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A Real Stab in the Back
Posted by Kevin

This is inexcusable:

Thousands of Iraqis whose support for the U.S. war effort in Iraq has put them and their families in grave danger at home are being excluded from a new fast-track system aimed at speeding up refugee resettlement in the United States for American allies, officials said Thursday.

The Bush administration within the next month will begin accepting refugee applications directly from the about 100 Iraqi employees of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and their relatives, letting them bypass an often-lengthy U.N. referral process in third countries where they must travel at great expense, they said.

But possibly tens of thousands more at-risk Iraqis — those who worked for private contractors, aid agencies or media outlets and their relatives — won’t be eligible due to objections from the Homeland Security Department, which fears that terrorists might use it to slip into the country, the officials said.

Homeland Security is effectively blocking contract employees, like drivers, translators, technicians, from benefiting from the initiative by insisting they provide official U.S. references and sponsors before applying for resettlement, a more stringent standard than for direct hires and even those in the U.N. system, according to the officials.

We invaded their country, destroyed its infrastructure, failed to provide either security or the political rebirth we [promised, and now we are going to turn our backs on thousands of people who helped us try to reach our goals. Why? becasue the Bush Administration and its backers are too God damn afraid of the Scary Brown Terrorists to do the right thing by these people. We owe these people, but the Bush Administration is perfectly willing to let them and their families be raped tortured and killed becasue, apparently, no one in the damn place is smart enough to figure out a way to minimize the already slight risk that a terrorist might slip into the country. The notion that terrorists could slip into the country under the cover of this program is silly. Could it happen? maybe - -but there are screening processes that could be done and, frankly, its easier for a terrorists to come into the country in a way that does not invite such stringent scrutiny. You’d have to be a pretty stupid terrorist to try this. Denying help to these people base don that is inhumane and disgusting.

It is a loathsome decision made by loathsome people . And may God have no mercy on their souls if they are just doing this to keep the number of official refugees down in order to allow Bush to keep pretending that things are just going swimmingly. And full credit, here, to the people at the State Department (and I have to assume this includes Rice and her deputies) who are backing legislation to let these people in and who are fighting the DHS to get them to do the right thing. This is, in a literal sense, the very least we can do for those Iraqis who tried to help us. We cannot turn our back on these people becasue of mis-placed and overblown fears over terrorism.

November 30th, 2007 Iraq, Terrorism | 7 comments