With the FBI still having 1,000 open investigations on the books (which has also been made public and mentioned by me numerous times) makes it just as tough and those were set up based on the previous administrations policy.
Don’t you think we should finish getting these investigations finished before creating a far bigger back log?
I looked for a while tonight and couldn’t find an article about thousands of open investigations at the FBI… on immigrants? On potential immigrants? If you have a link, I’ll take a look at it (bonus points if it’s from the FBI itself). But if the FBI is suspicious of someone, I assume the case stays open until they find solid evidence one way or another. It’s tough to close a case (and I’d say that’s a good thing), especially if the person you’re suspicious about hasn’t really shown up on the radar yet.
I can give you this …
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/22/us/fbi-terror-ahmad-khan-rahami.html?_r=0
I apologize for the late reply but it’s been a long few days and I wanted to give these articles a thorough read and good consideration.
The first article seems to more or less corroborate my point: it’s a very difficult task. A lot of these guys don’t show up on the radar until it’s too late, and even when they do (like Omar Mateen) it’s hard to gather the intel you need to actually make a move within legal channels before they carry out their attacks, and we can’t just go around arresting people for posting positive things about ISIL on the Internet because of our Bill of Rights. There’s a really fine line that the FBI and CIA walk between keeping people safe and overstepping our rights. Not to mention Omar Mateen was born in the US and was thus considered a citizen as much as you (assuming you were born in the US) or myself, and from all accounts his parents were model citizens who immigrated in the 80s (long before Obama was President). No humane or reasonable immigration law would have prevented this.
It also talks about how cases stay on the books until actionable data is obtained which leads to an arrest. I’m really okay with that. Let the FBI have thousands of open cases in my opinion, because it means that they’re watching people who they’ve deemed are risks. I would be angry if they watched a guy for a couple of years and then closed the case because he seemed okay, and then he blew up a school. That would be far worse to me than knowing they had an open book on him at the time of his attack and just didn’t have the evidence to make an arrest.
Sometimes they do get that evidence, though:
In May, the parents of a young man in Queens told the authorities that their 18-year-old son, Ranbir Singh Shergill, had threatened family members. After the parents gave officers consent to search the home, members of an F.B.I. terrorism task force found a handgun, several magazines and 118 rounds of ammunition. They also found a note that discussed killing police officers. The F.B.I. charged Mr. Shergill in June with buying a gun in Ohio using fake identification and transporting it to New York.
From what I can see, Shergill’s family are great Americans who should be lauded for having the guts to implicate their son as a possible terrorist, and it looks to me like that tip stopped what could have been a loss of life set off by a guy who wasn’t even on the FBI’s radar yet.And a blurb from it …
The threat has only grown since Sept. 11, 2001, and more recently with the rise of the Islamic State. In recent years, the F.B.I. has averaged 10,000 assessments annually, and 7,000 to 10,000 preliminary or full investigations involving international terrorism. In addition, the F.B.I. receives tens of thousands of terrorism tips. All of those have to be tracked down, as in the case involving Mr. Rahami. That does not include information the F.B.I. learns from foreign partners, war zones or American agencies. Most investigations never end in prosecution.
To address this, yes, it’s a dangerous world. And yeah, the FBI is probably overworked, but if there were fewer immigrants, would they be able to prevent more attacks? I don’t know if we can say that for sure. If the investigations don’t end in prosecutions, I assume they’re not finding actionable intel and thus cannot take the next step towards an arrest either because there isn’t any wrongdoing or because they can’t find it. From the sentence above your blurb:
Nobody expects the police to prevent every homicide in Chicago or Los Angeles, or to prevent public corruption or eliminate drugs. But the expectation among many Americans is that the F.B.I. should stop every terrorist attack. Former and current F.B.I. officials accept the reality that the bureau faces a different standard.
They’d have more time to work on specific cases, definitely, but we can’t say with certainty that it would lead to more prevention because, again, a lot of the time these guys don’t do anything illegal until they’re actively killing people. So it’s not so much a “backlog” of cases taking up resources, it’s more that they’re actively keeping an eye on possible threats and not ruling anything out until they have firm intel with which to make a move. Sometimes the cops stop the robbers, but sometimes the robbers get away with it. It’s the nature of law enforcement within the boundaries of American law: everyone is innocent until proven guilty. Is it wrong to deny rights to the majority because of the misdeeds of the few? As a pro-gun person, I think strongly that it is. Why should I lose my rights because certain other people would use them for evil? Why should we deny everyone from Syria because they have some evil people? Should Americans be denied from visiting other countries because we have hate groups and terrorists of our own?
In the meantime, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department have prosecuted more than 100 cases involving the Islamic State. Officials say those are the cases that the public tends to overlook, as well as all the other plots they have stopped.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/dec/4/obama-administration-fails-to-check-immigrants-aga/
Obviously a failure for sure, certainly not malicious, though. Trusting computers is tough, and transitions from paper to digital records are always rife with these kinds of issues. Luckily they discovered the problem and I feel like it was handled well by halting all immigration until the proper checks had been applied. It looks like only 175 (out of 15,000 who were still working through the process) were actually fully approved before the issue was caught and of those 175 people, anyone who was flagged by the retroactive checks would have been stripped of their citizenship. Not a good thing to happen, definitely, but it seems to have been handled as well as it could have been.
What I’m getting from this article is that Trump is fear-mongering. Correlation isn’t always causation, but I feel that Trump would have us believe that it is. As the article says:
“Just because someone is being investigated for terrorism does not mean that the terrorism threat is up,” said Laura Dugan, a University of Maryland professor of criminology and criminal justice. “It just means that the FBI is increasing investigations.”
It also goes on to say that:
According to the New America Foundation, about 81 percent of individuals accused of jihadist terrorism crimes since Sept. 11 are citizens or legal residents and about 48 percent were born with U.S. citizenship.
And:
A New York Times analysis in 2015 found that half of the jihadist attacks since 2001 were committed by men born in the United States. Many others were naturalized citizens.
Other databases show some information related to tracking terrorism but didn’t reflect the full number of FBI investigations.
George Washington University collects data on the number of individuals charged with offenses related to the Islamic State. There were 61 individuals in 2015 and 33 individuals in 2016 charged with ISIS-related activity. The university reported that the vast majority were Americans.
[. . .]
The number of cases can rise if the FBI decides to make suspected terrorists more of a priority — but that doesn’t necessarily mean there is more terrorism. Also, not all terrorism cases carry the same level of threat. A charge against someone for material support is not the same as charging someone accused of carrying out an attack. Also, only some investigations lead to actual charges and then convictions.
American University professor Tricia Bacon, who worked in counterrorism for the State Department from 2003-13, said that only FBI headquarters could credibly measure whether the FBI is investigating more people than ever before for terrorism and why.
John Mueller, an adjunct political science professor at Ohio State University and senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, said that the FBI has followed up on millions of terrorism leads since Sept. 11, 2001.
“Although scarcely any develop into anything, the FBI continues and is probably getting more efficient at it, made more so by the fact that so many would-be terrorists announce their intentions (or fantasies) on Facebook and Twitter,” he said.
And finally:
Max Abrahms, assistant professor of political science at Northeastern University, said he wouldn’t be surprised if the number of people under investigation by the FBI for terrorism is unprecedented. However, he noted some problems with attempting to ban people from certain countries.
“No nation has a monopoly on terrorists,” he said. “And no nation is exempt from producing them. Furthermore, the ban does not affect domestic terrorism, which is a growing concern, by not only Islamists, but also right-wing extremists.”
So I’m just not convinced that the FBI having un-closed cases is a bad thing, even if they had millions of them. It just means that they’re doing their job trying to keep us safe. Do they fail? Of course. As I said before, sometimes these guys don’t commit an illegal act or even show up on the radar until they’re actively killing people. Not every murder can be prevented, nor every bank robbery or car theft or jaywalk stopped. There are limitations placed on the system by our Bill of Rights. Even the FBI can’t see everything, and frankly I’m okay with that because it means they’re not explicitly impinging on our rights as Americans. I am happy to take my chances in a free world.
And looking at the data provided in the last article, I’m really not convinced that less immigration will mean less terrorism. The majority are people who made it through the grueling citizenship process without raising so much as a suspicion of doubt. Would looking super extra closely at them change anything about that? I’m not sure it would. Were they terrorists before coming in with the plan to destroy the country, or were they normal people who wanted a new life and were then radicalized? I can’t answer that, but maybe we should stop and ask ourselves if we’re doing everything we can to provide an accepting, trusting country where immigrants can feel at home and will want to assimilate into society, or are we providing a country where they feel hated, distrusted, discriminated against, and unwanted?
This is a holistic issue that requires a holistic answer. Even stopping all immigration completely won’t change anything, and would likely make things worse. Would walking across the street to invite your new Muslim neighbor and his family to your annual neighborhood BBQ (no pork of course!) instead of ignoring their existence help them feel more accepted and like they fit in? I can’t say that, either, but it sure can’t hurt.
Thanks for the well thought out and worded response. I know the system isn’t perfect. I don’t believe that they are considering making the “vetting” process itself any more vigorous, I believe they are looking at options we haven’t heard about yet. We may not hear about them either. The travel ban itself, as I take it, was meant and instituted as a warning to those hiding amongst the innocent refugees. When you can’t get information about someone because they aren’t from where they say they are and where they are from is a known bad place, they’re never going to make the right choice because someone is always going to oppose it.
Being creative and changing things up can put a damper on ill conceived plans because predictability has gone out the window. The harder they have to work to get in, the easier it becomes for them to make a mistake, which can technically make it easier for them to be caught before they get to their destination.
Their have been consequences to the meddling our Presidents have been doing, to de-stabilize regions in favor of democracy and there have been casualties, on all sides. American taxpayers lost millions of dollars when Obama and Clinton armed what they thought were rebels who then went to Syria and announced the formation of ISIL with all the American resources they received. Bush tore things up over there to and left a mess for Obama. Now Trump has whatever mess Obama left from the other messes. It’s not as easy, for me, to hate a President because they are trying to find different ways to clean up anothers mess while still getting done what they promised they could do for Americans.
If there is one thing that is certain, it’s that this is going to be a hard road, but I believe we can endure.