Loophole
Used by 9/11 Hijackers Still Open with 6 Million Visa Overstays in U.S.
11 Sep 2019424
There are at least six million illegal aliens who arrived in the United States the same way seven of the 9/11 Islamic terrorist hijackers came to the country: by overstaying a visa.
All nineteen 9/11 terrorists — who murdered nearly 3,000
Americans and injured more than 6,000 others in 2001 — arrived in the U.S.
legally, with 16 obtaining tourist visas and three others obtaining business
and tourist visas.
In total, seven of the 19 terrorists overstayed their visas at some point either before the 9/11 attacks
or at the time of the attacks and were supposed to be deported, but never were.
Those terrorists who overstayed their visas include:
- Hani
Hasan Hanjour from Saudi Arabia
- Nawaf
al-Hamzi from Saudi Arabia
- Mohamed
Atta from Egypt
- Satam
al-Suqami from Saudi Arabia
- Waleed
al-Shehri from Saudi Arabia
- Marwan
al-Shehhi from the United Arab Emirates
- Ahmed
al-Ghamdi from Saudi Arabia
Eighteen years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the loophole
where legal immigrants become illegal aliens after overstaying their visas
remains fully open, with at least 4.5 to six million foreign nationals living in the U.S. who should have been deported after their
visas expired, according to Pew Research Center.
In total, there are roughly 11 to 22 million illegal
aliens living in the U.S. at any given moment, and
more than 1.2 million foreign nationals are legally
admitted to the country every year — like all 19
terrorists were.
Foreign nationals arriving on temporary visas continue to go
largely untracked by the federal government despite The 9/11 Commission Report pleading with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to
implement a nationwide biometric entry-exit system, which would identify legal
immigrants who have overstayed their visas and help in deporting them.
As of March, there were more than 415,000 illegal aliens in the
U.S. who had overstayed their visas. This includes more than 300,000 illegal
aliens who arrived in the U.S. from countries that are not part of the Visa
Waiver Program, which allows certain nationals to come to the country for up to
90 days without obtaining a visa. In total, 20 foreign countries have visa
overstay rates that exceed ten percent.
DID WE
LEARN ANYTHING FROM 9/11?
Or
are we still sleeping?
September 11, 2019
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism
Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer
focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Two things happened in 2001.
Islamic terrorists carried out their most
successful attack on America with the murder of 2,977 people. And the number of
immigrants obtaining permanent residency passed a million for the first time in
a decade. Before 2001, a million plus was a streak that might linger for a few
years before falling back.
These days it’s the new normal. Aside from
one blip, we’ve been riding the million plus train for over a decade. The
resistance to that trend is currently the one thing we seem to have learned
from 9/11.
After decades of being massacred by
terrorists who have come here as tourists, refugees and immigrants, we are
finally trying to close the door on travelers from Islamic terrorist states.
And it only took 16 years.
That’s because learning nothing from the
past has been our specialty.
"A flag bearing a crescent and star
flies from a flagpole in front of the World Trade Center, next to a Christmas
tree and a menorah,” The New York Times reported in 1997.
Four years earlier, Muslim terrorists had
bombed the World Trade Center in an unsuccessful effort to bring down the
towers. Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheikh at the center of the terror
plot, had urged, “We . . . have been ordered with terrorism because we must
prepare what power we can to terrorize the enemy of Allah and your enemy. The
Koran says ‘to strike terror.’”
Mohammed T. Mehdi, the Muslim activist
responsible for the flag of Islam flying at what would become Ground Zero, had
been an adviser to Rahman. The U.S. Attorney’s Office had listed Mehdi as an
unindicted co-conspirator in the trial of the blind terror sheikh. And
nevertheless, the flag flew.
Imam Sirraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the bombing, who had testified
as a character witness for Rahman, had already become the first Muslim cleric
to present an invocation prayer to the House of Representatives. He was introduced by Rep. Nick Rahall who had proposed the idea. The
invocation included a Koranic curse aimed at Christians and Jews.
That same year, President George H.W. Bush
had taped his own Eid message for Muslims.
In 1996, Hillary Clinton inaugurated the
first Eid event at the White House. Capitol Hill politicos held their own Iftar
event that year. Regular Islamic prayers began to be held on Capitol Hill in
1998. The State Department hosted its first Iftar event in 1999. So did the
Pentagon. All of this is still going on.
Not only haven’t things gotten better since
then, they’ve gotten much worse.
The height of our counterterrorism efforts
took place after September 11 with Operation Green Quest. That was our last
serious effort at cracking the infrastructure of Islamist terrorism in this
country. These days counterterrorism mainly consists of informants and
undercover operatives catching lone ISIS supporters before they carry out an
attack. Going beyond that was unacceptable even before Obama.
Under Obama, the Muslim Brotherhood was in
the White House and Hezbollah had a free hand.
The War on Terror also reached its height
in the creative and relentless attacks on Al Qaeda and the Taliban after 9/11.
But, before long, that campaign degenerated into nation-building, endless legal
proceedings for captured terrorists in the Bush era, and feeding thousands of
soldiers into a meat-grinder with restrictive rules of engagement and
negotiations with the Taliban in the Obama era.
By 2003, our response to Islamic terrorism
had reached its peak. It’s been downhill from there.
It took 4 years for the lessons of the
World Trade Center bombing to be so thoroughly forgotten that an unindicted
co-conspirator was able to get the flag of Islam flown at the site of the twin
skyscrapers.
It took even less time for the lessons of
9/11 to fly away leaving behind hollow memorials.
After Qari Yasin, a top Al Qaeda terrorist,
whose terror plots had killed U.S. Air Force Maj. Rodolfo I. Rodriguez and Navy
Cryptologic Technician Third Class Petty Officer Matthew J. O’Bryant, was taken
out in an airstrike, there was no mention of the fallen American military
personnel killed by his attacks.
Instead Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis,
the point man for the tough bombing campaign against ISIS, declared, "The
death of Qari Yasin is evidence that terrorists who defame Islam and
deliberately target innocent people will not escape justice."
That was in 2017.
20 years after the flag of Islam flew at
the World Trade Center, we were no longer killing Islamic terrorists to avenge
our dead or even to defend ourselves, but to punish those who “defame Islam.”
Meanwhile, Kris Bauman, who had argued that, “the Obama Administration must find creative (but legal)
ways to include Hamas in a solution” held down the position of Senior Director
for Israeli, Palestinian, Jordanian and Egyptian Affairs from 2017 to 2018
until John Bolton took over the National Security Council. These days, Bauman
heads the Eisenhower Center at the Air Force Academy.
The problem is structural.
Our national security infrastructure and
our entire strategic apparatus is run by people who think like Mattis and
Bauman. It’s run by them under Democrat and Republican administrations. Their views
represent the consensus that terrorism can’t be defeated, it can only be
defused or appeased.
There’s been some debate over whether we
should be negotiating with the Taliban.
We’ve been officially negotiating with the
Taliban since at least 2013. That’s a long time to be holding talks when
there’s nothing to actually talk about. We will eventually withdraw from
Afghanistan. The Taliban will eventually take over Afghanistan. What then is
there to talk to the Taliban about?
And yet our foreign policy apparatus
insists that we can’t pull out until we get the Taliban to commit to respecting
Afghanistan’s constitution. Why do we care about the Afghan constitution
anyway? Did thousands of Americans really die in Afghanistan to uphold a
constitution that upholds Islamic law?
Or did we begin this war to avenge our dead
and to punish the perpetrators and their allies?
The debate over interventionism and
appeasement has left September 11 behind. The interventionists insist that we
have an obligation to spread democracy and the appeasers claim that we’re
warmongers
Neither side likes this country very much.
And neither side cares about what happened on this day.
If we are to have a meaningful strategy, it
has to begin on a fall Tuesday. It has to start in the cockpit of one of the
hijacked planes. It has to start with a prayer from a terrorist and from one of
his victims.
“In the name of Allah, the Most Merciful,
the Most Compassionate,” a terrorist declares on the Flight 93 cockpit
recording. That’s followed by the sounds of the terrorists assaulting a
passenger.
“Please don’t hurt me,” he pleads. “Oh
God.”
Flight 93 is a reminder that we are a brave
and courageous people. But that we have to wake up first.
And to wake up, we have to understand what
it is we’re facing. On September 11, 2001, hundreds, thousands, tens of
thousands, and eventually millions of Americans were forced to wake up.
Some died. Most went back to sleep. And
some still remember.
9/11 was neither a beginning nor an ending.
The war we are in has gone on for over a thousand years. It might go on for
another thousand making a mockery of the appeasers who lecture about “endless
war.”
Wars go on for as long as one side is
willing to fight them. The nightmarish reality is that the other side is
willing to fight forever. That is a truth too troubling for most people to come
to terms with.
But until we understand that, we will have
learned absolutely nothing from September 11, 2001.
This is not WW2. It’s not the Cold War.
It’s a clash of civilizations. Technology, jet planes and the internet, have
allowed our civilizations to overlap each other. War is the inevitable result.
Immigration, not bullets and bombs, is the
main weapon of a clash not between armies, but civilizations.
16 years later, we have only begun, not to
fight, but to defend ourselves against a clash of civilizations.
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