Did you know that not so long ago it was the Republicans who were saying they wanted more people put on the NO-FLY LIST and/or TERRORIST WATCH LIST and that it was Democrats who were saying "Whoa! Not so fast!! What about due process?!"
Today they seem to have flipped. The Dems and liberals are saying "We need to take away the right to purchase guns from anyone on those lists!"...and the Republicans are saying, "Whoa! Not so fast!! Who is on that list and why are the on it?"
I ran across this article from The Atlantic which is a liberal leaning magazine and please notice that it's from last December BEFORE the recent shooting in Orlando.
It’s a familiar story of the post-September 11 era: Democrats and Republicans are engaged in a partisan fight over the “no-fly” list created after the attacks. One party insists that the nation must take common-sense measures to protect citizens and the homeland. The other party howls that it’s an outrageous violation of due-process rules and part of a slide into lawlessness. All that’s different now is that the dominant voices in the two parties have flipped 180 degrees.
During his Oval Office speech Sunday night, President Obama said: “Congress should act to make sure no one on a no-fly list is able to buy a gun. What could possibly be the argument for allowing a terrorist suspect to buy a semi-automatic weapon? This is a matter of national security.”
Republicans reject that argument. “These are everyday Americans that have nothing to do with terrorism, they wind up on the no-fly list, there’s no due process or any way to get your name removed from it in a timely fashion, and now they’re having their Second Amendment rights being impeded upon,” Senator Marco Rubio, a top Republican presidential candidate, said on Sunday.
Last week, prior to the massacre in San Bernardino, House Republicans blocked debate on the Denying Firearms and Explosives to Dangerous Terrorists Act. On Thursday, the measure failed in the Senate as well. While its sponsors say the bill would prevent those on terror lists from acquiring guns, the law doesn’t specify whether it would bar those on the no-fly list or on several other federal watchlists.
What’s striking about this debate is how closely it mirrors the argument during the George W. Bush administration, when Democrats warned against the excesses of the list and Republicans defended it. The current debate suggests the extent to which the leading voices in the parties are willing to rearrange their positions around hot-button issues like gun rights, and shows how civil liberties tend to be treated as a tactical tool, exalted when they’re politically useful and forgotten when that’s more expedient.
Before September 11, the government did maintain a list of people who were not permitted to get on planes—16 of them, according to 60 Minutes. The list quickly grew after the attacks, though the government doesn’t report exact figures, making it tough to tell where things stand at any given moment. By 2006, 60 Minutes reported, there were 44,000 people on the list, plus another 75,000 for whom the feds called for extra screening. The no-fly list is also part of a much larger set, the Terrorist Screening Database, which the government compiled in 2003. In September 2008, an FBI deputy director told Congress there were 400,000 people on that last, 97 percent of them foreigners.
How does someone get on the watchlist? Who knows! The government says it gets thousands of tips a day, but it won’t tell you whether you’re on it, and it won’t tell you how to get off, as my colleague Conor Friedersdorf explained in 2012. The enormous size of the lists inevitably led to confusion, false positives, and outrage. Even Senator Ted Kennedy managed to end up on the no-fly list. So did Cat Stevens, now known as Yusuf Islam.
“If his name got on the list in error, is that happening to other citizens and are they experiencing such difficulty in resolving the problem?” Kennedy’s spokesman told The Washington Post.
Over the late 2000s, pressure grew, and the no-fly list actually shrank significantly, to about 4,000. But after the failed Christmas Day “underwear bomber” attack in December 2009, the Obama administration reversed course and significantly ramped up the list. By 2013, according to documents obtained by The Intercept, there were 47,000 people on the no-fly list, topping the Bush administration’s high. Obama’s decision was driven in part by national-security hawks in his own party, including California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, who called for a more aggressive list after the failed attack.
Here; http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/no-fly-list-inverted-politics/419172/
Yes! Good question!! How do you get your name on The List? And how do you go about getting your name off The List? And WHY did Team Obama put the editor of a conservative magazine on The List?
They couldn't or wouldn't say....
Well, that should be concerning to all Americans....kind of like it should be concerning to all Americans of WHY the IRS targeted Conservative institutions?
Hey, did you know that if you are a foreigner that you can't buy guns in America?
Hey, did you know that 97% of the people on that list are foreigners?
So really, what does it accomplish if the Democrats want to block people on the NO-FLY LIST from buying guns when 97% of them can't buy already?
Yawn....more evidence of Liberals attempting to look like they are doing SOMETHING. Certainly they don't want to talk about the 160,000,000 Muslims who are extremists and/or support extremists and who are successfully inserting themselves and their theology/ideology into the USA.
No comments:
Post a Comment