From the Dallas Morning News:

A 19-year-old Jordanian citizen is expected to make an appearance before a federal magistrate in Dallas this morning after authorities accused him of attempting to blow up a downtown Dallas skyscraper. . . .
As more undercover Arabic-speaking agents engaged him, Smadi, living illegally in the U.S. in the small town of Italy, about 45 miles south of Dallas, pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden and expressed a desire to kill Americans, authorities said.
In conversations with agents posing as members of an al-Qaeda sleeper cell, Smadi said he came to the U.S. to wage jihad, or holy war. He told agents he wanted to target military recruitment centers, but eventually settled on financial institutions.

According to the story, the FBI only found this joker “after an agent monitoring an online extremist Web site discovered Smadi espousing jihad against the U.S. more than six months ago.” That’s nice, but if we had a functioning check-in/check-out system for foreign visitors (something Congress mandated in 1996 but that the tourist industry and the airlines and border-town retailers have been fighting every step of the way), guys like this wouldn’t be able to disappear into our communities in the first place.