OnTuesday the DOJ issued a 10 page report which attempted to prove that Immigrants were largely responsible for Terrorism as a method to justify the Trump’s administrations Muslim Travel ban and their attempts to shut down Family based “Chain” migration.
“This report reveals an indisputable sobering reality—our immigration system has undermined our national security and public safety,” U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a press statement. “And the information in this report is only the tip of the iceberg: we currently have terrorism-related investigations against thousands of people in the United States, including hundreds of people who came here as refugees.
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The report comes in response to the president’s Executive Order 13780 in March of last year, which allowed the federal government to temporarily suspend all refugee resettlement and ban the issuance of new visas for nationals from six-Muslim majority countries on claims of protecting the United States from national security risks. Section 11 of the executive order also required the DOJ and DHS to collect information about the number of foreign nationals in the United States who have been charged with terrorism-related offenses in the country; information relating to the number of foreign nationals who have been “radicalized” or have provided material support to terrorism-related organizations; information about the number of “honor killings;” and any information relating to the immigration status of people charged with major offenses.
The problem of course, was that that’s a load of bullshit because the vast majority of actual acts of what fits the legal definition of “terrorism” are committed by White — and usually Christian — men. Some of them may be White Supremacists, Radical Christian Anti-Abortionist, Sovereign Citizens or simply lone mass murdering gun men — but by either percentage or intensity terrorism attacks by Muslim Immigrants pale by comparison.
On Wednesday Assistant Deputy AG Ed O’Callaghan tried to paint a smiley face on this turd report and was savaged by WH reporters who actually know a little something about actual Justice.
“You talked about the immigration system and reforming the immigration system to defend Americans in the United States, but a lot of the crimes that you’re using as examples to justify changing the immigration system are crimes that were attempted or would have taken place outside the United States — people wanting to travel outside the United States to fight, providing support for fighters outside the United States,” Andrew Feinberg of BroadbandBreakfast.com said to O’Callaghan. “And I understand there’s a nexus there with U.S. forces in those regions, but if the point is to reform the immigration system to protect Americans, can you provide more information, more statistics that show doing so would have prevented people from coming in that committed more crimes inside the United States?”
By definition someone who leaves the U.S. to commit a violent act, or was never inside the U.S. until being extradited after the fact — is not an “Immigrant or refugee who came to the U.S. to attack it.”
So did O’Callaghan explain why a report about immigrants also included information about people who either left the U.S. or otherwise never voluntarily immigrated here? Uh, nope.
O’Callaghan could not. Instead, he offered the excuse that “this is the first iteration of this report” and added, unconvincingly, that “we are trying to prevent terrorist attacks, so the most successful prosecutions I’ve ever been involved in are ones where we actually are able to stop it at a conspiratorial stage.”
As a follow up, Feinberg asked the obvious question — again — if the focus is Immigration, why are non-immigrants involved in events overseas included in the report?
Unsatisfied with that response, Feinberg followed up and asked O’Callaghan to explain “how preventing people from coming in who were conspiring for instance to go to fight in Syria would have protected us in the United States. These are international terrorism crimes and they weren’t all planning attacks in the United States, they were planning things overseas, and you want to reform the immigration system, and it seems like your focus there should be on things that people did in the United States to people in the United States.”
And naturally O’Callaghan had a perfectly good answer for that. Or rather he didn’t.
Again unable to address the criticism substantively, O’Callaghan said, “I firmly believe that, and I know that the fact that there are individuals here in the United States that are willing to, in support of ISIS-related philosophies, engage in and talk about engaging in committing acts here in the United States that we’re able to prevent — I think that makes the American people safer and I know the Trump administration does.”
Well, I firmly believe and, I know, that if you want to write a report about immigrants and individuals who want to attack the U.S in support of ISIS — then that’s what you should have included in your report. Unlike, for example, cases like the “Bowling Green Massacre” as referenced in Trump’s original Executive Order.
For example, in January 2013, two Iraqi nationals admitted to the United States as refugees in 2009 were sentenced to 40 years and to life in prison, respectively, for multiple terrorism-related offenses.
On closer inspection, even those examples are flawed. The first involved two Iraqi men living in Bowling Green, Kentucky, who were convicted on charges of supporting terrorism in Iraq, not in the United States. (It was White House counselor Kellyanne Conway who had a month earlier mistaken the incident as an act of domestic terrorism she dubbed the “Bowling Green massacre.”) Moreover, people from Iraq were not barred by the March executive order.
So as many have noted, there was no attack — or even an attempted attack — on Bowling Green. These men were gathering weapons to send to Iraq and fight U.S. forces there, not here.
As noted by TalkingPointsMemo the report claims that:
The report finds that of the 549 people convicted in the U.S. of international terrorism since 9/11, 402, or nearly three out of four, are “foreign-born.” But to get to that number, it includes foreigners who committed crimes on foreign soil before being extradited to the U.S. — cases which have no bearing on immigration issues.
House minority whip Steny Hoyer said the report’s “picture of a nation under assault from foreigners” served no serious purpose. The report, the Maryland Democrat said in a statement send to press and posted to his website, “cannot be taken seriously because it is so deeply misleading.”
“The fraction of immigrants who engage in terrorism is minuscule, barely registering against the overwhelming share who contribute positively to our economy and national security,” Hoyer wrote. “The report counts those who committed terrorist acts overseas and were brought here to face trial – such individuals are not ‘immigrants’ by any stretch of the imagination.”
Yes, of course we have had immigrant terrorists attack us since 9-11. Some have even been refugees including the perpetrators of the Boston Marathon Bombing, the Tsarnaev brothers, who were refugees from Russia and Kyrgyzstan. Although they both technically entered the U.S. originally as tourists and then later sought Asylum.
Strangely neither Russia nor Kyrgyzstan have ever appeared on any of the Trump administration list of countries not to accept refugees from. Ain’t that something?
Trump himself attacked Immigrants when the Pulse Nightclub shooting occurred, yet the perpetrator of that massacre of 49 people, Omar Mateen, was actually born in New Hyde Park, NY, not that far from where Trump was born.
Yes, the wife of the primary attacker in the San Bernadino massacre which killed 16 people — including the perpetrators — was Tashfeen Malik who immigrated to the U.S. from Pakistan on an K-1 family Visa thanks to her husband Syed Rizwan Farook, but he himself was a U.S. Citizen born in Chicago.
Major Nidal Hassan who killed 13 people at Fort Hood was born in Arlington County, VA.
Ahmad Khan Rahimi who attempted to set off bombs in New Jersey in 2016, was indeed born in Afghanistan but he came to the U.S. at age 12 and had become a naturalized citizen long before the attacks in 2011.
This sampling doesn’t really generate the “3 out of 4” ratio that the report claims, partly because besides using attacks that occurred overseas per persons who in fact were not immigrants to the U.S. like Rahami or Mateen it also bases it’s analysis on attacks that never actually happened.
As noted by the Investigative Fund most “terrorism” arrests are for plots that were actually foiled by use of sting operations — and those are quite heavily targeted at Islamist aggressors but not at where most actual terrorism attacks are coming from.
Percent of domestic terrorism incident foiled by sting operations
Most attempted Islamacist attacks over the past decade have been thwarted, in fact it could be argued that FBI agents and informants have somewhat “entrapped” the suspects by posing as radical Islamist themselves and supplying their targets with plans and (deactivated) weapons as was the case with the so-called “Christmas Tree Bomber” in Seattle as noted by the Investigative Fund.
That sting targeted 19-year-old Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a naturalized citizen who grew up in Portland and suburban Beaverton, Oregon, having arrived as a refugee from Somalia’s civil war at age 3. Educated at local schools, he showed little interest in religion or politics until his teens, when he began attending services at a mosque led by a Wahhabi cleric in Portland.
Alienated at home, where his parents were going through a divorce, Mohamud began to visit extremist websites and, at 18, declared that he was heading off to a religious school in Yemen. His father panicked and called the FBI for help, setting in motion surveillance and, ultimately, the sting.
Mohamud was arrested at the annual Christmas tree lighting at Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland on Nov. 26, 2010, after trying to detonate a fake truck bomb supplied by undercover FBI agents. Convicted of a single count of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction, he was sentenced to 30 years.
A young white man who literally did firebomb the mosque that Mohamud attended in retaliation for the fake Truck bomb that he actually didn’t detonate — only served five years and is now free.
By contrast, less than two days after the Christmas tree sting, another Oregon youth, Cody Seth Crawford, then 24, launched a homemade firebomb into the offices of the Salman Alfarisi Islamic Center in Corvallis, Oregon, a mosque where Mohamud sometimes prayed. The bomb caused thousands of dollars’ worth of damage, though no injuries.
Crawford had written anti-Muslim screeds on Facebook in the wake of Mohamud’s arrest: “I ha te (sic) the ji-had’st (sic), they should go and realize what life is about!!! This guy on the news was a really bad guy !!! He went to the mosque right in front of my house here in Corvali (sic).” When he was arrested, according to court documents, he told his arresting officer, “you look like Obama. You are a Muslim like him” who is “going to burn in Hell like other Muslims.”
Citing Crawford’s history of mental illness, a federal judge sentenced him to five years’ probation, and he is now free.
Examining data from 2008-2016 the Investigative Fund found vastly different results than Sessions DOJ, even when using the DOJ’s own data.
The president sometimes has appeared to grasp for data to justify this narrow approach. Intense protests and rapid court challenges greeted his first travel ban. By the time of his second, signed March 6, his staff had compiled information to justify it.
“According to data provided by the Department of Justice, the vast majority of individuals convicted of terrorism and terrorism-related offenses since 9/11 came here from outside of our country,” he claimed in the speech to Congress a week before signing the order. “We cannot allow our nation to become a sanctuary for extremists.”
But in examining incidents from 2008 through 2016, we could identify only 36 perpetrators or alleged perpetrators who were foreign born, 13 percent of the total. And only three came from a nation listed in his second travel ban. A Department of Homeland Security analysis likewise found that citizens of nations named in the ban are “rarely implicated in U.S.-based terrorism.”
There is another problem with this data, which is that generally terrorism acts committed by non-Islamists are not charged and prosecuted as “Terrorism” by Federal forces, instead they are charged as “Murder” by local agencies even when they exactly fit the legal definition of “Terrorism” even though there are many more actual incidents of Right-Wing Terrorism than Islamic or Left-Wing attacks.
- From January 2008 to the end of 2016, we identified 63 cases of Islamist domestic terrorism, meaning incidents motivated by a theocratic political ideology espoused by such groups as the Islamic State. The vast majority of these (76 percent) were foiled plots, meaning no attack took place.
- During the same period, we found that right-wing extremists were behind nearly twice as many incidents: 115. Just over a third of these incidents (35 percent) were foiled plots. The majority were acts of terrorist violence that involved deaths, injuries or damaged property.
- Right-wing extremist terrorism was more often deadly: Nearly a third of incidents involved fatalities, for a total of 79 deaths, while 13 percent of Islamist cases caused fatalities. (The total deaths associated with Islamist incidents were higher, however, reaching 90, largely due to the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood in Texas.) [Ed. This total comparison has now flipped positions after adding the 58 Killed at Mandalay Bay and 26 Killed in Sunderland Springs making the current right-wing/white mass murder death total 163!]
- Incidents related to left-wing ideologies, including ecoterrorism and animal rights, were comparatively rare, with 19 incidents causing seven fatalities – making the shooting attack on Republican members of Congress earlier this month somewhat of an anomaly.
- Nearly half (48 percent) of Islamist incidents in our database were sting operations, more than four times the rate for far-right (12 percent) or far-left (10.5 percent) incidents.
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While a majority of the incidents were perpetrated by right-wing extremists (57 percent), the database indicates that federal law enforcement agencies focused their energies on pre-empting and prosecuting Islamist attacks, which constituted 31 percent of all incidents, a finding confirmed by counterterror experts.
For instance, 84 percent of Islamist incidents resulting in arrests involved terrorism charges, and all the law enforcement resources that implies, as opposed to 9 percent of far-right incidents.
While federal charges of some kind were filed in 91 percent of the Islamist incidents that led to arrests, federal prosecutors handled 60 percent of far-right cases, leaving many in the hands of state or local authorities.
Moreover, three-quarters of the Islamist incidents in the database were pre-empted plots, including elaborate sting operations, while 35 percent of far-right incidents were pre-empted, a much smaller ratio. That disparity, counterterror experts say, is an indication that far fewer investigative resources – such as analysts, paid informants and undercover operatives – have been deployed to halt far-right attacks
Recent examples such as the Las Vegas Mandalay Bay massacre which killed 59 people perpetrated by Stephan Paddock — topping the Pulse Shooting body count — are not considered “Terrorism” although it could be clearly argued that those who were under gunfire for nearly a half-hour were clearly terrorized by the experience.
Similarly the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood Shooting which killed 3 including a police officer, the Sunderland Springs Shooter who killed 26 people, the Las Vegas Cop Killing spree perpetrated by Jared and Amanda Miller who left notes arguing this was the start of a “Revolution” after killing 3 people, the Pittsburgh Cop Killing Spree by Richard Poplowski in 2008 in protest of “Obama taking away guns” which killed 3 Officers, the attack on the Knoxville Unitarian Church by James Addkison which killed 2 where he stated he “Hated Liberals”, Sandy Hook which killed 28, the Holocaust Museum Shooting by James Van Brunn who was really intended to target David Axelrod and killed a guard, the Wisconsin Sikh Temple shooting which killed 6, the Minnesota Mosque Firebombing, the Charleston Church Massacre by Dylann Roof that killed 9 and the Charlottesville Car Attack by the Klan and Alt-Right that killed Heather Heyer and injured 19 others, and incidents such as when West Memphis, Ark., police officers Brandon Paudert and Bill Evans were killed by Sovereign Citizens Joe and Jerry Kane — are also generally not considered or prosecuted as “Terrorism.”
So we have a gap between reality and perception.
The perception which is being pushed by the Trump administration is that America is under siege by foreign immigrant terrorist hordes, the reality is very much something different as far more of the mass murders and horrific attacks that happen in America — are in fact perpetrated mostly by Americans.
Not immigrants.