The evidence backing Trump's travel ban simply isn't there - WaPo Editorial Board
TRY AS it might, the Trump administration has made scant progress in its effort to find intelligence that might justify its proposed temporary travel ban on citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries. Even as it scours the federal government for data to validate its proposed policy — an inversion of a systematic, rational decision-making process — the administration keeps running into obstacles in the form of stubborn facts that provide no basis for a ban.
The latest such example arrived in the form of a report from the Intelligence and Analysis branch of the Department of Homeland Security. Tasked with compiling a report on the terrorist threat posed by citizens of the seven countries in President Trump’s crosshairs, the DHS study found, first, that citizenship itself is an “unlikely indicator” of danger to the United States and, second, that very few people from the seven nations in question have been linked to terrorism in the United States over the past six years.
That’s a damning conclusion, and one that eviscerates the rationale for Mr. Trump’s proposed ban, issuing as it does from an agency intimately involved with safeguarding the United States from terrorist attacks. A DHS spokeswoman hastened to belittle the analysis as mere “commentary,” based on unclassified sources and lacking the full weight of what she called “an official, robust document with thorough interagency sourcing.” Specifically, said the spokeswoman, Gillian Christensen, the report “does not include data from other intelligence community sources.”
Fair enough. Fortuitously, a former top CIA official, Michael Morell, who twice served as the agency’s acting director, and an intelligence scholar, Robert Pape, weighed in days later with a conclusion widely shared in the U.S. intelligence community: that the most serious terrorist peril to America is home-grown, from U.S. citizens who have been radicalized by Islamic State propaganda. (Similarly, most of the bloodiest terror attacks in Europe, including the 2015 carnage in Paris, were carried out by individuals born in Europe, not the Mideast.)
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