They’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars to monitor the activities of every single American by turning their listening networks on purported domestic terrorists operating in the United States.

They know your underwear size. They know where you drove your car today. They know what you put up on Facebook, texted to your wife and emailed to your friends. And they’ve done it all in the supposed interest of “national security.”

If, however, you were an Al Qaeda terrorist coordinating a large-scale prison break to free senior members of your mid-east terror organization, you would have been able to operate with impunity.

As you read the following report from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq keep in mind that the National Security Agency operates under authorization from Executive Order 12333. The agency was originally tasked not with “acquiring information concerning the domestic activities of United States persons,” but with analyzing information and data of foreign intelligence and counterintelligence value.

Hundreds of convicts, including senior members of al Qaeda, broke out of Iraq’s Abu Ghraib jail as comrades launched a military-style assault to free them, authorities said on Monday.

The deadly raid on the high-security jail happened as Sunni Muslim militants are gaining momentum in their insurgency against the Shi’ite-led government that came to power after the U.S. invasion to oust Saddam Hussein.

Suicide bombers drove cars packed with explosives to the gates of the prison on the outskirts of Baghdad on Sunday night and blasted their way into the compound, while gunmen attacked guards with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades.

Other militants took up positions near the main road, fighting off security reinforcements sent from Baghdad as several militants wearing suicide vests entered the prison on foot to help free the inmates.

Ten policemen and four militants were killed in the ensuing clashes, which continued until Monday morning, when military helicopters arrived, helping to regain control.

…

“The number of escaped inmates has reached 500, most of them were convicted senior members of al Qaeda and had received death sentences,” Hakim Al-Zamili, a senior member of the security and defense committee in parliament, told Reuters.

“The security forces arrested some of them, but the rest are still free.”

One security official told Reuters on condition of anonymity: “It’s obviously a terrorist attack carried out by al Qaeda to free convicted terrorists with al Qaeda.”

Reuters

Two Words: EPIC FAIL.

While our government is supposedly preventing terrorism by searching grandma at airports, arresting kids for making jokes on the internet, deploying thousands of drones over America’s skies, and looking for lone wolves, they have failed at their absolute top priority: stopping actual terrorists from doing what terrorists do.

The fact that an unknown number of senior members of Al Qaeda, who we as a nation likely spent hundreds of millions of dollars and countless lives to capture, have been freed from prison in what can only be described as a premeditated coordinated attack is a complete failure of our foreign intelligence directives.

The challenge we now face is that senior Al Qaeda leaders who have likely been tortured and spent years in the hellhole of Abu Ghraib are now out in droves and they have one thing on their mind – to kill as many American men, women and children as they can before we catch or kill them.

Perhaps our spy agencies and the highly trained individuals monitoring domestic data streams would better serve the national security of the American people by turning their efforts back to what they were originally intended to do.

Will this be a wake up call for our Chief Executive and his security Czars to focus the attention of our signals intelligence and security community to the real threat facing America?

Or is identifying and stopping foreign terrorists no longer the priority?