Divers recover items at San Bernardino lake near site of massacre

Tashfeen Malik, who helped her husband kill 14 people in the San Bernardino massacre, was allowed to enter the United States because officials never checked her social-media posts – which made no secret of her hateful goal of participating in violent jihad, it was reported Saturday.

Law enforcement reportedly is using the previously unreported postings to build a profile of the lives of the couple – Malik and Syed Rizwan Farook, as they planned the terrorist attack at Farook’s workplace. However, she declined to say whether any items recovered are related to the probe. In a brief telephone interview, her sister Fehda Malik said that Tashfeen was not an extremist, and she rejected the allegations against her sister. Washington is considering tighter scrutiny of visa applications and tougher norms for entering the U.S. after it failed to detect pro-jihad social media posts by the Pakistani terrorist Tashfeen Malik and allowed her to enter the country on a fiancee visa.

This is the vetting process the White house wants America to rely on.

In the social media era, it seems impossible that something like a supportive tweet or post would go unnoticed during the vetting process. “But immigration officials do not routinely review social media as part of their background checks, and there is a debate inside the Department of Homeland Security over whether it is even appropriate to do so”, the paper reported. “In cases where those lists don’t hit, there’s nothing that distinguishes them from people we would love to welcome to this country”.

In order for Malik to gain permanent residency in the United States, she faced three extensive national security and criminal background screenings – two of which were conducted in-person. She was first vetted by the Department of Homeland Security, which checked her name against law enforcement and national security databases.

All those reviews came back clear, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation has said it had no incriminating information about her or her husband in its databases. The Department of State then reviewed her fingerprints against other databases and she was thoroughly reviewed once more after she applied for a green card.

Obama said that while there was no evidence the shooters were directed by a terror network overseas or part of a broader plot, “the two of them had gone down the dark path of radicalisation”. Social media include is rarely included. They cautioned that such searches, particularly one in a bustling public park, tend to dredge up debris from many sources, and that investigators still have to determine the value of what was found.

An interview and a cursory check of Malik’s application might have revealed that she used a phony address and had attended an Islamist school in Pakistan which critics say forges an anti-Western view in students. The divers pulled items from the murky waters of the lake, which they have been scouring since Thursday.