National Security Takes a Hit

AIA-FL Blog ^ | January 21, 2010 | Bethany Stotts

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National Security Takes a Hit

Bethany Stotts, January 21, 2010

A little less than a year after an academic and other groups wrote the Secretaries of State, Homeland Security and Justice demanding that the Obama Administration end President Bush’s “practice of ‘ideological exclusion’” in its visa policy, it seems that two Muslim academics previously barred entry could soon be making their way to American soil with visas in hand.

“Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has signed orders effectively reversing the Bush Administration’s decisions to bar two prominent foreign Muslim scholars, Adam Habib and Tariq Ramadan, from entry into the United States,” reported Peter Schmidt for the Chronicle of Higher Education yesterday.

“The orders, signed last week but not made public until today,” he writes, “clear the way for Mr. Habib, a South African political commentator, and Mr. Ramadan, a European scholar of Islam, to apply anew for entry visas without having the past reasons for their exclusion held against them.”

Why would these academics have been banned from the U.S. under President Bush? Because they allegedly participated in terrorist acts. And if the order was signed last week, then the decision to reconsider their visas came within half a month of the Christmas attempt to bomb Flight 253.

Schmidt writes that Habib was banned from the U.S. for engaging in “terrorist” activities not disclosed by the government. “Secretary Clinton’s order pertaining to Mr. Ramadan says that he will not be excluded for donation he made before 2003 to two charities that the U.S. Treasury subsequently designated as terrorist organizations to the Palestinian militant group Hamas: the French-based Comité de Bienfaisance et de Secours aux Palestiniens and the Swiss-based Association de Secours Palestinien,” he writes....

[Captain Rhino]

Fine.

Secretary of State Clinton will now bear sole responsibility if these two “gentlemen” (or anyone else on the “ideological exclusion list” that is now cleared for a visa) is subsequently involved in a hostile act or acts against the United States, its citizens, or its interests while inside the United States.