Mr. Trump, in short, has described a policy of keeping potential terrorists out of the country altogether, even if that means suspending or violating Americas longstanding principles of taking in refugees and not discriminating against immigrants on the basis of their religion. Mrs. Clinton, in contrast, has argued for the vetting of immigrants about their history or sympathy for radical ideology but working to counter extremists messages or behavior.
A core element of Mrs. Clintons counterterrorism strategy has been to build on pilot programs in four communities that, among other features, offer residents ways to report individuals who could become radicalized or otherwise exhibit troubling behavior. The four communities are Minneapolis-St. Paul, Los Angeles, Boston and Montgomery County, Md. In the Elizabeth, N.J., neighborhood where Mr. Rahami lived and worked, such a program might or might not have made a difference. In recent years, for instance, some friends of Mr. Rahamis noticed a significant change in his personality and religious devotion after a trip to Afghanistan, where he and his relatives are from. But there is no evidence that they alerted anyone, or expressed any concern. Mrs. Clinton aims to set up an early-warning system, community by community. That builds on a growing number of programs that the Obama administration terms countering violent extremism. The aim is not just to rely on religious leaders such as imams to help detect the early signs of radicalization, but also to enlist teachers, coaches, physicians and others who might notice subtle changes in an individuals behavior and, perhaps with family and friends, intervene. Mrs. Clinton also suggested, in December, that she would accelerate work with technology companies to take radical speech off Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat and encrypted apps used by terrorists. You are going to hear all the familiar complaints: Freedom of speech, she told the Brookings Institution. She suggested those complaints should be dismissed. Continue reading the main storyHer advisers acknowledge this would not constitute a complete solution but neither would immigration bans, which they view as counter to American values. Look, were never going to be able to identify every potential bad actor solely through a police record or their involvement with other bad actors, said Daniel Benjamin, a former State Department terrorism coordinator and now a scholar at Dartmouth College. So having more eyes on this, and more awareness within communities, is absolutely essential, and will have to be a key part of the solution. Mr. Benjamin, who is an adviser to the Clinton campaign, acknowledged Tuesday that theres no guarantee that such programs would have identified Rahami ahead of time. But he said Mr. Rahamis case, and that of a Somali-American man who stabbed 10 people at a mall in St. Cloud, Minn., before he was shot and killed by an off-duty police officer, appear to be examples of fairly dramatic changes in behavior that might have set off alarms. Mrs. Clinton spoke by phone for 45 minutes on Tuesday morning with a group of top national security and counterterrorism advisers about lessons learned from the most recent terrorist attacks and what additional steps a Clinton administration would need to take to prevent strikes on American soil, according to a summary of the call that the campaign released. They also discussed how to ensure that the police and other law enforcement agencies followed up on individuals who had been previously identified as possible threats. Mrs. Clinton has called for an intelligence surge to improve information sharing among federal agencies and with foreign partners. Mrs. Clinton and her advisers mulled over ways to combat so-called lone-wolf attacks and online radicalization without specific direction or enabling from groups like the Islamic State or Al Qaeda and how we can best balance the right to privacy with this modern national security imperative, according to the summary. Finally, the group examined the dangers of inflammatory rhetoric, generalizations and expressions of prejudice, all of which Mrs. Clinton and her supporters have accused Mr. Trump of using in his social media comments and campaign speeches. Mr. Trump has one word for those solutions: Weak. He argued during the primaries that he would temporarily ban all Muslim immigration, a position that received withering criticism from his own party. (He also said he would take out the families of terrorists, a violation of international conventions.) He combined that with what he maintains would be a far more relentless attack on the Islamic State, including seizing oil in areas where it operates, presumably in Iraq (although most of the oil belongs to Iraq, and the Bush administration always went to some lengths to say it would be preserved for the benefit of the Iraqi people, not sold by the United States). Continue reading the main storyUnder pressure, Mr. Trump amended his approach to saying he would temporarily ban immigration from countries that have been breeding grounds for terrorism; he seemed to have Afghanistan and Pakistan in mind. But that definition could easily embrace Germany, France, Belgium and Britain as well. Had that program been in effect in 1995, it might have stopped Mr. Rahamis entry into the country as a 7-year-old, or his readmission in 2000, when he and his family were admitted as refugees. Mr. Trump said in a rally on Tuesday that the lesson of the New York and New Jersey bombing attacks was the need for an immigration crackdown. These attacks were made possible because of our extremely open immigration system, which fails to properly vet and screen the individuals or families coming into our country, he said. Attack after attack from 9/11 to San Bernardino to Orlando we have seen how failure to screen who is entering the United States puts all of our citizens in great danger. He said Mrs. Clinton was for people pouring in from Syria, though the 10,000 refugees who have come from there this year is a tiny fraction of what European nations have taken in. Mr. Trump called for stopping the massive inflow of refugees, which Hillary Clinton is trying to drastically increase. Continue reading the main story
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
April 2018
Categories |