That would be the Federal Government Ambassador to NH Jeanne Shaheen who told WMUR that the US does the HIGHEST level of vetting – far more than any other country does:
U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., stopped short of calling for a halt to U.S. acceptance of refugees. She did speak of the need to enhance screening, but also told News 9 that the U.S. already has one of the most stringent refugee vetting processes in the world. “Much longer and much more thorough than many of the European countries,” said Shaheen. “And I think that process needs to go forward.”
WELL, there’s a huge problem with that. First off, WMUR said “refugee” and not what the topic really is, SYRIAN refugees in which Islamic Jihadists might embed themselves (which ISIS has already claimed). Second, technically she may be right, but…
…there’s a complication – HOW does that vetting happen when there is nothing against to check? Shaheen makes it sound like this is just run of the mill but in depth stuff. Has she actually seen the condition of the Syrian government on which this process depends upon? The database(s) of information that SHOULD be there – but are not?
But when it comes to refugees from Syria, what is called “vetting” relies mostly on one source of information: the refugee.
The UNHCR referral is a crucial first step to gaining admittance to the U.S., but the candidate must then pass “the highest level of security checks conducted on any category of traveler to the United States,” a State Department official said.
And are we supposed to first trust the UN with OUR security?
…Republican U.S. Rep. Peter King of New York urged the White House to suspend its plan to accept up to 10,000 Syrian refugees over the next year. He disputed the administration’s contention that “robust vetting procedures” would screen out potential terrorists. “There’s virtually no vetting because there are no databases in Syria,” he said. “There are no government records. We don’t know who these people are.”
IBD:
Under grilling from GOP Sen. Jeff Sessions, head of the Senate subcommittee on immigration, the Homeland Security official in charge of vetting Syrian and other foreign Muslim refugees confessed that no police or intelligence databases exist to check the backgrounds of incoming refugees against criminal and terrorist records.
“Does Syria have any?” Sessions asked. “The government does not, no sir,” answered Matthew Emrich, associate director for fraud detection and national security at DHS’ U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Sessions further inquired: “You don’t have their criminal records, you don’t have the computer database that you can check?” Confessed Emrich: “In many countries the U.S. accepts refugees from, the country did not have extensive data holdings.”
While a startling admission, it confirms previous reporting. Senior FBI officials recently testified that they have no idea who these people are, and they can’t find out what type of backgrounds they have — criminal, terrorist or otherwise — because there are no vetting opportunities in those war-torn countries.
Syria and Iraq, along with Somalia and Sudan, are failed states where police records aren’t even kept. Agents can’t vet somebody if they don’t have documentation and don’t even have the criminal databases to screen applicants.
So the truth is, we are not vetting these Muslim refugees at all….
And finally this from the head of the FBI:
FBI director James Comey said during a House Committee on Homeland Security hearing on Wednesday that the federal government does not have the ability to conduct thorough background checks on all of the 10,000 Syrian refugees that the Obama administration says will be allowed to come to the U.S.
“We can only query against that which we have collected,” Comey said in response to a line of questioning from Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson . “And so if someone has never made a ripple in the pond in Syria in a way that would get their identity or their interest reflected in our database, we can query our database until the cows come home, but there will be nothing show up because we have no record of them.”
So under Congressional oath during hearings, top officials of the Obama Administration have had to admit “they got nuthin'”. Isn’t that special?
So Jeanne, how’s that gonna work for ya? Or more importantly, us? You just outright lied by omission – you’ve made the totally false impression that all is well when absolutely nothing is well at all. NOTHING is there to check against. As a member of the Senate, you KNOW that fact. Yet, you decided to lead your fellow NH citizens by the nose to believe in that smoke and mirrors.
And let’s not forget about WMUR’s part in this as well for they are not innocent in this, either. Did they challenge her during the interview? No. Did the do any checking (or as the NYT says, “layers of editors and fact checkers”) into her answer or story? No. Did they even bother to spend 3 minutes to Google this before running with the story?
I guess they couldn’t bother to be bothered – let’s just accept what the Government tells us as The Truth. Which even the most cursory superficial quick look would have shown “Houston, we have a problem” with Shaheen’s story.
Good job, “journalists”, good job!
