Background

From the Feb. 6 New York Times article:

Mr. Alfallaj, who is from Riyadh, came to the United States in late 2011 on a nonimmigrant visa based on his wife’s status as a foreign student. He had been living in Weatherford, Okla., about 70 miles west of Oklahoma City, the authorities said. Prosecutors say that he falsely answered questions on his visa application, including about whether he had supported terrorists. The F.B.I. said he lied about whether he had contacts with anyone from a terrorist group when agents interviewed him in December. The next month, Mr. Alfallaj confirmed that the telephone number found on the application belonged to his father, the F.B.I. said.

The F.B.I. had been watching him for several months and had been trying determine whether Mr. Alfallaj was involved in terrorist activity in the United States.

Mr. Alfallaj and his family did not interact with neighbors and stayed mostly to themselves. Mr. Alfallaj’s apartment complex was not far from Southwestern Oklahoma State University. A student there said that many Saudis attended the school and that they often mingled and had cookouts, but that Mr. Alfallaj did not attend these gatherings.

The case highlights the difficulty facing the government in processing the large amounts of fingerprints, photographs, messages, email addresses, phone numbers and DNA samples that have been collected in nearly two decades of war.

Many documents and electronic media collected in Afghanistan land on the shelves of a unit in the F.B.I.’s counterterrorism division. The materials, which are stored in federal facilities in Northern Virginia and at F.B.I. Headquarters in Washington, have been a vexing problem for the agency. American officials have long wanted to exploit the materials but lacked the resources as the F.B.I. has focused on other pressing terrorism investigations over the years.

The number of documents was staggering, perhaps in the hundreds of thousands, said a former F.B.I. official who worked in the unit. Much of the information is in other languages, such as Arabic. To inspect the materials, the F.B.I. would need to reassign linguists from other cases.

The case of Mr. Alfallaj is similar to one brought in 2011 against two Iraqi men who were arrested in Bowling Green, Ky., after they had entered the United States. The F.B.I. discovered the men after finding fingerprints on explosive devices that had been used to attack American soldiers in Iraq. The two men were later convicted of terrorism charges and sentenced to life in prison.

After the men were discovered, the F.B.I. deployed hundreds of people to pull fingerprints off of improvised explosive devices stored at the Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center, known around the bureau as the Bomb Library of America. Officials said a similar effort is underway to make sure other materials similar to the training camp application are examined.

In March 2017, the F.B.I. decided to go through the terrorist camp applications to determine whether any fingerprints could be identified as part of a renewed effort to identify possible terrorism suspects, federal court documents show. Seven months later, the F.B.I. matched the fingerprints taken from Mr. Alfallaj when he applied to become a pilot.

From a 2013 USA Today article “Saudi students flood U.S. colleges”:

Thousands of international students arrive each year in the U.S. to study English as the first step toward a college degree. They come from all over the world, but Saudi Arabia, where the government has poured billions of dollars into a generous scholarship program for its citizens, is driving the recent surge.

Saudi student enrollments skyrocketed from 11,116 in 2006 to 71,026 in 2012, according to the Saudi Arabian Cultural Mission to the United States, the Virginia-based agency that administers the scholarship. Nearly all recipients (95%) start with language training, which can take anywhere from a month to a year or more, officials say.

The infusion of full-paying international students has been a boon for cash-strapped U.S. colleges.

The Saudi scholarship grew out of a meeting in 2005 between Crown Prince (now King) Abdullah, and President George W. Bush as a way to strengthen ties — and ease tensions — between the two countries in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks. [No word on how the U.S. benefitted, other than to give universities millions of dollars in foreign enrollment.]

Saudi scholarship students can receive up to a five-year visa. The scholarship covers full tuition, housing and health benefits for students and family members. All that, plus round-trip tickets home once a year. After language training, business and engineering are the top fields of study.

Skeptics argue for stricter visa policies. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers in the Sept. 11 attacks were from Saudi Arabia; and one had entered the USA with student visas.

In 2011, after a Saudi engineering student was charged in a failed plot to bomb U.S. targets, Investor's Business Daily repeated its concern that a new initiative for Saudi students opened the door for terrorist attacks. "How many will overstay their visas and become sleeper agents?"