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No-Fly List denies due process
Where you and I disagree is on barring the sale of guns to persons on the No-Fly List (Urban Journal, December 9). The government manages the list in such a defective way that a court has held that the list is a violation of the due process clause in a suit brought by the ACLU.
Using the list to identify violent persons is bad policy and is not “the mildest of gun-control measures.”
SCOTT
Close borders until we get immigration overhaul
Let me express my First Amendment rights here without being excoriated. Concerning the Muslim refugees not being allowed into America, why aren’t the liberal media and others on the left telling the whole story?
Trump said in as many words, “Let’s keep out all Muslims until we get our own house in order and figure out what’s going on.” He didn’t say, “Let’s keep all Muslims out forever.”
All we hear about is Muslims bombing this place and shooting up that place. America has a right to be scared. Why don’t we err on the side of common sense and put a stop to all refugees, not just Muslims, but everybody who wants to come to America? Let’s close the borders until we can get a viable immigration policy in place; the one we have now looks like a piece of Swiss cheese.
The majority of people who want to come to America are good people. But there are people who want to come to do damage to you, me, and our families. The vetting process we have isn’t working or at least it didn’t work for the Muslim mother who immigrated here and slaughtered 14 people in San Bernardino.
I’m Irish and Polish. If the Irish and Polish were creating all this carnage around the world, I’d be the first to say, let’s keep out all the Irish and Polish until we can figure out how to vet them properly. The left is running wild with this story and it’s not fair to the good people of America who are frightened and want a proper vetting process.
TOM DOLAN
Cartoon recalls Kissinger
I was struck while reading Tom Tomorrow’s “The Quantum Republican Universe” in the December 16 issue how the cartoon’s captions accurately reflect the worldview embodied and shaped by Henry Kissinger.
The captions are, in edited form:
• Reality is extremely malleable;
• The traditional laws of cause and effect no longer apply;
• Things are true because we want them to be true;
• The powerful are able to construct entirely self-contained realities;
• Outside criticism has no effect on those realities.
I refer readers to Greg Grandin’s indispensable “Kissinger’s Shadow” for a fuller explanation.
GEORGE DARDESS
Fatima Razic fan club
I’ve been a fan of Fatima since I first heard her perform a few years back. And I have met her a few times. She has a beautiful voice and stage presence. But I never knew anything about her background or character until I read this article (Music, December 16). She has a very inspiring story, and we are blessed to have her here in Rochester.
LOUIS AMICO
This article appears in Dec 23-29, 2015.
Re the closing of our borders.
Yes our immigration services do not appear capable of screening asylum seekers, but this is a task that is liable to prove impossible no matter how efficiently it is done. Literally years of war and massive damage to civilian infrastructure makes verifying claimant’s identities unlikely in many cases. Closing our borders to Muslims is an odious reaction, at least not without recognizing and taking steps to minimize further creation of refugees.
The CIA has been actively training and directing many of these terrorist organizations going back to the Soviet/Afghan war, through the Balkans and on into Libya and now Syria. To what extent the CIA is responsible for the existence and success of ISIS is debatable but certainly some role if not a fundamental one.
The level of human suffering and destruction that has been financed by the American citizen in recent years is breathtaking in its scale. We own this mess almost 100%. Millions of people do not flee their homes, histories, property unless their very lives depend on it. Now might be a good time to point out that it is Muslims who bear the brunt of our homicidal foreign policy, and they also do the brunt of the fighting against these terrorist organizations on the ground. Western media deliberately does not clearly identify the players in these fights, as our enemy today may need to be our ally tomorrow, or at the same time. Our blind acceptance of the military/intelligence/geopolitical strategies whipped up behind closed doors in Washington is the root cause of the current mass migrations. And this speaks nothing of the literally millions of those already dead because of same. It is almost obscene to add to this the financial cost to us here at home – the country is on the brink of insolvency and the crash of the Federal Reserve Note.
Yes we should do all we can to prevent terrorists from easily entering our country, we should also reign in our intelligence apparatus and adopt a marginally sane foreign policy that allows people to live in peace as much as possible. We should also accept as many refugees as we can responsibly house, and do what we can to facilitate their return to their home countries as soon as it is safe to do so.