Miranda Devine: The FBIs repeated non-answers on US terrorism attacks raises alarming red flags
The official response to my column Monday about the FBI’s failure to prevent four recent Islamic terror attacks has been unsatisfactory, to say the least, and the personal attacks by FBI Director Kash Patel’s private PR operatives have been downright deranged.None of which is reassuring when it comes to the FBI’s preparedness to handle a heightened terror threat on home soil.It’s not Patel’s fault that our foremost domestic counterterrorism agency has been degraded and politicized under his predecessors, but it’s his job to fix it fast and his defensiveness suggests a problem.The most alarming case involves Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, a convicted ISIS terrorist who was on supervised federal release when he yelled “Allahu Akbar” and opened fire on an ROTC classroom at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., last Thursday, killing the instructor before being killed himself.Jalloh, a naturalized US citizen from Sierra Leone, had been released from federal prison in Allenwood, Pa., on Dec.23, 2024, having served eight years of an 11-year sentence for “providing material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization,” the Islamic State group.Specifically, he planned an attack on US military personnel during Ramadan.
He was placed on federal supervised release for five years until 2029.I asked the FBI if it had forewarning of Jalloh’s attack in Norfolk, seeing he was on supervised release.But the FBI insists it’s not their job to monitor released terrorists.A spokesman replied: “The FBI does not oversee supervised release from prison; that would be up to the federal district courts . . .When the FBI has information or intelligence of a threat, the FBI works with our local and federal law enforcement to address those threats.”I asked the question in a variety of ways and received the same answer.Jalloh’s probation officer last visited him in November 2025 in Sterling, Va., where he lived with his sister, according to the federal a...