The Refugee Vetting Process Will Fail

From the files of Dan Bongino at The Conservative Review

Dan Bongino at The Conservative Review

In a recent interview I did on the Sean Hannity radio show, I challenged liberal talk-radio show host Leslie Marshall on her position supporting the intake of more refugees from Syria, despite the recognized flaws in the U.S. government's screening process.

While I respect Ms. Marshall's willingness to take a position on the issue, what I find perplexing is the tendency for Ms. Marshall, and others on her side, to confidently defend that position while having little to no inside knowledge of how the Syrian "vetting" process works.

Their overconfidence in the government databases used to screen the Syrian refugees for potential terrorism ties may stem from an ideological blindness to government shortcomings, or it may stem from a misguided belief that opposition to the plan is being guided by xenophobia, rather than common sense.

Throughout my twelve years as a Secret Service agent I conducted a number of financial crimes investigations, one specifically which intersected with an ongoing FBI terror-group investigation. As my fellow agents and I worked these cases, I learned a lot about the investigative capabilities of the U.S. government, as well as its many limitations.

As the lengthy and complex financial crimes case with a terror-nexus revealed, the U.S. government's databases are limited by the information inputs. This may seem obvious to those without ideological blinders on but this simple fact has evaded many supporters of the Syrian refugee intake program.

Many of us living in the United States have grown accustomed to our personal information being stored in both private and government databases, but this information infrastructure is not indicative of how information finds its way into public and privately searchable databases in a country such as Syria.

As FBI Director James Comey stated in an October congressional hearing, "We can only query against that which we have collected... 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."

Read the entire article at The Conservative Review

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Dan Bongino is the bestselling author of the book Life Inside the Bubble and is a Contributing Editor at Conservative Review. He was the 2012 and 2014 Republican nominee for the United States Senate and 6th congressional district in Maryland. He served for over a decade as a special agent in the United States Secret Service, and currently owns a security consulting business. 

You can follow Dan Bongino on his website, at Facebook or on Twitter.

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