More “worrisome” than Afghanistan!
Basically he says we don’t know who these refugees are “moving up into Europe or elsewhere in the Middle East.” No kidding!
Partway into this Politico piece on Obama’s State of the Union speech and Afghanistan comes this telling section of the article:
The danger from Syria, for example, seems likely to linger for a long time. And it’s exactly the kind of danger that, in the wake of Sept. 11, was deemed by Republicans and Democrats to be unacceptable.
“As long as that conflict is going on, as long as people are learning how to kill other people and meeting really bad people, it’s going to be a big worry,” FBI Director James Comey told reporters recently.
“The conflict in Syria has attracted so many people from so many places, of so many motivations, including Americans, that it is an enormous challenge for all intelligence services, including the FBI, to identify the ones of bad intent,” he said. “To figure out where they’re going, why they’re going and to keep track of them. It’s something we’re spending a lot of time on.”
The new FBI director told reporters at his office that the FBI has a relatively good handle on Americans who’ve traveled back and forth to Syria, or made the attempt, but knows much less about the many others involved with or displaced by the conflict, including refugees moving up into Europe or elsewhere in the Middle East.
People inside the counterterrorism world have compared it to Afghanistan in the 1980s, Comey said, “but in some ways it’s more worrisome.” Syria is easier to reach, more people are involved, and the population is much more diverse, he said.