We want to watch the debate again tonight before going in-depth, but we have to say that Kobach's know-it-all attitude really came through in The Kansas City Star's coverage this morning.
Republican challenger Kris Kobach attacked full bore Sunday, calling U.S. Rep. Dennis Moore “utterly out of touch” with Kansas morals, “utterly ineffective” and, at one point, “utterly ignorant.”And that was just the first paragraph.
Today, we want to focus on the "utterly ignorant" comment, because it referred to Moore's criticism of Kobach's National Security Entry/Exit Registration System (NSEERS), which we promised last week to discuss.
Moore said NSEERS hurt U.S. cooperation with other countries in the war on terror and that the administration had to send a message to allies assuaging their concerns about the program. Kobach rebutted by calling Moore "utterly ignorant."
Apparently, Kobach thinks the 9/11 Commission, State Department, and FBI Director Robert Mueller are "utterly ignorant" too...
There was significant opposition to the NSEERS program from some U.S. government officials, who feared the program would offend countries that were U.S. allies in the global war on terror. State personnel we interviewed said that NSEERS did harm our relations with foreign countries whose citizens were subject to its registration requirements. FBI Director Mueller said it came at a cost.The footnotes of the 9/11 Commission staff report describe some of this opposition from allies, including the fact that one of the few things the leaders of feuding India and Pakistan could agree on is their mutual distate for NSEERS.
Kobach has also claimed that 11 suspected terrorists were caught. But the 9/11 Commission staff report disagrees.
DHS asserts that 11 persons out of approximately 140,000 registrants have been shown to have a connection to terrorism. Of these, six were NSEERS call-in registrants, though it is not clear from information we have received whether the registration process led to their arrest; two were denied entry at the port of entry following a hit in the TIPOFF watchlist, and thus their identifications were not attributable, in other words, to the NSEERS program; one failed to appear for a call-in registration and was encountered and arrested in the field on grounds that are not clear to us; one was arrested, and we have no information whether he was required to participate in the NSEERS program; and one is currently "at large."
The counterterrorism benefits from the NSEERS program are unclear. (emphasis added)
So the evidence isn't quite what Kobach claims.
Add in the comments of Asa Hutchinson, former Republican congressman and the Department of Homeland Security's undersecretary for borders and transportation, when NSEERS was shut down in December 2003:
Hutchinson said in an interview that the domestic portion of the program "didn't yield sufficient leads" to justify the money being spent. The government will focus more on individuals rather than "whole categories" of people, he said.
Kris Kobach created a program that wasn't cost-effective, that angered foreign governments, and for which the benefits were "unclear." That's quite the track record.
So, we now know that, with regards to border security, Kris Kobach thinks he knows more than the...
9/11 Commission
Undersecretary of Homeland Security for Borders and Transportation
Secretary of Homeland Security
President of the United States
Did we miss anyone?
