Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com edoitor in chief Terry Jeffrey spent his June 7 column recounting how one of the 9/11 hijackers entered the U.S. on a tourist visa. He concluded:
"It is perhaps obvious to state that terrorists cannot plan and carry out attacks in the United States if they are unable to enter the country," concluded the 9/11 Commission staff report on terrorist travel, published three years after the attacks.
But, even then, the problem had not been fixed.
"Indeed," said the commission staff in 2004, "even after 19 hijackers demonstrated the relative ease of obtaining a U.S. visa and gaining admission into the United States, border security still is not considered a cornerstone of national security policy."
Now, 16 years after 9/11, President Donald Trump appears committed to fixing this problem and securing our border — including where it runs through our international airports.
Jeffrey is being disingenuous in his false suggestion that absolutely nothing has been done to address visa issues, hiding the work that has been done. He's also conveniently mum on the fact that Republicans ahve controlled Congress during most of the post-9/11 era.
An actual news outlet, CBS, explains the actual situation:
Congress passed legislation in 2004 requiring the implementation of a biometric entry/exit system. Still, 12 years later, actually implementing that system has remained elusive—though experts say technological advances mean it’s on the horizon -- at least for people arriving by air.
There’s widespread consensus that such a program needs to be put in place, but it’s been much more difficult to do in practice than it is to support in theory. One House aide noted that it’s not a partisan issue: various proposals for implementing the system have received broad bipartisan support.
“If it was easy, it would have been done already,” the aide CBS News.
To begin with, it wasn’t until the last few years that technology was up to the task: a 2009 pilot program at airports ended up being scrapped, experts say, because the process was too clunky to use nation-wide and would have required too many additional security staffers, among other reasons. There are also questions about how such a system could be implemented while still keeping the flow of international passengers moving at high-volume airports in the U.S.
It's simply dishonest for Jeffrey to claim nothing as been done on the issue and that his beloved President Trump is riding in to save the day because he's "committed to fixing this problem and securing our border" -- as if nobody else has been over the past 15 years.
