On Thursday night, Breitbart News National Security Editor Dr. Sebastian Gorka, author of the best-selling book Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War, appeared on Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor” to discuss presidential candidate Donald Trump’s proposal for “extreme vetting” of immigrants.
Dr. Gorka called it a “hugely important idea.”
“Before I had the honor of becoming an American citizen, I had to come to America on the visa waiver program,” he recalled. “You fill out a little green form on the plane, and one of the things it asks you is, ‘Have you ever been a member of the National Socialist Party of Germany?’ So we’re asking people right now, in 2016, if they were Nazis. I get it. I get it. But why aren’t we asking them if they’re connected to al-Qaeda, to ISIS, to the Muslim Brotherhood? This is what Donald Trump is talking about.”
Gorka conceded that few active members of ISIS are likely to identify themselves as such on a visa questionnaire, but he noted that “if you lie on a federal form, you’re starting a paper trail.”
“It’s really important. You’ve got to make the connection. You’ve got to find those people who don’t share the values that Americans share. You’ve got to look at what they actually have as their guiding ideology,” he said.
“This is a war against a totalitarian ideology, global jihadism,” Gorka pointed out. “You interview people. You have professionals interview them. You push them, and you find whether or not they share our values. This is part of counter-terrorism. It’s not just arresting people. It’s identifying what values they have, before they go kinetic.”
As a presidential candidate, Trump has begun to receive security briefings. Gorka said the nature of those briefings would depend on “which agency’s briefing, and who the individual briefer is.”
“I would expect updates on the domestic ISIS threat, so what do we have in terms of intelligence chatter, in terms of terrorist potential activity. And I am pretty sure there’s going to be some information on what Russia is doing,” Gorka predicted. “Russia has now massed 100,000 troops on the Ukrainian border, so there’s bound to be somebody who’s looking at the European theater as well, and there could be some other things about China, and so forth.”
Gorka said that only people with the proper clearances would get to be in the room during those briefings, so only a few people will know exactly what the briefings cover. He said Trump would be able to choose who he wishes to accompany him into the briefings, but “those people have to be vetted by the briefing agencies.”
“For example, General Flynn, I had lunch with him yesterday – he has the clearances, former director of the DIA, he is advising Mr. Trump. So people like General Mike Flynn will be in that meeting,” Gorka said.
He explained that such security briefings are designed to fill in the candidates on “the latest broad-brush intel – not about what we’re going to do, or the operational details of our response but things that you wouldn’t necessarily read in the Washington Post, or on Fox News. Something that goes a little bit deeper on global trends.”