat ISIL in the battlefield,” he added. “We have to prevent it from radicalizing, recruiting and inspiring others to violence in the first place, and this means defeating their ideology.”

The Obama administration also announced 30 new sanctions against supporters of ISIS on Tuesday, aiming to cut off the group’s access to money, while Attorney General Loretta Lynch spearheaded a U.N. effort to connect city officials trying to prevent radicalization before it starts.

The Homeland Security Committee created its task force in March to probe ways that the government can fortify its defenses against ISIS.

Among other findings, it concluded that foreign nations are still sharing their intelligence in an “ad hoc” manner that makes it difficult to track extremists, that the U.S. government has done little to counter-message radical propaganda at home and that border points could use additional intelligence to better screen people entering the country.

McCaul also criticized the use of encryption technologies, which officials have warned make it impossible for law enforcement agencies to read people’s communications, even with a warrant.

The government has rapidly escalated its aggressiveness against suspected ISIS supporters in recent months, amid concerns about the group’s growing reach. 

Nearly 70 people have been arrested in the U.S. for planning to support the group and the number of prosecutions is nearly certain to grow, predicted task force leader Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.).

Critics of the government’s approach have claimed that the extra scrutiny about ISIS in America overlooks other types of domestic extremism, such as the white-supremacist ideology that inspired Dylann Roof, the alleged killer of nine people in an historically African-American church in Charleston, S.C.

According to analysis from the New America Foundation, right-wing extremists have killed nearly twice as many Americans than Islamic extremists in the years since Sept. 11, 2001.

This story was updated at 5:08 p.m.