FBI director, James Comey, repeated his claim that the U.S. does not have the ability to thoroughly screen Syrian refugees for terrorist ties. The Obama administration has said they want to increase the refugee cap from 70,000 to 85,000 next year with at least 10,000 coming from Syria.
During the House Committee hearing on Homeland Security on Wednesday Director Comey responded to a question from Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) saying, “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.”
The FBI director also described the differences between the U.S.’s ability to screen Syrian refugees versus Iraq refugees after the Iraq War. “And with respect with Iraqi databases, we had far more because of our country’s work there for a decade,” he said. This is a different situation,” he said.
Read more at the Daily Caller.
