It's Going To Be Really Hard To Adequately Vet Syrian Refugees Say Racists...In The Obama Adminstration

Advocates for resettling tens of thousands of Syrians in the US say the process is robust, thorough and extensive. But in the end the reality is you can only check people's backgrounds against the information you have and when it comes to Syrians we don't have much.

Don't take the word of a crazy rightwinger who is clearly afraid of women and children, take the word of Team Obama.

But one of the senior administration officials at Tuesday’s briefing acknowledged the limitations inherent in screening refugees from Syria, where it’s very difficult to determine something as basic as an applicant’s criminal history.

“We do the best with what we have,” the official said. “We talk to people about what their criminal histories are, and we hear about that. That’s pretty much where we are.”

Here's FBI Director James Comey testifying before Congress last month.

FBI Director James Comey, flanked by the nation’s top intelligence officials, admitted to the House Homeland Security Committee Wednesday that for some of the 10,000 Syrian refugees the administration has agreed to allow into the U.S., there will be no basis to vet them through the databases it uses to determine if they have ties to terrorism.

“We can only query against that which we have collected, and so if someone has never made a ripple in the pond in Syria in a way that would get their identity or their interests reflected in our database, we can query our database til the cows come home, but … there’ll be nothing show up, because we have no record on that person,” said Comey.

And here's DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson also from last month.

“We’ve gotten better at that over the last couple of years, but it is a time-consuming process and one of the challenges that we’ll have is that we’re not going to know a whole lot about the individual refugees that come forward.”

The "gotten better" part is important because, let's just say there's a lot of room for improvement in the screening process.

Several dozen suspected terrorist bombmakers, including some believed to have targeted American troops, may have mistakenly been allowed to move to the United States as war refugees, according to FBI agents investigating the remnants of roadside bombs recovered from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The discovery in 2009 of two al Qaeda-Iraq terrorists living as refugees in Bowling Green, Kentucky -- who later admitted in court that they'd attacked U.S. soldiers in Iraq -- prompted the bureau to assign hundreds of specialists to an around-the-clock effort aimed at checking its archive of 100,000 improvised explosive devices collected in the war zones, known as IEDs, for other suspected terrorists' fingerprints.

Oops.

And keep in mind, we were in Iraq for almost a decade. We have a lot more information about the people there and access to government records than we'll ever have on the Syrians. Yet we still couldn't properly screen them.

Even if we could screen all the applicants with 100% accuracy it still doesn't mitigate the risk. We're going to be creating a huge pool of potential recruits. Let's be honest, some of these refugees won't like the US, we'll decide someone saying something mean about them is an insult to their religion that must be avenged or will just get bored. That's when the idea of jihad will sound interesting.

Think that's just crazy racism talk? Well, it's happened before in refugee circles. Again, don't believe the crazy righwinger, believe Team Obama.

Six Minnesota men who appeared in federal court Monday are charged with providing support to a terrorism organization, the U.S. Attorney's Office said. The men were arrested in Minnesota and California on Sunday.

Nineteen-year-old Zacharia Yusuf Abdurahman, 19-year-old Adnan Farah, 19-year-old Hanad Mustafe Musse and 20-year-old Guled Ali Omar were arrested in Minneapolis. Twenty-one-year-old Adirahman Yasin Daud and 21-year-old Mohamed Abdihamid Farah were arrested in San Diego. All six are Somali-American, the FBI said.

The charges and arrests are tied to the efforts of the six men to try to get to Syria to join the terrorist group Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

"We have a terror recruiting problem in Minnesota," U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Andrew Luger said at a news conference Monday. "This case demonstrates how difficult it is to put an end to recruiting here."

Emphasis mine.

But it will be totally different THIS time. Because...shut up you cowardly racists.

In other news, French President Francois Hollande announced his endorsement of the fascist Marie Le Pen to succeed him in the 2017 French presidential election.

Speaking to French mayors after the raid, Hollande warned against reprisals targeting the nation’s Muslim community. He added that refugees in France are also victims of the same terror, adding that he is committed to taking in 30,000 new refugees over the next 2 years.

RIP The Western World. It was a good run.

posted by DrewM. at 09:38 AM

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