These guys fled to Jordan, thinking they could get asylum from the US and move to the States. The US envoy, however, gives very few visas to Iraqi war refugees.

These guys apparently found their way to Spain where they, in turn, flew to Mexico, and made it over the border where they were granted some temporary refugee status.

These guys obviously had money, but it showed that there are some folks from the Middle East successfully getting to the US through the southern border.

I am still a little confused as to why they would target a military base unless they hold a particular grudge against the US military and perhaps public officials. Fort Dix doesn’t seem like the most likely target to produce mass casualties.

But - that they were here illegally, and (ostensibly) getting ready to launch a terror-type attack, does, at least at some level, validate the idea that terrorists can enter the country through the Mexican border. They may not have been card-carrying Al-Qaida opperatives, and may have come here as infants, but the facts remain (or appear to be) that these guys were here illegally, got here through Mexican border, and planned an attack on US soil.

So if they can do it, why couldn’t Al Qaida opperatives? If they could gain entry to Mexico (and I’ll admit I do not know how hard that would be, or how porous Mexico’s borders are), why would it be any harder for a real group of UBL sponsored agents (or Iranian/Hezbollah agents, or fill in the blank agents)? If you can smuggle a child - how much harder is it, really, to smuggle an adult? At least an adult can control his or her bowels and knows not to cry at an inopportune time.

I can understand the desire to keep the incident in perspective, this was a small group of guys with no known direct link to overseas terror, but it seems entirely legitimate to me to raise some red flags about border security when you start catching illegal aliens involved in this sort of thing, regardless of what their connections are.