Originally Posted by
spacev1986
If someone ran the 9/11 hijacker's passports or visas on 9/11, they all would have come up as overstayers and would have been detained.
We should be looking for bad guys.
and less hassle for the 95% of passengers that are of low risk.
Thank you for the informative opening post.
However you are wrong on one item. Please check before repeating “facts” you may have heard around the coffee table at work. There is a lot of misinformation out there. I am sure much is spread by the older generation of the Created by
9/11™ employees.
The
9/11 Staff Report disproves your claim quoted above. From the report it appears a total of 6 hijackers had direct immigration violations, three for giving false information on their applications and three for violations on their visa entry provisions.
However all 19 had some sort of US visa and all had been questioned by INS, several in secondary questioning because they were suspicious, and allowed into the US. Thirteen of the 19 had valid visas on 9/11, due to the mentioned violations.
Only two 9/11 hijackers had overstayed their visa, one by four months and the other by nine months. Running the 9/11 hijacker passports under the rules in place at the time would have cleared at least 13 and probably 17 of them. Your claim that they were "all overstayers" is simply wrong.
And they followed all screening procedures in place at the time. Everything they carried on board was legal, and they were properly screened by prevailing regulations.
Along with others who have posted, I disagree with the notion that “ID=Security.” Checkpoints are NOT warrantless “Papers Please” universal dragnets, although you seem to be in the group that believes they should be. Your desire to link checkpoints to more and more instant check databases is called a "Police State" in my opinion.
The 9/11 hijackers showed real IDs in their real names that matched their real BPs on tickets in their real names. If the airline computer check allowed them to buy a ticket and get a BP today, their IDs would pass your checkpoint
today. Proving your whole ID Theatre is just a joke.
And “95% of the passengers are low risk”??? You screen 2 million per day, and you are telling me 5% or 100,000 PER DAY are High Risk? In ten years you have seen 365 MILLION high risk passengers? TSA has found ZERO terrorists total in ten years. ZERO is a long way from 365,000,000. If you really believe that 5% of the passengers you see daily are a threat to the flight they are about to board, then you need to put in for hazardous duty pay. And have the bomb squad remove every botle of confiscated water.