Remembering 9/11



Field of American FlagsThis weekend, as we have for the past 15 years, Americans will pause to remember the most significant terrorist attack on U.S. soil. As stirring as the remembrances are sure to be, the United States has still not completed some of the most basic steps to ensure that future attacks don’t occur.

These steps were laid out extensively by FAIR in the wake of 9/11 and some of these recommendations made it into law. However, even these measures remain stymied. In particular, the REAL ID program and the entry-exit tracking system have still not been fully implemented.

The REAL ID act was passed in 2005. The major provisions required states to verify the legal status of people that they give licenses to. All of the 9/11 hijackers had licenses, many of them valid, from multiple states. Mohammed Atta was able to get a Florida driver’s license despite being in the U.S. on a temporary visitor’s visa.

More than ten years later, fewer than half of states are compliant with REAL ID. Numerous delays have extended the implementation date of the act to give states more time to comply. And several states continue to issue licenses to illegal aliens.

The entry-exit system was originally passed into law 20 years ago with IIRIRA. The law, signed by then-President Bill Clinton, recognized that a substantial percentage of illegal aliens are visa overstayers.

Again, despite clear congressional intent to establish such a system, subsequent administrations refused to implement the law. There are clear security risks for not having an effective entry-exit tracking system – According to a 2011 study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), 36 of about 400 terrorists convicted by the United States since 9/11 had overstayed their visas.

The American public’s willingness to confront the continued threat posed by terrorist attacks is very high. Our elected leaders are a different matter. Terrorism is still a real threat in the United States, as several deadly attacks over the past year have demonstrated. These attacks, linked to the terrorist group ISIS, are a reminder that the threat of terrorism didn’t end with the death of Osama bin Laden and that laws passed to respond to these attacks need to be enforced.

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Content written by Federation for American Immigration Reform staff.

3 Comments

  1. avatar

    Japan has a biometric entry-exit system that is fully implemented, it empowers it’s police to enforce their immigration laws, puts anyone caught in their country illegally in jail, has tough penalties for employers that knowingly hire illegal aliens which include fines and jail time, and has allowed very few Muslims to move to Japan.

    Guess what? Japan has not had any terrorist attacks carried out by Islamic terrorists in their country and they have a much lower violent crime rate. And to help us pay for all the benefits we lavish on illegal aliens and for our endless Middle Eastern wars that our foreign policy elites think are going to turn the Muslim world into something it never has been, we have borrowed over a trillion dollars from Japan (and have borrowed a lot from a lot of other countries as well).

    Looks like the Japanese are a lot smarter than we are. No Islamic terrorists carrying out terrorists attacks in Japan and they don’t have large numbers of illegal aliens constantly killing and raping Japanese citizens. They have a much more effective strategy and it comes with a much smaller price tag. We’re a bigger country, but we’re incredibly incompetent.

  2. avatar

    Trump is always portrayed as being so dangerous for the security of the country, but the fact is a person who refuses to even acknowledge that Islamic terrorists are a threat is a far greater danger. And that person is Hillary Clinton, who has stated that Islam has “nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism”. Ok, so will her administration have a Muslim “quota” on terrorism investigations. In other words, will an agent get a talking to over the fact that he’s investigated three Muslims in one year and not enough grey haired third generation American grandmas from Kansas?

    Hillary supporters are now claiming that she’s being unfairly targeted by the media because of things like her hacking fits. But she’s been doing that for weeks and the press has only paid attention the last few days. She’s lucky she never got indicted for Travelgate. She testified under oath she had “no idea” who came up with the idea to fire the people in the WH travel office. Then years later memos showed up by one of her aides saying that the idea had originated with her and that she had said “we have to get their people out and our people in”.

    And there is a complete double standard when it comes to who associates with who. Trump has rejected any support from white nationalists and he still gets portrayed as being aligned with them. Meanwhile Hillary gets asked no questions, zero, about her long time chief aide Huma Abedin.

    It’s beyond dispute that both Huma and her mother Saleha were involved as editors of a Muslim journal funded by the Saudis that endorsed all the Sharia fundamentalist extremism that discriminates against the very groups that Hillary claims to be so supportive of. Huma was listed on the mast head of the journal for a dozen years. Saleha edited a book that calls for death for those who leave Islam. She also once wrote an article that excused the beating of wives because their husbands were unemployed and frustrated, calling those men “victims too”.

    And Hillary appeared with Saleha in 2012 in Saudi Arabia and praised her. It’s estimated that the Saudis have given 25 million to the Clinton Foundation. So Trump gets trashed for people who he has said he doesn’t want their support and Hillary gets NO questions from the press about long time relationships with people who encourage a 14th century fundamentalist view of the world.