Presidents are supposed to take intelligence findings and formulate policies accordingly. All too often, though, there is a temptation to reach conclusions and then cherry-pick evidence to support them. That tendency has been taken to an extreme by the Trump administration in the formulation of its infamous executive order on immigration.
The genesis of the order is clear: On December 7, 2015, five days after a terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Trump demanded “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” This was an emotional response that proved popular with the Republican base even if, from the start, it was obvious it had little to do with addressing the security issues the country faced. One of the San Bernardino attackers had, after all, been born in Chicago.
Over the next year, as the Muslim ban came under assault from a variety of quarters, Trump tried to refine it in various ways so as to address legal and political objections. Eventually, by the time he issued an executive order on immigration on January 27, it was whittled down from a ban on all Muslims to a ban on all visitors from seven majority Muslim countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Evidently, the White House thought this measure would survive legal and political scrutiny because the Obama administration had already identified entrants from those seven countries for greater scrutiny at the borders.
So the president was in for a nasty shock when the courts halted the implementation of his executive order in response to numerous lawsuits. Now, as the administration prepares to revise that order, its rationale is undermined further an intelligence assessment leaked by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Assessment. In essence, the analysis supports what outside terrorism analysts wrote immediately after the executive order was issued: As I wrote in COMMENTARY, “It is striking how little overlap there is between the seven countries singled out for a temporary visa ban–Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen—and the actual sources of terrorism in the United States since 9/11.”
The analysis finds “that country of citizenship is unlikely to be a reliable indicator of potential terrorist activity.” The assessment noted that since the start of the Syrian uprising in March 2011, at least 82 individuals have attempted to carry out acts of terrorism in the United States, and of these “slightly more than half were native-born United States citizens. Of the foreign-born individuals, they came from 26 different countries, with no one country representing more than 13.5 percent of the foreign-born total.” Indeed, of the “top seven origin countries of the foreign-born individuals,” only two—Iraq and Somalia—were on Trump’s list. The other terrorists came from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Cuba, Ethiopia, and Uzbekistan, none of whose citizens are affected by the travel ban.
Rather than accept this finding—which tallies with the work of all reputable terrorism analysts—the administration, sadly, has decided to trash the work of its analysts. “The president asked for an intelligence assessment. This is not the intelligence assessment the president asked for,” a senior administration official told the Wall Street Journal, while DHS’s acting press secretary called the report “commentary” based on public sources rather than “an official, robust document with thorough interagency sourcing.”
The reality, which the White House refuses to accept, is that “extreme” vetting already exists for refugees as well as for all visa-holders from high-risk countries. There is no need for an executive order banning citizens of any other countries from coming here. The greatest risk we face from terrorism is of the homegrown variety, and having the government send a message that will be perceived as hostile to Islam will only exacerbate that danger and play right into the hands of terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda and Islamic State.
