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Violent Jihad

Law Enforcement: San Bernardino Jihadist Farook Planned Other Attacks with His Family

But, while this was all going on, no one who knew Enrique Marquez and Syed Farooq saw anythig, and no one said anything.

BY Philip Haney · | April 29, 2016

Yesterday, law enforcement arrested three close relatives of San Bernardino jihadist Syed Farook. Several statements included in Fox News’ coverage of the story struck me right away:

First, we learned that Enrique Marquez—who supplied the guns to shooters Syed Farooq and Tashfeen Malik—was “already in jail and awaiting trial for conspiring with one of the San Bernardino attackers, Syed Rizwan Farook, in terror plots that never materialized.”

As a longtime counterterrorism specialist at the Department of Homeland Security, I found it immediately intriguing—and highly disturbing—that Marquez being held in jail for conspiring with Farooq in terror plots (in the plural) independent of the participation of Tashfeen Malik (Farooq’s wife). This would imply that Marquez and Farooq, both American citizens, were actively colluding together to harm their own countrymen, either before Farooq ever met Tashfeen Malik in Saudi Arabia, or at least apart from her direct participation.

In other words, Enrique Marquez and Syed Farooq were operating within their own sphere of activity, perhaps without the involvement or influence of any foreign individuals at all. This also give rise to several difficult questions, like:

How many plots were they conspiring in?

What was the time frame (was it months, or even years)?

Were any other individuals involved in these plots?

Why weren’t they discovered, and arrested, well before the December 2, 2015 attack in San Bernardino?

It seems clear that this case is much broader in scope than general media reports would indicate, and that there were likely several early indicators (clues) that could have alerted law enforcement to intervene in the situation, and possibly prevent the attack.

Also, despite the fact that the FBI found no evidence of links to a foreign terrorist network in Syed Farooq’s iPhone, it remains highly plausible that the iPhone data will point back to some of these early indicators, and/or possibly link Farooq to a domestic network of individuals and organizations.

But, while this was all going on, no one who knew Enrique Marquez and Syed Farooq saw anything, and no one said anything. Instead, “Several of Syed Farook’s neighbors told ABC News they noticed ‘suspicious activity’ at the home of the San Bernardino shooter, as well as his mother’s home at another location. No reports were made, however, for fear of being accused of racial profiling.”

This is just of several recent examples (as with Paris mastermind Salah Abdeslam) of the risks involved when law enforcement agencies rely solely on ‘Model Communities’ to monitor themselves, and to voluntarily report any terrorists who may be living openly in their midst.

In my forthcoming book, See Something, Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad, I discuss seeing the dangers of America’s politically correct national security policies first-hand.

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