Let me summarize this Fox News report: apparently, the FBI is being told by one Enrique Marquez (the guy who bought the guns for San Bernardino terrorists Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, and an in-law of sorts*) that Farook originally planned an attack to take place in 2012. That attack – which would have featured another person whose name has not revealed – was called off; presumably it was a different target than Farook’s place of employment.  Also: Farook and Malik apparently were planning to strike somewhere else after their first strike, so we can probably rule out ‘workplace violence’ at this point. Not that anybody sensible thought that it was simply that, but now there’s no excuse at all.

You are certainly asking yourself at this point, How did Syed Farook manage to get this far  Also: why is Enrique Marquez not in jail right now?  – Because it does in fact seem insane that somebody can say that, sure, they knew that this guy was actively planning to commit terrorist murder, and not end up in jail for it.  I don’t know.  Maybe they’re offering immunity in exchange for testimony.  Not that that’s great news, because it implies that the testimony is valuable, which implies that the terrorist cell did not begin and end with Farook and Malik…

Moe Lane

PS: Just so we’re all clear, here: this is a galloping disaster for the US government. One of the expectations that we are supposed to have towards government and bureaucracies is that they work; which is to say, we accept that a certain amount of inefficiency and delay is worth it if we get certain things to happen, or more usually not happen. That did not happen here.  Whatever your opinion is about our immigration system, it is broadly true that nobody wants it to permit people to emigrate to this country so that they may shoot up a holiday party in San Bernardino.  I do not see how what happened here can be seen as anything except a lot of people not doing their [expletive deleted] jobs.  And this time, people died because of it.

Not that any of this will ever be discussed by the administration.  It’s a matter of constituent services, you see. People who work for government agencies are well-represented in the Obama coalition.  People who own guns are not.

*Married to the sister of the wife of Farook’s brother. We don’t really have a single word in American English the really defines that kind of quasi-family tie, so ‘in-law of sorts’ will just have to do.