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发帖数: 61690 | 1 Homeland Security chief: Critical lawmakers should change policies or 'shut
up'
Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly laid out a dark vision Tuesday of the
global threats the sprawling agency responsible for defending the U.S. must
face.
“Make no mistake — we are a nation under attack,” Kelly said at George
Washington University in his first major public speech since taking the helm
of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
“We are under attack from people who hate us, hate our freedoms, hate our
laws, hate our values, hate the way we simply live our lives. And we are
under attack every single day,” he warned. “The threats are relentless.”
Kelly covered a wide swath of issues — from transnational criminal
organizations to cyberattacks to homegrown violent extremism, often using
graphic descriptions of human suffering to illustrate the dangers.
The speech harkened back to President Trump’s inaugural address to Congress
, in which he described “American carnage” outside of the Beltway.
On the topic of human smuggling — which Kelly discussed as a partial
defense of tougher border security — the Homeland Security chief invoked
Dante’s journey to hell. Describing online radicalization, he cited images
of “headless bodies, innocent people being thrown from buildings, rape
victims being stoned to death.”
He described the threat of terror in the U.S. as being as high as it was at
the time of the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, citing open FBI investigations
currently underway in all 50 states.
He warned that proliferating encrypted communications technology would soon
make it “impossible” to track terrorist threats.
Offering a defiant defense of the sprawling agency, Kelly repeatedly and
fiercely defended the DHS while simultaneously backing some of the Trump
administration’s more controversial national security policies.
Pushing against claims that President Trump’s travel ban was intended to
block Muslims from entering the country, he argued that critics should
instead applaud Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials for “doing
what they do.”
In an apparent allusion to widespread outcry that followed the first
executive order, which temporarily banned immigration from seven Muslim-
majority countries, Kelly dinged lawmakers for criticizing the agency
personnel responsible for carrying out U.S. policies.
Personnel are “often ridiculed and insulted by public officials, and
frequently convicted in the court of public opinion on unfounded allegations
testified to by street lawyers and spokespersons,” Kelly said.
“If lawmakers do not like the laws they’ve passed and we are charged to
enforce — then they should have the courage and skill to change the laws.
Otherwise they should shut up and support the men and women on the front
lines,” Kelly said, to a burst of applause in the auditorium.
Reports emerged in the first chaotic hours following the signing of the
Trump’s order that CBP officials had verbally abused detainees and left
many standing for hours on end.
Large numbers of protesters, including some Democratic members of Congress,
popped up at airports around the country the first weekend the ban was in
effect. |
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