The FBI is currently investigating over 300 of Obama’s “robustly vetted” refugees for their ties to terrorism, Jeffrey Sessions announces. But in truth we know that Obama’s vetting was anything but robust. In fact, DHS even refused a rudimentary check of social media because they believed it violated the refugees rights to hide terrorist activities. The wife in the San Bernardino shooting was allowed in from Pakistan despite radical posts on social media.
Liberals would tell you 300 isn’t so bad. Really? How many American deaths are acceptable. Omar Mateen killed 49 people and wounded another 53 people all by himself. A suicide bomber could kill many more in such a crowded venue.
It was an ancient practice that allowed a judge to set a prisoner free. There was a catch. If that person committed more crimes the judge would be punished for those crimes as well. Let’s revive that practice. Judges would have second thoughts before releasing dangerous criminals back on the streets.
So far, there aren’t any more details forthcoming on these cases, and … there’s not likely to be, either. The FBI doesn’t usually comment on ongoing investigations (insert laugh track here), and particularly not when they are tracking potential terror sympathizers and/or recruits. Needless to say, this provides a rather stark backdrop to Donald Trump’s new executive order restricting entry to the US from a handful of high-risk nations — and that’s certainly the intent of the leak.
This leaves us with two ways to look at this information: the glass-half-full take, and the glass-half-empty take. Glass half full: The US admitted tens of thousands of refugees every year even under the Bush administration, although Obama increased the cap in 2014 from 50,000 to 100,000. Even in a single year, three hundred cases among 100,000 means 99.7% of these were not problematic at all, and shows that the vetting system works. The new improvements mean we’ll do even better, and refugees don’t even make up a third of all current FBI counterterrorism probes.
Glass half empty: First, these are just the 300 of whom the FBI has become aware. In an age of terror, it doesn’t take more than a handful to get together to conduct major operations that could pt thousands or more at risk. The 9/11 attacks only took 19 terrorists, for instance, even if none of them came from the countries targeted by Trump’s EO. In Europe, cells much smaller than this number continue to conduct major attacks on population centers.