Good news everyone: We're back to pre-911 complacency as Islamic terror armies gain ground all over the world (as a side note, the United States apparently still doesn't have a strategy in place on how to deal with this growing, real threat). An alarming new report from ABC News shows authorities from U.S. Customs and Immigration and the State Department have lost track of 6,000 foreign students whose visas have expired.
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As a reminder, the 9/11 hijackers purposely applied for student visas to get into the United States and knew when those visas expired nobody would come looking for them. To add insult to injury, the 9/11 hijackers should have never been issued visas in the first place. Remember this headline? State Dept. Lapses Aided 9/11 Hijackers.
A new report accuses the State Department of staggering lapses in its visa program that gave Sept. 11 hijackers entry into the United States.
The political journal National Review obtained the visa applications for 15 of the 19 hijackers — and evidence that all of them should have been denied entry to the country.
Almost all of the hijacker's visas were issued in Saudi Arabia, at the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh or the U.S. Consulate in Jedda. Terrorist ties aside, the applications themselves should have raised red flags, say experts. The forms are incomplete and often incomprehensible — yet that didn't stop any of the 15 terrorists for whom the visa applications were obtained from coming to the United States.
The only alleged would-be hijacker who failed to get a visa was Ramzi Binalshibh, who was denied entrance to the United States repeatedly.
"This is a systemic problem," said Nikolai Wenzel, a former U.S. consular officer. "It's a problem of sloppiness, it's a problem of negligence which I would call criminal negligence because obviously, having reviewed all these applications, there is a pattern here."
The pattern? None of the 15 applications reviewed was filled out properly.
You get the idea. This is an attack waiting to happen.
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