US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6687

On January 29 2017 16:35 xDaunt wrote:
The countries chosen are either war zones or state sponsors of terrorism. There are a bunch of other Muslim states that were left off the list.

On January 29 2017 13:37 PhoenixVoid wrote:

Bannon having this much authority is concerning.

"Protecting The Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into The United States," targets seven nations: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

Trump has no business interests in those countries.

One of the categories of travelers that the Obama administration says it wants to
allow to receive waivers – dual nationals traveling to Iran and Iraq for business
purposes -- is a category of travelers that presents a significant national security risk;

We do know that the ESTA screening relies on the same sources of information,
intelligence, and records as the rest of our immigration system, and we know that those systems
have major gaps. Notwithstanding the confident claims of Obama administration officials about
the thoroughness of our vetting, in fact virtually every visa or immigration program we operate
has been used by terrorists or criminals. San Bernardino terrorist Tashfeen Malik, Iraqi terrorists
admitted as refugees, and the Nigerian “underwear bomber” are some of the most recent
concerning examples.

The Obama administration, which has strongly opposed proposals to limit the refugee program, has been more open to changing the visa waiver program. It already has begun imposing its own changes to the program and has welcomed the efforts in Congress to further tighten the restrictions. There was no indication Tuesday that it was backing off.

Instead, the White House said it wanted to work with Congress on potential tweaks to the visa waiver program, calling it a “fruitful area for possible bipartisan discussion.” Under the program, foreigners from 38 countries can enter the U.S. without visas for short stays.

...

Feinstein and Flake hope to force anyone who has been in Iraq or Syria in the past five years to go through the traditional visa process, including an in-person interview, fingerprinting and tamper-proof passport security. Feinstein has said she plans to introduce the bill a Thanksgiving, calling the visa waiver program “the soft underbelly of our national security policies.”

The White House wouldn’t say whether Obama supports her proposal in its current form or what other options were under consideration.

Obama’s newfound focus on visa changes marked an effort to subdue momentum for the refugee bill following the White House’s failed lobbying effort in the House. Some Democrats briefed on the refugee screening process by Obama’s chief of staff and Homeland Security secretary emerged far from impressed, leading to Thursday’s 289-137 vote to undermine the president’s program.

Obama has called for accepting roughly 10,000 Syrian refugees in the next year. But that program has been plunged into uncertainty following the Paris attacks that killed 129 and stoked deep fears across the West about terrorism being exported from Syria, where the long-raging civil war has fueled the Islamic Stage group’s rise.

"We have been aware of the details of this bipartisan compromise and like any compromise piece of legislation, there is some give and take, but we believe this legislation as a whole strikes the appropriate balance between ensuring the security of the homeland, while allowing for legitimate travel to the U.S.," a senior administration official told POLITICO.

It[the visa waiver changes] may also be included in the omnibus spending bill Congress needs to pass by Dec. 11 to avert a government shutdown, senior GOP lawmakers and aides told The Hill.

Attaching the visa bill to the $1.1 trillion must-pass spending package likely means Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) leadership team will skip over efforts to insert into the omnibus other security-related bills that are opposed by President Obama, including one tightening screening for refugees.

On January 29 2017 18:17 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
So the DHS is refusing to comply to the Court orders....

We appear to nearing that Constitutional Crisis folks...

The man who now has more security clearance than the Secretary of State etc.

https://twitter.com/JessikaJayne/status/825622046453424129

On January 29 2017 17:53 Biff The Understudy wrote:
In 2015, toddlers shot and killed more people in the US than muslim terrorists. And Same in 2016

But it has nothing to do with security and everything with biggotry: those people are dangerous!!!! And evil!!! And brown!!!!!

On January 29 2017 16:16 Kamisamanachi wrote:
Not regular poster here, but i just want to ask one thing. how the hell did countries like pakistan and especially, saudi arabia escaped out of his order?

i mean, Pakistan has been proven factory for terrorists since many years and is also a place where gangsters like Dawood Ibrahim and terrorists like osama bin laden took refuge under government. what stops trump from issuing orders against them if he wants to sign order for countries? , some of which are very less dangerous places than the ones i mentioned.

On January 29 2017 20:10 NukeD wrote:

Im thinking Saudi Arabia is too big of a fish to openly opose right now. Its not really a secret they are the biggest sponsors of Isis, Podesta openly says it in his email to Hillary.

On January 29 2017 20:05 NukeD wrote:

How many toddlers raped women in 2015 and 2016? Its not only about killing.

On January 29 2017 20:10 NukeD wrote:

Im thinking Saudi Arabia is too big of a fish to openly opose right now. Its not really a secret they are the biggest sponsors of Isis, Podesta openly says it in his email to Hillary.

On January 29 2017 20:14 nojok wrote:

That's just racist... It comes out of nowhere and it's insulting, wtf?!

On January 29 2017 20:13 Toadesstern wrote:

they're openly oposing China... I don't think being a big fish has a lot to do with it

Malevolence Tempered by Incompetence: Trump’s Horrifying Executive Order on Refugees and Visas

The malevolence of President Trump’s Executive Order on visas and refugees is mitigated chiefly—and perhaps only—by the astonishing incompetence of its drafting and construction. [...] As I shall explain, in the short term, the incompetence is actually good news for people who believe in visa and refugee policies based on criteria other than—let’s not be coy about this—bigotry and religious discrimination. The President has created a target-rich environment for litigation that will make his policies, I suspect, less effective than they would have been had he subjected his order to vetting one percent as extreme as the vetting to which he proposes to subject refugees from Bashar al-Assad and the bombing raids of Vladimir Putin. [...] In the broader sense, however, it is most emphatically not good news to have a White House that just makes decisions with no serious thought or interagency input into what those decisions might mean. In fact, it’s really dangerous.

[...]

Put simply, I don’t believe that the stated purpose is the real purpose. This is the first policy the United States has adopted in the post-9/11 era about which I have ever said this. It’s a grave charge, I know, and I’m not making it lightly. But in the rational pursuit of security objectives, you don’t marginalize your expert security agencies and fail to vet your ideas through a normal interagency process. You don’t target the wrong people in nutty ways when you’re rationally pursuing real security objectives.

When do you do these things? You do these things when you’re elevating the symbolic politics of bashing Islam over any actual security interest. You do them when you’ve made a deliberate decision to burden human lives to make a public point. In other words, this is not a document that will cause hardship and misery because of regrettable incidental impacts on people injured in the pursuit of a public good. It will cause hardship and misery for tens or hundreds of thousands of people because that is precisely what it is intended to do. [...]

I would wax triumphant about the mitigating effect of incompetence on this document, but alas, I can’t do it. The president’s powers in this area are vast, as I say, and while the incompetence is likely to buy the administration a world of hurt in court and in diplomacy in the short term, this order is still going take more than a few pounds of flesh out of a lot of innocent people.

Moreover, it’s a very dangerous thing to have a White House that can’t with the remotest pretense of competence and governance put together a major policy document on a crucial set of national security issues without inducing an avalanche of litigation and wide diplomatic fallout. If the incompetence mitigates the malevolence in this case, that’ll be a blessing. But given the nature of the federal immigration powers, the mitigation may be small and the blessing short-lived; the implications of having an executive this inept are not small and won’t be short-lived.