Top U.S. officials warn of "gaps" in screening Syrian refugees

Top officials of the Obama administration on Thursday cautioned that "gaps" remain in their ability to screen Syrian refugees whom the White House had pledged to accept.

"My concern is there are certain gaps ... in the data available to us," said James Comey, Director of Federal Bureau of Investigation, at a congressional hearing.

"There is risk associated of bringing anybody in from the outside, but specifically from a conflict zone like that," Comey said.

Under increasing pressure to demonstrate U.S. willingness to join European countries to resettle Syrian refugees displaced by Syrian civil war and killings by the extremist group the Islamic State, the White House announced in September its plan to accept about 10,000 Syrian refugees over next year.

However, without solid intelligence assets in Syria, the U.S. ability to check the backgrounds of every refugee applying to come to the United States was hampered, Nicholas Rasmussen, chief of the National Counterterrorism Center, said at the hearing.

"The intelligence that we have of this particular conflict zone is not as rich as we would like it to be," he said.

"We've got a much more streamlined and effective system to make sure that all of our intelligence holdings are brought to bear as these decisions are made, but you can only review against what you have," he added.

According to UN data, about 17,000 Syrians had been referred over the past few years to the United States for resettlement by the United Nations. So far, only about 1,500 have been resettled in the United States. Enditem