Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump went too far in calling for a ban on all Muslim immigration, but he was right on calling for a better vetting process on people entering the country, former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik told Ed Berliner on "The Hard Line" on
Newsmax TV.
"We have to consider that we don’t know where they're coming from in Syria, as far as the refugees go," Kerik said. The Islamic State "has taken over the northern part of Syria, including those governmental offices that have passports, residency documents, so forth and so on."
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With news that Tashfeen Malik, the female terrorist in the San Bernardino mass shooting, was allowed to enter the United States on a financee visa despite
evidence on social media she supported terrorism, Kerik said mistakes lead to better intelligence work.
"Take it back to Sept. 10 of 2001. We're in much better shape today in the intelligence community than we were then and we get better constantly," Kerik said. "However, the unfortunate thing for us is we usually get better based on our mistakes. This is one of those mistakes that's going to come back to haunt us, that already has."
But while American intelligence will learn from the mistake, so will jihadists, he added.
"Just like the Cali cartel did back in the '70s and '80s," he said. "We would do one thing, they would do another to refute it. That's what's going on now, so these guys watch us, they monitor us, they know what we know as soon as they figure out how to deceive us that they move on and they go to that venue. We're just going to have to stay on top of these guys better than ever."
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