By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

Rep. Michael McCaul  (R-TX), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, says the danger is great that the thousands of Syrian refugees coming into the United States will include terrorists who want to kill Americans. So what is he doing about it? He told Sean Hannity of Fox News the other night that he has sent a letter!

He said, “I sent a letter to National Security Advisor Susan Rice asking her to explain why she’s doing this, and to try to stop this from happening. My job as chairman of Homeland Security is to protect the American people. I believe this will put Americans at risk.”

“Keep up the good work,” said Hannity.

It’s true. McCaul sent a letter to Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice. But what is she going to do about it? Rice was part of the Benghazi cover-up.

This is the same Congressman McCaul who didn’t even respond to our letter two years ago asking for an investigation of Al Jazeera’s expansion into the United States.

A letter is not a substitute for a bill to stop this dangerous wave of immigration into the United States. But this is what passes for “action” from the Republican running the House Committee on Homeland Security.

McCaul is very good at posing for the cameras and going on Fox News to talk about his hearings. But his record of doing anything to actually stop the Islamic threat is weak.

McCaul did introduce a bill, the “Secure Our Border First Act of 2015,” supposedly designed to curb illegal immigration. But Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), perhaps the top opponent of amnesty for illegal aliens in the U.S. Congress, said that McCaul’s border bill does not include the following reforms needed to achieve a sound immigration system:

• It does not end catch-and-release.
• It does not require mandatory detention and return.
• It does not include worksite enforcement.
• It does not close dangerous asylum and national security loopholes.
• It does not cut off access to federal welfare.
• It does not require completion of the border fence.
• It delays and weakens the longstanding, unfulfilled statutory requirement for a biometric entry-exit visa tracking system.

We are now learning why McCaul is so reticent about doing anything of substance against the Islamic threat.

McCaul was recently exposed by Matthew Boyle of Breitbart News for having held a friendly meeting with an Islamic leader from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in Texas. McCaul and CAIR Houston branch executive director Mustafa Carroll were photographed together. A photograph of the meeting includes a note written in silver sharpie from McCaul to Carroll: “To Mustafa and the Council on American Islamic Relations, the moderate Muslim is our most effective weapon.”

The February 11 hearing held by McCaul, “Countering Violent Islamist Extremism: The Urgent Threat of Foreign Fighters and Homegrown Terror,” was certainly worthwhile.

But the idea that a letter to Rice is somehow sufficient to deal with the threat is laughable.

Rice is one of the top Obama officials implicated in the Benghazi terror attack cover-up. And she is now supposed to do something to stop terrorists from coming into the U.S. disguised as refugees because McCaul has sent her a letter?

McCaul himself signed a letter to Obama, noting that Rice “propagated a falsehood that the [Benghazi] attacks were ‘spontaneous,’ the outcome of a protest ‘spun out of control,’ and the result of a YouTube video.”

The letter, signed by McCaul and others, said Rice “is widely viewed as having either willfully or incompetently misled the American public in the Benghazi matter. Her actions plausibly give U.S. allies (and rivals) abroad reason to question U.S. commitment and credibility when needed.”

The letter was designed to warn Obama against making Rice Secretary of State. Instead, he made her National Security Advisor.

The letter that was sent to McCaul two years ago, warning of Al Jazeera’s expansion into the U.S., cited Dr. Judea Pearl’s criticism of Al Jazeera as “the main propaganda machine” of the pro-terrorist Muslim Brotherhood. Equally significant, Dr. Pearl, the father of slain journalist Daniel Pearl, said that “Al Jazeera weaves the ideological structure and combustible angers from which Jihadi recruits eventually emerge.”

McCaul now claims to be concerned about the emergence of Islamic terrorists on American soil. Yet he refused to even respond to the letter about Al Jazeera.

Accuracy in Media learned and reported that Al Jazeera and its financial sponsor, the government of Qatar, had hired various K Street lobbyists to put pressure on McCaul and other Republicans to stop a probe into Al Jazeera’s operations on American soil.

Yet, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey has said, in regard to Al Jazeera, “I think if an American medium is controlled by a political force from abroad, that’s a proper subject for inquiry.”

McCaul is emerging as very good at getting “face time” on the news to sound tough about the Islamic threat. But when the threat is mounting, sending letters just doesn’t seem to cut it.

A tougher border bill that would help keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States seems like an absolute necessity. But McCaul and the Republican-controlled Congress aren’t even pushing for that.

“My job as chairman of Homeland Security is to protect the American people,” he says. So why won’t he do his job?

A letter to Susan Rice won’t protect us. A tougher border bill would help. And so would hearings into Al Jazeera leading to the eviction of this Muslim Brotherhood channel from the United States.