Dan Bongino on the Belgium Terror Attacks
4 Takeaways From The Belgium Terror Attacks
March 22, 2016
1. The Syrian refugee resettlement program within the United States should be halted immediately.
It’s abundantly clear, as evidenced by the attacks in San Bernardino, Paris, Mumbai, and Belgium, that as few as five to 10 terrorists can cause unspeakable death and destruction. Unquestionably, the most important function of the United States government is to protect U.S. citizens, and until the government can ensure that the broken process for vetting Syrian refugees and allowing them into the United States, is secure and effective at rejecting terrorists, the program should be stopped. In addition, terrorists have developed the capacity to create large numbers of spurious identification documents and passports. Therefore, even if we put a refugee through the “vetting” process and that person is cleared, there is no guarantee that the “cleared” person whose name appears on the identification documents is the person being admitted into the United States.
2. The international terror-alert systems are largely ineffective at stopping soft-target, small-arms, and explosives attacks.
Belgium was under a heightened state of alert for terrorism pursuant to the capture of Salah Abdeslam. The terrorists involved in the latest attacks still managed to accomplish their deranged mission. Soft-target terror attacks using small-arms and explosives give the terrorists a strategic advantage because the execution of these types of attacks only requires the ability to fire a weapon and construct homemade explosives. These are activities that, in a free country, are relatively easy to learn without eliciting a high level of law-enforcement suspicion. Compare that with the deadlier, and more logistically demanding, 9/11 attacks. The need for flight training and airport security evasion training during a 9/11 style attack has the potential to leave investigative breadcrumbs behind for international counter-terror investigators to pick up on, and use, to disrupt the attacks.
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Dan Bongino is the author of the book The Fight, bestselling author of the book Life Inside the Bubble and is a Contributing Editor at Conservative Review. He was the 2012 and 2014 Republican nominee for the United States Senate and 6th congressional district in Maryland. He served for over a decade as a special agent in the United States Secret Service. He is a radio host and a frequent guest media-commentator on political issues and security matters.
You can follow Dan Bongino at www.bongino.com; on Facebook and on Twitter.