Of the 31 states that have declared their opposition to taking in Syrian refugees, one state, Kentucky, has a specific reason to be wary of the background check process: previously two Iraqi refugees who settled in Bowling Green turned out to be al Qaeda-linked terrorists with the blood of American soldiers on their hands, an ABC News investigation found. Both pleaded guilty to terror-connected charges after trying to acquire heavy weapons while in America’s heartland.

The 2013 ABC News investigation also revealed that several dozen other suspected terrorist bombmakers, including some who were believed to have targeted U.S. troops, may have mistakenly been allowed to move to the U.S. as Iraq and Afghanistan War refugees, among the tens of thousands of innocent immigrants.

The Obama administration insists now that Syrian refugees are subjected to intense vetting before they’re allowed to settle in the U.S. and that a vast majority of the millions of refugees the U.S. has resettled since the 1970s are normal, peaceful people, but the program has had serious security problems before. In 2009, a flaw in background screening of Iraqi refugees allowed the two al Qaeda-linked terrorists to settle in Bowling Green and led to a temporary suspension of the refugee program, officials told ABC News in a 2013 investigation.

The two men, Waad Ramadan Alwan and Mohanad Shareef Hammadi, were caught on surveillance video in 2010 in a storage locker in Kentucky handling heavy weapons, including a Russian-made machine gun and a Stinger missile launcher, which the FBI said the men thought would be smuggled to insurgents in Iraq.

An FBI agent assigned to the sting operation that eventually nabbed Alwan and Hammadi told ABC News for its original report that Alwan had bragged to an informant about killing American soldiers in Iraq.

“He said he had them ‘for lunch and dinner,'” FBI Louisville Supervisory Special Agent Tim Beam told ABC News in 2013.

Some officials have claimed publicly that the suspects intended to attack a U.S. military post in Kentucky, but FBI officials told ABC News the men only discussed using a bomb to kill a U.S. Army captain they had known in Iraq but did not take any action toward killing him.

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Source: James Gordon Meek, Brian Ross, http://abcnews.go.com