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In his usual polite and scholarly way, Senator Sessions has laid out the case to condemn the President’s reckless (at best!) importation of unscreenable foreigners from the millennial enemy of western freedom — Islam. As the Senator notes, “Good public policy puts the safety and security of this country first,” and welcoming unknowable Syrian Muslims into our neighborhoods fundamentally violates that principal.
What could possibly go wrong with Obama’s scheme?
Preventable terror, suffering and death, for starters — as is happening now in Europe’s summer of terror, following Chancellor Merkel’s insane flinging open the continent’s borders and subsequent jihad invasion.
We should learn from Europe’s terrible immigration catastrophe, not ignore it.
WASHINGTON—U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), Chairman of the Subcommittee on Immigration and The National Interest, issued the following statement today about the Obama Administration’s refugee policies, its temporary amnesty for Syrians in the United States, and dangers posed by admitting large numbers of refugees to the United States:
“Despite a clear nexus between immigration and terrorism, and warnings from top officials in his own Administration about their inability to properly vet refugees, President Obama remains in denial about the dangers that his policies pose to the United States. Instead of taking a sober assessment of the dangers that we face, and analyzing the immigration histories of recent terrorists so that we can more effectively safeguard our immigration system from being infiltrated, the Obama Administration leads the United States down a dangerous path – admitting as many refugees as possible from areas of the world where terrorists roam freely, and granting a temporary amnesty to Syrians living in the United States illegally. And contrary to the assertions made by many, the potential for future terror activity is real.
Our primary effort, and that of our allies, should be to provide support to those who are displaced as close to their homes as possible, and work to return them home as soon as possible. Of course, our foreign policy should always seek to avoid situations where such violence and chaos occur. But instead of pursuing these policies, the Obama Administration continues with its radical plans.
The 10,000 Syrian refugees his Administration will admit this Fiscal Year represent a nearly 500 percent increase over the roughly 1,600 Syrian refugees who were admitted last year. This radical increase places the safety and security of the American people at risk, there will surely be consequences.
Since September 11, 2001, we know that at least 40 individuals who were admitted to the United States as refugees have been convicted for, or implicated in, terrorism or terrorism-related offenses – and the total is likely much higher. Some were admitted as adults, others as children, but these cases refute the false assertion that those admitted to the United States as refugees never engage in terrorism. But because these facts do not fit within his worldview, President Obama rejects them. And in so doing, he rejects his sacred oath for what he perceives as political gain.
Plainly, there is no way to properly vet these refugees. Our intelligence databases are only as good as the information that goes into them – meaning that the absence of derogatory information in our systems about an individual does not mean that admitting that individual carries no risk. Nor do we have an effective method to screen refugees for the possibility of potential post-entry radicalization.
Good public policy puts the safety and security of this country first. There is no doubt that this continuous, dramatic increase in refugees from areas of the world where terrorists roam freely will endanger this nation. We must change course.”
On Wednesday, the PBS Newshour had a segment on the need to speed up the issuance of visas to Afghan refugees who had previously provided translation services to American troops. The segment begins at 25:00 on the video following:
Somehow the plea from the liberal media for speedier admittance of war refugees sounded strangely familiar. In fact, it was a lot like the heartfelt appeal of Sixty Minutes in 2008, which shrieked how Iraqis who worked for the US were “marked for death” so we Americans should quit being so mean and rescue 100,000 of them immediately.
Through the magic of the internet, we can be reminded of the media generosity of yesteryear in The List: A Mission to Save Iraqi Lives, CBS News, May 16, 2008.
If lives were in danger, then haste was important, and therefore 58,000 Iraqis got swift service for relocation to America as refugees. But in the rush, national security was sacrificed, and proper screening was not done. As a result, a couple of genuine enemies were admitted, one a former soldier from Saddam’s army.
Sardar Khan cradles his infant son in one arm as he considers a thick stack of his life’s most important documents on a glass table before him. The documents include medical records, letters of recommendation from U.S. military officers and five passports–one for Khan and each member of his family.
Khan is 26, an Afghan native, and has spent seven years working as a translator for the U.S. Army. He is proud of his work, but fears that it has put him and his children in danger. And the visa program designed to help Afghans like him escape such danger, he says, has done little to secure his safety.
“I am living in a village where everybody knows me … who I am, who I am working for, where my house is, these things,” Khan says. “They are just waiting for a small chance, like if the security gets a little bit worse. I am really concerned about my babies especially. I love them more than my life.”
Khan says he applied for a U.S. visa in 2012, under a program designed to help Afghans like him escape the country. He had an interview with the U.S. Embassy in early 2013 and has been waiting for an answer ever since. The process has left him emotionally and financially drained. Continue reading this article
The current administration apparently believes that welcoming Muslim refugees is more important than national security. Otherwise it wouldn’t have unilaterally loosened the rules by which persons having terrorist ties are kept out. Now they can get in.
Apparently, the reduction of standards was done to enable more Syrians to enter the US (something that has been in the pipeline for a while):
President Barack Obama’s administration announced on Wednesday that it had eased some immigration rules to allow more of the millions of Syrians forced from their homes during the country’s three-year civil war to come to the United States.
Their suffering is regrettable, but importing more thousands more unfriendlies into America is not the answer. Why don’t majority Muslim nations take them — why is the West supposed to admit likely enemies?
Anyway, Washington has a poor record in weeding out the bad guys let in on “humanitarian” grounds, such as the Iraqis Waad Ramadan Alwan and Monahad Shareef Hammadi, now serving lengthy prison terms for terrorism.
CIS’s Jessica Vaughan pointed out that the executive order removes the burden of proof from the applicant, even though the political asylum program has a 70 percent fraud rate already. One example discussed was the Tsarnaev family who received asylum without a background check, the two sons of whom bombed the Boston Marathon, killing three:
Note to White House: the country needs tighter standards on who is admitted into America, not a loosening during this dangerous time. National security must be the top concern of government, not generosity toward sketchy foreigners.
The Obama administration has unilaterally eased restrictions on asylum seekers with loose or incidental ties to terror and insurgent groups, in a move one senator called “deeply alarming.”
The change, approved by Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and Secretary of State John Kerry, was announced Wednesday in the Federal Register. It would allow some individuals who provided “limited material support” to terror groups to be considered for entry into the U.S.
Supporters of the change, including Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., argued that the current ban on anyone who has ever aided terrorists has unfairly blocked thousands of refugees.
“The existing interpretation was so broad as to be unworkable,” Leahy said in a statement. “It resulted in deserving refugees and asylees being barred from the United States for actions so tangential and minimal that no rational person would consider them supporters of terrorist activities.”
But critics say despite the good intentions, the change raises security concerns, particularly after a report published Thursday on asylum fraud.
“In light of these and other facts, it is thus deeply alarming that the Obama administration would move unilaterally to relax admissions standards for asylum seekers and potentially numerous other applicants for admission who have possible connections to insurgent or terrorist groups,” Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., said in a statement on Thursday. “We need to tighten security standards for asylum, not relax them even further.”
Sessions also complained that the administration was, on its own, altering the Immigration and Nationality Act. “What is the point of Congress passing a law if the administration abuses its ‘discretion’ to say that law simply no longer applies?” he said. Continue reading this article
This ABC story is an interesting follow-up to an old story, that of refugees brought from Iraq and Afghanistan turning out to be serious bad guys. The new information seems to be details about how jihadist soldiers were discovered. I’ve been writing for a couple years about the now-imprisoned Iraqi refugees, Waad Ramadan Alwan and Mohanad Shareef Hammadi (shown below), and what the affair indicates about America’s haphazard refugee program. It’s good to see the case hasn’t disappeared from media interest.
Washington never seems to learn that opening the nation’s doors to war refugees presents an opportunity for the worst of the worst to sneak in along with genuine victims. Diverse war criminals of all stripes have entered this country as refugees and immigrants, sometimes using their real names like Bosnian Marko Boskic, due to the permissive standards applied to millions of foreigners.
This sloppiness is not new news — many Americans can remember the decades of wrangling over Ukrainian immigrant John Demjanjuk about whether he was war criminal in a Nazi death camp. But at least as a Ukrainian, he was culturally unlikely to wage war against Western people, something you cannot say about Muslim immigrants.
One important fact tucked into the ABC piece was the amount of time devoted to rescreening to find enemy soldiers, that the FBI assigned “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” for fingerprints matching those of refugees. That is a lot of time spent that could be better used to keep enemies out in the first place.
Detecting “bad” Iraqis among the non-hostiles is a fool’s errand. If we send our armed forces to smack down jihadists in foreign countries, that should be the extent of our efforts. Our immigration door should be limited to friendly and productive folks. And why admit Muslims as immigrants at all?
Big government appears to work as efficiently for refugee and immigrant screening as it does for ObamaCare. As a result, authorities are now pursuing “dozens” of cases of jihadist enemies admitted to our country as refugees.
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.
“We are currently supporting dozens of current counter-terrorism investigations like that,” FBI Agent Gregory Carl, director of the Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center (TEDAC), said in an ABC News interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC News’ “World News with Diane Sawyer” and “Nightline”.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if there were many more than that,” said House Committee on Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul. “And these are trained terrorists in the art of bombmaking that are inside the United States; and quite frankly, from a homeland security perspective, that really concerns me.” Continue reading this article
Does anyone think Obama’s meddling in Syria won’t end up with his admitting many thousands of suffering victims of the cruel dictator Assad? After all, the mission is a humanitarian one, we little citizens are told. No attentive adult believes this President would go to war to defend American security interests, so the do-gooder explanation sounds as good as any — although the timing curiously distracts from Republican efforts in Congress, and the recent use of chemical weapons in Syria followed 100,000 deaths by other means.
(CNN) — Every 15 seconds, a Syrian becomes a refugee, and those witnessing the violence unfolding on the ground don’t believe military action against the regime would bring relief.
While a doctor who treats refugees says the regime has a history of becoming more vicious when backed into a corner, one Syrian says he doesn’t believe strikes against Bashar al-Assad’s forces would be effective because the regime would protect its own people and leave the rest to die so it could blame the massacre on the United States.
“We are stuck in the middle, between the Russians and the Americans, the Iranians and the Saudis, and we are the victims,” the man said.
The United Nations’ refugee agency said Tuesday that the number of Syrians who have fled their war-ravaged country has now risen to more than 2 million. Continue reading this article
It’s not enough for Obama & Co. that they may be on the brink of importing a mass population of future Democrats (i.e. 46 million in 20 years according to the CBO), but a recent project is to welcome thousands of Syrians as refugees. What could possibly go wrong?
The refugee system has been a handy doorway for enemies to gain entrance to stupid-generous America. One example: after a couple of Iraqi refugees were found to be pursuing jihad, the government rescreened 58,000 now residing in the US who had been recently admitted without adequate investigation.
The fear of jihadists using America’s permissive refugee program is well founded and has even been noticed in Washington. Last December the House Homeland Security Committee held a hearing titled Terrorist Exploitation of Refugee Programs. Chairman Patrick Meehan noted in his opening statement that “intelligence indicates that the threat posed by refugees with ties to al Qaeda is much broader than was previously believed.” But the bureaucrats promise to do better in the future, for sure!
Below is the Chairman’s opening statement:
Obama dropped hints for a couple months about wanting Syrian refugees, but now there’s a number: 2000. It’s not a huge number by itself, but the door is now open to many more. And though Syria is 90 percent Muslim, one could safely guess that 100 percent of the refugees will be worshippers of Allah. Christians stuck in ummah territory are apparently unwelcome. Why does the administration continue to welcome tribes unfriendly to American values who present a national security threat?
With conditions continuing to deteriorate in Syria, the Obama administration is making a major policy shift by agreeing for the first time to allow thousands of new Syrian refugees into the United States, The Cable has learned.
The numbers are relatively small: just 2,000 refugees, compared to an estimated two million people who have fled Syria during the civil war. But it’s a significant increase from the 90 or so Syrian refugees who have been permanently admitted to the U.S. in the last two years. And it’s not entirely uncontroversial. The refugees, mostly women and children, will be screened for terrorist ties — a process that could take a year or more to complete.
Unlike previous efforts by the Department of Homeland Security to give temporary protected status to Syrians already in the United States, the State Department effort will bring in Syrians from overseas for permanent resettlement in America.
“Referrals will come within the next four months. We will need to interview people and perform security and medical checks,” Kelly Clements, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for Population, Refugees, and Migration, tells The Cable. Continue reading this article
However, his Friday opinion piece usefully examined the problems with refugees and asylum seekers, a topic far too PC for most politicians to confront. Those groups are uber-victims, which makes them highly favored by liberals. The associated symptoms of terrorism, criminality and fraud are little explored in the press, except when an unavoidably blatant example pops up.
Senator Paul’s interest may have been arroused earlier by the case of Waad Ramadan Alwan, an asylee from Iraq resettled in Kentucky, who had been a soldier in Saddam’s army fighting Americans and whose fingerprints were found on an IED, yet he was admitted to this country. Senator Paul voiced the opinion during a 2011 hearing that there were too many refugees and asylum seekers to be screened adequately, remarking “I don’t fault you for missing the needle in the haystack. You’ve got to make the haystack smaller.”
Yes, let’s reduce the number of refugees and asylees to the low dozens, a number the government could conceivably screen properly.
Fazliddin Kurbanov is from Uzbekistan, a Central Asian country that borders Afghanistan. This month, Mr. Kurbanov was arrested in Boise, Idaho, charged with teaching people how to build bombs that could be used to target public transportation. He is accused of conspiring with the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which the United States recognizes as a terrorist organization. Mr. Kurbanov was here legally, admitted as a refugee in 2009.
Last year, in Aurora, Colo., Jamshid Muhtorov was arrested and charged with providing material support to the Islamic Jihad Union, which the United States recognizes as a terrorist organization. Like Mr. Kurbanov, Mr. Muhtorov is from Uzbekistan and was also here legally as a refugee.
In 2011, in my hometown of Bowling Green, Ky., Waad Ramadan Alwan and Mohanad Shareef Hammadi were arrested and accused of supporting efforts to kill American troops in Iraq. Both men are from Iraq. Both were also here legally as refugees.
The Bowling Green Daily News reported that these Iraqi refugees “slipped through the vetting process that allowed both of them political asylum in the United States.” Apparently, Mr. Kurbanov and Mr. Muhtorov “slipped through” as well.
So did Ulugbek Kodirov, who was arrested in Birmingham, Ala., last year and sentenced to 15 years in prison for plotting to kill President Obama. Kodirov was from Uzbekistan and was in the country illegally on a student-visa overstay.
Last month, two pressure-cooker bombs were exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three and injuring 264 people. The Washington Post noted of the suspects, brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev: “With their baseball hats and sauntering gaits, they appeared to friends and neighbors like ordinary American boys. But the Boston bombing suspects were refugees from another world — the blood, rubble and dirty wars of the Russian Caucasus.”
I condemn government inefficiency and incompetence often. The targets for criticism are endless. In the repeating patterns from these refugee and visa cases, however, we see potentially dangerous scenarios in which we cannot afford any excuses.
In the case of Sept. 11, 2001, if the State Department had more adequately monitored visa overstays and application screening, most of hijackers would have been detected and caught beforehand. After the Boston bombing, I asked what faults we might have in our current intelligence that allowed the Russian government to identify the suspects as potential terrorists before the US government did. Continue reading this article
Abdullatif Aldosary (pictured), currently a resident of Coolidge Arizona, is being questioned about the bomb set off in the Casa Grande Social Security office Friday morning.
The police kept neighbors of Aldosary out of their homes for hours until they determined the residence was safe, so they may have suspected a bomb trap.
A 47-year old Iraqi refugee is in federal custody Saturday in connection with an explosion at a Social Security office in Casa Grande.
A source close to the investigation says he’ll likely face a litany of federal and state explosive and arson charges on Monday. Continue reading this article
This just in: authorities have noticed that Washington’s permissive refugee policy regarding Iraqis has created a national security threat. The rush to rescue meant that do-gooder behavior trumped normal prudence in background checks, and dangerous persons were admitted as a result.
As I noted in Iraqi Refugees Pose a Terror Threat, in 2008 Sixty Minutes created a major sob story (The List: A Mission to Save Iraqi Lives) that 100,000 noble Iraqi freedom-fighters who helped Americans needed to be quickly resettled to the US to rescue them from death. The story appears to have the desired effect.
So now, 58,000 Iraqi refugees reside in this country and should be rescreened. There is a new list, one with 300 names who are thought to have a higher possibility of being enemies of America.
Below, refugees Waad Ramadan Alwan and Mohanad Shareef Hammadi are accused of terrorism. Alwan is now thought to have participated in roadside bomb attacks in Iraq, but was still welcomed to the United States because of sloppy vetting procedures.
Officials fear lapses in immigration security may have let insurgents and potential terrorists enter the country. More than 58,000 Iraqis are being screened again.
Reporting from Washington— In a far-reaching inquiry, authorities are rescreening more than 58,000 Iraqi refugees living in the United States amid concerns that lapses in immigration security may have allowed former insurgents and potential terrorists to enter the country, U.S. officials said.
The investigation was given added urgency after U.S. intelligence agencies warned that Al Qaeda leaders in Iraq and Yemen had tried to target the U.S. refugee stream, or exploit other immigration loopholes, in an attempt to infiltrate the country with operatives.
The rescreening began late last year after the FBI learned that an Iraqi man in Kentucky had participated in roadside bomb attacks in Iraq before he was granted U.S. political asylum in 2009. He and another Iraqi refugee were arrested in an FBI sting in May on charges of trying to send explosives and missiles to Iraq for use against Americans.
So far, immigration authorities have given the FBI about 300 names of Iraqi refugees for further investigation. The FBI won’t say whether any have been arrested or pose a potential threat. Continue reading this article
Even the Los Angeles Times, which normally promotes open borders and diversity no matter what, lambastes the government for sloppiness in this case. One of the refugees actually fought against American troops in Iraq. Appalling.
Below, refugees Waad Ramadan Alwan and Mohanad Shareef Hammadi used their location in the United States to aid their jihadist goals.
Two men are charged with sending cash, explosives and missiles to Iraq for use against Americans. Their case underscores gaps identified in the U.S. refugee vetting process before last year.
Before he was granted refugee status in the U.S. and settled down in Bowling Green, Ky., Waad Ramadan Alwan was allegedly a sniper and skilled bomb maker who targeted U.S. forces and bragged that his “lunch and dinner would be an American.”
Alwan is one of two Iraqi refugees who the Justice Department announced Tuesday had been charged with participating in an alleged plot to send cash, explosives and Stinger missiles to Iraq for use against Americans.
The men are among 56,000 Iraqis who took advantage of special programs to come to the United States after demonstrating they were in danger from Iraqi militias for their religious beliefs or because they were translators for U.S. government or media organizations.
Alwan was admitted into the U.S. in 2009 even though his fingerprint was found in 2005 on an unexploded roadside bomb that was set to blow up a U.S. convoy in Iraq, according to court documents. His print was loaded into a Defense Department database. But when he applied for U.S. refugee status, a search of that database was not yet a part of the application process.
Since then, those information-sharing weaknesses have been identified and corrected, said an official with the Department of Homeland Security. Also, as new records go into the terrorist watch list, he said, refugees already in the U.S. are being vetted again.
When asked how men who actively fought against the U.S. in Iraq could have been allowed in the country, the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information, said the case demonstrated that there were “specific gaps” in refugee vetting procedures before 2010. Continue reading this article
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The current administration apparently believes that welcoming Muslim refugees is more important than national security. Otherwise it wouldn’t have unilaterally loosened the rules by which persons having terrorist ties are kept out. Now they can get in.
Abdullatif Aldosary (pictured), currently a resident of Coolidge Arizona, is being questioned about the bomb set off in the Casa Grande Social Security office Friday morning.