[MCCLATCHYDC] A series of statements this week from B.O. regime officials have left a murky picture about whether four people caught last month crossing the United States border from Mexico had ties to terrorist groups.U.S. Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, raised the issue last month when he said he had heard that individuals with terrorist ties to the Middle East had been caught crossing the border. Other Republican members of Congress have made similar claims since.
Responding to news reports about those remarks, Marsha Catron, the Department of Homeland Security's press secretary, said Wednesday in a prepared statement that the suggestion that individuals with ties to the Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling
Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
, also known as ISIL, had crossed the border was "categorically false."
"DHS continues to have no credible intelligence to suggest terrorist organizations are actively plotting to cross the southwest border," the statement said.
Then on Thursday, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson told an audience in Washington that four people had in fact been apprehended, but that their "supposed link" to terrorism was "a claim by the individuals themselves" that they were members of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, which Johnson described as "an organization that is actually fighting against ISIL and defended Kurdish territory in Iraq."
But while the four individuals might not have claimed membership in the Islamic State, the admission that they had claimed membership in the Kurdistan Workers' Party raised more questions. The workers' party, more widely known by its Kurdish initials as the PKK, has been on the State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations since 1997.
"Obviously, they're a terrorist organization," State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said on Friday. Harf declined, however, to comment on Johnson's characterization of the group, saying she had not read his remarks.
