Obama was so weak on terrorism he didn’t even have the balls to put some of the most dangerous countries on his list of “countries of concern,” because doing so would piss off governments that we have an allegiance to. But we’ll use that same pathetic list anyway, because… our hands are tied?
Yeah, it makes no sense. Completely arbitrary.
I trusted a fair bit of the Obama administration’s work before, so this isn’t really the “change of heart” you imagined. Have you got a post from me last year saying that their “countries of concern” classification was bullshit and / or wrong?
What I mean is that this doesn’t explain why that list, and those countries, and not others, were actually chosen. What was special about this list and these countries?
So what is your theory then? Do you think he has a special hatred-hard-on for these seven countries, so he scoured the archives of the Obama administration looking for some memo or footnote that would justify this for those seven particular countries that he already had settled on in his own mind?
Good deflection attempt, but no, I’m not going to play your redirection game.
Can you cite any time that Trump trusted the Obama administration on anything prior to this list that he just had no choice but to use for his important Executive Order? He is the president now and he is the one saying that he’s following Obama’s list now. Do you not see that as a change of heart? How does this behavior jibe with his behavior regarding Obama for the last 8 years?
They’re the ones that were previously identified as being of particular concern.
Given the Left’s concerns with Trump ignoring advice from intelligence agencies (a legitimate gripe I think, but not the subject of this thread), I think you’d all be tickled-pink that he’s taking their recommendation on something, but instead the left seems … furious about it. I don’t get it.
-Political Cover
-Blame Obama
-Avoid responsibility for fallout
-Keep his preferred Muslim majority countries off the list so as not to affect his business interests there
-Rile up his base and get them to follow the blame Obama talking points
-Piss off liberals by pointing finger at Obama
Lots of good reasons from Trump’s perspective. Why wouldn’t he have done exactly that?
There’s also a perfectly-innocent explanation: it actually was an accurate list of “countries of concern”. Whether it was some nefarious plot or not is probably largely in the opinion of the beholder without some hard evidence.
These are the countries that are exporting refugees right now. There aren’t so many people seeking to flee Pakistan or Indonesia as refugees, for example, because those countries aren’t active war zones in the way that Syria is.
He, or at least elements within his administration, wants America to remain white and Christian, and you can’t do that if you let in too many brown non-Christians, with poor uneducated brown non-Christians (i.e., people who didn’t arrive here on H1-B visas or the like) being special targets.
Cite that the intelligence agencies recommended this specific policy for those seven countries? There’s nothing in Obama’s EO, supposedly the origin, recommending this new policy.
“Hey, you’re always saying I don’t stand up for myself and now you’re complaining that I shot the guy? I don’t get it.”
What Obama EO are you talking about? And I never claimed they “recommended this specific policy”.
You said “Given the Left’s concerns with Trump ignoring advice from intelligence agencies (a legitimate gripe I think, but not the subject of this thread), I think you’d all be tickled-pink that he’s taking their recommendation on something, but instead the left seems … furious about it. I don’t get it.”
What about this policy constitutes “advice from intelligence agencies” and “their recommendations on something”? Cite for these recommendations and advice?
Like I said way back in post #93 and #103, I think there’s plenty of rich territory for discussion and debate on whether temporarily banning virtually everyone from these countries was casting too wide a net or not. That’s one of the reasons I find this infatuation with the list so perplexing. It seems like really weak ground for the anti-Trump crowd to be arguing on, but, whatever, carry on.
However, what 8 U.S.C. 1187(a)(12) was talking about was people who would not ordinarily require a visa anyway (because they were from countries in the visa waiver program) but who had traveled to certain trouble-spots and then wanted to travel to the U.S. There was a concern that if you were a German or a Brit, for example, but had chosen to travel to countries that sponsored state terrorism, that you might have chosen to do so because you yourself were radicalized or involved in terrorism, so we needed to vet you a little more closely than we would vet Germans who had NOT visited Iraq/Syria/Iran.
Is that the same concern as would apply to somebody who was born in Syria, really wanted out of Syria, and has already been vetted for a visa? I don’t think so.
No, just the opposite – that’s why the list feels arbitrary, because I doubt Trump could find all 7 of these countries on a map.
I think he had one country in mind, Syria, but he didn’t promise to ban Syrians, he promised to ban Muslims. Even he knew he couldn’t get away with a religious ban, so he set his lackeys to work finding some justification for banning as many Muslims as possible while still keeping it “legal.” This isn’t speculation, mind you, this is what Guliani said actually happened. I think finding this list was probably a moment of quiet joy for all involved in this task, because it happened not to include any majority-Muslim countries that would object terribly loudly, but did include Syria, and helped give the whole thing an air of legitimacy.
Missing from this entire process, though, is any rational analysis of risk, because the intention never was safety or security, it was to ban Muslims. Like he said he was going to do.
DHS was asked to identify areas or countries “of concern” to national security. They did so, and Trump re-purposed their findings for his 90-day stay in immigration from those areas of concern. The “advice from intelligence agencies” that Trump followed was that these seven countries were “of concern”. He didn’t run off and try to tabulate his own list from whatever names popped into his head at the time. I’d think we could all celebrate that as a win for fact-based governing rather than governing by emotion / tantrum / whatever-word-you’d-like-to-use-to-describe-how-you-think-Trump-normally-operates.
I hope we’re all aware at this point, that the DHS list was actually for an adjustment to the Visa Waiver Program, for people traveling to these seven countries in recent years. The fear there is basically that they might have gone there to be a terrorist or learn how to be one. They weren’t, at the time, recommending a total ban on people from those countries of concern.
Is that clear?
I largely agree with you. Frankly, I think Trump does too, which is why this is just a 90-day (or 120-day) moratorium while they work out how to more carefully screen immigrants from those places for terroristic tendencies.
Clear as mud – but a very brave attempt to try to justify your claim that the existence of this list of countries (made up for an entirely different purpose) constitutes advice/recommendations for Trump on his entirely new (and inhumane, unAmerican, etc.) policy on these countries.
Did you read the AP story I cited in post #103?