What jshore said. Trump has basically spent his entire career saying stuff, and then walking away from it without correcting or withdrawing it, and even going on to say the complete opposite. He simply accepts no responsibility for anything he says, which is why he’s quite shameless about saying things that are unfounded, and stating as fact things which he has no reason to believe to be factual.
It has served him reasonably well in business - especially since his business is reality television, which as we all know has no actual connection with reality - but it’s really coming back to bite him in the arse in his current role. What the President of the United States says does matter, and everybody thinks so - except, apparently, the President of the United States.
If his lawyers were able to prove that they have historically committed acts of terrorism on American soil, that there is a real risk of such occurring in future, and that such a strategy would be successful in preventing them from entering the country, which they have been completely unable to do convincingly to this point.
What seems absurd to me is that (to use your example) a Yemeni national who was a terrorist wouldn’t think to get a fake passport and attempt to enter the country from a non-banned nation. Maybe fly to Canada and cross the border from there, where there are many stations that are far less policed than American airports that handle international flights.
Assassinations are against specific, individual targets who (theoretically) have been shown to be dangerous to national security in and of themselves. Blanket denial of visas is just a kneejerk reaction to fulfill a campaign promise, which doesn’t actually solve the problem he says it does and hurts innocent individuals in the process.
It seems absurd to me that there are Americans so dangerous that the government has them executed, or imprisoned for life, and yet it believes that Americans are so innocuous that it generally allows them to walk the streets without restriction and to enter and leave the country as they please.
Oh, wait, maybe it’s not so absurd. Maybe the people being sentenced to death or life imprisonment are not being sentenced because they are American so much as because they have committed serious crimes? Maybe their nationality actually has nothing to do with their crimes or their sentences?
Well, if you concede that’s possible in the case of Americans, I think you have to concede that it’s also possible in the case of Yemenis. Basically, it’s discriminatory, irrational, offensive and in many circumstances illegal to target somebody simply because she has the same citizenship as somebody else who has done something you don’t like. Trump, obviously, has difficulty understanding this, but a doper should grasp it readily.
I mean, if you’re arguing that our travel security apparatus is absurd and nonsensical and so full of holes that the average sixth-grader could figure out how to circumvent it with moderate effort, I agree.
But that predates Trump’s presidency, and none of the other bullshit that we and foreign travelers have to put up with has been successfully halted, despite the fact that brown people seem to be “randomly selected” by the TSA awfully often.
I’m also not sure that it’s an effective argument against additional restrictions. That is, you can’t implement a complete and perfect security plan in one fell swoop. You built it up over time, and the fact that one small part of it can be easily circumvented doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t add that while also working on ways around the circumvention.
Like, I think that checking people’s passports before they get on planes is a good thing to do. Sure, someone could get around it by getting a fake passport, but that doesn’t mean that checking passports is completely worthless.
I think the whole thing hinges on your parenthetical “theoretically”. Who is determining that these people are worthy of execution? The executive branch of the government. And (apparently?) we trust that they are capable of making this distinction. At least, no Federal judges have seen fit to stop them from continuing to kill people in Yemen, despite no due process or evidence being available for public review.
Sure, but there is actual due process for Americans who are executed (except the ones with scary Muslim-sounding names that we kill overseas with drones), and the Constitution protects our general right to walk around and to enter the country. So, perhaps it is kind of absurd, but it’s absurdity encoded into law.
The difference with Yemeni drone strikes is that it’s entirely within the purview of the executive branch of government. And this has been challenged in the courts. The ACLU is fairly adamant that you can’t kill (at least) American citizens overseas without judicial process. But the courts have not agreed. So, apparently, it’s ok to kill select people because you say they are terrorists (based on no known evidence), but it’s not ok to restrict entry to a larger group of people because you say the risk that a terrorist among them could get through is too high (based on no known evidence).
I think we are both slightly wrong I guess. Saying “we are currently bombing” Yemen would imply we are part of the Saudi led bombing campaign, not the occasional drone strike. But by that measure, there’s a fair number of countries the U.S. is “currently bombing”, several of which did not make Trump’s list.
Ok, it looks like we were just using different definitions. For the purposes of my argument, recent past and possible future drone strikes count.
But you’re missing why I brought this up. I’m not saying that every country in which we’re using bombs to kill people should have travel restrictions.
I’m saying the process by which we determine whether or not to kill people in a particular country and whether or not to give visas to people in that country are the same: The executive branch says that it’s the right thing to do, based on evidence, or the lack thereof, that we have no way of verifying.
Yet the former is apparently ok, according to our legal system. Not allowing someone into the country is so grave a miscarriage of justice that it must be stopped, but killing them with robots is ok.
Imagine for the sake of argument, that there really does exist solid evidence of some kind of plot in Yemen that seeks to get enemy combatants through the visa process and onto American soil. And, even though I started the last sentence with “for the sake of argument”, I’m going to reiterate here that I don’t think such evidence exists. But imagine that it does. I would say that temporarily limiting visas to Yemenis wouldn’t be unreasonable in such a situation.
Now, how would we, the people, differentiate between that imaginary case and the current one? We don’t know what evidence the President has. We know he’s a bullshitter, and we can’t really trust what he says. But we (apparently) trust him enough to kill people he claims are terrorists, and the courts have not challenged him to produce reasoning for that.
Note that Trump made a statement that the US should “kill terrorists’ families”, which is a war crime, and that drone strikes made under his command have killed family members of terrorists. That seems awfully analogous to the immigration restrictions, but even worse.
So, based on his previous statements, should the courts stop Trump from all military operations in majority-Muslim countries?
That sure reads like “we’re bombing them, so why not travel ban them?”
But regarding your last point, I can’t really see who could get legal standing in court to challenge drone strikes except perhaps congress saying the president is waging undeclared war. And if that actually happened then yes, I think it would be nice if the courts put a stop to it.
I was discussing the travel ban, not the drone strikes. But I never denied that they occurred.
I agree about the TSA/DHS. What boggles me is why so much effort is put into this nonsensical ban instead of just building up the screening procedures from the get-go. Of course, I’m less than confident that any of this is any more than a Trump attention-getting device.
Well, when you’re talking about bin Laden or other high-ranking members of al Qaeda or ISIL, the distinction is fairly obvious. Regardless, it’s a rare, individually-targeted thing which bears no real similarity to the blanket ban.
Got a link for the ruling? I’d be interested to read that. I hadn’t heard of it.
‘No known evidence’ doesn’t mean that there isn’t any in the first case; in the second, there is literally no evidence whatsoever.
Heh yet another post correcting a previous post. Grr…
This is what I get for replying without reading the rest of the posts, and then reading the quoted response, which cuts out others’ quotes within it. Just ignore the stuff about drones in my last post.
Fair enough. I can see how my initial comment could be read that way. Hopefully my further explanation makes my point clearer.
[quote=“Johnny_Ace, post:150, topic:782281”]
Well, when you’re talking about bin Laden or other high-ranking members of al Qaeda or ISIL, the distinction is fairly obvious. Regardless, it’s a rare, individually-targeted thing which bears no real similarity to the blanket ban.
To clarify, when you say first and second case, are you referring to the drone strikes vs travel ban, or to my hypothetical travel ban / real travel ban?
My point is that we don’t really know. I can certainly imagine evidence that might make a temporary blanket travel ban in a certain country reasonable. Not because everyone in that country is a terrorist, but because the evidence raises enough doubts about a terrorist currently getting through screening that blah blah blah. I don’t actually think that’s the case. But I don’t know. Nor do I know whether the people the military kills or imprisons for “terrorism” are actually terrorists.
Circling back to the main point: I think that the travel ban is just Trump’s bigotry wrapped in a weak pretense of national security. But I can’t see how a legal precedent blocking it will hold up because:
The pretense isn’t on its face unreasonable. Evidence could exist that would lead to such a ban for valid reasons, and we and the courts don’t get to see that evidence.
We accept basically the same argument and lack of evidence for even worse things the government does.
Well I can’t speak to the legalities in this case but in general, public statements are going to have a legal effect. If I publicly declare “I’m going to kill that guy!” it really does change the judge’s opinion about whether driving the forklift over him was an accident or not. That’s just the only realistic way we can expect judges to make decisions.
Courts can have access to classified information; they simply seal transcripts of the proceedings. However, the government hasn’t made that case. Their evidence regarding the travel ban, which is apparently insufficient, isn’t classified. If they had such evidence, rest assured that they would be presenting it.
Nevertheless, I’d posit that their argument is false on its face, as they have been unable to show credible threats of attacks on American soil by nationals of the banned countries.
I hate to say it, but that first paragraph of the opinion looks to me like waving one hell of a red cape in front of Justice Kennedy. Not exactly an attempt at consensus-building. :dubious:
