Evidence that Barney Frank has been in Congress too long

Way back in 1986, President Reagan created the Alien Border Control Committee in response to several horrific terrorist attacks: the 1983 bombing of our Marine barracks in Lebanon that killed 241 soldiers, the hijackings of  TWA flight 847 and the cruise liner Achille Lauro.  The CIA complained that America was vulnerable to terrorists entering this country and creating sleeper cells. Reagan created ABCC so that the FBI and the CIA could work in tandem to root out those suspected terrorist illegals who had either over stayed their visas or entered the country illegally.

Within 6 months, the ABCC had it’s first success story. The CIA tipped off the FBI about a group of suspected Palestinian terrorists living in Los Angeles. Eight men were arrested. But instead of being applauded, they were slapped in the face by civil liberties organizations who held that information gleaned by the CIA from routine visa investigations, should  be banned.

Can you imagine? This violated the civil liberties of not only non-Americans but illegal and suspected terrorist non-Americans. So this kind of information should not be allowed.

Leading these civil liberties groups was Congressman Barney Frank, always a big civil liberty advocate. He wrote an amendment to the Immigration and Nationality act that said that being a member of a terrorist group was not sufficient grounds to prevent enterance into the United States. A visa could only be denied if there was proof that the person in question had committed a terrorist act.

Mind you, this was all pre-9/11.

Thanks to this Frank amendment, there was no longer any way to prevent suspected terrorists from obtaining visas, even when there was information connecting them to terrorist organizations.

This was 25 years ago.

Barney Frank has been in Washington too long and has created way too much damage.