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If he (or anyone else) is so confident that the vetting is safe, he should invite them to live with him and his family in the White House. That should the American people his confidence and lack of fear.
Det screening process
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...aae_story.html
U.S. lets in four times as many suspected terrorists as it keeps out
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A 2014 photo shows Tashfeen Malik, left, and Syed Farook, as they passed through O'Hare International Airport in Chicago. Malik entered the United States on a visa. (Associated Press)
By Marc A. Thiessen December 21
The Obama administration insists that it is safe to admit 10,000 Syrian refugees because we have “very extensive screening procedures” in place. “It involves our intelligence community, our national counterterrorism center, extensive interviews, vetting them against all the available information,” deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes recently declared.
He left out one fact: Those screening procedures are so broken that, State Department records show, they let in more than four times as many suspected terrorists as they keep out.
Marc Thiessen writes a weekly column for The Post on foreign and domestic policy and contributes to the PostPartisan blog. He is a fellow at the American Enterprise Ins ute. View Archive
The State Department admitted to Congress last week that it had revoked the visas of 9,500 individuals since 2001 who were believed to have either engaged in terrorist activities or were associated with a terrorist organization. Think about what that means: Nearly 10,000 people considered too dangerous to enter the United States because of suspected terrorist activity or association were mistakenly granted visas to lawfully enter the country. They successfully penetrated our defenses, beat our screening system and got their hands on U.S. visas.
Worse still, after officials caught their mistake and revoked the visas after the fact, they lost track of the visa holders. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, pressed Michele Thoren Bond, assistant secretary for the Bureau of Consular Affairs, to explain what had happened to the 9,500. She replied: “I don’t know.”
We don’t know where these 9,500 individuals are, or how many of them — if any — are in the United States today.
That’s bad enough. But the story gets worse.
An examination of State Department records by American Enterprise Ins ute researcher Justin Lang found that since 2001, the State Department had denied visas to just 2,231 individuals because the applicant was suspected of terrorist ties or activity. Yet during that same period, the State Department granted U.S. visas to 9,500 people who it later figured out posed a terrorist threat — and had to go back and retroactively revoke those individuals’ visas.
The means our screening system is so bad, it let through more than four times as many suspected terrorists as it stopped. If a National Hockey League goalie let in more than four times as many goals as he blocked, he would be fired.
And let’s be clear: Those 9,500 visa revocations are just the suspected terrorists we know about. How many more terrorists are out there who also beat our screening system but officials did not figure out their mistake and revoke the visas?
I can name at least one: Tashfeen Malik. She never had her visa revoked. We learned she was a terrorist only after she and her husband massacred 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif. She beat our screening system, got into our country and carried out a terrorist attack.
So did Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 2009 so-called underwear bomber who nearly blew up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009. His father walked into a U.S. embassy and reported that his son was involved with terrorists. Yet the Wall Street Journal reports that the State Department “didn’t revoke his visa after Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father alerted U.S. officials to his son’s potential radicalization.” How many more terrorist visa holders like Tashfeen Malik and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab are out there today?
Our screening system is badly broken, and we have an administration that is more concerned with enforcing political correctness than protecting the American people. We know that terrorists use social media to spread propaganda, recruit operatives and plan attacks. Yet MSNBC reports that in 2011, officials in the Department of Homeland Security proposed a policy of scouring social media of visa applicants to look for terrorist ties. The proposal went through a year-long review and was about to be issued as official policy — when it was quashed by senior officials.
So when you hear Obama officials claim to have “extensive screening procedures” in place, remember that they considered and rejected a policy of checking social media accounts of visa applicants for terrorist ties. This was not an oversight. It was a conscious decision.
Despite this record, President Obama says Republicans are “betraying our values” for their reluctance to admit 10,000 Syrian refugees. Perhaps he should keep his moral outrage in check until his government finds the nearly 10,000 missing terrorists — and fixes a screening system that lets through more terrorists than it catches.
If he (or anyone else) is so confident that the vetting is safe, he should invite them to live with him and his family in the White House. That should the American people his confidence and lack of fear.
Man, you guys are truly terrified.
Throwing in the Twin Towers and going back to when this started in the 1970s, it's been about 140 people every year that dies. The 4000 from the tower is an outlier but we'll just be conservative and throw it in there.
You have about the same chance to win the lottery. Then again the OP and co. seem like the people that buy lottery tickets.
Pussy
I think Th'Pusher has accused me of this before. Strange - especially since I believe in a God who is in control and please no mocking - I'm just explaining why I don't live in fear. Anyways, I prefer to call it common sense. I wonder, though, why there is this insistence on letting THESE refugees in. There are lots of people who are persecuted from other parts of the world (non-ISIS) that you aren't all clamoring to let in.
Thiessen, a.k.a professional bedwetter
An appeal to emotion. No surprise it has drawn the interest of the OP.
Last edited by Th'Pusher; 12-22-2015 at 11:01 PM.
One click brings the entire sympathizer brigade.
OK, where are you talking about?
So this is just a troll thread?One click brings the entire sympathizer brigade.
Good to know you aren't serious about any of this.
Only guns.
I'm confused, this article starts off talking about refugees and that screening process, then tried to make a point about its efficacy using the visa process. It kinda went off the rails there so I stopped reading. Did I miss anything?
Its seems like its very simple to me if you want Islamic terrorism in your country then allow Muslim immigration/visas. If you dont want any then dont allow any Muslims in. Not everyone should be allowed to live here. How many Islamic terror attacks has Japan had?
http://reuters.com/article/idUSKBN0M70JN20150311
TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan accepted 11 asylum seekers out of a record 5,000 applications in 2014, Ministry of Justice data showed, drawing criticism from advocates and lawyers that the country is not doing enough to provide protection to refugees.
In 2013, Japan accepted six refugees, its lowest for 15 years.
It's that easy
gun fellators scared less, clinical paranoia, behind their racism, xenophobia
that's as it should be. the free movement of people is net beneficial.
system's not perfect but it doesn't have to be: attacks are rare.
Last edited by Winehole23; 12-23-2015 at 11:28 AM.
and the threat isn't existential, it is merely episodic and deadly.
the overreaction to real danger and harm is more menacing to the American system than any possible attack on it.
Here's a story that will warm greatly the Christian Taliban hearts of all you Muslim haters
British Muslim Family Barred From Flight to Disneyland
A British Muslim family headed to Disneyland was prevented from boarding a plane to Los Angeles by U.S. authorities, even though they had received authorization for the trip, the Guardianreports.
They weren't given an explanation for why they were turned away;
the airline merely informed them they would not be reimbursed for the $13,340 flight fees.
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/british-muslim-family-barred-flight-disneyland?akid=13801.187590.JEbMTm&rd=1&src=newsl etter1047836&t=10
The father was blocked from flying to Israel and was also detained two days in Tel Aviv. Where was your outrage then or just maybe there is good reason he was blocked.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-35111938
"just maybe there is good reason he was blocked"
... you working assumption. Israel is wonderful, unbiased judge of risk from Muslims.
And Israel has good reason.
Just wanted to point out the father has been stopped twice before. Why alternet leave that out of their unbiased top notch reporting?
being stopped doesn't mean the stopping was justified.
No . But before screaming Islamaphobe in their article they should at least find out what he's been stopped twice and detained once.
For the OP and the others who live in a constant state of fear...
This Christmas, Tune It All Out
Americans are just about the safest people in the world, but we're more frightened than ever
The solution to most of our fears? Stop watching the news.
Before I had kids, I despised Christmas.
I thought the holiday was symbolic of everything that was fake, exploitative and wasteful about our culture. And nothing symbolized our population's sheep-like inability to think for itself than millions of economically strained people stampeding into debt because Television tells them they will offend Christ if they don't buy thousands of dollars of worthless crap.
A consumer Christmas, after all, is a bigger political shoo-in in America than an expanding defense budget. There will never be a meaningful movement in this country to make Christmas about peace, love and hand-made gifts. Even though many or perhaps most of us would like that, an avalanche of messaging would always intervene to prevent the holiday from ever being divorced from the ad-driven anxiety that's needed to keep spending levels high.
All of this used to drive me crazy, but now? My little boy likes the tree. He's getting Matchbox cars Friday, and he's going to love them. I can live with the political downside.
As for the rest of that shopaholic, mall-rushing craziness that can make this holiday so stressful, it turns out that it's optional. Switch off the wi-fi for a few days, turn off the TV, and it's amazing how much more reasonable the world instantly seems.
This has been a bad year for America, largely because politically, we've lost the ability to tune out. We no longer know how to calm down and appreciate what we have.
Though our economy may not be what it was, we're actually safer and less susceptible to crime or war than at any time in our history. But in the same way retailers want us buying on Christmas, others want us scared to death and addicted to news of threats at home and from abroad.
Media companies and politicians alike want us buying stories about terrorists, Ebola, immigrants, crime, hurricanes and whatever else gets the blood rushing to the fear center. And just as retailers sell us things we don't need, news writers and presidential candidates alike will sell us scare stories, whether we need them or not. They will never not need us to buy.
And we're obliging. We've become fear addicts. Not that this world is without threats, but what there is to worry about – even the threat of being killed in a terrorist attack – exists on a level nowhere near in proportion to our anxiety.
Madison Avenue has always understood that scaring people is a fantastic way to sell things. Decades ago, the worst abuses on this front tended to be relatively mild appeals to social neuroses, things like the classic "ring around the collar" commercial that made a generation of Americans frightened of being the dope with the sweat stain around his neck.
As the years passed, advertisers learned a lot about how not just to use existing fears, but to create new ones. How do you sell Head & Shoulders in China, a country that traditionally never gave a thought to dandruff? Easy: You run ads to create the social stigma, then sell the solution in the same message.
We Americans grew up bombarded by manipulations like this, and it's finally broken our spirit. After spending a long enough time learning to worry about relatively less harmful (though not harmless) things like having bad hair or yellow teeth or a thick waistline or unfashionable clothes, we've gradually become more susceptible to darker appeals.
What about those immigrants rushing across the border? Can you really be sure the people at the local mosque aren't planning something? Couldn't someone break into your home at night, or start shooting up your office?
It's not that there aren't real threats. The problem is that no one in popular culture is incentivized to mitigate our fears of those threats, or place them in context. Fox News is not going to sell many ads running stories called "Mexicans Are Basically Nice People Just Like Us." CNN isn't going to grab eyeballs showing videos of Muslim immigrants in New Jersey just hanging out watching soccer.
Moreover, any savvy Beltway operative will tell politicians that nuanced solutions and appeals for calm don't fly with voters geeked up on fear. Barack Obama was panned a few weeks ago after the San Bernardino massacre, when he offered an oddly un-alarmist four-point plan to combat ISIS-inspired terrorism in a speech that might as well have been en led "It's Complicated."
That doesn't work with our generation. If you're going to sell us on the contagion, you've got to give us the simple antidote in the same breath. Tell us we've got terrorists in our hairline, fine, but where do we buy the Head & Shoulders to get rid of them? We get off on the fear, but the easy solution is also part of the addiction ritual. Now, when it's denied, we go crazy.
We saw this in the Republican debate last week, when the candidates repeatedly promised to resort to fantastic extremes to resolve our anxiety about things like terrorism and immigration. Debate moderator and jovially crazy person Hugh Hewitt, for instance, pressed Ben Carson on whether or not he could be as "ruthless" as Winston Churchill was fighting the Nazis.
"So you are OK with the deaths of thousands of innocent children and civilians?" he asked.
Hewitt was so obsessed with the question of Carson's willingness to kill children he asked it twice. Carson dodged the first attempt, but on the second he reassured Hewitt by playing up his experiences as a surgeon, when he told frightened children he would have to open up their heads.
Half-wits like Hewitt invoking the name of Churchill is a symptom of a protective fantasy we're sinking into in our panic. We want to believe that complex problems like terrorism can be met on the field of battle and beaten, Sherman to Panzer, like we beat the Nazis.
It's a national version of multiple personality disorder. We're tuning out and switching into characters from Band of Brothers because we can't handle who we really are: millions of people who feel helpless to do anything about those next-door neighbors who might be plotting mass murder.
The talk about internment and registries and carpet-bombing is just more Forties nostalgia. We want to shut the borders, put anything with slanty eyes in camps, and drop as many bombs on the bad guys as Rosie the Riveter can assemble. Our strength is in our industrial capacity, and we want to unleash it on someone, whether that will fix the problem or not.
People want answers. Rand Paul isn't going to win the Republican nomination because his platform is a question. He began his remarks last week with this: "The question is, how do we keep America safe from terrorism?" You could practically see the question mark on his suit. He might as well have been wearing Frank Gorshin's Riddler costume.
Paul then proceeded to pooh-pooh all the goofball fantasy answers his opponents are proposing: closing the Internet (!), banning religions, invading foreign countries. If we want boots on the ground, he said, they need to be "Arab boots on the ground."
Paul was trying not to lie to the voters about what's ahead. But that's why he's going to lose. Voters want easy solutions. It was weird enough when the idea of building a Great Wall of Mexico launched Donald Trump to the top of the polls, but now we also want to build a wall across the Internet, as though people could be physically prevented from getting bad ideas.
In reality, the solution to most of our fears is so much simpler. Stop watching the news. Or at least try to understand that there's a massive bureaucracy whose entire purpose is to exaggerate threats and keep us afraid, just as there's one designed to get us to empty our bank accounts at Christmastime.
What we're experiencing now is very much a sci-fi dystopia, where an overweening and intrusive bureaucracy of interests controls us through legends of death and chaos behind the wall. A frightened population is comically easy to manipulate. Scared people will give up the few things they have – their rights, their money, their freedom to travel and explore the world and alternative ideas – in exchange for promises of safety, even empty ones.
And that's exactly what we're seeing this year. ISIS notwithstanding, Americans are the safest, richest, most extravagantly protected people in the world, but we're more miserable, divided and frightened than ever. That we literally want to be walled off from the rest of the world would be bad enough, were it not also true that we increasingly also hate and fear each other.
It's gone too far. Yes, there are things to fear in the world, but there always will be, if your habit is to constantly scan the entire planet for threats and horrifying images. At least for the holidays, let's turn our scanners off and just look outside. It's not that bad. We don't have to be like this, not all the time anyway.
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...#ixzz3vBP6xyuG
Good looking out Shekelsteins
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...officials.html
British Muslim father whose planned Disneyland trip was ruined when he and his family were barred from boarding a flight to the U.S. has now been forced to distance himself from a Facebook account claiming links to Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Mohammad Tariq Mahmood, 41, his brother and their children, aged between eight and 19, said they were stopped at the departure gate at Gatwick airport and told their visas to the US had been revoked.
He claimed the family were barred from flying 'because they are Muslim'.
However, it has since emerged that a Facebook page claiming links to radical Islamist groups was set up by someone who has lived at the family's postal address, according to ITVnews
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