Patrick Poole in this Pajamas Media piece entitled "What Senators Didn't Hear About Somali American Jihadists" raises a basic disturbing question about why our FBI and Senator Lieberman's Homeland Security and Government Committee (HSGAC) staff continually evade the realities of Muslim extremism in hearings over the past two years. His sub-text message in his jeremiad is clear:

A serious new terrorist threat is on the horizon -- but government officials are too politically correct to face it.

Poole goes on to note clear evidence that Somali American Jihadists constitute a 'clear and present danger.'

In December 2007, months before the Somali men began disappearing from Minneapolis, I reported exclusively here at Pajamas Media about a jihadist fundraiser in the Twin Cities area attended by hundreds of local Somalis. The event featured top jihadist organizer Zakaria Mahmoud Haji-Abdi, the deputy chairman of the Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia (ARS) and now second in command to Somali "president" Sheikh Sherif Ahmed.

In that instance, homeland security officials failed to prevent Abdi from entering the country and conducting a series of fund raisers here in the U.S., where he encouraged recruitment to the jihad and financial support from the Somali community for their cause. As the story of the missing Somali men began to unfold late last year, I reported that some of those same homeland security officials have now admitted privately that the fundraiser the year before had been the "tipping point" for radicalization in the Minneapolis area. That notwithstanding, another ARS official was recently allowed to enter into the U.S. to conduct even more jihadist fund raisers. (Stay tuned to Pajamas Media for more on that report.)

And it is no big secret what the common denominator is to all of the missing men -- all attended the Abubakar as-Siddique Mosque in south Minneapolis, led by extremist imam Sheikh Abdirahman Ahmed, the largest mosque in the area. Seeing as this link between the mosque and the missing men has been the focus of recent articles in the Los Angeles Times and Newsweek, it is hard to believe that this has escaped homeland security's notice, especially since the mosque's imam and youth director have been placed on the agency's "no-fly" list and were prevented from leaving the country back in November.

Clearly dismayed at the HSGAC hearing on March 11th, Poole comments:

Anyone following this issue closely in recent months knows the potential danger Somali jihadists carrying American passports pose to our national security, but you wouldn't get that impression listening to Wednesday's hearing. If Senator Lieberman and his Homeland Security Committee colleagues want to avoid a potential homegrown 9/11, they're going to have to circumvent the official channels and the politically correct agency propaganda to get an accurate assessment of how serious the threat is and how rapidly it is growing.

The reason that the HSGAC hearings on Muslim extremism are a failure is that the Committee staff is mired in the paradigm that Islamic extremists are isolated to a fringe group and the fostering of gang like behavior among Muslim youths who are disadvantaged whether here in the US or abroad in Eurabia and in this case the failed state of Somalia with a Taliban-like irredentist terror group like Al-Shabaab.  This is doubtless traceable to 'shadow warriors' in the CIA, Homeland Security and academia like Dr. Marc Sagerman who evade the core values of Jihad and Political Islam at our peril. In effect we have benightedly built a Trojan Horse in the form of Muslim infiltration of our national law enforcement translator cadres and the influx of legal humanitarian refugees from Muslim countries, like Somalia harboring Islamic extremists. Poole, for example notes, the infiltration of Muslim extremist translators in the form of Al Shabaab sympathizers in the Voice of America Somali service.

We made many of the same points as Poole in a letter sent to Sen. Joe Lieberman's, Homeland Security and Government Committee (HSGAC) staff, on March 4th. In 2007, we have also written about the corruption of leaders in the American Somali Community in Nashville and Minneapolis - major Somali émigré centers.  In the March 5th letter to the HSGAC Majority Counsel we noted:

More concerning is that the UN control of humanitarian refugee processing has introduced Jihadis among the Somalis from the Horn of Africa, who now number in the tens of thousands throughout America. The Somalis have brought with them strict Islamic Sharia values that violate our Constitution and Civil Rights laws and mock our Judeo Christian values. Still worse, they, and some other refugee groups, have brought with them undetected contagious diseases like TB, Hepatitis and HIV that evaded health screening prior to their entry to America.

The Somali immigrants are a significant proportion of those included in the humanitarian refugee program for Africa. For the Federal Fiscal year ended, September 30, 2007, according to information from the ORR, 7,500 Somalis entered this country out of a total of 17,000 such refugees allotted to Africa. The aggregate total of Somali refugees as of 2005 was close to 70,000. Given figures for both 2006 and 2007, the current aggregate may approximate 90,000.

Among those Somali legal humanitarian refugees are Imams indoctrinating naturalized American youths in extremist Islamic violence.

We saw in the tragedy in Mumbai, India, late last year, the devastation, death and destruction wrought by a 'swarming attack' by a limited number of Kashmiri and Pakistani extremists recruited by radical Islamist groups. Counter terrorism experts and the FBI consider that a high risk in America. Such attacks could be perpetrated by homegrown Jihadis like those among the several hundred naturalized Somali youths, alleged to have 'disappeared' to join Al Shabaab militia groups in Somalia Al Shabaab returnees could constitute cadres to train fellow American Somali youths to undertake swarming attacks against public facilities in this country. FBI and local counter terrorism authorities monitoring of the radical Somali émigré communities are a vital necessity to stifle swarming attack threats.

Unless and until the HSGAC staff penetrates the fog of disinformation emanating from the FBI, Homeland Security and National Counter-Terrorism groups, the US stands vulnerable to the threats of home-grown naturalized Somali Jihadis returning to this country under US passports to possibly initiate Mumbai-type swarming attacks.